Art and Knowledge: Kant’s Perspective (original) (raw)
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Art and knowledge in Kant's aesthetics
Working Papers in Art & Design, 2002
The growth of interest in art and design as subjects of academic research has led to questions regarding the status of art as knowledge, for example, whether art can be quantified as a form of knowledge or whether it should have to be quantified as such. In looking at how studio-based practice can be seen as a form of research, I take the view that studio practice is an activity that is not wholly removed from those other empirically- or theoretically-generated areas of research that are, so to speak, the "home" of the conventional Ph.D. In supporting this view, I am essentially challenging the two distinctions which have mapped the history of thought in the west from the pre-Socratics to the present. These are the distinctions between the mental and the physical, and between the subjective and the objective. The work to show that these binaries are not radical opposites but actually interwoven terms begins in the eighteenth century with Immanuel Kant. Kant’s philosophy helps us to establish aesthetic judgement as a form of knowledge because it shows how art and design are those aspects of human enquiry which invite us or motivate us to reassess the way we apply our categories to the world. I outline the key arguments from Kant’s critical philosophy which allow him to orient aesthetics as a form of knowledge, and show how aesthetic judgements made by the artist-researcher about their work can contribute to the theoretical basis of their research and, therefore, to the epistemic status of their practice.
Aesthetic Understanding and Epistemic Agency in Art
Disputatio
Recently, cognitivist accounts about art have come under pressure to provide stronger arguments for the view that artworks can yield genuine insight and understanding. In Gregory Currie’s Imagining and Knowing: Learning from Fiction, for example, a convincing case is laid out to the effect that any knowledge gained from engaging with art must “be judged by the very standards that are used in assessing the claim of science to do the same” (Currie 2020: 8) if indeed it is to count as knowledge. Cognitivists must thus rally to provide sturdier grounds for their view. The revived interest in this philosophical discussion targets not only the concept of knowledge at the heart of cognitivist and anti-cognitivist debate, but also highlights a more specific question about how, exactly, some artworks can (arguably) afford cognitive import and change how we think about the world, ourselves and the many events, persons and situations we encounter. This paper seeks to explore some of the ways i...
Art, Knowledge, and Reflexivity
Artnodes
The essay addresses the manifold relationships between art and research under the perspective of the artsâ own way of thinking, separating artistic knowledge-production from science. While in science âresearchâ means a goal-guided action that has the purpose of developing truth, in the arts research is related to an open âsearchâ without being bound to gaining results. Obviously, art works neither with concepts nor with propositions, nor does it need any theory or general model or ways of verifying theses and making them valid. There is also no method to follow, nor does art depend on public justifications through critique. Rather, art is based in practices that let something appear and make it perceivable, and by doing so producing new insights. Hence, artistic cognition and recognition it not based in logic, but in certain non-discursive media-âlanguagesâ which allow for non-propositional reflections on their own structure and limitations, using actions, performances...
One of the main debates in current aesthetics and philosophy of art concerns the question whether we can learn anything from art. On one hand, cognitivists argue that art works are an important source of knowledge, either of propositional, conceptual, moral or experiential knowledge (i.e. knowledge what-it-is-like). On the other hand, non-cognitivists deny that art can give us any knowledge, at least knowledge that is non-trivial (not known before the work appears) and unique (cannot be obtained by other means). The purpose of art, anti-cognitivists argue, lies in the development and imaginative realization of the theme, rather than in the theme itself and what it communicates. That is, what matters in art is the organization and structure of elements (of characters, events and situations) and how these elements cohere into a unified pattern or aesthetic form, producing thereby an aesthetic experience of pleasure or displeasure. Both positions have their own merits. Cognitivists are right in claiming that there is much to an art work than just being pleasing to the eye (i.e. producing aesthetic pleasure). We often praise works of art for their insightfulness, while we criticize other works for being shallow and superficial. Thus, it appears that our vocabulary of artistic appraisal is charged with cognitive value terms. On the other hand, also anti-cognitivists make a good point. The kind of knowledge that art is supposed to give is something that can be gained by other means. But if knowledge can be gained by non-artistic means then what is so special about cognitive value of art? It appears that the only way to defend the position that art has a unique cognitive value depends first on arguing that aesthetic experience, essential to artworks, is cognitive. This is a difficult task to begin with considering that aesthetic value has traditionally been distinguished from cognitive value based on the assumption that aesthetic experience is emotional (depending on the feeling of pleasure or displeasure) and that feelings are essentially non-cognitive. In what follows, I aim to express a critique of this view and to show that aesthetic feelings of pleasure (beauty) and displeasure (ugliness) have inherent cognitive aspirations. I reconcile cognitive and anti-cognitive positions by claiming that aesthetic value is a species of cognitive value and thus art works can have a distinctive cognitive value. I intent to show that apprehension of a meaning in an art work is an aesthetic apprehension, that is, meaning is apprehended through the feeling of pleasure or displeasure. I develop my proposal in light of Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas put forward in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.
Can Art Provide Knowledge? On the Cognitive Value of Images
New Theories, 2022
The question of the relationship between art and knowledge and whether and in what sense art can be regarded as a form of knowledge has been addressed from different perspectives but it still does not have secure grounds in contemporary aesthetics. The argument involves rather skeptical attitudes – from Plato to Kant and throughout the dominance of positivist tradition in Western philosophy in the first half of the 20th century – as well as cognitivist approaches, such as James O. Young’s view of art as a source of knowledge, which has the capacity to provide both propositional and practical knowledge. The “linguistic turn” in contemporary thought and the ensued iconization of language in western culture led to the identification of cognitive potential with discourse, resulting in inequitable disregard of sensory awareness and turning the human experiences and cognition into the product of language. The submission of iconicity to semantics and reducing the pictorial to interpretable text without sensory significance led to the questioning of the cognitive aspect of visuality. The hermeneutical perspective, drawing upon Michael Polanyi’s view of all knowledge as established in relation to tacit thought, considers art as embodying tacit knowledge and emphasizes the importance of the inherent inexhaustibility of meaning in art that can contribute to the inquiry. Recognizing that knowledge is not always reducible to language, such perspective liberates knowledge from the dominance of the propositional and provides further insights for the phenomenology of art as a creative practice. No doubt that the ways of representation in arts are fundamentally different from those in the sciences and both realms contribute to knowledge in radically different ways. However, while the ways to explicate how art can enhance the faculty of judgment and practical knowledge might be relatively obvious in literary works, the question of how visual works can provide the same kinds of knowledge is more ambiguous. Consequently, the question of epistemic potential of visual representation is even more challenging. Image as a system constructed according to the immanent laws with its own iconic sense - which determines its difference from reality as well as from discourse – challenges perception, because a conceptual, abstract tendency of perception is incompatible with a sensual particularity of the image (Boehm). At the same time, it allows a multiplicity of experience made possible by simultaneity inherent in the image provided that we understand the act of seeing as comprising simultaneity and consecutiveness as well as the unconscious, pre-conceptual processes. It is the expressive potential of the pictorial and the specificity of art as an experiential and perceptual modality embodying representational meanings that distinguishes it as a distinctive form of knowledge. In an endeavor to defy the approach of semiotics and the epistemology of science that insist on amodality of knowledge and its dependence on discursive context, this paper rejects the reducibility of knowledge to language and embraces the approach that advocates „disestablishing the view of cognition as dominantly and aggressively linguistic“ (Stafford). Keywords: Visual art; pictorial representation; art and knowledge; aesthetic cognitivism.
An epistemology of art has seemed problematic mainly because of arguments claiming that an essential element of a theory of knowledge, truth, has no place in aesthetic contexts. For, if it is objectively true that something is beautiful, it seems to follow that the predicate " is beautiful " expresses a property – a view asserted by Plato but denied by Hume and Kant. But then, if the belief that something is beautiful is not objectively true, we cannot be said to know that something is beautiful and the path to an epistemology of art is effectively blocked. The article places the existence aesthetic properties in the proper context; presents a logically correct argument for the existence of such properties; identifies strategies for responding to this argument; explains why objections by Hume, Kant, and several other philosophers fail; and sketches a realization account of beauty influenced by Hogarth.