Modernity and Historicity in Kant's Theory of Fine Art

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1. Kant and Philosophical Modernism In his recent study of modernism, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, Robert Pippin identifies Kant as the first thoroughgoing `philosophical modernist,' and suggests that our deepest with modern life originate with the paradoxical results of Kant's critical project.' On the one hand, Pippin argues, the self-restriction of reason's application means that we must forego our natural desire to seek the unconditioned-the in-itself world that is independent of human cognition-and unhappily for knowledge of phenomena-how the world must spatiotemporally appear to finite beings like ourselves. On the other hand, Pippin also reminds us that although pure reason can be practical, it is virtually impossible to achieve the purity of will necessary to consistently obey the moral law, since practical reason must in effect compete with our sensuous natures, our petty and egotistical drives, desires, and self-satisfactions. We must, as a result, settle for `legality,' not morality.2 Consequently, from both a theoretical and practical point of view, these formulations of rational autonomy trade offsatisfaction for legitimacy, and initiate the exclusively problematization of autonomy that preoccupies virtually all nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophy, particularly in Germany. One important and characteristically modernist response to the gap Kant unwittingly opens up between the use of reason and the satisfactions this use provides is the reformulation of autonomy as an category. From this perspective, it is not the reasongoverned activities of knowing or willing that exemplify self-legislation, but the self-defining and expressive activity of the imagination that most aptly demonstrates this mode of autonomy, and helps inaugurate descriptions of human being. But before proclaiming any potential advantage in conceptualizing autonomy in terms of creativity, we should again briefly consider the aporiai Pippin identifies with Kant's critical project. At first blush, it appears that autonomy would not produce these sorts of dissatisfactions, since anonymous, rational constraints do not seem required to legitimate the activity of painters, poets, and musical composers, even if certain rulegoverned norms and conventions are scrupulously observed in their endeavors. In Kant's Critique of Judgment, however, there is a strong claim made that the otherwise free and unconstrained activity of genius must ultimately be subordinated to the universalizing constraints of taste. If this argument is convincing, then perhaps there are good reasons to abandon any search for the grounds of autonomy in creativity. But if the argument fails, then perhaps we can discern within the critical project itself the impetus behind the subsequent claims from both philosophical and artistic communities that autonomy must in fact be conceived in just this aesthetic sense. If this is the case, moreover, then there are good reasons for re-thinking the nature of Kant's contribution-as Pippin and others have understood it to the trajectory of both and modernism. Kant's contribution, in this light, would not be solely negative; it would not be simply reducible to the rational self-constraints governing all knowing and willing and the dissatisfactions that follow therefrom, but would also include Kant's inability to constrain the free and originary activities of genius, which means, according to Nietzsche's words, that a new dignity can once again be conferred to art and artist alike.3 In this essay, consequently, I want to briefly trace the opposition between genius and taste in the third Critique, and determine to what extent Kant succeeds or fails in disciplining the creative activity of the artist. This will open up, I hope, a larger debate about the centrality of the third Critique in our understanding of modernism, particularly with respect to how the relationship between modernity and history must be construed, which, as Nietzsche first explicitly showed in his second Untimely Meditation, is the crucial opposition governing our modern self-understanding. …