Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction

204 Pages·1992·22.29 MB·English

by  Salim Kemal (auth.)

KANT'S AESTHETIC THEORY
Also by Salim Kemal
KANT AND FINE ART: An Essay on Kant and the Philosophy
of Fine Art and Culture
THE POETICS OF ALFARABI AND A VICENNA
OBJECT AND LANGUAGE IN ART HISTORY: Volume 1
Kant's Aesthetic
Theory
An Introduction
Salim Kemal
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-21945-2 ISBN 978-1-349-21943-8 ((eeBBooookk))
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21943-8
© Salim Kemal 1992
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1992
ISBN 978-0-312-06833-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kemal, Salim.
Kant's aesthetic theory: an introduction / Salim Kemal.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-06833-2
1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804-Aesthetics. 2. Aesthetics,
Modern-18th century. I. Title.
B2799.A4K46 1992
111' .85'092-dc20 91-25271
CIP
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 The Background 1
The Kantian Background: the First Critique 2
Kant and his Predecessors 14
2 The'A nalytic of the Beautiful' 23
Judgements and the Aesthetic 23
Analyzing Judgements of Taste 29
The Four Moments of the 'Analytic of the Beautiful' 33
3 The Second Moment 38
4 The Third and Fourth Moments 57
Some Implications of the Analytic 68
5 Judgements of Taste and Their Deduction 73
Kant's Deduction of Judgements of Taste 80
Other Writers on the Deduction 103
6 The Necessity of Judgements of Taste 116
7 The Context of Kant's Aesthetic Theory 152
Beauty and Bibliography 165
Notes 170
Index 194
Acknowledgements
Some of the material in this book appeared in different versions in
the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Kant Studien. I
am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to use
the material here.
Carl Hausman, Peter Iver Kaufmann, and Nabil Matar read
earlier drafts of the book; their advice helped give it its present
form. I am grateful to them, as I am to Jane Baston, without whom
it would not have been possible for me to write this book.
I have again been lucky with editors: Sophie Lillington and
Frances Arnold at the publishers have been consistently helpful,
and I am happy to thank them.
S. K.
vi
1
The Background
This book will examine Kant's Critique of Judgement, and will be
concerned with both historical and conceptual matters. Arguably
that text is the first systematic study of aesthetic theory to be
produced in the history of modem philosophy, and it raises issues
which, if in somewhat changed form, still generate debate among
aestheticians.
Kant was concerned with the distinctive nature, scope, and
validity of aesthetic claims. When we say that things are beautiful,
graceful, deformed, ungainly, pretty, prosaic, delicate, sad, or
tragic, we usually intend these predicates to signify something that
is more and other than a merely subjective liking or disliking.
Rather, we expect that a claim that an object is beautiful can be
acceded to by other subjects. Our claim is not just the expression of
a subjective, idiosyncratic and merely personal preference, but is
more like a claim about facts.
To explain this expectation, Kant clarifies just what sort of
validity aesthetic claims can have; how they are like or unlike facts
or moral demands; or how we know when someone has success
fully made an aesthetic judgement rather than misunderstood
what is merely an expression of personal preference. This leads
him to consider other issues: what kinds of objects do we find
beautiful? Does beauty depend on objects being of a certain kind?
What makes them beautiful? For example, in the case of art: must
we judge it beautiful in a way distinctive from our appreciation of
natural beauty? How is art produced? What makes for creativity?
What is genius in art? Or further, what is the value of beauty? How
does it fit into our social, political, cultural and moral lives? Is the
pursuit of beauty the most important task that can engage us? And
so on.
1
2 Kant's Aesthetic Theory
THE KANTIAN BACKGROUND: THE FIRST CRITIQUE
At the time of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
believed that claims about beauty were subjective and could not
have any general validity. Knowledge claims, for example, are true
or false, and we not only expect that an assertion about events or
objects will gain agreement from others, but also look for general
principles or criteria for making such claims. By contrast, the claim
that an object is beautiful is subjective because it is based only on
feelings of pleasure that a subject has. These vary from subject to
subject. Consequently, just as a subject would not expect others to
like apples just because he happens to like their taste, Similarly we
cannot expect that our feeling-based assertion that a thing is
beautiful will generate agreement from others. Nor will we have
some rule or principle about how people should behave. If we do
all behave uniformly, this is at best the result of a uniformity in
ourselves.
In the past, philosophers attempted to provide rational prin
ciples for aesthetic judgements. But, as we shall see, Kant thinks
their efforts were unsuccessful. The principles they put forward
either turned out to be merely empirical generalizations about
actual usage or did not apply to aesthetic claims specifically. Either
way they could neither warrant particular claims about aesthetic
value nor possess a justifiable validity.
As aesthetic responses are variable, subjective, and unruly, they
cannot possess any valid principles. Consequently, Kant did not
expect to produce a 'critique of taste', where the latter involves
examining the scope and power of the rules or principles govern
ing our rational capacity for appreciating beauty. Better then, Kant
suggests, to reserve the term 'aesthetics' for a study of our sensi
bility and its operations, and to give up the search for a 'critique of
taste' or any examination of the validity that any subject may claim
for their appreciation of beauty. As he writes in a footnote to the
Critique of Pure Reason, the 'Germans are the only people who
currently make use of the word "aesthetic" in order to signify what
others call the critique of taste. This usage originated in the abort
ive attempt made by Baumgarten, that admirable analytic thinker,
to bring the critical treatment of the beautiful under rational prin
ciples, and so to raise its rules to the rank of a science. But such
endeavours are fruitless. The said rules are, as regards their sources,
The Background 3
merely empirical and consequently can never serve as apriori laws
by which our judgement of taste may be directed ...
'.1
Yet some years later Kant rewrote this passage to allow for
aesthetic validity. He also went on to publish a third Critique,
whose first part, The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, sought just
those rules and justifications for our appreciation of beauty that he
had earlier rejected. There is no inescapable contradiction between
the two positions, however, but an increasing certainty on Kant's
part that, in spite of the inadequacy of his predecessors' argu
ments, and despite his own earlier doubts, aesthetic validity was
possible.
Nonetheless, we can understand why, in the first flush of the
critical enterprise, aesthetics must have seemed too subjective and
idiosyncratic ever to be rationalized. In the process of clarifying
which distinctions, concepts, and operations are basic to correct
reasoning, Kant also dismissed the conclusions of previous writers
about the power and validity of reason. As those conclusions
underlay their accounts of aesthetic validity, by implication Kant
also rejected the aesthetic theory they sustain.
Kant initiated his account of correct reasoning with the Critique of
Pure Reason. He begins by taking it for granted that we can have
knowledge and resolve conflicting cognitive assertions. But he also
wants to discover what warrants our certainty in this. We can
clarify the need to discover the basis for such certainty by pointing
out instances where reasoning seems to fail us. For example, it
seems that a number of problems which engage us - about the
eternity of the world, about the nature of the first cause, about the
totality of the world - remain unresolved because we are not clear
about the process of reasoning involved in thinking them through.
This leads to antinomies - argument forms in which we can argue
for mutually contradictory conclusions from the same premises. To
resolve or escape such problems, Kant proposes that we should
first carry out a critique of our capacity for reasoning, of the
cognitive faculties we use, to see what are their strengths, how far
they are reliable, and what kind of problems their use enables us to
solve. Once we become clear about their power and scope, we can
proceed to use reason in gaining knowledge, knowing which of
our knowledge and other claims have a warrant and are reliable.
Kant's conclusions depend on the premise that the operations
and nature of the mind structure our knowledge of the world. We