7 - Feeling and/as force

Summary

Passion: the lucidly gathering grip on being.

Martin Heidegger

Throughout the preceding chapters, I have emphasized the need to dissociate the issues raised by Kant's theory of aesthetic reflection from what we have come to recognize as autonomous works of art. That dissociation is necessary in view of the fact that what lies at stake in Kant's third Critique is not just the fate of artworks as a class but a particular mode of judgment and its responsiveness to sensuous particulars – to feelings of pleasure and pain – that cannot be reduced to any underlying cause or conceptual scheme. When Nietzsche railed against the logic of causality and similar modes of deep-structure thinking in the sketches that comprise The Will to Power (see, e.g., sec. 545 ff.), he was extending a theme from Kant's Critique of Judgment, albeit within the context of an attack on the philosophical culture of which Kant was believed to be a part: “cause is a capacity to produce effects that has been super-added to the events,” Nietzsche wrote; “interpretation by causality a deception.” The process of aesthetic reflection as I have described it so far does not require us to track the causes of aesthetic effects; indeed, it banks on the hope that the very indeterminacy of pleasure and pain with respect to the fact-world of cognition and the value-world of morality may deflect our fascination with the notion of cause and that this, in turn, may help reveal something that the apportionment of the world into “facts” and “values” fails to grasp – the force of the feelings that accompany our representations of values and facts.