Posts Tagged ‘Emmanuel Kant’

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Apr
23
2010

Hegel and His Impact on Art and Aesthetics

Hegel and his Impact on Art and Aesthetics

Like any aesthetician, G. W. F. Hegel does not get involved in any particular movement or style or work of art, but, that said, he was very definite about the kind of art where Beauty could be found.  Like Emmanuel Kant, Hegel brings art and freedom together and anticipates the idea of art-for-art’s sake.  For Hegel, the Idea is always opposed to Nature.  The mind is contrasted to the mindlessness of matter or nature.  The mind creates art, which gives an idea to nature.  This idea is the unity of the externality or objectivity of nature and the subjectivity or personal vision of the artist.  As with Kant, the spectator of the work of art is as important as the art maker for Hegel.  Beauty in art is the emanation of the Absolute or Truth through an object.   Beauty can be shown only in a sensuous form called the Ideal, which transcends the Idea to become a special form.  Like all of Hegel’s triads, nothing is lost: nature and idea are the Other to one another but together they create an organism, the work of art.

The contemplative mind strives to see the Absolute. In order to see Beauty, this detached mind must transcend nature.  By freeing itself, the mind perceives the spiritual content of the work of art, which must also be free in order to be Beautiful.  Kant insisted that the higher form of beauty had to be free and independent and Hegel followed suit.  Hegel insisted that, to manifest Beauty, art must expel all that is external or contiguous or unnecessary.  Remember, in Hegel’s system, each part of the triad must be “pure” and can contain only its dialectical opposite.  For art to reveal Beauty is to reveal Truth, which can only be pure.  This is why art can never imitate nature, which is, mindless and irrational.  Nature must be reversed with its antithesis, the idea, which brings about the inner unity necessary for spiritual content: nature, idea, spirit = art.

If art must be free, then art should show, not just Beauty and Truth, but Freedom itself, which is the property of the free mind.  Hegel, true to his age, is a child of Neoclassicism and, like many Germans, was looking back to a Golden Age when human beings were free.  Part of being “modern” is being un-free.    Society has demands, which are placed upon people who have lost their sense of wholeness and self-actualization.  Thinking along the same lines as Friedrich Schiller’s “alienation,” Hegel felt that his own age was a diminished one.  Therefore, the artist should take subject matter from the past, a heroic age populated by characters that were free of the social restrictions so prevalent of the industrial age.

Ancient peoples, Hegel assumed could determine their own destinies and could make their own lives on their own terms.  While the current times were particular to the modern period, the primeval era could manifest life in its universal and essential form.  By stripping the process of living down to its basics, one is nearing the first cause of life, the logic of existence in which one is in the process of becoming.  One can “become” only if one is free, linking the rational with the free to the universal.  Hegel explained art’s predilection for the depiction of the high-born because those individuals are free, assuming that the lower classes are unsuited to being represented because, being subservient to their masters, they can never be free and therefore, never universal.   Stripping away the elitist assumptions that princes are preferential to peasants as subject matter in art, it is possible to note that Hegel was insisting that the artist attempt to reach the universal through art.

But Hegel was a also creature of history.  The idea of “princes” should not be taken so literally in the modern era, an era badly suited to the classical art of the past.  Hegel understood that the antique forms were indissolubly linked to their own time.  Greek and Roman sculpture expressed the ideal in universal poses of repose, rather than with active poses linked to a particular action. But in the modern age, the new society did not lend itself to  rest and repose, which could be found only in the spirit of the artist or in his personality.  The modern age has come to realize that any hope of freedom or infinity is impossible and the human mind has no escape, except into itself.  The new subjectivity of the spirit produces a new kind of art in which the artist imprints him or herself upon the art.  the result is Romantic art which is the art of modern Europe.  Unlike ancient art which needs the sensuous manifestation of the classical statue, Romantic art gives rise to an independent spirituality or mind which leaves behind its traces as sensuous remnants.   It then logically follows that sculpture is not the appropriate receptacle for the spirit of the Romantic artist.  Clearly, Hegel could not conceive of a form of sculpture that was allowed to transcend its traditional role of starting with and then transcending nature into idealism.  Sculpture was, despite its attempt at perfection of form, too bound to the “real.”

Painting, in its two-dimensional flatness, is the most suitable manifestation for the spirit, mind, and personality of the artist.  Painting is appearance, rather than actuality or matter and, as a mental process of the artist, is subjective.  The external world is allowed to enter into the subjective world of art because concrete reality is transformed through art.  Hegel allows for the ugly, the grotesque, suffering and evil in Romantic art as the other necessary element in his dialectic.   Beauty must contain ugliness, just as Truth conceals Lie, and for reconciliation to take place beauty and ugliness must be reconciled into a concrete unity that is a higher form of Beauty, which is also Truth.

Although Hegel’s ideas on art and aesthetics were inspiration for those who believed in “art-for-art’s-sake” or the avant-garde, his deterministic philosophy was politically very retrograde and repressive.  There is another way to view Hegel’s “princes.”  As with his colleague at the University of Berlin, Johann Gottleib Fichte, Hegel believed that Germany’s destiny was to become the dominant power in Europe, due to the forces of history, which had passed England and France and had progressed to Germany. A snob and a social climber, the consummate academic ego, Hegel was enamored of power and, during the French occupation of Germany, was thrilled by Napoléon.  Like Fichte, he believed that Germany was a chosen nation and that it had the moral right to pursue its hegemonic dominance ruthlessly with “absolute privileges over all others.  It should behave as the spirit willed it and will be dominant in the world…” With Hegel, war and dominance as historical tools of historical progress entered into European thought.  Because his philosophy was based in history, Hegelian aesthetics also impacted upon art history and art criticism.  The basic structure of art history has followed his model of successive and contrasting movements.

The history of art has been told as a succession of conflicting styles by Heinrich Wölfflin and as a tale of successive and contrasting movements by history based upon formalist models. The ancient produced the modern, the universal produced the particular, the timeless produced the contingent and modern art is the synthesis of these conflicting forces.  As a synthesis, Romantic art must be independent and begins to exist on its own.  Hegel’s aesthetics inspire the theory of the avant-garde: thesis, antithesis, synthesis—Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, and so on.   One avant-garde movement, assigned the positive position, opposed another avant-garde movement, the negative or counter position, resulted in a dialectic, which pushed art ever forward and towards an absolute of purity.  The result of the influence of Hegel, art criticism, especially under the American art writer, Clement Greenberg, was model of artistic progression from representation towards abstraction.  By using the avant-garde and its oppositional stance as the engine of change, art history in the Twentieth Century has been Hegelian in structure.

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

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Apr
02
2010

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831)

It has been said that all philosophy is simply a series of footnotes on the ideas of Plato and Aristotle.  It can also be said that all modern philosophy is a series of footnotes no the work of Emmanuel Kant.  Writing in the early Nineteen Century, G. W. F. Hegel inherited the philosophy of Kant and accepted the (Copernican) notion that the mind constructed the world but then proceeded to modify much that was Kantian in his own philosophical system. In The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), Hegel assumed the universe was rational and that through a progress of deduction, human beings would eventually find and agree upon the truth. The question was the starting point for the process of deducing the truth. Kant had introduced the notion of the Thing-in-Itself, a concept that Hegel found difficult to accept.  Like Plato, Kant assumed there were what Plato called “Forms” that were beyond the reach of human consciousness. The forms are unseeable and unknowable and exist only as ideas. Ideas are “beings” that produce the world.  All existence is Appearance and all appearance is dependent upon the world.  According to Plato, Things of the world are mere “copies” of Universals or Ideas.  Copies of the form/idea are made by and/or through Images of Ideas being stamped upon Matter by God(s).  Matter, for Plato was formless; matter was emptiness.  Matter is “not-being”, something that has not yet arisen from Idea.  Matter is primordial and independent.  The Thing comes into being only when matter is acted upon.

According to Aristotle, the Form, the Universal of a Thing, is also its End or Purpose.  The final cause (end) (thing) is identical with the formal cause (form).  A purpose must logically exist prior to the execution of the form.  This conclusion leads Aristotle to the distinction between potentiality and actuality.  Matter in itself is absolutely formless, the substrate of things.  In other words, matter is actually nothing but it is also potentially all things.  Matter gains actuality—becomes a “thing”—by acquiring Form.  Form is actuality, for Aristotle.  With the Greeks, the world process is crucial: there is the end, the form, and the universal. A “thing” is a combination of matter and form.  Without form, which must always be Universal, the thing cannot exist. Compared to the universality of form, the object/matter must be particular. All things strive towards their own ends.  Form molds matter and impels it to a higher state of existence.  The end must be present at the beginning; otherwise the end could not exert propelling force.  There is no new element, in other words, for the new must be present as a potentiality of the old.  The ancients considered development to be the process by which that which was latent or hidden came to light.  For the ancients, and for Plato and Aristotle, the world was driven by this dualism between idea and actuality, by these contradictions, which drive development.  These ancient ideas will be Hegel’s starting point and the source of his famous Dialectical Method, an invention that allowed him to ground truth and reality in the process of deductive Logic.

An idealist, who learned from Kant, Hegel accepted Kant’s Copernican Revolution or Kant’s concept of the self or Self as an enduring entity, that is independent of events and stands alone in a condition of self-awareness.  This “awareness” is the awareness of the object.  This recognition of the object results in the realization of the difference between the self and the “other”.  This moment is the origin of consciousness or being, an awareness of object as “other-than-me”.  Things are content, and Hegel distinguished between the object, as it is “in itself,” and the object as it is for an observer.  Although the concept of duality originated in ancient philosophy, modern philosophy credits René Descartes with the “Cartesian split.” Since Descartes, Western thought assumed a split between mind and matter. It was David Hume who questioned Greek idealism, exposing the inherent weakness of the dualism between mind and matter by returning to the question of how do we know reality?  Or what is knowledge?  Hume explored the most basic concept upon which all knowledge depends: cause and effect, both of which must be both universal and necessary. True, we experience what we name “cause” and then we experience what we call “effect.”  But we have done nothing more than placed a convenient label upon the events that transpired.  We have not established knowledge.   Experience in itself is never universal nor is experience in itself ever necessary.  The connection between cause and effect is an assumption and any “knowledge” is therefore illusionary.  Hume determined that knowledge could never arise out of experience and thus exposed the metaphysical base of philosophy.  Kant immediately understood the implications of Hume’s thought: once the metaphysics of philosophy had been revealed as a “faith based” system, any knowledge of the world was now impossible.  We knew nothing but our own beliefs and belief is not knowledge.

In order to correct David Hume and to put philosophy back on track, Kant proposed space and time as conditions that are both universal and necessary. The universal and necessary conditions of Space and Time give us objects.  Space and Time are a priori conditions, they preexist thought and make thought possible.  Space and Time are perceptions of our own minds and do not exist apart form us and are forms of our own perceptive faculty.  Space and time are Forms of sensations and these forms are filled with sense data.  The objects perceived by us through space and time are not real objects: they are Appearances.  Thought is conceptual and non-sense-based concepts—synthetic a priori judgments—are derived, not from experience, but from constructions made by the mind.  These concepts are the result of formal judgments of Logic.  We arrive at these concepts thorough the epistemological operations of the mind, Kant called “categories”, and there were twelve of them.  The twelve categories were subjective, and, because they were universal, were necessarily static, and unchanging.  However, as Hegel noticed, these categories were not deduced one from another and were therefore arbitrary models made up by Kant in order to show the way the mind worked. If the categories were not Logical, then the Reason-based philosophy of Kant was not on a firm base.  And this is the problem Hegel wanted to solve: to build a Logical base for the foundation of the Categories.

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

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Mar
12
2010

Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805)

“Art” and what the term means and how the object is apprehended and the discourse that surrounds its objects emanates out of aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy.  The discourse about art, art criticism, art history, and art theory all are variations on philosophy.  Kant’s use of aesthetics was to establish the grounds for the viewing of art—disinterestedness—the grounds for beauty—necessity—and absolute universality of aesthetic criteria.  In many ways, his philosophy is divided.  On one hand, there is absoluteness and rules of judging; but, on the other hand, there is the new Romantic artist who is called upon to “play” and to create new “rules” for art by breaking rules through creative invention.  It will be up to Friedrich Schiller to expound upon this gap in Kantian philosophy by concentrating on the artist.

Schiller was writing his essays at a pivotal moment in time.  Germany was not yet a unified or modern country, nor did it have a powerful middle class.  As a nation it had yet to be industrialized and faced another century and a half of autocratic rule, and, yet Romanticism with its emphasis on the individual somehow managed to thrive in artistic circles.  Schiller died four decades before Marx would re-define alienation but the poet foresaw what the philosopher would witness, the splitting of the modern personality, rent between intellect and emotion.  Schiller’s stress on the emotional aspects of alienation is best understood in response to the subjectivism of the Romantic era and as an answer to the highly artificial age of the Enlightenment, which stressed reason and rationality in the name of nature, creating an overly mannered society through rules.  Acutely aware of the modern agony of alienation, Schiller sought to lead humans towards wholeness through art, where intellect and emotions could be resolved into a healthy and united whole.  Art allows all aspects of the mind to indulge in “free play” and creates a place where reason and passion can become balanced into a perfected form.

If Kant is the “head” or “intellect” of aesthetics, then Schiller is the “heart” of art philosophy.  While Kant’s discussion of art was strictly conceptual and abstract, Schiller was a poet himself and knew of the problems and rewards of creation.  But Schiller was also a playwright and a philosopher who was aware of his condition as a “hermaphrodite” or a hybrid creature: the artist who was also a philosopher.  But Schiller the artist appeared in his philosophical writings only in his poetic and rhetorical tone, for he rarely wrote on art itself.  Schiller followed not just the lead of Kant but also the lead of Baumgarten in writing aesthetics for the Romantic period.  Kant wrote of the abstract arabesque as his ideal form of the beautiful, but Baumgarten had envisioned art as having a more central role in human life and so did Schiller.  “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”, 1795, concerns itself with the importance of the “aesthetic” that is the sensuous as a counterpoint to the intellectual for the development of the human being.  Kant’s Critique of Judgment was the capstone of his epistemological theory, but Schiller was concerned less with theory and more with the predicament of modern life.

“On the Aesthetic Education of Man” was written as a series of letters to the Duke of Augustenburg and was published in 1795 and 1801.  “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” was also written in 1795 as a response to his friendship with Germany’s most celebrated Romantic poet, Göethe, comparing himself as a poet to his friend as a poet.  Johann Wolfgang von Göethe had written the quintessential work of German Romanticism, the rather overwrought, Sorrows of Young Werther, the fictional version of many youthful love affairs.  However, as he matured, Göethe assumed a mantle of dignity, of near-Olympian calm, and repudiated Romanticism as “sick” and extolled (neo) Classicism as “healthy”.  The famous friendship got off to a rocky start.  Göethe spurned the advances of the younger poet whose dramatic plays were associated with Romanticism.  And Schiller, for his part, viewed Göethe with antipathy, distrusting the apparent ease with which poetry apparently flowed from this distinguished inhabitant of Olympia.  Nevertheless, the younger poet who experienced creative agonies and self-doubts was driven by a need to understand Göethe and pursued the poet.  The two men eventually succeeded in achieving a meeting of the minds and their consequent correspondence and collaboration is of great importance to German literature.

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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Mar
05
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.

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

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Feb
26
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.

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
19
2010

Kant and the Critique of Judgment

Kant’s System of Judgment

Art and beauty were considered synonymous.  During Kant’s time, the criteria for the “beautiful” was a simple—and specific one—based upon and derived from the supposed Greek ideal of nature perfected.  Art theorists of the Eighteenth Century believed that the ancient Greek artists had started from nature and perfected its imperfections, creating, through the medium of art, a sublime and perfect beauty.  The role of art and the artists was to follow the lessons of Greek art, attempt to emulate it, and achieve the Greek standards of “perfection”.  According to the first art historian, Johann Winckelmann, “To take the ancients for models is the only way to become great.”

The idea of copying the Greeks, the ancients, is also stated by Quatremère de Quincy in “An Essay on the Nature and Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts” (1823).  De Quincy wrote that the final perfection of art is to reproduce, not things as seen with all their faults and imperfections, but ideally beautiful nature, never experienced in the actual but “corrected” by the Greeks into “superior beauty” which is the goal of all art.  The equation of the Greeks with idealized beauty will establish a standard, or a canon, that would be challenged by the later generation.  The quarrel between the old generation and the new will be termed the “Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns.”  The new generation, the Romantics, would not only reject the ancient as subject matter but would also refute the notion of idealized ‘beauty”.

At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, the idea of “beauty” as being an attempt to renew the artistic quest for perfection of the natural, based upon Greek models, was firmly entrenched and frozen into academic dictum and practice.  But academic practice had confused great art with great ideas and great subjects with large works of art whose merit began to rest more and more upon excellence of technique and morals rather than upon inherent greatness.  The problem for Kant was to separate worthy subject matter from a worthy work of art, for subject matter that is meaningful in one era may be meaningless in another.  The worth of any work of art must be transcendent and universal, allowing the viewer of any time and place to appreciate the work of art in its own inherent terms which, for Kant, were excellence of drawing (line) and design (composition), without consideration of color which was subjective and emotional and content which was extrinsic to form.  The role of color was solely to enhance form.  The argument over line or color was somewhat related the Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns, as the Ancients, Line and disciplined behavior were linked to strong ruling régimes and color and feelings were related to the new and dangerous ideas of freedom and democracy.  From Kant’s perspective, however, color is secondary to preserve the universality of line, which is unchangeable and, supposedly, beyond interpretation.

Kant sought a universal standard for judgment in the realm of art, a set of values that would be independent of personal likes and dislikes, of subject matter which was bound up in its own time, of morality or fashion or passion.  Upon what can universal judgments that are timeless and absolute be based?  Kant wove certain prevailing ideas into a coherent system, which differentiates the Judgment of aesthetic pleasure from other pleasures.  Aesthetic judgments are both subjective, that is, not provable in any scientific way, and also universal, that is, agreed upon by everyone.  A thing can be “proved” to be beautiful because it belongs to a certain class of things or characteristics.  A phenomenological judgment is the result of a direct aesthetic experience.  The subjective aesthetic judgment is the feeling or the response of the subject when the object is apprehended, contemplated, and then judged.

Even though subjective (not empirical), the aesthetic judgment is opposed to a relativistic doctrine in which beauty is dependent upon individual likes and dislikes.  Kant was quite opposed to such relativistic judgments, for they are based upon personal responses, which are tied to a particular place and time as well as to the individual.  Kant also rejected the concept of “interest” as the basis for determining beauty and art.  Interest is desire, a concern for the existence of a thing; it is a utility judgment: this thing is “good” for something, especially sensory pleasure.  Kant excluded sensory pleasure: “That taste is still barbaric which needs an added element of charm and emotion in order that there may be satisfaction and still more so if it adopts these as the measure of its approval.”  He denied aesthetic pleasure or value to beautiful tones in music and to the beauty of color in art.

Kant advocated disinterest and indifference to content or subject matter and appreciated only design and composition.  Purity in tone or color make form more definite and clear and easily intuitable.  Form, clearly and purely delineated, sustains attention to the object itself.  Thus, Kant puts forward the concept of “free beauty,” or pure aesthetic beauty, which has its own internal or inherent or intrinsic purposiveness: “The beautiful is that which pleases apart from a concept.”  For the judgment of the beautiful to be universally valid, it must be detached from individual and personal feelings.  For this aesthetic judgment to claim to be correct, it must not be singular or unique to a particular object.  “Art” must rest upon the principle of disinterestedness.  This judgment, from a universal standpoint, assumes the existence of common sense, which is universally communicable.

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Feb
12
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.

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Feb
05
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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Jan
29
2010

Kant and Reason

Kant and Reason

The Eighteenth Century British philosopher, David Hume, suggested that we believed that there is a connection between cause and effect.  For example. fire causes flame and results in an effect of smoke.  Were it not for this belief system, we would be surprised every time we lit a match, saw fire, and witnessed the fire burn an object. Kant replaced Hume’s charge that cause and effect were mere metaphysical constructs with the idea of the a priori: mental structures possessed by human beings that allowed people to logically order empirical experiences in a rational fashion. We understand that “smoke” means “fire” not because one observes the effect of a lit match upon a dry leaf, but because one carries a preconceived concept of cause and effect in the mind.  Thus Kant replaced Descartes’s blind faith that God would not delude him with human reason and the powers of rational thinking.  Kant removed God from the philosophical equation. In his critique of Western philosophy, Kant realized that much of the writings of his predecessors had rested upon this ultimate appeal to God–metaphysics–placing philosophy in the precarious position of having its efficacy based solely upon belief in God.

The preconceived concept or preexisting idea is the a priori, or a structure in the mind that organizes perceptions.  The procedure of critique is nothing less than a Copernican Revolution, a call to reason rather than to faith, a demand for self-knowledge rather than for dogma.  Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was concerned with epistemology, establishing the grounds of knowledge, and with refuting untenable metaphysics. God does not give us the world that we see and experience.  We understand the world through reason. Knowledge is a cooperative affair—the mind organizes sense data actively and imposes reality upon the world.  We, as humans, can never hope to “see” “reality” or the “thing-in-itself.” We construct reality with our minds, which are organized at the most basic and abstract level to structure the most basic experiences, our perceptions of time and space.

There are two kinds of judgment: a priori and a posteriori.  The a priori judgment is pure and transcendent and self-evident.  It is absolutely valid and strictly necessary.  This judgment is independent of experience and is expressed in a statement in which the subject is defined by its predicate: ”The rose is a flower,” which is an analytic statement.  For Kant, the real problem for philosophy is a posteriori statements that were synthetic, that is, statements in which the predicate is not contained in the subject.  Cause and effect would come under the concept of a synthetic statement: there was no necessary connection between cause and effect.  Kant had to make an argument for cause and effect being a synthetic a priori judgment, that is a judgment that is absolute and necessary without being self-evident.   Kant argued that the mind imposes patterns and the patterns themselves are necessary.  Because the patterns are necessary, they are also transcendental.  This Aesthetic is immediate and non-discursive and sensuous, but it can be ordered and constructed by the mind.  For example, the mind has an intuition, that an immediate and sensuous, apprehension of space that is sensuous or aesthetic.

This intuition must be a priori to account for our knowledge of objects.  Thus Space is an a priori representation that underlies all outer intuitions and validates all claims of geometry, which is a science of space.  “Space” is the way the mind organizes experience.  “Space does not represent any property of things in themselves; it is, therefore, solely from the human standpoint…” and is inner and outer.  Time, like space, is another “pure form of intuition” and is the temporal ordering of experience into before and after and simultaneous.  But time is only “inner space” and is part of a spatiotemporal ordering of contents: a synthetic ordering due to the active mind’s cognition of physical objects.  This is what Kant called transcendental logic, the “putting together” (synthetic) of perceptions.  This synthetic operation makes experiences of objects possible.

In a typically Enlightenment fashion, Kant conceptually “built” an architectonic structure that would contain philosophy within a model.  Based upon reason, knowledge comes from thinking, which comes from judging.  All effective knowledge is the result of experiences of concrete sense data ordered by conceptual thinking.  According to Kant, “…thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind…” Kant was the first philosopher to distinguish between precepts and concepts, after the Cartesian duality of mind and body had proved to be untenable.  Kant then set out to establish categories of judgments, based upon Aristotelian logic.  Each form of judgment is an a priori conceptual category and the categories correspond to types of judgments.  Kant calls his arrangements the metaphysical deduction of the categories: each judgment presupposes one or another twelve synthetical (putting things together) categories or operations (such as cause and effect).

The categories are transcendental because they are rules.  These rules are not empirically observable but are necessary, because they make synthesis possible.  In other words, successive messages of data must be organized or held together into an experience or a unity of consciousness, which is the unity of self.  Experience is a combination of the self that experiences objects as a result of a priori acts of synthesis.  The human experience of objects consists of unified representations, producing objects of representation.  All knowledge demands a concept and the form of the concept must be universal and must serve as a rule.  Self and object are reciprocal.  Kant asked, “What conditions make experiences possible”?  and stated that experience is a combination of a priori concepts and empirical concepts.  The necessary conditions for “experience” is the object—sense experiences, put together into unity—and self—a collection of desires, memories, expectations, feelings, attitudes that unifies the data.  The self is also an object.  The putting together is a transcendental synthesis: objects-for-a-self.  The object is a synthesis of data of outer sense/space and the self is the synthesis of inner sense/space.

Thus, for Kant, empiricism is rehabilitated, cause and effect becomes a rule, and the function of concepts is to order the manifold of sense into meaningful and stable patterns.  The key to knowledge is order and rule that makes experience possible.  Order, in other words, must be presupposed (a priori) to make experience possible.  The world as experienced reflects patterns or categories.  Two important categories are substance and causality for human experience would not be human experience without an order that is indifferent.  We never experience these substances or the necessary connections; we experience only succession (synthesis).  Kant attributed our understanding of objects to a priori concepts through which our minds order experience with a notion of permanence and regular sequence.  His conclusions are an advance on the fallback position of Descartes that is that God “implanted” helpful innate ideas that give us reality.

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Jan
22
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.

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