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PHILOSOPHY MUSIC |
Arnold Berleant
Abstract The importance of Kant in the development of modern aesthetics is unchallengeable. Drawing on the work of his immediate predecessors, such as Shaftesbury, Alison, and others, especially of the British school, Kant elaborated their notions of disinterestedness, imagination, and taste within the frame of his larger epistemological and moral order. The influence of Kant's accomplishments in all these areas continues to be felt, as do the problems to which they led. The same is true in aesthetics, even though two full centuries of artistic innovation and social, political, and technological change have intervened. Why should such an inveterately rationalistic philosophy maintain so powerful a grip on a theory so fundamentally experiential as aesthetics? This paper will not dispute Kant's importance for aesthetic theory. Its interest is different: to examine the leading points of Kant's's aesthetic philosophy and reconsider their theoretical assertions in the light of our present understanding of art and the aesthetic, and in the process, to develop a critique of Kant's principal claims from the standpoint of the present. My view is that, despite its theoretical coherence and historical importance, Kant's aesthetics is grounded on an inappropriate model and its principal ideas are to a greater or lesser extent theoretically irrelevant. In brief, its purpose no longer suits. Introduction This essay takes the bold step of offering a critique of Kant's aesthetics. It does so because I am convinced that the continuing influence of Kant is the single most persistent obstacle to any significant change in aesthetic theory. Apart from Kant's historical importance[1] and his observations on the sublime, which retain vitality from their insights and analysis of that distinctive experience, Kant's aesthetics is governed not by experiential evidence but by the rationalistic presuppositions of his overall systematic order. Because of this, he offers an aesthetic that possesses the consistency and coherence desirable in a theory, but this does not account satisfactorily for the phenomena it should explain and, in fact, distorts and misrepresents them. Let me show how this is so. Modern aesthetics owes much to Kant. His importance in the historical development of aesthetics is unchallengeable. Kant's third Critique founded the discipline as most know it, and he established many of the guiding concepts and issues that continue to inform discussion. Drawing on the work of his immediate predecessors, especially of the British school, such as Shaftesbury and Alison, Kant elaborated their notions of disinterestedness, imagination, and taste within the frame of his larger epistemological and moral order. Among the useful contributions of Kant's theory are many distinctions, such as between beauty and charm; beauty, the pleasant, and the good; pure and dependent beauty; freedom and necessity; form and sensuousness; imagination and understanding. Then there are some of his provocative ideas, especially his influential theories of the sublime, of aesthetic disinterestedness, and of purposiveness without purpose. It is important, however, to interpret and critique these distinctions and ideas, and much of Kantian scholarship devotes itself to this, attempting to reconcile apparent inconsistencies and other problems, and to defend his various claims. Considerably more important in my view, however, is the need for a thoroughgoing and penetrating critique of Kant's methodology and the theoretical claims that direct it. As the foundation of modern aesthetics, Kant's Third Critique is more than a sacred text. It presents a highly structured theory and, as such, it requires not only formal analysis in the context of the other Critiques and historical studies to place it in the context of the evolution of ideas, but consideration in itself as a theory. What is it a theory of and what does it purport to do? If, like other theories, it claims to identify, define, and relate the aesthetic to other orders of knowledge, we must consider how well it does this and not accord it the blind and unthinking deference usually given a canonical text. Kant's development of a comprehensive philosophical vision into a coherent system was early in a sequence of powerful intellectual structures produced mainly in the German-speaking world. The logical strength of such an approach to philosophical inquiry is obvious. Who would willingly dismiss the prospect of an organized conceptual universe? Yet the fecund multiplicity of experience constantly disrupts and undermines that equanimous order. The unruly phenomenal world has often been legislated into conformity by applying conceptual constraints so as to maintain that systematic arrangement. Herein lies its problem. Imperial order is found wherever we force experience into categories that fail to respect the untidy complexity of our perceptual world. Legislative order appears, correspondingly, in efforts to coerce behavior into conformity with custom, convention, or absolute ideals. This essay will not dispute Kant's historical significance for aesthetic theory. Its interest is different: to examine and critique the leading points of Kant's aesthetic philosophy in the light of our present understanding of art and the aesthetic. Kant's Enlightenment rationality, filtered though the demands of his moral theory, pervades his aesthetics. This rationalistic orientation centers around at least three key ideas; his theory of aesthetic disinterestedness, his attempt to achieve universality of judgment and his views of purposiveness and necessity. These ideas supply the conditions that underlie Kant's analysis of aesthetic judgment. Because they are integral to his system, one cannot deal critically with that analysis without confronting these basic presuppositions. My claim is that they are not only presumptive but are grounded on an inappropriate, rationalistic model. This condemns the principal ideas of Kant's aesthetics as theoretically irrelevant, so that, despite the theory's theoretical coherence and historical importance, its purpose no longer suits. But where does Kant's theory make such assumptions and where do aesthetic transgressions occur? Let me develop the outlines of a critique by discussing each of Kant's four moments in turn. Disinterestedness Central to Kant's aesthetics is his claim that the judgment of taste is not cognitive but subjective and disinterested. It is not a judgment of cognition and so not logical because it is not objective and based on a concept. The judgment of taste is rather subjective and therefore bound up with feelings of pleasure or pain.[2] Kant insisted that it must not depend on the existence of the object but that it elicits a satisfaction in the mere representation of the object. Such satisfaction is therefore disinterested and this led him to exclude desire and pleasure from the aesthetic.[3] For reasons similar to those for which he excluded inclination from morality, desire and pleasure involve having a practical interest in the sensation. And this rests on the subject instead of referring to an object, which would make cognition possible.[4] Making disinterestedness a condition of aesthetic appreciation is an instance of the common practice of imposing external strictures on experience. Although it is important to acknowledge the historical value of disinterestedness for moral judgment, its claim to apply to the aesthetic rests on Kant's distinction between objective and subjective sensation, and on his excluding the aesthetic from all but humans, thus achieving the possibility of cognitive objectivity to aesthetic judgment, just as he endeavored to do for the moral law. I have developed an extended critique of the notion of disinterestedness elsewhere, arguing that it is misguided both in fact and in theory, and I cannot review this fully here.[5] Let me simply observe that disinterestedness was for Kant a conceptual constraint, not one that reflects appreciative experience. In point of actual fact, aesthetic appreciation often occurs with objects and in situations that so thoroughly combine a practical function with intrinsic aesthetic satisfaction so that such satisfaction cannot be considered independently. The functional cannot be separated from the aesthetic in architecture and design or in didactic literature and political theater, and aesthetic appreciation is often employed in the service of other purposes, such as enhancing religious or political observances, in aesthetic education, and in therapeutic treatments. Such uses do not vitiate or diminish aesthetic value but testify to its integral place in social and personal life. This adds, of course, to the complexity of aesthetic evaluation. Furthermore, contemplative distancing and the correlative isolation of the art object serve to narrow and distort the scope of appreciative experience.[6] Indeed, the subjective-objective distinction, so central to Kant's argument here and elsewhere, offers a false clarity by distorting both fact and experience in the service of a cognitive end. Descartes notwithstanding, from contemporary philosophy of science to deconstruction and hermeneutics, we widely recognize the impossibility of separating the knowing subject from the object of knowledge. Indeed, there is no pure subjectivity or pure objectivity but rather a continuity between sensation and consciousness and the experienced world. Moreover, to impose a cognitive constraint on perceptual experience is misguided; it distorts the data from which theory must derive and which it must endeavor to explain. In my view, all these claims, distinctions, and goals are misleading. Disinterestedness nonetheless supported the important stage in the history of the arts that affirmed their autonomy. Yet in affirming disinterestedness, Kant, at the same time, made the aesthetic subservient to rationalistic and system-generated preconceptions. Freeing art from the strictures of religion, politics, and morality only to harness it to the logical constraints of a rationalistic system is an ironic liberation. Universality Perhaps the easiest place to show the infelicitous imposition of system on empirical complexity lies in Kant's argument for universality of aesthetic judgment, the intent of his Second Moment. For Kant a particular burden that aesthetic theory must carry results from his claim that the beautiful stands entirely apart from concepts. This cognitive deficiency prevents attaining the logical grounds for universality. Kant was thus compelled to achieve universality by other means, and this requires a sidewise reference to subjectivity, for he appealed to a common ground of satisfaction shared by everyone, and this cannot be personal but must be presupposed.[7] And if universality is presupposed, it must be a priori and so entirely ungrounded apart from the theoretical requirement for such a concept. Yet this offers little support for the claim. At best, universality is admitted as a pure assumption; at worst it merely begs the question. The only ground for a common satisfaction is empirical, and once this is allowed, the entire cast of aesthetic theory must be transformed and the likelihood emerge that true universality will never be realized. Kant himself recognized this.[8] He assiduously avoided basing his views on experience and his bias of conception over perception has dogged the history of aesthetics for two centuries. It led him further to the empirically untenable position of excluding pleasure, since this is "pleasantness in the sensation" and "could have only private validity."[9] Kant's claim that duty requires an unflinching obedience to the moral law regardless of consequences is well known. This resulted from his effort to attain universality of moral judgment, but for many this distorts the moral situation by excluding any consideration of the effects of such duty-governed acts. The very same insistence on universality, which may have its origins in Aristotelian logic, is even more problematic in aesthetics. Indeed, it was more difficult for Kant to force taste into conformity with universal judgments than it was for him to establish it in the moral order, since he could elaborate a thoroughly non-empirical morality but cannot do the same for aesthetics. He acknowledges this at the outset, since he acknowledges that we need to refer to the imagination of "the subject and its feeling of pleasure or pain" to distinguish whether any thing is beautiful or not.[10] Kant imported the exclusion of pleasure and the inclination it engenders from his moral philosophy to his aesthetics. His thoroughly non-empirical aesthetics thus systematically excludes the sensible experience that is the grounding of every aesthetic event. Such a restriction hobbles Kant's moral philosophy but it eviscerates his aesthetic. The experience of art, like its creation, is an empirical process, and any theory that systematically excludes this is entirely beside the point. Universality in aesthetic judgment became for Kant an article of faith: "The judgment of taste itself does not postulate the agreement of everyone...; it only imputes this agreement to everyone...."[11] Normative disagreement creates unsurmountable difficulties in reaching the goal of universality, yet for a rationalist like Kant universality is necessary for all objective knowledge. Kant's effort is instructive. He begins with the conventional division applied here to judgments, a division into those based on objects and therefore objective, and judgments of taste based on feeling that refer only to a subject.[12] This subject-object bifurcation was fundamental for him as it was for much philosophy well into the twentieth century. And yet such a view, while sanctioned historically, is falsely based on the a priori assumption of a separation between subjectivity and objectivity that creates the problem of reconciling them in the interests of a consistent and integral philosophy. But rather than rendering the beautiful understandable, it creates more bifurcations, such as Kant's distinction between objective sensation, referring to our perception of an object of sense, and subjective sensation in the feeling of pleasure that gratifies us.[13] Kant was led to make still further divisions, such as among the pleasant, the beautiful, and the good, the first and last of which are based on an interest in an object, whereas the beautiful alone is disinterested.[14] This tripartite division has generated all sorts of difficulties. By separating the beautiful from the good, we are unable to deal effectively with the many instances in which moral and aesthetic concerns are intertwined, as when art has deleterious personal or social consequences, or when the arts are used, as they often are, for social or political purposes, as in propagandistic, religious, and civic art. Moreover, the claim that the beautiful alone is disinterested fails to account for the many beauties that derive from perfect functioning, as in sport, design, and architecture. And to separate the beautiful from the pleasant because the latter gratifies irrational animals also, whereas the beautiful pleases people as both rational and animal, rests on the presumption of a restrictive distribution of rationality and its necessity for judgments of taste. All animals, including human ones, judge with their noses and their feet. In point of empirical fact, common satisfaction does indeed occur but it is rarely if ever truly universal since many factors mediate the experience – personal history, cultural influence, education, and lead to divergent responses. At least Kant did not propose to place beauty under a concept, for "there can be no rule according to which anyone is forced to recognize anything as beautiful."[15] Kant could only acknowledge "that subjective unity of relation can only make itself known by means of sensation," leading, at best, to "the universal subjective validity of the satisfaction" in the representation of the object we call beautiful.[16] Yet non-universality does not mean abandoning taste to total subjectivity. The alternatives are not all or nothing. There are degrees of agreement in aesthetic judgment, indeed a whole spectrum of degrees, from virtually none – an anarchy of taste and opinion – to overwhelming accord. Instead of universality, which is never fully attained in practice, there is a high degree of generality, which even Kant acknowledged: "There emerge rules which are only general (like all empirical ones), and not universal, which latter the judgment of taste upon the beautiful undertakes or lays claim to."[17] Artistic innovation typically evokes wide disagreement, from avid partisanship to incredulity, fascination, and outrage. But such cognitive chaos usually settles down quickly and the normative landscape becomes clearer, with peaks in view that represent a coalescence of judgment. While not universal, this, however, is quite good enough for a coherent cultural landscape to emerge. Thus we have a canon, always changing its rules and boundaries as well as its membership but relatively stable nevertheless.[18] Yet Kant claimed that to call anything beautiful implies that one is speaking for everyone about something that is a property of things. Recognizing that an aesthetic judgment cannot be objectively universal, Kant acknowledged that such a judgment can have only subjective universal validity and so cannot be cognitive and thus logically compelling.[19] Kant may have believed that there is a logical need for universal judgments of taste but there is no aesthetic need. Purposiveness and necessity Kant's concern for universality underlies his discussion of purpose. His rationalistic aesthetics manifests itself in the ideal of beauty that derives from his Third Moment, "purposiveness without purpose," and from which this essay obtains its ironical title. For Kant, purposiveness is "the causality of a concept in respect of its object" in which form acts as a final cause (formal finalis).[20] The sensations of color or tone that gratify us are relegated to charm, not beauty, for it is form alone that allows universal communicability.[21] Similarly, Kant excluded emotion from beauty as merely the sensation of pleasantness. Beauty concerns form only, which leads to the possibility of universal communicability, that is, formal subjective purposiveness. We can see purposiveness as a manifestation of platonic form, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Kant's discussion of the rational idea "which makes the purposes of humanity, so far as they cannot be sensibly represented, the principle for judging of a figure through which, as their phenomenal effect, those purposes are revealed."[22] Such rationalistic conditions lead to the isolation of the aesthetic from the concourse of practical and social activities. Kant's concern for necessity supplies the fourth moment of his judgment of taste. Again, he cannot claim objective necessity in the concurrence of aesthetic judgment but he asserts that there is more of a moral necessity in that "we ought to act in a certain way." Such aesthetic judgment can only be considered exemplary, he states, since it is not an objective cognitive judgment.[23] We are left, then, with subjective necessity, and can only request the agreement of everyone.[24] Universal communicability is required for cognition and judgment to be possible, and from the universal communicability of a feeling Kant infers a common sense.[25] This common sense is then made into a rule for everyone and becomes the basis for subjective universality, necessary for everyone, "and thus can claim universal assent (as if it were objective)...."[26] The flimsy justification for universality offers even flimsier grounds for necessity. Conclusion Kant's aesthetics takes as its model the rationalistic objectivity and universality of scientific knowledge as it was understood in the eighteenth century. Science has abandoned that Enlightenment model for a less presumptive one, recognizing the determinative role of the investigator and, in the empirical sciences, the replacement of universality with magnitudes of probability. However, Kant's divisions between subject and object, sense and reason, pleasure and taste, and interest and disinterestedness can be challenged on both philosophical and empirical grounds. So, too, can the presumed theoretical desiderata of universality, disinterest, objectivity, and necessity. Quite a different picture emerges if one sets aside such divisive presumptions and external assumptions and instead regards humans as integral beings, in constant formative exchange with the conditions in which they live, so that there is no pure or even impure subjectivity but a constant reciprocal interchange as a situated, environmental process. However attractive the orderliness of a rational universe may be, it cannot be elaborated apart from the empirical conditions of human situatedness. The phenomena of aesthetics are resolutely empirical and any theory that does not confront them is basically flawed. Thus in the final analysis, Kantian aesthetics suffers from irrelevancy. It possesses the essential features of a good theory, scope and internal consistency, but it fails to adequately account for the data, an equally essential requirement: the practices and experiences of the arts, and the aesthetic encounters with nature and things not commonly intended primarily for aesthetic delight. Kantian aesthetics possesses the power and conviction of a monument but it is a lifeless and anachronistic monument that misconstrues aesthetic attention and artistic effort, supplanting perception and activity with structure. Thus we have here theory without application, an aesthetics without purpose. It has coherence and scope but does not respond to the phenomena of artistic practice and aesthetic appreciation. Purposiveness without purpose, indeed, applies equally to Kant's theory, in which the demands of the theory are the cause of its form. Kant's aesthetics proclaims a rational structure and it possesses formal rather than material truth. Like mathematics its beauty is tautological. Indeed, Kant's theory exemplifies his aesthetic. Its force is logical rather than empirical. But any theory of aesthetics must give priority to its empirical grounds, not only because of the etymology of the term 'aesthetics' but because of the data from which any account must be developed and against which it must be judged: the contextual data of aesthetic experience. Perhaps we need to work for the autonomy of aesthetics rather than the autonomy of art, toward an aesthetics that is free of the strictures of philosophical rationalism and that responds instead to the phenomena of art and aesthetic experience.[27] Instead of being an effete derivative from philosophical presuppositions, perhaps aesthetic theory could then contribute to the foundation of philosophy. That would constitute a meaningful change. "Aesthetics without Purpose," paper given at the XVI International Congress of Aesthetics, Rio de Janeiro, July 2004. [1] Nietzsche's comments on Kant are pungent, unequivocal, and worth quoting at length: 'Kant had thought he was doing an honor to art when, among the predicates of beauty, he gave prominence to those which flatter the intellect, i.e. impersonality and universality .... Kant, like all philosophers, instead of viewing the esthetic issue from the side of the artist, envisaged art and beauty solely from the "spectator's" point of view, and so ... smuggled the "spectator" into the concept of beauty. This would not have mattered too much had that "spectator" been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of beauty, as a strong personal experience, a wealth of powerful impressions, aspirations, surprises, and transports in the esthetic realm. But I am afraid the opposite has always been the case, and so we have got from these philosophers of beauty definitions which, like Kant's famous definition of beauty, are marred by a complete lack of esthetic sensibility. "That is beautiful," Kant proclaims, "which gives us disinterested pleasure." Disinterested! Compare with this definition that other one, framed by a real spectator and artist, Stendhal, who speaks of beauty as "a promise of happiness."... For him it is precisely the excitement of the will, of "interest," through beauty that matters.' Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), Third Essay, VI. See also Derrida's criticism in Truth in Painting. [2] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790, 1793), trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), pp. 37-38 (§1). [3] Ibid., §2, 3. [4] Ibid., §2, 3. [5] See A. Berleant, "Re-thinking Aesthetics," in Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIV ICA), Proceedings of the XIV International Congress of Aesthetics (Ljubljana, Slovenia, pp. 25-33; "The Historicity of Aesthetics I," The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol.26, No.2 (Spring 1986), 101-111; "The Historicity of Aesthetics II," The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol.26, No.3 (Summer 1986), 195-203. "Beyond Disinterestedness." The British Journal of Aesthetics, 34/3 (July 1994). These papers are reprinted in Re-thinking Aesthetics, Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming 2005). Arnold Berleant and Ronald Hepburn, "An Exchange on Disinterestedness," Contemporary Aesthetics, I (2003). See also Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press,1980). [6] Kant did, in fact, acknowledge beauty in things that embody a purpose, but this hinders the purity of the judgment of taste and is therefore considered dependent beauty, in contrast to free beauty. See Critique of Judgment, §16 ( esp. pp.65-67). [7] Ibid., §6. [8] Ibid., p. 68 (§17). [9] Ibid., p. 51. [10] Ibid., §1. [11] Ibid., pp. 50-51 (§ 8). [12] Ibid., §1. [13] Ibid., §3. [14] Ibid., §4. [15] Ibid., p.50 (§ 8). [16] Ibid., p. 53. [17] The full passage is as follows: "Thus we say of a man who knows how to entertain his guests with pleasures (of enjoyment for all the senses), so that they are all pleased, 'he has taste.' But here the universality is only taken comparatively; and there emerge rules which are only general (like all empirical ones), and not universal, which latter the judgment of taste upon the beautiful undertakes or lays claim to. It is a judgment in reference to sociability, so far as this rests on empirical rules." Ibid., pp. 47- 48 (§7). [18] Few seriously debate the merits of the collective opus of a master such as Bach or Shakespeare, although evaluations of specific works may differ. Still, even the most awesome talents are not consistent: Beethoven could write a Battle Symphony and P. B. Shelley these lines (cited somewhere by Cleanth Brooks and for which I am indebted to Paul Gray.) "I fall upon the thorns of life. [19] Ibid., §7, 8. [20] Ibid., p.55 (§10). [21] Ibid., pp.60, 68 (§ 14, 17). [22] The passage continues, in part: " ...The greatest purposiveness in the construction of the figure that would be available for the universal standard of aesthetical judgment upon each individual of this species – the image which is as it were designedly at the basis of nature's technique, to which only the whole race and not any isolated individual is adequate – this lies merely in the idea of the judging [subject]." Ibid., §17. [23] Ibid., §18. [24] Ibid., §19. [25] Ibid., §21. [26] Ibid., pp.76-77 (§22). [27] 'Up to the time of Kant, a philosophy of beauty always meant an attempt to reduce our aesthetic experience to an alien principle and to subject art to an alien jurisdiction. Kant in his Critique of Judgment was the first to give a clear and convincing proof of the autonomy of art.' Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), p. 178. Yet Kant sacrificed the autonomy of aesthetics to the autonomy of art. What we need is the converse. |