Sunday, October 20, 2019

Aesthetic Pleasure, Communication, Morality

In Kant's system, Taste is the appreciation of Beauty, constituted by universalizable Aesthetic pleasure.  The locus of the pleasure is the interplay of universal cognitive structures, so his concept of Beauty is Formalist, and he often characterizes Taste as consisting in "universally communicable" pleasure.  But this attribution is perhaps a misnomer--what is universally communicable in his analysis is not the pleasure per se, but one's judgement that a work is pleasurable, i. e. his topic is not the Art of Criticism, but the Criticism of Art.  Regardless, conspicuously absent in his introduction of the concept of Communicability into Aesthetic Theory is an explicit recognition of where Communication does occur--in the presentation of a work to an audience, prior to any inter-audience interaction. Communication is implicit in the artist-audience relation, and, indeed, universal Communicability is entailed in his criterion that a work of Genius be "exemplary".  By failing to consider the initial act of Communication, Kant misses the complete phenomenon, and, so, fails to trace the Communicable pleasure to its source--the work of Genius.  He, thus, does not consider that what is communicated might be other than pleasure, i. e. a creative impulse, which is pleasurable, one discharge of which is the excited recommendation of the work to another.  Accordingly, he suppresses the characteristic of Beauty that indicates that it is an impulse to Creativity, by representing the hortatory 'Act in an exemplary manner' as the categorically imperative 'Act only on that Maxim that you can at the same time will to be a Universalization Law'.  He thus misses that the latter is a special case of Examplification--i. e. in which the example is codified.  So, in addition to the two derivations of Moral principle of which Kant is aware--from the concept of Duty, and from the concept of Reason--there is a third of which he is unaware--from the concept of Genius, via the concept of Communication.

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