Kant's Aesthetics Research Articles

Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility ed. by James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp

Reviewed by: Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility ed. by James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp Daniel Reeve James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp. Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. 264. $75.00. The authors of this intriguing book regard medieval romance as a "deeply philosophical" (3) kind of writing whose speculative force lies in its exploration of possible worlds and its resistance to conceptualization. In order to explain the continuing "immediacy" (ix) of romance for its readers today, the authors draw upon Kantian aesthetics, since, in such a system, aesthetic judgments are universal, not historically contingent (22–23). Accordingly, the book devotes much space to arguing that the texts it discusses are beautiful in the Kantian sense. This commitment to arguing for the transhistorical appeal of romance surfaces in several other aspects of the book's structure. The core readings of medieval romances are supplemented at various points with discussions of postmedieval analogues and adaptations. This practice is justified using a theory of bidirectional intertextuality derived from Leibniz's concept of apperception. Texts contain a multiplicity of [End Page 488] detail, and our knowledge of other texts determines which details are perceived as important; the simple presence of intertexts thus exerts a force on our interpretation (12–14). The sections in which later adaptations are discussed generally follow this gentle logic of juxtaposition, rather than insisting on rigid connections. The Leibnizian notion of "folded time" is another key component of the book's methodology. Time is not a "smooth historical progression" but contains "mysterious deep connections" along different axes (9). On the face of it, this would seem to be queer temporality stripped of any non-normative politics, and while the similarity with Carolyn Dinshaw's work is briefly noted (9), the absence of any detailed comparison of these two theoretical frameworks is regrettable. Each of the book's six chapters focuses on case studies that "have echoed across culture with particular vitality and which reflect internally on romance itself" (6). Chapter 1, on the Lais of Marie de France, takes an initial cue from the Prologue's famous metapoetic reflection on the interpretation of difficult texts: Marie's term surplus de sen is used to describe an excess "within the text itself, an excess of tiny detail always available to new perception" (31). In a reading of Eliduc alongside John Fowles's The Ebony Tower, the concept of possible worlds allows for a deft account of the consequences of changing the lai's name (as Marie's narrator suggests) from Eliduc to Guildeluëc and Guilliadun: "the tale suddenly becomes two tales … both told at the same time, through the same events … obscuring untroubled perception of either" (36). The reading of Lanval draws upon the Leibnizian idea of compossibility (the capacity of objects to exist together in a given world without logical contradiction) to show how the lai uses Lanval's love for a fairy from another world to express the irreconcilability of love and feudal obligation. The chapter's final reading, of Yonec, makes a distinction between two types of possible world, metaphysical and epistemic, in order to explore what might be at stake in the imaginative work of fiction for the construction of possible futures. Chapter 2, on Sir Orfeo, takes the Middle English poem as a point in the intertextual web of the Orpheus legend, between ancient and more recent versions: Virgil's Georgics, Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground beneath Her Feet. The poem's intertextual affiliations are taken as analogous to a narrative scheme in which "the past is not restored, but strangely folded into Orfeo's present" (54). The reading thus teases out the poem's awareness of its own legendary past [End Page 489] and narrative future, reflecting on the ways in which traveling through time and between worlds demarcates the essential and contingent aspects of personal identity. Chapter 3 discusses Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, arguing that the poem oscillates between a "realistic mode" and a "tendency towards allegory" (85). This refusal of either schematic allegory or simplistic realism allows Troilus and...

Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius by Gerald Egan

Reviewed by: Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius by Gerald Egan Timothy P. Campbell (bio) Gerald Egan. Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xvii+ 229. 37 illus. $90. Gerald Egan’s Fashioning Authorship relates what might seem a familiar story of poetic vision entangled with the grubby detail of the printed book and the exigencies of the literary marketplace. Yet what more typically appears as a scene of authorial distraction or compromise becomes for Egan something more like a dialectical drama of the ideal—a luxuriously bookish, fashionable staging ground for a peculiarly English (and presciently Kantian) aesthetic “genius.” Centering on Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson, and Lord Byron, Egan grounds these poets’ literary authority in the wider story of a “commercial school of art” in Britain (defined by the aesthetic theory of the artists Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, and Joshua Reynolds) where, most essentially, “idealization proceeds through fashionable particulars” (41). The “commercial school” most directly echoes in authorial portrait frontispieces that grow prominent in the age’s poetic volumes, which present a vision of transcendence achieved not despite but by means of fashion (and an allied “ magnif[ication of] the accidental and particular” by these poets’ “distinctive physicality”) as the ephemeral ground from which genius takes flight (4–5). Egan’s star, perhaps, is Pope—particularly in the outsized portrait-à-la-mode contained in the quarto volumes of his Works of 1717 (so large it had to be folded twice to fit, under the painstaking printshop supervision of the poet himself). In the printed book, Pope’s aphoristic elision of “fine Genius” with “fine fashion” (in each case, “all those are displeas’d … who are not able to follow”) finds a material-ideal correlate, enfolding “the timeless truths of high art” in a hand-held, stylishly urbane “luxury object” (1–2). The careers of Pope, Robinson, and Byron oscillate between embrace and rejection of fashion, but all consistently define their genius in relation to the same phenomenon, shaping the period’s broader articulation of autonomous subjectivity itself. Following an introduction, Egan’s second chapter provides a historical and conceptual architecture via the commercial-aesthetic theory of Richardson and his successors, who together equated “creative self-consciousness” with “fashionable self-presentation” (11). Richardson’s treatise notably [End Page 627] synthesizes painters’ hands-on expertise in craft and materials with the more idealizing “stretch[ing]” of their rational minds (quoted 18), making the “observation of visible phenomena … continuous with complex mental operations” like “discernment” (15). For Hogarth, similarly, “the way to transcend nature proceeds through the particularity of nature, as with the eroticism of “anatomical detail” “minutely modified” to become the empirically-derived “little bit more” that marks the master (27) or by contemplating movement not as motion per se but as the fusion of “discrete but successive moments of perception” (29). For Reynolds, in turn, fashion’s “insubstantial” ornaments nonetheless convey “the original fabric of our minds” (quoted 31); and the painter’s “improvement” of “visible phenomena” paradoxically hews to “nature’s truth even as he improves it” (16). In a sign of the contemporaneous appreciation of the mutual “resona[nce]” of these perspectives, Reynolds’s own portrait head adorns a reissue of Richardson in the later eighteenth century (36). But Egan also explores the longer resonance of the “commercial school” for Kantian aesthetics (extending to contemporary theorists like Jean-Luc Nancy). Here, as Kant himself insisted, imagination “creat[es], as it were, another [higher] nature out of the material that actual nature gives it” (quoted 147), as poetic books artfully bridge the gap between causal world and free genius. Egan’s third chapter takes inspiration from Friedrich Schlegel’s suggestion that each individual book is fragmentary, for ultimately there is only one universal book, to consider the intrinsic “plurality of the poetic edition” in three senses: as a “material entity” shaped by bookmaking trades, as part of a social practice, and as aesthetic “intersection of materiality and ideality” (59, 61). In the poetic edition, the tensions between seeming unity and final plurality are pronounced, as poets’ “image of alienation” from the moment contrasts...

Some Critical Reflections on Berleantian Critique of Kantian Aesthetics from the Perspective of Eco-aesthetics

In order to develop environmental aesthetics, Berleant takes environment as an aesthetic paradigm. His understanding of the nature of environment decides the nature of his aesthetics of engagement, which emphasizes experiential continuity and rejects the separation between subject and object. Based on these ideas, he criticizes Kant’s core idea of disinterestedness in his series of books. Berleant’s environmental aesthetics has a significant impact on ecoaesthetics in China. However, Berleant’s criticism of Kant’s core idea of disinterestedness is a misunderstanding and his conception of environment is not fundamentally sound. The future of ecoaesthetics is taking ecosystem not environment as a new aesthetic paradigm .

"Striking Similarities": Ibn Sīnā's Takhyīl and Kant's Aesthetic Judgment

This article systematically compares Ibn Sīnā's paradigm of takhyīl, taṣdīq, and idh'ān to Kant's aesthetic ideas and judgment, rational ideas, and reflecting judgment, touching upon some previously investigated historical links (al-ḥiss al-mushtarak versus sensus communis, and ḥads versus ingenium). Its main purpose is to show that although the two thinkers have dissimilar perspectives on logic's relation to art and poetry leading to differences in many parts of their theories, a careful consideration of the particulars destabilizes many of the assumed differences.

Judging words: the task of criticism

ABSTRACTCriticism is apt to take the existence of its object for granted. This article’s interest is in an attitude that takes criticism to be constitutive of its object rather than secondary to it. After locating this attitude via Hegel, at the threshold between Kantian and Romantic aesthetics, the article shows how Walter Benjamin risks its consequences. Benjamin adopts a stance towards a condition of lapse in or as the object, which is then revealed to be tantamount to the founding condition of the possibility of criticism. Ascribing priority to the object amounts to a disavowal of loss. Consequently, lest criticism become a fetish, it may be necessary for it to lay a foundation on something other than the work as such. Benjamin’s reading of Genesis is presented as an exemplary instance of such an approach.

The First Notes About an Epistemological Orientation to the Law From the Relation Between Sensitivity and Understanding

O artigo tem como tema a estética kantiana e propõe um estudo do juízo reflexionante e de sua relação com a ética hermenêutica crítica, tendo como objetivo geral investigar a ética hermenêutica crítica e as possibilidades desta oferecer bases epistemológicas para o direito na contemporaneidade. Identificou-se que estender o juízo reflexionante para o campo da ética é possível, pois ainda que o juízo reflexionante não seja constitutivo e nem normativo, possui função orientadora ligada ao princípio da conformidade e a fins que podem servir de orientação para os casos que se apresentam em Direito.

Resolving the Paradox of Phenomenology through Kant's Aesthetics: Between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

ABSTRACTCommentators have claimed that the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze converge upon a spatial field of sensation which is prior to representation. This essay will contest these readings by showing that, for Deleuze, the pre-representational spatial field of intensity is fundamentally split from thought. This “gap” between sensation and thought is, for Deleuze, fundamentally temporal, in that thought is continually open and passive to being violated and transformed by the sensible and the sensible is continually being pushed beyond itself by a certain kind of thought. This violent exchange across the gap between thought and sensibility is found, by Deleuze, in Kant's notion of the aesthetic idea. On the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty, Kant's aesthetics imply a non-conceptual “ground” shared by both thought and sensibility. By contrasting these two readings of Kant's aesthetics, this paper reveals the basic divergence between the philosophies of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.

Seventy-Five Years of Kant … and Counting

There have been more articles on Kant's aesthetics in the history of the Journal than on the next four leading figures in the history of aesthetics combined. I argue that this is because Kant's aesthetic theory consists of multiple levels of theory that makes it accessible to and important for multiple approaches to the subject itself. Continuing issues for both Kant interpretation and for aesthetics in general arise at each of these levels, including the plausibility of the claim to universal validity in judgments of taste, the nature of the free play of the imagination in aesthetic experience, the character of aesthetic pleasure, the proper objects of aesthetic judgment, and the moral significance of aesthetic experience.

Pure taste in popular music: The social construction of indie-folk as a performance of “poly-purism”

This article examines the social construction of indie-folk as a genre, defined not primarily as an aesthetic category but as a tool and resource of social differentiation. Drawing from 48 in-depth interviews with musicians, gatekeepers, and audience members, the discourse of indie-folk is analyzed, focusing on how Dutch community members draw social and symbolic boundaries. Analysis shows that they are “poly-purists,” a type of cultural omnivores who consume a broad variety of musical genres yet by staying within the confines of the indie music stream rather than adopting a politics of ‘anything goes.’ By transposing the aesthetic disposition to the historically lowbrow phenomenon of folk music, community members distinguish ‘authentic’ folk from mainstream pop and dance, lowbrow country, and highbrow jazz and classical music. Simultaneously, they choose within these and other genres those items that match their ‘quality’ taste. Therefore, this study classifies indie-folk as a rising genre and contributes to existing research on cultural hierarchy and diversity, arguing that the emergence and institutionalization of indie-folk is part of the ongoing historical narrative of a Kantian aesthetics emphasizing the disinterested nature of artistic evaluation.

From Genius to Taste

I reconstruct the aestheticism of Martin Buber in order to provide a new way of framing his moral philosophy and development as a thinker. The evolution of Buber’s thought does not entail a shift from aesthetics to ethics, but a shift from one aspect of aesthetics to another, namely, from taking genius to be key to social renewal, to taking taste to be key. I draw on Kantian aesthetics to show the connection between Buber’s aesthetic concerns and his moral concerns, and to defend the notion that a certain aesthetic orientation may be just what is needed for moral response.

Kant's Conceptualism: a New Reading of the Transcendental Deduction

AbstractI defend a novel interpretation of Kant's conceptualism regarding the contents of our perceptual experiences. Conceptualist interpreters agree that Kant's Deduction aims to prove that intuitions require the categories for their spatiality and temporality. But conceptualists disagree as to which features of space and time make intuitions require the categories. Interpreters have cited the singularity, unity, infinity, and homogeneity of space and time. But this is incompatible with Kant's Aesthetic, which aims to prove that these same features qualify space and time as intuitions, not concepts. On my interpretation, the feature is objectivity. Space and time are objective, in that they ground our judgments in geometry and mechanics.

Orbit Around a Void

Orbit Around a Void Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (bio) Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting by Sianne Ngai. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 333; 44 halftones, 4 line illustrations. $20.50 paper. “Now I’m happy for a time and interested”: a state of being “interested,” a disposition to prefer one thing to another, replaces definite interests and consistent preferences . . . . He’s shopping without a list.”1 Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Passagenwerk, 1927–40) led readers into the dream underside of everyday life in the heyday of bourgeois capitalism. Benjamin’s high modernist notebook assumes both a comfort with formal gesture and the antisocial solitude of the European high literary reader of the early twentieth century, a person comfortable with the indirection of posited and disconnected things at the level of the text. Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories similarly plunges her reader into the dream underside of everyday life in our heyday of global capitalism, but hers is a plain style that feels personal, comfortable, and fluid—almost chatty. True to her training with Stanley Cavell, her style is at home in the ordinary, not wandering as the flâneur in the extraordinary. Hers is an approachable, infectious book, written around a set of tightly argued theses. Yet, Our Aesthetic Categories is an heiress of the Arcades Project. Like Ngai, Benjamin thought we can unlock the meaning of quotidian things from the perspective of the tensions generated in them through their relation to the formal causes of capitalism. It may seem [End Page 329] strange to invoke the Aristotelian notion of formal cause to explain Benjamin’s work, but one of his core assumptions is that the dynamics of capitalism literally form the way things appear in our world, straight down to their contradictions—and to the utopian possibility of overturning them. The mass-manufactured angel that even a poor wretch could buy under the translucent glass of an arcade in the 8th arrondissement grants a small piece of forgetting to end the long day of work and to assuage the children who sense their parents’ anxiety over the next rent due. This forgetting is also a reminder of the higher order of noncalculative things once solid, now melting into air. Yet the manufactured quality of the trinket reduces its dreams to clichés. Stamped on the product is the formal quality of capitalism: exhausting what it can use, spreading its wares to all, dividing and maintaining class distinctions, reducing the order of what is in itself good, and deadening ideals through the appearance of their alienation from us.2 Benjamin’s brilliance is to teach a way of experiencing everyday objects that includes their wider productive context, social relations and all. Ngai’s thesis is that our forms of judgment similarly betray the formal causes of capitalism in our current round of global restructuring. She thinks our minds are made up, too. Yet, just as Benjamin liberates us by showing us how to read objects, so Ngai might show us the direction to liberate ourselves by helping us read our judgments. Hers is a fascinating combination of critical theory with Cavell’s focus on Kantian aesthetics, and, although she does not mention Hannah Arendt, her approach would be worthy of Arendt’s work from Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) on. Arendt ended her life working on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Critik der Urtheilskraft, 1790), wanting to understand—after Adolf Eichmann’s banal evil—how people keep alive a sense of meaning in the absence of clear rules to guide us. Ngai argues that in today’s round of capitalist restructuring—a period stretching roughly from the onset of post-Fordism to today, but whose aesthetic judgments were forming from the end of the Second World War on—three forms of aesthetic judgment betray the formal contradictions of being a subject in capitalism. These three forms help us grasp where and how we are. Yet they are all so minor or paradoxical as to be aliens to the high tradition of post-Kantian aesthetics with its emphasis on the beautiful and the sublime. They are alien to Kant’s inheritors in twentieth-century art criticism at...

O Sublime de Kant

The following essay presents an analysis on Kantian aesthetics, more specifically directed to the concept of the sublime. We begin with a broad approach to the nature of Kantian aesthetics – in relation to aesthetic-reflexive judgements. Only after this brief context we move on to define the sublime following Immanuel Kant’s approach, doing so in contrast with the concept of beauty – the same way Kant clarified. Sublimity incurs from an inability of human imagination and understanding to comprehend certain phenomena, whose magnitude is beyond us and petrifies us; there is, however some moral potential in this sentiment. In conclusion, we propose a more contemporary reflection on the sublime.

Sublime Subjects: On the Impossibility of an Objective Theory of the Sublime

Starting from 20th-century theories of the sublime, this essay shows that an objectivist interpretation of such concept cannot fit in with a return to Kantian aesthetics. My argument is based on four points: imagination’s failure, as it is described in “the Analitics of Sublime”; the non-conceptual nature of Kantian sublime; its incompatibility with the ttheory of the symbol; finally, Schiller’s interpretation, which, while trying to read Kant’s aesthetics in objective terms, ends up superimposing two contrasting patterns

Is akantianMusical Formalism Possible?

In this article, I consider whether a suitably stripped-down version of Kant's aesthetic theory could nevertheless provide philosophical foundations for musical formalism. I begin by distinguishing between formalism as a view about the nature of music and formalism as an approach to music criticism, arguing that Kant's aesthetics only rules out the former. Then, using an example from the work of musicologist and composer Edward T. Cone, I isolate the characteristics of formalist music criticism. With this characterization in mind, I conclude by showing that even if Kant's aesthetic theory is reduced to its most fundamental claims, the logic of formalist music criticism precludes its practice within even a kantian perspective.

The ideal of beauty and the subjective universality: Morality in Kant's aesthetics

This paper considers the position of the relationship between the moral, the good, the beautiful and the arts in Kant's aesthetics. Its main assumption is that this relationship, which is very important for Kant, is not self-evident for a subjectivist understanding of the aesthetics phenomena and problems, and that its assertion implies a sort of reconceptualizing of the traditional understanding of the relationship between the good and the beautiful. The analysis offered in this paper aims to investigate the problem of subjective universality and sensus communis in Kant's understanding as a horizon which provides a backdrop for such re-conceptualization.

Embodied meaning and art as sense-making: a critique of Beiser's interpretation of the “End of Art Thesis”

The aim of this paper is to challenge Fred Beiser's interpretation of Hegel's meta-aesthetical position on the future of art. According to Beiser, Hegel's comments about the “pastness” of art commit Hegel to viewing postromantic art as merely a form of individual self-expression. I both defend and extend to another territory, Robert Pippin's interpretation of Hegel as a proto-modernist, where such modernism involves (1) his rejection of both classicism and Kantian aesthetics and (2) his espousal of what one may call reflective aesthetics. By “reflective aesthetics,” I mean an aesthetic framework which sees art as a form of enquiry, one whose aim is to not merely excite the imagination but to principally focus attention on social and cultural norms. The meta-aesthetical consequences of reflective aesthetics and their Hegelian heritage have both an interpretive and philosophic value: according to me, Beiser's reading of Hegel is challenged, and my interpretation of how Hegel envisaged the future of art offers a new and engaging way of understanding one of the most notorious claims in the philosophy of art, namely that art has ended.

The Judgment of the Drawing Room

The Judgment of the Drawing Room Kristin Flieger Samuelian (bio) Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility by Hina Nazar. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. 192. $45.00 cloth. In Enlightened Sentiments, Hina Nazar shows how Enlightenment rationalism is involved with sentimentalism, and how that involvement is embedded within Romantic fiction. Sentimentalism, located philosophically with David Hume and Adam Smith and fictively with novelists as differently positioned as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jane Austen, is “mutually engaged” with rationalism “in an ongoing liberal project that seeks normative underpinnings for a postmetaphysical age” (3). Nazar grounds her argument in a delineation of an autonomous judgment that is fundamentally social, enacted through the epistolarity of mid-century novels and within the drawing rooms of Austen’s domestic fiction. The “social constitution of subjectivity” (4) aligns sentimentalism with Kantian rationalism through their shared use of an “aesthetic analogy for moral judgment” (5): characters in novels judge others and their own hearts by using the same rules and standards by which they judge landscapes, artworks, poems. Nazar establishes the frame-work for her argument in the first two chapters, which outline the “rhetoric of spectatorship” (12) that informs philosophical and novelistic sentimentalism. Spectatorship links aesthetic and moral judgment to “an understanding of individuals as socially embedded subjects, whose ability to question the norms [End Page 679] of their societies and to constitute alternative principles of action requires active social engagement in the form of critical debate” (16). The “claims of the subject” in sentimentalism and Kantian aesthetics share space with the claims “of context” (58). In chapter 3, “Judging Clarissa’s Heart,” Nazar points out that Samuel Richardson’s epistolary structure cooperates with Clarissa’s (1748) trope of spectatorship to enforce the sociability of judgment. Throughout the novel, until her death and martyrdom, Clarissa “insistently questions her heart’s authority” (61), installing herself as both spectator and judge. Her understanding of herself “as her heart’s observer rather than its blind disciple” emerges in her injunctions to her friend and correspondent Anna to “‘lay [her] heart open,’ as though it were a book that could be placed on a lectern, or some other object for joint viewing” (64). In its formal structure as much as its plotting, Richardson’s novel insists on an “other-directedness of judgment” (52) that derives from David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Through her letters, Clarissa “socialize[s]” the “paradigm of judgment” (62). Correspondence enables her to receive “readers’ reports on her self-representation” (67)—a departure from the Puritan diarists whose rigorous self-scrutiny constitutes them as her most obvious formal forebears. Epistolarity articulates inward judgment but upends its infallibility. Through Clarissa’s insistence that self-examination is a social act, fully realized only in exchange, Richardson “opens up an ethical understanding that pivots around standpoints rather than standards, and that identifies the social world to be an ineluctably perspectival public space” (79). In “A Sentimental Education: Rousseau to Godwin,” Nazar reads Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise (Julie, or the New Heloise, 1761), as one of Clarissa’s immediate heirs. Inheritance is a key critical trope in Enlightened Sentiments: the legacy of “moral self-direction” (1) passes from Clarissa to Julie to Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777) to William Godwin’s Fleetwood (1805) to “the writings of one of sentimentalism’s most important literary heirs”: Austen (115). But, like the plots of so many sentimental novels, literary heritability is never straightforward: every generation, as Mary Crawford remarks in Mansfield Park (1814), “has its improvements.” In Julie, “Rousseau seeks to revise Clarissa into a Bildungsroman of the passions, to show how the love of two people of refined sensibilities . . . lends itself to affiliation with virtue” (82). But by the novel’s conclusion, which leaves St. Preux as an intellectually free ascetic and Julie as both bourgeois matron and willing sacrifice, it has become “simply [End Page 680] a narrative of replacing obedience with obedience” (91). Mackenzie and Godwin set out to correct the patriarchalism that erases Julie from Rousseau’s narrative—one with tragic overlay, one with liberal corrective. In Julia, Mackenzie returns to the female community that constituted the...

Monstrous Desires and Disinterested Appreciation: Architecture, Technique and Nature

It seems that in the last decades architecture has finally become aware of the impact the demands of its construction and of its maintenance and operation have on the environment. The demands for architecture of being green or becoming ecological have been answered mostly through an enhanced use of technology, through a technical deployment of a multiplicity of systems and gadgets that try to achieve a better performance, or in other words, a better efficiency, but not by addressing the roots of the question. Henceforth, this increase in the use of technology is covering the fact that what architecture needs to do for being green is not to promote the use of technology, but to rethink its original relation with technique and nature. This paper will propose in the first place a brief survey of this original and tainted relation between architecture, technique and nature, to show how and why this relation was condemned since the beginning. Then, I will propose in the first place two strategies to fight this original misunderstanding: an architecture of visibility, which should be a critical one, and an architecture of gratuity, that should necessarily be a disinterested one. It will follow a review of some of the questions already mentioned with more detail, addressing the question of a necessary negotiation with nature, the issues posed by the rhetorical use of green technology, the demands of transparency and gratuity in architecture, the relations between physis and techne, and the important question of disinterest through the lens of Kantian aesthetics. In a final and short conclusion I will propose, instead of a technical substratum for the relations between architecture and nature, an aesthetical one, that can anticipate a relation between man and nature based in disinterest instead of extraction and domination.

Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure. Rowan Boyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. v+241.

<i>Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure</i>. Rowan Boyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. v+241.