Autonomy and Integrity in Kant’s Aesthetics

Abstract

That the imagination should be both free and yet of itself conformable to law, that is, that it should carry autonomy with it, is a contradiction.1 So Kant writes to express as a paradox the epistemological problem that the feel ing on which an aesthetic judgment is based must be free of the constraint provided by determinate concepts, for otherwise there will be no reason why it should be pleasurable, yet must also be subject to some kind of rule, for otherwise the claim of universal validity which this judgment asserts will be irrational. And so understood, the remark is entirely rhetorical, for it is the express purpose of Kant's main argument in the Critique of Aesthetic Judg ment to show that this conception of the judgment of taste is coherent rather than contradictory. But taken from its intended context, the remark need not be rhetorical, for it can be seen as an expression of competing demands for aesthetic integrity, or demands for individual freedom and social agreement in the creation and reception of art which, unlike the two epistemological constraints on aesthetic judgment, cannot be simultaneously satisfied but which instead introduce a permanent source of instability into the history of art and taste. Indeed, it is even fitting that Kant's remark has to be taken out of context to be given this interpretation, for although Kant lays the theoretical basis for such a picture of art history he also tries to suppress its consequence and to avert the destruction of the eighteenth-century ideal of aesthetic stability which is its inevitable outcome. The tension which must arise on Kant's theory of taste may be seen as one between two competing demands for aesthetic integrity precisely because the concept of integrity has two distinct senses. On the one hand, it connotes a property of individual action or character: individual agency possesses in tegrity when it is determined independently of anything except principles free ly chosen by the agent but steadfastly by those principles. In a word, integrity in this sense is what Kant calls autonomy. On the other hand, the concept of integrity also has a sense in which it connotes not so much the autonomy of individual agency as the unity, coherence, or completeness of a whole such as an organism or an organization. It is in this sense of the term that a bridge, for instance, might be said to possess structural integrity.2 Kant has included in his theory of taste demands for integrity in each of these senses. In his ac