The Rebirth of Beauty

Reflections on starting an art and politics reading group in the time of corona: Week 2.

Dear reader,

Kant is a peculiar figure for us. Of all the figures in this reading group, Kant is the oldest and hardest to read. Many treat Kant as a canonical thinker or “philosopher’s philosopher”, especially since he often represents the starting point of German Idealism — a line followed by Schiller and Hegel, among others. But truly he is a world philosopher. He is principally a revolutionary bourgeois philosopher of freedom; that is, Kant is a philosopher of the conditions of possibility for change, of the self-transformation of the faculties by members of society. In many ways, postmodernism could be considered an attempt to go beyond Kant, but it turns out to fall below it, meaning it represents the abandonment of the question of how art relates to the question of freedom.

I have asked one of the active participants of this session, Florian Walch, to send me his thoughts on the session. He writes as follows:

Today, the reputation of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment is, at best, ambiguous. Specialized academic philosophy has long divided up the spoils of the prior two critiques, cutting out ethics and epistemology from what Kant considered to be one critical project.

For what was once considered true, or good, or beautiful, is no longer deemed so. And yet a desiring, thinking humanity must judge its object — nature, into which it is born, and what is born into it — in these terms, transforming all else: origin had ceased to be destiny, and eternal virtues became social faculties. 

This is, grossly simplified, what I took away from the introduction to the third critique — as close to a systematic account of his mature thought that Kant ever put to paper, occasioned by his account of what mediates understanding and reason, theory and practice.

It was the reconstruction and discussion of this moment of synthesis, one of the many “ends of philosophy”, as well as the launching pad (through Schiller) of the competing systems of German Idealism, that seemed to occupy the reading group more than anything else.

Tracing the antinomies of posterity back to a moment when feelings, desires, and drives were thinkable as the ground of reason confirmed what is implicit in some dismissals of the third critique: Kant was not a philosopher of art, but of freedom. Of what we could know, but do not yet know — and how even our instincts push us towards developing our faculties beyond them.

For even if, as Heinrich Heine wrote of Kant, the cathedral clock of Königsberg (where Kant spent all his life) could not have performed its outward routine more methodically than the philosopher, the world no longer appeared as clockwork. Even in East Prussia, the circle of time had been bent into an arrow. And, however hard this experience may be to recapture for us, at that moment, even the contemplation of flowers or the firmament reflected this.

How for Kant, in his inimitably wry translation of Rousseau’s revolutionary fervor into the labyrinthine stylings of the received “dogmatic” philosophy, the restlessness of the reflective judgment moved from the trajectories of distant stars to the righteousness of the ancien régime — just as the word “revolution”, once used to describe the orbits of the planets, acquired its modern, distinctly political meaning. Having read my fair share of denunciations of Kant’s esteem of what our aesthetic imagination accomplished, usually by those advocating a more immediately engaged art and criticism, I was left marveling at how Kant had helped the following generation — Hegel, above all — think their way from innocuous designs à la grecque all the way to the terror of the French Revolution and beyond.

What is this beyond that Walch invokes? What value/significance, if any, can Kant’s approach to thinking about aesthetic experience and the beautiful have on us today? For one, Beauty is not merely about pleasing the senses or gratifying a practical need; it goes beyond these. Meanwhile, Kant emphasizes that beauty is not static. It is ever-changing, and beauty — what we consider the beautiful — is not invalidated by the fact that its meaning changes. (This is what Baudelaire — beyond Schiller and Hegel  — is in dialogue with in Flowers of Evil.) For Kant, as a revolutionary bourgeois philosopher of freedom, beauty is the appearance and phenomenon of freedom. This is because beauty mediates between nature and freedom. In other words, art mediates the what is, the given, nature, and what is tasked with becoming, that is, what could and should be, the possibility of freedom. When an object appears to be beautiful, it appears to be more than itself; it appears to be alive in a way. We can all relate, I hope, to the experience that when an artwork appears to be beautiful it appears to be alive. But that is a function of our imagination — our subjectivity — not the artwork itself. 

However, immediately after Kant — beginning with Romanticism and then finally in Modernism — art becomes compensation for life. It is in the early to mid-19th century that the antagonism between art and life begins to emerge, where art makes up for for a deficit of life. But, that we would need art to compensate for the misery of life would not have been imaginable to Kant. This makes Kant super peculiar for us. We still need to make sense of the faculty of judgment as expressed in art. We still should try to make sense of the condition of possibility for change that art poses, but we must do so in a world where art compensates for life, instead of transcending itself, or pointing towards change and transformation of ourselves and society. This brings me to the contradictory nature of art: art is a phenomenon of our suffering and a phenomenon of the possibility of freedom. Kant (and Rousseau, as Walch said above) is the origin of a “critical philosophy” or “critical theory” that allows us to reflect on this problem even if it did not appear as such in Kant’s own lifetime. What do we mean by critical philosophy or critical theory? It’s a theory that is concerned with transformation; it’s concerned with how/what might become, what could and should be, “the ought”. What we need is the ability to pursue change and freedom, and what we suffer from is the unrealized potential of that pursuit. This is why Robert Pippin, in the first week’s reading, says the modernism is “fraught with oughts”, because in modernism we suffer in a particular way; we suffer from an unfulfilled task, and that is the task of transformation, of self-realization, self-overcoming, or self-fulfillment.

More soon,

  Laurie

P.S. I have been obsessed with Grimes’s new album, Miss Anthropocene. I feel absolutely intoxicated by the songs and the new videos are beautiful. “Delete Forever” sticks out like a sore thumb in the whole album, but it is one of my favorites because it just throws me back to the 90s when I was a teenager (where “innocence was fleeting like a season”). I don’t know yet what I will make of this, but I hope to write something on her cosmos soon. I am also fascinated by her romance — and soon baby! — with Elon Musk. They are the first celebrity couple I am completely rooting for — but I will leave that for my non-existent therapist.  //

The previous introduction to the Art and Politics reading group is here.

Still from the music video for “Delete Forever” by Grimes. 2020.