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MARK PACKER, friedlander, eli. Expressions of Judgment: An Essay onKant'sAesthetics.HarvardUniversity Press, 2015, $22.95 cloth., The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 73, Issue 4, October 2015, Pages 474–477, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12217
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Often regarded as the stepchild of the critical philosophy, Kant's aesthetic theory rarely attracts the degree of attention his ethics and epistemology receive. But Expressions of Judgment promises to correct this oversight by reconsidering the significance of the third Critique for Kant's philosophy as a whole.
Kant states in the Critique of Pure Reason that judgment has no independent field of application and does not, therefore, provide knowledge or grounds for action. The primary capacity that Kant assigns to judgment is that of mediation, connecting the faculties of sensibility, cognition, and reason in theoretical activity, and reason and will in the practical sphere. But Friedlander notes that the activities of judgment also conjoin the theoretical and the practical employments of reason themselves. The Critique of Judgment thereby provides a blueprint for the critical philosophy as a whole and thus plays a vital role in explicating the structure of reason.
Given that judgment mediates between the functions and employments of reason, rather than comprising a faculty of its own, it has no independent rules by which it operates. Unlike theoretical knowledge, judgment does not produce conceptual insight. And unlike the ethical determination of the will, it does not issue the kinds of ends required to motivate action. In its reflective employment as aesthetic judgment, therefore, there is no accountability to the objective criteria of cognitive claims or to the practical standards of moral imperatives. Aesthetic judgment, for Kant, is therefore based neither on truth nor goodness. Rather, it is grounded in a feeling of pleasure engendered by the free play of the faculties. But, Friedlander asks, how then are we to distinguish between sound aesthetic judgment and merely private episodes of enjoyment? Does this not call into question the very possibility of valid judgments about beauty? Or might it be the case that aesthetic judgment actually introduces another kind of meaning, besides the moral and the cognitive? If so, what are the standards for evaluating expressions of this third kind?
