Whither Kantian Aesthetics?

Kant’s Critique of Judgment is generally recognized as a fountainhead of many of the central aesthetic concepts of Romanticism and Modernism: aesthetic autonomy, disinterestedness, play, and organic organization. Either directly or indirectly, Kant’s influence plausibly exists in every important aesthetic theory from Romanticism onward. In this sense, ‘Kantian aesthetics’ would be so broad as to be useless as a descriptive term. But one can define a more specific sense of Kantian aesthetics as the project Kant develops in the third Critique of fundamentally connecting aesthetic concepts with the issues of individual autonomy and collective morality. Kantian aesthetics examines how our capacity for aesthetic response plays a central role in individual and social development. In German thought Schiller picks up this project of Kantian aesthetics in The Aesthetic Letters, and the central figures of German Romanticism and Idealism, such as Novalis, the Schlegels, Schelling, and Hegel further develop the project. In contemporary theory, Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory represents both a culmination and a critique of this philosophic project. The project is transmitted in English thought from Coleridge through Carlyle and Matthew Arnold. But despite this presence in three of the most influential figures in English criticism, the Kantian project of positing a central connection between aesthetic response and the formation of subjectivity and morality remains incompletely incorporated into English criticism and philosophy. The three books reviewed here point out, in different ways, some of the consequences of this theoretical gap.

The collection of four lectures by the prominent German Kantian scholar Dieter Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World, foregrounds the connections between aesthetics and moral theory at the center of Kantian aesthetics. Three of the lectures were at American universities (one at Emory and two at Stanford, whose press has issued this volume). However, there is very little accommodation for any English-language reader who is not already well-versed in Kantian philosophy. The first lecture, “The Moral Image of the World,” focuses on how Kant’s moral philosophy emerges out of a systematic moral view of the world, the “moral image,” as Henrich terms it. Although the emphasis here is on Rousseau’s influence on Kant, the idea of the moral image as “constitutive of the form of an agent’s self-image” (p. 62), as he later puts it, is a recurring theme in the lectures.

The second lecture, “Kant’s Explanation of Aesthetic Judgment,” is a very technical explication of the relationship between the Imagination and the Understanding in the third Critique. Henrich’s goal is to describe Kantian aesthetics wholly within the terms of Kant’s “critical business,” that is, “the investigation of all knowledge claims that cannot be justified by experience alone” (p. 30). While this is certainly a legitimate goal for a Kant specialist, it does not serve well the more general aspirations of the lectures and the book as a whole to place Kant’s aesthetic within a larger philosophic context. For example, at the end of this lecture, Henrich, by reference to relatively obscure Kantian lecture notes, asserts that “we can say that only in the aesthetic situation does the fight [between Imagination and Understanding] come to an end, the coercion cease, and an unconstrained accordance prevail” (p. 53). This description of Kant’s aesthetic ‘situation’ is basically the same as Schiller’s account of the various reconciliations effected in the aesthetic ‘state.’ Consequently, it is a bit disappointing to make one’s way through a rather labored technical analysis of Kant only to reach a conclusion already well known to students of Kantian aesthetics through Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters.

The third lecture, “The Contexts of Autonomy: Some Presuppositions of the Comprehensibility of Human Rights,” traces the development of the idea of moral autonomy in the West. Henrich describes the origin of the modern concept of moral autonomy in the philosophy of Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, and the subsequent falling away from moral autonomy toward nihilism and totalitarianism in this century. In order to recoup the Western philosophical ideals of individual autonomy and human rights, Henrich seeks to situate the discourse of human rights beyond its historical identification with the culture of the West: “If one advocates rights generally, it must be because of their universal validity” (p. 84). For Henrich, one of the “most powerful images of freedom” in this philosophical tradition of human rights is that of aesthetic judgment, in which the autonomy of the subject and the autonomy of the aesthetic object are fundamentally connected. This kind of aesthetic judgment is exemplified in “the autonomous agent who confronts the sensuous embodiment of freedom in beautiful appearances, because the form of the beautiful is free-flowing” (p. 78).

The fourth lecture, “The French Revolution and Classical German Philosophy: Towards a Determination of Their Relation,” attempts to draw connections between philosophic systems and political events. Henrich examines whether the connections between Classical German philosophy (Kant through Hegel) and the French Revolution can be understood as coincidences, as the result of direct influences, or as emerging from underlying similarities. The bulk of the lecture lays out different models to understand the connections (which are presented with a precision verging on scholasticism as: 1, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, 4a, 4b). Ultimately, Henrich traces the connections to “a change in the self-description of human beings” (p. 91), returning to his key idea of the moral image. And once again, Henrich connects this autonomy of subjectivity with the freedom symbolized by aesthetic judgment, describing one of the key aspects of Classical German philosophy as “the conviction... that the insights and attitudes communicated by art are intimately related to a philosophy that aims to liberate the subjectivity in thought” (p. 86).

In this final lecture, as in the book as a whole, Henrich’s analysis is not likely to convince anyone who does not already believe in philosophy, and particularly the Kantian tradition of philosophy, as representing the most complete and moving expression of the ideals of human self-determination. For Henrich, as for Kant, the autonomy of moral action depends on its separation from the network of material causes. The ‘moral image’ for Henrich is the ultimate ground for all human action. This view emerges in his account of the moral image as representing both the way individuals view themselves as moral agents and the way they view the metaphysical structure of the world in which they act. Thus, in speaking of the relationship between political changes and subjectivity, he asserts that “the conditions of the possibility of such changes are grounded in the human constitution and cannot therefore be derived adequately from sociohistorical development” (p. 91). And he cites Max Weber as “among those who have explained why a fundamental reorganization of an economic system is not possible without a prior change in the mode of consciousness and in the conduct of life depending on it” (p. 90). But such brief assertions are unlikely to convince those who see consciousness as, in whole or in part, constituted by material conditions. For a recent example of precisely such a materialist critique, one can turn to Martha Woodmansee.

Henrich’s book assumes the reader’s basic grounding in, if not basic agreement with, the Kantian aesthetic project of connecting aesthetic and subjective autonomy. In contrast, Martha Woodmansee’s The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics mounts a sustained critique of the very concept of aesthetic autonomy. And whereas the collection of Henrich’s lectures limits its potential audience to Kant specialists, Woodmansee presents her arguments in light of contemporary debates in critical theory. She seeks to describe the specific material and social conditions that stand behind the development of aesthetic theory in Germany and in England in the eighteenth century. While Woodmansee also analyzes the significance of the development of copyright law and the role of women writers of the time, in this review I will focus on what is the central thread of the work, a critique of Kant’s and Schiller’s concept of aesthetic autonomy.

In chapter one, Woodmansee traces the origin of the concept of aesthetic autonomy to Towards a Unification of all the Fine Arts and Letters under the Concept of Self-Sufficiency (1785), a book by Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–93) published five years before the publication of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Moritz there defines works of art as “‘self-sufficient totalities’ produced simply to be contemplated ‘for their own sake’—that is ‘disinterestedly’” (p. 11). In attempting to historically contextualize the emergence of this concept of aesthetic autonomy, Woodmansee discusses the expansion of the market for popular literature. Moritz was a prolific writer whose most ambitious philosophic works were never appreciated by the public, and Woodmansee argues that “by shifting the measure of a work’s value from its pleasurable effect on the audience to such purely intrinsic considerations as ‘the perfection of the work itself,’ Moritz arms his own and all difficult writing against the eventuality of a hostile or indifferent reception” (p. 32).

In chapter three, Woodmansee applies the same interpretation to Schiller and the Aesthetic Letters, likewise arguing that Schiller felt rejected by the mass reading public and thus formulated his account of an autonomous aesthetic sphere as an ego-saving strategy. Woodmansee portrays an elitist and antipopulist Schiller who formulates a theory of aesthetic autonomy in order to oppose the idea that poetry has a goal, namely, to “move” the audience. She champions Gottfried August Bürger (author of the popular supernatural poem Lenore) as a preferred example of poetic populism, and endorses his Herder-like pronouncements that poetry should be connected to the traditional epics of a nation and based on the common language of its people. Woodmansee thus brings up the crucial issue of how to view the origin of the aesthetic sphere in history, and I support her project of scrutinizing the central premises of aesthetic theory by holding them up to the particulars of material and social history. But one may well concede the very personal motivations that Woodmansee presents about Moritz and Schiller as struggling writers while also taking the position that personal motivation is not the final horizon of interpretation for a cultural development as far-reaching as the development of the modern concept of the aesthetic sphere. For, despite Woodmansee’s professed intentions to discuss the origin of the concept of the aesthetic sphere as “rooted in the far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century” (p. 32), her focus on the personal motivations of Moritz and Schiller seems to reduce the origin of modern aesthetics to a case of sour grapes on the part of individual writers.

From the standpoint of Kantian aesthetics, the irony of Woodmansee’s critique is that she seeks to cast both Kant and Schiller as the founders of formalist, antihumanist, aesthetics. But for Kant and Schiller the purpose of positing an autonomous aesthetic sphere was to grant freedom to the subject, not, as Woodmansee argues, to take freedom away from the subject by placing all autonomy in the work of art. Schiller’s account of the aesthetic explicitly appears in the service of promoting humanism, specifically a Kantian model of individual self-determination: the whole purpose of Schiller’s account of the aesthetic education is not to annul individual subjectivity but to develop it. Schiller saw subjectivity as the end point of a process of development (Bildung), and he saw the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere as the key to the development of full and free subjectivity. According to Schiller’s argument, the aesthetic sphere has to be autonomous, that is free from outside constraints, so that individual subjectivity can achieve the same free state. Many objections might be and have been brought against Schiller’s account of an autonomous aesthetic sphere, but it is crucial to acknowledge that Schiller’s arguments emerge out of a central concern for human freedom.

Indeed, Schiller’s concern to insure freedom of individual subjectivity lies behind many of those aspects of The Aesthetic Letters that seem to promote a formalist aesthetics. For example, in the Twenty-Second Letter, Schiller argues that “in a truly successful work of art the contents [Inhalt] should effect nothing, the form everything; for only through the form is the whole man affected, through the subject-matter [Inhalt], by contrast only one or the other of his functions.” With statements like this, we can see why many critics, most recently Woodmansee, charge Schiller with being a formalist. There are, however, significant differences between Schiller’s and modern formalist concepts of form. Unlike modern formalist theories that oppose the intentional and the formal aspects of a work of art, for Schiller, ‘form’ denotes the rational organizing aspect that the work of art shares with human subjectivity. That being said, it is nonetheless true that by emphasizing ‘form,’ Schiller does, like some modern formalists, give a secondary role to the representational and affective aspects of art. But the important issue is why he does so. Woodmansee criticizes Schiller for moving aesthetics away from an affective model, what she calls an “instrumentalist” account (a particularly unfortunate term, given its mechanistic connotations). Her argument is that, contra Kant and Schiller, art has a purpose and that purpose is to move the audience emotionally. I would agree that for Kant and especially for Schiller, art does have a purpose, although not one that is explicable within a model of physical causation: its purpose is to develop the freedom of human subjectivity. (And it is within that context that Kant uses the famous but frequently misunderstood statement that the work of art displays a “purposiveness without purpose.”)

What is behind Schiller’s objection to art’s main purpose as eliciting an emotional response? After all, as he also states in the Twenty-Second Letter, “the unfailing effect of beauty is a freedom from passion.” The modern formalist exclusively values the art object’s aesthetic form, and thus excludes from consideration the emotional effect of the work on the viewer’s mind. In contrast, Schiller’s whole project involves discussing the art object’s effect on the mind. The effect Schiller is interested in differs from and in a certain way is antithetical to eliciting a simple emotional response. Schiller does not object to an emotional component in the work of art. In discussing “arts which affect the passions, such as tragedy,” Schiller does criticize them for not being “entirely free arts since they are enlisted in the service of a particular aim (that of pathos),” but he adds that “no true connoisseur of art will deny that works even of this class are the more perfect, the more they respect the freedom of the spirit even amid the most violent storms of passion.” Thus, what he objects to is not emotion per se, but that emotion should totally control one’s response. Schiller’s position is similar to familiar critical objections against ‘manipulative’ works of art. We criticize a work as manipulative when we think it seeks to control our emotions and degrade our intelligence. Once again, even in his criticisms of affective art, Schiller’s aim is to uphold the autonomy of the subject.

Since Woodmansee regards Schiller’s aesthetic theory as seeking to suppress the free subjectivity of the viewer, one must consider the model of freedom behind her critique. Her book’s rhetoric suggests a vaguely progressive political orientation, with Foucaultian chapter titles such as “Policing of Reading,”and “Aesthetic Autonomy as a Weapon.” At one point she says that a minor figure, Bergk, has been “repressed by disciplinary history” (p. 102). Furthermore, the book features an enthusiastic foreword by Arthur C. Danto, long-time art critic for The Nation, who describes the work as “an enlightened and convincing form of Marxist analysis” (p. xiv). In chapter six, however, it becomes evident that Woodmansee’s freedom of subjectivity rests on the consumer model of free-market capitalism. This view becomes explicit in her endorsement of the laissez-faire aesthetic theory of Archibald Alison and Francis Jeffrey, which, according to Woodmansee, “affirms art’s complete integration into a economy in which the value of an object is a function of its utility to consumers who cannot be wrong—except by consuming too little” (p. 136). Woodmansee seeks to connect Jeffrey’s “confidence in the free market for culture” with contemporary concerns with respecting cultural diversity, and she approvingly discusses a passage from Jeffrey in which the Cockney tourists’ judgment on the Highlands’ lack of beauty is granted the same validity as the opposing judgment of the upper-class viewer (pp. 133–34). For Woodmansee, Jeffrey’s account of the relativity of perceptions of beauty is the most democratic of aesthetic doctrines. But Jeffrey’s aesthetic relativism is no more intrinsically democratic than Schiller’s arguments for aesthetic autonomy are intrinsically antidemocratic. In order to discuss any actual political consequences of an abstract theory, one has to place that theory within its historical moment, and despite Woodmansee’s avowed commitment to this procedure, her attempt to view the laissez-faire principles of Jeffrey as a “joyful affirmation of diversity” represents a case of importing the political situation and concerns of the present into the past. For there is a world of difference between the political implications of arguing for the relativity of taste in the present, when there is at least some semblance of access to political power among all the social classes (as one can claim for the universally enfranchised modern democracies), and the implications of presenting such an argument when only one class has access to political power, as in Jeffrey’s day. Jeffrey’s ‘affirmation of diversity’ is not expressed in terms that would give political weight to working-class opinions; Jeffrey was no philosophic radical. Rather, within the historical context of his class-stratified society, Jeffrey’s comments on the relativity of taste simply reinscribe on a theoretical level the practical fact of the vast differences of perception that separate social classes due to the differences in their material and social conditions. What Woodmansee describes in contemporary terms as Jeffrey’s affirmation of diversity is, given the political context of his day, the benign indifference of the middle-of-the-road Whig who freely grants members of the working class the relative validity of their quaint opinions precisely because their opinions do not and can not have any political consequences given the actual economic and political structure of the State.

Early in the book, Woodmansee admits that she has “little to say...directly” (p. 7) about the Critique of Judgment, and I think the lack of direct engagement with Kantian philosophy results in the theoretical oppositions that structure her book: individualism versus universalism and cultural consumer populism versus aesthetic elitism. These oppositions reflect the worldviews of English empirical philosophy, political individualism, and classical political economy—in other words everything Coleridge turned to Kant and to the Germans to oppose. The lack of engagement with Kant is particularly evident when Woodmansee claims to read “poststructural currents in criticism” out of the typically British empirical associationalist psychology of Alison, on the basis that “the way an object affects us depends heavily on what we bring to it, and that what we bring to it depends in turn on our individual situation” (p. 131). On this basis, John Locke would take an unlikely place among the fathers of Poststructuralism. But there have been significant developments in philosophy between Locke and the present, and a good many of them are bound up with the philosophic revolution that Kant initiated.

My point is not that Woodmansee must be a Kantian, but that the kind of critique she wants to bring to the history of aesthetics necessitates a thorough engagement with the Kantian project and its continental aftermath. The great continental theorists associated with deconstruction worked tirelessly to unmask the contradictions of the philosophical traditions in which they found themselves. But they were never under the illusion that they could completely step outside of the systems that they so thoroughly critiqued from within. One of the odd consequences of postdeconstructionist theory in the American academy is the implicit premise that, now that Western Metaphysics has been completely deconstructed, we can get on to using real categories of analysis, i.e., history, class, gender, and race. But any approach that seeks to detach the sociology of knowledge from the philosophic premises by which it was formed runs the risk of affirming not a post- but a pre-theoretical worldview, as in the case of Woodmansee’s empirical, rather than dialectical, materialism. One ends up with a seemingly radical rhetoric that, at best, fails to challenge, and, at worst, serves to reaffirm the status quo.

Paul Crowther’s The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art is also British in orientation, but in a different way. His work is very much within the Oxford analytic style. (Indeed, he acknowledges the genesis of two of his chapters in a Kant seminar led by P. F. Strawson, the author of the influential analytic reformulation of Kant, The Bounds of Sense.) Crowther’s book examines the Kantian concept of the sublime, which he argues has traditionally received little attention in comparison with Kant’s treatment of beauty and art. However, while emphasizing the sublime, the book gives a comprehensive account of the whole concept of the aesthetic in the third Critique. In the introduction, Crowther cites the centrality of the sublime in the work of deconstructionist and poststructuralist theorists such as Derrida, de Man, Lyotard, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Weiskel, and he notes that although “the concept of beauty seems outmoded—passé even—in relation to the current practices of criticism in the arts, sublimity has suddenly become—fashionable” (p. 3). But for Crowther this fashionable dimension of contemporary relevance “introduces a worrying aspect into these reappropriations of the sublime” because “in all these cases...Kant’s theory is put to use on the basis of...some broader set of theoretical interests,” with “little or no attempt to consider it in the context of possible tensions and distortions forced upon it by the broader philosophical position embodied in Kant’s ethics and aesthetics” (p. 3).

Having raised the importance of the sublime in contemporary theory, Crowther unfortunately never returns to it. The first five chapters of the book are a straight-forward, laudably clear exposition in the analytic style of the structure and validity of the Critique of Judgment, informed by engagement with the mainstream of (mostly English, mostly analytic) secondary philosophical literature on Kant. From Kant’s precritical work through the third Critique, Crowther traces the idea that “moral consciousness is sublime because it manifests the ultimate authority and transcendence of our rational over our sensible being” (p. 21). Given this concern, the absence of contemporary theory is perhaps understandable, but Crowther does devote his final two chapters to his own ‘philosophic reconstruction and revision’ of the Kantian concept of the sublime, and it is here that engagement with contemporary theory would have broadened the relevance of his discussion.

Crowther’s ‘reconstruction of Kant’s theory of the Sublime’ follows a model in which the modern philosopher attempts ‘rationally’ to reconstruct the central insights of a historical philosopher by jettisoning the metaphysical baggage of the past. Although not without value, such projects of rational reconstruction run the risk of getting stuck between historical explication and contemporary theorizing. The lack of engagement with contemporary theory becomes an issue here because Kant and the idealist reaction to Kant are the influences behind much contemporary continental theory. Thus, contemporary continental theory provides a rich current vocabulary through which one can discuss the issues of Kantian aesthetics. But Crowther does not make use of the descendants of Kantian aesthetics in presenting his contemporary rational reconstruction, not even as close a descendant as Schiller, who is quoted once briefly and none too instructively. Consequently, Crowther ends up reinventing certain positions, such as Schiller’s account of aesthetic play: “We find ourselves undergoing an experience wherein a rational capacity and the sensible world are mutually enhancing, but where there are none of the psychological pressures usually associated with the demands and interests of everyday life” (p. 143). More importantly, Crowther does not appear to realize what is at stake for contemporary theory in some of the issues. For example, in discussing the interesting connections between the philosophic concept of the sublime and its representations in Gothic novels and in sublime landscape painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he speculates that the original audiences were “transported” by such works and that they “responded to the represented subject-matter in much the same terms as they would respond to the experience of it in real life.” He goes on to comment:

Unfortunately, once the treatment of a sublime subject-matter consolidated into a conventional genre, it became much more difficult to respond in such terms. This is probably one of the reasons why the sublime has become generally debased as an aesthetic concept. The infinite vistas and terrifying events become mere signifiers of an outmoded theatricality.

(p. 155)

The process that Crowther here casually decries, the movement in the reader’s mind from viewing works of art as unmediated experiences to becoming aware of them as conventional signifiers, is precisely what deconstructionist criticism celebrated and sought to preform on every aesthetic work in the canon. It is precisely at a juncture such as this that the very different assumptions about philosophy and criticism embodied in continental and Anglo-American traditions should be brought to the surface and discussed. But although Crowther notes the centrality of the sublime in contemporary continental theory in his introduction, he does not show how such contemporary interest in the sublime might connect to his attempts at a modern reconstruction of the concept.

In conclusion, I would like to turn to an issue that Crowther discusses at the very end of his modern reconstruction of the sublime, the role of the experience of the sublime as a basis for a sense of shared human identity and moral respect:

We may know that all human beings have the potential to comprehend things which far exceed their sensible capacities, but to countenance this fact through an experience of the sublime is to experience it, as it were, from the inside. This might be interpreted as a secular example of the old adage that every human being possesses a spark of the divine. Given that through experiences of the cognitive sublime we can become vividly aware of the utter extraordinariness of what it is to be human, then we might reasonably hope that such experiences will be conductive to our sense of respect for persons.

(p. 173)

Crowther here describes the connection between the joint realizations of individual subjectivity and the moral respect for others, arising from an awareness of shared human intersubjectivity. The medium for these realizations is the experience of the sublime, one subset of Kant’s category of aesthetic judgment. This connection is at the heart of the moral and political implications of Kantian aesthetics that are so foreign to the mainstream of American academic thought, which, like Woodmansee’s book, regards a complete relativity of taste as the only theoretical doctrine compatible with individual freedom and mutual respect. But appeals to inter-subjectivity are not intrinsically antithetical to the ideals of human diversity and freedom. Kant was at once the great universalist of reason and the great promoter of individual political freedom. If this is a combination that seems increasingly incomprehensible to us, we might want to explore how we might, in our historical moment, reclaim the unifying hopes of intersubjectivity while avoiding the dangers of totalization and exclusion. A re-engagement with Kantian aesthetics would be a good place to begin.