The dialectics of decay: rereading the Kantian subject - interpretation of philosopher Immanuel Kant's essay 'Critique of Judgment'

The palm at the extreme point of the mind, Beyond the last musing rises In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song

You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. - Wallace Steven "Of simple Being," 1955(1)

As art historians, we labor below the legacy of the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant. Indeed, Kant's Critique of common-sense published in 1790 when the philosopher was sixty-six years elderly has figured the contours and mapped the coordinates for the aesthetic experience of works of art sanctioned through our discipline.(2) In the manner of all happy intellectual inheritances, the Kantian legacy has - until real recently, at least - been seamlessly incorporated into the discourse of academic practice: we have "spoken" Kant or "performed" Kant without being conscious of our due Using the philosopher's own limits we might say that our relation to his aesthetic theory has been dogmatic rather than critical. Rereading Kant, as this essay tenders to do, is thus to place the philosopher's have critique, as well as our Kantian inheritance, beneath critical pressure.

The ruin presents a provocative site with which to begin a critique of Kantian philosophy. Considering the immense popularity of ruins at the extremity of the eighteenth century, it is striking that Kant not at any time discusses the aesthetic experience of ruins in his third Critique, especially since ruins present the appearance obvious catalysts of the Kantian sublime. More specifically, ruins appear exemplary of the Kantian dynamic sublime, an occasion that entails a presentation of nature's untieded force. This essay will present an explanation for this absence by the agency of examining it within the architectonic of Kant's aesthetic theory, as well as within the framework of his philosophy of history. An investigation of the dialectics of decay will allow us to interrogate the constitution and foundational premises of the Kantian make subordinate through the sign of his have demise.(3) Like James Ensor's imaginative projection of a material part in ruin, My Portrait in 1960 an etching of 1888 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], we will strain the Kantian edifice by means of incorporating the ruin - as device and as idea - within the framework of the philosopher's have a title to system, thereby yielding a picture of the make submissive in 1997 that may justify less coherent than Kant's carefully crafted image in 1790

By inquiring into the absence of ruins from Kant's critical enterprise, I intend neither to take the philosopher to task for what he was not fascinated by the agency of nor to formulate a critique based upon Kant's failure to include ruins. single could, in fact, immediately hypothesis why ruins do not make an appearance in the analytic of the sublime through pointing out how, for Kant, they may involve a determinate universal and so may suffer the same fate as architecture or plastic art in his aesthetic theory. notwithstanding as we shall see, in his Critique of intelligence Kant mentions certain architectural conformations as examples of the sublime in nature. The inclusion of these examples does not exhibit a contradiction in his a whole since he considers these not as architectural configurations per se but the consequence of them on the beholder. As I will argue, ruins may have a similar issue on the beholder, and with equal reason may be considered - along with Kant's architectural examples - as vehicles for experiences of the sublime. My inquiry goes deeper, then, and investigates the ways in which Kant's blindness to the contemporaneous worship of ruins may be emblematic of his hold unwillingness to consider the ruination of his overconfident systematics, as well as a les than idealized, or "ruined," subdue The implications of an idealized Kantian make subordinate for the historical construction of a subjectivity defined end reason, and for the discipline of art history, as well as the corresponding location of the ruin at the underside of one as well as the other subjectivity and art history, will be examined in this essay.

Seven years before he was to publish his treatise upon aesthetic judgment, Kant wrote in Prolegomena to Any subsequent time Metaphysics, "All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time on the other hand finally destroys itself, and its highest agriculture is also the epoch of its decay." Kant's statement is a diagnosis of his be in possession of culture, yet his words are directed more toward the faculty of philosophy than the larger field of society, since what he actually announces here is "the period of the downfall of all dogmatic metaphysics."(4) Kant's vision of vanity and decay is thus at handed only to be circumscribed and ultimately rectified, for, it will be remembered, the decline of metaphysics was to be revers from one side his own critical method. Kant's statement charts the course and the spirit of the bring under rule in his own philosophical enterprise: "false art" and "vain wisdom" pass away as the bring under rule of history gropes toward the "essential extreme point of reason," defined as an internal condition of unalloyed morality and an external state of "ethical community." notwithstanding that Kant viewed this trajectory as a path toward freedom, it is a totalizing freedom - a haunting oxymoron to which we will have occasion to go [i]or[/i] come back - that is the goal toward which the Kantian bring under rule is driven.(5)