13 minute read
A Kant rant
A KANT RANT: DO YOU UNDERSTAND KANT? NEITHER DO I! OSCAR CLARKE (UPPER SIXTH)
Immanuel Kant, contrary to the Python adage, was an incredibly stable and clear-headed individual. So regimented and regular were his walks, in fact, that the townspeople of Königsberg used to set their watches by his movements. He only ever missed his daily constitutional twice: once whilst being infatuated with Rousseau’s latest philosophical hot take, Émile, and the other to obtain news about the French Revolution - so I think we can forgive him these but two discrepancies.
This obsessively organised Prussian also has quite a lot to say about philosophy, and aesthetics in particular. He is probably the greatest
philosopher of all time and the
father of modern aesthetics and, if you disagree with me, you can run away and hide under your copy of The Republic - let’s hope the Form of the half rate philosopher saves you!
Now Kant, like every other philosopher, liked to talk about beauty. What it is. Why we are invariably drawn to it. How things possess it (if they do at all). As the final instalment in his famous trilogy, Kant published the Critique of Judgment (1790), following on from his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Despite all of his genius,
he really was not a creative book
title-er (anything is a word if I try hard enough). The Critique of Judgment was, as final instalments usually are, slightly less well received than the original - although topping the Critique of Pure Reason is hard to do, considering it is modern philosophy’s most seminal work. Now, the 3rd Critique focused on aesthetics (aesthetics being the branch of axiology –the study of value - that focuses on beauty, art and taste) which was a break from tradition, with the others focusing on metaphysics and epistemology.
Kant begins this arduous, impenetrable, verbose, and generally unreadable 450page brick* of fancy German words by setting out how he analyses a judgement of beauty under four headings called ‘Moments’:
*To prospective Kant readers: This is not an exaggeration for comedic effect. Trying to read the Critique of Pure Reason gave me a migraine and I only got 60 pages in…
you have been warned!
The First Moment
Kant asserts that judgments of beauty are primarily based on ‘feelings of disinterested pleasure.’ Now, when Kant says ‘disinterested,’ he means that beauty is not dependent on the subject having a desire for the beautiful object, but instead that judgments of beauty are based off feeling and sensation.
The Second Moment
Judgments of beauty are claims of “universal validity.” Kant wrote at some length about ‘universalisation,’ most famously in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), but also here - as consistent with principles then as with his walks. Here Kant means that when we make a judgment about the beauty of an object, we
expect everyone else who perceives that object to also find it to be beautiful, and consequently to share in the pleasure of seeing it.
Simply put, we expect our subjective pleasure to be the objective pleasure. It’s why I’m always immensely disappointed when someone doesn’t like the music I like and am forcefully subjecting them to. There is, then, a recognition here that beauty is not in fact an objective standard, as much as we recommend our judgements of it to others. This is of course not entirely true, as Crocs put with socks are objectively not beautiful and I can
state this with categorical and
apodictic certainty. To quote the old Platonic aphorism, “the form of the Croc is not with the sock.”
Perhaps thinking about comfort, breathability, inferred intent and aesthetic sensibilities, to what extent do you agree that Crocs and socks are objectively not beautiful? And, is such a sweeping statement too grandiose?
The Third Moment
Kant likes to distinguish judgements of ethics from judgements of aesthetics. Judgments of beauty, according to Kant, do not ascribe a purpose to the subject. To elucidate this, he argues that beauty has no purpose in and of itself as beauty is self-generating we “perceive in it without the concept of a purpose.”
The Fourth Moment
Kant returns to the Second Moment and argues that judgments of beauty are statements of “necessity”. In this, Kant means that when we make a judgment of taste, we expect it to be universally true, we also accept that
someone who perceives our beautiful object may not share in
the pleasure it elicits. However, we feel like they ought to do so, even if they don’t.
Kant’s Four Moments then appear to me to be very much in harmony with his transcendental idealism. In brief (and I cannot stress how brief this explanation is), transcendental idealism is the belief that space and
time are subjective features of how we perceive objects, rather than
being independent of us. The perceiver (us) only recognises objects of experience (everything else) in the way they appear to us under the limits of our perception. We do not perceive an object ‘in and of itself’. Perhaps it is best to let Kant explain this as I am struggling:
“I remove the thinking subject, the whole material world must at once vanish because it is nothing but a phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of ourselves as a subject, and a manner or species of representation.
Immanuel Kant
Did that actually make it any clearer?
I have to beg you not to take my explanation of Kant’s idealism as accurate - it is not. In fact, no one really understands exactly what Kant means and it has been a subject of incredibly heated debate. The unfortunate by-product of German continentalism really is its unending ambiguity. But, in essence, Kant
synthesises empiricism (using our senses) and rationalism (treating reason as primary) to argue that space and time are empirically real but transcendentally ideal.
Now, when I say his Moments are fitting with his idealism, I mean that Kant is arguing that, when we make a judgement of beauty, we empirically
perceive an object in a
transcendentally ideal way. That is to say, we perceive all objects in the way they appear to our limited perceptions and make judgments based on that. To me, this explains nicely why we all have separate, but often somewhat similar, ideas of beauty and aesthetic value. "Why is this of import?" you may ask. It is because transcendental idealism is the crux of Kant’s - and his followers’ (including but not limited to: Schopenhauer, Strawson, Allison, Schelling, Fichte, and Husserl - but his idealism did more generally influence all subsequent western philosophy) philosophies. His idealism can clearly be seen as the basis for his aestheticism in the way in which he recognises that the material world i.e. art and objects of beauty, are perceived not in the material world but in the phenomenal world i.e. our own individual minds.
Kant is an immensely complicated philosopher. His ambiguities and unwieldy writing style have not made interpreting and separating the granules of sense from his work easy, but his view on aesthetics is surprisingly straightforward:
Beauty is not purposive.
We do not perceive these objects in and of themselves. We perceive objects through our limited and fallible faculties as they appear to us.
We have an emotional reaction to said objects.
We expect this reaction to be objective and universal, or at least believe this ought to be the case.
If you wish to punish yourself and explore Kant further, I would highly recommend the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s summation of his philosophy and Bertrand Russell’s chapter on Kant in A History of Western Philosophy, but please do not subject yourself to his tracts of poorly translated jargon.
If you're feeling contrarian and now want to go and challege yourself on Kant, the advice to look at secondary literature first is sound. Only someone who really didn't know what they were doing would read the Groundwork as the first even remotely philosophical text they had ever read...
IN REFERENCE TO THOMAS HOBBES’ ‘LEVIATHAN, ’ HOW AND WHY DO HUMANS CONCEPTUALISE BEAUTY? AMY CLARKE (LOWER SIXTH)
To understand the human conception of beauty, we first have to understand how thoughts are formulated within the human mind from sense phenomena. Thomas Hobbes explores his materialistic view on how thoughts are formulated in his renowned novel Leviathan, which is influential in the realms of both literature and political philosophy. However, it also (less famously) explores the realms of aesthetics.
Hobbes was an English philosopher who lived during the period of the English Civil Wars (1588-1679), which shaped many of his arguments. He wrote his best-known work Leviathan in 1651. Leviathan means “sea monster” in Hebrew, and appears in the Bible as a terrifying sea creature. Hobbes proposed that the state can be metaphorically represented as the Leviathan, the sovereign person or group of people which rules over the Commonwealth, an artificial body which has the Leviathan at its head and the Leviathan's subjects as its body. Hobbes believed that without law
exercised by an all-powerful sovereign, humans will murder each
other due to “the life of man [being], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, i. xii, 9). The Leviathan is created by a covenant to protect the people from harming one another due to the natural desires of the human condition. This is achieved by instituting and imposing harsh laws. By understanding the reasoning behind Hobbes’ famous doctrine through exegesis of Leviathan, we can analyse the desires of humans and what we find pleasurable and beautiful.
Hobbes adopts a mechanical, materialist view that everything in the world is in a constant state of flux, or motion, and interacts with our sensory organs to create thoughts. Hobbes teaches that thoughts are produced
when an amalgamation of sensory aspects produces images in our mind which we then subjectively
interpret. The origin of all these thoughts he believes, “is that which we call sense, for there is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not … been begotten upon the organs of sense”. This is a ‘tabula rasa’ empiricist view (the belief that we are born with a ‘blank slate’ and all knowledge is learned from experience) that all perception comes from the physical world in a state of motion and interacting with our sensory organs to produce thought.
Like Hobbes, Aristotle thought that everything is in a constant state of motion. However, Hobbes’ materialism points him in a different direction from that of Aristotelian scientific thought, which Hobbes mocks and accuses of being “insignificant speech” and the proposition of “absurd doctrines”. This is due to Aristotelianism, and the “philosophy-schools,” proposing that every physical object has an essence and is being attracted by a Prime Mover, or an “intelligible-being” which causes this very state of movement. Hobbes vehemently rejects this nonsensical proposition which delves into the realms of metaphysics (a branch of philosophy that studies concepts and objects beyond physical reality), which, as Immanuel Kant asserts, is a “is a dark
ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic
wreck.” Hobbes says that the Prime Mover is absurd as the schools ascribe an appetite for self-preservation to inanimate objects, and consequently it is incoherent in nature. Not only do humans not know the desires of objects, they also don’t fully understand their own desires and thus
there are inherent inconsistencies with anthropomorphising these inanimate objects.
A key example of this very fallibility is when philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas, see the reason why an object falls downwards as an intelligence guiding it, which therefore proves the existence of a divine creator who is God, for example in Aquinas’ 'Five Ways' (Quinque Viae) cosmological arguments which attempt to prove God’s existence. Contrastingly, Hobbes fervently argues that the objects fall downwards due to impersonal physical forces i.e., gravity, which move the object downwards, abiding to the laws of nature and not emotion. “The Schools say, heavy bodies fall downwards, out of an appetite to rest, and to conserve their nature in the place which is most proper to them”; Hobbes asserts that humans
have a tendency to anthropomorphise the physical world and see its entirety in human terms, thus, it is an inherently false proposition.
Hobbes stresses in Leviathan (i. ii) that people get things wrong when they use their imagination, as they fall into a way which feels most natural to imagine. When something first makes an impression on us, we see it due to our senses. “After the object is removed… we still retain an image of the thing seen”; this “decaying sense” is our imagination. Imagination can be both simple (familiar things being imagined) and compound (mashing multiple images together – for example, a human and a horse to make a centaur). Dreams are simply imaginary because the rest of our senses are numbed so we see and hear things that aren’t there. Hobbes gives the example of Marcus Brutus thinking he had a vision because he was unaware that he had been asleep and thus he perceived his imagination to be the truth.
Carolyn Korsmeyer, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buffalo in New York, emphasises in Relativism and Hutcheson's Aesthetic Theory that Hobbes’ framework addresses how artwork achieves its desired effect. Hobbes argues that:
pleasure and “all action is motivated by desire or aversion and that human beings, having both a selfish nature and insatiable appetites, always act in ways calculated to maximise their self-interest.
Thomas Hobbes
He argued that moral justification is focused on those actions which one believes will satisfy their own desires and appetite. “Good” becomes a term which is applied to the objects of our desire or appetite, and “beautiful” is used to
signify the objects which promise the satisfaction of our desires.
Therefore, pleasure emerges from both real and imagined satisfaction of desire. If every person is driven by the overarching goal to maximise their own personal selfinterest, and if the set of objects perceived by a person to be beautiful is a manifestation and a reflection of that very self-interest, each judgment made of
beauty is consequently an expression of individual desires and thus is a
matter of subjectivity (no absolute truths). Hobbes’ reduction of beauty to interest involves relativism (the concept that knowledge, truth, and morality are not absolute and objective and instead exist in relation to cultural, societal, and historical factors) due to the subjective nature of interest.
Instead of beauty mirroring an objective (uninfluenced by opinion) quality in an object, Hobbes believes that beauty only involves the perceiver’s pleasure.
Hobbes appeals to the biological similarity of human beings: being living organisms, humans are in need of many of the same things which they all perceive as ‘beautiful’. The coinciding perception of beauty might not substantially differ in regard to the base necessities to sustain human life and thus this may lead to human’s competitive nature which drives their “selfish, brutish” lives which Hobbes examines in detail in Leviathan.
