What is it to be called Kantian?
It's sometimes said of a thinker or of an art critic, say, that they are Kantian.
In simple terms, what are the attributes of a Kantian, exactly? What elements of Kant's project are generally being referenced in such an assessment? (formalism, deontology, idealism, transcendentalism...?)
Is this a useful designation to help us understand another thinker's perspective? I imagine calling someone a Kantian could be an imprecise moniker and used as a slight or a compliment, depending on the perspective and context?
Thoughts?
In simple terms, what are the attributes of a Kantian, exactly? What elements of Kant's project are generally being referenced in such an assessment? (formalism, deontology, idealism, transcendentalism...?)
Is this a useful designation to help us understand another thinker's perspective? I imagine calling someone a Kantian could be an imprecise moniker and used as a slight or a compliment, depending on the perspective and context?
Thoughts?
Comments (128)
When a philosopher says, I am using Kant's theory of art to explain this artwork, they are a Kantian.
"Kant After Duchamp", by Thierry de Duve. He came to one of my art classes. Talked about Kant.
Indeed, but some may not use such overt language, right? We then have to infer it from the critical perspective they bring, which is? (You've already partly answered this on the other thread).
Actually, they usually do.
Again, emphasis on formal analysis. Treating the art object as not having practical purpose. Appealing to universality of judgment.
Yes, Kant reduces ontology to epistemology.
Cool, so it's rigidity and method.
Kantian aesthetics never asks, how does it make you feel? They reduce sensations, feelings, emotions to judgments.
Read Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.
If you read it, make his argument.
So, you have no idea what Kant said.
I missed that. Post your refutation. Telling someone to go read something is not an argument.
I think it depends on the branch of knowledge that bases your criteria. One some is called a "Kantian" means that, at least, he or she is agree with most of Kant's works. Then, their arguments tend to flow around on Kantian perspectives.
We can put the same example as empiricism. If some says "I am an empiricist", he would tend to spread his arguments according to British empiricism: John Locke, Hume, Berkeley, etc...
Exactly. You gave no argument.
"Let us take a great philosopher like Kant. There are two modes to repeat him. Either one sticks to his letter and further elaborates or changes his system, as neo-Kantians (up to Habermas and Luc Ferry) are doing, or one tries to regain the creative impulse that Kant himself betrayed in the actualization of his system (i.e., to connect to what was already “in Kant more than Kant himself,” more than his explicit system, its excessive core). ...One should bring this paradox to its conclusion. It is not only that one can remain really faithful to an author by way of betraying him (the actual letter of his thought); at a more radical level, the inverse statement holds even more, namely, one can only truly betray an author by way of repeating him, by way of remaining faithful to the core of his thought". (Zizek, Organs Without Bodies)
To speak soley for myself, the Kantian in me is defined by a few of Kant's innovations: his recognition that our epistemic relation to the world is no different to the epistemic relation to one's own self (I am as much a 'noumenon' as things 'out there'); his understanding that thought generates its own (transcendental) illusions, and that error is not just an 'empirical' problem; his conception of human nature as, effectively, 'second nature', a matter of enculturation that makes of human nature an ongoing process, rather than something 'given', once and for all. And of course his discovery and invention of the transcendental, as set off from the empirical, making time and space themselves not merely givens, but subject to a genesis of their own. Lots of very cool stuff that Kant did.
Quoting StreetlightX
If you don't mind me asking, how does that play out in ordinary life?
Oh, that’s easy. Exactly? The prime attribute of a Kantian is the recognition and development of, and the absolute necessity for, the dualism of his transcendental intelligence.
Pretty good summary of Kant. And I don't agree with Kant at all.
Good. My question as well.
:up: I think there is good ideas in his philosophy. His basic natural scientific standpoint is not mine though.
I find Kant's influence to be mostly negative. It makes smart people stupid.
I could imagine that Kant's philosophy could make stupid people at least a little bit smarter.
Kant is like an engineer explaining all the parts in great detail. But you're left with: Yes, but what is the point?
I'd guess that his point was to "modernize" the philosophy. To make it compatible with the modern scientific world view.
Yes, and he was wrong. Science does not explain anything but purely physical movements.
A good point.
I dont agree with any philosophers, but I think they all have valid ideas. Put differently , I think the history of philosophy can be understood as a development (although not causally linear or cumulative) in which newer philosophies subsume the essence of earlier ones. And I think that this is true of all creative modalities. The philosophy , arts, literature , politics and sciences of an era are variations of a theme , a series of interconnected worldviews, and that theme evolves. It a not a question of a philosophy or worldview being right or wrong ( they are all ‘right’ initially to the extent that they are pragmatically useful, and then found to be ‘wrong’ when they are superseded by the next era of thinking). It was not just philosophers or art critics who embraced Kant, it was also artists , whether they read him or not.
In fact, I would argue that in for for an artist to express a more developed worldview in their art, they must pass through a ‘Kantian’ stage.
What is that exactly?
Recognizing that thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. This is a realization you will not find in Descartes through Hume.
All thought is perception for Hume. And thus content.
From Mark Chatham:
“ The well-documented references to Immanuel Kant in the literature surrounding the advent and ongoing critical reception of Cubism are a paradigm of issues in word-image studies. Given that Kant's texts and ideas might seem an unlikely inspiration for artists and critics of a new art movement - even in his own lifetime, the Critiques, though not all his writings, were notorious for their technical difficulty, and the Critique of Judgment purposefully provides little direct commentary on the arts - how should we understand their remarkable influence within the visual arts generally and around Cubism especially? Kant's name was dropped1 with notable regularity in France during the formative years of Cubism. Many of the most prominent critics and art dealers of the time employed his terminology and concepts, putatively to explain what was widely perceived as a new and radical artform and certainly also to garner the authority any reference to the philosopher seemed to bestow on their views of Cubism.
Less often, Kant's name was invoked by artists to the same ends. But these references to Kant were not univocal and in fact divided contemporary commentators. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler - the most important dealer and historian of Cubism in the early part of this century, a man who represented in the broadest and most influential ways the work of Braque, Gris, and Picasso until the beginning of the First World War - encapsulated the power of the Kantian interpretive frame to which he was a convert when he claimed that Cubism's ‘new language has given painting an unprecedented freedom coloured planes, through their direction and relative position, can bring together the formal scheme without uniting in closed forms .... Instead of an analytical description, the painter can. ... also create in this way a synthesis of the object, or in the words of Kant, “put together the various conceptions and comprehend their variety in our perception”’ (1949, p. 12).2 Kahnweiler read Kant and Neo-Kantian texts by Wilhelm Wundt, Heinrich Rickert, and others in Bern from 1914 to 1920, during his exile from France because of his German patrimony (Gehlen, 1966).
For him, the analytic/synthetic distinction, the notions of the thing-in-itself and disinterestedness, and the formal autonomy of the work of art provided nothing less than a way of conceptualizing and justifying Cubism. Kant's ideas and terminology were also crucial for several of the central French critics who helped to define Cubism in its early years. Léonce Rosenberg, Pierre Reverdy, and especially Maurice Raynal used Kant to present and lend weight to their vision of Cubism as a breakthrough to essential reality as well as the paradigmatic art of autonomy, of personal as well as aesthetic freedom. These and other commentators used Kant recurrently to articulate what has come to be known as a ‘conceptualist’ or ‘idealist’ reading of Cubism, one that underlines its departure from the appearance of things and movement towards the comprehension of a supposedly more profound reality (Crowther, 1987; Nash, 1980). In 1912, the critic Olivier-Hourcade expressed a variant on this view - and the complexity of its provenance3 - by citing approvingly a well-known reference to Kant made by Schopenhauer: ‘The greatest service Kant ever rendered is the distinction between the phenomena and the thing in itself, between that which appears and that which is ... ’ (Fry, 1966, p. 74). On this interpretation, the Cubists present what they conceive, not what they see.“
No offense, but I never read stuff just because someone posts it quoting someone. Make an argument.
Here’s an argument. It is well documented that many dealers, critics and artists found strong consonances between Kant’s ideas and modern art, particularly Cubism. Why did they think this? Let’s begin with the question , what changes in philosophical worldview were required in order for visual artists to make the transition from realist pictorial representation to the various phases and modes of abstraction that began to proliferate in the 20th century? There certainly must have been a dawning realization that something intervenes between our experience of the world and the world itself, such that it became increasing important to capture this something rather than a photographic copy of reality.
I haven’t read much on Hume in relation to modern art , but so far I’m having no luck finding any writings connecting him to cubism
or any other trend toward abstraction in art. We could analyze why that might be.
Cubism came about in response to impressionism and the flattening out of the picture plane. Perspective was a deliberate construction of visual/optical perception of space--it originated in architecture around 1500.
Cubist paintings took the idea of frontal, optical perception and created a geometry of the picture plane. A cube is a spatial object--a die--that when looked at does not show its back. The idea was to paint an object from all perspectives.
So, cubism is about how the picture plane is presented.
Hume believed continuity of physical objects is an illusion and our perceptions are really of discrete objects or events. He had a digital idea of perception much like today. Hume anticipated film, which is discrete images in motion.
Are you saying that all of the philosophy that came after Hume, as a critical reaction to his thinking and the era he belonged to, was wrong about him? That his thinking still stands at the cutting edge of contemporary ideas? Or are you arguing that only certain details of his thought are still relevant in this post-modern age?
What, specifically?
You’ve explained what it is but not why it is. What changes in the way artists see and feel the world was it trying to convey? Significant movements in art are not about merely reshuffling old technical concepts but offering a new vision.
Vision is a function of the technical. Nothing to do with "reshuffling." For example, Space in paintings was fairly flat. Not because they did not know how to paint a 'realistic' human form, but that the intention was more symbolic.
The technical has to do with the applied, and the applied is a reshuffling within an extant theoretical edifice. Steve Jobs introduced brilliant technical innovations but added nothing to the existing scientific theory underlying
it. Great art isn’t just application of extant theory, it is the creation of new theory, a new vision.
Not sure what that means.
Thanks Joshs. Not sure I recognise the significance of these two ideas. Are you able to briefly describe how this Kantian stage actually plays out in art with an example?
Starting from impressionism the progression was basically > post-impressionism > cubism. If you're saying there's a "new theory" behind each of these stages, what are they?
I remember reading a description by an art critic of a work
of abstract art that consisted of a series of geometric shapes. The critic argued that these shapes captured some sort of deep essence , some transcendental
truth , underlying sensory appearances. Why would the artist assume there would be such an underlying order?
Because Kant showed that whatever contingent causal
concatenation of sensations we experience in visual perception, we cannot assume that visual experience presents us with a direct truth. The renaissance artists seem to have had absolute faith in such a truth. This is why it was so important for them to render precisely and faithfully the perspectival facts of a painting. One could get close to the mind of God by disclosing the rational
logic of the visually appearing world.
But Kant told us that the only direct truths in a visual scene are the inborn categories of perception that puts the world together for us in terms of causality, space and time. So one could imagine the abstract painter
‘abstracting’ from the contingent details of a scene these underlying categories in the guise of geometrical
forms. The real , divine truth of a scene is in its deep categorical structure.
Maybe. But, really, I don't agree with any of that. Art is about the sensual. Kant never understood that.
How does the sensual appear in DaVinci’s Last Supper and why is the perspective such a spectacularly powerful element of the drama?
If you can't remember the critic or artist it is hard to discuss this. The artist Frank Stella used to say, "What you see is what you see."
Because the geometry of a picture plane was new. Using the abstract math of architecture was a new thing.
You sound more like an engineer than an artist. What philosophical and scientific innovation made it new? Could it have been Descartes’ , Galileo and Newton’s discoveries of a rational, clockwork universe, amenable to mathematical description?
What philosophical discoveries threatened Descartes’ and Newton’s vision of a rational machine-like universe directly apprehended by human reason?
And what movements within the art world expressed this critique of the clockwork universe?
I am, and have been, a painter. All about how we see. The sensations and what they make us think about.
For Leonardo, and the Renaissance, it was about the end of seeing the world--quite literally--as an expression of the Divine (God). As I said, perspective was an invention of Italian architects trying to figure out how to build a dome and place it on top of a building--and where someone would stand on the plaza viewing it.
I honestly do not know about this. Please tell me.
Impressionism recognized the inter penetration of the elements of a visual scene. That’s what made their depiction of color so much more vibrant than the Romantics. They discovered that each colored space
is a mix of every color of the rainbow because of the way differently colored objects in a scene bleed their colors into each other. As Cezanne showed, the same is true of the way shapes that interact change and influence each other in our perception of them. So the impressionists were beginning to take seriously the contribution of the perceiver to what is perceived. With the ensuing waves of abstraction in art, these insights extended to include bodily positioning ( Degas) emotions and in general the full subjectivity of the perceiver(Van Gogh, Munch, Pollack, Rothko).
Art has always been about how things are perceived. No one invented that.
Once upon a time art was conceived as mimesis , imitation. There wasn’t really a concept of perception as interpretation as we accept it to be today. if you go back far enough in time, art was thought of as just the direct impressing of the world upon the mind. So yes, the modern concept of perception is an invention.
It is in Aristotle. Mimesis means both invention and copying. I have the exact passage if you want it.
:100:
"art in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates
nature." (Aristotle; Physics, 199a15)
By mimesis Aristotle means both imitating/copying and producing/creating.
Just getting back to this - would you mind providing an example of 'epistemology-constrained ontology' and a deductively proposed solution in search of problems?
Transcendental idealism.
Transcendental arguments.
Going back to ancient world. For Aristotle, sense perception (aesthesis) cannot take place without the imagination (phantasia).(De Anima). So we can imagine things without sensing them, but cannot perceive things without the imagination.
Sure. Hence my initial question, can it be a slight - a reference to a superseded and rigid epistemologically constrained ontology?
There are of course modern concepts of perception and they continue to develop as we learn more about the world and ourselves.
It's unclear what you mean by "direct impressing of the world upon the mind". It seems to mean that ancient people could only record their perceptions and therefore their art could only be representational. If I'm not mistaken, some of the oldest art known is thought to be depictions of some kind of mother-earth spirit. Sculptures of a subject that they didn't actually perceive with their senses.
Religious relics used for worship, for example.
Quoting Jackson
Art for Aristotle is a representation of ideals, but artists must accurately portray reality to be successful, so overall it is mimetic, and that attitude toward art remained up through the 1700’s.
I not only think it can, but it is. Kant's rigidly constrained epistemological ontology lies at the base of his equally rigid moral imperative. His metaphysical transcendent reality feels inert and unshakable, like the bridge in Köningsbergen over which also the rigidly classical Hamilton walked when he had his quaternion eureka moment. Too classically rigid and absolute...
So art, tragedies, copy an action and is imitative that way. Not ideals, but actions or plots. You're not imitating something that happened, you're constructing purposes for why they happened that way.
Quoting Hillary
The modern scientific world was Kant’s world and the world of Einstein’s physics. The postmodern world is led by philosophy , with the sciences being slowly dragged into it kicking and screaming.
Can you say more about that? Led to where?
I’m saying the approach to art up through the 1700’s was based on mimesis, even when constructing purposes and ideals. The concept of mimesis was brought into question as philosophy and art stopped believing that perception is correspondence of the mind with an independently existing world.
I don't agree with that about art. Seriously, artists always knew what they were doing was fake. If people wanted to commission portraits they wanted a realistic likeness. As I was saying, perspective used by Renaissance artists was self-consciously fake precisely because it was a mathematical/systematic structuring of space.
Alberti defines painting as a "projection of lines and colours onto a surface", (On Painting, Alberti, 1435).
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/old-masters/alberti-leon-battista.htm
I want to run something by you. It's been troubling me for a long time.
The Unanswered Questions
So legend has it that the Buddha refused to answer the following questions:
1. Does the Tathagatha exist after death?
2. Does the Tatagatha cease to exist after death?
3. Does the Tathagatha exist & cease to exist after death?
4. Does the Tathagatha neither exist nor cease to exist after death?
My question is this: Does the Buddha know in the sense that post-death these categories are N/A or does the Buddha not know what happens post-mortem? In other words is Buddha's stance (Noble Silence) ontological or epistemological?
N/A – irrelevant to addtessing dukkha pre-death.
IMO, ethical/psychological.
If he left metaphysics as he said....
“....by this critique it has been brought onto the secure course of a science, then it can fully embrace the entire field of cognitions belonging to it and thus can complete its work and lay it down for posterity as a principal framework that can never be enlarged...”
....then why couldn’t one remain Kantian in his thinking, no matter the advances in empirical science?
:ok: Arigato gozaimus sensei.
One can stay Kantian, obviously. Kant had a wrong view on spacetime though. You could incorporate all scientific progress, spacetime being relative and left-right asymmetric (he offered Leibniz the glove left example to refute his relational concept of time), but in his view space is no material, which is the question.
But in the empirical sciences that would make no difference.
That the noumon can't be known is questionable.
Leibniz was a relativist about space and time and severe critic of Newton.
Yes. He considered space as the relation between objects only. Which would make a left glove the same as a right glove. Which the aren't. Left and right are fundamentally different.
I never understood the glove and left and right thing in Kant. Seems trivial.
It is trivial. But it was used to show Leibniz was wrong. All relational properties of a left hand and a right hand are the same. Still they are different.
I think Leibniz is right. He stated a principle of relativity Einstein demonstrated to contemporary physicists. Again, the left and right thing would be based on an absolute measure of space.
Leibniz didn't use relativity as Einstein did. The relation between objects stays the same fir every observer in Leibniz' view, contrary to Einstein's. And Kant proved him wrong with the glove. A relational view denies the difference between left and right.
Leibniz explicitly said time and space are relative and not absolute as Newton stated.
Again, I seriously have no idea what the glove thing is. I've heard others say it and it means nothing to me. A glove is about human anatomy. What does that have to do with the structure of the universe?
No.
Trust me Jackson, 180 Proof is clueless about Kant. His Wiki is the full extent of it.
Anyone citing wiki for philosophy should not be discussing philosophy.
What did he mean by that?
Exactly what Einstein meant. There is no absolute measure of time or space.
How, according to Leibniz, are the relations of the parts of a goive, damned, a glove! different for you and me?
What does human anatomy have to do with the structure of the universe?
Not so sure. The distance between objects varies, according to L?
Conceptually. Like I said, Leibniz did not present mathematical demonstrations.
L says the relations between the parts are dependent in the observer. So how does this apply to a glove? It fits for you but not for me?
Space is subjective?
I genuinely have no idea what the glove thing is supposed to mean.
Relational. No such things as things occurring in space for Leibniz.
It's my question. If the relation between It's parts, as L defines space, is different for two observers then would they be different gloves for each?
If the glove does not fit you have to acquit. Same realm.
Then Einstein thought differently. E saw space as really existing with objects in it. And space between them.
Ok.
So for a moving observer the glove might have different relations?
What then did you mean with the comparison between L and E?
I said it already.
Possibly, of course. Just not as Kant’s noumenon.
Of course. But as the noumenon can become part of us, simply by litterally eating it, it can turn to phenomenon. Kant tells us that das Ding an Sich can't be known. Which would imply we can't know ourselves, which for some might be the case though.
Edible noumenon. Guarantee that won’t sell. Hell...couldn’t even give it away. I mean....how would it be packaged? Pretty hard to shrink wrap something impossible to perceive, right?
Isn't noumenon contained in food? You are what you eat.
Okay, but their relativisms are different.
Leibniz:
"As for my own opinion, I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is, that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions. (Third Paper, paragraph 4; G VII.363/Alexander 25–26)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-physics/#LeiSpaTimSec
:rofl:
which was my point
So your point is they have a different kind of relativism. Then what's the point?
I see nothing productive from this conversation.
That's because you made no point.
Goodbye.
So space is an order of coexistence and time an order of successions. Things exist relative to each other. Doesn't that mean there is something between them things?