Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne
grounded in Walter Benjamin’s account of the historical meaning of dialectical images. The image in question here is the image of LeWitt’s Sentences as at once an image of Romanticism and an image of conceptual art.
Art Versus Aesthetic (Jena Romanticism contra Kant)
What is wrong with thinking about art, philosophically, as ‘aesthetic’? What is wrong with identifying ‘aesthetics’ with the philosophy of art? The problem appears in an exemplary formulation in the fortieth of Friedrich Schlegel’s Critical Fragments (1798):
In the sense in which it has been defined and used in Germany, aesthetic is a word which notoriously reveals an equally perfect ignorance of the thing and of the language. Why is it still used?4
What is this ‘equally perfect ignorance’ [ gleich vollendete Unkenntnis]of both the language and the thing? Nothing less, it would seem, than what Kant himself derided in his much-quoted footnote to the Transcendental Aesthetic of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781): namely, its use by ‘the Germans … to designate that which others call the critique of taste’. Schlegel’s fragment is an ironic citation or rewriting of this passage. Its reference to ‘ignorance of the language’ cannot but evoke Kant’s advice to ‘desist’ from the use of the word ‘aesthetic’ to designate the critique of taste, in order ‘to save it for that doctrine which is true science (whereby one would come closer to the language and the sense of the ancients, among whom the division of cognition into aisthéta and noéta [things of sensibility and things of the mind] was very well known).’5 The doctrine to which Kant is referring is his own Transcendental Aesthetic, the first part of the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements [of knowledge] in the Critique of Pure Reason, within which the passage in question is located. It is dedicated not to taste, but to the exposition of space and time as pure forms of intuition, conditioning the possibility of objects of knowledge in general.
Schlegel’s rewriting is ironic, in part because Kant himself equally famously appeared to go against his own advice when, nine years later, in 1790, the first part of his Critique of Judgement-Power, ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement-Power’, contained an extensive analysis of aesthetic judgements understood as, precisely, judgements of taste. The idea that ‘aesthetics’ is a philosophical discourse about art is in large part the fatal legacy of the reception of this text, with its apparent confirmation of the legitimacy of drawing together the three (originally independent) discourses of beauty, sensibility and art into an integral philosophical whole.6 Schlegel may be read as referring his readers back to Kant’s earlier text in the context of Kant’s own apparent subsequent concession to Alexander Baumgarten’s ‘German’ usage. He is being sarcastic about the first Critique, and hence about Kant’s self-understanding; at the very least, he is drawing attention to Kant’s apparent inconsistency or change of mind.7 Schlegel is crowing over the triumph of the ‘German’ use of ‘aesthetic’ – a terminological triumph which, in the Romantic philosophy of art, was in the process of being transformed into a philosophical victory of a higher order: a triumph of art over ‘philosophy’ within metaphysics itself.
However, discursively, the famous Romantic triumph of art within metaphysics (against which Schaeffer rages)8 is a triumph of philosophical art criticism over systematic philosophy; it is not a triumph of aesthetic, as Kant understood it in Critique of Judgement-Power. In the transition within critical metaphysics from systematic philosophy to Romantic art criticism, Kant’s transcendental account of aesthetic judgement is a vanishing mediator. In order to understand the disjunction between aesthetics and art criticism that is produced here (prefiguring the development of aesthetics as a discipline, in the course of the nineteenth century), it is necessary to examine the apparent inconsistency between Kant’s two meanings of ‘aesthetic’ in more detail.
The inconsistency in question is that between an insistence upon restricting the term ‘aesthetic’ to its ‘original’ meaning, denoting the sensible element in knowledge, and its extended use to refer to judgements of taste. The error of the extension, from the standpoint of Kant’s first Critique, derives from what Kant describes there as the ‘failed hope’ of ‘bringing the critical estimation of the beautiful under principles of reason, and elevating its rules to a science’; that is, from the aspiration to a rational doctrine of the beautiful, an ‘aesthetics’, in a scientific disciplinary sense. It was this aspiration that led Baumgarten to subsume the philosophical treatment of beauty under the sign of a doctrine of sensible knowledge. And it is the ‘futility’ of this aspiration that led Kant to judge the usage inappropriate, since, he claimed, ‘the putative rules or criteria are merely empirical as far as their sources are concerned’. It is not – note – the connection between beauty and sensibility to which Kant objects in the Critique of Pure Reason, but the idea that the field of their connection (judgements of taste) might be governed by ‘a priori rules’.9 For Kant, then, the term ‘aesthetic’ was from the outset a term of philosophical art, part of the doctrine (Lehre) of knowledge. And it is for this reason that it should not have been used to refer to taste: not because beauty is not ‘sensible’, but precisely because of the fact that it is, and hence, its judgements are merely empirical. So what led Kant to change his mind?
The fact is that he did not; at least, not on this particular point. For there is a rarely acknowledged underlying consistency to Kant’s position, despite the change in usage. When he subsequently himself adopted the supposedly inappropriate, extended usage, Kant never went back upon his initial reason for rejecting Baumgarten’s extended use of ‘aesthetic’. In Critique of Judgement-Power, Kant maintains – in fact he emphasizes – this point: ‘There is neither a science [Wissenschaft] of the beautiful, only a critique, nor beautiful science’. In fact, he writes it twice: first in section 44, ‘On Fine Art’, and then again in section 60, the appendix, ‘On Methodology Concerning Taste’, where it becomes more emphatically, ‘there cannot be any science of the beautiful’.10 That is, there neither is, nor can be, a philosophical aesthetics. Rather, the change in Kant’s position concerns a clarification of the methodological status of ‘critique’. Critique appears here no longer in association with doctrine (Lehre), but as a conceptually self-sufficient term, distinct from both ‘science’ (qua doctrine) and ‘the empirical’. ‘Criticism of taste’ is no longer conceived in terms of the application of a priori rules to particular cases, or the judgement of such rules by particular cases (Kant’s earlier focus), but in terms of the immanent notion of transcendental critique that governed the project of the Critique of Pure Reason from the outset. It is a part of ‘critique of reason by reason alone’: in this instance, critique of aesthetic judgement-power (Urteilskraft) by transcendental reflection, critique of a particular power of the faculty of judgement, not criticism of particular judgements. Philosophically, where judgements of the beautiful are concerned, there is only critique, transcendental critique, of the structure (but not the content) of what are always singular (that is, radically empirical) judgements.
This distinctively Kantian idea of philosophy as a critical standpoint beyond positive ‘criteria’, or positive knowledge, that is nonetheless no longer metaphysically self-sufficient as rational doctrine, but purely reflective, was crucially formative for Romanticism. It is the other side of the more familiar Kantian idea of the ‘limits’ to reason, which Karl Ameriks has emphasized as the basis for the construction of a common ‘Kantian-Romantic position’.11 Famously, the method of immanently transcendental critique allowed Kant to stray beyond the cognitive limits of reason, legitimately, as a ‘standpoint’ but never as a doctrine. The critique of aesthetic judgement-power concretizes this standpoint, subjectively, as the feeling of pleasure accompanying reflective awareness of the unity of subjectivity, as the ‘harmony’ of the faculties. It was precisely this ‘straying beyond’ that the Romantics seized upon and elaborated further, in a new post-critical metaphysics of art. However, this formal consistency in Kant’s position does not appear sufficient to meet his own earlier objection to that use of ‘aesthetic’ which strays too far from ‘the language and sense of the ancients’. For the standpoint of a transcendental critique of the structure of judgement abstracts from all concretely sensuous particularity (that is, it conceptualizes sensuous particularity