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Liberal Art: Art and Education for Citizenship in Kant's Critique of Judgment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2013

Christian R. Donath
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Abstract

While most political theorists focus on the role of reflective judgment in Kant's Critique of Judgment, the political dimensions of art itself have been overlooked. Kant's treatment of art suggests a consistent political message: art, as an analogy, can teach basic values for citizenship. I examine his hierarchy of the arts, as well as his treatment of genius and taste, arguing that each is informed by Kant's belief in the heuristic capacity of art.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , Winter 2013 , pp. 3 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2013 

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References

1 References to the Critique of Judgment (henceforward CJ) are by volume and page in the Akademie edition. The translation used here and throughout is that of Paul Guyer and Eric Mattews in Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Guyer, Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which includes the Akademie pagination.

2 In the Anthropology, for example, he notes that music is a “social pleasure that is not diminished by the fact that many participate” (Kant, Immanuel, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. Louden, Robert [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 47Google Scholar).

3 See Guyer, Paul, introduction to Kant's “Critique of the Power of Judgment”: Critical Essays, ed. Guyer, Paul (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)Google Scholar, xxxv, for a discussion of this topic.

4 Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966).

5 Guyer, introduction to Kant's “Critique of the Power of Judgment”: Critical Essays; Shell, Susan, Embodiment of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 225Google Scholar.

6 Arendt, Hannah, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Beiner, Ronald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

7 Benhabib, Seyla, “Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Arendt's Thought,” Political Theory 16, no. 1 (1988): 29–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Villa, Dana, “Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action,” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992): 274–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar (and ensuing responses); Zerilli, Linda, “‘We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2005): 158–88 (and ensuing responses)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 E.g., Benhabib, “Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics,” 39.

9 Villa, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 277, and Zerilli “‘We Feel Our Freedom,’” 162.

10 Zerilli and Villa, though different in their orientations, fall into this category.

11 Bonnie Honig has noted Kant's alarm particularly when it comes to “virtuosic politics” (Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993], 390Google Scholar).

12 Ellis, Elizabeth, Kant's Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 61Google Scholar. Ellis was not the first to identify problems with Arendt's appropriation of Kant. Seyla Benhabib, following Richard Bernstein, finds the appropriation peculiar given “the denigration of action” that “follows” from Kant's practical philosophy (Benhabib “Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics,” 39). Whether Kant “denigrates” action is, of course, another question.

13 Kant, Immanuel, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?,’” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Reiss, H. S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 60Google Scholar. This volume will be cited hereafter as PW.

14 Kant, Immanuel, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice,’” in PW, 80Google Scholar. One might also object that this is law or principle rather than politics. I think this claim reads a particular political theory into Kant, which is anachronistic or, at very least, external to Kant. It wants to separate, for example, the juristic from politics in a way that Kant would object to.

15 Especially the concluding portions of the essay. See note 13.

16 One noteworthy exception is Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11, no. 2 (1981), 2–25.

17 While Christoper Janaway (“Kant's Aesthetics and the Empty Cognitive Stock,” in Kant's “Critique of the Power of Judgment”: Critical Essays, ed. Guyer) deals with music, he does not relate music to Kant's moral project.

18 An exception: Parret, Herman, “Kant on Music and the Hierarchy of the Arts,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 3 (1998): 256CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In spite of the titular description, Parret remarks on the perfume comparison without much explanation and without explaining its significance. See also note 16 above.

19 For a brief account of Kant's musical milieu as well as specifics about his own taste in music, see Vorländer, Karl, Immanuel Kant, Der Mann und das Werk (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1977), 388–92Google Scholar.

20 In his course notes on rhetoric (1872–73), Nietzsche identifies this passage in the CJ as epitomizing the distinction between ancient and contemporary man: “What is unique to Hellenistic life,” he writes, “is thus characterized: to perceive all matters of the intellect, of life's seriousness, of necessities, even of danger, as play.” See Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. Gilman, Sander et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3Google Scholar.

21 The “play” announced here must be distinguished from what Schiller describes as “play” several years later—though the influence of Kant's CJ on On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967) is distinct. Schiller's play impulse is that which reconciles man's other two impulses: sense and form. It is the transcendent element that links the phenomenal and noumenal realms. Kant uses “play” here in a different, though not unrelated, sense. Play as regards to poetry is that which is not associated with payment (i.e., it is distinct from work) and thus it contains an “in itself” purposiveness not associated with (most?) rhetoric. The more “playful” the art is for Kant, the further it is from engaging in work. For Schiller (Aesthetic Education, 128) this is also the case, but his orientation toward purpose relates to his criticism of the mimesis question originating with Plato (i.e., does mimesis teach untruth?). Schiller believes that play is what routes the mimesis question in that art aiming to simulate reality is “nothing but a base tool for material ends and can prove nothing for the freedom of the spirit.” Clearly art in Schiller functions to prove something for freedom. Kant is rather less forceful on this final point, as for him, art functions as an analogy rather than as proof.

22 For an extensive discussion of the connection of beauty to morality in the eighteenth century see Robert Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), chaps. 1, 2, and 6.

23 In Arendt's language, the “spectator.”

24 This is a composite of adjectives that Kant applies alternatively to art.

25 This point aligns with the Arendtian emphasis on freedom in art, in this case in the imagination's experience of art. See especially Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom.’”

26 To be precise it is the capacity of freedom. That this is capacity rather than freedom itself serves to emphasize the sheer element of agency in what Kant is trying to do: one must choose to judge nature. (To judge nature is significant for Kant as this means to stand outside of experience in its contingency.)

27 “I must confess that a beautiful poem has always given me a pure enjoyment, whereas reading the best speech of a Roman popular speaker…” (V: 327; emphasis added). In both cases, his experience is of reading.

28 Another discussion of music's qualities can be found in §16. Here Kant makes the distinction between free and adherent beauties. One of the features of this treatment—though this is certainly not an exhaustive characterization—is the question of mimesis. “In the judging of a free beauty (according to mere form) the judgment of taste is pure.” “Music fantasias (without a theme), indeed all music without a text” fall into this category (V: 229). With a preconceived “concept of the end that determines what the thing should be” (mimesis), this “hinder[s] the purity of the judgment of taste” (V: 230). But this moves the discussion away from the hierarchy of the arts and into a treatment of the type of judging that they produce (pure vs. unfree).

29 See the Anthropology, 145: “among poets there are not so many shallow minds (minds unfit for business) as there are among musicians, because poets also speak to the understanding, but musicians speak only to the senses.”

30 Allen Wood suggests that it is imagination that is similarly free in all and thus aesthetic pleasure can be expected to be universally valid thereby (Allen Wood, Kant [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005], 156).

31 Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 42–43.

32 Further evidence of Kant's orientation toward music comes from his discussion (V: 317) of the genius's aptitude for communication: “thus genius really consists in the happy relation … of finding ideas for a given concept on the one hand and on the other hitting upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced, as an accompaniment of a concept, can be communicated to others. … Whether the expression consists in language, or painting, or in plastic art—that requires a faculty … which can be communicated without the constraint of rules.” Note: music is absent from the list.

33 The question of pleasure—viz., which art provides what kind of pleasure, and how this relates to Kant's argument—persists but this would move the discussion too far astray.

34 Parret, “Kant on Music,” 256.

35 From the aptly titled essay “What is Orientation in Thinking,” in PW, 222.

36 Kant's hostility toward devotional singing relates also to his ambivalence toward Pietism around this time. For more on this see Cassirer, Ernst, Kant's Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 18Google Scholar.

37 Of course, he could not have anticipated the advent of headphones.

38 To suggest that music has no structural restraint would, of course, be preposterous. Of concern here are its effects on others rather than the orderliness of its production.

39 For a discussion of this phrase in the context of Arendt and Kant, see Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom.’”

40 Following Kant, I use the masculine here as well as to refer to Kant's conception of genius.

41 The question persists as to why everyone playing their own music would not turn into an orchestra. It seems sufficient to say that such a case rests on the unlikely probability that everyone would want to join in, etc. Kant sets out a related argument about music in his Über Pädagogik: “Children are fond of noisy instruments, such as trumpets, drums, and the like; but these are objectionable, since they become a nuisance to others” (Kant on Education, trans. Davids, Rhys [Boston: Heath, 1900], §61)Google Scholar.

42 Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice,’” in PW, 86.

43 For Kant's extended consideration of the definition of exemplary see CJ, §18.

44 Villa, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 280.

45 E.g., V: 318, where we find that for those lacking genius there should be “instruction in accordance with rules.”

46 Arendt disagrees with Kant on this point in “What Is Freedom?” She separates the “creative arts” in which “the element of freedom remains hidden” from the “performing arts,” which “have indeed a strong affinity with politics.” “The point here,” she argues, “is not whether the creative artist is free in the process of creation, but that the creative process is not displayed in public and not destined to appear in the world” (“What Is Freedom?,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt [New York: Penguin Books, 2003], 446). This distinction is hardly one that Kant would feel the need to make, and one explanation for Arendt's stridency here is her desire to avoid the metaphysics that Kant's account seems to imply. In seeing the performance there is less room (ostensibly) for quarrel over the process because witnesses watch it come into being, whereas a product obscures the freedom of creation; thus “so long as [the capacity to begin] remains hidden, freedom is not a worldly, tangible reality; that is, it is not political” (ibid., 458). Even if this capacity isn't hidden, a question of beginning persists. Kant considers this in a discussion of art and whether bees possess art (V: 303). He concludes that bees are driven by instinct and that “their creator [ihrem Schöpfer]” is responsible for their products whereas humans possess freedom and thus can be responsible. Interestingly, Arendt suggests that in epochs when the capacity to begin in politics has been paralyzed, “freedom can so easily be mistaken for an essentially nonpolitical phenomenon … [as] a supreme gift which only man, of all the earthly creatures, seems to have received, of which we can find traces and signs in almost all his activities” (“What Is Freedom?,” 458). Whether Arendt would argue that Kant was living in such an epoch is itself an interesting question. Yet with Kant not only does the artifact serve as evidence for freedom, it does so also through the free play of the viewer's imagination and the feelings that this provokes (see Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom,’” 173–74). This latter aspect avoids the Cartesian epistemological problem that Arendt's orientation presents.

47 For Derrida, the genius becomes the link to nature (Derrida, “Economimesis,” 10).

48 For a counterpoint to this reading, which advances the argument that the genius is akin to thoughtless (irresponsible) bees, see Zammito, John, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 142Google Scholar. The salient aspect of the genius—indeed what sets him apart from the madman—is that he retains choice, which the bees do not have. This choice signifies freedom and the responsibility following from it. That he can explain the origins of his actions (which leads Zammito to his characterization) is of less importance.

49 Shell, Embodiment of Reason, 225.

50 See Allison, Henry, Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 279CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here Allison puzzles through the structure of Kant's discussion. See also Brigitte Sassen, “Artistic Genius and the Question of Creativity,” in Kant's “Critique of the Power of Judgment”: Critical Essays, 172, which problematizes Kant's treatment of genius.

51 Thus, when we employ the imagination in this way it “emulates the precedent of reason in attaining to a maximum” (die dem Vernunft-Vorspiele in Erreichung eines Größten nacheifert) (V: 314). Art reveals (through emulation) the realm beyond contingent phenomena and thus emulates the precedent of reason acting freely. The precedent of reason is the freedom that it wields over one's moral agency.

52 Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom,’” 162–63 and 174.

53 This is essentially the same as what Guyer describes as the “balance between rule and freedom” in morality, though I apply it to teaching about citizenship (Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Experience of Freedom [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

54 I.e., in his originality.

55 CJ, §50.

56 Zammito, Genesis, 142.

57 This is in reference not to the CJ but to his Nachlass. This said, it is clearly applicable here. See Giorgio Tonelli, “Kant's Early Theory of Genius (1770–1779): Part II,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 4, no. 3 (1966): 222.

58 Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 301.

59 Ibid., 302.

60 Crawford sees the precedence of taste to be one of communication—i.e., when inspiration and communication conflict, the latter should win out. He lets this point stand with little in the way of explication. Furthermore, questions of education for citizenship make no appearance in his account. See Donald Crawford, “Kant's Theory of Creative Imagination,” in Kant's “Critique of the Power of Judgment”: Critical Essays, 160.

61 On this point, my argument converges with that of Susan Shell who notes Kant's devaluation of genius in favor of the audience (Embodiment of Reason, 207) and concludes: “Taste is thus politically important for Kant, not only as a historical vehicle of ‘socialization’ toward genuine morality … but also as an externalization of the egalitarian reciprocity of the kingdom of ends” (ibid., 229).

62 See §7 with its comparison of agreeableness and beauty for more on this point.

63 A discussion that, from its very beginning, was concerned with morality. See Norton, The Beautiful Soul, chap. 1.

64 It should be noted that lurking within this discussion is the question of disinterestedness in judgment. This is often linked to sociality in Kant's work as well as that of his predecessors. Both Hobbes and Locke, for example, see interested judgments as being a fundamental problem that civil government serves to remedy. As far as aesthetic judgments are concerned, Kant is also not the first to focus on this theme. Hutcheson assails interest both in our moral and aesthetic judgments. For more on this, as well as Kant's relationship to Hutcheson, see Dabney Townsend, “From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 2 (1987): 287–305.

65 Kant, “On the Common Saying,” in PW, 73.

66 Ibid., 86.

67 Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in PW, 60.