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| Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790)—his principal work on aesthetics and teleology--is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and influential philosophical texts of the last three centuries in any philosophical subdiscipline. Knowledge of this treatise is a prerequisite to any understanding of the subsequent history of aesthetic theory, as well as German Idealism more generally. We’ll spend half the term reading the Critique of Judgment, exploring the beautiful and the sublime (the aesthetic), as well organic nature (the teleological), as modalities of reflexive judgment. We will then look at a three highly significant 19th and 20th century transformations of the Kantian conceptualization, which we can characterize as rhetorical, psychological, and political displacements, respectively. First, we’ll consider the German romantic theory of « wit » and «irony » in Jean Paul and Friedrich Schlegel. Second, we’ll study Sigmund Freud’s modernist appropriation of this German romantic aesthetics of wit in his « Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious. » Third, we’ll explore Hannah Arendt’s proposal that Kant’s aesthetic theory prepares the foundations for a productive political philosophy. With this last, perhaps we come full circle : whereas Kant’s aesthetic theory is often considered to be the first full articulation of the separation of aesthetics from politics—the creation of an autonomous aesthetics through the notion of disinterested pleasure—Arendt’s reading of Kant reverses this movement, discovering precisely in his aesthetics a basis for a new politics. Graduate students will be invited and expected to explore, in addition to the primary texts, some major secondary literature on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, from the analytic and/or continental traditions, according to the given student’s interests. |
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