Reflections on Kant

When I read Kant many years ago as part of my undergraduate German degree, I did not appreciate how radical and progressive a thinker he was. 

I find fascinating the way in which Kant seeks a resolution to the traditional opposition of subjective and objective experience (previously separated by rational and empirical philosophies), within the human consciousness itself. His acceptance of the limits of human cognitive powers, and of the role of subjective experience in stimulating a continuing creative interplay between mind and 'reality', take him beyond the Enlightenment belief that reality can be conceptualised. His thinking in many ways approaches much more contemporary philosophical realms of 'lived' life and relational indeterminacy.   

R. Bolinger: Kant in the style of Picasso

For Kant the aesthetic sense occupies that 'space' created by the relationship between what we sense and our conceptual understanding of it: the 'aesthetic idea' is 'a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, ie, no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it'. (CJ 314).  Aesthetic beauty encourages us subjectively to seek an objective judgement. Kant believes that this dynamic relationship between subjective and objective is a fundamental human condition, driving the way we construct our knowledge of the world, including our moral sense. This interplay elicits a sense of 'purposiveness', or 'the feeling of freedom in the play of our cognitive powers... which underlies that pleasure which alone is universally communicable yet not based on concepts' (CJ 306). ‘Purposiveness’ structures our aesthetic response both to nature and art.

For Kant consciousness of nature is shaped by the way in which we attempt to articulate and order it within our cognitive limitations, even though human understanding does not allow nature to be completely conceptualised (‘Independent natural beauty reveals to us a technic of nature that allows us to present nature as a system in terms of laws whose principle we do not find anywhere in our understanding’ (CJ 246)). Within an aesthetic response to nature that acknowledges the limits of cognition there is an intuition of the ‘supersensible’. Kant describes a process whereby, ‘we cannot cognise, but can only think nature as an exhibition of [the supersensible]. But it is this idea that is aroused in us when, as we judge an object aesthetically, this judging strains the imagination to its limit…because it is based on a feeling that the mind has a vocation that wholly transcends the domain of nature (namely moral feeling’ and it is with regard to this feeling that we judge the presentation of the object subjectively purposive’ (CJ 268).

It is this aesthetic response to nature that forms the premise for Kant’s reflections on art. While he associates art (unlike nature) with intention, ‘a determinate intention to produce something’ (CJ 307), he elevates art that (like nature) appears uncontrived: ‘even though the purposiveness in a product of fine art is intentional, it must still not seem intentional; i.e., fine art must have the look of nature even though we are conscious of it as art (CJ 307). For Kant the highest form of art is the product of 'genius', which he defines as 'originality', 'the very opposite of a spirit of imitation' (CJ 308), or as 'the innate mental disposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art' (CJ 307). ‘Good’ art, therefore, is art that evokes a multi-faceted aesthetic response similar to that experienced in nature.

Kant's reflections on the limits of cognition and language, the emphasis on lived experience, the question of mimesis in representation, and that elusive 'of-itself' quality that gives both nature art their potency, prefigure more contemporary philosophical thought. Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’ occupies the same space in which mind interacts with lived experience. His circular thesis that it is art that is the originator of both art and artist - that the origin of art concerns the nature of art – appears to progress Kant’s idea of ‘purposiveness’. Heidegger's familiar articulation that,' The nature of art, on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth' (OWP 70), occupies itself, just as Kant does, with that aspect of the aesthetic that exceeds or transcends conceptualisation.

In relation to a personal creative practice that is about human engagement and relationship with a non-human world, Kant forms an important philosophical starting point. For Kant nature is the well-spring of creativity, moral and spiritual awareness, a world of which humans are inextricably a part, but from which our conscious self is felt to separate us. In today's increasingly virtual world this separation is as much physical as conceptual. In this world, as in Kant’s, is the aesthetic sense, the intuition or ‘genius’ though which 'nature gives the rule to art', that creates the possibility of reconnection.

Illustration

Kant in the style of Picasso, by Renee Bolinger [online] Available from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/04/renee-bolinger_n_3865653.html  [16 Sept 2016]

Sources

 Heidegger, M. (1971) ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’  Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated from German by Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper and Row [online] Available from: http://ssbothwell.com/documents/ebooksclub.org__Poetry__Language__Thought__Perennial_Classics_.pdf

Kant, I. (1790), The Critique of Judgment. Translated from German by W.S.Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company 1987 [online] Available from: https://monoskop.org/images/7/77/Kant_Immanuel_Critique_of_Judgment_1987.pdf [16 Sept 2016]

Cazeaux, C. (ed.) (2000) The Continental Aesthetics Reader. Oxford and New York: Routledge.

Rohlf, Michael, "Immanuel Kant", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) [online]. Available from <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/kant/> [16 Sept 2016]