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Aesthetic/Political Disinterest in Matthew Arnold and Immanuel Kant *

3. BEAUTY AS THE SYMBOL OF MORALITY

In what sense, then, is beauty “the symbol of morality”? In other words, how is it possible that the beautiful, which we like without interest, can be the symbol of the morally good, which is “connected necessarily with an interest”67? In other words, why does Arnold’s dismissal of Wragg’s “hideous” example from the realm of universal truth and morality, and therefore, from the (idea of) the State, constitute another serious and ethically suspect misreading of Kant?

Kant argues that symbols contain “indirect exhibitions of the concept”, and

“symbolic exhibitions use an analogy”.68 Kant’s example for the symbol that exhibits this concept analogically is the “animate body” that symbolically exhibits “a monarchy ruled according to its own constitutional laws”.69 Since there is no similarity between the symbol and what it symbolises (i.e. between the animate body and monarchy),

“there is certainly one between the rules by which we reflect on the two and on how they operate”.70 In other words, we reflect by the same rules on the operation of the body as on monarchy. The similarity between these reflections is that of the relationship between the subject and the objects of its presentation, which, in both cases, is “free”.

As Kant argues, taste (i.e. the ability to judge the beautiful) “legislates to itself, just as reason does regarding the power of desire”.71 Both our judgment about the beautiful and our judgement about the good contain the element of freedom. Yet, aesthetic judgement, which is supposed to offer a bridge from truth to morality, is only similar to moral judgement while remaining distinct from it (one is determinative while the other is reflective), and it is only an analogy, the fact that aesthetic judgments are

65 Ibid., p. 216.

66 Ibid. [emphasis added]

67 Ibid., p. 354.

68 Ibid., p. 352.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid. [emphasis added]

71 Ibid., p. 229.

as if they were moral judgments, that allows for beauty to become the symbol of morality. As Kant puts it later, while “judging the beautiful, we present the freedom of the imagination (and hence of our power of sensibility) as harmonising with the lawfulness of the understanding”, “[i]n a moral judgement, we think the freedom of the will as the will’s harmony with itself according to universal laws of reason”.72 Thus, the sensible object (the animate body) exhibits the concept of freedom “not by means of direct [sensible] intuition but only according to an analogy with one, i.e. a transfer of our reflection on an object of intuition to an entirely different concept, to which perhaps no intuition can ever directly correspond”.73 Thus, the analogy seems to lie between the two mental acts: between that of judging the beautiful and that of judging the good. In the first case, judgement is autonomous in the sense of being free from all interest, in the second case, reason legislates for itself, it gives itself its own laws.

As Alexander Rueger and Sahan Evren equally explain:

In the case of beauty and the morally good the probably most significant parallel between the judgement of taste and moral judgements lies in the role freedom plays in both instances. In judgements of taste the imagination is able to unify a manifold intuition without a (determinate) concept and hence its operation is free. [...] In the moral case, by analogy, the will is free in the sense that it determines itself ‘in accordance with the laws of reason’. In this way an analogy is established without the claim that there is a further undelying principle or concept that would unify.74

Yet, the question rises, in what sense we can judge, according to Kant, the animate body as beautiful? What are the implications of the disinterested contemplation of the body, what would it mean that we do not care for the body’s actual existence?

Arkady Plotnitsky explains Kant’s conception of the natural body as it emerges from the First Critique as follows:

[w]hen we think of our bodies as having a certain shape or organization, defined by such features as the head, the arms and the legs, and so forth, we think of it on the basis of (phenomenal) appearances. The very concept of the body is defined by this way of looking at it, possibly with inner organs, such as the heart, the liver, the brain, and so forth, added on. When, however, we think of

72 Ibid., p. 354. [emphasis in the original]

73 Ibid., p. 353.

74 Rueger, Alexander and Sahan Evren. “The Role of Symbolic Presentation in Kant’s Theory of Taste.”

British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 45, no. 3, 2005, p. 232. [emphasis added]

“THE HUMAN FORM”

the body as constituted by atoms or elementary particles, even if we think of the latter classically (in terms of physics or epistemology), we think of the body as a (material) thing in itself.75

In contrast, what applies to the “sublime and the beautiful in the human figure”, Kant describes as follows:

we must not have in mind, as bases determining our judgement, concepts or purposes for which man has all his limbs, letting the limbs’ harmony with these purposes influence our aesthetic judgement (which would then cease to be pure), even though it is certainly a necessary condition of aesthetic liking as well that the limbs not conflict with those purposes. Aesthetic purposiveness is the lawfulness of the power of judgement in its freedom. Whether we then like the object depends on how we suppose the imagination to relate to it, but for this liking to occur the imagination must on its own sustain the mind in a free activity. If, on the one hand, the judgement is determined by anything else, whether a sensation proper or a concept of the understanding, then the judgement is indeed lawful, but it is not one made by a free power of judgement.76 This passage immediately follows the passage about the ocean (i.e. “we must be able to view the ocean as poets do”77), which Paul de Man analyses in his discussion of the sublime,78 even though Kant is speaking of not only the sublime, but also the beautiful.

Although de Man uses this specific passage in order to point to the disarticulation of Kant’s system, one can apply his argument about the “pure aesthetic vision” of the ocean to Kant’s pure aesthetic judgement of the human figure. Following de Man’s reading, the fact that aesthetic judgement is “pure” or else, disinterested, should disrupt the “aesthetic ideology”, such as Arnold’s, positing a metaphorical (rather than analogical) relationship between the natural body, the body judged beautiful, and the morally good. As Geoffrey Harpham puts it, in de Man’s version, Kant insists that “‘the faculties should maintain their internal system of differentiated powers and prerogatives, and not be tempted into various forms of illusory, premature synthesis’

(Norris) of, for example, phenomenal perception and ethical categories, or theoretical

75 Plotnitsky, Arkady. “Thinking Singularity with Immanuel Kant and Paul de Man: Aesthetics, Epistemology, History and Politics.” Romantic Circles, 2005. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/deman/

plotnitsky/plotnitsky.html. Accessed 20 January 2020.

76 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 270. [emphasis in the original]

77 Ibid., p. 270.

78 de Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 82.

reason”.79 Indeed, this is precisely what Kant claims in the above passage: when we aesthetically judge the human figure, we contemplate it without interest, without subsuming our presentation of it either under the concepts of the understanding or under the concepts of reason. We do not care whether it is good, or what it is good for, we do not consider what its meaning is, or how “we think it”.80 Instead, we base our judgement merely on “how we see it”,81 and find pleasure in the free play of our own faculties during its presentation. Thus, Arnold, by reminding us to forget Wragg’s

“hideousness” (related to the disharmonious sound of her name) when we think about cultivation, and concentrate on the idea of the State, constitutes another instance of the misreading of Kantian “disinterestedness”, since Arnold posits a metaphorical relationship between the realm of the beautiful and the realm of the good, which he, as a rhetorician of the aesthetic state, posits as an object of beauty.