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As If
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In this Assessment I would like to engage in three debates that run throughout the Seminars: the terms of the debate—the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic; their implications for thinking about the periodization of the arts; and their implications for contemplating the spatiality of art, in particular with regard to the quotidian, that most “dire” of experiences, as Jay Bernstein so emphatically puts it (seminar 5). The Stone Summer Theory Institute Seminars are about the anti-aesthetic, and therefore by implication that which it supposedly opposes, the aesthetic. They are about how we can think beyond this binary. But they are also about what this binary means. In fact, they are also about what these concepts themselves may or may not mean, and have or have not meant over the years. For Hal Foster, for instance, the aesthetic refers to the (modern) construction of a unity, while the anti-aesthetic refers precisely to the (postmodern) deconstruction of that unity. Bernstein, meanwhile, seems to suggest that the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic are about sublimation and the return of the repressed, respectively (seminar 5). Others propose yet other definitions: harmony and dissent , the beautiful and the ugly, art and politics. The concepts of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic thus simultaneously function as the defining problematic and form a problem of definition; its guiding thread and a surprisingly slippery slope. Kant seems to be a central figure, however, in each of the discourses, and so his writings on aesthetics may well offer us insight into some of the issues at stake across the debates. As Diarmuid Costello and Bernstein, among others, note (seminar 1), there are various ways in which The Critique of Judgment can be approached: as an inquiry into the experience of modernity, a reinterpretation of the human faculties, a contemplation of taste, and so on. I would offer yet another way of rethinking Kant’s third critique. This particular way of reading Kant was suggested some years ago by the German philosopher of art Eva Schaper. According to Schaper, the aesthetic judgment in Kant is by definition an allegorical judgment, that is to say, a judgment about something which one knows represents something else. “Nature was beautiful when it appeared as art,” she cites Kant, while “art can only be called beautiful when we are conscious of its being art whilst it yet appears to us as if it were nature.”1 Unfortunately, I do not have the space to discuss Schaper’s argument in detail here. What I want to as if timotheus Vermeulen 1. Eva Schaper, “The Kantian ‘As-If’ and Its Relevance for Aesthetics,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 65 (1964–65): 220. Assessments 169 2. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in On History, edited by Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), 21 (my emphasis). draw attention to is that aesthetic judgment is a category of the imagination, the faculty where Kant thinks all mental capacities conjoin. When engaging in an aesthetic judgment, one is imagining. That is to say, one articulates one’s mental capacities to think something that those same mental capacities tell him he cannot think. Kant here simultaneously attests to and casts doubt upon the faith his contemporaries put in Reason. Indeed, as Kant writes elsewhere, “the history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret” and “each . . . people, as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them unknown goal.”2 We may view history as the materialization of the Ideal, he says, but we may not, as well. The aesthetic is not an alternative way of thinking about modernity, as Bernstein describes it, but is, in fact, a vital part of Kant’s notion of the modern thought experiment as such. If one accepts this reading of Kant, the relationships between aesthetics and modernity, aesthetics and the human faculties, and aesthetics and taste take on other meanings. It is certainly the case that this particular interpretation of the aesthetic is enabled by modern processes of democratization. After all, to imagine one thing (say, the slave) is something else (say, the master) requires the kind of liberty inherent to democracy. Yet modernity as we have come to understand it, as a universalizing, progressive materialization of Reason, is not, in a Schaperian sense, an aesthetic regime. There is nothing allegorical about the fanaticism of the...