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.  

Paragraphs 34 and 35 in Kant's Critique of Judgment

Paragraph 34 stresses that there can be no objective principles of taste.  Such a principle would make it possible to deduce by syllogism that something is beautiful.  But Kant believes that to experience beauty I must immediately feel pleasure in the presentation of the object, and not be persuaded of its beauty by proof.  Critics, as Hume says, may reason better than cooks, but they still cannot expect to establish the value of a work of art by way of proof.  They can only expect their judgments to be based on reflection on the proper state of their immediate pleasure or pain in response to the object.  Kant stresses that all precepts and rules need to be rejected here.  (This may go against Hume, who does allow empirically grounded principles of taste.)   

To be sure, reasoning can help critics perfect and extend their judgments of taste.  But rather than finding a universal formula, critics, when acting according to their proper role, investigate the cognitive faculties and their practice of making judgments, as well as explaining, by examples, the form of purposiveness which "constitutes the beauty of the object." (The latter seems to be what we normally expect of critics, although to see the objects of criticism as simply examples seems to put it the wrong way around.)  

The critique of taste, then, is "the art or science of reducing to rules the reciprocal relation between the understanding and the imagination in the given representation." This is a phenomenological point, a point about the structure of our experience of an aesthetic object.   The representation in our mind, say of the Virginia State House by Thomas Jefferson, will exhibit in it this relation between understanding and imagination.  The reference to "reducing to rules" is puzzling since we are supposed to reject objective principles, but see below.  The reciprocity of the relation is also explained below. 

The critique of taste will explain the accordance or discordance between the two faculties, imagination and understanding.  It is an art if it only shows by examples; whereas it is a science if it derives this possibility from the nature of these faculties.  Here, by “science,” Kant means the sort of thing he is doing is doing here.   He calls this "Transcendental Critique."  The Transcendental Critique derives the subjective principle of taste as an a priori principle.  This is all Kant means by "reducing to rules." As art, the critique of taste applies physiological (psychological) rules concerning how taste actually proceeds.  He also thinks it "criticizes the products of beautiful art..." although it is not clear how it could do this.

 

#35 The principle of taste is the subjective principle of judgment in general.  

The subjective condition of all judgments is the faculty of judgment itself.  For beauty to exist there has to be an accord of the two representative powers: the imagination and the understanding.  And “because no concept of the object lies here at the basis of the judgment, it can only consist in the subsumption of the imagination itself…under the conditions that the understanding requires to pass from intuition to concepts.”  Moreover, “because the freedom of the imagination consists in the fact that it schematizes without any concept, the judgment of taste must rest on a mere sensation of the reciprocal activity of the imagination in its freedom and the understanding with its conformity to law.”  This is hard to parse out.  The judgment of taste rests on a feeling in which we judge the object by the purposiveness of its representation in respect of the furtherance of the cognitive faculty in its free play.  In taste there is subsumption not of intuitions under concepts but of the faculty of intuitions, that is, the imagination, under the faculty of concepts, the understanding.  This is freedom harmonizing with conformity to law. To discover the ground of a deduction of taste we need to consider the form of this kind of judgment.

This all goes along with the tenor of the rest of the Critique of Judgment.  Taste is a yin-yang thing:  it involves both the imagination and the understanding, both freedom and law in a reciprocal relationship.  Kant elsewhere talks about the need for academic training for the genius artist, a similar kind of balance.   

Kant says "the judgment of taste is not determinable by concepts" for "it is based only on the subjective formal condition of a judgment in general."  He further says "the subjective condition of all judgments is the faculty of judgment itself."   

It is puzzling exactly what is going on here.  I think that Kant is stressing that in judgments of taste there is a movement from intuition to concepts as we also find in objective reasoning, and yet the concepts at the end of the line are indeterminate and hence not true concepts of the understanding.  Later, these will be referred to as aesthetic ideas.  

What however should we make of the following sentence: "It [the judgment of taste] must therefore rest on a feeling, which makes us judge the object by the purposiveness of the representation (by which an object is given) in respect of the furtherance of the cognitive faculty in its free play."  Kant seems to be saying that the judgment of taste rests on some fusion of the purposiveness in the object with the sense that free play furthers our cognitive powers, a fusion of something seemingly objective and something else seemingly subjective.   It is also hard to know what it means to subsume the faculty of intuitions under the faculty of concepts so that the first "in its freedom harmonizes with the latter in its conformity to law" and how this relates to appropriate appreciation of an art object. 

Well, as you can see, I have not fully understood these two chapters, but this is the best I can do for now.

Interested in learning more?  See my book:  Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.  Broadview Press, 2012.  Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 32 pages including the table of contents.  You can also buy it from Broadview. 

JAAC Special Issue on the seventy-fifth anniversary part 1

I had originally titled this blog "Aesthetics Today" with the idea that I would make comments on up-to-date material, and in reality it became a place for me to try out any ideas I had in aesthetics.  But today I want to comment on something quite up to date -- the special issue of the The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism titled "Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Issue."  There will be nothing terribly organized about these comments and I will not try to summarize the claims made by the various authors since these are readily available in the abstracts they have provided.  I will begin by saying that this issue is well worth reading.   I will proceed article by article. 

Kathleen Marie Higgins writes in "Global Aesthetics -What Can We Do?" on something very dear to me -  the idea that aesthetics should not just be limited to Western aesthetics but should include in a systematic way aesthetic theories from throughout the world.  Last year I taught a Philosophy of Art class for the first time with this emphasis.  Higgins had already been an influence on me by way of a textbook she put together several years ago called Perspectives on Aesthetics.  It was partly an interest in global aesthetics that led me to think more and more in the late 80s and early 90s about everyday aesthetics.  For instance, I early wrote a paper on gardens as art which was in response to a paper by Mara Miller (who later wrote an important book on gardens as art), and Miller is also a specialist in Japanese Aesthetics.  Yuriko Saito's work has also long had a very strong influence on my own not only in her interest in Japanese aesthetics and everyday aesthetics but also in her work on the aesthetic of the natural environment.  In my World Aesthetics class I also incorporated many articles on various aesthetic traditions form the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.  I will close with one quote from Higgins:  "We might take our expanded horizons as points of departure for new theories that relate to similarities and differences....If 'aesthetics' is interpreted as being global in scope, new theoretical discussions are likely to proliferate..."  (346)  Global Aesthetics, as described so well by Higgins, can only enhance aesthetics generally speaking.  Ultimately aesthetics should be global, and we are right now making baby steps in that direction.

Paul Guyer "Seven-Five Years of Kant....and Counting"

Guyer's work in aesthetics, especially on Kant, is very high quality.  I have been reading his history of modern aesthetics which has been a rich source for me of instruction and insight.  In this work Guyer explores the history of Kant scholarship within the JAAC.  Guyer, I believe rightly, places considerable emphasis on Kant's notion of "aesthetic ideas."  In this regard, it is interesting to think that there is a metaphysical dimension to Kant's analysis connected with Kant's thought that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good because, as Guyer puts it, "of analogies between the experience of beauty and moral experience, above all the analogy between freedom of the imagination and freedom of the will." (360)  I find something intriguing about this.  Perhaps there is a deep tie between the two in terms of the notion of freedom:  it seems that when we are truly creative in art, or feel fully engaged in the experience of art, or of nature, we experience ourselves as free.  I do not quite understand the relationship between this freedom and moral duty, but I suspect that behaving morally is a matter of treating one's life as an other-centered art, the "art of living" as Liu Yuedi puts it.  

I am not happy however with Guyer's second point, which basically advocates an idea of Kant's that the naturally beautiful provides a  sign that nature "has our own interests at heart."  This, it seems to me, is precisely the kind of metaphysics Kant tried to overcome in the Critique of Pure Reason.  Whereas Guyer thinks that "perhaps in fact...it is...natural for us to make such reflections" i.e. reflections that there is a God-like being who has our best interests at heart, I think that we need to avoid this illusion (as Freud rightly called it).  Nature does not care about us.  There is no evidence that it cares about anything.  At best the only thing we can say is that we cannot avoid thinking of the world as possibly guided by goodness and that this may somehow be an overlay on our feelings of freedom associated with creative activity and in the art of living.  Only the later can provide any grounds for self-improvement.

Guyer's overall thesis, however, is well taken: as he concludes the paper:  "Kant's aesthetic theory ...combines logical and linguistic analysis, psychology and phenomenology, and metaphysics in both the older and the newer sense."  I would only argue that the metaphysics in the older sense problematic.  However, there is great value in Kant's metaphysics in the newer sense.      

Kant's Ideal of Beauty as a key to the Critique of Judgment

For me, section 17 "Of the Ideal of Beauty," has always been one of the most difficult passages in the Critique of Judgment. (I am using the J. H. Barnard translation, Hafner Press, 1951).  But I think I have found the key to its understanding.  My current take on it is that it contains important intimations of what will happen later on in the book, particularly in the section on fine art, and can be seen as the entire CJ philosophy in a nutshell. I also see it as both taking into account cultural relativism but also seeking to transcend it by way of the notion of a rational ideal of beauty that goes beyond mere empirical considerations.  It is consonant with his egalitarianism, and it is noteworthy that what would normally be taken to be the paradigm of a western-dominated conception of universal beauty in the sculpture by Polycleitus, which itself was taken as "the canon" in Ancient Greece, is rejected, or at least downplayed, as nothing more than something at the level of the empirical.  One can also see here an anticipation of Hegel since the classical, as represented by Polycleitus, and humorously, perhaps, by Myron and his cow, is sublated in the last paragraph by the rational ideal which would be better represented by what Hegel would call "the Romantic," for example the self-portraits of Rembrandt, in which the inner spirit and inner beauty shows through, overcoming that which is merely average based on a mere mechanical combination of elements. When I discuss the concept of beauty in regards to humans the notion of inner beauty being more important than mere external beauty: this section exemplifies and elaborates on this perception, but also in terms of a creation of an ideal beauty within oneself, a kind of aesthetic self-molding that was elaborated later in Nietzsche, Foucault and Shusterman. Perhaps molding an inner beauty within oneself allows for perception of, and judgment of, inner beauty in others and in their representations.

The section (#17) begins by reiterating that there can be no objective rule of taste, and yet the sensation of satisfaction or dissatisfaction attending the object considered beautiful or ugly is universally communicable in the sense that we can expect, or even demand, that everyone experience it as being beautiful or as having the same attendant sensation.  Kant suggests that it is hardly even probable that this accord will exist in all times and ages, but it ought to exist based on "deep-lying grounds of agreement in judging of the forms under which the objects are given" these grounds being the way that the faculties of the imagination and the understanding respond to forms that are designed or look designed and thus have a certain purposefulness of look.  He then says that we consider "some products of taste as exemplary."  Those who have already read the book may note that the word "exemplary" is also found in the the section on fine art.  Also, as with the genius later, it turns out that taste cannot be acquired by imitating others, but must be "an original faculty" and that, although imitation of a model may show skill, taste requires ability to "judge the model itself."  Again this reminds us of how genius will later be described as creating its own rules.  So it looks like the man of taste is someone who is operating already like a person of genius.

Kant then says that "the highest model, the archetype of taste, is a mere idea which everyone must produce in himself and according to which he must judge every object of taste" etc.  He is saying that the archetype or ideal is something that we create within ourselves, and is not, for example, simply a set of works that has stood the test of time, or even some paradigmatic works set up by a particular culture.  The level of autonomy given to the good critic is stunning. Again, this reminds us of the ability of the genius to create his or her own rules or even his or her own world.  Creating the internal model of beauty is interestingly like creating the original work of fine art, one that exhibits what Kant calls "aesthetic ideas."  

Then it turns out that this idea is a rational concept which is correlated with an ideal which is itself a "representation of an individual being" seen as implied by the idea.  The ideal depends on the "indeterminate idea that reason has of a maximum," which is to say that it depends on the notion of "the best."  So we create within ourselves an ideal of beauty which is connected to the ideal notion of the best.  We are not in immediate possession of such an ideal, but we "strive to produce" this ideal of imagination in ourselves.  

Then the question is whether we arrive at such an ideal, a priori or empirically.  Kant's answer will be in a sense both.  But the a priori method is much more important.  Kant then surprisingly tells us that  the beauty "for which an ideal is to be sought" must be "fixed by a concept of objective purposiveness."   This is a paradox as it seems to go against everything he has previously told us about beauty. As a result, it is not aesthetic as ordinarily understood.  Kant had already undercut or modified his original idea of the aesthetic as pure by introducing the notion of appendant or dependent beauty.  Now he indicates that the ideal of beauty "cannot appertain to the object of a quite pure judgment of taste" as it is "in part intellectual."  There has to be an "idea of reason in accordance with definite concepts" that lies at its basis.  And this idea determines its internal possibility a priori.  Hence there cannot be an ideal of beautiful flowers, furniture or views, nor even an ideal of appendant beauty as in a beautiful house, tree or garden, since these are nearly as vague as free beauty.  It must be related to something the purpose of its existence is in itself, i.e. man, since man can "determine his purposes by reason" and this is why man is alone "susceptible of an ideal of beauty," given that "only humanity in his person, as an intelligence...is susceptible to the ideal of perfection."  

Why turn to man as the ideal of beauty?  Why introduce the notion of man as the ideal of beauty in this book or at this point?  The reason seems to be that only man is connected in this way to the supersensible realm, the realm of soul, God and immortality, the realm that needs to be supposed but which cannot be proved to exist.  Now, Kant continues, there are two "elements" in all of this, the one being the "normal idea" and "the rational idea" i.e. two ideals of beauty.  He spends a lot of time on the normal idea, but what he is really interested in is the rational idea to which he devotes a short paragraph at the end.  I take the normal idea to be a not-to-useful empirical approach to the ideal of beauty in man.  It is the approach that most people take to the ideal of beauty, and it is superficial.  The normal idea is "an individual intuition (of the imagination), representing the standard of our judgment (upon man) as a thing belonging to a particular animal species."  We know Kant would be disinclined to take it seriously since it treats humans as merely animal.  

The "rational idea" by contrast is one that focuses on the "purposes of humanity" which cannot be fully represented in sense but the phenomenal effect of which can be revealed.  The normal idea is taken from experience. By contrast, when we are talking about the purposes of humanity or its purposiveness, a purpose to which "only the whole race [of humanity] and not any isolated individual is adequate" the rational idea of this "lies merely in the idea of the judging subject."  It is this "aesthetical idea" which can be represented in a model, i.e. in a work of art, and presumably fine art, although he is not supposed to be talking about that in this part of his book.  I take an example of such a model to be a work of art that represents humanity by way of representing an individual human, say a self-portrait by Rembrandt.  

Where Kant may go wrong to some degree in this section, or perhaps he is merely being intentionally devious or playful, is in saying that we can make "how this comes to pass" intelligible through a "psychological explanation."  Let us assume that he is just being tricky, for the next paragraph, the penultimate in the section, is almost a joke.  In this paragraph he describes the imagination as reproducing "the image of the figure of the object" from a great number of objects of different kinds or even the same kind, and, by comparison, unconsciously letting "one image glide into another," thus coming up with an average which can serve as a common measure.  For example, we see a thousand full-grown men (as all adults have seen at least), compare their sizes, and judge a "normal size" by way of letting the images of these "fall on one another."  And so "this is the stature of a beautiful man," except that how can anyone take seriously the idea that a mere average size is what makes a man beautiful or have a beautiful stature?  The idea of equating the beautiful with the average is absurd.  Moreover, size has little to do with beauty anyway.  Kant, in short, is messing with us. The normal idea is purely mechanical.  It is as though we were dealing with the philosophy of Democritus, rather than Kant. The "various impressions of such figures on the organ of internal sense" through a "dynamical effect" produces the norm.  As he admits, the result can be arrived at mechanically "by adding together all thousand magnitudes, heights, breadths, and thicknesses" and dividing by the sum of one thousand.  The average man, based on all of this applied to all of his parts, is the "normal idea."  

But then it turns out it is the normal idea "in the country where the comparison is instituted."  The possibility of relativism in beauty raises its ugly head.  The "normal idea" on this culturally relative interpretation or variation implies that the "Negro," "European," and "Chinaman," would all have a different normal idea of beauty, something which may be true empirically, given that what we see as physically beautiful in a human is based on what we are used to looking at plus the fund of judgments of beauty we heard when growing up. 

Kant then seems to transition from this culturally relative moment to "the whole race" by which he means humanity itself, but still talking in terms of the normal idea.  The normal idea for the whole race "is the image for the whole race," and it is this idea "which nature takes as archetypes in her production of the same species" but which is not reached in any individual case.  (Why Kant should intrude the intentions or plans of nature here is not clear.)  But we know we have not gotten far here since Kant insists that this is "by no means the whole archetype of beauty in the race," and in fact is only a necessary condition for correctness in the mental presentation of humanity. The Doryphorus of Polycleitus and the Cow of Myron are examples he gives of such correct representations, but ones which do not reach beyond the normal idea.  Kant emphasizes this by ending the paragraph with reiterating that the presentation of this sort "is merely correct." Moreover, the representation does not please by its beauty, he says, but simply by not violating the condition of correctness necessary for beauty.  It is not, in short, sufficient for beauty.  So we need to move beyond that which is merely considered racially or ethnically correct, or based on the dynamic psychology of the imagination in its associative mode, to the rational (and perhaps to imagination in its productive or creative mode).

The last paragraph contains the key to the section.  As Kant previously observed, we can only expect the ideal in the human figure (as opposed to any other part of nature or in the human artifactual world which could be represented), and this ideal "consists in the expression of the moral" which provides the basis for the object itself pleasing universally, and not just as being merely correct.  What we are looking for is "the visible expression of moral ideas that rule men inwardly." Although we can get this from experience, "the idea of highest purposiveness" in man found in such virtues as "goodness of heart, purity, strength, peace" is only visible in the body or portrait through a "union of pure ideas of reason with great imaginative power."  This is precisely what we find later that the genius artist is able to accomplish with his or her aesthetic ideas.  This further step away from the empirical is required not only in the object itself but in the perceiving subject and, Kant insists, in the creator of the work, i.e. "still more in him who wishes to present it."  We know finally that this ideal of beauty is correct, or rather escapes the realm of the merely sensible, if the satisfaction is not infected by "sensible charm." 

Now this judgment is not "purely aesthetical" since we take a "great interest" in it because of its connection with morality.  But this is not a bad thing for Kant.  

The great irony of this section is that it is immediately followed by the moral of the entire Third Moment, the "explanation of the beautiful derived from this Third Moment," which is that "Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of purpose."  The irony is that this explanation has been transcended, bracketed, or perhaps even sublated, since the ideal of beauty does involve purposiveness, even more than dependent or appendent beauty, which was an odd enough exception earlier on.  Here there is a representation of purpose, although not a logical one. Rather, it is the way that the moral qualities, or inner spirit, shines through some great portraits, for example.  I find myself here thinking of Davide's Oath of the Horatii (1785) where the virtue of courage shines through action, but also, perhaps more appropriately, the portraits of Rembrandt, where an inner light of personal character, sometimes of tragic sadness, as well as deep humanity, seems to shine through.  As said, previously, this is similar to what Hegel refers to as "The Romantic."