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Kant and Metaphor in Contemporary Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Clive Cazeaux
Clive Cazeaux
Affiliation:
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, UK
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Extract

Trying to assess Kant's impact on contemporary aesthetics is by no means a straightforward task, for the simple reason that the subject is saturated with his influence. In all aspects of the theory and practice of art, it is possible to observe concepts and attitudes at work which are either a reflection of, or a response to, Kant's thinking. This might seem a rather overblown claim and a difficult one to substantiate but, without going into too much detail at this point, one has only to consider that the central tenets of both modernism and postmodernism can be traced back to Kant's Critical thought. There is the modernist's interest in the conditions of possibility of representation – as evidenced, for example, by the push towards abstraction in the visual arts and the attempt to paint not the world but the process of painting itself – and, responding to this, the postmodernist's concern that these conditions of possibility should not become universal absolutes.

Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 8 , March 2004 , pp. 1 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 2004

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References

Notes

1 Kittay, Eva Feder, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)Google Scholar ; Ortony, Andrew (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999)Google Scholar .

2 Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar .

3 Allison, Henry E., Kant's Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

4 Derrida, Jacques, ‘Parergon’, The Truth in Painting, trans. Bennington, Geoff and McLeod, Ian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 15–147Google Scholar .

5 Among the major works by these thinkers are: Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Harris, Roy (London: Duckworth, 1983)Google Scholar ; original work published 1916; Frege, Gottlob, Philosophical Writings, ed. Black, M. and Geach, P. T. (Blackwell: Oxford, 1962)Google Scholar ; Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Ogden, C. K. (London: Routledge, 1922)Google Scholar and Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953)Google Scholar ; Whorf, Benjamin Lee, Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. Carroll, John B. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956)Google Scholar .

6 For a detailed discussion of this aspect of metaphor, see Black, Max, ‘More about Metaphor’, Ortony, Andrew (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 19–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Czerny, Robert et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978)Google Scholar ; Hausman, Carl R., Metaphor and Art: Interactionism and Reference in the Verbal and Nonverbal Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar .

7 See, for example, Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense’, Cazeaux, Clive (ed.), The Continental Aesthetics Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 53–62Google Scholar ; Heidegger, Martin, ‘The origin of the work of art’, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Hofstadter, Albert (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 15–87Google Scholar ; Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, trans. Hullot-Kentor, Robert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997Google Scholar ; original work published 1970); Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatari (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)Google Scholar ; Rorty, Richard, ‘Philosophy as a kind of writing’, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 89–109Google Scholar .

8 See, for example, Nietzsche, ‘On truth and lie’, Adorno, Aesthetic Theory; Derrida, Of Grammatology.

9 Further discussion of Kant and constructionist epistemology can be found in: Devitt, Michael and Sterelny, Kim, Language and Reality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987)Google Scholar ; Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

10 Good accounts of the development of the Neue Hörspiel (although not in any Kantian context) are given in Cory, Mark, The Emergence of an Acoustical Artform: An Analysis of the German Experimental Horspiel of the 1960s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974)Google Scholar, and Kahn, Douglas and Whitehead, Gregory (eds), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

11 Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar ; also The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 19831998 (London: Verso, 1998)Google Scholar.

12 , Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and consumer society’, Cultural Turn, p. 3Google Scholar .

13 Ibid., pp. 11-16.

14 , Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Heath, Malcolm (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 34–8Google Scholar . For a fuller account of diaphor and epiphor, see Wheelwright, Philip, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), pp. 71–91Google Scholar .

15 , Aristotle, Poetics, pp. 34–35Google Scholar .

16 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, trans. Pluhar, Werner S. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987)Google Scholar . This and all subsequent references to the third Critique follow the pagination of the original Akademie edition and are given in parentheses in the main text.

17 The first instance of the applicability of a concept being pictured in spatial terms is the ‘container’ trope in Aristotle's account of syllogistic reasoning, where ‘for so-and-so to be wholly within such-and-such, and for such-and-such to be predicated of every so-and-so, is just the same’. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, trans. Geach, P. T., in A New Aristotle Reader, ed. Ackrill, J. L. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 24b, p. 25Google Scholar ; emphasis added.

18 For an account of how connections between aesthetics and teleology promote the unity of Kant's critical system, see Banham, Gary, Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For a review of the book, see Kantian Review, 5 (2001), pp. 141–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

19 The passages in which Aquinas considers analogy are given in Palmer, Humphrey, Analogy: A Study of Qualification and Argument in Theology (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 165–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

20 , Guyer, Claims of Taste, p. 32Google Scholar .

21 Ibid., 29.

22 Allison gives his account of these reasons at , Allison, Kant's Theory of Taste, pp. 180–82Google Scholar .

23 , Guyer, Claims of Taste, p. 101Google Scholar .

24 , Allison, Kant's Theory of Taste, p. 176Google Scholar .

25 Elliott, R. K., ‘The unity of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’, in Chadwick, Ruth F. and Cazeaux, Clive (eds), Critical Assessments: Immanuel Kant, Vol. 4 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 293–308Google Scholar .

26 A. C. Genova, ‘Kant's complex problem of reflective judgement’, ibid., pp. 54-76.

27 D. W. Gotshalk, ‘Form and expression in Kant's aesthetics’, ibid., pp. 147-57.

28 Salim Kemal, ‘The importance of artistic beauty’, ibid., pp. 104–26.

29 Pluhar presents his interpretation of the normativity of aesthetic judgement as part of the introduction to his translation of the Critique of Judgment, especially pp. lxi–lxvi.

30 Rogerson, Kenneth F., ‘The meaning of universal validity in Kant's aesthetics’, in Chadwick and Cazeaux Critical Assessments, pp. 309–20Google Scholar .

31 , Kemal, ‘Importance of artistic beauty’, p. 107Google Scholar .

32 Ibid., p. 118.

33 , Gotshalk, ‘Form and expression’, pp. 154–5Google Scholar .

34 , Allison, Kant's Theory of Taste, pp. 217–18Google Scholar .

35 Ibid., p. 218.

36 , Guyer, Claims of Taste, pp. 312–17Google Scholar .

37 Ibid., pp. 313-15. The works identified by Guyer are: Crawford, Donald, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), pp. 143–5Google Scholar ; Elliott, R. K., ‘The unity of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 244–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

38 For arguments relating the formation of concepts to artistic processes of shaping or transforming matter, see Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘On truth and lie’, pp. 53–62Google Scholar ; and , Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, pp. 65–70, 110-19Google Scholar .

39 Jacques Derrida, ‘Parergon’; ‘Economimesis’, in Kearney, Richard and Rasmussen, David (eds), Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 431–50Google Scholar ; first published in Diacritics, 11 (1981), 57–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

40 , Derrida, ‘Parergon’, p. 63Google Scholar .

41 Ibid., p. 68.

42 Ibid., pp. 69, 71, 73.

43 Ibid., p. 73.

44 Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 395Google Scholar .

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 See n. 17.

48 For discussion of the relationship between deconstruction, philosophy and art, see Rorty, Richard, ‘Philosophy as a kind of writing’, pp. 89–109Google Scholar ; Norris, Christopher, ‘Philosophy as not just a “kind of writing”: Derrida and the claim of reason’, in Dasenbrock, R. W. (ed.), Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction and Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 189–203Google Scholar .

49 , Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, pp. 257–314Google Scholar . For an account of how a Heideggerian interpretation of Kant supports Ricoeur's theory of metaphor, see Cazeaux, Clive, ‘Metaphor and Heidegger's Kant’, Review of Metaphysics, 49 (1995), 341–64Google Scholar .

50 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith, Colin (London: Routledge, 1962)Google Scholar . For a Kantian view of Merleau-Ponty and metaphor, see Cazeaux, Clive, ‘Metaphor and the categorization of the senses’, Metaphor and Symbol, 17 (2002), 3–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar .