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August 2, 2010
In Kant's Critique of Judgement art is commonly taken to be autonomous in an enlightened modernity. As autonomous art it is generally seen to be merely aesthetical, where aesthetics has come to mean beauty, so it lies outside truth, reason and morality. If taken to be outside truth and reason, then if art speaks in its own voice, it does not speak truthfully or rationally.
Aesthetic autonomy, or inscribing art within the autonomous realm of the aesthetic, means that art lives in an expelled space; a space in which art is an object of taste based on a certain kind of pleasurable experience is outside of truth and morality.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, rose, Adelaide Parklands, 2010
This is the heritage of positivism in which science has a hegemony over questions of truth and which denies that art has any cognitive potential, is deprived of its power to speak the truth and, as a self-sufficient form of practice, loses its critical edge.
What we have inherited from Kant are the aesthetic concepts such as aesthetic reflective judgment, or the judgement of taste, which questions the paradigm of knowing as subsuming particulars under universals; the act of genius, which conceptualizes free action as creative and legislative rather than as rule following; sensus communis, which installs the notion of an epistemic community that breaks the claims of methodological solipism and permits a re-inscription of sensibility; and the sublime which provides for a concept of alterity or otherness that challenges the sovereignty of the self-determining autonomous moral agent.
There is a critical edge to Kant's Critique of Judgement as it was concerned to preserve something like teleological thought in a culture increasingly dominated by positivism and scientism---art's apparent unreason reveals the irrationality of a formal, enlightened, instrumental reason. This critical edge is buried in the refuge that aesthetics represents. This critical edge that is lost when some postmodern-era theorists reject traditional philosophies of art and the aesthetic as an autonomous sphere; but who then claim for their own practice a kind of reflective freedom – and hence autonomy that is beyond the discourse of science and philosophy.
There is a repression of what needs to be salvaged.
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One strand that emerges out of Kant is an experiential formalism---aesthetics is about a certain kind of pleasurable experience caused by the formal organization of objects or aesthetic properties” such as beauty.
Another strand is more concerned with what aesthetic experience points or refers to than with the experience itself. Artworks, from this perspective, are valuable in the end not because of what they make us feel so much as because of what, directly or indirectly, they mean: they embody meanings.