The Trouble with Literature by Victoria Kahn

Author:Victoria Kahn [Kahn, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192536242
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

1. Kant and Aesthetics

Let me begin with Kant, who is widely recognized as the most important philosopher for thinking about the emergence of the discipline of aesthetics. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant set out to determine the limits of reason. In so doing, he delegitimized the traditional metaphysical concerns of philosophy—knowledge of God, the soul, and the order of the cosmos—as beyond our powers of cognition. Instead, he made it clear that the world we experience is a world of our own making, one that we construct through a priori categories. While, from one perspective, Kant deprived philosophy of its redemptive role, from another he can be seen as the apogee of the maker’s knowledge tradition: our constructed knowledge derives from the nature of the human mind as a self-legislating spontaneity. At the same time, Kant argued for what he called ideas of reason, regulative ideas of such things as divine providence and the afterlife, which he thought had a positive practical role to play in human life. For all these reasons, Kant has been seen as the “constructionist” par excellence, to use Ian Hacking’s term.4

This emphasis on construction became even more important in the course of Kant’s career as aesthetic judgment came to the fore. Kant turned to aesthetic judgment at the end of his life, when he realized he needed to explain the relationship between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, that is, between the natural world, governed by the laws of causality, and our moral assumptions of individual freedom and human agency.5 Kant thought he found the evidence for the bridge between these two worlds in aesthetic judgment—a kind of judgment, he argued, that illustrates the harmonious relationship between the faculties of the understanding and the imagination.

Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment was enormously influential in the decades that followed the publication of the third Critique. It impressed the generation of German Romantic writers who influenced Kierkegaard, and it remains influential in contemporary understandings of aesthetic experience and practical judgment. Let me focus briefly on three features of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment that were to be important to later accounts of aesthetic experience and that can serve to frame my discussion of Kierkegaard and Coetzee.

The first is Kant’s description of aesthetic judgment or the judgment of taste as a peculiar kind of subjective judgment, one that is disinterested rather than interested. Aesthetic experience for Kant involves a pleasurable, subjective judgment of a particular object, one for which there is no general concept.6 But aesthetic experience is also not merely subjective as sensory experiences of pleasure are. Let me give a simple example: “I like this tomato” is a merely subjective judgment, according to Kant, but “I like this painting” makes a different kind of claim on the listener. This is because, in making a subjective judgment of the painting, we also claim that everyone should agree with us.7 Kant calls this kind of judgment, which is both subjective and universalizing,

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