The taste as a kind of sensus communis

Abstract

Our objective is to show how the idea of sensus communis, which appears in §40 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft), a work published by Immanuel Kant in 1790, intends to function as a transition from an individual feeling to the constitution of a community, and the consequent importance of this passage for the universality of the judgment of taste, as well as for the critical-transcendental project. The argumentative attempt in §40 is to associate a sense of community, termed sensus communis, with the reflective faculty of judgment, that is, to legitimize the universality of the judgment of taste through the idea of sensus communis. The sense of community is, primarily, conceived according to a sensus communis logicus and its maxims, namely: to think for oneself, to think in the place of others, and to think in agreement with oneself. It is not a matter of the faculty of cognition, but of a way of thinking beyond individual subjective conditions, arriving at a “universal standpoint (which one can only determine by placing oneself at the standpoint of others)” (KU, AA 05: 295). Such maxims of human understanding are associated with the Kantian system and its primacy of morality. The first maxim, to think for oneself, is the result of the courageous attitude of making use of one’s own understanding. The second, to think in the place of everyone else, is the enlargement of thinking for oneself to a communicability with everyone else. The second maxim demonstrates an affinity of the sensus communis logicus with the aesthetic one, since thinking in the place of everyone else also means thinking according to a universal communicability, stemming from a subjectivity characteristic of the judgment of taste, which judges subjectively and, at the same time, universally, according to an aesthetic feeling, having a sensus communis as a point of reference. The sensus communis aestheticus, according to a sense of community of taste, appears in the third Critique as an attempt to ground the universality and necessity of the judgment of taste, thus constructing a community of universal communicability. The universality of the judgment of taste, in turn, seeks to resolve the problem of the unbridgeable gulf between nature and freedom, exposed by Kant in the Introductions to the book. Between nature and freedom there is no possible passage, “as if it were a matter of so many other different worlds, in which the former could have no influence on the latter” (KU, AA 05: 176). However, the argumentation attempting to legitimize a community of sensible and rational human beings through a sensus communis runs up against the limits previously drawn by the critical-transcendental project, for the grounding of an intersubjective common sense cannot be metaphysical, empirical, or psychological.