Abstract
Using Immanuel Kant’s work in aesthetics, I argue that language is a site of aesthetic receptivity in the work of the poet in a manner distinctive from our instrumental use of language in theoretical enterprise. While the art of the poet presents genius of remarkable ability, poetic reading seeks to emulate the reflective dexterity of the poet. Poets cultivate receptivity responding to the song of nature through language, exploiting the musicality of language. As onlookers, non-poets might establish a relationship to nature, a moment of reflection, by means of the poet’s text. The less talented onlooker listens to the song of the text through which he or she can hear nature’s song. In this interplay, language, freed from its proper or conventional designations, brings to mind a plenitude, which initiates aesthetic judgment. Poetry resembles beauty — the language of nature — insofar as it speaks without delimiting, transforming a typically instrumental tool of discourse into a site of imaginative associations, a site for aesthetic judgment.
For the human being in his surrounding world there are many types of praxis, and among them is this peculiar and historically late one, theoretical praxis. It has its own professional methods; it is the art of theories, of discovering and securing truths with a certain new ideal sense which is foreign to prescientific life, the sense of a certain “final validity,” “universal validity.”
Here we have again offered an example of exhibiting what is “obvious,” but this time in order to make clear that in respect to all these manifold validities-in-advance, i. e. “presuppositions” of the philosopher, there arise questions of being in a new and highly enigmatic dimension. These questions, too, concern the obviously existing, ever intuitively pre-given world; but they are not questions belonging to that professional praxis and techne which is called objective science, not questions belonging to that art of grounding and broadening the realm of objectively scientific truths about this surrounding world; rather, they are questions about how the object, the prescientifically and then the scientifically true object, stands in relation to all the subjective elements which everywhere have a voice in what is taken for granted in advance.
Edmund Husserl
The Crisis of the European Sciences
translated by David Carr
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Notes
John Sallis, “Nature’s Song,” in Revue Internationale de Philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), vol. 45, no. 176, p. 7.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 8.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar ( Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987 ), p. 196.
Ibid.
In other places, I have tried to give an account of the speechlessness characteristic of aesthetic judgment. As an audience of genius, the speechless provides a response precisely as an acknowledgment of what cannot be expounded. It is a testimony to the success and failure of language. As a success, the genius makes language’s tone speak in unpredictable ways. As a failure, the audience comes to acknowledge their linguistic impotence, and seeks other modes of expression. Further, it mirrors the dynamic of the individual who encounters the beautiful only to find that it was a deceit — and for a moment or forever, it is unclear — loses the ability to have judgments of taste. The audience believes themselves, for a moment, to hear the song of nature only to find that it is not they who hear the song of nature, but the mediation of the genius which includes them in this cosmological harmony. Were it not for the genius, the audience would cease to acknowledge the harmony, except for occasional encounters with natural beauty. Hence the genius has an important power which differentiates him (and others like him) from the masses. One cannot but wonder what ideological murmurs can be found in this reading of genius.
Kant, op. cit., p. 59.
Ibid., p. 186.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996), A114, p. 163. Kant completes this passage with the following: “we shall not be surprised that we see nature in its unity merely in the root power (Radikalvermogen) for all our cognition, viz., in transcendental apperception; we see there nature in that unity, viz., on whose account alone it can be called object of all possible experience.”
Ibid., Al25, p. 171. The full text of Kant’s observation highlights our ordering of appearances as itself a designation of nature even though his earlier statement suggests that nature underlies such appearances: “Hence the order and regularity in the appearances (which order and regularity) we call nature are brought into them by ourselves; nor indeed could such order and regularity be found in appearances, had not we, or the nature of our mind, put them into appearances originally.” Nature appears doubly, as both ground (as root power) and appearance (as ordered regularity). My reading of poetry draws out nature’s originary, dis/ordered, essentially subjective appearance in the aesthetic receptivity.
Ibid., A51/B75, p. 107.
Ibid., p. 167.
Kant’s explication of the beautiful in the third Critique follows the categories by developing the four moments of the beautiful according to quantity, quality, modality and relation.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s “Dialectic of Pure Reason” outlines the schein of reason in the form of the paralogisms, antinomies and ideal in which reason proposes resolution to conflicting ideas even though it has no basis for establishing these conclusions.
Rousseau highlights the construction of vain desires as one of the origins of inequality in the Second Discourse. Kant suggests that ornamentation and vanity separate us from nature and distance us from our moral vocation. His explication suggests that we desire to find the beautiful in nature; our resort to decorative vanities responds to the very failure to satisfy this desire. Aesthetic comportment, thereby, may inform the very origin of technological and cultural development through a frustrated pursuit of beauty.
Kant, op. cit., section 42, pp. 165–70.
Ibid., p. 169.
To annihilate one’s aesthetic interest, the conditions that encourage aesthetic judgment are removed. In other words, one cannot attain disinterest or detachment and, therefore, can no longer be receptive to one’s originary presentations. A psychology, much to Kant’s dismay, emerges. In this psychology, one’s broken hopes prevent one from becoming disinterested. A broken aesthete may still chase aesthetic judgment. He or she, however, cannot have aesthetic judgment due to the very fact that this chasing remains interested. Hence, while one can hope to encounter beauty, one cannot single-mindedly seek out nature’s beauty. Such single-mindedness cannot allow the subject to be the ground for the appearance of nature, but reflects a subject’s self-interest, an interest to appear according to his/her rational conception of beauty and not in keeping with beauty itself.
Kant, op. cit., p. 183.
Ibid., p. 183–4.
Ibid., p. 185.
Ibid., p. 198.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 199.
I remind the reader that, in a Kantian framework, this nature remains a site of originary subjectivity.
Ibid., p. 185.
Ibid., p. 186.
Ibid., p. 183.
Octavio Paz, The Other Voice ( New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991 ).
Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1995 ).
Louise Chawla, In the First Country of Places: Nature, Poetry, and Childhood Memory (Albany: State University of New York, 1994).
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Cunningham, S.B. (2000). The Song of the Text: A Kantian Aesthetic of Poetry and Poetic Reading. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Poetry of Life in Literature. Analecta Husserliana, vol 69. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3431-8_7
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