Aesthetic Disinterestedness

Art, Experience, and the Self

Thomas Hilgers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317444886
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The notion of disinterestedness is often conceived of as antiquated or ideological. In spite of this, Hilgers argues that one cannot reject it if one wishes to understand the nature of art. He claims that an artwork typically asks a person to adopt a disinterested attitude towards what it shows, and that the effect of such an adoption is that it makes the person temporarily lose the sense of herself, while enabling her to gain a sense of the other. Due to an artwork's particular wealth, multiperspectivity, and dialecticity, the engagement with it cannot culminate in the construction of world-views, but must initiate a process of self-critical thinking, which is a precondition of real self-determination. Ultimately, then, the aesthetic experience of art consists of a dynamic process of losing the sense of oneself, while gaining a sense of the other, and of achieving selfhood. In his book, Hilgers spells out the nature of this process by means of rethinking Kant's and Schopenhauer's aesthetic theories in light of more recent developments in philosophy–specifically in hermeneutics, critical theory, and analytic philosophy–and within the arts themselves–specifically within film and performance art.

1 Introducing Disinterestedness

I. Kant

In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant focuses on the nature of the “judgment of taste” (CPJ, §1, 5:204), the kind of judgment we make when calling something “beautiful.”¹ According to Kant, we do not make such a judgment on the basis of applying a determinate concept to the representation of an object, as we do when making a cognitive judgment. We make it on the basis of feeling a specific kind of pleasure or delight (§1, 5:204). What Kant takes to be unique about this kind of delight is not a particular phenomenal quality, but an independence from all interests: “One can say that among all … kinds of delights only the one of taste for the beautiful is a disinterested and free delight; for no interest, neither that of the senses nor that of reason, extorts approval” (§5, 5:210). Disinterestedness, then, is the defining feature of the kind of delight that serves as the determining ground for making judgments of taste. Even though Kant officially explicates disinterestedness as such, and never explicitly speaks of a disinterested attitude, I will argue that Kant takes the adoption of such an attitude to be constitutive for making judgments of taste. Such a reading has been contested by some commentators. Nick Zangwill, for instance, writes: “The example on which I shall spend most time is the bad twentieth-century notion of disinterested attention or of a disinterested attitude. Aestheticians who have discussed this idea are concerned with whether or not there are interests operative in the activity of contemplation… . [T]he notion of disinterest in play is quite unKantian.”² Against Zangwill, I will show that the notion of a disinterested attitude is a good eighteenth-century notion and, indeed, quite Kantian.

In general, I take an attitude or a perspective to be that which makes a person organize her intentional and propositional relations to the world and to herself. A person essentially is an intentional agent, possessing sensuous, affective, and, most notably, conceptual capacities that allow her to relate to the world and to herself via a great variety of intentional and propositional states, such as desires, intentions, judgments, perceptions, emotions, actions, and so on. As such an intentional agent, a person also must be a rational agent, attempting to unify all of her propositional states into one coherent whole, because it is part of a propositional state’s nature to be rationally related to other such states. If a person adopts a particular attitude or perspective, her propositional states will take on a particular form and direction. In fact, the adoption of some attitude is necessary in order to relate to anything. Without it there can be no organized relation, but only blindness. The adoption of a perspective, then, is not an obstacle to gaining knowledge, but rather is one of its conditions.³

Moreover, every person must possess some attitude that fundamentally and continuously structures her relations to the world and to herself. While the causal history of her own body secures her quantitative identity as a particular embodied being, this fundamental perspective secures her qualitative identity. It cannot be totally idiosyncratic, however. As a rational agent and as a subject of cognition—that is, as an entity capable of having propositional states that qualify as true or false—a person must share certain concepts and interests with other people, because justified judgments, objective experience, and cognition all rely on the observance of shared, universal norms. More precisely, a person must share certain categories, principles, and interests—such as the interest in unifying all of her states into one coherent whole—with all other rational agents in order for her to share a world with them, and in order to possess some knowledge of this world. A person could hardly relate to objects and share a world with other people if her conceptual capacities always expressed themselves in an idiosyncratic manner. As a human being, which not every person must be, she further has some particular receptive and somatic features, and as the member of specific historical, cultural, and social groups, she has some more fine-grained categories, principles, and interests determining her perspective. Finally, there are her own personal interests that greatly influence how the world appears to her. So, our fundamental perspectives include many things, some of which we share with all other rational agents, all other human beings, or all other members of our own particular groups.⁴

From a postmodernist point of view, my claim that a person is a rational and synthesizing agent whose qualitative identity is secured by a fundamental attitude may seem antiquated. That is, one may object that I ignore the postmodernist insight that none of us is a rationally unified agent, but rather is some assemblage of dynamic, fragmentary, and contradictory structures or processes.⁵ However, I do not deny that a person’s fundamental perspective may radically change over time, and may also manifest internal contradictions. Moreover, a person’s goal of unifying all of her states into one coherent whole may never be fully realized. In order to qualify as a person, though, one must strive for such unification. One cannot relate to the world and to oneself via propositional states—specifically not via cognitive ones—unless one attempts to integrate them rationally, which cannot be achieved independently of one’s observance of universal norms. Nor can one continue relating to the world and to oneself as the same person unless some aspects of one’s fundamental perspective remain the same. So, if we conceive of ourselves merely as assemblages of dynamic, fragmentary, and contradictory structures, which lack any kind of unity, we no longer can conceive of ourselves as persons, subjects, or individuals. The adoption of a fundamental perspective surely is the product of a social process, but this process is not so much a “form of power which makes individuals subjects,”⁶ as it is a form of empowerment that allows one to be an individual, a subject, or a person in the first place. Without the adoption of such a perspective, which structures one’s propositional relations to the world and to oneself, there only is animal existence, and possibly not even that. This is not to say that it makes no sense to challenge perspectives and thereby to “promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.”⁷ According to my view, works of art serve exactly this purpose.⁸

Of course, aside from her fundamental perspective, a person frequently adopts more fine-grained perspectives. So, depending on the specific situation, she organizes her propositional states by means of different concepts, principles, interests, or goals. Like her fundamental perspective, however, these more particular perspectives or attitudes make her relate to the world and act in it according to her own specific interests—or as Jerome Stolnitz put it: “We usually see the things in our world in terms of their usefulness for promoting or hindering our purposes. If ever we put into words our ordinary attitude toward an object, it would take the form of the question, ‘What can I do with it, and what can it do to me?’ I see the pen as something I can write with, I see the oncoming automobile as something to avoid;… .”⁹

This passage appears as if it was influenced by Heidegger, who famously claimed that we primarily relate to objects as things that are “at hand”¹⁰ to us. That is, we do not first look at objects and then ascribe practical purposes to them. Rather, we already ascribe such purposes while first perceiving them in the context of our daily lives. Stolnitz as well as Heidegger, then, took it that we usually relate to the world according to practical interests. Indeed, our attitudes towards the world rely heavily on them. The question now is whether we can still relate to the world while disengaging from such practical interests and from the non-universal features of our perspectives. This is the question I am aiming towards when I ask whether a person can adopt a disinterested attitude. I take it that Kant assumed the adoption of such an attitude to be not only possible, but necessary in the experience of beauty. In order to support my interpretation, and in order to begin introducing my own particular notion of disinterestedness, I first examine Kant’s account of interested pleasure. Then, I discuss his distinction between feelings of pleasure combined with interests and feelings of pleasure free of all interests. Moreover, I show that this distinction not only implies the notion of a disinterested attitude, but also anticipates Schopenhauer’s claim that the aesthetic experience of beauty makes a person lose the sense of herself. Finally, I explicate the account of an aesthetic experience and the account of art that I will rely upon throughout this book.¹¹

§1 Interested Pleasure

Kant takes a feeling of pleasure or pain to be an intentional state by means of which a subject relates to the way that a representation affects her. A feeling of pleasure or pain, then, does not allow a subject to relate to some objective feature of the world. Rather, it allows that the “subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation” (§1, 5:204). That is, when feeling pleasure or pain, one realizes how some thought or experience affects oneself. When Kant discusses feelings of delight (Wohlgefallen) in the third Critique, I take him to be discussing feelings of pleasure (Lust). “Delight,” then, is just another word for pleasure.¹²

In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant distinguishes between feelings of “sensuous pleasure” and feelings of “intellectual pleasure” (APPV, 7:230).¹³ In contrast to the former, the latter are always combined with interests, which brings us to the main question of this section: how does Kant conceive of an interest? In the third Critique, he defines it as a kind of delight “that we combine with the representation of the existence of an object” (CPJ, §2, 5:204). So, according to Kant, if we are interested in something, we will take pleasure not only in the way that it appears to us, but also in conceiving of it as something that exists. One might wonder what it means to feel delight in the idea that an object exists in contrast to feeling delight in the representation of that object. One might further wonder how the notion of an interest can help us to distinguish between different types of pleasure if the notion itself refers to such a type. Kant’s more nuanced account of an interest as presented in his mature works on moral philosophy ultimately offers the most promising answers to these questions.

In the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant calls an interest “the dependence of a contingently determinable will on principles of reason” (G, 4:414) and states that an “interest is that by which reason becomes practical, i.e., becomes a cause determining the will” (G, 4:460).¹⁴ In the Critique of Practical Reason, he further characterizes an interest as “an incentive of the will insofar as it is represented by reason” (CPracR, 5:79).¹⁵ In his works on moral philosophy, then, Kant does not explicate an interest as a particular type of pleasure, but rather explicates it as an incentive to do something that reason asks one to do. For Kant, reason can ask a person to do something in two different ways: on the one hand, it can order her to follow pure practical principles, with the effect that she has the incentive to act only in accordance with them (G, 4:414). When being determined as such, she may, for instance, have the incentive never to kill under any circumstances. That is, she may have the “pure interest of reason” never to become a killer (G, 4:414). On the other hand, reason may ask her to follow certain rules in order to reach a personal goal (G, 4:414). When being so determined, she may, for instance, have the incentive to give as many talks as possible in order to become famous. That is, she may have the “empirical” or “pathological interest” to give a lot of presentations (G, 4:414). In his mature works on moral philosophy, then, Kant defines an interest as an incentive to do something that reason makes one conceive of as an end.

This definition is in line with Kant’s discussion of intellectual pleasure in the third Critique. Here, he calls feelings of such pleasure “feelings of delight in the good” (CPJ, §4, 5:207). The good is that “which pleases by means of reason alone, through the mere concept” (§4, 5:207). The “mere concept” Kant is thinking of here is, specifically, the concept of an end. He further distinguishes between two different kinds of ends and, consequently, between two different ways in which something can be good. On the one hand, we can take something to be an end in itself, which will make us judge it to be absolutely good. On the other hand, we can assume it to be useful for achieving some further end, which will make us judge it to be conditionally good. Of course, this distinction relates back to the distinction between pure interests of reason and empirical ones. Both kinds of goods have in common that we ascribe some value to them. Since something can unfold its full value only if it is real, we further desire that something exist in reality if we judge it to be good. The following relationship, then, holds between feelings of pleasure in the good, interests, and representations of things as existing: when a person feels pleasure in something good, she must already have a conception of it as of something that is either absolutely or conditionally good. When having such a conception of it, reason orders her to do or produce it in reality, and she therefore has an incentive to do or produce it. The feeling of pleasure in the good makes a person aware of this determination of her will. It is combined with interest in the sense that it is combined with an incentive to do or produce something that reason makes one conceive of as an end.¹⁶

We have not yet arrived at a truly general definition of an interest, however, for Kant takes it that there also are feelings of sensuous pleasure combined with interests, yet holds that only a feeling of intellectual pleasure in the good is related to an “object of the will (i.e. of a faculty of desire that is determined by reason)” (§4, 5:209). So, we must look more closely at the kind of sensuous pleasure that Kant assumes to be combined with interest.

Overall, Kant distinguishes between feelings of sensuous pleasure in the agreeable and feelings of sensuous pleasure in the beautiful (APPV, 7:230). The former ground “aesthetic judgment[s] of sense,” while the latter ground judgments of taste, which instead of being judgments of sense are “aesthetic judgment[s] of reflection” (CPJ, 20:224).¹⁷ If a person feels pleasure in something agreeable or pain in something disagreeable, she experiences one of her sensations as a state that she either wants to main...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Introducing Disinterestedness
• 2 Defending Disinterestedness
• 3 Explicating Disinterestedness
• 4 Generating Disinterestedness
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index