Beauty’s Past
We find clear reference for a lot of our more familiar dealings with Beauty in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. For the purposes of this writing we will use’s Kant’s conception of Beauty as a starting point as it both provides opportunity to mention both the ‘empiricist’ tradition of beauty proposed by the likes of Hume and Burke and the ‘rationalist’ tradition represented by Baumgarten and Meier, as well as holding a significant place in the projects of Whitehead, Deleuze and Meillassoux. Kant’s discussion of beauty is not without some significant quirks that often seem over looked in more contemporary dealings with beauty and will be important in reconciliation with Meillassoux. To start our discussion we shall work through some of the key aspects of Kant’s characterisation of Beauty.
Kant starts his study of aesthetic with an analysis of judgements of beauty (or taste). To consider the term judgement itself, ‘Judgment’ can be wrongfully believed to require a position on whether a judgement is true or false. In Alfred North Whitehead’s project he offers the term propositions instead, as Shaviro says,
“the notion of judgment tends to imply, wrongly, that “the one function” of propositions and theories “is to be judged as to their truth or falsehood”. Whitehead insists, rather, that “at some point” in the entertainment of a proposition “judgment is eclipsed by aesthetic delight.” (Shaviro, 2009, p.3)
We will continue with Kant’s term of judgements as the causal journey evoked by the term Judgement is surely the journey that one must start before the path is "eclipsed by aesthetic delight". This initiation of a movement to be met with a new order is an important chart for us to reference when evaluating our pleasures all the while not escaping the space in our minds that remembers the reframing of Whiteheads speculative propositions.
In dealing with judgements of taste, Kant lays out four movements that are characteristic. The first movement proposes that judgements of beauty are based on feeling, in particular feelings of pleasure (and displeasure). This feeling of pleasure is however more peculiar than a general pleasure. Kant refers to a distinctive kind of pleasure; one that is disinterested. With this kind of pleasure I experience an object as beautiful if I like it without interest. As Christian Helmut Wenzel says,
“I should be free from any kind of desire, aim, or purpose, or any social, moral, or intellectual considerations. (Kant wants to exclude personal as well as non-personal interests – which correspond to the agreeable and the good, as we shall see later.) Only then can my contemplation of the object be “pure,” as Kant says.” (Helmut Wenzel, 2005)
Shaviro proposes we consider passion when trying to understand Kant's disinterestedness. "The scandal of passion is that it is utterly gratuitous: it has no grounding, and no proper occasion. In this sense, it is entirely free (though I am not free with regard to it)." (Shaviro - Without Criteria)
Kant uses this disinterested character to distinguish judgements of beauty from other judgements such as judgements of the good expressed when one simply finds something pleasing, and judgements of the good, which include judgements about the moral goodness and the non-moral aspects of an experience. These distinctions seem useful when considering many of the reorganisations of artistic production since beauty became less of a concern. The Marxian agenda for the social intervention of arts practice seems to wish the arts to be predominantly concerned with judgements of the good. Whereas compositional strategies like Jonathan Burrows’ and Mattio Fargion’s investment in Information Theory seem to be the continual employment of judgements of the agreeable in order that the audience stay present and attentive with the work.
The second movement proposes that, judgments of beauty have, or make claim to, ‘universality’ or ‘universal validity’. Though the case of beauty’s universality is peculiar, it is a universal that is not based on concept. As Kant says, “The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal liking.” (Kant, 1987, p.53)
This makes the universality involved in judgments of taste to be somewhat problematised when compared to Kant’s previous legitimizing and universalizing projects. Kant says further, a judgment of taste “does not allow us to cognize and prove anything concerning the object because it is intrinsically indeterminable and inadequate for cognition” (Kant 1987, 213).
This characteristic of Kant’s beauty means that there could be no scientific or intersubjectively objective way to determine whether an object is beautiful, and if it is beautiful how it could be explained. It is the status of a judgment of beauty, that it must be subjective, as Kant says; aesthetic judgment is “a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective.” (Kant, 1987, p.44). Yet these subjective judgments make claim to universality, they are not merely subjective. Nor are they universally subjective, as Shaviro says, “for, in contrast to an empirical judgment of understanding, a judgment of taste does not involve the mind’s active impressing of its own Categories upon a passive external world.” (Shaviro, 2009, p.19).
It is not merely something that I project onto or inject into my experience, ‘judgments of beauty’ produce the response of an appearance of an objective quality in the thing that I behold and as far as Kant is concerned this universality does not exist until I have made this judgment of beauty.
Following Shavrio’s project it makes sense if we here compare any claim to an objective quality away from (for now) any material objectivity and towards the potentials and virtuals of Deleuzian or Whiteheadian thought. Whitehead in particular has one concept, that of eternal objects that could serve to help elaborate this proposal.
Eternal objects are “Pure Potentials”, or “potentials for the process of becoming” (Whitehead, 1978, pp.21, 29). For Whitehead everything is made up of actual entities. These are singular “occasions” or events of becoming, similar to the Deleuzian Singularities that, for Whitehead, are the most fundamental constituents of everything. In relation to actual entities, these Eternal objects provide “the ‘qualities’ and ‘relations’ ” that enter into, and help to define, these occasions of actual entities. Whitehead says, when “the potentiality of an eternal object is realized in a particular actual entity,” it “contributes to the definiteness of that actual entity” (Whitehead, 1978, p.23). It gives it a particular character. Eternal objects thus take on something of the role that universals, predicates, Platonic forms, and ideas played in older metaphysical systems. But we have already seen that, for Whitehead, “concrete particular fact” cannot simply “be built up out of universals”; it is more the other way around. Universals, or “things which are eternal,” can and must be abstracted from “things which are temporal” (Whitehead, 1978, p.40) yet they cannot be conceived in the absence of the subject experience of actual entities. Whitehead defines eternal objects as the following, “any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world is called an ‘eternal object’ ” (Whitehead, 1978, p.44)
This seems in ways similar to the mechanisms of universality in Kant’s discussion of Beauty, they make a proposal similar to that of Kant’s transcendentalism, and help us think how it might be possible for such a universality to manifest itself. It may also be worth briefly mentioning a further Whitehead proposition in regard to this point. Whitehead does not privilege subject-hood to human subjects, to some degree or other he ascribes subject-hood to all things. In Whitehead we must understand that the world is made out of various events, actual entities, becomings and he does not privilege the affect of these events to the human. The potential subjectivity of non-human subjects such as objects found in Whitehead can help us consider the possibilities of how the universalising quality of beauty may function as both a secondary property and the appearance of a primary quality of an object or event.
In the third movement Kant shows that unlike judgements of the good, judgements of the beautiful do not presuppose an end or a purpose. They do however involve the representation of what Kant calls “purposiveness”. Kant insists, “we cannot even think [a being]… without also thinking that they were produced intentionally.” (Kant, 1987, p.269). This third movement seems to function with a similar mechanism to the function of universality and this section of Kant’s aesthetics can be linked to his transcendental solution to causation in physical laws.
This representation of purposiveness injects an a priori causation (at least the appearance of one) into the experience of beauty. Heidegger highlights this as an issue, specifically in relation to an artwork, in his critique of the aesthetic approach, he understands aesthetics to be “that kind of meditation on art in which humanity's state of feeling in relation to the beautiful represented in art is the point of departure and the goal that sets the standard for all its definitions and explanations” (Heidegger, 1979, p.78)
His point in relationship to our discussion of purposiveness is as follows, “the artwork becomes an object of lived experience and in this way art comes to count as an expression of human life.” (Heidegger, 1977, p.116). Heidegger is making two points with this statement. Firstly that the thing that is experienced becomes an object for human subjects to experience in meaningful ways following the object/subject relationship that Heidegger looks to find an other option than. The second point is that through these objects of meaningful experience the artwork itself becomes understood as a meaningful expression of the artistic subject of the artist. This is so familiar to our understanding of art that it is surprising that this be Heidegger’s critique of Aesthetics. Even considering Roland Barthes Death of the Author this aesthetic approach is still symptomatic of what Heidegger calls ‘subjectivism’, contemporary humanity's ongoing effort to establish “our unlimited power for calculating, planning, and moulding all things”. (Heidegger, 1977, p.135). This subjectivism, seems to function on the same representation of purpose or ‘purposiveness that Kant is ascribing to judgements of Beauty.
Meillassoux recognises something similar in Fancis Wolff’s notion of ‘object-worlds’. Meillassoux says, “During the twentieth century, the two principal 'media' of the correlation or subjectivism were consciousness and language, the former bearing phenomenology, the latter the various currents of analytic philosophy.” (Meillassoux, 2008a, p.15) Francis Wolff describes both language and consciousness as “object-worlds”. As objects they are unique in that they both ‘make the world’, this is because from their perspective ‘everything is inside’ but at the same time ‘everything is outside’.
As Wolff says,
“Everything is inside because in order to think anything whatsoever, it is necessary to 'be able to be conscious of it', it is necessary to say it, and so we are locked up in language or in consciousness without being able to get out. In this sense, they have no outside. But in another sense, they are entirely turned towards the outside; they are the world's window: for to be conscious is always to be conscious of something, to speak is necessarily to speak about something. To be conscious of the tree is to be conscious of the tree itself, and not the idea of the tree; to speak about the tree is not just to utter a word but to speak about the thing. Consequently, consciousness and language enclose the world within themselves only insofar as, conversely, they are entirely contained by it. We are in consciousness or language as in a transparent cage. Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out.” (Wolff, 1997, p.11)
Let us think to the infinity pool for a moment.
As we shall discuss later the necessity of presuming any order or law to that which is a priori to experience, such as is given in Kant’s third movement, is challenged rigorously by Meillassoux in his conception of the Absolute. But for Kant this purposiveness is ‘merely’ the form of purposiveness. As Ginsborg says, it is “perceived both in the object itself and in the activity of imagination and understanding in their engagement with the object.” (Ginsborg, 2008) Purposiveness is then key for this relationship between imagination and the ‘in-itself’ of the object. Something, which Kant elaborates with the notion of the ‘Free Play‘ of the faculties, which we will refer more to later.
The fourth movement of Kant’s judgements of beauty pertains to the idea of necessity. This is a characterisation of beauty, which has, in relationship to a lot of contemporary thought caused the concept of beauty to be considered in bad light. When I take my judgement of beauty to be universally valid, as the second movement has described, I take it not in so much that everyone who perceives the object will share my pleasure and agree with my judgement but that everyone ought to do so. This necessity of Kant’s beauty can be described as normative; in seeing my pleasure stand in a ‘necessary’ relation to the object that produces it begs why shouldn’t everybody feel this way? Kant elaborates this point by saying,
“Many things may be charming and agreeable to him; no one cares about that. But if he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. That is why he says: The thing is beautiful, and does not count on other people to agree with his judgment of liking on the ground that he has repeatedly found them agreeing with him; rather he demands that they agree. He reproaches them if they judge differently, and denies that they have taste, which he nevertheless demands of them, as something they ought to have.” (Kant, 1987, p.212)
Underneath the obvious mechanism of a demand that everyone agree with the judgment of beauty and the question of what puts the subject in the position to think that everyone should agree with them (which is not without problems), there is another theme at work in this statement. Despite the normalising result the statement there is the production of a purely imminent universality. This kind of phenomenon is what Deleuze is so significantly interested in with the immanent production of notions such as individuation, which as opposed to being concerned with the constitution of an individual within a pre-established concept of an individuality, it is instead concerned with producing the potentials of what an individual could be.
Here we find mechanisms of both normalisation and differentiation in the same characteristic of judgments of beauty.
What is most striking in our brief journey through the most basic constitution of Kant’s judgments of beauty is how reconcilable it is with both Whitehead and Deleuze’s projects. Both philosopher having considered themselves critics of Kant.
What is fundamentally characteristic to Kant’s conception of beauty is that Beauty may seem as though it were property of the object or event in question however he insists that there is no objective property of a thing to make it Beautiful and that it is in fact a product of the human mind. This thinking is characteristic of Kant’s whole project and is incredibly familiar to discussions of subjectivity in the contemporary art experience.
Meillassoux summarises this line of thought in his analysis of the correlationist, a tradition in philosophy that started, for Meillassoux, with Kant’s Transcendentalism. The correlationist, such as Kant, argues that it is impossible to know anything in-itself (or absolutely) as it will always be in relationship to my having thought it. Meillassoux seeks to re-find access to the beyond the correlation without dogmatism, and what we are looking for is a way to write an other account of beauty that through the Speculative Realism of Quentin Meillassoux which provides another point of access with the beyond of the correlation. That finds a harmonic between sensation and reason that happens upon the great out doors.
