Today marks the three hundredth anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s birth. In his honor, we’ve invited some of Kant’s best living readers to write about their favorite passages from Kant, and their enduring influence on our thought today.
—The Editors
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Deep in the thicket of the Critique of Judgment, having toiled through 48 forbidding sections on aesthetic experience, you come across a creature not seen before. “Aesthetic idea,” Kant calls it. Which is what?
By an aesthetic idea … I mean that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible.
Let’s take it slowly. You have an aesthetic idea, Kant says, when your imagination produces a representation (basically any manifestation of the mind) that “occasions much thinking.” The imagination unleashes thinking, much thinking: so far, so good. What happens next is where you enter unmapped terrain, for this thinking triggered by the imagination is rather strange: it is thinking “without it being possible for any determinate thought … to be adequate to it”—a thinking without thought. To make sure we don’t miss the point, Kant adds: it’s thinking that surpasses any single concept, thinking that overflows language.
Stay for a moment and savor the fact that this man, so maniacally devoted to conceptual rigor, opens the view to a field—an “immeasurable field,” he adds a page later—of a form of thinking uncorseted by concepts. This thinking that happens in aesthetic experience is of a kind that “no language … can make intelligible”—unintelligible thinking. Yet it is not nonsense; it is not madness or divine possession or Bacchic transport or any of the other things philosophers have called the experience of art. No, it is thinking. And take Kant at his word: thinking is active, continuous, present. Often it stiffens into thought, which is just thinking in the past. But not here.
Here the imagination is in the driver’s seat. It is productive. It is poetic, in the word’s ancient sense, which is why Kant says that poetry is the true home of aesthetic ideas. Poetry produces poetic thinking, thinking that eludes the grasp of concepts. It puts into words what cannot be made intelligible by words alone.
Now you pause and relish the reward of slogging through 49 sections: a vista of an immeasurable field of thinking out of the reach of the very philosophy that discovered it.
—Michel Chaouli
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We may presuppose evil as subjectively necessary in every human being, even the best. Now, since this propensity must itself be considered morally evil, hence not a natural predisposition but something that a human being can be held accountable for, and consequently must consist in maxims of the power of choice contrary to the law and yet, because of freedom, such maxims must be viewed as accidental, a circumstance that would not square with the universality of the evil at issue unless their supreme subjective ground were not in all cases somehow entwined with humanity itself and, as it were, rooted in it; so we can call this ground a natural propensity to evil, and, since it must nevertheless always come about through one’s own fault, we can further even call it a radical innate evil in human nature.
Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:32
Kant’s views here are taken by many philosophers to be an impossible attempt to have it both ways. Kant seems to be arguing that evil is necessarily attributed to each of us, apparently rooted in human nature. And yet at the same time he claims that evil is freely chosen: each of us is fully responsible for this unavoidable human predicament. But how is this possible? How could a condition “entwined with humanity itself” be something that “come[s] about through one’s own fault”?
Nonetheless I always found this passage to contain a powerful insight into the human condition. It is not only Kant who needs to have it both ways; we all do. The high ideals that we set for ourselves are indeed unattainable, and yet we betray our freedom if we do not own up to every particular failure of our agency. Not seeing that these ideals are unattainable, let alone thinking that one has attained them, is a form of moral arrogance or fanaticism that blinds us to the real obstacles for moral progress. Yet not seeing that our failures are imputable to us is a form of self-satisfaction that lets us rationalize our shortcomings as vicissitudes of human nature. It is certainly difficult to find a path here between arrogance and rationalization. Whether or not Kant succeeded in doing so, it is undeniably to his credit that he saw that such a path must be there.
—Sergio Tenenbaum
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Act One, Scene Five of Annie Baker’s play The Flick starts with a disagreement. When Sam, a longtime usher in the titular movie theater, proclaims, “Avatar! Avatar was a great movie made in the last ten years,” Avery, a younger and newer usher, is aghast. “Okay. Uh. If you think that,” he tells Sam, “I can’t even like continue to have this conversation. If you actually think that I need to like quit this job.” Avery is an extreme (“an aesthetic snob,” my students said). Yet his responses to Sam, to a possible community of taste and the risk of alienation, are continuous with what so many of us do every day. When I read The Flick for the first time, I’d stop at almost every page, exclaiming, “Arata, you must hear that; you must read it too!” Though everything else seemed to go well on their dates, my friend Samir stopped dating a woman because she (as she put it) “didn’t like black and white films.” Jonny Thakkar wrote in this magazine that “beautiful people make [him] want to talk.” (He added, “When we find someone beautiful, then, we are often also finding their sense of beauty beautiful.”) Beauty and art create conversations; they beget attraction to and alignment with others, different though they may be. But they can also, for the same reason, keep us apart, alienate us.
One thing I like about Kant is how he illuminates this central dimension of our lives. He calls the capacity for appreciating beauty and art “taste,” and describes it as “a faculty of making social judgments.” Taste “concerns the communication of our feeling of pleasure or displeasure to others.” I communicate my pleasure in The Flick to you because appreciating it (and any beauty) is done through “sensus communis,” which Kant identifies with taste. What is this sensus communis? It is “the idea of a communal sense, i.e., a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought.”
If Kant is right, our widespread aesthetic sociality and the risk of aesthetic alienation are not a happenstance—a result of the way we happened to organize our lives, the fact of the vast world of beauty or the shortness of our lives. They are already there every time each of us appreciates beauty, whether we are alone or together. To appreciate, for Kant, is already to speak to you as a “you” and as different from “me”; it requires that I acknowledge others as those who can either agree or disagree with me, as other members of the same potential community. And it is by experiencing beauty and art that we experience this fundamental connection between us and our necessary “separateness” (in Stanley Cavell’s coinage). Simone de Beauvoir calls it “the miracle of literature”: “that an other truth becomes mine without ceasing to be other. I renounce my own ‘I’ in favor of the speaker; and yet I remain myself.” No wonder, then, that Kant’s aesthetics influenced thinkers like de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, who explore the political and social aspects of human existence. No wonder it is still relevant for us today.
—Keren Gorodeisky
Today marks the three hundredth anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s birth. In his honor, we’ve invited some of Kant’s best living readers to write about their favorite passages from Kant, and their enduring influence on our thought today.
—The Editors
●
Deep in the thicket of the Critique of Judgment, having toiled through 48 forbidding sections on aesthetic experience, you come across a creature not seen before. “Aesthetic idea,” Kant calls it. Which is what?
Let’s take it slowly. You have an aesthetic idea, Kant says, when your imagination produces a representation (basically any manifestation of the mind) that “occasions much thinking.” The imagination unleashes thinking, much thinking: so far, so good. What happens next is where you enter unmapped terrain, for this thinking triggered by the imagination is rather strange: it is thinking “without it being possible for any determinate thought … to be adequate to it”—a thinking without thought. To make sure we don’t miss the point, Kant adds: it’s thinking that surpasses any single concept, thinking that overflows language.
Stay for a moment and savor the fact that this man, so maniacally devoted to conceptual rigor, opens the view to a field—an “immeasurable field,” he adds a page later—of a form of thinking uncorseted by concepts. This thinking that happens in aesthetic experience is of a kind that “no language … can make intelligible”—unintelligible thinking. Yet it is not nonsense; it is not madness or divine possession or Bacchic transport or any of the other things philosophers have called the experience of art. No, it is thinking. And take Kant at his word: thinking is active, continuous, present. Often it stiffens into thought, which is just thinking in the past. But not here.
Here the imagination is in the driver’s seat. It is productive. It is poetic, in the word’s ancient sense, which is why Kant says that poetry is the true home of aesthetic ideas. Poetry produces poetic thinking, thinking that eludes the grasp of concepts. It puts into words what cannot be made intelligible by words alone.
Now you pause and relish the reward of slogging through 49 sections: a vista of an immeasurable field of thinking out of the reach of the very philosophy that discovered it.
—Michel Chaouli
●
Kant’s views here are taken by many philosophers to be an impossible attempt to have it both ways. Kant seems to be arguing that evil is necessarily attributed to each of us, apparently rooted in human nature. And yet at the same time he claims that evil is freely chosen: each of us is fully responsible for this unavoidable human predicament. But how is this possible? How could a condition “entwined with humanity itself” be something that “come[s] about through one’s own fault”?
Nonetheless I always found this passage to contain a powerful insight into the human condition. It is not only Kant who needs to have it both ways; we all do. The high ideals that we set for ourselves are indeed unattainable, and yet we betray our freedom if we do not own up to every particular failure of our agency. Not seeing that these ideals are unattainable, let alone thinking that one has attained them, is a form of moral arrogance or fanaticism that blinds us to the real obstacles for moral progress. Yet not seeing that our failures are imputable to us is a form of self-satisfaction that lets us rationalize our shortcomings as vicissitudes of human nature. It is certainly difficult to find a path here between arrogance and rationalization. Whether or not Kant succeeded in doing so, it is undeniably to his credit that he saw that such a path must be there.
—Sergio Tenenbaum
●
Act One, Scene Five of Annie Baker’s play The Flick starts with a disagreement. When Sam, a longtime usher in the titular movie theater, proclaims, “Avatar! Avatar was a great movie made in the last ten years,” Avery, a younger and newer usher, is aghast. “Okay. Uh. If you think that,” he tells Sam, “I can’t even like continue to have this conversation. If you actually think that I need to like quit this job.” Avery is an extreme (“an aesthetic snob,” my students said). Yet his responses to Sam, to a possible community of taste and the risk of alienation, are continuous with what so many of us do every day. When I read The Flick for the first time, I’d stop at almost every page, exclaiming, “Arata, you must hear that; you must read it too!” Though everything else seemed to go well on their dates, my friend Samir stopped dating a woman because she (as she put it) “didn’t like black and white films.” Jonny Thakkar wrote in this magazine that “beautiful people make [him] want to talk.” (He added, “When we find someone beautiful, then, we are often also finding their sense of beauty beautiful.”) Beauty and art create conversations; they beget attraction to and alignment with others, different though they may be. But they can also, for the same reason, keep us apart, alienate us.
One thing I like about Kant is how he illuminates this central dimension of our lives. He calls the capacity for appreciating beauty and art “taste,” and describes it as “a faculty of making social judgments.” Taste “concerns the communication of our feeling of pleasure or displeasure to others.” I communicate my pleasure in The Flick to you because appreciating it (and any beauty) is done through “sensus communis,” which Kant identifies with taste. What is this sensus communis? It is “the idea of a communal sense, i.e., a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought.”
If Kant is right, our widespread aesthetic sociality and the risk of aesthetic alienation are not a happenstance—a result of the way we happened to organize our lives, the fact of the vast world of beauty or the shortness of our lives. They are already there every time each of us appreciates beauty, whether we are alone or together. To appreciate, for Kant, is already to speak to you as a “you” and as different from “me”; it requires that I acknowledge others as those who can either agree or disagree with me, as other members of the same potential community. And it is by experiencing beauty and art that we experience this fundamental connection between us and our necessary “separateness” (in Stanley Cavell’s coinage). Simone de Beauvoir calls it “the miracle of literature”: “that an other truth becomes mine without ceasing to be other. I renounce my own ‘I’ in favor of the speaker; and yet I remain myself.” No wonder, then, that Kant’s aesthetics influenced thinkers like de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, who explore the political and social aspects of human existence. No wonder it is still relevant for us today.
—Keren Gorodeisky
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.