Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology: Form and World (review)

In Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology, Fiona Hughes argues that aesthetic judgment is exemplary of the subjective activity of judgment, the harmony of imagination and understanding, necessary for any cognition in general (199). Unlike ordinary empirical judgment, aesthetic judgment phenomenologically reveals to us the synthesizing activity of the power of judgment that remains concealed by the cognitive aim of ordinary empirical judgments (262). According to Hughes, aesthetic judgment is exemplary for cognition because, in aesthetic experience, the fit between mind and world, or how a subject has a point of access to an external world of objects, is not merely inferred but experienced (266). From here follows Hughes’ provocative claim that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment in the third Critique completes the general transcendental project of establishing the possibility of a priori synthetic judgments (176). Thus, in contrast to the dominant “impositionalist” (89) interpretation of Kant’s critical project, according to which our knowledge ultimately amounts to the content of our own mind, Hughes places aesthetic judgment at the center of Kant’s epistemological project in order to show that our minds are capable of getting at something outside of ourselves in the world.

On Hughes’ view, this interpretation also explains Kant’s commitment to the necessary relation between the aesthetic judgment’s principle of taste and the reflective judgment’s logical principle of nature’s purposiveness. According to Hughes, the principle of nature’s purposiveness must be grounded in the principle of taste because the latter shows, in an exemplary way, the possibility of empirical cognition, which is also the most fundamental aim of the former.

The book is divided into eight chapters. In the first two chapters, Hughes summarizes and critically evaluates the critics and defenders of Kant’s cognitive formalism in order to situate her own interpretation within current debates. The third through sixth chapters focus on the first Critique and the role of the synthetic process in cognition. Hughes’ aim in those chapters is to show that, despite Kant’s own tendency to characterize synthesis as being in the service of the understanding, there are a number of passages that warrant her interpretation of Kant’s formalism as “dynamic” and “relational” (131), that is, as an achievement of both our spontaneity and our sensibility understood as a capacity to open ourselves to things in the world. Chapters seven through eight discuss Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment in order to show how it completes his transcendental project. In the Afterword, Hughes gives some directions for how her interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic judgment as exemplary for cognition may help elucidate the nature of the Kantian sublime.

Having summarized the main claims of the book, allow me to raise a couple of questions. My first concern does not apply only to Hughes, but to all the interpreters who argue for a tight connection between Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment and his general epistemological project. Describing aesthetic experience as a “heightened version” of cognition (155), or as a phenomenologically-revealed determinative judgment, obliterates the distinction between aesthetic and cognitive judgments. Although Hughes anticipates this objection, her efforts to characterize aesthetic judgment as a resistance to or interruption of cognition (296) do not convince because they still assume that aesthetic judgment is initiated by a cognitive aim. This, however, does not find support in Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment.

Second, if Hughes is to argue consistently that Kant’s transcendental project (if left to the first Critique) is susceptible to skeptical challenges, then her conclusion should be that his account of aesthetic experience completes his transcendental project because it serves as a piece of evidence that there is a fit between mind and world. Indeed, this is what she, at places, seems to suggest. However, at other places, Hughes cautiously respects the limits of Kant’s transcendental project and claims more modestly that, for Kant, aesthetic experience serves as a suggestion (263) that our rational project “could be” in tune with external nature...