Kant on the fine arts: A reply to a social practices objection (original) (raw)

The Moral Value of Artistic Beauty in Kant

In § 42 of the third Critique, ‘On the intellectual interest in the beautiful,’ Kant claims that it is ‘always the mark of a good soul’ (5:298) to take an ‘immediate interest’ in natural beauty because it indicates a moral interest in harmony between nature and moral freedom. In the same pages, however, he denies the possibility of a similarly morally significant interest in artistic beauty. This paper argues that according to his own theory of fine art Kant ought not to deny this value to artistic beauty. In the pages that immediately follow his discussion of immediate interest Kant defines artistic beauty as the joint product of a ‘natural gift’ of genius and a freely exercised discipline of skill and taste. This commits him to the claim that artistic beauty embodies and expresses a harmony between nature and freedom in the productive act of a human being, and thus to the claim that one can take an immediate and morally significant interest in artistic beauty, just as much as in natural beauty.

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.

How to judge a work of art today? Contemporary echoes of Kantian aesthetics

How to judge a work of art? This question, already present in the Critique of the Power of Judgment by Immanuel Kant, was updated in France in the early 1990s (thus more or less two centuries later), when the Esprit and Télérama journals dedicated some issues to what was called a " crisis " in contemporary art, namely the supposed loss of normative criteria allowing one to evaluate artworks. Following their publication, several French philosophers – among which Marc Jimenez, Yves Michaud, Gérard Genette, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, and Rainer Rochlitz – took part in a public debate on judgment, which more or less explicitly centered on the third Critique, in terms similar to those employed by Kant himself in 1790. Underlining the specificity of this debate, the present paper intends to (re)examine the issue of the judgment on works of art, by presenting and responding to two types of relativism and establishing a dialogue between Kantian aesthetics and contemporary philosophical discourses. Comment juger une oeuvre d'art ? Cette question, déjà présente dans la Critique de la faculté de juger d'Emmanuel Kant, fut réactualisée en France au début des années 1990 (soit près de deux siècles plus tard) quand les revues Esprit et Télérama consacrèrent plusieurs de leurs numéros à ce qui fut appelé une « crise » de l'art contemporain, soit la perte supposée de repères normatifs pour juger les oeuvres. Suite à ces publications, plusieurs philosophes français – parmi lesquels Marc Jimenez, Yves Michaud, Gérard Genette, Jean-Marie Schaeffer et Rainer Rochlitz – prirent part à un débat public sur le jugement, qui se concentra plus ou moins explicitement sur la troisième Critique, en des termes proches de ceux employés par Kant lui-même en 1790. En soulignant la spécificité de ce débat, cet article entend (ré)examiner la question du jugement sur les oeuvres d'art, en présentant et en répondant à deux types de relativisme et en établissant un dialogue entre l'esthétique kantienne et les discours philosophiques contemporains.

A Surfeit of Thinking: Kant’s Aesthetic Ideas

The paper offers an interpretation of the notion of "aesthetic ideas" in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment and shows how it exceeds the conceptions of art as imitation (mimesis) and as expression.

Contemporary echoes of Kantian aesthetics

In the early 1990s, the Esprit and Télérama journals dedicated several issues to what was called a “crisis” in contemporary art , namely the supposed loss of normative criteria allowing one to judge and evaluate works of art. Following their publication, several French philosophers – among which Marc Jimenez, Jean-Pierre Cometti, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Gérard Genette, Yves Michaud and Rainer Rochlitz – took part in a public debate which more or less explicitly centered around the Critique of Judgment, in terms similar to those employed by Kant himself in 1790. Indeed, the art world has appeared divided since then: one side (which includes, among others, Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Gérard Genette ) argues that judgment can only be subjective (left to each individual’s appreciation), while the other side (on which Rainer Rochlitz can notably be found) contends that judgment can be objective (by resting on impartial properties or criteria). Not only do these two antagonistic positions correspond respectively to the thesis and antithesis of the Kantian antinomy relative to the judgment of taste , they also exclude what allowed Kant to resolve this apparent aporia: the notion of common sense. A detailed analysis of the aforementioned positions nevertheless calls for a complexification of this somewhat schematic description of the current debate. Other philosophical legacies deserve to be recognized and examined; a semiotic study of the main expressions used (“contemporary art”, “aesthetic judgment”, “artistic criteria”) also sheds light on linguistic differences – which can contribute to the distortion of the debate and to the caricaturing of the positions at hand; contemporary art, finally, has redefined the debate’s fundamental terms, since it has questioned several notions and definitions which seemed to be given until recently – starting with the very idea of “work of art”. If, in its general outline, the current debate therefore can be apprehended through the Kantian treatment of the issue of the aesthetic judgment, it is not limited to his framework of analysis, and those convergences and divergences will be highlighted here. This presentation will therefore reexamine the issue of the judgment of works of art, by challenging Kantian aesthetics through contemporary artistic philosophical discourses and practices.

Reflective and Non-reflective Aesthetic Ideas in Kant's Theory of Art

The aim of this paper is to resolve some of the inconsistencies within Kant's theory of aesthetic ideas that have been left unaddressed by previous interpretations. Specifically, Kant's text appears to be imbued with the following two tensions. First, there appears to be a conflict between his commitment to the view that mere sensations cannot function as vehicles for the communication of aesthetic ideas and his claim that musical tones, on account of being mere sensations, can express aesthetic ideas. Second, his description of musical form as consisting of a play of aesthetic ideas that leave behind no thoughts appears to be incongruous with his formulation of aesthetic ideas as free imaginative representations that contain a wealth of thoughts and meanings. If what it means to express aesthetic ideas is precisely to stimulate much thinking, then how can an object exist that expresses aesthetic ideas, but without leaving any thoughts behind? I attempt to resolve these two perceived tensions by proposing a distinction between reflective and non-reflective aesthetic ideas communicated by form and mere sensations respectively.

Communicative Implications of Kant’s Aesthetic Theory

In recent discussions of aesthetic theory, critics who raise social, cultural, and political concerns have issued important challenges to the Kantian legacy. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) continues to be widely regarded as one of the founding documents of modern aesthetic theory. But the arguments he laid out in that notoriously enigmatic work remain controversial on a variety of fronts. One of those arguments concerns his distinction between pleasures that are beautiful and those that are agreeable. According to Kant’s de nition, what makes experiences of the beautiful special is that they have a potentially communicable universal validity. By contrast, pleasures that are merely agreeable are incommunicable and remain con ned to private sensation. Philosophers have found this distinc- tion problematic for a variety of reasons. eir detailed commentaries have examined the intricate logical and conceptual di culties that Kant’s theory raises (see Allison 2001; Guyer 1982, 1997, 2002; Kalar 2000; Wenzel 2005). On another front, sociologists and cultural critics—whom I will broadly refer to as “social critics”—typically raise concerns about the theory’s hidden social implications (Bourdieu 1984; Eagleton 1990; Smith 1988; Shumway 2005). Speci cally, they question Kant’s proposal that judgments about the beautiful ought to have universal validity. Taking an external standpoint, they tend to regard aesthetic judgments either as the peculiar habits of speci c social classes, or as badges of hierarchical distinction, or as weapons in symbolic struggles for cultural dominance. To suggest why Kant’s theory is worth revisiting in the wake of such critiques, the following analysis defends his theoretical e ort to distinguish the experience of the beautiful from that of the agreeable. is feature of his aesthetic theory highlights an alternative to the cognitive and practical concerns that social critics emphasize. In particular, I indicate how Kant’s aesthetic theory o ers directions for the e ort to explain how aesthetic experience promotes communicative sociability. By emphasizing this theme, I hope to supplement the rival emphasis that social critics place on the Kantian legacy’s elitist undercurrents. Social critiques characteristi- cally overlook the a ective type of sociability to which aesthetic experience gives rise. is oversight occurs because those critiques tend to privilege the theoretical and practical dimensions of communication. In the process, they disregard the special types of validity claims that are unique to aes- thetic discourse. Following the lead of his academic precursors Meier and Baumgarten, Kant tried to de ne a possible third mental “faculty” that dif- fers from cognitive and practical reason (see Henrich 1992, 31–36). But the di culty of de ning this third faculty, much less determining its existence, continues to vex both philosophers and communication theorists.