Aesthetics at Large: Volume 1

Art, Ethics, Politics

Thierry de Duve

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780226546735
  9780226546568
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226546872
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, Thierry de Duve argues in the first volume of Aesthetics at Large, is as relevant to the appreciation of art today as it was to the enjoyment of beautiful nature in 1790. Going against the grain of all aesthetic theories situated in the Hegelian tradition, this provocative thesis, which already guided de Duve's groundbreaking book Kant After Duchamp (1996), is here pursued in order to demonstrate that far from confining aesthetics to a stifling formalism isolated from all worldly concerns, Kant's guidance urgently opens the understanding of art onto ethics and politics.
          Central to de Duve's re-reading of the Critique of Judgment is Kant's idea of sensus communis, ultimately interpreted as the mere yet necessary idea that human beings are capable of living in peace with one another. De Duve pushes Kant's skepticism to its limits by submitting the idea of sensus communis to various tests leading to questions such as: Do artists speak on behalf of all of us? Is art the transcendental ground of democracy? Or, Was Adorno right when he claimed that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz?
          Loaded with de Duve's trademark blend of wit and erudition and written without jargon, these essays radically renew current approaches to some of the most burning issues raised by modern and contemporary art. They are indispensable reading for anyone with a deep interest in art, art history, or philosophical aesthetics.

Part I

The “Kant after Duchamp” Approach

1

Overture

Why Kant Got It Right

Excerpted and adapted from “Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us?,” in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (London: Tate, 2008).

The reader of Kant cannot fail to wonder how the critical thinker could ever establish conditions of thought that are a priori. With what instruments can he formulate the conditions of legitimacy of judgments when he is not yet supposed to have any at his disposal? How, in short, can he judge properly “before”’ knowing what judging properly is, and in order to know what it might be?

Jean-François Lyotard1

This book finds its point of departure in a straightforward claim and a blindly mechanical reading method. The claim, already made in Kant after Duchamp, is that the sentence “This is art,” with which readymades are baptized and countless other works made in the wake of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades are appreciated, is an aesthetic judgment in the Kantian sense. The reading method is an invitation to reread Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment mentally substituting the word art for every occurrence of the word beauty and to ask oneself whether anything essential would be changed to Kant’s approach. I dare say there is something mechanical and stupid in such a systematic substitution. And there is something as mechanical and stupid in the rationale behind it, the quasi interchangeability of artist and viewer in front of readymades. Technically, their position is identical: neither artist nor viewer has made the objects; the artist has merely challenged the viewers to approve or disapprove the claim that they should be seen as art. Beauty is irrelevant and has no saying in either the artist’s or the viewers’ decision.

Now, why would readers of Kant want to reread the Critique of Judgment substituting art for beauty simply because one twentieth century artist has made beauty irrelevant to the appreciation of a handful of objects constituting only a small part of his oeuvre? The substitution is compelling only for readers of Kant who are convinced that (1) Duchamp’s readymades are serious landmarks of modern art and cannot just be dismissed as hoaxes or far-out experiments; (2) calling an object by the name “art” is exercising one’s aesthetic judgment about it; and (3) Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments is the best ever given. Were I the only reader of Kant with that triple conviction, two facts would still remain: if Duchamp’s readymades had not had a tremendous impact on art and had not been taken seriously by a significant number of art critics, historians, and theorists, the question of whether the baptism “This is art” is an aesthetic judgment might never have arisen. And if Duchamp had not been the messenger of a reality that reaches way beyond his agency as author of the readymades, no one convinced that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments is the best would have to reread the third Critique with the substitution of art for beauty in mind. Duchamp’s “message” pertains to a sea change in the institution of art: the readymades have brought us the news that we have moved from the Beaux-Arts system to the “Art-in-General” system, that is, from a closed set of art conventions within which to an open cluster of art conventions about which aesthetic appreciation is asked to pronounce. I shall say a word about Duchamp’s “message” in the next chapter, but otherwise I shall not elaborate on it in this book. My aim is to argue and complexify the book’s premise, which this overture addresses and which consists in a twofold thesis: (1) when it comes to understanding what aesthetic judgments are, how they operate, what they do to us, and what is at stake when we utter them, Kant “got it right”; and (2) historical changes since Kant’s time have made some crucial shifts of emphasis necessary in our reading of Kant—shifts that, however, do not weaken the validity of the Critique of Judgment.

By claiming that Kant “got it right,” I mean that Kant’s understanding of what humans do when they experience the world aesthetically, and of what this means and implies for them, is the most accurate and profound ever arrived at. Such a claim may seem strange to philosophers, who tend to read the work of their colleagues, especially a colleague as systematic as Kant, for its own coherence and consistency on the one hand and for its place in the history of philosophy on the other but not for the truth it begets once and for all. To some extent, I approach Kant as if he were a scientist rather than a philosopher. I consider his account of aesthetic judgments a discovery that all theorists of aesthetics coming after him should adopt and then build on. Just as Newton or Einstein marked points of no return for physics, or Darwin for biology, so did Kant for aesthetics.

Ms. A and Mr. B Quarrel over a Rose

I’ll try to explain Kant’s discovery in the simplest terms. Imagine two people—let’s call them Ms. A and Mr. B—coming upon a rose. Ms. A exclaims, “Oh! What a beautiful rose.” Mr. B replies, “Are you out of your mind? I’ve never seen a rose so ugly.” Kant witnesses the scene. As it happens, he agrees with Ms. A, for he takes pleasure in the experience of looking at the rose—and thus you might think his conclusion is in line with his gut reaction: Ms. A is right, Mr. B is wrong. But that’s not what Kant concludes. Asking himself how he knows that the rose is beautiful, he realizes that he feels it: the rose’s beauty literally coincides with his pleasure in contemplating it. Reflecting on his state of mind, he corrects his immediate gut reaction. Since feelings are personal and subjective, therefore varying from individual to individual, culture to culture, epoch to epoch, social class to social class, the feeling of beauty is not an objective property of the rose and is thus not an object of knowledge in the manner of two plus two equals four. Now you would expect Kant to conclude that Ms. A, Mr. B, and himself were all wrong in ascribing beauty or ugliness to the rose as if it were a fact. Shouldn’t we have admitted to the subjectivity of our judgment rather than authoritatively ascribing the rose an objective predicate? Shouldn’t we have said “I like (or dislike) this rose,” “This rose pleases (or displeases) me,” or “I find this rose beautiful (or ugly)”? But that’s not what Kant concludes, either. He now wonders why all three protagonists, himself included, spontaneously reached for a formula that “objectified” their subjective feeling. Expanding on the trio’s usage of words, he reflects on the fact that people in general tend to speak of beauty and ugliness as if these were objective properties of the things deemed beautiful or ugly, whereas they ought to know, like himself, that their only access to these properties is their subjective feeling. There must be some reason for such widespread a mistake, Kant ponders. And this is what leads him to conclude that in spite of their blatant disagreement, Ms. A and Mr. B were both right in claiming so-called objective validity for their judgments. Why is that? Kant just discovered that what the phrase “this rose is beautiful (or ugly)” actually does is not ascribe objective beauty (or ugliness) to the rose; rather, it imputes to the other—all others—the feeling of pleasure (or pain) that one feels in oneself. Whether it is Ms. A claiming that the rose is beautiful or Mr. B claiming that it is ugly, their disagreement amounts to rightly shouting at each other, even if they do it politely: “you ought to feel the way I feel. You ought to agree with me.” To say that people rightly claim universal approval for their aesthetic judgments when all it takes is one exception to prove them wrong is to say that this call on all others’ capacity for agreeing by dint of feeling is legitimate. This is what Kant understood better than anyone before or anyone since.

Three points are worth emphasizing here. The first is that every aesthetic experience, in Kant’s terms, every pure judgment of taste, contains an ought addressed to someone. This is not the case with judgments about what Kant calls “the agreeable,” which deal with merely personal preferences and where disagreements are not an issue. Ms. A addresses Mr. B and vice versa. Obviously, they don’t only address each other. They would have had the same aesthetic experience in front of the rose if nobody had been present. They would not have expressed it out loud, but they would still have addressed their silent “this rose is beautiful (or ugly)” to an implicit “you.” The phrase is not addressed to anyone in particular, but it has an addressee. Let’s say that the grammatical structure of an aesthetic judgment is something like “this is beautiful, isn’t it?” The addressee is indeterminate, and thus universal; the implicit “you” refers to anyone and everyone. Conclusion 1: aesthetic judgments imply a universal address.

The second point worth emphasizing is that aesthetic judgments are not logical, they are based on feeling. Feelings are subjective and involuntary—you might say egotistic (my feeling is mine, not someone else’s) and automatic (I can’t help but feel what I feel). Pleasure and pain certainly correspond to and perhaps epitomize this general definition of feelings. Both agreeableness and beauty yield pleasure. The former is content with being merely egotistic, whereas the latter claims universal assent. And it does so automatically, that is, involuntarily. Conclusion 2: a true or pure aesthetic judgment is a call for agreement by dint of feeling involuntarily addressed to all.

The third point worth emphasizing is that this call for agreement holds true for both Ms. A and Mr. B despite their disagreement. Ugliness, too, claims universal assent. When Mr. B claims the rose is ugly, he invokes his dissatisfaction, displeasure, or pain in looking at the rose in the name of what he thinks is his excellent taste in roses; he nevertheless claims that Ms. A, or indeed anyone and everyone, ought to agree with him: Ms. A should know better and not derive pleasure from such a mediocre example. Conclusion 3: what is ultimately at stake in an aesthetic judgment is neither the rose’s beauty nor the feeling it arouses; it is the agreement.

Needless to say, Kant did not reach these conclusions watching two people quarreling over the beauty of a rose. He never even uttered them in the words I used. Yet I believe that my short account of Kant’s discovery is compatible with most other accounts, say, those popularized in philosophy classes, although it differs from them on crucial points. (1) Those accounts rarely set the stage of a quarrel. They talk about beauty’s claim to universality and conveniently silence the fact that ugliness makes the same claim.2 (2) They never present Kant as someone who has aesthetic experiences and can’t help but take sides in aesthetic quarrels; they present him as a cool and impartial philosopher who reflects on aesthetic judgment in general from within his ivory tower. As a result, though they underline that the judgment of taste is reflective rather than determining, they seem not to notice that Kant’s reflection throughout the book is a long and elaborate intellectual translation of what every single aesthetic judgment actually does. In other words, they don’t take full measure of why the Critique of Judgment is a critique and not a theory: it is in exercising your reflective judgment that you understand what a reflective judgment is.3 (3) While recognizing that beauty is not an objective property but rather a subjective feeling, they justify the right of this feeling to claim universal assent with arguments such as disinterestedness, free play of imagination and understanding, purposiveness without purpose, or exemplary necessity;4 they rarely put the emphasis on the demand addressed to others as such. (4) When noting that the aesthetic judgment is imputing to all others the feeling of pleasure that one feels in oneself, they emphasize the theoretical necessity of endowing all human beings with the faculty of taste while distracting attention from its counterpart, the quasi-ethical obligation of endowing all human beings with the faculty of agreeing. Such accounts are correct. What they emphasize is in Kant’s text, and you will pardon me, I hope, for not citing chapter and verse here in order to prove that all my reading of the text does is shift emphasis a little bit. The faculty of taste is not important in itself. It is important inasmuch as it testifies to a universally shared faculty of agreeing, which Kant calls sensus communis.

Sensus communis

Kant’s sensus communis is not ordinary common sense, it is common sentiment: shared or shareable feeling, and the faculty thereof; a common ability for having feelings in common; a communality or communicability of affects, implying a transcendental definition of humankind as a community united by a universally shared ability for sharing feelings universally. There is no proof that sensus communis exists as a fact, though. What exists as a fact is that we say such things as “this rose is beautiful,” that we say them by dint of feeling, and that we claim universal assent for these feelings, whether we know it or not. Of course (witness Mr. B’s response), humanity as a whole will never agree on the rose’s beauty. But that’s not required for the phrase “this rose is beautiful” to be legitimate (I’m not saying “true,” I’m saying “legitimate”). All I need is to make the supposition that my feeling is shareable by all. And that’s what I suppose, indeed. That’s what we all suppose, Ms. A, Mr. B, you and I, everyone, when we make aesthetic judgments. The implied “you ought to feel the way I feel” is what justifies me in my claim, you in yours, and all our fellow human beings in theirs, even though there is not a hope in the world for universal agreement among us. War is the rule, peace and love are the exception. But Kant feels it is his duty as a philosopher to grant all humans the faculty of agreeing and to theorize it correctly. Either taste is this faculty or signals it. Kant hesitates between these two theorizations, but in the end he decides it doesn’t matter. What matters is that regardless of whether sensus communis exists as a fact, we ought to suppose that it exists at least as an idea. The standard reading of the third Critique sees the theoretical necessity of this supposition clearly but in my view pays insufficient attention to the quasi-moral obligation that might “explain how it is that the feeling in the judgment of taste is expected of everyone as if it were a duty.”5 The reading I propose underlines Kant’s skepticism as to whether sensus communis is a natural endowment of the human species—say, an instinct—or whether it is merely an idea, but one we cannot do without. Here I must cite chapter and verse:

This indeterminate norm of a common sense [Kant here means sensus communis] is actually presupposed by us, as is shown by our claim to lay down judgements of taste. Whether there is in fact such a common sense, as a constitutive principle of the possibility of experience, or whether a higher principle of reason makes it only into a regulative principle for producing in us a common sense for higher purposes; whether, therefore, taste is an original and natural faculty or only the idea of an artificial one yet to be acquired, so that a judgement of taste with its assumption of a universal assent in fact is only a requirement of reason for producing such harmony of sentiment; whether the ought, i.e. the objective necessity of the confluence of the feeling of any one man with that of every other, only signifies the possibility of arriving at this accord, and the judgement of taste only affords an example of the application of this principle—these questions we have neither the wish nor the power to investigate as yet.6

This is from section 22. When, in section 38, Kant finally returns to the postponed questions, his deduction of the judgment of taste (and in Kant deduction means legitimation without proof) is itself a reflective and regulative use of judgment, which is why Kant, apparently to his own surprise, finds it easy.

This deduction is so easy, because it is not necessary for it to justify any objective reality of a concept; for beauty is not a concept of the object, and the judgment of taste is not a judgment of cognition. It asserts only that we are justified in presupposing universally in every human being the same subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves.7

I read this passage as the best indication that it is the claim to universality that s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dear Reader
• Part I: The “Kant after Duchamp” Approach
• Part II: Close and Not So Close Readings
• Notes
• Index of Proper Names
• Index of Concepts