Kant’s Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life

The perennial challenge for any Kant scholar is to offer close reading of a dense and often exceedingly abstract text that is faithful both to its driving philosophical insights and to something recognizable as human life. Perhaps it is with this in mind that Katalin Makkai breaks ground on her interpretation of Kant’s theory of taste with a nod to Zadie Smith’s (2019) reflections about how she came, one day, to love the music of Joni Mitchell after years of sheer bafflement that anyone could find it worth listening to. Her conversion was not brought about through any effort to understand the work—for example by learning what an open-tuned guitar is, or by repeated listening—it was simply ‘a sudden, unexpected attunement’ (Makkai, 2021, p. 1, quoting Smith, 2019). Suddenness is not essential to attunement, but a possible sign of the openness that is. Makkai describes this attunement as a readiness to be drawn ‘into improvisatory engagement with’ a work of art (p. 3). It is an exchange requiring an active, playful receptivity. Attraction is necessary, too: ‘I want to stay with it … to follow it out, to explore its character’ (p. 3). But this communion is not won through understanding. Even a sophisticated version of this thought, one that recognizes the singularity of the meaning of a work of art, gets things backwards. Any genuine understanding can only flow from a more basic recognition of it as meriting a distinctive kind of attention and engagement (p. 7–8). That recognition, for Makkai, is aesthetic attunement.