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223 5 Gadamer and Lyotard on Aesthetic Judgment (II): The Story of Where They Go Wrong Setting the Stage The Players and Spectators Kant’s essay on the progress of the human race left us with two influential role models: the modern player and the postmodern spectator, with whom, by now, we are well acquainted and with whose various guises we are becoming familiar. An important aspect of their joint hegemony over our philosophical options, however, and one to which we have yet to call attention, is the opposition between purpose and passivity that has so effectively divided the “domains” of science and ethics from the “domain” of art, and so influentially determined that the judgments of the aesthete have little effect on “real-world” issues of knowledge and right. Now, while Gadamer and Lyotard, in opting for the aesthetic as a model for understanding, also opt for “passivity” over “purpose,” there is a sense in which, already in their combined elaboration of the distinct opportunities proffered by a sense of taste and a feeling for the sublime respectively, the binary opposition of “purpose or passivity” is undermined. In the light of Gadamer’s hermeneutic rereading of the Kantian sense of taste, and the hermeneutic reinterpretation of scientific purposes to which Hacking, Heelan, and Habermas and Vattimo, too, contribute, we need no longer render the deliberations of “common sense” as inevitably disinterested or devoid of purpose; our judgments on art are, Gadamer shows, as reliant on pregiven, conceptual possibilities as our scientific claims, as Hacking and Heelan show, are subject to indeterminacy and prejudice. Thus, the philosophical landscape mapped out by Kant’s player-spectator divide is redrawn by the version of “taste” that Gadamer describes and that is demonstrated so effectively in contemporary reinterpretations of both scientific “purposes” and aesthetic “indifference.” And it is because of the manner in which a sense of taste, as Gadamer renders it, refuses to be either purposive/ 224 E F F E C T I V E H I S T O R Y determinate or passive/reflective that it articulates a role for our effective historian on a philosophical stage that had seemed entirely occupied . At once determined within the more or less “deep” prejudices of his tradition and conscious of the inevitable prejudice of human understanding to a degree that justifies intermittent “passivity” or openness in the face of other possibilities for understanding and the lessons of history generally, the effective historian, equipped with his sense of taste for what is “commonly” acceptable and “humanly” possible, both usurps, in one sense, the binary roles of player/spectator and clarifies the manner in which player and spectator are simply the limit cases of a broad spectrum of critical activity, in which “science” is no longer opposed to “art” nor “thought” entirely at odds with “feeling.” Nevertheless, it is no coincidence that Kant delineated the roles for player and spectator in an essay, the explicit concern of which is to establish the possibility of human progress. At stake in the distinction between “purpose” and “passivity” is the linear notion of progress so central to Enlightenment ambitions, so utterly embraced by the “moderns,” Habermas and Apel, and so implicitly present in the objection to a merely “relative” account of progress that determines even the “postmodern” Vattimo’s critical options. Both player and spectator, on Kant’s account, so long as they are kept strictly apart, make plausible our hopes of absolute progress: the player, equipped with identifiable and coercive goals, is master over history and contingency, and ensures that whatever happens , happens in accord with her overriding teleologies; the spectator, bereft of any identifiable goal, is entirely a slave to history and contingency , such that the “natural” progression of events unfolds without interference and is reflected in her feelings of enthusiasm and enlightenment . The player makes progress; the spectator feels that we are making progress: simply reconcile player and spectator in such a way that the idea of progress that agitates the spectator never contradicts the progressive concepts that motivate the player—as Kant does with his subjective a priori principle of the purposiveness of nature for thought (taste) and of thought for reason (sublime)—and the progress of the human race, the possibility of which Kant opened to question, is secured. But it is precisely the promise of progress that player and spectator secure which is compromised or historicized by the effective historian, such that, though he in one sense continues with the...

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