Posts Tagged ‘Emmanuel Kant’

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Feb
05
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.

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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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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Jan
22
2010

The Definition of the Avant-Garde

The Definition of the Avant-Garde

In his book, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger stressed the historical basis of the avant-garde.  The rise of the avant-garde was directly linked to the rise of the middle class.  The main role of the avant-garde is the critique of the middle class by detaching it self from it.  Bourgeois totalizing institutions, such as the institutions that are the “art world” must also be critiqued and defied. The kind of critique Burger discussed was a Marxist style critique, which, because it was delivered from a detached perspective, was far more radical than conventional criticism. The Marxist approach was, of course Kantian in origin in its stance of disinterest, but Marxist in its focus on bourgeois practices.

The radicality of the avant-garde position rests upon its freedom from having to “take sides” or obligation to maintain a position.  The freedom to detach from an ideology is also the freedom to find an entirely unexpected stance.  The avant-garde critique of the capitalist mode of production and its impact upon cultural producers has many consequences.  First, the avant-garde artist is always alienated from the audience, outside the mainstream of traditional art and scornful of the middle class and its utilitarian preferences.  The bourgeois saw little use for pure art in the service of the intellect or beauty or aesthetics, and understood only that art could be useful to reinforce their own social and political power, a lesson learned from the once powerful church and state.  The middle class audience was unsympathetic with art, which lay outside what was familiar,   traditional and recognizable.  Thus, the artist, who felt constrained by bourgeois restrictions and by the low level of middle class taste, took on a defiant, rebellious stance, upholding the right of the artist to express him/herself artistically. Delighting in shocking the art public, the avant-garde artist is confrontational, refusing to meet the expectations of the middle class audience.

Instead of striving for acceptance, the avant-garde artist remains outside and alienated in order to critique middle class values, which placed money above love, status above mercy, work above play, and matter over mind.  Avant-garde art, in challenging middle class pragmatism, challenged middle class power.  Often this art directly or indirectly exposed middle class hypocrisy.  Sunny and beautiful on the surface, many Impressionist paintings actually depicted well-known meeting places of scandalous encounters between prostitutes and their clients.  Although today the meaning of these paintings may be lost on today’s viewers, the audience of the day was fully aware that the subjects of these artists were less than respectable. Starting with the proto-Romanticism of Jean-Antoine Gros and Théodore Géricault, the reality of current events were used to confront the public with the unpalatable truth, as shown by Gustave Courbet, or simply with ordinary every day life, as displayed by the Impressionists.  The public literally could not read the broken brushwork of the Impressionists and reacted with anger and derision.

The activity of critique places the avant-garde artist outside of conventional ways of thinking.  But this artist is also in front of the crowd and thus is making the future of art. The first separation within the art world can be seen during the Romantic period when certain artists began to represent current events.  This shift to reality was an important one.  Previously, the Neoclassical approach was an allegorical one, making statements about the present by using past events or using ancient examples to teach lessons for the present.  The split between the ancients and the moderns is not simply a stylistic one, from the linear to the painterly, but most significantly, from the past to the present.  The avant-garde artists refused to look back to a past that was increasingly irrelevant and insisted upon recording the present.  Eugene Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) was perceived, not so much as a heroic rendering of a major event in recent French history, but as a political statement valorizing rebellious uprisings.  Compared to Neoclassicism, which displaced politics to the past, Romanticism and Realism, were political simply in presenting the present.  By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the avant-garde had become political and dangerous to the established powers.

By the beginning of the 20th century, avant-garde artists were totally separated from the mainstream art world.  The art world in France and England had become splintered into factions: the very conservative, the conservative or official art, the conservative avant-garde, and the radical avant-garde.  For example, the Salon des Indépendants was conservative compared to the Salon d’automne. Avant-garde artists were completely isolated from mainstream art audiences and these artists followed the lead of the Impressionists and relied more and more upon sympathetic art dealers and understanding collectors for survival. The audience for the avant-garde artists was very small, often consisting of art critics who were crucial in writing the first accounts of indecipherable art.

This so-called “difficult” art was made by an artist, who was   outside of official art and beyond public approval. Avant-garde art tended to engender yet another generation of art, even more difficult. For example, Monet was succeeded by his colleague, Cézanne, who was, in turn, was studied by the Cubists, Picasso and Braque.  Picasso and Braque were typical of the avant-garde artists of the Twentieth Century. Working alone and unrecognized, supported by their dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.  Living in dire poverty, these two artists, like other avant-garde artists, were totally dedicated to their vision and to their belief in their art.  Art historians depicted these artists as “heroes,” struggling to maintain personal and artistic integrity in the face of a life without honor and success, understood only by those educated few.

The emergence of the avant-garde artists and the theory of “art-for-art’s sake” emerged at the same time in France.  Due to historical and economic forces, the avant-garde and aesthetics was dependent upon one another.  The public did not approve of either the style or the content of avant-garde art, and in order to defend and explain this new art, critics often put forward an appeal for a formalist reading.   When Emile Zola demanded that Edouard Manet’s work be understood in terms of its stylistic innovation, the writer was also insisting that the viewer look away from the subject matter and to the way in which the artist handled the formal elements.  Looking at art from a formal and/or disinterested perspective required a new kind of “eye.”  The purpose of avant-garde art was, by necessity an aesthetic one.  But as Bourdieu explained in The Rules of Art,

“Although it appears to itself like a gift of nature, the eye of the nineteenth-century art-lover is the product of history…the pure gaze capable of apprehending the work of art as it demands to be apprehended (in itself and for itself, as form and not as function) is inseparable from the appearance of producers motivated by a pure artistic intention, itself indissociable from the emergence of an autonomous artistic field capable of posing and imposing its own goals in the face of external demands  and it is also inseparable from the corresponding appearance of a population of ‘amateurs’ or ‘connoisseurs’ capable of applying to the works thus produced the ‘pure’ gaze which they call for.”

Although, as Bourdieu contends, the avant-garde was created as much by material forces as by aesthetic ideals, the avant-garde would have been impossible without the theory of “art-for-art’s sake.”  This timely idea, borrowed from the German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, took half a century to come to fruition in France.

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
31
2009

Podcast 6 Romanticism

ROMANTICISM AND NATIONALISM

Although Romanticism was supposedly subjective, or based in the individual sensibility of the artist, this movement was an international movement with characteristics unique to each nations.  The Romantic Movement is discussed in comparative terms, assessing the differences among the movements in France, England, America and Germany.

 

 

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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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Oct
16
2009

Podcast 5 Romantic Aesthetics

ART-FOR-ART’S SAKE

Aesthetics, as a branch of philosophy, was established in 1735 by Alexander Baumgartner in Germany.  The early development of aesthetics evolved from moral stances on art, espoused by Lord Shaftsbury and Winckelmann, became the basis for the modern definition of “art.”  This new definition of art was articulated by Kant and extended by Schiller.  Ideally suited to a modern world, ruled by the middle class, modern aesthetics ushered in the era of the independent Romantic artist and the concept of “art-for-art’s sake.”

 
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Sep
11
2009

The Enlightenment: Introduction

The Enlightenment: Introduction

Like any great cultural change, the Enlightenment was long in gestation.  By the Eighteenth Century, a critical mass of philosophical thinking and social custom had emerged, and, with it, certain famous intellectual heroes.  The Enlightenment can be understood precisely in terms of its entomology–that which sheds light: light into the darkness of religious “superstition”.  The principal conflict of the Enlightenment was the contest between established religious beliefs and a growing body of scientific knowledge that grounded knowledge, not in the will of God, but in an exercise of empirical evidence.  Upon this dialectic, struggles for social, political, and economic parity would be launched and would last to this very day. It is important to remember that the Enlightenment way of thinking is very Western and is a singular result in a particular place due to the impact of science and technology, resulting in the “death of God.”  Other areas of the world, such as Africa, were left out of technological progress and its benefits, and other areas, such as the Mid-East chose to not follow the secular path of the Europeans.  The result, two centuries later, would be a world split between those who took part in “Modernism” and those who did not.  The Enlightenment was a Western phenomenon, which established not only new philosophical ideas concerning the grounds of knowledge but also new ideals, such as “liberty, equality and fraternity,” “all men are created equal,” and the “inalienable right” of the “pursuit of happiness.”  These ideals would not be forgotten, but it would take time for the Enlightenment to become more than the ideals of speculative philosophers and to become a gradually unfolding reality.

A complex phenomenon, the Enlightenment was defined by one central question: how can life be lived and understood without God?  If God was “dead,” as Friedrich Nietzsche proposed, then the Deity was certainly an animated corpse, going to its demise, kicking and screaming, and becoming reanimated at unpredictable intervals.  The Enlightenment was confronted with Counter-Enlightenments, such as Romanticism and Catholic revivals, but politics, society and economics continued their inexorable march down the secular path.  Over time, Christianity came to occupy a smaller place in Western culture and ceased to be the basis for society’s belief system.   Once religious faith had permeated Western life and the answer to all questions was “God’s will.”  Unquestioning belief in God was challenged by two forces that proved to be critical to Enlightenment thinking.  First, was the idea  of “natural rights,” that is, the notion that people were created free and equal and had, as human beings, certain rights that could not be violated.  The concept of “natural rights” would be articulated by Enlightenment philosophers, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Thomas Jefferson but it dated back to the Twelfth Century and was present in a nascent from during the Medieval era.  The second was the explosion of scientific experimentation and hypothesis that shattered doctrines supported by the Church. Although there were certain scientific discoveries that particularly irked the religious authorities, such as the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, the combined weight of empiricism and the scientific method undermined the ability of religion to insist upon unquestioning belief.  Doubt entered into society.  Western culture shifted decisively towards secular questions and secular answers.

The result of secularism was a ripple effect that questioned the validity of the “divine right to rule,” creating a question of how could society be governed without God.  It was not just a question of government in the sense of whether or not to continue with Kings and Emperors but government in the sense of self-governance.  Without religious edicts telling people what to do, what kind of system would take the place of God’s law?  Just as scientists rewrote the knowledge of the universe, philosophers sought a new epistemology or ground for social relations. But even more urgent was the problem of knowledge.  Without God, what was knowable and how?  A new epistemology of knowledge also had to be established.  The new philosophical system proposed a new society and a new form of knowledge that would have profound impact upon art and artists, creating new ways of defining both art and artist and developing an entirely new branch of philosophy called “aesthetics.” The idea of “artistic freedom” is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment introduction of the concept of the “individual.”  The idea of the defiant artist, challenging the establishment and shocking the conservative public is an Enlightenment concept of rethinking received wisdom.

The profound secularization that is the Enlightenment has installed suspicion of authority, tradition, and divine right to rule…at least in the West.  Using the deductive and logical practices of science, rational thinking, and the powers of human reason discovered universal laws, which appear to have taken the place of God, the Enlightenment ended eighteen hundred years of spiritualized thinking.  As Thomas Carlyle said, “Philosophers strove to sink the supernatural to the natural”.  The concepts of “Nature” and “Natural Law” and “Natural Rights” and “Progress” could be used as powerful weapons against traditional powers that once ruled by “divine right.”  The Enlightenment also had a dark side.  The proponents of this unsettling upheaval in society were able to go only so far in their thinking.  The concept of “nature” or the “natural” could be used as powerful weapons to deny participation and power to those declared to be outside the confines of progress, such as women and people of color who were tied to Nature and therefore were beyond the forces of History and thus, the democratic fruits of the new social system.  Emmanuel Kant once stated, “If someone asks are we living in an Enlightened Age today?  The answer would be, ‘No,’ but we are living in an age of Enlightenment.”  The Enlightenment could not guarantee fully enlightened thinking, but the alternative to the Enlightenment, with all of its a prorias was, as David Hume, remarked, “..stupidity, Christianity, and ignorance”.  The men who made the new laws were bold, brave and even arrogant, quite capable of using enlightened modes of thinking to justify slavery and imperialism, all in the name of European superiority.

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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