The Mute Foundation of Aesthetic Experience?

Abstract

Luiz Costa Lima argues in The Limits of Voice that Kant's Critique of Judgment plays a pivotal role in furthering aestheticization, or the objectification and universalization of aesthetic experience. He introduces the term ‘criticity’ to refer to the act of questioning and finds that Kant poses the alternatives of aestheticization and criticity. However, Costa Lima sees Kant and most of the following literary criticism as accepting aestheticization, with exceptions such as Schlegel and Kafka (Costa Lima 1996: xii). He states ‘The effective actualization of an aesthetic experience is then defined by the fact that it constitutes a mute universality, one that necessarily cannot be communicated’ (1996: 100). Yet Kant's view is that aesthetic experience is communicable. I suggest the tension between the two can be resolved through the distinction between actual and potential communication, and argue that what is foremost for Kant is the potential to communicate aesthetic experience, not its privacy. Thus I demonstrate how Kant can be seen as a proponent of criticity and can account for our capacity to share experiences and judgments of taste. Furthermore, I contend that Hannah Arendt's work on ethical and political judgment, particularly in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (1982), can be seen as an another example of criticity in the moral and political spheres, and show how she extends both Kant's aesthetic work and Costa Lima's ideas. Arendt, like Kant, shows how aesthetic experience is potentially communicable. Finally, I explain how Arendt turns Kant's aesthetic judgement to criticity in ethical and political judgment through developing an intersubjective account of judgment. In that sense, aesthetic experience is able to find a way out of muteness and Costa Lima's concept of criticity can find a place in other fields.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank participants in the Costa Lima Symposium at the University of Queensland, Matthew Lamb, Costica Bradatan and anonymous reviewers for this journal for helpful comments.

Notes

¹Although not my focus here, this is a thesis that deserves more examination. In addition to Costa Lima's work in Control of the Imaginary (1988) and The Dark Side of Reason (1992), Heidegger reclaims the imagination in Kant's first critique in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1962).

²Costa Lima quotes Arendt's work on Kafka in The Limits of Voice (1996: 245, 248) See Arendt (2005: 69–80).

³In his Anthropology, Kant sees the insane person as characterized by a disruption of the sensus communis (2006: 7: 216).

⁴Kant sees beauty as exhibiting purpose without purposiveness or finality without end (2000: 5: 221).

⁵See Costa Lima's Control of the Imaginary (1988) for his development of this idea.

⁶The context of this criticity was post-Kantian and that of German disunity, unlike the unity of Britain and France (Costa Lima 1996: 104).

⁷Costa Lima notes that there is another modality of aesthetic experience, that of the circus, which oscillates between criticity and aestheticization (1996: 130).

⁸There are a number of discussions of these distinctions in Arendt scholarship (Arendt 1982; Dostal 1984; Bernstein 1986; Vila 1999; d'Entreves 2000; Yar 2000; and Degryse 2011).

⁹Arendt suggests that Kant's other concern in the third Critique is why human beings exist at all (Arendt 1982: 12; Kant 2000: 5: 378).

¹⁰Kant argues that we must follow the maxims of thinking in an unprejudiced (maxim of enlightenment), broad-minded (maxim of enlarged mentality) and consistent (be in agreement with oneself) way, that is, understanding, judgment, and reason (2000: 294–295).