Tinguely’s ingenious book revolves around the thesis that all human intentionality is affective: ‘Any act of attention is grounded within the wider mental dispositions and affective states of mind’ (p. 150). Tinguely is fully aware of how controversial this claim is, especially with respect to a reading of Kant, and thus he provides a thought-provoking discussion of the connection between empirical and aesthetic cognition in order to explore the affective dimension of intentionality. The book consists of one introductory chapter outlining the project, followed by seven chapters that can be read independently of each other. All chapters develop the thesis, from various historical, etymological and systematic perspectives, that individual objects cannot be cognized independently of an agent’s specific ‘affective states of mind’ (p. 97), e.g. ‘passions, moods, dispositions, attitudes’ (p. 136). Tinguely presents our encounter with the empirical world as saturated with affective sensibilities and subjective forms of attention (pp. 97, 151). In what follows, I will highlight some aspects of Tinguely’s very rich book as it explores the relation between affectivity and intentionality and the significance of Kant’s aesthetics in this context.
Chapter 2, ‘The Productive Imagination: An Aesthetic Touch’, formulates the thesis that Kant’s account of empirical cognition can best be understood through Kant’s investigation into aesthetic experience (p. 33). Even though both aesthetic experience and empirical cognition require ‘productive imagination’, the author rightly wonders whether the ‘aesthetic key’ fits ‘the empirical lock’ (p. 35). Isn’t the role of imagination in aesthetic judgement very different from its role in empirical judgement? So how does aesthetics provide guidance to how the mind discerns fact? (p. 36) Why should aesthetics have a ‘privileged mode for getting a handle on the role of imagination in empirical cognition’? (p. 36) Even so, Tinguely points out that much of Kant’s theory of transcendental imagination as presented in the Critique of Pure Reason is like a black box and suggests that it is worth trying to use Kant’s more developed theory of imagination with regard to aesthetic judgements to bring light into that box.
In its strongest version, Tinguely’s claim is that ‘the details of Kant’s account of aesthetic experience … are necessary for filling out the account of empirical cognition and intentionality initiated in the first Critique’ (p. 23; cf. also pp. 37, 51). So what’s the problem and what’s the solution? ‘In order to yield objects of experience the imagination must bind together not just any and every sense property, or some arbitrary aggregation, but rather it must bind those properties that have some claim to belong together’ (p. 39). This implies some prior conception for the synthesizing activity, some prior ‘teleological cogence’ such that the imagination can aim at a ‘whole’ that is not yet present (pp. 52–3); thus, ‘an anticipated sense of the whole already informs the order and significance of the individual parts’ (p. 52). We cannot take up and separate out a sensible manifold in intuition without also having a prior conceptual idea of how to bind it together (p. 45) as both activities are intricately connected (pp. 47, 64). Thus, following Strawson and Sellars, Tinguely claims that ‘conceptual capacities are at work within, rather than merely upon, the deliverances of sensibility’ (p. 53). However, since ‘Kant has little to say directly about how concepts inform the way the imagination brings [a prior conceptual grasp] to bear on the given sense manifold’, Tinguely invites us to turn with him to aesthetic perception, in order to get a richer picture of ‘how the imagination is at work in empirical perception’ (p. 51).
In this way, affectivity and subjective openness to the world become guiding ideas of Tinguely’s book, which now turns to investigating a variety of Kant’s texts (pre-Critical, Critical, student notes, etc.), as well as texts by his precursors (e.g. Aristotle, Rousseau and Hume) and successors (e.g. Heidegger and McDowell), in order to show that affective states are ‘integral and irreducible’ (p. 139) elements for empirical cognition. The depth and breadth of Tinguely’s discussions will engage readers with various philosophical backgrounds and interests. For example, commencing from Rousseau’s and Kant’s reflections on language, Tinguely shows how any use of language essentially contains affective attitudes. He uses this insight to defend the thesis that the communicability of knowledge in general can legitimately be seen through the lens of the conditions of the communicability of judgements of taste. Referring to Lyotard, Tinguely notes that there is a symmetry between schema and affect, i.e. cognitive and aesthetic experience, insofar as both require the cooperation of the same cognitive faculties (p. 171). Subsequently, Tinguely explores the ‘relationship between mind and world … [and how it is] somehow mediated through an affective mood’ (p. 172).
In this context, Tinguely puts Kant into conversation with Heidegger and his fundamental category of being-in-the-world. For Tinguely, feelings have epistemic authority: feelings orient one in the world because they are ‘forms of commitment that themselves stand liable to the way things in the world actually turn out to be’ (pp. 202–3). Heidegger’s notion of Befindlichkeit is read by Tinguely into Kant’s ‘Orientation’ essay, where Kant famously says that we need to feel the difference between the left and the right hand in order to orient ourselves in empirical space (cf. 190). For Tinguely, then, Kant is ‘at the forefront of a distinctive turn of thought within contemporary philosophy’ (p. 204; cf. p. 210, n. 24).
But what does it mean to say that a feeling ‘discriminates features of the object?’ (p. 178) How does feeling promote ‘the schematic process by which empirical objects come into view in any perceptual encounter?’ (p. 179) What role does affectivity play for cognition? Kant’s aesthetics emerges as the key to better understanding the connection between affectivity and intentionality because ‘all language itself is of a kind with aesthetic discourse’ (p. 151), where we aim at agreement in sense (p. 149). ‘Aesthetics, then, becomes privileged as a philosophical domain insofar as … aesthetic discourse communicates not only about the sentiments but also by means of appeal to affective states’ (p. 150). In this way, the book can be seen as a contribution to what the author calls the ‘affective turn’ (p. 2) or ‘philosophical aestheticism’ (p. 13). In Kant’s account of aesthetics ‘normativity, perception, and affectivity overlap’ in such a way that it provides privileged access to the ‘relations between mind, mood, and world’ (p. 23).
At this point, however, the discussion could benefit from a clearer definition of the terms ‘feeling’, ‘affect’ and ‘mood’. For example, when cleaning the gutters, my fear that falling from the ladder will hurt me presupposes that height is perceived as dangerous based on my desire that nothing bad happens to me. In this sense, feelings combine judgements and desires. Feelings disclose an empirical world to me and have correctness conditions. Indeed, most feelings have object-directedness in this sense: given the multitude of subjective modes of affectivity, it is ‘always debatable whether one perceives an object or a scene under the right conceptual description’ (p. 105). Returning to my example, there are innumerable things I could be focusing on as I climb up the ladder to clean the gutters. Tinguely is certainly right in insisting on the intentionality of feelings in empirical contexts. However, moods are generally taken to lack a specific object, and affects do not seem to designate a relation to any object at all. Rather, affects indicate a subjective response to stimuli based on beliefs. I wonder, can all of these, i.e. feeling, mood and affect, be seen as normative on Tinguely’s account? This seems to be a key point because the normativity of our affective responses is said to make Kant ‘uniquely’ (p. 1) fitted to make progress on the relationship between affectivity and intentionality: the normativity of subjective feeling is rooted in the demand that our aesthetic judgements are not based on private but common feeling (p. 13).
The relationship between affectivity and intentionality is also at the centre of Chapter 3, ‘Tone, Modulation, and Affectivity: The Aesthetics of Intentionality’. Tinguely suggests that subsuming an intuition under a concept does not exhaust the mind–world relationship (p. 74). Rather, ‘the notion of “tone” [inherent in Kant’s theory of language] suggests that the difference in manners or modes of taking in the world … allows for … richer levels of experiential content over and above that provided by a discrete pairing of a determinate concept with a spatio-temporally unified intuition’ (p. 92). The reader is reminded of Heidegger’s notion of ‘attunement’ understood as a mode of openness to the world (74), which resonance Tinguely affirms: ‘What the notions of “tone” and “attunement” make explicit … is that there are various ways or modes in which the mind can attend to or be directed towards the world’ (p. 73). This thought is further developed in Chapter 4, ‘The Implicit Affection between Kantian Judgment and Aristotelian Rhetoric’ and Chapter 5, ‘Kantian Quarrels: Hume, Rousseau, and the Making of Aesthetic Discourse’. Since aesthetic judgements (and, by analogy, cognitive judgements) are not exclusively based on concepts but also on affects, there is room to quarrel with respect to both empirical and aesthetic judgements (p. 142). All language (meaning) has a subjective-affective component, and there is a normative demand originating in Kant’s aesthetic theory to ‘enter into each other’s meanings’ not only via agreement in terms ‘but also by agreement in sense’ (149). Tinguely outlines a close connection between affective mood and meaning, which is subsequently used as a model for all cognitive encounters with the world: ‘In short, to take Kant’s own understanding of language seriously is to locate affective elements at the basic site of any representational or intentional encounter with the world’ (p. 155, n. 34; cf. 153, n. 20, 154, n. 21).
Chapter 6, ‘Kantian Meta-aesthetics and the Neglected Alternative’, elaborates on ‘how our affective sensibilities are part and parcel of the way we are oriented in the world’ (p. 180), while Chapter 7, ‘Orientation and the Aesthetic Symbolization of the World’, further discusses how feeling ‘constitute[s] an experience in which the structure of the world is revealed’, and how orientation in the world requires ‘an irreducible aesthetic or felt’ state (p. 185).
It should be noted that Tinguely emphasizes several times that his book does not aim at providing an accurate interpretation of Kant’s historical position (cf. pp. 100, 179, 185); rather, the author wants to show that much of ‘the letter’ (although not the ‘spirit’) of Kant’s philosophy can be used to elucidate the philosophically important connection between affectivity and intentionality. From a historical point of view, we would need to say that there is a problem of the a priori reference between representation and object at the outset of Kant’s Critical philosophy (cf. Kant’s famous 1772 letter to Herz). Yet Tinguely rarely speaks about any a priori elements in Kant’s philosophy, or how, precisely, Kant’s theory of the transcendental schematism could be completed by a theory of feelings. Nevertheless, Tinguely’s new book constitutes a well-executed effort to press Kant’s writings for a better understanding of how we can find not only a transcendentally structured but also an empirical world.
