AN INTRODUCTION TO KANT'S AESTHETICS

80 NECESSITY: FOURTH MOMENT
also be translated as: “that is regarded as if it were an example”). This exemplary
necessity is not objective or practical. There is no rule from which it would follow.
But because the justifying grounds are nevertheless (intersubjectively) universal
(being basically the free play and the a priori principle of purposiveness), it seems
to us as if there were such a rule. And at this point Kant introduces the sensus
communis as an idea of a common feeling: a sense or feeling that we share, that
decides about beauty and that therefore could take the place of such a rule. Now
how does this relate to exemplary necessity?
There term “sensus communis” is a Latin expression, and there are several
related terms in other languages: “common sense” in English, “Gemeinsinn” in
German, and “sens commun” and “bon sens” in French. They all have their own
histories and their own connotations. In particular, the English “common sense”
should not be identified with the “sensus communis.” We will see in the next
section that Kant in fact wants to draw a line between these two. The reader at
this point might want to have a look at the beginning of that section, where I
give a brief historical account of the “sensus communis” that should be helpful for
what follows.
The judgment of taste itself appears as an example of a rule that would guarantee
the necessity we feel, and the sensus communis steps in, so to speak – or,
rather, we imagine it to do so (after all, it is only an idea) – to fill in what the
desired rule alone cannot provide. The rule cannot be sufficient, because we don’t
know how to “subsume” something under it, Kant says, and maybe such a rule
in the strict sense of an objective rule is impossible anyway. (On the other hand,
by subsuming “Socrates” under the concept “human,” we can derive “Socrates
is mortal” from the premise “Humans are mortal.”) Now something has to take
its place, and we are entitled to demand some kind of sensus communis to step in,
because in a judgment of taste we feel the need for such a rule. In this way the
judgment of taste appears as an “example” of the sensus communis, and accordingly,
Kant suggests, the latter, the sensus communis (together with its history),
should be understood in the light of the former (the judgment of taste). In fact,
we will see in the next section that free play and the principle of subjective purposiveness
are in the end, for Kant, the essential ingredients that make up (and
allow us to explain) the sensus communis and whatever tradition has thought it to
be.
For Kant, the traditional understanding of the sensus communis is merely an
idea, an ideal norm, or an ideal feeling that would provide such a norm – maybe
something to strive for (section 22). For him, the best we have achieved so far in
our human history is the ability to make judgments of taste. These are real.
These we can take as pointers toward such a norm. He calls them – and actually
“offers” or at least “indicates” (angeben) them to his readers as – an “example”
of such a norm: “The common sense [Gemeinsinn], of whose judgment I here