Kant, Critique of Judgment

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Kant, Critique of Judgment 1 Critique of Judgment Karsten Harries Kant, Critique of Judgment Seminar Notes Fall Semester 2016 Yale University 2 Critique of Judgment Contents 1. Introduction 3 2. Baumgarten and the Birth of Aesthetics 17 3. Kant's Critique of Judgment — Preface and Introduction 32 4. Kant's Critique of Empiricism 50 5. Kant's Critique of Rationalism 64 6. The Sublime 83 7. Taste as a Sensus Communis 99 8. Taste, Art, and Genius 117 9. The Division of the Fine Arts 133 10. The Beautiful as Symbol of the Good 149 11. The Incomprehensibility of Nature 161 12. Dialectic of Teleological Judgment 172 13. Teleology Between Science and Theology 189 3 Critique of Judgment 1. Introduction 1 To begin with a few words about what concerns me in this seminar: for many years I have been preoccupied with the question of the legitimacy, but also the limits of the understanding of reality presupposed by our science and technology.1 That understanding presides over our modern age, which Heidegger would have us understand as “The Age of the World Picture.”2 I look to art, which has been important to me as long as I can remember, as a way of opening windows or doors in this world picture, i.e. in the world building objectifying reason has raised. Art so understood possesses an ontological significance. It points to a different understanding of reality. In this connection Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”3 and Kant’s Critique of Judgment have become important to me. But do I not expect too much of art when I give it thus an ontological significance and expect it to lead us beyond the understanding of reality presupposed by our science? Was it not precisely Kant, who in the Critique of Judgment laid the foundation for the modern understanding of beauty and more fundamentally of the aesthetic object, and did so in a way that discourages all attempts to attribute to art an ontological significance? Was it not Kant, as for instance the critic Clement Greenberg claimed, who laid the foundation for that aesthetic approach to art that has dominated both the theory and practice of modern art and architecture? As we shall see, there is good reason for such a judgment. But as we shall also see: there is also good reason to question it. 1 See Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966). Trans. Robert M. Wallace, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). Also Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). 2 Martin Heidegger, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” in Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), pp. 75-113. “The Age of the World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 115-154. 3 See Karsten Harries, Art Matters: A Critical Commentary on Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art (New York: Springer, 2009) 4 Critique of Judgment What is at issue is hinted at by some remarks Heidegger makes in the Epilogue to the Origin of the Work of Art: Almost from the time when specialized thinking about art and the artist began, this thought was called aesthetic. Aesthetics takes the work of art as an object, the object of aisthesis, of sensuous apprehension in the wide sense. Today we call this apprehension experience. The way in which man experiences art is supposed to give information about its nature. Experience is the source that is standard not only for art appreciation and enjoyment, but also for artistic creation. Everything is an experience. Yet perhaps experience is the element in which art dies. This dying occurs so slowly that it takes a few centuries.4 In thinking this possibility Heidegger gestures beyond it. The “Origin of the Work of Art” most definitely does not want to be understood as a work in aesthetics. It is thus striking how quickly Heidegger moves in that essay from a discussion of art to a consideration of the question: what is a thing? Art and ontology here turn out to be inseparably intertwined. But to do justice to their relationship we have to free our understanding of art from aesthetics. To do so with some rigor we have to gain a more adequate understanding of “aesthetics.” Just because Kant (1724–1804) would appear to give such powerful support to the aesthetic approach, a critical reading of the Critique of Judgment can help us to do so. In gesturing beyond aesthetics, Heidegger also gestures beyond modernity, beyond the ruling understanding of reality. What I attempt to do in this seminar is something similar. As should become clearer in subsequent sessions: the aesthetic approach and modernity belong together. One point of this seminar is to examine the nature of this relationship. 2 4 Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5, p. 65; “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Truth, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 79. 5 Critique of Judgment But let me say a bit more about what I understand by an aesthetic approach to beauty and to art. Such an approach and the rise of philosophical aesthetics belong together. We can point to the Wolff student Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) as the founder of philosophical aesthetics, more precisely to his dissertation, Meditationes de nonnullis ad poema pertinentbus, and to a specific year, 1735. He followed this up with his Aesthetica, which appeared in 1750. To call him the founder of aesthetics may be overdoing things just a bit, but it is to Baumgarten, at any rate, that we owe the word "aesthetics." In the next session we shall therefore take a closer look at Baumgarten’s dissertation, where that word makes a first appearance. The influence of Baumgarten on Kant will, I trust, become obvious in the course of this seminar. Without some understanding of Baumgarten, some key passages in The Critique of Judgment remain quite obscure. When I call Baumgarten the founder of aesthetics I am distinguishing aesthetics from the philosophy of art. I realize that the two are often taken as synonyms, but I find it useful to draw a distinction. But I should give a bit more definition to what I mean by "aesthetics." In the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment Kant distinguishes two rather different meanings of "aesthetic." The expression, aesthetic way of presenting, is quite unambiguous, if we mean by it that the presentation is referred to an object, as appearance, to [give rise to] cognition of that object. For here the term aesthetic means that the form of sensibility ([i.e.,] how the subject is affected) attaches necessarily to the presentation, so that this form is inevitably transferred to the object (though to the object only as phenomenon). This is why it was possible to have a transcendental aesthetic, as a science pertaining to the cognitive powers. However, for a long time now it has become customary to call a way of presenting aesthetic, i.e. sensible, in a different meaning of the term as well, where this means that that the 6 Critique of Judgment presentation is referred, not to the cognitive power, but to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.5 “Aesthetic” indicates, for one, what has to do with sensibility. Kant’s transcendental aesthetic thus investigates space and time as the forms of sensibility, the necessary presuppositions of all possible experience. “Aesthetic” is understood here as belonging to the object qua phenomenon. From this meaning of aesthetic we have to distinguish a second, where by means of the aesthetic mode of representation the represented is not related to the faculty of knowledge, but to the faculty of pleasure and pain. It is this second sense that is presupposed by the aesthetic approach. Aesthetic judgment involves a reflective movement. Reflective here suggests a looking back from the beautiful object to the kind of experience it evokes. The philosophy of art understood as aesthetics has its foundation in a more subjective approach to art that tends to view the work of art first of all as an occasion for a certain kind of pleasant experience. What is enjoyed is finally not really the work of art, but the occasioned experience or state of mind, a state of mind that Kant, as we shall see, will characterize, when the aesthetic judgment is a judgment of beauty, as the harmonious interplay of understanding and imagination. Not every aesthetic judgment need be a judgment of beauty. The judgment of the sublime is also an aesthetic judgment. So is the judgment of the interesting. I shall have more to say about these aesthetic categories and their significance. Here I want to underscore the reflective turn back to the self. Aesthetic pleasure is a kind of self-enjoyment. This understanding of the aesthetic invites us to look back to Leon Battista Alberti, who in On Painting writes: I say among friends that Narcissus who was changed into a flower, according to the poets, was the inventor of painting. Since painting is already the flower of every art, the story of Narcissus is most to the point. What else can you call 5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. 409-41). Subsequent references are to this edition. 7 Critique of Judgment painting, but a similar embracing with art of what is presented on the surface of the water in the fountain.6 That passage, which suggests that art has its foundation in narcissism, invites further exploration.
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