Let us return to Kant’s description of beauty and discuss the four characteristics in respect of Meillassoux’s project.
The first movement shows us that beauty is based on feeling, in particular feelings of pleasure or displeasure, and a specific disinterested kind of pleasure. Given that our project is based on a property of beauty that we claim is connected to Meilassoux’s absolute we have to understant that something must happen for this to be the case. As Meillassoux says of his radical contingency.
“the term ‘contingency’ refers back to the Latin contingere, meaning ‘to touch, to befall.’ Which is to say, that which happened, but which happens enough to happen to us. The contingent, in a word, is something that finally happens – something other, something which, in its irreducibility to all pre-registered possibilities, puts an end to the vanity of a game wherein everything, even the improbable, is predictable. When something happens to us, when novelty grabs us by the throat, then no more calculation and no more play – it is time to be serious.” (Meillassoux, 2008a, p.108)
This is what we shall understand as feeling. And this is to say that it can be understanding, sensation, imagination or otherwise. Just so long as it ‘happens enough to happen to us’
With regard to Pleasure or Displeasure, it is not hard for us to understand that pleasure could mean something other than a subjects autonomous satisfaction. For example it has been argued, such as by Henry Allison, that one must included negative judgements of beauty into the conception of beauty in order for their to be a satisfactory interpretation of Kant's theory of taste. (Alison, 2001, p.72). What we learn, is that pleasure is sited clearly in a relationship between the subjective experience the object. Yet beauty is referred to by Kant as being without category. It's aesthetic delight eclipsing the classic subjective position, such as Meillassoux says of death, "what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and of elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of all things, traversing us continually and instantaneously" (Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory, p. 104)
When considering the disinterested quality to this pleasure. In view of our understanding that Meillassoux’s absolute is outside of the realm of predictability, outside of any possible conseption of causality, or any conception based on empirical experience at all, it is not hard for us to argue that disinterested describes our dealing with what may be beyond what we can conceive of. This could be similar to the immanent production of Deleuze’s deterritorialisation - that which is disinterested is beyond what we could be interested in, since that before our experience of beauty happens we could have no conception of it having anything to do with our interest. Really what could also be the case and is more significant in regard to Meillassoux’s project is that interest itself wouldn’t be what it is now, it could change a little or it could be entirely other, perhaps this is what disinterested refers to that which as the moment is not interest, as opposed to being not interested.
The second movement of Kant’s judgments of beauty is that of a universal without concept. As we have said, the ‘without concept’ of this universal is what removes it from being any kind of scientifically describable material property of the object. Meillassoux describes the ‘correlationist cogito’, (that which, encloses thought in a reciprical relation to being, one which is merely the mask for thoughts underlying relationship to itself) relationship to universalisation as follows,
“it is not strictly speaking a solipsistic cogito, but rather a 'cogitamus', since it founds science's objective truth upon an intersubjective consensus among consciousnesses. Yet the correlationist cogito also institutes a certain kind of solipsism, which could be called a 'species solipsism', or a 'solipsism of the community', since it ratifies the impossibility of thinking any reality that would be anterior or posterior to the community of thinking beings. This community only has dealings with itself, and with the world with which it is contemporaneous.” (Meillassoux, 2008a, p.84)
We will take this critique to be referring to the potential of a universalisation that in being without concept reaches outside of the ‘solipsism of the community’ and is directly referring to factiality, (Deleuze, 1984)to the universal “absence of reason for any reality; in other words, the impossibility of providing an ultimate ground for the existence of any being.” (Meillassoux, 2008b, p.8)
The third movement proposes that judgments of beauty do not presuppose an end or a purpose, however they do involve the representation of ‘purposiveness’. This purposiveness functions very differently from any utility of an actual purpose or end would do. As we have noted the representation of purposiveness works with an injection of logic into the a priori to produce the representation of a purposive causation in the experience of beauty.
Given that this purposiveness does not involve the ascription of an end, Kant calls it a “merely formal purposiveness”. It could be this formal purposiveness that Meillassoux is talking about when dealing with the question of why, if there is no necessity to the continutity of physical laws, do things not change all the time. Meillassoux’s response is that Kant’s probabilistic reasoning cannot be applied to laws themselves only to the physical objects already subject to those laws. Perhaps it is here in contained in representations of purposiveness that we find a mechanism in what happens to us that can account for the application of such reasoning to objects already subject to physical laws not change all the time.
The forth movement proposes that judgments of beauty involve reference to the idea of necessity. Far from most readings of this necessity functioning as a normalising aspect of the judgment of beauty. As we have learnt from Meillassoux the only necessity is the necessity of contingency. From this perspective the forth movement gives us the ability to put back in thought that which was considered its limit.
As Meillassoux says, “we are going to put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought.” In other words, “instead of construing the absence of reason inherent in everything as a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that this absence of reason is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity.” (Meillassoux, 2008a, p.88) This is the only necessity for Meillassoux, the necessity of contingency and It is in these characteristics that Beauty finds access to the absolute property of an entity.
