Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Question · Explain Newcomer-friendly

Kant says taste is subjective but everyone ought to agree with it. How is that not a contradiction?

Serkan Aydoğdu Fellow
· 4 replies
Beauty & artModern EuropeanKantianismDavid HumeImmanuel Kant#antinomy-of-taste#beauty#kant#subjective-universality
Follow

Yesterday a lecturer explained Kant's view of beauty and I nearly missed a stop.

As far as I understood: when I call something beautiful, I am not reporting a property I can prove with concepts; it rests on my feeling of pleasure. But I am also claiming that everyone else should feel the same. The lecturer called this "subjective universality".

My example. There is a recording of a Yunus Emre hymn that I think is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard. My colleague on the 405 thinks it is boring. I cannot prove anything to him. But I also do not think it is just "my taste", like preferring tea to coffee. I think he is missing something.

Is that Kant's point, or am I mixing things up? And how can a feeling demand agreement from other people? It sounds like a contradiction to me: either it is my feeling, or it is a fact about the music.

LikeAnswer
Follow4 answers

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Henrike Vogel

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Your tea example is almost Kant's own, Serkan. Kant separates the agreeable from the beautiful. If I say Canary wine is agreeable, I must add "to me", and I don't quarrel with someone who dislikes it.

    A judgement of beauty is different. It still rests on feeling, so no argument can force your colleague to feel it. But the feeling comes from a free play between imagination and understanding, capacities that every human being has. Because that pleasure comes from something we all share, I may speak as if beauty were a property of the thing and expect agreement. Kant's word is that we demand it, not that we can prove it.

    So there is no contradiction, only a tension, and Kant names it himself as the antinomy of taste: judgements of taste are not based on determinate concepts (otherwise we could settle them by proof), and yet they must rest on something more than private feeling (otherwise we could not even disagree). His resolution is that they rest on an indeterminate ground, which he admits we cannot spell out.

    Unlike Hume, who puts the standard in qualified judges, Kant puts it in the structure of every mind. Your colleague has the equipment; something is in the way.

    Helpful · 2

Other answers

  1. Elif Yıldız

    Fellow

    My grandmother would side with you, Serkan. But I wonder if part of what moves you in the Yunus Emre hymn is the words and what they mean to you. Kant would want to separate the pleasure in the form from the pleasure in the meaning, and I am not sure that is possible with a hymn.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Johanna Reinhardt

      Fellow

      Elif's worry has an answer in Kant himself. He distinguishes free beauty, which pleases without any concept of what the thing should be (his examples include flowers and patterned borders), from dependent or adherent beauty, which is judged in light of what the thing is for: a church, a horse, a person. A hymn is easily dependent beauty. Kant does not think that disqualifies it; he thinks it makes the judgement less pure. Many readers find that the weakest part of the third Critique, but it does let Serkan keep both the words and the music.

  2. Serkan Aydoğdu

    Fellow

    So when I tell my colleague he is missing something, I am not proving a fact. I am inviting him, as one human to another, to listen again. That is how I will say it tomorrow at the depot.

    Helpful · 1