A Rescued Legacy and a Jazz Model:
Mapping Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment”’s Twentieth-Century Reception
Silvestre Gristina[*]
University of Padua, Italy
Review of: Marino, Stefano, Terzi,
Pietro (edited by), Kant’s “Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment” in the 20th Century. A Companion to Its Main
Interpretations, Berlin/Boston, Walter De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 361, ISBN
978-3-11-059613-7.
“Nun war vor Törleß der Name Kant nie anders als
gelegentlich und mit einer Miene ausgesprochen
worden, wie der eines unheimlichen Heiligen. Und Törleß konnte gar nichts anders denken, als daß von Kant die Probleme der Philosophie endgültig
gelöst seien, und diese seither eine
zwecklose Beschäftigung bleibe”. This passage from Musil
is well known: after a conversation with his
mathematics teacher, Törleß has just taken into his
hands a book by Kant, which had been lying open on a table, like a Bible. And
although Musil does not write it explicitly, that
book has been universally recognized as The
Critique of Pure Reason. In the following pages, Musil
shows us Törleß, struggling to read the first pages
of the Kant. At the end of the day he is exhausted, he
does not want to read a single page more, and he asks himself whether the
reason for that feeling is sickness or just fear. But the most meaningful
passage comes right after, when Törleß falls asleep
and dreams of Kant, walking with a heavy book in his arms. And that book is so
heavy that Kant has to stop every three steps to rest. The result of Törleß/Musil’s encounter with Kant
was the strong belief that Kant had surely found the conceptual order for the
understanding of the rational world, but refused to
investigate the dimension of irrationality and the imaginary. It was probably
the first Viennese step towards Canetti’s novel Die Blendung, which was originally to be
entitled Kant fängt
Feuer. But what if Törleß had read – for example
– the Analytic of the Sublime?
Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the 20th
Century, edited by
Stefano Marino and Pietro Terzi, could help us to rethink Törleß’s
dream, drawing a map of the influence of “another” Kant, which burst into
flames not because – as Canetti would have wanted – his philosophy was unfit to address the new
challenges posed by the twentieth-century, such as irrationality or blind spots
of rationality, but rather because his philosophy had to become a torch to
illuminate new paths through the unexplored land disclosed after the turn of
the century. Let us now imagine Törleß stands
symbolically for the twentieth century, and from his unconscious emerges
Immanuel Kant, with his eighteenth-century ponytail, as Musil
ironically writes, but this time something is different: in his arms he is
carrying another book, “a complex, multi-layered, heterogeneous, discontinuous and,
so to speak, ‘patchy’ work” (p.4), the Critique
of the Power of Judgment. Out of metaphor, it is well known that the third Critique has deeply influenced the
twentieth-century history of philosophy, nourishing debates in many
philosophical disciplines. However, the volume’s editors are right when they
argue that, “while the importance of the Critique of the Power of Judgment for
the birth of nineteenth-century romanticism and transcendental idealism was
widely acknowledged and documented early on, scholars have sometimes overlooked
its far-reaching influence on twentieth-century thought” (p.4). Marino and
Terzi’s editorial project takes the first important step towards the
comprehension of Critique of Power of
Judgment’s widespread importance in contemporary philosophy. This
collective volume does not only make a first mapping – both properly
geographical and chronological and conceptual – but also provides a
methodological toolbox to follow the track taken. Indeed, the second paragraph
of the introduction is a fresco of the history and geography of the reception,
which constitutes the background on which the contributions can be organically
placed. The editors follow the Wirkungsgeschichte vertically,
crossing two centuries, and horizontally, looking at different cultural
contexts. In this way, tracing the reception paths in Germany, France, Italy,
the United Kingdom and America, within a range of two centuries, a
three-dimensional web emerges. Precisely this figure allows the editors to
organize the material of the contributions, and also provides the reader with
orientation within such a complex phenomenon.
In
the third paragraph the editors accurately describe the state-of-the-art of the
research on the reception and the interpretations of the Critique of the Power of Judgement by referring to the last three
decades of conferences and publications on the topic. This thorough overview of
the status quaestionis
is not a mere formality, but allows the editors to
show the originality of Kant’s “Critique
of Aesthetic Judgment in the 20th Century in the light of
current scholarly debate, and also to declare the general ambition of the book.
Indeed, Marino and Terzi clarify that they aimed to produce “the first
comprehensive study on this missing piece in the history of contemporary
philosophy, capable of cutting in a unique way across different traditions,
movements, and geographical areas” (p.30). The last part of the introduction
makes explicit the methodological framework used for the coordination of the seventeen
contributions that compose the collective work. First, each chapter – for both
methodological and historical-philosophical reasons – investigates the
contemporary reception of the Critique of
the Aesthetic Power, leaving out the contemporary debate on the Critique of the Teleological Power of
Judgment. This focus allows the work to concentrate specifically on
aesthetics as a field of philosophy, and its implications. Secondly, the
general method of choice and organization proves to be, paradoxically, a successful
non-method, since the editors explicitly declare that they restrained
themselves from dictating an overreaching methodological model to the authors,
with the aim of showing, practically, the complexity and variety of the
phenomenon of reception of one of the most crucial texts in the history of
philosophy. Indeed, the Critique of Power
of Judgment is not only the fulfilment of the system of transcendental
philosophy, it could be considered the core of the system, the work in which
the elements that make a critique of the whole reason possible truly appear.
The unedited use of the reflective judgment, the role of imagination in its
free play, and the power of teleological judgment are the conceptual devices
that opened new paths of thought in the history of philosophy, from Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre to Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism. This collection, as was anticipated, is
about sketching a cartography of this web of paths, a map of a territory that
has remained historically uncharted, and it is also a tool to shed light on Törleß’s multi-layered dream, in the way we have
reformulated it.
The
first part of the volume collects contributions regarding German philosophers.
The opening one, by Arno Schubbach, discusses the
interpretation of the third Critique
by the most prominent representatives of the Marburg school, Hermann Cohen and
Ernst Cassirer. In the first paragraph, Schubbach
introduces Cohen’s “violent” reading of this Kant text as an aesthetic in the
narrow sense of philosophy of art. Then, the author proceeds, showing how
Cohen’s pivotal twist was to interpret Kant’s universal communicability of the
pleasure of beauty as the horizon in which humanity is aesthetically revealed
as a cultural community. From this point of view, Cohen could reinterpret
aesthetic as the keystone of the whole Kantian system of critical philosophy,
contributing, as a specific part of the system, to the plurality of cultural
fields and, as the systematic pin, to the integrity of philosophy and the unity
of its object, which is culture. The second paragraph is dedicated to
Cassirer’s interpretation, which takes a position against the common view of
the Critique of Power of Judgment as
a filler of an architectonical missing piece. According to Cassirer, it is an immanent
progress of the critique of reason that led to the third part of the system,
since empirical knowledge could not be gained by applying general concepts, but
only through a system of particular laws, which would have necessarily led to a
keener and deeper formulation of apriority itself. This reading leads Cassirer
to the formulation of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, based on the concept of
symbol as the vanishing point of philosophical reflection based on empirical
findings. To sum up, in contrast to Cohen, Cassirer reads the examination of
empirical knowledge and the reflective power of judgment not as mere elements
of a philosophy of art, completing the system, but rather as fundamental
devices to transform and improve critical philosophy as such.
Leaving
Marburg, Günter Figal discusses Kant’s aesthetics
from Heidegger’s (non)-reception to Gadamer’s interpretation and his landing to
phenomenological aesthetics until today. The contribution opens with a
conjecture about why Heidegger never referred explicitly to the third Critique: “since Heidegger could not
seriously regard Kant’s contribution to aesthetics as marginal, he maybe
skipped it because it might have been a serious challenge of Heidegger’s view
on aesthetics, and thus also of his own thinking of art” (p.62). Developing
this hypothesis, the author sketches Heidegger’s portrait of aesthetics,
consisting in a contrast between his evocation of “true art” and a self-centred reduction of art to a stimulus of subject’s
emotional states. According to Figal, this simplified
picture helped Heidegger to avoid the challenge posed by Kantian aesthetics,
which was, instead, accepted by Gadamer in Truth
and Method. Indeed, while claiming, in the wake of Heidegger, that the only
alternative to aesthetics is the truth-character of art, Gadamer develops his
critical argument against Kant extensively. Finally, opposing the
Heidegger-Gadamer critical arguments, Figal argues
that Kantian aesthetic framework actually resists those critiques. Aesthetic
experience clearly has a subjective aspect, but the pleasure gained from the
contemplation of an artwork, the free views and possibilities that it opens,
are by no means self-centred. Aesthetic experiences
have their roots in the concrete artwork, which make them possible precisely
because it is an aesthetic object.
Dennis
J. Schmidt’ chapter is linked to the previous one. In fact, if Figal focused on Gadamer’s criticisms to Kantian
aesthetics, on the pars destruens of its interpretation, Schmidt highlights the
pars costruens
by claiming that Gadamer’s originality starts exactly with his reappropriation
of Kant’s effort to clarify the bond between aesthetic experience and truth. In
this sense, although Gadamer was not an orthodox Kantian, Kant’s third Critique has been for him an inspiration
to be pressed forward on and radicalized. In order to find his hermeneutic upon
a humanistic sense of truth, Gadamer isolated four concepts – Blidung, sensus communis,
Urteilsckraft and Geschmack –, which are precisely Kant’s third
Critique’s conceptual pillars. From
these premises, the author shows how the analysis of Kant was the bridge that
connected Gadamer’s hermeneutics with humanism. Gadamer himself acknowledged
that he found his way to hermeneutics discussing the narrowness of the concept
of knowledge that limited Kant’s position on aesthetics. Developing this
argument, the author ends meaningfully the contribution claiming that “Gadamer
radicalizes the phenomena and experience that Kant first exposes in the Critique of the Power of Judgment” and
“can be read as one of Kant’s most loyal successors in the twentieth century” (p.90).
Haans-Peter Krüger’s original chapter is about
Helmuth Plessner’s usage of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The first part is dedicated to Plessner’s functionalization of reflective judgment for
modern research procedures. Plessner was convinced
that it could be possible to conceive of a new idea of philosophy in a
systematic form by inverting the relation between determining and reflective judgment
in Kant into a future orientation for modern research. Since, moreover,
research involved not just working through known laws but, rather, revolves
around the discovery and invention of the new, it was a matter of
functionalizing Kant’s reflective judgment for modern research into a
procedure. The reflective judgment was, indeed, able to deal with contingency,
and invent new methods of representation of science, and provide new operative
hypotheses. This new procedure, according to Plessner,
could be applied not only to the natural sciences, but also in the field of the
humanities. Following these premises, the last part of the contribution deals
with Plessner’s late formulation of the ideal of
dignity in the conflict among research procedures. If reflective judgment works
as a device of historicization of the universal, then it could be seen as a
principle of democratization as long as it is fixed on the heuristic ideal of
man’s dignity.
Moving
now towards Frankfurt, Tom Huhn’s essay retraces Adorno’s
attempt to overcome Kantian aesthetics. First, Adorno argues that objectivity
has to resist subjectivity by installing itself between the pores of
subjectivity. This is why he could not accept Kant’s aesthetic model, which
precludes the possibility of beauty ever attaining the status of something in
itself. According to Adorno, aesthetic pleasure is a historically determined
feature of aesthetic experience: “Kant’s having yoked pleasure to the aesthetic
as an unavoidable element of this experience snatched […] what was a historical
component of aesthetic experience and attempted to make it ahistorical and absolute”
(p.118). Adorno claims that beauty cannot be a mere formal or subjective thing, but has rather to be something in the matter itself,
the reason for his return to Hegel, who first set the problem of the resistance
of the aesthetic matter itself to consciousness. In this sense, the success of
an artwork cannot be determined by taste, which is merely subjective, but
rather by the aliveness of the object itself. Resuming Adorno’s own terms, Huhn efficiently explains that the artwork is a constellation or a force-field, which
means that the artwork is a living, dynamic phenomenon, while taste is a
permanent capacity that would want to correspond to unchangeable features.
Staying within the Frankfurt School,
Nicola Emery’s contribution focuses on Horkheimer’s original interpretation of
Kantian aesthetic judgment in Art and
Mass Culture. According to Horkheimer, the question of aesthetic judgment
is immediately a question about the possible
community. From this point of view, in the judgment of taste, egoism is overcome,
and a social space is opened. Theoretically, “by arousing this enlarged
communitarian dynamic […], the reflecting
judgment draws the open space in which the subject’s movement develops and fights its historical affliction,
combats the expropriation of its cum
and its dynamis” (p. 139), but, in historical reality,
“capitalistically, increasingly burdened by a mortage […] the incomplete reflecting-judging life, with is secret communitarian sense, is
entirely foreclosed” (p.140). To sum
up, Emery argues that Kant’s aesthetic-political community was the constant
term of orientation in Horkheimer’s research. In fact, if in a capitalistic society
the subject, isolated and separated, is deprived of the possibility of opening
communitarian worlds, the aesthetic experience, with its anti-dogmatic feature,
assumes an emancipatory office of resistance against capital’s burdens, and a
driving function towards a communitarian future, the ideal of the
aesthetic-moral community. In this sense, art effectively becomes the possible
opening of forms of critical life.
The following chapter, by Serena Feloj, investigates Hannah Arendt’s interpretation, focusing
on those elements that define the very nature of judgment. In line with
Horkheimer’s interpretation, according to Arendt, judging is the most political of men’s mental abilities and, for
this reason, the third Critique has
to be considered Kant’s most political work.
Moreover, its core concept lies in the need for a social life and for
the comparison with other human beings. Feloj
effectively presents Arendt’s conception of the linguistic nature of language
and her notion of Weltbetrachter,
but she also sharply detects Arendt’s forcing and weakening of Kantian thought.
It has to be acknowledged that, embracing a realistic perspective, Arendt
misses the transcendental feature of Kantian judgment, implementing a detranscendatalization of Kant’s aesthetics. However,
considering these problematic differences, Feloj
insists on the importance of Arendt’s interpretation, recognizing its
historical and theoretical value in having re-elaborated and politically
actualized Kant’s concepts, and in having produced an intense debate, which led
to a renaissance of the studies on the Critique
of the Power of Judgment.
Patrice Canivez’s
contribution, presenting the interpretation of Eric Weil – German, naturalized
French – is the juncture between Germany and France. Weil’s interpretation
revolves around the Kantian gap between nature and liberty, which the
philosopher rethinks in terms of facts and meanings. According to Weil, the
major discovery of the third Critique
is the existence of facts that are meaningful in themselves, the discovery of
the reality of meanings. Weil’s Logique de la philosophie starts, indeed, “with a pure attitude that
is a way of experiencing the real as a meaningful whole” (p.189), but in order
to maintain this idea, the word “meaning” has to be understood in the enlarged
sense of an overall signification that does not have to be necessarily linked
to the pursuit of an end. However, in the last part of his Logique, Weil retrieves the
notion of finality and the Kantian notion of a moral end to human action. In
this sense, crossing the connected categories of meaning and action, Canivez concludes his contribution showing that, according
to Weil’s definitive reading of the third Critique,
the world exists only for human beings, and reality without humans is an
abstraction that would reveal itself to be incomprehensible as soon as it would
been taken seriously.
Opening a proper French section,
Anne Sauvagnargues focuses on Deleuze’s
interpretation of the Critique of the
Power of Judgment as a general doctrine of the faculties, which would be
the kernel of the transcendental method. In this perspective, Deleuze could
arrange the three Critiques as
different sides of a three-faceted system of the regulation of faculties, even
though, soon after, he re-evaluated the status of the third critique, putting it clearly in a
prominent role because of the turning point of the Analytic of the Sublime. That section marks the passage from a
harmonic synthesis of faculties to a dissonant one, an unstable equilibrium of the
faculties. This disequilibrium, after a Proust crossing, allows Deleuze to turn
the involuntary into the highest mode of exercise of a faculty, which has to
encounter the contingency to be forced to create and release the conditions of
creativity of thought. The Deleuzian discovery of the
potential of Kant’s Sublime brought him to the formulation of the main features
of his transcendental empiricism and – combining the power of judgment to
Bergson’s Matter and memory – to most
of the categories he used to develop his philosophy of cinema. In this sense, Sauvagnargues sums up, writing that “the sublime does not
simply define the relationship between thought and sensibility, philosophy and
art, [but] also ensures the conversion of the well-known, of the sensorimotor
clichés and the doxic behaviors, into a discovery of
the new, in this irruptive and violent mode that Deleuze attributes to
creation” (p.205).
In his chapter, Pietro Terzi follows
Derrida’s reading of the third Critique,
suggesting that his interest in it was not related to art or aesthetics per se,
since they were mere pretexts to deal with questions intimately concerning his
own “encyclopedic” concern. In this sense, according to Terzi, what Derrida
found in Kant’s work was a “chance of questioning a founding text where the
conditions of a philosophical discourse
on art are fully and paradigmatically deployed” (p.210). After all, the Critique of the Power of Judgment was
the implementation of the legislative function of philosophy, the actualization
of the question quid juris, the
founding gesture of a system of transcendental philosophy. And if the “era of
deconstruction” had announced itself as a challenge to the subordination of all
the fields of questioning to the onto-encyclopedic instance, then the third Critique was, according to Derrida, the
paradigmatic example of philosophy on which deconstruction had to work. After
have faced the main conceptual hearts of Derrida’s encounter with Kant, Terzi
exhaustively concludes by arguing that, also thanks to Kant, “Derrida was able
[…] to deploy a more general account of how deconstruction works and which
stance it adopts towards the philosophical tradition: in principle, in fact,
deconstruction is a questioning of the frames, a supplement of reflexivity that
obliges philosophy to unveil and “denaturalize” its own conceptual frameworks
and their inner economy” (p.227).
Completing this French section,
Dario Cecchi proposes an analysis of Lyotard’s reading of the Kantian Sublime. Enthusiasm is the text in which Lyotard
deals systematically with an aspect of Kantian philosophy, wondering whether
the third Critique provides a fitter
framework for Kant’s political philosophy than his works properly dedicated to
the philosophy of rights. Specifically, the sublime is what, according to
Lyotard, unveils the paradox of reflective judgments as “dispute,” which might
produce enthusiasm. This concept of “dispute” is the condition of possibility
of the evaluation of the disproportion between general political ideas and
their realization, which prompts the question of the legitimacy of revolutions.
In this sense, “enthusiasm is an ambivalent feeling: it incites to action as
much as it invites the critical discrimination of events” (p.243). Referring to
enthusiasm and melancholy, Cecchi interestingly shows how Lyotard’s attempt is
to establish a transcendental transition by which ideas – such as justice,
freedom, moral law – could be embodied through the exposition of the fact of absence.
Applying this concept to cinema and painting, it is clear that Lyotard’s
philosophy of art is not based on Kant’s theory of genius, but rather develops
a new theory of sublime art. In this sense, every artistic element, insofar as
it is sublime, symbolically refers to the presence of a transcending thing, by
exhibiting absence.
In
his contribution, Claudio Paolucci deals with Umberto
Eco’s interpretation of the third Critique,
providing the opportunity for a short Italian stopover. The starting point of Kant and the Platypus is Eco’s conviction
that there is a connection between Kant’s reflective judgment and Pierce’s idea
of abduction. According to Eco, once
the reflective judgment comes to be introduced in the system, it overturns the
whole structure of Kantian critical philosophy. As a consequence of these
assumptions, abduction should result in having a primacy for cognition and knowledge.
In this sense, empirical knowledge is only possible thanks to a predictive
process, implemented by the reflective judgment/abduction, which works by
hypothesis and confirmations. That is where the Kantian als ob enters the stage: according to Eco, it
is necessary to interpret the world as if
it is coherent or as if our
hypothesis can guess its real structure. In a suggestive passage of the essay, Paolucci shows how this “as if” principle actually founds
the conception of the world as a story or a text. And even if the predictive
hypothesis can always be susceptible to error, even if there is nothing in the
structure of the world that guarantees the success of our abductive techniques
grounded on reflective judgment, without this regulative method we wouldn’t be
able to gain experience.
Moving to America, Scott R. Stroud
presents John Dewey’s challenge to Kantian aesthetics, arguing that Dewey’s account
of aesthetics can be seen as an explicit rejection of Kant’s perspective.
According to the American philosopher, the main problem of Kant’s aesthetics is
the alleged contemplative character of the reflective judgment. In other words,
Kant errs in the extreme separation of desire and emotion from the experience
of art. In fact, in total opposition, Dewey’s naturalist perspective does not
separate emotional dimension from the rational thought. The aesthetic has to be
considered as an immediate “consummatory experience,” which involves the whole
human life and its relationship with his environment, synthetizing all the
previous parts of experience, and also the anticipated future part of it. For
Kant, aesthetic experience – in its disinterestedness – is generally separated
from practical activity, from actual liveliness, being generated by a
contemplative approach to the artwork. In reverse, Dewey believes that the
aesthetic experience is a total absorption, which involves the human being in
its entirety. However, at the end of his contribution, Stroud makes also clear
the area in which Kant and Dewey seem to overlap. For both authors, indeed, the
experience of aesthetic phenomena invigorates and encourages humans, disclosing
their moral dimension or making them feel wholly united with their environment,
and therefore fully alive.
Diarmuid Costello’s essay focuses on
the relation between Kant’s aesthetic and art theory from Greenberg to Danto
and de Duve. First, the author shows how Greenberg distorted Kant’s theory of
aesthetic judgment, overlapping Kant’s criterion of “disinterest” with his own,
psychologist conception of “aesthetic distance.” Then, Costello presents de
Duve’s “Kant after Duchamp” approach. According to his view, De Duve believes
that making Kant’s aesthetic “actual,” “up to date,” involves “substituting the
judgment ‘this is art’ for the judgment ‘this is beautiful,’, thereby capturing
the transformation in the nature of art embodied by Duchamp’s Readymades” (p.288). In direct contrast to de Duve,
instead, Danto rejects entirely what he calls the two “Kantian tenets,”
grounding Greenberg and de Duve’s writings: “genius must be unconstrained by
rules” and “the critic’s practised eye is at home
everywhere.” In fact, starting from the criticism against these alleged
“tenets,” Danto argues that Kant conflates natural and artistic beauty,
considering this overlapping as the demonstration of the inadequacy of Kant’s
aesthetics as a basis of a theory of art. Finally, in the last part of his
contribution, Costello tries to amend some of these misunderstandings, pointing
out some resources in Kant’s theory of art, which according to him, has
remained neglected in art theory.
The
last American contribution, by Thomas Teufel, gives an overview of Stanley
Cavell’s constant confrontation with Kant. Cavell focuses on Kant’s idea that
in the absence of empirical verification, the judge of taste speaks with a
“universal voice,” which solves the problem of the lack of empirical grounding
by revealing transcendental warrant for her judgment. Cavell is convinced that
something similar to this universal voice can be found in ordinary language
philosophy’s meta-linguistic pronouncements, especially in the similarities
between self-reporting and the reflective nature of judgment. There would be,
then, a strict connection between Cavell’s conception of the meta-linguistic
claims of ordinary language philosophy and Kant’s idea of judgment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. This is why Cavell relies on “Kant’s view
that the source and legitimacy of that voice traces to the heautonomy
of the principle of nature’s purposiveness present in reflecting aesthetic
judgments” (p. 312). Teufel, then, concludes his contribution by discussing the
problem of authority in Cavell’s thought. Since there is no empirical evidence
on which language could be grounded, the ordinary language philosopher is
claiming something as true in itself, as an authority.
After all, only the Kantian principle of heautonomy
could yield the authority to build a “thin net over the abyss,” and show
meta-linguistics the way to ground the language.
Opening
the last section, dedicated to some examples of contemporary debates, Alessandro
Bertinetto and Stefano Marino discuss the possible
relations between Kant’s concept of power of judgment and the logic of artistic
improvisation. The contribution aims to show that the reflective judgment could
shed light on some of the creative processes operating in improvisation and, on
the other side, that improvisation could be read as a paradigm of the artistic
creativity. The principle of heautonomy, the capacity
of the power of reflective judgment to legislate over itself, might be considered
the grounding principle of improvisation as such. According to the authors,
this self-regulatory and recursive structure represents the clear link between
improvisational practices and the notions of reflective judgment and genius.
But this link is so strict that if the aesthetic judgment permits
improvisation, it is because the reflective judgment itself works in an
improvisatory way, inventing abductively
the norms valid for the single empirical cases. Furthermore, the improvisatory
structure of the reflective judgment grounds the possibility of communities,
which are produced by the inventive and intersubjective development of a common
normativity in the practice. And, finally, improvisation seems to be the very
nature of genius, since it creates without knowing the rule, with heautonomy its only rule. Thanks to this grounding (on
itself) principle, which does not follow any pre-established plan and does not
have a prefixed goal, “artworks are, in a way, the concretizations of the ‘free
play’ of imagination and understanding that describe the proper dimension of
the aesthetic experience, according to Kant” (p.335).
Concluding
this long summary of the volume’s content, the last essay, by Thomas W. Leddy,
deals with the importance of Kant in everyday aesthetics. In this recent field
of philosophical aesthetics, the most common point of debate over Kant concerns
the notion of “disinterestedness,” which could allow for anything to be
considered beautiful. But starting from this point, Leddy’s contribution crosses
everyday aesthetics’ internal debate, reaching some interesting conclusions.
Kant could have a multifarious usage in everyday aesthetics, that is the reason
why the best application of Kant’s concepts for everyday aesthetics “would move
beyond a narrow focus on one of these ways to recognize a complex layering of
ways based on […] various dimensions” (p. 357): the agreeable, the pure beauty,
the dependent beauty, the ideal beauty, the intellectual interest in beauty,
and the aesthetics idea based on nature and everyday life.
With
this detailed review of each contribution we hope to
have given a general overview of the volume’s content, in the attempt of
replicating on a reduced scale the panoramic view that characterizes Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in
the 20th Century. The map of the uncharted land of the third Critique’s reception in the twentieth
century is drawn by authors with different research interests, ages and
backgrounds, but the result is solid and harmonious. In this sense, the objective
of providing a descriptive and interpretative mapping seems to have been
successfully achieved. Avoiding the risk of a mere classification, the editors
manage to orchestrate the numerous and heterogeneous material, keeping and
communicating the idea of the dynamism and plurality of the different
interpretations. Indeed, the result of this very refined work is not a picture
gallery, on whose walls are hanging figures locked in their frames, but a
living web of connections, in which the elements illuminate each other.
Therefore, if it is certainly true that this kind of ambitious collective work
might easily run into many problems, appearing, for instance, disjointed and
approximate, Kant’s “Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment” in the 20th Century succeeds in supplying a
selective and synoptic view, which stands out for its consistency and its
deepening in each of its components. Furthermore, all the theoretical problems
listed in the very last part of the introduction do not seem to destabilize the
work’s inner logic, but become the opportunity to test
a research method. It is true that it might be difficult, if not impossible,
for a thorough selection to distinguish between major and minor authors or to
decide which interpretation has to be considered more influential than others.
And it could also be quite difficult to evaluate the impact of a philosophical
object, avoiding the risk of slipping into naïve teleologies,
or pre-fixed schemes, which would probably weaken this kind of work. But one of
Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment”
in the 20th Century’s strengths is to have addressed and
resolved these critical problems of method, offering a practical clear example
of a sophisticated methodological approach to the history of philosophy. The
result aimed at by the editors was meant to be the picture of “a constellation
of major points that may serve as a scheme to be fitted with further, larger
and more in-depth analyses” (p. 32), a “first step towards the comprehension of
the historical and conceptual elements that have made the third Critique such an interesting text for
its readers over two centuries in various geographical and cultural milieus”
(p. 33). But far from being an excusatio non petita to prevent eventual criticism of partiality or
approximation, the renunciation to provide a complete account makes this work
avant-garde and a headlamp for the research. It is an open mapping, that has to
be completed. Incorporating reflective judgment’s operativeness,
this important book provides an open structure, able to adapt to the individual
case. As a jazz model, Kant’s “Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment” in the 20th Century offers a method and a
first in-depth example of its use, opening up multiple possible research paths
and directions. This volume not simply rescues the Critique of the Power of Judgment’s twentieth-century legacy and
helps us to reinvent Törleß’ Kantian dream, but also
makes itself an open scheme on which other scholars are invited to “improvise”
in order to map the rest of this uncharted land.
