In a recent Wall Street Journal article, art critic Terry Teachout asks: “Are our brains big enough to untangle modern art?”
As examples, Teachout quotes one of thousands of sentences from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake like this one: “It is the circumconversioning of antelithual paganelles by a huggerknut cramwell energuman, or the caecodedition of an absquelitteris puttagonnianne to the herreraism of a cabotinesque exploser?” And he mentions “the splattery tangles and swirls” of Jackson Pollock pieces and quote music theorist Fred Lerdahl, who argues that much modernist music “overwhelms the listener’s processing capacities.”
To which I juxtapose three quotations from Section 23 of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment of 1790. Professor Kant divides art into the merely beautiful and that which is magisterially sublime:
“But there are remarkable differences between the two. The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by the occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought.”
Further: The beautiful “directly brings with it a feeling of the furtherance of life.” “But the other [i.e., the sublime] is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, viz. it is produced by the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outflow of them, so that it seems to be regarded as emotion—not play, but earnest in the exercise of the imagination. Hence it is incompatible with charm; and as the mind is not merely attracted by the object but is ever being alternately repelled, the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much involve a positive pleasure as admiration or respect, which rather deserves to be called negative pleasure.”
And finally: “But the inner and most important distinction between the sublime and beautiful is, certainly, as follows. … . Natural beauty (which is independent) brings with it a purposiveness in its form by which the object seems to be, as it were preadapted to our judgment, and thus constitutes in itself an object of satisfaction. On the other hand, that which excites in us, without any reasoning about it, but in the mere apprehension of it, the feeling of the sublime may appear, as regards its form, to violate purpose in respect of the judgment, to be unsuited to our presentative faculty, and as it were to do violence to the imagination; and yet it is judged to be only the more sublime.”
So, for Kant, the sublime in art is formless, charmless, checks our vital powers, is repellent and a negative pleasure, violates our attempt to judge its purpose, and does violence to the imagination.
One of the major, major pessimists in history. I quoted him last week in the context of contemporary anti-humanism and those calling for human extinction. But lest we think of Arthur as always grim and cranky, here’s a delightful zinger.
Schopenhauer, assessing Kant’s moral philosophy:
“I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife” (On the Basis of Morality).
Although it is hard to imagine (even if one tries very hard, which I don’t recommend) Professor Immanuel Kant in pursuit of a love affair, Schopenhauer’s simile is on to something. Kant and his followers presents his project as new, modern, and revolutionary, but after doggedly reading through hundreds of pages of dense prose (sample here), one realizes it’s essentially the same old dowdy stuff (apologies to all wives).
Which is why Schiller could say, in a letter to Goethe, “There still remains something in Kant, as in Luther, that makes one think of a monk who has left his monastery, but been unable efface all traces of it.” Indeed.
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 9:33 am. Add a comment
The poet John Enright has a post entitled “Kant and Abstract Art,” in which he takes up the claim Rand made in The Romantic Manifesto that “the father of modern art is Immanuel Kant (see his Critique of Judgment).” Rand does not elaborate, and Enright notes that some people scoff at the claim.
Rand’s claim is a strong one, in part because it makes intellectual-causal connection across centuries. How does one establish a fatherly connection between an uptight eighteenth-century philosopher and a sprawling twentieth-century movement? And in part Rand’s claim is hard to wrap one’s mind around because Kant’s philosophy is known to be turgid, arid, and highly rationalistic while modern art is known to be wild, weird, and wacky. How on earth could the Prussian lead to Pollock?
Is Rand right, and if so what is the connection?
I’ve been working on and off toward an essay on the topic of Kant’s influence on modern and postmodern art. Huge topic, so let me here give only some preliminary scholarly props to Enright’s post in the form of a few quotations from recent thinkers.
What have scholars after Rand said about the connection between Kant and modern art?
In a scholarly collection of essays on Kant’s philosophy, Eva Shaper writes that Kant is “the father of modern aesthetics” (“Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: the Aesthetics of Nature and Art,” in Paul Guyer, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 368).
Harold Osborne, longtime editor of the scholarly British Journal of Aesthetics, writes of “Kant, who is rightly regarded as the founder of modern aesthetics” (Aesthetics and Art Theory: An Historical Introduction, E. P. Dutton, 1970, p. 153). And further Osborne claims of Kant’s analysis: “This theory is the most important anticipation of the modern aesthetic outlook in any philosopher before the twentieth century” (p.191).
Without the first part of Critique of Judgment, writes philosopher Roger Scruton, “aesthetics would not exist in its modern form” (Kant, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 79).
Philosopher Arthur Danto agrees with influential modernist art critic Clement Greenburg on the centrality of Kant’s work to the modernist project:
‘“The essence of Modernism,” [Clement Greenberg in “Modernist Painting” (1960)] wrote, “lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Interestingly, Greenberg took as his model of modernist thought the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist.” […] I suppose the corresponding view of painting would have been not to represent the appearances of things so much as answering the question of how painting was possible”’ (After the End of Art, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 7).
Kant scholars Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer note that in the Critique of Judgment Kant “is entrenching the assumption of the subjective character of aesthetic judgment so strongly that by our own time it has become virtually an (unargued) commonplace” (Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 11).
And more sweepingly, Professor Denis Dutton, philosopher and author of The Art Instinct, writes that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is “the greatest work of philosophical aesthetics ever written” (Dutton’s website).
Enright notes that scholar Roger Kimball makes a point of connecting Kant and modernist art in an essay on Schiller.
So from Kant’s Critique to Christo — an interesting fill-in-the-blanks intellectual-history project awaits.
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 10:29 am. Add a comment
Stephen Hicks discusses Immanuel Kant’s emphasis upon obedience and discipline as fundamental in education. This is from Part 7 of his Philosophy of Education course.
Zeev Sternhell is an ally in the battle against the nihilism of the Anti-Enlightenment and its heirs. His book is written for scholars, but note this ringing conclusion:
“To prevent the people of the twenty-first century from sinking into a new ice age of resignation, the Enlightenment vision of the individual as creative of his or her present and hence of his or her future is irreplaceable.”
The modern world’s great battle of Anti-Enlightenment-versus-Enlightenment was launched, in Sternhell’s reading, by Johann Herder’s attack on Immanuel Kant:
“Some ten years after [Herder's] Bückeburg pamphlet, the polemic with Kant began, which symbolically confirmed the great division between the two types of modernity: the one that stood for universal values, the greatness and autonomy of the individual, master of his fate, the one that conceived of society and the state as instruments in the hands of the individual who had set out in conquest of liberty and happiness, and the communitarian, historistic, nationalist modernity, a modernity in which the individual is determined by his ethnic origins, history, language, and culture” (p. 11).
Sternhell takes Rousseau and Kant to be Enlightenment figures, though he is very aware of their being “complex and ambiguous figures in the history of Western political thought.” (By contrast, I take Rousseau and Kant to be Counter-Enlightenment figures, though I agree very much with Sternhell that those are difficult judgment calls. And I laughed out loud at his quoting from Judith Shklar’s Men and Citizens on Rousseau as “the Homer of the losers.” Perfect.)
My thoughts on the Enlightenment, the Counter-Enlightenment and our resulting postmodern intellectual condition are here.
Posted 4 months, 1 week ago at 12:27 am. 1 comment
Immanuel Kant’s famous line from his Critique of Pure Reason is discussed as representative of the change of strategy among religion-friendly thinkers after the widely-perceived failure of natural theology. This is from Part 3 of Professor Hicks’s Philosophy of Education course.
We are now, however, talking about a very different Reason than the Enlightenment one. Hegel’s reason is fundamentally a creative function, not a cognitive one. It does not come to know a pre-existing reality; it brings all of reality into existence.
More notoriously, Hegel’s reason operates by dialectical and contradictory means, and not in accordance with the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction.
Hegel’s dialectic is driven partly by the fact that by the early nineteenth century evolutionary ideas are in the air. In contrast to Kant’s belief that the subjective categories of reason are necessarily unchanging and universal, Hegel argued that the appropriate categories themselves are changeable. But Hegel’s dialectic is a special kind of evolution, one designed less to be responsive to discoveries in biology than to square with Judeo-Christian cosmology.
Judeo-Christian cosmology had traditionally been plagued by metaphysical assertions that were repugnant to reason. Respect for reason during the Enlightenment had led accordingly to a significant decline in religious belief among the intellectuals. Aristotelian reason cannot countenance a god that creates something out of nothing, that is both three and one, that is perfect but creates a world that contains evil. Accordingly, the thrust of Enlightenment theology had been to alter religion by eliminating its contradictory theses in order to make it compatible with reason. Hegel’s strategy was to accept that Judeo-Christian cosmology is rife with contradictions—but to alter reason in order to make it compatible with contradiction.
Here Hegel made another significant step beyond Kant and further away from the Enlightenment. Kant had come close to the truth, Hegel believed, in developing the antinomies of reason in the first Critique. Kant’s purpose there was to show that reason is out of its depth when it tries to figure out noumenal truths about reality. He did so by developing four pairs of parallel arguments on four metaphysical issues and by showing that in each case reason leads to contradictory conclusions. One can prove that the universe must have had a beginning in time, but one can equally soundly prove that the universe must be eternal. One can prove the world must be made up of simplest parts and also that it cannot be, that we have free will and that strict determinism is true, that God must exist and that He does not exist.[24] These contradictions of reason show, Kant concluded, that reason can never know reality, and that therefore our reason is limited to structuring and manipulating its subjective creations.
Hegel thought that Kant had missed a deep point here. The antinomies are not a problem for reason, contrary to Kant but rather the key to the whole universe. The antinomies of reason are a problem only if one thinks that logical contradictions are a problem. That was Kant’s mistake—he was too trapped in the old Aristotelian logic of non-contradiction. What Kant’s antinomies show is not that reason is limited but rather that we need a new and better kind of reason, one that embraces contradictions and sees the whole of reality as evolving out of contradictory forces.
Such a conception of contradictory evolution is compatible with Judeo-Christian cosmology. That cosmology begins with a creation ex nihilo, posits a perfect being that generates evil, believes in a just being that gives humans independent judgment but punishes them for using it, includes accounts of virgin births and other miracles, says that the infinite becomes finite, the immaterial becomes material, the essentially unitary becomes plural, and so on. Given the primacy of that metaphysics, reason must give way. Reason, for example, must be adapted to the demands of this metaphysics of creation:
“As yet, there is nothing and there is to become something. The beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed; therefore being, too, is already contained in the beginning. The beginning, therefore, contains both, being and nothing, is the unity of being and nothing; or is non-being which is at the same time being, and being which is at the same time non-being.”[25]
While that account of creation is incoherent from the perspective of Aristotelian reason, such a poetically grand-sounding drama of evolution by contradiction is perfectly rational —if one grants that reason contains within itself contradiction, that analysis consists in seeking the implicit contradiction within anything and teasing it out in order to put the contradictory elements explicitly in tension with each other, thus leading to a resolution that both goes beyond the contradiction to another evolutionary stage while at the same time preserving the original contradiction. Whatever that means.
Hegel thus explicitly rejected Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction: Absolutely everything depends on “the identity of identity and non-identity,” Hegel wrote in The Science of Logic.[26]
Hegelian dialectical reason also differs from Enlightenment reason by implying a strong relativism, against the universality of Enlightenment reason. For all of Hegel’s talk of the ultimate Universal perspective of the Absolute, from any other perspective nothing holds for long: dialectic injects contradiction into reality at any given time as well as across eras. If everything is evolving by the clash of contradictions, then what is metaphysically and epistemologically true in one epoch will be contradicted by what is true in the next, and so on.
Finally, Hegel’s reason differs from Enlightenment reason by not only being creative of reality and in embracing contradiction, but also by being a fundamentally collective function rather than an individual one. Here again, Hegel went beyond Kant in rejecting the Enlightenment. While Kant preserved some elements of individual autonomy, Hegel rejected those elements. Just as the Judeo-Christian cosmology sees everything as God working out His plan for the world in, around, and through us, for Hegel individuals’ minds and whole being are a function of the deeper forces of the universe operating upon them and through them. Individuals are constructed by their surrounding cultures, cultures that have an evolutionary life of their own, those cultures themselves being a function of yet still deeper cosmic forces. The individual is a tiny emergent aspect of the largest whole, the collective Subject’s working itself out, and the creation of reality occurs at that level with little or no regard for the individual. The individual is merely along for the ride. Speaking in Philosophy of History of collective reason’s operations, Hegel stated that as “Universal Reason does realize itself, we have indeed nothing to do with the individual empirically regarded”; “This Good, this Reason, in its most concrete form, is God. God governs the world; the actual working of his government—the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World.”[27]
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 6 months, 3 weeks ago at 2:03 pm. Add a comment
Beethoven, according to biographer Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven:
“Wegeler tells us that when a series of lectures on Kant was organized in Vienna in the 1790s, ‘Beethoven didn’t want to attend even once, even under my urging.’ Rather, Beethoven preferred self-education through voracious reading in popularizations of the works of the major thinkers; through rich encounters with poetry, drama, and opera; and, most happily, through discourse and conversation with good minds in pleasant surroundings—whether in the salon or the tavern, the palace or the coffeehouse.” (pp. 36-37)
And: “In 1809 [Beethoven] wrote to the Leipzig music publisher Breitkopf & Hä̈rtel: ‘There is hardly any treatise which could be too learned for me. I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood I have striven to understand what the better and wiser people of every age were driving at in their works.’” (p. 37)
That intense engagement with the great works of the great minds reminds me of Michelangelo’s early and ongoing education.
When Michelangelo was a teen, according to biographer William Wallace, he was exposed to the best of the Florentine intellectual ferment:
“To begin with, the young boy was taken into the famiglia by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who treated him like a son. He spent two of the happiest years of his life in the Medici Palace, surrounded by the members of Lorenzo’s humanist circle and alongside his future patrons, Giovanni and Giulio de’ Medici (respectively popes Leo X and Clement VII).” (The Genius of the Sculptor in Michelangelo’s Work, p. 152)
“Michelangelo venerated Dante throughout his life, and addressed two of his own poems to him. When he stayed in Bologna for about a year after the fall of the Medici in 1494, he is said to have read every evening to his patron Giovan Francesco Aldovrandi passages from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – only stopping when his employer fell asleep.” (p. 21)
“But there are remarkable differences between the two. The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by the occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought.” 
Rand’s claim is a strong one, in part because it makes intellectual-causal connection across centuries. How does one establish a fatherly connection between an uptight eighteenth-century philosopher and a sprawling twentieth-century movement? And in part Rand’s claim is hard to wrap one’s mind around because Kant’s philosophy is known to be turgid, arid, and highly rationalistic while modern art is known to be wild, weird, and wacky. How on earth could the Prussian lead to Pollock? 
In a scholarly collection of essays on Kant’s philosophy, Eva Shaper writes that Kant is “the father of modern aesthetics” (“Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: the Aesthetics of Nature and Art,” in Paul Guyer, ed.,
Stephen Hicks discusses Immanuel Kant’s emphasis upon obedience and discipline as fundamental in education. This is from Part 7 of his 
We are now, however, talking about a very different Reason than the Enlightenment one. Hegel’s reason is fundamentally a creative function, not a cognitive one. It does not come to know a pre-existing reality; it brings all of reality into existence. 
