Irony and Singularity

Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas

Gary Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351926171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Although, initially, dealing with specifically pedagogical issues arising out of debates within the philosophy of education, the main thrust of this book tackles the more fundamental questions concerning communication, dialogue and solitude. Irony and Singularity introduces aesthetics into higher education not as an academic discipline among others but as part of a wider strategy to re-orientate teaching. Although focused on the manner in which art and aesthetics are taught within the context of the art school, the book raises wider and more central issues within pedagogy, challenging the currently dominant models rooted in science and the humanities. Engaging with a wide range of philosophers and philosophical traditions often ignored in the philosophy of education, Peters questions the resistance of the aesthetic object to language, communication and instruction and claims that the philosophical acknowledgement of incommunicability coupled with the demand for communication allows us to better understand the role of the teacher as complicit in the production of the aesthetic rather than merely receptive as a reader or interpreter of the aesthetic 'text'.

Chapter 1
Teaching the Unteachable: Method and Manner in Kant’s Aesthetics

In a word, science (critically undertaken and methodically directed) is the narrow gate that leads to the true doctrine of practical wisdom, if we understand by this not merely what one ought to do, but what ought to serve teachers as a guide to construct well and clearly the road to wisdom which everyone should travel, and to secure others from going astray.¹

Kantian critique and metaphysics are inseparable from modem teaching. They ‘are’ this teaching, that is to say that they ‘are’ teaching forms untried until now…Kantian philosophy is elaborated and structured as a teaching discourse. More precisely, that of a professor in a state University.²

If, as Kant and Derrida, respectively, both seem to agree, the critical philosophy of the former is primarily a teaching, a mode of reflection intended for a professional audience of philosophers employed by or attending the State educational system, then the publication in 1790 of the Critique of Judgement would represent a writing of the aesthetic into the university curriculum, an event of some importance. But what is an event? Derrida again:

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ‘event’…What would this event be then? Its exterior form would be that of a rupture…³

And its interior form would be a certain movement of play, one not limited by the immobility of a structural centre which, while allowing and controlling playfulness, is always intent on putting itself ‘beyond play’⁴ but, rather, a play that really plays. In Writing and Difference, as a guide, Derrida offers the names of some players: Nietzsche and Heidegger to be precise. One suspects that by the time of writing The Truth in Painting he would have added Kant’s name here too.

Derrida’s friend, Paul de Man, does exactly that when he uses this same thought to return to what he describes as the ‘occurrence’ of Kant’s third Critique, an event which ‘interrupted, disrupted [and] disarticulated’ aesthetics thanks to the critical rigour of the thought contained therein.⁵ As de Man describes it, the history of the reception of Kant’s aesthetics from the valorization of art in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man onwards, is guilty of repeatedly attempting to ‘domesticate’⁶ the more threatening insights of this thought often, indeed, in the name of education and teaching.

Pedagogically then, the productive force of the Critique of Judgement has largely failed to enter the space of the university, disabled, ironically, by a mode of reception that has promoted it precisely as a model for education. As will be discussed below, Lyotard’s reception of Kant’s aesthetics presented, significantly perhaps, as a series of ‘lessons’,⁷ argues for a break with this dominant model of the model, but, as will be seen, this itself creates other difficulties which themselves threaten to undermine aesthetic education tout court. As a consequence, a firmer grasp of Kant’s central notion of ‘exemplification’ will be necessary if his own more dynamic utilization of the model is to be saved from domestication and radicalization respectively: this will be dealt with below.

In the meantime, if de Man is correct, the Critique of Judgement remains not only outside of the university but also outside of history:

One could say, for example, that in the reception of Kant, in the way Kant has been read, since the third Critique—and that was an occurrence, something happened there, something occurred—that in the whole reception of Kant from then until now, nothing has happened, only regression, nothing has happened at all. Which is another way of saying there is no history, which is another way of saying…that reception is not historical, that between reception and history there is an absolute separation…⁸

Paul de Man will be returned to later, but it might be worth noting that the ‘regression’ he perceives in the ahistorical process of reception is one that is evident in Kant’s own reception of his aesthetic thought as is apparent in the structural borrowings from the Critique of Pure Reason in an effort to delimit the play of the aesthetic already noted. Derrida describes this as an act of framing and reframing:

Kant thus imports this table [of categories]…into the analytic of aesthetic judgement…it is a transportation which is not without its problems and artful violence: a logical frame is transposed and forced in order to be imposed on a nonlogical structure… The frame fits badly. The difficulty can be felt from the first paragraph of the book… The violence of the framing multiplies. It begins by enclosing the theory of the aesthetic in a theory of the beautiful, the latter in a theory of taste, and the theory of taste in a theory of judgement. These are decisions which could be called external: the delimitation has enormous consequences, but a certain internal coherence can be saved at this cost.⁹

To rupture this frame, to put Kant’s aesthetics back into play, back into the openness and movement of what de Man identifies as its repressed performativity is one of the main aims of the following reflections. This will require from the outset a shift of emphasis away from the dominant reading of the Critique of Judgement as a reception aesthetics (for academics with ‘taste’) to one more attuned to the productive moment of both the art work and the restless movement of reflective judgement eternally caught up in the working of this work. The allusion to Heidegger here is deliberate; during the aforementioned (non)history of aesthetic reception where, it is true, nothing much has happened, he alone poses the essential question: what is the origin of the work of art? Not, what is art? The so-called ‘ontological’ question that clogs up so many academic textbooks on aesthetics. Who cares what art is? An expression, intention, label, institution, ideology or joke, it doesn’t matter, it is how art comes into being that is the real ontological question, the movement or transition from the unmarked to the marked space, to use Niklas Luhmann’s words,¹⁰ the rupture, the ‘cut’, the occurrence of art as a work prior to work. As we will see, Maurice Blanchot describes it as the work of a ‘worklessness’ at the centre of art, Heidegger famously expresses it the following manner:

The artist is the origin of the work of art. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is the sole support of the other. In themselves and in their interrelations artist and work are each of them by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely that which also gives artist and work of art their names—art. As necessarily as the artist is the origin of the work in a different way than the work is the origin of the artist, so it is equally certain that, in a still different way, art is the origin of both artist and work. But can art be an origin at all? Where and how does art occur?¹¹

Art, then, is not an object, it is not even the experience of an object, in spite of the familiar ‘Kantian’ reading of Kant, it is, as Heidegger rightly insists, an occurrence, an event, indeed a ‘rupture’ prior to the partitioning of being into subject and object, artist and work, thus rendering all aesthetic reception too late and the Critique of Judgement literally out of time, suspended between the inscrutable singularity of production and the unattainable universality of reception. So, to be clear, the aforementioned shift of emphasis from reception to production is not intended as a crude inversion of the ‘standard’ reading of Kant, thereby unproblematically offering something ‘better’; on the contrary, Kant’s ‘disarticulation’ of the aesthetic is here taken seriously. In this sense, the Critique will not, cannot, be read, and as a consequence, as Kant himself recognized, in essence it cannot be taught. It is precisely here that Derrida’s account of the frame is at its most suggestive:

This critique of taste does not concern production, it has in view neither ‘education’ nor ‘culture’, which can very well do without it…he admits the lacks, the lacunary character of his work…

What does the lack depend on? What lack is it?

And what if it were the frame. What if the lack formed the frame of the theory. Not its accident but its frame.¹²

But, to the extent that the absence of the productive moment frames or inscribes the limit of the marked space of the third Critique, it is very much Kant’s concern, not, to be sure, in order to ‘educate’ or ‘cultivate’ (and I retain Derrida’s inverted commas), something totally alien to Kant’s aesthetics, but to teach nonetheless. Indeed, the separation of education and teaching, evident in Kant’s distinction between ‘method’ and ‘manner’, is perhaps one of the most important tasks in the following reflections, and one that differentiates many of the arguments presented here from those to be found within educational theory and philosophy.

The Work of Art

If aesthetics is to have a substantial, even constitutive role within the university it must be able to engage with the work of the artwork as an ongoing and ontologically open productive enterprise. The reception of the artwork as a completed thing or act and the aesthetic judgement necessary to take pleasure in the contemplation of it is largely irrelevant to the day-to-day work of the aesthetic producer. Rarely do the tutor or student stand before a work that could be claimed to have reached completion or achieved, what might be called, finality. On the contrary, in most cases an essential aspect of teaching practice is precisely to resist the impending closure of the work through a critical engagement which challenges the student to consider and reconsider the aesthetic possibilities of given forms within a situation of infinite reflection. Given this, it is important at the outset to consider Kant’s notion of finality without end.

So we may at least observe a finality of form, and trace it in objects—though by reflection only—without resting it on an end.¹³

Whenever an end is regarded as a source of delight, it always imports an interest as determining ground of the judgement on the object of pleasure. Hence the judgement of taste cannot rest on any subjective end as its ground. But neither can any representation of an objective end, i.e. of the possibility of the object itself on the principles of final connection, determine the judgement of taste…¹⁴

Echoing his famous description of art as ‘purposiveness without purpose’, here the Kantian relation between final...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Teaching the Unteachable: Method and Manner in Kant’s Aesthetics
• 2 Aesthetic Education or Aesthetic Ideology? Schiller and de Man
• 3 Severity, Ideality and Pleasure: Hegel contra Irony
• 4 Hearing, Seeing, Teaching: Nietzsche, Rosenzweig and the University
• 5 Dissymmetry and Height: Intersubjectivity and Pedagogy in Husserl, Blanchot and Levinas
• 6 Judgement, Critique and Ignorance: Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index