The Communicability of Pleasure and the Pleasure of Communication: the ‘Obligation’ of Aesthetic Feeling in the Critique of the Power of Judgment

Abstract

Kant makes a puzzling claim in the Critique of the Power of Judgment concerning the connection between the feeling of pleasure occasioned by the appreciation of an object as beautiful and the universal communicability of this aesthetic feeling: on the one hand, he claims that this feeling is due to the free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding, and on the other hand, that it has its ground in the very communicability of this pleasure. The central argument of the present study is that it is possible to clarify the relation between the feeling of pleasure occasioned by the reflective judging of an object and the universal communicability Kant attributes to such a judging by grasping the demand for a ‘universality without concept’ claimed by a pure judgment of taste in terms of what appears to be a problematic relationship of grounding between the shareability of pure aesthetic feeling and the reflective activity of the mind. I will claim that this relationship can be rendered clearer by an explication of the ‘share’ of disinterestedness, purposiveness, and subjective universal validity claims in pure judgments of taste and brought together in the notion of a common sense (sensus communis). What thereby comes into view is an original orientation in the world that is presupposed by explicitly theoretical and practical judgments.