Episode 105: Kant: What Is Beauty?

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 105 is something like, what is beauty? And we'll be discussing Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, first book of the first part. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in free play from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, purposive Without Purpose, in Austin, Texas.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:40 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey Judging in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:44 Mark: This is the first one that we've just. The four of us all together have been on since 97.

0:50 Wes: 97, yes.

0:52 Mark: Episode 97, not 1997. What do you think I'm saying?

0:57 Wes: Just trying to figure out how long we've been doing this. Well, it's good to have us.

1:02 Mark: It seemed like a throwback reading Kant. We haven't done this in a couple years. We haven't done anything really remotely like it in a couple years. I feel like it took some adjusting.

1:12 Dylan: I love it.

1:13 Wes: This was brutal.

1:15 Mark: So Wes picked this selection and we even narrowed it down further so that we're just going to talk about the beautiful this time. And we're actually going to have another episode probably in the near future where we talk about the sublime. So we'll talk more about this book. So we just picked the first part of the first book, which ignores a very long introduction.

1:33 Wes: Yeah, I actually. I thought you guys all said you read the introduction.

1:36 Mark: Well, yes, some of us got sucked into that. And that was actually much, much more difficult than the part about aesthetics.

1:42 Dylan: But super interesting.

1:44 Wes: But I think it's helpful, actually. I think I made a mistake.

1:48 Dylan: Did you judge wrongly, Wes?

1:50 Wes: Yes, yes, I did. Right.

1:53 Mark: So the introduction ties the part about aesthetics, about art, that we're going to talk about today about judgments of beauty, with the rest of his system. Do we want to briefly say. Well, so this book as a whole has a section on aesthetics, on art, and then it also has a section on teleology, on the internal purposiveness of things, on teleological accounts in natural science. So maybe a good point to start with. Can we say how those are at all related?

2:24 Dylan: Well, should we say that? Or how this is related to the critique of pure reason?

2:28 Wes: Maybe we should start by saying what judgment is.

2:32 Mark: Yes, that's kind of what I was trying to. So go ahead. What is judgment?

2:37 Wes: So the judgment we're used to, from. Or some of us, some listeners will be used to, from the Critique of Pure Reason and of the Prolegomena. And I'm talking now about what he calls determinative judgment is the way in which you bring particulars under a universal. Basically, so when you predicate of something that this is a dog, or so on and so forth, you're making a judgment. So that's judgment in its broadest sense. Of course, most of this book is going to be concerned with these very specific sorts of judgment that are quite different from what he's talking about in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Just to remind listeners too, of something that we do discuss in the episode on the Prolegomena is the way Kant is always worried about objectivity. And the way objectivity works for him is he realizes that it can't be this correspondence between our thoughts or our judgments and some thing in itself, some completely mind independent reality. So instead it's this relationship between concepts and appearances. Appearances are objects, he also calls them, but things that we have sort of constructed according to those concepts. So objectivity is sort of a rigged game in this sense.

It's a game in which the imagination has synthesized appearances or intuitions according to concepts in the first place. So that's this sort of synthetic constructive moment. And then when we make a judgment, we're in a sort of analytic mode where we apply concepts to these particulars or these intuitions or appearances. And it works because they've already been constructed according to those in the first place. We've also talked a lot in these podcasts about theory ladenness, the sense in which a particular isn't just a raw sensation, it already has a lot going on in it.

So that's another way to think about that.

4:18 Dylan: This particular kind of judgment in terms of concepts has an intrinsic determinate completeness to it. As you point out, he references, but he's not nearly as interested in that in this book.

4:29 Wes: Yeah, that's the foil for this. That's going to be what this is. What we're. The kind of judgment we're talking about in this book is not that it's reflective judgment, but. Go ahead.

4:38 Dylan: So anything that's what we normally think of as logical judgment or something where we say we understand when we make a judgment that there are seeds in this apple. It's because of the concept of apple that we have and has a determinate relationship to its parts, and one of its parts is it has seeds or something like that. Is that too complicated of an example.

4:55 Wes: It is complicated. I'm trying to think about it.

4:57 Dylan: I guess I was trying to come up with an example because the way I understood it from Kant was this determinative judgment. The determinative part was the relationship of the parts to the whole. So you have a concept of some entity and there is a determinant relationship between that entity and its parts and the things implied by that entity. And you can have a completeness to that.

5:23 Mark: I thought it was more that you've got a general term and then you have specifics under it. So it's not part whole, it's concept and instantiation. Right?

5:32 Wes: Yeah, that's basically it. We're talking about particulars and universals and their relationship. And the way we consciously relate those things is to make judgments. We make assertions about objects in the world, and those are determinants. Affirmative judgments.

5:43 Dylan: The distinction between a whole and its parts versus. What did you say, Mark?

5:47 Mark: The concept and the particulars that fall under it.

5:50 Dylan: There's going to be an interesting relationship between those two. And it might be for a different conversation to talk about that.

5:55 Wes: Parmenides, probably.

5:57 Dylan: Yeah.

5:58 Wes: The one and the many. Yeah. So I get your whole part thing. Yeah, yeah.

6:02 Dylan: So I blew the example. So I think it'd be helpful to have an example that we can work with as our canonical example of this kind of.

6:10 Wes: You're just asserting that this particular is a dog or this is an apple or. That's really the most basic example. Asserting of a particular that it belongs to a certain kind or concept.

6:20 Mark: And I think the difference between determinant and reflective judgment isn't just that reflective is the new kind that's introduced in this thing for the use of taste and stuff. But just one is up, down, and one is down, up. So then he talks about like you already have a concept. In fact, he's mostly concerned in critiquing pure reason with these innate concepts. Right. Shapes things like that.

6:39 Wes: Or pure concepts like, say, for instance, causality. And we know, for instance, that every experience to be experience is going to be causal. That's a pure concept, unlike apple or something like that, which is an empirical concept.

6:51 Mark: Right, right. But in either case, when you identify a given thing, whether you identify it just as a thing or as an apple in particular, you already have the concept. And so you're determining, thus the word determinant, that the individual falls under that.

7:05 Wes: Exactly.

7:05 Dylan: Yeah. See, I don't like this particular example because of the way in which he starts talking about reflective judgment as generating concepts.

7:15 Mark: Right. So Reflection is supposed to go the other way, that you don't necessarily have the concept already. You see something and you say, ah, what is this? Let's invent something for it.

7:24 Dylan: The obvious question is, how the hell did you come up with Apple in the first place? I mean that. So that's why I don't like the example.

7:29 Mark: All science uses reflective judgments, coming up with species and genuses.

7:33 Dylan: Yeah, and that's why that little tidbit is why the third half of the book is about teleological judgment.

7:41 Mark: Say a little more about that since we can be almost done with the intro.

7:44 Dylan: Well, it made the most sense to me in just thinking about the everyday language that a scientist uses to talk about all kinds of physical phenomena, whether it be in physics or in biology, that things have directions and purposes that are innate to them. And the understanding that a scientist would have is not that they actually have those purposes. The electron doesn't actually want desire to be closer to the proton. It's that the language of purpose is invoked as a way of speaking about nature to give it direction and purpose.

8:19 Wes: Yeah, we have a concept of what the thing ought to be, and so we can make judgments based on that purposive concept of the thing having an end or something it ought to be. So we can think, ah, yes, this human being is imperfect, in a sense, missing a limb. Or let's say it's something that makes it not what a complete human being ought to be. Something like that.

8:37 Dylan: Well, but entities are determined by their ends. Human being becomes in some ways the perfect example, but also the most difficult example. But the way he talks about this would apply to any kind of language a scientist would have about the physical world. Talking about what the entity wants to do. And that language is saying what its ends are, how its activity is structured. So when you say the north pole of the magnet repels the south pole of the magnet, it doesn't want to be near it. You're using this teleological language to describe the. Its ends. Because in some funny way, its ends is the language of effect. It's the language of cause.

9:16 Wes: Yeah, I think he's usually thinking about biological.

9:19 Dylan: Yes.

9:19 Wes: Or what he calls organized. I think he calls them organized beings. But, you know, the heart is for the sake of pumping blood and that sort of thing.

9:26 Dylan: Just as an aside, I think that this, even before I dipped my finger into the end part of the book, just the whole discussion of purposeless purposiveness, it just reeked of the thinking that goes on in science. And so I just couldn't possibly help. I couldn't help myself. I'm sorry I brought it up.

9:45 Wes: No, I think this is really important and we should hit this early, actually, because it'll help when we get to this purposeless purposiveness, which gets complicated because this idea here in section four where he talks about the determining sort of judgment which was gone over and then the reflective sort of judgment where we go from particular universal. It's in the reflective judgment that we get a kind of principle. So when Kant was doing a critique of Pure Reason, he thought judgment was sort of just a go between the understanding and sensibility or the imagination.

But really it has its own sort of principle. And that principle is that it sees nature as ordered and knowable and amenable to cognition. What he's really getting at in this section 4 of the introduction is that for all his categories and so on and so forth, you'll get general principles like every effect must have a cause. But you're not going to get an inverse squared law. There's these specific scientific laws which make use of this element of necessity and the pure laws, but they are themselves empirical. And there's no necessity that we might just have a multiplicity of laws that are completely unrelated.

So one example is this, I guess, is a general relativity and quantum mechanics which we don't yet have a unified theory for. So there's no necessity in Kant system that we ever get that unity. But the understanding has a principle according to which we should expect that unity. We expect the world to be reasonable and we expect to be able to relate different principles to each other and boil them down to more fundamental principles and so on and so forth. So that is the so of independent operating principle of the faculty of judgment.

11:18 Mark: I'm glad you pointed out that distinction because I wanted to make sure we were clear on. He's trying to fit judgment and judgments of taste in between the work of his previous critiques. So whereas in the first critique he was concerned, among other things, with coming up with concepts, as you said. So we've got the faculty of the understanding that is supposed to help us apply these pure concepts like causality to experience and number and other things. And then we also said stuff about could have empirical concepts like Apple, whether they're empirical concepts or pure concepts, but they're both ways of relating to the contents of experience that are in some ways are not out of our purview.

Right? They're either things that are already in our heads, like causality. And number and Right space and other things like that. Or there are things that we can invent just to organize what's going on. Let's. At least that's the way I'm interpreting the empirical concepts. But I want to contrast both those with the ideas. Right, the faculty of reason, where there are expectations that we approach experience with that are sort of built into us, but are not these pure concepts or anything like that. So one of them, like you just said, is we expect things to be orderly.

So we expect things, as Dylan was saying in science, to operate as if they had teleology, as if they had something that looks like purposiveness. But this is not something that is sort of built in like one of the pure concepts. Instead, it's something really that's referring to a realm outside of experience. Right. So the transcendental.

12:41 Wes: Yeah, but I think that when he talks about purposiveness here, he's actually talking about something a little different. He's talking about what he'll end up calling formal purposiveness, as opposed to teleology. So when he says purposive here, he means it seems as if the world were sort of designed to be knowable by us. It was sort of designed to fit our cognition of things. And in some sense, that's not surprising. The critique of reason is all about that, how all that's rigged. But he means that even beyond the pure concepts of the understanding and stuff that's just baked into what we think of as reality, there's a surplus beyond that which is not determined by our minds.

So, for instance, whether or not we're going to be able to find a unified theory in physics has nothing to do with the way our minds are constructed. And if we do find that unified theory, that kind of discovery makes it seem as if the world is orderly in such a way that it's really designed. That's for the purpose of our knowing it in some sense. See what I'm saying? So that's the purposiveness at stake here.

13:39 Dylan: Yeah, in the chapter, in the introduction, chapter five, actually, the principle of formal purposiveness of nature is a transcendental principle of judgment right around paragraph 184 in the middle of it. Hence, we must think nature, as regards its merely empirical laws as containing the possibility of an endless diversity of empirical laws that, despite being laws, are nonetheless contingent as far as we can see. And it is in view of this possibility that we judge the unity of nature in terms of empirical laws, as well as the possibility of the unity of experience as a system in terms of empirical laws to be contingent.

And yet we must necessarily presuppose and assume this unity, since otherwise our empirical cognition could not thoroughly cohere a whole of experience. For though the universal natural laws do make things cohere in terms of their genus as natural things, as such they fail to provide them with specific coherence in terms of the particular natural beings they are. Hence, judgment must assume as an a priori principle for its own use, that what to human insight is contingent in the particular empirical natural laws does nevertheless contain a law governed unity, unfathomable, but still conceivable by us in the combination of what is diverse in them to form an experience that is intrinsically possible.

14:59 Wes: So that's exactly what I was trying to say in a more simple way.

15:03 Seth: Oh, is that right?

15:04 Wes: Yep. That was what I just might comment before, that was just my translation, that

15:09 Dylan: also now we have them both.

15:11 Mark: So it's interesting that when he's talking about the transcendental here, he's not talking about the normative, whereas throughout the second Critique, right. All of his moral work. And I think where the notion of the transcendental is going to be useful to us in talking about taste is the normative aspect, that somehow when we have a judgment about taste, we expect that others should fall into line. If we find something beautiful, others should find it beautiful too. And he wants to compare that to moral imperatives, right? That you can't just look at experience and see that murder is wrong or something like that.

You have to get any right and wrong judgments somehow out of the transcendental. Right. It's just, it's an idea that we for practical purposes can't avoid approaching the world with. Right. So it's nothing that we could prove through scientific means, but yet it's still something that's built into our relation to the world. He thinks ethics is. And so taste is going to be similar to that. It's going to be kind of splitting the difference between the theoretical and the practical, between the metaphysical and the moral here.

16:05 Wes: Right? To say the moral is transcendental is just to say that it's not a part of what we can experience. It's not empirical. And what that means is, for Kant, the world is just a determined causal system, and morality requires free will. So free will must be transcendent. It must in some way, if morality is to be possible, has to be outside of that causal system. So that's what transcendence is doing here.

16:27 Mark: Yeah. You might think, oh, of course I could experience something being bad. I mean, I get hurt. I experience that as being bad. But no, that's not, for Kant, a moral matter. Right. That would be for Hume or somebody that thinks what ethics is possible has to be based on empirical matters, has to be based on experience. Then that would be a fine basis for things. But Kant can't do that.

16:46 Dylan: Right. Before we get out of the introduction, he presents the Critique of Judgment as unifying philosophy between practical reason and pure reason. And that idea is really interesting. And when I was reading the book, I just felt like, just even in his writing, Kant was. He just felt like a live wire. And like nothing else I've ever read of his. I haven't read a ton of. I mean, I've read the Critique of Pure Reason and a couple other things, but it felt like he was really working through something in an excited way, reading through this book.

17:20 Wes: Yeah.

17:21 Dylan: And part of that seemed to me is just he comes to a conclusion and openly thinks like, well, that's crazy. What do we make of that? And part of that is in this scene that this third critique in some ways unifies the other two.

17:34 Wes: Yeah. Another way of saying that is just that the aesthetic becomes the bridge between morality and science.

17:40 Dylan: Yeah.

17:40 Wes: And we'll see why as we delve into this.

17:43 Mark: All right. I feel like we've been neglecting Seth, who probably actually followed the reading assignment and didn't read the intro. Do you want to get us started on the section one on the first book proper?

17:53 Seth: Sure. The first book, the analytic of the beautiful section one. He talks about the judgment of taste. This translation says aesthetical, but I would just use aesthetic.

18:03 Wes: What translations do people read, by the way?

18:05 Seth: I use the one online that Mark pointed us to.

18:08 Dylan: I read the Pluhar.

18:09 Wes: Okay.

18:09 Seth: Bless you, Bernard. Pluhar.

18:13 Mark: Yeah. Bernard is the one that's on, and I have a paper version of that too. So, yeah, I read that.

18:17 Wes: So I ended up reading starting on the Bernard and then moving to the Guyer, the Critique of the Power of Judgment.

18:24 Mark: When you mentioned Guyer, I hadn't done any of the secondary reading or anything, but now, after listening to a lecture or a couple lectures on itunes, U on this and looking at some of the secondary sources. Guyer is like one of the big interpreters of this too.

18:36 Unknown speaker: Right.

18:37 Mark: Who actually gives something that actually seems to make sense in terms of a version of this free play and weird stuff that's really hard to figure out from the text itself.

18:46 Wes: Right. He's a big. He's one of the big ones, the Kant guys.

18:49 Mark: I might have gone that way if I had realized, but it was fine.

18:52 Dylan: So what are the three different ways of translating the beginning of the book? Like mine, it's the analytic. It starts with the analytic of aesthetic judgment. Analytic of the beautiful. Is it different in those books?

19:02 Wes: I mean, all the translations are actually pretty well. The Pluhar seemed the most divergent, but there's still. There's a lot of similarity, especially between the Guyer and the Bernard.

19:11 Dylan: Okay.

19:12 Mark: They're all really stilted and awkward. No translator. Fix that.

19:15 Dylan: Oh, well, yeah, Right on that. This was like candy. It's Kant candy, as far as I could tell.

19:21 Wes: Really?

19:22 Dylan: Yeah.

19:23 Wes: I found it brutal, despite my Kant fandom. He's so repetitious. The sentences are so long. I'm like, oh, my God, does the Critique of Pure Reason really like this?

19:33 Dylan: Oh, it's so much easier than the Critique of Pure Reason, as far as I'm concerned. So maybe it's not actual candy. Maybe. And being Kant, candy means it's not actually candy.

19:42 Mark: All right, so we let Seth read one sentence before we interrupted him and talked about the translation for 10 minutes.

19:47 Wes: Go ahead, Seth.

19:48 Unknown speaker: Seth.

19:48 Seth: That's quite all right. So I read the Stanford Encyclopedia entry and the Internet Encyclopedia entry, and it gave me some kind of structure to read it. And I thought, man, this is really easy. The first day I did it, and then when I was reading sections three and four, I kind of, like, lost my momentum and it was a complete morass. There's a wonderful sentence at the tail end of the third moment that's so typically Kant. I'm going to read it aloud later on for sure. Let me quote here, because I think this is pretty lucid as far as he goes. In order to decide whether anything is beautiful or not, we refer the representation not by the understanding to the object for cognition, but by the imagination to the subject and its feelings of pleasure or pain.

The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective. So let's break this apart a little bit. A judgment of cognition is a judgment that they were talking about when they were talking about the introduction, which is to say you get a representation. You get representation of the world in sensation, and you use your understanding to subsume that in a cognitive act under some other object. I think Wes was saying, for example, you see a dog and you say, oh, this is a dog.

You don't say it out loud, but that's what happens intellectually under the concept. Under the concept. Under the concept dog. And you say, oh, a chair is under the concept of a chair. Or even for situations. You know, you recognize situations and events as falling under concepts. What he, Kant, wants to say there is all that work that's being done by the understanding is referring to something that can be considered as part of the object or the representation. In other words, you can say of this representation, that's a dog. And you're talking about the object that you're looking at.

You're not talking about yourself. You're not referring to something subjective. When you make a judgment, that's a judgment of taste. And you're saying something is beautiful. What he's saying is you're actually talking about whether or not something is pleasing to you, and that that makes a reference to you as the subject. It's not something in the object. It's your relation to the object or your experience of the representation itself. And so when he says this is not a logical but an aesthetical judgment, what he's saying is this is not a function of the understanding, doing something conceptual.

Rather, it's actually in your experience of it.

22:22 Mark: Can I just say how refreshingly clear talking about objective and subjective this way is compared to the way we normally talk about it? Oh, yeah, we say that. It's just if it's pointing outward, it's object. If it's pointing back at you, it's subjective. That's all it means. It doesn't mean, like, it's tainted in some way, and that's why it's subjective or. You don't have to do any philosophical work to use this distinction.

22:46 Wes: Right. It doesn't mean it's relative in the way we normally think of aesthetic judgments.

22:52 Seth: Basically, that's kicking off the discussion. Kant's gonna have to do a lot of work talking about, in particular, the feeling of pleasure and how there are different ways that you can have feelings of pleasure about a representation. But that's where this whole discussion gets started.

23:08 Wes: Yeah, so really, it's about the way the subject is affected with pleasure or pain in response to the object.

23:17 Seth: Now, section two. Section two. So I have to say, I really enjoyed this. I think there's some really, really incisive and sharp and clever things that he's doing here. He says, okay, so we've got this idea of a judgment of taste. We say something's beautiful, and we recognize that in saying something's beautiful. We are saying something about how we experience it, our feeling of pleasure, our feeling of pain. He says, though, when you say that something is beautiful, it's not simply to say that you like it. You get a pleasant feeling, say, for example, from drinking a glass of red wine.

But somebody else may not get a pleasant experience of drinking red wine. They may hate it, and that's perfectly normal. What he says is that in the case of something that you find pleasant, that's simply subjective in the sense that it's your experience of it and somebody else may have a different experience, it's because you have an interest in that thing. So if you find red wine pleasant, it's because you want to drink red wine or you want to possess bottles of red wine or something like that. In the case of beauty, when you say that something is beautiful, he says that you're making that judgment and you're saying that with the experience of finding it pleasant, but with no interest in the representation or the thing itself.

24:34 Mark: In the existence of the thing, not the representation.

24:36 Wes: Yeah. You're focused on the representation, but not the existence of the thing itself.

24:41 Seth: Right. It's like you can take it or leave it, but you're having a pleasant. You know, you're getting something pleasant out of it. In the text he talks, and in the commentary, they talk about having an interest in being tied to the existence of the thing. But he does talk about desire. And there is a component of him using the term, or the translators using the term interest that is supposed to indicate desire. Desire for possession, desire for consumption, Something like that.

25:06 Wes: Yeah. So to give an example, and this is a variation on one of his examples, I'm kind of combining actually or two of his examples. So, for instance, I might morally disapprove of the existence of a palace because it's an extravagance, yet I could find it beautiful. My disposition is negative towards the existence of the palace, but. But I still get a satisfaction out of the beautiful representation of the palace, regardless of how I feel about whether or not it should actually be there.

25:34 Seth: Yes.

25:34 Wes: So that's one way of getting at it.

25:36 Seth: Like Rousseau, you could rebuke the vanity of the great, who wastes the sweat of the people on such superfluous things.

25:42 Wes: Right. Oh, is that what you wanted to.

25:44 Seth: No, no, I'm just saying that's what he says. Yeah.

25:47 Dylan: It's a nice quote in being disinterested. And I thought that it was. You could like and find the beautiful agreeable, but in terms of it being Beautiful. Agreeableness wasn't going to factor in. It seemed like it must necessarily go, in fact, so that you could find it actually disagreeable and consider it beautiful. It wasn't a requirement that you find it agreeable. And also for some separate reasons that you find it beautiful because of your lack of interest in it. I suppose it could be your way into considering it beautiful. But agreeableness of the object doesn't have any bearing on whether it's beautiful.

26:29 Wes: So, Seth, in your translation, agreeable is pleasant. That was one of the innovations of the new translation, is to use this word agreeable instead of pleasant to make it less confusing. Because the point is that we get pleasure from a judgment that something is beautiful. We don't judge it beautiful because it's pleasurable. That's going to be the critical thing we get. The pleasure comes from the judgment that it's beautiful.

26:51 Dylan: So it's a cognitive pleasure.

26:52 Wes: But in the case of agreeableness, we are just. We are interested in the object because it gives us pleasure.

27:00 Seth: Yeah.

27:01 Wes: And so when we're interested in the glass of wine and because it's agreeable, you know, we're interested because it's pleasurable, and we want that actual existent object because it's pleasurable. In the case of beauty, we are judging the representation to be beautiful and then get the pleasure. And that's not the same thing as agreeableness. So agreeableness is limiting us to those specific cases of like, you know, eating and drinking and that sort of stuff.

27:21 Seth: Stuff that may be a distinction that is a little too fine for me. But another way of saying it maybe is agreeableness is something that you get directly from the sensation. It doesn't go through judgment. You just simply have an agreeable or pleasant experience of the representation of the world, your sensation. Whereas to say something's beautiful means you have to go through the process of this judgment. And then, Dylan, what I understood was that beauty is always going to be attended by a certain level of agreeableness. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to recognize it as a feeling and go on and do the rest of that stuff.

28:00 Wes: It's not wrapped up with agreeableness. We'll find out later that he thinks agreeableness charms putting things that are agreeable into our beautiful objects actually muddies the water. So we have to be careful here. Yes, pleasure is consequent of beauty, but agreeableness is the enemy of beauty.

28:15 Seth: So what is the positive feeling that attends on the judgment of beauty?

28:19 Wes: Pleasure. So this is the problem. This is why they change the translation.

28:22 Mark: Pleasure. That's not actual pleasure in your translation.

28:25 Wes: It's confusing because he's talking about the pleasant, but the pleasant is very different from the pleasure attending the judgment of beauty. And so the new translator said, okay, let's call this agreeable, so it's not so freaking confusing.

28:37 Seth: Let's agree then, to call the positive feeling that attends direct sensation agreeableness, and the positive feeling that attends the judgment of beauty as pleasantness.

28:48 Wes: Pleasure.

28:49 Seth: Pleasure. Sorry. Okay.

28:51 Dylan: Thinking about this, it made perfect sense to me, the following kind of claim that you would go and see a piece of furniture or a building, and you'd say, I can see how it's beautiful, but I don't like it.

29:05 Mark: That seems foreign to Kant. To me, that seems like you're saying, well, I can see why other people would find that beautiful, but I don't find that beautiful. So it's sort of embracing a relativism of the beautiful that I think is foreign to Kant.

29:18 Wes: Actually, there's a way to make sense of that. So, for instance, when there are beautiful representations of ugly or disturbing things, and that actually is not a. That's not an outlier in art. That's pretty central to art. So, for instance, Greek tragedy, very obviously disagreeable to us. It's certainly possible to think something is beautiful and have it be full of disagreeable things.

29:39 Mark: But that's not the same as what Dylan was saying is that I think it's beautiful, but I just don't like it. It that's like you're saying it's beautiful, but I have no taste. My taste is shitty.

29:50 Wes: No, it depends on why he doesn't like it. He doesn't like it because of the color. He doesn't like the particular color green. Well, on Kant's theory, that has nothing to do with beauty. So it's disagreeable to him in color. But formally, it could be beautiful.

30:05 Dylan: So, you know, on the one hand, I could. If I said something like that, it might be just that I have bad taste in the mode of the beautiful being a claim of universality, that I have bad judgment. But I thought there was room that I could find something that I recognize as beautiful, disagreeable.

30:26 Mark: An easy example for this, which also just I think illustrates the distinction very clearly, is pictures of nudes.

30:34 Seth: Right?

30:34 Mark: You could say, this is a beautiful picture of a nude, but do you actually want. Is it bringing lust in you? So that would be the. Be agreeable according to the way we've been using the word. If it actually incites Lust in you, but that's an interest. That's exactly not beauty. So you could say, I recognize that this painting is beautiful, but I'm not really into it. In other words, it doesn't actually bring out that lascivious lust in me. So that is a case where I'm evaluating it on non aesthetic grounds. I recognize its beauty, but I don't really care right now because that's not what I'm looking for.

31:10 Wes: Yeah. If you're looking for pornography and not Picasso, then you're in trouble.

31:15 Dylan: Well, I'm so confused that the point of nude paintings was to bring out lust. That doesn't make any sense to me.

31:23 Wes: To the person of bad taste. Marcus Singh.

31:26 Mark: Yes.

31:27 Dylan: Okay.

31:27 Mark: I was just trying to give something that would mirror your example where you're saying, I recognize this is beautiful, but I don't like it.

31:34 Dylan: Like 90% of classical music is like that for me.

31:37 Mark: But then you really don't recognize that it's beautiful. You recognize that society says that this kind of thing is beautiful, but you really don't see the beauty at all.

31:44 Dylan: Because I don't take pleasure in.

31:45 Wes: You have to have the feeling of pleasure.

31:46 Mark: Yeah. However, you could be like, okay, I recognize this is beautiful, but I'm just not in the mood for it right now. This, I think, sounds more like Kant, that the recognition of beauty is more cognitive. It has some relation to pleasure. It's not foreign to pleasure. If you never found any of the things beautiful, if you just had some brain defect, you could recognize just based on what other people call beautiful. Okay, well, I guess that's beautiful and that's beautiful and that's beautiful. But I don't like any of them. According to Kant, you wouldn't really be understanding beauty. No. Beauty really has to be tied to experience and pleasure on some level. But at the same time, you could recognize beauty and not feel the pleasure at that moment.

32:25 Wes: Yeah. And also we can be conflicted about things. We could be at the same time pleased and displeased by something on different grounds. So we might be pleased by its beauty but irritated by it for other extraneous, non aesthetic reasons. Kant will also talk about getting bored with stuff later on. It's possible to initially think something is beautiful and then just kind of be sick of it. You know, you've heard it too many times.

32:48 Mark: We've almost made our way through the first moment. Maybe just to Clarify this section 5, the three different types of satisfaction. So we've been talking about the first two types, the agreeable or the pleasant

32:59 Wes: in this, we'll be on section four as well, right?

33:02 Dylan: Yeah. The good. The good at all.

33:05 Mark: So that's the third one, right? Which is more obviously interest. Wes's example about the palaces is a moral condemnation. That is obviously separable from the aesthetic evaluation. That's the third one, is that you could be interested in two ways. You could be interested because it's giving me immediate pleasure. It's giving me immediate agreeableness. It's inciting lust or whatever the thing is, it's tasty. And on the other hand, I could be interested in it because I morally approve of this kind of thing. Neither of those is a judgment of beauty. Beauty lies in between.

33:40 Wes: The good is conceptual first of all, and the beauty isn't. So to find something good, I have to have a concept of what it ought to be first of all. So that's where the concept comes in. And I don't need any such concept to find something beautiful. I'm just basing it on the feeling. For something to be good, it must be made an object of the will. And you use principles of reason to bring it under the concept of a purpose. And you think about either what it's going to be good for. If it's something that's going to be useful. Because the good can be just simply be useful for other ends. Or it could be an ultimate end, and so on and so forth. Pleasure of the aesthetic is entirely distinct from that.

34:19 Mark: It seems to provide a good corrective for the way some people use judgments of tastes. That Wes just was saying that if you have a concept of how it should be. Then it's not really a judgment of beauty. And that's how a lot of people like if they're listening to music and like. Well, this isn't really exactly the kind of music I like is more exciting than this. And it has better lyrics and has more interesting and whatever. If all he's coming to mind it should be. And that what you're noticing is the absence of that thing. Then you're not actually really paying attention to the stimulus itself.

34:52 Dylan: I'm not sure I quite agree with you, Mark, about that. Because in this section, while the good is associated with a determinant notion of purpose. The beautiful ends up being directly associated with purpose. And it might have this free form or free play that we'll talk about later. But it is associated with concept and purpose. It's just associated in a different way.

35:17 Wes: It's going to be a really weird kind of purpose, though. So we need to be very careful about that. It's not purpose in the sense that we normally think about it here.

35:25 Dylan: Well, it's not determinative purpose. Right. We have on the one hand the agreeable, which is directly related to sense and stimulus, and we have the good, which is related to reason and a concept with a purpose. And the beautiful ends up being somewhere partaking of both of these things. Right.

35:43 Wes: Well, Kant's pretty clear though, that if you judge something according to the good and what it ought to be, then you've abandoned the aesthetic.

35:51 Mark: Just to keep the example that I threw out there. If you don't like something, that doesn't mean you're wrong, of course. It just means that if you give the reasons for your not liking it is it doesn't achieve some purposes or expectations that I had. That's not right. That's not actually why you don't enjoy it. You're not enjoying it. It's supposed to be irreducible and non conceptual. And if it really is based on I only like heavy metal music and I don't like anything else, then actually you are ignoring the stimulus itself and you're applying concepts out of turn.

36:24 Wes: Or I like it because it's classical music and classical music is good music, rock and roll music is bad music. That's completely non aesthetic. That's moral.

36:33 Dylan: Yes, that's fine. So you're applying categories to the kinds of things that you like, and it's a separate judgment from agreeableness versus beautiful. But if you say that it's beautiful, you are making that claim based upon what it ought to be like. There's a implicit or explicit claim about that that's what the purpose means.

36:55 Mark: Not that it ought to be specifically a style of music or whatever, but that it ought to be stimulating my free play of the understanding and the imagination.

37:06 Wes: But you're not doing that at all. It must be what it is.

37:08 Dylan: It must be approaching some ideal version of what it's supposed to be.

37:13 Seth: So if you say that that's a beautiful tree and you get pleasure at looking at that tree, there's something different about that than saying this is a good hammer. And you wouldn't say this is a beautiful hammer with respect to the utility of the hammer. And you wouldn't say this is a good tree except with respect to, you might say this is good wood, or this tree's going to be a good for climbing or good for building a tree fort or something like that. I kind of am on board with Kant's claiming these Distinct judgments and then trying to pan out how they differ.

Because it does feel to me like the judgment about whether something is good, at least with respect to utility. His claim is you have to use the understanding in this case to bring the object under a concept, specifically the concept of its purpose, its specific purpose, in order to make the judgment about whether or not it's good. And in the case of the beautiful and Dylan, we're jumping ahead. To answer your question though, is to say it feels like you're doing the same thing, but you're not bringing the beautiful thing under a specific concept of a purpose.

You're not making that same cognitive move.

38:24 Dylan: It's not a determinative purpose.

38:26 Wes: Also, the purpose involved is going to turn out to be that nature. It seems as if it's purposively designed to be amenable to our faculties. So that's the purpose. It's not as in I like it because there's a space specific purpose that it can do something for me, or there's some moral end or something like that, but it's something to do with that harmony that we'll. We'll talk about later.

38:49 Seth: Yeah. So the point is in section 5k sort of sums up and says, look, I'm talking about three different things here. You know, one is the agreeable, which is this subjective and not universal experience of gratification that you get from sensation. I'm talking about the beautiful, which is, we'll find out, a universal subjective experience of pleasure. And then there's the good, which has got an objective universality. And is this translation uses the word esteem. So you don't actually take pleasure in the good so much as you esteem the good. And that. That's how he ends section one.

39:28 Mark: We just should add that you can feel pleasure in the good, but that's not why you call it good. And you can feel. Can feel pleasure in the beautiful, but that's not what you base. You know, you can feel agreeable, you know, agreed with. There's no verb for agreeable.

39:46 Wes: Yeah, the pleasure is the right word here.

39:48 Mark: You could get a thrill, you could have a lustful urge in the presence of a beautiful painting. As long as you don't base your judgment of beauty on that urge, it's fine.

39:57 Dylan: How about if your judgment of it being beautiful doesn't depend upon that agreeableness?

40:03 Mark: Yes.

40:04 Seth: So the summation of this first moment is taste is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or Dissatisfaction, the object of such satisfaction is called beautiful.

40:19 Mark: And just in line with what I just said, disinterested here doesn't mean uninterested. Right. It means, like, impartial.

40:25 Seth: Yeah. I continue to represent that to myself as judgment without desire to possess, because that's the easiest way that I can. I can characterize it to myself.

40:36 Wes: Yeah. It means you have no ulterior motives. It's beautiful because it's beautiful, not because it's agreeable or good.

40:43 Seth: So he then goes on to what's called the second moment, judgments of taste vis a vis according to quantity, which doesn't make any sense to me, so I don't even know why I just read it.

40:52 Mark: Well, he.

40:52 Wes: Right.

40:53 Mark: He's imposing for these titles the structure of the first critique.

40:55 Seth: Okay, so these are.

40:57 Wes: Yeah, these are just basic categories of judgment.

41:00 Seth: This is, I think, another brilliant and interesting move. So in section six, he says the beautiful is that which, apart from concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction. And basically what he's saying here is, when you find something agreeable, and I'm going to use the red wine again, you can say, I like red wine. And if somebody else says, I don't like red wine, you can go, eh, okay, well, that's fine for you. In other words, you can have this idea of agreeableness being something that's relative to each individual. And some individuals may share that interest and some will not.

But he says when you call something beautiful, there's implied in that judgment that everybody should find that thing beautiful. And he says this is a universality, that judgments of beauty are judgments that every person ought to find something beautiful. But it's done, interestingly, not under a concept which would be objective. It's instead done based on that feeling you have of pleasantness. It's actually subjective, but seemingly paradoxically, it's also something that you then generalize or universalize to other people. I feel this way. So everybody should feel this way.

42:12 Dylan: Subjective universality.

42:14 Seth: Yeah, yeah, right.

42:15 Mark: Generalized normatively.

42:17 Seth: Yes, it's normative universality.

42:19 Mark: It's funny, it's not descriptive in that. It's not saying everybody does find this beautiful, because obviously they don't. You show the painting to different people and they don't all say, yay, but. But it's also not normative in a moral sense. You're not saying you're evil if you don't find this. But.

42:34 Wes: But it's normative.

42:37 Seth: What you're saying is you don't have taste.

42:38 Wes: That odd statement. It's still normative. And that odd statement is critical.

42:41 Seth: This is what I found fascinating about

42:42 Wes: this, is that they ought to find it beautiful as well, but not because in the same way that if you say this is a dog, they ought to agree because you're applying the right concept. They ought to agree. And we'll figure out why they ought to agree, but based on having the same feeling of, well, we'll explain it

43:00 Seth: later because, yeah, yeah, I absolutely love this thing. Not because I think he's right or wrong, but just because I think it's a really interesting observation, namely, that there are times that we speak of things that we find enjoyable or pleasant where we're perfectly satisfied with thinking that we might be the only people on Earth that find that interesting or funny or whatever. But the idea that a place where I say this is beautiful or this is pleasant, and if you tell me you don't find it pleasant, I can say, well, you just have bad tastes, is really a move where I'm doing a normative move.

I'm doing this subjective universality where I'm saying, in one case, because I like it doesn't mean anybody else should, but in another case, because I like it, everybody else should. It's interesting that he's identified this as something that we do and then trying to find a way to account for it.

43:50 Wes: I mean, the critical thing here is that we don't say, I have an aesthetic response to this. We say it's beautiful. We attribute it to the object. Right. How did Mark Santayana describe it? I listened to that our last podcast, but I think he said something that's like pleasure objectified or pleasure as if it were a property of the object. Do you remember that?

44:09 Mark: Sounds right.

44:10 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

44:10 Wes: So Santayana had a really good way of describing this, but instead of merely attributing it to ourselves, we talk about it as if it were a property of the thing outside of us. That's beautiful.

44:18 Dylan: That's the universality.

44:20 Mark: Yep.

44:20 Seth: Yes. But it's important to say as if the beauty is still subjective. So we say as if the object has it, but it doesn't.

44:27 Wes: Right. It's not a property of the object for Kant, but there are still good reasons for saying it's universal. The grounding will be in the subject side of things, but will still be a grounding. Yeah.

44:36 Seth: Yeah. This is what I think is interesting, Wes, is he's basically saying there's two cases. In the cases where you can talk as if the experience is attributable to the object, you're talking about beauty or you think you are, but in the cases where you wouldn't make that linguistic move, you wouldn't treat the satisfaction you get from an agreeable experience, you wouldn't talk about it as being a predicate of the object in the same way that you do with beauty, then you aren't making that move. I'm not saying anything different. I'm just saying this is really interesting that Kant notices this linguistic and conceptual and social way that people interact and pulls out this philosophical inquiry out of it.

45:13 Unknown speaker: It.

45:13 Seth: It's amazing. Maybe I'm overblowing it, but I was pretty floored.

45:18 Wes: It's a really interesting idea that somehow we're going to get universality without objectivity.

45:24 Mark: I was just struck by how customs that he's trying to account for change over historical time. It was a big concern in the 18th century here to say that some people are just people of good taste and some people are not people of good taste. And that's just not something we now, at least in this country, care about as much. I can still identify something in my experiences corresponding to this so that I. I'll read more. I don't. I'm not just saying no, no, no. We really do disregard the pleasing and the beautiful as equally subjective and equally relative because I don't think we always do that. I think there's. It's more complicated than that. But it does seem like the picture of what he's trying to account for, I don't think is identical now to what he felt like he had to account for at the time.

46:06 Dylan: Well, but I think that he is consciously disagreeing with something he takes to be very conventional in his own time, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. He's arguing that that's not true.

46:20 Mark: It was a point of dispute among philosophers that he's just like in his epistemology, he's trying to cut between the rationalists and the empiricists. He was trying to do the same here. So, yes, guys like Burke and Hume right before him really did have a beauties in the eye of the beholder kind of thing. And we have to just base it on what people's actual reactions to things are. And that's the only basis that we could come up with, aesthetics. Whereas these other guys, Baumgarten, I don't know, some other names, German folks mostly, I think, thought against this, that not only is it universal, but it is conceptual. That you could come up with a definition for the beautiful. You know, like it obeys the golden mean or something like this. There's a long history of that.

46:59 Dylan: But this claim of subjective universality reminds me of a lot of the language in the Critique of Pure Reason, where it's sort of the condition under which we call it beautiful is that it's a subjective experience. But for things that are beautiful, we have the implicit claim that's a universal characteristic of it, that everybody ought to be able to consider it beautiful. Otherwise that's not the sort of thing that we mean when we talk about something beautiful. Otherwise it's just agreeable.

47:26 Wes: I think we could probably jump ahead to Section 9 at this point to get to the answer to all our puzzlement over how it can be universal but subjective. Investigation of the question whether in the judgment of taste, the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object, or the latter precedes the former, or the

47:41 Dylan: judgy precedes the pleasure.

47:43 Mark: See, my translation is actually clear. Investigating the question whether in the judgment of taste, the feeling of pleasure precedes or follows the judging of the object.

47:50 Wes: Yeah, that's better.

47:52 Seth: And what's the first sentence? The solution of this question is the key to the critique of taste and so is worthy of all attention.

47:59 Mark: Of all attention.

48:00 Seth: Yes. Very rarely do the authors of books tell you exactly what the most important part is.

48:07 Dylan: Pay attention here, people.

48:08 Wes: But the important thing about this section, and yes, it's going to turn out that the pleasure follows the judging and not the other way around, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to make it universal. Right. If the pleasure was the first thing, then that's just the agreeableness where we can agree to disagree about what's agreeable. The universality requires a judgment first. And as we've discussed, that judgment's not going to be based in concepts where we correctly apply some concept to an object. It's going to be based in something that all the judging subjects have in common, which is their cognitive powers. And this is where it gets kind of difficult to explain.

48:49 Seth: Well, here's the way that I characterized it to myself. When you judge something that's beautiful, you judge it without interest. And this disinterest implies no connection to you as an individual subject. It follows from the exercise of the faculty of judgment, which is shared by all human beings. It's almost as if it's functionally the same move as doing something with the understanding where you're making an objective, logical judgment. But instead of exercising your faculty of reason or what have you to accord your structure, the world, etcetera, it's like you exercise the judgment and then you sort of notice that this thing attends to it, this pleasant use your imagination.

Yes, he hasn't introduced that yet, but it comes in and by virtue of the fact that it follows from the faculty, the application of the faculty, and isn't subjective first, that justifies you in supposing that anybody else with that same faculty is going to make the same judgment. And it's just a question of whether they notice it or not, which is to say they have that pleasant feeling and they have taste or they don't.

50:00 Wes: And critically here it's about a kind of harmonizing between the understanding and the imagination, which we all have. And as we recall, the imagination is that constructing, synthesizing activity. And the understanding is the analytic moment where we apply concepts to things. So normally in an objective judgment that harmony has something to do with a determinant concept. But in this case it's a harmony that we can all expect to share. But it doesn't have anything to do with a shared object outside of us that we're making a judgment about. It has to do with the way the imagination and the understanding harmonize independently of a specific conceptual judgment.

50:41 Mark: If you think you understand that.

50:43 Wes: So he uses so this is the. This is a quote in the relation of the powers of so of the communicability. I'm in section nine. He's trying to figure out what the grounds of the universality is, the communicability also, despite the fact that it's subjective. And he says it's a state of mind encountered in the relation of the powers of representation to each other. By the powers of representation, he means imagination and understanding powers of representation to each other insofar as they related a given representation to a cognition in general, not to an object.

So normally we're relating the concept to an object. Here we're relating a representation not to a concept, but to the understanding in general. In this sense, the cognitive powers are not limited by concept, but they're in free play. So what does it mean to be in free play? The freedom comes from the lack of a concept. When you're judging something beautiful, you're not constrained in the same way that you're. When you say this is a dog, you're constrained by the concept whether or not the particular in question meets the criteria of the concept, and so on and so forth.

But when you assert beauty of something, there's a freedom to that judgment because it's. That's non conceptual, but it's cognitive it's non cognitive. The static judgment is.

52:01 Mark: I don't understand how, how it's communicable if it's non cognitive. If you can't put it in words.

52:07 Dylan: It is cognitive, though. He says it's cognitive. The state of free play of cognitive.

52:12 Wes: No, cognitive judgment is a judgment according to a concept. Cognition in general is involved. Yes, cognition is involved because we're talking about, instead of a specific, specific concept of the understanding applied to an object, we're talking about how when you look at something beautiful, your understanding sort of buzzes with the sense that the order of this thing, its formal orderliness, let's say, is made for me. The understanding is, let's say, delighted by that. So these are two types of agreeableness, right? The cognitive conceptual agreeableness is where the concept agrees with the object.

In the aesthetic case, there's something over and above the be. It's being a dog, or it's being a flower, or it's being this or that. There's a formal element there which has nothing to do with its being a flower. It's form. And we're responsive to that form. But it's not a conceptual response. But it's a response where our understanding is sort of, let's say, revved up by that. Because the understanding is looking for unity in form. And here it is, it finds it, it's finding it in a non conceptual way. So it's not doing its usual thing and churning out a concept in that case.

But what it's doing is it's just sort of idling. So you get like a buzzing where. Yeah, so that's the free play. I think of free play as idling. It's not doing the usual work of producing a specific concept, it's just responsive to that form. And you get a vague sense that the formality of the thing is amenable to my understanding. And that's what creates the pleasure. It's that kind of, of harmony between those two things.

53:46 Mark: I'm still stuck on this communicability point. Is it communicable because it can be the target of an ostension? In other words, you can point it out. Listen to those notes that are playing.

53:59 Wes: So we already know objectivity is possible. And that requires that we all have understandings and imaginations and that they work in a very specific way. And even though they're not working in that specific way this time, the communicability is parasitic on that. So even though it's a non objective judgment, it's parasitic. We're using the apparatus of objectivity. So we expect that everyone has the same sort of cognitive faculties. We expect everyone's understanding to buzz in the same way to the same sort of formal arrangement outside of them and produce that aesthetic feeling of pleasure. It's not based in, again, an agreement between the object or the concept. It's on, based, placed in an agreement between the form and the understanding or cognition in general, just the way it functions as a sort of engine, let's say.

54:50 Dylan: And this is a characteristic of human beings in particular?

54:54 Wes: Yeah, I think so.

54:54 Mark: So did this description jibe intuitively with the rest of you in terms of not just. Do you agree with it? Did you understand? I don't think I really understand, frankly. I've read enough of the secondary literature that I understand with this. Free is supposed to be so my

55:11 Wes: thing, Mark, that doesn't make sense to you or.

55:14 Dylan: No, I liked it.

55:15 Mark: Just trying to put my finger on what the problem was. Okay, say it again.

55:18 Wes: So all I'm saying is, like, there's two types of harmony. One is the cognitive harmony where we say, oh, the concept is applicable to the object. And that's the kind of harmonizing between imagination and understanding, because imagination has baked that cake using the concepts. The understanding goes back and analytically retrieves, divides the thing up and finds the concepts in there. So that's the rigged game I talked about. So that's one type of harmonizing in cognitive judgment. But in aesthetic judgment, the harmonizing is just vaguer. Instead of dealing with a harmony between a specific concept in the understanding and the object, you're dealing with a harmony between the understanding in general and that object.

And that harmony is just that. The understanding has that principle that we talked about where it's expecting to find order in the world. It's expecting to find unity. It's expecting to find all of the Kantian categories. And the beauty in an object is kind of surplus unity in order and form, over and above whatever form makes it an apple or a dog or a flower. It's surplus form. What you're responding to, and we get to this later, is the formality of the thing. And what the understanding sees is, oh, look, there's surplus. I'm kind of butchering it a little bit.

But this is the easier way to understand it, this surplus formality in the world. Not only do I get the expected rigged game thing of matching concepts to objects, but I get more than that. I get orderliness and form on top of that. It's like the icing on the cake and the understanding is gratified that the world is excessively ordered and formed and has form in excess. In that way, it makes the world look as if someone designed it so that the understanding could frolic in the world.

57:05 Mark: Right. And I do recall that later, beyond the part that we read, because you might say that, well, if it's a work of art, of course it was designed, somebody designed it. But that's actually not the paradigm case that he has in mind. He has in mind more natural beauty. And then it requires some additional explanation. To say, you know, what makes a good work of art is part because it shares the kind of beauty that natural beauty has. So looking for the purposiveness in the order is not a matter of figuring out what the artist's intentions were or something like that. It's a matter of, like you said, it's the form itself.

57:37 Wes: Right.

57:37 Dylan: Mark, when you asked about its communicability, at least in this section, Kant kind of dodges that. He says that the ability to communicate one's mental state, even if this is only the state of one's cognitive powers, carries a pleasure with it could easily be established from man's natural propensity to sociability. So here, for now, he just wants to say, well, we could show that this is communicable. He's just asserting that right now.

58:06 Mark: Right. I think it's probably just easier to ignore that part that it's supposed to follow from just the fact that we share the common sense faculties.

58:14 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

58:16 Mark: What he calls common sense, which is not a matter of the understanding, but an actual part of sense in terms of the sensibility.

58:23 Unknown speaker: Right.

58:23 Mark: The feeling of pleasure. I think we would feel the same thing, like if we both like wine and we're both drinking the same wine and we're going, oh man, this is good. And you're going, oh yeah, this is good. We would sort be of be communicating in that same way as if we were both looking at an object that Kant would say is objectively beautiful. And we're kind of nodding at each other and yes, this is beautiful. I think it's just that it's shared.

58:44 Wes: And Kant talks about that though. Yeah. Sometimes we mistake that agreeableness because we do get agreement on that. Right. So sometimes it becomes difficult to disentangle, you know, and we get disagreement about the beautiful.

58:54 Mark: In fact, we could both have terrible taste and we could agree that something sucks that is actually beautiful. And so we have false communicability.

59:02 Wes: Right. Judgments of beauty will turn out are very Flawed because they're often tied up with judgments about the good or about what's agreeable. And it's hard to disentangle those things. And things that are works of art are often not. They have elements of them which appeal not only to our sense of the aesthetic, but to other. Again, to what's agreeable or good.

59:22 Mark: And it doesn't take a huge Platonic step to say something like people that have bad taste are maybe more beastly, they're more bronze type people. And so they would be interpreting everything they look at in terms of does it give them an immediate thrill?

59:39 Wes: Right. Or wish fulfillment? If you look at the way most the movies and theaters, right. Function purely on their wish fulfillment fantasies, but a real play, often it's not wish fulfilling at all. It's not just there to gratify your revenge fantasy or the lovers to hook up in the end or for often say in a tragedy. It's completely disagreeable in that respect. But the aesthetic, there's a strong aesthetic response that comes from something else.

1:00:05 Dylan: It might be cathartic.

1:00:08 Wes: Yes, exactly.

1:00:10 Mark: Can Kant talk about that? That's not.

1:00:13 Dylan: I'm just being a smartass.

1:00:15 Wes: I think it's totally turning around all that.

1:00:18 Mark: And then to bring in his predecessors that he read, of course, he read Aristotle talking about this.

1:00:24 Seth: Well, I really liked Wes's characterization of how free play sort of works. But I was not jokingly or ironically thinking that Kant is saying something like the experience of the beautiful is freeing. It's liberating from the structure of conceptualizing or of bringing specifics under concepts. And it actually makes you aware of yourself and your faculties, the way they interact and the experience, the way in which you actually function as a. A human being. It was almost a little bit poetic in that sense.

1:00:58 Wes: I think you're absolutely right about that. I think you have to think about the free play involved when someone is actually creating something. Right. So if I am producing a painting of something, it's not just, oh, look, I'm painting this, it's not entirely mimetic, right. I'm just painting this particular. To belong to this particular concept. There's an element of freedom involved. So I'm doing things which go above and beyond simply execution of a concept. And that's where the free part comes in. And then when you appreciate that aesthetically you are responsive to that free play, you're identifying with the free play of the creator and the freedom there.

Again, it's that freedom, the same freedom from concepts that the person who created the painting had, you're free from that in your aesthetic response as well. But again, the significance of that freedom is just that. That surplus thing I was talking about, where there's something formal that's happening, but it's formal yet non conceptual. And it's sort of something that harmonizes with the understanding without putting the understanding into work. Concept making mode, that's the free part there. The understanding doesn't have to do the work of making concepts.

It's at play in a sense. Right. It's just responding to something formal. In a way, it's doing the work of the understanding, but in a way it's at rest, it's idling, it's. That's at play.

1:02:18 Dylan: When I was reading this, I wasn't sure if Kant was going to go as far as saying that this is the avenue through which all thinking, all cognitive activity to the extent that it's pleasurable, is accessing the beautiful or turning on that, the pleasure that we derive from the beautiful. So that when I enjoy figuring something out or a creative activity of mind of trying to understand where I didn't understand before and I find pleasure in that, that that is my. The signpost for that is I'm responding to my experience of the beautiful.

1:02:58 Wes: There's lots of different kinds of satisfaction for Kant.

1:03:02 Dylan: Let me put it this way, ask this question, because I haven't read the Critique of Pure Reason in a long time. And we were talking about other forms of determinant cognition, determinative judgment. Is there any pleasure derived from determinative judgment?

1:03:17 Wes: I think there is.

1:03:20 Mark: Okay, this is number eight, the taste of reflection.

1:03:24 Dylan: Well, reflection isn't determinative.

1:03:26 Wes: You do get a satisfaction from determinative judgments. I think. I think I remember him talking about it here. Mark, you're saying it's an A.

1:03:35 Mark: That is what I had in my notes, that how do we distinguish the taste of sense from the taste of reflection? But no, that's actually just talking about the difference between the agreeable and the beautiful. Still not about intellectual satisfaction versus aesthetic satisfaction.

1:03:50 Dylan: So we are gratified by the good, that when we recognize and we make judgments according to the good, we're gratified by that. But that's different than maybe that's a kind of pleasure. Pleasure. Right.

1:04:00 Wes: Yeah. There's gratification in the good. There's gratification in just merely conceptual judgments. I think these are hints of Kant's pragmatism. There's a psychology behind this. And the way human beings work is pleasure.

1:04:13 Dylan: That's what I'M responding to.

1:04:14 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

1:04:15 Mark: He talks about math next time. So maybe we can return to this.

1:04:18 Dylan: Let me just read the sentence that was making me think of this, which is in the last paragraph of section 9. The unity in the relation between the cognitive powers and the subject can reveal itself only through sensation. This sensation, whose universal communicability a judgment of taste postulates is the quickening of the two powers, imagination and understanding, to an activity that is indeterminate, but as a result of the prompting of the given presentation, nonetheless accordant the activity required for cognition in general. Okay, so that's just a messy sentence, but in this whole section he's talking about how the beautiful, our response to it, is a relation between our imagination and our understanding.

And we had this term of free play that was characterizing it and Wes was talking about we're idling along and just as a characteristic of our cognition, our intellect, our minds, in these two powers we have of imagination, understanding. And he links that this relation is required of cognition in general. So that made me think, that's what took me down this path of, of thinking that. Well, when I'm having fun thinking and I figure things out, or I'm having that pleasure of doing that and making, whether it be making music or whether I'm, you know, I.

All kinds of creative activities, big and small, and even ones that are somehow deductive where I didn't really know the answer. But then all of a sudden that light bulb goes off and I know what's going on right where I. All of a sudden I understand those are me partaking of the signpost of

1:05:56 Wes: the beautiful in this section. So the idea is that brings the faculties of cognition into the well proportioned disposition that we require for all cognition. But cognition is not going on. The understanding is responding to this form, but it's not doing the usual cognitive thing. But it's getting revved up in a way where we feel the imagination and understanding harmonize in a way that that typically it does in cognition, and yet there is no cognition here. That's the really interesting thing about aesthetic judgment, is that we get this harmonizing between faculties that goes on in cognition and yet it's non cognitive.

1:06:34 Dylan: Well, let me just read the first mention that he has a free play in my translation. If then we are to think of that judgment about this universal communicability of the presentation as a merely subjective determining basis, that is one that does not involve a concept of the object, then this basis can be nothing other than the mental state that we find in the relation between the presentational powers, imagination and understanding, insofar as they refer a given presentation to cognition in general. When this happens, the cognitive powers brought into play by this presentation are in free play because no determinative concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition. Now I understand that there's no rule of cognition going on.

1:07:17 Wes: There's no cognition going on. That's a really important part of this.

1:07:20 Dylan: I'm just going to have to put that off to the side.

1:07:21 Wes: Extremely important. There's no cognition because cognition just is the subsumption of particulars under universals and then other sorts of determinative judgments. That's just what cognition is. And the reason why he's using this phrase, cognition in general is because the apparatus of cognition is getting stimulated, even though we're not getting concepts and we're not getting cognition. The essence of the aesthetic is that it's non cognitive.

1:07:47 Dylan: You're insisting that Kant is using the word cognitive in a very restricted sense.

1:07:51 Wes: Yeah, he is, though it's cognitive and conceptual are the same thing here. So the cognition of the object. When he talks about cognition of the object, he means understanding the object according to concepts.

1:08:03 Dylan: So cognition does not involve imagination.

1:08:05 Wes: It does, because cognition is a relationship between imagination and understanding. Where the imagination synthesizes the appearances, the manifold, into appearances, it bakes the bread, it makes these things, it constructs them, and it uses the concepts of the understanding in that construction. And then the understanding when we come back consciously with cognitive determinative judgment, we use the understanding to analyze those things.

1:08:30 Mark: I just want to make this clear to the listeners, the role of imagination here, that whenever you identify anything, you're synthesizing the manifold. Right. If you see a dog, then you have to imagine the other dogs that you're familiar with and then connect this to those. Or even just the fact that every time you look at a given three dimensional object, it has a number of different appearances from second to second to second to second. So just remembering the thing from a half a second ago, where you were looking at the other part of it, that requires imagination, it's kind of a weird way of using that term. It doesn't really mean my mind is floating away and imagining something. You know, it's just synthesis.

1:09:09 Wes: And that's a really good example. That's a paradigmatic. There's different kinds of ways in which imagination is synthesizing. But that whole idea that we collect these little slices over time, we're having these momentary perceptions of a thing, and yet we're Attributing all of them to the same object. For instance, we talked about this with Husserl and phenomenology a lot, too. So that's the synthesis of the imagination. We have to collect all the data and hold them together. Not just remember, but we have to hold the old alongside the new. Otherwise there is no object without.

1:09:40 Mark: So the difference here is that you're using imagination in a judgment of beauty. And you're holding these things together. Like the different notes in a phrase that you're hearing. Or the different colors next to each other on a canvas. But you're not sort of shoving them together. I mean, you could have a computer that you could program to. Like that was major chord, that was ascending Mixolydian scale, you know, that. That maybe could synthesize these things and give them a concept. But that wouldn't be appreciating it as a art.

1:10:07 Wes: There's something synthetic, right? Because there's formality. The aesthetic. We're responding to form. And the form is a unified thing. That we expect to have been synthesized. But it doesn't seem to have been synthesized according to concepts. And we don't come back to it with concepts cognitively.

1:10:25 Mark: Actually, I don't even think it matters if the artist put it together with. I mean, the artist. I'm going to put a major scale here, you know. But the analytical work is not why we enjoy. Enjoy it, right?

1:10:34 Wes: And there's a lot. Of course, there's. To any piece of art, the art is also a object. There's lots of actual cognitive processing going on. We can't see a thing without that. It's just that the aesthetic part of that is surplus. On top of that, there's form. After we've identified notes and colors. And the formal arrangement of all that.

1:10:55 Mark: If you didn't know it was music. If you thought maybe it was a wild animal cry.

1:11:00 Wes: After we've said what it is, and we know, yeah, we've done our cognitive work. Then the aesthetic comes after that.

1:11:05 Seth: I get what Dylan is saying. I guess you guys are trying to explain how that might happen. But it does raise the question of what are the appropriate subjects of aesthetic appreciation for Kant. Because it does seem to be very heavily based on visual. He talks a lot about beautiful things that you can look at. And then he mentions, I think, music at some point.

1:11:28 Mark: Pantomime. Every form of the object, of sense, both of external sense and also immediately of internal. Is either figure or play. In the latter, it is either the play of figures in space. Namely pantomime and dancing or the mere play of sensations in time.

1:11:42 Seth: I wonder how this would work in poetry. If you describe a poem as beautiful because it's not something you passively view or listen to. There's a certain intellectual activity that has to attend the reading of a poem or any kind of linguistic thing. I think it gets more complicated. And what I understood Dylan to be saying was, I can see a math equation. You know, mathematicians frequently speak of solutions as being beautiful, or at least elegant. And the attribution of beauty to something that requires some level of intellectual engagement, which is to say more of reason and understanding. And Kantian language seems to get a little problematic, but maybe there's a way to untangle it.

1:12:26 Wes: Yeah, no, I think we can have an aesthetic response to. I wasn't disagreeing with Dylan about that. We could have an aesthetic response to doing physics, let's say. Or we can have an aesthetic response to. And this reminds me again of the Santayana, where our feelings about democracy, for instance, might be informed by our aesthetic response to it. We could have an aesthetic response to anything.

1:12:45 Mark: I don't know about for Kant, like the wine. I would think that if you are a wine aficionado.

1:12:51 Wes: But we can also have an aesthetic response to the glasses.

1:12:53 Mark: Right. You cannot just say, this is delicious wine. I love wine. I want to drink wine. It's agreeable. You're interested in drinking it, but you just, oh, this is just a beautiful wine. You've gained an aesthetic sense for wine. It seems really hard to distinguish for

1:13:09 Wes: me, but it's usually really hard to distinguish in any aesthetic. I mean, in real life, all those things are mixed up. Agreeableness and all the rest of it.

1:13:16 Dylan: You would be saying something very different if you said, this was a beautiful wine versus I like it, whether in Kantian terms or not.

1:13:22 Wes: It doesn't mean it tastes good. It means, so, for instance, that you're responding to the bouquet. And it's formal. It's the arrangement of tastes, not the particular tastes themselves.

1:13:34 Mark: It is a buxom flavor.

1:13:35 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:13:36 Dylan: I think that part of my confusion is that I want to gloss cognitive with thinking in general or intellectual activity in general. And what's going on here is we have an aesthetic and a cognitive. Which Wesley could say, yes, that's exactly what's going on. That there's a specific meaning of cognitive regarding a particular mode of our thinking.

1:13:59 Wes: Yep.

1:14:00 Mark: Well, even thinking is not the general term. Thinking refers specifically to reason in the ideas. Right. It's not referring to understanding. So cognition and thinking are Opposed in the system.

1:14:11 Dylan: I'm going to like, like, like both slit my throats and kill everybody in the room. If we're going to start, how many technical terms are we going to have here? Because we have to allow for some general term to refer to the activity of my mind in its full flourishing glory. And I'm going to use thinking. If you don't want to use cognition, that's fine. But for crying out loud, what are you going to call it?

1:14:36 Wes: I mean, the problem is Kant has a technical vocabulary.

1:14:40 Mark: Let's call it mentation. Let's make up one.

1:14:44 Wes: It's Kant's problem. And if you don't obey his rules, he becomes really impossible to understand. That's the only thing. So. And nine, this is the most difficult section in the whole critique of judgment.

1:14:56 Dylan: Okay. Am I at least okay in saying that aesthetic response is something to do with mental powers or mental activity?

1:15:07 Mark: Yeah.

1:15:07 Wes: And it has something to do with cognition in general. I'm just saying aesthetic judgments aren't cognitive because cognitive means specifically use of concepts. And.

1:15:15 Dylan: And I was glossing those two things. I was thinking that they were.

1:15:18 Wes: But I'm not doing that just to be nitpicky. I just wanted to get the sense of the activation of the cognitive powers of the imagination and understanding without the typical conceptual thing going on. So that's all.

1:15:30 Dylan: That's the fun and interesting link he's making. Right. Is it's cognitive without being cognitive. Right. And as you put it, it's like the engine of cognition. Right. Without actually having concepts. Steps.

1:15:40 Wes: Exactly. That's what's free about it.

1:15:43 Dylan: It's called thinking.

1:15:45 Wes: It's whatever you want to call it in the end, because you're free.

1:15:48 Mark: Now, are we just about up to elucidation by means of examples?

1:15:53 Seth: Oh, yeah, that was a great section.

1:15:55 Wes: No, no, no. We didn't talk about Section 10 yet. Purposiveness.

1:16:00 Mark: And fine. Just like examples.

1:16:05 Wes: So. So here there's a lot of weird language. He's talking about people having concepts. You have the representation of the shoe in your mind before you're going to make it. And so the representation of the effect, the actual shoe, would precede the efficient cause of making that. So it's a very confusing, needlessly confusing section. But I think what is the thing that we want to get out of it?

1:16:28 Dylan: Purposeless purpose.

1:16:30 Seth: Purposiveness.

1:16:31 Mark: I just looked it up and purposive and purposive are both correct. So don't worry about how you pronounce it.

1:16:38 Wes: I wasn't so he talks about the will as the faculty of desire and determining through concepts representing a purpose. So that's our typical sense of purposiveness, saying something is good for something, or it ought to be this way. But even for something that we don't think of as having a specific end, whether it's designed as a shoe or something, it can be purposive in this broader sense that we can only explain its possibility by treating it as if it's been designed in some way way or arranged in accordance with someone's purposive concept. So, I mean, Dylan, you mentioned that scientists, even though they know, especially when talking about biology, they don't think of nature as having real purposes in them, and they're not teleologists, but they find it impossible to talk about biology without talking in this way.

So this is your purposiveness, design and end, or purposiveness without purpose. Purposiveness is general. We know that some form is not the result of someone's conscious intentional design, but it's intelligibility requires that we treat it that way.

1:17:41 Mark: So why is he bringing this up? First he brings it up to say, so this is in 11. Every purpose, if it be regarded as a ground of satisfaction, always carries with it an interest as the determining ground of the judgment about the object of pleasure. Therefore, no subjective purpose can lie at the basis of the judgment of taste. But neither can the judgment of taste be determined by any representation of an objective purpose I of the possibility of the object itself in accordance with purposive combination. Combination. So that's two kinds of purposefulness that are not involved, but yet it has this. It's like the free play. It involves cognition, but is not ultimately cognitive. It involves purposefulness, but it is not, in conclusion, purposive.

1:18:18 Wes: Subjective purposiveness in the representation of an object without any purpose, an object that doesn't have a specific purposeness. So we get this sense that there's purposiveness even though we can't with a concept specifically attribute some purpose.

1:18:33 Mark: Isn't that just tantamount to saying that form and purpose in the way that we encounter them really amount to the same thing?

1:18:40 Wes: Exactly.

1:18:41 Mark: If we see something as having a form, then, well, that couldn't have been an accident. It looks like somebody drew it that way or wanted it to be that way. That's the same experience.

1:18:50 Wes: So it's about intelligibility. Right? So for something to be formal and intelligible, it's as if it's designed for our minds. It's knowable, somehow receptive to our cognitive powers. And that's where the purposiveness comes in.

1:19:04 Mark: I was just thinking of a musician or somebody getting fan mail. Like, that album was just designed just

1:19:09 Wes: for my mind, man. But, you know, it's like. It's a weird feature of the world that. I mean, today we're jaded. Think of things evolutionary and minds developing in order to cognize the world. But independent of that, the alignment of world and mind seems serendipitous. The fact that we could know anything at all.

1:19:27 Dylan: In the next section, he links this purposiveness with causality. And I think that this goes to the intelligibility question. That we begin to understand things by them having causal relationships between them. It's a kind of causality. Right. So this is at the end of section 12. He's making the distinction here in the kind of pleasure that you have in aesthetic judgments. That it's not practical as it is when you have moral judgments. And it's not merely contemplative. He says this pleasure is not practical in any way. Neither like the one arising from the pathological basis, agreeableness, nor like the one arising from the intellectual basis, the conceived good. It's pleasure, but it's not one because we like it. And it's not one because we understand it as a conceived good, an intellectual pleasure.

1:20:18 Wes: Yep.

1:20:19 Dylan: But it does have a causality in it. Namely, to keep us in the state of having the presentation itself. And to keep the cognitive powers engaged in their occupation without any further aim. We linger in our contemplation of the beautiful. Because this contemplation reinforces and reproduces itself. This is analysis analogous to, though not the same as, the way in which we linger over something charming as we present an object. Repeatedly arouses our attention. Though here the mind is passive. So that points us to this distinction with the merely charming.

1:20:51 Wes: Right? Yeah.

1:20:52 Mark: Can I just say how much I love the use of the word pathological in an aesthetic context. To say your taste, since you're just like being turned on by the lustful painting or something. Your taste is pathological. It is merely the agreement, agreeable.

1:21:07 Wes: I think this part is hard to understand this idea of pleasure being a state that simply maintains itself. So to think about this, if we were to define pleasure purely in terms of brain states and behavior, we would say pleasure just is what causes the organism to behaviorally stay in whatever state is producing that. And then in the future increases the likelihood of repeating that behavior.

1:21:32 Mark: Yes, but that sounds pathological.

1:21:34 Dylan: It sounds pathological in the sense that it seems to be acting on us

1:21:39 Mark: as a pleasure independent of mind. Yeah.

1:21:43 Dylan: It's agreeable to our mind. Yes. So it's not clear how that wouldn't be pathological as well. Like there'd be almost. You'd almost want to say that there would be an aesthetic of the aesthetic. Right. You could take the same pleasure in something that was beautiful, but have it actually not be beautiful. So you'd have that contemplative pleasure. But you'd be misunderstanding. You would not be making the mistake of taking pleasure in the merely agreeable or the good. You'd be taking pleasure in the beautif. But it would be, I guess, not beautiful.

1:22:13 Mark: I think you're hitting on something that is very difficult here in terms of really distinguishing between the agreeable and beautiful. As soon as you feel actual pleasure from it, then it's agreeable.

1:22:23 Wes: That's not the case.

1:22:25 Mark: No, no.

1:22:26 Wes: But I mean the aesthetic response, the beautiful is just the feeling of pleasure. I mean, that is his definition. So it's not pleasure that distinguishes the aesthetic response from the agreeable response. It's the fact that that pleasure in the agreeable is an immediate response to the sensation, but pleasure in the beautiful is a response to the judgment. Then you can talk about possessing the object and the existence of the object, although I think those get tricky.

1:22:49 Mark: Well, so this was a point that was picked on in the Stanford article on this, was that if you say that the judgment comes first, then you have to say, well, what is the judgment based on? And it's certainly not based on observing yourself and saying my faculties are in free play. And having the pleasure is just to have your faculties in free play. I almost would want to say in the case of the merely agreeable, you just have the pleasure without the judgment, but for the beautiful you have the pleasure. It still could be that the pleasure and the judgment come at the same time and in some ways are the same thing.

I think the character of the pleasure has to be different. If it's a pleasure that is mental to the extent that you can sort of give your reasons for it. Obviously not reasons in terms of giving formal rules. That would be violating Kant's rule that this is non copyright cognitive. I just want to go back to Plato that this is a higher spiritual mental pleasure. Whereas the straight up agreeable is free of that. It's free of any mental component, at least necessary mental component.

1:23:50 Wes: Yeah, I Mean, that's something I'd have to think about, but that's. That seems agreeable to me.

1:23:54 Mark: So I'll keep saying it. I'll keep saying it over and over again. You want it to continue, then you'll get bored.

1:24:00 Wes: I don't know if I want to have that kind of relationship with you

1:24:02 Dylan: over and over again.

1:24:04 Mark: Keep explaining this passage to me until I reach or guess, please.

1:24:08 Wes: Thanks for just going there. Thanks for making that explicit.

1:24:11 Mark: All right.

1:24:12 Wes: Now there's one other thing in here because I think this section 12 is another linchpin. It sort of brings together section 9 with the free play stuff and then in light of section 10 and 11 with the purposiveness. So I'm just reading in the last paragraph here that Dylan was reading from. And this consciousness of the merely formal purposiveness in the play of the cognitive powers of the subject in the case of a representation through which an object is given is the pleasure it's itself because it contains a determining ground of activity of the subject with regard to the animation of its cognitive powers.

Thus an internal causality which is purposive with regard to cognition in general, but without being restricted. Why did I read this? But without being restricted to a particular cognition. Hence it contains a mere form of the subjective purposiveness of a representation in an aesthetic judgment. So here again we get this vaguely purposeful, vaguely formal without being specifically conceptual or having a specific purpose. Purpose. And that animates the cognitive powers. So I was using that word revs them up. So revs them up. Even though it doesn't put them to their usual specific work.

1:25:18 Dylan: Pluhar uses the word quickens instead of animates.

1:25:22 Seth: All right.

1:25:23 Mark: I think we need to get to the difference between a pretty flower and just a pretty image in general. That whole difference, the pure aesthetic judgment and the mixed. What does he call it?

1:25:32 Dylan: Free beauty and accessory beauty.

1:25:34 Mark: Just that we've talked about how beauty is supposed to be free of concepts and gave the example of this works well. Like that's not a judgment of beauty. But as a matter of fact, when we judge specific things, according to Kant, we judge them according to their kind. It's kind of a mixture that we are really thinking that what makes a beautiful tiger really does have something to do with the teleology of what makes an awesome tiger. That it's not sickly, that it is shiny and strong and looks like it is capable of awesome tiger y things.

1:26:05 Wes: Yeah, but those are kind of corrupted aesthetic judgments, right? They're not pure. This word adherent.

1:26:10 Mark: Right. Most actual judgments that we make of beauty, I would think, are of a particular type of thing that we have identified. And so we have some idea if it's a naturally occurring thing of its telos. And, you know, to bring back my example of the music, you might say, oh, I don't like this kind of music because I think music should be exciting or something. Even abstract forms like that. You might have some idea. And this is a little foreign to Kant. I'm just throwing this in here of the telos of a type of thing, you know, that a painting is supposed to be colorful or something, or that it's supposed to decorate the wall, that it's hanging on properly. You know, it has some function in the real world. Right. If you're in a dance club, the music is not just an aesthetic object to be appreciated. It has a utilitarian function of. And if that's not there, then it is failing.

1:26:57 Wes: And the other side of that. So that's the good side of things. But then there's the agreeableness side, where charms and emotions, the pure judgment of taste can't be a response to anything that's charming or emotional in the object as well, which to me is even more problematic. Right. Because we usually think of our aesthetic responses as we laughed, we cried, blah, blah, blah.

1:27:20 Mark: So it's not surprising that when he gets to talking about specific kinds of art, that, for instance, as far as music goes straight up instrumental music, that's where it's at, because that's just the pure play of force, forms. Whereas once you throw in libretto, once you have singers squawking around there, then it just clouds everything.

1:27:39 Wes: Right. And even like a color in itself can't be beautiful, a tone in itself can't be beautiful. It has to be the arrangement. It has to be the formal.

1:27:46 Mark: Yep, yep.

1:27:47 Wes: So this is like hyper formalist and very counterintuitive in some ways.

1:27:52 Mark: Right. Folks should definitely go back to our last aesthetics one on Santayana, where we discussed this in more detail, that Santayana also was kind of a snob about form is better.

1:28:04 Wes: Yeah, he's.

1:28:04 Mark: But he at least acknowledged that the matter is a legitimate part of it. Whereas Kant is saying, oh, if there are ornaments, only if they add to the interest of the form are they good. Otherwise it's a charm. They can't make it more beautiful.

1:28:19 Wes: In fact, they often make it less. Or they damage the judgment of taste by attracting attention to themselves.

1:28:24 Dylan: Sounds right to me.

1:28:26 Mark: So he said. So purity of Color. All colors are equally beautiful as long as they're pure. If you like red more than green, that's more of like an agreeable. People have different tastes in terms of colors, just like they have different tastes in terms of wines. But you can objectively say if the color is pure, then it is more beautiful than a more complex thing.

1:28:47 Dylan: Where is that?

1:28:48 Wes: 14.

1:28:49 Mark: I mean, I just plain don't agree.

1:28:51 Wes: I think that blue is more.

1:28:53 Mark: Blue is more beautiful than. No, I think that complexity in the presentation of a color, like a strange straight up plain blue swatch, is just plain boring compared to a blue carpet where you see all the different textural and shadows that the different fibers create. And so having a more complicated.

1:29:13 Wes: Yeah, but that becomes formal though. That becomes an arrangement of different colored elements. So arguably you're responding to form. Right.

1:29:20 Mark: And impurity in color is a form as well.

1:29:23 Wes: That's a good point. Yeah, it is. I mean, that's one real objection. It becomes. Becomes hard to know where form and matter, you know, what's form and what's matter.

1:29:33 Mark: Take us to the next step. Seth, you had some thought. I didn't mean to pick on Seth. Anybody can have a go nuts. I didn't have particularly good. We should hear notes by this point, Seth.

1:29:46 Wes: Sweet, charming, agreeable voice.

1:29:52 Mark: Charming to be beautiful.

1:29:54 Wes: Now his, his thoughts are beautiful.

1:29:58 Seth: You find them pleasant sometimes, but you're completely disinterested in what I have to say.

1:30:03 Wes: That's why they're beautiful, Seth. That's why they're beautiful.

1:30:09 Seth: So what I got out of the section about the ideal of beauty is that it's almost like a horizon or a limit. He goes through an argument about how the ideal of beauty can't be a specific concept of beauty that then we hold beautiful things to simply for all the reasons we've already talked about. It's more like the ideal of beauty is a structure or a form against which we can measure. Sort of like the purposiveness without purpose. The ideal of beauty is kind of like the concept of a maximum in mathematics in the sense that for any specific number that you can think of, you can always imagine something greater.

You'll never actually reach the actual maximum number. But the concept of maximum functions as something that you can judge numbers and things against. And that's kind of how I was thinking about the ideal of beauty. That it's not any particular thing that you're going to do any kind of cognitive act with, with, but it's somehow. I don't know if it arises out of the free play, or if it's somehow a limit on the free play, or if it's a structure in which the faculties function around this particular type of judgment. But it's something like that.

1:31:26 Wes: So we should say that the ideal of beauty will turn out to be the human figure. So he sort of builds up to that, right. With we can think of the ideal beauty in terms of what he calls the aesthetic normal idea, where we get a standard for judging. It's sort of a negative idea of what the average human being looks like as a way of rejecting certain forms that don't look like that. So that's where you define the ideal by experience. But then he wants to incorporate purposiveness. So to do that, you have to think about the visible expression of the moral in the form.

So in the human figure, you can represent things like the goodness of the soul, purity, strength and repose and so on. So we should also say here, because it incorporates the good, the ideal of beauty is actually less than ideal. Right. It's not purely aesthetic, but it's the best we can do. So that was, I thought, kind of a strange interlude. And I don't know how to fit that in with the rest of this. I don't know anything else.

1:32:28 Mark: Right. It seems not to fit so well with the section right before that which was saying that ideas of beauty, when attached to specific types of objects, are somehow less pure. That he said, you know, if you'd have to just say, what makes for a pretty castle? Then you're very restricted. Then if you could just take the image of the castle and twist the lines, however they look most awesome. It would seem strange after that to say, well, the ideal of beauty in some ways is the human figure, which is restricted in just the way the castle is.

1:32:58 Wes: Yeah. And it's an ideal, you know, because of the good.

1:33:02 Dylan: It reminds me of Kant's general tendencies to go from observations about the character of our thinking, or in this case, the character of our aesthetic experience, where he observes that when we call something beautiful, we're invoking a subjective universal distinction. And then on the one hand, insisting that that is a sort of a claim, a condition under which we call something beautiful, but not necessarily that there is some kind of objective beauty. And then in this section, he keeps reinforcing that universality until at the end you feel like, well, he's just saying that there is a universal form of beauty. And that's the way I find it confusing. It's like at this point, point he begins to toe up to sort of not betraying exactly, but. Well, not taking his own medicine from earlier in the book.

1:34:00 Mark: Trying to please all his constituents with their opposing agendas. I don't know.

1:34:06 Seth: Yeah, I kind of honestly just glossed that section because it's like Wes says, it doesn't really contribute anything, I don't think, to the overall argument.

1:34:17 Dylan: Even when he's saying that, well, this subject of universality is a kind of normative thinking and parsing that. That out. But then to come down on. Well, there's one norm. I mean, it's hard not to read it that way.

1:34:28 Mark: Right.

1:34:29 Wes: Well, that's the highest ideal, according to which we judge.

1:34:32 Mark: So I think in my translation, they just abridged that whole section to a parenthetical note. Props to Myron's cow.

1:34:41 Wes: What?

1:34:42 Mark: That's one of the things.

1:34:43 Wes: It is the rule.

1:34:44 Dylan: Just as the famous Doryphorus of Polykleitos was called the rule rule. Myron's cow, within its kind, also allowed this use as such a rule.

1:34:53 Wes: Oh, I must have skipped over that weirdness, I guess.

1:34:57 Mark: It's a statue of a cow.

1:34:59 Dylan: So Polykleitos and Myron are Greek sculptors from the fifth century.

1:35:03 Wes: Oh, okay.

1:35:04 Dylan: And one is. Doryphorus is the spear bearer and the cow are works of theirs.

1:35:12 Mark: There you go.

1:35:13 Seth: Yeah, this is one of those passages. And we talked a lot about this. Many. It feels like many. It feels like a hundred years ago when we did the Locke episode, which I think was like, Wasn't that one of the first 10 or 15, something like that?

1:35:25 Mark: I think it was 1995.

1:35:27 Seth: But here's. Here's a sentence from this section to give you an idea. Thus, necessarily, under these empirical conditions, a Negro must have a different normal idea of the beauty of the human figure from a white man, a Chinaman, a different normal idea from a European, etc. Okay. This is kind of his version of. Of Hegel saying that the end of history is manifest in the Prussian state.

1:35:49 Wes: Like, okay, well, here he's just talking about, like, what the average person is.

1:35:53 Dylan: Yeah, he's talking about normative conditions.

1:35:55 Wes: And they're different. You know, the average black person looks different than the average. You know, but.

1:36:00 Seth: Yeah, but the point is that that has almost little to nothing to do with what he's been talking about. He hasn't been talking in this way. He hasn't been talking about this kind of thing. Myron's cow.

1:36:12 Mark: Yeah.

1:36:12 Wes: I honestly don't know how the ideal fits in. And I mean, that's where he's talking about the aesthetic normal idea, which is the weird preliminary to the full ideal. I mean, in the beginning of this section he talks about some products of taste are exemplary. They're sort of models. And we will get some of that in our modality thing. So it's kind of a lead in this idea of aesthetic judgment. The way we recommend it to others is that it's exemplary. That's a non concept conceptual thing. So in some sense, I think the point is that when we judge things to be beautiful, we're doing so based on models, based on examples, since we can't do it conceptually. But I'm honestly not quite sure how this fits in exactly.

1:36:53 Mark: I just did a Google image search on Myron's cow and it looks pretty stringy to me.

1:37:00 Unknown speaker: Ideal.

1:37:01 Dylan: You want more plump cows, Mark?

1:37:05 Mark: I want one with more meat on it. Oh, wait a second. That's just my interest getting involved.

1:37:11 Dylan: I thought you weren't eating beef now, Mark.

1:37:13 Mark: You're right, actually, I don't eat beef really very much anymore. So it's my. I aesthetically appreciate that someone else would be interested. No, this is getting too complicated.

1:37:22 Wes: All right, so we just have modality left, and I think that's pretty short.

1:37:27 Mark: What the modality in a judgment of taste is, is. Is it that it is possible? That the pleasure is possible? Is it? The pleasure is. No, it's necessary. The beautiful is necessary. It has a necessary reference to satisfaction. All right, so why do we care about that?

1:37:45 Wes: It's kind of related to the universality. Why we can assert beauty of something as if it were an objective thing. So the necessity is that it's not just me. Right. The necessity part of this is that everyone will necessarily assent to the idea that something X is beautiful.

1:38:04 Dylan: It's not just me, it's everyone. Everyone's doing it.

1:38:07 Wes: Or everyone ought to. Everyone ought to. So we should be clear about that.

1:38:11 Dylan: If everyone wanted to jump off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff?

1:38:16 Mark: It might be aesthetically beautiful for everyone to jump off a cliff. I just don't want it lemmings against my interest.

1:38:23 Wes: So this is where we get common sense. We need some grounding of asserting that the beautiful is something that others ought to agree with our judgments. And so in section 20, and again, the concepts can't be the basis of that. It has to be a feeling. And so here we get common sense as the grounding of that.

1:38:43 Dylan: Yep.

1:38:44 Mark: Which actually means what? It literally says that there is a. Some commonality about our sense and the way that we should, under ordinary circumstances, if we have the proper equipment, feel the pleasure. Right. It's not a matter of a stitch in time saves nine or whatever. These things that we say. Oh, it's just common sense.

1:39:03 Wes: Not that kind of common sense, but a feeling that we share in common, a sort of response.

1:39:08 Dylan: I like the fact that he came to this conclusion. The way he presents it. If we have subjective universality to the extent that we have universality, aren't we presupposing common sense? Yes, actually, we are presupposing common sense. In order for there to be subjective universality, there has to be, as a condition for that, the ability for it to be communicable. And the only way that can be true is if there's something in common between human beings to allow it to be communicable. And I guess you could disagree with him about that, but in the end, you'd be disagreeing with the possibility of the universality being communicable.

You would be left with the notion that the beautiful is a subjective universality. That when we make a judgment of the beautiful, that we assume that everyone will judge it to be beautiful, but it might not in fact be possible for that to happen. So there's a kind of nice, pleasant hopefulness about this, that we'll actually all just be able to get along and understand everything is beautiful together. Right. The alternative is that we could completely disagree about it and there'd be no way we could resolve that disagreement. So human beings would be sort of fundamentally disparate from one another.

And Kant seems to have a rosier

1:40:25 Mark: view, and I like the way he puts the communicability in terms of. It's just the state of mind underlying. Any cognition has to be communicable. Otherwise how could we even learn language? Like, if really ostension, you have to be able to point to the bunny rabbit and say, before the kid knows the word bunny rabbit, understand that you're referring to that thing and which elements of it he's supposed to pay attention to that. You're not referring to the ground plus the bunny rabbit's foot, you're referring to that figure, et cetera. And that that's supposed to be common to the way that we would point out the beautiful, but then not common to the way we'd point out pleasure, which I still don't know if that. That is, you know, agreeableness. And I still don't know if that was works, but it's okay.

1:41:09 Wes: So in 21, he's actually giving an Argument for common sense. So that's part of why he. So it's not just he's going to assume it, and it goes towards some of the things we were puzzled about earlier. So since cognitions can be universally communicated, so since our, you know, our objective cognitions with concepts and such can be universally communicated, then this associated mental disposition towards cognition, or the cognition in general thing that we see in the aesthetic can be universally communicated as, as well. Because if it couldn't, then something that's given in our experience would not animate the imagination, which would in turn animates the understanding in the way that it does.

So because we know that a given can aesthetically animate the imagination, the understanding, we know that the commonality that we see in cognitive judgments that spreads to the universal communicability also applies to aesthetic judgment judgments. That's a difficult argument to understand, but once you accept that, then you say, well, it's only a feeling that can do this, not concepts. We need a common sense, because the function of that faculty, of the common sense is just to say that we can have something that's universally communicable, even though it's a feeling.

Anyway, I probably wasn't much clearer than Kant himself there, but that's the best I can do.

1:42:26 Dylan: This common sense that Kant is talking about really is a kind of condition for rationality and be able to talk about anything. Anything. This is the point that Aristotle makes in the metaphysics about reason and logic. And in trying to come up with a grounding for the rules of logic itself, like deductions that you make. He doesn't have a real proof of it, but what he says is that you just simply can't speak. The very fact that we speak and have language means that this is true, period.

1:43:02 Mark: I think that provides a great model of how Kant gives explanations. That's entirely what his transcendental deduction of whatever he's deducing today, how that works. We have closings on this portion of the discussion.

1:43:16 Wes: So I just want to say one more thing about common sense. Common sense, I just wanted to say. So I think common sense is like common understanding, but without the concepts and objects. He says basically, common sense just is the effect of the free play of the cognitive powers, which I. I think we think of as the understanding sort of revving without its concepts. That's the way I think of it. The common sense is sort of the understanding doing its thing, but doing it without cognitions.

1:43:42 Dylan: Let me just be wildly speculative here. Would this framework admit of the Possibility of an intellectual entity that was a different species than human beings, that would have an aesthetic experience that was not communicable to human beings. Beings.

1:43:59 Wes: Yeah, I think.

1:44:00 Dylan: Yeah. Yeah, it seems like it has to. Right.

1:44:03 Wes: Actually maybe that's a question.

1:44:04 Dylan: Or is that just a character of all reasons? So the extent that anything is sentient.

1:44:09 Wes: Right. It could be a function of something that would be universal to any sentient being. So it's. I think it's hard to say.

1:44:16 Dylan: That's a tangent. We don't need to go further.

1:44:18 Mark: So we're going to talk more about this book. We're going to talk about the second book in the first part here, the analytic of the sublime. We're not going to do it next time for 106. We have another topic already scheduled for then, which is Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 1. So some ancient skepticism. We're going to have Jessica Berry from our Nietzsche Truth and Lie episode back as a guest. So big treat. That means that this episode will actually be posted before we record the next one. So I want to encourage people that are confused about this.

This, I have strong opinions about this to get on the blog partiallyexaminedlife.com for the episode posting for this and give us some questions to try to grapple with in the next one or give us some other ideas, give us some objections. I guess as far as closing down this discussion, it's such a task to get a handle on his language and figure out what he's trying to say, that it's hard to engage this critically. I think I'm still at the stage where I kind of want to just give him the benefit of the doubt and just try to make some sense sense of it.

So for instance, I like the description that you gave Wes for free play, which I think is clearer than what's actually in the text. But when I think about that critically, I, you know, appreciating a work of art is by necessity, of course, being non conceptual. It's kind of like describing a religious experience. That is, it's very hard to describe. And if somebody pitches you well, when you're appreciating a work of art, isn't this and this and this what you do? Aren't you appreciating the play of forms? You could just look at an experiment and say, yeah, that seems kind of right.

But then I think somebody could give a very different account of the same phenomenology. And you might likewise say, yeah, I could take it that way too. Like, it's almost an open canvas, if you will, to throw theories on, throw phenomenological descriptions on. So my personal preference in approaching this would be a little more of a phenomenological description and less of just here's the finished theory. That's very complicated. Like, I can kind of get at what's motivating. But of course, Kant does not. Even in his section that says some examples does not actually give you a lot of examples to sink your teeth in and really think about.

So I think we have to do that work ourselves. And I think talking about the sublime next time will help round this out. Right? If you're talking about any aesthetic experiences that don't encompass the fact that not everything we appreciate aesthetically is beautiful, then obviously you're missing something. But Kant at least has a piece of that. So we'll see if in his discussion of the sublime, if he's captured our intuitions about the other half of this other closings.

1:46:54 Seth: I really enjoyed this. I think there's some amazing and interesting insights in here. Even though you have to kind of presuppose certain assumptions of the Kantian framework, you only have to presuppose them in your general understanding. You don't actually have to read the first and second critiques before you get to this. I fully expected Wes to spend about 45 minutes explaining how all this stuff fit together. And I'm glad we didn't. He wasn't called upon Khan to do that. I don't even remember reading the first critique. It was so long ago.

But this felt like a much more modern work of almost phenomenology to me in the sense that I really did feel like he was saying this is the kind of thing that we experience. This is the kind of language that we use. How can I parse this out to make sense of it? It just has a very different character than what I expect to see from Kant. But it helps to read the hard work that other people have put in to explain it. I don't think I would have gotten as much out of it if I had read the text this time like I normally I do. But I went and I read a couple of commentaries first before diving into

1:47:57 Dylan: was the most fun Kant I've ever read. So I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It was a book that I've been wanting to read but had never gotten around to it. And it has been just very stimulating and interesting. And on the one hand, Kant's writing is still terrible in many Respects, but it was the most accessible that I remember reading in a while.

1:48:20 Wes: Yeah, what's interesting about Kant is the amount of actual repetition that's going on. And I think some of that is because each little section is like its own argument. And it's as if he's starting from scratch. But we'll hear over and over and over again the same things about non purposive purposiveness, as if we haven't heard it before. Because it's like each little proposition that's supposed to stand on its own. So that's part of the frustration for me. And then, I mean, I honestly think you could rewrite this in a much shorter, clear way. So I think Kant, it's a legitimate criticism to say he's just a bad writer, but it's not completely arbitrary. It's because he's trying to be almost geometric and sometimes he's just thinking things through, but he's not thinking enough about communicating about universal communicability.

1:49:06 Dylan: Yeah, I read the whole thing twice and the second time I read it, it was just much more clear. I sort of got what he was doing and I was much more conscious of the repetition that you're referring to, Wes, because found that I could. Okay, I get this section. I get this section. So I would just recommend never reading it the first time. Just read it the second time.

1:49:27 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I. With the Critique of Pure Reason, which. It's been a long time since I've really looked at that. I mean, I was young and I was trying to figure things out and it didn't matter whether it was repetitious, I was just trying to figure it out and it was fascinating. And once you've learned Kant's language and then you can just read through and then it becomes tedious. I did my usual thing with this where I kind of try and summarize it as I'm reading it, so it makes it harder. And I found this a real slog to try and do that, but I found that rewarding.

And I find that whole idea really interesting. I mean, I don't know what to think of it. I don't know. Like Mark, I don't know how to evaluate at this point. I mean, this kind of strict formalism of Kant seems to go a little bit too far. This idea of giving this very, very deep foundation to aesthetic judgment where this purposiveness without purpose and this activation of the cognitive faculties without spec cognitions, that's a really interesting way to try to get one's head around aesthetic judgment, which is kind of mysterious. It's Kant's usual brilliance coming up with an ingenious idea for how to explain something which you might think is inexplicable.

So that's what I love about Kant.

1:50:36 Mark: It sounds like it's a description of an undergraduate's experience of Kant where there's a lot of cognitions that are not specific. There's thinking going on, but without actual specific thoughts involved.

1:50:51 Wes: Yes, the theory of Vagueness if people

1:50:55 Mark: got lost in the woods of the many quotes that we read in this episode, I will name check the itunes U lecture that I brought up earlier. It's the Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art lectures from Oxford University. James Grant that he's got two different lectures in a row on the Critique of Judgment that go a little more into almost no reading of the text directly. More Here is a high level overview of what's being said. Thanks everybody. Folks should, like I said, go to the website partialexaminelife.com while you're there, why don't you make a donation?

We exist thanks to wonderful people who have given us one off donations or become ongoing members of our citizen site. Folks that have given substantial amounts since the last time I read these and since it's been a couple episodes, the list is long. I'm sorry. Include John Glazer, Louise Wales, Brandon Goodwin, Alan Hester, Dennis Murray Sr, Michael Zanett, John Taylor, Jeff Hedge, Colin Gorey, Sandra Yorke, Stan Martin, Michael Guido Sims Preston, Arthur Green, Stephen Tullock, Lindsey Bunt, Dominic Harris, Laura Davis Chanin, Heath Adams, Greg Vogelsberger, Matt Sanza, Allison Jones, Michael Rouge, Nick Martin, Jeffrey Mullen, Steven Ellis, Lewis Ware, Daniel Buzzatu, Leonard Williams, Andrew Pendakis, Joe Varro, Hans Villamil, Max Smith, Linda Reeves, Chris Statham, Lucy Hutchinson, David Richardson, Michael Gusher, Jeffrey McIntyre, Robin Boddy, Peter O.

Callaghan, Jonathan Maithaller, Rebecca Bond, Giselle Stahl, Jeremy Rean, Borion Damien Bickhoff, Steven Sanchez, Harriet Tampa, Judith Klinger, Joshua Duke, David Sutherland, Nell Iyer, Luca Brennick, Luca

1:52:44 Seth: Brasi Sleeps with the Fishes Josh Khoury,

1:52:48 Mark: Eric Risberg, Shada Crickenmayer, Pedro de Caratri, Steven Couch, Claire McElroy, Luke Tilbury, Jeff Pooley, James Roberts, Kimberly Jean Smith, Marco Connor, Evan Holley, Soroya Haas, Daniel DiPasqually, Emma Corey, Alan Hester, Megan Edwards and Monica Serra. God damn, I got to read those more often.

1:53:10 Wes: Since when was that

1:53:13 Mark: the last two episodes were right next to each other and I didn't read them on either of those. We are getting late August, but yet it's never enough. It's never enough.

1:53:23 Wes: We're not getting rich at all.

1:53:25 Mark: Hey, another announcement. In light of this aesthetics episode, I want to invite all you artists, that is Visual artists, photographers, sculptors, musicians. I'm not going to add writers to that just because there are too damn many of you. If you've got samples of your work online that you think are in some way philosophical, I want to invite you to send a link of your material to pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com and I'll at least write a blog post within the next couple weeks and try to share those links out so readers can get an idea of what, according to our listeners, philosophical art might be.

I also want to invite musicians in particular that might want to record with me at some point. Drummers, lead guitarists, bassists, horn players, string players. I'd like to produce more up to date original music for given episodes, and it would help if I have a stable of sidemen to draw on who have recording gear so that I can record a guide track, send it to you, you add your thing. So even if you've already been in touch with me in the past about this, please drop me an email and I'll actually take careful note this time of all that respond so we can create some quick crowdsourced philosophy songs.

Thanks. Join our Facebook group Follow on Twitter Give us a nice rating on the iTunes store, will ya? And love your neighbor, but not disinterestedly. Good night everybody.

1:54:37 Seth: Good night.

1:54:52 Unknown speaker: In love but that wasn't enough of her ah she must have misjudged you, let you go let's stop up at your feet when the tryst is made. She wants to cool down. Will your feelings fade if you drag them around or is there some way back? Can you cool down this time Just cool down. Well you know that she cared but you should have danced so excessively maybe you should be scared don't let all that you should be the deputy when your whims have passed and she wants to cool down. Will your feelings last if you kick them around or is there some way out? Can you come down this time? Cool down. It doesn't matter what you said you would lose you've released what you've given but you don't have to choose to leave it just cool down. I will take it seriously anyway

1:56:47 Wes: have you had enough?

1:56:51 Unknown speaker: Just cool down just cool down. I must say that you're looking surprising insane you must be getting accustomed to see the pain you're almost normal when her choice is made and she wants to cool down Will your feelings fade or will they drag you down? Or is there some way through it? Can you cool down cold? Just cool. I wouldn't take your team easy anyway

1:57:38 Mark: have you had enough

1:57:41 Unknown speaker: and just not giving yourself or you? Cool down Just cool down Just cool down Just.