Kant with Michael Fried: Feeling, Absorption, and Interiority in the <em>Critique of Judgment</em>

Abstract

While the greater part of criticism and refl ection on Kant takes the question of aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment to center on the subject’s relation to art, art is not actually Kant’s model of aesthetic experience in the text. 1 Niether is it simply nature. The Critique of Judgment, in other words, cannot simply be understood as Kant’s engagement with the realm of what we understand by aesthetics. Rather, it is the case that in the third Critique, an aesthetic object for Kant constitutes itself as aesthetic object only in relation to a particular kind of subject or unique experience of the subject. Aesthetic experience for Kant is an economy between subject and object rather than an encounter with what we understand by beauty. Aesthetics, then, rather than being the division of Kant’s philosophy concerned with art or the beautiful becomes, instead, a mode or a displaced way of his posing questions about subjectivity more generally. The fact that Kant does not understand aesthetic experience, or the power of judgment, to be primarily “of” art or to be limited to the experience of art has great consequences for how the third Critique can be read and for what its implications are for Kant’s philosophy as well as for literature and philosophy following Kant. How an aesthetic object constitutes itself as aesthetic object, for Kant, cannot be understood simply in terms of the object’s formal features. The question of the constitution of an aesthetic object in the third Critique is neither a formal nor even an epistemological one. Because Kant conceives aesthetic experience as an economy, Kant’s aesthetic object must work to achieve an ontological shift in itself, one through which too a different kind of subject is brought into existence. It is an economy that, as I hope to show, bears a striking resemblance to the shift between artwork and apprehender that Michael Fried claims transpires at about the same period in the history of art and conceptions of aesthetic experience. 1 I am indebted to Rodolphe Gasche’s The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (2003) in this line of argumentation.