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KANT'S AESTHETIC REVOLUTION* Albert Hofstadter ABSTRACT This paper interprets t

KANT'S AESTHETIC REVOLUTION* Albert Hofstadter ABSTRACT This paper interprets the Critique of Judgment as the culmination of Kant's contribution to our understanding of freedom—the human meaning of which is being-with-other-as-with-own. Central to that com- plex achievement and to the overarching role assigned by Kant to the aesthetic dimension (beauty, feeling, judgment, and art) is his revolu- tionary new way of seeing beauty and art as the expression of aesthetic ideas—a definition of them which carries him beyond formalism to illuminate also the modern and romantic search for freedom. This move also brings Kant to the threshold of religious ethics as man's ultimate freedom, his being-with-the-infinitely-transcendent-as-with-own, is, in art and beauty, disclosed for imagination and made available for the life of feeling in this world. The central matter of thinking, as of life, is freedom. Kant's aesthetic revolution, continuous with what he called his Copernican revolution in thought, has to do with his effort to think freedom. Like every great thinker he is concerned eventually with the F»roblem of the freedom of the individual in relation to his membership in the free social whole. Kant is con- fronted with this problem in the context in which the enlightenment presented it. He is the heir of Enlightenment thinking, French, English, and German, and •This study was written under a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am also gratefully indebted to the Research Committee of the University of California at Santa Cruz for funds allocated to specific research in this and allied fields. JRE 3/2(1975), 171-191 172 HOFSTADTER he is the great source of our tradition who has handed over to us the major problems. During the Enlightenment period the idea of humanity as such, surpassing all nationalities, races, and religions, began to become explicit, ironically but intelligibly at the very time that national differences were firming up more strongly than ever. During the same period the idea of the inalienable rights of the individual as such also began to become explicit. Within the human com- munity each individual self was seen as the bearer of rights attaching to his very humanity and on that account inalienable. These thoughts pervade the im- portant documents of the French and American Revolutions and pervade as well the thoughts, aspirations, and actions by which those revolutions were brought about—recognizing, of course, that their realization was and still remains far from the ideal. Above all other philosophers, Kant was the bearer of these thoughts. His philosophizing was correlative to the revolution in socioeconomic, political and legal practice that was taking place in and through the Enlightenment period, especially toward its end in the late 18th century and the very early 19th. His thinking was part of the total European revolution of the time. The focus of his philosophical vision is the combination of the freedom of the human individual with the social community of mankind, even with that of all rational beings. His thinking penetrates to the source—supersensuous for him—of the unalienable freedom of the human individual, a source which is at the same time the ground of the individual's freedom as a human being, that is, as a member of the human community, even of the community of all rational beings. Despite any limitations existing during his age—the slave trade, developing class differences between capital and labor, developing national differences which were ultimately to lead to our century's world wars, developing colo- nialism in Africa, South America, and Asia—the idea of freedom is the bur- geoning idea of the time. Kant is the great bearer of it as it involves the dif- ference between the inalienable freedom of the individual and the rightful claims of the human community, together with the possible and necessary unity of the two, and including in between the differences and the unity of the particular rights of estates, classes, peoples, and nations. Kant initiated the attempt to think this idea of freedom as the central systematizing idea of philosophy itself. I am not speaking of his terminology, even though the word "Freiheit" played an important part in it. Part of Kant's limitation was in fact that he did not fully comprehend that this word could have the more comprehensive employment about which I shall be talking. I am speaking rather of the real content of Kant's thinking, which everywhere was concerhed first of all with man and human freedom. In his lectures on logic he says that there are four philosophical questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? and What is man? And he adds that the last question, the anthropological one, comprehends the other three. His own Anthropology carries the qualification in its title: "from a pragmatic viewpoint"; and he ex- KANT'S AESTHETIC REVOLUTION 173 plains in the preface that it differs from anthropology considered from a physio- logical viewpoint in that it examines what man makes, or can and should make, of himself as a freely acting being, as contrasted with examining what nature makes of man.^ Thus the basic question of anthropology, the sum-total of philosophy, is: How does man-and how can he and must he—realize his own freedom? When we look at Kant's doing of philosophy as well as his statements about it, we see that its actual content is man's freedom of self-determination, his self-articulation as a rational being. Of course there are severe dangers in this Kantian way of dealing with freedom as self-making and self-determination. The basic danger lies in a virtual or actual deification of man in theory and, in practice, man's overreaching of himself and his world, an overreaching which, as we see it before our very eyes today, threatens to destroy man, his freedom, and his world in the process. This experience of ours leads us back to the thought of freedom and to the need to reconstitute it in a more adequate way than we find it in Kant or his successors. But that is our problem. I am to speak here chiefly of Kant's. Kant initiated the attempt to think freedom centrally and coherently. He was not able to formulate the enterprise in its full integrity, though he made a close approach. He saw the parts of the problem and saw their interconnection as well. One gets a glimpse of this from the table which he placed at the end of the present "Introduction" to the Critique of Judgment, similar to that at the end of the first introduction published separately as the essay, "On Philosophy in General."^ Here the domains of nature and freedom, of theoretical knowledge and practical (moral) knowledge, are linked by way of the domain of art and the aesthetic. Understanding and reason are linked by judgment. Conformity to law and final purpose are linked by purposiveness, that is, by beauty. Knowledge and desire (and therefore practice) are linked by feeling, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. Beauty, feeling, judgment, art—these are the middle and medium linking man's theoretical and practical sides together so as to make it possible for him to be humanly whole. The aesthetic dimension of man is given an over- arching role by Kant, one which some of his immediate contemporaries and successors like Goethe, Schiller, and Schelling clearly understood. Fichte, too, saw the tremendous significance that had to be given to imagination in the constitution of freedom and humanity. Hegel later tried to put'it together by making art the first member of the triad of absolute spirit, which latter itself was the ultimate form of the actualization of freedom. Now in Kant, and generally in our modern tradition thereafter, freedom has a' negative and a positive meaning: negatively it is absence of determination by another, positively it is self-determination. Where I am not the author or cause of what I am or do, I am not free; where I am the author or cause, I am free. Most of the problems of freedom, metaphysical, ethical, political, and other, have tended to be treated as problems regarding determination, whether by other or by self. But if we investigate the word etymologically—the English "freedom" or Kant's German "Freiheit"—we make the interesting discovery that 174 HOFSTADTER a different sense is attached to it, namely, the sense of Being-with-other-as-with- own. One can find the details in any available handbook for English (Partridge, 1958) or German (Grebe, 1963). We learn there that free and friend are identical in origin. The verb to free derives from Old English frebgan, and the noun friend derives from the Old English ffeond, itself shaped from the present participle of the verb frWon, which is a contraction of the verb frFogan, the same as that from which to free is derived. And what is of decisive significance is that freogan means: to love. Freogan is one of a close-knit family of words in the Anglo-Germanic lan- guages meaning love, peace, protection, care, preservation. There is nothing explicitly referring to determination, whether by other or by self, in these. 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