Knowledge of the Beautiful: Chomsky and Kant

Benjamin M. Horvath December 17, 2008

Introduction

In an interview, Brian Magee questioned Noam Chomsky on the similitude between his work and that of Immanuel Kant (Magee 1979, 221). Chomsky acknowledged Kants inuence, remarking that he had even tried to bring it out, in a certain way (cf. Salkie 1990, 8384; Harpham 1992, 103104; and Fraser 2003). His work in linguistics and Kants three Critiques have common inquiries about knowledge and the processes whereby the human mind arrives at such knowledge. In their works, the idea of innate mental faculties is an important explanatory concept. Such faculties allow humans access to a priori knowledge, which is logically necessary and known separate from experience. For both philosophers, there are limits to human understanding that cannot be overcome. The usefulness of theorizing innate faculties in explaining human linguistics has led Chomsky to casually suggest there may be other faculties which control specic aspects of human behavior. Responses to morality and aesthetics, he says, may likewise be explainable by faculties of the mind. Kants book, Critique of the Power of Judgment, seeks, among other things, to attribute aesthetic response to innate structures. In context of the link between the two, might this then be what Chomsky has in mind when he writes, Work of true aesthetic value follows canons and principles that are only in part subject to human choice; in part, they reect our fundamental nature (Chomsky 1988b, 152)? In other mentionings of aesthetics, Chomsky speculates a human aesthetic faculty would be similar to the structures he nds control human language. Chomskys aesthetic faculty will defer from his language faculty mostly in purpose, but not in basic structure. By examining what Chomsky thinks this language faculty is like, it can be reasonably deduced what he supposes a human aesthetic faculty would consist of. Kant, too, explains the
Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405. E-mail: bmhorvat@ indiana.edu. URL: http://mypage.iu.edu/bmhorvat/.

aesthetic sense by relying on innate faculties. Yet, the third Critique should not be viewed as a predecessor of a Chomskyan theory of taste. Kants views on the role of mental faculties, and knowledge and judgments of the beautiful, are substantially dierent from the Chomskyan faculties, despite their other similarities.

Constructing Chomskys Theory of Innate Aesthetic Sense

In Chomskys writings, there are a few clues as to what he thinks about aesthetics. They are mostly analogies to his linguistic studies. For instance, there are limitations, he has found, on human communication; it is possible to imagine a more advanced organism than a human, which communicates in ways impossible for humans to understand. Similarly, We like and understand Beethoven because we are humans, with a particular, genetically determined mental constitution (Chomsky 2003, 5455). Some arrangements of music, color and form, etc., create an aective response. Chomsky has suggested scientists undertake inquiry [of cognitive systems] modeled on existing constructive studies of the mindsuch as language, presumably. These remarks are highly suggestive that Chomsky believes an aesthetic faculty exists, and that it is similar to the language faculty. Analogies suppose similar relations. By reconstructing Chomskys linguistic theory, a fuller theory of aesthetics can be deduced. Language is the most accessible starting part in the study of the mind, Chomsky writes, and indeed the one with the most profound consequences for human society (1988b, 2). Earlier, Descartes questioned how humans have obtained the knowledge they have. He observed a disparity between data and knowledge (Chomsky 1988a, 105). For instance, by ignoring the actual workings of the mind, it is a black box that receives inputs of data, and organizes this data to produce output of knowledge. Looking at a gure, one can acknowledge that it is a triangle (Chomsky 1988a, 106). Chomsky and Descartes attribute this knowledge to innate structures (cf. Kants notion of a priori knowledge). Language provides a valuable test ground. A young child appears to have no knowledge of language. Out of innite possible constructions of language, children will observe only pieces of speech. Mostly without instruction, children will come to master the grammar of a language within years. Here to, according to Chomsky, the childs knowledge cannot be accounted for by the data he is received. The variation in language is innite, and that humans know certain things about language separate from what they were taught (i.e., environmental factors), leads Chomsky to claim the existence of a language faculty. Consider the English sentences The man is tall, and Is the man tall? (Chomsky 1988a, 152). In the interrogative sentence, is shifts to the leftmost part of the sentence. In other sentences, this is not possible. The man who is tall is angry, cannot be made 2

interrogative by the same method, as this would result in the nonsense, Is the man who tall is angry? Furthermore, even though it is unlikely one has ever read such a sentence, it is clearly ungrammatical. Even young English-speaking children somehow knows this without instruction or previous experience with that specic sentential structure. This is evidence, Chomsky claims, of an innate language faculty. The disparity is thus explainable by the existence of a priori knowledge which Chomsky imputes to a mental faculty. Humans have an innate conception of grammar that allows them to know when a language unit is ungrammatical. Art and nature are not empirically beautiful. That humans nd these things nonetheless can be reframed as another problem of disparity of knowledge. Kant and Chomsky both believe that it is similar innate functions that determine what humans consider beautiful. A Chomskyan theory of taste will posit a similar a priori knowledge of the beautifula grammar of taste, or a common aesthetic sense.1 A language unit is a representation of language, and it can be judged as positive (grammatical) or negative (ungrammatical). Similarly, aesthetic representations can be judged in the same way, where a grammatical (positive) representation is beautiful, and an ungrammatical (negative) one is not beautiful. The language faculty can be compared to a box of switches (Chomsky 1988a, 453). Input is received, but before output, i.e., knowledge of grammar, can be produced, some of the switches must be set to their proper setting.2 These switches are parameters. Chomskys theory of Universal Grammar claims all humans language faculty is identical in structure, and variation among languages is explainable by these parameters. As a child begins learning a language, the mind nds the settings for the proper parameters from experience. One instance of parameters is the use of the preposition a in Spanish, which translates as to in English, in front of direct objects (Chomsky 1988b, 12). The Spanish sentence, Juan afeita a Pedro, literally translates as Juan shaves to Pedro. However, because the parameters of English do not require this preposition, its actual translation is Juan shaves Pedro. Childrens errors are often attributable to these unset switches, rather than fundamental misconceptions of grammar (Chomsky 1988a, 460). At a supercial level, Spanish and English grammars appear dierent, but Chomsky claims the empirical studies done on many languages show that, more abstractly, they are highly similar and are all limited in the same manner. This Chomsky attributes to the genetic programming of the species, that is, innate capacity. Parameters account for variation in and the eects of experience on grammar. This
Kant, too, refers to a sensus communis. To avoid confusion, Chomskys common sense will not be Latinized. 2 Chomsky notes output can signify mental grammatical representations, or directly observable linguistic performance (1972, 11517). As the latter is subject to extralinguistic beliefs . . . that are not, properly speaking, aspects of language, output here refers to internal processes rather than performance.
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concept can serve the same function in aesthetic theory to explain the dierence in judgements of taste between, e.g., Attila the Hun and Queen Victoria. On the surface, the two subjects tastes appear eternally irreconcilable. A more penetrating analysis, a Chomskyan theory of taste would hold, would reveal similarities. Chomsky directly suggests the existence of limitations on what can be called beautiful. For him, modern music is accessible to professionals and maybe to people with a special bent, but it wouldnt be accessible to me if I listened to it forever (2003, 55). Some of Chomskys contemporaries, e.g., W.V.O. Quine, disagreed with Chomsky on, among other things, the necessity of postulating an independent language faculty (Chapman 2000, 15460). Humans learn to do things such as drive cars, but this is no reason to introduce a car driving faculty to explain this ability. Chomsky notes, however, a childs ability to drive a car or do algebrathings he would be capable of in timedevelop separately from language. While a child is unaware the amount of water stays the same when you pour the contents of a low, wide glass into a tall, thin container, he will still display mastery of his languages grammar (Chomsky 1988a, 414; quote from the interviewer). This further reinforces the notion that the language faculty is physiological mental organ: the circulatory system doesnt wait until the visual system reaches a certain stage of organization before proceeding to imitate the visual systems organizational complexity (1988a, 415). The language faculty can be reasoned to be such an organ by the fact its behavior and growth is independent as are other bodily systems. For the aesthetic theory be precisely analogous, and consistent with Chomskys remarks, it will necessarily maintain the existence of a separate aesthetic faculty. It must be uninuenced by other mental faculties. As a whole, such an explanation theorizes that the mind (i) has a specic faculty; that (ii) uses an innate, common sense; for (iii) processing and creating inputs of aesthetic representations and outputs of aective representations or judgments; which (iv) at an abstract level, is the same for all humans; (v) varies within certain parameters; and (vi) nonetheless restricted.

Kant and Aesthetic Judgments

Kants purposes in the third Critique are broader than a theory of aesthetics. Shaper (1992, 36768) recognizes two types of analysis of the third Critique. The systematic view takes it as the bridge between the two other Critiques. This is how Kant formulated it in the opening pagesthe faculty of judgment was to be the way he could link theoretical and moral philosophy, previously described in the rst and second Critiques, respectively. The second view focuses on Kants theory of taste, and its role in broader aesthetics. This 4

latter view is the subject of this section. Kant establishes what he proposes to add to philosophy of aesthetics, and identies the fundamentals of his contribution. Primarily, he is concerned with how judgments of beauty can be universal and necessary, that is, synthetic a priori. He theorizes the origin of aesthetic judgments to be a harmony of faculties and the a priori principle on which these judgments are grounded to be the mental similarity among humans. The Critique of Pure Reason, and the shorter version contained in Kants subsequent Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, addresses fundamental questions of philosophy. He is concerned with how metaphysics can be possible. Being beyond experience, that is, beyond the physical, empiricism is an improper method (P 1, 15).3 Physics and psychology have no room in Kants Copernican revolution. Instead, the source of metaphysics must be a priori judgments, originating in pure reason. These judgments take two forms: analytic and synthetic. The former add no information, and are instead denitional. The subject of such claims already contains what is given in the predicate. They are known to be true a priori on the basis of contradiction; to say x is true and x is false is necessarily false. Synthetic judgments predicates, on the other hand, do oer new information about the subject. They can been a posteriori or a priori ; metaphysics is only concerned with the latter (P 2, 1617). Having established synthetic a priori judgments as the necessary and singular source of metaphysical cognition, Kants question then becomes, how are such judgments possible? Taste is the faculty for the judging of the beautiful (CPJ 1, 89n). Taste poses a particular problem for Kant by the third Critique. He introduces a conceptual division between kinds of judgment. For a judgment to be determinant, a general concept must be known, and a particular representation must then be judged to be an instance of that concept. Such judgments then move from general to particular. Reective judgments are the opposite. Given a particular, reective judgments will occur when one recognizes the particular as an instance of a concept, i.e., moving from particular to general. Kant notes that the underlying principle of reective judgments is that for all things in nature empirically determinate concepts can be found (CPJ, rst intro., 15). Claims such as, This rose is beautiful, are clearly synthetic, but that they are a priori is not immediately apparent. One experiences, e.g., the rose, which is certainly not a representation located in pure reason. Kants focus, however, is not the subject, but the predicate and the domain of the judgment. He compares judgments of what is agreeable with judgments of beauty (CPJ 7, 97). One might say, To me, this pea soup
In-text citations of Kants Critique of the Power of Judgment and his Prolegmona to Any Future Metaphysics will take the form of CJP and P, respectively, followed by the relevant section number and page number from the editions listed in the bibliography.
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is pleasurable, but another may disagree. The statement is bounded by to me, i.e., it is a private feeling. This is implied in all such claims of agreeableness, Kant says. In contrast, claims of beauty extend to everyone. As a judgment, This rose is beautiful, implies a literal right to demand assent from all (on the exact character of this demand, see Guyer 1979, 140). Kant relies on the common usage of beautiful.It would be ridiculous, he writes, if someone claimed, This object . . . is beautiful for me (CPJ 7, 98, emph. his). Judgments of beauty, Kant says, have intersubjective validity. Subjects sense representations, and judge them. These judgments are valid between all subjects. They are to be universally valid, characterized by necessity, and we, as the subjects, speak on such matters with a universal voice (CPJ 8, 100101). This phrasing, common to humans, about the beautiful is Kants reasoning for attributing necessity and universality to judgments about the beautiful. Humans imply it when communicating. Kant deduces the a priori principle of judgments of taste: humans, as subjects, have the same faculties for aesthetics judgments (CPJ 59, remark II, 220). To be sure, Kant does not seek to establish rules whereby aesthetic judgments can themselves be judged (Guyer 1979, 17; CPJ 1, 89). He recognizes these as wholly subjective. Indeed, aesthetic judgments do not involve concepts at all, and so no rule is applicable (CPJ 8, 99). Rather, his aim is toward explaining the character of such judgments. He is then not claiming that an innate aesthetic faculty (taste) makes human reactions toward the same objects necessarily similar, but is instead arguing for the similarly between judgments of beauty. Borrowing from the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant establishes four moments of criteria that are specic to critiques of judgment. Guyer (1979, 122) and Shaper (1992, 374) nd this a rather forced way for Kant to proceed. They blame this on Kants insistence of working within the critical framework, and further divide the moments into two groups. One group describes the form of an analytical judgement. It is universal and necessary. The second group is an explanation of how one should respond to something beautiful: with disinterestedness and a perception of a form of nality. Universal validity arises from the pleasure attributed to the harmony of the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding. Broad (1978, 76) believes that what Kant means by the faculty of imagination is the faculty that allows one to synthesize various presentations in an intuition (emph. his). He uses a bell as an example. One receives sensations of sound, sight, and touch from a bell. They occur in dierent sensory elds. Yet these presentations are associated with each other, i.e., they have been synthesized into a new presentation. Similarly, understanding is the faculty which allows us to work with, or synthesize in Broads language, concepts (rather than sense data). Kant explains why these two faculties would be in use at the same time (CPJ, rst 6

intro., 26). One is presented with an object and while trying to attach a concept to this subject (reective judgment), the imagination apprehends the object, while the understanding presents concepts before cognition as possibly valid generalizations for that particular object. Ones power of judgment perceives this mutual assistance of the faculties (harmony), and one perceives pleasure. Guyer (1979, 7679) notes Kant employs several arguments to actually link this harmony of faculties with pleasure. Finally, Kant attributes the pleasure to achieving an aim (CPJ 6, 73). The third Critique is not an explanation of what a human should nd beautiful. It does not present prescriptions for judging aesthetic judgments; indeed, it rejects that very possibility. Kants purpose in writing this book is instead to show how we make aesthetic judgments, what form they take, and the nature of intersubjective validity. By our use of language, one demands intersubjective validity. This object creates within us pleasure, and one requires everyone else to feel the same pleasure. The only way this can be possible is if humans have the same taste, i.e., the same faculty for aesthetic judgment. This is the synthetic a priori principle of aesthetic judgment. Humans share the process of aesthetics judgments. Every person is to feel the same harmony of imagination and understanding, and engage in reective judgments in the same order.

A Limited Inuence

There is justication for drawing parallels between the Kant and Chomskys aesthetic theories. Both propose answers to the disparity between the input of the senses and aesthetic judgments, or how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. They explain this by the use of faculties of the mind. These faculties are supposed to be common between all humans, and allow for similar aesthetic judgments. Beyond these correspondences, however, are signicant dierences. Foremost among them is that Kant does not propose a separate aesthetic faculty. Rather, imagination and understanding operate in synch to produce a pleasure which allows for the recognition of the beautiful. In Chomskys model, an object is perceived, and checked against the common sense, and can then be found to be beautiful. Pleasure results from this recognition. Kant nds beautiful to be that which causes a play between two cognitive faculties, producing pleasure, followed by the recognition that the object of perception is beautiful. Chomsky nds pleasure the result of the common sense nding a representation beautiful. For Kant, an object is beautiful because it creates pleasure, while for Chomsky, an object gives rise to pleasure because it is beautiful. Chomskys theory allows for the creation of objective measures of beauty based on the common aesthetic sense. As humans can recognize what is grammatical, they can recognize 7

what is beautiful, and because grammar has been found to follow certain restrictive rules, so too can rules for aesthetic judgments be excavated from the common sense. Kant explicitly disagrees with this notion. Pleasure is completely subjective, and because, for Kant, this pleasure is what essentially denes the beautiful, there can be a discrepancy in what people nd beautiful. Parameters do allow for this inconsistency between people in Chomskys theory. They do not allow for the complete subjectivity of aesthetic judgments, however. Instead they are meant to account for the eects of environment on such judgments. Presuming subjectivity, Kant has no need for similar explanatory concepts. By accepting this subjectivity, the Critique of the Power of Judgment denies a universal grammar upon which measurements of taste can be found. Kants point is not to show this, however, but o establish the a priori principle upon how ones judgments of the beautiful can be imputed to others. This is that humans have similar faculties: what causes pleasure in one can be expected to cause pleasure in other. But this is not necessarily so. Further analysis may reveal a subtle inconsistency in the third Critique of simultaneously positing aesthetic subjectivity and a sensus communis.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Chomsky and Kant are at least within the same philosophical school. Even in their aesthetic theories, there are similarities. They question how humans can know what is beautiful, and explain this knowledge by innate mental faculties. In the specics of this faculty, however, the two diverge. Chomsky nds the possibility of an entirely separate aesthetic faculty, while Kant does not. Instead, knowledge of the beautiful arises from two other faculties working in conjunction. Should a separate faculty exist, it would be possible to create a grammar of beautya view Kant explicitly dismisses. Kants inuence on Chomsky is certainly real, but rather than being as acute as some have suggested, is rather limited.

References
[1] Broad, C.D. 1978. Kant: An Introduction. Edited by C. Lewy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [2] Chapman, Siobhan. 2000. Philosophy for Linguists. London: Routledge. [3] Chomsky, Noam. 1972. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

[4] . 1988a. Language and Politics. Edited by C. P. Otero. Montreal: Black Rose. [5] . 1988b. Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [6] . 2003. Chomsky On Democracy and Education. Edited by C.P. Otero. New York: Routledge. [7] . 2005. Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia University Press. [8] Fraser, Bruce W. 2003. Noam Chomskys Linguistic Revolution: Cartesian or Kantian? In From Kant to Davidson, ed. J.E. Malpas. New York: Routledge. [9] Guyer, Paul. 1979. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [10] Harpham, Georey Galt. 1992. Getting it Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [11] Kant, Immanuel. [1793] 2006. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by E. Matthews. Edited by P. Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [12] . [1783] 2006. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Translated by G. Hateld. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [13] Magee, Bryan. 1979. Men of Ideas. New York: Viking. [14] Salkie, Raphael. 1990. The Chomsky Update: Linguistics and Politics. London: Unwin Hyman. [15] Shaper, Eva. 1992. Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: The Aesthetics of Nature and Art. In The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. P. Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.