Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne
the critique of a specific type of judgement-power, rather than the critical estimation of sensuous representations – is not ‘aesthetic’ in the sense in which the ‘things of sensibility’ may be distinguished from the ‘things of the mind’. Rather, it is decisively ‘of the mind’, or, better, it is ‘of the mind’ and ‘of sensibility’ at the same time: in pure aesthetic judgements of taste, the ontological distinction between aisthéta and noéta collapses. The mind feels itself.
This is precisely the point of Kant’s transcendental analysis of judgements of taste in terms of the reflective relations between cognitive faculties – linguistic niceties apart, which at this point begin to appear pedantic and (as Hegel later treated them) ‘a mere name’.12 Kant’s Third Critique transformed the meaning of ‘aesthetic’ by extending it beyond the sensible (spatial and temporal) apprehension of the objects of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ intuition to include reference to the feelings accompanying the relations of reflection constitutive of the internal cognitive structure of subjectivity itself. What is this but what Novalis would have called a ‘romanticization’ of aesthetic; its presentation as a self-reflection of the absolute, once, following Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the subject has been absolutized qua self-positing and self-reflective process?13 The ancient distinction between aisthéta and noéta, to which Kant initially appealed, is here no more than the linguistic register of a dualistic rationalism that Kant has, finally, managed to move beyond. Human sensibility is irreducibly judgemental and furthermore (contra Aristotle – who thought each sense judged discretely) internally relationally so. This is a new philosophical account of the ontological specificity of human subjectivity – the main philosophical source of the early Heidegger’s existentialism, in fact. Kant’s linguistic innovation – to extend the range of ‘aesthetic’ to embrace the paradoxical pure ‘self-affection’ of the self-relation of human subjectivity14 – registers this conceptual novelty. Philologically speaking, this is hardly ‘ignorance’.
But what of ‘the thing’, critique of taste, as Kant called it, or more simply ‘criticism’ as it was known in England at the time, to which the new philosophically extended usage of ‘aesthetic’ must also refer, since aesthetic subjectivity can only feel itself, for Kant, via judgements of taste occasioned by objects that ‘quicken’ it?15 This is the point at which the satirical charge of ‘ignorance’ begins to acquire a more literal bite. For, in Kant’s later, dialectically ambiguous sense of aesthetic, it is not the extension of sensibility to include the subject’s relation to itself – auto-affection – that is the problem, so much as its consequent principled indifference to the character of the objects that occasion judgement; in particular, its principled indifference to the cognitive, relational, historical and world-disclosing dimensions of works of art, which were such a central part of ‘that which others call the critique of taste’.
Famously, art judgements (such as ‘this is a beautiful painting’) – are explicitly excluded by Kant from ‘pure’ aesthetic judgements of taste. That is, Kant excludes from aesthetics precisely those judgements that constitute the main part of the critique of taste, historically, as a critical discourse, as an effect of the transcendentalism of his method. These are grasped only by Kant’s much neglected and under-elaborated concept of ‘logically conditioned’ aesthetic judgements – judgements which, operating under the conditions of a determinate concept, such as ‘art’ or ‘painting’, are not aesthetically ‘pure’. For Kant, artistic beauty can never be what he calls a ‘free’ or ‘purely aesthetic’ beauty (at least, not qua artistic beauty), but only an ‘accessory’ or adherent beauty.16 This is the conceptual residue of his earlier objection to Baumgarten’s use of the term ‘aesthetic’. There is thus a conceptual gap between art and aesthetic that cannot be adequately bridged within the terms of Kant’s thought. In so far as ‘aesthetics’ is taken as the name for the philosophical treatment of art, we are confronted with a new and equally ironic ‘ignorance of the thing and of the language’: aesthetic’s principled ignorance of art qua art.17 For Kant readily acknowledges that ‘aesthetic’ itself cannot distinguish art from nature: art becomes aesthetically pure only when it appears ‘as if it were a mere product of nature’.18 Moreover, Kantian aesthetic judgement does not reflect on the conditions of this appearing ‘as if’ – that is, upon its ontological and epistemological qualities as illusion; it merely takes it as its condition. Kant’s restriction of the concept of beautiful or ‘fine’ art to a type of ‘aesthetic art’ (his own term) thus excludes most of what has always been and continues to be of most significance about art: the difference from nature marked by its metaphysical, cognitive, and politico-ideological functions, qua art.
In identifying the ‘aesthetic’ significance of objects with their affect upon the subject in its purely reflective judgement, Kant simultaneously expanded ‘aesthetic’, giving it a central role in the metaphysics of the subject, and cut it off from any possible metaphysics of the artwork as a self-sufficient or ‘autonomous’ entity. ‘Aesthetic art’ is the contradictory result of the negotiation of the impasse.
The nineteenth and twentieth century tradition of ‘art as aesthetic’ – artistic aestheticism – covertly perpetuated by the very term ‘aesthetics’, when used to refer to philosophy of art, rests upon a self-contradictory absolutization of Kant’s conception of ‘aesthetic art’. Contrary to Hegel’s acceptance of it as a mere ‘name’, the term ‘aesthetics’ functions as much more than a name here: it seals and legitimates the exclusion of art’s other aspects from the philosophical concept of art, reducing it to a single plane of significance – namely, its capacity to appear as ‘a product of mere nature’ and hence as the object of pure judgements of taste. Even Kant’s account of genius (otherwise so productive for a post-Kantian, Romantic aesthetic) is subjected to the constraints of this problematic. This ignorance of language – the idea that ‘aesthetics’ is an appropriate term to designate the philosophical treatment of art – sums up the ignorance of the thing: ‘art’. This ignorance persists today in the widespread belief that it is the logical autonomy of pure aesthetic judgements of taste from other types of judgement (as theorized by Kant) that is the philosophical basis of the autonomy of art. Even writers as sophisticated in their reading of German idealism as Andrew Bowie and Jay Bernstein, for example, have contributed to the perpetuation of this myth to the level of a philosophical commonplace through their use of the phrase ‘aesthetic autonomy’ to refer to the autonomy of art.19 Yet Kant’s work cannot, in principle, provide the conceptual ground for an account of the autonomy of the artwork, since it has no account of (nor interest in) the ontological distinctiveness of the work of art. That was the contribution of Jena Romanticism.
Locating the origin of the autonomy claim for art after Kant, in Schiller’s reinterpretation of aesthetic appearance in terms of self-determination, in his Kallias Letters (1793) – ‘a reformulation of Kant’s aesthetic theory that reaches its apotheosis in On the Aesthetic Education of Man’ (1795), the crucial transitional text between Kant and early Romanticism – is more convincing.20 However, this is so only if one follows through its ontological consequences for the artwork to their Romantic conclusion. Schiller himself remained largely at the epistemological level of aesthetic appearance, that is, illusion – the illusion of self-determination of the object of aesthetic judgement; at his best, at the level of an aesthetically modified practical reason (thereby founding the notorious problematic of ‘aesthetic and politics’ to which our intellectual culture compulsively returns).21 However, there are metaphysical as well as practical implications of the artwork’s production of the illusion of its self-determination. The illusion of self-determination appears metaphysically as a distinctive type of productivity. Kant provided the model for this special kind of productivity – call it creativity (as long as you remember it is the creation of an illusion) – in his concept of genius. But he failed to connect genius to self-determination, or to the illusion of self-determination (at least explicitly), let alone to theorize the production of the illusion of self-determination as the self-reflexive structure of the artwork (since he had no ontological concept of the artwork). That was left to Novalis’s transposition of the structure of Fichte’s absolutization of the subject onto the work of art. Only at this point does art become a distinctive form of presentation