Different from the autonomy of understanding in cognition and the autonomy of practical reason in praxis, the heautonomy in the judgement of taste is reflexive. The reflexivity consists not only in the fact that the power of judgement legislates to its own usage but also, and more importantly, it legislates to itself through its own operative process. This normativity, based on the self-referential structure of pure aesthetic judgement and the a priori principle of subjective, internal purposiveness, can be regarded as (...) a self-discovering and self-flourishing principle that organically grows out of the aesthetic experience and, at the same time, regulates its growth in return. In this scenario, aesthetic freedom can be identified as a third kind of freedom different from Kant’s transcendental freedom and practical freedom – a flexible and living freedom with spontaneous legislation, but not bound by any determinate laws. (shrink)

In the recent debate on the nature of Kantian ‘content of cognition’, some scholars argue that Kantian judgments of taste bear a nonconceptual mental content because these judgments lack any conceptual determining functions of some kind. In this article, I challenge the latter standpoint for the very simple reason that judgments of taste are no propositions, but rather formative evaluations. This implies as well the fact that we are initially in possession of no aesthetic representation. Hence, neither propositionally nor non-propositionally (...) is an aesthetic representation eligible to be counted as mental content. Instead, as the representation of the beautiful just contents oneself with itself, it refers to its objects relationally, yet not representationally in the full-fledged sense. Regarding the properties of objects, it remains consequently always ineffectively monotonous. On the occasion of agreement of the relevant cognitive faculties, we may, however, count the representation of the beautiful as phenomenal content. -/- . (shrink)

Political theorists have traditionally grappled with laughter by posing a simple, normative question: ‘What role, if any, should laughter play in the polis?’ However, the outsized presence of laughter in contemporary politics has rendered this question increasingly obsolete. What good does determining laughter’s role in the polis do when the polis itself is to a large extent shaped by laughter? The present essay argues that Kant’s aesthetic investigations of laughter in the Critique of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point (...) of View offer a much needed alternative to the normative discourse. Kant theorizes laughter as an intensely dialectical experience — at once an aesthetic judgment and an affect. Laughter in Kant enacts dissensus: it disrupts and transforms sensus communis, or the ways subjects see and hear the world in common that organize and structure a political community. The essay illustrates the advantages of a Kantian conception of the politics of laughter over the normative discourse by examining Dave Chappelle’s controversial 2019 stand-up comedy special Sticks & Stones. It concludes that the dissensus enacted by laughter, while not necessarily democratic, provides a privileged opening for democratic politics. (shrink)