Kantian Aesthetics as “Soft” Iconoclasm Thomas Pfau (bio) What is this endeavor called aesthetics, and what prompted its rise in the mid-eighteenth century? Do such theories typically, or perhaps only, arise when their main object of inquiry has become questionable, when (as Hegel avers) the end of art is upon us? Has the time for aesthetic reflection only come when the practice of art has drifted away from meanings that, at some earlier (though not easily specifiable) point in time, had been intuitively felt and practically embraced? Is aesthetics but a supplemental discourse, only called for under conditions of a modernity that, “estranged from the world, sees the world as severed into the purely factual and the hidden signification of metaphor, [whereas] the old image rejected reduction to metaphor”?1 If Schiller’s das Sentimentalische marks the moment when the production of art has become terminally self-aware, philosophical aesthetics attempts to relegitimate practices now seemingly incapable of enduring without a conceptual warrant. As evidenced by the myriad prefaces, defenses, manifestos, and reviews that, from Romanticism to high Modernism, seek to frame works of art for an increasingly disoriented and distracted public, philosophical aesthetics is a belated attempt at legitimating symbolic forms that have [End Page 69] manifestly become untethered from their millennia-old function. The result, as Hans-Georg Gadamer notes, is the paradoxical situation in which “as far as so-called classical art is concerned, we are talking about the production of works which in themselves were not primarily understood as art.” Their function, we may say, was to mediate human beings with an “order” (Gk. kosmos) that formerly could be seen, felt, and touched, but that human beings never claimed to have made or control themselves. Conversely, Gadamer goes on, “as soon as the concept of art took on those features to which we have become accustomed and . . . began to stand on its own, divorced from its original context,” the result was the “emancipation of art from all of its traditional subject matters and . . . [its] rejection of intelligible communication itself.”2 The shift from a metaphysical order to the immanent frame of homo faber thus appears to have drained the very concept of mimêsis of its essential motivation. Provided we do not misconstrue it as neo-classical “imitation” but retain its classical Greek meaning as “symbolic presentation” (Darstellung), mimêsis had been the very pivot of attempts, both in pagan cults and in Christian liturgical life, to mediate between the human and the divine. Yet, in the wake of the Reformation and the rise of Enlightenment rationalism, that sacramental framework has become notably atrophied and, at times, vigorously contested. As a result, the metaphysical view of mimêsis as intercession seems increasingly drained of motivation, irrelevant or, within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-Protestant, Pietist, and Methodist culture, is regarded with a mix of perplexity and suspicion. Let me now put a sharper focus on what, thus far, has been but a series of sweeping and eminently debatable hypotheses by raising some fundamental questions about Kant’s discussion of art as unfolded in his Critique of Judgment (1790). What follows proceeds from the hypothesis that Kantian aesthetics amounts to a concerted, if not entirely successful, attempt to repurpose the Platonic notion of the beautiful for an avowedly postmetaphysical world and its procedural and conceptualist notion of rationality. Within this paradoxical [End Page 70] situation, Kantian aesthetics occupies a unique position in that he does not yet seek to “explain” art by situating it within an explicitly historical scheme. Then again, inasmuch as Kant’s project of a “critique” aims to delimit and exclude given metaphysical commitments of any kind, his proposed rehabilitation of the beautiful is carried out with much ambivalence and countless qualifications—perhaps nowhere more so in section 59 of the Critique of Judgment, which takes up the quintessentially Platonic thesis that the Beautiful is the symbol of the Good. Two questions arise here that warrant closer consideration: first, why reengage with the concept of the beautiful at all? What necessitates reintroducing a concept whose metaphysical entanglements are palpable and bound to vex the very project of a critical philosophy so keen...
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Jul 1, 2021
Vedad Spahić + 2
Open Access
