Sad Mondays #9
Author: Magda Wisniowska - August, 2020.
Before returning to the question of time at some future date, I would like to address the productive aspect of Kant’s aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience always produces something, even if this is the simple feeling of pleasure associated with the aesthetic judgment of taste. But what I mean is the kind of product that, in sustaining aesthetic judgment, constitutes the exceptional time of Aion. This for Kant, would be the work of genius.
In the relevant section of the Third Critique Kant describes the activity of a poet as follows,
[The poet] takes things that are indeed exemplified in experience, such as death, envy, and all the other vices, as well as love, fame, and so on, but then, by means of an imagination that emulates the example of reason in reaching [for] a maximum, he ventures to give these sensible expression in a way that goes beyond the limits of experience, namely, with a completeness for which no example can be found in nature. And it is actually in the art of poetry that the power … of aesthetic ideas can manifest itself to full extent. (§ 49, 314)
A poet takes up an experience — an overwhelming experience such as death or love — and gives it a sensible expression. Now obviously, there are no words that can fully express the experience of death directly — it is not that we can show what death is to another, completely. Kant would say, such an extreme experience has no corresponding determinate concept, a concept which could be presented sensibly in intuition. Nevertheless, the poet finds those imaginative ways of presenting concepts that give rise to thought, specifically the kind of thought that does not operate logically through concepts. He does so by looking at the implications of certain concepts and forging connections between them, seeking out affinities that might otherwise not be found. “Thus Jupiter’s eagle with the lightning in its claws is an attribute to the mighty king of heaven” (§ 49, 315). While this image of an eagle with lightning in its claws might now seem rather commonplace (already found on Ptolemaic coins and firmly part of a Fascist iconography), for Kant it was still an image that could inspire the imagination to ignite, gathering together a number of related images and generating more thought than can be expressed in words. Ultimately this image yields an “aesthetic idea,” whose function is “to quicken the mind by opening it to view into an immense realm of kindred presentations” (ibid.). This ability to present aesthetic ideas, which Kant defines as presentations that prompt the kind of thinking to which no concept is adequate and that no language can express or grasp, he calls genius. And while this kind of talent might seem exceptional, Kant describes it as a facility we all have. Every time we engage our imagination to create “another nature out of the actual material nature gives us” in order “to entertain ourselves when experience strikes us as overly routine,” we use this power of the mind (ibid.), our claim to genius.
What interests me is how this ability to think the aesthetic idea, pushes both the conceptual and the sensible beyond themselves. As Joseph Barker argues in his essay “Resolving the Paradox of Phenomenology through Kant's Aesthetics,” Deleuze does not resolve the paradox of phenomenological reduction, namely, of how to communicate non-worldly concepts to those who think in worldly terms, where the theorising ego stands opposed to those remaining in the natural attitude. Instead, Deleuze emphasises the gap between the sensible and thought. What I described so far — us amusing ourselves with images outside the routine, the poet and his images of eagles with lightning bolts, generating thought, presenting the aesthetic idea, and even, giving birth to reason (see how aesthetic experience is described in Deleuze’s “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics”) — is violent. The enlivenment and enrichment of thinking is a violent act. It is not easy to step outside the routine, to force kinship on concepts that naturally show no such affinity. But this is what the image, something in the realm of the sensible, does. It forces non-conceptual thought, beyond the limits of experience, with a completeness that cannot be found in nature. It is in this sense, unnatural. Kant admits as much when he returns to the figure of the poet in a later section to write,
Now although the two cognitive powers, sensibility and understanding, are indispensable to each other, still it is difficult to combine them without [using] constraint and without their imparing each other; and yet their combination and harmony must appear unintentional and spontaneous… (§ 51, 321)
In aesthetic experience, there is only the appearance of harmony in the free play of the imagination and understanding. Its reality is a violence no longer confined to the experience of the sublime. All aesthetic experience harbours a deep dissonance within. This is its unnatural product.