Christopher Forster

English Department
University of Virginia
csf2g@virginia.edu

 

Review of: Rodolphe Gasché. The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

 

When poststructuralists return to “classics” of Western philosophy, it is often in a spirit of revision. When Lacan turns his attention to Kant, it is to insist, against prevailing wisdom, that Kant must be read “avec Sade.” When Foucault reads Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” it is largely to appropriate a notion of enlightenment for Foucault’s own project. Rodolphe Gasché’s project in The Idea of Form is decidedly different. More in the tradition of the explication du texte than that of the hermeneutic of suspicion, Gasché returns to the Critique of Judgment in order to reinforce its position within the Kantian corpus.

 

Gasché shares with his poststructuralist peers a practice of meticulous close reading which guides The Idea of Form. Having published books on Derrida and Paul de Man, Gasché’s credentials may ally him with deconstruction. The Idea of Form, however, is not a “deconstruction of the Third Critique.” Rather than borrowing his vocabulary from deconstruction, or any other critical tradition, Gasché offers a thoroughly Kantian reading of the Third Critique. Gasché attempts to take seriously Kant’s famously obtuse claim that the Third Critique completes the critical project of the first two critiques. Judgment, Kant claims, is “suitable for mediating the connection of the domain of the concept of nature with that of the concept of freedom, as regards freedom’s consequences, inasmuch as this harmony also promotes the mind’s receptivity to moral feeling” (Kant 38). Gasché focuses on what he calls the “para-epistemic” role of the faculty of judgment, exploring the capacity of aesthetic judgment to mediate between the realm of the understanding (deterministically governed by laws) and the realm of reason (which is the domain of freedom and morality).

 

While Gasché is not the only critic to take seriously Kant’s claim that the Third Critique bridges the chasm between the other two, his analysis nevertheless operates as a helpful corrective to the manner in which we may normally understand the Third Critique.¹ Too often the province of the First Critique is taken to be epistemology, that of the Second morality, while the Third, a somewhat inexplicable addition, is thought to deal with aesthetics. This model is an oversimplification that does not respect the complexity of Kant’s texts, yet it remains the prevailing model. Gasché offers a compelling corrective, demonstrating how Kantian aesthetics emerges from the subject’s confrontation with objects for which it has no concepts.

 

As its title suggests, the Third Critique is not primarily concerned with aesthetics, but with the faculty of judgment. Kant explains, “judgment in general is the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal” (18). As it appears in the Critique of Pure Reason, judgment is at the disposal of the understanding as the faculty which subsumes the particular, which is given from intuition, under the universal concepts of the understanding. In the Third Critique, Kant identifies this type of judgment as “determining” or “determinative” and posits another form of judgment. “If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given, then judgment, which subsumes the particular under it, is determinative. . . . But if only the particular is given and judgment has to find the universal for it, then this power is merely reflective” (Kant 18-19). Reflective judgment provides most of the subject matter for the Critique of Judgment, and it is as a form of reflective judgment that aesthetic judgment emerges in the Third Critique.

 

Reflective judgment has the singular function of securing a minimum level of cognition when the subject confronts a seemingly uncognizable object. Gasché explains,

 

in the case of certain objects of experience or empirical representations, determining–that is to say, cognitive–judgments are at a loss . . . and thus reflective judgment, whether aesthetic or teleological, is needed. The task of such judgment consists in nothing less than “discovering” concepts and rules that the particular obeys. In short, the task of reflective judgment, as distinct from the task of determining judgment, is to render intelligible what is particular and contingent by showing it to have a unity that is thinkable by us, although it does not rest on the objective rules that are, of course, the prerogative of determining judgment. (16)

 

It is this peculiar epistemic situation that Kant’s aesthetics seeks to address, and it is in this situation that judgment discovers its “para-epistemic” task as reflective judgment. “Such judgment is not ‘ante-‘ or ‘proto-‘ epistemic, since these qualifications would suggest, of course, that its achievements precede epistemic accomplishments properly speaking. . . . But the accomplishments of aesthetic reflective judgment stand beside and on a par with cognitive accomplishments; thus aesthetic judgment holds its place as equal to cognition” (Gasché 4). Explaining precisely how the particular and contingent, for which the mind has no concept, comes to be interpreted by purely subjective principles provides the bulk of the material of both the Third Critique and The Idea of Form.

 

At the end of the published introduction to the Third Critique, Kant provides a table which lists the three cognitive powers (understanding, judgment, reason) alongside each other (38). Such a schema seems to suggest that each of these “cognitive powers” is somehow equal, legislating over its own domain. In the first two critiques, Kant goes to great lengths to demonstrate how reason and understanding each legislates over its own domain. The reader of the Critique of Judgment might easily be misled into believing that the judgment is just another faculty, with its own distinct sphere of legislation. While capable of autonomy in aesthetic judgments, judgment is typically at the service of the understanding:

 

However autonomous reflective judgment may be, we must recall that its autonomy exists only in distinction from the reflection that takes place in the understanding. In mere reflection upon particulars without objective concepts, the exercise of autonomy remains a function of the judgment’s divestment of something that it ordinarily achieves. (Gasché 24)

 

 

The Third Critique itself, like the judgment, is not simply another critique, but is comprehensible only in terms of the other critiques. The judgment emerges as the unifying faculty, and the Third Critique proves the completion of the Kantian system, only once we understand that the failure of determining judgment opens up the possibility of another level of judgment, predicated upon an a priori principle that is subjective, rather than the objective concepts of the understanding. It is only its status as “mere” reflection, operating as not quite a faculty, as a para-epistemic power, that allows reflective judgment to unify the reason and the understanding.

 

In an act of brilliant textual analysis, Gasché highlights the peculiar position of reflective judgment by tracing the qualifiers by which Kant describes it, particularly the German adjective bloss, normally translated as “mere.” Over and over again, Kant speaks of “mere judgment” or of judgments upon the “mere form” of an object. “Mere” captures the way in which reflective judgment represents an achievement in the wake of determining judgment’s failure. Gasché explains,

 

I believe that his abundant use of these restrictive terms betrays the difficulty of the task faced by Kant in this last critical work–the difficulty of isolating, with the required purity, the realm to be delimited. It could thus well be that rather than occurring incidentally in Kant’s texts, merely is used for systematic reasons, and that its status is that of a philosophical concept comparable, say, to that of the pure. (19)

 

In The Idea of Form, Gasché charts the development of the Kantian “mere” as one of his key terms.

 

The sense of “mereness” is captured when Gasché suggests that the a priori principle which governs reflecting judgment, the principle of purposiveness, is “one principle more.” In his discussion of teleological judgments, Gasché highlights purposiveness as something merely added to a failed determining judgment. After differentiating determining judgments from reflecting judgments, Kant further divides the latter category into aesthetic and teleological judgments. By placing his discussion of teleological judgments at the beginning of The Idea of Form, Gasché reverses the order in which Kant discusses the different forms of reflective judgments, and in doing so suggests that aesthetic judgments are of greater concern in the Third Critique. Gasché establishes the priority of the aesthetic by pointing out that only in aesthetic judgment is the judging faculty completely free of the understanding:

 

Aesthetic judgment precedes all conceptual understanding of the object and hence has its determining basis in the power of judgment alone, free from any admixture of the other cognitive faculties. Teleological judgment, on the other hand, is based on “the concept of a natural end” (27)

 

 

Faced with an object to which no concept of the understanding applies, the reflective judgment attempts to secure a minimal cognition of the object. In the case of teleological judgments, this is achieved by adding the rational principle of “inner purposiveness” to the perception of the object.

 

Teleological, rather than aesthetic, judgment imposes itself when confronted with objects of nature, with “its life forms and organisms. From the perspective of the understanding (which knows only mechanical causality), the forms of such objects of nature are contingent, since it cannot come up with any necessary concepts for these natural phenomena” (28). While such objects cannot be comprehended by the understanding, they nonetheless seem as if they are governed by some concept. Teleological judgment operates by adding “one principle more” to the otherwise incomprehensible object–the principle of a natural purpose. “In order to make the organized forms of nature available to possible observation and investigation, teleological judgment follows a guideline, which is the rational concept of a thing as a natural purpose (Naturzweck)” (30). As Gasché points out, because teleological judgment borrows its principle from reason, it is not, like aesthetic judgment, “a faculty that really has its own distinctive and a priori principle” (27). Its principle is, instead, borrowed from reason. Even though the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” is included within the Critique of Judgment, it could as easily have been “appended to the theoretical part of philosophy” (Kant qtd. in Gasché 27).

 

One implication of this claim, which Gasché’s analysis seems to imply, though he does not comment on it, is the unified epistemic ground of science and aesthetics. Such a unification would not be a facile return to the vainglorious dream of a “scientific” form of aesthetics (as in the more vulgar claims of structuralist literary criticism). In fact, it suggests quite the opposite–that science and aesthetics, while sharing the common ground of reflective judgment, are two clearly demarcated domains: the domain of aesthetic judgment and the domain of teleological judgment. Sciences such as biology and to some extent physics require precisely the sort of assumption that teleological judgments make–assumptions of rationality, comprehensibility, and systematicity in nature. With such an assumption, phenomena are rendered “susceptible to observation and investigation” (Gasché 31). The a priori principle which governs all reflective judgments, that of purposiveness, undergirds both aesthetic and teleological judgments. It is at this level that science and aesthetics are unified within the Kantian framework.

 

Just as the Third Critique may offer an epistemic model that unifies science and aesthetics, it dissolves any strict division between art and nature. Against most understandings of aesthetics, Kant’s is not particularly concerned with art.

 

The meaning of “aesthetic” in [the Third Critique], moreover, bears little resemblance to what is known under that title in the history of aesthetics, both before and after Kant. As Kant uses the term it does not refer to artistic representation at all, but to that which concerns the senses in judgments, and is subjective. (90)

 

 

One consequence of Kant’s subjective criteria is the irrelevance of the origin of the aesthetic object. Aesthetic judgment arises when the mind is confronted with an object for which it has no determinate concept, and yet experiences pleasure in its judging of that object. It is therefore as likely to occur in the presence of objects of nature (such as Kant’s perennial example of the beautiful–a flower) as in the presence of human art. By defining aesthetics with reference to subjective experience, Kant radically reorients the domain of aesthetics. Among other pesky aesthetic issues that Kant sweeps aside is the question of the ontological status of art. Kantian aesthetics, as epistemic phenomenology, is concerned with the entire realm of experience. In place of the question of ontology, as Gasché argues, the central preoccupation of the Third Critique is the nature of the beautiful.

 

The notion of the beautiful is likely to strike the reader as quaint and unimportant for whatever we might describe as “contemporary aesthetics.” The Third Critique, upon first examination, is likely to seem hopelessly mired in the eighteenth century. Yet, if Kant speaks of the sublime and the beautiful, and fastidiously divides the realm of aesthetic experience into a hierarchical catalog, he nonetheless breaks with eighteenth-century aesthetics in many significant ways. One such break is the complete absence of any notion of “perfection” from the beautiful. More broadly, the Kantian beautiful provides no standards or rules for evaluating art. Instead, what a judgment of the beautiful “is concerned with is exclusively whether the objects under consideration have an indeterminately purposive natural form; in other words, whether they have the form of an object of empirical experience at all” (Gasché 80).

 

The key word here, and the key to Gasché’s book, is the notion of form–“beauty resides in the form of an object” (60). As Gasché is at pains to demonstrate, this does not make Kant’s aesthetics formalist, in the usual sense of the term. Kant’s sense of form completely evades the form/content division. “Rather than being opposed to content, form, in [Kant’s] sense, gestures toward what is otherwise than form and content–an exuberance of indeterminateness prior to any fixing of objective meaning and its constraining formal characteristics” (Gasché 66). Kant’s formalism refers to the para-epistemic place that aesthetic judgments occupy within his framework.

 

We must remember that aesthetic judgment, as a type of reflective judgment, concerns objects for which the mind has no concept. If, in spite of the absence of any determinate concept, an object may be judged purposive, “this is because this object displays form” (Gasché 80). Such a display of form occurs when the power of imagination (which apprehends the empirical object as a perception) unites harmoniously with the understanding–but only in a free, undetermined way. If the union of understanding and imagination were determining, the judgment would not be aesthetic at all.

 

Under the condition that the merely apprehended intuitive manifold of a single object lends itself to being collected into the presentation of a concept in general, a harmonious agreement of the imagination and the understanding takes place, and thereby represents the minimal condition for cognition in general. (80)

 

 

Like “mere,” the qualifier “in general” highlights the strange position occupied by the aesthetic. While it is not determined, it has the property of determinability, purposiveness without purpose.

 

A beautiful object is not determined by a concept, nor is it simply undetermined; it is “marked by open determinability” (Gasché 81). As Gasché states,

 

to put it bluntly, what is found beautiful in the judgment upon the mere form of an object is that the thing judged conforms to the form of an empirical object or thing (irrespective of what it is), rather than refusing itself to such representation (and consequently to representation as such). (80)

 

 

Beauty is therefore pleasure in the cognizability of an uncognized object, the determinability of an undetermined object. Gasché captures the nature of the Kantian beautiful most succinctly when he writes that “a judgment of taste savors not the phenomenal nature of what is judged but its susceptibility to empirical concepts. Because of its form, a beautiful object is, as it were, exquisitely cognizable” (80). More than any other, the notion of an object that is exquisitely cognizable captures the pleasure that inheres in the act of judging an object. The very act of judging becomes pleasurable, even as the work of judgment is undetermined and necessarily incapable of completion.

 

Against the beautiful, which resides in form, the sublime is formless. While this sounds like a straightforward recapitulation of the traditional opposition between the beautiful and the sublime, Gasché provocatively re-reads this division. While postmodern criticism has largely forgotten the “beautiful” in favor of the notion of the sublime, Gasché not only reasserts the place of the beautiful, but relegates the category of the sublime to an appendicular position, neither equal nor alternative to the beautiful, but an “appendage to the beautiful” (121).
Formlessness is only capable of being judged sublime, however, when it also exhibits totality. “Boundless chaos is not enough to suggest sublimity; it must be such that it allows thinking to add (hinzugedacht wird) totality to it. If Kant’s strict terminology did not prohibit it, one would be inclined to say that boundless formlessness must have the ‘form’ of a whole, in order for it to be sublime” (Gasché 123-4). As in judgments on the beautiful, determining judgment fails in the face of the sublime. This failure is experienced as sublime only when the notion of totality can be added to the perception of formlessness.

 

The notion of totality, however, does not arise in the judgment, but comes from the reason. “In the sublime, there is a presentation of a power that subtends cognizability and its intelligibility, namely reason. This presentation takes place precisely at moments when a given thing not only cannot be subsumed under given concepts but refuses even to be a presentation of the powers of cognition in general” (Gasché 125). The beautiful, while it fails to be subsumed under any particular concept, harmoniously unites the powers of cognition in general. The sublime, on the other hand, represents the complete failure of such powers. The subject, when faced with such failure, nevertheless feels its own power beyond cognition through the reason. This experience of its own power allows the subject to experience formless objects as sublime. “What is judged sublime is the mind’s capacity to form an apprehension of something that thwarts even the possibility of minimal objectification” (Gasché 127). This apprehension only occurs through the intervention of the reason. Strictly speaking, only feelings, and not objects, may be properly judged sublime. The objects which inspire sublimity, inspire only incomprehensibility. Yet reason (through the rational concept of totality) masters this incomprehensibility, leading to an experience of pleasure in the subject as it experiences its own ability to overcome formlessness.

 

Judgment on the sublime is “an aesthetic judgment at the very limits of aesthetics. . . . it gestures toward something else, namely, practical reason and morality” (Gasché 154). The intervention of reason, necessary for the experience of sublimity, lends a moral dimension to the sublime. Judgments on the beautiful remain pure judgments of taste, representing a harmonious relation between the imagination and the understanding, while judgments on the sublime enter into a relation with the faculty of reason.² It is this adding of reason to failed judgment that makes the “Analytic of the Sublime” an appendix to the “Analytic to the Beautiful.”

 

The appendicular nature of “The Analytic of the Sublime” thus consists also in this: that it adds the problematic of reason . . . to the analytic of the reflective aesthetic judgment that has been illustrated by privileging the beautiful. In the discussion of the sublime, it becomes clear that there is an autonomous kind of reflective judgment in which reason, rather than the understanding, plays the major role. (130)

 

Gasché reorients our understanding of the Critique of Judgment by revealing the para-epistemic role of judgment in cognition and re-centering the text around the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” While the primary division in Kant’s text is the division between the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and the “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” Gasché compellingly argues for the centrality of the former. And while Kant divides aesthetic judgments into judgments on the sublime and judgments on the beautiful, Gasché insists that the former is simply an appendix to the latter. Kant’s text, in eighteenth-century fashion, takes as its province the entire faculty of judgment and proceeds to catalog every appearance of that faculty. Gasché’s focuses the energy of Kant’s text, revealing the centrality of the beautiful in the Third Critique and, more specifically, the notion of form which undergirds it. By doing so, Gasché fleshes out the claim that the Third Critique is not concerned with aesthetics as a theory of art, but with the para-epistemic task of representing an object for which judgment has no concept.

 

Gasché proceeds to discuss Kant’s notion of interest and disinterestedness, how reason and aesthetic judgments interact, and what special provisions must be made for our understanding of the fine arts in contradistinction to nature. The final chapter, on the role of the rhetorical figure of “hypotyposis,” though a previously published essay, manages to distill and collect much of what has come before. In discussing poetry, in this closing chapter Gasché writes,

 

the free play of imagination produces only presentation as such, that is, not determinate intuitive fulfillment of concepts but their fullness, their vivid lively filling out in general. This indeterminate, intuitive fullness of the concepts that occurs in the play of the imagination in poetry livens up the mind. It conveys life to the mind, a life yet indeterminate, but purposive to the extent that it brings about the minimal arrangement of the faculties necessary for cognition in general. (204)

 

It is hard to imagine a clearer, more concise statement of Gasché’s argument for a para-epistemic reading of the role of judgment in Kant’s aesthetics.

 

Gasché accomplishes a great deal largely as a function of his ability to wed close textual analysis brilliantly to a philosophical discussion of Kant’s system. The drawback of such an approach is its tendency to insulate itself. Gasché explains,

 

I have also sought to avoid, whenever possible, a critical debate with the various and often contradictory interpretations that these and the related issues have received in Kant scholarship. Rather than challenging Kant’s commentators, I have endeavored to think with Kant. (11)

 

 

Yet without an engagement with a larger critical discourse the reader is left wondering what implications Gasché’s reading of Kant might have for larger critical debates. Gasché suggests cryptically that the Critique of Judgment “is important for the understanding of the fine arts, and particularly of modern and postmodern art” (3). Yet exactly how it is important he never makes clear.

 

As a reading of the Third Critique, The Idea of Form is a difficult but compelling account of the Critique of Judgment. Its failure to engage larger conversations within Kant criticism or contemporary aesthetics leaves the significance of Gasché’s re-thinking of Kant’s aesthetics largely undetermined. Gasché highlights a number of aspects of the Third Critique which seem resonant with contemporary critical theory. Kant’s subject-centered aesthetic theory is consistent with that strain of contemporary theory interested in artistic consumption rather than production. Kant’s stress on an aesthetic treatment of nature would seem to be useful for eco-criticism. For my own part, what is particularly compelling about Gasché’s vision of Kant’s aesthetics is its success as a description of our actual experience of aesthetic objects. Eschewing any normative judgment on the role of art, the aesthetic object according to Kant’s model becomes absolutely individual and semantically rich. Because it is indeterminability which defines the work of art, such work enjoins endless interpretation. It is, therefore, the very possibility of infinite interpretability that defines the Kantian beautiful.

Notes

 

1. Gilles Deleuze’s lucid, and notably concise, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Philosophy, similarly locates the Third Critique as the capstone of Kantian philosophy.

 

2. It worth noting, however, that the relation between judgment and reason in judgments on the sublime is not symmetrical with a relation established between the reason and the understanding in judgments on the beautiful. Kant’s schematic style might lead one to this incorrect conclusion, for which Gasché’s reading is a helpful corrective.

Works Cited

 

• Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjan. London: Athlone, 1984.
• Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.