Derrida Economimesis: An outline and comments [not completed]

On one level Derrida's "Economimesis" is just a close reading of Kant's Analytic of the Beautiful in the Critique of Judgment (with some side moves to the Introduction).  It is sometimes difficult when reading this text to determine when Kant leaves off and Derrida begins.  There are many lengthy quotes by Kant and some of the explications of Kant are fairly straightforward.  Sometimes one gets the feeling that Derrida approves of what Kant is saying, but he may not outright say this.  Economimesis is a deconstructive critique of Kant's great work.  The strategy Derrida uses is to note various oppositions in Kant's thought and then show how those oppositions are questioned, sometimes dissolved, and so forth.  The reading is extremely difficult, but not without value. It appears in the textbook I am using this semester Continental Aesthetics:  Romanticism to Postmodernism, and I will cite from that.  I cannot pretend to be a Derrida specialist:  this is just my best effort to understand what is going on here.  I will number the paragraphs.

1. It is usually helpful in reading Derrida to focus on the key Derridean (i.e. in this case non-Kantian) terms being used.  For example in the first paragraph Derrida mentions politics and political economy, and of course this relates to the made-up term used as title to the essay.  Derrida observes that politics acts upon this discourse, although it does not play a prominent role in Kant's actual discussion.  A typical move for the deconstructionist is to show the underlying political context.  This is something that deconstructionism shares with Marxism.  Derrida suggests that the motifs here go back to Plato and Aristotle in one chain of discourse, and to other philosophical chains as well (for example, Marxism), although, now talking in a metaphilosophical may, the same concept will have a different meaning in different sequences, its identity based on the way it functions in the particular discourse.  He talks in the end of "elaboration, that is dislocation, by the structure of the parergon" which means simply that it is subject to deconstruction.
2. Production as Mimesis.  We pretend to find a point of departure in examples or locations which are neither empirical nor metaempirical.
3. These locations are motivated by the concept of economimesis, a term created to combine mimesis and economics, and although they seem unrelated to each other, there is a systematic link.  (The opposition between these two is deconstructed.  This may be the primary deconstruction of the essay.)  Further, with respect to economy, there is no opposition between economy of circulation (regular economy) and general economy (the use of the term "economy" that is much broader and metaphorical...relations of exchange on a broad cultural level.)  
4. The locations in the text are two statements about economics in the first restrictive sense, i.e. about salary.  Although such statements are rare in the text they are not insignificant.  The theory of mimesis is bracketed by these statements.
5. One is in section 43 of the Critique of Judgment where free art is defined in opposition to mercenary art.  The other is in 51 where the free arts are independent of salary.  
6. The first statement is related to the definition of art, which comes late in the book.  Kant had just said that natural beauty is superior to art from a moral point of view since nature speaks to us symbolically through its beautiful forms.  But this also leads us to think of nature as though it were art production.  
7. Kant seems to define art as not nature "thus subscribing to the inherited, ossified, simplified, opposition between techne and physis" and the related one between the play of freedom and mechanical necessity.  Derrida will work on deconstructing these distinctions as well.  His negativity about the opposition can be seen in the quoted adjectives.   He first observes that "analogy annuls this opposition" since, for Kant. Nature dictates what is free in production of art through Genius.  Genius receives its rules from nature.  Previous philosophers, especially Plato, have attacked imitation in art, but this is undermined, as it turns out that nature, in giving rules to the genius, "folds itself, returns to itself, reflects itself through art."  So, although direct imitation of nature is perhaps still condemned, there is this indirect imitation through nature's power over genius.  [I am not sure I agree with Derrida's analysis here since Kant seems to be saying rather that it is the nature of the genius that gives the rule to art, not some external nature, not nature in the wild, for example.]  So both the oppositions of physis (nature) and mimesis (imitative art) and physis and tecne (craft) are overcome.  Note that Derrida is saying that Kant is doing this deconstruction.  As in other writings there is a sense that everything Derrida is bringing out is already, strangely, there in Kant.
8.  Derrida speaks of "apparently irreducible oppositions" which are finally dissolved.  He also asks what political economy is advantaged by this dissolution.  I am not sure what this means:  perhaps a better political system, a freer less capitalist one would be advantaged
9. To dissolve them these oppositions must be produced and multiplied.  This is Derrida's methodology:  he shows more and more oppositions and then dissolves them.
10. An example of this multiplication is within art in general where the opposition forms a hierarchy in which one side is always classified as more valuable, for example one art as more properly art than another. (Collingwood could be said to make such a distinction, i.e. between amusement art and art properly speaking.)  Derrida will seek to dissolve this too.
11. Kant says that we should only call "art" the production of freedom by means of freedom, using free will and reason.  Thus the product of bees is not art.  This humanist theme treats animality in general under certain examples, in this case the bee, which is opposed to the human.  The human is always seen as associated with reason, freedom, etc.  The other is not.  The concept of art is constructed to raise man from "below."  So Aristotle argues that only man is capable of mimesis.   What this is leading to is a deconstruction (which is usually just a questioning) of the standard duality between man and animal.  Derrida also finds a "ruse" in this:  that what is unique to man is said to be grounded in absolute naturalism and "indifferentialism" which is to say that differentiation is effaced by opposition. The ruse is the effacement. Derrida wants to go the other way, replacing opposition with difference.
12. So bees have no art, or have it only by analogy.
13. Art is also distinguished from science.  This is another of the multiplying oppositions which needs deconstruction.  In art it is not enough to have knowledge to do it.  For science, to know is to know how.  But high-wire dancing is different:  it is not enough to know about it.  Art is like that, on this view.
14. For Kant, art cannot then be reduced to craft.  The craftsman exchanges the value of his work for a salary.  But art is liberal, free:  it is not part of economics, not exchangeable.  Derrida somewhat confusingly says that liberal art and mercenary art are not then opposite terms.  I think he means they are not exactly opposite since liberal art is considered to be more art, to have more value, and precisely because it does not have economic value.  Derrida will deconstruct this too.  Mercenary art is, for Kant, only art analogically.  And it is like the productivity of bees, lacking such things as freedom and play of imagination.  So the opposition here is play and work -- also to be deconstructed.
15. So, for Kant, free art is more human than salaried work as with the work of bees.  The free man is not homo oeconomicus.
16. 2. The free man may use the work of man insofar as he is not free.  This is, of course, the basis for capitalist exploitation.
17. 3.  But Kant also must distinguish reproductive and productive imagination, the later being free and playful.  
18. Poetry is the summit of fine art, taking productive imagination to its extreme.  But mimesis comes in here too since it "deploys the brute power of its invention only by listening to nature."  So nature replaces God in the enlightenment ideology:  we have now "onto-theological humanism."  Genius takes this productivity to its highest point:  it both gives rules and also (in a seemingly contradictory fashion) has rules dictated to it by nature.  Thus the distinction between liberal and mercenary art breaks with mimesis as imitation only to identify itself with nature itself freely unfolding.  The idea of genius as creating its own rules through nature is the key to Derrida's deconstruction.
19. The free play also offers enjoyment which should be distinguished from pleasure.  The definition that Kant uses to distinguish Fine Arts "does not proceed by symmetrical opposition" since Fine Arts do not all belong to the liberal arts some of which are Sciences.
20. What then characterizes the Fine Arts?
21. An art that produces the beautiful need not be beautiful itself.  But it is connected since "the relation to the product cannot, structurally, be cut off from the relation to a productive subjectivity..."  This is implied by the signature of the artist on his or her work.  So the beautiful is not only the object but also the work that goes into making it.  The signature is in the "parergonal thickness of the frame":  neither wholly out or in the work.  The beautiful is also in the passage between the process and the product: it "depends on some paregonal effect."  Thus Fine-Arts are "always of the frame and the signature."  Derrida thinks Kant would not endorse this but it is consistent with his system.
22.   To say an art is fine one implies "a repetition, a possibility of beginning again."
23. The repetition is of a pleasure.  Science cannot be beautiful just as art cannot have scientific value, and, for Kant, the beauty of a scientific statement would just be a witticism.
24.   Science must do without wit, art, beauty and pleasure.  But Derrida will seek to deconstruct this set of distinctions too.
25. He does this (i.e. shows how Kant himself deconstructs it) by turning to the Introduction where pleasure is in the distant origin of knowledge.  
26. This"immemorial time" is not a time of consciousness.  Here pleasure was not separated from knowledge.  We are led back to "the buried or repressed origin of science, that is to the science of science, to the point where all the distinctions, oppositions, limits remarked by the Kantian critique lose their pertinence."  Deconstruction is a matter of going back to this time.  Derrida notes sweeping consequences here.  [Is Derrida advocating something like Rousseau's return to the state of nature?]
27. So, for Kant, the Fine Arts give pleasure and not enjoyment, science gives neither, and the fine arts (small letters) give pleasure without enjoyment.  [This distinction between Fine Arts and fine arts is not familiar to me in reading Kant.]
28. Mechanical art neither seeks nor gives pleasure:  it is opposed to aesthetic art which ends in pleasure.
29. Aesthetic art, too, splits into hierarchic species:  there is aesthetic art that has no relation to the beautiful, e.g. the agreeable arts, which have enjoyment as their aim, whereas the Fine Arts seek pleasure without enjoyment.  The arts of enjoyment include conversation, party games, etc.
30. Pure pleasure without empirical enjoyment belongs to judgment and reflection.  Derrida seeks to deconstruct this distinction too [as I have in my work in everyday aesthetics].
31.  This pleasure is according to the order of a society, a reflective intersubjectivity.
32. So what is the relation with economimesis?  This taking pleasure belongs to the essence of man capable of pure non-exchangeable productivity...not in terms of use value or exchange values (to use the terms of Marx.)
33. "nevertheless this pure productivity of the inexchangeable liberates a sort of immaculate commerce"  i.e. universal communicability between free subjects.  This is the pure economy of the free man.
34. Mimesis comes in since a certain "as if" re-establishes it at the point where it appears detached.  Fine Arts must have the appearance of nature, must resemble effects of natural action:  the purposiveness of its form must seem to be as free as if it were the product of pure nature.
35. What is the scope of the "as if"? (436)
36.   The less pure productivity depends on nature the more it resembles nature: mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another:  not the relation of two products but of two productions, two freedoms.  The artist then imitates acts of nature.  So the mimesis displays the identification of the human with the divine, a commerce between divine and human artist.  The commerce is mimesis "in the strict sense, a play, a mask, an identification with the other on stage" not a copy.  So true mimesis is between two producers.  Imitation, by contrast, is servile.
37. This secures the hierarchical opposition between free and mercenary art  "Economimesis puts everything in its place, starting with the instinctual work of animals without language and ending with God, passing by way of the mechanical arts, mercenary art, liberal arts, aesthetic arts, and the Fine-Arts."  That is, it establishes the hierarchy.
38.  So the structure of mimesis effaces the opposition between nature and art.  [I find this confusing since in the preceding paragraph it established a hierarchy.  Is hierarchy different from opposition?]  We rediscover the root of pleasure in knowledge.  Derrida then diverges to a discussion of Aristotle on mimesis.  For Aristotle mimesis is essential to man.  But Kant thinks imitation is aping:  the ape cannot mime.  So Aristotle is back at the joining of knowledge and pleasure.  He sees man as different from other animals in being good at imitation, and taking pleasure in it.
39. Why are Aristotle and Kant different here? They are not so different.  Kant does not exclude the unity of pleasure and knowledge:  he merely re-assigns it to the unconscious at some immemorial time.  Also, here, nature is an art and natural beauty a product of that.  Kant says nature was beautiful when it was seen as art and that art cannot be beautiful unless we are conscious of it as art but see it as nature.  
40.   Art is beautiful to the degree it is like productive nature.  Kant again has led us back to a time before his critique and before all of the disassociations and oppositions. 
41.    "The beautiful brings productive nature back to itself, it qualifies a spectacle that artist-nature has given itself.  God has given himself to be seen in a spectacle,  just as if he had masked - had shown - himself."   This paragraph is difficult.  It may be indicating a theology.  Derrida speaks of "an immense liberality which however can only give itself in itself to be consumed."  I wonder whether this is something he favors, i.e. as a virtue.
42.   But how can man's freedom be said to resemble that of God? It resembles by not imitating.
43.  The mimesis can only proceed by exemplars.
44. Thy genius naturalizes economimesis.  It is produced and given by nature. It is a gift of nature.  "Nature produces freedom for itself and gives it to itself" and in giving non-conceptual rules of art, i.e. exemplars, the genius reflects nature.
45.   The originality of the genius and its exemplarity must incite a certain imitation (back to Aristotle)  but one that avoids plagiarism.  We have free imitation of a freedom of genius which freely imitates divine freedom.  [Note that this is a rejection of Plato in that the string of imitations does not reduce freedom]  Kant distinguishes between imitation and copy, the two terms only being different by one letter.
46. Then when nature has "detached genius" everything is naturalized, interpreted as nature, "the content of empirical culturalism, the political economy of art"...[it is not clear what is happening here]
47. The second remark on salary distinguishes between the orator and the poet.
48.  The poet is at the summit analogous to God.He gives more than he promises.  He breaks the circular economy (traditional economics.)  A transeconomy is a general economy of the subject says Nick Mansfield.
49. Economesis "unfolds itself there to infinity" as in Hegel:  "An infinite circle plays [with] itself and uses human play to reappropriate the gift for itself."  This may refer to Hegel's Absolute.  The poet receives from nature/God the power to give more than he promises.   This "surplus value" makes its return to the infinite source.  [I wonder whether Derrida believes in God.  This sounds a bit too mystical for my taste.] And this passes through the voice.  [The next part is very poetic and the only thing one can do is quote.]  As a result the opposition between restricted and general economy is effaced.  He speaks of "passage of the infinity between gift and debt."  What is debt?
50.  Giving more than he promises is something conceptual.  The genius is not paid but God supports him with speech and in return for gratitude.  God gives him surplus.
51. This is poetic since God is a poet.  [Why doesn't Derrida deconstruct this hierarchy God/poet too?]
52. This structure has its analogue in the city:  the poet must eat, must sustain the labor force.  He receives subsidies from the sun-king, Frederick the Great.  Kant's use of Frederick's poem is no accident.  There is an economics behind this, and a hierarchy.
53.  The poem of Frederick describes the overabundance of a solar source.  The various helio-poetics of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Bataille form an analogical chain.  
54. Derrida quotes from the poem and Kant's footnote about Isis as Mother Nature:  here the concept of virtue diffuses many sublime and restful feelings which not definite concept can match.
55. Exemplorality.  Perhaps we are approaching the embouchure..
56.  opening onto economimesis.
57.   pure productivity is "a sort of gift for itself of God who makes a present of himself to himself"
58. The analogy between God and Poet finds its origin in the logos, reason, word, the embouchure.
59. Now it must be deconstructed.
60. Nature furnishes rules to genius as orders.  The discursive metaphors in the text (nature says) are analogies of analogy: nature is properly logos towards which one must always return.  "Analogy is always language."
61. Genius agrees to be nature's secretary, inspired.  It has no concept or knowledge.  
62.  Nature also the the product of the divine genius.  Productive imagination creates a second nature.  Genius, first nature, and God.  "Such hierarchical analogy forms a society of the logos, a sociology of genius, a logoarchy."  
63. What does it mean for analogy to be a rule.  Derrida gets very poetic/witty here:  "It means what it means and that it says that it means wheat it wants and that it wants what it wants, for example,"
64. To continue:  "It is by example that it means that it means and that it says that it means that it wants and that it wants what it wants by example."  
65. Analogy between the rule of art and the moral rule:  that analogy is the rule.    But the articulated play of this analogy is itself "subject to a law of supplemenarity"
66.   The purpose-lessness leads us back to ourselves:  we seek purpose within:  we slurp, giving ourselves orders which no longer come from outside.
67.   This is a movement of idealizing interiorisation:  for Kant we seek it in our ultimate purpose.
68.  Not finding our purpose in our aesthetic experience we fold ourselves back towards the purpose of our Da-Sein (Heidegger: Being in the World):  we are there to respond to a vocation of autonomy/morality.  There there of our Dasein first determined by this purpose.
69.  Here analogies multiply concerning the language of nature. We take a moral interest in the beautiful of nature:  for nature harbors a principle of harmony between its productions and our disinterested pleasure:  a harmony between purposiveness of nature and our delight.
70. How does one announce the adherence between adherence and non-adherence?  Derrida is speaking here of the adherence of interest and disinterest.
71. By means of signs.  This is the "primary place of signification in the third Critique."  Nature announces to us by signs and traces there must be a harmonious agreement between its purposiveness and our disinterested delight.  
72. Meditation on this pleasure provokes a moral interest in the beautiful.  Derrida:  strange this interest taken in disinterestedness, moral revenue from production without interest, moral surplus value of the without, related to the trace and sign of nature.  We may be assured our stocks are on the moral rise.
73. The account may seem too studied regarding the interpretation of the cipher of beautiful natural forms.
74.  The without of pure detachment is a language nature speaks to us:  but this, in common with Heraclitus, causes the parergon to strain.
75.   The in-significant non-language of forms, silence, is a language between nature and man
76. The charms\, colors and sounds for example, also seem to converse:  the white color of lilies dispose us to ideas of innocence.
77.  The trace and wink of nature do not have to be objectively regulated by conceptual science.  It is our interest in nature's communicating that matters:  we believe in the sincerity of the ciphered language.  And what speaks through the mouth of the poet also must be veridical.  If a poet speaks of a nightingale's song but it is really a trickster, that is ignoble.  Oral examples are important here:  Kant says it is ignoble to confine ourselves to eating and drinking.  Exemplorality is exemplary orality.  There is an allergy i the mouth between pure taste and actual tasting. But would not disgust, turning against actual taste, be the origin of pure taste?
78. 
    
79.  

Nietzsche Birth of Tragedy Section 9 The Genius and Sacrilege

Section 9 of the Birth of Tragedy is mainly about the value of a certain kind of sacrilege, the sacrificial sacrilege needed to achieve Dionysian wisdom, or any sort of deeper wisdom.  It is all described in terms of the ancient Greeks and their myths, in terms of battles between various groups of Gods, particularly between the Titans and the Olympians, and yet, as always, N. has in mind something more contemporary.  The significance of this section for the project of the book as a whole can be seen in the fact that the title page of the book features Prometheus unchained.  So part of the question here is the significance of Prometheus for N.  It gets pretty complicated since N. does not just identify Prometheus with the Dionysian, although the Titan is closer to that than to the Apollonian.  Ultimately Prometheus is seen as having both sides.

The significance of this for today, in N.s view, would be in terms of the price paid by the genius (whether artistic or philosophical). Such a person must violate "natural law" (or what is conceived as such) in order to achieve something real.  In this section the natural law is symbolized by, in Oedipus Rex, the rules against incest and patricide, and the violation of those rules. Quite possibly (well, quite probably) N. identifies himself both with Prometheus, as hero of Aeschylean tragedy, and Oedipus, as hero of Sophoclean tragedy.  We get here the beginnings of a critique of morality not simply of the Christian sort, but of morality itself (by which he mainly means, the conventional and traditional, especially the Alexandrian, which is really the Appolinian without the Dionysian).  

But the best way to think of this is to ponder N. the rebel academic, the violator of his philological scholarly parents.  Then you have this idea that in order to really do something, in philosophy for example, or in German culture as a whole, or perhaps for humanity itself, one must commit sacrilege (i.e. break the idols, which means, for example, taking on Kant and even Socrates), and that the consequent suffering is just part of it.  

His main thought is to get behind the dialogue and the character of the hero in tragedy, all of which is clear and precise in an Apollinian way, and get to the myth which is projected as the bright image of the hero, an image which simply stands out on the wall of the cave (read Plato's cave, but with reality not outside in the sun and the world of the Forms, but deeper inside the cave in the Schopenhauerian depths of the wisdom of Silenus) as a healing image against the background of the abyss.  The mask of the hero (on stage) has two aspects: the Apollinian and the Dionysian, the second related to the gruesome terrors of nature.  And what of the much vaunted Greek cheerfulness?  Well, if there is any it is due to this contrast, the same one that was described in terms of the Greek response to the wisdom of Silenus mentioned earlier.

It is odd that, for N., Oedipus not only suffers due to his errors and wisdom but also "spreads a magical power of blessing" that continues beyond his death, since even if the entire moral world is destroyed by his actions, he magically founds a new world on the ruins of the old.  This is a two stage process, following the two great Sophoclean plays. The cheerfulness evident in Oedipus Rex through our pleasure in the hero's solving of the mystery of the Theban plague, a cheerfulness that softens the edges of the king's personal tragedy, is heightened, infinitely says N., in Oedipus at Colonus, where the king's suffering faces an unearthly cheerfulness in which the hero's passiveness is itself the highest form of activity, and we are overcome by a "profound human joy" as a counterpart to dialectic (a clear reference again to Plato's methodology and how it does not work in regard to these deepest of questions).  

Yet, the play itself, "the poet's whole conception," is nothing but a bright healing image projected to save us from our perception of the abyss.  The question N. then raises is how Oedipus can be both the violator of custom and also solver of the riddle of the Sphinx, a riddle which represents the deepest wisdom about man.  The clue is to be found in the "popular belief" that the wise man is born from incest, i.e. he gains "prophetic and magical powers" that "break the spell of present and future," i.e. the spell of convention by way of an act of sacrilege.  He must "compel nature to surrender her secrets" by means of something unnatural.  Dionysian wisdom is the result of an "unnatural abomination" by which the hero plunges nature into destruction and then suffers his own dissolution as a result.  Wisdom of this sort, is "a crime against nature."  

And no one before N. has ever said something like that, although perhaps he is right that the Greek tragedians implied it. No one has ever associated wisdom with sacrilege.  And think about the cost N. himself will pay life for his radical questioning, for his own sacrilege.    

In short, we do not have here the death of God but rather a joyous defiance of God, something shared by Prometheus and the philosophical or artistic genius: "Man, rising to Titanic stature [Prometheus was a Titan], gains culture by his own efforts and forces the gods into an alliance with him because in his very own wisdom he holds their existence and their limitations in his hands." Man can kill the gods, or bring them alive again.  

N., as always, sees this in terms of stages.  In this case the Aeschylean tragedy poses the bold individual against the gods in decline, the two reconciled by the mediation of Moira, Fate, who stands above both men and gods.  So Aeschylus, himself audacious like Prometheus, places both God and men on the same scales (i.e. of justice), this based on the Greek capacity to use "mysteries" (generally associated with the Dionysian) to ground metaphysical thought and to counter the dominance of the Olympians.  

The Greek poet recognizes that the gods depend on him as much as he on them.  For N., the death of God is the destruction of God by the individual foretold by the myth of Prometheus creating men to overcome the gods and then suffering eternally as a result.  But, where Aeschylus ends with a story of eternal suffering, Sophocles tells a higher story that ends with "the holy man's song of triumph" a Nietzschean yes to life.  Aeschylus is Schopenhauer to Nietzsche's Sophocles.  Thus, Aeschylus's "interpretation of the myth" is one-upped by that of Sophocles.  

The artist's image again is just "a bright image of clouds and sky mirrored in a black lake of sadness" -- the abyss. Prometheus brings fire to man and this is the crucible for the ascent of culture insofar as man uses it, not as a present from heaven, but as something he has robbed from the gods.  This battle, this "irresolvable contradiction between man and god" is the origins of culture. Myth, one might say, hides, but also reveals, this contradiction.  

N. compares this idea to the idea of the Jews and Christians (he calls it Semitic myth), the idea of sin whereby, in his view, various feminine qualities give rise to evil.  The Aryan (by which he means Greek and German) idea of "active sin" as Promethean virtue provides the "ethical basis" for Greek tragedy:  in this case human evil is justified, along with guilt and resultant suffering.  (I think "evil" for N. mainly means not cruel acts against others but violations of conventional limits based on systematic application of a skeptical methodology.)

So, at the heart of things, there is a contradiction between the divine and the human, each having right on its side as an individual, but suffering nonetheless, the individual hero trying to transcend his individuation to become, in a Schopenhauerian way, "one world being."  

Not important to me is N.s identification of sacrilege with the Aryan and the masculine and sin with the Semitic and feminine, but simply the idea that the "titanically striving individual" is no follower of Apollo since Apollo draws boundaries by way of his Socratic, and ultimately Alexandrian, demand for self-knowledge and moderation, i.e. self-knowledge only by way of moderation and limitation, i.e. logical tidiness.  This is the scholarly ideal too: philosopher as definer in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, for example. 

Nietzsche then combines the Titanic and the Dionysian: "The Titanic impulse to become, as it were, the Atlas [brother of Prometheus] for all individuals, carrying them on a broad back, higher and higher [as Zarathustra does for his friends?], farther and farther, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian have in common."  So, Prometheus "is a Dionysian mask" and the demand for justice is just his Apollinian side.  

The end of the section is a riddle that sums it up:   "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." i.e. we have moved "beyond good and evil" as N. later puts it.  N. follows this with "This is your world!  A world indeed! ---"  a quote from Faust. To say yes to your world, a wondrous world, one needs to see just and unjust as equally justified, something I cannot personally go along with.  But the idea of the necessity of sacrilege and a battle between men, allied with Titan gods, and the Olympian gods (representing what N. called the Socratic but also the tradition of Plato's Forms and all attempts as self-knowledge through logic, boxing in, limitation of sort) haunts.

  

Kant on how to be a genius

Kant is usually thought of as too obscure and theoretical to provide practical advice, but I find a lot of practical advice in the Critique of Judgment on the question of how to be, or rather become, a genius.  (I am working with the Bernard translation here).  There are some preliminaries to keep in mind.  First, Kant does not associate genius with high IQ.  If you think that you have to have high IQ to be a genius then you are not talking about Kant's concept of genius.  High IQ is overrated anyway.   It is neither necessary nor sufficient for creative work.  Before I go into his advice about becoming a genius I also want to make clear that Kant is just mistaken about scientists.  He argues that a great scientist cannot be a genius.  This is just a misconception about science.  Science requires creative and original thinking every bit as much as art does. To be sure, creativity works differently in science than in the fine arts:  for example you are not supposed to change your data set.  There is perhaps less flexibility in science than in fine art.  But, for now, let us just assume that everything Kant says about a genius in fine art could also apply to other practices including science, sports, business, religion, and philosophy itself. 

Kant believes that genius is "a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given" and "is not a mere aptitude for what can be learned by a rule."  This would eliminate people who are often seen as geniuses simply because they can memorize lots of information, follow certain rules, or play simple games like solitaire with great rapidity.  None of this requires genius.  

The mention of talent may seem to imply that genius must be something one is born with.  However, Kant does not say directly that it is.  He does speak of a pupil "endowed" with a "like proportion of mental powers" but I think this means that you need to find a teacher with "like proportion of mental powers" to yours: i.e. you need the right fit.  Given that Kant believes that genius comes from the use of the faculties of imagination and understanding, and given that he believes that everyone has these faculties, I suggest that, on a Kantian view, anyone can be a genius, and everyone has the capacity (although usually undeveloped) to do original cutting-edge work.  Granted, Kant says that genius is rare, but his system doesn't give us any reason to believe this is true.

How do you know that someone is a genius, then?  Well, simply if that person is original in a way that is valuable:  of genius, "originality must be its first property."  Moreover, Kant clearly indicates that works of genius should not "spring from imitation" but should be "a standard or rule of judgment for others." We will see, however, that this later idea is qualified in an important way: the genius should not be a rule or standard for other geniuses if by this we mean something that can be copied or followed by way of clearly stated formulas. 

Another factor is that the genius "cannot describe or indicate scientifically" how he or she brings about her products.  Instead, the genius creates his or her own rules.  I take this to mean that the genius creates his own definitions of key terms and concepts central to his own project and creates new ways of seeing and doing things. We shall see that this involves creating a world of his own, one based on the materials of the world we experience.  An excellent example of someone who created his own rules was Van Gogh.  In painting Starry Night, for example, he followed own rules and not the rules of accurate reproduction.  He created an alternate world based on the world as he experienced it.  

Also, like Plato before him in the Ion, Kant believes that the genius is inspired.  That is, he speaks with approval of the origins of the word "genius."  The word originally referred to a "guardian spirit given to the man at birth."  This seems something like the Greek Muse, a source of inspiration, although personal.  Again, I recommend that you not read this as saying that some people get a guardian spirit (or the physiological genetic equivalent) and some do not (although Kant might have meant this).  It is quite possible that everyone is given such a guardian spirit at birth.  In other words, in principle, everyone could act like a genius ... and hence could be a genius.  This does not mean that everyone is capable of being a genius at every thing or at every time:  there are certain things you are naturally fitted to do well, and certain other things not. 

So here is the advice so far:  Do not imitate.  Create your own rules. Work towards originality.  Produce models.   Create your own world.  

The next piece of advice is find a genius to be your teacher. Remember that although the genius artist creates his own rules, others can take that person's artworks as models.  The genius artist prescribes his rule, a rule that cannot be reduced to a formula, but which is, rather, "abstracted from the fact, i.e. from the product."  Others may then "try their own talent by using [this product] as a model, not to be copied but to be imitated."  So the potential genius must find a genius teacher who should not be merely copied but imitated, not just imitated but "followed."  Against this teacher he/she can test his or her own talent.  As Kant says, "the ideas of the artist excite like ideas in his pupils if nature had endowed them with a like proportion of mental powers."  If you want to be a genius you need to find your match in a great teacher, a great teacher for you. 

Kant does not require that this be one teacher only.  Nor does he insist that the teacher be living.  The works of genius produced in the past can be models, can be the teachers.  Indeed, he writes that "the models of beautiful art are the only means of handing down these ideas to posterity."  A living teacher can teach you by means of his or her own works, but also through modeling his or her artistic practice, for example in the classroom. 

On the other hand we cannot accept Kant's claim that "classical models are only to be had in the old dead languages."  Clearly this is a prejudice of his time.  However, we today are amazingly incapable of treating the dead languages (Latin, Greek, etc.) and writings in those languages as sources of inspiration, unlike the Renaissance and Kant's own time.  We should not be so arrogant as to just assume that these should occupy the dustbin of history.

Kant offers another important piece of advice for being a genius. He observes that there is still a mechanical element in what you do; there are still skills to learn in your practice; there is still something "scholastic" to learn; you still need to follow certain definite rules in order to accomplish the purpose of your art.  So you should not throw away "all the constraint of all rules," or to think that genius can replace "careful investigation by reason" where that is appropriate.  

I want to add one more thing that Kant did not say but I think is consistent with the thrust of his approach.  If you want to be a genius in Kant's sense find the hot spot of creativity in your city or neighborhood, and if there is nothing, move somewhere else where there is something.  It might be a cafe where really interesting people bent on revolutionizing painting go to argue:  that was the hot spot for the Impressionists in Paris in the late part of the 19th century.  It might be a garage where people on the cutting edge in technology collect to pursue their dream.   It might be a great start-up with a new idea.  The hot spot is a place where you can find people who themselves can be models, contemporary models, in your quest for genius.  Genius seems to thrive best in the hot house of interactive work and debate.  What Kant teaches is that genius is not simply an individual trait but rather arises out a creative relationship between student and teacher, mentor and mentee, aspirant and model.  

Finally, paragraph #49 constitutes the deepest thing Kant has to say about genius.  Genius requires what Kant calls "spirit" and what is sometimes also translated as "soul."  Kant calls it an "animating principle of the mind," which is to say that it brings things alive. What this does is put "the mental powers [imagination and understanding] purposively into swing, i.e. into such a play as maintains itself and strengthens the mental powers in their exercise."  Moreover, this principle is "the faculty of presenting aesthetical ideas," i.e. of creating symbols (and works of art can be examples of such symbols), imaginative products which send the mind into much thought, none of it definite or completely intelligible by language.  

It is here that Kant tells us that the imagination, in this productive use, "is very powerful in creating another nature" out of the material of actual nature.  It remolds experience using metaphors and analogies. Such symbols "strive after something which lies beyond the bounds of experience" and try to get as close as possible to present what Kant calls the "concepts of reason," by which he means transcendent things such as God, soul and immortality, as well as all the most fundamental ideas by which and under which we live; for example, death, envy, love, and fame.  In doing this, the imagination "brings the faculty of intellectual ideas (the reason) into movement": i.e. it enlivens these ideas.   In sum the genius is someone who creates things that connect us in this way to what is transcendent but ultimately inexpressible.     

A Super-quick History of Western Aesthetics but With a Different Moral

Cynthia Freeland in her well known introduction to aesthetics called But is it Art? gives a super-quick history of western aesthetics, what she calls a "virtual tour," which is intended to solve the problem of how to account for disturbing work by contemporary artists (such as Serrano's Piss Christ) that seems to violate two standard theories of art she previously discussed, i.e. that art fosters "communal religious rituals" and that it promotes disinterested aesthetic experience.  Her super-quick survey covers five periods in western aesthetics, each of which involves a pairing of a philosopher or philosophical school of the time and an art style in some artistic medium.  Freeland concludes her history by implying that the last pairing, Andy Warhol and Arthur Danto, resolves the problem, Danto's philosophy easily handling disturbing art and pointing the way to a pluralist future.  I have a somewhat different take on the super-quick history, although what I will say here is certainly inspired by Freeland's amazing effort.

Freeland begins with a standard survey of the debate between Plato and Aristotle over the value of imitative poetry, tragic poetry in particular (in which Aristotle, as usual, comes off the victor), and then notes, as a kind of aside, that Aristotle's defense does not extend well to Euripides' Medea where we are supposed to sympathize with a woman who has just killed her two sons in vengeance against Jason who has dumped her for another woman, moreover she ridiculously (in our contemporary eyes, at least) escapes in a chariot sent by Apollo.  Aristotle seems to jump back onto Plato's ship by disapproving of this play because it seems to approve of a person deliberately choosing evil.  Freeland also dings him for abstracting tragedy from its social-political context.  She then moves on to talk about Ernst Gombrich as another supporter of "the imitative theory of art" insofar as he sees the history of western painting as one of progress in accuracy of representation until Constable at least, except that, as she observes, photography spoils the story, and artists like Van Gogh and O'Keefe start painting irises that are no longer accurate imitations but achieve some other purpose.  My thought about this is that just as Aristotle had a deeper notion of mimesis than Plato (although Plato anticipated most of Aristotle's objections in various asides) so too Euripides may have had a deeper sense of it than Aristotle, that mimesis covers disturbing art such as that of Medea quite well, the thought being that art at its best connects us up with a Dionysian level of Being as well as the Apollonian (to use Niezsche's terminology).  What strikes me, then, as I move through Freeland's very quick history, is that this is not a history of failures (as she portrays it) but rather a history in which there are very important continuities (and, dare I say it, a development)...and that we share a lot more with the ancient Greeks, with the medievals, and so forth, than one might initially think.  

Freeland turns next to Chartres cathedral and the paired philosopher, Aquinas, (who was, himself, strongly inspired by Aristotle) as well as the Plato-inspired philosophers who directly influenced the creation of Chartres.  Aquinas's view on beauty, that a beautiful work like a cathedral should have proportion, light and allegory, is nicely discussed in this section of her chapter.  Proportion of course connects us back to Pythagoras (and hence Plato), who is also sculpturally represented in the church, as well as in the emphasis placed everywhere on harmony and geometrical forms.  It is the idea of luminosity, claritas, which I find most interesting.  The notion that light is associated with beauty goes back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave where the Good (which plays the same role as Beauty in the Symposium) emanates light, which represents reason and truth.  Light, in the middle ages, as Freeland observes, is proof of divine presence in our world, denoting "internal brightness and design."  For Aquinas, "divinity is present in the internal forms of things on earth."  As Freeland puts it, "A cathedral, like a good and beautiful person, should have organic unity and manifest claritas."  There seems to be a tie here, that organic unity comes with manifesting claritas, and of course "organic unity" is not only associated with Aristotle's notion of beauty (as found in the Poetics) but also with a deeper sense of harmony already present in the Pythagoreans.  So perhaps the idea of claritas is a deepening of the notion of mimesis which itself was a deepening of the notion of harmonia.  That is what I would like to suggest.  Moreover, one need not be a believing Christian to find inspiration in Aquinas' idea: one need only visit Chartres to find that the sense of something sublime there refers back to the world outside and around us, a world of ordinary things that can become extraordinary if looked at in the right way, i.e. as illuminated or as having an aura of significance.  Allegory, Aquinas' third principle, should not be separated from the other two but should be seen as organically related to them.  Just as God is present in the world through the capacity of things to have claritas and exhibit illumination (which I have suggested is a kind of aura), so too this sense is associated with a richness of meaning which is found in the idea of allegory.  As Freeland puts it, "each thing in the world could be a sign from God" but not just as a sign but as a sign that both is harmonious and also illuminating, i.e. with aura.  Then, as an atheist (I am speaking not only of myself, here, but of anyone similarly situated), one might, although rejecting God and the top-down approach to explaining this type of experience, see aura as something emergent from meaningful human interactions with the world, finding this sort of experience to give meaning to life (i.e. in a Nietzschean fashion).

Freeland's third station in her mini-history is the gardens of Versailles by André Le Nôtre, paired this time with Kant.  The continuity is again evident, as the Sun King, Louis XIV, replaces the Christian God in this realm of meaning in much the way the Christian God replaced Beauty/Good in Plato's metaphysics.  Freeland observes that Le Nôtre designed the gardens on the theme of Apollo, a point that captures the Apollonian aspect of art in just the way Nietzsche would require, that is, require of great art (the Dionysian aspect is required too...which is less evident at Versailles).  But just as we 20th century viewers can be overwhelmed by the richness of beauty and meaning of a Greek tragedy well-performed or the cathedral at Chartres, so too, it can happen with the gardens at Versailles.  Here again the elements of geometry (the plan of the gardens) allegory (the many statues) and claritas (the everpresent Sun-King) are remade, transformed. 

Kant, as Freeland observes, saw gardens as a kind of painting, certainly as a fine art, and thus as an art of genius, of someone who could present what Kant called "aesthetic ideas."  Freeland, however, loses sight of this a bit when she talks about gardens on a Kantian view as only providing us with beauty, as in an object that gives rise to a free play of the cognitive faculties, as if gardens of this level of greatness and genius were like ordinary wallpaper.  Sure, beauty is involved:  the "fine" arts are "beautiful arts" for Kant.  But they are also arts of genius, and so this connects them with the sublime (and Kant's section on fine art is to be found in his section on the sublime, not in his section on the beautiful!), perhaps in gardens by way of incorporating something more disordered, something, as Nietzsche would put it, Dionysian, where Freeland seems to misunderstand Kant as disapproving of the English garden whereas he sees them more in terms of a dialectical development, the French garden being Apollonian, the English being Dionysian, to use the language of Nietzsche, but not inappropriately.  

Freeland now moves on to Nietzsche himself, both in his initial agreement with, and later opposition to, Wagner (specifically against Parsifal).  I see, once again, the Apollonian/Dionysian duality as a continuation of the beautiful/sublime duality and synthesis found in the Kantian notion of the art of genius (fine art) and of the idea of claritas as infusing a proportionally ordered world by way of allegorical meaning as found in Aquinas, which reaches back to the eruption of the Dionysian in Medea as a greater deepening of the idea of mimesis, which has been deepened already by Aristotle as opposed to Plato.  Nietzsche rejects Parsifal for backsliding into a shallow, kitschy, notion of Christianity, decadent in refusing to say "yes" to life. 

The last duo is Danto and Warhol.  Danto argues that, as Freeland puts it "the artworld provides a background theory that an artist invokes when exhibiting something as art" which is to say that an artworld representative (even an artist) simply designating something as art (in the way Dickie would hold it) is not enough...there must also be a pathway by which we can see the item as art.  True enough, except that neither Medea nor Chartres  existed in a world in which there was an artworld, and so the way in which people came to see this as art, or as whatever appropriately preceded what we now call art, would be by way of a theory that was not so much an artworld theory as a cultureworld theory (to coin a term).  This would fit Freeland's Dantoian idea that the relevant theory is "something the social and cultural context enables both artist and audience to grasp."  So too, obviously, Warhol's Brillo Boxes, as Danto observed, could never have been seen as art in medieval times.  (Odd:  we think that we can see Chartres Cathedral as art but that people in the middle ages could not see Warhol as art.  Even with training? We think we 21st century types have access to the medieval perception but they would not, if they were living today, have access to our own.  What makes us so sure?  Medieval humans were not biologically all that different from us.  Are we, and is Danto in particular, giving them too little credit, or ourselves too much?)  Freeland concludes, still roughly following Danto, that "With Brillo Boxes, Warhol demonstrated that anything can be a work of art, given the right situation and theory" and that interpretations are what constitute art as such, making them (artworks) objects that embody meaning.  So, the previous art theories are criticized by Danto as mere "disguised endorsements of the kind of art that philosophers approved of "insofar as the theories are "defined against the historically familiar art of the philosopher's own time."  So he concludes that, up until his own work, "philosophy of art has really only been art criticism."  Again, true enough, except that it is not clear from this that the way philosophers proceeded in earlier times was such a bad thing or that what they did was exactly the same in practice as art criticism.  Moreover, it is hard to take Danto seriously on this point while at the same time seeing a picture on the opposite page in Freeland's book in which Danto is seen contemplating Andy Warhol's stacked Brillo Boxes.  Isn't Danto himself creating a theory that is very much a product of 1964, the year in which he first encountered Brillo Boxes?  How could Danto have succeeded in climbing out of history where all previous philosophers have failed?  It is true that, as Freeland puts it, Danto tried to avoid endorsing a particular type of art and that he favored pluralism in art. But his theory is no less "defined against the historically familiar art of the philosopher's own time" and probably no less a kind of sophisticated art criticism, one that endorses pluralism in art, for example.  Freeland notes that Danto's theory "explains why the artworld now accepts such diverse entries as bloodfests, dead sharks, and plastic surgery as art."  Perhaps it partially explains these things, although the list is hardly a representation of pluralism, but rather a representation of disturbing art, art that hearkens back to the kind of thing we find in Medea or in the wisdom of Silenus mentioned by Nietzsche as connected with the Dionysian.  The sublime, disturbing, aspect of art is hardly explained by reference to art as embodied meaning or some theory that art is embodied meaning.  Moreover, Danto's theory results in this absurdity: if it were universally accepted there would be no more theories of art (his is the last one) and hence nothing more to back up art or to play in tandem with art in the magnificent ways we have seen in this short history.  Danto at one time talked about the end of art, and then later said that this did not mean that artists would not longer have anything to do, since this is just the end of art history.  But on his own view, the end of art history would have to be the end of art period since there would be no more theories to allow us to see art as art. (Just saying that the artist's own interpretation of the artwork is theory enough is not enough and is not even consistent with Danto's overall theory.)  

Moreover, it is not enough to prove that "almost anything goes," as Freeland puts it, or that anything can be art if a theory backs it up.  Oddly, this quick history in which a dialectic of philosophy and art produced both amazing philosophy and amazing art, always deepening the issue of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the sublime in the mundane, ends in a deadening thud (masked as glorious  freedom from the constraints of theory).  Freeland thinks that the lesson of Danto is that the earlier views of philosophers were "narrow and restricted" since they defined art in terms of "Beauty, Form, etc." as if there isn't something rather narrow in defining art in terms of embodied meaning too.  What narrows, of course, is not the use of these concepts to understand art but how one uses them.  For example, if one sees "genius" narrowly as applicable only to men then the word and concept can no longer be useful in a feminist society (and yet, oddly, Kant never mentions that this term is limited to men!)  

One can agree with Freeland that "Art doesn't have to be a play, a painting, garden, temple, cathedral, or opera.  It doesn't have to be beautiful or moral.  It doesn't have to manifest personal genius or devotion to a god through luminosity, geometry, and allegory."  Sure, it doesn't have to be any of these things, but surely that is not  interesting.  The point is that art was all of these things, and that all of these things were art, and in wondrous ways, and that, as we have seen, this involves a constant historical transformation of a background set of ideas, really protean in nature, where "personal genius" and "devotion to a god through luminosity, geometry, and allegory" are really different ways of saying something somewhat similar, but where "communicating thoughts through a physical medium" is a serious come-down (as if there really was no difference between art and advertising, as if there were no sublime dimension to art at all).  Freeland's concluding complaint that Danto fails to say how an artwork communicates meaning and fails to stress the very evaluation of art he, Danto, engages in as an art critic in another venue (as writer for The Nation) seems trivial by comparison.