Abstract: Kant claimed that a distinctive feature of aesthetic judgments is their ‘subjective universality’. We must judge for ourselves - our aesthetic judgments must be based on our own ‘subjective’ response to an aesthetic object - yet we also judge for others: aesthetic judgments speak in a ‘universal voice’, claiming ‘the assent of everyone’. However, if my judgments must always be based on my own subjective responses, by what right can I claim that they are authoritative for others? In aesthetic disagreements, does Kant’s analysis license an attitude of arrogance?
In this paper, I examine Samantha Matherne’s recent claim that we can find in Kant not a license for aesthetic arrogance, but rather a model for aesthetic humility. However, I argue that Matherne's model has important limitations: it misrepresents the ways in which others’ aesthetic judgments may give us reason to revise our own, and it downplays the extent to which making an aesthetic judgment obliges us to be willing to justify that judgment to others. Drawing on Stanley Cavell's reading of Kant, I argue for a view that emphasises these intersubjective aspects of aesthetic judgment, concluding that our judgments can be vindicated, if at all, only through others’ acknowledgement of their aptness. This view, I argue, has important consequences: the possibility that one’s claim to authority will turn out to be an expression of arrogance is a risk that attends all aesthetic judging, and the universality we inevitably claim for our judgments is unavoidably fragile.
Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar Convenors: Jack Wearing, Joseph Schear, Kate Kirkpatrick and Mark Wrathall.
