The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno 9781472545893, 9781441186935

Table of contents :
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations of Primary Texts
Introduction: The Crisis of Art in Modernity
Chapter 1 Aporias of Aesthetic Pleasure in Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful”
I Interpreting the third Critique: A reconstructive or a structural approach?
II Against the reconstructive bias
III The phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure: Interpretive possibilities
IV Valences of aesthetic disinterestedness
V The problem of the universal voice
VI Sensus communis: Regulative or constitutive?
VII On the centrality of Kant’s “lesser question”
Chapter 2 The “Great Gulf ” of the Third Critique: Kant’s Ambivalence about the Role of Aesthetic Pleasure in Moral Life
I Kant’s aesthetics in the broader context of the third Critique
II The fact of reason in the second Critique
III The aporia of nature’s purposiveness in the third Critique
IV Can aesthetic pleasure bridge the “great gulf” between nature and freedom?
V Kant’s legacy in Schiller’s Letters, the “System-Program,” and beyond
Chapter 3 Kant Romanticized: Aesthetic Intuition as Redemption in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism
I The Kantian foundations of Schelling’s Romantic aesthetics
II Intellectual intuition in Kant and Fichte
III The Ichschrift: Early Schelling’s speculative critique of Kant
IV The aesthetics of Schelling’s System: Art as the “organ” of philosophy
V Anxieties of Romanticism
Chapter 4 Hegel contra Schlegel: On the Aporetic Epistemology of Romantic Irony
I Permanent parabasis: Schlegel’s call for a radicalized skepticism
II Schlegel’s epistemology of irony
III The origins of Schlegel’s theory of irony in Kant and Fichte
IV Recuperating Hegel’s metacritique of Schlegelian irony
V Irony and/as dialectics
VI Schlegel’s vision of a “new mythology”
Chapter 5 Art’s “After” and the Dialectical Possibilities of Irony in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics
I From the end of art to the “after of art”
II The synchronic and diachronic dimensions of Hegel’s aesthetics
III Hegel’s three-stage “Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art”
IV Stage one: Kantian aporias and the crisis of modernity
V Stage two: The quest for aesthetic unity in Schiller and Schelling
VI Stage three: The dynamics of irony in Schlegel, Novalis, and Solger
VII From Hegel to Kierkegaard: Toward a dialectics of objective humor
Chapter 6 The Idealist Legacy: Adorno’s Dialectical Retrieval of Aesthetic Agency in Aesthetic Theory
I Adorno between Kant and Hegel
II The “aporia of aesthetic objectivity” in Kant’s aesthetics
III Artwork as force-field: Adorno’s Kierkegaardian reading of Hegel
IV Erschütterung: Adorno’s negative dialectics of aesthetic experience
V Rethinking aesthetic praxis
Epilogue: Art as Force: From Critical Suspicion to Dialectical Immanence
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency

Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy presents cutting-edge scholarship in all the major areas of research and study. The wholly original arguments, perspectives, and research findings in titles in this series make it an important and stimulating resource for students and academics from a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Available in the series: Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy, edited by Owen Hulatt Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty, Rajiv Kaushik Art, Myth and Society in Hegel’s Aesthetics, David James The Challenge of Relativism, Patrick J. J. Phillips The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction, Jukka Mikkonen The Demands of Taste in Kant’s Aesthetics, Brent Kalar Descartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature, edited by Justin Skirry Dialectic of Romanticism, Peter Murphy and David Roberts Kant: The Art of Judgment in Aesthetic Education, Pradeep Dhillon Kant’s Aesthetic Theory, David Berger Kant’s Concept of Genius, Paul W. Bruno Kant’s Transcendental Arguments, Scott Stapleford Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory, Alison Assiter Metaphysics and the End of Philosophy, H.O. Mounce The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition, Tiziana Andina Popper’s Theory of Science, Carlos Garcia The Science, Politics, and Ontology of Life-Philosophy, edited by Scott M. Campbell and Paul W. Bruno Virtue Epistemology, Stephen Napier

The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno Ayon Maharaj

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Ayon Maharaj, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Ayon Maharaj has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-4084-5 epub: 978-1-4411-5203-9 ePDF: 978-1-4411-8693-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maharaj, Ayon. The dialectics of aesthetic agency: revaluating German aesthetics from Kant to Adorno/Ayon Maharaj. p. cm. – (Bloomsbury studies in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-4084-5 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4411-5203-9 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4411-8693-5 (ebook (pdf)) 1. Aesthetics, German–History. I. Title. BH221.G3M34 2013 111’.850943–dc23 2012028311

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Art leads beyond and yet not beyond. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (351)

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Contents Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations of Primary Texts Introduction: The Crisis of Art in Modernity 1

2

3

Aporias of Aesthetic Pleasure in Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” I Interpreting the third Critique: A reconstructive or a structural approach? II Against the reconstructive bias III The phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure: Interpretive possibilities IV Valences of aesthetic disinterestedness V The problem of the universal voice VI Sensus communis: Regulative or constitutive? VII On the centrality of Kant’s “lesser question” The “Great Gulf ” of the Third Critique: Kant’s Ambivalence about the Role of Aesthetic Pleasure in Moral Life I Kant’s aesthetics in the broader context of the third Critique II The fact of reason in the second Critique III The aporia of nature’s purposiveness in the third Critique IV Can aesthetic pleasure bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom? V Kant’s legacy in Schiller’s Letters, the “System-Program,” and beyond Kant Romanticized: Aesthetic Intuition as Redemption in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism I The Kantian foundations of Schelling’s Romantic aesthetics II Intellectual intuition in Kant and Fichte

x xi xiii 1 17 17 19 23 25 27 35 42

45 45 47 51 57 68

73 73 75

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Contents

III The Ichschrift: Early Schelling’s speculative critique of Kant IV The aesthetics of Schelling’s System: Art as the “organ” of philosophy V Anxieties of Romanticism 4

5

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Hegel contra Schlegel: On the Aporetic Epistemology of Romantic Irony I Permanent parabasis: Schlegel’s call for a radicalized skepticism II Schlegel’s epistemology of irony III The origins of Schlegel’s theory of irony in Kant and Fichte IV Recuperating Hegel’s metacritique of Schlegelian irony V Irony and/as dialectics VI Schlegel’s vision of a “new mythology” Art’s “After” and the Dialectical Possibilities of Irony in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics I From the end of art to the “after of art” II The synchronic and diachronic dimensions of Hegel’s aesthetics III Hegel’s three-stage “Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art” IV Stage one: Kantian aporias and the crisis of modernity V Stage two: The quest for aesthetic unity in Schiller and Schelling VI Stage three: The dynamics of irony in Schlegel, Novalis, and Solger VII From Hegel to Kierkegaard: Toward a dialectics of objective humor The Idealist Legacy: Adorno’s Dialectical Retrieval of Aesthetic Agency in Aesthetic Theory I Adorno between Kant and Hegel II The “aporia of aesthetic objectivity” in Kant’s aesthetics

78 82 89

93 93 96 99 103 109 111

115 115 117 121 123 128 132 139

143 143 145

Contents

III Artwork as force-field: Adorno’s Kierkegaardian reading of Hegel IV Erschütterung: Adorno’s negative dialectics of aesthetic experience V Rethinking aesthetic praxis Epilogue: Art as Force: From Critical Suspicion to Dialectical Immanence Notes Bibliography Index

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148 153 160

161 167 197 207

Preface This is something of a hybrid project. The book offers detailed analyses of the aesthetic thought of mostly Continental figures, so it can be fairly considered an intervention in Continental aesthetics and in the history of philosophy. However, I draw on secondary literature from analytic as well as Continental traditions and adopt a syncretic methodology that combines aspects of both traditions. My somewhat unusual approach is perhaps most evident in the first two chapters, which engage primarily analytic commentary on Kant in the service of establishing a broadly “Continental” argument about structural tensions in Kant’s third Critique. Indeed, one of the book’s guiding convictions is that the still firmly entrenched divide between analytic and Continental approaches to philosophy is an artificial and a pernicious one. The book’s broader polemical defense of aesthetic agency is informed by my training not only in philosophy but also in literary theory and modern poetry. In literary studies and other fields of art criticism, it has become fashionable to dismiss art’s aesthetic dimension and to pillage the philosophical canon for isolated aperçus that purportedly support a suspicious stance toward art. It seems to me that critics and theorists writing on art stand to learn a great deal from a more careful and patient study of the German aesthetic tradition in particular. Conversely, the field of contemporary philosophical aesthetics would be considerably enriched by more active dialogue not only between analytic and Continental philosophers but also between philosophers and non-philosophers working in a range of fields in the humanities. My hope is that this book will encourage such a healthy cross-fertilization among disciplines and philosophical approaches. Belur Math, West Bengal August 24, 2012

Acknowledgments This book grew out of the doctoral dissertation I submitted to the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. I am grateful to Fulbright-IIE for funding my research stay at the Institut für Philosophie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin from 2006 to 2007. My dissertation research at Berkeley was supported by a Chancellor’s Fellowship and a Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship. I revised my dissertation into a book as a new faculty member and monk-in-training at Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University in West Bengal, India. I wish to thank Swami Atmapriyananda, Vice Chancellor of Vivekananda University, for giving me the scope and the resources to pursue my book project and for convincing me through his own example that academic work can be integrated successfully into monastic life. I am very fortunate to have received a great deal of helpful input on earlier drafts of my work from distinguished scholars and peers. First of all, I would like to thank the three members of my dissertation committee. I owe an enormous debt to Charlie Altieri, my dissertation chair, for his invariably incisive and detailed feedback. It is a great privilege to have been able to work closely with Charlie for so many years. His work was an inspiration to me when I first encountered it as an undergraduate, and it continues to provoke and surprise. Dan Blanton was a wonderful interlocutor, challenging me to consider various sides of an issue and to anticipate important objections to my methodological approach and to my specific arguments. I am also grateful to Tony Cascardi for responding to my work so thoughtfully and carefully and for encouraging me to revise the dissertation into a book. In the spring of 2007, I presented earlier drafts of the first two chapters on Kant during a research colloquium held at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. A number of formidable Kant scholars attended this colloquium, including RolfPeter Horstmann, Dina Emundts, Paul Guyer, Hannah Ginsborg, and Michael Rosen, all of whom gave me extremely insightful comments and suggestions. In the spring of 2008, I presented a revised draft of Chapter 1 at an International Graduate Philosophy Conference on Kant’s third Critique at Johns Hopkins University, where I had thought-provoking discussions with Eckart Förster, Reinhard Brandt, and Rolf-Peter Horstmann.

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Acknowledgments

From 2007 to 2008, I led a biweekly UC Berkeley Townsend Center Working Group on the Frankfurt School that focused on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. I am very grateful to Lyn Hejinian, Jessie Hock, Alex Dubilet, and Jill Richards for memorably intense and fun discussions of Adorno’s text, which planted the seeds for the final chapter of this book. Matthew Seidel, Richard Terdiman, Andrei Apostol, and May Mergenthaler gave helpful feedback on individual chapters of my dissertation. My parents Raj and Illa Roy, my sister Millie and her husband Rhiju, and Alek Jeziorek tracked down texts I urgently needed that were not available in West Bengal. Chapter 4 derives largely from an article published under my pre-monastic name Ayon Roy: “Hegel contra Schlegel; Kierkegaard contra de Man,” PMLA 124.1 (January 2009), 107–26. The epigraphs used in this book are reprinted by permission from the following sources: Aesthetic Theory by Theodor Adorno, translated by Robert-Hullot Kentor, University of Minnesota Press © 1997, University of Minnesota; Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Philosophy and Art by William Desmond, State University of New York Press © 2003, State University of New York; Die Bedeutung von Kants Begründung der Ästhetik für die Philosophie der Kunst (Kant-Studien Ergänzungsheft, volume 77) by Walter Biemel, Walter de Gruyter © 1959; The New Aestheticism, edited by John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, Manchester University Press © 2003, University of Manchester. This book is for Thakur, Ma, and Swamiji—without whom nothing.

Abbreviations of Primary Texts Kant A/B Kritik der reinen Vernunft. KGS, vols. III–IV. CPJ Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. CPR Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. CPrR Critique of Practical Reason, in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 133–272. KdU Kritik der Urteilskraft. KGS, vol. V, 165–486. KGS Kants gesammelte Schriften, Herausgegeben von der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902–. KpV Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. KGS, vol. V, 1–164. Pro Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können. KGS, vol. IV, 253–464.

Schelling IPN Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, in Sämmtliche Werke, Band II: 1797–1798. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1857, 1–344. PB Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus, in Sämmtliche Werke, Band I: 1792–1797. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1856, 281–342. ST System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. StI System des transzendentalen Idealismus, in Sämmtliche Werke, Band III: 1799–1800. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1858, 327–634.

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Abbreviations of Primary Texts

VIP Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen, in Sämmtliche Werke, Band I: 1792–1797. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1856, 149–244.

Friedrich Schlegel KA II Friedrich Schlegel: Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, Band II: Charakteristiken und Kritiken I, ed. Hans Eichner. München: Schöningh, 1967. KA XII Friedrich Schlegel: Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, Band XII: Philosophische Vorlesungen 1800–1807, ed. Jean-Jacques Anstett. München: Schöningh, 1964. KA XVI Friedrich Schlegel: Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, Band XVI: Fragmente zur Poesie und Literatur I, ed. Hans Eichner. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1981. KA XVIII Friedrich Schlegel: Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, Band XVIII: Philosophische Lehrjahre 1796–1806, vol. I, ed. Ernst Behler. München: Schöningh, 1963. KA XIX Friedrich Schlegel: Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, Band XIX: Philosophische Lehrjahre 1796–1806, vol. II, ed. Ernst Behler. München: Schöningh, 1963. OI “On Incomprehensibility,” in Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, 257–71. PF Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Hegel ÄS “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus.” HW, vol. I, 234–6. BS Berliner Schriften: 1818–1831. HW, vol. XI. DB The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf. Albany: SUNY Press, 1977.

Abbreviations of Primary Texts

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DS Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie. HW, vol. II, 9–138. FK Faith and Knowledge, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf. Albany: SUNY Press, 1977. GPR Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. HW, vol. VII. GW Glauben und Wissen. HW, vol. II, 287–433. HW Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Werke, 20 vols., ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970–1. LA I–II Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vols. I–II. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. LHP I–III Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vols. I–III, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances Simson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. PG Phänomenologie des Geistes. HW, vol. III. PR Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. PS Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. VÄ I–III Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. HW, vols. XIII–XV. VGP I–III Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. HW, vols. XVIII–XX. VGPb 1825–6 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Teil 4: Philosophie des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit, vol. IX, ed. Pierre Garniron and Walter Jaeschke. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1986.

Adorno AT Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ÄT Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992. KC Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert HullotKentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. KK Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979.

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Introduction: The Crisis of Art in Modernity

Art raises its head where religions decline. It takes over a host of feelings and moods produced by religion, clasps them to its heart, and then itself becomes deeper, more soulful, so that it is able to communicate exaltation and e­ nthusiasm which it could not do before . . . Growing enlightenment has shaken the dogmas of religion and inspired a thorough mistrust of it; ­therefore feeling, forced out of the religious sphere by the Enlightenment, throws itself into art . . . Friedrich Nietzsche (1878)1 Too much has been asked of art, with the result that too little, or almost ­nothing, is now being asked of art. William Desmond (2003)2 What are the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity? The Enlightenment’s “disenchantment of the world,” its critical demolition of traditional appeals to religious and metaphysical verities, proved inseparable from the privileging of an instrumental rationality modeled on the mathematical and natural sciences that adjudicates questions of value in terms of quantifiability and usefulness.3 While the Enlightenment’s radical insistence on empirical method and the primacy of reason ushered in a new era of critical inquiry and paved the way for breathtaking advances in science and technology, it also helped trigger a full-blown cultural crisis involving the vexed question of the role and value of art in a disenchanted age. A variety of thinkers, ranging from Friedrich Schiller and G. W. F. Hegel to Max Weber, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, argued that the third-person  analytic stance fostered by Enlightenment scientific rationality so narrowed the scope of knowledge and value that it seemed unable—or unwilling—to honor first-person values and commitments that resisted empirical verification, such as religious beliefs and aesthetic and moral convictions.4 As early as 1800, F. W. J. Schelling lodged a protest against the

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materialist excesses of a modern age that “locates the highest efforts of the human spirit in economic discoveries.”5 Shortly thereafter, Hegel sought to demonstrate that the Enlightenment had grown so enamored with its “negative method” that it ended up collapsing into a dogmatic “system” in its own right.6 Over a century later, Adorno and Horkheimer took Hegel’s lead in interrogating the positivist dogma lurking at the basis of Enlightenment instrumental rationality. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectical perspective, the Enlightenment falls prey to the self-contradiction that its very critical stance toward myth and superstition smuggles in a crude positivist “mythology of what is the case” that “cuts away the incommensurable”7 and spuriously equates “intelligence” with “hostility to spirit” (Geistfeindschaft).8 In short, the increasing dominance of scientific rationality in postEnlightenment culture has seemed to many to come at the cost of neglecting or impoverishing those affective and experiential dimensions of our lives that lie beyond the scope of empirical or conceptual paradigms. No wonder so many German thinkers and artists have felt compelled to articulate this modern crisis in overtly spiritual terms, since the supple term “Geist” has lent itself to being mobilized not only as a robustly metaphysical category—as it was by Schelling and Hegel—but more often as a negative placeholder for all those subjective forms of value, knowledge, and experience that Enlightenment rationality tends to marginalize or deny. In the wake of the Enlightenment, art gained sudden importance as a potentially secular means of filling this spiritual void. In a provocative epigram from 1878 (the first of this introduction’s epigraphs), Nietzsche observed that “feeling, forced out of the religious sphere by the Enlightenment, throws itself into art.” This is no doubt a tacit exercise in self-critique, a way of historicizing— and thereby distancing himself from—the Romantic aesthetics of his earlier Birth of Tragedy (1871), which conceived aesthetic experience as nothing less than a form of “metaphysical solace” capable of redeeming man of his empirical ­poverty and tragic finitude.9 In Nietzsche’s case, however, self-critique almost invariably doubled as trenchant cultural diagnosis. Nietzsche was one of the first to recognize that many post-Enlightenment thinkers and artists would become increasingly preoccupied with articulating and defending what I call “aesthetic agency,” art’s capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that could challenge the primacy of Enlightenment norms of rationality.10 Nietzsche proved even cannier, though, in his recognition that such defenses of aesthetic agency

Introduction: The Crisis of Art in Modernity

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would tend to conceive the experience of art as a surrogate for religious feeling and consolation.11 Indeed, I would suggest that Nietzsche’s epigram looked—at a stroke— both backward and forward in history, deftly isolating the latent metaphysicoreligious impulse at the core of early-nineteenth-century Romanticism as well as twentieth-century modernism. In the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), a foundational text of early German Romanticism, Schelling invoked tellingly religious language in his effusive paeans to the “wonder of art” as the “one and only eternal revelation,” a “feeling of an infinite satisfaction” in which “all ­contradictions are dissolved and all riddles are answered.”12 Arthur Schopenhauer soon followed suit in The World as Will and Representation (1819), where he conceives the experience of art as a momentary source of redemption. In the “blessedness” of aesthetic experience, Schopenhauer writes, “we celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.”13 Twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, for all its strident opposition to Romanticism, nonetheless often shared the Romantic tendency to ascribe a redemptive role to art. Many modernist painters, writers, and musicians were convinced of art’s indispensable role in combating the excesses of a capitalist culture so enamored with scientific and technological advancement that it seemed to leave little room for more spiritual needs and satisfactions. Yet, the modernists also remained plagued by lingering doubts that perhaps they were asking too much of art, burdening art with a quasi-theological role it could not fulfill. Wassily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1912) gave exemplary expression to aesthetic modernism’s most elemental hopes and fears: Only just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim. The nightmare of materialism, which turned life into an evil, senseless game, is not yet passed; it still darkens the awakening soul. Only a feeble light glimmers, a tiny point in an immense circle of darkness. This light is but a presentiment; and the mind, seeing it, trembles in doubt over whether the light is a dream and the surrounding darkness indeed reality.14

If Kandinsky believed that the “feeble light” of art could awaken us from the “nightmare of materialism,” he remained haunted by anxieties about the very possibility of an aesthetic redemption of modernity.15 Kandinsky’s appeal to art as “one of the mightiest agents” of “spiritual life” was echoed repeatedly by other modernists.16 Kasimir Malevich soon went on to indulge in consciously

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extravagant speculations about art’s non-objective “fourth dimension,” while Piet Mondrian declared: “Art – although an end in itself, like religion – is the means through which we can know the universal.”17 Yet, such exaltation was never far from despair: modernism, we might say, hovered precariously between desperate faith and utter disenchantment. The modernist poet Wallace Stevens, for instance, wrote: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”18 However, Stevens also felt compelled to voice the dark obverse of this sentiment: “Poetry is a form of melancholia.”19 Since the 1960s, however, theorists and artists of various persuasions have attacked the underlying metaphysics and ideology of modernist aesthetics. Thinkers in the Western Marxist tradition argue that modernism’s inflated claims about aesthetic agency prove to be complicit with capitalist ideology: the ascription of a full-blown redemptive role to art serves as a convenient means of acquiescing to a social order based on rampant exploitation and dehumanization. Theorists influenced by poststructuralist and postmodern thinking target the nostalgic ontotheological underpinnings of modernist claims about the spiritual powers of art. The second half of the twentieth century also witnessed the rise of postmodern art, which consciously rejected modernism’s apparently metaphysical and spiritual pretensions as well as its elitism and selfseriousness. Leveling the supposedly sacrosanct distinction between art and non-art, postmodern artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol favored an irreverent aesthetics of bathos and ironic playfulness.20 These theoretical and artistic trends of the past half-century have contributed to a prevailing climate of suspicion in contemporary discourse on the arts. Pronouncements of the “end” or “death” of art are becoming increasingly frequent and shrill.21 Academic study of the arts, meanwhile, is now dominated by a fashionable “cultural studies” orientation that rejects traditional claims about aesthetic value and refuses to grant artworks any privileged status over against other cultural phenomena.22 Critics and theorists have tended to dismiss aesthetic agency in favor of purportedly less ideologically and metaphysically laden approaches to art. In such a suspicious climate, many thinkers have sought to rearticulate art’s cultural role in modernity on the basis of what might be called art’s criticoconceptual agency, its capacity to reflect on and critique prevailing sociocultural and philosophical ideologies as well as its own underlying presuppositions. Several decades ago, at roughly the same time that the aesthetician Arthur Danto

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declared that art had “finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself,”23 the poststructuralist theorists Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe introduced the notion of an “eidaesthetics,” the inauguration of art’s “theoretical project” in modernity.24 The notion of art’s transformation into an essentially theoretical or philosophical enterprise has been reaffirmed in various ways by a host of more recent theorists. Marxist theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, and C. Daniel Blanton reject the “ideology” of aesthetic autonomy but reclaim art as an incipiently political discourse capable  of interrogating socioeconomic and power structures.25 Meanwhile, postmodern thinkers like Gianni Vattimo, Simon Critchley, and Giorgio Agamben argue that avant-garde art—in its very repudiation of the possibility of aesthetic redemption—affords valuable philosophical insight into our inescapably nihilistic predicament.26 However, in their eagerness to reconceive art as a theoretico-conceptual enterprise, these thinkers seem to me to concede too much to Enlightenment norms of rationality. If they deny aesthetic agency in order to make room for art’s continued cultural relevance, they nonetheless bind art so closely to the Enlightenment’s third-person scientific ideals that they are left with a rather thin account of what art can accomplish. Art tends to be reduced to a vehicle for communicating truths about underlying conditions and realities—be they socioeconomic, linguistic, or ontological—that could just as easily be disclosed by a variety of other media and disciplines. William Desmond aptly observes that in this contemporary climate of suspicion, “too little, or almost nothing, is now being asked of art.”27 Those celebrating art’s critico-conceptual agency have tended to foreclose prematurely the possibility that art’s most important cultural role in postEnlightenment modernity is to make available and vital those experiential and imaginative dimensions of our lives that lie beyond the purview of scientific or conceptual discourses. To begin to explore this possibility, we should note that these suspicious thinkers tend to align aesthetic agency with a purportedly modernist ideology of full-blown aesthetic autonomy or redemption. But perhaps it need not be an either/or between a patently extravagant metaphysics of aesthetic agency and a disenchanted suspicious stance that dismisses aesthetic agency tout court in favor of art’s critico-conceptual agency. Perhaps this pervasive binary thinking in recent aesthetic discourse is itself symptomatic of a hegemonic scientific rationality that is virtuosic at parsing and dissecting but significantly clumsier at detecting synthetic wholes and dynamic processes.

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The tendency among contemporary theorists to reduce the dynamics of aesthetic agency to a metaphysics of autonomy or redemption, I am convinced, can be traced to a severely impoverished understanding of the rich philosophical discourse on art since Kant.28 It is hardly a coincidence that theorists in a variety of camps have drawn on a very narrow range of topoi in the German aesthetic tradition from Kant to Adorno. Since these theorists tend to have certain a priori assumptions about art, they strategically pick out isolated doctrines from the philosophical tradition in support of these a priori assumptions. In particular, recent theorists have often appealed to two basic aspects of the German aesthetic tradition in order to articulate and justify art’s criticoconceptual agency: Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of Romantic irony and Hegel’s so-called “end of art” thesis. Schlegel’s conception of irony as a principle of disruption and skepticism is widely assumed to have anticipated recent theories of antifoundationalism and the postmodern repudiation of inflated claims about art.29 Meanwhile, for many contemporary theorists, Hegel’s notorious declaration that art in its highest vocation is “a thing of the past” signaled at once the demise of traditional aesthetic values and the inauguration of a disenchanted hermeneutics of suspicion that subordinates sensuous particularity to conceptual thinking.30 However, the purportedly Hegelian theme of the “end of art” tends to be discussed in isolation from Hegel’s broader philosophical system, while Schlegel’s theory of irony is rarely situated within the complex post-Kantian landscape to which it belongs. This piecemeal appropriation of the German aesthetic tradition has resulted in drastic simplifications and sometimes even outright falsifications. If we give a full hearing to the German aesthetic tradition since Kant, we might be surprised by the richness and sophistication of the various stances toward aesthetic agency that emerge. This book argues that key figures in this tradition—namely, Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno—not only anticipated modernist claims about art’s spiritual powers as well as recent suspicious approaches to art but also developed the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of aesthetic agency that does not rely on untenable metaphysical assumptions.31 From a dialectical perspective, art cannot quite redeem who we are in our empirical contingency, but it can nonetheless play an indispensable role in reminding us of who we might be. It will take six dense chapters to substantiate these claims. At the level of methodology, the book aspires to blend careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian’s attention to the broader cultural resonance of philosophical arguments. Accordingly, the book has two interrelated aims—the first exegetical

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and the second polemical. Although most of the figures considered in this book (with the possible exception of Schelling) have been widely discussed, I will focus on aspects of their aesthetic thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in both Anglo-American and German scholarship. Hence, each chapter can be read profitably as a stand-alone intervention in a specialized field of German aesthetics. At the same time, I seek to balance close exegesis with a more synthetic interpretive perspective that conceives the aesthetic standpoints of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno as integral conceptual moments in a collective effort to elaborate the role of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. My polemical ambition is to revive the all but forgotten discourse of aesthetic agency by laying the conceptual groundwork for a dialectical approach to art that avoids the familiar extremes of aesthetic theology and knee-jerk dismissal of art’s aesthetic dimension. My philosophical narrative begins with Kant, whose Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) sought to address the problem of a “great gulf ” between the sensible realm of causal necessity and the supersensible realm of ethical freedom.32 As Schiller and Hegel were the first to recognize, although this “gulf ” originated in a lacuna in Kant’s critical system, it signaled nothing less than the fundamental crisis of modernity. With the growing dominance of instrumental rationality and the waning of religious authority, modernity became the site of an ever-widening rift between the newly ascendant third-person standpoint of the empirical sciences and increasingly precarious first-person convictions and values that were suddenly deprived of religious sanction. Kant’s third Critique inaugurated discourse on aesthetic agency by exploring the possibility that aesthetic experience could play an important role in negotiating the diremptions plaguing modernity. However, as I will argue at length in the first two chapters, Kant encounters considerable difficulties in attempting to specify the precise nature of aesthetic experience and its role in moral life. In the “Analytic of the Beautiful” of the third Critique, Kant seeks to explain how a subjective feeling of aesthetic pleasure can nonetheless be universally valid—that is, carry the demand that everyone ought to feel the same pleasure in a given beautiful object. His fundamental strategy is to argue that aesthetic pleasure arises from a “free harmony” of the cognitive faculties of the imagination and understanding, which is a universal condition for cognition in general.33 But this raises an important question: how are we to determine that our feeling of aesthetic pleasure arises from the harmony of the faculties? Chapter 1

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examines Kant’s vexed efforts to answer this question in the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” The basic answer that emerges in the course of the “Analytic” is that some phenomenologically distinctive feature of aesthetic pleasure indicates its source in the harmony of the faculties. However, I will argue that in his attempt to elaborate this answer, Kant ends up endorsing a variety of conflicting conceptions of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure. Through a detailed analysis of the “Analytic,” the chapter isolates a series of subtle and complexly interwoven tensions plaguing Kant’s account of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure as well as his core doctrines of the universal voice and the sensus communis. I make a cumulative case that the various tensions in the “Analytic” point to Kant’s pervasive ambivalence about whether aesthetic pleasure provides phenomenological certainty of its source in the harmony of the faculties. Chapter 2 traces Kant’s ambivalence about the question of phenomenological certainty to systematic ambiguities in the introduction to the third Critique, where he makes an oblique and notoriously obscure argument for the role of aesthetic pleasure in moral life. He introduces the principle of nature’s purposiveness—the necessary assumption that nature is in some way amenable to our cognitive and ethical aims—as a means of negotiating the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom and then claims that aesthetic pleasure is in some way intimately linked to the principle of nature’s purposiveness. However, I argue that Kant’s palpable uncertainty about the precise epistemic status of the principle of nature’s purposiveness leaves unresolved the question of whether the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom can indeed be bridged. This lands Kant in an aporetic situation: he remains torn between inflationary and deflationary conceptions of the role of aesthetic pleasure in moral life. Kant’s central move is to suggest that our affective awareness of the harmony of the faculties in aesthetic pleasure somehow subjectively evokes or hints at nature’s purposiveness. He also repeatedly emphasizes that nothing short of fullblown certainty of nature’s purposiveness would allow us to bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom. Building on the results of Chapter 1, I argue that everything thus hinges on the question of whether aesthetic pleasure provides certainty of its universal validity. On the one hand, if aesthetic pleasure provides phenomenological certainty of its source in the harmony of the faculties, then we seem to have the basis for a proto-Romantic defense of aesthetic agency: aesthetic experience helps resolve the diremptions of modernity by assuring us of a supersensible unity of nature and freedom that lies beyond the scope of theoretical cognition. On the other hand, if aesthetic pleasure fails to provide certainty of the harmony of the faculties, then the “great gulf ” between nature

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and freedom remains unbridged and we have the basis for more skeptical approaches to art that deny or downplay the possibilities of aesthetic agency. This book’s guiding conviction is that it is precisely the tensions and uncertainties in Kant’s third Critique that prove to be so generative and fruitful for subsequent aesthetic speculation, for they signal fundamental dilemmas concerning aesthetic agency and art’s role in moral life that continue to haunt contemporary thinkers. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that the tensions plaguing the third Critique escalate into a full-blown crisis in the aesthetic speculations of Schelling and Schlegel, who embody the conceptual extremes of early German Romanticism. At the same time that Schelling develops a Romantic metaphysics of aesthetic agency that ascribes an outright redemptive role to art, Schlegel proposes an aesthetics of irony that locates the power of art in its capacity to revel in the vertigo of abyssal skepticism and to exercise radical suspicion toward aesthetic or metaphysical appeals to redemption. Recent commentators have tended to dismiss the aesthetics of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism as an extravagant Romantic metaphysics that bears little resemblance to Kant’s comparatively sober aesthetic theory. Chapter  3 challenges this stereotyped view of Schelling by taking seriously Schelling’s claim that his philosophical project is nothing but “a presentation of Kantian philosophy through higher principles.”34 Schelling’s aesthetics of System, I argue, is a sustained—albeit largely implicit—attempt to grapple with and resolve the aporias of the third Critique without violating the spirit of Kant’s critical strictures. In his philosophical work prior to the System, Schelling proves acutely aware of the fundamental aporias of the third Critique—particularly, Kant’s ambivalence about whether the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom can be bridged. The young Schelling traces this ambivalence to the ambiguous epistemic status of the principle of nature’s purposiveness: Kant seems torn between a weaker conception of purposiveness that fails to bridge the gulf and a stronger conception that does bridge the gulf by somehow assuring us of nature’s objective purposiveness. Schelling’s strategy for resolving these Kantian aporias is to adopt the stronger conception of purposiveness latent in the third Critique, which hints at a special form of objective certainty of nature’s purposiveness that is irreducible to theoretical cognition. In the System, Schelling anchors this non-theoretical form of objective certainty in aesthetic experience by drawing on key aspects of the third Critique. His basic strategy is to exploit and amplify the inflationary conception of aesthetic pleasure aporetically present in the third Critique. For Schelling,

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aesthetic experience furnishes full-blown affective certainty of the harmony of the faculties and thereby indirectly assures us of the “highest unity of freedom and necessity” that lies at the basis of the harmony of the faculties.35 Accordingly, Schelling is able to honor Kant’s insistence that we can never cognize or know directly the “highest unity of freedom and necessity” while maintaining that we can nonetheless feel this supersensible unity indirectly through the harmony of the faculties. This complex Kantian subtext, I argue, motivates Schelling’s central Romantic thesis that the “wonder of art” resolves nothing less than “the greatest and most extreme contradiction in us.”36 Yet, certain incipiently self-critical moments in the System suggest that Schelling remains haunted by the possibility that his appeal to aesthetic experience as “the one and only eternal revelation” threatens to reinstate in another form the very theological dogmatism that art was meant to supplant.37 Schlegel, like his contemporary Schelling, acknowledges the tensions and contradictions plaguing Kant’s philosophy and stages his own thinking as a radicalization of Kantian principles. Breaking with the prevailing assumption that “Kant’s philosophy should be in agreement with itself,”38 Schlegel presents Kant as a tortured Enlightenment figure, a “half critic” torn between radical skepticism and nostalgic yearning for metaphysical unity and solace.39 Unlike Schelling, however, Schlegel negotiates the aporias of Kant’s philosophy by radicalizing the skeptical strain in Kant. Schlegel, I argue in Chapter 4, locates a radicalized skepticism not in philosophy but in “Romantic poetry,” which revels in the very impossibility of achieving any kind of metaphysical unity or redemption.40 If Schelling mobilizes the third Critique as the basis for a redemptive account of aesthetic experience, Schlegel in effect takes Kant in the opposite direction, rejecting aesthetic agency in favor of art’s conceptual agency: art outstrips philosophy in its relentless capacity for critical reflection, multiplying “reflection ad infinitum, as if in an endless series of mirrors.”41 For Schlegel, art’s governing principle is irony, an abyssal form of antifoundationalist skepticism that undermines appeals to metaphysical certitudes. Schlegel’s aesthetic ironist “hovers” deftly over the great abyss between enthusiasm and skepticism, reveling in its capacity not to bridge the abyss but to plumb its depths without reaching after metaphysical panaceas. Curiously, however, as Hegel was the first to recognize, Schlegel sometimes invokes the category of intellectual intuition—borrowed from J. G. Fichte’s foundationalist metaphysics—in his vexed efforts to articulate irony’s epistemic underpinnings. The ironist, Schlegel cryptically writes, achieves an “intuition of the Whole,”42 an “intellectual intuition of an eternal χα [chaos].”43 From Hegel’s perspective,

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the dogmatic Fichtean epistemology at the basis of irony signals a fatal selfcontradiction: the ironist surreptitiously exempts itself from its own ironic skepticism. While Schlegel’s theory of irony has generated seemingly endless commentary in recent critical discourse, Hegel’s critique of Schlegel has tended to be ignored or, at best, summarily dismissed as an ad hominem attack fueled more by personal animus than by any genuine insight into the structure of irony. Militating against this trend, I reconstruct from Hegel’s scattered remarks on Schlegel a searching metacritique of irony that pinpoints the metaphysical dogma at its basis. For Hegel, the ironist’s hovering between enthusiasm and skepticism depends tacitly on a ground-level metaphysical enthusiasm. No wonder Schlegel comes so close to Schelling in his paeans to the modern artist as the “priest” of a “new mythology” that could fill the metaphysical void left by the collapse of dogmatic religion.44 From a Hegelian vantage, both Schelling’s metaphysics of aesthetic agency and Schlegel’s aesthetics of irony end up apotheosizing art as a mythological surrogate for religion that could provide a sense of unity and purpose in a disenchanted age. Chapter 5 argues that one of the most significant and enduring contributions of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1823–9) is its prescient elaboration of the conceptual underpinnings of a fully modern form of art that repudiates any such faith in an aesthetic mythology. I suggest that the core of Hegel’s account of art’s role in modernity consists not in his purported thesis of the “end of art” —a phrase, in fact, that Hegel never uses—but in his richly bivalent notion of the “after of art” (das Nach der Kunst).45 On the one hand, the “after” of art signals art’s pastness—its inability to fulfill the “highest need of the spirit”—and anticipates religion and philosophy, the cultural forms that have outstripped art’s capacity to convey the Absolute. On the other hand, Hegel exploits the ambiguity of the genitive in the “after of art,” conceiving the “after” as a property of art itself rather than as a sphere that supersedes art: art’s “after” indicates art’s dialectical capacity to reflect on its own powers and limits and to “point beyond itself ” to epistemic possibilities lying beyond the aesthetic domain.46 Art in modernity, as Hegel puts it in a startling paradox, is the “self-exceeding of art, yet within its own sphere and in the form of art itself.”47 Hegel’s most elemental account of the complex dynamics of art’s “selfexceeding” is contained in the “Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art,” a relatively neglected section of the introduction to Lectures on Aesthetics. In the “Historical Deduction,” I argue, Hegel attempts nothing less than to reconceive the aesthetic standpoints of his predecessors and contemporaries

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as progressive stages in the philosophical self-articulation of art in modernity. Hegel’s foundational move in the “Historical Deduction” is to transpose the aporias of Kant’s third Critique into the ontological structure of art. For Hegel, the dilemmas Kant encounters in his attempt to specify the role of art in negotiating the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom reveal something essential about the predicament of art in modernity. Art aspires to transcend the domain of empirical contingency by evoking a spiritual realm that makes a mockery of our quotidian needs and dependencies, yet it remains haunted by the possibility that its desperate retreat into spirit betrays its inescapable filiations with the very empirical pressures it disavows. Hegel includes Schelling in the second stage of the “Historical Deduction” because Schelling’s metaphysics of aesthetic agency embodies one basic pole of art’s aporetic structure—art’s incipiently religious impulse to manifest the Absolute. If art’s constitutive limitations prevent it from reaching the Absolute, its permanent aspiration to the Absolute nonetheless justifies its placement beside religion and philosophy as one of the three highest forms of Geist. In the third stage of the “Historical Deduction,” entitled “Irony,” art’s religious impulse reverses into a disenchanted awareness of its own limitations and a celebration of its capacity to dwell in aporia and contradiction. According to Hegel, Romantic art terminates in a subjective form of irony—epitomized in Schlegel’s work—that revels in the ironic caprice and virtuosity of its creator. Hegel’s next and final conceptual move in the “Historical Deduction,” I argue, has yet to be recognized as a pivotal moment in post-Enlightenment aesthetics— one that has far-reaching implications for our understanding of art’s role in modernity. For Hegel, fully radicalizing the logic of irony entails pushing ironic negativity to the point where it becomes dialectical. What would happen, Hegel asks, if irony were conceived not as a global paradigm but as a dialectical resource? Instead of wielding irony as a subjective instrument for establishing the ironist’s superiority over the external world, the dialectical ironist would explore the positive possibilities that emerge from “infinite absolute negativity.”48 Although Hegel fails to specify concretely how such a dialectics of irony might manifest in post-Romantic art, I suggest that the young Søren Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony (1841), starts where Hegel’s “Historical Deduction” leaves off: it begins to explore the far-reaching aesthetic implications of Hegel’s speculations about irony. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, the postRomantic aesthetic subject evacuates itself to the point where it cedes agency entirely to the artwork, which then becomes a dynamic centering force that challenges and reshapes the assumptions of artist and audience alike. The most

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advanced forms of art, Kierkegaard suggests, would be able to harness ironic negativity as an immanent dialectical resource for gesturing toward a “higher actuality,” thereby assuaging the “deep pain that wants to make everything dark.”49 In Chapter 6, I argue that Adorno, over a century later, takes Kierkegaard’s lead in drawing on the dialectical aspects of Hegel’s aesthetics to develop a viable non-metaphysical account of aesthetic agency. In Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno seeks to determine the “spirit” of artworks—that which makes artworks “more than what they are”—without reverting to a dogmatic metaphysics that reifies spirit into art’s Absolute.50 From Adorno’s Hegelian perspective, the basic lesson to be drawn from the conceptual difficulties plaguing both Kant’s third Critique and early German Romanticism is that Enlightenment and counterEnlightenment aesthetic paradigms are doomed to reverse into their own opposites. Adorno’s strategy is to develop a dialectical alternative to this binary thinking in aesthetics. Instead of positioning art either inside or outside the Enlightenment, Adorno conceives the artwork itself as a dynamic site where the competing pressures of Enlightenment skepticism and aesthetic optimism are continually negotiated. Following Hegel, Adorno argues that the “contradiction” in Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment “inheres” in art itself.51 Art in modernity is torn between “aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment,”52 but this fundamental aporia of art proves to be a source of dynamism rather than stasis. The artwork is a “force-field” (Kraftfeld) that summons spirit dialectically by tarrying with spirit’s radical Other, the persistent skeptical counterpressure to art’s claims to transcendence.53 On the basis of this dialectical ontology of the artwork, Adorno navigates between an extravagant phenomenology that exaggerates the powers of art and a vulgar materialism that reduces art to a superstructural reflex of socioeconomic forces. Adorno realizes that Schelling’s Romantic appeal to aesthetic experience as a means of bridging Kant’s “great gulf ” between nature and freedom collapses into dogmatic metaphysics. Instead of seeking to bridge this great gulf, Adorno  harnesses the dialectical potential of the gulf itself. Rejecting Kant’s assumption that aesthetic experience must be conceived as a positive feeling of pleasure, he shrewdly mobilizes Kant’s account of the negative feeling of sublimity as an internal corrective to Kant’s emphasis on pleasure. For Adorno, the “Kantian description of the feeling of the sublime as a trembling between nature and freedom” lays the groundwork for a negative dialectics of aesthetic experience.54 The “semblance-shattering” experience of art convulses the subject into the recognition of a radical gulf between empirical actuality

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and spiritual possibility—a gulf that serves as the precondition for moral action and revolutionary praxis.55 In the book’s epilogue, I begin to explore the contemporary implications of my revaluation of the German aesthetic tradition from Kant to Adorno. Ours is a Schlegelian age, disenchanted with aesthetic and religious panaceas yet enamored with its own powers of critical irony. In such a climate of suspicion, it is no wonder that so many recent thinkers have favored sober, hard-nosed analysis of art’s philosophical or conceptual agency over what seem hopelessly nostalgic appeals to the powers of aesthetic experience. The now fashionable suspicious stance, however, is not without its own ironies, for it proves to rely on a problematic binary thinking about art that this book traces to early German Romanticism. The Romantic polarities of Schelling’s metaphysics of aesthetic agency and Schlegel’s aesthetics of irony reemerge in contemporary aesthetic discourse in the form of the widely held assumption that aesthetic agency and conceptual agency are mutually exclusive. One of this book’s primary aims is to argue that the dialectical perspective opened up by Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Adorno motivates post-Romantic modes of thinking about aesthetic agency that reject the binary logic still pervading discourse on the arts. Indeed, Hegel’s and Kierkegaard’s speculations about the dialectical possibilities of irony and Adorno’s conception of the artwork as a “force-field” collectively suggest that one of the basic challenges of art in modernity is to harness its immanent forces of ironic negativity and reflexive suspicion as dialectical resources for testing and refining the very experiences and intensities art makes available. I conclude the epilogue by highlighting the work of the contemporary theorist and literary critic Charles Altieri, whose dialectical approach to aesthetic agency offers an urgent and powerful alternative to the dominant suspicious stance in aesthetic discourse. Altieri seeks to defend art’s capacity to counter “the primacy of epistemic values”—the Enlightenment’s privileging of the third-person standpoint  of the sciences—without relying on untenable ontological or phenomenological assumptions.56 What Adorno calls the “spirit” of artworks Altieri calls their “force,” a dialectical category he adapts from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. For Altieri, aesthetic force is less a positive ontological phenomenon than a negative category designating those aspects of art that prove too supple and dynamic to be captured by third-person conceptual frameworks. In  Altieri’s hands, aesthetic agency becomes a dialectical force that thrives on the “constitutive tensions” of the artwork.57 The artwork, Altieri argues in an Adornian vein, is a field of forces in which evocations of spirit and

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suspicious demystifications of spirit are placed in dynamic tension. Altieri goes on to articulate the affective force of art not in terms of pleasure or emotion but in terms of a “dialectic taking place within the subject”58 that activates elemental levels of the psyche that are new and estranging for the empirical ego. In the experience of art, we do not so much transcend the empirical ego as become suddenly aware of the ego’s poverty and contingency in the face of a “terror and sublimity” that moves us in ways we “cannot understand” to places we “cannot quite map.”59 This book argues that only a dialectical approach to aesthetic agency is able to honor art’s experiential force and continued cultural relevance without reducing art to a conceptual enterprise or instrumentalizing art for overtly political ends. Art may not directly influence what happens in the world, but it can influence how people respond and adapt to what happens. The social force of art, then, consists in its capacity to challenge one of the most deeply rooted of all ideologies—the assumption that the world can be transformed without transforming the consciousness of those who inhabit it. Art at its most sublime registers the pathos of the distance between who we are and who we might be. To ask anything more of art would be to relapse into an aesthetic theology that Hegel had long ago relegated to a thing of the past.

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Aporias of Aesthetic Pleasure in Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful”

The confrontation with Kant’s grounding of aesthetics cannot consist in reproaching Kant for mistakes and oversights through an external ­critique . . . It must rather seek to reveal the inner tensions present in Kant’s work in order to make visible the genuinely fruitful moment in his grappling and agonizing. Walter Biemel1

I  Interpreting the third Critique: A reconstructive or a structural approach? Kant’s third Critique (1790) has the unique distinction of being at once one of the most influential and one of the most baffling texts in the history of modern philosophy. Kant’s attempt in the third Critique to address problems left unresolved in the previous two Critiques and his notorious claims about an “intuitive understanding” and a “supersensible substrate” inspired some of his immediate successors—most notably, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—to mobilize aspects of the third Critique as the conceptual starting point for their own metaphysical positions, which in turn helped inaugurate the so-called “Continental” tradition in philosophy. Meanwhile, the theory of taste developed in the first part of the third Critique has proven to be massively influential for postKantian aesthetic discourse up to the present. Aestheticians from both analytic and Continental perspectives have derived a variety of aesthetic positions from the third Critique, ranging from theories of aesthetic formalism, subjectivism, and objectivism to broader speculations about aesthetic autonomy, art’s relation to the Enlightenment, and the role of art in political, cultural, and moral life.

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Although the historical importance of the third Critique is undeniable, readers have failed to reach any kind of consensus on even the most fundamental issues and problems raised by the third Critique.2 Why did Kant feel compelled to write the third Critique in the first place? Does the third Critique break with, or merely supplement or modify, the tenets of the previous two Critiques? Do aspects of the third Critique signal Kant’s incipiently “post-critical” interest in modes of thought and experience that trouble his own epistemic strictures? What is the precise epistemic status of such core principles of the third Critique as nature’s purposiveness, the supersensible substrate, the universal voice, and the common sense? How does Kant attempt to justify judgments of taste? What is the nature of aesthetic pleasure and what is its role in judgments of taste? How does Kant conceive the relation between beauty and morality? Since Kant’s time, readers have rightly complained that the third Critique not only fails to provide clear answers to such fundamental questions but, at times, even suggests contradictory answers. Indeed, the various well-documented ambiguities, tensions, and inconsistencies in the argument of the third Critique have given rise to wildly divergent interpretations and appropriations of the text, ranging from the speculative readings of Fichte, Schelling, and the early Hegel to more epistemically modest interpretations favored by many contemporary Kant commentators. At a very general level, I think it is fair to say that there are two basic interpretive  approaches to the tensions in the third Critique, which I would call  “reconstructive” and “structural” approaches. Those who adopt the reconstructive approach—which has dominated Kant commentary for the past few decades, especially in the Anglo-American tradition—assume that the tensions and inconsistencies in Kant’s argument are the result of carelessness or momentary confusion on Kant’s part, and hence, that the commentator’s primary task is to reconstruct the most consistent and plausible argument based on Kant’s presumed intentions even at the expense of suppressing certain aspects of Kant’s argument. At the basis of the reconstructive approach lies the conviction that Kant’s intentions were clear and coherent but that he was not entirely successful in expressing his intentions. Prominent analytically oriented commentators such as Paul Guyer, Henry Allison, and Karl Ameriks have offered detailed and careful reconstructions of the third Critique that emphasize Kant’s epistemic modesty and that tend to treat the text more or less in an ahistorical vacuum.3

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By contrast, the structural approach to the third Critique—inaugurated by Kant’s idealist successors, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—is rooted in the assumption that the tensions and contradictions in Kant’s argument are, in fact, structural rather than contingent and hence cannot be reconstructed away. From a structural perspective, the various local inconsistencies and ambiguities in the third Critique signal full-blown aporias—deep underlying contradictions and ambivalences—at the core of Kant’s philosophical project, which, in turn, reflect fundamental dilemmas of post-Enlightenment modernity. Those who adopt a structural approach reject the assumption that Kant’s intentions in the third Critique were unitary and coherent, arguing instead that Kant remained torn between an allegiance to Enlightenment critical principles and an incipient interest in more radical or speculative modes of thought and experience that probe the limits of Enlightenment rationality. This structural approach to Kant has been favored especially by twentieth-century Continental thinkers such as Walter Biemel and Theodor Adorno, and more recently, Burkhard Tuschling and J. M. Bernstein, all of whom have sought to account for the text’s complex historical legacy and enduring significance.4 Bernstein rightly emphasizes the “double effect of the third Critique,” its telling status as a foundational text for both analytic and Continental philosophical approaches.5 Ironically, however, there has been very little dialogue between analytic and Continental readers of Kant, particularly in recent discussions of Kant’s aesthetics.6 The first two chapters of this book cut across the analytic–Continental divide in scholarship on Kant’s aesthetics by adopting a structural approach to the third Critique that critically engages primarily analytic literature on the text. I will make an extended case that only a structural reading of the tensions in the third Critique is able to honor Kant’s deeply conflicted philosophical ambitions and to account for the astonishing variety of ways that the text has been interpreted and appropriated by major aesthetic thinkers up to the present.

II  Against the reconstructive bias In the “Analytic of the Beautiful” of the third Critique, Kant asks a fundamental question: how can judgments of beauty claim to be universally valid if they are grounded in a subjective feeling of pleasure? Kant’s general answer can be parsed

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into three steps. First, when we perceive the “purposive” form of a beautiful object, our cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding are set into a harmonious “free play” that is manifested in a feeling of pleasure. Second, Kant claims that this harmony of the faculties is universally valid because it is a necessary condition for cognition in general. Third, since the basis of judgments of taste is none other than the feeling of pleasure arising from the harmony of the faculties, we are indeed justified in imputing universal validity to judgments of taste. Every aspect of this account raises serious questions, not the least of which concern the nature of the feeling of pleasure involved in judgments of taste. In what precise sense is the harmony of the faculties manifested in aesthetic pleasure? How are we to determine that aesthetic pleasure indeed arises from the harmony of the faculties? Is aesthetic pleasure distinct from other forms of pleasure at a phenomenological level? Recent analytic commentators on the third Critique have offered a host of competing answers to these questions. Commentators such as Paul Guyer, Jens Kulenkampff, and Kenneth Rogerson argue that aesthetic pleasure is qualitatively indistinguishable from all other forms of pleasure.7 In Guyer’s words, the “qualitative uniformity” of all pleasure entails the phenomenological “opacity” of aesthetic pleasure: that is, no phenomenological feature of aesthetic pleasure registers or indicates the harmony of the faculties from which the pleasure arises.8 An important consequence of this view is that in any given judgment of taste, we cannot be certain of the universal validity of our judgment, since we can never be sure that our feeling of pleasure indeed arises from the harmony of the faculties. By contrast, a variety of recent commentators on the third Critique argue that aesthetic pleasure is phenomenologically distinctive in some way. For instance, Henry Allison, Richard Aquila, Rachel Zuckert, and Wolfgang Wieland claim that aesthetic pleasure exhibits a phenomenologically distinctive “intentionality,” an ineliminably qualitative aspect of “aboutness” or object-directedness. According to this view, aesthetic pleasure constitutes intentional awareness or consciousness of the harmony of the faculties.9 Meanwhile, Christian Wenzel and Robert Wicks argue that aesthetic pleasure is phenomenologically distinctive but not intentional.10 Interestingly, all of these commentators nonetheless agree with those espousing the opposite view of the phenomenological opacity of pleasure—such as Guyer and Kulenkampff—

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that we can still be mistaken in making a judgment of taste. In other words, the phenomenological distinctiveness of aesthetic pleasure does not guarantee that the pleasure arises from the harmony of the faculties, since we can never entirely rule out the possibility that we have misperceived or misinterpreted the phenomenological features of our feeling of pleasure. It is also worth noting that recent commentators on both sides of this debate about the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure share the seemingly reasonable assumption that Kant develops a single, more or less consistent conception of aesthetic pleasure in the third Critique. However, it is precisely this ground-level assumption that Konrad Marc-Wogau calls into question in his provocative—and now relatively neglected—study, Vier Studien zu Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft (1938). Marc-Wogau argues that Kant remains torn between two directly competing conceptions of aesthetic pleasure: on the one hand, as a feeling of pleasure that directly instantiates the harmony of the faculties, and on the other hand, as a feeling of pleasure that arises from the harmony of the faculties but without manifesting the harmony in any way.11 I propose that Marc-Wogau’s general interpretive approach helps us to cut across long-standing debates about the nature of aesthetic pleasure in the third Critique. At the basis of Marc-Wogau’s methodological orientation lies the conviction that it should by no means be taken for granted that Kant develops a fully coherent and consistent theory of taste in the third Critique. Taking MarcWogau’s lead, I suggest that the prevailing impulse in recent commentary to argue for a single model of aesthetic pleasure in the third Critique can be traced to a reconstructive bias. If we stave off the impulse to reconstruct, however, we can ask: what if tensions in Kant’s account of taste turn out to be so fundamental that they cannot be explained away? Indeed, I will argue in this chapter that Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure is fraught with tensions and ambiguities so deep and so complexly interwoven that they prove to be irresolvable. Part III lays out an interpretive schema that will help us track how Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure unfolds and evolves in the course of the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” Parts IV through VI offer a detailed analysis of the “Analytic,” isolating a series of interrelated tensions in Kant’s account of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure and of the core doctrines of the universal voice and the sensus communis. I will make a cumulative case that Kant ends up endorsing a variety of conflicting conceptions of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure.

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One might object that this chapter makes unduly heavy weather of what seems a relatively marginal issue in Kant’s aesthetics. I do not address in this chapter such fundamental doctrines of the third Critique as the concept of genius, the aesthetic Idea, the purposive form of the art object, the distinction between free and adherent beauty, or the theory of the sublime—all of which have no doubt contributed to the rich and enduring legacy of the third Critique. This chapter focuses on the single issue of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure for three reasons. First, I hope it will become clear in the course of this book that many of the core aesthetic doctrines of the third Critique not addressed in this chapter, in fact, presuppose Kant’s more philosophically elemental investigation into the precise nature of aesthetic experience in the “Analytic.” Second, I believe that the problem of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure in the third Critique is important in its own right and has not yet received the sustained attention it deserves. The dominant reconstructive bias, it seems to me, has led most commentators to neglect, simplify, or explain away some of the most interesting and mysterious aspects of Kant’s account of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure. Third, I will argue in Chapter 2 that the stakes of my specific argument about tensions in Kant’s theory of aesthetic pleasure are very high indeed, since these tensions in the “Analytic” prove to be intimately linked to a large-scale structural aporia at the argumentative core of the third Critique. In particular, the second chapter traces Kant’s ambivalence about the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure to his fundamentally aporetic account of the role of aesthetic pleasure in moral life: Kant provides conflicting answers to the question of whether aesthetic experience can bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom. The first two chapters, then, should be read as a single, unified argument for the structural nature of the tensions in the third Critique. As we will see, Kant set the agenda for subsequent discourse on aesthetic agency precisely in his vexed efforts to embed his account of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure in a much broader account of the role of beauty in moral life. In other words, Kant’s third Critique raised a momentous question for which it failed to provide a definitive and unambiguous answer: what is the ethical and social force of aesthetic experience in post-Enlightenment modernity? It would be no exaggeration to assert that this has been one of the central questions of postKantian aesthetic discourse up to the present. This book argues that some of

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the major aestheticians since Kant—including Schiller, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno—grappled with this Kantian question about aesthetic agency by mobilizing and transforming the conceptual resources of Kant’s own philosophy.

III  The phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure: Interpretive possibilities There seem to me to be three basic interpretive questions in any discussion of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure in the third Critique: (i) whether aesthetic pleasure is phenomenologically distinctive, (ii) whether aesthetic pleasure is intentional, and (iii) whether aesthetic pleasure provides phenomenological certainty of its universal validity. It will be useful for what follows to schematize various models of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure on the basis of these questions. As I pointed out in the previous section, the first two interpretive questions have been vigorously debated in recent commentary on the third Critique. Remarkably, however, the third question concerning phenomenological certainty is rarely discussed. In fact, as we have seen, the vast majority of recent commentators simply assume that Kant’s position on this issue is unambiguous: aesthetic pleasure does not provide certainty of its universal validity. However, for an unbiased reading of the “Analytic,” it seems to me essential to leave open the question whether aesthetic pleasure provides certainty of its universal validity. Indeed, I will argue that the question of phenomenological certainty turns out to be fundamental to Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure in the third Critique. In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should clarify how I construe the question of phenomenological certainty. There is a potential ambiguity in the notion of aesthetic pleasure providing “phenomenological certainty” of its universal validity, since the phrase could be understood in a weak sense that still allows for the possibility that one’s judgment of taste is objectively mistaken. In support of this weak reading, it could be pointed out that one often feels convinced of something that nonetheless turns out to be false. In my interpretive schema, however, phenomenological certainty of universal validity should be taken in the maximally strong sense of unmistakable certainty: if the feeling of aesthetic pleasure provides phenomenological certainty of its universal validity,

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then it ipso facto guarantees that the pleasure is in fact universally valid. This rules out the possibility of fallible phenomenological certainty; a feeling of certainty that may turn out to be mistaken does not count as phenomenological certainty at all. Based on the three interpretive questions outlined above, I suggest that we distinguish two groups under which various models of aesthetic pleasure can be subsumed. Models of aesthetic pleasure belonging to the first group are those that do not provide certainty of the universal validity of aesthetic pleasure; hence, these models are denoted by “U,” standing for “uncertainty.” The models that belong to the second group are those that do provide certainty of the universal validity of aesthetic pleasure; hence, these models are denoted by “C,” standing for “certainty.” The two other features of aesthetic pleasure are denoted by subscripts: the first subscript denotes whether aesthetic pleasure is phenomenologically opaque (“o”) or phenomenologically distinctive (“p”); the second subscript denotes whether aesthetic pleasure is non-intentional (“n”) or intentional (“i”). Based on these criteria, we can distinguish five models of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure that can be plotted as coordinates on a grid of interpretive possibilities: (1) Uon denotes aesthetic pleasure that does not provide certainty of its universal validity and that is phenomenologically opaque and non-intentional; (2) Upn denotes aesthetic pleasure that does not provide certainty of its universal validity and that is phenomenologically distinctive but non-intentional; (3) Upi denotes aesthetic pleasure that does not provide certainty of its universal validity but that is both phenomenologically distinctive and intentional; (4) Cpn denotes aesthetic pleasure that provides certainty of its universal validity and that is phenomenologically distinctive but non-intentional; and (5) Cpi denotes aesthetic pleasure that provides certainty of its universal validity and that is both phenomenologically distinctive and intentional.12 By availing myself of this interpretive schema in the ensuing discussion of the  “Analytic of the Beautiful,” I will make the case that Kant remains profoundly ambivalent about the precise phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure. In Chapter 2, I trace this ambivalence in Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure to a fundamental aporia in his account of the role of aesthetic pleasure in moral life. Figure 1 maps out the interrelation of the various elements of the somewhat complex argument I will be developing in these first two chapters. The reader is encouraged to use the diagram as a roadmap for both chapters, although the diagram will not be fully clarified until the end of Chapter 2.

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Figure 1  Kant’s aporetic account of the role of aesthetic pleasure in moral life.

IV  Valences of aesthetic disinterestedness The “Analytic of the Beautiful” sets itself the task of elaborating the four “moments” in a judgment of taste. §§1–5 provide an exposition of the first moment: a judgment of taste is based on a pleasure that is “without any interest” (KdU, §5, 204–5). For Kant, a judgment of taste is “aesthetic” in the sense that it is based exclusively on a subjective feeling of pleasure rather than on any property of the object itself. He then points out that establishing the “aesthetic” nature of a judgment of taste is not sufficient to isolate the unique quality of a judgment of taste because a judgment about the agreeable—a judgment such as “this wine is agreeable”—is also aesthetic in this sense. This leads him to introduce a fundamental distinction between pleasure that is connected with interest and

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pleasure that is not connected with any interest. Judgments about the agreeable and the morally good are based on a pleasure connected with interest because such pleasure arises from an interest in the existence of the object in question. By contrast, a judgment of taste is based on a pleasure devoid of all interest because interest in the existence of the object plays no role in the pleasure on which the judgment is based. But a closer examination of this first moment of the “Analytic” reveals a certain  ambiguity in Kant’s characterization of aesthetic pleasure as being “without any interest.” Initially, it seems to be a merely negative characterization that designates what is absent from aesthetic pleasure. At the end of §2, however, Kant introduces a significant complication when he “contrasts the pure disinterested delight [dem reinen uninteressierten Wohlgefallen] that occurs in a judgment of taste with delight that is connected with interest” (KdU, §2, 205). We might wonder whether Kant’s use of the peculiar word “disinterested” as an adjectival modifier of “delight” implies that disinterestedness is somehow a positive—perhaps even phenomenologically distinctive—feature of aesthetic pleasure. Relatedly, we might ask in what precise sense Kant “contrasts” disinterested delight with interested delight. Does disinterested delight possess some phenomenological feature that distinguishes it from interested delight? In fact, no clear answer to this question emerges in the remainder of the first moment. Guyer takes a stand on this question by emphasizing Kant’s remark at the end of §5 that “the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good . . . designate three different relations of representations to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, on the basis of which we distinguish among objects or among ways in which these objects are represented” (KdU, 209–10).13 On Guyer’s reading, this passage suggests that the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good relate in three different ways to one and the same feeling of pleasure, and he proceeds to extrapolate that pleasure in the beautiful is phenomenologically identical to pleasure in the agreeable and the good. As Guyer puts it, “various instances of pleasure may differ in origin or intersubjective validity,” but “the nature of the feeling itself is always the same.”14 However, a number of passages in the first moment prove difficult to reconcile with Guyer’s interpretation. In the heading of §5, Kant refers to “three specifically differentiated types of delight” (KdU, 209)—suggesting that the three “types” of delight somehow differ in kind. Moreover, several passages in the first moment seem to raise the possibility that pleasure in the beautiful is indeed

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phenomenologically distinct from pleasure in the agreeable and the good. In §3, Kant claims that the interest involved in a judgment about an agreeable object is manifested in a “sensation” (Empfindung) through which “a desire is aroused for objects of that kind” (KdU, 207). It seems reasonable to suppose that the presence or absence of such a “sensation” in a given feeling of pleasure is phenomenologically detectable. Thus, the absence of such a sensation in disinterested pleasure could very well distinguish it from interested pleasure at a phenomenological level. Indeed, in §5, Kant seems to appeal to a difference in what we might call the first-person “raw feels” involved in pleasure in the agreeable and pleasure in the beautiful: “Agreeable is that which everyone calls what gratifies [vergnügt] him, beautiful what merely delights [gefällt] him” (KdU, §5, 210). Shortly thereafter, Kant claims that pleasure in the beautiful is “a disinterested and free delight,” since no interest extorts our approval (KdU, §5, 210). Conceived as freedom from compulsion, the disinterestedness of aesthetic pleasure seems to take on a positive valence. On this basis, Kant goes on to contrast “inclination” (Neigung) and “respect” (Achtung)—the forms of delight involved in judgments about the agreeable and the good, respectively— with “favor” (Gunst), which he calls the “only free delight” (KdU, §5, 210). This claim could easily be interpreted as suggesting that the three forms of delight are distinguishable at a phenomenological level. Nonetheless, these passages are couched in such vague and general language that they can hardly be taken as decisive evidence against Guyer’s view of the  phenomenological uniformity of all pleasure. I think the most charitable reading of the first moment of the “Analytic” would simply have to leave unsettled the question of whether disinterested pleasure is phenomenologically distinctive.

V  The problem of the universal voice The second moment in a judgment of taste, §§6–9 of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” begins to clarify the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure but also introduces a number of fresh problems and complications. In the second moment, Kant seeks to establish that aesthetic pleasure is not merely a private sensation but a universally valid feeling that can be rightly imputed to anyone in a position to judge (KdU, 211–19). Kant opens §6 with the notorious claim that the universality of aesthetic pleasure “can be inferred” from his previous account of the disinterestedness

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of aesthetic pleasure.15 Kant’s subsequent justification of this strong claim is contained in two very dense sentences, which deserve to be quoted in full: For one cannot help but judge that that [object]—in regard to which one is conscious [sich bewuβt] that the delight in it [that object], in his own case, is without any interest—must contain a basis of delight for everyone. For since it [the delight] is not based on any inclination of the subject (nor on any other considered interest), but rather since the one judging feels completely free [völlig frei fühlt] in regard to the delight which he invests in the object, he cannot discover any private conditions, which would depend only on his subjectivity, as the basis of his delight, and he must therefore regard it [the delight] as based on that which he can presuppose in everyone else; consequently, he must believe that he has a basis for expecting a similar delight from everyone [folglich muß er glauben Grund zu haben, jedermann ein ähnliches Wohlgefallen zuzumuten]. (KdU, §6, 211–12)

Does this passage help resolve the central ambiguity of the first moment? Is disinterestedness a positive phenomenological feature of aesthetic pleasure or a mere negative designation indicating the absence of interest in aesthetic pleasure? Everything hinges on the precise nature of the process by which we become “conscious” of the disinterestedness of aesthetic pleasure in a judgment of taste. The passage seems to leave open two competing interpretive options. On the one hand, aspects of the passage suggest that our “consciousness” of disinterestedness is a reasoned belief stemming from a fallible process of discursive introspection. As Kant puts it, the one judging “cannot discover any private conditions, which would depend only on his subjectivity, as the basis of his delight.” Notice that instead of investigating the phenomenological contours of the pleasure itself, the person examines the “basis” of his feeling of pleasure in order to determine whether it is contaminated by any private interests.16 This introspective act leads the person to “believe” that the feeling of pleasure is disinterested. On this reading, then, disinterestedness is not a phenomenological feature of the pleasure itself but a quality attributed to the feeling of pleasure after a strictly discursive act of introspection. Moreover, both the language of “belief ” and the inherent fallibility of discursive introspection suggest that one can never be certain whether one’s pleasure is, in fact, disinterested. Although the person does not “discover” any private conditions at the basis of his pleasure, it might turn out that some private condition lurking in the recesses of his consciousness managed somehow to escape his notice. This reading would suggest that aesthetic pleasure fails to provide certainty of its universal validity, whether or not the feeling of pleasure is phenomenologically distinctive (Uon, Upn, or Upi).

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On the other hand, certain aspects of the passage suggest that disinterestedness may, in fact, be a positive phenomenological feature of aesthetic pleasure. Recall from our discussion of the previous moment that Kant characterized aesthetic pleasure as the “only free delight” (KdU, §5, 210), and it remained unclear whether that freedom was discernible at the phenomenological level. This passage from the second moment could be taken to imply that this freedom is an affectively discernible property of aesthetic pleasure itself: the one judging, as he puts it, “feels completely free in regard to the delight which he invests in the object.” One could easily interpret the word “free”—which adverbially modifies “feels”—as suggesting that freedom is a positive phenomenological feature of the pleasure itself. Accordingly, one’s “consciousness” of the disinterestedness of his pleasure would be a consciousness afforded by—or present in—the pleasure itself. Yet, this passage would still leave undecided whether this affective consciousness of disinterestedness provides full-blown certainty of the pleasure’s universal validity. On the one hand, one might emphasize Kant’s language of “belief,” which implies that the person’s affective conviction of disinterestedness remains fallible: the person believes that his phenomenologically distinctive feeling of pleasure is universally valid, but he can never be certain of its universal validity on the basis of his feeling alone (Upn or Upi). On the other hand, one might point to the language of apparent compulsion also present in the passage. The person, Kant writes, “cannot help but” judge that the pleasure has universal validity. In the final sentence of the passage, Kant twice invokes the language of “must”: The person “must . . . regard” the pleasure as universal and “must believe that he has a basis for expecting a similar delight from everyone” (my emphasis). To account for this “must,” we could reason that if the person is made aware of the disinterestedness of his pleasure through some distinctive phenomenological feature of the pleasure itself, then there seems no room left for uncertainty. The very fact of experiencing this “free,” phenomenologically unique feeling of pleasure would unmistakably announce the pleasure’s own disinterestedness, hence compelling one to grant it universal validity. On this reading, the phenomenological distinctiveness of  “free” aesthetic pleasure would be sufficient to assure one of its universal validity (Cpn or Cpi). The ambiguities in Kant’s account of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure reemerge in his crucial discussion of a “universal voice” (eine allgemeine Stimme) in §8. Kant claims that when one calls something beautiful, “one believes that one has a universal voice and lays claim to the agreement of everyone” (KdU, §8, 216). He argues that a judgment of taste “postulates” such a universal voice “with regard to pleasure” (KdU, §8, 216). The language he uses here clearly echoes the

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language of §6. Recall that in §6, we are told that one “must believe” that one is justified in imputing universality to his feeling of pleasure. Kant’s claim in §8 that one “believes” to have a universal voice “with regard to pleasure” should then be read as a metaphorical redescription of his claim in §6. Kant goes on to elaborate this notion of a “universal voice”: The universal voice is therefore only an Idea (on what this Idea rests has not yet been investigated). That one who believes [glaubt] he is making a judgment of taste in fact judges in accordance with this Idea can be uncertain [kann ungewiβ sein]; but that he is nonetheless referring his judgment to this Idea, and hence that it should be a judgment of taste, is indicated by the use of the term beauty. For himself, however, he can attain certainty of that through the mere consciousness of the separation of whatever belongs to the agreeable and the good from the delight that remains leftover for him. [Für sich selbst aber kann er durch das bloβe Bewuβtsein der Absonderung alles dessen, was zum Angenehmen und Guten gehört, von dem Wohlgefallen, was ihm noch übrig bleibt, davon gewiβ werden.] (KdU, §8; Ak. 26–7)

For the first time in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” Kant explicitly declares that it “can be uncertain”—presumably, both for the one judging and for the public from which one requires assent—whether one has indeed judged with a universal voice. By referring to the universal voice as an “Idea,” Kant indicates the concept’s merely regulative status. According to the first Critique, regulative principles are heuristically necessary principles that are not verifiable in experience, whereas constitutive principles are objectively necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. Kant then goes on to point out that since the universal voice is “only an Idea,” the person judging can be certain merely of the fact that he believes that he is judging with a universal voice. For Kant, the regulative status of the universal voice seems to entail the inherent fallibility of judgments of taste.17 Kant uses the language of “belief ” here as a means of foregrounding the person’s fallibility, just as he did in §6, where he refers to the person’s “belief ” that he is justified in imputing universality to his feeling of pleasure. The person believes that he is judging with a universal voice, but he cannot be certain, on the basis of his feeling of pleasure, whether his belief is true (Uon, Upn, or Upi).18 The very next sentence in this passage from §8, however, introduces a significant complication. Kant suddenly suggests that “for himself,” the one judging can be “certain” of the universal validity of his judgment of taste “through the mere consciousness” of the disinterestedness of the feeling of pleasure. It is hardly a surprise that most commentators ignore this sentence altogether; the

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prevailing tendency among recent commentators to reconstruct a coherent theory of taste simply prohibits them from tolerating what seems to be a flagrant contradiction in the span of two sentences. And those few commentators who do address this sentence nonetheless betray their reconstructive bias in their eagerness to explain it away. Allison and Ted Cohen, for instance, engage in remarkable feats of interpretive acrobatics in order to accommodate this recalcitrant sentence within their respective reconstructions of Kant’s theory of taste. Exploiting the ambiguity of the “davon,” they argue that the word refers to the final clause of the previous sentence, which asserts that the one judging is certain that he is “referring his judgment to” the universal voice. Accordingly, Kant would be asserting in the subsequent sentence only that one is “certain” of the mere intention of judging in accordance with the universal voice.19 For Allison and Cohen, then, there is no discrepancy between this sentence and the previous sentence, which emphasizes uncertainty in judgments of taste. Allison and Cohen’s reading, however, seems to me to be implausible. Their reading makes the recalcitrant sentence entirely redundant: it would repeat the exact same point that Kant had already made in the last clause of the previous sentence. That Kant did not intend the recalcitrant sentence to be a mere repetition of something already stated is clear from his use of “aber” at the beginning of the sentence, which indicates that Kant is, in fact, contrasting his claim about what the person judging can be “certain” of “for himself ” with the claims of the previous sentence. Hence, the natural reading of the recalcitrant sentence would be that Kant is clearly asserting the possibility that one can be certain of the universal validity of one’s judgment of taste on the basis of the feeling of aesthetic pleasure alone. If we resist the impulse to reconstruct, we can take seriously this natural reading of the recalcitrant sentence and attempt to situate the sentence within the context of Kant’s broader theory of taste. According to the recalcitrant sentence, the person can be “certain” that he is, in fact, judging with a universal voice “through the mere consciousness of the separation” of any form of interest from his feeling of pleasure. In other words, the person’s “consciousness” of disinterestedness would amount to infallible phenomenological conviction of the pleasure’s universal validity (Cpn or Cpi). Moreover, since we have just seen that Kant links fallibilism in judgments of taste to a regulative conception of the universal voice, Kant’s sudden suggestion here of the possibility of an infallible judgment of taste seems to imply a robustly constitutive principle of the universal voice (see the right-hand column of Figure 1).

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If we take the recalcitrant sentence at face value, there seem to me to be only two possible ways of interpreting how this sentence relates to the previous one. Guyer takes the perfectly valid route of claiming that Kant is guilty of an outright contradiction. Accordingly, Guyer interprets the recalcitrant sentence as a “momentary suggestion that one can be certain of the abstraction of one’s pleasure from improper sources.”20 On Guyer’s reading, Kant declares in the previous sentence that one cannot be certain that one is judging with universal validity and then immediately goes on to assert that one can be “certain” on this point. Tellingly, Guyer swiftly dismisses Kant’s “momentary suggestion” as a regrettable aberration, since Guyer’s reconstruction of Kant’s theory of taste does not allow the possibility of certainty in judgments of taste.21 It seems to me, however, that Guyer is overhasty in reconstructing this apparent contradiction away. If we follow Guyer in his reading of the recalcitrant sentence but resist his impulse to dismiss it, we can establish one possible reading of this passage from §8: Kant offers patently contradictory answers to the question of whether aesthetic pleasure provides certainty of its universal validity. The other interpretive route open to us is to find a way to reconcile the apparently recalcitrant sentence with the previous one, yet without committing Allison and Cohen’s mistake of denying the natural reading of the sentence. Notice that in the previous sentence, Kant asserts that it “can be uncertain” (my emphasis) that one is judging with a universal voice. One could point out that since “can” is weaker than “must,” Kant would be suggesting not that judgments of taste must always remain uncertain but that they sometimes can be uncertain. On this reading, the following sentence would not be a contradiction at all: it would simply assert that there may also be cases in which the one judging can be certain, “for himself,” that he is judging with a universal voice. This reading of the two sentences would suggest, on the whole, that Kant has not yet taken a strong position on the question of phenomenological certainty. On this reading, Kant points out that the feeling of aesthetic pleasure does not always provide certainty of its universal validity (Uon, Upn, or Upi) and then adds that there are, however, cases in which the feeling of aesthetic pleasure does assure us of its universal validity (Cpn or Cpi). The crucial point to bear in mind is that however we decide to interpret this passage from §8, Kant’s position thus far on the question of phenomenological certainty remains opaque in the extreme. Whether Kant commits an outright contradiction or simply asserts that some judgments of taste are certain while others are not, it is apparent up to this point in the “Analytic” that Kant does

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not take a decisive stand on the question of whether aesthetic pleasure provides certainty of its universal validity. Moreover, Kant’s ambiguity about the question of phenomenological certainty seems linked to a corresponding uncertainty about the epistemic status of the universal voice. While Kant explicitly conceives the universal voice as a mere regulative “Idea,” he later asserts in the same paragraph that a judgment of taste may sometimes be certain, thereby implying a constitutive conception of the universal voice. Instead of trying to reconstruct these ambiguities away, I will explore in this and the next chapter the tensions and pressures internal to Kant’s broader argument in the third Critique that give rise to such ambiguities in the first place. As a first step, I would suggest that Kant’s palpable ambivalence about the epistemic status of the universal voice in this passage from §8 can be linked to his ambiguous account of the person’s “consciousness” of disinterestedness throughout the first two moments of the “Analytic.” One’s “consciousness” of disinterestedness could be fallible discursive awareness of the absence of private interests at the basis of aesthetic pleasure, in which case the feeling of pleasure would fail to provide certainty of its universal validity (Uon, Upn, or Upi). On the other hand, one’s “consciousness” could be an affective conviction of the pleasure’s disinterestedness, in which case the feeling of pleasure would be phenomenologically distinctive but nonetheless may or may not provide infallible conviction of its universal validity (Upn, Upi, Cpn, or Cpi). Kant himself seems all too aware of these ambiguities in his account of the person’s “consciousness” of disinterestedness. In §9, which he claims holds the “key to the critique of taste,” he tries to resolve these ambiguities by introducing the central notion of the harmony of the faculties (KdU, 216). Kant begins the section by elaborating how an object of beauty sets one’s cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding into a harmonious free play, which in turn serves as the universally valid basis for a feeling of pleasure.22 Kant then proceeds to reframe the issue of the “consciousness” of disinterestedness by linking it to his newly introduced doctrine of the harmony of the faculties. This “consciousness” of disinterestedness is tantamount to one’s consciousness of the harmony of the faculties at the basis of the feeling of pleasure. Kant then explicitly poses the question that has haunted the first two moments of the “Analytic.” He writes, “For now we shall still concern ourselves with the lesser question: in what way do we become conscious [bewuβt], in a judgment of taste, of a reciprocal subjective harmony of the cognitive powers? Is it aesthetically, through mere inner sense and sensation? Or is it intellectually, through the consciousness of our intentional activity, by which we set these

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powers into play?” (KdU, §9, 218). Is our awareness of the harmony of the faculties in a judgment of taste an affective (“aesthetic”) consciousness registered in the feeling of pleasure itself, or is it a cognitive (“intellectual”) consciousness of the universal basis of the feeling of pleasure? Kant argues that “intellectual” consciousness of the harmony of the faculties only obtains in the case of cognition of an object, so in a judgment of taste—which does not involve cognition—we must become conscious of the harmony of the faculties aesthetically, “through mere inner sense and sensation.” This “sensation” through which we become “conscious” of the harmony of the faculties is obviously none other than the feeling of pleasure at the basis of judgments of taste—what Kant refers to earlier as “pleasure in the harmony of the cognitive faculties” (Lust an der Harmonie der Erkenntnisvermögen) (KdU, §9, 218). Kant’s account of “aesthetic consciousness” in §9 finally begins to clarify the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure. We can definitely rule out Guyer’s thesis of the phenomenological opacity of aesthetic pleasure (Uon), since we clearly become conscious of the harmony of the faculties through some distinctive phenomenological feature of the pleasure itself.23 Unfortunately, however, the ambiguous language of §9 still leaves open a variety of competing interpretations of the precise nature of aesthetic pleasure. On the one hand, §9 could be taken to suggest that aesthetic pleasure yields consciousness of the harmony of the faculties as its intentional object. When Kant refers to the “pleasure in the harmony of the cognitive faculties,” the preposition “in” could be read in the full-blooded sense of robustly intentional awareness of the harmony of the faculties. On this interpretation, our “mere consciousness” of disinterestedness should be understood, in more psychically elemental terms, as an intentional awareness of the harmony of the faculties registered in the feeling of aesthetic pleasure. However, since §6 and §8 leave undecided whether such consciousness provides phenomenological certainty of the pleasure’s universal validity, we would be left with two possible conceptions of aesthetic pleasure: Upi or Cpi. On the other hand, it could be pointed out that pleasure “in” the harmony of the cognitive faculties need not be read in such strongly intentional terms. One might argue that the harmony of the faculties “makes itself known” in aesthetic pleasure not as the pleasure’s intentional object but only indirectly by virtue of the  non-intentional phenomenological distinctiveness of aesthetic pleasure itself. On this reading, one would be conscious of disinterestedness through a non-intentional but nevertheless phenomenologically distinctive feeling of aesthetic pleasure: Upn or Cpn.

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Evidently, Kant’s uncertainty about the epistemic status of the universal voice in §8 reverberates throughout the first two moments in the “Analytic of the  Beautiful.” A strictly regulative conception of the universal voice projects the universal voice as a mere Idea. On the basis of introspection, we believe that we are judging with a universal voice, but we can never be certain of this fact since our aesthetic “consciousness” of disinterestedness—or, equivalently, of the harmony of the faculties—is fallible and thus leaves open the possibility that our feeling of pleasure is nonetheless contaminated by some interest that remains hidden from us (Upn or Upi). However, as we have seen, §8 also raises the possibility that we can be “certain” that we are judging with a universal voice, in which case the universal voice would be more than a mere regulative Idea. What §8 would imply, on this stronger reading, is a novel conception of constitutive principles based not on the conditions of possibility of experience but on an epistemic certainty rooted in feeling rather than cognition. A constitutive conception of the universal voice presupposes a strong model of aesthetic pleasure that provides infallible affective “consciousness” of the universally valid harmony of the faculties (Cpn or Cpi). Since Kant leaves ambiguous whether the universal voice is a regulative or a constitutive principle, §8 authorizes no fewer than four competing models of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure (as indicated in Figure 1).

VI  Sensus communis: Regulative or constitutive? Clearly, how we conceive the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure depends on how we interpret Kant’s claim that aesthetic pleasure furnishes affective “consciousness” of disinterestedness. In the fourth and final moment of the “Analytic” (§§18–22), Kant attempts to clarify the “consciousness” of disinterestedness by conceiving it as a “common sense” (or “sensus communis”) (KdU, §22, 239).24 As we will see, however, Kant’s vexed account of the sensus communis only exacerbates and deepens the ambiguities and tensions in the previous moments of the “Analytic.”25 In §20, Kant argues that judgments of taste “must have a subjective principle, which determines [bestimmt]—only through feeling [nur durch Gefühl] and not through concepts, but nonetheless with universal validity—what pleases and displeases” (KdU, 238). He then goes on to claim that such a principle “can only be seen as a common sense,” a shared capacity to judge “according to feeling” (nach Gefühl) (KdU, §20, 238). In other words, Kant introduces the common

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sense as a shared capacity to make universally valid judgments of taste through feeling alone. The next sentence, however, offers a somewhat different definition of common sense: “Thus, only with the presupposition [Voraussetzung] that there is a common sense (by which, however, we do not mean an outer sense, but rather the effect arising from the free play of our cognitive powers [die Wirkung aus dem freien Spiel unsrer Erkenntniskräfte]), only with the presupposition, I say, of such a common sense can a judgment of taste be made” (KdU, §20, 238). Strikingly, common sense is defined here as “the effect arising from the free play of our cognitive powers.” As we have seen from §9, this “effect” is none other than the feeling of pleasure arising from the harmony of the faculties. However, there seems to be a discrepancy between this definition of common sense as a feeling of pleasure and Kant’s previous characterization of common sense as a capacity to judge through a feeling of pleasure.26 In order to reconcile these two characterizations, I suggest that we conceive common sense not merely as the feeling of pleasure arising from the harmony of the faculties but as the ideal postulate of a feeling as judgment—more specifically, as infallible judgment. As Georg Kohler puts it, common sense is a feeling of pleasure that unmistakably “announces” its own transpersonal status.27 Common sense is an ideal feeling that exemplifies its own universal validity by infallibly manifesting—at a phenomenological level—its source in the harmony of the faculties. Hence, Kulenkampff quite aptly characterizes common sense as “immediate conviction” or “immediate certainty.”28 Endowed with such a common sense, we would be certain on the basis of our feeling of pleasure alone that we are judging with universal validity. It is essential to bear in mind, however, that Kant introduces common sense as a  regulative Idea, an asymptotically approachable ideal that never obtains in actual  judgments of taste. Accordingly, Kant insists that one must merely “presuppose” this regulative Idea of a common sense; that is, the feeling of pleasure on which a given judgment of taste is based must always fall short of such an infallible affective conviction of universal validity. Kant makes this point explicit in §19: “One solicits everyone else’s assent because one has a basis that is common to all [einen Grund hat, der allen gemein ist]; indeed, one could count on that basis if one could always be certain that the instance had been subsumed correctly under that basis, which is the rule for the approval” (KdU, 237). This “common” basis on which judgments of taste are based is, of course, the common sense. In any given judgment of taste, one can never be “certain” that one has

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correctly “subsumed” the feeling of pleasure under this Idea of a common sense. In other words, one’s feeling of pleasure can, at best, approximate endlessly such an ideal feeling of pleasure that infallibly attests to its own universal validity. Recall that in §8, Kant claims that it “can be uncertain” in a given judgment of taste whether one is “in fact judging in accordance with a universal voice” (KdU, 216). Kant asserts there that “the universal voice is . . . only an Idea,” and he adds parenthetically that “on what this Idea rests has not yet been investigated” (KdU, §8, 216). I propose that the regulative Idea of a common sense is the underlying basis for the regulative Idea of a universal voice presented in the second moment.29 We can never be certain that we are judging with a universal voice because our feeling of pleasure always falls short of affective certainty of its universal validity. In short, the regulative Ideas of a common sense and a universal voice jointly sanction only our fallible belief in the universal validity of our feeling of aesthetic pleasure (Upn or Upi). However, we should recall that Kant also implies a constitutive conception of a universal voice in §8, so it should come as no surprise that his account of the epistemic status of common sense in the fourth moment proves equally torn between regulative and constitutive conceptions. Although Kant explicitly introduces common sense as a strictly regulative Idea, he nonetheless goes on to suggest a stronger constitutive construal of common sense as a special feeling of  pleasure that affords infallible affective conviction of its universal validity (Cpn or Cpi). The section heading of §21 announces its task of justifying the regulative “presupposition” of the Idea of a common sense (KdU, 238). The argument proceeds in six steps, which I will briefly enumerate. First, the “attunement” of the cognitive faculties necessary for cognition in general is “universally communicable.” Second, there must be one attunement of the cognitive faculties—namely, the harmony of the faculties—that is optimally “conducive” to the “quickening” of the cognitive powers. Third, the harmony of the faculties is therefore universally communicable. Fourth, the harmony of the faculties can only be “determined through” the feeling of aesthetic pleasure. Fifth, the feeling of aesthetic pleasure is hence also universally communicable. Sixth, in Kant’s words, “the universal communicability of a feeling . . . presupposes a common sense” (KdU, §21, 238–9). As many commentators have noted, the first five steps of the argument have provided a constitutive justification of the common sense by building it into the conditions of cognition in general.30 Oddly, in the sixth step, Kant suddenly weakens the argument to a regulative justification of the

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common sense as a mere presupposition. Hence, while §21 is explicitly staged as a regulative justification of common sense, it nonetheless implicitly suggests that common sense is constitutive in force. Kant’s ambivalence about the epistemic status of the common sense culminates in §22. He begins by insisting that the common sense is a “mere ideal norm,” a regulative “Idea that is necessary for everyone” (KdU, §22, 239). He then reminds us that this regulative conception of the common sense entails that one can never be “certain” that one has “correctly subsumed” one’s feeling of pleasure under the Idea of a common sense (KdU, §22, 239). Shortly thereafter, however, in a startling moment of uncertainty, Kant raises the possibility that this common sense is more than a mere regulative Idea: Whether there is in fact such a common sense, as constitutive principle of the possibility of experience, or whether there is a still higher principle of reason that makes it a mere regulative principle for us, to bring forth in us, for higher ends, a common sense in the first place; whether, therefore, taste is an original and natural capacity [ein ursprüngliches und natürliches], or whether it is only the Idea of an artificial capacity [künstlichen Vermögen] that is yet to be acquired, so that a judgment of taste, with its requirement of a universal assent, in fact would only be a demand of reason to produce such agreement in the way we sense, and the ought—that is, the objective necessity with which the feeling of each particular person flows together with everyone’s feeling—would signify only the possibility of reaching such a harmonious coincidence of feeling, and the judgment of taste would only offer an example of the application of this principle: this question we do not want to nor can yet investigate here . . . (KdU, §22, 240)

Kant’s incipient uncertainty regarding the epistemic status of common sense erupts in this tortuous sentence. Not surprisingly, this passage has proven to be quite puzzling to many commentators on the third Critique. The prevailing reconstructive bias has led most commentators either to suppress this moment entirely or, at best, to explain it away.31 On my reading, however, Kant’s candid admission of uncertainty about the epistemic status of common sense radiates outward, as it were, generating profound tensions in Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure throughout the third Critique. Is common sense a regulative or a constitutive principle of judgments of taste? As I have argued, this question reduces to the question of phenomenological certainty: does aesthetic pleasure provide infallible affective conviction of its universal validity or does it provide merely fallible grounds for belief in its universal validity? Do we have an “original

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and natural” capacity to judge infallibly through feeling or must we resign ourselves to projecting this merely “artificial” capacity as a regulative Idea that can only be approached asymptotically? Notice also that Kant implies that a constitutive conception of common sense would entail “objective necessity.” In §18, Kant explicitly denies that pleasure in the beautiful could possess “theoretical objective necessity, where it can be cognized a priori that everyone will feel this satisfaction in the object called beautiful by me” (KdU, 236–7). Here, in §22, however, Kant admits to being ambivalent about whether aesthetic judgments have “objective necessity with which the feeling of each particular person flows together with everyone’s feeling.” Kant suggests that a constitutive common sense would involve a non-theoretical form of objective necessity that is grounded in feeling rather than cognition. A constitutive common sense would be objectively necessary in that it would assure us that our subjective feeling of pleasure is, in fact, universally valid: we would be certain at a phenomenological level that our feeling “flows together with everyone’s feeling.” Remarkably, Kant seems to argue implicitly for such a strongly constitutive conception of common sense in §40, “On Taste as a Form of Sensus Communis.” Kant’s strategy in this section is to distinguish two basic forms of common sense—“sensus communis logicus” and “sensus communis aestheticus”—and to argue that only sensus communis aestheticus can truly be considered to be shared by everyone (KdU, §40; 295–6). Kant describes the sensus communis logicus as a complex discursive operation, ‘the Idea of a shared sense, i.e. a capacity to judge that in reflecting takes into account (a priori), in thought, everyone else’s way of representing, in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from subjective private conditions that could easily be taken for objective ones, an illusion that would have a disadvantageous influence on judgment.’ (KdU, §40, 293–4). Notably, in the sensus communis logicus, we reflect in thought on whether we have successfully abstracted from “private conditions” that would detract from the universality of our judgment. As Kant soon goes on to state, the person “puts himself in the position of everyone else, in that he abstracts [abstrahiert] merely from the limitations that contingently attach to our own judging” (KdU, §40, 294). Since one can “easily” mistake private conditions for objective ones, one can never be certain that one has fully abstracted from these private conditions. Hence, Kant explicitly states that the sensus communis logicus must remain a regulative “Idea.”

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However, in a crucial move, he adds: Now perhaps this operation of reflection [Operation der Reflexion] seems all too artificial [künstlich] to be attributed to the capacity which we call common sense; but it only looks that way when it is expressed in abstract formulas; in itself nothing is more natural [an sich ist nichts natürlicher] than to abstract from charm and emotion when we seek a judgment that should serve as a universal rule. (KdU, §40, 294)

Kant contrasts here the “artificial” operation of the sensus communis logicus with the “natural” operation of the sensus communis aestheticus. The sensus communis logicus appears “all too artificial” because there seems no reason to assume that everyone is capable of performing such a demanding discursive operation of abstracting successfully from one’s private conditions. By contrast, he hints that the sensus communis aestheticus is a quite “natural” operation of abstraction. As we will soon see, this “natural” form of sensus communis is none other than taste. Notice that Kant’s contrast between “artificial” and “natural” forms of common sense directly echoes the language of §22, where his uncertainty regarding the regulative or constitutive status of common sense amounted to an uncertainty about whether taste is an “artificial” capacity that is yet to be acquired or a “natural” capacity that everyone already possesses. In §22, as we have seen, Kant admitted that he was “not yet” able to settle the question of the epistemic status of common sense. §40, I would suggest, hints at an answer to the dramatic question raised in §22: taste is an utterly “natural”—and, hence, constitutive—form of common sense that is shared by all. In the remainder of §40, Kant seeks to account for the constitutive status of taste as sensus communis aestheticus by sharply distinguishing it from the mere regulative Idea of sensus communis logicus. He begins by clarifying the three “maxims of common human understanding” that must be followed in order to be liberated from “superstition.” These maxims are: “(1) to think for oneself, (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else, and (3) to think always consistently” (KdU, §40, 294). Notice the emphasis on “thinking” here: sensus communis logicus is an intellectual operation of abstracting from private conditions that might prejudice one’s judgment. In a decisive passage, Kant proceeds to argue: I take up again the thread from which I just digressed, and say: that taste can be named sensus communis with more justification than healthy understanding;

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and that the aesthetic power of judgment deserves to carry the name of a shared sense [den Namen eines gemeinschaftlichen Sinnes] more than does the intellectual power of judgment, if indeed one wants to use the word “sense” [Sinn] to stand for an effect [Wirkung] of mere reflection on the mind: for one thereby means by “sense” the feeling of pleasure. (KdU, §40, 295)

The intellectual power of judgment is the discursive common sense, the sensus communis logicus, which involves the capacity to think in a certain way. By contrast, the aesthetic power of judgment is an affective common sense, the sensus communis aestheticus, which consists in the capacity to judge through feeling rather than through concepts. Taste is a special feeling of pleasure that doubles as a universally valid aesthetic judgment. In other words, taste as the sensus communis aestheticus is the shared capacity to experience the universality of one’s aesthetic judgment in a feeling of pleasure. Not surprisingly, in his earlier account of the sensus communis logicus, Kant repeatedly foregrounded the possibility of error in judgment. One can “easily” mistake subjective conditions for objective ones because there is an irreducible gap between believing that one is thinking for oneself and knowing that one is thinking for oneself. It is precisely the discursive cast of the sensus communis logicus that leads Kant to deem it “artificial” and to insist that it is a mere regulative “Idea of a shared sense” rather than a robustly constitutive principle. In his subsequent account of the sensus communis aestheticus, however, Kant drops talk of regulative Ideas and claims that the aesthetic power of judgment just is “a shared sense.” The affective nature of the sensus communis aestheticus, in effect, closes the gap between believing that one is making a universally valid judgment and being certain that one is making such a judgment. The very fact of experiencing aesthetic pleasure stands as infallible evidence that one has abstracted successfully from any merely private conditions. Insofar as aesthetic pleasure directly instantiates or exemplifies its universality, the question of error becomes moot: in a judgment of taste, one is certain of the universal validity of one’s judgment through the feeling of pleasure alone. Hence, in contrast to the “artificial,” merely regulative Idea of a sensus communis logicus, the sensus communis aestheticus is a “natural”—and, therefore, constitutive—capacity to be convinced of the disinterestedness of one’s judgment of taste through a feeling of pleasure. In a judgment of taste, as Kant puts it, the representation of a given object “communicates itself not as thought but as the inner feeling [inneres Gefühl] of a purposive state of mind” (KdU, §40, 296). Kant reminds us that this “purposive state of mind” is none other than the “play” of the cognitive faculties

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(KdU, §40, 296). Hence, according to the reasoning of §40, aesthetic pleasure would be the “inner feeling” of the harmony of the faculties in the sense of robust certainty: the feeling of pleasure would unmistakably register the harmony of the faculties at a phenomenological level, although it remains unclear whether the harmony of the faculties should be taken as the intentional object of aesthetic pleasure (Cpn or Cpi). Is the sensus communis a mere regulative Idea or a constitutive principle? In §21, Kant explicitly conceives the sensus communis as a regulative principle but implicitly conceives it as a constitutive principle. In §22, Kant frankly admits that he is unable to determine whether the sensus communis is a regulative or a constitutive principle. In §40, he even seems to suggest that the sensus communis is constitutive in force. Taken together, these sections reveal Kant’s profound ambivalence about the epistemic status of the sensus communis. This ambivalence, I have argued, is linked structurally to a variety of tensions in Kant’s account of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure.

VII  On the centrality of Kant’s “lesser question” In what precise sense do we become “conscious” of the harmony of the faculties when we take pleasure in a beautiful object? The answer that has emerged in the course of the “Analytic” is that we become conscious of the harmony of the faculties through some phenomenologically distinctive feature of aesthetic pleasure. As we have seen, however, Kant’s account of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure remains deeply mysterious. Does aesthetic pleasure provide intentional or non-intentional awareness of the harmony of the faculties? Is this affective awareness of the harmony of the faculties fallible or infallible? Far from providing decisive answers to these questions, Kant offers conflicting answers at various points in the “Analytic.” In particular, I have argued in this chapter that the “Analytic” provides evidential support for no fewer than four competing conceptions of aesthetic pleasure (Upn, Upi, Cpn, and Cpi). Moreover, Kant’s ambivalence about the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure has proven to be inseparable from his radical uncertainty about the precise epistemic status of the universal voice and the sensus communis. Kant explicitly assigns merely regulative status to the principles of the universal voice and the sensus communis and insists, accordingly, on the inherent fallibility of judgments of taste. As Kant repeatedly emphasizes, the regulative status of these

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principles signals the fact that we can never be certain in any given judgment of taste whether we are judging with a universal voice or whether we have correctly subsumed our judgment under the “ideal norm” of a common sense. However, it has emerged that Kant’s official regulative approach to the universal voice and the sensus communis stands in uneasy tension with an incipiently constitutive approach to these principles. In §8, for instance, Kant momentarily suggests that one can be “certain” of the disinterestedness of one’s judgment of taste on the basis of the feeling of aesthetic pleasure alone. In my discussion of the fourth moment of the “Analytic,” I linked this apparently aberrant remark in §8 to Kant’s pervasive uncertainty about the regulative or constitutive status of the sensus communis in §21, §22, and §40. As the left-hand column of Figure 1 indicates, a regulative construal of the universal voice and the sensus communis entails the inherent fallibility of judgments of taste, thus corresponding to a deflationary account of aesthetic pleasure (Upn or Upi). On the other hand, as the right-hand column of Figure 1 illustrates, a constitutive reading of the universal voice and the sensus communis entails the infallibility of judgments of taste, which presupposes an inflationary conception of aesthetic pleasure that provides phenomenological certainty of its universal validity (Cpn or Cpi). Ironically, the question of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure—which Kant relegates to the status of a “lesser question” in §9—has turned out to be central to the “Analytic.” At this point, however, my argument about the structural nature of the tensions in Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure remains incomplete, since I have not yet explored the crucial question of why Kant would have felt compelled to vacillate on the issue of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure. Most fundamentally, why is Kant so deeply ambivalent about whether aesthetic pleasure provides phenomenological certainty of its universal validity? I argue in the next chapter that this question can only be answered by taking into account Kant’s broader argumentative ambitions in the third Critique. In particular, I will trace the tensions in Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure to his aporetic account of the role of aesthetic pleasure in moral life and his pervasive uncertainty about the extent to which the third Critique departs from the first and second Critiques.

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The “Great Gulf ” of the Third Critique: Kant’s Ambivalence about the Role of Aesthetic Pleasure in Moral Life I  Kant’s aesthetics in the broader context of the third Critique The previous chapter isolated various ambiguities and tensions in Kant’s account of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” a brief but pregnant section of the third Critique that quickly became a foundational  text for post-Enlightenment aesthetic discourse. Admittedly, recent analytic commentators such as Guyer, Allison, and Kulenkampff also acknowledge many of the same tensions and ambiguities in the “Analytic,” but they attempt to resolve these ambiguities by reconstructing from the “Analytic” what they take to be the most plausible and consistent theory of aesthetic pleasure. Militating against this prevailing reconstructive approach, I have begun to make a case that the tensions in Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure are structural and hence cannot be reconstructed away. To be fully convincing, a structural reading of the tensions in Kant’s theory of aesthetic pleasure must establish two premises: first, that the tensions are somehow interrelated rather than merely local or contingent, and second, that these tensions are irresolvable or unavoidable for Kant since they stem from a full-blown aporia at the heart of Kant’s philosophical enterprise. Chapter 1 sought to establish the first premise by linking the tensions in Kant’s account of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure to his fundamental ambivalence about the epistemic status of the universal voice and the sensus communis. It will be the task of this chapter to establish the second premise by situating Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” within the context of Kant’s critical philosophy as a whole.

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Indeed, perhaps what is most distinctive and radical about the aesthetics of the third Critique is that it is embedded in a much more ambitious philosophical program that broaches fundamental questions concerning the broader sociocultural and ethical role of aesthetic experience in modernity. Hence, we simply cannot account for the rich and complex historico-philosophical legacy of Kant’s aesthetics without considering how Kant’s theory of taste relates to the larger ambitions of the third Critique. In the published introduction to the third Critique, Kant addresses a major problem left unresolved by the previous two Critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason (first edition, 1781; second edition, 1787) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). The problem stems from Kant’s fundamental distinction in the first Critique between the causally determined sensible realm to which we have cognitive access and the supersensible realm of ethical freedom that we cannot cognize but must nevertheless presuppose. By the time of writing the third Critique, Kant realized that our pressing ethical concern is not whether we possess freedom in some mysterious supersensible domain that remains unknown to us but whether it is possible for us to act freely in the sensible world (KdU, IX, 176). How can we be sure that the sensible world is structured in so felicitous a manner that the freedom we possess as supersensible agents can be exercised in it? In the third Critique, Kant dramatizes this ethical problem in terms of a “great gulf ” between the realms of causal necessity and ethical freedom (KdU, II, 175). He addresses this problem of the gulf by introducing a new a priori principle of judgment—the principle of nature’s “purposiveness” (Zweckmäßigkeit)—which allows us to assume that nature is amenable to our cognitive and ethical aims. Kant goes on to claim that the principle of nature’s purposiveness plays a key role both in aesthetic judgments about beautiful objects and in teleological judgments about organisms. However, as many readers from Kant’s time up to the present have noted, his vexed elaboration of this fundamental claim in the third Critique raises a number of questions and puzzles. What is the precise epistemic status of the principle of nature’s purposiveness? Is Kant’s account of the principle of purposiveness consistent with the epistemic strictures of the previous two Critiques? Does the principle of purposiveness actually bridge the “gulf ” between nature and freedom or does it play a more modest role in negotiating the gulf without quite bridging it? And how do aesthetic judgments relate to the principle of purposiveness?

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For deep structural reasons, Kant fails to provide clear and consistent answers to these questions. In the course of this chapter, I isolate a variety of inconsistencies and equivocations in Kant’s account of the principle of purposiveness that I trace to unresolved problems in the first and second Critiques. Part II briefly addresses Kant’s attempt in the second Critique both to justify our assumption of ethical freedom and to account for the role of beauty in moral life. This will provide the background for Part III, which examines Kant’s vexed account of the “transcendental” epistemic status of the principle of nature’s purposiveness in the introduction to the third Critique. Linking Kant’s discussion of the principle of nature’s purposiveness in the third Critique to his earlier account of the principle of nature’s systematicity in the first Critique, I argue that Kant vacillates in the third Critique between inflationary and deflationary conceptions of the transcendental principle of nature’s purposiveness. Part IV traces the tensions in Kant’s account of the epistemic status of the principle of nature’s purposiveness to what I identify as the central aporia of the third Critique—Kant’s ambivalence about whether aesthetic pleasure is able to bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom. Drawing on the previous chapter’s discussion of the tensions in Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” I claim that Kant remains torn in the third Critique between two directly competing conceptions of the role of aesthetic pleasure in moral life. Part V sets the stage for the remainder of the book by beginning to make a case that the aporetic structure of the third Critique helps account for the complex and enduring legacy of Kant’s aesthetics. Schiller, as we will see, was the first to explore the broader philosophical and cultural implications of Kant’s aesthetic speculations, thereby setting the stage for subsequent engagements with—and appropriations of—the third Critique in early German Romanticism, post-Kantian idealism, and beyond.

II  The fact of reason in the second Critique How can there be room for freedom in a deterministic natural world? Kant first addressed this paradoxical question in the Third Antinomy of the first Critique by appealing to his doctrine of transcendental idealism. In the resolution to the Third Antinomy, Kant argues that as a phenomenal agent, one is indeed constrained by deterministic natural laws, but as a noumenal agent, one can be assumed to be free. Consequently, Kant concludes that freedom and natural

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necessity can exist without conflict “in one and the same action” (A557/B585). What is crucial to recognize is that the Third Antinomy establishes only the negative thesis that freedom is not incompatible with nature.1 Hence, Kant is careful to emphasize that “we have not even tried to prove the possibility of freedom” (A558/B586). Establishing the stronger positive claim that freedom is in fact possible in the phenomenal world would require cognitive insight into the metaphysical structure of nature—that is, insight into whether nature in fact accommodates our noumenal freedom. Kant insists throughout the first Critique that finite human intellects are incapable of such metaphysical insight. Before long, however, Kant began to worry that the negative result of the Third Antinomy is an insufficient basis for moral action. After all, if nature provides no indication that it is amenable to our ethical aims, then we might remain paralyzed by the doubt that our freedom of will is nothing more than a figment of the brain. Accordingly, in the second Critique, Kant attempts to hazard more positive claims about freedom without overstepping the epistemic strictures of the first Critique.2 Kant’s foundational move in the second Critique is to invoke what he calls the “Fact of Reason” (Faktum der Vernunft). Kant claims that “the moral law is given, as it were, as a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori conscious and which is apodictically certain [apodiktisch gewiß] . . .” (KpV, 47). In other words, the Fact of Reason assures us of the moral law in us that prescribes our moral duty under all circumstances.3 By ascribing “apodictic certainty” to the Fact of Reason, Kant is able to claim that the moral law “has no need of justifying grounds”: as he puts it, the “moral law proves its reality” (beweiset seine Realität) directly in the Fact of Reason (KpV, 48). One might reasonably inquire about the epistemic status of the a priori “certainty” involved in the Fact of Reason. Unfortunately, Kant remains frustratingly vague and non-committal on this point. It is clear, however, that our certainty of the moral law in the Fact of Reason is not the constitutive certainty of theoretical cognition, which only obtains in the knowledge of spatiotemporal objects. It is equally evident that our “apodictic certainty” of the moral law cannot be conceived in regulative terms, since direct and infallible awareness of the moral law involves a robust form of certainty rather than a merely heuristic assumption. Hence, Bernard Carnois seems right to point out that “[c]onsciousness of the moral law is . . . an absolutely primary fact founded on neither practical nor speculative knowledge.”4 Dieter Henrich goes so far as to speculate that Kant’s Fact of Reason is a “primordial unity of both cognition

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and feeling.”5 The apodictic facticity of the moral law, it seems, is a species of certainty that is neither regulative nor constitutive, thus enabling it to mediate between the noumenal and phenomenal domains.6 On the basis of the Fact of Reason, the Kant of the second Critique makes the provocative positive claim that freedom is thereby “afforded objective and, though only practical, undoubted reality” (KpV, 49). This would be an untenably strong claim if it meant that the Fact of Reason furnishes robust certainty of our noumenal freedom, but Kant makes clear that he is not making such a strong claim. Hence, he explicitly anchors his positive claims about freedom in the second Critique in the negative result of the first Critique’s Third Antinomy: “But no insight can be had into the possibility of the freedom of an efficient cause, especially in the sensible world: we are fortunate if only we can be sufficiently assured that there is no proof of its impossibility, and are now forced to assume it and are thereby justified in doing so by the moral law, which postulates it” (KpV, 94). As Kant claims earlier in the second Critique, although we can never have “immediate consciousness of freedom”—which would amount to theoretical cognition of a noumenal Idea of Reason—the Fact of Reason nonetheless compels us to adopt the regulative assumption that we can act freely (KpV, 29–30). Put simply, the “ought” implies “can” for Kant: our apodictic certainty of our moral duty in the Fact of Reason implies or presupposes that we are, in fact, free to carry out our duty in the empirical world. As Kant puts it in his much later Opus Postumum, “if I ought to do something, I must be able to do it.”7 This necessary regulative assumption of freedom amounts to what Kant calls the “practical cognition” [praktische Erkenntnis] of freedom (KpV, 19–20). Hence, Kant goes on to claim that the Fact of Reason lends “objective reality” to the concept of freedom, but he adds the crucial qualification that the concept of freedom has only practical objective reality since there is no intuition corresponding to the concept of freedom that could lend it robustly “objective theoretical reality” (KpV, 56). However, the argument of the second Critique is not yet complete, for Kant is quick to point out that the Fact of Reason alone does not guarantee that we will act according to our moral duty. So, while Kant insists that for exceptionally moral  people, the immediate awareness of the moral law is alone both the necessary and sufficient condition for acting in accordance with duty, he argues that for the vast majority of people, certain moral “incentives” (Triebfedern) are necessary to induce us to act morally (KpV, 71–2). As Kant acknowledges, perhaps the single strongest incentive to act morally would be an assurance

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that we are in fact free to act in accordance with our duty. However, since Kant rules out the possibility of direct awareness of our noumenal freedom, he argues that moral feelings—the most fundamental of which is the feeling of respect for the moral law—are the primary incentives to act in accordance with our moral duty. In a suggestive passage near the end of the second Critique, Kant elaborates the role of aesthetic experience in cultivating our capacity to be receptive and responsive to such moral feelings. The contemplation of beauty produces subjectively a consciousness of the harmony of our powers of representation [ein Bewußtsein der Harmonie unserer Vorstellungskräfte] . . . in which we feel our entire cognitive faculty (understanding and imagination) strengthened [gestärkt]: it produces a delight [Wohlgefallen] that can also be communicated to others, while nevertheless the existence of the object remains indifferent to us, insofar as the object is viewed only as the occasion of our becoming aware of the tendency of talents in us which are elevated above animality [der über die Tierheit erhabenen Anlage der Talente in uns inne zu werden]. (KpV, 160)

In the feeling of aesthetic pleasure, we are conscious of the harmony of the faculties and are thereby made “aware of the tendency of talents in us which are elevated above animality.” Notice the heavily qualified nature of this claim: aesthetic pleasure does not make us directly aware of our capacity to raise ourselves above our animal wants and needs but rather only provides a kind of hint that our cognitive faculties seem in some way predisposed to distinctly moral ends. Kant then goes on to argue that the next necessary stage in the pupil’s “moral cultivation and exercise” involves being subjected to didactic examples of the moral disposition (KpV, 161). By the end of this process of moral cultivation, the pupil acquires a feeling of respect for the moral law (KpV, 161). To summarize, Kant’s argument in the second Critique about freedom and the role of aesthetic experience in moral life proceeds in four stages. First, the Fact of Reason assures us of the moral law in us. Second, the “ought” of the moral law implies “can,” thereby necessitating the regulative assumption that we can act freely in the phenomenal world. Third, for the vast majority of people, the Fact of Reason is an insufficient incentive to act morally, so moral feelings are necessary to motivate them to carry out their moral duty. Fourth, the experience of beauty helps cultivate our receptivity to these moral feelings. Two features of Kant’s argument in the second Critique are worth foregrounding. First, notice his careful insistence on the oblique—and relatively

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modest—role of aesthetic experience in moral life: the experience of beauty trains the pupil to be receptive to the force of didactic moral examples that gradually instill in him a feeling of respect for the moral law, which in turn encourages him  to (but by no means guarantees that he will) act in accordance with his moral duty. Second, Kant emphasizes in the second Critique that the practical cognition of freedom, combined with moral feelings, are a sufficient basis for moral action, although such practical cognition falls short of cognitive certainty of our noumenal freedom. As Kant puts it in a telling passage, the practical objective reality of freedom constitutes a “long step from the sensibly conditioned . . . to the supersensible . . . , although an infinite gulf [eine unendliche Kluft] between that boundary and what we know remains always unfilled” (KpV, 55). It is clear from this statement that the Fact of Reason is unable to bridge the “infinite gulf ” between the noumenal and phenomenal domains. For the Kant of the second Critique, the full-blown bridging of this gulf would require nothing less than theoretical cognition of our noumenal freedom, which is obviously ruled out by his first Critique epistemic strictures. In according practical objective reality to freedom, “pure theoretical reason is not given the least encouragement to fly into the transcendent” (KpV, 57). However, Kant seems convinced in the second Critique that the inescapable fact of this “infinite gulf ” need not hinder our capacity and willingness to act morally. Kant thinks that the moral feelings derived from our practical cognition of freedom provide a sufficient incentive for us to act morally despite the fact that the gulf remains unbridged—in other words, despite the fact that we can never know whether the phenomenal world is in reality amenable to our moral ends. The Fact of Reason cannot assure us of our noumenal freedom, but it nevertheless provides the basis for moral feeling and the practical certainty of freedom, which collectively enable us not to see this gulf between the noumenal and phenomenal domains as an absolute hindrance to moral action. For the Kant of the second Critique, we might say, the Fact of Reason successfully mitigates the severity or direness of the problem of the “infinite gulf ” without actually bridging the gulf.

III  The aporia of nature’s purposiveness in the third Critique Remarkably, the “infinite gulf ” between the noumenal and phenomenal domains mentioned in the second Critique comes back to haunt Kant in the third Critique.

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At several points in the introduction to the third Critique, Kant raises the problem of a “great gulf that separates the supersensible from appearances” (KdU, IX, 195). This might seem puzzling, since the entire argument of the second Critique was meant precisely to address the problem of this gulf. The fact that the gulf reemerges in the third Critique suggests that Kant is no longer entirely satisfied with his approach to the problem in the second Critique. Most fundamentally, the Kant of the third Critique seems to realize that he underestimated the severity of the problem of the gulf in the second Critique and now worries that the Fact of Reason and the moral feelings derived from it are not a sufficiently strong incentive for us to act morally. As he puts it in IX of the introduction to the third Critique, “the very concept of a causality through freedom” requires that the “effect” of freedom “should take place in the world” (KdU, 195). Kant now worries that our uncertainty about whether freedom is possible in the phenomenal world could indeed pose a serious hindrance to moral action. Hence, the challenge Kant sets himself in the introduction to the third Critique is to find a principle that allows him to resolve—or, at least, to mitigate—the problem of the gulf in a more adequate manner without violating his own epistemic strictures. In the introduction to the third Critique, Kant argues that the a priori principle of the purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit) of nature is uniquely suited to mediate the domains of nature and freedom. According to this principle, the natural world, despite its seemingly endless and unmanageable heterogeneity, is “purposive” for—somehow contoured to—the cognitive and moral ends of human beings. If nature is purposive, it would mean that the phenomenal world is so felicitously ordered that it does not thwart our efforts to understand it or to act ethically within it. In the introduction to the third Critique, Kant argues that this principle of nature’s purposiveness resolves, or at least mitigates, the problem of the “great gulf ” between the domains of nature and freedom by suggesting a special kind of fit or harmony between nature and freedom. As we will find, however, Kant runs into significant difficulties when he tries to account for the epistemic status of the principle of nature’s purposiveness. Is the purposiveness of nature a mere subjective assumption that helps us negotiate and make sense of the natural world or an objective principle indicating that nature is in fact amenable to our cognitive and moral ends? Or, does the principle of purposiveness possess some intermediate epistemic status that is not easily classifiable as either subjective or objective? I will argue that Kant ends up in an aporetic situation in his attempt to answer these questions in the introduction to

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the third Critique: he proves torn between two directly competing conceptions of the epistemic status of the principle of purposiveness, each of which has radically different implications for how we understand the nature of aesthetic pleasure and its role in moral life. Before considering the complexities involved in Kant’s account of nature’s purposiveness in the third Critique, we will need to turn briefly to the notoriously opaque “Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic” of the first Critique, where Kant introduces reason’s a priori principle of nature’s “systematicity,” clearly a precursor to the principle of nature’s purposiveness of the third Critique. In the first Critique, Kant introduces the principle of nature’s systematicity in order to address the problem of what Henry Allison has called “empirical chaos”—the possibility that nature is so disordered that the human understanding would be unable to subsume the diversity of nature under concepts.8 As Kant puts it in the “Appendix,” “if among the appearances that present themselves to us, there were so great a variety . . . that even the acutest human understanding could never by comparison of them detect the slightest similarity (a possibility which is quite conceivable) . . . the understanding itself, which has to do solely with such concepts, would be non-existent” (A654/B682). To address the problem of empirical chaos, Kant introduces the regulative principle of nature’s systematicity, which amounts to the necessary assumption that nature in its empirical diversity nonetheless conforms to our cognitive and ethical aims. However, Kant fails to provide a clear and unambiguous account of the precise epistemic status of this necessary regulative assumption of nature’s systematicity. Kant’s argumentative difficulties in the “Appendix” of the first Critique stem from his crucial distinction between “logical” and “transcendental” principles. Kant defines transcendental principles as “objectively necessary” conditions for cognition in general and hence takes them to be coextensive with constitutive principles; by contrast, he defines logical principles as merely “subjectively” necessary heuristic maxims that allow us to organize our cognitions and hence takes them to be coextensive with regulative principles (A647–8/B675–6).9 In light of this distinction, it is no surprise that Kant ascribes merely logical status to the regulative principle of nature’s systematicity. If the principle fails to give us insight into the actual purposiveness of nature, it nonetheless serves as an indispensable heuristic maxim that enables us to subsume objects of experience under empirical laws and allays our potential anxieties that nature might be hostile to our ethical aims (A648/B676).

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At certain points in the “Appendix,” however, Kant seems to ascribe a transcendental role to the principle of nature’s systematicity, which implies that it is not merely heuristic but somehow necessary for cognition itself. For instance, he asserts that “it cannot even be seen how there could be a logical principle of rational unity among rules unless a transcendental principle is presupposed, through which such a systematic unity, as pertaining to the object itself, is assumed a priori as necessary” (A650–1/B678–9). Accordingly, Kant goes on to suggest that the principle of nature’s systematicity requires a transcendental deduction (A669–70/B697–8). Kant’s vacillation between logical and transcendental conceptions of the purportedly regulative principle of systematicity in the “Appendix” has led Norman Kemp Smith, among other commentators, to complain that the argument of the “Appendix” is “extremely self-contradictory.”10 Kant’s dilemma in the “Appendix” can be put as follows. On the one hand, if he assigns logical status to the principle of nature’s systematicity, it would play a merely heuristic role in the organization of our cognitions, but it would not be able to resolve the problem of empirical chaos, since it could not rule out the possibility that nature is simply too diverse and chaotic for us to be able to apply the categories of the understanding to it.11 On the other hand, if Kant assigns robustly transcendental status to the principle of systematicity, it would play an objectively necessary role in cognition, but he would then seem to come perilously close to the dogmatic metaphysical claim that noumenal nature in fact conforms to our cognitive and ethical aims—a claim ruled out by Kant’s own epistemic strictures.12 With this background in place, we can return now to the third Critique. The basic ambitions of the third Critique can only be understood within the broader context of unresolved problems in the first and second Critiques. As I have already pointed out, the introduction to the third Critique reintroduces the problem of a “gulf ” between the noumenal and phenomenal domains, which was inadequately addressed in the second Critique. Moreover, in V of the introduction to the third Critique, Kant once again raises the problem of empirical chaos first raised in the first Critique: “the specific diversity of nature could . . . be so great that it would be impossible for our understanding to discover in them an order that we can grasp . . ..” (KdU, 185). Presumably, Kant’s reassertion of this problem in the third Critique implies that the first Critique’s principle of nature’s systematicity was not quite able to exorcise the specter of empirical chaos.

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One of the primary ambitions of the third Critique is to demonstrate how a new transcendental principle of reflecting judgment—namely, the principle of nature’s purposiveness—is uniquely suited to address both the problem of empirical chaos and the problem of the “gulf ” between the noumenal and phenomenal realms. Whereas Kant vacillated in the first Critique “Appendix” between logical and transcendental conceptions of nature’s systematicity, he unambiguously asserts in V of the introduction to the third Critique that the regulative principle of nature’s purposiveness is transcendental. Superficially, this seems to clarify an issue left unresolved by the first Critique but, as I hope to demonstrate, Kant’s vexed account of the regulative but transcendental status of the principle of purposiveness in V ends up reproducing the ambiguities of the first Critique “Appendix” in another form. In V, Kant introduces the principle of purposiveness as a regulative principle. He explicitly denies that the principle could be constitutive, since that would entail direct “insight” into—or “cognition” of—nature’s actual purposiveness, which is impossible for the limited human intellect (KdU, 184). Although we can never directly “cognize” the purposiveness of nature, we must nevertheless presuppose nature’s purposiveness as a regulative principle, a necessary heuristic maxim that allows us to conceive nature as amenable to our cognitive and ethical aims. However, Kant goes on to insist in V that the principle of purposiveness nonetheless carries “transcendental,” as opposed to merely logical, force (KdU, 184–6). In the first Critique, as we have seen, Kant takes transcendental principles to be coextensive with constitutive principles, which comprise objectively necessary conditions for cognition. In the third Critique, by contrast, Kant seems to allow that certain regulative principles can also be transcendental. The interpretive challenge, then, is to establish in what precise sense the principle of nature’s purposiveness can be both regulative and transcendental. To make matters more confusing, Kant defines transcendental principles in V in what seem constitutive terms: “A transcendental principle is one through which we represent the universal a priori condition under which alone things can become objects of our cognition in general” (KdU, 181). At first blush, this definition seems virtually identical to Kant’s definition of transcendental principles in the first Critique: transcendental principles are those that account for the objective conditions of cognition in general. However, such a construal of transcendental principles entails that only robustly constitutive principles would qualify as transcendental; and since the principle of purposiveness is explicitly regulative

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in the third Critique, Kant would be committed to the outright contradiction of lending constitutive status to a regulative principle.13 This cannot be what Kant intended. How else can “transcendental” be interpreted in V of the introduction? I will argue that Kant remains undecided in V between two competing conceptions of the transcendental status of the principle of purposiveness—which I will call P1 and P2—neither of which he finds entirely satisfactory (for reasons I will explain). Since Kant does not specify in V that transcendental principles must provide objectively necessary conditions of cognition, he seems to leave room for subjectively necessary conditions of cognition as well.14 Accordingly, the regulative principle of purposiveness might be transcendental in the weak sense of being a subjectively necessary condition of cognition. Let us call this weakly transcendental principle of purposiveness P1. However, in the first Critique, Kant defines logical principles as the subjectively necessary conditions of cognition (A648/B676). We would then be left with the question of why the Kant of the third Critique would expand his conception of transcendental principles to include logical principles. Indeed, the very notion of a “transcendental” principle seems in danger of losing its explanatory force since, presumably, Kant lends transcendental status to the principle of purposiveness precisely as a means of contrasting it with a merely logical principle. Moreover, a subjectively necessary principle of nature’s purposiveness would not be able to handle the problem of empirical chaos any better than the principle of nature’s systematicity in the first Critique. After all, the merely subjective assumption of nature’s purposiveness in no way rules out the possibility that nature might in fact be recalcitrant to our attempts to understand it and to act ethically within it.15 Yet, there seems to be a stronger way of interpreting the transcendental status of the principle of purposiveness that does address the problem of empirical chaos more adequately than the first Critique principle of nature’s systematicity. One might suggest that by conceiving the regulative principle of purposiveness as a robustly transcendental condition of cognition, Kant makes the very distinction between regulative and constitutive principles a permeable one.16 In the first Critique, Kant insists on an utterly rigid and impermeable distinction between regulative and constitutive principles. Kant’s definition of transcendental principles in the third Critique, however, might allow that the regulative principle of purposiveness can exhibit certain features of constitutive principles without playing a role in theoretical cognition. Such a strongly transcendental principle of purposiveness (P2) would somehow hint at nature’s actual purposiveness but

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without yielding theoretical cognition of any sort. But we would then have to ask in what concrete sense a regulative principle can share features of constitutive principles. And we might also worry that this more capacious conception of regulative principles so strains his first Critique epistemic strictures that it verges on dogmatic metaphysics. The remainder of V vacillates between deflationary (P1) and inflationary (P2) conceptions of the transcendental status of the principle of purposiveness. Initially, he conceives the principle of purposiveness as a merely subjectively necessary principle (P1): although the lawful unity of nature cannot be “cognized” (erkannt), it must nevertheless be “presupposed and assumed” (KdU, V, 183). Thus, the lawful unity of nature is “for us in fact not fathomable but still thinkable” (für uns zwar nicht zu ergründende aber doch denkbare) (KdU, V, 183–4). Yet, in the next sentence, he seems to conceive the transcendental status of the principle of purposiveness in more constitutive terms (P2): the principle of purposiveness allows us to “cognize” (erkennen) the lawful unity of nature “as conforming to a necessary aim that we have . . . but at the same time as in itself contingent” (KdU, V, 184). This claim should be read in the context of the next sentence, which indicates that the “transcendental concept of a purposiveness of nature is neither a concept of nature [Naturbegriff] nor a concept of freedom [Freiheitsbegriff], because it contributes nothing at all to the objects (of nature)” (KdU, V, 184). By explicitly denying the possibility of construing the principle of purposiveness as a “concept of nature”—that is, as one of the twelve categories— he excludes the possibility of understanding the “cognition” of purposiveness as straightforwardly theoretical cognition. The “cognition” of the lawful unity of nature afforded by a strongly transcendental principle of purposiveness (P2) would be somehow more than a merely regulative presupposition—since it indicates the actual purposiveness of nature itself—yet not quite robustly theoretical cognition.

IV  Can aesthetic pleasure bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom? I have argued that Kant’s vacillation in V of the introduction to the third Critique between weak (P1) and strong (P2) conceptions of the transcendental principle of nature’s purposiveness stems from an unresolved dilemma in the “Appendix” to the first Critique. Only P2, which would indicate nature’s actual purposiveness,

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could successfully rule out the possibility of empirical chaos. Yet, Kant also realizes that such a strongly transcendental principle would overstep his first Critique epistemic strictures, which forbid any insight into the noumenal structure of nature. In this section, I will argue that there are deep structural reasons for Kant’s vacillation between P1 and P2 that extend well beyond V’s concern with the problem of empirical chaos. In particular, I hope to demonstrate that Kant’s vacillation between P1 and P2 stems from his fundamental ambivalence about how to cope with the “great gulf ”—an ambivalence that proves to be inseparable from the various tensions in his account of aesthetic pleasure in the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” As I argued in the previous section, the fact that the “gulf ” between the sensible and supersensible domains first alluded to in the second Critique reemerges in the introduction to the third Critique signals Kant’s implicit dissatisfaction with his practical approach to the problem of the gulf in the second Critique. In II of the introduction to the third Critique, Kant claims that there is a “field of the supersensible . . . for which, in relation to the laws from the concept of freedom, we can provide nothing but a practical reality, through which, accordingly, our theoretical cognition is not in the least extended to the supersensible” (KdU, 175). Kant is clearly alluding to the argument of the second Critique, which established the “practical reality” of the supersensible concept of freedom while insisting that an “infinite gulf ” remained between the sensible and supersensible domains. The Kant of the third Critique seems to accept the argument of the second Critique but now finds the apparent insuperability of this “gulf ” to be quite disturbing. Hence, in contrast to his approach to the “infinite gulf ” in the second Critique, Kant now makes the startling claim that this “gulf ” signals the fact that a merely practical validation of freedom is an insufficient basis for moral action: Now although there is an incalculable gulf fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible, so that from the former to the latter (thus by means of the theoretical use of reason) no transition is possible, just as if there were so many different worlds, the first of which can have no influence on the second: yet the latter should have an influence on the former, namely the concept of freedom should make the end that is imposed by its law real in the sensible world; and nature must consequently also be able to be conceived in such a way that the lawfulness of its form is at least in agreement with the possibility of the ends that are to be realized in it in accordance with the laws of freedom. (KdU, II, 175–6)

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For the Kant of the third Critique, the “incalculable gulf ” between the sensible and supersensible domains points to the fundamental limitations of a merely practical point of view. Kant reasons that if the natural world fails to give us any hint that we are able to exercise our ethical freedom within it, then the basis for moral action is threatened. However, since Kant’s epistemic strictures forbid any possibility of theoretical cognition of the noumenal Idea of freedom, he emphatically declares that “no transition is possible” from the phenomenal to the noumenal domain (KdU, II, 176). Kant’s intentions in the third Critique hence appear to be paradoxical in the extreme. On the one hand, a merely practical justification of freedom would leave the “incalculable gulf ” unbridged, thus leaving open the possibility that we would be unable to exercise our freedom in the empirical world. On the other hand, any attempt to bridge the “gulf ” seems to require theoretical cognition of noumenal Ideas, which is forbidden by Kant’s epistemic strictures. Indeed, Burkhard Tuschling has argued that this passage from II signals a fullblown aporia in the argument of the third Critique. As Tuschling puts it, Kant seeks to “bridge the ‘gulf ’ between the concepts of nature and freedom and to fashion a ‘transition’ between them, although ‘no transition is possible’. ”17 I will make the case here that Tuschling rightly identifies a fundamental aporia at the core of Kant’s attempt to negotiate the “incalculable gulf.” Kant finds himself in the aporetic situation of asserting the need to bridge a “gulf ” that he nonetheless insists can never be bridged. Moreover, Tuschling seems to me to be correct in noting that this “problem continues to be ignored by the overwhelming majority of Kant scholars, even though it is of vital importance for Kantian philosophy.”18 Kant’s contradictory stance toward the “great gulf ” has been ignored by many recent commentators in large part because of their reconstructive orientation, which has led them to underplay or suppress tensions in Kant’s argument for the sake of reconstructing the most plausible and consistent theory. Militating against this reconstructive approach, I will argue that Kant’s ambivalence about whether the “great gulf ” can be bridged is, in fact, the central aporia of the third Critique—an aporia lying at the basis of the various tensions and ambiguities of the third Critique that this chapter and the previous one have sought to elaborate. Everything turns on the ambiguity of Kant’s fundamental claim in IX of the introduction that the principle of nature’s purposiveness is the “mediating concept between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom, which makes possible the transition from the purely theoretical to the purely practical, from

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lawfulness in accordance with the former to the final end in accordance with the latter” (KdU, 196). The transcendental principle of nature’s purposiveness, Kant suggests, “makes possible the transition” from the theoretical domain of sensible nature to the practical domain of supersensible freedom. However, as we will see, the precise nature of this “transition” remains ambiguous throughout the third Critique. Should the “transition” provided by the principle of nature’s purposiveness be understood as a full-blown bridging of the “gulf ” between nature and freedom or as a merely practical transition that mitigates the severity of the gulf without quite bridging it? For deep structural reasons, Kant remains undecided about how to answer this question: conflicting aspects of Kant’s argument in the third Critique lend support to both stronger and weaker conceptions of this “transition” from nature to freedom. Most recent commentators, including Henry Allison and Paul Guyer, adopt the weaker reading of the “transition” between the domains of nature and freedom. Guyer, for instance, has made a sustained argument that “even though—or precisely because—the great abyss between nature and freedom cannot be bridged by the theoretical use of reason, it can and must be bridged by the practical use of freedom, from whose point of view nature must be able to be seen as a realm within which morality’s demands on both our actions and their outcomes can be satisfied.”19 On Guyer’s reading of the introduction, Kant’s strategy is to distinguish implicitly between the theoretical gulf that cannot be bridged and the practical gulf between our sensible nature and our moral agency, which would amount to a lack of incentive—an empirical-anthropological inability or unwillingness—to act morally in the phenomenal realm.20 Even if the theoretical gulf cannot be bridged, it only poses a serious problem so long as it entails the unbridgeability of the practical gulf, which would present an absolute hindrance to our capacity or willingness to act morally. For Guyer, then, despite the unbridgeability of the theoretical gulf, the principle of nature’s purposiveness can nonetheless bridge the practical gulf and thereby mitigate the problem of the theoretical gulf from “a practical point of view.”21 Allison suggests that a passage from II of the introduction lends support to such a practical reading of the “transition” from nature to freedom. Kant states in II that the principle of purposiveness “makes possible the transition [Übergang] from the way of thinking [Denkungsart] in terms of principles of nature, to the way of thinking in terms of principles of freedom” (KdU, 176). Allison emphasizes the heavily qualified nature of Kant’s claim: since Kant explicitly states that the principle of purposiveness does not yield cognition of the supersensuous, the principle does not make possible the actual bridging of the “prominent gulf ”

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separating the domains of nature and freedom (KdU, II, 175–6). Thus, Kant is careful not to claim that the principle of purposiveness makes possible the transition from the domain of nature to the domain of freedom; rather, it makes possible the transition from the way of thinking in terms of the principles of the one domain to the way of thinking in terms of the principles of the other.22 In this passage from II, Kant clearly seems to have in mind the weakly transcendental principle of purposiveness (P1) suggested in V, which falls short of theoretical cognition of nature’s purposiveness. Kant’s reasoning seems to be that even if P1 cannot bridge the theoretical gulf, it can nevertheless bridge the practical gulf: by allowing us to entertain in thought the coexistence of nature and freedom, P1 provides sufficient incentive for us to act morally in the phenomenal world. In other words, P1 does not so much resolve as finesse the problem of the theoretical gulf by preventing it from hindering our capacity and willingness to exercise moral freedom. This approach to the problem of the gulf would be more or less consistent with the practical point of view of the second Critique: P1 of the third Critique would strengthen our belief in the practical objective reality of freedom rooted in the Fact of Reason. How does aesthetic pleasure fit into Kant’s account of the role of P1 in negotiating the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom? Recall from Part II of this chapter that Kant had already claimed in the second Critique that our consciousness of the harmony of the faculties in aesthetic pleasure makes us “aware of the tendency of talents in us which are elevated above animality” (KpV, 160). P1 of the third Critique seems to be a natural extension of his earlier account of the moral role of aesthetic pleasure in the second Critique. §59 of the third Critique, largely consistent with the second Critique’s more abbreviated account of beauty’s oblique role in moral life, conceives beauty as a “symbol” of morality. Beauty, as Kant puts it, “arouses sensations in us that are somehow analogous to the consciousness involved in a state of mind produced by moral judgments” (KdU, §59, 354). Aesthetic pleasure, Kant suggests, is an affective analogue of moral feeling and thereby helps cultivate our receptivity to the latter. It is in this sense that Kant claims toward the end of IX of the introduction that the “concept” of nature’s purposiveness—which I take to be P1—“promotes the receptivity of the mind for moral feeling” (KdU, 197). In a telling passage from §59, Kant paints a vivid picture of how the experience of aesthetic pleasure helps bridge the practical gulf between our sensuous inclinations and our moral interests: “Taste makes possible, as it were, the transition from sensuous charm [Sinnenreiz] to habitual moral interests without making too violent a leap; for taste represents [vorstellt] the imagination,

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even in its freedom, as purposive [zweckmäßig] and hence determinable for the understanding, and it teaches us to find a free delight in sense objects even without sensuous charms” (KdU, 260). Clearly, a weakly transcendental principle of purposiveness (P1) lies at the basis of this account: taste indicates not the purposiveness of nature itself but the “purposive” harmony of the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding, which trains us to value objects without regard to our sensuous inclinations. Moreover, this passage from §59 suggests that P1 dovetails with the regulative dimension of taste of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” outlined in Chapter 1 (represented in the left-hand column of Figure 1). Notice that aesthetic pleasure does not directly exhibit this purposive harmony of the cognitive faculties; rather, the judgment of taste “represents” (vorstellt) the imagination as purposive for the understanding. Kant’s employment of the discursive language of “representation” here implies the inherent fallibility of the judgment that the harmony of the faculties lies at the basis of a given feeling of aesthetic pleasure. Hence, this account is consistent with regulative conceptions of the sensus communis and the universal voice, which jointly entail the fallibility of the one judging. In a given judgment of taste, one resorts to discursive presumption precisely because one’s feeling falls short of full-blown certainty of the harmony of the faculties. Hence, this account presupposes the weak account of aesthetic pleasure at the basis of the regulative dimension of taste (Upn or Upi). At best, the presumed purposiveness involved in the harmony of the faculties evokes by analogy the purposiveness of nature, and this analogical evocation of nature’s purposiveness helps gradually to wean us from our sensuous inclinations and to make us receptive to the force of moral feelings. This regulative approach to the third Critique has obvious advantages. Perhaps most importantly, it presents the third Critique as elaborating or supplementing, but by no means breaking with, some of the key tenets of the first and second Critiques. P1 of the third Critique would supplement the Fact of Reason of the second Critique by reinforcing our practical cognition of freedom. Moreover, Kant’s regulative conceptions of the sensus communis and the universal voice motivate a theory of taste that can be accommodated within the epistemic strictures of the first Critique. However, this regulative approach to taste, though plausible in a number of respects, proves difficult to reconcile with some of Kant’s fundamental claims about the mediating role of the principle of purposiveness in the third Critique. First, conceiving the principle of nature’s purposiveness as a straightforwardly

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practical principle ignores Kant’s repeated insistence that the principle of nature’s purposiveness is able to play a mediating role between the domains of nature and freedom precisely because it is “neither a concept of nature nor a concept of freedom” (KdU, V, 184) and hence “has no proper domain of its own” (KdU, II, 176). In the preface to the third Critique, Kant elaborates how this peculiar feature of the principle of purposiveness—that it lacks a domain of its own—can serve a positive function in mediating between domains: although the principles of the power of judgment “are not such that they can form a special part between theoretical and practical philosophy, they can be annexed [angeschlossen] to one or the other as the occasion demands [im Notfalle]” (KdU, 74).23 By conceiving the principle of purposiveness as a straightforwardly practical principle, commentators such as Guyer and Allison are unable to account for the principle’s unique role as a mediator between the theoretical and practical domains. Second, and even more fundamentally, a regulative approach to the third Critique would secure its consistency with the first and second Critiques only at the cost of painting a rather bizarre picture of the third Critique, according to which Kant proposes to address a number of interrelated problems none of which he successfully resolves. He raises the problem of a metaphysical “gulf ” between the domains of nature and freedom, which, it turns out, the weakly transcendental principle of purposiveness (P1) is unable to bridge. He attempts to address the cognitive problem of empirical chaos left unresolved in the “Appendix” to the first Critique, but it turns out that P1 of the third Critique fares no better than the principle of nature’s systematicity of the first Critique in handling the problem. He raises the ethical problem of nature’s potential intransigence to our moral ends—a possibility, it turns out, that cannot be ruled out by P1. In short, a weak conception of the principle of purposiveness leaves unresolved  the fundamental worry of the third Critique: what if nature is organized in such a way that it proves inimical to our cognitive and ethical aims? The force of this question consists in the fact that the practical point of view of the second Critique fails to defuse this worry at all. Put another way, the fundamental worry of the third Critique originates precisely in Kant’s recognition of the limitations of a merely practical point of view.24 Conceiving the principle of purposiveness of the third Critique as a strictly practical principle (P1) makes little sense if the principle is supposed to negotiate an “incalculable gulf ” that remains unbridgeable from a practical standpoint. I would suggest that these worries about a merely practical approach to freedom compel Kant to risk much stronger claims about the epistemic status

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of the principle of nature’s purposiveness and the role of beauty in moral life. In V of the introduction, as we have seen, Kant theorizes a strongly transcendental principle of purposiveness (P2) alongside the weak principle (P1) at the basis of his regulative account. If P1 is meant to supplement the argument of the second Critique by reinforcing the practical cognition of freedom, P2 of V suggests a radical break with the second Critique: it reflects Kant’s incipient recognition that a merely practical resolution of the problem of the “gulf ” between nature and freedom—no matter how robust—fails to provide a sufficient basis for moral action. Let us revisit Kant’s key claim in IX of the introduction to the third Critique: the principle of nature’s purposiveness “makes possible the transition from the purely theoretical to the purely practical” (KdU, 196). I have already pointed out that II of the introduction renders this claim in a weak sense that is consistent with P1 of V: P1 would provide a practical transition in the “way of thinking” from the domain of nature to the domain of freedom. However, one might point out the conspicuous absence of the language of “ways of thinking” in Kant’s formulation in IX. One could argue that P2 of V leads Kant to drop the language of “ways of thinking” in IX and to make the much stronger claim that the principle of purposiveness guarantees nature’s actual purposiveness, thereby bridging the gulf between nature and freedom.25 Kant goes on to characterize the role of the principle of purposiveness— which I take to mean P2 here—in terms of cognition: “through” the principle of purposiveness, “the possibility of the final end, which can be actualized alone in nature and in agreement with its laws, is cognized [erkannt]” (KdU, IX, 196). A great deal depends on how we interpret “erkannt” here. As I pointed out in my discussion of V, P2 cannot yield theoretical cognition of nature’s purposiveness, since such a conception would flagrantly violate Kant’s epistemic strictures. Hence, I propose that we read “erkannt” as suggesting that P2 yields the certainty of theoretical cognition without being cognition.26 Such an interpretation has three basic advantages. First, it allows us to reconcile his statement with his repeated assertion that the principle of purposiveness yields neither theoretical nor practical cognition.27 Second, it helps account for the intermediate epistemic status of P2: the principle would be more than regulative but less than constitutive.28 Third, it helps explain how the principle of purposiveness “makes possible the transition” between the domains of nature and freedom. P2 would make possible the actual bridging of the gulf between nature and freedom without requiring full-blown theoretical cognition of things

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in themselves. On this reading, P2 would somehow assure us of the possibility of freedom without yielding any form of theoretical cognition. Of course, this reading would nonetheless entail a fairly radical break with the more epistemically modest approach to freedom in the first and second Critiques, since certainty of the possibility of freedom is much more robust than the mere thought of the possibility of freedom. On what basis, however, does Kant feel justified in adopting a strongly transcendental principle (P2) that assures us of nature’s purposiveness? Why is his appeal to P2 not just as epistemically ungrounded as his appeal to the Fact of Reason in the second Critique? The key to answering these questions, I would suggest, lies in the constitutive dimension of Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure (outlined in the right-hand column of Figure 1). In the second Critique, we should recall, Kant claimed that the Fact of Reason furnishes “apodictic” certainty of the moral law that is neither theoretical nor practical. We can interpret the constitutive dimension of the third Critique as an attempt to locate apodictic certainty of nature’s purposiveness in a distinctive feeling of aesthetic pleasure that provides phenomenological certainty of the harmony of the faculties at its basis (Cpn or Cpi). As we have seen, the regulative approach to the problem of the gulf is embodied in §59 of the third Critique, which indicates that the judger’s fallible postulation of a purposive harmony of the faculties at the basis of aesthetic pleasure (Upn or Upi) evokes analogically the purposiveness of nature. In §57, however, Kant proposes a much stronger and more direct link between the purposive harmony of the cognitive faculties and the purposiveness of nature. Kant makes the startling claim in §57 that the “purposive disposition of the imagination for its correspondence with the faculty of concepts in general” should be understood as “that which is merely nature in the subject, i.e., the supersensible substratum of all our faculties (to which no concept of the understanding attains)” (KdU, 344). By explicitly identifying the harmony of the faculties with a “supersensible substratum” that unites the noumenal basis of nature with the noumenal basis of freedom, Kant seems to imply the strong metaphysical thesis that the harmony of the faculties directly attests to nature’s purposiveness for our cognitive and ethical ends. Even as sober a commentator as Guyer admits that Kant construes the harmony of the faculties in §57 as nothing less than “a metaphysical guarantee of a predetermined harmony between human being and nature.”29 Tellingly, however, Guyer’s reconstructive bias leads him to dismiss §57 as an unnecessary

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“flight into metaphysics.”30 Against Guyer, I have been arguing that there is a deep structural necessity in Kant’s metaphysical appeal to the “supersensible substrate” in §57. Kant feels compelled to provide a metaphysical account of the harmony of the faculties in §57 as a means of resolving fundamental problems in his critical philosophy that cannot be adequately addressed from a merely practical standpoint. Béatrice Longuenesse argues that Kant’s vacillation in the third Critique between the epistemically modest conception of the harmony of the faculties in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” and the patently metaphysical construal of the harmony of the faculties in §57 signals a structural aporia in Kant’s aesthetics.31 On the basis of this thesis, Longuenesse arrives at the provocative conclusion that “Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgments is perhaps the place where the choice between remaining strictly within the ‘point of view of man’ or somehow finding within this point of view a way to reach ‘knowledge of God’ is most directly offered.”32 As should be clear by now, I am in basic agreement with Longuenesse’s structural approach to the tensions in the third Critique. Put in terms of my own argument, the regulative dimension of Kant’s theory of taste expresses what Longuenesse calls the “point of view of man,” while the constitutive dimension hints at a metaphysical standpoint that bridges the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom by providing insight into nature’s actual purposiveness. The foundation of the constitutive dimension of taste, I would argue, is an inflationary model of aesthetic pleasure that assures us of the harmony of the faculties at its basis (Cpn or Cpi). In other words, Kant’s metaphysical claim in §57 about the supersensible basis of judgments of taste tacitly presupposes Cpn or Cpi. If the harmony of the faculties just is the supersensible unity of nature and freedom, a strong conception of aesthetic pleasure that assures us of the harmony of the faculties (Cpn or Cpi) would provide nothing less than apodictic affective certainty of nature’s purposiveness. Since Cpn or Cpi would assure us of nature’s purposiveness through feeling rather than through cognition, it would bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom without entailing theoretical cognition of things in themselves. Hence, if the regulative dimension of taste naturally motivates §59’s establishment of a weak analogical link between the harmony of the faculties and nature’s purposiveness, the constitutive dimension of taste implies §57’s robustly metaphysical conception of the harmony of the faculties. If we keep in mind this strong model of aesthetic pleasure (Cpn or Cpi), we can also make sense of Kant’s cryptic claim in IX of the introduction that the

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judgment of taste “occasions” (veranlasset) the “principle of the purposiveness of nature” (KdU, 197).33 By assuring us of the harmony of the faculties, Cpn or Cpi “occasions” P2, which guarantees nature’s actual purposiveness and thereby bridges the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom.34 In other words, Cpn or Cpi assures us of nature’s amenability to our cognitive and ethical ends without furnishing theoretical cognition of noumenal nature. This constitutive approach to taste, I would suggest, lies at the basis of Kant’s bold claim in §42 that the beauty of nature provides a “hint” or “trace” of the noumenal harmony of nature and freedom. Kant’s claim deserves to be cited at length: But since it also interests reason that the Ideas (for which it produces an immediate  interest in the moral feeling) also have objective reality, i.e., that nature  should at least show some trace [Spur] or give a hint [Wink] that it contains in itself some ground for assuming a lawful correspondence of its products with our satisfaction that is independent of all interest . . . , reason must take an interest in every manifestation in nature of a correspondence similar to this; consequently the mind cannot reflect on the beauty of nature without finding itself at the same time to be interested in it. (KdU, §42, 300–1)

Notice Kant’s emphasis on reason’s interest in the “objective reality” of noumenal “Ideas.” He suggests here that if nature gave us some “hint” of the objective reality of nature’s purposiveness, then we would be much more receptive to moral feeling. The Kant of the second Critique, we should recall, assumed the adequacy of a practical resolution of the problem of the “infinite gulf ” between nature and freedom. In §42 of the third Critique, by contrast, Kant implies that a merely practical bridging of the gulf between nature and freedom still leaves open the possibility that the assumption of freedom in the phenomenal world is a mere figment of the brain, which would pose a serious hindrance to moral action. Accordingly, by tacitly exploiting the constitutive dimension of taste, the Kant of the third Critique accords a much more prominent and direct role to the experience of natural beauty in moral life. The experience of natural beauty— which has to be understood here in the strong sense of Cpn or Cpi—hints at the “objective reality” of nature’s purposiveness and thereby bridges the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom.35 Kant’s ambivalent stance toward the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom in the third Critique has turned out to have far-reaching implications for how we conceive the role of aesthetic experience in moral life. The regulative

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dimension of the third Critique, embodied in the left-hand column of Figure 1, presupposes the unbridgeability of the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom and invokes a weakly transcendental principle of purposiveness (P1) as a kind of practical consolation that allows us at least to conceive in thought the possibility of freedom in the empirical world. This practical approach to the problem of the gulf is linked to Kant’s deflationary conception of aesthetic pleasure in the “Analytic” (Upn or Upi), which is largely consistent with his second Critique account of art’s oblique role in moral life. On the other hand, as the right-hand column of Figure 1 indicates, the constitutive dimension of the “Analytic” is rooted in an inflationary account of aesthetic pleasure that provides phenomenological certainty of the harmony of the faculties (Cpn or Cpi). This inflationary model of aesthetic pleasure, in turn, “occasions” a strongly transcendental principle of purposiveness (P2) that bridges the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom by assuring us of nature’s actual purposiveness for our cognitive and ethical aims. These first two chapters have identified a variety of structural tensions in Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure and in his broader efforts to articulate the role of aesthetic pleasure in moral life. In the remainder of this book, I will argue that the conceptual possibilities for aesthetic agency that Kant explores and the various dilemmas he encounters in attempting to elaborate these possibilities are absolutely vital to understanding how major aestheticians up to the present have attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in modernity. Kant’s third Critique, as we will see, provided the philosophical impetus not only for the metaphysical and skeptical extremes of early German Romanticism— embodied, respectively, in the aesthetic doctrines of the early Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel—but also for the dialectical approach to art inaugurated by Hegel and later developed by Kierkegaard and Adorno.

V  Kant’s legacy in Schiller’s Letters, the “System-Program,” and beyond No account of the philosophical aftereffects and ramifications of Kant’s third Critique can ignore two major milestones in the immediate legacy of Kant’s aesthetics: Friedrich Schiller’s influential treatise, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793), and the jointly authored manifesto known as the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” (c. 1796), written in Hegel’s hand. To set the stage for the remainder of the book, I will address briefly some

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of the ways that these two texts attempted to grapple with—and rework—the problems raised in Kant’s third Critique. As we will see, these texts introduced a variety of important themes and problems concerning art’s role in modernity that reemerged in the aesthetic speculations of Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno. Schiller was the first to recognize the far-reaching philosophical and cultural implications of Kant’s abstruse speculations in the third Critique. At the outset of his Letters, Schiller announced that he would draw on “Kantian principles” in order to articulate art’s newfound role in a post-Enlightenment landscape.36 From Schiller’s perspective, although the “great gulf ” of the third Critique originated in a lacuna in Kant’s philosophy, it signaled nothing less than the fundamental crisis of modernity.37 In stark contrast to the idyllic age of classical Greece, when there was “not yet a diremption” between “sense and spirit,”38 our modern age is characterized by radical fragmentation, disharmony among the human faculties, and the tyranny of scientific rationality over imagination: Utility is the great idol of our age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage. Weighed in this crude balance, the insubstantial merits of art scarce tip the scale, and, bereft of all encouragement, she shuns the noisy marketplace of our century. The spirit of philosophical inquiry itself is wresting from the imagination one province after another, and the frontiers of art contract the more the boundaries of science expand.39

As Schiller presciently diagnosed, modernity had become the site of an everwidening rift between a hegemonic third-person scientific standpoint that fetishized the “idol” of utility and increasingly marginalized first-person aesthetic and moral values. Drawing on the conceptual resources of the third Critique, Schiller set the agenda for post-Kantian aesthetic discourse by exploring the possibility that art could play a crucial role in healing the “wound” inflicted by modern civilization.40 Schiller’s challenge was to find in art a means of restoring the “inner unity of human nature” without lapsing into nostalgic appeals to a classical age that remained irretrievably past.41 His basic strategy was to foreground the central role of aesthetic “play” in educating our sensibility so that we could progress gradually from the realm of crude feeling to the realm of moral and spiritual freedom. Yet, Schiller’s attempt to specify the precise role of beauty in mediating between the domains of sense and spirit ends up reproducing, rather than resolving, the aporias plaguing Kant’s third Critique. In a revealing passage, Schiller raises a distinctly Kantian dilemma. On the one hand, Schiller

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maintains that “there must be a state midway between matter and form, passivity and activity, and that it is into this middle state that beauty transports us.”42 On the other hand, he notes that “there is nothing more absurd than such an idea, since the distance between matter and form, passivity and activity, feeling and thought, is infinite, and there exists nothing that can conceivably mediate between them.”43 Notice that this is remarkably akin to the problem faced by Kant in the third Critique: the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom must be bridged, yet the limitations of the finite human intellect make the prospect of bridging this gulf impossible. In Kantian terms, Schiller remains torn between regulative and constitutive approaches to the role of beauty in negotiating the gulf. Just as II of the introduction to Kant’s third Critique argues for a merely practical transition in “ways of thinking” from the domain of nature to the domain of freedom, Schiller claims that beauty leads man “from matter to form, from feeling to law,”44 “merely by furnishing the faculties of thought with the freedom to express itself according to its own laws.”45 Schiller notes that although beauty cannot actually “bridge the gulf separating feeling from thinking,” it can nonetheless provide a practical resolution of the problem by allowing us to think the possibility of a unified human nature.46 And just as Kant linked this practical resolution of the great gulf to regulative conceptions of the universal voice and the common sense, Schiller goes on to emphasize that a “purely aesthetic experience,” in which we feel a “lofty equanimity and freedom of spirit,” is “not to be met with in actuality.”47 Our experience of beauty, according to Schiller, can only endlessly approximate an ideal feeling that would directly instantiate the “freedom of spirit.” Since all empirical aesthetic experience falls short of this ideal feeling, we must be content with beauty’s consolation that we can at least think our way from sense to spirit. Just pages later, however, Schiller hazards much more extravagant claims about the experience of beauty, which seem to assume the empirical actuality of Kant’s sensus communis. Schiller claims that beauty provides us with nothing less than “triumphant proof that passivity by no means excludes activity, nor matter form, nor limitation infinity—that, in consequence, the moral freedom of man is by no means abrogated through his inevitable dependence upon physical things.”48 Schiller seems to have in mind here the constitutive dimension of the third Critique, according to which aesthetic pleasure (Cpn or Cpi) directly attests to nature’s actual purposiveness for our moral ends. On the basis of this constitutive dimension of the third Critique, Schiller goes on to make protoRomantic metaphysical claims about aesthetic experience. As he puts it, “in the

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enjoyment of beauty . . . an actual union and interchange between matter and form, passivity and actuality, momentarily takes place” and the “compatibility of our two natures, the practicability of the infinite being realized in the finite, hence the possibility of sublimest humanity, is thereby proven.”49 Since the possibility of actualizing our ethical ends in the empirical world is “proven” in aesthetic pleasure (Cpn or Cpi), we need not be tormented by the gulf between sense and spirit. In spite of dismissing the possibility of a transition from sense to spirit earlier in his treatise, Schiller now triumphantly declares that beauty provides precisely such a “transition from sensuous dependence to moral freedom.”50 In short, while Schiller’s influential treatise made a convincing case for the broader cultural significance of the third Critique and accurately identified some of the key aporias at the heart of Kant’s aesthetics, Schiller’s own attempt to articulate art’s role in modernity remained trapped in the binary thinking and aporetic logic of the third Critique.51 As we will see in the next three chapters, Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel were careful readers not only of Kant’s third Critique but also of Schiller’s Letters. Each of them followed Schiller in treating the third Critique as a foundational text for thinking through art’s role in modernity, but they adopted a variety of strategies unexplored by Schiller for grappling with the aporias of Kant’s philosophy. Three or four years after the publication of Schiller’s Letters, the young Hegel penned a fragmentary two-page manifesto—which has come to be known as the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” (1796 or 1797)—most likely in collaboration with his former Tübingen colleagues, Hölderlin and Schelling.52 Clearly indebted to the philosophical speculations of Kant and Schiller, the “System-Program” introduced a number of vital themes that anticipated both Romantic and idealist aesthetics and that continue to inform contemporary debates about the role of art in modernity. Indeed, the document’s ambiguous authorship is itself telling, since the manifesto seems to voice not so much the idiosyncratic ideas of a single author but the collective plaints and aspirations of a post-Enlightenment age at once eager to celebrate the ascendancy of critical reason and wary of reason’s seductions and excesses. The manifesto echoes Schiller’s complaint that modern man has become “nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge.”53 The “System-Program” calls for the “equal development of all powers” and complains in a Schillerian vein that the state treats “free human beings like mechanical works.”54 By thwarting the harmonious development of human powers, rationalistic modern society has torn asunder sense and spirit, reason and feeling, thought and imagination. The “System-Program” also

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follows Schiller in appealing to art as a means of negotiating and potentially resolving these diremptions of modernity. “The highest act of reason,” the “System-Program” triumphantly declares, is “an aesthetic act,” since it is only in the aesthetic domain that “truth and goodness” are united.55 Alluding implicitly to Schiller’s notion of an “aesthetic education” of man, the “System-Program” claims that poetry is bound to become the “teacher of humanity” and prophesies that “poetry alone will outlive all the rest of the sciences and arts.”56 However, the “System-Program” departs starkly from Schiller’s Letters in its articulation of the precise nature and method of aesthetic education. Whereas Schiller emphasizes art’s “play drive,” which would gradually reconcile sensuous inclination with moral feeling, the “System-Program” makes the much bolder claim that art must become the basis of a “new mythology”—a “mythology of reason” that would “stand in the service of ideas.”57 Andrew Bowie has persuasively argued that this appeal to a “new mythology” in the “System-Program” reflects a growing awareness that the “revelation of the hollowness of theology does not lead to the disappearance of the needs which gave rise to it.”58 No wonder the “System-Program” conceives the “new mythology” of art as nothing less than a “sensuous religion,” a powerful force for social cohesion that does not depend on outmoded religious dogma.59 In light of the argument I have been developing in these first two chapters, I would suggest that the implicit foundation for the “new  mythology” of the “System-Program” is the constitutive dimension of Kant’s third Critique, which makes aesthetic experience the basis for nothing less than the metaphysical unity of nature and freedom.60 The “System-Program” can be considered an urtext for Romantic and idealist aesthetics precisely in its ascription of a full-blown mythological role to art. As we will see, Schelling, Schlegel, and the early Hegel all shared the conviction that art in modernity could serve as a mythological surrogate for traditional religion, providing meaning and purpose in a newly disenchanted age. By contrast, the mature Hegel of Lectures on Aesthetics set the stage for post-Romantic aesthetic discourse by decisively rejecting any such appeals to “art-religion” or aesthetic mythology. In the book’s final chapter, I will examine Adorno’s ambitious attempt over a century later to retrieve key aspects of Kant’s and Hegel’s aesthetics in order to motivate a dialectical defense of aesthetic agency that remains as timely as ever.

3

Kant Romanticized: Aesthetic Intuition as Redemption in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism I  The Kantian foundations of Schelling’s Romantic aesthetics Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), rightly considered a foundational text of early German Romanticism, follows Schiller’s Letters and the “System-Program” in construing the Kantian “gulf ” between natural necessity and ethical freedom as a symptom of the large-scale crisis of modernity. As Schelling dramatically puts it, “man is an eternal fragment, for either his action is necessary, and then not free, or free, and then not necessary and according to law” (StI, 628).1 From Schelling’s perspective, modern man’s fragmentation can be traced to the Enlightenment’s skepticism toward traditional religious values and its privileging of a third-person scientific standpoint that locates “the highest efforts of the human spirit in economic discoveries” (StI, 622). In the System, Schelling seeks to marshal the twin resources of philosophy and art to respond to this distinctly modern crisis. The brunt of the System is devoted to an elaborate philosophical demonstration of the necessity of presupposing the foundational principle of “intellectual intuition,” which embodies the underlying metaphysical unity of nature and freedom at the basis of all thought and activity. Intellectual intuition, which lies at the basis of empirical consciousness, cannot itself be verified in empirical consciousness. Hence, Schelling admits that intellectual intuition must remain a mere subjective postulate within the domain of philosophy. In a characteristically Romantic move, Schelling then asserts art’s superiority to philosophy precisely on account of its ability to lend objective reality to intellectual intuition. Art, Schelling declares, “objectifies with universal validity what the philosopher is able to present in a merely subjective fashion” (StI, 628).

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Tellingly, Schelling’s effusive paeans to art in the System are couched in religious language: Art is superior to the philosopher, precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart. (StI, 628)

For Schelling, only art can restore a sense of unity and harmony to a disenchanted age, grown weary of dogmatic appeals to religion and metaphysics. At the end of the System, Schelling calls for a “new mythology” of art that would reunite what has been torn asunder by the forces of modernity.2 Echoing the “SystemProgram,” Schelling declares that with the advent of this new mythology, all the sciences would “flow back like so many individual streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they took their source” (StI, 629). It is hardly surprising that recent commentators have tended to read Schelling’s System as a regression to pre-Kantian dogmatic metaphysics. According to the prevailing account of Schelling’s relation to Kant, while Kant was careful to grant merely regulative status to such metaphysical postulates as God, freedom, and nature’s purposiveness, Schelling ran roughshod over Kant’s epistemic strictures by taking Kant’s regulative Ideas to be robustly constitutive truths and going on to hazard hyperbolic claims about art’s capacity to depict nothing less than “infinity” or the “Absolute.”3 This standard view of Schelling’s Romantic aesthetics is based on the widely held assumption that Kant’s third Critique adopts a more or less consistently regulative approach to nature’s purposiveness and art’s role in moral life. However, the previous two chapters have challenged this assumption by arguing that Kant’s third Critique is itself torn between regulative and constitutive approaches to art. Indeed, Kant has serious doubts about the ultimate tenability of his regulative-constitutive distinction—doubts that are especially prominent in his vexed efforts in the third Critique to establish a mediating link between the domains of nature and freedom. As we have seen, Kant’s ambivalence about the epistemic status of some of the core principles of the third Critique results in an aporetic account of the role of aesthetic pleasure in moral life. The regulative dimension of Kant’s theory of taste yields a deflationary model of aesthetic pleasure (Upn or Upi) that fails to bridge the “great gulf ” between the domains of nature and freedom. On the other hand, the constitutive dimension sponsors an inflationary model of aesthetic pleasure (Cpn or Cpi) that does bridge the “great

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gulf,” but at the cost of having to exceed the epistemic parameters of the first and second Critiques. I hope to demonstrate in this chapter that Schelling was acutely aware of these Kantian aporias and sought to resolve them immanently by exploiting the resources of Kant’s own critical philosophy. By situating Schelling’s System within the context of his pre-1800 writings on Kant, this chapter interprets Schelling’s Romantic aesthetics of the System as a sustained—albeit largely implicit—attempt to grapple with the complexities and tensions of Kant’s third Critique. Parts II and III of this chapter provide the philosophical background for my reconsideration of Schelling’s aesthetics. In Part II, I establish the complex philosophical provenance of the category of intellectual intuition, which lies at the basis of the metaphysical edifice of Schelling’s System. I argue that Schelling’s appeal to intellectual intuition in the System stems from his attempt to resolve a fundamental problem concerning self-consciousness in the philosophies of Kant and J. G. Fichte. Part III focuses on Schelling’s On the I as Principle of Philosophy (1795) (hereafter referred to as the Ichschrift), a relatively neglected early text that reflects a searching engagement with Kant’s philosophy. The early Schelling of the Ichschrift, I will argue, strove to honor the spirit of Kant’s epistemic strictures while interrogating the presuppositions and tensions internal to Kant’s system that resulted in such a drastic delimitation of our claims to knowledge in the first place. Part IV situates Schelling’s System within this broader philosophical context and argues that his Romantic aesthetics derives from the constitutive dimension of Kant’s third Critique. Schelling’s key move in the System, I argue, is to adopt the strongly intentional conception of aesthetic pleasure aporetically present in the third Critique (Cpi): by furnishing full-blown affective certainty of the harmony of the faculties, aesthetic pleasure indirectly assures us of the “highest unity of freedom and necessity” that lies at the basis of the harmony of the faculties. Yet, as I will show in Part V, certain moments in the System threaten to resurrect the very regulative dimension of Kant’s third Critique that Schelling strove to suppress, adumbrating his eventual repudiation of his System aesthetics.

II  Intellectual intuition in Kant and Fichte Kant’s sharp distinction in the first Critique between the faculties of sensibility and understanding entails that theoretical cognition only obtains when a

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given sensible manifold is subsumed under concepts. At various points in his work, Kant contrasts human cognition—based on the joint operations of sensibility and understanding—with what he calls “intellectual intuition” or “intuitive understanding,” a strictly hypothetical mode of cognition in which the distinction between sensibility and understanding somehow collapses or fails to obtain. As Kant puts it in §76 of the third Critique, “if our understanding were intuitive, it would have no objects except what is actual. Concepts . . . and sensible intuitions . . . would both disappear.”4 Kant sometimes even suggests that such intellectual intuition would afford direct cognition of things-in-themselves.5 The story of Kant’s legacy in post-Kantian German idealism has to begin with §76 of the third Critique, a section singled out by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel as embodying some of the highest speculative insights of Kant’s critical philosophy. But we must be careful at this crucial juncture, for it would be a gross falsification to assert that the post-Kantian idealists simply embraced the very form of intellectual intuition that Kant repeatedly denied. Rather, the postKantian idealists adopted a much more subtle and complex stance toward §76. At a general level, it can be said that all of them sided with Kant in denying the possibility of cognizing things-in-themselves, but they nonetheless argued that Kant’s own critical philosophy tacitly presupposed another form of intellectual intuition suggested in §76—namely, a mode of cognition that collapses or transcends the familiar Kantian binaries between sensibility and understanding, intuition and concept, and phenomenon and noumenon. To make their case, they point to Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories, a notoriously opaque section of the first Critique where Kant attempts to justify the objective validity of our cognitions by appealing to “the transcendental unity of apperception,” a minimal form of self-consciousness— an “I think”—that “must be able to accompany” all of our representations.6 The post-Kantian idealists ask: what precisely is this “transcendental unity of apperception” and how can such self-consciousness be accounted for within the terms of Kant’s own epistemology? What is the epistemic status of this mysterious “apperception”? While Kant never fully answers these questions anywhere in the first Critique, his basic position is that the transcendental unity of apperception has a strictly “logical status”: since it is the condition of possibility of all experience, it cannot itself be an object of experience.7 However, there are moments in Kant’s work when he seems to conceive the transcendental unity of apperception in more experiential or phenomenological terms; for instance, Kant claims at one point that the transcendental unity of apperception is the

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“act” by which one “determines” one’s “existence.”8 In his 1783 Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Kant states even more baldly that the transcendental unity of apperception is “nothing more than the feeling of an existence [Gefühl eines Daseins].”9 Kant’s failure to provide a fully coherent and satisfying account of the epistemic status of the transcendental unity of apperception signaled to the post-Kantian German idealists that a mode of self-consciousness lurked at the basis of Kant’s critical philosophy that troubled his own epistemic binaries. One of the primary motivations of Fichte’s philosophy—and, in particular, in the texts collectively known as his later Jena Wissenschaftslehre—was to try to clarify the precise nature of Kant’s elusive notion of the transcendental unity of apperception.10 As a starting point, Fichte indulges in a thought-experiment that he believes can reveal the unique status of self-consciousness: I am conscious of an object B, but I cannot be conscious of B without being conscious of myself . . . . I am however only conscious of myself in that I am conscious of consciousness. I must therefore be conscious of . . . the consciousness  of consciousness. How will I become conscious of this consciousness? This process proceeds into infinity and in this way consciousness cannot be explained. The main reason for this impossibility is that consciousness is always taken as a state of mind, as an object, which always requires another subject.11

So long as self-consciousness is understood as being aware of oneself as object, there seems no way to avoid an infinite regress: since every object requires a subject that is aware of the object, self-consciousness itself becomes the object of a higher-order self-consciousness, ad infinitum. The only way to avoid this problem of infinite regress, Fichte goes on to argue, is to conceive selfconsciousness as the “immediate”—that is, non-discursive—consciousness of the unity of subject and object.12 In his 1797 Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte characterizes this immediate consciousness as the “fact-act” (Tathandlung) by which “the primordial self ” (das ursprüngliche Ich) comes into existence.13 In a decisive move, Fichte identifies this immediate self-consciousness with none other than intellectual intuition: “This intuiting of himself that is ascribed to the philosopher, in performing the act whereby the self arises for him, I call intellectual intuition.”14 For Fichte, we might say, the primordial Ich itself emerges in—and as—an act of intellectual intuition through which the immediate unity of subject and object is directly registered. It is worth emphasizing that Fichte’s doctrine of intellectual

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intuition emerges from his ongoing efforts to resolve what he took to be a fundamental aporia in Kant’s philosophy: Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental unity of apperception relies tacitly on a form of intellectual intuition that his own first Critique strictures forbid. Fichte goes on to voice his conviction that “intellectual intuition is the only firm standpoint for all philosophy.”15 Yet, this Kantian aporia comes back to haunt Fichte in his vexed efforts to clarify the epistemic status of intellectual intuition. Kant, as we have just seen, vacillates between logical and phenomenological accounts of the transcendental unity of apperception. Fichte’s own philosophizing betrays a similar ambivalence in its continual vacillation between logical and phenomenological conceptions of intellectual intuition.16 On the one hand, Fichte insists that since intellectual intuition is the condition of possibility of all empirical consciousness, intellectual intuition can never be an object of empirical consciousness. As Fichte puts it, “there is no immediate, isolated consciousness of intellectual intuition.”17 On the other hand, Fichte sometimes suggests that intellectual intuition is somehow directly present to empirical consciousness and hence phenomenologically verifiable. For instance, he remarks that “everyone must find it [the faculty of intellectual intuition] immediately in himself, or he will never make its acquaintance.”18 This tension between logical and phenomenological conceptions of intellectual intuition results in a paradoxical account of the absolute Ich that recurs throughout Fichte’s early work: “The I is infinite, but merely in terms of its striving; it strives to be infinite [es strebt unendlich zu sein].”19 The absolute Ich is confronted with the insuperable contradiction that it is only insofar as it strives infinitely to be; yet, insofar as it can only strive toward its own being, the Ich is never fully present to itself.

III  The Ichschrift: Early Schelling’s speculative critique of Kant In several writings published between 1795 and 1797, particularly the Ichschrift, the young Schelling followed Fichte in elaborating the speculative underpinnings and implications of Kant’s critical philosophy. This section reconstructs from Schelling’s Ichschrift a six-step immanent critique and speculative transformation of Kant’s philosophy.20 In the following section, I will argue that Schelling’s complex engagement with Kant in the Ichschrift tacitly informs the Romantic aesthetics of the System.

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The first step in Schelling’s critique of Kant in the Ichschrift is contained in a dense sentence from the preface: Finally, granted that Kant’s theoretical philosophy maintains at every point the most conclusive coherence among all its parts, his theoretical and practical philosophy is nonetheless by no means connected through a common principle: the practical philosophy, for Kant, appears not to comprise one and the same building with the theoretical philosophy, but is a mere annex to the philosophy as a whole—an annex that is subject to continual assaults from the main building.21

Schelling makes two interrelated claims here: first, that there is no “common principle” connecting Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy; second, that Kant illegitimately subordinates his practical philosophy to his theoretical philosophy. Of course, Schelling was fully aware of Kant’s efforts in the third Critique to establish the principle of nature’s purposiveness as a mediating link between the theoretical and practical domains. Schelling’s objection is that the mediating principle developed in the third Critique is not a “common” principle—that is, a principle genuinely belonging to both theoretical and practical philosophy. This claim has to be considered jointly with Schelling’s second assertion about Kant’s subordination of practical philosophy to theoretical philosophy. Taken together, these two criticisms isolate a fundamental aporia in Kant’s third Critique, one discussed at length in Part III of the previous chapter. On the one hand, Kant insists that in order for the principle of purposiveness to fulfill its role as a mediating principle between the domains of nature and freedom, the principle itself must belong to neither domain.22 On the other hand, Kant’s epistemic strictures disqualify the principle of purposiveness from occupying a mediating space between the domains of nature and freedom; as Kant puts it, the principle of purposiveness cannot “form a special part between theoretical and practical philosophy.”23 This dilemma forces Kant into the aporetic situation of asserting a mediating principle whose peculiar epistemic status troubles the fundamental tenets of his own critical philosophy. As a result, Kant paradoxically lends regulative status to a principle that must be neither regulative nor constitutive. As Kant puts it in a telling formulation from the third Critique, the principle of purposiveness “belongs to the concepts of nature, but only as regulative principle of the cognitive faculty.”24 Schelling shrewdly suggests that such aporetic formulations in the third Critique stem from Kant’s persistent privileging of the theoretical domain over the practical domain, leading him to annex the mediating principle of purposiveness

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to the theoretical domain of constitutive principles while denying it the dignity of constitutive status. In short, Schelling realizes that the immanent logic of the third Critique evokes the possibility of a genuinely mediating principle without being able to actualize it. As we have seen from Chapter 2, this aporia reverberates throughout the introduction to the third Critique—most dramatically in Kant’s conflicting claims about the role of the principle of purposiveness in bridging the “great gulf ” between the domains of nature and freedom. In Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795), Schelling articulates the aporetic structure of the third Critique in a single pregnant sentence: Kant’s critical philosophy, Schelling claims, sponsors two directly competing claims regarding the gulf between the infinite and the finite—on the one hand, that “there should be no transition from the infinite to the finite” and on the other hand, that “there should be” such a transition.25 Schelling’s second move in the Ichschrift is to interrogate Kant’s narrow determination of objective reality in terms of theoretical objectivity: “in the hands of a man who wants to determine Ideas theoretically, anything that goes beyond the table of the categories—especially the Idea of the Absolute—becomes a figment of the brain . . . .”26 Schelling points out that “man may not find any further objects where he himself begins to create and to make real.”27 Exploiting the multiple valences of the word “objective,” Schelling suggests that the primacy of the theoretical in Kant compels him to adopt a severely impoverished model of what counts as “objectively real.” For Kant, only that which is theoretically determinable as a spatiotemporal object possesses objective reality. As a result, Kant is compelled to relegate the Ideas of Reason—which cannot be determined as objects of theoretical cognition—to the domain of mere “figments of the brain.” Here again, Schelling seems to pursue a line of thinking incipiently present in the third Critique itself. As we have seen from the previous two chapters, the constitutive dimension of the third Critique hints at a special feeling of aesthetic pleasure (Cpn or Cpi) that provides full-blown phenomenological certainty of nature’s purposiveness without requiring theoretical cognition of things in themselves. From the young Schelling’s perspective, the constitutive dimension of Kant’s philosophy gestures toward a form of objectivity more capacious than theoretical objectivity. However, at this early stage in his philosophical thinking, Schelling is not yet able to offer a concrete positive account of such a nontheoretical model of objectivity. Schelling’s third move in the Ichschrift is to follow Fichte in claiming that Kant is compelled to grant to the transcendental unity of apperception an epistemic status that is neither regulative nor constitutive.28 Fourth, again following Fichte,

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Schelling argues that if we get sufficiently clear on the precise nature and status of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, we will find that it is none other than “the absolutely present unity of an absolute Ich.”29 Fifth, reading the third Critique back into the first Critique, Schelling claims that this absolute Ich is itself none other than the intuitive understanding to which Kant alludes in §76 of the third Critique. Since the absolute Ich is not a theoretically cognizable object, it can only come about in—and as—an act of intellectual intuition that bypasses Kant’s epistemic binaries.30 In a crucial passage, Schelling admits: I know very well that Kant denied all intellectual intuition, but I also know where he does so—namely, in an investigation that at every point only presupposes the absolute Ich . . . . I also know that this intellectual intuition must be completely incomprehensible as soon as one tries to liken it to sensuous intuition since intellectual intuition can occur in consciousness just as little as can absolute freedom.31

Schelling makes two basic points in this passage. First, he suggests that the merely regulative status of intellectual intuition in Kant’s philosophy can be traced to Kant’s failure to follow through on the implications of his doctrine of the transcendental unity of apperception. As soon as we conceive the transcendental unity of apperception in all its radicality as an absolute Ich that transcends Kant’s epistemic strictures, we have to accord more than merely regulative status to the category of intellectual intuition. Second, he distinguishes his own notion of intellectual intuition from Kant’s by claiming that Kantian intellectual intuition “can occur in consciousness.” By contrast, for Schelling, intellectual intuition never occurs in empirical consciousness since it is the condition of possibility of all consciousness. Here, it is clear that while Fichte himself vacillates between logical and phenomenological conceptions of intellectual intuition, the early Schelling opts for a strictly logical conception. In the sixth and final step of the Ichschrift, Schelling calls for a speculative transformation of Kant’s highest principles as a means of resolving the contradictions of his critical philosophy: “the many apparent contradictions in Kant’s writings pointed out by opponents of the critical philosophy—which should have been admitted long ago (particularly with regard to the doctrine of the thing in itself)—can be fully resolved only through those higher principles which, in the Critique of Pure Reason, its author only presupposed.”32 We can resolve the fundamental aporias in Kant’s philosophy, Schelling argues, only by reconceiving Kant’s mere regulative Ideas as “higher principles” that, in fact, transcend Kant’s regulative-constitutive dichotomy. In particular, Kant fails

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to establish a genuinely mediating principle between the domains of nature and freedom because he accords merely regulative status to the category of intellectual intuition. According to Schelling, the absolute Ich—as a form of intellectual intuition—possesses an objective reality that refuses Kant’s epistemic binaries and hence constitutes the true point of union between theoretical and practical philosophy. For Schelling, intellectual intuition is neither regulative nor constitutive,33 neither phenomenon nor noumenon.34 My reconstruction, I hope, makes clear why Schelling insists that his own philosophical project is nothing more than “a presentation of Kantian philosophy through higher principles.”35 However, it turns out that the early Schelling of the Ichschrift, like Fichte, remains trapped within the very Kantian binaries he struggles to overcome. So long as Schelling maintains the strictly logical status of intellectual intuition, he seems unable to move beyond the Kantian impasse of lending regulative status to a category that has to be more than regulative. Since intellectual intuition can never “occur in consciousness,” its objective reality must remain uncertain, and Schelling then seems only a short step away from Kant’s ascription of regulative status to intellectual intuition and nature’s purposiveness. Indeed, at a telling moment in the Ichschrift, Schelling admits that intellectual intuition is “an object of faith.”36 Moreover, despite reproaching Kant in the preface for merely “presupposing” his highest principles, Schelling deems his own category of intellectual intuition to be a necessary “presupposition.”37 As a result of the merely logical status of intellectual intuition, Schelling admits at the end of the Ichschrift that the principle of nature’s purposiveness remains even for him “a regulative principle of objective unity which ought to become immanent.”38 Two years later, in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), he once again confesses that the “absolute purposiveness of the whole of nature” is “a necessary maxim of the reflective reason,” which we cannot “transform into a constitutive law.”39 In short, while the early Schelling deftly isolates the aporias involved in Kant’s efforts to theorize a principle that mediates between theoretical and practical philosophy, Schelling’s own doctrine of intellectual intuition—intended to resolve the Kantian aporias—only ends up reinstating them in another form.

IV  The aesthetics of Schelling’s System: Art as the “organ” of philosophy By the time of writing the 1800 System, Schelling recognizes that his entire philosophical system threatens to collapse so long as intellectual intuition—the

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logical principle at its basis—remains resistant to experiential verification. Schelling poses this dilemma in the starkest terms: The whole of philosophy starts, and must start, from a principle that, as the absolutely Identical, is absolutely non-objective. But now how should this absolutely non-objective principle nonetheless be called up to consciousness and  understood—something that is necessary if it is the condition for understanding the whole of philosophy? (StI, 625)

Intellectual intuition, an “absolutely non-objective” principle, can never be the object of consciousness since it is the logical condition of possibility of all consciousness. Yet, intellectual intuition must nonetheless be present to consciousness in some way, since otherwise the first principle of philosophy would remain in doubt and the entire philosophical enterprise would be threatened. However, in a startling departure from his earlier work, the Schelling of the System now simply concedes that any attempt to move beyond this Kantian aporia while remaining within the domain of philosophy is doomed to fail. Indeed, Schelling’s account of intellectual intuition in the theoretical portion of the System proves to be consciously aporetic. On the one hand, Schelling claims that the “first principle” of his philosophy—namely, the absolute Ich qua intellectual intuition—possesses an “absolute certainty [absolute Gewißheit] whereby all other certainty is mediated” (StI, 346). On the other hand, Schelling seems to contradict his claim about the principle’s “absolute certainty” when he asserts that intellectual intuition is “absolutely non-objective” and hence can never be present to consciousness. In what meaningful sense, after all, can we be “absolutely certain” of a first principle of which we are not even conscious? As Dieter Jähnig aptly puts it, “the beginning of philosophy is, for Schelling, the demand for certainty; and that means that certainty is expressly established as not (yet) present.”40 Hence, Schelling bluntly asserts that “a complete intuition of oneself (as subject and object)” is “impossible” (StI, 401) and goes on to define the absolute Ich in characteristically Fichtean terms as “the infinite tendency to intuit itself ” (StI, 404; my emphasis). In other words, the Ich can only infinitely approach perfect self-intuition without ever attaining it. Accordingly, Schelling’s System culminates in an attempt to demonstrate how the utterly “non-objective” principle of intellectual intuition can nonetheless be present to consciousness, thereby earning the status of absolute certainty. “The task of all science,” as he dramatically puts it, is to establish “how, for the I itself, the highest ground of harmony between the subjective and objective becomes objective” (StI, 610). Schelling seems almost to savor the paradoxical nature of

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his enterprise. For, how can the non-objective ground of all philosophy possibly “become objective”? In a virtually unprecedented move, Schelling argues that philosophy must secure its ultimate validation in a domain outside of itself—namely, in art. For Schelling, art is nothing less than the “universal organ of philosophy” because it furnishes affective certainty of intellectual intuition, which lies at the basis of his metaphysical system (StI, 349). Accordingly, in the relatively short final section of the System, Schelling articulates a Romantic philosophy of art that seeks to demonstrate that “aesthetic intuition is intellectual intuition made objective” (StI, 625). This claim then becomes the basis for Schelling’s effusive paeans to the “wonder of art” as “the one and only eternal revelation” (StI, 618) that literally “achieves the impossible” (StI, 626) by “resolving the greatest and most extreme contradiction in us” (StI, 617). It is precisely at this point, of course, that charges of metaphysical extravagance tend to be lodged against Schelling. By what right, one might ask, does Schelling appeal to aesthetic intuition as a special organ through which we become conscious of something that is supposed to be inaccessible to consciousness? Indeed, as I pointed out in Part I of this chapter, a number of recent commentators have viewed Schelling’s invocation of aesthetic intuition in the System as little more than a sleight of hand by which the aporia plaguing his earlier work is not so much resolved as conjured away—a sleight of hand, moreover, that signals a wholesale abandonment of what seem the comparatively sober premises of Kant’s aesthetic theory. In the remainder of this section, however, I propose a more sympathetic reading of Schelling’s aesthetics that reconstructs the implicitly Kantian premises at the basis of his doctrine of aesthetic intuition. Schelling, as we will see, does not so much break with Kant as develop strains of thought that are incipiently present in the third Critique itself. Drawing heavily from the previous two chapters of this book, I will argue that Schelling’s implicit strategy in the System is to amplify the constitutive dimension of Kant’s aesthetics into a full-blown Romantic aesthetics. Let us revisit Schelling’s second major criticism of Kant from the Ichschrift: Kant’s first Critique epistemology conceives objectivity exclusively in terms of the theoretical cognition of spatiotemporal objects. In the Ichschrift, though, Schelling was never quite able to deliver on his promise to develop a more capacious model of objectivity. I will make the case that Schelling’s System begins where the Ichschrift leaves off: it seeks to honor Kant’s drastic circumscription of

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the scope of theoretical cognition while expanding Kant’s first Critique model of objectivity to encompass non-theoretical modes of awareness and certainty. To this end, the aesthetics of the System takes its conceptual bearings from the constitutive dimension of Kant’s third Critique, which anchors a special nontheoretical form of objective certainty in aesthetic experience. The constitutive dimension of the third Critique, I argued in Chapter 2, hints that an inflationary model of aesthetic pleasure (Cpn or Cpi) “occasions” the strongly transcendental principle of P2, which provides non-theoretical certainty of nature’s purposiveness. P2 thereby bridges the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom without entailing full-blown theoretical cognition of things in themselves. In the System, Schelling develops his doctrine of aesthetic intuition by drawing on the constitutive dimension of the third Critique. According to my reconstruction, Schelling’s derivation of the category of aesthetic intuition proceeds in four steps. In the theoretical portion of the System, as we have seen, Schelling posits the absolute certainty of intellectual intuition as an endlessly approachable ideal. In the aesthetic portion of the System, Schelling argues that this theoretical ideal can be realized only in the experience of art, which confirms the objective reality of intellectual intuition. Schelling’s tacit first move is to adopt the strongly intentional model of aesthetic pleasure aporetically present in Kant’s third Critique (Cpi). According to Cpi, one is certain of the pleasure’s origin in the harmony of the faculties because this harmony is felt directly as the pleasure’s intentional object. Schelling claims: “Just as aesthetic production starts from a feeling of an apparently irresolvable contradiction, it ends—according to the testimony of all artists and all who share their inspiration—in the feeling of an infinite harmony . . .” (StI, 617). As we have seen from Chapter 1, Kant leaves mysterious in §9 of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” the precise sense in which aesthetic pleasure can be said to be a feeling of the harmony of the faculties. Depending on how strongly we read the genitive in this formulation, this feeling could simply arise from the harmony of the faculties without directly registering it in any way (Upn or Cpn) or the feeling could be understood as directly instantiating the harmony of the faculties as its intentional object (Upi or Cpi). Schelling’s conception of aesthetic experience as the “feeling of an infinite harmony,” admittedly, seems no less ambiguous than Kant’s account of the relation between aesthetic pleasure and the harmony of the faculties. Nonetheless, I would argue that the strong claims that Schelling ends up making about aesthetic intuition must be anchored implicitly in a strongly intentional account of aesthetic experience (Cpi). Aesthetic intuition, as I will show, attests

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to the objective reality of intellectual intuition by unmistakably registering the harmony of the faculties as its intentional object. Notice, however, that unlike Kant—who considers the aesthetic experience of the one judging the artwork—Schelling emphasizes the experience of the artist in this passage. Yet, Schelling does add the important qualification that “all who share” in the artist’s “inspiration” can also experience the feeling of infinite harmony afforded by art. Clearly, Schelling realizes that in order to make good on his ambition to validate the objective reality of the absolute basis of philosophy in aesthetic experience, he has to expand his model of aesthetic experience so that everyone can share in the artist’s experience. To this end, Schelling invokes the constitutive form of the sensus communis aestheticus aporetically present in Kant’s aesthetics. In the fourth moment of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” Kant introduces the notion of common sense as the capacity to judge works of art through feeling. In §22, as we have seen from Chapter 1, Kant is unable to decide whether the common sense is a constitutive or regulative principle—whether, in other words, it is an “original and natural” capacity to judge infallibly through feeling or whether it is a merely “artificial” capacity that can only be approached asymptotically as a regulative ideal. However, in §40 of the “Deduction,” Kant takes a different tack by contrasting two forms of common sense: the sensus communis logicus and the sensus communis aestheticus. The sensus communis logicus, the discursive operation by which the “common human understanding” engages in abstractive reasoning, cannot be said to be shared by everyone. By contrast, the sensus communis aestheticus—the affective procedure by which one judges a work of art through feeling—is in fact a “natural” capacity common to all and should thus be considered a constitutive form of common sense. Schelling’s second move in his System aesthetics, then, is to borrow Kant’s argument about the sensus communis aestheticus as a means of lending objective validity to his conception of aesthetic intuition. Schelling dismisses the sensus communis logicus—what he calls the “commonplaces of the sense for truth” or the “common understanding”—as an unreliable basis on which to develop the claims of philosophy (StI, 351). Schelling then contrasts this “common understanding” with the “aesthetic sense” or the “aesthetic organ,” his term for Kant’s sensus communis aestheticus (StI, 351). For Schelling, this “aesthetic sense” is a constitutive common sense—an innate capacity, potential in everyone, to apprehend feelingly the universal basis of pleasure in the harmony of the faculties. Equipped with this aesthetic sense, one who feels the harmony of the faculties

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elicited by a work of art experiences one and the same feeling of pleasure that the artist experienced when he first created the work of art. Hence, it is precisely on the basis of this aesthetic sense that Schelling is able to validate the ultimate claims of philosophy: “The true sense, with which this type of philosophy must be apprehended, is therefore the aesthetic sense, and that is why the philosophy of art is the true organ of philosophy” (StI, 351). Schelling’s third move is contained in a dense sentence that requires a good deal of unpacking: the “Unknown [Unbekannte] . . . which sets the objective and conscious activities into unexpected harmony [unerwartete Harmonie], is none other than that Absolute, which contains the universal ground of the preestablished harmony between the conscious and the unconscious” (StI, 615). This passage should be understood in the context of §57 of the third Critique, where Kant cryptically identifies the harmony of the faculties at the basis of judgments of taste with the “supersensible substratum of all our faculties.” As we have seen from Chapter 2, this claim seems to commit Kant to the strong metaphysical thesis that certainty of the harmony of the faculties is tantamount to certainty of nature’s actual purposiveness. In Schelling’s hands, Kant’s uncognizable supersensible substrate becomes the “Unknown” at the basis of the harmony of the faculties. Notice that Schelling is careful to honor Kant’s regulative strictures: Schelling follows Kant in claiming that this supersensible substrate cannot be the object of theoretical cognition and hence must remain “unknown.” Schelling goes on to identify the “Unknown” at the basis of the harmony of the faculties with intellectual intuition, the “Absolute” that underlies nature’s purposiveness. Then, by drawing implicitly on the constitutive dimension of Kant’s aesthetics, Schelling is able to claim that if a strong model of aesthetic pleasure (Cpi) furnishes affective certainty of the harmony of the faculties, then it also provides indirect certainty of the objective reality of nature’s purposiveness (P2). Schelling’s implicit reasoning seems to be that if we can be certain that a given object of nature sets our cognitive faculties into harmony, then we would be assured that nature is somehow contoured to— or purposive for—our cognitive and moral ends. Accordingly, in stark contrast to the Ichschrift—which accords merely regulative status to the principle of nature’s purposiveness—the System culminates in the triumphant claim that aesthetic experience assures us of the full-blown objective reality of nature’s purposiveness. By making objective nothing less than the “highest unity of freedom and necessity,” aesthetic experience attests to nature’s amenability to our moral ends (StI, 634). This apodictic affective conviction of

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nature’s purposiveness, in turn, assures us of its ultimate supersensible basis in intellectual intuition, hence validating the claims of philosophy. Moreover, since Schelling emphasizes that aesthetic experience (Cpi) provides only indirect certainty of nature’s purposiveness, he avoids lapsing into dogmatic pre-Kantian claims that depend on theoretical knowledge of the supersensible. By exploiting the special model of affective certainty adumbrated in the constitutive dimension of the third Critique, Schelling is able to conceive aesthetic experience as a mediating principle that successfully unites the domains of nature and freedom. Since aesthetic experience assures us of nature’s purposiveness, it affords the “feeling of an infinite satisfaction” in which “all contradictions are dissolved and all riddles are answered” (StI, 615). In the System, Schelling believes he has finally resolved the aporia plaguing both Kant’s third Critique and his own early work: in aesthetic experience, Schelling finds a genuine mediating principle that is “neither theoretical nor practical but rather both at once” (StI, 348). It is crucial to recognize that Schelling does not make the dogmatic metaphysical claim that intellectual intuition, or the unknown “Absolute,” is somehow directly felt in aesthetic experience.41 Rather, he makes the carefully qualified claim that affective certainty of the harmony of the faculties indirectly guarantees nature’s actual purposiveness, which in turn attests to the objective reality of intellectual intuition.42 By exploiting the constitutive dimension of Kant’s aesthetics, Schelling thinks he can establish the reality of intellectual intuition without overstepping its strictly logical status. Aesthetic experience is the “feeling of an infinite harmony,” as Schelling put it, because the feeling of the harmony of the faculties provides indirect affective assurance of the supersensible harmony of nature and freedom at its basis. Schelling’s fourth and final step follows from the previous three: “aesthetic intuition,” he declares, is “intellectual intuition made objective” (StI, 625). What Schelling calls “aesthetic intuition” is none other than Cpi from the third Critique, a feeling of aesthetic pleasure that assures us of the harmony of the faculties. From Schelling’s standpoint, aesthetic intuition provides “objective” validation of intellectual intuition indirectly through our affective awareness of the harmony of the faculties. Moreover, as we have seen from the second step of my reconstruction, the “aesthetic sense,” the innate organ by which everyone is capable of apprehending the harmony of the faculties through feeling, allows Schelling to generalize aesthetic experience beyond the standpoint of the artist. Schelling thus declares that aesthetic intuition “can at least occur in every

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consciousness” (StI, 630) and that “the one field to which absolute objectivity is granted is art” (StI, 630). We can now see how Schelling manages to resolve the central paradox of his philosophy: how can the “absolutely non-objective” principle of intellectual intuition “nonetheless be called up to consciousness”? By providing infallible affective certainty of the harmony of the faculties, aesthetic experience (Cpi) indirectly guarantees nature’s purposiveness and its underlying basis in intellectual intuition without making intellectual intuition the object of empirical consciousness.

V  Anxieties of Romanticism It has emerged that the aesthetics of Schelling’s System proposes a Kantian solution to a Kantian problem—albeit a “Kantian solution” which Kant himself only hinted at and never fully embraced. From Schelling’s perspective, Kant’s third Critique demands a mediating principle that unites nature and freedom without entailing full-blown theoretical cognition of the supersensible realm. Schelling’s Romantic strategy in the System is to demonstrate that the constitutive dimension of the third Critique lays the groundwork for a redemptive metaphysics of aesthetic intuition that makes this mediating principle possible. But is it, in fact, legitimate to lend robustly constitutive status to Kant’s aesthetic categories? Can the experience of art really assure us of nature’s purposiveness for our cognitive and moral ends? Is the “aesthetic sense” a genuinely innate judgmental capacity shared by everyone? Perhaps most fundamentally, is it plausible to burden art with the role of resolving nothing less than the “infinite” contradiction within us? Despite Schelling’s best efforts to stave off these worries, certain self-critical strains latent in the System threaten to resurrect the very regulative dimension in Kant that Schelling seeks to suppress. There is a curious tension throughout the System between Schelling’s repeated insistence on the absoluteness of the diremptions in man and his claim about art’s capacity to overcome these diremptions. Schelling never tires of reminding us that the “contradiction” in man is “absolute” (StI, 624). “Man is an eternal fragment [ein ewiges Bruchstück],” as he puts it in a formulation that anticipates postmodern skepticism (StI, 608). Yet, at the same time, he has to temper such claims in order to be able to stage aesthetic experience as the privileged locus where these supposedly irresolvable

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“contradictions” in man are “dissolved” once and for all (StI, 615). But if we are to take seriously the eternally fragmentary nature of man, then it would seem that not even art can make man whole again. Moreover, Schelling so rarefies the “true” work of art that every empirical artwork seems to fall short of this ideal. In a revealing moment, he declares that “there is actually but one absolute artwork, which may indeed exist in quite different versions, yet is still only one, even though it should not yet exist in its most primordial form [wenn es gleich in der ursprünglichsten Gestalt noch nicht exiStI,eren sollte]” (StI, 627). In the System, as we have seen, art is the “organ” of philosophy precisely because it lends objective reality to the otherwise strictly logical category of the absolute Ich. Here, however, he suggests that empirical works of art can only endlessly approximate what he calls the “one absolute artwork.” The one true artwork “should not yet exist in its most primordial form”—implying that the absolute work of art is a kind of regulative ideal that artists can strive toward but never quite attain.43 No wonder he is so reluctant in the System to proffer concrete examples from the history of art to support his abstract aesthetic claims. The more he rarefies the “true” work of art and the more he builds into the experience of art, the less he seems able to anchor his aesthetics in empirical experience. Yet, if the “absolute” work of art is shifted into infinity as a mere regulative ideal, then the entire argumentative structure of the System threatens to collapse; it is the role of art, after all, to bring the absolute Ich into empirical consciousness. In other words, Schelling’s critique of Kant in the Ichschrift comes back to haunt him in the System: one simply cannot appeal to a regulative principle as a means of overcoming the regulative-constitutive dichotomy in the first place. These latent anxieties in the System soon compelled Schelling, a notoriously protean philosopher, to abandon his efforts to locate a “new mythology” in art and to reassess the relation of art to philosophy. Just a few years after the publication of System, Schelling delivered a series of lectures on the Philosophy of Art (1802–3), where philosophy regained its ascendancy over art and the category of aesthetic intuition—so prominent in the System—virtually dropped out of his philosophizing. Tellingly, however, Schelling’s interest in mythology only intensified after the publication of System. Indeed, in much of his later work, Schelling struggled to ground a viable modern mythology not in aesthetics but in an idiosyncratic form of theology.44 Not surprisingly, Schelling’s attitude toward art also became increasingly skeptical. In a startling moment from a lecture delivered in  1836, Schelling

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remarked: “Art is for happy people, not for the profoundly unhappy, those who are inwardly torn” (Die Kunst ist für die Glücklichen; nicht für die tief Unglücklichen, die innerlich Zerrissenen).45 At this late point in his career, Schelling realized retrospectively that his metaphysical approach to art in the System was a hopeless attempt to turn art into a form of religion. From the late Schelling’s religious standpoint, only a full-blown philosophical theology, and not a spurious art-religion, could address and potentially resolve the deepest fissures and diremptions of our being. Schelling’s progressive disenchantment with art, I would suggest, should be seen not so much as a break with his earlier Romanticism but as a fundamental aspect of Romanticism itself. Schelling’s continually evolving stance toward art embodied the ongoing struggle in Romanticism to come to terms with the predicament of art in a post-Enlightenment age. Romantic thinkers often appealed to art as a proxy for traditional religious values, yet they remained haunted by the possibility that their very efforts to treat art as a secular form of transcendence proved to be no less dogmatic and metaphysical than the religious claims that art was meant to supplant. Romanticism became the site of a fundamental crisis in which art began to reflect on—and reassess—its newfound role in a disenchanted modernity. If this chapter has addressed the metaphysical strain in Romanticism, the next chapter will explore the equally prominent skeptical strain in Romanticism. Schelling’s contemporary, Friedrich Schlegel, articulated an aesthetics of irony that rejected appeals to aesthetic redemption or metaphysical Absolutes while foregrounding art’s endless resources for ironic play and skepticism. As we will see, the conflict within early German Romanticism between Schelling’s metaphysics of aesthetic intuition and Schlegel’s aesthetics of irony is paradigmatic of a perennial conflict that haunts much of post-Enlightenment aesthetic discourse up to the present.

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Hegel contra Schlegel: On the Aporetic Epistemology of Romantic Irony I  Permanent parabasis: Schlegel’s call for a radicalized skepticism Schelling’s Romantic contemporary, Friedrich Schlegel, would have embraced wholeheartedly Schelling’s assertion that “man is an eternal fragment.”1 However, this Romantic ontology of existential fragmentation sponsored two fundamentally divergent aesthetic paradigms, foreshadowed in the tension between the regulative and constitutive dimensions of Kant’s aesthetics. Schelling, as we have seen, exploited the constitutive dimension of the third Critique, conceiving “aesthetic intuition” as a redemptive experience that momentarily restores man’s lost spiritual wholeness. Schlegel, by contrast, in effect radicalized the regulative dimension of the third Critique, arguing that art does not redeem existence so much as it reflects—and revels in—man’s irredeemably fragmentary nature itself.2 In 1798, Schlegel complained that “there is as yet no skepticism worthy of the name” and went on to declare that a truly radical skepticism “would have to begin and end with the claim of—and the demand for—infinitely many contradictions” (KA II, 240–1).3 Schlegel’s Romantic philosophy, as we will see, is distinctive precisely in its insistence on the need to dwell in contradiction and diremption rather than to seek metaphysical unity or solace. From Schlegel’s perspective, while Kant and Fichte paved the way for such a thoroughgoing skepticism rooted in infinite contradiction, they did not go far enough. Accordingly, one of Schlegel’s primary ambitions was to radicalize the critical strains in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte into a full-blown skeptical paradigm. Schlegel located this radicalized form of skepticism in what he called “irony,” a principle he introduced and elaborated in a number of cryptic formulations between 1797 and 1800. In a particularly revealing formulation, Schlegel wrote

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that “irony is a permanent parabasis” (KA XVIII, 85). In ancient Greek drama, parabasis is the moment when the continuity of the dramatic narrative is disrupted by the sudden intrusion of the playwright.4 By conceiving irony as a permanent parabasis, Schlegel turned irony into a principle of unrelenting antifoundationalist skepticism—one that undermines any claims to stability or continuity, be they artistic, philosophical, or theological. Indeed, as he emphasized in “On Incomprehensibility,” his 1800 meta-essay on irony, one of irony’s basic features is its permanently disruptive force: its refusal to be neatly defined or circumscribed, its uncanny tendency to proliferate endlessly into further ironies. At the essay’s climax, Schlegel posed a rhetorical question that signaled his decisive rejection of theological solace in favor of abyssal skepticism: “What gods will be able to rescue us from all these ironies?” (KA II, 369).5 Schlegel argued that the primary locus of irony was “Romantic poetry,” a relentlessly self-reflective and philosophical artform capable of dwelling   in contradiction and hovering between possibilities. Schlegel’s aesthetics of irony proved to be massively influential, quickly becoming one of the paradigmatic doctrines of early German Romanticism. Before long, Schlegel’s contemporary, Hegel, launched a bitterly polemical campaign against irony, arguing that it embodied one of the most dangerous trends of the modern age. In particular, Hegel claimed that at the basis of Schlegel’s theory of irony lurked a hyperinflated—and decidedly unironized—ego modeled tacitly on Fichte’s metaphysical postulate of an absolute Ich. Since Hegel’s time, however, scholars have sided overwhelmingly with Schlegel against Hegel in this debate about irony. While Schlegel’s theory of irony has generated seemingly endless commentary in recent critical discourse, Hegel’s critique of Schlegel has tended to be ignored or, at best, summarily dismissed as an ad hominem attack fueled more by personal animus than by any genuine insight into the structure of irony.6 The widespread neglect of Hegel’s critique of Schlegel in recent criticism can be attributed in part to a burgeoning interest in Schlegel’s engagement with Fichte. By making subtle use of Schlegel’s copious philosophical writings, recent critics have drawn attention to the various ways that Schlegel breaks with, and makes significant advances over, Fichte.7 This trend in recent scholarship has made it very easy to dismiss Hegel’s apparently straightforward attribution of Fichtean subjectivism to Schlegel’s theory of irony—a dismissal that, in turn, seems to render irrelevant Hegel’s polemical critique of irony itself. Militating against this recent trend, this chapter attempts to vindicate Hegel by laying bare the Fichtean underpinnings

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of Schlegel’s theory of irony. My reexamination of Schlegel’s theory of irony in light of Hegel’s critique will, I hope, provide a fresh perspective on the role of irony in Schlegel’s broader account of art’s role in modernity and allow us to identify both affinities and divergences in the Romantic doctrines of Schlegel and Schelling. In this chapter, I will focus on an aspect of Schlegel’s engagement with Fichte largely ignored by recent scholars: Schlegel’s vexed stance toward Fichte’s doctrine of intellectual intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung). I hope to demonstrate that the Fichtean category of intellectual intuition plays a significant role in Schlegel’s theory of irony and in his philosophical thinking more generally. Part  II provides a synthetic examination of Schlegel’s various cryptic formulations of irony with the aim of reconstructing irony’s epistemic underpinnings. Tellingly, Schlegel feels compelled to appeal to an epistemology of intuition in his attempt to characterize the ironist’s unique mode of perception. In Part III, I begin to account for Schlegel’s curious linkage of irony to intuition by situating his theory of irony in the broader context of his engagement with the philosophies of Kant and Fichte. Faulting Kant for being a “half critic,” Schlegel seeks to radicalize the skeptical strain in Kant’s philosophy (KA XVIII, 5). In his efforts to develop a radicalized skepticism, Schlegel also draws on certain aspects of Fichte’s philosophy but faults Fichte for appealing to absolute foundations and for reverting to pre-Kantian dogmatic metaphysics. Schlegel’s vexed stance toward Fichte is most evident in his philosophical lectures delivered between 1800 and 1805, which betray an aporetic stance toward the Fichtean category of intuition. As we will see, although Schlegel presents a variety of strong objections to Fichte’s metaphysical foundationalism, Schlegel ultimately remains committed to a foundationalist epistemology of intuition. This will lay the groundwork for Part IV, which seeks to reconstruct a subtle and cogent metacritique of Schlegelian irony from Hegel’s scattered remarks on Schlegel. I argue that Hegel accurately pinpoints a fundamental aporia at the core of Schlegel’s theory: in attempting to account for the conceptual underpinnings of irony, Schlegel appeals to a Fichtean epistemology of intuition that escapes interrogation. Hence, from Hegel’s perspective, the Schlegelian ironist commits the self-contradiction of elevating itself into an absolute Ich able to “intuit” the vanity of everything. Part V examines a crucial place in Hegel’s work where his critique of Schlegel’s theory of irony takes a dialectical turn. While Schlegelian irony founders on its inability to ironize its own epistemic basis, Hegel suggests that a more dialectical

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form of irony would be able to turn its ironic negativity against the ironic subject at its basis and thereby explore the positive possibilities that emerge from ironic self-negation. Indeed, I will argue that a dialectical form of ironic negativity plays a central role in Hegel’s own philosophical project. In Part VI, I suggest that Hegel’s critique of Schlegel helps account for the curious irony that despite the skeptical and anti-metaphysical tenor of Schlegel’s thought, Schlegel nonetheless repeatedly construed art’s role in modernity in overtly theological terms. In  1800, Schlegel, like Schelling, called for a “new mythology” of art that would provide a cohesive source of meaning and purpose for modern society. Convinced that art must take the place of religion in post-Enlightenment modernity, Schlegel conceived the modern artist as nothing less than a priestly “mediator” able to reveal “divinity” to “all mankind” (KA II, 260). From a Hegelian perspective, Schlegel’s telling appeal to an aesthetic “mythology” and his explicit divinization of the ironic artist betray the fact that Romantic irony turns out to be a thinly veiled form of religion—a spurious means of smuggling in theological and metaphysical dogma under the guise of their repudiation.

II  Schlegel’s epistemology of irony Between 1797 and 1800, Schlegel felt compelled to define and redefine irony in ever stranger and more cryptic formulations scattered throughout issues of the journals Lyceum and Athenaeum. Much of the complexity of Schlegel’s theory of irony derives from his constant vacillation between characterizations of the inner logic of irony as such and descriptions of the ironist’s mood or state of mind.8 Schlegel encounters a unique problem in describing the ironist: namely, how is it possible to offer an account of the ironist that does not illegitimately exempt the ironist itself from the antifoundationalist operation of parabasis? In other words, any description of the ironist seems haunted by the self-contradiction that such an account requires smuggling in a stable subject-position that goes unironized. In the famous fragment 42 from his 1797 Lyceum Fragments, Schlegel registers an acute awareness of this dilemma. Irony is defined there as “the mood that surveys everything and rises infinitely above all that is conditioned [alles Bedingte], even above its own art, virtue, or genius” (KA II, 152).9 If the ironist truly rises above all “that is conditioned,” then it simply will not do to assume that the ironist’s subject-position somehow remains unconditioned. Hence, the final

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clause of this formulation insists that the ironist rises above even “its own art, virtue, or genius.” Yet, this approach to handling the dilemma seems plagued by an infinite regress, for the subject-position of the ironist can, in turn, be ironized only from a still higher subjective standpoint that remains unironized. At various points in the Lyceum and the Athenaeum, Schlegel seeks to defuse the threat of infinite regress by shifting what might be called the “vector” of irony. Schlegel implicitly reasons that infinite regress is only a problem so long as one accepts a vertical model of grounding, according to which one ground is shown to depend on yet another ground that lies beneath it, ad infinitum. Schlegel’s ingenious strategy for finessing the regress problem is to conceive irony not as a vertical operation but as a horizontal one.10 Irony, for Schlegel, denotes the capacity to move laterally among opposing perspectives: instead of settling into a single perspective and thereby reverting to foundationalism, the ironist is able to test and inhabit multiple perspectives at will. Accordingly, in Lyceum fragment 108, Schlegel claims that irony contains and arouses “a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the unconditioned and the conditioned” (ein Gefühl von dem unauflöslischen Widerstreit des Unbedingten und des Bedingten) (KA II, 160). Far from rising above the realm of the conditioned by straightforwardly inhabiting a higher, purportedly “unconditioned” standpoint, the ironist faces the much more daunting challenge of somehow inhabiting both realms at once—or, at least, shuttling constantly between these two realms. Not surprisingly, in the Athenaeum Fragments, Schlegel repeatedly describes irony as a kind of shuttling or hovering between antithetical extremes. In Athenaeum fragment 51, for instance, irony is vividly characterized as the “constant alternation of self-creation and self-destruction” (stete Wechsel von Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung) (KA II, 172). As Ernst Behler has convincingly argued, the “rhythm of self-creation and self-destruction, of enthusiasm and skepticism” is the “fundamental characteristic of Schlegel’s conception of irony.”11 Hence, we can say that there are three basic coordinates in Schlegel’s theory of irony: the two first-order ironies of enthusiasm and skepticism and the second-order “irony of irony,” which oscillates continually between these first-order ironies. This conceptual schema, however, raises some important questions. What is the epistemic status of this second-order “irony of irony”? And is this second-order irony subject to ironic parabasis in its own right? As we will see, Schlegel occasionally appeals to the philosophical category of intuition in his efforts to clarify the nature and epistemic underpinnings of second-order irony.

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We can begin to explore irony’s curious affiliation with intuition by comparing two of Schlegel’s formulations of irony that are almost, but not quite, identical. In his 1800 Ideen aphorism 69, contained in the penultimate issue of Athenaeum, Schlegel offers a vivid description of second-order irony: “Irony is clear consciousness of eternal agility, of the infinitely teeming chaos” (Ironie ist klares Bewuβtsein der ewigen Agilität, des unendlich vollen Chaos) (KA II, 263). One could object, however, that this formulation proves insufficiently aware of the regress problem in that it sets up too sharp a contrast between the stable, decidedly unironized subject-position of the ironist’s “clear consciousness” and “the infinitely teeming chaos” of which the ironist is conscious. A year or two earlier, in an underdiscussed fragment from his Philosophische Lehrjahre, Schlegel offers a subtly different formulation of irony that handles the regress problem by collapsing the distance between the ironist and that which is ironized: “Irony is clear χα [chaos] in agility, intellectual intuition of an eternal χα [chaos] . . .” (Ironie ist klares χα in Agilität, intell.[ektuale] Ansch.[auung] eines ewigen χα . . .) (KA XVIII, 228). If, in the Ideen formulation, irony is defined as the “clear consciousness” of chaos, in this earlier, violently paradoxical formulation, the genitive disintegrates: irony is “clear χα,” that explosive point at which clarity and chaos impossibly meet. In the next clause, Schlegel invokes the Fichtean category of intellectual intuition as a means of conveying this radical ironizing of the very distance between the ironist and its medium. In his 1800 “Dialogue on Mythology,” published in the same Athenaeum issue as Ideen, Schlegel once again characterizes irony in terms of intuition: “We therefore adhere only to the meaning of the Whole; what stimulates, moves, occupies, and amuses individually the sense, the heart, the understanding, and the imagination appear to us only as figures, a means to the intuition of the Whole [Anschauung des Ganzen], to which we raise ourselves in an instant” (KA II, 323). Notice that this formulation is structurally identical to Schlegel’s 1797 definition of irony as a “mood” that rises above everything conditioned. In this case, the realm of the conditioned becomes the realm of mere “figures,” and the mechanism by which the ironist rises above this realm is an instantaneous “intuition” of a rather mysterious “Whole.” At this point, it should remain an open question whether Schlegel’s invocation of intuition really avoids the regress problem or simply masks it: by what right, after all, does Schlegel exempt this “intuition of the Whole” from ironic parabasis? As far as I am aware, these are the only two formulations in Schlegel’s entire corpus in which irony is explicitly linked to the faculty of intuition. However, these occasional suggestions of a connection between irony and intuition

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gain added significance once we note the frequency of Schlegel’s invocation of intuition throughout the Athenaeum. Intuition (Anschauung) and intellectual intuition (intellektuale Anschauung) are frequently exalted in the Athenaeum as faculties capable of overcoming the limitations of rational or discursive modes of thought.12 The exemplary passage in this regard has to be Schlegel’s 1800 Ideen aphorism 150: “One can neither explain nor comprehend the universe—one can only intuit and reveal it [anschauen und offenbaren]” (KA II, 271). Passages such as these offer preliminary evidence—against many recent critics—that even in 1800, Schlegel had not entirely repudiated Fichte’s philosophy.

III  The origins of Schlegel’s theory of irony in Kant and Fichte To gain a more precise sense of the complex conceptual underpinnings of irony, we have to situate Schlegel’s theory of irony in the context of his broader philosophical ambitions and his critical engagement with Kant and Fichte. Like Schelling, Schlegel proves acutely aware of the aporias plaguing Kant’s philosophy. Schlegel faults orthodox “Kantians” for naively assuming that “Kant’s philosophy should be in agreement with itself ” (KA II, 181). From Schlegel’s perspective, Kant was a “half critic” torn between radical skepticism and nostalgic yearning for metaphysical unity and solace (KA XVIII, 5). The argument of the first two chapters of this book bears out Schlegel’s view of Kant as a “half critic”: the tension between skepticism and metaphysics that Schlegel shrewdly detects in Kant’s philosophy is epitomized in the unresolved conflict between the regulative and constitutive dimensions of Kant’s third Critique. As I argued in the previous chapter, Schelling’s strategy in the System of Transcendental Idealism was to exploit and radicalize the constitutive dimension of the third Critique, deriving a full-blown metaphysics of “aesthetic intuition” from Kant’s theory of aesthetic pleasure. Three years before the publication of Schelling’s System, Schlegel cannily remarked that “Schelling’s philosophy, which one could call criticized mysticism [kritisierten Mystizismus], ends, like Aeschylus’ Prometheus, in disaster and ruin” (KA II, 180). Schlegel’s characterization of Schelling’s philosophy as “criticized mysticism” succinctly captures the early Schelling’s efforts to develop the metaphysical and mystical strains in Kant’s critical philosophy. Indeed, although Schlegel’s remark about Schelling was made in 1797, it applies equally well to the aesthetics of Schelling’s 1800 System, which conceived aesthetic

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experience as the privileged locus for the metaphysical resolution of “infinite contradictions.” If Schelling takes Kant in the direction of a “criticized mysticism,” Schlegel by contrast seeks to radicalize the skeptical strain in Kant’s philosophy. I would suggest that the seeds of Schlegel’s theory of irony are contained in the regulative dimension of the third Critique, which rejects the possibility of a metaphysical resolution of the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom. While Schlegel embraces Kant’s epistemic sobriety and his critique of dogmatic metaphysics, Schlegel nonetheless declares that “philosophy must be critical . . . in a much higher sense than in Kant” (KA XIX, 346). In particular, Schlegel faults Kant’s philosophy for failing to reflect on its own presuppositions. Schlegel seems to have Kant in mind when he remarks at the beginning of the Athenaeum fragments that “nothing is more rarely the subject of philosophy than philosophy itself ” (KA II, 165). Later in Athenaeum, Schlegel credits Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre for taking Kant in a more critical direction by making philosophy self-reflective. According to Schlegel, Fichte is a “Kant raised to the second power” precisely because Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre “is always at the same time philosophy and philosophy of philosophy” (KA II, 213). However, it would be a mistake to assume that Schlegel conceives Fichte’s philosophy as a straightforward advance from Kant. In fact, Schlegel typically plays Kant and Fichte against each other, arguing that the critical dimensions of their respective philosophies serve as mutual correctives to the other thinker’s blind spots and excesses. On the one hand, as we have already seen, Schlegel stages Fichte as a radicalized, self-reflexive version of Kant. On the other hand, Schlegel contrasts Kant’s epistemic sobriety with Fichte’s metaphysical extravagance. Hence, while Schlegel describes Kant as a cautious Spürhund (“sniffer dog”) of philosophy, on the trail of the supersensible but never quite able to hunt it down, Schlegel calls Fichte a Jäger (“hunter”) keen on taking the supersensible by force (KA XVIII, 61). In a similar vein, Schlegel faults Fichte for a lack of philosophical sobriety, likening him to a “drunk who never tires of mounting the horse from one side and falling off the other” (KA XVIII, 32). In light of this philosophical background, Schlegel’s theory of irony can be seen as an attempt to combine a Kantian suspicion toward dogmatic metaphysics with a Fichtean emphasis on the metareflective and self-critical dimensions of philosophy. Irony as a “permanent parabasis” is a skepticism so radical that it is able to turn its ironic negativity against itself and to hover between “selfcreation and self-destruction.” From Schlegel’s perspective, the critical and reflective strains in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte find their synthesis and

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culmination in aesthetic irony, which radicalizes reflection into a full-blown skeptical antifoundationalism. Schlegel argues that the privileged locus of irony is “Romantic” or “transcendental” poetry, conceived in a very broad sense as a philosophical artform that raises “reflection again and again to a higher power, multiplying it as if in an endless series of mirrors” (KA II, 182–3). Schlegel’s reflective conception of art contrasts sharply with traditional mimetic theories of art, which are based on the foundationalist assumption of a stable reality. Rejecting such a foundationalist premise, Schlegel argues that Romantic poetry creates the semblance of reality through an endless process of self-mirroring and selfothering. Not surprisingly, there is something close to a consensus among recent scholars—including Behler, Manfred Frank, and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert—that Schlegel’s antifoundationalist theory of irony marks a total break with Fichte’s metaphysical foundationalism. Behler is typical in dating Schlegel’s break with Fichte as early as 1796, a year before Schlegel even began to develop his theory of irony.13 I would argue, however, that this prevailing view of Schlegel’s so-called “break” with Fichte drastically oversimplifies Schlegel’s complex stance toward Fichte’s philosophy. To begin to make my case, I suggest that we consider an unresolved problem raised at the end of the previous section: if Schlegel broke entirely with Fichte’s foundationalism before he developed his theory of irony, why did he nonetheless continue to appeal to Fichte’s doctrine of intellectual intuition in his account of irony and to refer approvingly to the faculties of intuition and intellectual intuition throughout the Athenaeum? I would argue that Schlegel’s post-1796 stance toward Fichte should be understood less as a “break” and more as a tortured agon. Indeed, Schlegel’s philosophical lectures delivered between 1800 and 1805 reveal a much more vexed stance toward Fichte than most critics are willing to allow. Two of Schlegel’s lecture courses (neither of which has been translated into English) are especially relevant for our purposes: his course on Transcendental Philosophy offered at the University of Jena between 1800 and 1801 (at least part of which Hegel attended)14 and his course on The Development of Philosophy in Twelve Books delivered to a private audience in Köln between 1804 and 1805.15 In these philosophical lectures, Schlegel advances trenchant criticisms of Fichte’s doctrine of intellectual intuition yet is never quite willing—or able—to repudiate Fichte’s foundationalist intuitionism altogether. Early in the Jena lectures, Schlegel registers skepticism about the faculty of intuition: “The longing for the infinite must always be a longing. It cannot occur

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in the form of intuition. The ideal can never be intuited. The ideal is produced through speculation” (KA XII, 8).16 What seems straightforward dismissal of the category of Anschauung, however, soon proves to be much more complicated. Before long, despite his earlier repudiation of the category of intuition, he advances  intellectual intuition as nothing less than the “absolute” basis of his philosophical system: “The consolidation of the entire primordial consciousness, when it comes into consciousness, that is, the primordial consciousness intuited and understood, is intellectual intuition. The absolute thesis of all philosophy cannot  be proven; it has absolutely nothing to do with proof; it contains its proof within itself ” (KA XII, 24).17 Schlegel clearly subscribes here to Fichte’s foundationalist intuitionism in establishing intellectual intuition as “the absolute thesis of all philosophy.” However, this passage also reveals some of the subtle ways in which Schlegel implicitly reworks Fichte’s doctrine of intellectual intuition. While Fichte himself vacillates between conceiving intellectual intuition as a state of empirical consciousness and as the logical condition of possibility of empirical consciousness, Schlegel claims that intellectual intuition  is the “coming to consciousness” of primordial consciousness. And whereas Fichte rarely appeals to direct self-evidence in his justification of intellectual intuition, Schlegel insists that intellectual intuition “contains its proof within itself.” The Köln lectures delivered a few years later reveal an even more conflicted stance toward intuition. In contrast to the Jena lectures, Schlegel generally avoids here any talk of “intellectual intuition.” He singles out for attack the mystical epistemological basis of intuition: its source of cognition is “a supernatural, higher revelation” (eine übernaturliche, höhere Offenbarung) (KA XII, 258). Yet, at this early point in the Köln lectures, he still seems convinced that the category of intuition can be retained so long as its epistemological basis is revamped. He first proposes what he calls Selbstanschauung: “the investigation of all sources of philosophy leads us to self-intuition as the most certain starting point of philosophy” (KA XII, 299).18 However, Schlegel’s confidence in the category of Selbstanschauung wanes as he begins to generate quite powerful general objections to the notion of Anschauung. Recall that Fichte appeals to the category of intellectual intuition as a means of avoiding the infinite regress involved in any attempt to conceive selfconsciousness as an object. Here, Schlegel cleverly turns this argument against Fichte by arguing that intuition falls prey to the very regress problem that it is meant to overcome: “This capacity to be the ‘I’ of ‘I’ is, however, infinite; for just as there is an intuition of intuition, there can just as well be an intuition of intuition of intuition, into infinity; this has absolutely no limits” (KA XII, 325).19

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Shortly thereafter, Schlegel argues that any model of Anschauung faces the insuperable problem that fixing an object intuitively is tantamount to destroying it. “As for intuition,” Schlegel writes, “it has already adequately been shown that it can afford no cognition in the actual sense precisely because it crushes the inner essence of the object—the living, the free and moving” (KA XII, 331).20 For Schlegel, any theory of intuition faces a Heisenbergian dilemma: in the very process of delimiting an object as an object, intuition necessarily falsifies it. Hence, Schlegel concludes that intuition “can afford no cognition in the actual sense.” The force of these objections compels him to renounce his earlier espousal of the category of self-intuition as the basis for philosophy. He turns instead to the category of “feeling” (Gefühl), yet he soon admits that feeling could just as well be called “spiritual intuition” (geistige Anschauung) or “aesthetic intuition” (ästhetische Anschauung) (KA XII, 355). Evidently, despite his uneasiness about the category of intuition, Schlegel nonetheless feels compelled to invoke the category because he insists on grounding his philosophical system in a nonconceptual form of cognition. Hence, Walter Benjamin quite aptly characterizes Schlegel’s seemingly paradoxical enterprise as the search for “an unintuitable intuition” (eine unanschauliche Intuition).21 Schlegel’s self-defeating efforts to theorize a non-intuitional model of immediate cognition culminates in this astonishing claim: “The infinite fullness as such cannot be intuited; one must then assume an intuition that can never be completed. This concept comes only . . . through the foreboding, prophesying feeling in human consciousness” (KA XII, 381).22 If the infinite fullness cannot be intuited, why must we then assume such an incomplete intuition, such a mysterious faculty of “prophecy”? Over the course of his Jena and Köln lectures, as we have seen, the category of intuition simply reemerges again and again in various terminological guises as the basis of his philosophical system. Ultimately, Schlegel remains committed to an aporetic epistemology doomed to collapse repeatedly into the very intuitionism it seeks so desperately to overcome.

IV  Recuperating Hegel’s metacritique of Schlegelian irony With this background in place, we are finally in a position to examine and assess Hegel’s critique of the allegedly Fichtean underpinnings of Schlegel’s theory of irony. The standard dismissal of Hegel’s critique of Schlegel is based on two premises. First, many scholars claim that Hegel’s seemingly straightforward

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attribution of Fichtean subjectivism to the theory of irony fails to honor the actual complexities of Schlegel’s engagement with Fichte. Second, they argue that Hegel’s exclusive emphasis on a single aspect of irony at the expense of other equally fundamental aspects betrays an impoverished understanding of Schlegel’s theory itself.23 Indeed, there seems no dearth of evidence to support either of these claims. Commentators frequently point to Hegel’s treatment of Schlegelian irony in a passage from his Lectures on the History of Philosophy: This [Schlegel’s] irony is an application of Fichte’s philosophy, it emerges from Fichte’s philosophy . . . . It is when subjective consciousness is finished with all things: “It is I who through my cultured thoughts can negate all determinations of right, morality, good, etc.; and I know that if anything seems good to me I can just as well subvert it. I know myself absolutely as the master of all these determinations—I can make them valid or also not; all things are only true to me insofar as they please me now.”24

Beginning with the vague assertion that Schlegel’s theory of irony “emerges from Fichte’s philosophy,” Hegel proceeds to lampoon the ironist as an absolute subjectivity confident in its mastery over all its determinations. Scattered passages throughout Hegel’s work echo these sentiments, inviting critics to dismiss his understanding of Romantic irony as hopelessly one-sided. Behler’s response to Hegel’s critique of irony is typical: One can say that it is precisely at this point that Hegel’s understanding of irony errs completely and his conception of the absolute power of the ironic self proves definitely false. For the critique that expresses itself in irony is no outwardly directed irony that merely wants to deceive and bewilder but a self-critique of the artist directed toward himself (“self-destruction”), which should protect him from investing too much trust, hubris, and self-importance in “self-creation.”25

Schlegel’s theory of irony, we should recall, involves three basic coordinates: the two first-order ironies of self-creation and self-destruction and the second-order “irony of irony,” which alternates between self-creation and self-destruction. Working from this schema, Behler swiftly dispenses with Hegel’s critique of irony. On Behler’s account, Hegel mistakes the irony of self-creation for Schlegelian irony tout court, thereby neglecting—or perhaps willfully ignoring—the equally important moment of self-destruction within irony.26 I hope to demonstrate, however, that Hegel’s understanding of Schlegel’s theory of irony and its allegedly Fichtean underpinnings is significantly more nuanced and penetrating than most scholars acknowledge. The first step in making my

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case is to establish that Hegel was, in fact, fully aware of the complexities of Schlegel’s engagement with Fichte. It has already been noted that Hegel attended at least some of Schlegel’s Jena lectures, which reveal Schlegel’s vexed stance toward Fichte. That Hegel did not take Schlegel to be a straightforward Fichtean is also clear from a remark in his Lectures on Aesthetics (1823–9): “Friedrich von Schlegel, like Schelling, started out from the Fichtean standpoint, Schelling to go beyond it entirely, Friedrich von Schlegel to develop it in his own way and to tear himself away from it.”27 Recent commentators have been so eager to show the various ways that Schlegel moves beyond Fichte that they tend to neglect those aspects of Schlegel’s thinking that remain persistently Fichtean—most notably, as I have tried to show in the two previous sections, his stance toward intuition. Hegel proves here to be the subtler critic of Schlegel in his careful distinction between a complete overcoming of Fichte’s philosophy and a more immanent— and tortured—negotiation with it. Indeed, as a characterization of Schlegel’s engagement with Fichte’s doctrine of intuition, Hegel’s remark can hardly be bettered: Schlegel tries precisely to develop the category of intuition “in his own way and to tear himself away from it.” In fact, in the short section of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy devoted to Schlegel, Hegel specifically isolates Schlegel’s problematic attempt to develop “forms of sensation” that could avoid Fichtean subjectivism: “The Fichtean standpoint of subjectivity has retained its character of being unphilosophically worked out, and arrived at its completion in forms belonging to sensation which were in part the effort—futile though it was—to get beyond subjectivity.”28 Hegel then gets quite canny. He implicitly links the Fichtean subjectivism at the core of Schlegel’s theory of irony to the specifically intuitional subjectivism of Friedrich Schleiermacher.29 In his 1799 work On Religion, Schleiermacher—himself an occasional contributor to the Athenaeum—repeatedly privileges the faculty of intuition (Anschauung) as the primary means for the direct apprehension of God.30 That On Religion was frequently praised in the Athenaeum by Schlegel and fellow early Romantics was not lost on Hegel. So Hegel proceeds to launch a joint attack on what he perceives to be the shared intuitional basis of Schlegel’s theory of irony and Schleiermacher’s epistemology: In accordance with this principle, the spiritual living essence has then transformed into self-consciousness, and it intends to know the unity of Spirit immediately [unmittelbar] from itself, and in this immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit] to know it in a poetic or at least a prophetic manner. As regards the poetic manner, it knows the life and person of the Absolute immediately in an intuition, not in the Concept, and it thinks it would lose the Whole as Whole, as a self-penetrating unity, were

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it not to express the same in poetic form; and what it thus expressed poetically is the intuition of the personal life of self-consciousness. – But the truth is absolute movement . . . .31

The details of this passage suggest Schlegel as the primary target. In his allusions to knowing Spirit “in a poetic or at least a prophetic manner,” Hegel seems to point to Schlegel’s various efforts to theorize a non-intuitional mode of cognition— including Schlegel’s last-ditch attempt to develop the category of “prophecy” in the Köln lectures. In his reference to intuiting “the Whole as Whole,” Hegel may even have in mind Schlegel’s Athenaeum definition of irony as the “intuition of the Whole.” Hegel’s point is that all of Schlegel’s efforts to overcome intuitionism are doomed to fail so long as he remains committed to the dogma of immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit). Indeed, in a dense passage from his essay on “Solger’s Posthumous Writings and Correspondence” (1828), Hegel explicitly identifies a Fichtean epistemology of intuition at the basis of Schlegel’s theory of irony. Hegel begins by interrogating Fichte’s intuitional epistemology. He credits Fichte for bringing to consciousness “the highest starting point for the problem of philosophy”—namely, the task of developing “the particular from the presuppositionless, the universal” (von dem Voraussetzungslosen, Allgemeinen aus das Besondere zu entwickeln).32 However, Hegel goes on to argue that the principle Fichte invokes in order to carry out this task is “itself a presupposition” (selbst eine Voraussetzung).33 It is at this point that he specifically targets Fichte’s intuitional epistemology, one that is shown to underwrite Schlegel’s theory of irony: A principle must also be proved, not require that it be accepted from intuition, immediate certainty, inner revelation, or as one may call it in a word, in good faith; the requirement of proof, however, has become something obsolete for the many monochromatic philosophies of the time . . . . In this cited form such negativity has remained only in the one-sided, finite affirmation that it has as I. In this merely subjective affirmation, it has been taken up from Fichtean philosophy by Friedrich von Schlegel with a lack of understanding of the speculative and a setting aside of the same; and it has been so torn from the field of thought that, applied directly to reality, it has flourished into irony, into the negation of the liveliness of reason and truth and the debasement of the same to appearance in the subject and to appearing for others.34

What should not be missed is Hegel’s careful distinction between Fichte’s genuinely   “speculative” philosophy and Schlegel’s decidedly non-speculative appropriation of Fichte. As we have seen, whereas Fichte never straightforwardly

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aligns intuition with “immediate certainty,” Schlegel makes precisely this dogmatic identification in his philosophical lectures when he claims that intellectual intuition “contains its proof within itself.” For Hegel, Schlegel’s assumption of the radical presuppositionlessness of his intuitional epistemology itself turns out to be an unexamined presupposition. Hegel then goes on to argue that Schlegel’s “merely subjective affirmation” of Fichtean idealism directly sponsors his theory of irony. In addressing Hegel’s critique of Schlegel, commentators have failed to acknowledge what emerges here as the strict inseparability of Hegel’s critique of irony from his critique of intuition. As a result, they can easily dismiss Hegel’s attribution of Fichtean subjectivism to Schlegelian irony. I would argue, however, that Hegel’s general alignment of the ironic subject with the Fichtean subject should be taken as the corollary to his more pointed—and more fundamental— metacritique of Schlegel’s theory of irony: his critique of irony’s underlying epistemology of intuition. The success of Hegel’s metacritique of irony would then depend on the plausibility of his claim about irony’s intuitional basis. Hopefully, our examination of Schlegel’s philosophical lectures has already made plausible Hegel’s identification of an intuitionism at the heart of Schlegel’s epistemology, so it remains to be shown how this intuitional epistemology infects Schlegel’s theory of irony. Let us turn first to a revealing sentence from Hegel’s discussion of Romantic irony in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy: “The divine is said to be the purely negative attitude, the intuition [Anschauung], the consciousness of the vanity of everything . . . .”35 Hegel provocatively claims here that intuition is the mode of consciousness by which the ironist registers the “vanity of everything.” Hegel’s frequent attacks on the rhetoric of elevation pervading Schlegel’s descriptions of irony then suddenly become understandable: the epistemic means by which the ironist elevates himself above everything is none other than the faculty of intuition.36 We need only recall Schlegel’s 1800 definition of irony as the “intuition of the Whole, to which we raise ourselves in an instant” (KA II, 323). Although Schlegel rarely links irony with intuition, Hegel’s point is that those occasional instances when Schlegel does establish this link betray irony’s fundamental structure: the ironist raises himself to “the Whole” by means of the immediate perception of intuition. In section 140 of his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel interrogates the ironist’s declaration of the vanity of everything: the form of irony “is not only the vanity of all ethical content in the way of rights, duties, and laws . . . but it is also the form of subjective vanity: it knows itself as the vanity of all content and in this knowledge knows itself as the Absolute.”37 This

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passage offers us a very precise way of handling Behler’s critique of Hegel. In Behler’s account, Hegel treats the “self-creation” aspect of irony as irony tout court, thereby neglecting the equally fundamental aspect of “self-destruction.” However, this passage suggests that the primary target of Hegel’s critique is, in fact, the second-order irony hovering between the first-order ironies of selfcreation and self-destruction. The passage’s final clause is crucial: at precisely the moment that the ironist declares itself to be vain—the moment, we can say, of self-destruction—it elevates itself to the status of the Absolute. What Hegel attacks, in other words, is the underlying absolute subjectivity that arrogates to itself the capacity to alternate at will between self-creation and self-destruction, between enthusiasm and skepticism. In the fascinating oral supplement to section 140 of Elements of the Philosophy of Right—not available in either of the extant English translations of the text—Hegel traces the ironist’s absolute subjectivity to an underlying Fichtean epistemology of conviction: [I]n the particular conception of the “I” of Friedrich v. Schlegel, this “I” is itself portrayed as God with respect to the good and beautiful, so that objective good is only a figment of my conviction [Überzeugung], and only gains support through me, and I emerge as lord and master over it and can make it disappear. Insofar as I encounter something objective, it is at the same time nugatory for me, and I therefore hover over a monstrous space, from which I call forth and destroy shapes.38

For Fichte, “conviction” is a kind of pre-rational form of certainty, and he often claims that conviction is apodictically true: as he puts it, “conviction of error is utterly impossible.”39 Hegel’s implicit suggestion is that Schlegel’s theory of irony depends on a tacit identification of the Fichtean categories of intuition and conviction as a spurious means of securing intuition’s apodictic validity. The ironist’s self-proclaimed mastery over “the good and the beautiful” masks an absolute subjectivity for which the external world is a mere subjective projection: “objective good is only a figment” of the ironist’s “conviction.” The brilliantly polemical final sentence targets the boundless hubris of an absolute subjectivity hovering between shapes that it alternately creates and destroys. It is no coincidence that Hegel employs the language of hovering (schweben)— the very language Schlegel typically invokes to describe the ironist’s movement between enthusiasm and skepticism.40 So, if Schlegel presents his notion of “irony of irony” as a hovering between what seem the equally fundamental extremes of enthusiasm and skepticism,

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Hegel points out that such second-order hovering itself depends on a groundlevel acceptance of enthusiasm. Let us revisit Schlegel’s 1800 definition of irony as “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of the infinitely teeming chaos” (KA II, 263). Notice that Schlegel does not define irony simply as “eternal agility” but as the clear consciousness of eternal agility. In a Philosophische Lehrjahre fragment, as we have seen, Schlegel redefines the ironist’s “clear consciousness” as the “intellectual intuition of an eternal χα [chaos]” (KA XVIII, 228). It is as if Schlegel comes clean here in establishing the faculty of intellectual intuition as the enabling precondition for the ironist’s agile hovering between enthusiasm and skepticism. From a Hegelian vantage, however, the Schlegelian ironist is not quite agile enough in that it is never quite able to ironize its own intuitive faculty. In effect, Hegel applies Schlegel’s own argument in the Köln lectures about the infinite regress of intuition to the intuitional epistemology at the basis of Schlegel’s theory of irony. Hegel’s basic point is that Schlegel’s invocation of intellectual intuition does not so much resolve the problem of infinite regress as mask it. If irony is the intellectual intuition of an eternal chaos, then this intuition will, in turn, have to become the object of a higher-order intuition, ad infinitum. Hegel’s metacritique of Schlegelian irony thus proves to be strictly immanent: it demonstrates that a problem internal to Schlegel’s theory of irony—namely, the problem of infinite regress—is ultimately insuperable, and Schlegel’s last-ditch recourse to intellectual intuition simply reinstates the problem in another form. For Hegel, then, Schlegelian irony turns out to be insufficiently radical since it fails to follow through on its own inner logic. In the Jena and Köln lectures, Schlegel proves unable to repudiate the category of intuition even in the face of his own strong doubts about the category. From Hegel’s meta-perspective, it is precisely this point of equivocation in Schlegel’s epistemology that results in a permanently unstable theory of irony; and irony’s epistemic instability, in turn, attests to the fundamental inadequacy—one might even say incoherence—of irony as a self-sustaining paradigm.

V  Irony and/as dialectics My reconstruction of Hegel’s critique of Schlegelian irony is not quite complete. Thus far in my account, Hegel’s critique has been strictly negative: the Schlegelian ironist commits the self-contradiction of exempting itself from the operation of ironic parabasis, thereby elevating itself into an absolute Ich that “intuits” the vanity of all things. However, Hegel’s treatment of irony

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takes a crucial dialectical turn in his essay “Solger’s Posthumous Writings and Correspondence,” where he acknowledges the “speculative moment that lies in one side of irony”—namely, “negativity in general.”41 Hegel specifies here that he is not so much hostile to irony as such as he is to Schlegel’s unspeculative, merely “one-sided” conception of ironic negativity as the subjective principle of the “I.”42 From Hegel’s perspective, the negativity involved in Schlegel’s theory of irony proves to be abortively radical since it fails to turn against the inflated subjectposition of the ironist itself. The “speculative moment” of irony, Hegel suggests, is the precise moment when ironic negativity doubles back on the ironist itself, thereby allowing irony to emerge in its truth as a dialectical moment of negativity that ultimately supersedes itself. Hegel goes on to credit his Berlin colleague K. W. F. Solger with recognizing this essential dialectical dimension of irony that Schlegel denies or ignores. Hegel praises Solger for arriving at the fundamental dialectical insight that “true affirmation” consists in “negation of negation.”43 Solger’s conception of irony as “comic solemnity,” Hegel observes, is irreducibly dialectical: irony, for Solger, is at once a “seriousness [Ernsthaftigkeit] that negates itself ” and a “nothingness [Nichtigkeit] that makes itself serious [ernsthaft].”44 While Hegel praises Solger for having the “speculative daring” to recognize that the “Idea inherently contains contradiction,”45 Hegel nonetheless points out that even Solger’s conception of irony is insufficiently dialectical. In Hegel’s view, Solger remains so mired in negativity that he ends up treating contradiction more as “something static” (ein Bleibendes) than as a truly dialectical moment that gets incorporated into a higher affirmation.46 In a footnote to his essay on Solger, Hegel points out that a full-blown dialectical conception of ironic negativity is to be found only in his own philosophical system, particularly in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and his Science of Logic (1811).47 Indeed, Hegel’s vigorous critique of Schlegel’s model of ironic negativity should not blind us to the fact that negativity plays a central role in Hegel’s own philosophy. In the preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel seems to have Schlegel in mind when he criticizes the standpoint of the “merely negative” as a “dead end which does not go beyond itself to a new content.”48 Rejecting such a Schlegelian model of negativity that “fails to see the positive within itself,” Hegel conceives negativity as an essential dialectical moment in the “Whole,” a “determinate negative” that is “a positive content as well.”49 Accordingly, Hegel urges us to “tarry with the negative”50 and characterizes his dialectical enterprise as a “self-completing skepticism” (sich vollbringende Skeptizismus), a skepticism so radical that it dissolves the skeptical paradigm

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from within.51 Hegel’s basic procedure in the Phenomenology is to entertain provisionally a given foundational claim to true knowledge and then to pursue the immanent logic of that philosophical position to the point where it admits its own self-contradictory status and hence deconstructs itself. Hegel calls this immanent self-deconstruction “determinate negation” because it is a self-negation so precise that it gives rise to a higher standpoint, which is then subjected to dialectical critique in turn.52 Hegel’s notion of determinate negation, I would suggest, can be understood as a dialectical form of irony that harnesses negativity as a means of progressing to higher epistemic standpoints. As we will see in the next chapter, Hegel’s dialectical conception of ironic negativity also plays an essential role in his mature account of the dynamics of art in modernity. Remarkably, Schlegel himself fleetingly acknowledged the dialectical dimension of ironic negativity in a private notebook dated around the time of his Athenaeum contributions: “Perfect, absolute irony ceases to be irony and becomes serious [ernsthaft]” (KA XVI, 144).53 This startling moment of selfcritique, which predates Hegel’s critique of Schlegel by many years, suggests that Schlegel remained haunted by the possibility that his own view of irony as “permanent parabasis” was only abortively radical, since it failed to arrive at the dialectical point where ironic negativity negates itself and becomes “serious.” From this vantage, we might say that Hegel’s immanent critique of Schlegelian irony brings to the surface the incipiently dialectical dimension of ironic negativity that remains suppressed—or, perhaps, repressed—in Schlegel’s published remarks on irony.

VI  Schlegel’s vision of a “new mythology” Hegel’s critique of Schlegel helps clarify an important aspect of Schlegel’s thought that is not often discussed in the context of his theory of irony: like Schelling, Schlegel calls for a “new mythology” of art that would serve as a unifying force in post-Enlightenment culture. In the same year that Schelling prophesied the advent of a “new mythology” in the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schlegel effused in his “Dialogue on Mythology” (1800) that a “new mythology” would be the “most artistic of all artworks,” an “infinite poem that contains the germ of all other poems” (KA II, 312). As I argued in the previous chapter, it is hardly surprising that Schelling’s System culminates in the vision of a “new mythology,” since Schelling ascribes an outright redemptive role to the

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“miracle of art” in healing the wounds inflicted by modernity. However, given the skeptical and antifoundationalist thrust of Schlegel’s thought, it might seem puzzling that Schlegel echoes Schelling’s call for a new mythology. Why does Schlegel feel compelled to appeal to a “new mythology’? How are we to reconcile Schlegel’s notion of a “new mythology” with his theory of irony? And what are the similarities and differences between Schlegel’s and Schelling’s respective conceptions of a “new mythology”? We can answer these questions if we keep Hegel’s critique of Schlegelian irony in view. In the “Dialogue on Mythology,” Schlegel complains that “[w]e have no mythology,” noting in particular that “our poetry lacks a focal point [Mittelpunkt], such as mythology was for the ancients” (KA II, 312). The task of a “new mythology,” Schlegel suggests, would be precisely to provide such a “focal point” for a modern age grown disenchanted with traditional religious values. No wonder Schlegel repeatedly invokes religious language in his account of the new mythology: in post-Enlightenment modernity, art alone can provide a mythological surrogate for religion by giving shape to the “supremely Holy” (das höchste Heilige) (KA II, 312). Yet, Schlegel insists that this “new mythology” of art cannot simply attempt to resuscitate the ancient mythology of classical Greece. In a revealing fragment from Athenaeum, Schlegel contrasts a Homeric mythology based on the “self-illuminating subjectivity of all theology” (die von selbst einleuchtende Subjektivität aller Theologie) with a modern mythology rooted in “the more incomprehensible innate spiritual diremption of man” (die unbegreiflichere angeborne geistige Duplizität des Menschen) (KA II, 190). From a Schlegelian perspective, Schelling’s aesthetics of the System—rooted in the assumption of a unitary metaphysical Ich that gets validated in “aesthetic intuition”—is a hopelessly nostalgic attempt to revive a Greek age that remains irretrievably past. By contrast, Schlegel’s “Dialogue on Mythology” proposes a “new mythology” based on an ontology of radical diremption rather than of unity. Schlegel locates this new mythology not in an allegedly transcendent aesthetic experience but in the “great wit” and “irony” of “Romantic poetry,” which he defines as an “artistically ordered chaos,” an “alluring symmetry of contradictions,” a “wonderful and eternal alternation of enthusiasm and irony” (KA II, 318–19). This new mythology of irony would acknowledge—and revel in—the inherent contradictions of existence without seeking metaphysical or theological panaceas. From Schlegel’s perspective, irony is uniquely poised to become the new religion of a godless age. Such a new mythology of irony would not directly manifest the “Highest” so much as it would evoke or constellate it

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through its very absence. In the “network” (Gewebe) of such a new mythology, as Schlegel puts it, “the Highest is really formed [gebildet]; everything is relation [Beziehung] and transformation [Verwandlung], shaped [angebildet] and re-formed [umgebildet], and this shaping and re-forming is in fact its very own technique, its inner life, its method, if I may call it that” (KA II, 318). This should remind us of Athenaeum fragment 116, where Schlegel claims that Romantic poetry “multiplies reflection as if in an endless series of mirrors.” From Schlegel’s proto-postmodern perspective, art is able to evoke—but not quite instantiate— the “Highest” through formal artifice and complex relational dynamics. However, as I pointed out in Part II, just a few pages later in the “Dialogue on Mythology,” Schlegel adds the startling caveat that the ironist’s capacity for endless reflection is enabled by an “intuition of the Whole” (KA II, 323). From a Hegelian perspective, Schlegel’s use of Fichte’s metaphysical language betrays the unironized dogma at the basis of his theory of irony: the ironist’s skeptical negativity is enabled by an “intuition” of a metaphysical “Whole” that somehow escapes ironic scrutiny. Despite Schlegel’s first-order repudiation of the “selfilluminating subjectivity of all theology,” he ends up smuggling in precisely such a metaphysical subjectivity at a second-order level. In Schlegel’s theology of irony, the ironist is conceived as an absolute Ich capable of intuiting the vanity of everything. The tacit theological underpinnings of Schlegel’s theory of irony are made more explicit in Schlegel’s 1800 Ideen, where Schlegel emphasizes parallels between irony and religion in modern society. Schlegel baldly declares in Ideen that the new mythology of art would be nothing less than a “great rebirth of religion” (KA II, 261). Noting that religion appears in society either “as mythology or as Bible,” Schlegel argues that the combination of poetry and philosophy in an ironic form of art would serve as a mythological form of religion (KA II, 259). As he puts it, “Poetry and philosophy are, depending on one’s point of view, different spheres, different forms, or simply the aspects of religion. For, just try to combine the two, and you will find yourself with nothing but religion” (KA II, 260–1). However, in another aphorism from Ideen, Schlegel explicitly conceives irony not in terms of mythology but in terms of dogmatic religion: the ironic artist, Schlegel declares, is a full-blown “mediator [Mittler] . . . who perceives the divinity within himself and who self-destructively [sich selbst vernichtend] sacrifices himself in order to reveal, communicate, and represent to all mankind this divinity in his conduct and actions, in his words and works” (KA II, 260). This passage betrays the aporetic structure of irony first detected by Hegel: the artistic “mediator” ends up divinizing himself under the guise of self-negation

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and self-sacrifice. The ironic artist turns out to be nothing less than the religious savior of humanity. Perhaps fittingly, Schlegel—the father of modern irony and antifoundationalist skepticism—converted to Catholicism in 1808 and remained a staunch political and religious conservative until his death in 1829. From a Hegelian perspective, Schlegel’s religious conversion, far from constituting an about-face, only made explicit the theological underpinnings of irony itself. With Schlegel in mind, Hegel archly observed that “it is . . . no help to him to adopt . . . , so to say, past world-views, i.e. to seek to root himself firmly in one of these ways of looking at things, as for instance, to become Catholic,” for Schlegel’s conversion to Catholicism is only a spurious means of “stabilizing the mind.”54 In Schlegel’s early thought, irony already occupied the structural position of religion and the ironic artist was explicitly conceived as a priest for the modern age. By 1808, Schlegel had lost faith in the possibility of a new mythology rooted in art and replaced his theology of irony with Catholic theology.55 From a Hegelian standpoint, both Schlegel and Schelling called for a “new mythology” precisely because they shared the core Romantic assumption that art must serve as a surrogate for religion in post-Enlightenment modernity. Strikingly, however, both Schelling and Schlegel eventually lost faith in the possibility of an aesthetic mythology and embraced Christian theology instead, while at the same time downplaying art’s cultural role in modernity. Evidently, although Schelling and Schlegel sought to move beyond the aporias plaguing Kant’s philosophy, they remained trapped within Kant’s binary thinking about art, vacillating between metaphysical exuberance and disenchanted skepticism. The next chapter argues that Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics develops a postRomantic framework for understanding the dynamics of art in modernity that avoids conceiving art as a form of mythology or religion. From Hegel’s perspective, one of the most distinctive features of modern art is its capacity to mobilize ironic negativity as a dialectical resource both for interrogating and testing its own presuppositions and for gesturing toward higher possibilities beyond the aesthetic domain. In the remainder of the book, I hope to make a cumulative case that Hegel’s suggestive speculations about the role of negativity in art—which are later exploited and amplified by Kierkegaard and Adorno—lay the groundwork for a timely defense of aesthetic agency that cuts across longstanding debates about the powers and limits of art.

5

Art’s “After” and the Dialectical Possibilities of Irony in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics I  From the end of art to the “after of art” In the introduction to Lectures on Aesthetics (1823–9), Hegel notoriously declares that art, “considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (VÄ I, 25; LA I, 11).1 Since the early twentieth century, commentators have tended to take this claim out of the context of Hegel’s broader aesthetic project, arguing that the so-called “end of art” thesis is the most salient and controversial feature of Hegel’s aesthetics. Early commentators such as Benedetto Croce and Israel Knox took Hegel’s claim in crudely literal terms, censuring Hegel for making a presumptuous historical verdict belied by the various artistic movements that emerged after Hegel’s time.2 More recently, thinkers as diverse as Arthur Danto, Gianni Vattimo, J. M. Bernstein, and Robert Pippin have interpreted Hegel’s thesis of art’s obsolescence in a more nuanced manner as a prescient anticipation of the self-negating and self-reflexive logic of modernist and postmodern art.3 Nonetheless, this preoccupation with the “end of art” has resulted in a skewed account of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics that foregrounds Hegel’s emphasis on art’s limitations at the expense of his emphasis on the powers of art within its epistemic limits. Indeed, once we situate Hegel’s aesthetic project within the complex post-Kantian landscape to which it belongs, we will find that Hegel in no way prophesied the “end of art”—a phrase, in fact, that never occurs in Hegel’s work.4 This chapter makes a case for shifting attention away from the now fashionable thematics of the “end of art” to the relatively neglected notion of the “after of art” (das Nach der Kunst), which Hegel introduces in the first chapter of Lectures on Aesthetics (VÄ I, 142; LA I, 103). In Part II, I argue that Hegel’s richly bivalent notion of the “after of art” provides a capacious and dialectical framework for speculating about the possibilities of art in modernity. On the one hand, the

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“after of art” designates religion and philosophy, the cultural forms that have outstripped art’s capacity to fulfill the “supreme need of the spirit” (VÄ I, 142; LA I, 103). On the other hand, Hegel exploits the ambiguity of the genitive in the “after of art,” conceiving the “after” as a property of art itself rather than as a sphere that supersedes art: art’s “after” signals art’s dialectical capacity to reflect on its own powers and limits and to “point beyond itself ” to possibilities outside of art (VÄ I, 142; LA I, 103). Hegel’s most searching and elemental account of the complex dynamics of the “after” of art, I suggest in Part III, is contained in the “Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art,” a brief but pregnant section of the introduction to Lectures on Aesthetics. In the “Historical Deduction,” Hegel reconceives the aesthetic positions of some of his major philosophical predecessors and contemporaries—including Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Solger—as progressive conceptual stages in art’s ongoing efforts to register and respond to the crisis of modernity. Hegel’s “Historical Deduction” thus proves to be an especially fertile locus for thinking through the newfound role and significance of art in modernity. As we will see, Hegel’s elliptical remarks on thinkers in the “Historical Deduction” presuppose his more extensive critical discussions of these figures in other works. Hence, significant reconstruction is required to appreciate the force and subtlety of Hegel’s “Historical Deduction.” Parts IV through VI of this chapter provide a systematic reconstruction of the three-stage “Historical Deduction” that situates it in the context of Hegel’s other works and draws on the previous chapters of this book. Part IV examines Hegel’s discussion of Kant’s aesthetics in the first stage of the “Historical Deduction.” I argue that Hegel isolates a number of aporias in the argument of Kant’s third Critique that are intimately related to the aporias discussed at length in the first two chapters of this book. From Hegel’s perspective, the Kantian “gulf ” between nature and freedom is symptomatic of the perennial conflict in modernity between the compulsion of “natural drives and passions” on the one hand and the spiritual realm of “thought and freedom” on the other (VÄ I, 81; LA I, 54). Art responds to this crisis, Hegel suggests, by absorbing the diremptions of modernity into its internal structure. Part V addresses the second stage of the “Historical Deduction,” which focuses on the aesthetics of Schiller and Schelling. Hegel credits Schiller with beginning to articulate art’s crucial role in reconciling the rational and sensuous dimensions of humanity, yet he faults Schiller for failing to specify art’s precise relation to philosophy. Schelling, Hegel goes on to claim, paves the way for a

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genuine philosophical understanding of art but nonetheless lapses into an extravagant Romantic metaphysics that exaggerates the powers of art. Part VI examines Hegel’s momentous discussion of irony in the third stage of the “Historical Deduction,” where he carefully distinguishes Schlegel’s subjective irony from more radical forms of irony—embodied in the thought of Novalis and Solger—that turn against the ironic subject. For Hegel, as we saw in Part V of the previous chapter, Solger’s philosophical writings contain the seeds of a full-blown dialectical form of irony that explores the positive possibilities latent in ironic negativity. In the final stage of the “Historical Deduction,” Hegel hints that the most promising route for art after Romanticism would be to experiment with the dialectical possibilities of aesthetic irony, but he breaks off the “Historical Deduction” without specifying concretely how a dialectics of irony might manifest in art. In Part VII, I suggest that the young Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony (1841), starts where Hegel’s “Historical Deduction” leaves off. Kierkegaard derives from Hegel’s dialectical approach to irony a powerful hermeneutic paradigm for appreciating the dynamics of post-Romantic art. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, the post-Romantic dialectical ironist evacuates itself to the point where it cedes agency entirely to the artwork. The most advanced forms of art, Kierkegaard suggests, are able to harness ironic negativity as an immanent resource for gesturing toward a “higher actuality” that helps assuage the “deep pain that wants to make everything dark.”5 In the next chapter, I will argue that Adorno, over a century later, takes Kierkegaard’s lead in drawing on the dialectical aspects of Hegel’s aesthetics in order to elaborate art’s crucial role in keeping alive redemptive possibilities beyond the poverty of life under late capitalism.

II  The synchronic and diachronic dimensions of Hegel’s aesthetics Much of the complexity of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics derives from the subtle interplay of what I would call “synchronic” and “diachronic” conceptions of art.6 From a synchronic perspective, art is a static, ahistorical concept with fixed epistemic boundaries. Hegel defines beauty synchronically as the “sensuous manifestation of the Idea,” thereby placing art in the same sphere as religion and philosophy (VÄ I, 151; LA I, 111). The common task of art, religion, and philosophy is to convey the Idea—that is, the “Divine, the deepest interests of

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mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of Spirit” (VÄ I, 20–1; LA I, 7). Nonetheless, since the Divine in its highest truth is a supersensuous form of “spiritual inwardness,” art’s sensuous epistemic medium makes art inferior to both religion and philosophy in conveying the Divine (VÄ I, 112; LA I, 79). While art is constrained to depict the Divine in the form of “sensuous intuition” (sinnliche Anschauung) (VÄ I, 140; LA I, 101), religion conveys it through the subjective “representation” (Vorstellung) of inner faith and belief (VÄ I, 142; LA I, 103), and philosophy conceptualizes it in the “highest form” of “thought” (Denken) (VÄ I, 143; LA I, 104). However, Hegel nuances this straightforward synchronic understanding of art by introducing a crucial diachronic dimension, according to which art is a historically variable cultural formation with more fluid and permeable epistemic boundaries. Hegel’s complex diachronic account distinguishes various forms of art along two axes. Along one axis, Hegel distinguishes three basic historical periods of art: the symbolic art of the ancient Egyptians, Mohammedans, and Indians; the classical art of ancient Greece; and the Romantic art of the postclassical era, which extends to the art of Hegel’s own time. Along the other axis, he ascribes a paradigmatic genre of art to each historical period: architecture for the symbolic period; sculpture for the classical period; painting, music, and poetry for the Romantic period. In the classical age of ancient Greece, Hegel observes, “art was the highest form in which the people represented the gods to themselves” (VÄ I, 141; LA I, 102). Since the Greek gods were anthropomorphic and hence lent themselves to being depicted in sensuous form, art fulfilled an essentially religious function by depicting these gods and their deeds to the populus. However, with the advent of Christianity in the post-classical period of Romanticism, the Divine began to be conceived in its truth as “spiritual inwardness” and was thus no longer capable of being embodied in sensuous form (VÄ I, 112; LA I, 79). Accordingly, in the Romantic period, which stretches to Hegel’s own time, art has to defer to religion and philosophy with regard to the highest task of depicting the supersensuous truth of the Divine. In the course of elaborating art’s diminished role in the Romantic age, Hegel introduces the provocative notion of the “after of art,” which deserves close attention: But just as art has its Before in nature and the finite areas of life, so too it has an After [Nach], i.e. a sphere which in turn exceeds art’s mode of apprehending and representing the Absolute. For art has still a limit [Schranke] in itself and therefore

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passes over into higher forms of consciousness. This limitation [Beschränkung] determines, after all, the position which we are accustomed to assign to art in our contemporary life. For us art no longer counts as the highest mode in which truth fashions an existence for itself. (VÄ I, 141; LA I, 102)

Here, the “after” of art clearly denotes the spheres of religion and philosophy, which surpass art’s capacity to convey the supersensuous Absolute. Hence, since the advent of Christianity, “art no longer counts as the highest mode in which truth fashions an existence for itself.” It should be clear that Hegel does not declare the end of art so much as he declares the end of art-religion—the end of art’s religious function in post-classical modernity.7 When Hegel declares earlier in the introduction that art “remains for us a thing of the past,” he means that art is no longer able to play the religious role in cultural life that it once did in the classical Greek age. In our post-classical age, art is unable to fulfill its highest vocation because absolute Spirit can no longer be embodied in sensuous form. As Hegel puts it, we “bow the knee” before art “no longer,” since it is now given to religion and philosophy rather than to art to fulfill our deepest spiritual needs (VÄ I, 142; LA I, 103). These well-known claims about the obsolescence of art in modernity not only assert the irretrievable pastness of the classical Greek age but also have a contemporary polemical thrust. They signal Hegel’s rejection of the various new forms of aesthetic theology that were gaining currency in his own time, such as the Romantic “new mythologies” of art embraced by Schelling, Schlegel, and the youthful Hegel himself. The mature Hegel of Lectures on Aesthetics decisively rejects any such attempts to conceive art as a surrogate for religion in modernity.8 Thus far, we can say that Hegel has conceived the “of ” in the “after of art” as an objective genitive: the “after” of art designates the higher forms of religion and philosophy that come after art. Hegel uses the term “after” here to indicate both the historical and epistemic superiority of religion and philosophy vis-àvis art. Since religion and philosophy are not bound to art’s sensuous epistemic medium, they come “after” art in the sense that they have taken over from art the role of conveying the supersensuous inwardness of Geist in post-classical modernity. Sentences later, however, Hegel provides a subtly different formulation of the “after of art” that complicates and nuances his earlier conception. Instead of straightforwardly conceiving the “after” of art as religion and philosophy, Hegel now observes that “the after of art [das Nach der Kunst] consists in the

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fact that there dwells in Spirit the need to satisfy itself solely in its own inner self as the true form for truth to take” (VÄ I, 142; LA I, 103). Here, the phrase “after of art” proves to be richly bivalent: the genitive “der” in “das Nach der Kunst,” I would suggest, invites to be read as both objective and subjective genitive. As an objective genitive, it indicates the higher forms of religion and philosophy that come “after” art, but as a subjective genitive, it implies that art’s “after” is a property of art itself rather than a sphere that supersedes art. Hegel conceives art’s “after” in this latter sense as the “time in which art points beyond itself ” (VÄ I, 142; LA I, 103). In this case, the “after” of art designates not the post-aesthetic forms of religion and philosophy but the paradoxical dynamics of Romantic art itself, which is able to reflect on—and “point beyond”—its own epistemic limitations.9 In a dense passage toward the end of the introduction to Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel elaborates the internal dialectical mechanism by which Romantic art both registers its own limitations and hints at possibilities lying beyond its sensuous epistemic confines: The unity of human and divine nature is, hence, a conscious unity that can only be realized through spiritual knowledge and in Spirit. Accordingly, the new content that emerges from this unity is not bound to a corresponding sensuous presentation but is, rather, liberated from this immediate existence—which must be posited negatively, overcome, and reflected into a spiritual unity. In this manner, Romantic art is the self-exceeding of art, yet within its own domain and in the form of art itself [In dieser Weise ist die romantische Kunst das Hinausgehen der Kunst über sich selbst, doch innerhalb ihres eigenen Gebiets und in Form der Kunst selber]. (VÄ I, 112–13; LA I, 80)

Hegel begins by asserting that the highest supersensuous unity of the human and the divine is realized only in the “spiritual knowledge” (geistige Wissen) of philosophy. Remarkably, however, instead of detailing art’s comparative shortcomings in conveying this spiritual unity—as we might expect—Hegel goes on to elaborate art’s powers and possibilities. Although Hegel ordinarily restricts the operations of positing, negating, and reflecting to the domain of philosophy, he now builds these philosophical operations into the dynamics of Romantic art itself. One basic dimension of the “after” of art is Romantic art’s capacity to harness the conceptual resources of speculative dialectics. Romantic art probes beyond its own epistemic confines by “positing” sensuous immediacy “negatively” and “reflecting” this immediacy into a “spiritual unity” that art can project but not quite realize. By adopting a negative stance toward its own

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sensuous epistemic boundaries, Romantic art points through itself to spiritual possibilities that lie outside the sensuous domain. Hence, in a startling paradox, Hegel defines Romantic art as the “selfexceeding of art . . . in the form of art itself.” With the collapse of the Kunstreligion of ancient Greece, art in modernity is not so much condemned to lament its own obsolescence as it is empowered to explore various modes of “self-exceeding” without quite relinquishing its status as art.10 If the synchronic dimension of Hegel’s aesthetics foregrounds art’s epistemic inferiority to religion and philosophy, Hegel’s diachronic account of the “after” of art in Romanticism emphasizes the powers of art within its epistemic limits. From Hegel’s diachronic perspective, art in modernity by no means abandons the attempt to fulfill our deepest spiritual needs. In fact, what is perhaps most distinctive about Romantic art is its ongoing efforts to depict “free concrete spirituality” in spite of its sensuous limitations (VÄ I, 113; LA I, 80). As we will see, Hegel elaborates the complex dynamics of Romantic art’s “self-exceeding” by drawing on key aspects of the aesthetic speculations of his predecessors and contemporaries.

III  Hegel’s three-stage “Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art” In order to gain a richer and more nuanced understanding of Hegel’s dialectical conception of Romantic art, we have to situate it within his broader historical account of the crisis of post-Enlightenment modernity in Lectures on Aesthetics. At the end of the section of the introduction entitled “The Aim of Art,” Hegel takes Schiller’s lead in arguing that the binaries plaguing Kant’s philosophy provide unique insight into the fundamental dilemmas of the modern age. Hegel specifically targets Kant’s moral rigorism, the “contrast” in Kantian ethics between “the sensuous and the spiritual in man,” “the battle of spirit against flesh, of duty for duty’s sake, of the cold command against particular interest, warmth of heart, sensuous inclinations and impulses” (VÄ I, 80; LA I, 53). From Hegel’s Schillerian perspective, the sharp opposition between duty and inclination in Kant’s ethics is symptomatic of the general existential and social plight of modern humanity. Hegel then goes on to link the binary oppositions plaguing Kant’s ethics to the “great gulf ” between natural necessity and ethical freedom that Kant

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addresses in the introduction to the third Critique—in Hegel’s terms, the “harsh opposition between inner freedom and the necessity of external nature” (VÄ I, 80; LA I, 54). For Hegel, the oppositions endemic to Kant’s philosophy in fact pervade “modern culture” as a whole, which has “driven up” these oppositions to “the peak of harshest contradiction” (VÄ I, 80; LA I, 54). Hegel characterizes the contradictions of modern culture in vivid detail: Spiritual culture, modern understanding, generates this antithesis [Gegensatz] in man, which makes him an amphibian, in that he now has to live in two worlds which contradict one another, so that consciousness wanders about in this contradiction, tossed from one side to the other, and is unable to find satisfaction for itself in either the one or the other. For on the one hand we see man imprisoned in common reality and earthly temporality, oppressed by need and poverty, plagued by nature, entangled in matter, sensible ends and their enjoyment, mastered and borne away by natural drives and passions; on the other hand, man raises himself to eternal Ideas, to a realm of thought and freedom, gives to himself as will universal laws and determinations, strips the world of its enlivened and flowering reality and dissolves it into abstractions . . . . (VÄ I, 81; LA I, 54)

Modernity has driven a wedge, as it were, between the sensuous and rational dimensions of humanity, forcing us to become restless amphibians living in “two worlds” but not quite feeling at home in either. We remain helplessly torn between matter and spirit, sense enjoyment and the freedom of thought, the richness of empirical life and the cold abstraction of reason. In Hegel’s view, the most urgent task in modernity is to find a resolution to this “diremption [Zwiespältigkeit] in life and consciousness” (VÄ I, 81; LA I, 54). Ultimately, of course, Hegel believes that philosophy alone—particularly his own philosophy—is able to “sublate” (aufheben) the antitheses of modernity by providing “reflective insight” into the highest “truth” that the “two sides” of the opposition “do not exist at all” but “they exist reconciled” (VÄ I, 81; LA I, 54–5). Crucially, however, instead of emphasizing art’s obsolescence, Hegel goes on to insist on art’s vital cultural role in modernity. “Art’s vocation,” as Hegel puts it, “is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration, to set forth the reconciled opposition just mentioned” (VÄ I, 81; LA I, 55). While art in modernity is no longer the highest means of achieving the reconciliation of nature and spirit, art nonetheless plays an indispensable role in making people receptive to the insights of philosophy by conveying spiritual truths in an accessible sensuous form.

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This claim about art’s true vocation in modernity provides the segue into Hegel’s “Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art.” Hegel announces that the “Historical Deduction” will track how the “true reverence and understanding of art arose historically” through an examination of the aesthetic views of some of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries (VÄ I, 83; LA I, 55). He divides the “Historical Deduction” into three stages: he addresses Kant in the first stage, focuses primarily on Schiller and Schelling in the second stage, and considers Schlegel, Novalis, and Solger in the third stage. It might be tempting to read the “Historical Deduction” as a predictably skewed historical account of how various aesthetic positions partially anticipate, but nonetheless fall short of, Hegel’s own insights into the “true concept of art.” However, the very fact that Hegel calls it a “deduction” (Deduktion) suggests that he is after something much more interesting and significant than a biased historical survey.11 As Hegel puts it, each of the aesthetic views addressed in the “Historical Deduction” represents a progressive moment in the unfolding of the “concept of art in its inner necessity” (VÄ I, 83; LA I, 55). In the next three sections of this chapter, I will argue that Hegel’s account of the historical development of German aesthetics since Kant doubles as a prescient exploration of the possibilities of art’s “self-exceeding” in modernity.12 From Hegel’s dialectical perspective, the aesthetic speculations of his predecessors and contemporaries mirror art’s ongoing efforts to negotiate the diremptions of modernity.13 As we will see, Hegel’s discussion of irony in the final stage of the “Historical Deduction” proves to be especially prophetic and timely. I hope to demonstrate in Parts VI and VII of this chapter and in the next chapter that Hegel’s provocative speculations about post-Schlegelian forms of irony contain the seeds of a powerful dialectical ontology of post-Romantic art that has far-reaching implications for contemporary aesthetic discourse.

IV  Stage one: Kantian aporias and the crisis of modernity Not surprisingly, the first stage of the “Historical Deduction” is “the Kantian philosophy” (VÄ I, 83; LA I, 56). Throughout his career, Hegel was convinced that Kant’s third Critique not only offered a searching diagnosis of the dilemmas of modernity but also hinted at art’s essential role in negotiating these dilemmas. In order to establish what is distinctive and original in Hegel’s treatment of Kant

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in the “Historical Deduction,” we will need to consider briefly his much earlier quasi-Romantic approach to Kant in Faith and Knowledge (1802). In Faith and Knowledge, the early Hegel follows Schelling in isolating a pervasive tension in Kant’s philosophical system between a drastic restriction of the scope of knowledge claims to the “finite understanding” and the “highest results” of Kant’s philosophy, which project “quite different” modes of being and knowing that exceed the domain of the finite understanding.14 Hegel finds the “absolute, primordial identity of antitheses” in Kant’s doctrine of the “synthetic unity of apperception,” introduced in the transcendental deduction of the categories in the first Critique.15 Later in Faith and Knowledge, Hegel points to Kant’s notion of an “intuitive understanding” in §76 of the third Critique as a mode of cognition “for which possibility and reality are one.”16 However, the early Hegel rightly notes that instead of conceiving the unity of apperception or the intuitive understanding as genuine mediating principles, Kant invokes them in such a way that they end up reproducing the very antinomies and diremptions they are supposed to resolve. In Kant’s philosophy, Hegel argues, the mediating principle that unites opposites is “made into a pure limit, which is only a negation”: it is a mere “postulate that possesses a necessary subjectivity but not . . . absolute objectivity.”17 Kant’s intuitive understanding, accordingly, remains a mere regulative principle that can “never be thought.”18 In other words, the early Hegel isolates a recurring aporia in Kant’s philosophy: the principles meant to reconcile subject and object get reinscribed ultimately into a higher-order subjectivism, which disqualifies them from serving as genuine mediating principles. In Chapter 2, I showed how this aporia resurfaces in Kant’s vexed efforts in the third Critique to theorize the mediating principle of nature’s purposiveness. Kant lands in an impasse when he tries to account for the epistemic status of the principle of purposiveness: he explicitly assigns it regulative status, but he also realizes that in order for it to mediate successfully between the regulative and constitutive domains, the principle must be more than merely regulative. As we have seen, this aporia in Kant’s account of nature’s purposiveness stems from Kant’s fundamental ambivalence about whether art is able to bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom. In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel proves keenly aware of these aporias plaguing Kant’s third Critique. In particular, Hegel identifies a fundamental aporia in Kant’s doctrine of the “aesthetic Idea.” Kant claims in the third Critique that all beautiful art expresses an “aesthetic Idea,” which he defines as a “representation of the imagination that . . . stimulates so much thinking that it can never be

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grasped in a determinate concept.”19 In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel argues that in spite of Kant’s explicitly “empirical” account of the aesthetic Idea as an “intuition to which no determinate concept is adequate,” Kant gestures toward a more speculative account of the aesthetic Idea as “the identity of the concept of nature and the concept of freedom.”20 From the early Hegel’s perspective, although Kant insists on the strict “indemonstrability” of Ideas of Reason, he nonetheless hints that “beauty” is nothing less than a direct “demonstration” of the Idea of Reason.21 Kant, despite having “recognized in beauty a form of intuition [Anschauung] other than the sensible,” dogmatically posits “finite cognition” as an “absolute” horizon beyond which one cannot venture.22 Indeed, the first two chapters of my book— which identify a fundamental tension between the regulative and constitutive dimensions of the third Critique—to a large extent bear out Hegel’s claims about the aporias at the heart of Kant’s aesthetic project. As Béatrice Longuenesse has recently argued, the early Hegel’s reading of the third Critique reflects a remarkable sensitivity to the argumentative nuances and ambiguities of the third Critique.23 In order to appreciate the early Hegel’s strategy for handling these Kantian aporias, we should note that Faith and Knowledge was written shortly after his Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801). In this earlier work, while still under Schelling’s influence, Hegel conceived aesthetic experience in metaphysical terms as a “transcendental intuition” (“transzendentale Anschauung”) of the “Absolute” that has the potential to resolve the diremptions of modernity.24 In Faith and Knowledge, the early Hegel—still confident in his faith in transcendental intuition—devises an artificial scenario in which Kant confronts a “choice” between finite cognition and intuitive understanding and chooses the former out of contempt for Reason: Kant has here before him both the Idea of a Reason in which possibility and reality are absolutely identical, and its appearance as the cognitive faculties, in which they are separated; he finds in the experience of his thinking both thoughts; in the choice between the two, however, his nature despised the necessity of thinking the Rational, an intuitive spontaneity, and decided without reservation for appearance.25

It must be said that this reading reveals more about the early Hegel than it does about Kant. By imagining that Kant was faced with two equally viable epistemic options and simply “chose” to accept the limits of finite understanding, the early

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Hegel is able to stage his own philosophy as the equally valid option of pursuing the path Kant himself made possible but ultimately rejected. Here again, Hegel is directly influenced by Schelling, who—as we saw in Chapter 3—strategically foregrounded the constitutive dimension of Kant’s aesthetics at the expense of the regulative dimension. In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel seems to adopt the strong model of aesthetic pleasure (Cpi) aporetically present in the third Critique, which provides full-blown certainty of nature’s purposiveness for our cognitive faculties. For the early Hegel, as for the Schelling of System, aesthetic experience is a metaphysical form of “intuition” that explodes Kant’s epistemic strictures and discloses nothing less than the absolute “identity” of nature and freedom. The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) marks a decisive turning point in Hegel’s intellectual development. In the Phenomenology, Hegel vigorously renounces philosophical appeals to “intuition,” claiming that the “rapturous haziness” of intuition is “in no way distinguishable from superficiality.”26 Moreover, a philosophy rooted in the private experience of “non-conceptual” intuition proves to be no better than unverifiable dogma: “through the scorning of measure and determination,” as Hegel puts it, intuition “gives free rein both to the contingency of the content within it and to its own caprice.”27 Hence, the Phenomenology implicitly announces Hegel’s break with Schelling’s metaphysics of intellectual intuition and his own earlier faith in transcendental intuition. Hegel’s decisive rejection of intuition in the Phenomenology compels him both to rethink art’s role in modernity and to modify and nuance his understanding of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries. This becomes clear in his discussion of Kant in the first stage of the “Historical Deduction” of Lectures on Aesthetics, to which we can now return. In the “Historical Deduction,” Hegel isolates many of the same Kantian aporias already identified decades earlier in Faith and Knowledge. Echoing his critique of Kant in Faith and Knowledge, the mature Hegel claims that Kant’s aesthetic Idea, which hints at a perfect unity of “nature and freedom,” ends up being “merely subjective in respect of judgment and production, and not itself the True and the Real” (VÄ I, 89; LA I, 60). He asserts, moreover, that although Kant hints at principles and modes of cognition that unite subject and object—such as the Ideas of Reason and the intuitive understanding—Kant ends up assigning them merely regulative status and hence reinscribes the subject-object identity into a higher-order subjectivism (VÄ I, 84–5; LA I, 57). In Faith and Knowledge, the early Hegel’s dogmatic faith in a “form of intuition other than the sensible” led him to resolve these Kantian aporias by

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conceiving the aesthetic Idea in overtly metaphysical terms as the direct affective “demonstration” of the Idea of Reason. However, by the time of writing the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel realized that this attempt to resolve the Kantian aporias was question-begging in the extreme, since it relied on the dogmatic assumption of a special transcendental form of intuition in the first place. Accordingly, in his much later treatment of Kant in the first stage of the “Historical Deduction” of Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel conspicuously refrains from invoking a metaphysical form of intuition to correct for Kant’s subjectivism. Whereas in Faith and Knowledge, Hegel took for granted that the aporias and impasses Kant fell into were regrettable intellectual errors that Kant could have avoided, the mature Hegel of Lectures on Aesthetics takes the aporias themselves very seriously and realizes that they reveal something essential about the predicament of art in a post-Enlightenment age.28 In a move that proves decisive for all post-Enlightenment discourse on art, Hegel transposes the aporias of Kant’s aesthetics into the dynamics of art in modernity. If the early Hegel was inclined toward a Romantic view of art as a panacea for the wounds inflicted by modernity, the late Hegel of Lectures on Aesthetics recognizes that art is itself a product of modernity and hence implicated in the very diremptions it seeks to overcome. For Hegel, art enters modernity at the precise moment that it absorbs the diremptions of modernity into its own structure—a process that happens in the historical transition from classical to Romantic art. Romantic art shares the plight, as it were, of modern man, who “has to live in two worlds which contradict one another” (VÄ I, 81; LA I, 54). Modern man’s tragic amphibiousness resurfaces in Romantic art’s selfconscious awareness of its own inwardly dirempted ontology. “In Romantic art,” Hegel observes, “we have two worlds, a spiritual realm, which is perfect in itself ” and “the realm of the external as such,” which “is released from the fixedly secure unification with Spirit” (VÄ II, 140; I 527). Romantic art, we might say, at once reflects and reflects on the seemingly insuperable gulf in modernity between empirical actuality and spiritual possibility. As a result, Romantic art vacillates endlessly between the disenchanted depiction of “purely empirical reality” and the lyrical evocation of the deepest strivings of the “spirit and heart” (VÄ II, 141; LA I, 527–8). With the collapse of its highest theological vocation, art is now free to explore those prosaic aspects of life hitherto untreated by art: Romantic art, as Hegel puts it, treats “any and every material, down to flowers, trees, and the commonest household gear” (VÄ  II, 140; LA I, 527). At the same time, however, Romantic art denigrates the very

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empirical reality it depicts, since the “immediate world” proves to be “unworthy of the soul’s inner bliss” (VÄ II, 140; LA I, 527). If art in modernity is not quite able to bridge the gulf between the empirical and the spiritual, it can nonetheless “point beyond” itself to a spiritual realm that makes a mockery of our quotidian needs and dependencies. From the mature Hegel’s perspective, Kant’s aporetic account of art’s overcoming of first-order sensuous immediacy only to revert to a higherorder subjectivism reveals something fundamental about the logic of art in modernity. In Kant’s ambivalent account of the role of aesthetic experience in moral life, I argued in Chapter 2, aesthetic experience both does, and does not, bridge the “great gulf ” between the domains of nature and freedom. In Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel builds this Kantian aporia into the structure of art in modernity. As the “first reconciling middle term [Mittelglied]” between “finite reality” and “pure thought,” art responds to the crisis of modernity by initiating the process of healing the “breach” (Bruch) between the “supersensuous world” and “sensuous reality” (VÄ I, 21; LA I, 8). The Kantian provenance of Hegel’s formulation is unmistakable. Kant’s “great gulf ” between nature and freedom becomes, for Hegel, the “breach” between the supersensible and sensible domains that haunts modernity. Even more tellingly, Hegel’s use of the unusual word “Mittelglied” echoes Kant’s pervasive use of the word in the third Critique, which is concerned—as Kant puts it—with the question of whether the power of judgment constitutes a “reconciling middle term [Mittelglied] between understanding and reason.”29 Yet, art’s irreducibly sensuous epistemic mode prevents it from achieving such a full-blown reconciliation on its own. Hence, art has to defer to the higher forms of religion and philosophy, which heal the “breach” of modernity more successfully because they are not bound to a sensuous medium.

V  Stage two: The quest for aesthetic unity in Schiller and Schelling The foundational Kantian moment in Hegel’s “Historical Deduction,” we might say in summary, is the moment when art begins to heal the breach of modernity by absorbing this breach into its ontological structure: art becomes fully modern at the moment it acknowledges its filiations with both the empirical and the spiritual while admitting its incapacity to reconcile them fully. In the

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second stage in the unfolding of the “concept of art in its inner necessity,” Hegel focuses on the aesthetic philosophies of Schiller and Schelling, which represent two major attempts in post-Kantian aesthetics to conceive art’s liminal status between the empirical and the spiritual as a unique asset that allows art to play a unifying—even potentially redemptive—role in modern culture. Hegel observes, “It is Schiller who must be given great credit for having broken through the Kantian subjectivity and abstraction of thinking and for having dared the attempt to get beyond this by discursively [denkend] grasping unity and reconciliation as the True and by actualizing them in art” (VÄ I, 89; LA I, 61). Hegel praises Schiller both for his acute recognition of the dualisms plaguing Kant’s philosophy and for his daring “attempt” to move beyond them. While Hegel acknowledges Schiller’s crucial role in paving the way for a genuine philosophical understanding of art, he nonetheless implies that Schiller did not ultimately succeed in his attempt to conceive the truth of “unity and reconciliation.” Hegel’s carefully qualified praise of Schiller also informs his subsequent discussion of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. At the end of Chapter 2, I argued that while Schiller’s Letters accurately identify many of the conceptual aporias of Kant’s third Critique, Schiller’s appeal to “aesthetic education” as a means of restoring the “inner unity of human nature” ends up reproducing, rather than resolving, the aporias plaguing Kant’s third Critique.30 In particular, Kant’s fundamental ambivalence about whether aesthetic experience is able to bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom infects Schiller’s own aesthetic speculations. On the one hand, Schiller repeatedly asserts that a “purely aesthetic experience,” in which we feel a “lofty equanimity and freedom of spirit,” is “not to be met with in actuality.”31 On the other hand, Schiller sometimes makes much more metaphysically extravagant claims about the powers of art—as, for instance, when he asserts that the “compatibility of our two natures, the practicability of the infinite being realized in the finite, hence the possibility of sublimest humanity” is actually “proven” in the “enjoyment of beauty.”32 In the “Historical Deduction,” Hegel pinpoints precisely this tension at the argumentative core of Schiller’s Letters. Hegel first gives voice to the epistemically modest dimension of Schiller’s Letters: in the “conflict” of the “opposing sides” of reason and nature, “aesthetic education should actualize precisely the demand for their mediation and reconciliation” (soll nun die ästhetische Erziehung gerade die Forderung ihrer Vermittlung und Versöhnung verwirklichen) (VÄ I, 91; LA I, 62).

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According to Hegel’s carefully qualified rendering of Schiller’s thesis, aesthetic education “should” strive to actualize the regulative ideal of a full-blown “reconciliation” of nature and reason that can only be endlessly approximated. In the next sentence, however, Hegel claims that Schiller ultimately commits himself to a much more metaphysically robust conception of aesthetic education. In Schiller’s Letters, Hegel observes, “the beautiful is thus pronounced to be the formative unity [Ineinsbildung] of the rational and the sensuous, and this formative unity to be the truly real [das wahrhaft Wirkliche]” (VÄ I, 91; LA I, 62). Here, Hegel points out that at certain points in Schiller’s Letters, beauty is taken to instantiate the actual reconciliation of nature and reason. From Hegel’s perspective, Schiller’s Letters remain caught in an essentially Kantian impasse. Just as Kant failed to resolve the question of whether art can bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom, Schiller proves unable to decide whether aesthetic education actually achieves a metaphysical reconciliation of nature and reason or only strives toward such an ideal reconciliation.33 Hegel then goes on to suggest that this conceptual tension in Schiller’s aesthetics can be traced to his failure to establish the precise relationship between art and philosophy. Remarkably, Hegel claims that Schelling makes a crucial advance from Schiller by lending genuine philosophical dignity to art: This unity of universal and particular, freedom and necessity, spirit and nature, which Schiller grasped scientifically as the principle and essence of art and which he labored unremittingly to call into actual life by art and aesthetic education, has now, as the Idea itself, been made the principle of knowledge and existence, and the Idea has been recognized as that which alone is true and actual. Philosophy [Wissenschaft] has thereby attained, with Schelling, its absolute standpoint; and while art had already begun to assert its proper nature and dignity in relation to the highest interests of mankind, it was now that the concept of art, and the place of art in philosophy was discovered, and art has been accepted, even if in one aspect in a distorted way (which this is not the place to discuss), still in its high and true vocation. (VÄ I, 91–2; LA I, 62–3)

From Hegel’s perspective, Schelling was the first to elevate the unity of nature and spirit to a philosophical principle—what Hegel calls the “Idea”—and hence to establish the “absolute standpoint of philosophy.” As we have seen from Chapter  3, Schelling claims in the System of Transcendental Idealism that the foundational principle of philosophy is intellectual intuition, which expresses the underlying metaphysical unity between nature and freedom at the basis of all thought and activity. However, since intellectual intuition can never be verified in

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empirical consciousness, Schelling argues that art is necessary to “objectify with universal validity what the philosopher is able to present in a merely subjective fashion.”34 Hegel praises Schelling for ascribing to art a prominent role in his philosophical system but then asserts that Schelling’s account of art’s relation to philosophy remains “distorted.” Although Hegel fails to clarify the nature of this “distortion” in the “Historical Deduction,” we can reconstruct Hegel’s basic objections to Schelling’s aesthetics by drawing from his discussion of Schelling in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy delivered between 1825 and 1826 (hereafter referred to as the “1825–6 lectures”). Most fundamentally, Hegel believes Schelling’s account of art wrongly privileges art over philosophy, while Hegel himself argues—beginning with the Phenomenology—that art is inferior to both religion and philosophy in its capacity to manifest absolute Spirit. For Schelling, as Hegel puts it in the 1825–6 lectures, “art is grasped as what is highest.”35 Hegel continues: “But we soon recognize that the power of imagination, or art, is not what is highest, for the Idea of Spirit cannot be expressed in the truly highest way in art; art brings forth the Idea in the mode of the sensuous, of intuition, and because of this form of existence, the artwork cannot be adequate to Spirit.”36 From Hegel’s perspective, Schelling’s anachronistic privileging of art as the “highest” applies only to the classical Greek age of art-religion. Since the advent of Christianity, Spirit can no longer be embodied in sensuous form, so art has to defer to the supersensuous modes of religion and philosophy. Hegel faults Schelling for exaggerating art’s powers as well as ignoring its constitutive limitations. In contrast to Schelling, Hegel defines beauty dialectically in Lectures on Aesthetics as the “sensuous shining [Scheinen] of the Idea” (VÄ I, 151; LA I, 111). The bivalent—and more or less untranslatable—notion of Schein signals at once the powers and limits of art’s sensuous epistemic mode. On the one hand, Hegel mounts a proto-phenomenological defense of Schein as an essential aspect of the essence it expresses: “truth would not be truth if it did not shine and appear [wenn sie nicht schiene und erschiene], if it were not truth for one and for itself, as well as for spirit in general” (VÄ I, 21; LA I, 7). Here, Hegel emphasizes the positive, revelatory dimension of aesthetic Schein—art’s essential role in making the Idea present in sensuous form. On the other hand, he exploits the further connotation of Schein as deceptive appearance. Art is deceptive in comparison to the “thinking of philosophy” and “religious and ethical principles” because it remains bound to a sensuous medium and hence conveys supersensuous truths in misleadingly sensuous form (VÄ I, 23; LA I, 8).

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As I discussed in Chapter 3, Schelling himself remained haunted throughout his life by the negative dimension of aesthetic Schein. Indeed, three decades after writing System, Schelling made the startling observation that art was “only for happy people, not for the profoundly unhappy, those who are inwardly torn.”37 The mature Hegel differs from the late Schelling only in transposing this inward diremption from the unhappiness of particular individuals into the aporetic dynamics of art itself. Hence, as Hegel goes on to argue in the 1825–6 lectures, Schelling’s attempt to secure the objectivity of intellectual intuition in art is dogmatic: Schelling’s so-called “proofs . . . always presuppose what is supposed to be proved.”38 Recall that the early Hegel of Faith and Knowledge was inspired by Schelling’s System to conceive aesthetic experience as a special metaphysical form of intuition that disclosed the absolute unity of subject and object. By 1807, however, Hegel realized that the reality of such a metaphysical intuition could never be objectively validated—leading him to reject, by implication, Schelling’s Romantic theory of aesthetic intuition on which Hegel’s own early aesthetics was based. Since Hegel himself had flirted with Romantic ideas of a “new mythology” of art in his early days, he was keenly aware of the temptation in post-Enlightenment thought to conceive art as a full-blown surrogate for religion that could heal the wounds inflicted by modernity. Hegel accords a prominent place to Schelling in the “Historical Deduction” precisely because Schelling’s nostalgic attempt to locate the metaphysical unity of nature and freedom in art embodies one basic pole of art’s aporetic ontology in modernity: art’s incipiently religious impulse to manifest the Absolute. If art’s constitutive limitations prevent it from reaching the Absolute, its permanent aspiration to the Absolute nonetheless constitutes its greatness and alone justifies its placement beside religion and philosophy as one of the highest forms of Geist.

VI  Stage three: The dynamics of irony in Schlegel, Novalis, and Solger Hegel now arrives at the third and final stage of the “Historical Deduction,” entitled “Irony,” where he addresses a fundamental question that remains as timely as ever: if aesthetic theologies and mythologies are a “thing of the past,” what possibilities remain for art in modernity? Pursuing the internal logic of art in modernity, Hegel argues that art at this point in history becomes increasingly

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preoccupied with various forms of irony. It might come as a surprise that the “Historical Deduction” culminates in irony since Hegel is such an outspoken critic of Schlegel’s theory of irony. As we have seen from Chapter 4, Hegel argues that Schlegel ends up inflating the ironist’s subject position into an unironized Absolute. From Hegel’s perspective, this spurious exaggeration of the ironist’s subjectivity betrays the abortive radicality of Schlegel’s theory of irony, which fails to interrogate the ironist’s own epistemic standpoint. Accordingly, while the third stage of Hegel’s “Historical Deduction” begins with Schlegel’s theory of irony, it goes on to consider more radical forms of irony  embodied in the philosophical positions of Schlegel’s contemporaries, Novalis and Solger. By drawing on the argument of Chapter 4, I will argue that there is a deep dialectical logic in Hegel’s strategic ordering of the three theories of irony discussed in the final stage of the “Historical Deduction.” Instead of conceiving irony as a static concept, Hegel claims that aesthetic irony is an inherently dynamic and volatile principle that can take a variety of forms in the course of art’s development in modernity.39 As we will see, Hegel’s subtle dialectical treatment of irony in the “Historical Deduction” provides a fertile conceptual basis for charting out some of the basic possibilities of art in a postEnlightenment age. Hegel opens the third stage of the “Historical Deduction” with a pointed critique of Schlegelian irony that condenses into a few pregnant sentences the complex argument I reconstructed from Hegel’s scattered remarks on Schlegel in the previous chapter. The Schlegelian ironist, Hegel observes, “looks down on all other men” from his “standpoint of divine genius” (VÄ I, 95; LA I, 66). The ironist, Hegel continues, “lives with friends, mistresses, etc.; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironic” (VÄ I, 95; LA I, 66). From Hegel’s perspective, the Schlegelian ironist aggrandizes to himself the unfettered freedom to inhabit at will a variety of attitudes and worldviews without committing to any one worldview in particular. Accordingly, Hegel characterizes Schlegelian irony as the “divine irony of genius” (geniale göttliche Ironie), the “concentration of the ‘I’ into itself, for which all bonds are snapped and which can live only in the bliss of selfenjoyment” (VÄ I, 95; LA I, 66). As I argued in Chapter 4, Hegel rightly pinpoints a fatal aporia at the epistemic core of Schlegel’s theory of irony: the enabling precondition for the ironist’s reveling in contingency and contradiction is a spurious inflation of the ironist

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himself into a “divine genius” able to intuit the vanity of everything except his own ego. From Hegel’s perspective, Schlegel’s theory of irony turns out to be a thinly veiled Romantic ideology of genius, which exaggerates the agency of the artistic subject. As a result, Schlegel unduly restricts the powers of the artwork to its capacity to reflect—and revel in—the caprice and virtuosity of its creator. In his discussion of Schlegel in the “Historical Deduction,” Hegel proves to be a canny diagnostician of contemporary cultural trends. Hegel notes that although Schlegel “invented” what he calls the “irony of divine genius,” “many others have babbled about it or are now babbling about it again” (VÄ I, 95; LA I, 66). Hegel accords such a prominent place to Schlegel in the “Historical Deduction” precisely because various permutations of Schlegel’s subjective form of irony had begun to dominate the art of his own time—in the work, for instance, of Ludwig Tieck and Jean Paul. It should be emphasized, however, that Hegel’s stance toward subjective irony in the “Historical Deduction” is not merely oppositional or destructive. In fact, Hegel’s dialectical perspective allows him to detect a deep necessity in the contemporary obsession with subjective irony, which he takes to be symptomatic of the disillusionment and skepticism pervading post-Enlightenment culture. While Hegel acknowledges the necessity and momentousness of the contemporary turn toward subjective irony in art’s ongoing development in modernity, he insists that art cannot stop there. The artist must proceed to radicalize the logic of irony, turning ironic skepticism against the artist’s own self-elevation into a “divine genius.” Hence, in the “Historical Deduction,” Hegel argues that the self-contradictions and aporias of Schlegel’s subjective irony must give way to a more radical form of irony that begins to turn against the absolute subjectivity lurking at its basis: If the “I” remains at this standpoint [of Schlegel’s], everything appears to it as null and vain [nichtig und eitel], except its own subjectivity, which thereby becomes hollow and empty and itself vain. But on the other hand, the self may, contrariwise, fail to find satisfaction in this self-enjoyment and instead become deficient [mangelhaft] to itself, so that it now thirsts for the firm and the substantial, for determinate and essential interests. Through this comes unhappiness [Unglück] and the contradiction that, on the one hand, the subject does want to penetrate into truth and longs for objectivity, but on the other hand, cannot renounce his isolation and withdrawal into himself or wrest himself free from this unsatisfied abstract inwardness and is now attacked by the longing [Sehnsüchtigkeit], which we have also seen proceeding from the Fichtean philosophy. From the dissatisfaction of this quiescence and impotence—which may not do or touch

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anything for fear of losing its inner harmony and which, even if pure in itself, is still unreal and empty despite its longing for reality and the Absolute—arises the diseased beautiful soul and yearning. For a truly beautiful soul acts and is real. That longing, however, is only the feeling of the nothingness of the empty vain subject, who lacks the strength to escape from this vanity and to be able to fill himself with substantial content. (VÄ I, 96; LA I, 66–7)

Hegel’s compressed argumentation in this passage requires a good deal of unpacking. In the first sentence of this passage from the “Historical Deduction,” Hegel conveys the basic thrust of his metacritique of Schlegelian irony that I reconstructed in the previous chapter: “everything appears” to the Schlegelian ironist as “null and vain, except its own subjectivity, which thereby becomes hollow and empty and itself vain.” From Hegel’s standpoint, Schlegel’s arbitrary privileging of the contingent subjectivity of the artist itself demands to be ironized. Hegel’s next conceptual move in the final stage of the “Historical Deduction” has yet to be recognized as a pivotal moment in post-Enlightenment aesthetics—one that has far-reaching implications for understanding art’s role in modernity and the trajectories of art after Hegel’s time. What would happen, Hegel wonders, if the Schlegelian ironist were to turn its irony against itself? What possibilities emerge for art when it begins to foreground its own objective powers and energies instead of reveling in the subjective virtuosity of the artist? Hegel begins to address these questions in his vivid portrait of the ironic unhappy consciousness, which is transparently modeled after Novalis— an intimate friend of Friedrich Schlegel—who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight.40 For Hegel, this biographical fact takes on deep philosophical import: it attests to the failure of Schlegel’s model of irony to ironize the absolute subject at its basis and to the honesty and rigor of Novalis who, unlike Schlegel, pursued the internal logic of irony to the point where irony turns against itself. The Novalisian “I,” as Hegel puts it, becomes “deficient” to itself and “now thirsts for the firm and the substantial.” The Novalisian ironist grows reflexively aware of its own vanity, yet is unable to find a firm support outside itself because it remains trapped within the very subjectivity it recognizes to be inadequate. Hegel characterizes the predicament of the Novalisian “I” in terms borrowed from the Phenomenology of Spirit: it is an “unhappy” consciousness, a “diseased beautiful soul.” By briefly considering Hegel’s discussion of the emergence of the “unhappy self-consciousness” in the Phenomenology, we can

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gain a more precise understanding of the dialectical transition from Schlegelian irony to Novalisian irony in the third stage of the “Historical Deduction.” Remarkably, Hegel’s charge against Schlegel in the “Historical Deduction” is structurally identical to his account of comedic irony in the Phenomenology, which constitutes the endpoint of the “art-religion” stage in the journey of Spirit. In comedic irony, Hegel observes in the Phenomenology, the “particular Self is the negative power, through and in which the gods as well as their moments, existent nature and the thoughts of its determinations, vanish; at the same time, this Self is not the emptiness of vanishing but rather preserves itself in this nothingness itself, remains with itself and is the only reality. The religion of art has completed itself in it and has withdrawn completely into itself.”41 The comedic ironist’s “certainty of itself ” as the “absolute power”42 culminates in a “levity” expressed in the principle, “the Self is the absolute essence” (das Selbst ist das absolute Wesen).43 Art-religion culminates, in other words, in the selfcontradiction of the comedic ironist, which absolutizes itself in the very process of repudiating metaphysical Absolutes. It should be clear that the comedic ironist of the Phenomenology doubles—albeit only implicitly—as the Schlegelian ironist, which ironically elevates itself into a God in its ironic negation of all gods. In the Phenomenology, this internal self-contradiction at the core of comedic irony spells the end of art-religion and motivates the transition to the first stage of revealed religion, the “unhappy self-consciousness,” which Hegel calls “the counterpart and completion of the comic consciousness that is perfectly happy within itself.”44 For the unhappy self-consciousness, ironic negation— when radicalized—turns against the ironist itself: hence, the unhappy selfconsciousness “is itself this conscious loss of itself and the alienation of its knowledge of itself.”45 The comedic ironist of art-religion is perennially cheerful because it remains implicitly certain of itself as the Absolute. The unhappy selfconsciousness of revealed religion, by contrast, pursues the internal logic of irony to the point where it loses faith even in itself and hence despairs of all Absolutes. As Hegel dramatically puts it, the unhappy self-consciousness is the “grief which expresses itself in the hard saying that   ‘God is dead.’ ”46 In the Phenomenology, the levity of comedic irony dissolves into the leaden despair of religious unhappy consciousness. In the “Historical Deduction” of Lectures on Aesthetics, the late Hegel departs subtly from the Phenomenology by building religious unhappy consciousness into the dynamics of art itself. Expanding the scope of art to include crucial aspects of religious consciousness, Hegel now conceives the possibility of a

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specifically aesthetic unhappy consciousness—the possibility that art can turn its ironic negativity against the aesthetic subject. The evacuation of aesthetic subjectivity results in a void so profound that nothing can fill it. Hence, the keynote of this form of aesthetic irony is religious desperation and melancholic despair: the unhappy aesthetic consciousness finds itself in the maddening predicament of begging for a religious salvation that it simultaneously refuses. For Hegel, Novalis possessed this unhappy consciousness in the extreme. Art at this stage is condemned to reflect on its own powerlessness, its constitutive incapacity to fill the void left by the death of God in both its religious and aesthetic manifestations. Hegel deems Novalis the “diseased beautiful soul” because of his inability to resolve this predicament. By dwelling so obsessively on utter subjective vacuity, the Novalisian ironist ends up absolutizing vacuity itself: it stalls, as it were, at the self-contradiction of irony, withering away in the recognition of its own vanity. In the final move of the “Historical Deduction,” Hegel argues that fully radicalizing the logic of irony entails pushing ironic negativity beyond Novalis’ unhappy consciousness to the point where irony becomes dialectical. As I argued in Part V of the previous chapter, Hegel’s 1828 essay, “Solger’s Posthumous Writings,” credits the philosopher Solger with laying the groundwork for this insight. In the “Historical Deduction,” Hegel condenses the extended argument of “Solger’s Posthumous Writings” into a single dense paragraph: He [Solger] came to the dialectical moment of the Idea, to the point which I call “infinite absolute negativity,” to the activity of the Idea in so negating itself as infinite and universal as to become finitude and particularity, and in nonetheless sublating this negation in turn [diese Negation ebensosehr wieder aufzuheben] and so reestablishing the universal and infinite in the finite and particular. To this negativity Solger firmly clung, and of course it is one moment in the speculative Idea, yet interpreted as this mere dialectical unrest and dissolution of both infinite and finite, only one moment, and not, as Solger will have it, the whole Idea. (VÄ I, 98–9; LA I, 69)

According to Hegel, Solger makes a decisive advance from both Schlegel and Novalis by beginning to explore the dialectical potential of ironic self-negation. Instead of reifying irony into a principle of sheer negativity, Solger conceives irony as an incipiently dialectical principle, the “dialectical moment” of “infinite absolute negativity.” Hegel nonetheless reproaches Solger for “clinging” too tenaciously to the negative moment of irony instead of foregrounding the positive possibilities of the dialectical negation of negation.

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In the “Historical Deduction,” Hegel speculates (rather implausibly) that Solger would have worked out a fully dialectical conception of irony had he only lived longer. “Unfortunately,” Hegel notes, “Solger’s life was broken off too soon for him to have been able to reach the concrete development of the philosophical Idea” (VÄ I, 99; LA I, 69). Hegel identifies a tension between Solger’s theoretical conception of aesthetic irony and Solger’s refined and serious aesthetic sensibility. On the one hand, Hegel admits that Solger’s theory of aesthetic irony comes uncomfortably close to Schlegel’s irreverent and overly negative form of irony. As Hegel puts it, Solger sees the “principle of artistic activity” in a form of “negativity that has an affinity with the ironic dissolution of the determinate and the inherently substantial alike” (VÄ I, 99; LA I, 69). On the other hand, Hegel points out that in Solger’s “actual life, having regard to the firmness, seriousness, and stoutness of his character, he was neither himself an ironic artist of the kind depicted above, nor was his profound sense for genuine works of art, nurtured by his persistent study of art, in this respect of an ironical nature” (VÄ I, 99; LA I, 69). From Hegel’s perspective, the “firmness” and “seriousness” of Solger’s character—along with Solger’s “profound sense” for artworks—reflect a more dialectical and positive approach to irony than Solger’s theoretical speculations about irony let on. Hegel’s “Historical Deduction” breaks off at this crucial point. Hegel suggests that among his predecessors and contemporaries, Solger came closest to appreciating the dialectical possibilities of the “after” of art in modernity. For Hegel, Solger hints at a dialectical form of aesthetic irony that explores the positive possibilities that emerge from the ironic evacuation of artistic subjectivity. Indeed, I would suggest that a dialectics of irony tacitly informs Hegel’s account of art’s “self-exceeding” in modernity. According to Hegel, we should recall, post-classical art “exceeds” itself by adopting a “negative” stance toward its own sensuous epistemic medium and by gesturing toward a “spiritual unity” that can only be realized outside of the domain of art (VÄ I, 112–13; LA I, 80). If we read this statement in light of Hegel’s account of irony in the “Historical Deduction,” we can say that for Hegel, art in modernity begins to harness ironic negativity as a means both of reflexively probing its epistemic boundaries and of pointing to possibilities lying beyond the aesthetic domain. The remainder of this book begins to trace the complex legacy of Hegel’s highly suggestive but underdeveloped speculations about the latent dialectical structure of ironic negativity and its implications for aesthetics. Kierkegaard, I will argue in the next section, was the first to draw on Hegel’s dialectical treatment of irony in order to think through the possibilities of art after Hegel’s time.

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VII  From Hegel to Kierkegaard: Toward a dialectics of objective humor In light of Hegel’s treatment of Solger at the end of the “Historical Deduction,” we might expect him to go on to explore how art after Romanticism could begin to tap into the dialectical potential of irony. Curiously, however, Hegel’s brief speculations about the future possibilities of art prove to be largely undialectical and make no attempt to pick up where he left off in his discussion of Solgerian irony. Hegel prophesies that post-Romantic art would be dominated by “objective humor,” a minor artform that embraces art’s increasingly marginal role in modern culture and that contents itself with depicting scenes from everyday life in a loving and sympathetic manner. In the section of Lectures on Aesthetics devoted to the “dissolution of the Romantic form of art,” Hegel predicts that the “subjective humor” dominating the art of his own time would give way to “objective humor” (VÄ II, 240; LA I, 609).47 For Hegel, subjective humor is akin to Schlegelian irony, which purports to ironize itself but ends up elevating the ironist’s contingent subjectivity into an unironized Absolute.48 In this negation of everything objective, the “author renounces himself as well as his objects,” yet the artist’s self-renunciation turns out to be a sham, for in the end, the “person of the artist” reemerges again and again, “producing itself in both its particular and deeper aspects” (VÄ II, 229; LA I, 600). It is at this point that Hegel predicts that the dominant paradigm for the art of the future would be an “objective humor” that shifts attention away from the artist’s subjectivity to focus on the charming minutiae of everyday life (VÄ II, 240–2; LA I, 609–11). Art “exceeds itself ” in objective humor by making “Humanus its new holy of holies” instead of seeking to depict the Divine (VÄ II, 237–8; LA I, 607). This future art of objective humor, as Hegel puts it, would be a comedic form of “harmless play” that focuses on the “depths and heights of the human heart as such, mankind in its joys and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates” (VÄ II, 238; LA I, 607). Karsten Harries justly complains that the “return to the object” in objective humor “lacks necessity.”49 For Hegel, objective humor signals little more than the regression of art to a bland and arbitrary realism: the post-Romantic artist suddenly becomes earnest and regains interest in the very objects previously subjected to irony. Oddly, instead of teasing out the dialectical logic of art’s “self-exceeding,” Hegel’s decidedly unimaginative account of objective humor trivializes art’s cultural role in modernity and leaves little scope for speculating about the future trajectories of art.50 However, I concur with Robert Pippin that

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“Hegel’s failure to imagine a postromantic form of art . . . is just that, a failure of imagination, not a systematic or necessary exclusion.”51 In fact, as Kierkegaard was the first to demonstrate, Hegel’s treatment of irony in the “Historical Deduction” already contains the seeds of a much more capacious and dialectical framework for exploring the possibilities of art after Romanticism. In The Concept of Irony, the young Kierkegaard argues that although Hegel’s critique of Schlegel’s theory of irony is largely justified, Hegel’s animosity toward Schlegel prevented him from fully exploring more dialectical forms of irony that point the way toward a viable post-Romantic paradigm for art. As Kierkegaard puts it, Hegel “overlooked the truth of irony” because of his tendency to identify “all irony” with Schlegel’s “post-Fichtean” form of irony.52 Hegel avoids this tendency, as we have seen, only in his discussion of Novalis and Solger in the third stage of the “Historical Deduction” and in his essay “Solger’s Posthumous Writings,” where Hegel carefully distinguishes Schlegelian irony from incipiently dialectical forms of irony. Not surprisingly, Kierkegaard focuses in particular on Hegel’s nuanced treatment of Solgerian irony. For Kierkegaard, Hegel hints at a dialectical conception of irony in his discussion of Solger but fails to elaborate it fully because of Hegel’s strong antipathy to Schlegel and Romanticism. Kierkegaard echoes Hegel in praising Solger for making a major advance from Schlegel: in stark  contrast to Schlegel’s subjective irony, “Solger’s irony is a kind of contemplative devotion,” which entails that “[a]ll finitude must be negated, the contemplating subject as well—indeed, it actually is already negated in this contemplation.”53 From Kierkegaard’s Hegelian perspective, Solger pursues the logic of irony to the point where it negates the ironic subject itself, thereby allowing dialectical possibilities to emerge from the subject’s very self-negation. However, Kierkegaard concurs with Hegel that Solger nonetheless overemphasizes ironic negativity at the expense of the “higher” possibilities that arise dialectically from this negativity.54 Solger, as Kierkegaard puts it, “does have the negation of negation, but still there is a veil in front of his eyes so that he does not see the affirmation.”55 Kierkegaard then goes on to foreground and elaborate Hegel’s provocative claim in the “Historical Deduction” that Solger’s speculations contain the seeds of a full-blown dialectical conception of irony as “infinite absolute negativity.” In irony conceived as “infinite absolute negativity,” Kierkegaard claims, “that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not.”56 Dialectical irony exercises skeptical negativity in the service of a “higher something” that irony can posit but not quite actualize.

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In the provocative final section of The Concept of Irony (tellingly entitled “Irony as a Mastered Element, the Truth of Irony”), Kierkegaard attempts, in effect, to complete Hegel’s “Historical Deduction” by beginning to explore the far-reaching aesthetic implications of a dialectical approach to irony. Although Kierkegaard never explicitly alludes to Hegel’s doctrine of objective humor, I suggest that the final section of Kierkegaard’s dissertation can be read as an attempt to locate in Hegel’s dialectical treatment of irony an immanent corrective to Hegel’s own disappointing speculations about the future art of objective humor. Tacitly reconceiving objective humor as a dialectical form of aesthetic irony, Kierkegaard develops a powerful and dynamic framework for thinking through some of the fundamental possibilities of art in modernity. Taking Shakespeare’s work as a paradigm of dialectical irony, Kierkegaard observes that “[w]hen Shakespeare is related ironically to what he writes, it is precisely in order to let the objective dominate.”57 Interestingly, although Shakespeare preceded early German Romanticism, Kierkegaard believes that the dialectical logic of irony at work in Shakespeare’s plays represents a major conceptual advance from the subjective form of irony theorized by Schlegel two centuries after Shakespeare. In Hegel’s account of objective humor, the “objective” is understood straightforwardly as “external objectivity,” the external domain of physical objects in the world (VÄ II, 239; LA I, 608). Kierkegaard’s key move is to broaden Hegel’s notion of the “objective” to encompass anything that challenges or resists the claims of the subject. Hence, from Kierkegaard’s perspective, the “objective” designates most fundamentally the art object. In Kierkegaard’s dialectical recasting of Hegelian objective humor, the locus of agency resides not in the artist but in the art object: “the poem has the center of gravity in itself.”58 Instead of wielding irony as a subjective instrument for establishing its superiority over the external world, the post-Romantic aesthetic subject humbles itself by building irony into the objective energies of the artwork. As Kierkegaard puts it, “irony is not present at some particular point of the poem but is omnipresent in it, so that the irony visible in the poem is in turn ironically mastered.”59 In the dialectical artwork, irony is not so much an absolute horizon as a dialectical force immanent to the artwork that “limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content.”60 Kierkegaard condenses his complex dialectical stance toward irony into a pregnant aphorism: “Irony as the negative is the way; it is not the truth but the way.”61 The challenge for the post-Romantic artist, then, is to tame or master ironic negativity so that it can be used as a productive and energizing force within the immanent structure

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of the artwork itself. By mobilizing irony as a dialectical resource, the artwork becomes a dynamic centering force that challenges and reshapes the assumptions and attitudes of artist and audience alike. In a remarkable passage from an earlier section of The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard shows how a dialectics of aesthetic irony sets into relief the powers and limits of art in modernity: If we ask what poetry is, we may say in general that it is victory over the world; it is through a negation of the imperfect actuality that poetry opens up a higher actuality, expands and transfigures the imperfect into the perfect and thereby assuages the deep pain that wants to make everything dark. To that extent, poetry is a kind of reconciliation, but it is not the true reconciliation, for it does not reconcile me with the actuality in which I am living; no transubstantiation of the given actuality takes place by virtue of this reconciliation, but it reconciles me with the given actuality by giving me another, a higher and more perfect actuality . . . . [O]nly the religious is able to bring about the true reconciliation, because it infinitizes actuality for me.62

Hegel, we should recall, makes the paradoxical claim that art “exceeds” itself in modernity by absorbing aspects of the epistemic modes of religion and philosophy. Kierkegaard, in this passage, offers a very precise elaboration of Hegel’s claim: the philosophical operation of determinate negation manifests in the artwork as a dialectical form of irony that both negates “imperfect actuality” and projects a “higher and more perfect actuality.” Crucially, Kierkegaard follows Hegel in pointing out that art’s sensuous epistemic limits prevent it from achieving this higher actuality. In contrast to Hegel, however, Kierkegaard asserts the superiority of religion to both art and philosophy: only religion is able to bring about the “true reconciliation” in which actuality is transfigured. In spite of art’s constitutive limitations, Kierkegaard insists—as Adorno does over a century later in Aesthetic Theory—that art plays a unique and necessary role in assuaging the “deep pain that wants to make everything dark.” From Kierkegaard’s perspective, if art is unable to achieve full-blown religious reconciliation, it nonetheless remains indispensable in pointing to a redemptive beyond that makes the poverty of empirical life more bearable by making it less tragically absolute. In the next chapter, I attempt to shed new light on the complex philosophical ambitions of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory by reading it as the unacknowledged successor to Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony.

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The Idealist Legacy: Adorno’s Dialectical Retrieval of Aesthetic Agency in Aesthetic Theory

Aesthetics must go beyond the controversy between Kant and Hegel without leveling it through synthesis. Theodor Adorno (ÄT, 528; AT, 355)1

I  Adorno between Kant and Hegel In this book’s introduction, I traced the now fashionable hermeneutics of suspicion in contemporary discourse on the arts to a reductive understanding of post-Enlightenment aesthetic thought. One basic aim of my revaluation of the German aesthetic tradition from Kant to Hegel in the previous five chapters has been to nuance and enrich our conceptual vocabulary for thinking through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Adorno’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970) is one of the most ambitious and sustained attempts in the past century to grapple with the German aesthetic tradition in  all its complexity. Adorno, I argue in this chapter, mounts a sophisticated dialectical defense of aesthetic agency on the basis of a searching critical engagement with Kant and Hegel in particular. I will make the case that Adorno’s dialectical approach to aesthetic agency offers a powerful and timely alternative to the prevailing suspicious orientation in recent aesthetic discourse. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno seeks to navigate between an extravagant phenomenology that exaggerates the powers of art and a vulgar materialism that either reduces art to a superstructural reflex of socioeconomic forces or locates art’s social force in its overt thematic content.2 What remains vital

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in phenomenology, Adorno argues, is its emphasis on the “element of the incommensurable, that which in art is not exhausted by discursive logic” (ÄT, 148; AT, 96). However, Adorno equally insists that phenomenological claims about aesthetic experience have to be tempered and tested by the materialist emphasis on the inescapably ideological dimension of art, art’s participation in—and complicity with—the very social forces it strives to resist. Although the pervasive forces of late capitalism have reduced the subject to little more than an ideological automaton, Adorno locates a radical critical potential in aesthetic experience. For Adorno, the social force of art consists in its capacity to effect a “scarcely perceptible transformation of consciousness” (ÄT, 360; AT, 243) that allows the “I” to “catch the slightest glimpse beyond the prison that it itself is” (ÄT, 364; AT, 245). Adorno’s provocative assertions about the powers of art raise a number of urgent questions. What does this aesthetic “glimpse” consist in, concretely? In what precise sense is art able to transform consciousness? What are the ethical and social implications of such a psychic transformation? And how would Adorno respond to the familiar materialist charge that his appeal to a nonideological form of aesthetic experience relapses into the metaphysical dogma of his Romantic and idealist predecessors? Adorno’s strategy for addressing these questions is to anchor his claims about aesthetic experience in a complex dialectical account of aesthetic agency that combines key aspects of the aesthetic doctrines of Kant and Hegel. Adorno admits that there is some truth in the familiar opposition between Kant’s “retrograde” theory of subjective aesthetic pleasure and Hegel’s “crude” emphasis on art’s thematic content (ÄT, 528; AT, 355). Nonetheless, Adorno suggests more nuanced and dialectical readings of Kant and Hegel that demonstrate how crucial aspects of their philosophical positions work against—and immanently correct for—the conceptual excesses of their own respective aesthetic doctrines. Part II begins to explore Adorno’s complex engagement with Kant’s aesthetics. Adorno isolates a number of conceptual aporias in Kant’s third Critique and argues in a Hegelian vein that these aporias provide unique insight into the dynamics of art in modernity. For Adorno, the aporias of the third Critique reflect the constitutive tension in modern artworks between “spirit” and its “Other”— between art’s spiritual impulse to re-enchant the world and its disenchanted awareness of its own limitations. In Part III, I argue that Adorno draws on Hegel and Kierkegaard in order to clarify the complex dynamics of the modernist artwork. Exploiting what I

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have called the “diachronic dimension” of Hegel’s aesthetics, Adorno claims that art in modernity is able to “exceed its own concept” by absorbing philosophical reflection into its internal structure (ÄT, 50; AT, 29). I suggest that Adorno’s dialectical ontology of the artwork is tacitly indebted to the early Kierkegaard’s recasting of Hegel’s approach to irony. As we saw in the previous chapter, Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony (1841) conceives irony as a dialectical force of negativity immanent to art that points to a “higher something that still is not.”3 Although Adorno rarely makes explicit reference either to irony or to Kierkegaard in Aesthetic Theory, the dialectical logic of Kierkegaardian irony is ubiquitous in Adorno’s treatise. In a Kierkegaardian vein, Adorno conceives the twentieth-century modernist artwork as a dynamic “force-field” that harnesses negativity as a dialectical resource for pointing to redemptive possibilities beyond the “poverty of a life that always falls short” (ÄT, 28; AT, 14). Part IV examines Adorno’s bold attempt to derive what I call a “negative dialectics of aesthetic experience” from his dialectical ontology of the artwork. By   drawing explicitly on Kant’s doctrine of the sublime and implicitly on Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetics, Adorno conceives aesthetic experience not as a positive affective state but as an experience of radical negativity—at once harrowing and exhilarating—in which the empirical ego is convulsed into a sudden awareness of “its own limitedness and finitude” (ÄT, 364; AT, 245). Adorno’s negative dialectics of aesthetic experience, I suggest, provides the basis for a convincing defense of aesthetic agency that avoids lapsing into ideology or metaphysics. Part V then gestures toward the far-reaching social implications of Adorno’s dialectics of aesthetic agency. Adorno anchors aesthetic praxis in the convulsive experience of art, which denaturalizes and challenges the thoroughly ideological ego-identities shaped and manipulated by the forces of late capitalism. From an Adornian perspective, art intervenes in society indirectly through a subtle transformation of the psyche, which is the precondition for moral action and revolutionary praxis.

II  The “aporia of aesthetic objectivity” in Kant’s aesthetics In the course of this book, I have been making a cumulative case that the tensions and aporias of the third Critique are a crucial—and underappreciated—aspect of Kant’s complex legacy for aesthetic discourse up to the present. As we have

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seen, the fundamental aporia in Kant’s aesthetics between a modest regulative approach to art and a more metaphysically extravagant constitutive approach to art became the conceptual starting point for the aesthetic speculations of a variety of key figures in post-Kantian aesthetics, including Schiller, Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel. Like his Romantic and idealist predecessors, Adorno repeatedly foregrounds the aporias in Kant’s aesthetics. According to Adorno, Kant lands in a conceptual impasse in his vexed efforts to reconcile the subjective and objective dimensions of judgments of taste. Citing Kant’s assertion in §1 of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” that “even a judgment of taste still has reference to the understanding,” Adorno points out that Kant’s statement “flagrantly contradicts the thesis that beauty pleases universally without a concept” (ÄT, 149; AT, 97). For Kant, a judgment of taste is unlike cognition since it is based on a subjective feeling of pleasure, yet it is nonetheless akin to cognition because of its claim to universality: when I judge that a given object is beautiful, I expect everyone else to share my judgment. According to Adorno, Kant’s elaboration of the precise relation between aesthetic judgment and cognition is aporetic. On the one hand, Kant’s emphasis on the universality of judgments of taste threatens to blur the distinction between aesthetic and cognitive judgments. On the other hand, Kant’s emphasis on the non-cognitive basis of judgments of taste in a subjective feeling of pleasure threatens to jeopardize his efforts to establish the universality of judgments of taste. Later in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno links this aporia in Kant’s aesthetics to a related aporia in Kant’s account of the sensus communis. Kant’s aesthetics, Adorno  cryptically observes, “attempted to bind together the consciousness of necessity [Bewußtsein des Notwendigen] with the consciousness that this necessity  is itself blocked from consciousness” (ÄT, 511; AT, 343). In the fourth moment of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” Kant attempts to account for the “necessity” (Notwendigkeit) of judgments of taste by appealing to a sensus communis, which he conceives as a capacity to judge whether something is beautiful on the basis of feeling alone. As I argued in Chapter 1, however, Kant remains deeply ambivalent about the epistemic status of the sensus communis: he is unable to determine whether the sensus communis is a “natural” faculty possessed by all or a merely regulative Idea that can be striven toward but never quite attained. The constitutive conception of the sensus communis as a “natural” faculty entails an inflationary account of aesthetic pleasure that provides fullblown certainty of the pleasure’s universal validity (Cpn or Cpi). By contrast, the regulative conception of the sensus communis as an ideal norm entails a

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deflationary account of aesthetic pleasure that fails to assure us of its universal validity (Upn or Upi). Adorno’s statement, I would argue, is an elliptical reference to precisely this aporia in Kant’s doctrine of the sensus communis. From Adorno’s perspective, Kant’s commitment to epistemic modesty leads him to insist on a weak conception of aesthetic experience that fails to register its own “necessity.” On the other hand, Kant’s ambition in the third Critique to articulate art’s prominent role in bridging the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom compels him to conceive aesthetic experience in more inflationary terms as nothing less than infallible affective “consciousness of necessity.” Adorno’s point is that Kant fails to reconcile these two incompatible approaches to aesthetic experience. Remarkably, however, instead of faulting Kant for his failure to resolve the various conceptual aporias plaguing his aesthetics, Adorno follows Hegel in claiming that these Kantian aporias reveal something essential about the predicament of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. In the previous chapter, I suggested that the Hegel of Lectures on Aesthetics transposes the aporias of Kant’s third Critique into the inwardly dirempted ontology of modern art, which vacillates endlessly between the spiritual and the quotidian.4 In a Hegelian vein, Adorno asserts: “it is to Kant’s credit that he recognized the aporia of aesthetic objectivity and of the judgment of taste” (ÄT, 509; AT, 343). Adorno’s key move is to claim that the “contradiction” in Kant’s aesthetics “is in fact inherent in art itself ” (ÄT, 149; AT, 97). For Adorno, the structural tensions in Kant’s third Critique signal the constitutive tension between “aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment” playing out within the dynamics of the modern artwork itself (ÄT, 123; AT, 79). Art in modernity is torn between the spiritual impulse to transcend the quotidian and the disenchanted recognition that art itself—as a material, culturally situated artifact—is inescapably rooted in the quotidian. Art’s claim to “spirit”—that which makes artworks “more than what they are”—remains haunted by the relentless ironic skepticism internal to art, which threatens to reduce the “more” of spirit to what is merely the case (ÄT, 134; AT, 86). In twentieth-century modernism, Adorno suggests, art begins to reflect obsessively on its own conflicting allegiances and to explore dialectical possibilities emerging at the nexus of aesthetic transcendence and ironic suspicion. Hence, despite the fact that Kant had notoriously little to say about actual works of art in the third Critique, Adorno feels justified in claiming that Kant gave voice to the “deepest impulses of an art that only developed in the one hundred fifty years after his death” (ÄT, 509; AT, 343).

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On the basis of his speculative rereading of Kant, Adorno goes on to embed his account of the dynamics of modern art within a much broader sociocultural narrative first elaborated in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). From Adorno’s perspective, art is equally heir to magic and theology on the one hand and enlightened reason on the other, so the adventure of art in modernity consists in its ongoing efforts to internalize and negotiate the perpetual dialectical agon between the Enlightenment and its Other. Accordingly, Adorno foregrounds what he calls the constitutive “aporia of art” (ÄT, 87; AT, 54), the irresolvable tension in the modern artwork itself between art’s quasi-religious aspiration to redeem empirical reality and art’s potential complicity with the very forces of rationality that have come to dominate late capitalist society. Adorno observes, “If all art is the secularization of transcendence, it participates in the dialectic of Enlightenment. Art has confronted this dialectic with the aesthetic conception of anti-art; art is no longer thinkable without this moment” (ÄT, 50; AT, 29). Everything turns on the rich ambiguity of art’s “secularization of transcendence.” Does art “secularize” magical-theological transcendence by confronting a disenchanted modernity with experiences of alterity and excess that challenge Enlightenment norms and values? Or, is art’s secularization of transcendence itself an aspect of the Enlightenment’s project of disenchantment, the effort to disabuse the world of its nostalgic need for religious and metaphysical consolation? From Adorno’s dialectical perspective, this is by no means an either/or: art in modernity is able to mobilize the Enlightenment’s own critical resources as a means of testing and challenging procrustean Enlightenment paradigms of rationality.

III  Artwork as force-field: Adorno’s Kierkegaardian reading of Hegel Just as Adorno foregrounds structural tensions in Kant’s third Critique, he isolates a fundamental tension in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics between Hegel’s dialectical method and a number of decidedly undialectical assumptions about art. Hegel’s “aesthetics,” Adorno argues, “retained far more abstract invariants than is compatible with dialectical method,” which entails “giving oneself over to the phenomenon instead of thinking from above” (ÄT, 494; AT, 333). Adorno singles out in particular Hegel’s dogmatic “metaphysics of spirit” (ÄT, 510; AT, 343) and his classicist assumptions about art’s rigidly fixed sensuous epistemic boundaries, which lead him to posit a “premature aesthetic eschatology” (ÄT,

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501; AT, 337). Adorno’s characteristic strategy in Aesthetic Theory is to turn Hegel against Hegel, showing how the dialectical aspects of Hegel’s aesthetics immanently correct for the undialectical features of his philosophy. I argued in the previous chapter that the core of Hegel’s account of art’s role in modernity consists in his diachronic notion of the “after of art,” which designates both the end of art’s religious function in modernity and Romantic art’s dialectical capacity to reflect on its own powers and limits and to gesture toward possibilities beyond the aesthetic domain. Adorno finds in the diachronic dimension of Hegel’s aesthetics a rich and prescient framework for exploring the dialectical possibilities of art in modernity. In Hegel’s account of modern art, as Adorno puts it, “the naïve and reflexive elements are in truth inextricably linked” (ÄT, 501; AT, 337). If the “naïve” art of classical Greece remained bound to a sensuous epistemic medium, post-classical art is able to probe beyond its own epistemic limits, venturing into the terrain of philosophy. From Adorno’s Hegelian perspective, art in modernity “exceed[s] its own concept” (ÄT, 50; AT, 29) by absorbing critical reflection and philosophical dialectics into its internal structure. Adorno takes Hegel’s account of the dynamics of modern art in a direction first explored by the early Kierkegaard. Although Adorno hardly ever refers to Kierkegaard in Aesthetic Theory, I will argue that the dialectical ontology of the artwork sketched in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony deserves to be recognized as a crucial, albeit unacknowledged, precursor to Adorno’s theory of the aesthetic “force-field” in Aesthetic Theory.5 In Kierkegaard’s account, the artwork “has the center of gravity in itself ” and is hence capable of “mastering” irony and mobilizing it as a dialectical resource.6 Similarly, Adorno attempts to articulate and defend the agency of the artwork not by relying on metaphysical assumptions about art but by exploring the dialectical possibilities of aesthetic negativity. Instead of positing aesthetic agency as a metaphysical given, Adorno conceives the governing agency of the artwork as a non-metaphysical form of “spirit” (Geist) that emerges immanently from the negative dialectics of the artwork itself. Adorno’s key move is to appeal to the dialectical concepts of force (Kraft) and semblance (Schein) as the basis for a revamped, non-metaphysical conception of aesthetic spirit: Spirit is not merely spiritus, the breath that quickens artworks into phenomena [zum Phänomen beseelt], but it is equally the force [Kraft] or the interior of works, the force of their objectivation; spirit participates no less in this force than in its contrary phenomenality. The spirit of artworks is their immanent

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mediation, which sets in opposition [widerfährt] their sensuous moments and their objective structuration: this is mediation in the strict sense that each of these moments in the artwork becomes manifestly its own Other. (ÄT, 134; AT, 86–7)

The spirit of artworks emerges from the continual dialectical interplay of the work’s surface-level phenomenality as a sensuous object and the work’s underlying force as a formal construct.7 Adorno conceives force and phenomenality as irreducibly dialectical concepts. As we have seen from the previous chapter, Hegel foregrounds the bivalence of aesthetic Schein: it is deception insofar as it is only appearance, but it is truth insofar as it points through itself to spiritual possibilities beyond the deceptive reality of empirical existence. In a Hegelian vein, Adorno conceives the artwork’s phenomenality as Schein, which is “not only the imposture of something existing in-itself but equally the negation of all false being-in-itself ” (ÄT, 165–6; AT, 108). The artwork’s appearance as Schein is at once positive illusion and negative indictment of a radically impoverished status quo. Hence, the deceptive character of Schein reverses dialectically into the critical truth of a standpoint of redemption that has yet to be realized. For Adorno, force then becomes Schein’s necessary complement. Adorno begins by contrasting the artwork’s sensuous phenomenality with the force of the artwork’s objective structuration. However, since the work’s underlying structuration is actualized only in the realm of phenomenality, the phenomenal dimension of the artwork participates equally in the workings of force. The spirit of artworks thus emerges dialectically from the agon between force and Schein, each resisting the pull of the other, yet in that resistance, reversing into its own opposite. On the basis of this non-metaphysical conception of aesthetic spirit, Adorno goes on to develop a dialectical account of the artwork as “force-field” (Kraftfeld) that bears striking affinities with Kierkegaard’s dialectical ontology of the artwork. For Adorno, every artwork enacts the irresolvable conflict between spirit and its Other, which he often refers to as “spleen” or “anti-art.” What is fundamental to the artwork is the “irresolvability of antithesis, which never settles into quiescent being” (ÄT, 263; AT, 176). Adorno continues: Artworks are such only in actu because their tension does not terminate in pure identity with either pole. On the other hand, only as finished, congealed objects do they become force-fields of their antagonisms [Kraftfeld ihrer Antagonismen]; otherwise, the encapsuled forces would only run parallel to each other or fall

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away from each other. The paradoxical essence of artworks – to stand firm [der Einstand] – negates itself. Their movement must come to a standstill and through their standing still become visible. (ÄT, 263–4; AT, 176)

Adorno’s conception of the artwork as a “force-field” of “antagonisms” seems to bear certain affinities with Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic ontology of the artwork. Both Adorno and Schlegel privilege processual negativity over static synthesis, and they both conceive the artwork as the locus of contradictions and antitheses. But the differences between Adorno and Schlegel remain fundamental, for Adorno follows Kierkegaard in shifting the locus of agency from the aesthetic subject to the artwork. For Schlegel, agency lies squarely with the aesthetic ironist, who shuttles blithely between various attitudinal stances. Adorno, by contrast, emphasizes what he calls the “act-character immanent to artworks” (ÄT, 123; AT, 79).8 It is no coincidence that “art” and “artworks” are the grammatical agents of so many of the sentences in Aesthetic Theory: works of art have more agency than human beings under the conditions of late capitalism.9 For Adorno, the artwork actively absorbs the contingent individuality of the artist as an element in its own internal dynamics. “The individual who created the artwork,” as Adorno puts it, “is, in relation to the work, a moment of reality like any other” (ÄT, 250; AT, 167). The artwork thereby becomes a transpersonal space for exploring elemental psychic possibilities that cut across the contingencies of empirical subjectivity. In the objective force-field of the artwork, the “empirical ‘I’  ” of the artist and audience becomes a “function of the spiritual ‘I’  ” (ÄT, 249; AT, 167). Here, Adorno consciously borrows the language of metaphysical idealism, yet he avoids reifying spirit into an Absolute by defining the “spiritual ‘I’  ” as the negative force by which the artwork “alienates the private ‘I’  ” (ÄT, 250; AT, 167). The artwork mobilizes aesthetic negativity as a dialectical means of projecting redemptive possibilities beyond the empirical ego. In the long passage above, Adorno signals another fundamental difference from Schlegel when he claims that the forces in the artwork do not merely “run parallel to each other.” For Schlegel, the various elements in an artwork are inert and hence never come into contact with each other; it is the aesthetic ironist who moves dynamically among them. In Adorno’s ontology of the artwork, by contrast, the elements are not inert “givens” but “centers of force” (Kraftzentren) (ÄT, 266; AT, 178) that “grind away at each other or draw each other in” (ÄT, 275; AT, 184). The artwork constellates these centers of force as a magnet acts on a “field of iron filings” (ÄT, 18; AT, 7). What Kierkegaard calls the artwork’s “ironic mastering” of irony reappears in Adorno’s aesthetics as the artwork’s “spiritual

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mastery over reality” (ÄT, 268; AT, 180), which enables it to absorb skepticism and negativity into its immanence-nexus. By means of its “centering force” (ÄT, 19; AT, 7), the artwork brings “aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment” into dynamic tension (ÄT, 123; AT, 79). In Schlegel’s Romantic model of art as “permanent parabasis,” mediation is always unidirectional: ironic parabasis continually mediates claims to transcendence, but nothing checks or mediates the mediating activity of irony itself. Hence, as Hegel was the first to point out, Schlegel—ironically enough—ends up elevating irony into an absolute principle. In Adorno’s dialectical formula, by contrast, “the enchantment of artworks is disenchantment” (Ihr Zauber ist Entzauberung) (ÄT, 337; AT, 227). In the force-field of the artwork, enchantment and disenchantment are reciprocally mediated; each passes into its opposite. If enchantment remains haunted by the specter of irony, ironic negativity is equally reminded of the manifold enchantments and positivities involved in disenchantment. “In the determinate negation of the reality of spirit,” Adorno observes, “artworks nevertheless continue to refer to spirit: they do not feign spirit, but the force they mobilize against spirit is spirit’s omnipresence” (ÄT, 136; AT, 88). Aesthetic negativity, in Adorno’s hands, becomes a dialectical force attesting to the primacy of spirit in the artwork: art’s evocation of spirit proves inseparable from its profound suspicion toward spirit. Adorno is equally indebted to Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony in his elaboration of the ethical and social implications of his dialectical account of the artwork. As we have seen, Kierkegaard locates the ethical force of art in its capacity to harness ironic negativity as a dialectical means of opening up a “higher and more perfect actuality” that helps reconcile us to the “given actuality,” thereby assuaging the “deep pain that wants to make everything dark.”10 Kierkegaard adds, however, that art “is not the true reconciliation, for it does not reconcile me with the actuality in which I am living.”11 From Kierkegaard’s Christian perspective, “only the religious is able to bring about the true reconciliation, because it infinitizes actuality for me.”12 Following Kierkegaard, Adorno grounds art’s ethical and cultural force in a dialectics of aesthetic negativity. “If art is driven to absolute negativity,” Adorno  observes, “it is not an absolute negative precisely by virtue of such negativity” (ÄT, 347; AT, 233). Notice how close Adorno’s formulation comes to Kierkegaard’s assertion in The Concept of Irony that “irony as the infinite absolute negativity . . . is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not.”13 Adorno argues that “the purest negativity of

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content contains . . . a grain of affirmation” (ÄT, 347; AT, 233), and he goes on to elaborate art’s “grain of affirmation” in terms remarkably akin to Kierkegaard’s: “The iridescence that emanates from artworks . . . is the appearance of the affirmative ineffabile, the emergence of the nonexisting as if it did exist . . . . [W]hat does not exist, by appearing, is promised” (ÄT, 347; AT, 233). Ironically, although Adorno was by no means sympathetic to Kierkegaard’s religious standpoint, he subscribes fully to Kierkegaard’s negative theology of art.14 For both Adorno and Kierkegaard, art promises a redemption that it cannot quite actualize: art’s “grain of affirmation,” Adorno observes, is always haunted by the melancholic recognition of art’s inability to redeem the “poverty of a life that always falls short” (ÄT, 28; AT, 14). This important aspect of Adorno’s argument in Aesthetic Theory involves a Kierkegaardian recasting of Hegel’s claim about the “self-exceeding of art” in modernity. Adorno observes paradoxically that “art must exceed its own concept in order to remain true to it” (ÄT, 50; AT, 29). For Adorno, one basic dimension of art’s self-exceeding is captured in Stendhal’s notion of art as promesse de bonheur, which Adorno repeatedly invokes in Aesthetic Theory: art exceeds itself by promising a happiness that lies beyond art. Albrecht Wellmer nicely captures this feature of Adorno’s aesthetics: “what is made manifest in art is not the ‘light of redemption’ itself, but reality in the light of redemption.”15 From Adorno’s Kierkegaardian perspective, art exceeds its own concept by refusing to pass off the aesthetic image of redemption as redemption itself. Through an acknowledgment of its very failure to redeem empirical actuality, art keeps alive the possibility of a redemption beyond art.

IV  Erschütterung: Adorno’s negative dialectics of aesthetic experience One of the most distinctive and controversial aspects of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is its attempt to account for the singularity and social force of aesthetic experience without lapsing into phenomenological dogma. From Adorno’s perspective, thinkers adopting a broadly phenomenological approach to art—ranging from Kant, Schelling, and Schopenhauer to Heidegger and his epigones—have rightly emphasized the “element of the incommensurable, that which in art is not exhausted by discursive logic, the sine qua non of all manifestations of art” (ÄT, 148; AT, 96). However, Adorno goes on to argue

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that the phenomenological tradition has tended to make the fatal mistake of conceiving aesthetic experience as a positive state of intuitive immediacy and plenitude. For Kant, as we have seen, aesthetic pleasure is a non-conceptual feeling of the harmony of the cognitive faculties. For Schelling, aesthetic intuition registers nothing less than the metaphysical “harmony between the subjective and objective.”16 For Heidegger, aesthetic experience discloses what he calls the “Being of beings.”17 Adorno faults phenomenology both for failing to acknowledge “intellective mediation” in artworks and for burdening art with a quasi-theological role it cannot fulfill (ÄT, 146; AT, 94). Adorno’s challenge, then, is to mount a dialectical defense of aesthetic agency that honors the radical incommensurability of aesthetic experience without reverting to an untenable metaphysics of non-conceptual immediacy. Adorno meets this challenge by conceiving aesthetic experience not as positive plenitude but as Erschütterung (perhaps best translated as “convulsion”), a form of experiential negativity that challenges the claims and needs of the empirical subject. In this section, I attempt to tease out the nuances of Adorno’s conception of Erschütterung by clarifying its complex philosophical provenance in Kant and Nietzsche. As we will see, Adorno’s dialectical notion of Erschütterung is central to his broader account of the radicality and social force of art in modernity. In Adorno’s account of the artwork as force-field, the traditional subjectobject paradigm of aesthetic experience is reversed: by surrendering agency to the art object, both artist and audience become elements within the art object’s force-field. This subject-object reversal has important consequences for understanding the dynamics of aesthetic experience. Most fundamentally, Adorno argues that aesthetic experience challenges rather than gratifies the egoidentity of the experiencing subject. Hence, pleasure-based models of aesthetic experience—such as Kant’s—are unable to capture what is most distinctive about art: “the concept of aesthetic enjoyment as constitutive of art must be abolished” (ÄT, 30; AT, 15). We should recall from the first chapter of this book that the various aporias in Kant’s theory of aesthetic pleasure stem from his inability to specify precisely the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure. Does aesthetic pleasure directly manifest the harmony of the cognitive faculties at the phenomenological level? In what precise sense does aesthetic pleasure hint at nature’s purposiveness? Does aesthetic pleasure provide a phenomenological “mark” of its own universal validity and necessity? As we have seen, Kant fails to provide definitive answers to these questions.

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From an Adornian standpoint, the aporias in Kant’s theory of aesthetic pleasure can be traced to a presentist phenomenology concerned with demonstrating the presence of certain affective states and identifying the positive phenomenological features of those states. So long as Kant conceives aesthetic experience as a positive state or condition, he remains trapped within a problematic metaphysics of presence and its attendant conceptual difficulties. However, in a crucial dialectical move, Adorno identifies elements in Kant’s aesthetics that hint at an alternative conception of aesthetic experience—one that has greater explanatory power in accounting for the significance of art in modernity. In particular, Adorno appropriates Kant’s doctrine of the sublime as an immanent corrective to Kant’s presentist phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure. In Adorno’s view, Kant’s doctrine of the sublime contains the seeds of a negative dialectics of aesthetic experience. In the “Analytic of the Sublime,” Kant distinguishes the “positive pleasure” involved in the experience of the beautiful, which affords a direct feeling of the “furtherance of life,” from the “negative pleasure” of the experience of sublimity in nature, which momentarily inhibits the “life forces.”18 Accordingly, for Kant, the experience of the sublime is less a form of pleasure than a feeling of “wonder or respect.”19 Kant repeatedly asserts that only objects of nature—and not works of art—can elicit the feeling of sublimity. Adorno’s strategy is to reconceive Kant’s negative phenomenology of the experience of sublimity in nature as a paradigm for modern works of art. As Adorno puts it, “Aesthetic hedonism is to be confronted with the passage from Kant’s doctrine of the sublime, which he prejudicially excluded from art: happiness in artworks would be the feeling they instill of standing firm [das Gefühl des Standhaltens, das sie vermitteln]” (ÄT, 30–1; AT, 15). In the experience of the sublime, the subject stands firm in its refusal of hedonic gratifications in order to remain open to redemptive possibilities beyond the ego. Accordingly, for Adorno, aesthetic experience is best understood as the sublime experience of “unrelieved negativity” (ÄT, 296; AT, 199), which evokes spirit dialectically through the ruthless negation of ideological attempts to circumscribe subjective agency within a stunted ego-identity shaped and naturalized by the forces of late capitalism. According to Kant, the experience of the sublime registers the “incommensurability” (Unangemessenheit) between sensible nature and the supersensible Ideas of Reason hinted at—but not quite exhibited—by nature.20 Adorno preserves the structure of experiential incommensurability in Kant’s

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doctrine of the sublime while jettisoning the positive metaphysics of the supersensible at its basis. Adorno objects that Kant’s doctrine of the sublime relies on an untenable positive dialectics: “Through the triumph of the intelligible in the individual, who stands firm spiritually against death, man puffs himself up as if in spite of everything, he were absolute, as the bearer of spirit” (ÄT, 295; AT, 198). In Kant, the sublime negation of the empirical individual is compensated by the individual’s conviction of his supersensible vocation. From Adorno’s perspective, however, such conviction has degenerated into self-deceptive ideology under late capitalism. Art cannot guarantee spirit as a positive reality, but it can nonetheless evoke spirit negatively through its very refusal to sublate the “negation of the individual” into a spurious positive (ÄT, 295; AT, 198). Adorno transforms the Kantian incommensurability of the sensible and the supersensible into the felt incommensurability in aesthetic experience between the empirical “I” and the spiritual “I.” For Adorno, the “Kantian description of the feeling of the sublime as a trembling between nature and freedom” gives voice to an “ambivalence” that is registered in “all genuine aesthetic experience” (ÄT, 172; AT, 113). Kant, I argued in the first two chapters, lands in an aporia in his efforts to determine whether art can bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom. Adorno, in stark contrast to Kant, harnesses the dialectical potential of the gulf itself by revamping Kant’s theory of the sublime. In the sublime experience of art, the subject registers the radical gulf between empirical actuality and spiritual possibility—the recognition of which makes revolutionary praxis possible in the first place. On this basis, Adorno suggests that Kant’s doctrine of the sublime augurs the  “spiritualized” art of twentieth-century modernism: “Kant’s theory of the sublime anticipates in natural beauty that spiritualization first achieved by art. What is sublime in nature is for Kant nothing other than the autonomy of spirit in the face of the dominance of sensible existence, and this autonomy is first achieved in the spiritualized artwork” (ÄT, 143; AT, 92). Ironically, if Kant notoriously relegates the doctrine of the sublime to a mere “appendix” to his doctrine of the beautiful, Adorno argues that Kant’s account of the sublime possesses far greater explanatory power than his theory of the beautiful in accounting for the complex trajectory of art after Kant’s time. Adorno’s speculative rereading of Kant’s doctrine of the sublime serves as the conceptual foundation for his own distinctive account of aesthetic experience as Erschütterung. Remarkably, while Adorno emphasizes the

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dialectical “semblance-character” (Scheincharakter) of the artwork—its dual status as an undeniable force and as an unreal appearance—he repeatedly denies that aesthetic experience has the status of semblance. Instead, he goes so far as to claim that aesthetic experience is “real” (ÄT, 400; AT, 269) and that Erschütterung is a form of “consciousness that shatters aesthetic semblance” (ÄT, 364; AT, 246). But this raises an urgent question: how would Adorno respond to the objection that he lapses into undialectical positivity by granting robust reality to aesthetic experience? How can Adorno be so sure that the experience of Erschütterung is not merely an ideological fantasy or a subjective hallucination? Adorno attempts to handle these worries by anchoring the experience of Erschütterung in the force-field of the artwork, which makes the “empirical ‘I’ ” a “function of the spiritual ‘I’ ” (ÄT, 249; AT, 167). So long as the empirical “I” is taken to be straightforwardly real, the subject remains trapped within the ideological confines of a subjectivity manipulated by the forces of late capitalism. Yet, if the subject too readily assumes the reality of the spiritual “I” in aesthetic experience, he plays into the hands of late capitalist ideology at a higher level: the subject’s purportedly spiritual experience helps reconcile him to the status quo. Adorno negotiates this dilemma by granting the status of semblance to both the empirical “I” and the spiritual “I” while insisting that the subject’s experience of the gulf between the empirical “I” and the spiritual “I” is reality rather than semblance. By submitting to the askesis of the artwork, the empirical “I” of the experiencing subject is momentarily convulsed into a recognition of possibilities beyond the ego. As Adorno puts it, “the experiencing subject, which recoils from aesthetic experience, returns in aesthetic experience as a transaesthetic subject” (ÄT, 401; AT, 269). What is crucial to bear in mind is that this “transaesthetic subject” is not to be understood as a positive metaphysical entity along the lines of a Kantian noumenal subject or Schelling’s absolute Ich. Rather, Adorno locates the transpersonal objectivity of Erschütterung in the negative force by which aesthetic experience challenges the tyranny of the empirical ego. It is in this precise sense that “the subjective experience directed against the ‘I’ is a moment of the objective truth of art” (ÄT, 365; AT, 246). Instead of following Schelling in dogmatically positing the reality of the spiritual “I” in aesthetic experience, Adorno argues that the semblance of spirit in aesthetic experience momentarily shatters or suspends the subject’s faith in the naturalized reality of the empirical “I.”

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Hence, Adorno locates the objectivity of Erschütterung in art’s forces of negation and resistance, the strength by which the artwork convulses the empirical “I”: To be sure, the annihilation of the “I” in the face of art is to be taken no more literally than is art. Because, however, so-called “aesthetic experiences” [Erlebnisse] are, as experiences, psychologically real, it would be impossible to understand them if they were simply part and parcel of the semblancecharacter of art. Experiences [Erlebnisse] are no “as if.” In fact, in the moment of convulsion  [Erschütterung], the “I” does not really disappear; intoxication, which comes close, is nevertheless incompatible with artistic experience. For a few moments, the “I” becomes truly conscious of the possibility of letting selfpreservation fall away, although it does not actually succeed in realizing this possibility. It is not aesthetic convulsion that is semblance but rather its attitude toward objectivity: in its immediacy, it feels the potential as if it were actual. (ÄT, 364; AT, 245)

Here, Adorno carefully qualifies his claims about the convulsion of the empirical “I” in aesthetic experience. While aesthetic experience is “psychologically real,” this does not mean that the “I” is literally negated or transcended in art. Rather, aesthetic experience consists in the empirical subject’s semblance-shattering recognition that it is itself semblance. In aesthetic convulsion, the subject is made aware of the possibility of a “spiritual ‘I’ ” beyond the ego, yet without realizing this possibility as an actuality. Adorno thereby distances himself from Schelling, who comes close to merging the empirical “I” into the spiritual “I” in aesthetic experience. For Adorno, by contrast, although art can never annihilate the ego, it nonetheless allows the ego to feel the possibility of non-egoic modes of being as if they were actual. Aesthetic convulsion is an experience of radical negativity, the ego’s harrowing recognition of “its own limitedness and finitude” (ÄT, 364; AT, 245).21 An important precursor to Adorno’s negative dialectics of aesthetic experience is Nietzsche’s account of Dionysian art in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Nietzsche’s early work, The Birth of Tragedy (1871)—influenced by the  Romantic aesthetics of Schopenhauer and Wagner—celebrates the Dionysian element of rapture and ecstasy in art as a corrective to the Apollonian emphasis on rational logic and the third-person ideals of objectivity and lucidity dominating post-Enlightenment culture. For the early Nietzsche of the Birth of Tragedy, Dionysian art affords nothing less than “redemption from the ‘I,’ ” transporting us from the “I” of the “waking, empirical-real man” to the “single

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truly existent and eternal ‘I’ that lies at the basis of all things.”22 In Beyond Good and Evil, the mature Nietzsche decisively repudiates his earlier Romantic leanings and reconceives the Dionysian element in art as a more dialectical principle that incorporates into itself the Apollonian dimension of lucidity and analytic distance. In a startlingly lyrical passage from Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche offers an extended description of Dionysus as the “genius of the heart”: [T]he genius of the heart, who makes everything loud and self-satisfied fall silent and teaches it to listen, who smooths rough souls and gives them a new desire to savor – the desire to lie still as a mirror, that the deep sky may mirror itself in them –; the genius of the heart who teaches the stupid and hasty hand to hesitate and grasp more delicately; who divines the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick and opaque ice, and is a divining-rod for every grain of gold which has lain long in the prison of much mud and sand; the genius of the heart from whose touch everyone goes away richer, not favored and surprised, not as if blessed and oppressed with the goods of others, but richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, blown upon and sounded out by a thawing wind, more uncertain perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that as yet have no names . . .23

Notice how far Nietzsche has come from the early aesthetics of Birth of Tragedy. By divining the “sweet spirituality” under the “thick and opaque ice” of the empirical ego, art leaves us not redeemed but broken. Dionysus does not so much transport us into the realm of spirit as silence and humble us so that we can begin to entertain the possibility of spirit. Instead of bridging the distance between the empirical and the spiritual, art accentuates—and rigorously measures—this distance. This accounts for Nietzsche’s striking metaphor of the mirror: art teaches us to “lie still as a mirror” so that the “deep sky may mirror itself ” in us. In aesthetic experience, the empirical ego is humbled to the status of a passive mirror, lucidly projecting possibilities of consciousness that can only be realized outside the domain of art. The mature Nietzsche’s account of the Dionysian sublime bears remarkable affinities with Adorno’s doctrine of Erschütterung.24 For Adorno, as for Nietzsche, aesthetic experience leaves us convulsed, shaken—but thereby makes us responsive to spiritual needs that tend to be denied or marginalized in empirical life. If late capitalist ideology seeks to collapse the distance between empirical actuality and spiritual possibility, art’s a priori resistance to late capitalism consists in the force by which it manages to prise apart the empirical and the

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spiritual. Art at its most sublime convulses us into an awareness of the very distance between who we are and who we might be. No wonder aesthetic experience proves inseparable from melancholy. Adorno observes: “if in artworks the subject finds his true happiness in being convulsed, this happiness is one that is opposed to the subject; hence, its organ is weeping, which expresses mourning over one’s own inadequacy” (ÄT, 401; AT, 269). The melancholy of all art consists in its broken promise of redemption: instead of redeeming us, art makes us feel all the more acutely the poverty of who we are in our empirical contingency.

V  Rethinking aesthetic praxis Throughout Aesthetic Theory, Adorno polemically rejects the possibility that art could directly engage a social collective and instead foregrounds the individual’s solitary encounter with the artwork. As he puts it, “the acute reason today for the  social inefficacy of artworks—those that do not surrender to crude propaganda—is that in order to resist the all-powerful system of communication they must rid themselves of any communicative means that would perhaps make them accessible to the public” (ÄT, 361; AT, 243). For decades, many scholars have complained that Adorno’s insistence on art’s “social inefficacy” severs—or at least severely attenuates—the link between art and revolutionary praxis.25 However, we are now in a position to recognize that this familiar reproach stems from a failure to appreciate what Adorno calls the “dialectical relation of art to praxis” (ÄT, 359; AT, 242). For Adorno, the most insidious aspect of late capitalist ideology is its capacity so to infiltrate and condition the psyches of its subjects that these subjects end up embracing their own subjugation. Any attempt at revolutionary praxis is always already short-circuited by the weak, easily manipulable ego-identities of the would-be revolutionaries. Since any “transformation of reality” depends on a prior “transformation of consciousness,” art is “objectively praxis as the cultivation of consciousness” (ÄT, 361; AT, 243). Art, Adorno argues, is an indispensable form of psychic praxis that challenges the “principle of the ‘I’, the internal agent of repression” (ÄT, 365; AT, 246). If art attempts to play a more direct role in social life, it threatens to revert to ideology in its own right. From Adorno’s perspective, art’s highest vocation in modernity is to afflict the psyche with a longing for redemption from the ego in which it finds itself imprisoned. We are not yet what we might be.

Epilogue: Art as Force: From Critical Suspicion to Dialectical Immanence

The real challenge is, then, to steer a course between mere theoretical ­“knowingness” and mere unreflective aesthetic enjoyment. There is no way of mapping out such a course in advance: my claim is simply that the ­balance has in recent times moved too far in the direction of ­knowingness, and this has been reflected in some of the theories that have become ­decisive for many humanities subjects. Andrew Bowie1 Suspicion reigns supreme in contemporary discourse on the arts. The “aesthetic” is routinely dismissed as ideological mystification or nostalgic metaphysics. Theorists and critics have become adepts in unmasking, showing up the aesthetic dimension of art to be a mere epiphenomenon of some more fundamental sociohistorical, economic, linguistic, or existential reality. For these suspicious theorists, art matters because of its second-order capacity to register at a theoretical or conceptual level the underlying realities and conditions occluded by its first-order “aesthetic” agency. As I pointed out in the book’s introduction, many recent theorists emphasizing art’s critico-conceptual agency have appealed to Schlegel’s theory of irony and Hegel’s “end of art” thesis as precursors to the now fashionable hermeneutics of suspicion. In his influential essay, “The Concept of Irony,”2 Paul de Man argues that Schlegel’s theory of irony anticipated poststructuralism in its emphasis on semantic indeterminacy and its demystification of “aesthetic ideology.”3 For the nihilistic thinker Gianni Vattimo, Hegel’s purported declaration of the “death of art” finds startling resonances in late-twentieth-century postmodern art, which repudiates faith in aesthetic redemption and summons us to live “the leap into the Ab-grund” of our own mortality.4 The Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, meanwhile, claims that Hegel’s “end of art” thesis augured the dissolution of art into postmodern “Theory,” a “newer form of lucidity”5 that is able to penetrate through aesthetic agency to art’s “political unconscious.”6

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However, such increasingly frequent appeals to irony and the “end of art” in recent aesthetic discourse are not without ironies of their own. Our ironic age deserves to be reminded of Hegel’s polemical critique of Schlegelian irony, a momentous but now all but forgotten episode in the history of German aesthetics. From Hegel’s dialectical perspective, despite the Schlegelian ironist’s pretensions to staging a “permanent parabasis,” the ironist spuriously exempts its own subject-position from skeptical parabasis. The ironist, Hegel shrewdly points out, unironically aggrandizes to itself the capacity to revel in ironic play and to make sweeping pronouncements about the “vanity” of all things. This absolute Ich lurking at the basis of Schlegel’s theory of irony, I would suggest, finds its contemporary analogue in the suspicious critic who seems to have a monopoly on unlocking art’s mysteries. For de Man, the deconstructive critic enjoys the privilege of seeing through the text’s “aesthetic ideology” to its polysemic core.7 For Jameson, the Marxist critic plays the role of the gifted aesthetic psychoanalyst able to dredge up the patient-text’s “political unconscious.” For Vattimo, only the postmodern hermeneutician brave enough to confront our modern nihilistic condition is capable of exposing our faith in aesthetic redemption as a last-ditch retreat into metaphysics. In each instance, the clear-sighted critic has stealthily aggrandized the agency once attributed to the artist or the artwork. Ironically, the suspicious critic’s denial of aesthetic agency proves inseparable from a hyperbolic inflation of critical agency. As Adorno declared over 40 years ago, “the sovereignty of the topographical gaze, which localizes phenomena in order to assess their function and their right to exist, is usurpatory.”8 Indeed, in recent criticism on the arts, the largely unquestioned assumption of the critic’s sovereignty has become so pervasive that it deserves to be called ideological in its own right. Charles Altieri archly observes in a recent essay: “For our new century the critic must play the hero: only the critic can elucidate the author’s negativity, or impose negativity on authors’ lapses into self-projection or utopianism.”9 And here the ironies begin to multiply, for as soon as we turn the critic’s demystifying procedures against the critic, the curiously transcendental status of the critic’s own assertions becomes apparent. By what right, we might ask, does a de Man or a Jameson exempt himself from the workings of the underlying forces he detects in the repressed unconscious of art? To avoid selfcontradiction, the suspicious critic is forced to presuppose dogmatically a critical distance from the very forces that produce aesthetic ideology as symptom. From the perspective of this book, if the contemporary suspicious stance remains mired in the fatal aporia plaguing Schlegel’s theory of irony, the

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diachronic dimension of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics points the way toward a viable alternative to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Hegel’s dialectical understanding of the dynamics of art in modernity, I argued in Chapter 5, entails a drastic shift in emphasis away from an “end of art” orientation—which tends to pass sweeping verdicts on art from on high—to a recognition of the “after of art,” a more immanent and provisionally sympathetic hermeneutic orientation that grants to art the capacity and intelligence to reflect on its own presuppositions. In particular, Hegel hints that the art after his own time would begin to experiment with dialectical modes of irony that explore the positive possibilities of aesthetic negativity. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard foregrounds and amplifies Hegel’s suggestive speculations about the role of irony in the complex dynamics of the “after of art.” Kierkegaard argues in a Hegelian vein that the post-Romantic artwork would be able to harness ironic negativity as an immanent dialectical resource. The philosophical trajectory traced in this book from Hegel’s speculations about post-Schlegelian irony to Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony culminates in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, a sustained meditation on the powers and limits of art that rejects the binary thinking endemic to both early German Romanticism and the contemporary suspicious stance. Instead of opposing aesthetic agency to art’s critico-conceptual agency, Adorno adopts a dialectical approach to aesthetic agency that reconceives conceptual mediation and ironic suspicion as dynamic nodes within the internal structure of the artwork itself. Adorno’s key move, as we saw in Chapter 6, is to conceive the artwork as an active field of “forces” in continual tension. For Adorno, the “force of negativity in the artwork” is irreducibly dialectical, at once checking the hubris of art and making available states of experiential intensity that convulse the empirical subject into a recognition of possibilities beyond the ego.10 Adorno’s dialectical defense of aesthetic agency has yet to be recognized as a decisive intervention in ongoing debates about the role of art in modernity. In particular, Adorno’s sophisticated ontology of art motivates a dialectical understanding of aesthetic force that allows us to navigate between an extravagant phenomenology of art and an overhasty dismissal of aesthetic agency. There seems to me to be no better way to conclude this book than to draw attention to a promising development in contemporary aesthetic discourse that owes its conceptual foundations to the dialectical perspective on art opened up by Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Adorno. The contemporary theorists Altieri, Anthony Cascardi, and Krzysztof Ziarek have all taken Adorno’s lead in defending aesthetic agency against suspicious

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critics by exploring the dialectical possibilities of aesthetic force. Rooted in a subtle account of the “unresolved tensions” in Kant’s third Critique, Cascardi’s Consequences of Enlightenment theorizes aesthetic experience as an affective force that challenges Enlightenment paradigms of rationality from within.11 In The Force of Art, Ziarek draws on both Heidegger and Adorno—admittedly strange bedfellows—to conceive art as a dynamic “forcework” that is capable of redisposing the “relations inscribed in it through the sociocultural determination of artistic production.”12 By anchoring aesthetic agency in a dialectics of aesthetic force, Ziarek argues that the artwork should be understood not so much as an object but as a “transformative event.”13 I will focus here on Altieri’s unduly neglected essay, “The concept of force as a frame for modernist art and literature,” which seems to me to offer the most convincing account of aesthetic force available.14 Like Adorno, Altieri draws on Hegel to defend a dialectical model of aesthetic agency that cuts across the familiar dichotomy between dogmatic belief in aesthetic autonomy and outright dismissal of the aesthetic. In our suspicious climate, however, it has proven all too easy to reject such dialectical thinking as humanist piety or metaphysical nostalgia.15 One primary aim of my reconsideration of the German aesthetic tradition from Kant to Adorno has been to lay the conceptual groundwork for a defense of dialectical thinking about art against such dismissals. I have suggested, in fact, that a dialectical approach to art emerges from a recognition of the fundamental limitations of the suspicious stance itself. Altieri’s dialectical approach to aesthetic force provides an urgent and theoretically sophisticated alternative to the suspicious orientation dominating contemporary discourse on the arts. Altieri deserves a chapter-length treatment in his own right, but it will have to suffice here to sketch the main lines of his argument. At a very high altitude, we can say that if most approaches to art either posit art dogmatically as the Enlightenment’s radical Other or bind art too tightly to Enlightenment values and assumptions, Altieri follows Adorno in arguing for a perspective that honors art’s ongoing dialectical negotiation with the Enlightenment. As we have seen from Chapter 6, Adorno foregrounds what he calls art’s “immanent process of Enlightenment”—the internal dynamics by which art negotiates the competing pulls of aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment.16 Similarly, Altieri argues that modernist art counters the Enlightenment epistemic paradigm not by positing “some absolute other to it” but by “haunting it” with a “persistent excess not reducible to either sensible appearance or framing universals.”17

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Instead of reducing the artwork to an epiphenomenon of underlying forces, Altieri draws on Hegel’s account of force in the Phenomenology of Spirit to clarify the dynamic force-field of the artwork. For Altieri, Hegel’s dialectical concept of force embodies not only the force of phenomenal appearance but also the undeniable force of the underlying conditions that constitute and shape appearance. Neither type of force is quite reducible to the other; rather, force has to be understood as the complex interplay of soliciting and solicited forces, of “appearance and otherness.”18 From Altieri’s perspective, aesthetic agency is a dialectical force that thrives on the “constitutive tensions” of the artwork.19 Hence, the artwork becomes a dynamic “field” of forces that pits the “phenomenological” against the “structural” and enacts the “interplay of negative and reconstructive powers.”20 With this dialectical model of aesthetic agency in place, Altieri is able to stage the artwork as the locus where appeals to spirit and suspicious demystifications of spirit are placed in dynamic tension. By locating agency in the immanent forces of the artwork rather than in the audience or in the creative intelligence of the artist, Altieri develops what might be called a dialectical phenomenology that foregrounds the distinctive experiences made available by art. Against a hermeneutics of suspicion, Altieri insists on interpretive immanence as the precondition for appreciating art’s intricate dynamics. Altieri argues that without the “labor of provisional identification” with the “specific imaginative experiences” that artworks offer, “the suspicious or deconstructive critic is simply not dealing with a sufficiently rich version of the object.”21 Immanence in this sense is less a positive method dependent on outmoded phenomenological dogma than a possibility emerging from the negative resolve to bracket one’s own critical presuppositions and expectations. Indeed, Altieri is acutely aware of the danger of reifying immanence into a metaphysical property of the artwork. Against Clement Greenberg, Altieri argues that “autonomy is not a metaphysical or psychological absolute but a relative social term” defined in opposition to the leveling and repressive tendencies of increasingly hegemonic sociocultural forces.22 For Altieri, aesthetic autonomy is best understood not as a dogmatic presupposition but as a provocation and challenge internal to art’s dynamics. We do not need the contemporary critic to be suspicious about aesthetic autonomy because the artwork itself exercises continual reflexive suspicion toward its own ideals of immanence and autonomy. By conceiving aesthetic agency as a transformative force, Altieri locates the social force of art in a dialectics of aesthetic experience. The artwork sets

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into motion a “dialectic taking place within the subject” in which “the subject realizes that it is moved in ways it cannot understand to places it cannot quite map.”23 For Altieri, aesthetic experience is not a form of pleasure that gratifies the empirical ego but something more akin to “terror and sublimity,” evoked by our recognition that “the particular has more power over us than we have over it.”24 Notice that here, too, Altieri echoes Adorno, who shifts attention away from the pleasurable experience of beauty to the negative sublime of aesthetic convulsion (Erschütterung) in which the empirical ego experiences its nullity from a standpoint of redemption that art can project but never quite realize. For Altieri as for Adorno, art matters not because it redeems who we are but because it convulses us into an awareness of who we might be. Vattimo is typical of recent suspicious critics in his dismissal of aesthetic force as a hopelessly metaphysical category. “Aesthetic philosophy,” according to Vattimo, “continues to think in terms of the work as a necessarily eternal form, and, at a deeper level, in terms of Being as permanence, grandeur, and force.”25 Vattimo’s mistake is to align aesthetic force with metaphysical notions of permanence and presence—a mistake that can be traced ultimately to an impoverished understanding of the German aesthetic tradition. Ironically, Vattimo inherits the aporias plaguing the aesthetics of irony developed by Schlegel two centuries earlier, for Vattimo’s nihilistic antifoundationalist stance stops short of ironizing the transcendent standpoint from which he makes confident ontological claims about the meaninglessness of existence and the collapse of metaphysics. In a final irony, perhaps only dialectical thinking can resist the peculiar metaphysical blend of materialism and idealism at the basis of recent suspicious approaches to art, which hypostatize the reality of omnipotent material forces while denying the reality of aesthetic forces that make inescapable claims on us despite being irreducible to empirically detectable phenomena.

Notes Introduction 1 Nietzsche (1917: 266). For an English translation, see Nietzsche (1996). 2 Desmond (2003: 16). 3 See Adorno and Horkheimer (1988: 9). For an English translation, see Adorno and Horkheimer (2002). 4 Bernstein (2004: 140) aptly defines the “rationalization of reason” in the Enlightenment as the “process through which the sensory – the contingent, contextual, and particular – is first dominated and then repudiated as a component of reason, and the remnant, the sensory rump, dispatched into the harmless precinct of art and the aesthetic.” 5 Schelling, StI, 622. 6 Hegel, GW, 289. For an English translation, see Hegel, FK. 7 Adorno and Horkheimer (1988: 18). 8 Adorno and Horkheimer (1988: x). 9 Nietzsche (1998: 50). 10 My understanding of aesthetic agency takes its bearings from two essays: Altieri (1998a) and Cascardi (1998). However, the particular definition of aesthetic agency I provide in this introduction is my own. Both Altieri’s and Cascardi’s views on aesthetic agency will be discussed in the book’s epilogue. 11 Nietzsche was, of course, not alone among late-nineteenth-century thinkers in recognizing that art would be asked to supplant religion in post-Enlightenment modernity. Matthew Arnold, for instance, observed in 1880: “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry” (Arnold, 1911: 2–3). A number of scholars have attempted to account for the rise of art as religion in modernity. See Barzun (1974), Graham (2007), and Schaeffer (2000). Barzun (1974: 33) adduces three basic reasons for the rise of art as religion: “the Renaissance glorification of man, the scattering and weakening of creeds by the Protestant Reformation, and the general unbelief caused by the progress of science.”

Notes

168 12 Schelling, StI, 615.

13 Schopenhauer (1977: 252). For an English translation, see Schopenhauer (1969). 14 Kandinsky (1947: 24). 15 For two very good accounts of aesthetic modernism”s complex response to cultural crisis, see Altieri (1989) and Clark (1999). 16 Kandinsky (1947: 26). 17 Cited in Golding (2000: 26). 18 Stevens (1997: 901). 19 Stevens (1997: 902). 20 Two provocative and compelling accounts of postmodernism in the arts include Jameson (1991) and Kuspit (2004). 21 Geulen (2006: 14) observes that the “end of art” has been played out so “variously and repetitively” that it deserves to be considered a fundamental “discourse of modernity.” See also Danto (1986, 1998), Kuspit (2004), Seel (2006), and Baudrillard (2005). 22 Ross (2009: 14) notes that contemporary critics are increasingly concerned with modernism as a “cultural formation.” See also During (2007), Parker (2000), Gallagher and Greenblatt (2000), and Guillory (1993). 23 Danto (1986: 111). 24 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1988: 2). 25 See Jameson (2007), Rancière (2006), Blanton (2009), and Larsen (1990). 26 See Vattimo (1988), Critchley (2004), and Agamben (1999). 27 Desmond (2003: 16). For other recent critiques of the contemporary neglect of the aesthetic, see Joughin and Malpas (2003), Clark (2006), Altieri (2009), Bowie (2003a), Clark (2000), and Armstrong (2000). 28 Bowie (2003b: 73) makes a similar observation: “A great deal depends . . . on the kind of story about the history of aesthetics one tells, and on how that story informs the development of contemporary theoretical assumptions. It seems clear to me that the stories which have dominated some theoretical debate rely upon a too limited conception of the history of aesthetics, as well as on questionable assumptions about the nature and role of art. This is not least because some of the notions most frequently employed in theories concerned to unmask the aesthetic in fact rely on ideas that emerged as part of the history of aesthetic theory.” Bowie (2003a) is an insightful book that begins to correct oversimplified Anglo-American views of the aesthetic positions of key figures from Kant to Nietzsche by offering a more complex and nuanced

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account of their arguments. I join Bowie in his opposition to the dominant suspicious stance toward aesthetic agency—what he calls a “knowing approach” preoccupied with the “critical unmasking of the ideological aspects of art.” See Bowie (2003a: 330). 29 For readings of Schlegelian irony as an anticipation of postmodernism, see De Man (1996: 163–84), Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1988), Frank (2004), MillánZaibert (2007), and Hillis Miller (2000). 30 See, for instance, Geulen (2006), Danto (1986), Jameson (1998), Vattimo (1988), and Agamben (1999: 52–8). 31 One might ask why I address only these five figures and neglect other important aestheticians, such as J. G. Hamann, J. G. Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Schopenhauer. In this book, I focus on Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno because their aesthetic speculations—and the specific conceptual trajectory I trace from one figure to the next—provide the essential groundwork for my central argument about the dialectics of aesthetic agency. Methodologically, my book aims to provide close philosophical analysis of selected aestheticians rather than broad historical coverage of a wide range of figures. For a rich and detailed historical survey of a broad range of German aestheticians, I would recommend Bowie (2003a). For a more introductory survey of German aestheticians with an even broader historical sweep, see Hammermeister (2002). 32 See Kant, KdU, II and IX of the “Einleitung.” For an English translation, see CPJ. 33 See Kant, KdU, §9. 34 Schelling, VIP, 154. 35 Schelling, StI, 634. 36 Schelling, StI, 617–18. 37 Schelling, StI, 618. 38 See aphorism 107 of the Athenaeum fragments (Schlegel, KA II, 181). 39 See Schlegel, KA XVIII, 5 (note 10). 40 See aphorism 116 of the Athenaeum fragments (Schlegel, KA II, 182). 41 Ibid. 42 Schlegel, “Rede über die Mythologie,” in Schlegel, KA II, 323. 43 Schlegel, KA II, 228. 44 See aphorism 44 of Schlegel’s Ideen, in Schlegel, KA II, 260 and the “Rede über die Mythologie,” in Schlegel, KA II, 311–28. 45 Hegel, VÄ I, 142. For an English translation, see Hegel, LA I 103.

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170 46 Ibid.

47 Hegel, VÄ I, 112–13; Hegel, LA I, 80. 48 Hegel, VÄ I, 98–9; Hegel, LA I, 69. 49 Kierkegaard (1997: 330). For an English translation, see Kierkegaard (1989: 297). 50 Adorno, ÄT, 134. For an English translation, see Adorno, AT, 86. 51 Adorno, ÄT, 149; Adorno, AT, 97. 52 Adorno, ÄT, 123; Adorno, AT, 79. 53 Adorno, ÄT, 263–4; Adorno, AT, 176. 54 Adorno, ÄT, 172; Adorno, AT, 113. 55 Adorno, ÄT, 364; Adorno, AT, 246. 56 Altieri (1998a: 223). 57 Ibid., 211. 58 Ibid., 216. 59 Ibid., 215–16.

Chapter 1 1 Biemel (1959: 116) (translation mine). “Die Auseinandersetzung mit Kants Begründung der Ästhetik kann nicht den Sinn haben, durch eine äußerliche Kritik Kant Fehler und Versehen vorzuwerfen . . . sie muß vielmehr darauf aus sein, im Aufdecken der inneren Spannungen, die in Kants Arbeit vorhanden sind, das eigentlich fruchtbare Moment seines Ringens sichtbar werden zu lassen.” In this and the next chapter, I make parenthetical citations to Kant’s three Critiques in the body of the chapter. Citations to KrV are located by their pagination in the first (A) and second (B) versions of the Akademie edition. Citations to KpV are located by page number of the Akademie edition. Citations to KdU are located by section number (with the symbol “§”) and page number of the Akademie edition. When I cite passages from the published introduction (“Einleitung”) to KdU, I cite the section number (with a roman numeral) and the page number. All translations of passages from KrV, KpV, and KdU are my own, though I often consult the following English translations: CPR, CPrR, and CPJ. 2 Horstmann (1989: 159) aptly notes that Kant “obviously did not succeed in giving unambiguous indications about the function and the results of the third Critique. In other words, his treatise on judgment lacks explicit and intelligible answers to some very elementary questions—the most elementary being the question of why the third Critique was ever written at all.”

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3 Some of the many reconstructions of Kant’s theory of taste include: Guyer (1997), Allison (2001), Ameriks (2003: 283–343), Kulenkampff (1994), and Zuckert (2007: 171–367). 4 For structural readings of the third Critique, see Biemel (1959), Adorno, ÄT, 145–50 and 505–10, Tuschling (1990: 174–88; 1991: 109–27), and Bernstein (1992: 1–65). 5 Bernstein (1992: 7). For a classic account of the trajectory from Kant’s critical philosophy to Hegel’s speculative metaphysics, see Kroner (1924). For a discussion of Kant’s philosophy as the theoretical foundation for twentiethcentury analytic philosophy, see Hanna (2001). 6 Allison and Longuenesse are among the few analytic Kant commentators who have written at length on the Continental approach to the third Critique. Allison (2000) argues against Tuschling’s speculative reading of the third Critique. Longuenesse seems sympathetic to both structural and reconstructive approaches to the third Critique. Longuenesse argues that structural tensions in Kant’s three Critiques authorize two radically different readings of Kant: a Hegelian approach that develops the speculative standpoint of the “knowledge of God” and an analytic approach that emphasizes the “point of view of man.” See Longuenesse (2005a: 165–91). By contrast, Longuenesse (2005b) presents a sustained reconstruction of Kant’s philosophy from the “human standpoint.” 7 See Guyer (1997: 103–5). Similarly, Kulenkampff (1994: 76 and 220 fn. 6) argues that there is no phenomenological difference in the “quality” of different forms of pleasure. See also Rogerson (2008: 62) and Kemal (1992: 79). 8 Guyer (1997: 104–5). 9 See Allison (2001: 54, 105, 109–10) for his commitment to an intentional view of aesthetic pleasure that still allows for uncertainty in judgments of taste. See also Wieland (2001) §§13–15, Aquila (1982), Zuckert (2002), and Kalar (2006: 125). Ginsborg argues for a unique intentional view of aesthetic pleasure that does not take the intentional object of pleasure to be the harmony of the faculties. See Ginsborg (1990, 1991, 2003). 10 See Wenzel (2000: 71–83). Similarly, Wicks (2007: 45) argues that “the satisfaction related to pure beauty is the manifestation of the harmony of the cognitive faculties at a certain level of intensity.” 11 See Marc-Wogau (1938: 114–21). As Marc-Wogau puts it, Kant vacillates between conceiving aesthetic pleasure as the “effect” of the harmony of the faculties and as “consciousness” of the harmony of the faculties. See MarcWogau (1938: 114). Though the specific terms of my argument differ from

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Marc-Wogau’s, I adopt his structural methodological approach, which seeks to trace the various tensions and ambiguities of the third Critique to a fundamental conceptual aporia. Marc-Wogau (1938: 139) claims that this fundamental aporia is the “dual thought of the negation and the affirmation of the objectrelatedness of the judgment of taste” (der Doppelgedanke der Negation und der Position der Gegenstandsbeziehung des Geschmacksurteils). More recently, Kohler (1980: 250–1) has argued that there is a fundamental “ambiguity” in Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure. Kohler claims that Kant argues for two opposed models of aesthetic pleasure: aesthetic pleasure as an “experience of satisfaction” (Erfüllungserlebnis) and aesthetic pleasure as “the form in which the “play” [of the cognitive faculties] appears as such.” Nonetheless, Kohler betrays his reconstructive bias in favoring the latter model of aesthetic pleasure and claiming that Kant departs from this model only when he loses sight of the aesthetic phenomenon under investigation. Also see Biemel (1959: 117), where he argues that there is a “remarkable tension” in the third Critique between an “immediate” form of pleasure that does not make any claim to universal validity and some other form of pleasure that does make a claim to universal validity. While I agree with Kohler, Biemel, and Marc-Wogau that there are fundamental tensions in Kant’s theory of aesthetic pleasure in the third Critique, I argue in the second chapter that these tensions are rooted in Kant’s fundamental ambivalence about whether the principle of nature’s purposiveness can bridge the “great gulf ” between nature and freedom. 12 One might wonder why I omit as a possibility Con, a model of aesthetic

pleasure that would provide certainty of its universal validity while being phenomenologically opaque and non-intentional. Con seems to me to be a

conceptual impossibility since a feeling of pleasure is non-cognitive and hence can only assure us of its source in the harmony of the faculties through some distinctive phenomenological feature of the pleasure itself (whether or not that feature involves intentionality).

13 Guyer (1997: 122). 14 Ibid., 103. 15 For helpful discussions of the issues involved in Kant’s attempt to infer universal validity from the disinterestedness of pleasure, see Guyer (1997: 148–62) and Longuenesse (2005b: 272–4). Both Guyer and Longuenesse argue that Kant’s attempt is unsuccessful. 16 Throughout the chapter, I have tried to remain gender-neutral whenever possible by using “we” or “one” instead of “he.” However, since Kant frequently

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refers to the person making the judgment of taste (Beurteiler) in the masculine gender, I sometimes find it necessary to use the masculine gender in my exposition for the sake of clarity and fidelity to Kant’s text. 17 Guyer (1997: 266) similarly notes in the context of §8 that “aesthetic judgments must always be uncertain, and this might be a reason for regarding the principle on which they are grounded as merely regulative.” 18 Chignell (2007) offers a very illuminating discussion of the various forms of belief, knowledge, and conviction theorized by Kant. On the basis of Chignell’s schema, I would count our “belief ” that we are judging with a “universal voice” as theoretical belief, a form of belief that has sufficient subjective grounds but insufficient objective grounds. We can be said to have sufficient subjective grounds for our belief since we feel confident that our feeling of pleasure is based on the harmony of faculties. However, we do not have sufficient objective grounds for our belief, since we remain uncertain whether our feeling of pleasure (Uon, Upn, or Upi) is in fact grounded in the harmony of the faculties. In this and the next chapter, however, I will argue that the constitutive dimension of Kant’s aesthetics—anchored in an inflationary account of aesthetic pleasure that affords full-blown certainty of its source in the harmony of the faculties (Cpn or Cpi)—introduces a radically new infallibilist model of affective certainty

that does not fit into any of the forms of conviction, belief, or knowledge that Chignell reconstructs from Kant’s texts. 19 See Allison (2001: 108) and Cohen (1982). 20 Guyer (1997: 129). 21 Ibid. 22 Kant’s cryptic and sometimes apparently contradictory claims about the relation between aesthetic pleasure and judgment in §9 have inspired a variety of reconstructions of his argument. See, for instance, Guyer (1997:

133–41), Longuenesse (2005b: 272–84), Allison (2001: 98–118), and Ginsborg (2003). However, this issue in §9 does not bear directly on the issue of the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure, which is why I focus here on the issue of the “aesthetic consciousness” of the harmony of the faculties raised later in §9. 23 Since Guyer presupposes that aesthetic pleasure is phenomenologically opaque, he does not consider the natural reading of Kant’s answer to the “lesser question” in §9—namely, that the harmony of the faculties is directly manifested in a phenomenologically distinctive feeling of pleasure. According to Guyer (1997: 93), “the harmony of the faculties is not manifest to consciousness directly” but is only inferred to be the basis of a

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phenomenologically opaque feeling of pleasure. §9 seems to me to suggest, on the contrary, that the harmony of the faculties is manifested in aesthetic pleasure at the phenomenological level. 24 I skip the third moment of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” since it makes no advance from the previous two moments in clarifying the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure. In the third moment, Kant claims that aesthetic pleasure is “consciousness” of the “purposive” form of the harmony of the faculties (KdU, §12, 222). Unfortunately, Kant’s appeal to purposiveness does not enrich our understanding of the precise nature of this aesthetic “consciousness.” 25 It is no coincidence that commentators who seek to reconstruct a coherent theory of taste from the third Critique tend to neglect the concept of common sense. For instance, Guyer (1997: 251) dismisses common sense as a “needless complexity.” Similarly, Wenzel (2000: 183) argues that the principle of common sense plays no role in Kant’s justification of judgments of taste. In contrast to Guyer and Wenzel, I argue that Kant’s discussion of common sense is central to his ongoing efforts throughout the “Analytic” to specify the phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure. 26 Guyer (1997: 249–50) offers a useful discussion of this discrepancy in Kant’s conception of the common sense. Also relevant is the discussion in Allison (2001: 157). 27 Kohler (1980: 268). 28 Kulenkampff (1994: 108). Similarly, Christian Wenzel (2005: 80) defines common sense as “an ideal feeling.” 29 Allison (2001: 157) makes a similar claim for the dependence of the principle of the universal voice on the principle of sensus communis, but the details of his account differ substantially from mine. 30 For instance, Guyer (1997: 289) claims that §21 “tries to show . . . that the principle of a common sense is constitutive in force.” Allison (2001: 84) seems to make a similar point when he argues that §21 attempts to show that “the very idea of common sense” is “required as a condition of ordinary cognitive judgments.” See also Kohler (1980: 261). 31 Guyer (1997: 272) admits that §22 leaves open the question whether common sense is regulative or constitutive but dismisses this moment of uncertainty in §22 as an aberration. Longuenesse (2005b: 286–9) reconstructs the passage from §22 as a two-step argument for the existence of a sensus communis. Longuenesse’s reconstruction, however, sidesteps the problem of reconciling the

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conflicting suggestions of regulative and constitutive approaches to the common sense in §22.

Chapter 2 1 For an illuminating discussion of Kant’s Antinomy of Freedom, see Naticchia (1994). 2 It should be noted that in the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant presupposes the possibility of freedom and deduces the moral law from that presupposition. However, there is a radical shift in Kant’s approach to freedom in his 1788 Critique of Practical Reason, where he presupposes the Fact of Reason and deduces the practical cognition of freedom from the Fact of Reason. Allison (1990: 201) concurs with Karl Ameriks’ claim that this shift in Kant’s approach to freedom is a “great reversal.” What is relevant to my argument here is that this great reversal in Kant’s approach to freedom signals his renewed concern with the possibility of actualizing our moral ends in the phenomenal world. 3 This is obviously an oversimplified account of the Fact of Reason, but this is not the occasion to delve into the interpretive controversies surrounding Kant’s doctrine. I would refer the reader to the following detailed discussions of the Fact of Reason: Carnois (1987: 56ff.) and Allison (1990: 231ff.). 4 Carnois (1987: 57). 5 Henrich (1960: 87). 6 A number of readers since Hegel have attacked Kant’s doctrine of the Fact of Reason on the grounds that the alleged “apodictic certainty” of the moral law is epistemically hazy and borders on the ad hoc, since it is not reducible either to practical or theoretical certainty and hence does not fit within Kant’s own epistemic strictures. In this vein, Hegel notoriously refers to Kant’s Fact of Reason as that “cold duty, the last undigested log in the stomach, the revelation given to reason.” Cited in Henrich (1960: 93). More recently, Nancy (1993: 25) has argued that “the Kantian fact of freedom cannot receive, in a rigorous Kantian logic, its status as fact.” 7 Cited in Carnois (1987: 58). 8 See Allison (2001: 38–9). 9 In fact, Kant’s distinction between transcendental and logical principles in the first Critique is not so neat, and it has sparked a great deal of interpretive controversy. See, for instance, Horstmann’s extensive treatment of the issue in Chapter 5 of Horstmann (1997).

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10 Kemp Smith (1923: 547). Beiser (2002: 522) similarly argues that Kant vacillates between regulative and constitutive conceptions of nature’s systematicity in the “Appendix” to the first Critique. 11 Guyer (2005: 21) aptly notes, “[s]ystematicity cannot be viewed solely as a feature of our conceptual scheme, which can be imposed on nature . . . ; the empirical data which nature offers must themselves be amenable to systematization if systematicity is to be attained.” 12 Most commentators acknowledge this dilemma but attempt to reconstruct a consistent approach to the principle of nature’s systematicity in the Appendix. Horstmann (1989) and Guyer (2005: 11–28) argue for a logical reading of the principle of nature’s systematicity, while Allison (2000) and Brandt (1989) argue for a transcendental reading of the principle. In opposition to the reconstructive orientation shared by most commentators, I emphasize the structural necessity of the tensions and contradictions in Kant’s account of the principle of nature’s systematicity in the first Critique. 13 Marc-Wogau (1938: 18) supports this reading of the passage, though it seems implausible to me. 14 Horstmann (1989: 168), for instance, interprets this sentence from V as “a description of a transcendental principle that allows for only subjective necessity.” 15 A number of recent commentators, including Guyer, Allison, and Horstmann, interpret Kant’s account of nature’s purposiveness in the third Critique in weak terms as P1. For instance, Allison (2001: 39) argues that Kant’s “claim is not

that nature is purposive, that is, that we have some sort of a priori guarantee that it is ordered in a manner commensurate with our cognitive capacities and needs” but that “we are rationally constrained to approach nature as if it were so ordered.” Also see Guyer (2005: 57–73) and Horstmann (1989). Both Guyer (2005: 72) and Allison (2001: 39) admit that a weak construal of the principle of purposiveness as P1 is unable to resolve the problem of empirical chaos.

16 For instance, Heintel (1970: 18) claims that the principle of purposiveness must be regulative and constitutive at once. Bowie (2003a: 32) also claims that Kant “remains ambiguous as to whether” the principle of nature’s purposiveness is “a regulative idea or could actually be constitutive.” Friedman (1991: 95) makes the more general claim that “[t]he apparently paradoxical demand for principles that are, at the same time, both constitutive and regulative—literally for an intersection of the constitutive and regulative domains—is thus a natural and inevitable demand of the critical philosophy.”

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17 Tuschling (1990: 179) (translation mine). Also see Tuschling (1991). While I agree with Tuschling’s general claim about Kant’s aporetic stance toward the “great gulf ” in the third Critique, I adopt a different strategy for substantiating this claim. Tuschling pursues the Hegelian route of claiming that Kant’s argument about purposiveness results ultimately in the metaphysical presupposition of the intuitive understanding. By contrast, my attempt to establish Kant’s aporetic stance toward the gulf does not require any assumption about an intuitive understanding. 18 Tuschling (1991: 114). 19 Guyer (2005: 294). 20 Düsing (1990) claims that the “great gulf ” of the third Critique is at once a transcendental gulf and a practical gulf. By contrast, both Guyer (1990) and Rohlf (2008) interpret the “great gulf ” in the third Critique as a merely practical gulf since they assume that the problem of the transcendental gulf is resolved by the first and second Critiques. I side with Düsing against both Guyer and Rohlf, since I think that the Kant of the third Critique remains ambivalent about the success of his second Critique resolution of the problem of the transcendental gulf. 21 Guyer (2005: 282). 22 See Allison (2001: 203–4). 23 Derrida (1987: 38–9) emphasizes this passage from KdU. 24 As Bowie (2003a: 45) puts it, “[t]he very fact that there is a third Critique is not least a result of the insufficiency of the first two Critiques with regard to the characterisation of the relationship between human freedom and the rest of nature.” 25 I am not alone in reading IX in this manner. Tuschling (1991: 113–14) reads IX as suggesting a stronger account of the mediating role of the principle of purposiveness. Kulenkampff (1994: 37) also notes that Kant makes the strong claim in IX that the principle of purposiveness makes possible the actual bridging of the gulf between nature and freedom. However, Kulenkampff betrays his reconstructive bias in dismissing this assertion as a moment of carelessness. Also relevant here is the debate between Makkreel and Bernd Dörflinger regarding Kant’s account of the mediating role of the principle of purposiveness in the third Critique. See Makkreel (1991: 160) and Dörflinger (1991: 66). 26 One might argue that “erkannt” can be read as suggesting that the principle of purposiveness yields practical cognition of the possibility of the final end. However, there are three basic problems with this reading, all of which compel me to exclude it as an interpretive possibility. First, this reading would conflict

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with Kant’s claim in II that the principle of purposiveness does not yield practical cognition. Second, it simply begs the question of the need for the third Critique in the first place. After all, Kant has already accounted for the possibility of the practical cognition of freedom in the second Critique, so it is not clear why Kant would need to introduce the principle of purposiveness at all. Third, this reading would ignore Kant’s repeated insistence on the role of the principle of purposiveness as a “mediating concept” between the theoretical and practical domains. 27 In II, for instance, Kant emphasizes that the principle of purposiveness has “no proper domain of its own” and does not reach “cognition” of the supersensible either theoretically or practically (KdU, 176). 28 Krämling (1985: 44–8) is one of the few commentators to foreground the ambiguities and tensions in Kant’s account of purposiveness as a mediating concept between the domains of nature and freedom. 29 Guyer (1997: 308). 30 Ibid., 309. 31 See Longuenesse (2005a: 165–91). 32 Longuenesse (2005a: 207). 33 For illuminating discussions of how aesthetic judgments can “occasion” the principle of purposiveness, see Nerheim (1986: 107), Krämling (1985: 202–3), and Düsing (1968: 59). 34 In the same paragraph, Kant provides further support for what might be called a “bottom-up” account of the relation between aesthetic pleasure and the principle of purposiveness: the “spontaneity in the play of the faculties of cognition, the agreement of which contains the ground of this pleasure, makes that concept [of nature’s purposiveness] suitable for mediating the connection of the domain of the concept of nature with the concept of freedom in its consequences, in that the latter at the same time promotes the receptivity of the mind for moral feeling” (KdU, IX, 197). 35 Allison’s regulative approach to the third Critique leads him to read this passage from §42 in terms of beauty’s symbolization of morality in §59. Allison (2001: 196) claims that “the intimation natural beauties provide of nature’s moral purposiveness must itself be understood in terms of the symbolization of morality (through their expression of aesthetic ideas).” Allison’s reading seems implausible to me, since there is no evidence in §42 that the “hint” or “trace” of nature’s purposiveness offered by beauty should be construed in merely symbolic terms. 36 Schiller (1982: 1). I generally follow the translation of Wilkinson and Willoughby, though I sometimes make modifications to it.

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37 McCumber (1999) makes an extended case that Schiller historicizes Kant’s ahistorical account of the diremption between nature and freedom. 38 Schiller (1982: 30). 39 Ibid., 6. 40 Ibid., 32. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 122. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 133 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 152. 48 Ibid., 186–8. 49 Ibid., 189. 50 Ibid. 51 In a classic essay on Schiller’s relation to Kant, Henrich (1982: 239) notes a number of “contradictions and discrepancies” in Schiller’s aesthetic thought that stem from his ambivalent stance toward Kant’s third Critique. While I agree with Henrich’s basic approach to Schiller, I identify tensions in Schiller’s aesthetics that Henrich does not address. 52 The authorship of the “System-Program” has been a controversial topic in the past few decades. See, for instance, Tillette (1975) and Förster (1995). 53 Schiller (1982: 34). 54 Hegel, ÄS, 234–6. 55 Ibid., 235. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 236. 58 Bowie (2003a: 55). 59 Hegel, ÄS, 236. 60 Bowie (2003a: 107) also emphasizes the Kantian provenance of the aesthetics of the “System-Program.”

Chapter 3 1 Throughout this chapter, I refer to Schelling’s StI by making parenthetical citations in the body of the text. Translations of passages from StI are my own, but I often consult the English translation, ST.

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2 For a thorough account of the central role of art in Schelling’s philosophical thought from 1800 to 1807, see Zane Shaw (2010). 3 Pinkard (2002: 191), for instance, interprets Schelling’s System aesthetics as a radical break with Kant’s third Critique. Breazeale (1993: 168) similarly contrasts Kant’s regulative view of art—which provides us “with an ‘as if ’ glimpse of noumenal reality”—with Schelling’s much stronger claim that art affords us an actual glimpse of noumenal reality. For a similar understanding of Schelling’s relation to Kant’s third Critique, see Bowie (2003a: 114). Beiser is one of the few commentators who reject this standard account of Schelling’s relation to Kant. Beiser (2002: 522) aptly observes, “Kant himself was never very clear and firm about the distinction between the regulative and constiutitive . . . and . . . in places he came very close to the position of Schelling and Hegel.” Also, Beiser (2003: 4) makes a convincing case that the early German Romantics not only reacted against the Enlightenment but also “continued with, and indeed radicalized, the legacy of the Enlightenment.” 4 Kant, KdU, §76, 340. 5 Gram (1981) usefully distinguishes three logically independent accounts of intellectual intuition in Kant’s first and third Critiques, only one of which identifies intellectual intuition with theoretical cognition of things in themselves. 6 Kant, KrV, B131–2. For instance, Fichte notes in the Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre: “The intellectual intuition of which the Wissenschaftslehre speaks is not directed toward any sort of being whatsoever; instead, it is directed at an acting—and this is something that Kant does not even mention (except, perhaps, under the name ‘pure apperception’).” See Fichte (1845–6: 472). For an English translation, see Fichte (1994). 7 Kant, KrV, B132. 8 Kant, KrV, B157–8n. 9 Kant, Pro, 334. 10 For an illuminating discussion of Fichte’s doctrine of intellectual intuition in relation to the regress problem and to Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, see Neuhouser (1990: 72–102). 11 Fichte (1982a: 30). 12 Ibid. 13 Fichte (1845–6: 465). 14 Ibid., 463. 15 Ibid., 466.

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16 I am indebted to Neuhouser (1990: 86ff.) for his discussion of Fichte’s conflicting modes of justifying intellectual intuition. 17 Fichte (1975: 44). For an English translation, see Fichte (1982b). 18 Fichte (1975: 43). In the 1798 Doctrine of Ethics, Fichte adopts an indirectly phenomenological mode of justification by distinguishing different forms of intellectual intuition: while the philosophical form of intellectual intuition is not empirically discoverable, what Fichte calls “real intellectual intuition” (wirkliche intellektuelle Anschauung)—the immediate awareness of one’s freedom—is present in empirical consciousness and somehow itself validates the philosophical species of intellectual intuition. See Fichte (1964: 60). 19 Fichte (1845–6: 463). 20 I call this a “reconstruction” of the Ichschrift because I order Schelling’s scattered remarks on Kant into a six-step argument. 21 Schelling, VIP, 154. 22 Kant, KdU, V, 184. 23 Kant, KdU, “Vorrede,” 168. 24 Kant, KdU, IX, 197. 25 Schelling, PB, 314. 26 Schelling, VIP, 243. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 154. 29 Ibid., 207. 30 As Schelling puts it, “The I is thus determined for itself as pure I in intellectual intuition” (VIP, 181). 31 Schelling, VIP, 181. 32 Ibid., 154. 33 Ibid., 204. 34 Ibid., 176. 35 Ibid., 154. 36 Ibid., 216. 37 Ibid., 191. 38 Ibid., 242. 39 Schelling, IPN, 55. 40 Jähnig (1966: 44). (translation mine). 41 On this point, I disagree with Zane Shaw (2010: 4), who makes the very strong claim that for Schelling, “[a]rt presents and produces the absolute in the finite world.” In contrast to Shaw, I argue that the Schelling of the System

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never conceives art’s manifestation of the Absolute in such a metaphysically direct manner. 42 This helps account for the indirect metaphorical language of “reflection” employed throughout the System aesthetics. Schelling repeatedly conceives the mechanism by which art depicts the Absolute in terms of “reflection”; one need only note his pervasive rhetoric of “reflektieren,” “widerstrahlen,” and “zurückstrahlen.” He claims, for instance: “The artwork merely reflects to me [nur reflektiert mir] what otherwise gets reflected through nothing, namely that absolutely Identical which is already dirempted in the Ich” (StI, 625). A bit earlier in the System, he similarly asserts that the “unchangingly Identical . . . is merely radiated back from the [art] product [nur aus dem Produkt widerstrahlt]” (StI, 615–16). It is worth noting the qualification of the “nur” (“merely” or “only”) in these formulations. The artwork is capable merely of “reflecting” the Absolute, since it cannot make the “non-objective” Absolute directly present to consciousness. 43 Kroner (1924, v. 2: 106) voices a similar criticism. 44 For a helpful discussion of Schelling’s late philosophy of mythology, see Beach (1994). 45 Cited in Zeltner (1954: 206).

Chapter 4 1 Schelling, StI, 608. 2 In his generally insightful study, The Romantic Imperative, Frederick Beiser makes the problematic generalization that the early German Romantics “made aesthetic experience into the criterion, instrument, and medium of awareness of ultimate reality or the absolute.” See Beiser (2003: 73). As I will argue in this chapter, while Beiser’s statement certainly applies to Schelling’s aesthetics of System, it fails to honor the distinctiveness of Schlegel’s aesthetics, which foregrounds the reflective rather than experiential dimension of art. 3 Throughout the chapter, I refer to Schlegel’s work by making parenthetical citations in the body of the text. 4 Chaouli (2003) offers a helpful discussion of Schlegel’s understanding of the term “parabasis.” 5 A translation of Schlegel’s “Über die Unverständlichkeit” can be found in Schlegel, OI.

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6 “Ein ganz Großer, Hegel, sagt aus blindem Haß Falsches über F. Schlegels romantische Ironie” (Walzel, 1938: 50). For similar verdicts, see Allemann (1956: 97), Strohschneider-Kohrs (2002: 216), Behler (1988: 19), Bohrer (1989: 146ff.), Bubner (1987: 85–95), and Egginton (2002: 1040). One of the only critics to offer a more sympathetic view of Hegel’s critique is Pöggeler (1998: 45–54). However, Pöggeler remains at the general level of establishing irony as “substanceless subjectivity.” The most comprehensive treatment of Hegel’s critique of Schlegelian irony in the extant secondary literature is Behler’s long chapter, “Hegels Polemiken gegen Ironie,” in Behler (1997: 115–49). However, Behler also dismisses Hegel’s critique. See Behler (1997: 126). 7 Frank might be the most vocal and influential critic arguing for Schlegel’s more or less total break with Fichte. See Frank (1989: 287–306; 1994: 37–130; 2004: 177–200). Also see Bubner (1995), Behler (1993: 184–94), Rush (2006: 187), and Beiser (2003: 106–30). The following book-length studies also argue for Schlegel’s break with Fichte: Millán-Zaibert (2007), Götze (2001), and Frischmann (2005). 8 For a classic survey of the various “subjective” and “objective” interpretations of Schlegel’s theory of irony in the critical literature, see Immerwahr (1951: 173–91). 9 For a translation of the Lyceum and Athenaeum fragments, see Schlegel, PF. 10 Elsewhere in his work, Schlegel sometimes proposes an alternative strategy for handling the problem of regress. In “On Incomprehensibility,” for instance, Schlegel builds infinite regress into his conception of irony: irony becomes, paradoxically, the radicalization of regress itself, a regress made reflexively aware of its status as regress. Accordingly, Schlegel revels in what he calls “the irony of irony,” irony’s relentless tendency to regress into higher-order ironies (KA II, 369). However, it is clear from various other passages in his work—which I am about to discuss in the body of the text—that he is not entirely satisfied by this attempt to dodge the problem of regress. In this chapter, therefore, I focus instead on Schlegel’s complex efforts to tackle the regress problem head-on. 11 Behler (1997: 97). 12 For references to Anschauung and intellektuale Anschauung, see Ideen fragments 78 (KA II, 263), 102 (KA II, 266), and 150 (KA II, 271), and Athenaeum fragments 76 (KA II, 176), 102 (KA II, 180), 336 (KA II, 223–5), 342 (KA II, 226), and 448 (KA II, 254). 13 Behler (1997: 143). Similarly, Beiser (2003: 121) claims: “If Schlegel were ever a disciple of Fichte, it was only for a short time, probably at most for a year, from

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the summer of 1795 to the summer of 1796.” See note 7 for additional secondary literature that argues for Schlegel’s total break with Fichte. 14 Behler (1997: 139) cites as evidence a letter of Hegel’s indicating attendance at some of Schlegel’s Jena lectures. 15 For a general discussion of the circumstances of Schlegel’s Jena lectures, see Behler (1999: 52–71). 16 “Die Sehnsucht nach dem Unendlichen mub immer Sehnsucht seyn. Unter der Form der Anschauung kann es nicht vorkommen. Das Ideal lässt sich nie anschauen. Das Ideal wird durch Spekulazion erzeugt.” All translations of passages from Schlegel’s Jena and Köln lectures are my own. 17 “Die Zusammenfassung des ganzen ursprünglichen Bewuβtseyns, wenn es zum Bewuβtseyn kommt, d. h. das ursprüngliche Bewuβtseyn anschaut und versteht, ist die intellektuelle Anschauung. Die absolute Thesis aller Philosophie kann nicht bewiesen werden; es geht schlechthin nichts darüber; es enthält seinen Beweis in sich selbst.” 18 “[D]ie Untersuchung aller Quellen der Philosophie führt uns auf die Selbstanschauung, als den sichersten Anfangspunkt der Philosophie.” 19 “Diese Fähigkeit, das Ich des Ichs zu sein, ist aber unendlich; denn so wie es eine Anschauung der Anschauung gibt, kann es ebensogut eine Anschauung der Anschauung der Anschauung geben usw. bis ins unendliche; dies hat gar keine Grenzen.” 20 “Was die Anschauung betrifft, so ist schon hinlänglich dargetan worden, dab sie im eigentlichen Sinne keine Erkenntnis geben kann, weil sie eben das innere Wesen des Gegenstandes, das Leben, das Freie und Bewegliche erdrückt.” 21 Benjamin (1973: 42). The English translation of Benjamin’s text misleadingly renders “unanschauliche Intuition” as “non-eidetic intuition.” See Benjamin (1996: 139–40). 22 “Die unendliche Fülle als solche läßt sich nicht anschauen, man müßte dann eine Anschauung annehmen, die nie vollendet werden könnte. Dieser Begriff kommt nur . . . durch das ahnende, weissagende Gefühl in das menschliche Bewußtsein.” 23 See note 6 for a list of scholars who lodge such criticisms against Hegel’s critique of Schlegel. 24 Hegel, VGP I, 460. For the English translation, see Hegel, LHP I, 401. As Beiser points out, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy is not a text written by Hegel himself but a compilation by Hegel’s student Karl Ludwig Michelet, who draws on several sources: “(1) Hegel’s notebooks from his Jena lectures (1805–6), (2) a short fragment on the history of philosophy, probably written

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during the Heidelberg years (1816–18), (3) Hegel’s introduction to his Berlin lectures (1820), and (4) several sets of lecture notes, Michelet’s own 1823–23, those of J. F. C. Kampe 1829–30, and those of K. J. G. von Griesheim 1825–6.” See Beiser’s introduction to Hegel, LHP I, xxxi. 25 “Man kann sagen, dab genau an dieser Stelle das Ironieverständnis Hegels völlig in die Irre geht und natürlich schon seine Sehweise der absoluten Vollmacht des ironischen Ich falsch ist. Denn die Kritik, die sich in der Ironie äubert, ist keine nach auben gerichtete Ironie, die blob täuschen und verblüffen will, sondern eine auf sich selbst gerichtete Selbstkritik des Künstlers (“Selbstvernichtung”), die ihn davor schützen soll, zu viel Vertrauen, Anmabung und Selbsteinschätzung in die “Selbstschöpfung” zu investieren.” Behler (1993: 126). 26 Benjamin (1973: 75–81) was one of the first commentators to emphasize the moment of objectivity in Schlegel’s theory of irony. See also StrohschneiderKohrs (2002: 216) and Bohrer (1989: 147). 27 Hegel, VÄ I, 93. For the English translation, see Hegel, LA I, 64. 28 Hegel, VGP III, 415. For the English translation, see Hegel, LHP III, 507. 29 For a helpful account of Schleiermacher’s theological doctrine and Hegel’s critique of it, see Reid (2003). 30 For instance, Schleiermacher calls the “intuition of the universe” “the highest and most universal formula of religion.” See Schleiermacher (1988: 24). For the original German, see Schleiermacher (1967: 52). 31 Hegel, VGP III, 416; LHP III, 508–9. 32 Hegel, BS, 254. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 255. 35 Hegel, VGP I, 461; LHP I, 401. 36 Irony, as Hegel tersely puts it, is always “away above everything.” Hegel, VÄ I, 315; LA I, 243. 37 Hegel, GPR, 279. For the English translation, see Hegel, PR, 182. 38 “Von Fichte ist eigentlich nicht zu sagen, dass er im Praktischen die Willkür des Subjekts zum Prinzip gemacht habe, aber späterhin ist im Sinne der besonderen Ichheit von Friedrich v. Schlegel dieses Besondere selbst in betreff des Guten und Schönen als Gott aufgestellt worden, so dab das objektiv Gute nur ein Gebilde meiner Überzeugung sei, nur durch mich einen Halt bekommt, und dab ich es als Herr und Meister hervortreten und verschwinden lassen kann. Indem ich mich zu etwas Objektivem verhalte, ist es zugleich für mich untergegangen, und so schwebe ich über einem ungeheuren Raume Gestalten hervorrufend und zerstörend.” Hegel, GPR, 286.

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186 39 Fichte (1845–6: 513).

40 See, for instance, Schlegel’s invocation of schweben in Athenaeum fragment 116 in KA II, 182–3. 41 Hegel, BS, 254. 42 Ibid., 255. 43 Ibid., 238. 44 Ibid., 207. 45 Ibid., 271. 46 Ibid., 272. 47 Ibid., 274 fn. 2. 48 Hegel, PG, 56. For an English translation, see PS, 36. 49 Hegel, PG, 57; PS, 36. 50 Ibid. 51 Hegel, PG, 72; PS, 50. 52 Hegel, PG, 56–7; PS, 36. 53 “Die vollendete absolute Ironie hört auf Ironie zu seyn und wird ernsthaft.” 54 Hegel, VÄ II, 236; LA I, 606. 55 As Schaeffer (2000: 96) puts it, “it is . . . symptomatic that when Friedrich Schlegel was converted to the militant Catholicism of the Restoration, he abandoned his conception of universal poetry as the fundamental theologicalmetaphysical activity: as soon as revealed religion once again provided the basic hermeneutic framework, aesthetic religion faded away.”

Chapter 5 1 Throughout the chapter, I refer to Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics by making parenthetical citations in the body of the text, first listing the volume number and page number of the three-volume German edition (VÄ I–III) and then listing the volume number and page number of the two-volume English translation by Knox (LA I–II). Though I generally rely on Knox’s translation, I sometimes make minor modifications. 2 Croce (1909: 302–3) observes: “The Aesthetic of Hegel is thus a funeral oration: he passes in review the successive forms of art, shows the progressive steps of internal consumption and lays the whole in its grave, leaving Philosophy to write its epitaph.” Knox (1936: 101) asserts: “Hegel is chanting: le roi est mort; vive le roi—that is, art is dead; long live philosophy. And Hegel does not seem

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to be shedding any tears of lamentation. He is speaking of the death of art in no metaphorical sense but in a definite historical and cultural sense.” 3 Some of the more important and interesting “end of art” readings of Hegel include Danto (1986: 81–115), Vattimo (1988: 51–64), Agamben (1999: 52–8), Pippin (2002), Bernstein (2007), Kwon (2004), Oetjen (2003), and Geulen (2006: 19–40). 4 In his recent book, Benjamin Rutter offers a helpful critique of the “end of art” approach to Hegel’s aesthetics and then devotes the remainder of the book to a “positive account for art’s ongoing value” (7) that focuses on Hegel’s detailed discussions of modern painting and literature. See Rutter (2010: 7). I join Rutter in militating against what he calls the “pessimistic view” of Hegel’s stance toward modern art (6), but I will focus on aspects of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics not considered by Rutter—namely, the doctrine of the “after of art” and Hegel’s “Historical Deduction.” 5 Kierkegaard (1997: 330). For an English translation, see Kierkegaard (1989: 297). 6 Lectures on Aesthetics was compiled by Hegel’s student, H. G. Hotho, who was working from student transcripts and Hegel’s own notes from three series of lectures delivered in 1823, 1826, and 1828/9. Gethmann-Siefert (1991) has challenged the reliability of the Hotho edition of Lectures on Aesthetics on a number of grounds. By contrast, Pippin (2008: 395 fn. 3) observes, “I have never seen evidence to the effect that the Hotho version is seriously unreliable or some kind of fraud.” I concur with Pippin that the Hotho version is generally reliable, although I do not have the space here to argue for the text’s reliability. I should add, however, that in developing my argument in this chapter, I try to sidestep the various textual controversies surrounding the Hotho edition by not putting too much weight on any single formulation in VÄ. Instead, I try to synthesize a number of different strands in Hegel’s account of art’s role in modernity. 7 Houlgate (1997) usefully emphasizes this point. 8 Desmond (1986: 53) aptly observes: “When Hegel touches on the so-called ‘death of art,’ it is his alertness to this waning power of art in the contemporary era that we must keep in mind. If there is a ‘death of art’ it partly lies in the inappropriate centering of the absolute completely in man, or as we can put it, the loss of art as ‘religious’ event.” 9 The few commentators who have addressed Hegel’s doctrine of the “after of art” neglect the dialectical dimension I foreground in this chapter. For instance, Habermas (1990: 35) reads the “after of art” as art’s straightforward supersession by philosophy. Similarly, Perniola (2004: 63) equates the “after of art” with philosophy.

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10 Desmond (1986: 44) explains art’s “self-exceeding” nicely: “Art itself, as it were, sacrifices its own exclusively ‘aesthetic’ form to open out upon a fuller religious configuration.” 11 Speight (2011) provides a very helpful account of the textual status of Hegel’s “Historical Deduction.” Speight notes two important textual issues in particular. First, none of the extant lecture transcripts or notes “gives the relevant section the title ‘historical deduction’ ” (354), so the section title may very well be Hotho’s contribution. Although it is impossible to determine whether the title “Historical Deduction” is in fact Hegel’s own, I will argue that the “Historical Deduction” does unfold very much like a conceptual deduction. Second, Speight notes that “the 1820–1821 lectures (by Aschenberg) and the 1826 lectures (by both Pfordten and Kehler) have sections in their introductions that trace at the same point the same development of the concept of art among the same figures as does the text of the Lectures. The 1823 transcript (made by Hotho himself) does not have such a section” (354). Speight’s analysis of the section’s textual background provides strong evidence for the reliability of the basic contents of the “Historical Deduction” contained in the final Hotho edition of VÄ. 12 As far as I am aware, Speight, Ameriks, and Horowitz are the only commentators who provide sustained discussions of Hegel’s “Historical Deduction,” but my reading of the “Historical Deduction” covers substantially different ground from their respective discussions. Speight (2011: 355–60) usefully situates the “Historical Deduction” within the broader context of the Introduction to Lectures on Aesthetics. Ameriks (2006: 209–30) focuses on Hegel’s engagement with Kant and Romanticism in the “Historical Deduction,” but he offers more of a summary than a close reading of the “Historical Deduction.” Horowitz (2007) focuses on Hegel’s treatment of Schiller in the “Historical Deduction.” I engage some of the details of their readings of the “Historical Deduction” in later notes. 13 As Hegel puts it, each of the aesthetic views he considers embodies one basic mode by which art seeks to “dissolve and reduce to unity” the antithesis in modernity between “the abstractly self-concentrated Spirit and nature” (VÄ I 83; LA I 56). 14 Hegel, GW, 304. For an English translation, see Hegel, FK, 69. 15 Hegel, GW, 305; FK, 69. 16 Hegel, GW, 324; FK, 89. 17 Hegel, GW, 302; FK, 67.

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18 Hegel, GW, 327; FK, 91. 19 Kant, KdU, §49, 314. 20 Hegel, GW, 323; FK, 87. 21 Ibid. 22 Hegel, GW, 328; FK, 91. 23 Longuenesse (2005a: 165–91) identifies some of the most convincing aspects of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s third Critique. 24 Hegel, DS, 112–13. For an English translation, see Hegel, DB, 171–2. 25 Hegel, GW, 326; FK, 89–90. 26 Hegel, PG, 17. For the English translation, see Hegel, PS, 6. 27 Hegel, PG, 18; PS, 6. 28 Biemel (1959: 167) makes a similar observation: “The . . . contradictory determinations in Kant are present in Hegel in a different form. But instead of registering the contradiction unconsciously, Hegel—on the basis of the dialectical structure of Spirit—reveals this contradiction to be a positive moment” (translation mine). The original German reads: “Die oben herausgestellten widerspruchsvollen Bestimmungen bei Kant sind, auf andere Art, auch bei Hegel gegenwärtig. Aber dieser schleppt den Widerspruch nicht unbewußt mit sich, sondern vermag ihn auf Grund der dialektischen Struktur des Geistes als positives Moment aufzudecken.” 29 Kant, KdU, III, 177. 30 Schiller (1982: 32). 31 Ibid., 152. 32 Ibid., 189. 33 Wilm (1910: 23) aptly observes, “Hegel’s criticism of Kant, that the latter had not transcended the opposition of subjective thought and objective reality, applies to Schiller as fully as it does to Kant.” For a helpful discussion of the historical background of Hegel’s relation to Schiller, see Böhler (1972). McCumber (1999) argues that Hegel strategically foregrounds the metaphysical implications of Schiller’s aesthetics in the “Historical Deduction.” Horowitz (2007) explores why Hegel suppresses the concept of play in his account of Schiller. 34 Schelling, StI, 628. 35 Hegel, VGPb, 184. 36 Ibid. 37 Cited in Zeltner (1954: 206). 38 Hegel, VGPb, 185.

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39 Both Speight and Ameriks ignore much of the complexity and nuance of Hegel’s treatment of irony in the third stage of the “Historical Deduction.” Most fundamentally, they fail to distinguish among the doctrines of irony of Schlegel, Novalis, and Solger. Ameriks (2006: 218), for instance, makes the untenable generalization that the third stage offers an “extremely harsh treatment of the idea of romantic irony.” Ameriks goes on to make the problematic claim that “Hegel conflates Fichte and Schlegel in a way that we now know is highly misleading” (219). In Chapter 4, I sought to debunk this widely held view about Hegel’s critique of Schlegel by showing that Hegel was, in fact, acutely aware of Schlegel’s efforts to break with Fichte. Like Ameriks, Speight (2011) claims that Hegel conceives irony in the third moment of the “Historical Deduction” as a “degeneration” (362), “a mode that slips away from the true” (365). In stark contrast to Speight and Ameriks, I interpret Hegel’s discussion of irony in the third moment as the culmination of the “Historical Deduction.” Hegel, I suggest, explores radical post-Schlegelian forms of aesthetic irony that anticipate major developments in art after Romanticism. 40 Although Hegel does not mention Novalis by name in the “Historical Deduction,” it is clear from references to Novalis in other works that he has Novalis primarily in mind in the “Historical Deduction.” See, for instance, Hegel’s reference to Novalis as a “beautiful soul” in BS, 267. 41 Hegel, PG, 544; PS, 452. 42 Ibid. 43 Hegel, PG, 545; PS, 453. 44 Hegel, PG, 547; PS, 454–5. 45 Hegel, PG, 547; PS, 455. 46 Ibid. 47 Henrich (2003: 76) points out that since the first documented use of the language of “objective humor” is in Hegel’s 1828 Hamann-Rezension, Hegel must have introduced the concept of objective humor in the very last set of Lectures on Aesthetics. 48 In subjective humor, as Hegel puts it, “it is the artist himself who enters the material, with the result that his chief activity consists in destroying and dissolving everything that proposes to make itself objective . . . through the power of subjective impressions, flashes of thought, and striking modes of interpretation” (VÄ II, 229; LA I, 600–1). 49 Harries (1974: 692).

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50 Pippin (2008: 415) complains that the art of objective humor is “greatly diminished in ambition and importance.” Henrich (2003: 65–125) attempts to resuscitate Hegel’s doctrine of objective humor by taking it in directions that Hegel himself hinted at but did not pursue. In contrast to Henrich, I will argue that while Hegel’s doctrine of objective humor is not recuperable on its own terms, Kierkegaard’s reading of Hegel allows us to retheorize objective humor in a more promising dialectical manner. 51 Pippin (2008: 415 fn. 44). 52 Kierkegaard (1997: 303; 1989: 265). Stewart (2003: 132–81) provides a useful discussion of “the ironic thesis and Hegel’s presence” in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony. I agree with Stewart’s two fundamental claims that “Kierkegaard’s account of Romantic irony comes virtually verbatim from Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics” and that “The Concept of Irony is a profoundly Hegelian work with respect to its content” (135). My reading, however, focuses on places in The Concept of Irony—especially the final section—where Kierkegaard explores the aesthetic implications of Hegel’s dialectical approach to irony. 53 Kierkegaard (1997: 343; 1989: 311). 54 Kierkegaard (1997: 349; 1989: 319). 55 Kierkegaard (1997: 352; 1989: 323). 56 Kierkegaard (1997: 299; 1989: 261). 57 Kierkegaard (1997: 353; 1989: 324). 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Kierkegaard (1997: 355; 1989: 326). 61 Kierkegaard (1997: 356; 1989: 327). 62 Kierkegaard (1997: 330; 1989: 297).

Chapter 6 1 Throughout the chapter, I make parenthetical citations to Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie in the body of the text by citing the page number of the German edition (ÄT) followed by the page number of Hullot-Kentor’s translation (AT). My translations of passages from Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie rely heavily on Hullot-Kentor’s translation, but I sometimes depart from his renderings.

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2 Bernstein (2004: 142ff.) reads Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory as a dialectical response to a “vulgar materialism” that relegates all cultural phenomena to the realm of superstructure. 3 Kierkegaard (1997: 299; 1989: 261). 4 Hegel, VÄ II, 140; Hegel, LA I, 527. 5 It is clear that Adorno was familiar with virtually the entirety of Kierkegaard’s corpus, including The Concept of Irony, to which Adorno repeatedly refers in his first major philosophical publication, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933). Adorno’s early study on Kierkegaard’s aesthetics is a sustained polemical effort to rescue the aesthetic sphere from Kierkegaard’s ethicoreligious relegation of it to the domain of sheer immediacy. In his early study, Adorno singles out for attack the “crude excesses of Kierkegaard’s content-based aesthetics.” See Adorno, KK, 32. For the English translation, see Adorno, KC, 20. Tellingly, one of Adorno’s few references to Kierkegaard in his much later Aesthetic Theory is a dismissive nod to “Kierkegaard’s content-aesthetics” (ÄT, 18; AT, 7). Adorno’s polemical stance toward Kierkegaard, I would suggest, leads him to make reductive generalizations about Kierkegaard’s so-called “contentaesthetics” that mask his own profound debts to Kierkegaard—especially, Kierkegaard’s subtle engagement with Hegel in The Concept of Irony. Although I do not have the space to substantiate the claim, I think it can be argued that Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory remains strategically silent about Kierkegaard’s dialectical ontology of the artwork, which can hardly be said to rely on a content-based aesthetics. 6 Kierkegaard (1997: 353; 1989: 324). 7 Huhn (1985: 183) relevantly observes, “For Adorno, spirit is not the cause of art nor is it the locale wherein artmaking . . . takes place, but is rather a product of the artwork itself.” 8 As Adorno puts it several pages later, “The immanent process of artworks steps out as its own act [als ihr eigenes Tun]—not as something that people have done to it, nor as something merely for people” (ÄT, 125; AT, 80–1). 9 This perspective suggests how we might defend Adorno’s aesthetics against a prominent line of attack inaugurated by Peter Bürger and articulated in various ways by critics such as Neil Larsen and Lambert Zuidervaart. All of these critics reproach Adorno for presupposing an extravagant model of aesthetic autonomy that is complicit with bourgeois ideology. See Bürger (1984: lii), Zuidervaart (1991: 226), and Larsen (1990). I would argue, however, that such criticisms presuppose an undialectical reading of Adorno that takes aesthetic agency to be coterminous with aesthetic autonomy. Larsen (1990: 12), for instance,

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conflates autonomy and agency when he claims that Adorno transfers “agency from a ‘conventional’ historical subject to a ‘modern’ equivalent in the negative instrumentality of ‘autonomous’ art.” What Larsen and other critics ignore is Adorno’s careful effort to prise apart aesthetic agency from aesthetic autonomy. Explicitly denying that autonomy is an “a priori” of art, Adorno nonetheless argues that the category of autonomy plays an essential role in the dynamics of aesthetic agency (ÄT, 34; AT, 17). As Adorno puts it, “Art is for itself and not for itself; autonomy is forfeited without that which is heterogeneous to it” (ÄT, 17; AT, 6). In the force-field of the artwork, the claim to autonomy only gains force and plausibility when it is confronted with its Other, which threatens to reduce autonomy to ideological mystification. Hence, for Adorno, autonomy is not an unquestioned given but a provocation and challenge internal to art’s complex dynamics. Indeed, from an Adornian perspective, we can interrogate the binary thinking of critics such as Larsen and Bürger, who presuppose an undialectical either/or between aesthetic autonomy and thoroughgoing socioeconomic determinism. 10 Kierkegaard (1997: 330; 1989: 297). 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Kierkegaard (1997: 299; 1989: 261). 14 A variety of commentators have faulted Adorno’s aesthetics for being overly negative. For instance, Wellmer (1985: 22ff.) argues from a Habermassian perspective that Adorno’s crushing emphasis on aesthetic negativity prevents him from honoring art’s positive communicative potential. Also see note 21 below, where I defend Adorno against the typical charge that his aesthetics of negativity yields an insufficiently robust account of aesthetic experience. 15 Wellmer (1991: 8). 16 Schelling, StI, 610. 17 Heidegger (1975: 39). 18 Kant, KdU, §23, 245. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 A number of commentators have questioned whether Adorno’s notion of Erschütterung does justice to the complexity and richness of aesthetic experience. Jauß (1979: 146–68) offers perhaps the most sustained critique of Adorno’s concept of Erschütterung. According to Jauß, Adorno’s obsession with negativity results in an impoverished account of aesthetic experience as Erschütterung, a solipsistic “contemplative attitude” that ignores the

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“dialogic process between work, public, and author” (147–8). Jauß, by contrast, foregrounds the dimension of “communicative identification” in aesthetic experience—art’s capacity to elicit positive states in the audience such as sympathy and wonder (146–7). Jauß’s critique, however, errs in two directions. On the one hand, Jauß ignores Adorno’s sustained critique of experiential identification as an ideological support of late capitalism, which seeks to strengthen ego-identities in order to perpetuate the status quo. On the other hand, Jauß misinterprets Adorno’s account of Erschütterung as a form of solipsism because he fails to entertain the possibility of subtle modes of experiential objectivity that cannot be understood within the relatively crude framework of interpersonal dialogue. For other critiques of Adorno’s account of Erschütterung that are similar to Jauß’s, see Bohrer (1994: viii), Menke-Eggers (1988: 12), Wolin (1990: 44–5), and Altieri (2002). All of these critics, I suggest in this chapter, either ignore or give scant attention to the dialectical complexities involved in Adorno’s conception of aesthetic negativity and its crucial role in the dynamics of aesthetic agency. 22 Nietzsche (1998: 40). 23 Nietzsche (1994: §295, 230–1). 24 As far as I am aware, no critic has noted the Nietzschean resonances in Adorno’s account of Erschütterung. It is worth noting in this context that in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche explicitly invokes the concept of Erschütterung: he claims that Erschütterung is a sign of “higher culture” and contrasts it with the “happiness and comfort” characteristic of lower culture. See Nietzsche (1988: §277, 462). I think it could be argued that Adorno in effect imports Nietzsche’s notion of Erschütterung into the aesthetic sphere. 25 For instance, Johnson (1987: 69) complains that Adorno “finds it necessary to sacrifice the attempt to discover a practical role for art in order to preserve its critical negativity.” Jay (1984: 78) similarly claims that Adorno denies “the possibility of intersubjective communications in favour of aesthetic experience” and reproaches Adorno for failing to provide a “formula for political activism.” Against Johnson and Jay, I would suggest that Adorno’s dialectical theories of aesthetic negativity and Erschütterung, far from denying art’s link to praxis, compel us to reconceive aesthetic praxis as a radical intervention at the level of consciousness. Also see Sullivan and Lysaker (1992: 87) for a compelling defense of Adorno’s aesthetics against familiar “charges of pessimism, quietism, and resignation.”

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Epilogue 1 Bowie (2003b: 80). 2 De Man (1996: 163–84). 3 De Man (1996: 50). 4 Vattimo (1988: 125). 5 Jameson (1998: 85). 6 See the introduction and conclusion to Jameson (1981). 7 One might object that I fail to do justice to de Man’s repeated insistence on the immanence of his own methodology. I cannot address this issue in detail here, but I believe it can be shown that de Man’s first-order insistence on methodological immanence is vitiated by his second-order transcendent assumption of the primacy of figurality. For instance, in “The Concept of Irony,” de Man purports to shift the locus of agency from the reader to the text: “Words have a way of saying things which are not at all what you want them to say.” See De Man (1996: 181). Notice that although de Man grants the text enough agency to frustrate the reader’s or author’s desire for semantic stability, he nonetheless retains just enough readerly agency to detect—and to savor—the text’s ironic polysemy. De Man’s poststructuralist hermeneutics, in other words, betrays an abortive immanence in its constitutive incapacity to ironize the stable readerly standpoint from which to revel in the endless free play of the signifier. 8 Adorno, ÄT, 372; Adorno, AT, 250–1. 9 Altieri (2009: 200). 10 Adorno, ÄT, 26; Adorno, AT, 12. 11 Cascardi (1999). See especially the book’s final chapter, “Feeling and/as Force,” 241–65. 12 Ziarek (2004: 8). 13 Ibid. 14 Altieri (1998a). It should be noted that Altieri published a closely related essay in the same year from which I also draw: Altieri (1998b). 15 Larsen (1990: 29), for instance, argues that Adorno’s dialectical aesthetics collapses into a “radical idealism” that relies on a hopelessly metaphysical model of aesthetic agency. Vattimo (1988: 39) argues that Adorno’s aesthetics is untenably utopian and offers “confirmation of the still deeply humanistic vocation of Marxism.” Guillory (1993: 21) summarily dismisses Altieri’s defense of the aesthetic as a theoretically “weak” liberal humanist view.

Notes

196 16 Adorno, ÄT, 77; Adorno, AT, 48. 17 Altieri (1998a: 211–12). 18 Ibid., 205. 19 Ibid., 211. 20 Altieri (1998b: 84–5). 21 Altieri (1989: 7). 22 Altieri (1998a: 226).

23 Ibid., 216. I do not stress here Altieri’s (1998a) emphasis on the transpersonal affective “states” (232) afforded by art because this aspect of his theory seems to me to be an unnecessary remnant of his earlier Painterly Abstraction. I worry that Altieri’s theory of transpersonal states comes dangerously close to Greenberg’s ideology of aesthetic presence. Altieri’s later account of sublime negativity seems to me to be a more dialectical rendering of aesthetic experience, and I think it is separable conceptually from his theory of transpersonal states. 24 Altieri (1998a: 215–16). 25 Vattimo (1988: 63).

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Index Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory  13, 163 art, social force of  144 Erschütterung  154, 156–9 Hegel’s aesthetics “after of art”  149 modern art, dynamics of  148–9 Kant’s doctrine of the sublime  155–6 Kant’s third Critique  144–8 Enlightenment’s project of disenchantment  148 judgment of taste  146 modern art, ontology of  147 sensus communis  146–7 versus Kantian philosophy  13 Kierkegaardian irony  145 aesthetic spirit  149 ethical and social implications  152–3 force-field of antagonisms  150–1 Schein  150 negative dialectics of aesthetic experience  145, 153–60 Schlegel’s Romantic model of art  151–2 Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment  148 aesthetic modernism  3–4, 168n. 15 aesthetic pleasure harmony of the faculties  20–1 models of  24 phenomenological certainty of universal validity  23–4 question of intentionality  23 question of phenomenological distinctiveness  23 relation to moral life  25 role in judgment of taste  20–1, 25–6 sensus communis  35–42 universal voice  27–35 Agamben, Giorgio  5, 168n. 26, 169n. 30, 187n. 3 Allemann, Beda  183n. 6

Allison, Henry  18, 20, 31–2, 45, 53, 60, 63, 171nn. 3, 6, 9, 173nn. 19, 22, 174nn. 26, 29–30, 175nn. 2–3, 8, 176nn. 12, 15, 177n. 22, 178n. 35 Altieri, Charles  162–3, 167n. 10, 168nn. 15, 27, 170n. 56, 194n. 21, 195nn. 9, 14–15, 196nn. 17, 20–4 aesthetic force  14–15, 164–6 Enlightenment  164 interpretive immanence  165–6 Ameriks, Karl  18, 171n. 3, 175n. 2, 188n. 12, 190n. 39 Aquila, Richard  20, 171n. 9 Armstrong, Isobel  168n. 27 Arnold, Matthew  167n. 11 art’s critico-conceptual agency  4–5 Hegel’s “end of art” thesis  6 Schlegel’s theory of Romantic irony  6 art’s theoretico-conceptual enterprise  5 Barzun, Jacques  167n. 11 Baudrillard, Jean  168n. 21 Beach, Edward  182n. 44 Behler, Ernst  97, 101, 104, 108, 183nn. 6–7, 11, 13, 184nn. 14–15, 185n. 25 Beiser, Frederick  176n. 10, 180n. 3, 182n. 2, 183nn. 7, 13, 184n. 24 Benjamin, Walter  103, 184n. 21, 185n. 26 Bernstein, J. M.  19, 115, 167n. 4, 171nn. 4–5, 187n. 3, 192n. 2 Biemel, Walter  19, 170n. 1, 171n. 4, 172n. 11, 189n. 28 Blanton, C. Daniel  5, 168n. 25 Böhler, Michael  189n. 33 Bohrer, Karl Heinz  183n. 6, 185n. 26, 194n. 21 Bowie, Andrew  72, 168nn. 27–8, 169n. 31, 176n. 16, 177n. 24, 179nn. 58, 60, 180n. 3, 195n. 1

208

Index

Brandt, Reinhard  176n. 12 Breazeale, Daniel  180n. 3 Bubner, Rüdiger  183nn. 6–7 Bürger, Peter  192n. 9 Carnois, Bernard  48, 175nn. 3–4, 7 Cascardi, Anthony, Consequences of Enlightenment  163–4, 167n. 10, 195n. 11 Chaouli, Michel  182n. 4 Chignell, Andrew  173n. 18 Clark, Michael  168n. 27 Clark, T. J.  168n. 15 Cohen, Ted  31–2, 173n. 19 Critchley, Simon  5, 168n. 26 Croce, Benedetto  115, 186n. 2 Danto, Arthur  4, 115, 168nn. 21, 23, 169n. 30, 187n. 3 de Man, Paul, “The Concept of Irony”  161–2, 169n. 29, 195nn. 2–3, 7 Derrida, Jacques  177n. 23 Desmond, William  5, 167n. 2, 168n. 27, 187n. 8, 188n. 10 Dörflinger, Bernd  177n. 25 During, Simon  168n. 22 Düsing, Klaus  177n. 20, 178n. 33 Egginton, William  183n. 6 Enlightenment instrumental rationality  2 Kant’s third Critique  19 Erschütterung  154, 156–9 Fichte, J. G.  10, 17–19, 75–8, 80–2, 93–5, 99–102, 104–6, 108, 113, 180nn. 6, 10–11, 13, 181nn. 16–19, 183nn. 7, 13, 186n. 39, 190n. 39 Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre  77 Förster, Eckart  179n. 52 Frank, Manfred  101, 169n. 29, 183n. 7 freedom and natural necessity  10, 48, 75, 87, 122 Friedman, Michael  176n. 16 Frischmann, Bärbel  183n. 7

Gallagher, Catherine  168n. 22 German Romanticism  3, 9, 13–14, 47, 68, 73, 91, 94, 141, 163 Gethmann-Siefert, Anne-Marie  187n. 6 Geulen, Eva  168n. 21, 169n. 30, 187n. 3 Ginsborg, Hannah  171n. 9, 173n. 22 Golding, John  168n. 17 Götze, Martin  183n. 7 Graham, Gordon  167n. 11 Gram, Moltke  180n. 5 Greenblatt, Stephen  168n. 22 Guillory, John  168n. 22, 195n. 15 Guyer, Paul  18, 20, 26–7, 32, 34, 45, 60, 63, 65–6, 171nn. 3, 7–8, 172nn. 13, 15, 173nn. 17, 20, 22–3, 174nn. 25–6, 30–1, 176nn. 11–12, 15, 177nn. 19–21, 178n. 29 Habermas, Jürgen  187n. 9 Hammermeister, Kai  169n. 31 Hanna, Robert  171n. 5 Harries, Karsten  139, 190n. 49 Hegel, G. W. F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right  107–8 “end of art” thesis  6, 115 Faith and Knowledge  122 Lectures on the History of Philosophy  104 “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism”  71–2 Phenomenology of Spirit  110–11, 126 Science of Logic  110 self-completing skepticism  110–11 Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics  11, 148 Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory ‘‘after of art’’  149 modern art, dynamics of  148–9 “after of art”  115–16 objective and subjective genitive  118–19 religion and philosophy  118–19 Romantic art and spiritual knowledge  120–1 diachronic conception of art  118 Divine  117–18 “end of art” thesis  115

Index hermeneutics of suspicion  163 “Historical Deduction”  11–12, 116–17 Kant’s third Critique  123–8 Novalis  135–7 Schelling  130–2 Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man  129–30 Schlegelian irony  133–4 Solger  137–8 Kant’s third Critique  121–2 Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony  117 modern culture, contradictions of  122 synchronic understanding of art  117–18 Heidegger, Martin  153–4, 164, 193n. 17 Heintel, Peter  176n. 16 Henrich, Dieter  48, 175nn. 5–6, 179n. 51, 190n. 47, 191n. 50 hermeneutics of suspicion  6, 161, 163, 165 Hillis Miller, Joseph  169n. 29 Horowitz, Gregg  188n. 12, 189n. 33 Horstmann, Rolf-Peter  170n. 2, 175n. 9, 176nn. 12, 14–15 Houlgate, Stephen  187n. 7 Huhn, Thomas  192n. 7 Ichschrift  75 intellectual intuition, regulative status of  81–2 objective reality and theoretical objectivity  80 principle of purposiveness  79 transcendental unity of apperception  80–1 Immerwahr, Raymond  183n. 8 intellectual intuition  10, 73, 75–8, 81–9, 95, 98–9, 101–2, 107, 109, 126, 130, 132, 180nn. 5–6, 10, 181nn. 16, 18, 30 irony  93–114, 132–42 Jähnig, Dieter  83, 181n. 40 Jameson, Fredric  5, 161–2, 168nn. 20, 25, 169n. 30, 195nn. 5–6 Jauß, Hans Robert  194n. 21 Jay, Martin  194n. 25 Johnson, Pauline  194n. 25

209

Kalar, Brent  171n. 9 Kandinsky, Wassily, On the Spiritual in Art  3, 168nn. 16, 14 Kant, Immanuel, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics  77 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (first Critique) “Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic”  53 principle of nature’s systematicity  53–4 principle of purposiveness, transcendental principle  56 Third Antinomy of  45 Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (second Critique) aesthetic experience  50–1 Fact of Reason apodictic certainty  48 a priori certainty  48 contemplation of beauty  50 moral law, immediate awareness of  49–50 freedom  49 Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (third Critique) Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory  13, 144 Enlightenment’s project of disenchantment  148 judgment of taste  146 modern art, ontology of  147 sensus communis  146–7 aesthetic pleasure disinterested delight  26 harmony of the faculties  20–1 models of  24 phenomenological certainty of universal validity  23–4 question of intentionality  23 question of phenomenological distinctiveness  23 relation to moral life  25 role in judgment of taste  20–1, 25–6 sensus communis  35–42 universal voice  27–35 “Analytic of the Beautiful” aesthetic pleasure  7–8 judgment of taste, moments in  25

210

Index

Continental philosophy  17 Hegel’s “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” “new mythology”  72 Romantic and idealist aesthetics  71–2 versus Schiller’s Letters  72 inflationary model of aesthetic pleasure  66–8 Longuenesse’s structural approach  66 Marc-Wogau’s general interpretive approach  21 principle of nature’s purposiveness  8 principle of purposiveness  46 epistemic status of  52–3, 63–4 regulative dimension of taste  62–3 regulative principle  55 theoretical cognition  64–5 transcendental principles  56 reconstructive approach  18 Schelling  9–10 Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man beauty, regulative and constitutive approaches to  70–1 modernity  69 Schlegel’s theory of Romantic irony  10 structural approach  19, 45 Kemal, Salim  171n. 7 Kemp Smith, Norman  54, 176n. 10 Kierkegaard, Søren  12–14, 68, 114, 117, 138–42, 144–5, 149–53, 163, 170n. 49, 187n. 5, 191nn. 50, 52–7, 60–2, 192nn. 3, 5–6, 193nn. 10, 13 Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony  12–13, 140–2, 145, 149, 163 Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory  145 aesthetic spirit  149 ethical and social implications  152–3 force-field of antagonisms  150–1 Schein  150 Knox, Israel  115, 186nn. 1–2 Kohler, Georg  36, 172n. 11, 174nn. 27, 30 Krämling, Gerhard  178nn. 28, 33 Kroner, Richard  171n. 5, 182n. 43 Kulenkampff, Jens  20, 36, 45, 171nn. 3, 7, 174n. 28, 177n. 25

Kuspit, Donald  168nn. 20–1 Kwon, Dae-Joong  187n. 3 Larsen, Neil  168n. 25, 192n. 9, 195n. 15 Longuenesse, Béatrice  66, 125, 171n. 6, 172n. 15, 173n. 22, 174n. 31, 178nn. 31–2, 189n. 23 McCumber, John  179n. 37, 189n. 33 Makkreel, Rudolf  177n. 25 Marc-Wogau, Konrad, Vier Studien zu Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft  20–1, 171n. 11, 176n. 13 Menke-Eggers, Christoph  194n. 21 Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth  101, 169n. 29, 183n. 7 Nancy, Jean-Luc  5, 168n. 24, 169n. 29, 175n. 6 Naticchia, Chris  175n. 1 nature and freedom  8–9, 12–13, 22, 46–7, 52, 59–61, 63–4, 66–8, 70, 72–4, 79–80, 82, 85, 88–9, 100, 116, 124, 126, 128–30, 132, 147, 156, 172n. 11, 177n. 25, 178n. 28, 179n. 37 Nerheim, Hjördis  178n. 33 Neuhouser, Frederick  180n. 10, 181n. 16 Nietzsche, Friedrich  1, 145, 154, 167nn. 1, 9, 11, 168n. 28, 194nn. 22–4 Beyond Good and Evil  158–9 The Birth of Tragedy  2, 158 Oetjen, Malte  187n. 3 Parker, Chris  168n. 22 Perniola, Mario  187n. 9 Pinkard, Terry  180n. 3 Pippin, Robert  115, 139, 187nn. 3, 6, 191nn. 50–1 Pöggeler, Otto  183n. 6 principle of nature’s purposiveness Kant’s first Critique, transcendental principles  56 Kant’s third Critique  46, 79, 87–8 constitutive dimension of taste 65–8 epistemic status of  52–3, 63–4

Index regulative dimension of taste  62–3 theoretical cognition  64–5 transcendental principles  56 Schelling’s Ichschrift  79 Rancière, Jacques  5, 168n. 25 Reid, Jeffrey  185n. 29 Rogerson, Kenneth  20, 171n. 7 Rohlf, Michael  177n. 20 Ross, Stephen  168n. 22 Rush, Fred  183n. 7 Rutter, Benjamin  187n. 4 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie  167n. 11, 186n. 55 Schelling, F. W. J., Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature  82 Kant’s third Critique principle of purposiveness  79, 87–8 sensus communis aestheticus  86 ‘Unknown’ Absolute  87 On the I as Principle of Philosophy (Ichschrift)  75 intellectual intuition  75–8 intellectual intuition, regulative status of  81–2 principle of purposiveness  79 theoretical objectivity  80 transcendental unity of apperception  80–1 versus Kantian philosophy  9–10 Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism  80 Romanticism, anxieties of  89–91 System of Transcendental Idealism  3, 9 System of Transcendental Idealism: aesthetic intuition  84–9 intellectual intuition  73, 83 Kant’s first Critique epistemology  84–5 Kant’s third Critique  74–5, 85–6 “new mythology”  74 Schiller, Friedrich  1, 7, 23, 47, 72–3, 116, 121, 123, 128–30, 146, 178n. 36, 179nn. 37–8, 51, 53, 188n. 12, 189nn. 30, 33 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man  68–71

211

Schlegel, Friedrich, Catholic theology  114 “Dialogue on Mythology”  111 “new mythology”  111–14 Schlegel’s theory of Romantic irony  6 Anschauung  102–3 antifoundationalist skepticism  94 Athenaeum Fragments  96–7 “Dialogue on Mythology”  98 Fichtean category of intellectual intuition  95, 100–1 Hegel’s critique  95–6 Behler’s response  104 conviction  108 Fichtean subjectivism  105 Fichte’s intuitional epistemology  106 negativity  110 problem of infinite regress  109 self-creation and self-destruction  108 Solger’s conception of irony  110 standard dismissal of  103–4 Hegel’s perspective  10–11 immediate cognition, non-intuitional model of  103 intuition  98–9 ironist’s mood, descriptions of  96 Kant’s philosophy  99–100 versus Kantian philosophy  10 Lyceum Fragments  96–7 “On Incomprehensibility”  94 Schelling’s philosophy  99 second-order irony, formulations of  98 Selbstanschauung  102 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  105, 169n. 31, 185nn. 29–30 Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation  3, 153, 158, 168n. 13, 169n. 31 Seel, Gerhard  168n. 21 Selbstanschauung  102, 184n. 18 self-creation and self-destruction  97, 104, 108 sensus communis  8, 21, 35, 39–43, 45, 62, 70, 86, 146–7, 174nn. 29, 31 nature of aesthetic pleasure  35–42 Speight, Allen  188nn. 11–12, 190n. 39 Stevens, Wallace  4, 168nn. 18–19

212 Stewart, Jon  191n. 52 Strohschneider-Kohrs, Ingrid  183n. 6, 185n. 26 suspicion  161 Tillette, Xavier  179n. 52 transcendental principle of purposiveness  56 Tuschling, Burkhard  19, 59, 171nn. 4, 6, 177nn. 17–18, 25 Vattimo, Gianni  5, 115, 161–2, 166, 168n. 26, 169n. 30, 187n. 3, 195nn. 4, 15, 196n. 25

Index Walzel, Oskar  183n. 6 Wellmer, Albrecht  153, 193nn. 14–15 Wenzel, Christian  20, 171n. 10, 174nn. 25, 28 Wicks, Robert  20, 171n. 10 Wieland, Wolfgang  20, 171n. 9 Wilm, Emil  189n. 33 Wolin, Richard  194n. 21 Zane Shaw, Devin  180n. 2, 181n. 41 Zeltner, Herman  182n. 45, 189n. 37 Ziarek, Krzysztof  163–4, 195n. 12 Zuckert, Rachel  20, 171nn. 3, 9 Zuidervaart, Lambert  192n. 9



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