Abstract: There has recently been a resurgence of interest in the ‘acquaintance principle’, which holds that aesthetic judgments must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and cannot be formed on the basis of testimony. The locus classicus for this idea is Kant’s discussion of testimony in the third Critique. Kant thought that what was distinctive of and puzzling about aesthetic judgments is that they have – or claim – ‘subjective universality’: on the one hand, they can only be based on a subject’s response to an aesthetic object, but on the other, they speak in a ‘universal voice’ and make claim ‘to the assent of everyone’. The problem, then, is this: if my judgment is essentially based on my own ‘subjective’ response to an aesthetic object, by what right can I claim that my judgment is authoritative for others?
In this paper, I argue that this question has been neglected in recent discussions of the acquaintance principle. I defend a relatively strong version of the principle, drawing on Kant’s observations about our aesthetic practices. I then argue that the Kantian solution to the problem, which appeals to our supposedly a priori capacity to take disinterested pleasure in the free play of our imagination and understanding, is unsatisfactory. We should be pessimistic about the prospects of vindicating the Kantian demand for a ‘pure’ grounding of our aesthetic judgments. For this reason, I argue – drawing on work by Stanley Cavell and Amia Srinivasan – that the intersubjective authority we claim in forming an aesthetic judgment is essentially provisional: this authority can never be legitimised in advance, and can be vindicated, if at all, only through others’ acknowledgement of the aptness of our judgment. In this sense, the purported universality of our judgments is unavoidably fragile. I conclude by sketching how this response to the Kantian problem sheds light on our shared aesthetic practices, especially regarding the role of criticism and the positive value of aesthetic discussion.
The Workshop in Early Career Work in Progress is a venue for early career philosophers (usually within five years of PhD or employed on a fixed term position) to present their research in a low stakes, friendly environment.
If you are interested in presenting, please get in touch with James Laing (james.laing@philosophy.ox.ac.uk)
Workshop in Early Career Work in Progress Convenor: James Laing
