Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists

A Critical Reader

Christopher Kul-Want

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231526258
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation.

The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí's The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancière, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy.

1

Critique of Judgment

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Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) is one of the founding texts of aesthetics, representing a crosscurrent of ideas springing from the metaphysical tradition of philosophy and the growth of Romantic thought in the eighteenth century. Its importance lies in its consideration of the ways in which certain aesthetic experiences (of the beautiful and the sublime) cannot be classified as objects of knowledge.

The framework for Kant’s consideration of aesthetics was established in the earlier critical philosophy—the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788)—in which he referred to a tripartite network of three interacting “faculties” responsible for structuring and organizing the mind and experience. These are the faculties of imagination, understanding, and reason. The faculty of imagination is a kind of sensory organ apprehending manifold experience that normally “presents” the raw data for the faculty of understanding to shape into concepts based upon ideas of space and time. Thus, the imagination is concerned with perception, “apprehension,” and “intuition,” whereas understanding is the faculty of cognition. Kant equates the faculty of reason with the “the supersensible,” which is composed of a related series of transcendent “ideas”: namely, human freedom, God, immortality, and the immeasurability of creation. In the Critique of Reason, this last faculty legitimizes the understanding’s use of concepts.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant sets out to establish a universal lawfulness (which is confirmed in the form of a judgment) governing the imagination, even when it is seemingly not in the service of the understanding (see the sections on the beautiful) or when it fails in terms of any function at all (see the sections on the sublime). In the sections on the beautiful, Kant acknowledges that there are experiences that are not organized through concepts by means of the understanding (§1 and §16). However, in asserting a lawfulness to the imagination’s independence from understanding, Kant states that this is congruent with the experience of what is beautiful. Thus, this experience is governed by what Kant terms an aesthetic “judgment,” which involves “taste” and “pleasure” and is “subjective.” An aesthetic judgment differs fundamentally from personal taste (not to be confused with “subjective taste”), which Kant believes operates simply at the level of what is “agreeable” and charming; it also differs from moral (“practical”) judgments about “the good” (§16).

Kant goes on to suggest that concerning beauty the imagination is never entirely independent from the understanding. While the imagination does not perform any task on behalf of the understanding in the experience of the beautiful, nevertheless, this experience is composed out of “an accord” or a “harmony” between the imagination and understanding: the mind becomes conscious of its “presentational power” (§1) as it recognizes that the imagination can present its faculty to the understanding and that the two can work together through a sense of “play” and a “quickening” as the “freedom” and openness of the former is brought into contact with the “lawfulness” of the latter (§9). Thus, the experience of the beautiful is an experience of form arising from first the fact that the two faculties of the imagination and understanding are formally in accord with one another, and second that both are perfectly designed to correspond with nature and to seek out its laws. Hence, Kant’s four defining characteristics (or, as he terms them, “moments”) of the beautiful are disinterested liking and pleasure, universality apart from concepts, purposiveness without purpose, and the necessity of a subjective judgment gaining universal assent. While these “moments” appear to be a series of contradictory statements (or, as Kant terms them, “antinomies”), in fact, they are designed as a summary of the lawful role of the imagination. In the first moment, Kant separates the experience of the beautiful from “interested” feeling while maintaining a pleasure at the heart of the experience. The remaining three moments refer to the imagination’s apparent independence from the understanding, since it lacks concepts, is without purpose, and is entirely subjective. And yet, as this “independence” is actually an accord, the experience of the beautiful possesses three related characteristics composing a law: universality, purposiveness, and the sense of a necessary objectivity. (The idea of universality is based upon Kant’s idea of a “common sense,” which he refers to elsewhere in the Critique of Judgment as a “sensus communis.”)¹ Thus, Kant allows the experience of beauty to contain a series of contradictory qualities.

Kant argues that in order for art to be art it should be like experiencing beauty in nature. Thus, what is at stake in art is the same principle as for the beautiful in nature: that is, the relationship of the imagination in its freedom with the lawfulness of the understanding.² Kant argues that the figure of the genius unites nature with art. Through genius, whose “foremost property must be originality” (§46), “nature gives the rule to art” (§46).³

With respect to visual art,⁴ design—by which Kant means the sense of shape or play of shapes and sensations—is what is essential (§14). This idea of design fits with Kant’s idea of form, the basis of both the imagination and understanding. This is taken up in the text with the Pompeian inspired “designs à la grecque, the foliage on borders or on wallpaper etc.” (§16). These examples have a sense of shape, so they are not alien to the understanding, but their designs are incommensurate with a consistent reading of space as might be supplied by a concept. The section “On the Division of the Fine Arts” (§51) classifies the arts in terms of “word, gesture, and tone (articulation, gesticulation, and modulation).” The phrase “arts of the word” refers to rhetoric and poetry; those of gesture to painting, sculpture, and architecture; and tonal art is essentially music.

In the sublime (§23, §26, and §28), the imagination is overwhelmed and rendered inadequate, unable to absorb the manifold experience. In addition, the understanding is bypassed, since there is no determinate concept that can be brought to bear upon the sublime (§23 and §26). Kant identifies two kinds of experience of the sublime: the mathematically and dynamic sublime. The former is an experience of intellectual limitation in relation to infinity, and the latter a sense of physical vulnerability in relation to nature. Both involve a presentation of quantity (in contrast to a presentation of quality in the beautiful) and a feeling of “negative pleasure” (§23). Kant offers various examples of the sublime. In relation to the mathematically sublime, Kant speaks about standing in a certain position from one of the pyramids, where the observer is unable to see the top and bottom of the edifice at the same time; he also refers to the bewilderment and perplexity seizing the spectator upon entering St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome for the first time (§26). In connection with the dynamic sublime, Kant discusses a series of Romantic-influenced extremes of Nature’s power (§28).

Because the sublime is formless, it is unrepresentable: the sublime does not make reference to nature, nor can it be represented in art.⁵ However, the experience of the sublime is evidence of the fact that we are never just experiential beings, but that there exists a supersensible power governing experience: the faculty of reason (§23). For Kant, an aesthetic judgment concerning the sublime is a judgment that we are rational and moral beings.

How, then, are these ideas to be interpreted? Running throughout both the sections on the beautiful and the sublime is the problematic of the imagination and, by implication, how to theorize the senses, perception, and feeling. Specifically, there is the question whether the imagination can be assigned a legitimate role and purpose and, if so, what these might be. Kant grants that the imagination in relation to the beautiful and the sublime has no utilitarian purpose: there is no determinate concept at stake in the beautiful, and in the sublime the imagination is unable to perform its usual task in connection with the understanding. Nevertheless, Kant asserts that with respect to the beautiful there exists a deep correspondence between the imagination and understanding and, in relation to the sublime, the imagination is sanctioned by the transcendent ideas of reason. In this last case, this means that the mind’s faculties—including that of the imagination—are timeless and transcendentally pregiven. Kant’s recourse to reason counters a perceived excess within Romantic thought concerning the overwhelming power of the emotions. While Kant develops a notion of unrepresentability with respect to the sublime, he withdraws from this conclusion, proposing instead that the unrepresentability of the sublime overwhelming the imagination is, in fact, an affect of reason. As such, Kant’s interpretation of the sublime can be read in terms of an economy of surplus profit, assuring the subject that any relationship to, or exchange with, the Other is certain to be advantageous, since reason is infinite.

And yet, it is possible to interpret the arguments of the Critique of Judgment differently. Within the constraints of a rationalist discourse and a somewhat unwieldy set of separate, differentiated faculties, Kant’s ideas may be more nuanced than at first appears. Within the accord existing between the imagination and the understanding in which no determinate concept is involved in an aesthetic judgment of the beautiful, it is possible to see that Kant is suggesting that the imagination, and its related processes of perception, intuition, and feeling, are themselves forms of understanding that are, by nature, unquantifiable and without utilitarian purpose. The fact that Kant emphasizes the unrepresentability of the sublime is also important; the implications of this theory exceed Kant’s own attempt to control them (see the introduction to this book).

Several passages of writing in the sections on the beautiful warrant particular attention, especially in the light of subsequent philosophical concerns. Although much of Kant’s writing about genius appears typically Romantic, in which the (male) artist is identified with nature as a primal force of creativity, his statement that the genius “does not know how he came by the ideas for [the art product]” (§46) anticipates later philosophers who theorized the unconscious, such as Freud and Nietzsche. There is also a connection here with the theory of “the death of the author” expounded by, among others, Roland Barthes.⁶ In §51, Kant seems to envisage a type of gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) combining all modes of communication: “Only when these three ways of expressing himself are combined does the speaker communicate completely.” This may carry with it shades of cultivated perfection, but Kant’s inclusion of gesture and tone as intrinsic elements of communication, alongside that of the word, could be seen to open up ideas about the potentiality of meaning and understanding.

CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT

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First Moment of a Judgment of Taste, as to Its Quality

§1 A Judgment of Taste Is Aesthetic If we wish to decide whether something is beautiful or not, we do not use understanding to refer the presentation⁷ to the object so as to give rise to cognition;⁸ rather, we use imagination (perhaps in connection with understanding) to refer the presentation to the subject and his feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Hence a judgment of taste⁹ is not a cognitive judgment and so is not a logical judgment but an aesthetic one, by which we mean a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective. But any reference of presentations, even of sensations, can be objective (in which case it signifies what is real [I rather than formal I] in an empirical presentation); excepted is a reference to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure—this reference designates nothing whatsoever in the object, but here the subject feels himself, [namely] how he is affected by the presentation.

To apprehend a regular, purposive building with one’s cognitive power (whether the presentation is distinct or confused) is very different from being conscious of this presentation with a sensation of liking. Here the presentation is referred only to the subject, namely to his feeling of life, under the name feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and this forms the basis of a very special power of discriminating and judging.¹⁰ This power does not contribute anything to cognition, but merely compares the given presentation in the subject with the entire presentational power, of which the mind becomes conscious when it feels its own state. The presentations given in a judgment may be empirical (and hence aesthetic),¹¹ but if we refer them to the object, the judgment we make by means of them is logical. On the other hand, even if the given presentations were rational, they would still be aesthetic if, and to the extent that, the subject referred them, in his judgment, solely to himself (to his feeling).

§2 The Liking That Determines a Judgment of Taste Is Devoid of All Interest Interest is what we call the liking we connect with the presentation of an object’s existence. Hence such a liking always refers at once to our power of desire, either as the basis that determines it, or at any rate as necessarily connected with that determining basis. But if the question is whether something is beautiful, what we want to know is not whether we or anyone cares, or so much as might care, in any way, about the thing’s existence, but rather how we judge it in our mere contemplation of it (intuition or reflection). Suppose someone asks me whether I consider the palace I see before me beautiful. I might reply that I am not fond of things of that sort, made merely to be gaped at. Or I might reply like that Iroquois sachem who said that he liked nothing better in Paris than the eating-houses.¹² I might even go on, as Rousseau would, to rebuke the vanity of the great who spend the people’s sweat on such superfluous things. I might, finally, quite easily convince myself that, if I were on some uninhabited island with no hope of ever again coming among people, and could conjure up such a splendid edifice by a mere wish, I would not even take that much trouble for it if I already had a sufficiently comfortable hut. The questioner may grant all this and approve of it: but it is not to the point. All he wants to know is whether my mere presentation of the object is accompanied by a liking, no matter how indifferent I may be about the existence of the object of this presentation. We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the [respect] in which I depend on the object’s existence. Everyone has to admit that if a judgment about beauty is mingled with the least interest then it is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. In order to play the judge in matters of taste, we must not be in the least biased in favor of the thing’s existence but must be wholly indifferent about it.

Explication of the Beautiful Inferred from the First Moment

Taste is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest. The object of such a liking is called beautiful.

Second Moment of a Judgment of Taste, as to Its Quantity

§6 The Beautiful Is What Is Presented Without Concepts as the Object o...