Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good

Michael Weston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415243377
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134544776
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

In this provocative new examination of the philosophical, moral and religious significance of literature, Michael Weston explores the role of literature in both analytic and continental traditions. He initiates a dialogue between them and investigates the growing importance of these issues for major contemporary thinkers.
Each chapter explores a philosopher or literary figure who has written on the relation between literature and the good life, such as Derrida, Kierkegaard, Murdoch and Blanchot. Challenging and insightful, Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good is ideal for all students of philosophy and literature.

1
LIFE AS ART

Kant, Schlegel, Nietzsche

The necessity for the appeal to the metaphysical lies in the apparent possibility of sceptical questioning, of subjecting our forms of thought and life to a general doubt. Yet, of course, there has always been a difficulty in understanding how the philosopher, who is, after all, human, can have access to a standard which could fulfil the metaphysical need, one which would be able to stand in judgement over all human standards. We must either claim, as Plato and Aristotle do, that we are, in a sense, more than human, possessed of the ‘divine spark of the intellect’, or that we have in some other way, through faith in the Creator, for example, access to the ultimate ground in terms of which our forms of life and thought could be judged. But what if we were to recognize that such a claim was an illusion, born, no doubt, as Cavell will suggest, of a real human desire to be more than we are? What would it be to give up this desire? And how then would the philosophical significance of literature appear to us? From Kant to Derrida we can trace the development of a tradition of thought which attempts to divest us of this ambition. Kant, in returning us to our finitude, nevertheless tries to maintain an essential role in our thought and life for the idea of a more than human position, and literature and art play for him a part in the articulation of that role. If, however, with Schlegel and Nietzsche we recognize that even the idea of such a role is itself illusory, life becomes in a certain way its own measure. But that is something, as we shall see, that Kant attributes to the nature of art and literature itself. Both Schlegel and Nietzsche are inclined to draw the consequence from their unmasking of this illusion that life must be understood as itself a form of art, which raises the question whether they have freed themselves as radically as they suppose from Kantian conceptuality.

I

Kant develops his account of the beauty of nature in the context of a critique of judgement, that is, of an examination of the presuppositions involved in the subsumption of a particular under a general concept. Philosophy had traditionally claimed that its reflections could show us the general structure of reality as it is in itself, independently of human thought and experience, but Kant recognized the vanity of such a claim. All we can be said to know, he averred, were objects of human experience (contingent a posteriori knowledge) or the conditions for such knowledge: analytic knowledge (necessary and a priori) of the relations between concepts applied in that experience, or synthetic a priori knowledge of the principles in terms of which there can be such experience at all. What we take as the general structure of the world, that it is a world of objects having properties standing in causal and spatio-temporal relations to each other, is a result of the organizing principles of human experience and not a structure-in-itself to which we have access through thought. Nevertheless, the idea of things as they are ‘in themselves’, independently of the conditions of human sensibility, is not thereby redundant. When we reflect on our experience, Kant thought, we realize that we cannot avoid using it. Our experience is of being both knowers of the world and agents in it. As thinkers, we must presuppose that we are free of the causal nexus of the world since otherwise no distinction between true and false thoughts could be drawn: both would equally be the result of causal laws. Further, we have to think of ourselves as persisting through changes in experience and so as substantial egos which have thoughts and experiences but are never the object of them. Moreover, our experience is not of discrete items of knowledge: we strive towards connecting experiences in order to understand why things occur, and science is the systematic development of this. Such a project utilizes the idea of a totality of the world and of knowledge which guides the progress in our grasp of the world: we continue to ask for explanation and so presuppose there is one. We must, therefore, regard the world as ultimately intelligible and so as coming to be through the causality of intelligence, the supreme reason, God. As agents, we are aware of having to deliberate and decide, of being faced by the questions of what we ought to do and how we ought to live, and so of subjection to the moral law. This presupposes that we are positively free to intervene in the causal nexus of the world. We experience the moral law as obligation and so in opposition to our empirical nature. Morality holds out to us, therefore, a better state, holiness, in which this opposition between ourselves and what is moral would no longer exist, and which morally we are required to take as our goal. But we cannot do so unless we believe that it can be granted. It cannot be given in time, since no matter what our present state, deterioration is possible in the future. We must believe in the immortality of the soul and in a benevolent deity who will grant the goal by his grace. We must believe in the reality of these ideas of reason, and so believe that we are free, immortal souls embodied in a world made to fit our intellectual capacities and our capacity for action by a benevolent deity who will reward us according to our moral deserts in the afterlife. We cannot know this to be true: we have, however, to believe that it is. The ideas of reason have a ‘practical reality’.

Nature is known by us only as phenomenon, as it appears through our sensibility and the application of the concepts of the understanding, and so as a causal nexus of events. Yet our consciousness of the moral law compels us to believe we are free, free from external causality, which includes that of our emotions and desires, our given motivational nature, and free to act because of duty. But here a problem of intelligibility arises, for how can we conceive such free action is possible in the world of nature governed by causal laws? As Kant says in The Critique of Judgement:

Hence an immense gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible, so that no transition from the sensible to the supersensible (and hence by means of the theoretical use of reason) is possible, just as if they were two different worlds, the first of which cannot have any influence on the second; yet the second is to have an influence on the first, i.e., the concept of freedom is to actualize in the world of sense the purpose enjoined by its laws.¹

We need to show that free action, action for the sake of duty, is possible as an intervention in the causal world of nature: ‘Hence it must be possible to think of nature as being such that the lawfulness of its form will harmonize with at least the possibility of [achieving] the purposes that we are to achieve in nature according to the laws of freedom.’² It is through a consideration of the conditions of possibility of judgement, the thinking of ‘the particular as contained under the universal’³ that Kant will try to show this compatibility.

We may in thinking the particular already possess the relevant universal and so judge that the particular satisfies the conditions set out in the empirical concept we already understand. But such determinative judgement is dependent on the primary formation of empirical concepts, of the seeking for the universal which will subsume the particular. Such reflective judgement requires for its operation a principle. Now the understanding determines that nature will appear in general as a causal nexus of events, but it does not determine the nature and range of actual empirical laws: ‘the laws the pure understanding legislates concern only the possibility of a nature as such, but there are so many diverse forms of nature left undetermined by these laws. There must be laws for these too, which are empirical and contingent as far as our understanding can see.’⁴ In searching for the universals of species and genera and the principles which unite the genera towards a systematic comprehension, bringing the diversity of empirical phenomena under them, reflective judgement is acting on a rule, that the ‘diverse forms of nature’ are such that they can be so subsumed, that they are intelligible, as if they had been formed by an understanding, though not ours, so as to be intelligible to us. Our understanding dictates the general lawfulness of nature as appearance, but this would be quite compatible with a general absence of intelligibility in the empirical diversity which nature shows. In our pursuing intelligibility we act as if we believed nature to be intelligible through and through, an intelligibility which is not determined by the structure of our own understanding, but which we would have to regard as being already there, awaiting our inquiry. We act in reflective judgement on the principle that

since universal natural laws have their basis in our understanding which prescribes them to nature, the particular empirical laws must, as regards what the universal laws have left undetermined in them, be viewed in terms of such a unity as [they would have] if they too had been given by an understanding (even though not ours) so as to assist our cognitive powers by making possible a system of experience in terms of particular natural laws.⁵

This concept is that of ‘the purposiveness of nature’, that the actuality of nature is the result of the efficacy of a concept. We regard nature as if it had been made by an intelligence in the way in which we regard a human artifact as the result of intelligent, concept-organized behaviour. Reflective judgement uses this idea of the purposiveness of nature merely for its activity and cannot claim to know it has reality. It must act as if nature were already intelligible but reflective ‘judgement only uses this idea as a principle of reflection not determination’.⁶ As with other ideas of reason, theoretical reasoning can merely establish its possibility whilst experience clearly cannot pronounce as to its reality.

Where reflective judgement is successful, we experience pleasure in being able to grasp nature.⁷ The principle of reflective judgement is that ‘nature makes its universal laws specific in accordance with the principle of purposiveness for our cognitive powers’:⁸ reflective judgement must believe for its activity in the harmony between nature and our understanding, a harmony which, of course, is beyond any possible experience. Such a harmony would be prior to and render possible any actual harmony in the successful operation of reflective judgement in grasping nature. Such a success, if it really is so, and this we cannot know, would be the actualization of the pre-existent harmony in which we must believe. Although we cannot know there is such harmony, we nevertheless have experience of a pleasure in a conceptless harmony, in the experience of beauty. Such an experience is occasioned where, in independence of the application of any concept, we experience an order in what we receive through our sensibility as if it were designed for apprehension by our cognitive powers. Such an order prior to the application of any concept can only be in the form of our intuitions, in spatial or temporal organization. What we experience is an order prior to the imposition of order which is therefore received. The ‘subjective [feature] of the presentation which cannot at all become an element of cognition is the purposiveness that precedes the cognition of an object’.⁹ But this is the very harmony of nature with our cognitive powers which cannot be known. Beauty is the experience of a general harmony of nature as what we experience and our cognitive powers, a harmony experienced, therefore, prior to the achievement of any actualized harmony through the application of concepts. What we receive in sensible intuition appears as susceptible to the ordering of our power of concepts, as having ‘order’ but without any determinate order. The experience of this conceptless harmony is pleasurable as is the successful operation of reflective judgement. But whereas the latter is a pleasure in our being able to grasp nature, and so in the exercise of our own capacities, the former is an experience of passivity. We have an experience, as it were, of the world and our cognitive capacities as being made for one another.

This ‘purposiveness of nature’, that we must regard it as already intelligible and so formed to fit our intelligence, ‘mediates between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom’. If we must regard nature not only in terms of the concept of cause given by the understanding but also through that of purpose, then we may consistently think the possibility of action in accordance with freedom as possible within the world and pursuit of what is commanded by the moral law.¹⁰ But this purposiveness cannot be asserted as a reality. As an idea of reason it can only regulate activity in reflective judgement. The experience of beauty is not an application of reflective judgement: it does not contain a judgement. Rather, we experience, as it were, the possibility of reflective judgement, in contemplating a formal unity in terms of space or time, of what we sense which invites conceptualization: the imagination is able to form a unity in harmony with ‘the understanding’s lawfulness in general’.¹¹ In the experience of beauty what we receive appears as able to be structured but without any determinate structure. But the feeling of pleasure we take in this harmony of the given with our cognitive powers cannot take us any further towards asserting the actuality of the ‘purposiveness of nature’.

In the experience of beauty, in which our sensory experience takes on a form appropriate to the notion of a lawfulness in general without any specific law being at issue, the imagination and understanding ‘reciprocally quicken each other’. We experience the activity of reflective judgement at play and thus experience the harmony of the imagination with the understanding and the imagination with what it receives and so experience the purposive nature of such judgement, its being guided by the idea of a purposiveness of nature. Our cognitive powers are experienced for themselves rather than being used, and in their directedness towards the idea. The pleasure we experience in beauty is a self-recognition in feeling which involves our guidance by what is beyond our knowledge but on which we are dependent.

In the experience of beauty we experience nature as if it were art, that is, as if it were formed in accordance with concepts. Human artefacts are works of art involving the formation of materials into a product to perform some further function in terms of which their form is intelligible and may be assessed. But works of fine art are produced in order to engage the reader, spectator or listener in that disinterested experience of pleasure we call beauty. Since this judgement of taste involves no concepts, being the experience of the possibility of reflective judgement itself, it does not involve the estimation of the object in comparison with some independent concept (as the estimation of whether this is a good knife, say, would). Rather, the intention of the artist is realized in the work itself: if it is successful (that is, readers, spectators or listeners indeed engage in the disinterested contemplation of beauty in relation to it), then it is its own standard. A work fails, not because it doesn’t live up to some independently specifiable concept, but because we cannot engage in the required way in relation to it: we don’t find it beautiful. The production of fine art, therefore, cannot be taught; such works are not produced in accordance with determinate rules. Yet they are subject to estimation, in inviting our judgement as to their beauty. They involve a ‘rule’ in that sense, but the rule is that contained in the judgement of beauty itself: that is, in whether or not in relation to the work we have the experience of beauty, which, founded in our cognitive capacities, claims universality and necessity. Production of successful art, not being governed by a given rule and so not a craft, is a work of ‘genius’.¹²

If successful, the work is its own standard, is ‘exemplary’. And as such its ‘concept’ is itself. In this way what unifies the work, that through which we experience it as a whole, is something we cannot articulate and which nevertheless we must direct ourselves to in order to relate to its parts. We experience the unity of the work of art but cannot think it. In this way, the production and reception of the work involve the operation of our reason, our desire for unification, but without a rational idea. Encounter with the work activates the aspiration after unity, yet without a determinate thought. The work of human fine art as an intentional production is (if successful) the exhibition of a created harmony, whereas natural beauty is only the experience of a harmony as if the object were a work of art. In experiencing the beauty of a work of fine art we experience a harmony, a unity of its parts, which is the result of human activity. The experience of the beauty of fine art thus involves the play of our reason, our aspiration after unity, in the absence of a determinate concept.

Poetry has the highest rank of the fine arts.¹³ It is an art of speech, and thus uses the products of the understanding, but where the imagination is utilized, not to provide the ordered materials to the understanding, but rather to re-order experience: ‘it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it’¹⁴ and so makes it possible to ‘strive toward something that lies beyond the bounds of experience, and hence to try to approach the exhibition of rational concepts (intellectual ideas) and thus [these concepts] are given a semblance of objective reality.’¹⁵

Rational ideas cannot be exemplified in experience, but the re-ordering capacity of the creative imagination makes it possible to provide images of them. ‘A poet ventures to give sensible expression to rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on.’¹⁶ The poet does this through ‘aesthetic ideas’ which provide a ‘sensory embodiment’ of rational ideas and idealizations. Genius exhibits aesthetic ideas¹⁷ through the production of images and symbols which encourage the imagination to ‘spread its flight over a whole host of kindred representations that provoke more thought tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: LIFE AS ART
• 2: GEORGES BATAILLE
• 3: MAURICE BLANCHOT
• 4: JACQUES DERRIDA
• 5: IRIS MURDOCH
• 6: MARTHA NUSSBAUM
• 7: RICHARD RORTY
• 8: STANLEY CAVELL
• 9: A KIERKEGAARDIAN INTERVENTION
• 10: D. Z. PHILLIPS
• 11: A CONCLUDING READING
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY