Posts Tagged ‘Critique of Judgment’

Feb
03
2012

“Modernist Painting” by Clement Greenberg

THE MODERNISM OF MODERNIST PAINTING, 1960/1 

Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting,” originally given as a radio broadcast in 1916 for the Voice of America’s “Forum Lectures,” was printed in 1961 in the Arts Yearbook 4 of the same year, reprinted in 1965, ’66, ‘74, ’78, and 1982.   The article achieved a canonical status and served as one of the definitive statements of formalism as a mode of visual analysis and of formalism as a critical stance, and possibly, of formalism as a mode of making art.   In his 1961 essay on “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) defined “Modernism” as the period (in art) roughly from the mid-1850s to his present that displayed a self-critical tendency in the arts.

Greenberg considered Immanuel  Kant the first Modernist.  The essence of Kant’s thesis was the employment of the characteristic “methods” of the discipline to “criticize the discipline itself.”  According to Greenberg, Kant used logic to establish “the limits of logic.”  The Modernist goal of self-criticism grows out of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment philosophical system which was based upon the belief in the power of rational thought and human reason. “Critique,” as a method, analyzes from the inside, from within the object being examined and does not judge from the outside, according to external criteria.

Painting must analyze itself to discover its inherent properties. Painting, according to Enlightenment methodology, must be interrogated according to its inherent purposes.  The key term here would be “inherent,” for analyzing an object according to its essential definition must preclude bringing forward any non-essential or external criteria. In other words, a painting telling a “good story” is not necessarily a good painting.   In this article, Greenberg carries on his attempt to “save” and to define “high art,” and “Modernist Painting” of 1960 can be compared to “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” of 1939.  Two decades had passed and Greenberg had progressed from being an up-and-coming art writer to being the arbiter of fine arts in New York, enjoying a truly hegemonic position.  His crusade was all the more urgent in 1961, as territory of the avant-garde was being invaded by popular culture and the forces of disrule, exemplified by Neo-Dada and Pop Art and Fluxus.  Greenberg had also shifted his political position, from being an intellectual Marxist, to being a Kantian formalist, a far safer situation which removes the critic and art from current cultural considerations.

Greenberg stated that art can “save” itself from being entertainment by demonstrating that the experience it provides is “unobtainable from any other source.” It is the task of art to demonstrate that which is “unique” and “irreducible”, particular or peculiar to art and that which determines the operation peculiar and exclusive to itself.  All effects borrowed from any other medium must be eliminated, rendering the art form pure.  “Purity” becomes a guarantee of “quality” and “independence” of avant-garde art.  All extrinsic effects should be eliminated from painting.

One could say that it is not the essential to the definition of a painting that it re-create the world realistically.  Today, that role can be fulfilled by photography or film.  Film and theater are defined by storytelling and narrative, enhanced by illusions of everyday reality.  Following Greenberg’s line of reasoning, realism and story telling and illusionism should be eliminated from painting.   For Greenberg, art was used to call attention to art.  Clement Greenberg logically worked out the limitations and peculiarities of painting, which are a flat surface, the shape of the support and the properties of the pigment. These physical and material limiting conditions became positive factors.

Once suppressed by artists through under-painting and glazing, these material aspects of painting were now acknowledged by Modernist painters.  Because he appeared to have considered and taken into account the limitations of painting as the application of paint upon a flat surface, or a stretched canvas, Édouard Manet is designated by Greenberg as the first Modernist artist.  Manet “declared the surface;” his follower, Paul Cézanne, fit the drawing and design into the rectangle of the painting.  In Modernist painting, the spectator is made aware of the flatness and sees the picture first, before noting the content.

Modernist painting abandoned the principle of representation of Renaissance illusionistic space inhabited by three-dimensional objects, giving the effect of looking through the canvas into a world beyond. Modernist painting resists the sculptural, which is suppressed or expelled.  The question is that of a purely optical experience.  With Greenberg, flatness alone is unique to painting.  For this critic, “art” carries within itself its own teleology.  As art seeks self-definition and determines its own uniqueness, it becomes more pure, more reductive in its means.  More is eliminated—subject matter, content, figuration, illusionism, narrative—and art becomes independent, detached, and non-objective, that is, abstract.  Content becomes completely dissolved into form.  Greenberg, in looking back selectively at the history of art, presented a map of progress and evolution of painting, away from representation and toward purity, abstraction, reductiveness; to flatness, to pure color, to simple forms that reflected the shape of the surface.

The essay noted that Modernism “resists sculpture” or three-dimensionality and reminded the reader that this “resistance” was by no mean recent. The critic pointed to Jacques-Louis David as an example of an artist whose work was flat and surface based.  Greenberg insisted that the scientific method justified the demand that painting (and art) limit itself to “what is given in visual experience.”   Greenberg equated the artist to the scientists, both of whom “test” and experiment.  The equation of art with science, replaces his earlier equation of the avant-garde with politics:  “…a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture.”  One can “only look” at a work of visual art, which is discernible only to the “eye.”  Poetry is “literary,” art is not and should not attempt to be, for as Greenberg reminded us, any translation of the literary into the visual “loses” the literary qualities.

Like Avant-garde and Kitsch, Modernist Painting, had a subtext, Enlightenment philosophy, especially that of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.  The 1939 article concerned itself with aesthetics but more with the “experience” of the aesthetic.  In Avant-garde and Kitsch, it is possible to believe that Greenberg was writing of the experience of the aesthetic in terms of the placement of art in the culture, in other words, it is not so much the “how” of the experience but of the “where” of the aesthetic.  In Modernist Painting, the experience of the aesthetic is located in the realm of the how one looks at a work of art.

The proper attitude of the spectator was important to Kant who recommended a posture of detachment from personal desire and indifference to artistic content in search of a universal means of judging the efficacy of art.  The Enlightenment philosophy cherished the idea of the universal or the absolute, for some kind of standard had to be erected to replace the all-knowing presence of the now-banished God.  Kant was not interested in defining what “art” was but in establishing the ground for the judgment of art.  Working in the new philosophical field, aesthetics, Kant attempted to establish the epistemology of art, based, not in individual works but in a method of knowledge.

Greenberg’s understanding of Kant led him to use the methodology of critique but the critic took “critique” in a rather different direction.  Writing two centuries after the German philosopher, Greenberg looked backwards in time and implied another favorite Enlightenment idea, that of progress.  Modernist art, if one understands the essay correctly, seems to “progress” and move forward in time, away from manifestations of extrinsic properties and towards a purity of means.  “Modernist art develops out of the past without gap or break, and wherever it ends up, it will never stop being intelligible in terms of the continuity of art.”

The ground has shifted away from a means of judgment (Kant) to a theory of the evolution of art along telelogical lines with a goal in mind: purity.  Even though as Greenberg pointed out, “The first mark made on the canvas destroys its virtual flatness,” purity seems to imply a historical rejection of representation and a validation of abstraction. The point of noting Greenberg’s development of Kantian theory and its application toward Modernist Painting is that, without the notion of progress, the critic’s theory of artistic development would have to include some of the masters of flatness, such as William Bourguereau and some of the masters of the surface such as Thomas Kincaide, both of whom Greenberg would have excluded from the family tree of modernism.

While Kant would at least judge these two artists (and perhaps find them wanting), Greenberg seems to imply a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde and establish ground for exclusion of the unworthy. The oppositions of the dialectic are implied: those who did not follow the path of Modernist reductionism were, like dinosaurs, left behind.  If one reads in a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde, even if only through the names of the canonical artists Greenberg mentioned and thought his previous articles, then the conflation between the continuity of art and the avant-garde, which supposedly breaks with the past, becomes rather awkward.     Indeed, Greenberg does not mention the avant-garde, he uses the term “authentic art,” instead.

“Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity.  Art is, among many other things, continuity.  Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as modernist art would be impossible,” Greenberg stated.

However, as pointed out in his earlier work, Greenberg refused to connect the avant-garde with a rejection of the past: “…the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to ‘experiment’ but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving…” (Greenberg’s italics).  The underlying continuity of the two articles can be seen in the precursor remark in the 1939 writing on the role of the avant-garde artist: “’Art for art’s sake’ and ‘pure poetry’ appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like the plague.” Given the openness of the construction of this essay and the plurality of texts mobilized by Greenberg, it is no wonder that “Modernist Painting” lent itself to so many causes, whether as a rallying point or as a bête noir.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.   Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Mar
12
2010

Kant, the Artist, and Artistic Freedom

Kant,  the Artist and Artistic Freedom

The modern artist of the Nineteenth Century faced an aesthetic landscape that was quite different compared to that of the previous century.  The definition of “art” in the Eighteenth Century was that, which was sanctioned by the Church, the State or the aristocracy.  The definition of the “artist” in the Eighteenth Century was a trained technician who produced commissioned objects for these powers.  The definition of “subject matter” or “content” in a work of art was that which had been approved of by the client or patron.   Within these definitions of “art” and “artist” the cultural producer had a certain freedom of interpretation, but, ultimately, most artists were answerable to those who controlled the sites for art.

By the Nineteenth Century, the artist had lost a great deal of the traditional support system and faced a changing definition of the “artist” as a free and independent “genius.” The idea of a genius is a product of the Enlightenment concept of the individual as a free and independent human being who is allowed freedom of speech and expression as “natural rights.”  The role of the artist within Kant’s concept of aesthetics is that of a maker who must create new forms.  The artist is now free of any external “commands” from patrons or the audience.  His/her only role is that of being a “genius,” who gives free range to the imagination.  The result of Kantian philosophy is the elevation of the artist to “creator” and the exaltation of artistic originality.  There is a new value to artistic experience as such and a new affirmation of emotional aspects of art.  The notion of the expressive function of art is not unrelated to the new definition of “sensibility,” as an ability to feel and to express oneself.  In addition, there was a new importance attached to the invention of a fiction about the new Romantic artist, who was now the hero, the god, and the genius.  The genius is the one with exceptional intellectual and spiritual endowments, the one who breaks the rules and who creates breakthroughs to new possibilities for subsequent artists.

Genius, according to Kant, is that “natural endowment of mental aptitude which gives rule to art”.  Fine art is possible only as a “product of genius,” which produces essentially original art.  Originality or the ability to be original sets the genius apart from the need to imitate either other works of art or the  real world itself.   The artist or genius also has no need to respond to communal needs.  Thus art and beauty ceased to be communal or traditional, but instead became ideas, molded by the exceptional individual.  This exceptionalism alienates the artist from the rest of society and the artist is now no longer an integrated member of society and it is the artist him/herself who is the real subject of every work of art.

Suddenly, the artist is no longer the artisan working at the beck and call of an autocratic patron, suddenly the artist is no longer the illustrator of the message of the patron, suddenly the artist is no longer and interior decorator.  The artist has been recreated as a “genius,” who is required to play.  Play becomes a major concept within Kantian aesthetics.  Play, in art, performs the same role as technology in the Industrial Revolution in that playing produces constant “progress” or change in art.  Like technology, art responds to itself and evolves according to its own rules.  By mid-Twentieth Century, art critics and art historians have incorporated the implied notion of teleology—art progresses and evolves towards a goal.  Kant’s ideas were reinterpreted for another century, a century that developed the concept of evolution and continued to believe in the optimism of the Enlightenment.

A true child of Romanticism, the Kantian artist is a rule-breaker, not the rational rule follower of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment ended with the French Revolution, a product of political reason but the end of the faith in rationalism.  The sight of mob rule, the experience of government by rabble-rousers, and the blood soaked Terror was the end of Enlightenment optimism and faith in human nature.  But the ideals of the Enlightenment—freedom and individuality lived on long after the culture’s disillusionment over the failure of reason.  If humans could not be rational, as was hoped, then they must be constrained by laws. France became an empire under an Emperor, trading equality and fraternity for order.  The artist becomes the one truly liberated member of Nineteenth Century society, detached and free, like a homeless person—ultimately dangerous in an increasingly regulated society.

Aesthetics was split between rule and play.  The Critique of Judgment set in motion an idea of the autonomy of a work of art, an idea that spread beyond philosophy and permeated the artistic community.  For artists, Kantian concepts gave them a new reason to make art; for critics, Kantian concepts gave a new way to talk about art.  One half of the Critique, that which concerns itself with rules, becomes linked to the Academy, especially in France and England.  Following the rules meant following the dictates of ancient art and copying the antique masters. The other half of aesthetics—play—belonged to the independent artist and survived into the Romantic Era and, indeed, characterized the period.  Play, like technology, is coupled with progress and evolution, because play leads to innovation and change which results in “progress” for art.  The new concept of play and invention was linked to the free play of the artistic  imagination, putting the artist in a position of dominance over the demands of the academy.  If art was to “progress,” rules would have to be broken by the artist.  But for the artist to break the rules, s/he must have artistic freedom.  Artistic freedom was not a new idea, for artists had always struggled against the demands of troublesome clients (Michelangelo’s assertion of autonomy over  Pope Julius II comes to mind).  However, Kantian aesthetic philosophy constructed a set of concepts that articulated the ideas that would form Romantic thinking: genius and artistic freedom.  The idea of artistic change, led to multiple art movements and “isms” throughout the Nineteenth Century and into the next, the Twentieth, until the challenge of Postmodernism.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Mar
05
2010

Kant and Art for Art’s Sake

Kant and “Art for Art’s Sake”

The beautiful, for Kant, is “that which without any concept is cognitized as the object of necessary satisfaction.”  The status of aesthetic judgment is not empirical but logical, based upon the powers of human reason and rationality, which excludes internal and external purposiveness.  Kant introduces purposiveness without a purpose, allowing the mind of the one who contemplates art free, unrestricted play of the mental faculties.  Within the Romantic movement, artists were believed to have the right to exist for the sole purpose of making art and art supposedly existed for the sole purpose of being art.  Art for art’s sake is such a powerful (and necessary) concept, so pervasive and entrenched that it is one of the most important motivating forces behind art to this day.  With the initiation of “art for art’s sake,” a phrase coined, perhaps by Benjamin Constant, in response to or as a definition of Kant’s ideas, the artist and the work of art now had a purpose again—not a social purpose but a purpose that was strictly an art purpose.  Confronting the staid and serious Neoclassic was its rival “ism”, Romanticism, which championed the artist as a genius and art as an expression of that genius—concepts that were pure Kant.

“Art for art’s sake” is a particular concept developed within the branch of philosophy called Aesthetics.  These terms: “art for art’s sake,”  “aestheticism” and “aesthetics” are not interchangeable.  Also not to be confused with Kantian aesthetic theory is Aestheticism, which was an artistic movement in late Nineteenth Century England.   English Aestheticism was an attitude on the part of art makers and art appreciators, based upon the desire to make every object “artful” and beautiful, regardless of its utilitarian or use value.  Late Nineteenth Century  Aestheticism was a desire to combine art and life and life and beauty.  “Art for art’s sake” was an aspect of aesthetics, a Kantian derived concept, completely divorced from any specific work of art or from any particular art movement.  The independence of aesthetics from art is best illustrated when we picture Kant, an elderly and retiring philosopher professor who denied himself all sensual pleasures in his pursuit of the intellect.  Living in a backwater university town, he never went to museums and did not own any art, and yet he was able to reason his way to the solution of grounding the response to art, which is personal and therefore subjective (based in the viewing subject) in an intellectual framework that is impersonal and objective.

The intellectual framework devised by Kant is aesthetics or the grounds for the definition of art.  Kant set art free from content, subject matter, the client’s wishes, the community’s desires and the needs of religion.  The idea of art being given wholly over to aesthetic pleasure and delight was the ultimate freedom of art to exist on its own merits and to be the center of its own world.  Art lived and died by its own art rules and justified its own existence in terms of its separate universe.  Art was autonomous and free.  Kant’s ahistorical or transcendental ideas did not go unnoticed, and they were conveyed by German expatriates to post-Revolution French intellectuals and artists, who were increasingly alienated from society and adrift without the traditional patrons of Church and State.  Suddenly socially “useless” without their historical missions, certain artists found Kant’s concepts very appealing and timely.

The Critique of Judgment (1790) contained the right ideas at the right time: ideas, which were a fortuitous response to an artistic crisis.  What does an artist do?  How does an artist make art and why?  Why is it that certain objects are universally called “art?”  What are the common characteristics of these objects?  What is their “art-ness?”  Kant’s answers came, by the 20th century, to be commonly called formalism.  Attention to Form in Kantian philosophy, or art for art’s sake, separates art from its traditional role as purveyor of subject matter on the command of a patron.  But there is a difference between what Kant wrote and what his followers made of his ideas.  For Kant, formalism is a mode of apprehending and emphasizes direct experience or intuitional awareness, without consideration of practical implications, of a work of art.  The cultivation of aesthetic experience as a deliberate value was the work of Kant, who developed critical criterion for the aptness of a work of art for appreciation, based upon its formal properties, rather than upon practical significance or importance of subject matter.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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Feb
19
2010

Kant and Aesthetic Theory

Kant and Aesthetic Theory

 

While Kant was writing the Critique of Judgment, 1790, the answer of the role of the artist in society was increasingly unclear, and the social and cultural situation was increasingly unstable.  The artist was looking at an abyss, gazing into the unknown of a new era, when Kant solved the problem of art and shaped its definition for the next two centuries.  Kant began with assumptions common to his time: we can recognize “art” and we know what “art” is and that “art” is something we can see.  He also assumes “beauty” and its existence. Kant never dealt with specific works of art and thus was removed from the current taste and vogue for classical art.  Neo-classicism was the new art in Kant’s time, and it was, briefly, a revolutionary art movement denoting (Greek) freedom and democracy and the promise of individuality, along with (Roman) gravitas and stability.  But Neoclassicism was quickly co-opted by post-Revolutionary Academicism.  A once-revolutionary movement became a forced and regulated status quo.  The Neo-Classical ideal of beauty, before the ideals became rules, was associated with the art of ancient Athens, considered eternal and transcendent.  As Keats best expressed it, in Ode on a Grecian Urn:

….

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats (1795 – 1821)

Although Emmanuel Kant did not invent aesthetics, he formalized the philosophical concept and elaborated aesthetics into a new notion of art that turned out to be uniquely suited to the new century.  “Aesthetics” was that which is sensuous or the perception of sense data.  Aesthetics has evolved into a more inclusionary definition that is applied to the arts but in the middle of the Eighteenth Century when A. G. Baumgarten founded a “new science” and published Aesthetica in 1750, aesthetics connected art to life.  For the first time “art” became a distinctive value in life and was considered a mode of knowledge, called aesthetics or feelings registered by the subject/viewer in response to the stimulus of an art object. Regardless of the intent of the client or of the artist, the art object is a unique object in that it is contemplated for insight and delight.  Baumgarten widened the field of aesthetics from art to human conduct, opening possibilities for another philosopher, Friedrich Schiller, who would build upon Kantian aesthetics.  Aesthetics is a middle ground, existing somewhere between reason and morality.  Aesthetics concerned itself with that which was material or sensuous or plastic—physical life.  Like other aspects of human experience, aesthetics needed to be brought into the Kantian epistemological system.

Aesthetics is a dualistic concept, a philosophical play between the artist and the art critic or philosopher.  Aesthetics as a branch of philosophy is not concerned with particular works of art but is more concerned with the question of “art” itself.  Aesthetics like any other branch of philosophy, attempts to determine the grounds of “art,” its ontology, and the system of knowledge that produces and constructs the mode of judgment or contemplation of art, its epistemology.  Once art had been justified as an activity legitimated by its role in society as teacher and instructor and educator, working for the benefit of the community.  In the modern period, art needed two things.  First, a reason for being: ontology, and second, a definition: epistemology.  Although it was not Kant’s precise intention to create a new meaning and purpose for art, the effects of his philosophy was to link art to personal expressiveness and individual freedom. It was Kant who ushered in Romanticism by devising a theory of aesthetics that perfectly suited the times.

Given that aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, Kant proceeded by putting art into his transcendental system.  As is characteristic of his system, the idea of art was divided into two parts that correspond to self and object, that is, contemplation by the viewer of the work of art itself.  The ontology of a work of art is not the object, not even the artist, but the recognition of “art” which is a perceptual and conceptual act.  Too see is to judge/contemplate.  Art vision, like any vision, is never raw; it is always tempered and educated and acts according to (Kantian) rules.  Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) was the third in his trilogy of epistemology.  In his first two Critiques, Kant established new ground for reason and morality and the third Critique had to establish a universal and transcendent basis for making a judgment.

What did one have the occasion to judge?  To select the judgment of art as the centerpiece of this critique was a very modern move on the part of a man who had little experience of art himself.  But art was not amenable to judgment under a system of laws from the state and did not fall within the sphere of morality.  Simply by removing art from the rule of law or morality was to free it from its age-old tutelage at the hands of the powerful or the religious.  Like the rest of society, art had become secular, and, in becoming secular, had lost its place in society.  Coincidentally, Kant was writing at the precise time the artist was losing the class that had been the traditional patrons, the aristocrats, to the guillotine in France.  In the Nineteenth Century, the purpose of art and the role of artists were questions, and, regardless of his intentions, Kant’s aesthetics proved to be the new answers.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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Feb
12
2010

Kant and Aesthetics

Kant and Aesthetics

France became the titular home of the Enlightenment because of the necessity of opposing the decadence of the ancien régime, but it must be recalled that there were numerous important philosophers in England as well—the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke, David Hume–who were operating in a more “enlightened” society where royal power had long since been effectively curbed.  England had had its revolution, endured the rule of the middle class, the Puritans, and had gladly restored the monarchy in 1688.  The English, wary of religious extremism, established a careful balance of power between the Crown and the People.  The British had learned the hard way of the power of the people when the American colonies rebelled and fought their way to freedom, using the ideas of the Enlightenment that were developed in Europe.  The American Revolution was a philosophical affair, a grand experiment in democracy.  To the amazement and alarm of Europeans, the Americans were turning philosophical systems into a Constitution, a government, and a way of life. And yet, it was in what we can only call “the Germanies,” not yet a modern nation, but a collection of principalities, that philosophers synthesized Enlightenment philosophy and extended it to a world now called “modern.”

“Dare to reason—have the courage to use your own minds—is the motto of the Enlightenment.” This powerful statement, defining the Enlightenment, was written by Emmanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) in 1784 in Germany, a singularly un-Enlightened land.  In his essay, “What is Enlightenment?”  Kant defined the Enlightenment briefly and cogently as the foundation of a new conception of the essential qualities of the state and of history.  “History” exists as a concept, according to Kant, only in relation to a series of events moving towards an ideal unity or an immanent end. Writing at the end of a period, Kant coupled history with a teleological purpose.  The question, for the Enlightenment philosopher, is that of the goals of history.  The contemplators of past events–the historians–are no longer standing in the midst of a simple series of discrete events, but are philosophers observing a series of actions that include the idea of individual freedom. History was a process of self-liberation, a process from natural bondage towards a sense of individual becoming in a spiritual sense.

In place of irrational belief systems, the Enlightenment has created a doctrine of rational faith (perhaps a contradiction in terms)—faith in the powers of human reason.  Kant has been called the First Modernist, probably because he was among the most significant late-Enlightenment philosophers.  Kant sought to solve the problems put forward or suggested by the early Enlightenment philosophers.  He had to establish an epistemology of knowledge based upon the deductive powers of human reason.  He had to establish a system of modern morality and ethics for human behavior, without God.  He had to establish a universal means of arriving at a judgment recognized universally as being valid.  Ultimately, Kant had to create an architectural structure for the new individual in an Age of Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment is deeply concerned with politics: how people can rule and/or be ruled without God or King and the divine right of aristocracy.  The issue of freedom must be balanced against morals and truths and social controls.  Society and culture are in a state of change and flux and doubt under pressure from the rising aspirations of the lower classes and the growing power of the middle class.  Enlightenment philosophy both witnesses these changes and seeks to contain an unprecedented social situation that upends prevailing traditions.  Art is but one casualty of a culture, which goes into shock by the beginning of the Nineteenth Century.  Thus Kant’s aesthetic philosophy became the right philosophy for the right time—his ideas restored order and purpose, ironically by injecting art with the disorder of originality and stripping it of all purpose but its own.  Kantian aesthetics developed out of a sense of crisis in the arts, which were unanchored without traditional purpose or patronage, bereft of subject matter and content, once dictated, and validated by Church and State.  Already, the artists in France had discovered the vagaries of the middle class public, the new audience to which they were subjected in public salons.  Equally depressing was the rise of yet another new enemy, the art critic who freely gave his (unlearned) influential opinion of the endeavors of the artists.  How should art be judged?  Who had the right to judge?  The jurors?  the teachers? the artists? the critics? the patrons? or the public?  The goal of Kant was to put judgment on a universal basis and, because art fell neatly into the realm of subjectivity, he used  art as his model in his discussion of aesthetics.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

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Jan
29
2010

Kant and the Critique of Philosophy

Kant and the Critique of Philosophy

This concept of critique was central to post-Enlightenment philosophy, coming from the Greek word “krinein”, meaning to “separate” or to “discern”, which is the origin of the word crisis.  Whereas the Greeks took the concept of critique and applied it to texts, Kant used “critique” to re-conceptualize Western philosophy at a time of crisis.  The Enlightenment had been caught between the demystification or disenchantment of a once sacred world and the secularizing of a thoroughly modern and material world, based upon scientific analysis.  For the Enlightenment philosophers, “critique” and “reason” were indivisible and Kant began a search for the conditions, which governed reasoned criticism.  Critique is a concept central to Kantian thought and is an internal analysis of a concept in its own terms. A critique, by definition, cannot be conducted from the outside, looking in; an exercise, which would be more precisely called “criticism.”  A proper critique, in contrast, must always examine given concepts and not impose ideas, alien to the argument, from the outside. The examination or interrogation of an idea—a critique—is rational and based upon the process of logical deduction and the result is the creation of an architectonic structure, an argument that is “built” systematically. The critique is a form of analysis and deduction.  Contemporary audiences are probably more familiar with the use of “critique” by the American art critic, Clement Greenberg who “interrogated” or critiqued painting, seeking its intrinsic qualities.  Through a logical analysis of what was irreducible to painting, Greenberg deduced that for painting to be pure it must be purged of alien or outside elements.  Painting, stripped of extrinsic elements, could be revealed in its basic structure, or definition, as a flat surface covered with pigment arranged in a design. As the Nineteenth Century progressed, the question shifted from how to use critique to question the nature of art to which art is worthy of critique.   A critique of philosophy is nothing less than a search for the fundamentals of how humans create knowledge.

Living a quiet and retiring life of a college professor in Weimer, Kant was, by his own account, awakened from his academic “slumber” by a challenge to Reason from an unexpected quarter.  An English philosopher, the ultimate empiricist, David Hume, who in his Treatise of Human Reason and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding pointed out that reason, like religion, is only another instrument for establishing relations among ideas.  Reason, therefore, can tell us nothing about the world.  There is no evidence that the “order” of reason is necessary and this order and “pattern” actually has no rationale in nature, which is only an object upon which we have imposed our needs.  Cause and effect were a belief system that we lived by but could not prove. If reason is only a concept and not an intrinsic quality of human thinking, if cause and effect  are unexamined assumptions then we are back to metaphysics.

As Roy Strong in The Creation of the Modern World.  The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment expressed it,

“The concept of causation was doubtless the basis of all knowledge, but causality was not itself a demonstrable fact.  Experience showed the succession of events, but did not reveal any necessity in that succession—it was habit, which created the expectation that one event would invariably follow another.  Custom was not knowledge, however, and did not strictly justify projections from the past to the future, from the known to the unknown.  Causality was thus not a principle definitively derived from the order of things but a mental postulate.”

Hume’s arguments were immediately recognized by Kant as a destructive attack on reason.  When Hume attacked the concept of cause and effect by pointing out that “cause and effect” were only a concept, not a reality, the Enlightenment was effectively over.  Rational thinking alone could not make it so.  As a believer in the powers of reason, Kant realized that he had to restore reason to its rightful place.  To refute Hume, he had to create a system for reason.

In his Critique of Pure Reason (1789), Kant discussed what he called “The Copernican Revolution” in which critique was shifted from an external focus on dogmas to a focus on the inner workings of understanding.  The scientist, Nicolas Copernicus, questioned the assumption, which was received wisdom that the sun revolved around the earth.  One could see this “truth” with one’s own eyes.  There was no discernable reason to disbelieve what seemed plain to see.  In 1530, in De Revolutionibus, Copernicus revolutionized scientific (and philosophical) thinking by putting forward the revolutionary hypothesis that the earth revolved around the sun.  This extraordinary theory, inverting general knowledge, was based upon pure abstract reasoning or deductive thinking, based upon a hypothesis that was tested and provided proof of accuracy.  The mathematics of planetary movements made sense only if one threw out the belief that the sun revolved around the earth and substituted another theory that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun. Seeing may be believing, but any belief has to be tested and proven.  Scientific reasoning is based upon theory: one formulates a hypothesis that functions as a theory that is never proved and is always provisional.  Any theory will stand until it is disproved.

For Copernicus, his new theory was far too dangerous to publicize—he would be under instant interdiction from religious authorities, and he was the kind of person who sought perfection and could never release his theory. Although in the time of Kant, two centuries later, De Revolutionibus was still on the list of books forbidden by the Catholic Church, the ideas of Copernicus were not only accepted but were “proved”.  The “revolution” in thinking about the sun and the earth was the disregard of Copernicus of empirical evidence, which suggested that the sun revolved around the earth, and his faith in a hypothesis was based upon reasoned considerations.  Like Copernicus, Kant proposed that raw observation of raw experience was insufficient as an explanation of the world and argued that the human mind was capable of ordering perception through a priori conceptions.  The rejection of the notion of the passive receptive mind was Kant’s version of the Copernican Revolution: the mind ordered the world, not vice versa.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Oct
23
2009

Podcast Episode 4 Romantic Aesthetics

AESTHETICS AND TRE RISE OF ROMANTICISM

Emerging in the mid-eighteenth century, Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to define “art.”  The formulation of aesthetics as a separate aspect of Enlightenment thinking was a project of British and German writers on the arts.  By the end of the eighteenth century, Emmanuel Kant consolidated “aesthetics” into a coherent and influential book, the Critique of Judgment, which would shape the art world of the Romantic artists.

 

 

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