Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction

209 Pages·1997·11.8 MB·English

by  Salim Kemal (auth.)

KANT'S AESTHETIC THEORY
Also by Salim Kemal
KANT AND FINE ART
An Essay on Kant and the Philosophy of Fine Art and Culture
THE POETICS OF ALFARABI AND AVICENNA
THE LANGUAGE OF ART HISTORY (co-editor)
EXPLANATION AND VALUE IN THE ARTS (co-editor)
LANDSCAPE, NATURAL BEAUTY AND THE ARTS (co-editor)
NIETZSCHE, PHILOSOPHY AND THE ARTS (co-editor)
Kant's Aesthetic
Theory
An Introduction
SalimKemal
Second Edition
© Salim Kemal 1992, 1997
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First edition 1992
Reprinted 1993
Second edition 1997
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Contents
Preface to the Second Edition vi
Acknowledgements xi
1 The Background 1
The Kantian Background: the First Critique 2
Kant and his Predecessors 14
2 The ~alytic of the Beautiful' 23
Judgements and the Aesthetic 23
Analyzing Judgements of Taste 29
The Four Moments of the Analytic of the Beautiful' 33
3 The Second Moment 38
4 The Third and Fourth Moments 57
Some Implications of the Analytic 68
5 Judgements of Taste and Their Deduction 73
Kant's Deduction of Judgements of Taste 80
Other Writers on the Deduction 103
6 The Necessity of Judgements of Taste 116
7 The Context of Kant's Aesthetic Theory 152
Beauty and Bibliography 165
Notes 170
Index 194
Preface to the
Second Edition
A number of books and papers on Kant's aesthetic theory have been
published since the first appearance of the present book. This
preface will discuss some of them; but since the discussion
presupposes some familiarity with issues presented in the main text
of this book, it may be best to consider the preface after reading the
rest of the book.
John H. Zammito's book on The Genesis of Kant's 'Critique of
Judgement' (1992) reconstructs a history of this philosophical text,
presumably on the grounds that its history determines the text's
meaning and use. In keeping with this guiding conviction, Zammito
argues that the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement is structured by
epistemic and moral or practical turns. Kant's lectures on Logic
show that he had worked out the character of aesthetic judgements
some time before he produced a deduction justifying their validity.
By emphasizing the developments in his thought that occurred
between the lectures on Logic and the deduction in the third
Critique, Zammito maintains, he can explain something about the
manner in which Kant came to construct the latter text; and,
similarly, pointing out the moral and cultural engagements of
beauty and fine art shows how he expanded the germ of his theory
into a set of practical inter-relations. It underscores the 'fissures' that
make the text interesting to some post-structuralist readings of
Kant's aesthetic theory.
In the context of this kind of historical explanation of a text,
Zammito's book is a detailed study, containing extensive quotations,
eighty pages of notes, and fifty pages of bibliography and index. The
book correctly identifies a cognitive tum that led Kant to explore the
nature of reflective judgements and to incorporate his critique of
taste within a critique of judgement. It is right also that Kant
construes art as a part of culture, which he sees in terms of the
construction of a morally satisfactory order. Some of us have argued
for the latter association for some time; some may still resist it but it
is unlikely to go away. The book also contains an interesting account
of Kant's criticism of Spinozism.
vi
Preface to the Second Edition vii
Despite these strengths, and perhaps because its purpose is to
explain the origins of the structure of the Critique of Judgement, the
book fragments the text, leaving some of its philosophical issues
unresolved. In identifying cognitive and ethical turns, for example,
the author relates the latter to the nature and promise of art; he also
suggests that Kant's discussion of taste principally concerns the
nature of subjects' experience of beauty. We might expect that the
author will also explain the inter-relation between these distinctions,
especially as explaining how epistemic and moral turns shaped the
text raises but does not answer the same issue, but it is not clear that
the book provides this explanation; thereby it seems bound to leave
the Third Critique in a fragmented state. Similarly, the book explains
the nature of art by reference to a shared expressive and symbolic
structure of products of genius and the sublime. But, given Kant's
argument that the sublime does not need a deduction such as taste
claims, too close an association between genius and the sublime will
cost art its validity. And regardless of how detailed an account of
symbolism and sublimity their association yields, it does not show
how Kant can maintain that art and nature are expressive. A
comparable problem occurs with the phenomenology of subjective
consciousness and its concomitant conception of experience that the
author uses to present the development of Kant's thought from his
earlier works up to the Third Critique's conception of aesthetic
judgements: it does not clearly tally with Kant's own claim that the
experience of pleasure that constitutes aesthetic judgements is not a
distinctive kind of pleasure even though pleasure plays a distinctive
role in aesthetic judgements.
At another point the author contrasts Kant's Enlightenment
commitment to reason and universality with Herder's 'enthusiastic'
and particularistic participation in the Sturm und Orang. He refers to
Herder's Gott to explain the structure of parts of Kant's teleology
and opposes Kant's rational and universalistic preferences to
Herder's Ideen ziir Philosophie der Geschichte der Mensch/zeit. By so
limning the differences between Kant and Herder, the book seems to
obscure Kant's concerns with particulars, in which rationality and
universality gain purchase through judgements. In Section 40 of the
Critique of Judgement Kant says that subjects making judgements
must think for themselves, from the viewpoint of others, and
consistently. He does not describe the latter in terms of logic and a
rational universality but conceives it, rather, in terms of the first two
viii Preface to the Second Edition
maxims of judging. This suggests that he wants to relate it to the
particular engagements of human actors with their actual context
rather than to a merely formal imperative. This call for consistency
raises questions of how far reason can maintain a critical stance if its
measure is what is acceptable within, in the sense of being consistent
with the rules of behaviour of a particular social order. Kant's claim
would be that Herder fails to provide any kind of critical stance
when he values societies and social products for their uniqueness;
therefore, for Kant, Herder also fails to explain value because he
cannot take up a rational and universalistic perspective. Yet the
viewpoint he himself promotes as consistency falls short of a
rational universality. It is possible to work out a solution for Kant
that allows him to escape the problem that afflicts Herder. But if the
contrast between the two thinkers is cast as an opposition between
the particularist villain and the universalist hero, it becomes difficult
to give their due to the issues of consistency and engagement with
particulars as they appear in Kant's work. Yet surely a history of the
text should be able to clarify these philosophical aspects of the
nature and kinds of judgements as they appear in the published text,
where Kant resolves the fissures that may have been evident in its
composition. An over-emphasis on the process of its construction
fails to do justice to the theory presented in the text.
In his book on Kant and the Experience of Freedom (1993), Paul
Guyer now maintains that Kant does seek to find a relation between
aesthetic and moral value - indeed, he is tempted to say that this
was Kant's principal reason for writing the Third Critique. The
chapter in which the author examines crucial features of the relation
more or less reproduces his paper on 'Feeling and Freedom: Kant on
aesthetics and morality', which I have considered at pp. 184, 187-8,
189-93, and so does not need to be repeated here.
There are many other aspects of this book's tendentious readings
of Kant that need comment, though it may be most useful for this
preface to restrict itself to one issue: the distinction and relation
between fine art and natural beauty. Guyer's explanation seems to
assume that the 'Analytic of the Beautiful' is cast in terms of natural
beauty. This assumption is not clearly warranted. Kant uses 'nature'
in at least three ways: to denote objects which we experience
according to the categories, to denote the complex and systematic
order of our knowledge of Nature, and sometimes to contrast with
grace or other divine actions. His explanations of the nature of
Preface to the Second Edition ix
beauty in the 'Analytic of the Beautiful' in the Critique of Judgement
are principally in terms of the first use, which covers the objects of
our experience. This would include both natural beauty and fine art,
since both are objects of experience, subject to the categories, and
capable of being explained by reference to their physical properties.
This sense of nature as denoting objects of experience allows Kant's
explanation of our experience of beautiful objects in nature to apply
to 'natural' objects, whose occurrence we explain by pointing to the
systematic order of our knowledge of Nature, and those of fine art,
whose occurrence we explain by reference to the actions of some
agent. Neither of them can make a greater claim to be the principal
model for Kant's earlier considerations of beauty, and he can say of
beauty generally that 'in the judgment of mere taste neither [natural
beauty nor fine art] could vie for superiority over the other.' (KDU,
Section 42, 300). In addition, despite this similarity between
beautiful objects, there are differences between fine art and natural
beauty that become important to Kant's theory when it turns to
consider the origins of the objects. In this context we would identify
objects either as natural beauty or as fine art by pointing to their
'construction' either in the order of our knowledge of nature or
through the actions of human agents. And, as Chapter 6 makes clear,
the distinctive origins of objects allow our experience of them to
carry different interests.
Guyer's account of natural beauty does not address these
distinctions and the passages in the Critique of Judgement, such as the
one cited in the last paragraph, where Kant sets out further details
of his theory. A useful corrective to his misreading of 'nature' is to be
found in 'Art, nature and purposiveness in Kant's aesthetic theory'
by Theodore Gracyk, in Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant
Congress, edited by Hoke Robinson (1995). Further, when in his book
Guyer criticizes an account of the relation between natural beauty
and fine art that I have given elsewhere, then, perhaps because he
assumes that natural beauty is the fundamental model for aesthetic
judgements, he misconstrues my explanation of the distinctive
interests and values we ascribe to fine art and to natural beauty: he
mistakenly takes it to be an argument for the absolute superiority of
fine art. Consequently his criticisms do not reach their target.
Two other books with significant sections on the Critique of
Aesthetic Judgement are J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art (1992) and
J. Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus (1993). Neither book is a