On Paul Guyer's Kant and the Experience of Freedom

Abstract

This excellent volume is a welcome companion to Prof. Guyer's first book, his path-breaking Kant and Claims of Taste. That work gave an extraordinarily close analysis of Kant's deduction of taste. It also generated, many readers, a desire to know much more about how third Critique relates to broader aesthetic, historical, and moral issues, both within and beyond Kant' s own system. The present volume collects six recent articles which develop this broader focus, and it adds four substantive essays, which include outstanding historical studies of eighteenth century background of Kant's aesthetics. In his Introduction, Guyer is explicit about coming to a change of view on these issues. He says, in my earlier work I was rash enough to suggest that Kant's discussion of such topics as sublime and genius, which appear to be tied only loosely to basic architectonic of Critique of Judgment, were mere concessions to literary fashion of his day, thus not essential to his fundamental argument about conditions... inherent a judgment of taste. ...I might now be tempted to assert opposite.. .that it is Kant's exclusive focus on problem of intersubjective validity of judgments of taste, 'Analytic of Beautiful,' which is his mere concession to a literary fashion of his time... I might also claim that real heart of Kant's aesthetic theory and underlying motivation for its creation is connection to his moral theory which appears his discussion of sublime, of aesthetic ideas as content of works of aesthetic genius, and of beauty as a symbol of morality (pp. 2-3). This welcome re-orientation does not come with a revision of fundamentals of Guyer's earlier analysis of Kant's justification of judgments of taste, but rather is meant to supplement and deepen it. On that analysis, Kantian judgments of taste are understood as having a complex epistemological and psychological character, as being universally valid disinterested judgments based on a pleasurable response that is felt as rooted a special freedom from cognitive or practical constraint (see e.g., pp. 7-12, and 279). Guyer now adds, the sense of unity of aesthetic experience without its subordi-