The Critique of Judgement [70]
faculties engaged in the estimate of a sensible object in general*.
*In order to be justified in claiming universal agreement an aesthetic judgement merely resting on subjective grounds, it is sufficient to assume: (1) that the subjective conditions of this faculty of aesthetic judgement are identical with all men in what concerns the relation of the cognitive faculties, there brought into action, with a view to a cognition in general. This must be true, as otherwise men would be incapable of communicating their representations or even their knowledge; (2) that the judgement has paid regard merely to this relation (consequently merely to the formal condition of the faculty of judgement), and is pure, i.e., is free from confusion either with concepts of the object or sensations as determining grounds. If any mistake is made in this latter point, this only touches the incorrect application to a particular case of the right which a law gives us, and does not do away with the right generally.
Remark.
What makes this deduction so easy is that it is spared the necessity of having to justify the objective reality of a concept. For beauty is not a concept of the object, and the judgement of taste is not a cognitive judgement. All that it holds out for is that we are justified in presupposing that the same subjective conditions of judgement which we find in ourselves are universally present in every man, and further that we have rightly subsumed the given object under these conditions. The latter, no doubt, has to face unavoidable difficulties which do not affect the logical judgement. (For there the subsumption is under concepts; whereas in the aesthetic judgement it is under a mere sensible relation of the imagination and understanding mutually harmonizing with one another in the represented form of the object, in which case the subsumption may easily prove fallacious.) But this in no way detracts from the legitimacy of the claim of the judgement to count upon universal agreement-a claim which amounts to no more than this: the correctness of the principle of judging validly for every one upon subjective grounds. For as to the difficulty and uncertainty concerning the correctness of the subsumption under that principle, it no more casts a doubt upon the legitimacy of the claim to this validity on the part of an aesthetic judgement generally, or, therefore, upon the principle itself, than the mistakes (though. not so often or easily incurred), to which the subsumption of the logical judgement under its principle is similarly liable, can render the latter principle, which is objective, open to doubt. But if the question were: How is it possible to assume a priori that nature is a complex of objects of taste? the problem would then have reference to teleology, because it would have to be regarded as an end of nature belonging essentially to its concept that it should exhibit forms that are final for our judgement. But the correctness of this assumption may still be seriously questioned, while the actual existence of beauties of nature is patent to experience.
SS 39. The communicability of a sensation.
Sensation, as the real in perception, where referred to knowledge, is called organic sensation and its specific quality may be represented as completely communicable to others in a like mode, provided we assume that every one has a like sense to our own. This, however, is an absolutely inadmissible presupposition in the case of an organic sensation. Thus a person who is without a sense of smell cannot have a sensation of this kind communicated to him, and, even if be does not suffer from this deficiency, we still cannot be certain that he gets precisely the same sensation from a flower that we get from it. But still more divergent must we consider men to be in respect of the agreeableness or disagreeableness derived from the sensation of one and the same object of sense, and it is absolutely out of the question to require that pleasure in such objects should be acknowledged by every
*In order to be justified in claiming universal agreement an aesthetic judgement merely resting on subjective grounds, it is sufficient to assume: (1) that the subjective conditions of this faculty of aesthetic judgement are identical with all men in what concerns the relation of the cognitive faculties, there brought into action, with a view to a cognition in general. This must be true, as otherwise men would be incapable of communicating their representations or even their knowledge; (2) that the judgement has paid regard merely to this relation (consequently merely to the formal condition of the faculty of judgement), and is pure, i.e., is free from confusion either with concepts of the object or sensations as determining grounds. If any mistake is made in this latter point, this only touches the incorrect application to a particular case of the right which a law gives us, and does not do away with the right generally.
Remark.
What makes this deduction so easy is that it is spared the necessity of having to justify the objective reality of a concept. For beauty is not a concept of the object, and the judgement of taste is not a cognitive judgement. All that it holds out for is that we are justified in presupposing that the same subjective conditions of judgement which we find in ourselves are universally present in every man, and further that we have rightly subsumed the given object under these conditions. The latter, no doubt, has to face unavoidable difficulties which do not affect the logical judgement. (For there the subsumption is under concepts; whereas in the aesthetic judgement it is under a mere sensible relation of the imagination and understanding mutually harmonizing with one another in the represented form of the object, in which case the subsumption may easily prove fallacious.) But this in no way detracts from the legitimacy of the claim of the judgement to count upon universal agreement-a claim which amounts to no more than this: the correctness of the principle of judging validly for every one upon subjective grounds. For as to the difficulty and uncertainty concerning the correctness of the subsumption under that principle, it no more casts a doubt upon the legitimacy of the claim to this validity on the part of an aesthetic judgement generally, or, therefore, upon the principle itself, than the mistakes (though. not so often or easily incurred), to which the subsumption of the logical judgement under its principle is similarly liable, can render the latter principle, which is objective, open to doubt. But if the question were: How is it possible to assume a priori that nature is a complex of objects of taste? the problem would then have reference to teleology, because it would have to be regarded as an end of nature belonging essentially to its concept that it should exhibit forms that are final for our judgement. But the correctness of this assumption may still be seriously questioned, while the actual existence of beauties of nature is patent to experience.
SS 39. The communicability of a sensation.
Sensation, as the real in perception, where referred to knowledge, is called organic sensation and its specific quality may be represented as completely communicable to others in a like mode, provided we assume that every one has a like sense to our own. This, however, is an absolutely inadmissible presupposition in the case of an organic sensation. Thus a person who is without a sense of smell cannot have a sensation of this kind communicated to him, and, even if be does not suffer from this deficiency, we still cannot be certain that he gets precisely the same sensation from a flower that we get from it. But still more divergent must we consider men to be in respect of the agreeableness or disagreeableness derived from the sensation of one and the same object of sense, and it is absolutely out of the question to require that pleasure in such objects should be acknowledged by every