Kant's Aesthetics

“An object is monstrous where by its size it defeats the end that forms its concept.

The colossal is the mere presentation of a concept which is almost too

great for presentation, i.e., borders on the relatively monstrous; for

the end to be attained by the presentation of a concept is made harder

to realize by the intuition of the object being almost too great for

our faculty of apprehension. A pure judgement upon the sublime must,

however, have no end belonging to the object as its determining

ground, if it is to be aesthetic and not to be tainted with any

judgement of understanding or reason.”

Kant

“Now in the aesthetic estimate of such an immeasurable whole, the sublime

does not lie so much in the greatness of the number, as in the fact

that in our onward advance we always arrive at proportionately greater

units.”

Kant

O.K. there are a few things going on here in these two quotes:

1. A monstrous thing is so big that you cannot grasp it. Consequently Kant thinks this is sublime.

2. The colossal is not so big that it can be “taken-in” as a whole. Not particularly important to Kant.

3. A pure judgment must not identify a theme and show with reason its nature.

4. To be sublime the thing cannot not be grasped as a unit but as something infinite.

There are many contemporary postmodern works that embody these attributes. Christo’s Umbrellas is great example.

Christo, America's leading conceptual artist, raised and spent 26 million dollars on his Umbrellas, 1991 project.

http://home.earthlink.net/~kitathome/LunarLight/moonlight_gallery/images/1991-10-01-11_ChristoUm.jpg

Over 3,000 industrial-sized umbrellas were placed simultaneously over large tracts of land in California and Japan. These umbrellas extended beyond what your eye could see. So that from the vantage point of any one umbrella there was always one you couldn’t see. Intellectually, one could imagine that they stretched from California to Japan.

Clearly this is an example of something that cannot be grasped as a whole, you cannot take it in as one unit or as an end in itself.

Related to point three, not so much as our judging it but from what the piece is about, it doesn’t make any sense. It cost 26 million dollars, it really was a monumental project, and at the end of 18 days was completely dismantled as if nothing had existed. So for us it would be almost impossible to “taint” this piece with any “judgement of understanding or reason” simply because it is a monstrous act of anti-reason.

Another more recent piece is Rauschenberg’s ¼ Mile work, a series of lithographs, lined end on end to cover the distance of a quarter mile.

http://www3.nb.sympatico.ca/motion/images/luelrausch.gif

Composition for an artist is how the images, forms, colors, light, etc balance in the work as a whole. This is impossible to do with the Rauschenberg piece because he or us would never see the image as whole, this would then fall under Kant’s concept of the sublime and be superior to artists that make brilliant compositions.

If I were a postmodernist I could come up with all kinds of variations on this and other Kantian concepts of the sublime. For instance, a painting which folds in two would then have essentially two surfaces facing in opposite directions. You wouldn’t be able to see the painting as whole. Get the idea? Of course this would destroy the concept as composition of the painting as a whole.

 

(Edited by Newberry on 9/02, 8:43am)

“For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be

contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason,

which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be

excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself

which does admit of sensuous presentation.”

Kant

By “sensuous form” Kant doesn’t mean a beautiful curve of a woman’s hip.  “Now the concept of an object, so far as it contains at the same time the ground of the actuality of this object, is called its end, and the agreement of a thing with that constitution of things which is only possible according to ends, is called the finality of its form.”

Form is the whole work; painting, symphony, novel, sculpture, etc. The “sensuous” part is not about eroticism but about the communication of the form through the senses.

Kant was dead before Beethoven’s 9^th, but he would/should have known about Bach, Mozart, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Dante,…the artists’ works circulated as copies, etchings, etc. It is very difficult to understand how Kant could elevate something that “no adequate presentation of them is possible” over Don Giovanni or The Pieta. (Though envy as a possible motive would fit his adamant rejection of beauty as “repugnant” in favor of his concepts of the sublime which awaken “displeasure.”

Kant’s calling something aesthetically sublime with no referent to “sensuous form”, i.e. art, is an impossible break between the highest, grandest visions of artists with their means of presentation. He relegates “sensuous form” to merely a craft and conceptually dismisses great artists from greatness.  

BTW, in my late 20’s and early 30’s, many postmodern artists when they viewed my work told me, with a wink, what a great craftsman I was. I knew then that they were maliciously stating that I was an inferior artist because I painted integrated works and didn’t get the bigger, more enlightening picture, that great art wasn’t about expression through paint but was conceptual with a disturbing edge to it, i.e. the Kantian view of the sublime. They probably didn’t know anything about Kant, at least not with any depth, but these types of thoughts were/are rampant through the art world.

Thanks Michelle for the including the link to the poem and the connections you make. Also for the acknowledgment.

The truth is I have lived so long in relationship to Kant's Critique it feels like a neurotic brother! and its easy for me to remember comments he made like the very relevant one below in relationship to what you have brought forth.

"We have no reason to fear that the feeling of the sublime will

suffer from an abstract mode of presentation like this, which is

altogether negative as to what is sensuous. For though the

imagination, no doubt, finds nothing beyond the sensible world to

which it can lay hold, still this thrusting aside of the sensible

barriers gives it a feeling of being unbounded; and that removal is

thus a presentation of the infinite. As such it can never be

anything more than a negative presentation-but still it expands the

soul. Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Law

than the commandment: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,

or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under

the earth, etc." This commandment can alone explain the enthusiasm

which the Jewish people, in their moral period, felt for their

religion when comparing themselves with others, or the pride
inspired by Mohammedanism."
Kant

Kant is making clear again that the sublime is not associated with sensuous form, with art. The sublime is something that “expands the soul” and yet has the indefinable something of the “infinite” not to be found in any image or likeness.

One perspective on Kant’s critique that is very important is that he is constantly putting down the superlative power of art. If he were commenting on the sublimity of Ideas as such that could be understood, but he chooses to create a context in which his concepts of the sublime are juxtapose against art at every opportunity.





(Edited by Newberry on 9/03, 3:14pm)

Jonathan asks:
"Would you say that the following reflects the essence of Kant's emphasis of the sublime over the beautiful:

"Metaphysics -- the science that deals with the fundamental nature of reality -- involves man's widest abstractions. It includes such a vast sum of knowledge and such a long chain of concepts that no man could hold it all in the focus of his immediate conscious awareness. Yet he needs that sum and the awareness to guide him -- he needs the power to summon them into full conscious focus.""

No. Not at all. Rand's statement above would fit nicely in how Kant sees beauty: form, theme, end, connected to the senses; the total package.

By including the concept of the formless nature of the sublime Kant breaks with the above, irrevocably.

Representation depictions of color on a two-dimensional surface, painting, is a universal form that has been with us since the dawn of humanity, over 30,000 years and counting. The furthest reaches of painting, in actuality the sublime, the integration of spatial depth, form, light, and movement has been advanced by such artists as da Vinci, Rembrandt, and many other artists that have perhaps not integrated everything but have furthered particular aspects, like Monet's development of color/daylight or Bouguereau's realistic advancement of painting life-like flesh.

Kant's inclusion of the formless in his definition of the sublime wipes out the defining characteristic of art, such the medium of painting, so that the sublime is not about the medium or form but about thought only.

There is a very important point in understanding Kant's aesthetic thought, and which can only be gained by standing back and seeing how he juxtaposes sublime vs.beauty/art.

There is no good justification, in aesthetics, to replace art for thought.