Kant's
Logic of the Pathological: Aesthetics and
Politics
Fernando M. F. Silva/Paulo Jesus ·
Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
The guiding thread of this thematic dossier
devoted to ‘Kant’s Logic of the Pathological: Aesthetics and Politics’ invites
one to follow and examine a subtle web of imperfect analogies that produce an
inter-expressive relationship between an aesthetic community and a political
community. The underlying assumption proposes that the creative or poietic Logos
of the community encloses and discloses several layers of Pathos,
namely ‘the most violent inclination of all,’ that is to say,
the passion of freedom. Indeed, paragraph 82 of the Anthropology from
a Pragmatic Point of View focuses ‘On the inclination to freedom as a
passion,’ describing the ‘natural human being’ (Naturmensch)
as inhabitant of a Hobbesian scenario in which the natural concept of justice
entails a reciprocal claim to freedom, and hence a state of continuous warfare
(AA 7: 268-269). As naturally obscure and primordially common representations,
the idea of freedom and the idea of justice (and right) merge originally
together, whereas all limitation or constraint or hindrance imposed on freedom
constitutes the very essence of injustice. Consequently, Kant endorses the
firstness of pathos in the genesis of both personhood and sociability,
reconnecting the history of psyche and polis. Now, the aesthetic genius can be
considered as the most passionate of all free beings capable of
self-organization, and the artworks that emerge from the creative genius reveal
not only the productive intensity of freedom but also its perfectibility
towards truth and beauty, validated by the sensus
communis, the judgment of taste, shared by a community. This
is why in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy H. Arendt
locates aesthetics at the heart of politics, through the communality and
communicability of taste, the togetherness of feeling and judging the
beautiful. Unsurprisingly enough, the powers of imagination are nurtured by the
intimate commercium that binds together the praxis of inventing, judging and feeling, and thus the formative efficacy of imagination
plays a central role in interweaving the texture of political life. Probably
the most paradigmatic case of the psycho-political efficacy of pathos
resides in the Kantian portrayal of the affect of
enthusiasm shared by the spectators of the French Revolution (see Conflict
of Faculties, 2nd Part, §. 6; AA 7: 85-86). This disinterested
enthusiasm testifies, according to Kant, to a universal moral community that
transcends the borders of States and enjoys every progressive movement towards
the fulfilment of republicanism and peace.
Texts
that integrate this thematic dossier deal with diverse issues at the intersection
of aesthetics and politics, and thereby try and contribute to the study of the
conditions of possibility of a social community. They unveil some of the
Kantian subtlest paradoxes or hidden dynamic antinomies that bind together the naturally
pathological powers of mankind with the rational duty of accomplishment of its
moral and cosmopolitical self-determination.
Maria Borges, in her article entitled ‘Emotion
and the beautiful in art,’ revisits the Kantian classification of emotional
processes that include affects, moral, feelings, and passions, in order to elucidate what emotions, if any, are mobilized
in aesthetic judgment and in aesthetic experience, broadly conceived. Her
analysis demonstrates that a strict formalist perspective is confronted with
serious limitations, especially in the realm of music. Therefore, she seems to
endorse a hybrid interpretation of Kantian aesthetics, partly formalist and
partly expressivist, entangling the structure of shapes with the force of
qualities (intensive qualities, as it were).
Virginia Figueiredo
proposes a metaphorical and analogical question to open up an inquiry
concerning the nature of aesthetic creativity: ‘Does a genius produce his
artworks like an apple tree, its apples?,’ and thereby she offers a careful
and audacious examination of a fundamental isomorphy underneath the
productivity of life in general and of artistic personalities in particular. Her
interpretive hypothesis asserts that the universal spontaneity of natura naturans reveals itself in the concrete singularity of
an artist; the subjective process of creation with its material uniqueness
espouses the transcendental poetry of life.
Daniela Angelucci’s
contribution, ‘From the Sublime to the Monstrous. Two Interpretations of
Kant,’ instead of considering Kant’s concept of sublime as such, as do many
scholars, presents a linguistic analysis of two of the main aspects of the
Kantian sublime: the monstrous and the prodigious, and from then proceeds to
show how these can be disruptive regarding one’s ability to represent. Namely, Angelucci’s theory is that both the monstrous and the
prodigious, in its sublime manifestation, bring about fear and astonishment
that provoke not only a break in one’s regular representative activity, but
greatly challenge it, thereby enabling new thoughts and cognitive experiences.
Martín Fleitas
González, in an article entitled ‘A Kantian Sovereignty of Attention as a
Therapy for Mental Illnesses,’ dwells on the topic of attention both as an
original constituent of knowledge, and, yet, as a possible contributing factor
for mental illnesses. Namely, by considering the role of attention in various
dimensions of Kant’s thought, the author is led to conclude that a frail
attention is linked to many disturbances of the soul, which, in turn, results
in a cognitive deficit. This can only be countered by what the author deems a ‘sovereignty
of attention,’ a Kantian ideal that stands as the ultimate proof and solution
for the aforementioned problems.
Serena Feloj’s study on
mental illness, ‘A Sick Imagination: Pathologies and Errors in Judgment,’
reflects on the hiatus between reason and absence of reason. The author hereby
challenges Foucault’s well-known position, which separates the worlds of folly
and science, or madness and mental illness, by defending that the
transition from madness to mental illness, as operated in the 18th
century, does not exclude elements of contact between rational knowledge and
the definition of psychopathy. This the author does with the help of several Kantian
texts, especially the Anthropology, which prove the aforementioned
opinion.
We
wish you all a most enjoyable reading.
The
editors