Kant and the feeling of life

Paul Guyer is right to note (in the excellent Kant and the Claims of Taste) that we are already introduced to sundry problems when we merely open the Critique of the Power of Judgment and see the particular moments into which the Analytic of the Beautiful is divided. Kant has employed the logical functions of judgment that we find in the Critique of Pure Reason: quality, quantity, modality, and relation. Why would he do this? In the manner of many of the dismissals of the conception of beauty within the Critique of the Power of Judgement itself (and we will see this similarity is not unimportant) we are ready to say this organization is just another instance of Kant being interested in form for its own sake—it has no intrinsic necessity or concreteness. But Guyer objects to this view—even as he too does so while bemoaning Kant’s choice to organize the analytic this way—saying that the reason “cannot be a mere obsession with the architectonic, for this itself could not dictate the particular architectonic elements to be employed.” He gives a plausible analysis for why this would be so, but does not sufficiently explain perhaps the most intriguing element about Kant’s decision, which we can see in Kant’s own hazy remark on it in a footnote to the first moment:

In seeking the moments to which this power of judgment attends in its reflection [in ihrer Reflexion Acht hat], I have been guided by the logical functions for judging… I have considered the moment of quality first, since the aesthetic judgment on the beautiful takes notice of this first [weil das äthetische Urteil über das Schöne auf dieses zuerst Rücksicht nimmt].

Quality comes before quantity, when in the Critique of Pure Reason quantity comes first.
This is not to say that Guyer does not at all address why quality comes first in the third Critique. He just does not do so with respect to how the third Critique might be employing this distinction in some similar way to the first. That is, Guyer explains 1) that Kant employs the logical functions with some connection to the first Critique in mind, and 2) that quality must come first for Kant. But no connection is made between these two points, and thus the whole discussion cannot account for the status of the text as we have it. Indeed, it seems that Guyer merely brings the priority of the moment of quality up so as only to follow the exposition of the text in his analysis, since he ultimately concludes that the quality of aesthetic judgment itself (that it is without any interest, ohne alles Interesse) is actually only an aspect of the “practice” of carrying out an aesthetic judgment in accordance with the more important requirement of the second moment (universality, Allgemeinheit)—and thus could just as well have followed the section on quantity (“in fact, I will argue, it is only in the practice of aesthetic judgment that the moment of quality comes first,” Guyer, 100). Guyer then wholly abandons the interesting similarity and discrepancy between the first and third Critiques that he himself pointed out.
We can use his indications, however, and make the connection that he apparently does not think profitable if we look deeper at the quality of pleasure that Kant thinks is involved in a judgment. Obviously, this then means we are resisting Guyer’s thinking of the qualitative aspect as merely an aspect that just happens to occur in a particular judgment—we are granting a greater importance and necessity to it already, even if it is not yet analyzed. At the same time, this will also go some ways towards resisting the dispersion of the act of judgment into three “stages” that Guyer famously has to posit to eventually make sense of the judgment at all (Guyer 110-2, 151-5). That is, Guyer fundamentally seems to think that because the universality of the judgment must be at the center of its operation, the fact that the disinterestedness of pleasure would be subordinate or less central means that it would have to have some sort of existence elsewhere than in the moment in which the universality would be operative. This is no doubt because Guyer understands the stakes involved and the incomprehensibilities in which he would involve himself if he were to take a different position (Note 1: Namely, whether the argument of the third Critique and its conception of pleasure are in any way coherent: Guyer thinks that without his distinction there would be a vicious circle in the argument (where pleasure would be merely self-referential, or pleasure in pleasure), and others, notably Hannah Ginsborg (cf. The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition. New York, Garland, 1990.) think it would still hold up, but precisely only if we think of pleasure as this self-referential feeling. We can only attempt to indicate here, perhaps in a manner a bit like Guyer, how it might be possible to thread the needle between these two theories), but it is certainly not insignificant that Guyer’s formulation has to manifest itself also on some level as a particular assertion about the structure of the book in general: namely, that it is only in the practice of aesthetic judgment that the moment of quality comes first and so there remains no real reason why Kant would reverse the moments of quantity and quality.
Kant defines pleasure in the first paragraph of the first moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful:

In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of the understanding to the object for cognition, but rather relate it [i.e. the representation] by means of the imagination (perhaps combined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure… To grasp [zu befassen] a regular, purposive structure with one’s faculty of cognition (whether the manner of the representation be distinct or confused) is something entirely different from being conscious of this representation. Here the representation is related entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life [Lebensgefühl], under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, which grounds an entirely special faculty for discrimination and judging… (CJ §1, 89; KdU, 279).

Kant is extremely confusing here, seeming to say two things at once. First, he looks as if he is claiming that pleasure is a feeling to which we relate a representation in order to decide whether or not it is beautiful. He elaborates upon this in order to introduce the idea that the decision regarding beauty has a thoroughly subjective determining ground or is aesthetic, and does so by rephrasing things first in terms of what is objectively “designated” by the relation of a feeling to a representation and then in terms of the faculty of cognition can grasp something without being conscious of it. But then he says, in order to further restate how the decision is aesthetic, that as a feeling, pleasure is at bottom not this feeling to which we relate a representation but really a feeling of life, a Lebensgefühl. We are led to ask, then, what is this Lebensgefühl, this life-feeling or awareness of life, and how could it allow itself to subsume itself as it were under the name of another feeling, a feeling to which we relate a representation so as to decide if it is beautiful? We should note that this is not to say that we are positing (or that the text itself posits) two distinct feelings. Rather, we are trying to trace how one could, for Kant “go under a name” that would be different than “Lebensgefühl.”
Luckily, we can clarify things here if we return to Kant’s first unpublished introduction to the third Critique. There he says that,

Pleasure is the state of the mind [Zustand des Gemüts] in which a representation is in agreement with itself [eine Vorstellung mit sich selbst zusammenstimmt], as a ground, either merely for preserving this state itself [entweder diesen bloß selbst zu erhalten] (for [denn] the state of the powers of the mind reciprocally promoting each other in a representation preserves itself), or for producing its object. If it is the former, then the judgment on the given object is an aesthetic judgment of reflection; however, if it is the latter, then it is an aesthetic-pathological or of an aesthetic-practical judgment. It can be readily seen here that pleasure or displeasure, since they are not kinds of cognition, cannot be explained by themselves at all [für sich selbst gar nich können erklart werden], and are felt, not understood; hence they can be only inadequately explained [dürftig erklären kann] through the influence that a representation has on the activity of the powers of the mind by means of this feeling (CJ, 33; KdU, 237).

The language here is perhaps a little more loose or inadequate with respect what it wants to express, but through it we actually get a very precise sense of what Kant means when he says that one must merely use the name of the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. This is exactly because it is inadequate: in other words, because what Kant calls a feeling is precisely something that is not a kind of cognition, even calling it something like pleasure or displeasure will only abstract from its immediacy—that is, unless pleasure or displeasure is thought as so close to a bare type of feeling that it would almost lose all of our normal associations of pleasure or displeasure as something we can understand, make clear, or explain. (Note 2: It should be noted that Kant here gives us another possibility than this which he does not follow up on because he feels he has treated of it in the Critique of Practical Reason: that pleasure is a state of the mind in which a representation is in agreement with itself, as a ground, for producing its object or willing it into existence. That is, Kant is talking here about the case in which one gets a pleasure out of something like respect, which has to do with acting such that one creates, as it were, a particular state of things in the world.) This “bare” feeling that we are talking about inadequately, would be closer to a “state of mind” or (to be a little more literal with Zustand des Gemüts) a condition in which one is naturally disposed, such that one is all together correctly or as one should be (zusammenstimmt)—that is, (only) when this state or condition is the ground of some effort to preserve, or hold (cf. befassen in §1 above) oneself within this very state or condition. (Note 3: “State of the mind” is a really lamentable translation, since it seems to suggest that Kant is saying something like “state of the process in which mental data is computed” rather than “state of one’s particular temper or comportment”--Gemüt is nowhere near a solely mental phenomenon, especially in the way Kant is using it here. But though the resistance to psychologism here might be too insistent in Guyer's rendering, saying “one’s particular” as we do pushes things too far in the other direction. Kant is indeed getting at a more formal phenomenon than any one person’s general temperament, since (as we have just seen) the temperament is precisely only one directed towards preservation of this temperament. No doubt the translators are trying to anticipate extremely formal use of "den Zustand des Subjekts" in §10 of the Analytic of the Beautiful (but even then to think Subjekt and Gemüt are similar seems really unnatural). The point is, ultimately, that within this context, Zustand des Gemüt is just not as formal as “state of the mind.”) This effort gets clarified as a maintenance or movement of arresting (erhalten) in the Critique in §10. But the important point about all this is that Kant thinks his definition of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is not a definition that can grasp at precisely what it is to be within that state that constitutes a feeling pure and simple. This make it sound as if it were more like a cognition than what it is: namely, something more holistic, something more dispositional, something more connected to a basic movement of life as an effort to hold onto life and to be held by life (or, in the case of displeasure, to be released from or hindered in this holding). Thus, if we were to really hold close to what we mean by the terms, namely a fundamental grip on life, “pleasure or displeasure, since they are not kinds of cognition, cannot be explained by themselves at all.”
So this is why in the first paragraph of the Analytic of the Beautiful Kant is moving between describing the relationship between a feeling and a representation as pleasure and then calling this feeling itself a name for a life-feeling or feeling of life. Lebensgefühl is precisely this more holistic phenomenon of feeling that we have to use this shorthand to describe: that is, it is what we just have to call pleasure or displeasure, which are themselves normally thought of as feelings in a more mentalistic or less bare sense—as something we could indeed subsume under a concept and think or of which we could be conscious (cf. “to grasp a regular, purposive structure with one’s faculty of cognition… is something entirely different from being conscious of this representation”). In short, Kant is trying to reinstate what he sees as the originary type of feeling from which the feeling in the normal sense could be explained and with which any analytic cannot avoid engaging rigorously just as much as it cannot avoid failing in this endeavor. In short, Lebensgefühl is feeling (a feeling that we describe as pleasure or displeasure) rigorously conceived.
We can now see that it is perhaps because of the ambiguity regarding the precise signification of “feeling” that the moment of quality has to come first. Because Kant has to introduce the sense in which the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is not a feeling in the common sense of the word, because Kant has to show that this life-feeling is the most basic feeling from which any other feeling would have to arise (or in terms of which it would ultimately make sense as aesthetic, as subjective), he has to give priority to the particular logical function of judgment that would outline this most basic phenomenon. That is, if he is going talk about pleasure and pleasure in any of the moments, he must qualify somehow the way that it will be thought—namely, as a non-conscious feeling—before he actually deals with its particular functioning in the judgment itself, whether in the sphere of its disinterestedness or its universality. In short, this is why he would give the reason that “the aesthetic judgment on the beautiful takes [nimmt] notice of this [quality] first:” Kant has to deal with what (in-)taking or grasping (nehmen) is when it is done by a subject, and do so as such—that is, with respect to its most primordial phenomenon, its life—before he can explain how the grasping or holding of life itself is the particular type of pleasure that we find in the judgment of the beautiful. In short, quality comes first because Kant feels that any consideration of the aesthetic aspect of the power of judgment qua aesthetic (that is, subjective) has to deal with the ability of the subject in its constitution to be the particular subject that could indeed relate to itself aesthetically. The particular way Kant conceives of this relation is as a feeling, and so he must actually define the more basic sense in which “feeling” is working to constitute a subject before he can properly consider its modalities. Furthermore, he must do so without recourse to transcendental apperception, any consideration of consciousness, because we are not considering that at all here. Thus, he qualifies it as a grip. This preliminary qualification naturally fits in with the moment of quality the best, and so, perhaps, Kant reverses the order. No doubt this would make Kant’s decision a bit more circular—Kant has to outline how the grasping of life or the holding of the state of the subject in life is proper to a grasping subject that grasps the beautiful. But perhaps it would also show that Kant would be disturbing the logical order because he perhaps is endeavoring to bring it closer to the particular hermeneutical task that someone like Heidegger would employ (that is, jumping into the circle and determining the possibility for circularity) so as to be able to define how a subject is able to have a consciousness of himself without consciousness—that is, without (or rather also alongside) apperception.