Short note: Kant our Contemporary
by sensuscommunist
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant began his Copernican turn, away from both the dogmatic metaphysics of Wolf and the nominalist skepticism of Hume. This turn revolutionized the history of philosophy by shifting all philosophical questions from asking whether one knows to how one knows. A philosophy of philosophy, a critique. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant moved on from questions of knowledge to those of action. No longer, how does one know, but rather how does one act. The problem is, he writes in the Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgement, that Pure Reason and Practical Reason dwell in separate, seemingly unbridgeable realms. Pure Reason is what can be known before physical experience, and practical is what one does while experiencing. Pure Reason is like a scientific experiment. It controls every single variable and tests particulars to figure out how they work universally. No one thinks that science is, or for that matter inquiring into way in which knowledge itself works is, without import. Surely, knowledge effects ethics, but not directly. Practical Reason dwells in the realm of contingency; while nature follows natural law, on an experiential level it appears contingent. He reached a deadlock between the everyday and the laboratory.
In these terms The Critique of the Power of Judgement, seems pretty relevant. With the ‘demystification of the world’ that (to meld three different thinkers) expresses the dialectic of enlightenment split between progress and terror but united in the positivistic empiricism of both, the rise of technocratic politicians, the institutional authority of the sciences, and the scientistic rhetoric apparent in war and policing, humanity needs a way to bridge the gulf and reach the ethical. Or, in other words, my wager is, were Kant alive today, he could rephrase the Critique of the Power of Judgement such that it would answer the question why Americans give more to charity than any other society in the world but have little problem murdering a couple million Iraqis.
In this sense reading the Critique of the Power of Judgement as merely a ‘formalist’ account of beauty–as a number of Kant’s critics have–misses the point entirely. It is like reading Moby Dick as an atlas. Furthermore, reading it as merely about art misplaces the emphasis of the book. Kant notably uses very few artistic examples of the beautiful. Occasionally he mentions buildings, paintings, and landscapes, but only ever vaguely. He seems much more inclined to regard, in one instance, certain crustaceans as true representations of beauty. The book is about Beauty, with a capital B, the type that is Universal, but it is not about what is and what is not Universally Beautiful. Rather, it is about the way one experiences universal beauty. It enquires after the relationship between subject and object, not after the object.
This relationship is both precise and obscure. Its theoretical delicacy causes it to be constantly misread. It is not that universally all experience the same things as beautiful, but that one experiences beauty as if it were universal. Beauty is subjective, but it is a subjective judgement with universal validity.
Two theses remain on how Kant is out contemporary, though an oppositional one. First, the experience of beauty, the sensus communis, is an experience of universal human community. The experience of all of humanity as one’s neighbor. I experience a beautiful object as if an Iraqi resistance fighter would also find it beautiful, as if a Haitian slum dweller would also find it beautiful. In other words, beauty knows no boundaries or borders, no exclusion, no racism, and no war. The experience of the beautiful is a cry for humanity to live as equals. A testament for social revolution rather than the voluntarism of charity and the fatalism of war. Second, the modern ideology, that beauty is particular, merely subjective, that here is my beauty and there is yours, reveals a radical inability to envision the social totality. This aesthetic ideology only accepts humanity as a collection of socially determined individuals. Masking itself as genuine equality, as pluralism, it in fact dooms us to total alienation. Kant did not believe that beauty created equality, but that it showed that, to use a cliché phrase, a better world is possible. Beauty yearns for utopia, against the individualism of today.
