Abstract

The Critique of Judgment aims to account for the affective sharing of a common world of appearance. To accomplish this project, Kant retrieves a connection between contemplation and judgment which had lain dormant in the philosophical tradition since the time of Plato. Kant rescues the theme of contemplatio or $\theta\varepsilon\omega\rho\acute\iota\alpha$ from the Neo-platonist tradition culminating in Leibniz and Shaftesbury. This tradition took beauty as the motivation for an intuitive assimilation to the order of ideas, which are understood as principles for the determination of natural form. Discovering imagination as a power through which human beings may escape the tyranny of determinate objectivity, Kant insists that taste demands an openness towards appearance, outside of cognitive and conative determination. The attitude of disinterestedness suspends objectivity and looks toward the idea of a sensus communis, which implies a human plurality. In the first two Critiques, Kant subjectivizes the Leibnizian principle of determining ground. In the third Critique he suspends this principle, while retrieving and retaining the significance of humanitas latent in the idea of sensus communis which forms the indeterminate ground for aesthetic judgments. ;The first two chapters develop a phenomenological interpretation of Kantian aesthetics. Operating with an unthematized method of phenomenological reduction, Kant uncovers features indicating the primacy of appearance over determining ground within aesthetic contemplation. The third chapter traces Kant's response to Leibniz from the pre-critical period up to the Critique of Judgment. Kant's rehabilitation of appearance emerges in opposition of the Leibnizian principle of determining ground. The fourth chapter resumes the phenomenological interpretation, now directed to illuminating Kant's apology for sensibility and his advance beyond Shaftesbury's Platonist aesthetics. Sensibility compels think to relinquish its power to determine objectivity. ;A tension emerges between the subject's powers of determination and the freedom within sensibility which escapes determination. Despite its indeterminancy, the regulative idea of a sensus communis orients a disciplined sensitivity to appearance. Beauty testifies to a fractured human subject who cannot determine its own ground and must dwell in a world of appearance among a plurality in the sharing of perspectivally situated voices.