Aesthetic/Political Disinterest in Matthew Arnold and Immanuel Kant *
4. THE HUMAN FIGURE
Yet, Kant’s use of the term “human figure”, in the above passage, is, at the same time, indeed deeply problematic: as if contradicting the passage quoted above, §17 “On the Ideal of Beauty” claims that “the ideal of the beautiful […] must be expected solely in the human figure”,82 and that, therefore, man cannot be the object of a pure aesthetic judgement that has nothing to do with “ideals”. As Derrida puts it in The Truth in Painting: although “the ideal of the beautiful can be found only in the human form”, man “cannot be the object of a pure judgement of taste”.83 Thus one encounters two paradoxes: the one analysed by Derrida lies within §17 itself, while the other lies between §17, which ultimately points to the impossibility of pure aesthetic judgment about the human figure on the one hand, and Kant’s argument in the “General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments” quoted above on the other, which concerns precisely the possibility conditions of pure aesthetic judgement about the human figure. Let us consider the paradox involved in §17 first.
In §16, Kant argues that there are two kinds of beauty: free beauty, which “does not presuppose a concept of what the object is meant to be”,84 and accessory beauty,
79 Harpham, Geoffrey. Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society. Durham, Duke University Press, 1999, p. 52.
80 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 270.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., p. 235. [emphasis in the original]
83 Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987. p.
84 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 229
“THE HUMAN FORM”
which “does presuppose such a concept, as well as the object’s perfection in terms of that concept”.85 Hence, pure judgements of taste only occur when we judge “free beauty”. Since the “beauty of the human being” does “presuppose the concept of the purpose that the thing is meant to be”,86 and man “has the purpose of its existence within himself”,87 his beauty cannot be but adherent beauty, and, therefore, the human being cannot be the object of a pure aesthetic judgement of taste. Redfield calls this an “empirical event”,88 by which he means that, contradicting Kant’s whole endeavour to investigate the subjective possibility conditions of judgements, it is the object itself that decides whether our judgement upon it can or cannot be pure.
In §17, Kant further claims that since there is a deeply hidden basis, common to all human beings, underlying their agreement in judging, there must be an idea of taste by which everybody judges any object of taste.89 This idea, according to Kant, is the ideal of the beautiful. Since this is an ideal, it “must be fixed by a concept of objective purposiveness”, that is, “there must be some underling idea of reason, governed by determinate concepts, that determines a priori the purpose on which the object’s inner possibility rests”.90 Since only man has the purpose of its existence within himself, it is equally “man, alone among all objects in the world, who admits of an ideal of beauty, just as the humanity in his person […] is the only thing in the world that admits of the ideal of perfection.”91 As mentioned above, pure aesthetic judgements, because they are reflective, are “wholly independent of the concept of perfection”.92 In contrast, the human being is utterly defined by a purpose and does admit of the ideal of perfection.
Meanwhile, “the ideal in this figure consists in the expression of moral”.93 Thus, the ideal of the beautiful is a rational idea, which, according to Kant, “makes the purpose of humanity, insofar as they cannot be presented in sensibility, the principle of judging his figure, which reveals these purposes as their effect in appearance”.94 Consequently, the judgement about man can only be determinative (i.e. not reflective or disinterested as would be proper to aesthetic judgements), and, also, the human figure cannot be the symbol of morality: it expresses the moral, or else, it reveals the purposes of humanity “as their effect in appearance”. Hence, we simply cannot judge
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid., p. 230.
87 Ibid., p. 233.
88 Redfield, Marc. Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996, p. 16.
89 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 232.
90 Ibid., p. 233.
91 Ibid. [emphasis in the original]
92 Ibid., p. 227.
93 Ibid., p. 235. [emphasis in the original]
94 Ibid., p. 233.
the human figure aesthetically, as the poets do: “apart from the moral, the object would not be liked universally”.95 As discussed above, pure, disinterested aesthetic judgements presuppose universal consent, and here, Kant says that there is one object (man), the universal liking of which is predicated precisely upon our judgement’s being impure. According to Derrida, Kant’s argument suggests that “there is no place for an aesthetic of man, who escapes the pure judgement of taste to the very extent that he is the bearer of the ideal of the beautiful and himself represents, in his form, ideal beauty”.96 This would mean that there is simply no place for what there is a place for in the “General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments”, that is, for the disinterested judgement of the human figure, quoted above.
Marc Redfield, drawing on Derrida, summarises Kant’s position as follows:
a bifurcation occurs in the Third Critique between the pure and the ideal: as the ideal of beauty, “man” is also strictly speaking the only entity incapable of serving as an object of pure judgement of taste. Man is the “impurity” necessary to provide taste with its ideal, even though the purity of the judgement of taste is what provides the system with its guarantee of internal and external harmony.97 The bridge between the First and the Second Critiques, the pure (reflective/disinterested) judgement of taste, is predicated upon an ideal that already belongs to the realm of (moral) interests. What is problematic with both Redfield’s and Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s bifurcation is, in fact, Kant’s further bifurcation, discussed above, concerning the use of the term “human figure”. This bifurcation suggests that at this point, what Redfield calls an “empirical event” does not seem to be truly empirical: as the “General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments” suggests, there is a case when we can judge the human figure as beautiful.
The stakes of this argument can be found in the fact that Kant, despite this ambivalence, does problematise the relationship between the trope of the human body and the sphere of morality, and does everything to separate (and only by analogy posit) the aesthetic and the moral judgements upon the human figure. And it is precisely this reflectivity, which also leads to a certain ambiguity that is missing in those thinkers, such as Arnold, who, by positing a metaphorical relationship between beauty and morality (i.e. between the beautiful and the moral, as well as the political and the natural body), contribute in an important way to the nationalist discourse of the aesthetic state.
95 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 235.
96 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 112.
97 Redfield, Phantom Formations, p. 17.