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Kant's Theory of Judgment, and Judgments of Taste:

On Henry Allison's Kant's Theory of Taste
a
Béatrice Longuenesse
a
Princeton University

Version of record first published: 05 Nov 2010

To cite this article: Béatrice Longuenesse (2003): Kant's Theory of Judgment, and Judgments of Taste: On Henry Allison's
Kant's Theory of Taste , Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 46:2, 143-163

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 Inquiry, 46, 143–163

Kant’s Theory of Judgment, and

Judgments of Taste:
On Henry Allison’s Kant’s Theory of
Taste*
Béatrice Longuenesse
Princeton University

Kant’s use of the leading thread of his table of logical forms of judgment to analyze
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judgments of taste yields more results than Allison’s account allows. It reveals in
judgments of taste the combination of two judgments: a descriptive judgment about
the object, and a normative judgment about the judging subjects. Core arguments of
Kant’s critique of taste receive new light from this analysis.

In the first part of the Critique of Judgment, Kant offers an account of what he
calls “judgments of taste of reflection” or “aesthetic judgments of reflection”
or, for short, “judgments of taste” or “aesthetic judgments.” What do we
mean, he asks, when we say of an object that it is beautiful (or also, that it is
sublime)? What is it about the object that warrants the use of such predicates
to characterize it? Why do we claim for our judgment the universal assent of
others, although it clearly has neither the objective warrant of theoretical
judgments, nor the binding force of moral judgments (Kant calls this the
“subjective universality” of the judgment of taste)? Why do we think that
others ought to agree with our aesthetic judgment, a claim we surely wouldn’t
make in the case of our preference for, say, vanilla ice-cream (Kant calls this
the “subjective necessity” of the judgment of taste)? Justifying our claim to
the “subjective universality” and “subjective necessity” of our aesthetic
judgments is the goal of the Deduction of Judgments of Taste. Resolving the
antinomy that arises from the peculiar features of judgments of taste is the
goal of the Dialectic of the Critique of Taste. Justifying the claim and
resolving the antinomy, Kant maintains, are major steps toward providing his
critical system with its final unity.

* Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) (henceforth KTT).

DOI 10.1080/00201740310001164 # 2003 Taylor & Francis

 144 Béatrice Longuenesse

A common complaint addressed to Kant’s third Critique is that to even

begin to understand the questions Kant is asking – let alone the answers he
offers to them – one has to take on board so much of the very complex critical
system, that an unbiased appraisal of Kant’s account of our experience of
beauty in nature and art is virtually impossible. In Kant’s Theory of Taste,
Henry Allison bites the bullet and invites his readers to plunge into Kant’s
system in order to understand Kant’s questions and the answers he offers to
them. Allison’s book is definitely a book about Kant’s philosophy and the
place of the critique of taste in Kant’s system rather than an independently
motivated book about aesthetic experience or aesthetic value. But the care
and analytical acumen Allison deploys in laying out Kant’s view will make
his book an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to understand
Kant’s place in the history of aesthetic theory and make up his mind about
Kant’s enduring contribution to the field.
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The book is in four parts. Part one is an in-depth analysis of the two
Introductions to the Critique of Judgment, and of the relation between
aesthetic judgments and the broader notion of “reflective” judgments. Part
two guides us through the “four moments” of Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful
and the Deduction of Pure Judgments of Taste. Part three takes us back to the
two Introductions, to review Kant’s systematic account of the relation
between taste and morality. In light of this account, Allison then offers an
original analysis of Kant’s solution to the Antinomy of the Critique of Taste.
Finally, in part four Henry Allison considers what he calls the “parerga” of the
critique of taste: Kant’s account of fine arts; and Kant’s analysis of the other
aesthetic predicate considered in the third Critique: the sublime.
One of the remarkable features of Allison’s book is the way he
systematically relates Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment to Kant’s theory
of judgment in general, expounded in the first Critique and in the Lectures
and Reflexions on Logic, and completed in the first and second Introductions
to the third Critique itself. In this paper I will focus my discussion on this
aspect of Allison’s work. I will first briefly recount Allison’s exposition of the
role of “reflection” and “mere reflection” in Kant’s theory of judgment in
general, and aesthetic judgment in particular. I will then discuss in some
detail Allison’s interpretation and defense of Kant’s use of the first Critique’s
table of logical forms of judgment as a guiding thread for his exposition of the
“four moments” of the judgment of taste. While in broad agreement with
Allison’s interpretation, I will argue that Kant’s use of his “leading thread”
can be taken more literally than Allison does. I think that the friendly
amendments I propose, far from contradicting Allison’s general approach to
Kant’s critique of taste, concur with Allison’s interpretation of the central
arguments in Kant’s theory of taste: the deduction of judgments of taste on the
one hand, and Kant’s solution to the antinomy of the critique of taste on the
other hand.
 Kant’s Theory of Judgment 145

I. Allison on Reflection, “Mere Reflection,” and Taste

Allison reminds us of the two directions of the act of judging according to
Kant: it is determinative when we have a concept, or concepts, and we look
for instances of the concept; it is reflective when we start with representations
of individuals and look for concepts under which they might fall. In clarifying
the latter – the reflective judgment – Allison refers to the analyses I have
proposed, in Kant and the Capacity to Judge, of the role of reflection in
Kant’s theory of judgment in the first Critique. He agrees with me that in
empirical knowledge, all determinative judgments must have a reflective
component: even if we have available to us the relevant concepts under which
to subsume individual objects, there is always an initial stage at which we
apprehend what is given to our senses and grope, as it were, for the relevant
concept. Allison and I also agree that in this process, the mind needs to have
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some rules available to it to get the whole inquiry off the ground. We agree
that these rules are of two kinds: (1) the so-called “schemata of the
categories,” those a priori rules that command specific modes of ordering of
what is given to our senses through time; (2) the “concepts of comparison” or
“concepts of reflection” (identity and difference, agreement and opposition,
and so on) corresponding to each of Kant’s “logical functions of judgment.”
These “concepts of comparison” guide the acts of comparing representations
in order to derive concepts from them. So according to Kant’s doctrine in the
first Critique, reflection does not start from a mere chaos of sense data. It has
available to it rules for ordering the data: grouping them through time (by way
of the schemata of the categories), and comparing (under the guidance of the
concepts of comparison corresponding to each logical function of judgment)
the groupings thus obtained.
Now, in the Critique of Judgment Kant adds two importantly new layers to
his account of reflective judgment. First, he points out that we would not even
begin to look for empirical concepts under which to subsume individual
things, unless we assumed that nature obliges, as it were. In his words, we
take nature to be “purposive for our power of judgment,” namely sliced up in
such a way that we can order individuals under concepts of natural kinds; and
that we can find empirical laws connecting individual events and states of
affairs. Kant calls this supposition the principle of the “logical purposiveness”
of nature. And he claims that this principle underlies all use of reflective
judgment in empirical cognition.1
Second, Kant points out that although all empirical cognition does have a
reflective component, not all reflective judgment leads to cognition, namely
to the formation of a concept. There are, he says, “merely reflective
judgments,” judgments where reflection does not lead to cognition. In fact,
there are two kinds of such judgments. Teleological judgments, which will be
the object of the second part of the Critique of Judgment. And aesthetic
 146 Béatrice Longuenesse

judgments of reflection, the object of the first part of the Critique of Judgment,
which concerns us here. Allison and I agree that the novelty of the Critique of
Judgment is not so much to have introduced reflective judgment into the
picture; rather, it is to have introduced those judgments Kant describes as
“merely reflective.” The great merit of Allison’s careful analysis of the two
Introductions is that, by laying out in detail both cases of “merely reflective”
judgment, he brings forth a major unifying theme (“mere reflection”) of the
whole book. And, as he indicates, he forestalls an important misunderstanding
in George Dickie’s account of the third Critique. It is true (as Dickie
bemoans) that the idea of the purposiveness of nature plays an important role
throughout the third Critique. It appears under three main guises: the “logical
purposiveness” of nature for our power of judgment, which I just explained;
the “formal purposiveness” or “purposiveness without a purpose” of the
beautiful object, which will play a central role in Kant’s account of our
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aesthetic experience; and finally the “objective purposiveness” of organisms

as objects of teleological judgment, considered in the second part of the
Critique of Judgment. But in all these cases, as Allison rightly insists,
“purposiveness” is a concept for use in “mere reflection,” not an objective
concept having metaphysical import, i.e. defining some fundamental
objective property of nature.2
In the case of “merely reflective” aesthetic judgments, Allison notes that he
disagrees with my own characterization of them as judgments in which the
search for concepts “fails.” It cannot fail, Allison objects, for concept
formation is not the goal of aesthetic judgments (see KTT, p. 354, n.2). I
agree. Nevertheless, aesthetic judgment starts where the search for concepts
collapses. In fact, Allison himself offers characterizations of aesthetic
judgment that are, in this respect, very close to mine. For instance:
The function attributed to the imagination in mere reflection is not that different from the one
assigned to it in cognition [. . .]. The difference is only that in the mere reflection involved in a
judgment of taste, the imagination does not exhibit the schema of a specific concept under which
the object can be subsumed in a determinative cognitive judgment. Instead, it exhibits a pattern
or order (form), which suggests an indeterminate number of possible schematizations (or
conceptualizations) none of which is fully adequate, thereby occasioning further reflection or
engagement with the object. (KTT, p. 51)

I couldn’t say it better: all reflection is geared toward concept formation.

That’s what the whole effort of reflection is about. But if this inbred goal of
the activity of judging fails, then it reveals something very important about
judging itself: its goal is self-set, heautonomous, and when it fails there may
remain, in some privileged cases that call for elucidation, the sheer pleasure
of judging itself: the pleasure of bringing imagination and understanding into
a common fruitful play. The failure is thus a welcome failure. Knowing
becomes an inferior goal, enjoying is the superior one: the “purposiveness
without a purpose” of aesthetic judgment.
 Kant’s Theory of Judgment 147

I am not sure how much Allison and I really disagree on this point. Our
difference might be a mere matter of nuance (indeed he merely says it is
“somewhat misleading” to characterize aesthetic judgments as I do). But I
suspect it is more than that, for two reasons. First, I don’t think we can
properly understand how aesthetic judgments depend, like all empirical
cognitive judgments, on the supposition of the logical purposiveness of
nature, unless we recognize the starting point they have in common with
cognitive judgments – namely with judgments that do lead to concept
formation. Second, recognizing that for Kant, our judgments of taste start up
like any other empirical (cognitive) judgment about an individual object
(searching for recognition under concepts), and then veer off in unexpected
ways for lack of an adequate concept, helps us understand just what role the
table of logical forms plays in Kant’s analysis of our judgments on the
beautiful.3 I shall argue that the main difficulty we encounter in understanding
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that role is that Kant uses his table as a guideline to analyze not one, but two
judgments. The first is a judgment about the individual object judged to be
beautiful. That’s the judgment that starts up like any other judgment where we
look for a concept under which to subsume the object. But the second is a
judgment about the judging subjects themselves. Correctly identifying these
two components depends on understanding the peculiar failure of concept-
determination that is proper to aesthetic judgment.
To show this, I now turn to the second and main point of my comments:
Allison’s interpretation of Kant’s “leading thread” in the Analytic of the
Beautiful.

II. Allison on Kant’s Use of the Logical Forms of Judgment as the

“Leading Thread” in the Analytic of the Beautiful
I should first say that I am somewhat puzzled by the way Allison applies to
Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful the distinction between “quid facti” and
“quid juris” questions laid out in the Critique of Pure Reason. Allison thinks
that Kant’s “four moments” of judgments of taste (their analysis according to
quality, quantity, relation and modality) is an answer to the question “quid
facti,” and the deduction of judgments of taste is an answer to the question
“quid juris” as defined in the introductory section of the Transcendental
Deduction in the first Critique.4 There Kant famously refers to the distinction
made by jurists between questions of fact and questions of right or
justification. In the juridical sense, questions of fact concern the way in
which some particular object came into our possession. Questions of right
concern our justification to have that object in our possession. Answering the
latter cannot rest solely on answering the former (i.e. explaining how we came
to have the particular thing in our possession) but has to address questions of
 148 Béatrice Longuenesse

origin and genealogy: who was the original owner, what was the origin of the
ownership, and so on. By analogy, a quid facti question, in the case of
concepts, is just the question of how we came to have the concept in our
possession (how we came to make use of it). A quid juris question is a
question concerning the right we have to make use of it. In the case of
empirical concepts, finding out how we came to form, or acquire, the concept
(the answer to the quid facti question) is a sufficient ground for coming up
with an answer to the question of right (by what right do we make use, in this
particular case, of this particular empirical concept?). But in the case of the
categories, elucidating the empirical circumstances in which we have learnt to
make use of the concept will give us no answer to the question: “by what right
do we make use of it”? Nor will it provide an answer to the question: “By
what right do we claim for this concept an a priori origin?” (as we do, for
instance, in the case of the concept of cause if we include a notion of necessity
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in its meaning).
In the first Critique, the metaphysical deduction of the categories answers –
at least provisionally – the question of right which concerns the origin of these
concepts: it shows that we do have a right to claim an a priori origin for the
categories if it is true that they have a systematic correlation with the
elementary forms of our acts of judging. The transcendental deduction
answers the question of right which concerns the use of these concepts: we
have a right to make use of these concepts in application to empirical objects
if it is true that the logical functions of judgment, and the corresponding
synthesizing functions guided by the categories, condition any representation
of object. This being so, both the metaphysical and the transcendental
deduction are just this: deductions, answers to a question of right, quid juris.
Neither of them is an answer to a quid facti question, for answering such a
question (how did we come to make use of this or that concept?) can be
sufficient only in the case of empirical concepts.5
So if, as Allison claims – quite correctly, I think – there is a significant
parallel between the exposition of the four moments of the judgment of taste
and the metaphysical deduction of the categories in the first Critique, it seems
misleading to describe this exposition as an answer to a quaestio facti. True,
Kant describes the four moments only as an exposition, and reserves the term
“deduction” for the argument that follows them and which alone is
characterized as a “legitimation of the claim” of judgments of taste (their
claim to subjective universality and necessity).6 Still, if the parallel with the
two deductions in the first Critique holds, then the “four moments” should not
be described as the answer to a quaestio facti. However important it is to
distinguish them from the deduction that follows, they are nevertheless
already a justification of a sort: a justification of the claim that aesthetic
judgments are judgments of a unique kind, which differ both from judgments
of cognition and from moral judgments, and both from judgments on the
 Kant’s Theory of Judgment 149

agreeable and judgments on the good. In the course of justifying this claim,
Kant also justifies the claim that judgments of taste have an a priori
grounding, one that is, again, unique to them. This makes the exposition of the
“four moments” even more like the metaphysical deduction in the first
Critique, and even less like an answer to a quaestio facti, at least if one sticks
to the meaning of this question as introduced in the first Critique. Indeed, the
question of how we came to form aesthetic judgments (the quaestio facti
strictly speaking), although it is important for the education of taste, is
irrelevant both to its exposition (the four moments) and to its deduction (the
justification of its claim to subjective universality and necessity).
Let me now consider Kant’s use of his “leading thread.” I agree with
Allison that it is not a mere architectonic mania. The question is, how should
we understand it, what are the differences between the use Kant makes of it
here and the use he made of it in establishing his table of the categories in the
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fist Critique?
Allison thinks that the table is used in order to guide our questioning of the
nature of the feeling that is expressed in the predicate ‘beautiful’ of the
judgment of taste. According to him, Kant thus asks: what is the quality of
that feeling? Response: it is disinterested. What is its quantity? Response: it
has subjective universality (it applies, or ought to apply, to all judging
subjects). When he reaches the third title, that of relation, Allison is somewhat
embarrassed. Relation, he claims, is not used in the usual sense of the table of
logical forms. For here it refers to the relation between the judging subject
and the object judged, not between the predicate of the judgment (‘beautiful’)
and the logical subject of the judgment (the individual object judged to be
beautiful). As for the fourth moment, that of modality, it concerns the demand
made upon other judging subjects by a judgment having the features analyzed
in the first three moments. In other words, it concerns the normative or
evaluative force of the judgment.7
Now, I believe that Kant’s use of his logical forms of judgment in analyzing
judgments of taste is closer to the original meaning of those forms as set up in
the first Critique than Allison allows. And I believe that one sees this better if
one keeps in mind that the aesthetic judgment is a judgment about the object
judged to be beautiful, not about our feeling in relation to the object.
Nevertheless, Allison is quite right in pointing out that the reason the order of
the original table of judgments is changed (here quality precedes quantity) is
that the main issue, the question on which all others depend, is: how should we
understand the predicate ‘beautiful’? In other words, what is affirmed in an
aesthetic judgment? Now, I want to suggest that Kant’s analysis of the
predicate ‘beautiful’ reveals within the assertion of this predicate an implicit
judgment which is not about the object any more, but about the judging
subjects themselves. I will suggest that a good deal of Allison’s own analyses
would be made clearer and more forceful if this point were given its due.
 150 Béatrice Longuenesse

To show this, I now consider each of the four “moments” of the judgment
of taste.

Quality
Allison writes:
[In an aesthetic judgment] the feeling may be regarded as to its quantity (strength), quality
(kind). The latter is crucial in determining what is distinctive about judgments of taste. (KTT, p.
77).

Therefore, he adds,
It is appropriate for Kant to claim that an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful is concerned
with its quality first. (Ibid.)

But when he considers the next title – quantity – Allison indicates that the
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quantity of the judgment qualifies, not the strength of the feeling, but the
scope of its application (KTT, p. 77). Surely he must acknowledge, then, that
the judgment is not about the feeling. So, as far as quality is concerned, what
Kant is asking is not: what is the quality of the feeling? Rather, he is asking:
given that as to its quality, an aesthetic judgment is typically affirmative, what
is being affirmed in the aesthetic judgment? 8 Response: what is being
affirmed is not an objective property of the object, but a feeling that is elicited
in us when we perceive the object. It is true that when we then ask what the
peculiar nature of this feeling is, Kant’s answer is: it is disinterested. This is
how the judgment of taste differs from a judgment in which one would assert
of the object that it is “agreeable ” or “good.” Allison proposes an admirably
precise and convincing analysis of Kant’s puzzling notion of “disinterested-
ness” (see KTT, pp. 86–94). I disagree with him, however, when he endorses
Kant’s claim that from the disinterested character of the satisfaction we take
in the beautiful, we infer and are entitled to infer the “subjective universality”
of this satisfaction, and of the judgment of taste itself.
Before I say more about this disagreement, I want to turn to the second
moment, the quantity of judgments of taste. For it is in the course of this
second moment that Kant’s questionable inference occurs. It is also in this
second moment that Kant’s turning around is most visible, from characteriz-
ing the judgment as a judgment about the object judged to be beautiful, to
revealing in its predicate an implicit judgment about the judging subjects
themselves.

Quantity
Allison writes:
A consideration of quantity naturally comes next on the grounds that an aesthetic judgment is a
judgment, and therefore necessarily has a scope. But, once again, since it is an aesthetic
 Kant’s Theory of Judgment 151

judgment, its scope or quantity cannot be understood according to the model of the logical
quantity of a cognitive judgment about objects (‘All S are P’) but must rather concern the sphere
of judging subjects to whom the feeling is applicable. (KTT, p. 77)

Now, Kant does attribute a logical quantity to the judgment considered as a

judgment about the object. “In their logical quantity,” he says, “ all judgments
of taste are singular judgments” (CJ, pp. 58–59; AAV, p. 215). Allison is
nevertheless right to insist that this obvious aspect of the aesthetic judgment is
not what most attracts Kant’s attention. What primarily attracts his attention
is the scope of the attribution of the feeling of pleasure to the judging subjects.
Thus Kant writes:
The aesthetic universality we attribute to a judgment of taste must be of a special kind: for
although it does not connect the predicate of beauty with the concept of the object considered in
its entire logical sphere, yet it extends that predicate over the entire sphere of judging persons
[die ganze Sphäre der Urteilenden]. (CJ, p. 59; AAV, p. 215).
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In other words: if we consider the explicit judgment, “this rose is

beautiful,” its logical subject, the subject in the proposition, is a singular term
(in Kant’s representational vocabulary, an intuition recognized under a
concept). So, as to its form, the judgment is singular. Nevertheless, embedded
in its predicate is a universal judgment, a judgment in which we “extend the
predicate over the sphere of all judging persons.” Of course, in this second
judgment the predicate is not ‘beautiful’. It is not the case either – on this
point I fully agree with Allison – that we assert of all judging persons that they
in fact do or will experience the same satisfaction we do. Rather, as Kant will
make clear later in his analysis, implicit in our feeling is the thought that they
ought to experience the feeling we experience and thus agree with our
judgment.
I suggest, then, that a judgment of taste such as “this object is beautiful”
could be developed in something like the following way: “This object is such
that in apprehending it, I experience a pleasure such that all judging persons,
in apprehending this same object, ought to experience a pleasure similar to
mine.” I am not claiming that Kant wants to convince us that this is what we
actually think when we say, “this is beautiful.” I am claiming that according to
him, if we analyze the pleasurable experience that is expressed in a judgment
of taste, we will acknowledge that one of its essential aspects is the claim we
make upon others to share it with us. Allison rightly insists that Kant does not
mean that we expect others to agree with our judgment. Rather, we make a
normative demand upon their agreement – a demand whose nature remains to
be elucidated.
This takes us back to the relation between “disinterestedness” of the
satisfaction and subjective universality of the judgment of taste. I said earlier
that I disagreed with Allison’s endorsement of Kant’s claim that because the
feeling of satisfaction that grounds the judgment “this is beautiful” is
disinterested, we require for it the universal agreement of others. Kant’s
 152 Béatrice Longuenesse

claim, Allison maintains, is essentially of the same nature as the first part of
“reciprocity thesis” in the Critique of Practical Reason: if we think of
ourselves as free, then we think of ourselves as bound by the moral law.
Neither statement – we are free, we are bound by the moral law – is thereby
proved: we only hypothetically assert that if the former is true, then so is the
latter.9 Similarly, Allison maintains, if there is such a disinterested feeling as
the one we seem to experience in the judgment of taste, then we claim for it
the universal agreement of others. Allison opposes Guyer’s view according to
which a judgment of taste might very well be disinterested and nevertheless
have no legitimate claim to universalizability. 10 Here I side with Guyer.
Consider the following example: when we take pleasure in some game, such
as chess, or a card game, the pleasure is disinterested. It is elicited by the mere
play of our mental capacities. We do not derive satisfaction from the
existence of any object or from the attainment of any particular goal. We may
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not care at all whether we win or not. We play for the sake of playing.
Nevertheless, we do not demand of others that they share our pleasure. We
derive no claim of subjective universality from the thought that our pleasure
is disinterested.
Of course, the aesthetic pleasure is of a different nature, since it is a
pleasure we take in our mental activity in apprehending an object, whereas in
the case I mention, we take pleasure in our own mental activity without the
mediation of any contemplation at all. Moreover, a game is bound by rules,
whereas aesthetic experience transcends all rules. So I am not saying the two
cases are identical. My claim is only the following: the fact that the pleasure is
elicited by the mental activity itself and is, in this sense, disinterested, is not a
sufficient ground for asserting that it is universalizable.
One way out of this problem might be a much debated sentence from §9,
where Kant seems to claim that the universal communicability or sharability
of the mental state is precisely what elicits the pleasure that is proper to the
judgment of taste. If this is so, there is no need any more to ground the
subjective universality in the disinterestedness of the pleasure. Rather, the
fact that the pleasure is a pleasure we take in the universal sharability of our
judgment and of the feeling that it expresses, is a primitive fact and is itself
one more reason for defining the aesthetic pleasure as disinterested. However,
Allison would not accept this solution. For like most commentators of the
third Critique (with the notable exception of Ginsborg),11 he takes the
sentence from §9 to be an aberration, not at all a true statement of Kant’s
view. He even adds, to the wealth of arguments others have already mounted
against the plausibility of that sentence, an elegant proposal for interpreting it
that entirely gets rid of its paradoxical aspect.
In its original form, the sentence says:

It must be the universal communicability [die allgemeine Mitteilungsfähigkeit] of the mental

 Kant’s Theory of Judgment 153

state in the given presentation, which underlies the judgment of taste as its subjective condition,
and the pleasure in the object must be its consequence. (CJ, p. 61; AAV, p. 217)

Allison proposes to read:

It must be the universally communicable mental state in the given representation which
underlies the judgment of taste as its subjective condition, and the pleasure in the object must be
its consequence.

Such a reading stands better than the original sentence in continuity with
the question that provides its title to the section: “Investigation of the question
whether in a judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of
the object or the judging precedes the pleasure.” Allison rightly sees in this
question, and in Kant’s comment on it in the first paragraph of §9, an echo of
the “Copernican turn” of the first Critique (see KTT, p. 110). And Kant’s
answer, as Allison translates it, is true to form: the universally communicable
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mental state is the state of free play of the cognitive capacities elicited in the
act of apprehending the object; the pleasure is the consequence of this state,
not merely of its property of universal communicability.
However, Kant does mention again, later in the section, the fact that the
universal communicability of a mental state is a source of pleasure. Of course,
in that same passage he also denies that we could be satisfied, in the context of
a critique of taste, to establish this fact empirically. But this is not a denial of
the fact. It is only a refusal to establish it by empirical means. (CJ, pp. 62–63;
AAV, p. 218)
So, while recognizing the elegance of Allison’s interpretation of the
sentence cited above, I would like to suggest another interpretation, which
keeps the sentence as is, and offers an answer to the question of §9 that takes
into account all of Kant’s statements. I suggest Kant’s complete view might
be something like the following. The pleasure we experience in apprehending
the object we judge to be beautiful is twofold. It is a first-order pleasure we
take in the free play of our own mental capacities (imagination and
understanding). But this pleasure on its own would not yet be sufficient to
constitute our experience of what we call aesthetic pleasure, pleasure in the
beautiful. What makes the specificity of the aesthetic pleasure is the sense that
our first-order pleasure could, and should, be shared by all. This sense of a
possible universal sharability of a pleasure is the source of the second order
pleasure that is characteristic of aesthetic judgment. As such, it elicits the
peculiar kind of longing (the demand we make upon others, says Kant) that is
characteristic of the aesthetic experience).
Note that my proposal is different from Ginsborg’s, although I share with
her the view that there is more to the contested sentence than a mere lapse in
Kant’s mode of expression. For in my interpretation of Kant’s view, the
aesthetic pleasure is not merely the pleasure we take in the awareness of the
normative character of our judgment (cf. Ginsborg, op.cit., pp. 299–300). It is
 154 Béatrice Longuenesse

a pleasure in the peculiar feeling of universal sharability of a pleasure, itself

elicited by the free play of our cognitive capacities. My interpretation is thus
to a certain extent similar to Guyer’s “two-act” view of aesthetic judgment
(see Guyer, op.cit., pp. 101–102). I differ from Guyer, however, in that I do
not think Kant’s view is that our awareness of the disinterested character (and
thus universal communicability) of our pleasure depends on a deliberate act
of judging added to the first order act of apprehending/judging that elicits the
free play of the faculties and the feeling of (disinterested) pleasure. In my
interpretation, the first order pleasure taken in the free play of the faculties is
supplemented by a second order pleasure taken in the universal commu-
nicability of the first order pleasure, without any deliberate act of judging
being necessary to elicit the awareness of the disinterested character of the
first order pleasure. I should add that admittedly, the objection of dis-
continuity in the argument of the first two paragraphs of §9 that can be
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mounted against Ginsborg’s interpretation (cf. KTT, p. 114), holds also

against mine. There is no doubt that the continuity of Kant’s argument in
these paragraphs can be preserved only by adopting a solution along the lines
proposed by Allison. But I still suggest that what Allison disposes of as a mere
grammatical lapse expresses an additional trend in Kant’s thought that is
worth taking into account. Unlike Guyer, I see no reason to dismiss the idea of
a pleasure we might take in the universal communicability of a state of mind
as the mere remnant of an earlier view Kant discards at the time of the
Critique of Judgment (see Guyer, op.cit., pp. 139–140).
Moreover, unlike Ginsborg’s, my proposal leaves room for the existence of
judgments of taste where the predicate is “ugly.”12 One might think that I
forsake such a possibility by making universal communicability itself the
source of a pleasure. For presumably, a judgment of the ugly would also, to be
an aesthetic judgment of reflection, be universally communicable. And then
as such it would express aesthetic pleasure, which is contradictory. But I was
careful to insist that in the case of the judgment on the beautiful, the pleasure
is in the universal communicability of a pleasure. Both pleasures have to be in
play to make the judgment a judgment of the beautiful. What happens, then,
in the case of the judgment on the ugly? The first order feeling is a feeling of
displeasure (presumably, imagination and understanding are arrested in their
free play. . . whatever this may mean in any particular case). But what about
the pleasure born from universal communicability? My suggestion is that
there is a certain degree of pleasure in passing a judgment on the ugly: a
pleasure derived from the feeling that our displeasure ought to be shared, that
it is not particular to us. Thinking of our discontent as universally sharable is,
in a peculiar way, an endorsement of our own resistance to being maintained
in the state of mind we are in when apprehending an object we judge to be
ugly. Nevertheless, what is universally sharable is a feeling of displeasure,
and that’s what makes the judgment a judgment on the ugly, not on the
 Kant’s Theory of Judgment 155

beautiful. Admittedly, this suggestion is speculative. I have no way of proving

that Kant had anything like this in mind. But I find the suggestion both
phenomenologically plausible and at least compatible with what Kant
actually says.
Another objection one might raise is that my account of the aesthetic
pleasure as a pleasure taken in the universal communicability of a pleasure
wreaks havoc with Kant’s claim that aesthetic pleasure is disinterested. Kant
describes sociability as an empirical interest of reason. Making universal
communicability a ground of aesthetic pleasure, one might object, would
introduce an interest as the ground of the pleasure. But I don’t think this is
correct. Communicability (Mitteilbarkeit) serves the interest of sociability.
But it is nevertheless a self-standing source of pleasure. That I know, by the
peculiar knowledge of feeling, that what I feel ought to and could be shared
by all human beings, is a pleasure of a unique kind. That this pleasure serves
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the empirical interest in sociability is a derived fact that no more diminishes

the disinterested character of the pleasure, than does the fact that aesthetic
pleasure generates an empirical interest in surrounding ourselves with
beautiful objects.

Relation
The third moment in the Analytic of the Beautiful corresponds to the third
title in the table of the logical forms of judgment: relation. Allison notes that
“unlike the logical functions of relation or the relational categories, however,
the relation in question is between the judging subject and the object judged
and/or its representation” (KTT, p. 119). But I don’t think there is any need to
suppose such a disanalogy between what Kant means by ‘relation’ in the
judgment of taste and the form of relation in the table of the logical functions
of judgment. The relation Kant is concerned with in the table of logical
functions is the relation between a predication and its reason or ground
(Grund). For instance, what is the reason for asserting of all objects thought
under the concept ‘man’ the predicate ‘mortal’? The reason is internal to the
concept ‘man’, it is one of the characters or marks of the concept ‘man’: the
character ‘animal’. Being an animal is a sufficient reason, or ground, for being
mortal. This is expressed in the categorical judgment, “all men are mortal.”
The table of logical forms lists three kinds of reasons or grounds for
predication: the reason contained in the subject of the judgment, expressed in
a categorical judgment; the reason added to the subject of the judgment,
expressed in a hypothetical judgment (“If S is R, then S is T”); and finally the
reason for the division of a concept, expressed in a disjunctive judgment (A is
either B or C).13
Now, aesthetic judgments are, as to their form, categorical: ‘this rose is
beautiful’. This form expresses the fact that the reason for asserting the
 156 Béatrice Longuenesse

predicate ‘beautiful’ is contained in the subject of the judgement: ‘this rose’.

The judgment is, moreover, singular. Its logical subject is represented in
intuition. In fact, as Allison admirably shows, the reason or ground of the
assertion of the predicate ‘beautiful’ is the form of the object as we apprehend
it (see KTT, p. 137).
Kant is quite explicit about the fact that what he is concerned with in the
third moment is the relation between the predication and its reason or ground.
Consider for instance the title of §11: “A Judgment of Taste Has No Other
Ground than the Form of Purposiveness of an Object (or of its Mode of
Presentation).” The German text says: “ Das Geschmacksurteil hat nichts
anders als die Form der Zweckmässigkeit eines Gegenstandes (oder der
Vorstellungsart desselben) zum Grunde [my emphasis, B.L.]” (CJ, p. 64;
AAV, pp. 219–20). The issue of the ground [Grund] of the judgment is
repeatedly mentioned throughout the section.
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What does this have to do with the extremely complex theme of

purposiveness, also present throughout this section? The answer is that the
ground of the judgment, namely that which grounds the attribution of the
predicate ‘beautiful’, to the logical subject of the judgment (the object judged
beautiful) is what Kant calls the “form of purposiveness” and the “formal
purposiveness” or “purposiveness of form” of the object. Allison devotes
many carefully crafted pages to analyzing and relating these two notions (see
KTT, pp. 125–38). About the first, he explains that it refers to the seeming
purposiveness of the object, the fact that it does satisfy an end, the free play of
the cognitive capacities and the satisfaction the mind derives from it. But no
concept is available that might define the properties by way of which the
object elicits this free play and the satisfaction that accompanies it. So, the
object cannot be objectively defined as an end, or purpose. About the second
(“purposiveness of form” or “formal purposiveness”) Allison explains that it
refers to “the arrangement of the sensible material produced by the
imagination in its apprehension of the object” (KTT, p. 137). It is thus the
object as apprehended that is the ground of the attribution of the predicate
‘beautiful’. In other words, it is such a ground by virtue of the shapes and
combinations our act of apprehension delineates in it.
But this takes us back to the developed formulation I proposed earlier for
the judgment of taste: “This object is such that in apprehending it, I
experience a pleasure such that all judging persons (or subjects), in appre-
hending this same object, ought to experience a similar pleasure (and thus
agree with my judgment).” Just as the judgment about the object, the
embedded judgment about “all judging persons” is categorical. It too
expresses a relation of the predication (“ought to experience a pleasure
similar to mine”) to its ground as contained in the logical subject of the
judgment (“all judging persons” or “all judging subjects”). It is in the very
nature of judging persons that the predicate (“ought to experience a pleasure
 Kant’s Theory of Judgment 157

similar to mine”) finds its ground. In other words, it is in the very nature of
judging persons that the normative force of my feeling finds its ground. In the
Deduction, Kant will build on this formal feature of the judgment when he
argues that it is just by virtue of their having the cognitive capacities
universally necessary for any act of judging (imagination and understanding)
that judging subjects, upon apprehending this particular object, ought to
partake in my pleasure and share in my judgment.
The point is, in a way, already announced in §12, when Kant says that it’s
not just the object, but the play of the subject’s cognitive powers that is
formally purposive.14 The “formal purposiveness” in the play of the subject’s
cognitive powers is, I presume, the capacity of the latter to achieve the end of
maintaining the mind in the state of harmonious free play and the satisfaction
it elicits. Like the formal purposiveness of the object, the formal
purposiveness of the play of the cognitive powers is without a purpose. Here
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too no concept is available to define the particular “fit” that makes the play of
the cognitive powers purposive in this way. Now, this purposiveness (of the
cognitive powers) is grounded in the purposiveness of the object. For it is the
object that is the occasion of the free play of the cognitive capacities. But
conversely, the purposiveness of the object, as we saw, is grounded in our acts
of apprehension, and in these the play of the cognitive powers is itself
“formally purposive.” So the relation of ground to grounded here is
reciprocal: the formal purposiveness of the object is grounded in acts of
apprehension, and the formal purposiveness of the play of cognitive
capacities in the act of apprehension is grounded in the formal purposiveness
of the object. We have here the culminating point of Kant’s Copernican
revolution. It is the object as apprehended that is formally purposive. It is the
act of apprehension that makes it so. But the act of apprehension is elicited by
this particular object, which is such that apprehending it elicits the free,
formally purposeful play of the cognitive powers.
Allison actually says something very similar to what I am suggesting here
when he writes, on the one hand, that in the moment of relation “the aesthetic
object, which up to this point has been largely left out of the picture, becomes
an explicit focus of attention.” (See KTT, p. 118). And on the other hand, he
also writes: “It seems reasonable to characterize the mental state of free
harmony as itself ‘subjectively purposive.’ In fact, this state is the primary
locus of purposiveness in the analysis of taste, since it provides the actual
determining ground of the judgment of taste” (KTT, p. 127). I agree. But
surely the subjective purposiveness of the mental state is not a determining
ground that we find in the object. As a judgment about the object, the
judgment of taste has to find its ground in the form of purposiveness and
purposiveness of form of the object. This being so, the subjective
purposiveness of the mental state has to find expression in another place in
the judgment: in the predicate. And indeed, if the analysis I am proposing is
 158 Béatrice Longuenesse

correct, the ground of the implicit thought that all judging subjects ought to
share in my judgment is the very nature, both of myself as a judging subject,
and of all judging subjects as such. The ground of the implicit judgment is
thus the harmony between imagination and understanding and the pleasure
derived therefrom, which I feel in myself and demand that all judging
subjects, considered simply as such, share with me.
This reciprocal relation between the two kinds of purposiveness is
precisely what is expressed in the general title of this third part: “Of
Judgments of taste, as to the relation of purposes that is taken into
consideration in them.” The relation of purposes, I suggest, is the relation of
the formal purposiveness in the free play of cognitive powers (expressed in
the predicate of the judgment of taste) and the formal purposiveness in the
apprehended object. So certainly Allison is correct when he says, at the
beginning of his analysis, that the relation Kant is analyzing here is a relation
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between subject and object. But as I said earlier, there is no reason to suppose
that this contradicts the systematic role of the logical form of relation between
subject and predicate in the judgment. Only in light of this relation can that
between subject and object be analyzed in its full complexity. The
purposiveness of form of the object grounds the purposiveness of form of
the play of capacities in the subject: this is expressed by the directly apparent
categorical form of the judgment, which, as Allison himself notes in this case,
is clearly, in Kant’s analysis, a judgment about the objects, and thus where the
object (as apprehended) contains the ground of the judgment “this X is
beautiful.” Nevertheless, the implicit judgment embedded in the predicate
makes the formal purposiveness of the play of faculties the ground of the
judgment, because it is the ground of the very formal purposiveness of the
object itself.
I would add that the analysis I am proposing here ties in nicely with
Allison’s admirable account of Kant’s solution to the Antinomy of the
Critique of Taste and helps clarify the relation between the Dialectic and the
Analytic of judgments of taste. In the latter, Kant is content with finding in the
formal purposiveness of the object as apprehended, namely as an appearance,
the reason or ground for the attribution of the predicate ‘beautiful’. But in the
Dialectic, what Allison calls the “absolutization”15 of the quest for the ground
of the judgment leads to the unknown and unknowable supersensible ground
of the object as what truly grounds the attribution to it of the predicate
‘beautiful’. Similarly, in the Analytic of the Beautiful the “free play” of the
cognitive capacities of the subject could be described as the ground (as will be
confirmed by the Deduction of judgments of taste) for the demand that all
judging subjects should share in my satisfaction and agree with my judgment.
But the “absolutization” of the quest leads to the unknown and unknowable
(indeterminable) supersensible ground of the judging subjects as what truly
grounds their capacity to share in my aesthetic experience.
 Kant’s Theory of Judgment 159

Modality
Allison insists on three main points about Kant’s characterization of the
modality of judgments of taste. First, he insists that despite some important
connections between the two “moments,” the modality of judgments of taste
(their “subjective necessity,” according to Kant) should be understood as
clearly distinct from their quantity (their “subjective universality”). Second,
the modality of judgments of taste has this in common with the title of
modality in the table of logical forms of judgment, that it “does not contribute
anything to the content of judgment.” By this Kant means, in the case of the
logical forms, that once one has characterized a judgment as to its quantity,
quality, and relation, its logical structure (the way concepts are combined in
it) is fully determined. Characterizing a logical form of judgment as to its
modality is not considering yet another feature of that logical form itself.
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Rather, it is characterizing “the value of the copula in relation to thinking in

general.” 16 Now, Allison insists that there is a similar discontinuity between
the role of the “moment” of modality in the Analytic of the Beautiful and the
title of modality in the table of logical forms. The moment of modality does
not add anything to the analysis of the judgment of taste. Rather, it unifies its
three previous moments, builds on this unity to characterize the judgment as
“subjectively necessary,” and offers a first hint at a possible ground for this
subjective necessity by introducing the notion of sensus communis. And
finally, the third main point emphasized by Allison in Kant’s characterization
of the modality of judgments of taste is the normative nature of their
“subjective necessity.” What is claimed as necessary is that judging subjects
ought to share my feeling, not that they will share my feeling and thus my
aesthetic judgment.17
I definitely agree with Allison about the first point: modality is a distinct
moment in Kant’s analysis of judgments of taste and the subjective necessity
of judgments of taste cannot be simply equated to their subjective
universality. About the second point, however, I am not sure how far the
analogy with the role of modality in the first Critique’s table of logical forms
can actually take us. Modality, as a logical “form”, depends on the relation of
a judgment to “thinking in general.” This is because a discursive, objective
judgment always belongs to a concatenation of judgments and derives its
modality (“the value of its copula,” according to Kant) from its place in this
concatenation. A judgment is merely problematic if it is a component in a
hypothetical or a disjunctive judgment. It is assertoric if it is asserted on the
authority of experience without being derived from other judgments
providing a ground for the necessity of its assertion. It is apodeictic if it is
derived from other judgments functioning as premises in a syllogistic
inference, for if it is itself analytic or synthetic a priori, and thus functions as a
principle for inference. But of course, nothing of the sort can be said of an
 160 Béatrice Longuenesse

aesthetic judgment, which is absolutely singular and rests on feeling. Its

modality can certainly not depend on its place in a concatenation of such
judgments. It is telling, in this regard, that in the case of modality alone Kant
should make use of the categorial rather than the logical terms to characterize
the judgment of taste (as we shall see shortly, he does not distinguish between
problematic, assertoric and apodeictic judgments of taste, but between judg-
ments of taste where the connection between the object and the feeling of
pleasure is merely possible, or actual, or necessary). And yet, these categorial
terms clearly do not have the same sense as the schematized categories of
modality defined in the first Critique.
I would suggest that to clarify their sense, and in particular to clarify what
Kant means by the “subjective necessity” of judgments of taste of reflection,
it is helpful to consider once again both of the judgments outlined in the
previous three moments: the explicit judgment about the object, the implicit
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judgment about the judging subjects. This duality of judgments is manifest in

Kant’s initial characterization of the modality of judgments of taste. He first
characterizes it as the modality of the relation between the feeling of pleasure
expressed in the predicate, and the object judged to be beautiful, thus the
logical subject of the explicit judgment about the object. He writes:
About any representation I can say at least that there is a possibility for it (as a cognition) to be
connected with a pleasure. About that which is agreeable I say that it actually gives rise to
pleasure in me. But we think of the beautiful as having a necessary relation to pleasure. (CJ,
§18, p. 85; AAV, pp. 236–37)

Here it seems clear that the necessity Kant claims for the judgment of taste
is the necessity of the connection between the object judged to be beautiful,
and the pleasure that is elicited by our act of apprehending it. But Kant then
immediately switches his attention to the necessity of the relation stated in the
judgment which, I suggested, is embedded in the predicate of the judgment of
taste:
This necessity is of a special kind. It is not a theoretical objective necessity, allowing us to
cognize a priori that everyone will feel this liking for the object I call beautiful. Nor is it a
practical objective necessity, where [. . .] one absolutely (without any further aim) ought to act
in a certain way. Rather, as a necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgment, it can only be
called exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent of everyone to a judgment that is regarded as an
example of a universal rule that we are unable to state. (Ibid.)

Here the necessity is not the necessity of the relation of the object to the
feeling of pleasure; but the necessity of the assent of everyone to a judgment
regarded as an example of a universal rule. The necessity, therefore, is that of
the embedded judgment: “All judging subjects, in apprehending this object,
ought to experience the feeling of pleasure I experience and share in my
judgment.”
Now, it is clear that if it were not for the necessity of this embedded
judgment, the explicit judgment (“this X is beautiful”) would be a merely
 Kant’s Theory of Judgment 161

empirical judgment and have the modality of actuality, or be stated as

assertoric. But the normative necessity of the embedded judgment becomes
the normative necessity of the explicit judgment itself. This is because, by
virtue of the implicit judgment embedded in its predicate, the explicit
judgment: “This X is beautiful” is to be understood as: “This X ought to be
judged beautiful.” In other words, when I judge something X to be beautiful,
if I am right in the judgment grounded on my present peculiar feeling of
pleasure, then saying that this object is beautiful is just the same as saying that
this object ought to be judged beautiful. That’s what is expressed by the
otherwise bizarre turning around of Kant’s attention, in the passage cited
above, from the necessity of the relation between “the beautiful” (namely: the
object judged to be beautiful) and the feeling of pleasure (and so the predicate
‘beautiful’ that expresses the fact that apprehending the object elicits such a
pleasure), to the necessity of the assent of all to the judgment.
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I suggest that this analysis, stressing the way in which the judgment
embedded in the predicate turns around, as it were, and determines the
modality of the explicit judgment about the object, ties in nicely with
Allison’s superb analysis of §§20 to 22 of the Analytic of the Beautiful.
Allison insists, rightly in my view, that these sections, which belong to the
fourth moment (modality), are not a preliminary version of the deduction of
judgments of taste, but rather an indication of the direction in which a
deduction will have to be sought. For what these sections indicate is that the
ground of the necessity will have to be found in the judging function itself.18
But this is just what my unpacking of the two aspects in Kant’s analysis of the
modality of judgments of taste makes explicit.
I have tried to show that taking seriously Kant’s leading thread of the four
“moments” of judgment as a sort of check-list for analyzing the various
aspects of the judgment of taste yields surprisingly rich results. I do not take
these results to contradict Allison’s approach but rather to reinforce it,
especially on the core issues of the deduction of judgments of taste or the
solution to the antinomy of the critique of taste. But I also think that following
Kant’s leading thread gives us a more vivid understanding of what is so
powerful and unique in Kant’s analysis of taste: his urging that in this case
even more than in any other, our attention to the object as the ground for our
judgment is inseparable from our attention to the (a priori) community of
judging subjects. The latter act of attention is not itself what is expressed in
our aesthetic judgment. It is all the more striking that Kant’s characterization
of each and everyone of the moments of the judgment of taste should turn out
to be, just as much as (and sometimes more than) a characterization of the
explicit judgment about the object, a characterization of the implicit, silent
judgment about the judging persons themselves. This silent judgment (act of
judging) is brought to light as an explicit judgment only by the critique of
 162 Béatrice Longuenesse

taste: Kant’s analysis of judgments of taste in light of the leading thread of his
logical forms of judgment.
Allison’s account of Kant’s theory of taste is the most sustained attempt I
know of, to give a systematic and consistent account of Kant’s view of
aesthetic judgments. I have tried to pick up the ball and suggest a few ways in
which it could be carried a few steps further. I am not sure Allison will find
my suggestions persuasive. What I am sure of is that his book will be an
indispensable resource for all of us who care to come up with a better
understanding of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.

NOTES

1 See Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (henceforth FI) V, transl. Werner
Pluhar, Hackett 1987, pp. 399–404; AAXX, pp. 211–16. Critique of Judgment (henceforth
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CJ), Introd. V, transl. Pluhar, pp. 20–26; AAV, pp. 181–-86. Citations from the Critique of
Judgment (CJ) and its First Introduction (FI) will always refer to the Pluhar translation. The
second reference (AA, volume V or XX) is to the German text in the Academy edition,
Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900.
2 See Allison, KTT, chapt. 1, pp. 13–42. And especially fnt.1, p. 345. Cf. George Dickie, The
Century of Taste, The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996).
3 In an “Author Meets Critique” session organized by the American Society of Aesthetics,
where I presented an earlier version of these remarks, Allison objected to my suggestion that
in aesthetic judgments “the search for concepts fails” by saying that aesthetic judgments do
not have the same form as cognitive judgments: they are not judgments about the object
(“this X is A”). Rather, they express a liking (“I like this”). I think this is incorrect. Kant does
think that aesthetic judgments of reflection have the same form as singular judgments of
cognition: “this X is A.” They do have the form of judgments about individual objects. But
their predicate, instead of asserting of the object one of its properties, asserts of it that it
elicits in us a feeling, the nature of which remains to be elucidated. It turns out that this
feeling is elicited precisely by the act of judging that fails to provide an adequate concept of
the object as we apprehend it. I will develop this point below.
4 See Critique of Pure Reason, A84–85/B116–17. References to the Critique of Pure Reason
are given in the original pagination of the 1781 edition (‘A’) and the 1787 edition (‘B’).
5 Kant’s clearest statement on this point is at A86/B118–119: “In the case of [a priori]
concepts, as in the case of all cognition, we can search in experience, if not for the principle
[principium] of their possibility, then for the occasional cause of their generation, where the
impressions of the senses provide the first occasion for opening the entire power of cognition
to them and for bringing about experience [. . .]. Yet a deduction of the pure a priori
concepts can never be achieved in this way. [. . .] I will therefore call this attempted
physiological derivation, which cannot properly be called a deduction at all because it
concerns a quaestio facti, the explanation of the possession of a pure cognition.”
6 7 See CJ, §30, p. 141 (in Pluhar’s translation, “legitimation of a pretension”); AAV, p. 279.
7 On Allison’s characterization of each of the four “moments”, see KTT, pp. 90, 99, 119, 145.
8 I agree with Allison that there are also negative judgments of taste (“this is not beautiful”)
and judgments where the predicate itself is negative (“this is ugly”). I shall say more about
this point below. Regardless, the typical case considered by Kant is that of the affirmative
judgment, where the predicate itself is also affirmative: “this X is beautiful”. Note that if I am
right about Kant’s question, then the use he makes of his leading thread is not so much to
analyze the form of the judgment, but to take the various “moments” of the form as a check-
list, as it were, to question the nature, and so the content of what is asserted in the judgment.
In the case of quality, granted that the judgment is affirmative, what is being affirmed in the
judgment? Meaning: what is the content of the predicate ‘beautiful’?
 Kant’s Theory of Judgment 163

9 See KTT, p. 102. Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, transl. Mary Gregor, (Cambridge
University Press, 1997, p. 26); AAV, p. 29. What Allison calls the “first part” of the
reciprocity thesis appears as the answer to “Problem II”: “Supposing that the will is free: to
find the law that alone is competent to determine it necessarily.” The answer to that question
is: the moral law.
10 See KTT, pp. 99–100; cf. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2nd edition [1997], p. 117).
11 See Hannah Ginsborg: “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” in Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly 72 (1991), pp. 290–313. I comment on the differences between my interpretation
and Ginsborg’s below.
12 See Allison’s discussion of Ginsborg on this point, KTT pp. 114–15. I am grateful to him for
pressing me on this point when we discussed his book at Asilomar.
13 See my discussion of these three forms of relation in judgment, in Kant and the Capacity to
Judge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 101–06).
14 See CJ, p. 68; AAV, p. 222: “The consciousness of the merely formal purposiveness in the
play of the subject’s cognitive powers in the presentation of an object that is given, is the
pleasure itself.”
15 Cf. KTT, p. 242. And see the relation Allison draws, p. 249, between Kant’s solution to the
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Antinomy of the Critique of taste, and the third moment of the judgment of taste.
16 See Critique of Pure Reason, A74–5/B100. I will explain this characterization shortly.
17 On the three points just mentioned, see KTT, pp. 144–49.
18 On the connections and differences between the fourth moment (modality) and the
Deduction of judgments of taste, see KTT, pp. 148–59; and 168–79.

Received 31 October 2002

Béatrice Longuenesse, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

08544-1006, USA. E-mail: beatrice@princeton.edu