Marginal Modernity

The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce

Leonardo F. Lisi

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780823245321
• eBook ISBN: 9780823245345
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have come down to us from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. In this revisionary study, Leonardo Lisi argues that these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form.Lisi traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as his point of departure, Lisi examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce.Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.

Part One: Philosophical Foundations

Chapter One

Presuppositions and Varieties of Aesthetic Experience

As scholars of the history of philosophy have frequently pointed out, the extraordinary rise in importance of aesthetics since the late eighteenth century is due, not least, to the solution it provided to the epistemological problems inherited from Kant’s Copernican revolution. In order to properly understand the nature and function of aesthetics, as well as the possibility and structure of alternatives to the dominant model that has come down to us, it is therefore necessary to briefly elucidate this larger philosophical context. The dominance of the aesthetics of autonomy and the avant-gardes is due not least to the dominance of a certain conception of truth and experience. And it is only by understanding Kierkegaard’s challenge to that conception that the aesthetic implications of his reconsideration of the nature of truth and experience become apparent.

Such an exegetical task, however, far exceeds the possibilities of this chapter, and only a study of its own can do it full justice. In the present context, I accordingly do not pretend to give an adequate representation of all relevant aspects of the extraordinarily complex and fascinating evolution of German philosophy between Kant and Hegel, nor of the full extent of Kierkegaard’s own complicated engagement with that tradition. Rather, with respect to the former, I will focus only on some aspects of the thoughts of a very few of the figures in that trajectory. While this is far from exhaustive, the aspects examined here are, in my view, both general enough in nature to serve as a characterization of a mode of thinking that extends beyond those thinkers explicitly discussed and sufficiently central to provide an understanding of the purpose and structure of the aesthetics of autonomy, its negation, and Kierkegaard’s own project. As such, this chapter provides a framework for understanding and identifying the distinctions between the various aesthetic models that the rest of the book will examine in their literary contexts and which constitute my focus.

The argument in this chapter proceeds in two steps. In the first, I begin by outlining Kant’s epistemology and its failure, as perceived by one of his most important critics, Salomon Maimon. Maimon’s attack on Kant’s epistemology lays bare an important shift in the normative assumption of the nature of experience during the late eighteenth century, from one that views it as containing positive and necessary relations between representations, to another that can allow only for the negative and anarchic differentiation between terms. It is this latter view that provides the epistemological foundations for the aesthetics of the avant-gardes and which the aesthetics of autonomy developed in the 1790s attempt to overcome and thereby salvage Kant’s project from his critics. Focusing on Schiller’s influential Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, I examine both the way in which this resolution is conceived and the larger historical conflict that it is intended to resolve. I conclude with an examination of Hölderlin’s fragment “Judgment and Being,” in which Schiller’s argument finds its logical conclusion. As Manfred Frank has argued, with the latter text, most of the deep structure of the thought that followed was in place (‘Unendliche’ 751) and the foundations of the aesthetics of autonomy secured.

Although my interpretation differs in its details, these claims about the overall trajectory of aesthetics after Kant are fairly uncontroversial. My argument about Kierkegaard, in contrast, radically reconsiders his relation to that tradition. I begin the second part of this chapter by pointing to Kierkegaard’s rejection of the solution to the neo-skeptical attack provided by the aesthetics of autonomy and its philosophical presuppositions. To Kierkegaard, the turn to monism that these entail ignores the constitutive nature of the conflict between thought and existence, which he equates with the condition of sin that cannot be resolved. This negative conclusion, however, which places Kierkegaard in line with the aesthetics of the avant-gardes, is complemented by a positive alternative that clearly sets him apart. Examining his philosophical anthropology in The Sickness unto Death, I show how Kierkegaard provides a new conception of truth and mediation intended to overcome the neo-skeptical conception of experience by simultaneously retaining and transforming the Kantian Table of Judgments and its title of modality. Like many of the idealist heirs to Kant’s thought, Kierkegaard conceives of the title of modality as the standard according to which the terms in a propositional judgment (its content) should be organized. But whereas for the idealists that standard is a positive ground coextensive with our subjectivity and accessible in the experience of beauty, to Kierkegaard this ground is wholly other. The relation to this transcendent criterion for the unification of terms is theorized by Kierkegaard as the condition of faith, which places us in a productive dependence on a transcendent point of view that simultaneously negates our representational structures and justifies them in their failure. This primarily theological and epistemic structure also contains an aesthetic dimension, which underlies the majority of the works examined in this study’s later parts.

The Fragmentation of Experience and the Aesthetics of Autonomy

The extraordinary success of the aesthetics of autonomy in post-Kantian philosophy rests on Kant’s effort in the first Critique to justify the possibility of synthetic a priori propositions.¹ Propositions are a priori if they combine representations with absolute necessity and universality and therefore do so independently of experience, which is always contingent (B 4, A 9 / B 13). They are synthetic if the predicate of the proposition “lies entirely outside” the subject, that is, if the predicate is not constitutive of the identity of the subject (in which case we would have an analytic judgment) but is added to it and thereby expands it (A 6–7 / B 10–11). Kant’s favored example of such a synthetic a priori proposition is “Everything that happens has its cause,” in regard to which he claims that “the concept of a cause indicates something different from the concept of something that happens, and is not contained in the latter representation at all” (A 9 / B 13). Accordingly, insofar as we are to be able to claim universal and necessary force for any causal proposition, something all scientific inquiry presupposes, we must be able to explain the transcendental conditions for the possibility of such judgments.²

Kant does so by abandoning the traditional supposition that “all our cognition must conform to the objects” and instead seeking to show that “we…get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition” (B xvi). Underlying this radical contention is Kant’s claim that human knowledge is “discursive” in nature, consisting of the interaction of two distinct cognitive faculties—sensible intuition and understanding—each with its own a priori structure (A 15 / B 29, A 51 / B 76). According to Kant, the specific contribution to knowledge made by the faculty of sensible intuition lies in its structuring of appearances according to the a priori principles of the pure intuitions of time and space (A 20 / B 34, A 22 / B 36). These are pure and a priori because they precede any particular appearance and therefore cannot be abstracted from experience (B 39, B 47). Likewise, they are intuitions because they do not contain representations under themselves (as concepts do) but rather within themselves, since each spatiotemporal determination is only a limitation of an “original representation” that itself must “be given as unlimited” (B 39–40, B 47–48). In spite of possessing this a priori order of relations, sensibility is described by Kant as passive and receptive (A 19 / B 32), thereby placing it in direct opposition to the understanding, which is defined as active and spontaneous (A 68 / B 93). The latter faculty Kant further describes as the “faculty for thinking,” where thinking, again in opposition to intuition, is defined as “cognition through concepts” (A 69 / B 94). Concepts, in turn, are strictly relational, which implies that we can use them only in judgments that unify several representations in a proposition (A 68 / B 93), making it possible for Kant to claim that “the understanding in general can be represented as a faculty for judging” (A 69 / B 94). Judgments, finally, can be exhaustively analyzed in terms of the four “logical functions” (quantity, quality, relation, and modality) that Kant claims constitute the fundamental forms of unification (A 69–70, B 94–95).

Kant does not explain why these four titles, together with the three moments contained in each, should be considered exhaustive of the functions of human understanding. It would seem, however, that this claim rests on the view that the Table of Judgments represents the structure of categorical judgments on which, according to Kant, all other kinds of judgment are based (A 73–74 / B 98–99).³ From this view, the quantity of a judgment is concerned with the subject in a proposition, determining whether the predicate includes all, some, or only one of its subjects (e.g., “all S = P” [universal judgment], as distinct from “some S = P” [particular judgments]). The quality refers to the copula (e.g., “S is P” [affirmative]), while the relation has the predicate of a proposition as its theme, specifying the way in which a predicate is ascribed to a subject (e.g., “if X then P” [hypothetical judgments]). Modality, finally, determines the value of the proposition “in relation to thinking in general” (A 74 / B 100) (e.g., logical possibility [problematic judgments] as distinct from that which is judged to be the case [assertoric judgments]). From these four titles, Kant goes on to derive the “categories,” which constitute the functions according to which objects of experience are ordered, or, what amounts to the same thing, the concepts by means of which the manifold of sensibility is unified by the understanding (A 78–79 / B 104–105).

While analytic a priori judgments are possible independent of sensibility, synthetic a priori judgments depend on the discursive interaction of our faculties (A 38 / B 55, B 73, A 158 / B 197; cf. also B 289). The latter kind of judgments, moreover, constitute the “principles of the possibility of…experience” (B 410; cf. also A 158 / B 197), where Kant defines experience as “cognition by means of connected perceptions” (B 161). The aim of Kant’s investigation, then, is to secure the objectivity of our experience by justifying how such discursive interaction is possible in light of the absolute difference of the faculties involved. Or, as Kant puts it, we must establish the legitimacy (the question, quid juris) of our actual use of such propositions (the question, quid facti) (A 84 / B 116).

The Transcendental Deduction that seeks to provide this proof unquestionably counts among the most complex and fruitful arguments of modern philosophy, making it impossible to give an adequate account of its particularities here. For the present purposes, it is sufficient to note that Kant’s proof for the a priori relation between sensible intuition and understanding rests on the claim that the unity of a manifold of representations given to us in sensible intuition is made possible by the combination of those representations in the transcendental unity of self-consciousness (B 132–136). This means that we can perceive a manifold only insofar as we can in principle be conscious of the combination of its parts into such a whole, which is itself possible only if the same “I” can accompany each constitutive representation (B 133). The unifying activity of this “I” that underlies all manifolds is in turn determined by the logical functions, the applications of which to the manifold, in turn, are the categories (B 143). The reason we can claim objective validity for synthetic a priori propositions thus derives from the claim that the very possibility of objects in the world rests on the a priori application of the pure categories of the understanding to sensible intuitions in the transcendental subject’s activity of self-consciousness (B 141–142). Since there can be no experience that we cannot at least in principle be conscious of (B 131–132), and no self-consciousness without the synthetic unification of the manifold of intuition by means of the rules governing the understanding, there can be no experience that is not subject to the categories (B 160–161).

It is to Kant’s claim that these categories are constitutive of human experience that Solomon Maimon forcefully objects in his 1790 Essay on the Transcendental Philosophy. As scholars have pointed out, while Maimon willingly concedes that experience as Kant defines it indeed requires the a priori application of the categories to sensible intuition, he nevertheless rejects the claim that we in fact have such experience to begin with (Versuch 72, 186–187). As Maimon puts it in his later Brief Overview of Philosophical Systems, of 1793: “[I]nthe sense in which the Kantian understands the concept of experience, I have no experience” (Kurzer 465). Drawing on the language of Kant’s own Transcendental Deduction, Maimon argues that while Kant may indeed deliver the quid juris he needs (the proof that the categories are constitutive of the universality and necessity of experience), he simply presupposes—without proving—the quid facti in question: that we have such universal and necessary experiences at all (Versuch 61, 70–71). Where to Kant experience inevitably involves some objective unity, to Maimon it has become anarchic. As he sums up the difference: “Mr. K[ant] presupposes as unquestionable the fact that we indeed have propositions of experience (which express necessity).…I on the contrary doubt the fact that we have propositions of experience itself” (Versuch 186).

Maimon illustrates his point by means of the very category of causality that Kant thought had been salvaged from Hume in the Second Analogy section of the first Critique (B 232– A 211 / B 256). The problem, to Maimon, stems from the fact that Kant claims that the categories apply to intuitions in their pure spatiotemporal form. As such, however, there can be no intrinsic difference between different representations (Versuch 52–54) and therefore no way of determining which categories are to be applied to which intuitions, or even whether they are to be applied at all. As regards judgments of causality, for example, it is not possible to know why the sequence “A-B” is causal, in the sense of being necessary and universal, while a different sequence, “B-C,” is merely contingent (Versuch 71, 187–188). According to Kant, the schematism of the category of causality stipulates that the principle “for every event ‘B,’ a prior event ‘A’ must be presupposed as its cause” has to be applied under certain conditions, as when a temporal sequence places “B” after “A” (B 234–A 189 / B 235) or when the sequence “A-B” is irreversible (A 193 / B 238–A 194 / B 239). Yet Maimon’s point is that these criteria are themselves not determinable, since on the basis of our experience we cannot say that “A” will always and necessarily precede “B” or that their sequence is always irreversible. As Hume already pointed out, empirically we only ever find the constant correlation of events, and from this, no a priori certainty can be derived (Versuch 72–73). But if it is impossible to determine when and which categories apply to which intuitions, then the grounds for claiming that such application occurs in the first place likewise disappears. The only way to overcome this problem, so Maimon claims, would be if sensibility provided us with a priori criteria with which to determine when and which categories are to be used, yet it is precisely this that Kant makes impossible by insisting on an absolute difference between the two faculties (63). Kant’s discursivity thesis in this way reveals itself as merely another version of the classic mind-body problem, and the Deduction remains as incapable of solving it as ever (62).⁴

It is ultimately questionable if Maimon’s criticism of Kant is valid, since it seems to rely on a confusion of transcendental and empirical levels of analysis. As Peter Thielke maintains, what Maimon assumes is that Kant is required to explain how the categories are perceptible in experience, which would make it necessary for the Transcendental Analytic section of the first Critique, which includes the Deduction, to provide not only the necessary but also the sufficient conditions for the application of the categories (111–112). Henry Allison has forcefully argued, however, that this is not necessarily the case, since the transcendental rules (the categories and their principles) with which the Analytic is concerned are merely formal. As such, they serve only

to preclude certain (logically) possible scenarios, such as changes that are not alterations of enduring substances or alterations without causes. Consequently, they may be said to provide the “norm” to which all empirical laws must conform in order to count as laws (A 128); for, as Kant himself notes, no cognition can contradict them without “at once losing all content, that is, all relation to any object, and therefore all truth” (A 62–3 / B 87). Indeed, that is why they can be used as a “canon for passing Judgment upon the empirical employment of the understanding” (A 63 / B 88). It does not follow from this, however, that they suffice to ground any particular causal law or even to guarantee that such laws are there to be found. In Kantian terms, that would give them the status of an organon rather than merely that of a canon. (“Is the Critique” 80; my emphasis)

While transcendental laws provide regularity and unity for our experience at the most fundamental level, they in this way nonetheless “underdetermine the particulars falling under them, that is to say, these [transcendental] laws are compatible with any number of possible empirical laws and arrangements” (83–84). To claim that this invali...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Citations
• Introduction: The Aesthetics of Modernism
• Part One: Philosophical Foundations
• 1. Presuppositions and Varieties of Aesthetic Experience
• Part Two: Aesthetic Forms at the Scandinavian Periphery
• 2. Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the Autonomy of Art
• 3. Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt
• 4. Nora’s Departure and the Aesthetics of Dependency
• Part Three: Modernism and Dependency
• 5. Henry James and the Emergence of the Major Phase
• 6. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Language of the Future
• 7. Conflict and Mediation in James Joyce’s “The Dead”
• 8. Intransitive Love in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography