But we are not quite finished with Kant—more accurately, he is not quite finished with us. We saw (# 24) that Kant’s problem is Aristotelian (and, in a sense, Platonic); his solution, too, is Aristotelian.
Kant’s formulation of the problem is bought at the price of restricting the entire issue to the human mind: we are not to ask how a divine, unchanging realm produces changes in the world we live in, as Aristotle (and Plato) did, but merely how the principles of different faculties of the mind relate to one another. But the solution to this quintessentially modern formulation must be bought at another price, one Kant is not willing to pay, because he wants us to remain with the timeless principles of transcendental philosophy, to go down with the transcendental ship he has invented. But in the first part of the Critique of Judgment, before entering its final debacle, Kant shows us a possible escape.
To be sure, he fights hard to disguise it.
Reflective judgment for Kant begins with a “summing-up” (Zusammen- fassung: CJ 287). What gets summed up must have been given originally not as a unit but as a series of sensory contents (“intuitions”), deliverances of our sensory organs which our mind has arranged in space and time. Judgment then must scan those sensory contents; when it achieves a ”summing up,” the scanning stops. This may be because of some characteristic of the contents themselves (e.g. a color which reaches an edge), in which case the object is judged to be beautiful; or it may result from some feature of the scanning apparatus itself, in which case the object “exceeds” the scanner in some way and is termed sublime.
In a judgment of beauty, there may be only one stopping-point or summing up, or (expanding on Kant) several. In the former case, the judgment is of one object; in the latter, of a plurality. In either case, that sensory contents can be summed up means that they are held within boundaries, within which all points have equal weight and nothing is more central than anything else. Kant calls this kind of arrangement “aesthetic form.”
Leaving Kant behind, we may suppose that an aesthetically-formed sensory unit, or “aesthetic unit,” is then associated with a sound, so that (as Plato puts it in the Phaedo) the sensation of either calls up the other. When the formed unit is a single object, the sound associated with it is its proper name. When it is a plurality, the sound is associated with a set of properties shared by the objects summed up; it is a common name.
Naming is traditionally viewed as a “baptism,” an association of a sound or mark with a being which pre-exists the act of naming. Viewed as a case of reflective judgment, the object named is not presupposed, but is co-created by the sensory contents, with their shared properties on the one hand and the mind which scans them and sums them up on the other.
Any two sensory contents resemble one another just in that both are sensually given. They may also resemble one another in an indeterminate number of further ways—in shape if they are colors, pitch if they are sounds, and so on. Any two sensory experiences which we would say resemble each other thus do so in more than one way; the resemblances we recognize as such are superadded to their shared, and normally unspoken, quality of being sensed at all. The association of a sound with a plurality of aesthetic units thus normally takes place via a selection among the shared properties of the aesthetic units. Just which resemblances get selected for often requires clarification, through repeated ostension, definitions or longer explanations.
Reflective judgment so understood forms names; and it does so via a process akin to that of Homeric simile: first, some similarity among a set of sensory givens is noticed and seized upon (in Kantian terms, “summed up”). Such similarities, being sensory contents, are private; associating them with a sound makes them public. To form a name is therefore to decide that a certain set of similarities among sensory contents should be a public matter. What are the criteria for such a decision?
Obviously they are many and various, because they concern what is usefully talked about by a group of people at a particular time and in particular circumstances; this is the obvious truth behind Franz Boas’ reputed claim that the Inuit have 50 words for snow. It is perhaps worthy of note, in this connection, that words can be embedded in practices shared across a society, to cue others as to what to do next: names are the pre-eminently human means of action-coordination.
The names we produce articulate only a small subset of the many ways in which things resemble one another. Which of those ways are selected to be named varies with time and place. Thus, when Kant, at the very outset of his philosophical trajectory, characterizes sensation as “receptivity” (Rezeptivität, KRV B33), we must ask where that word comes from. Did he examine a number of cases of affection by objects and see that they all had receptivity in common? Or did he have a “pure” cognition of receptivity apart from the many instances of it in his experience? Kant tacitly opts for the latter—and with this appeal to purity, vaults into timelessness and gives his whole game away: the debacle of the Critique of Judgment already awaits him. If the former, however, he must accept that other people, at other times and places, may not see those cases as coming under the heading of “receptivity” at all. The possibility which, in the Third Critique, haunts him most—the possibility that our very faculties are gifts of history, which history can take back—stands open.
It is not merely a possibility; it is an abyss.
Philosophy trembled on its brink.