The Tragedy of Philosophy

Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Project of Aesthetics

Andrew Cooper

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438461885, 9781438461892
• eBook ISBN: 9781438461908
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

In The Tragedy of Philosophy Andrew Cooper challenges the prevailing idea of the death of tragedy, arguing that this assumption reflects a problematic view of both tragedy and philosophy—one that stifles the profound contribution that tragedy could provide to philosophy today. To build this case, Cooper presents a novel reading of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. Although this text is normally understood as the final attempt to seal philosophy from the threat of tragedy, Cooper argues that Kant's project is rather a creative engagement with a tragedy that is specific to philosophy, namely, the inevitable failure of attempts to master nature through knowledge. Kant's encounter with the tragedy of philosophy turns philosophy's gaze from an exclusive focus on knowledge to matters of living well in a world that does not bend itself to our desires. Tracing the impact of Kant's Critique of Judgment on some of the most famous theories of tragedy, including those of G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Cornelius Castoriadis, Cooper demonstrates how these philosophers extend the project found in both Kant and the Greek tragedies: the attempt to grasp nature as a domain hospitable to human life.

Part I

Kant’s Critique of Judgment

1

From Disembodied Soul to Embodied Mind

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions that it cannot dismiss … but which it also cannot answer. … Reason falls into this embarrassment through no fault of its own.

—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason1

In 1687, Isaac Newton published Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy with the financial assistance of his admiring colleague, Edmund Halley. The original publication includes an ode to Newton written by Halley himself, announcing the cultural and historical significance of Newton’s discoveries:

Matters that vexed the minds of ancient seers,

And for our learned doctors often led

To loud and vain contention, now are seen

In reason’s light, the cloud of ignorance

Dispelled at last by science. Those on whom

Delusion cast its gloomy pall of doubt,

Upborne now on the wings that genius lends,

May penetrate the mansions of the gods,

And scale the heights of heaven, O mortal men

Arise!2

Halley depicts Newton as a Promethean figure, soaring on the wings of genius above the miasmas of superstition that hitherto cloaked the mind of God. He envisions a generation inspired by the light of reason brought to bear on the world by discoveries that will empower the formerly ignorant to “Discern the changeless order of the world, and all the eons of its history.”3

According to Halley, Newton’s genius lies in two distinct features: his discovery of this “changeless order” and his ability to communicate this discovery to the general public. These grandiose claims notwithstanding, less than fifty years after the publication of Mathematical Principles scientists conducting research in the life sciences began to see a critical flaw in Newton’s work. The basic assumption guiding Newton’s project was that the demonstrative, mathematical paradigm of knowledge provides the standard for the sciences. In order to adhere to this standard, Newton outlines a mechanical concept of nature in which active forces press upon inert matter. His third law of motion—“to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction”4—presumes a concept of nature that can be wholly explained in the paradigm of efficient causation, for every natural event is deemed to have a necessary and sufficient cause. Yet as the development of optical technologies made it possible to observe organic life on a cellular level, biologists were able to study the fertilization and early growth of seeds and eggs. They were faced with the task of explaining how individual parts within a single cell could form independently of each other and yet somehow cohere as an organic unity. While some responded by strengthening Newton’s mechanical view of nature by developing the idea of “molds” that press preestablished form upon inert matter, others began to search for an idea of matter capable of giving form to itself. This organic concept of matter stands radically opposed to Newton’s mechanical view; it rejects a dualism between matter and force by attributing motion to matter itself. It entails that the “form” or “law” of an organism does not preexist its development or press upon it as an exterior power. Rather, it is expressed through the organism’s constituent parts.

This self-forming concept of nature stands in tension with Newtonian physics, for it entails that organic events are contingent; they have necessary but not sufficient conditions of existence. If we begin from the contingency of organic events, then we require an alternative mode of explanation to Newton’s. Organic events cannot be fully explained through efficient causality, which explains change or movement according to the external conditions that act upon an object. Rather, they express an end toward which they are directed, requiring the explanatory paradigm of final causation, which opens scientific inquiry to matters of will and purpose. If providing an explanation for organic genesis requires a self-forming concept of nature, then the task of the life scientist would not be to provide a “changeless” system of natural phenomena that can explain “all the eons of [natural] history,” as Halley put it. Rather, the life scientist’s task would be to give account of singular organisms through a process of codetermination wherein both observer and observed are dynamically involved, the observed expressing form for which the observer seeks to give account. This approach rejects the notion of science as the construction of a complete system that we find in Newton’s natural philosophy and recasts the scientific endeavor as an open project. Such a project requires a sensuous kind of thinking whereby the observer searches for a principle adequate to the phenomenon under observation. This mode of thinking would be both sensuous and rational, for it would search for form within nature as experienced through the senses.

The aim of this chapter is to show that in the midst of the collision between the rationalist concept of nature inherited by philosophy and the organic concept of nature emerging in the life sciences, poets and philosophers employed the language and form of tragedy in order to express the inner tensions of this experience. Genius ceases to be modeled on natural scientists such as Newton, who boldly discover the changeless order of nature. Instead, it is modeled on poets such as the ancient tragedians, who use the seemingly changeless order of nature to express natural spontaneity. Through identifying the importance of tragedy for navigating this transition, I aim to show that tragedy did not first appear as a significant matter of philosophical discourse in post-Kantian philosophy, as the Idealist view suggests. Rather, it returns during the mid-eighteenth century in the work of philosophers and poets as a way of framing the tension between traditional philosophy and the experience of nature as a domain of radical singularity.

Before I begin, it is necessary to situate the renewed interest in tragedy in the mid-eighteenth century in the context of a broader reconsideration of Aristotle’s practical and rhetorical texts, such as Nicomachean Ethics, Rhetoric, and Poetics. In these texts, one of Aristotle’s primary concerns is to distinguish between two spheres of human thinking and to map out the appropriate use of reason in each sphere. In book 6 of Nicomachean Ethics, for example, Aristotle states that theoretical thinking (theoretike dianoia) deals with “things that cannot be other than they are,” such as mathematics and geometry. Practical thinking (praktike dianoia), on the other hand, is the principled way of dealing with “things that admit of being other than they are,” such as nature, politics, and art.5 Both forms of thinking are concerned with distinguishing truth from falsity, though the authority of practical thinking is limited to action.

Having mapped out the appropriate domain of practical thinking in terms of contingency, Aristotle then makes a finer distinction between two ways that action is guided by reason, techne and phronesis. First, he defines techne as the “reasoned state of capacity to make.”6 The mode of activity distinct to techne is poiesis. Thus, techne is productive, expressing the kind of knowledge possessed by the craftsman who understands the principles (logoi, aitiai) underlying the production of an object, such as a house, a table, or the state of being healthy. The technician acts upon his object in the paradigm of efficient causation: the material (hule) gives the maker something to work on, the form (eidos) is realized in the material, and the end (telos) is the realized form. The principles that govern the production of an object are teachable, reliable, and certifiable. Thus techne is interested, for it is subservient to a set of principles appropriate to achieving a preestablished end. Aristotle defines phronesis, on the other hand, as the “reasoned state of capacity to act.” It is characteristic of a person who knows how to live well (eu zen) in contexts that do not adhere to principles that can be known in advance. The form of activity distinct to phronesis is praxis, which does not make something with a given end in view, as does poiesis. Rather, it “is itself an end”; “good action” is the end of phronesis.7 The teleological dimension of phronesis entails that it does not produce something in the paradigm of efficient causation, where events have necessary and sufficient causes. Rather, it produces according to final causation, which involves the deliberation of a purposive subject. In this sense phronesis is not governed by principles that are teachable or reliable in general cases. Rather, it is concerned “with the ultimate particular fact, since the thing to be done is of this nature.” The attention phronesis gives to singularity entails that it is the kind of knowledge appropriate for living things, such as the polis. “Technical” considerations are thus contrasted with “political” considerations, just as making a table is contrasted with political action. A table is judged as an artifact, that is, without references to the motivations of the craftsman. A political act, on the other hand, is judged as an action, meaning that it cannot be evaluated apart from the aims of the citizen.

During the eighteenth century, philosophers and scientists became increasingly dissatisfied with the rationalist model of practical thinking, which grants techne an unrestricted authority over contingent matters. They turned to Aristotle’s separation of phronesis from techne for an alternative way to schematize the use of reason in practical matters. By separating cases in which the subject matter adheres to principles that are teachable, reliable, and certifiable from cases in which the subject matter is, by nature, underdetermined, Aristotle was seen to outline a reasoned way of thinking in regard to self-forming organisms. In the search for a new mode of practical thinking attuned to the singularity of organic life, such philosophers not only challenged the rationalist separation of reason from sensation, they also renewed philosophy’s concern with tragedy.

The problem of life

The tension in modern thought between the rationalist understanding of nature and the empirical sciences can be seen as the collision of a traditional system with novel demands, or, in the language of tragedy, a clash between old gods and new. To understand the origins of this tension, we begin with medieval philosophy. Broadly speaking, medieval philosophers concerned with the empirical dimensions of experience, such as science and art, drew from Neoplatonic resources, particularly from the transcendental principle of beauty. One of the central texts of Neoplatonism, Plato’s Timaeus, articulates a rational, mathematical cosmology. By upholding mathematics as the foundational principle of order, Neoplatonism imagines the world as, in Umberto Eco’s words, something “endowed with artistic order and resplendent with beauty.”8 The creative act of the demiurge does not proceed in the form of creation ex nihilo but as a mode of production through which he imitates the higher, eternal world of form in order to shape the lower, material world. Thus understood, our sensory knowledge of the lower world and our experience of beauty are only complete when we recognize the higher form in which empirical objects participate.

Thomas Aquinas presents a Neoplatonic view of creation in Commentary on Divine Names. He states that beauty is “a participation in the first cause, which makes all things beautiful. So that the beauty of creatures is simply a likeness of the divine beauty in which things participate.”9 In Aquinas’ view, beautiful objects are produced according to predefined laws that allow them to participate in a beauty identified with Being itself. They are produced by nature according to necessary and sufficient principles, meaning that the beauty we experience in works produced by human skill involves the representation of preestablished form. The beautiful is a First Principle, an original harmony from which all things derive. Thus Aquinas can state that everything “that exists comes from beauty and goodness (from God) as an effective principle. And things have their being in beauty and goodness as if in a principle that preserves and maintains.”10

Aquinas’ understanding of beauty as an effective principle builds not only from Neoplatonic sources but also from the speculative systems of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics. Carol Poster describes Aquinas’ reading of Aristotle as a “scientific-technical” approach, for it prioritizes his speculative metaphysics over his account of practical and ethical subjects.11 The dominance of the scientific-technical reading of Aristotle in medieval thought is reflected in the fact that his rhetorical and practical texts did not feature in medieval handbooks of the arts curriculum, and that neither Rhetoric nor Poetics were printed in the original five-volume Aldine Aristotle (1495–1498).12 The absence of Greek tragedy in the Latin west meant that Aristotle’s Poetics found little purchase on the medieval imagination, while the poetics of Islamic philosopher Averroës, which outlined a writing pedagogy that addressed poetry and prose together, were more easily assimilated into medieval cultural life.13

Aquinas’ scientific-technical reading of Aristotle plays a central role in establishing the priority of Aristotle’s technical account of practical knowledge in modern philosophy, for it collapses the distinction between making (poiesis) and acting (praxis). The mode of practical knowledge that produces a world according to an efficient principle (a preestablished rule) is techne. Moreover, the mode of practical knowledge appropriate to human agents is also one of techne, for it requires the application of principles that participate in the original principle. Thus understood, the creative dimension that Aristotle ascribed to praxis is collapsed into poiesis, and action is understood as a form of production. This collapse is evident in medieval Latin, which renders both poiesis and praxis as actio.14 Aquinas does distinguish two kinds of action, one pertaining to production and one to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Citations
• Introduction
• Part I. Kant’s Critique of Judgment
• Part II. Tragedy after Kant
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover