Kant ’ s Aesthetic Reading of Aristotle ’ s Philia : Disinterestedness and the Mood of the Late Enlightenment 1

This article roots Kant’s concept of disinterestedness, as he uses it in the Critique of Judgment, in Aristotle’s notion of philia by establishing a path from ethics to aesthetics and back. In this way, the third Critique turns out to be one of the main sources for a new ideal of humanity: the ideal suitable for late Enlightenment. This article argues that Kant reaches this fruitful use of disinterestedness by giving to Aristotle’s concept of philia an aesthetic turn.

Friendships are not found in heaven, for heaven is the ultimate in moral perfection, and that is universal; friendship, however, is a special bond between particular persons; in this world only, therefore, it is a recourse for opening one's mind to the other and communing with him.

The Critique of the Power of Judgement 3 and the late enlightenment mood
The Kritik der Urteilskraft (KU) considered as a whole is essentially a text about critical teleology.Its rationale relates to an abandonment of the mechanistic Cartesian philosophy of the Analytic of Concepts and the Analytic of Principles in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (KrV) 4 as well as to the development of new perspectives that were settled in the chapters 'Of the Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason' and 'Of the Ultimate End of the Natural Dialectic of Human Reason' from the 'Transcendental Dialectics' of the KrV. 5 Here the transcendental illusion of reason and the insatiability of this faculty are no longer seen as being harmful to philosophy.Rather, they become challenges that, when properly clarified, can be considered appropriate for a new generation of critical questions.These are the seeds that are germinating in Kant's third Critique, which is situated in the abandonment of the mechanistic understanding of nature in favor of a more organic and teleological conception of natural objects (KU, Part II) and artificial objects (KU, Part I).It is an option that favors the thinking of Aristotle and Leibniz rather than that of Descartes, although both Aristotle and Leibniz are passed through the sieve of criticism.
From an epistemological point of view, these new questions mean a radicalization of Kant's philosophy derived from a concern for the exercising of the faculty for judging, highlighted with some insistence by the substitution in the third Critique of the term Vermögen zu urteilen by Urteilskraft.From an ontological point of view, the new questions mean the philosophical rescue of the field of the empirical particular, traditionally pushed to one side and which until that point had maintained reverential respect for the Aristotelian statement that there is no science of the particular.That is why the fourth paragraph of the Introduction to the KU states that the exercising of the faculty for judging is the exercising of 'the faculty for thinking of the particular as contained under the universal,' 6 and the essential concern of the KU as a whole is the exercising of reflecting judgment, in which 'only the particular is given,' and 'for which the universal is to be found.' 7The term exercising is added here to the term faculty because this is the original notion of Kraft added to that of Vermögen.The search for a universal for a particular becomes a new task for a kind of thinking that adopts the form of critical teleology, of Aristotelian-Leibnizian origin, but also strongly regulated by the use of the 'as if' (als ob) in the arrangement of the final causes.
Kant's critical project thus embraces a new philosophical Weltanschauung, which is simultaneously affected by the vulnerability of the privilege of the field of the particular as well as by the audacity of privileging the exercising of reflecting judgment.In the third Critique, metaphysics does away with epistemic pretensions to become a science and, instead, turns towards a self-understanding of its responsibility as a part of human knowledge that is as unalienable as it is vulnerable.This self-understanding is developed through the critical attribution of final causes to theoretical and practical questioning.The critical advance of the KU is that it signals, now contrary to both Aristotle and Leibniz, that the final causes are no more than a pledge for thought, but one that is inevitably required for the insatiability of reason, and therefore (and at last) final causes are something unavoidable for metaphysics.From this moment metaphysics will conceive itself as a task both uncertain and audacious, adapting itself to the late Enlightenment mood, marked so strongly by the earthquake in Portugal and the French Revolution.That is to say, it will be shaped by the uncertainty of the break of natural laws and by the audacity required by the claims of democracy.

The path from Aristotle's philia to Kant's disinterestedness: from ethics to aesthetics and back
Audacity requires the action of a mind that is prepared to tackle unknown territory, even if the light is so dim that it barely illuminates the most immediate steps.The late Enlightenment period demonstrated an awareness that the lights of reason were discreet, what in the language of the time meant that they were 'hypothetical' or 'problematic.'The KU contributes to this Zeitgeist in devoting itself to setting up a kind of intelligibility that vindicates its potential precisely based on this vulnerability and in the most conscious exercising of audacity in the critical attribution of ends, i.e., in its link with a philosophy that no longer belongs to the real world but to the world of what is possible. 8The following pages show how the negative concept of disinterestedness in the first part of the KU forms one of the keys to this Zeitgeist, and that this is possible thanks to the fact that it is rooting in the Aristotelian concept of philia. 9 Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics defines philia as a virtue (1155a). 10Its specific nature is produced from the confluence of the following attributes: 'it is one of the most indispensable requirements of life'; it 'is not only indispensable as a means, it is also noble in itself'; it 'promote[s] concord'; it requires reciprocated feeling (1155b), that consists in the friends who 'love each other for themselves and not accidentally' (1156b), meaning that 'we ought to wish our friend well for his own sake' (1156a).This demonstrates a disinterested attitude, given that 'friends whose affection is based on utility do not love each other in themselves, but in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each' (1156a). 11hree conditions determine the possibility of reciprocity.The first one, that it should occur 'between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue' (1156b) 12 -in other words, according to their similarity (1155b)-; the second one: a constant exercising of attention or coexistence (1156b, 1157b); the third one: and mutual confidence (1157a).Reciprocity is, in addition, the consequence of the exercising of choice (1157b), and it occurs more frequently in democracies than in tyrannies, given that in the former 'the citizens being equal have many things in common' (1161b), with the result that 'all friendship […] involves community'.
One of Kant's greatest audacities was to convert the German language into a philosophical language.Wolff's effort, even taking into account its enormity, was hugely insufficient.The little giant of Königsberg, learned in Greek philosophy, adopted the same procedures as the first philosophers and devoted himself to inspiring his vocabulary and his argumentations in the most advanced disciplines of his own philosophical area: in science and in ethics.From this conviction, I will proceed to argue that the aesthetic concept of disinterestedness defended by Kant is clearly anchored in the ethical notion of Aristotle's philia, and that it traces a path from ethics to aesthetics and back again.
Following one of his usual procedures when arduously creating a vocabulary in his own language, Kant undertakes a first operation of negative argumentation with the term 'interest,' which is certainly used by Aristotle in both physics and ethics.In relation to this, and against the expression habitually employed by us, the interpreters, Kant does not use the term disinterestedness 13 as a substantive, but rather this negativity is being constructed in composed terms, as if Kant would be testing the adequacy of a right expression.The most successful Kantian terms in this trial are: 'pure and disinterested satisfaction' (dem reinen uninteressierten Wohlgefallen im Geschmackurteile, KU § 2), 'disinterested and free satisfaction' (ein uninteressiertes und freies Wohlgefallen, KU § 5), 'disinterested judgment' (ein bloßes Geschmacksurteil ohne alles Interesse, KU § 42), 'without any interest' (ohne alles Interesse, KU § § 5, 6; wenn wir gleich am Objekte gar kein Interesse haben, KU § 25), 'without interest' (ohne Interesse, KU § § 24, 26, 41), 'no interest' (kein Interesse, KU § § 5, 41), 'with the consciousness of an abstraction in it from all interest' (wovon jemand sich bewußt ist, daß das Wohlgefallen an demselben bei ihm selbst ohne alles Interesse sei, KU § 6), 'the aesthetic judgment […]  The main points of confluence between Aristotle's notion of philia and the Kantian notion of disinterestedness are described below.I understand the sequence proposed as being necessary for a coherent argument on this happy meeting between two concepts set apart by twenty-two centuries of a philosophy that at certain times gave little support to this kind of sacra conversazione between similar concepts.The late Enlightenment period, aware of its own fragility, turned this antipathy into a challenge and managed to get them into a conversation.

Philia requires "our friend well for his own sake" 14 from the point of view of disinterestedness
A friend is an empirical particular that can only be the object of discourse from the paradigm of relationship and not from the paradigm of substance: one is a 'friend' simply because one has at least one friend.Friendship, then, is a relationship between two empirical particulars; as Kant argues in the initial citation of this article, 'friendship, however, is a special bond between particular persons.' 15 In the same way, Kantian aesthetics is based on the relationship between particulars: Kant talks about subjects with an aesthetic way of looking and objects viewed aesthetically.The key to this relationship lies, as in the case of the Aristotelian philia, in the disinterestedness of the subject, as proposed by the 'definition of the beautiful derived from the first moment': Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest.The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful. 16 this relationship, the priority assigned by Kant to the subject is related to the effort involved in defending the autonomy of this subject within its own vulnerability.For that reason, taste is defined as a faculty.It is, however, a peculiar faculty that did not find its place in philosophy until Hume.If Kant places so much priority on this it is because, to his understanding, taste can only be conceived from disinterestedness, and that means a fertile (maybe the most fertile) philosophical possibility of the presupposition that individuals can be free and autonomous: 17 they can liberate themselves from their prejudices and their baggage and are prepared to find common ground.This is precisely the ideal in the late Enlightenment period for being a human being: someone who is not sure of being right but who, if problems arise, will sit down at a table, leaving his prejudices and interests to one side, and discuss the matter with other citizens as a self-confirming, proud but discreet exercising of their freedom. 18Kant retrieves the old platonic spirit of philosophical dialogue, which can only begin and take place within the productive freedom to 'think aloud' for and with others. 19his freedom, which could be referred to as aesthetic freedom, has to do with the free play of faculties. 20Those who sit down at a table to have a conversation, leaving to one side their prejudices and baggage, are prepared to avail their minds of an openness to that which is possible (not necessarily in opposition to what is real, but that which could be), as in Kant's account of friendship in the initial citation of this article: it is a recourse for opening one's mind to another particular human being and communing with him.Kant places aesthetic pleasure in this new ethical-aesthetic imperative of what nowadays we refer to as opening one's mind, which is a consequence of the sense of this new freedom in the exercising of faculties.It is the pleasure of being prepared to find common ground and agreement (whether this actually occurs or not); it is the pleasure of the search for communicability.This is why the Mittelbarkeit (mediation) became one of the most recurrent terms in the KU: the new individual (free, autonomous and fragile) can only find his strength in the power of what is common, and therefore disinterestedness is a sine qua non condition, just as it is for the pleasures of friendship.

What reciprocity meant to the late Enlightment notion of art. Beautiful art as a path to sociable communication
Art plays a fundamental role as a place for thought along this new path of freedom and pleasure.The previous section focused on disinterestedness as the defining element of this link between a type of empirical particulars in the aesthetic relationship: that of the subjects.This section considers this category in terms of the relationships established between the subjects that look aesthetically and the objects that are viewed in that way.The aesthetic sense is the exercising of the faculty that turns a piece of nature into a landscape, an object into a work of art.Kantian philosophy cannot escape (as indeed none can) the debts of its own history and for that reason it links this sense first to beauty, 21 which Kant translates as a sense of pleasure; and second to sublime, as a sense of displeasure (Unlust), a term that follows, as disinterestedness and displeasure, the dynamic of negative aesthetics.Both sublime and displeasure become negative categories of great innovative potential with respect to the category of the ugly. 22owever, the pleasure related to beauty is not just any type of pleasure, but the pleasure of reflection: 'this must not be a pleasure of enjoyment, from mere sensation, but one of reflection.' 23 And reflection is a special mode of intelligibility of the world, which can only be constructed from an empirical particular, in an attempt to bestow upon it a universal that has not been established a priori and that needs to be exercised to achieve communicability.The ideas governing this intelligibility are of a new genre for philosophy: they are aesthetic ideas, being an aesthetic idea 'a representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought.' 24 Consequently, they open the mind to the field of the possible.The exercising of aesthetic sense, therefore, carries the feeling of pleasure in the search for a sense that is not given, but constructed.And, as a matter of fact, the rigorous unity between the first and second parts of the KU is revealed above all in the concept of aesthetic idea.The exercising of reflection requires the metaphysical stake on a sphere of ends regulated by the als ob, and this is exactly the subject of the second part, which is nothing other than a treatise on critical teleology precisely because of the power granted to that regulation.
It is at the heart of that commitment that art has laid down strong roots to take full advantage of the potential contained in paragraphs 43-45 of the KU.Kant considers it a privileged place for the exercising of aesthetic sense and, therefore, for the reflecting judgment; the case of the work of art is an occasion25 for exercising the endowment of sense.The aesthetic judgment of art then becomes an area of intelligibility, generating representations as 'types of cognition,'26 given that art 'promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication.'27And, as a matter of fact, that is why judgment of art is 'indifferent with regard to the existence of an object' ( § 5: 95, AA 5: 94). 28Kant is making an effort here to distinguish the fine art objects from other objects: while the latter are self comprehending from their ends, the former begin to be so from their capacity to generate a new area of intelligibility, which is reflection.So, Rafael's Madonna is not a work of art because it incites religious fervor, but because its beauty generates the free play of faculties enabling them the exercising of reflection 'for sociable communication.'It is worth remembering that according to Book II of Aristotle's' Physics 'the existence of an object' means producing itself according to the fulfillment of its end, an aspect that Kant specifically excludes in this effort to distinguish fine art from art that is simply techné.It is also worth remembering, with regards to the question of 'sociable communication,' that at the time Kant was writing the KU the first art exhibitions were already being seen as places for the construction of the public sphere.
However and moreover, in this possession of public sense, disinterestedness in aesthetic judgment requires reciprocity with regards to the artistic object, as philia required reciprocated feeling (Nicomachean Ethics 1155b).In other words, if sense is given to the object in an act of affirmation of the subject's autonomy in the exercising of reflection 'for sociable communication,' the work of art will return to the subject a potential sphere for self-intelligibility, precisely as a subject in the public sphere.The proposal of a complicated term such as purposiveness without purpose, coined playing with Aristotelian terms, 29 as a transcendental principle of aesthetic judgment, is an attempt to capture the first glimmer of that reciprocity.Certainly, something resembling reciprocity exists between the subject that exercises aesthetic sense and the work of art, and that reciprocity occurs in terms of fitting: the work fits the subject, offering itself as an occasion for the exercising of reflection 'for sociable communication'; the subject fits the work, giving it a constituent sense of being 'for sociable communication' and the work returns to the subject as sense of self-understanding 'for sociable communication.'In short, the aesthetic relationship between the subjects and the work of art needs to be given a reciprocal, and at the same time, constituent sense of the public sphere, just as occurs in relationships of friendship.

Exercising disinterestedness for sociable communication: what Kraft brought to Vermögen
As seen in the previous section, disinterestedness as an aesthetic attitude favoring social communication only happens in the act of judgment, which must be exercised as much as possible to reach aesthetic expertise.Concerning philia, it only exists as being performed.Exercising and performing have to do with the Kantian derivation of the term urteilen from the first to the third Critique, where the term Vermögen (Vermögen zu urteilen) is replaced by Kraft (Urteilskraft), being the title of this work Kritik der Urteilskraft.In the quest to convert German into the language of philosophy, the term Kraft takes up the Latin vis, which was situated on the Aristotelian path from potentiality to actuality.Kant, in the mood of late Enlightenment aesthetics, is no longer concerned about the faculty for judging in itself, but about the exercising of that faculty at times of greatest uncertainty and focusing for this reason in reflecting judgment.With this opting for the term Kraft, Kant was taking on Hume's aesthetic legacy and his vindication of experience and exercise of judgment as the only ways to reach aesthetical expertise.

Disinterestedness, like philia, promote concord
It has already been discussed how Kant considers taste a privileged place for preparing common ground, in the sense that the disinterestedness which characterizes this faculty let aside purely subjective conditions, which may be harmful for concord.So, disinterestedness promotes concord in the same way as philia does (see Nicomachean Ethics 1155b).Paragraph 40 of the KU adds the explanation that the communal sense gives full philosophical sense to the disinterestedness inherent in taste: By 'sensus communis', however, must be understood the idea of a communal sense, i.e., a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else's way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its judgment up to human reason as a whole. 30r the late Enlightenment's new paradigm of communicability, the demand for Jèssica Jaques Pi recognition of the particular as well as of uncertainty require a fundamental modification of Kant's ethics, which is set out in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.This modification includes in both the first formulation of the categorical imperative ('Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in any other person, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means') 31 and in the third one ('Every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends'), a much more discreet and pragmatic consignment, which is to take 'account (a priori) of everyone else's way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its judgment up to human reason as a whole'; 32 it is the challenge of being aware, from the hegemony of the imagination, of what the other must be thinking.The exercising of the taste of reflection is similar, therefore, to the exercising of the search for concord (as is in friendship), given that, from a position of disinterestedness, (it) 'makes supposedly generally valid (public) judgments.' 33This search for accordance is one of the reasons of Kant's claim to subjective universality for the judgment of taste, 34 which, in its very formulation, vindicates the inherent perplexity in the reflecting judgment 35 and can only conceive itself as a disposal towards communicability. 36The reference here is to that which, for the late Enlightenment, is the strictly human.

What disinterestedness and philia mean to democracy
In the previous sections I have argued in favor of linking aesthetic disinterestedness to the wish for the generation of community.As has been alleged, it deals with the comprehension of taste as the common sense and with aesthetic pleasure as the pleasure of reflection.But reflection does not mean that this pleasure should not be deeply vital.In fact, the sense of aesthetic pleasure is, for Kant, the feeling of life, 37 and there is little more that can be said about it, given that it is profoundly enigmatic.In any case, it 'is found chiefly in those judgments that are called aesthetic, which concern the beautiful and the sublime in nature or in art' 38 and, for Kant, the conscious appreciation of this feeling of life is a requirement for a happy life.
The final objective in vindicating this particular type of aesthetic hedonism is none other than that of consolidating the first steps in a democracy called for by 18th century philosophy, just as Aristotle called for it in the 4th century BC with his philia. 39It can be said that in both cases disinterestedness is a commitment to the fundamental requirements of democracy, which are those of consensus, a topic that was important for Kant from his pre-critique period.In fact, in a letter to Marcus Herz dated June 1771, he considers the standpoint of others as a key to consensus, even with oneself: You know very well that I am inclined not only to try to refute intelligent criticisms but that I always weave them together with my judgments and give them the right to overthrow all my previously cherished opinions.I hope that in that way I can achieve an unpartisan perspective, by seeing my judgments from the standpoint of others, so that a third opinion may emerge, superior to my previous ones. 40would like to conclude with one of the most lucid texts from the third Critique, found in the last paragraph of the first part, which serves as its synthesis.In this text, the essence of what is human is situated within the universal feeling of participating in a common act and within the power of generating communication: The propaedeutic for all beautiful art, so far as it is aimed at the highest degree of its perfection, seems to lie not in precepts, but in the culture of the mental powers through those prior forms of knowledge that are called humaniora, presumably because humanity means on the one hand the universal feeling of participation and on the other hand the capacity for being able to communicate one's inmost self universally, which properties taken together constitute the sociability that is appropriate to humankind. 41e KU converts the essential ends of human reason into ends regulated by a new ideal of humanity: the human beings who have to judge by themselves.Their judgments will be constructed from the pride of one's own vulnerability, from the audacity of thought and from confidence in the power of communication for social construction.These are the three human virtues required for the new philosophy of the late Enlightenment, all three of them in strong relation to liberty, to reflection and, consequently, to disinterestedness, as Aristotelian philia was. 42The third Critique, in a late Enlightenment's mood, led to understand that these three virtues, like friendships, were not to be found in heaven, not in the best of the possible worlds, but in the most human, common and everyday life.And both art and aesthetic sense became the best places to be aware of this late Enlightenment human being that was taking account of his own liberty not in heavenly, but in public spheres.