Abstract
This chapter, which takes its bearing from Stanley Cavell’s ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, continues the work of ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ of exploring the grammatical affinity between Kant’s ‘beauty’ and Wittgenstein’s ‘aspect’; but it then goes on to develop a Wittgensteinian critique of Kant on two fronts: first, it questions Kant’s commitment to ‘systematicity’ in philosophy, and his related tendency to treat what Wittgenstein calls ‘grammar’ as, at best, an indication of something else—namely, the workings of our cognitive ‘powers’, or faculties, in their (systematic) inter-relations; and, second, it challenges Kant’s understanding of ‘concept’—an understanding that is shared by many in contemporary analytic philosophy, and which essentially divorces concepts from our (evolving and context-sensitive) linguistic practices.
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- 1.
Stanley Cavell, ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’ (Hereafter referred to as ‘Aesthetic Problems’), in Must We Mean What We Say?. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 86.
- 2.
See ‘Aesthetic Problems’, 86.
- 3.
See in this connection the opening pages of Cavell’s ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’, in Must We Mean What We Say?
- 4.
CJ, 5:212–14 and 5:282. References to the first Introduction Kant wrote for the third Critique will be given in the text as ‘FI’, followed by the page numbers in Volume 20 of the Prussian Academy Edition.
- 5.
Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason (hereafter ‘CPR’), Guyer, P. and Wood, A. (trans.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, A11/B25–A16/B30.
- 6.
In When Words are Called For (Harvard University Press, 2012) and The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017), I document the ambivalent attitude exhibited by contemporary analytic epistemologists toward everyday linguistic practice: they seem unable to proceed far without relying on (examples of) it, but at the same time take themselves to be tasked with the discovery of a reality that is theoretically separable from it; as a result, they tend to misrepresent that practice, sometimes quite grotesquely, despite being (no doubt) fully competent practitioners themselves.
- 7.
I thank Jim Conant for pressing me about this point. For other points of affinity between Kant and Wittgenstein, see When Words are Called For, especially the ‘Epilogue’.
- 8.
‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy, in Must We Mean What We Say, 64.
- 9.
To justify or legitimize (our employment of) certain key concepts is to give an answer to what Kant calls the ‘quid juris’ question (CPR, A84/B116). In When Words Are Called For, I argue that there is a sense in which for Wittgenstein, Kant’s ‘quid juris’ question and his ‘quid facti’ question become inseparable: the use to which we (may reasonably be found to) put our words is not separable from our normal and ordinary ways—identifiable from within the practice—of entitling ourselves to that use.
- 10.
As I said, I do not claim and will not argue that that line of answer is what Cavell had in mind when he wrote ‘Aesthetic Problems’. Stephen Mulhall, who does attempt to spell out the connection Cavell saw between judgments of beauty as characterized by Kant and the philosophical appeal to ‘what we say and mean’, offers a different line of answer to the above questions (Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). I will not attempt to summarize, let alone fully assess, Mulhall’s comprehensive interpretation of Cavell. I will only say that, so far as I can see, his account of the connection between the practice of aesthetic evaluation and the practice of ordinary language philosophy does not deliver on Cavell’s promise to vindicate the latter—or at least go some way toward doing so—on the basis of Kant’s account of the former. This is what I will attempt to do in the final part of this paper.
- 11.
This, I believe, is the realization that brought Wittgenstein to give up the plan to arrange his thoughts in such a way that they would ‘proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks’ and to opt instead for the ‘album’ format (PI, ix).
- 12.
This paragraph rehearses a point made in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’.
- 13.
That’s the illusion that in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’ I characterized as conflating the intransitive and transitive uses of ‘a quite particular’.
- 14.
See, for example, Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Basic Writings, Alfred Hofstadter (tr.), David Farell Krell (ed.), (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 161.
- 15.
Guyer and Matthews translate ‘veranlasst’ by ‘occasions’, and thereby cover up the phenomenological feature invoked by Kant’s word of being goaded, called upon by the beautiful thing to articulate, and thereby bring out, what it says.
- 16.
Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, J. Glenn Gray (tr.) (New York: Harper and Row, 1954), 19.
- 17.
An anonymous reviewer for the European Journal of Philosophy, where this paper was originally published, has commented that ‘aspect-perception experiences do seem phenomenologically rather commonly tied to pleasure (more generally, to playing games, to the pleasurable free play of the imagination)’. This is certainly true of some aspect-perception experiences. As Juliet Floyd points out, in some cases of aspect perception ‘what is to be discerned is not an object or fact or concept, but a world, a human being, an expression or gesture, a total field of significance’ (‘On Being Surprised: Wittgenstein on Aspect-Perception, Logic, and Mathematics’, in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, Day, W. and Krebs, V. (eds.), (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 324). These kinds of cases of aspect perception actually support the argument I will present later against the identification of aspects with empirical concepts. For my present purposes, however, what matters is that some clear cases of aspect-perception cannot plausibly be seen as involving pleasure, and yet their typical expression nonetheless manifests the kind of ‘subjective universal validity’ that according to Kant, as we will shortly see, necessitates a link with pleasure. I also think that at least certain kinds of moral claims exhibit ‘subjective universal validity’ as characterized by Kant (as noted by Mulhall, in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 34–54), without being essentially connected with, or expressive of, pleasure.
- 18.
I am thinking here in particular of Rachel Zuckert’s interpretation of the third Critique in Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- 19.
‘Kant’s Principle of Purposiveness, and the Missing Point of (Aesthetic) Judgments ’, Kantian Review 10 (2005): 1–32.
- 20.
This idea of the assumption of nature’s ‘purposiveness’ is a development of Kant’s discussion, in the first Critique , of the ‘Regulative Ideas’ that guide our investigation of nature.
- 21.
This is why, for Kant, natural beauty takes precedence over artistic beauty (CJ 299 and 301).
- 22.
That we all are tasked with ‘unifying the whole of nature’ is Beatrice Longuenesse’s way of putting the Kantian assumption I’m questioning here (Kant and the Capacity to Judge, Wolfe C. T. (trans.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 42).
- 23.
‘Kant’s Principle of Purposiveness, and the Missing Point of (Aesthetic) Judgments ’.
- 24.
‘Letter to Reinhold, December 1787’, in Kant’s Correspondence, Zweig, A. (ed. And tr.), (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 272.
- 25.
So, by Kant’s lights, I was competently making judgments of beauty and competently responding to those of others without having any notion or sense of what entitled me or anyone else to make those judgments. As I said in Sect. 5.2 first Section, this Kantian idea—that fully competent speakers of a language might use certain words or expressions fully competently and sensibly, and yet have no notion or sense of what entitles them (or others) to that use—is deeply problematic from Wittgenstein’s perspective: it partakes of the old philosophical fantasy of finding a metaphysical grounding for our practices from a perspective that is still external to those practices (even if not quite in the empiricist or rationalist way).
- 26.
And it’s important that, just as in the case of Kantian judgments of beauty, even those who cannot perceive some particular aspect they are invited to perceive, would still understand the invitation, and recognize its peculiar sort of legitimacy (see CJ, 214).
- 27.
In ‘Aspects of Perception’, I explore in much greater detail the difference between Wittgensteinian aspects and (objective) properties.
- 28.
Something like that, though without the link to Kant’s aesthetics, has been proposed by Reshef Agam-Segal in ‘Reflecting on Language from “Sideways-on”: Preparatory and Non-preparatory Aspect-Seeing’, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1 (2012): 1–17; and ‘When Language Gives Out: Conceptualization, and Aspect-Seeing as a Form of Judgment’, Metaphilosophy 45 (2014): 41–68.
- 29.
This clause anticipates the argument of ‘Aspects of Perception’ against the identification of Wittgensteinian aspects with, or in terms of, concepts.
- 30.
This is not to deny that an experience aptly characterizable as one of ‘aspect dawning’ could have a profound effect on how we go on with our life. As Kiku Mizuno has pointed out to me, if, for example, a meat-eater comes to see, or is brought to see, meat as butchered animals, rather than as food, that could have the effect of making it harder, or impossible, for that person to go on eating meat. The point remains, however, that the dawning aspect does not come with, and is certainly not identifiable by, the sort of network of commitments that an empirical judgment, or the application of an empirical concept, comes with and may be identified by.
- 31.
Charles Travis, Perception, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 91.
- 32.
This last point connects with Kant’s saying that the modality of a judgment ‘contributes nothing to the content of the judgment’ (CPR, A74/B100).
- 33.
This point will be developed in much more detail in ‘Aspects of Perception’. That aspects may be identified with, or in terms of, empirical concepts was first proposed by Peter Strawson (‘Imagination and Perception’, in Kant on Pure Reason , Ralph Charles Sutherland Walker (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) (originally published in Experience and Theory, Foster and Swanson (eds.). Amherst, Mass. and London: University of Massachusetts Press and Duckworth, 1971). It has since been proposed by Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects (second edition), New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Severin Schroeder (‘A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception’, in J. Cottingham & P.M.S. Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Reshef Agam-Segal (‘Reflecting on Language from “Sideways-on”: Preparatory and Non-preparatory Aspect-Seeing’, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1 (2012): 1–17).
- 34.
The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 78. Insofar as we equate concepts with the meanings of words, a similar idea may be seen to be expressed by Adriane Moore when he proposes that ‘meaning is a matter of how we carry on with a word’ (‘Transcendental Idealism in Wittgenstein, and Theories of Meaning’, Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1985), 144).
- 35.
The internal relation between the phenomenal body and the phenomenal world will be discussed in greater detail in ‘Motivational Indeterminacy ’.
- 36.
In When Words are Called For (Harvard University Press, 2012) and The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017), I argue that the widespread philosophical ‘method of cases’—that is, theorizing, as Analytic philosophers have tended to do, on the basis of the ‘application’ of terms to ‘cases’—is misguided precisely because it ignores this insight of ordinary language philosophy.
- 37.
See David Bell, ‘The Art of Judgment’, Mind 96 (1987): 221–244; and Anthony Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 35–7.
- 38.
The Claim of Reason , 31–2. In ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’ Cavell makes essentially the same point: ‘[M]y interest in finding what I would say (in a way that is relevant to philosophizing) is not my interest in preserving my beliefs… My interest, it could be said, lies in finding out what my beliefs mean, and learning the particular ground they occupy’ (in Must We Mean What We say, 241).
- 39.
Must We Mean What We Say, 52.
- 40.
An important difference between Kant and Wittgenstein is that the possibility that we might not be in (full) agreement with (all) others at that level does not seem to be a live option for Kant (see CJ, 239), whereas it is for Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein, or anyway in Cavell’s Wittgenstein, the possibility that we might at any point discover that our attunement with others only reaches so far is very much a live possibility. Cavell speaks of it as the possibility of ‘intellectual tragedy’ (The Claim of Reason , 19). This feature of Cavell’s Wittgenstein is helpfully brought out in Stephen Mulhall’s Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
- 41.
In The Crisis of Method, I argue, on the basis of empirical studies of first language acquisition, for this way of thinking about the meanings of words.
- 42.
The Claim of Reason , 215.
- 43.
By this I do not mean to say that the perception of Wittgensteinian aspects, or of Kantian beauty for that matter, does not reveal an important feature of ordinary and normal human perception. I believe it does. In ‘Motivational Indeterminacy ’ and ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’, I argue, following Merleau-Ponty, that far from revealing what’s involved in the ordinary and normal application of empirical concepts to cases in judgments, it reveals our capacity to find, or project, perceived unity that is pre-conceptual, pre-judgmental, and pre-objective, and yet is intersubjectively shareable.
- 44.
Versions of this paper were presented to audiences at Auburn University, University of Chicago, Åbo Akademi, and the University of Helsinki. I have benefited greatly from the ensuing discussions. In particular, I would like to thank James Conant, Eli Friedlander, Keren Gorodeisky, Martin Gustafsson, Harata Hamawaki, Kelly Jolley, Thomas Wallgren, Christian Wenzel, and an anonymous referee for the European Journal of Philosophy.
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Baz, A. (2020). The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar Between Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell. In: The Significance of Aspect Perception . Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_5
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