Dendang Koboi Gelap
Heading 5
This is an annotated extract from an email I sent to my cousin Chelvam (Senior Counsel C. R. Rajah) in seeking his permission to include the above image in this series in June 2016: –
In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Emmanuelle Kant asserts that the capacity to make meaningful judgements is the central cognitive faculty of the human mind. This a priori faculty or condition of mind is what enables the conceptual ‘subsumption of a particular under a universal,' as it mediates between the faculty of understanding (which supplies universals) and the faculty of reason (which draws inferences), serving as a kind of metacognition. Kant goes on to distinguish between 'determinate judgements,' which occur wherever universals are sufficient to determine particulars, and 'reflective judgements,' which enable the establishment of new universals. Kant then purports to show how aesthetic judgment (a form of reflective judgment), is analogous to both the theoretical cognition of nature and to moral judgment. He emphasizes this similarity between judgements of beauty and moral judgements, on the basis that both involve a non-purposive or non-instrumental conformity to (or realization of) some underlying order. Both kinds of judgement please us directly, even as we maintain an unmotivated or 'disinterested' disposition towards them.[1]
"I am sure you will recall our happy visit to the National Art gallery of Singapore in December 2015, particularly this photograph taken of us before Victor Tardieu's 'La Tonkinoise au Panier', 1923, in one of the Southeast Asian galleries - the one that used to be Perriappa's courtroom (Perriapa means ‘Senior Uncle’ and refers in this instance, to the late Justice of the Singapore Supreme Court, A. P. Rajah, Chelvam’s father). I want to include this image of the two of us standing where Perriappa's bench used to be - the place from which he delivered legal judgments all those years ago. This is an image of us standing as brothers in a familiar and, in a sense, familial, space - a prime space (the Supreme court of Singapore was relocated in 2005, making way for the National Gallery of Singapore, which was opened in November 2015), that was once reserved for the dispensing of judgments in law, your profession, and is now usurped by my profession to serve as a venue for displaying judgments on art. The title of this image, 4 Daya Pertimbangan, or The Power of Judgement, alludes to the proposition of Immanuel Kant, that there is an a priori faculty of judgment that enables us to experience beauty and, further, that there are common principles informing both aesthetic and moral judgement (from which legal judgement derives legitimacy)."