Orientation: Kant and the Aesthetic Content of Cognition

My dissertation is motivated by the conviction that contemporary debates about the role of conceptuality in cognition and perception suffer from the general neglect of Kant's Critique of Judgment. More specifically, I set out to show how Kant's aesthetics harbors a fully defensible account of empirical cognition capable of overcoming the deficits inherent in both the empiricist and conceptualist alternatives. The overarching argument of the dissertation is that the notion of orientation as used by Kant offers one concrete example in which our affective capacities are drawn on in perception and cognition.;I begin in Chapter 1, "Orientation in Kant", with a close analysis of the essay of 1786 and argue against standard interpretations that rather than fitting in neatly as a midway point between the epistemology and metaphysics of the first Critique and the aesthetics of the third, the largely overlooked question of how we orient ourselves in the world puts a curious strain on central tenets of Kant's own critical system, in particular, the conviction that affects are merely subjective and therefore "feeling is not a faculty whereby we represent things, but lies outside our whole faculty of knowledge" (A801/B829 n.a). In that case, the moment of worldly orientation, as it arises briefly in a minor essay, proves to be at odds with Kant's official and systematic division of labor between the subjectivity of aesthetics and the objectivity of epistemology. But the leading thread of the dissertation is that, on closer consideration, orientation is not a momentary departure from Kant's own better judgment but brings full circle a line of thought opened up by the "Copernican Turn" according to which the objects of experience and knowledge are not corrupted, but rather made possible in the first instance, by the disclosive and judgmental capacities of human subjectivity. In its basics, the notion of orientation requires that the "Copernican" insight into how our human subjectivity makes the objects of experience available to cognition is not be limited to our discursive or conceptual capacities but must include our affective sensibilities as well.;If the first chapter amounts to an "analysis" of the notion of orientation, the remaining chapters offer a "deduction" or demonstration why a functional ability to orient ourselves must already be built into our ground-level ability to experience and make sense of the empirical world. In Chapter 2, "The Double-Function of the Imagination", I use developments in the third Critique to fill-out the enthymematic doctrine of the "productive imagination" as presented in the first Critique for the purpose of identifying where an orientational capacity can be located in a Kantian account of mind. In order to make an orienting imagination not only tenable as a reading of Kant but plausible in itself, I work to demystify Kant's otherwise cryptic claim that the mental function of "apprehension" by which we passively sense empirical content is the "same power" as the "exhibition" of concepts by which we actively make sense of the world (5:279). With the double-function of the imagination as both passive and active firmly in hand, I then turn in Chapter 3, "Taste and the Intentionalist Accounts of Pleasure", to unknot the convoluted relationship between the imagination and the feeling of pleasure in aesthetic judgments of taste. I set out to argue, against several prominent interpretations, that judgments of taste are not judgments made about a feeling of pleasure but rather are judgments made by way of a feeling of pleasure (viz. pleasure is not the referent but the form of judgments of taste). Over and against causal and priority theories of the role of pleasure in judgments of taste, I defend an "internalist" or "intentionalist" account of aesthetic judgment according to which pleasure plays an internal and active role in bringing form to an aesthetic object and is thus part of the judgment itself.;Having located the feeling of aesthetic pleasure in the double-function of the imagination, I will have assembled out of Kant's account of taste all of the pieces needed to build out to the notion of orientation in which affective states are discriminatory of our ground-level, basic experiences of objects in the world. The move "From Taste to Orientation" is the goal of Chapter 4 but first requires showing that the intentional role played by pleasure in aesthetic judgment can be extended to other affects or feelings. Establishing that the feeling at play in aesthetic judgment cannot, in principle, be limited to pleasure amounts to a negative defense of orientation. I conclude the chapter, however, by trying to show that there are sufficient resources within the third Critique to prefigure a more satisfying positive defense of orientation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).