The Relevance of Immanuel Kant

First appeared in The Guardian

Last year Ronan MacDonald published a book that lamented the death of the academic critic, blaming mortality on a failure to proffer literary value judgment.

Despite long-seated ill-ease over critical practices based solely on personal pleasure and response, many academics agree with critic John Carey when he says that values have no validity outside ‘the person doing the valuing.’ If however, they continue to ignore valuation, MacDonald says, their relevance will evaporate; their voices will go unheard, entombed in a bog of opinion-less relativism.

And yet, while un-grounded opinion flows ever forth from journalists and literary prize judges, academics do continue, however unwittingly, to operate within sets of principles and procedures, not the least of which involves choosing the works they assign for study.

The tension between defenders of a stable, objective foundation against which to evaluate merit through time, and those who argue that valuation of art can only be subjective - the expression of fugitive likes and dislikes specific to locale and period - goes back centuries.

Immanuel Kant was one of the first to try to bring both camps in this debate together: to recognize the subjectivity of aesthetic judgment while allowing for its universality. This judgment, he suggests in The Critique of Judgment, while subjective, involves a common human sense, one which results in similar opinion about merit - valuation that an ideal totality of judges would agree upon. He also said that:

• Emotions don't belong at all to beauty; the beautiful must be admired in and of itself. Taste is both independent and necessary. It involves the ‘free’ interplay of imagination and understanding; its central question is: how can any feeling of pleasure "require" a corresponding liking from everyone else?

• The aesthetic judgment is a normative claim. We’re all free to have our own opinions about art, but ‘disinterested’ claims about ‘beauty’ contain within them the imperative to convince others of this truth; in short, all sane human beings, given enough logical, persuasive argument ought to agree with this ‘disinterested’ judgment. Objective beauty elicits a fundamental feeling, not a private response, but something shared -- something beyond individual experience, at a super-sensory, sublime, divine experiential level.

• Personal tastes are legislated by a universal faculty of “judgment” which if ‘properly’ reflected upon, will be evident to everyone. Beauty transcends the self; it is universal. Knowledge that a piece of music is a concerto by Mozart is irrelevant to its beauty. The music’s structure must accommodate free play of our imagination and harmonize with a non-conceptual awareness of order, an order comprehensible but at the same time indescribable. Form then, famously pleases universally when it displays a “purposiveness without a purpose."

In other words, there is cake here, and it's being eaten. An acknowledgement of the subjectivity of taste, combined with a complex, influential, somewhat contradictory justification for a shared ‘objective’ concept of what constitutes beauty. Influential, and susceptible to attack: just as religions that pontificate on known unknowns are condemned, so too should those who espouse absolutes and universals. Definitions of beauty that rely on ‘super-sensible substrates of nature’ – deserve to be labeled paternalistic and dictatorial.

Despite these fascist tendencies Kant nonetheless remains relevant. Perhaps more so than any other philosopher. While eschewing appeals to unsubstantiated, transcendental authority, those who believe in the utility of some form of literary ‘canon’, and the application of a standard evaluative criteria in order to determine membership, are in a sense suggesting, with Kant, that there are universal truths at work, beyond the subjective, which help identify what is great, what is beautiful, what ought to be valued.

Even more pertinent is the Kantian view that the aesthetic valuation and appreciation of literary work should stand on its own, independent of other considerations. Anyone (and there are many) who objects to the examination of literature through an extra-literary (Feminist, Marxist, Post-Colonial, the ‘holy trinity’ of gender, class and race, for example) lense, sits with Kant and the more recent New Criticism school of literary study which venerates the text, and discerns meaning through, among other things, argument, allusion, character, plot, style, metaphor, meter, and symbol.

There are some who believe that literary criticism shouldn’t be evaluative. Exegesis, they say, is interesting enough; it helps with reading and comprehension. But surely it’s natural to pass judgment? What is life, if not a series of lived likes and dislikes. Choices (subject to circumstances of birth of course) which determine what we do. Who we are. Who we hang out with. How we develop our minds and bodies. Where, if they exist, our souls will end up, and…what we read. The fascination of criticism lies in exploring primary likes and dislikes. In trying to understand them. Discussing them. The answers are crucial, for they help to tell us who we are.