Kant and Aesthetics
France became the titular home of the Enlightenment because of the necessity of opposing the decadence of the ancien régime, but it must be recalled that there were numerous important philosophers in England as well—the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke, David Hume–who were operating in a more “enlightened” society where royal power had long since been effectively curbed. England had had its revolution, endured the rule of the middle class, the Puritans, and had gladly restored the monarchy in 1688. The English, wary of religious extremism, established a careful balance of power between the Crown and the People. The British had learned the hard way of the power of the people when the American colonies rebelled and fought their way to freedom, using the ideas of the Enlightenment that were developed in Europe. The American Revolution was a philosophical affair, a grand experiment in democracy. To the amazement and alarm of Europeans, the Americans were turning philosophical systems into a Constitution, a government, and a way of life. And yet, it was in what we can only call “the Germanies,” not yet a modern nation, but a collection of principalities, that philosophers synthesized Enlightenment philosophy and extended it to a world now called “modern.”
“Dare to reason—have the courage to use your own minds—is the motto of the Enlightenment.” This powerful statement, defining the Enlightenment, was written by Emmanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) in 1784 in Germany, a singularly un-Enlightened land. In his essay, “What is Enlightenment?” Kant defined the Enlightenment briefly and cogently as the foundation of a new conception of the essential qualities of the state and of history. “History” exists as a concept, according to Kant, only in relation to a series of events moving towards an ideal unity or an immanent end. Writing at the end of a period, Kant coupled history with a teleological purpose. The question, for the Enlightenment philosopher, is that of the goals of history. The contemplators of past events–the historians–are no longer standing in the midst of a simple series of discrete events, but are philosophers observing a series of actions that include the idea of individual freedom. History was a process of self-liberation, a process from natural bondage towards a sense of individual becoming in a spiritual sense.
In place of irrational belief systems, the Enlightenment has created a doctrine of rational faith (perhaps a contradiction in terms)—faith in the powers of human reason. Kant has been called the First Modernist, probably because he was among the most significant late-Enlightenment philosophers. Kant sought to solve the problems put forward or suggested by the early Enlightenment philosophers. He had to establish an epistemology of knowledge based upon the deductive powers of human reason. He had to establish a system of modern morality and ethics for human behavior, without God. He had to establish a universal means of arriving at a judgment recognized universally as being valid. Ultimately, Kant had to create an architectural structure for the new individual in an Age of Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment is deeply concerned with politics: how people can rule and/or be ruled without God or King and the divine right of aristocracy. The issue of freedom must be balanced against morals and truths and social controls. Society and culture are in a state of change and flux and doubt under pressure from the rising aspirations of the lower classes and the growing power of the middle class. Enlightenment philosophy both witnesses these changes and seeks to contain an unprecedented social situation that upends prevailing traditions. Art is but one casualty of a culture, which goes into shock by the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Thus Kant’s aesthetic philosophy became the right philosophy for the right time—his ideas restored order and purpose, ironically by injecting art with the disorder of originality and stripping it of all purpose but its own. Kantian aesthetics developed out of a sense of crisis in the arts, which were unanchored without traditional purpose or patronage, bereft of subject matter and content, once dictated, and validated by Church and State. Already, the artists in France had discovered the vagaries of the middle class public, the new audience to which they were subjected in public salons. Equally depressing was the rise of yet another new enemy, the art critic who freely gave his (unlearned) influential opinion of the endeavors of the artists. How should art be judged? Who had the right to judge? The jurors? the teachers? the artists? the critics? the patrons? or the public? The goal of Kant was to put judgment on a universal basis and, because art fell neatly into the realm of subjectivity, he used art as his model in his discussion of aesthetics.
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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
