Fall 1999
Volume 26, Number 1

The social and the aesthetic problematic of literature. . . meet in the problem of form itself. They also meet through the institutionalization of the public realm. The social practice of writing implicates literature in the polity's forms of publicness. The aesthetic experience of inner form, I want to argue, is also implicated in publicness. Among the most suggestive passages in Kant's Critique of Judgment is the section titled "Of Beauty as the Symbol of Morality." Its key assertion restates and extends his central tenet that the experience of the beautiful "gives pleasure with a claim for the agreement of everyone else," which has most often been construed by Kant's advocates and detractors alike as equating the universalism of aesthetic judgment with some uniform standard of taste. Kant writes:

Now I say the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, and that it is only in this respect . . . that it gives pleasure with a claim for the agreement of everyone else. By this the mind is made conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above the mere sensibility to pleasure received through the sense, and the worth of others is estimated in accordance with a like maxim of their judgment.6

Aesthetic "judgment" is enabled by a material, institutionalized space of expression and criticism. The so-called universality of the judgment is thus conditioned by the education, cultivation, and discourse of the participants in the public sphere. In the guise of formulating a "critique of judgment," Kant evokes, to anticipate Hannah Arendt's phrase, the "worldly space" of criticism, that is, the democratic underpinnings of publicness. The beautiful is a symbol of the morally good in the sense that I affirm "the worth of others" in my tacit appeal for their agreement. However, since my experience of the beautiful is enmeshed in the practices of criticism, and since the appeal to agreement takes place on the socially uneven terrain of educated sensibility, aesthetic judgment is in fact drawn into the fray of critical contention and dispute. Estimating the worth of others does not celebrate a communal standard but prompts a task of persuasion. Add to this the post-Kantian view that artistic beauty arises not from harmonious form but from the illuminating, dappled counter-movements to formal coherence. Inner form is, therefore, the regulative ideal of aesthetic experience not in the sense of an established or anticipated standard of taste but, on the contrary, an open-ended, contentious valuing at stake in literary and political criticism.7

6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York, 1966), pp. 198-9.

7. Among Kant's commentators, Heidegger provides the strongest unconventional reading of the idea that the experience of the beautiful is, in Kant's phrase, "devoid of all interest." He assails the conventional reading, which he attributes to Schopenhauer: "If the relation to the beautiful, delight, is defined as 'disinterested,' then, according to Schopenhauer, the aesthetic state is one in which the will is put out of commision and all striving brought to a standstill; it is pure repose, simply wanting nothing more, sheer apathetic drift." Heidegger interprets Kant differently:

Whatever we take an interest in is always already taken, i.e., represented, with a view to something else. . . . Whatever exacts of us the judgment "This is beautiful" can never be an interest. That is to say, in order to find something beautiful, we must let what encounteres us, purely as it is in itself, come before us in its own stature and worth. We may not take it into account in advance with a view to something else, our goals and intentions, our possible enjoyment and advantage. Comportment toward the beautiful as such, says Kant, is unconstrained favoring. We must freely grant to what encounters us as such its way to be; we must allow and bestow upon it what belongs to it and what it brings to us.

John Brenkman is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Baruch College. He is the author of Culture and Domination (1987) and Straight Male Modern: A Cultural Critique of Psychoanalysis (1993), and is the editor of the literary magazine Venue.