Kant, Hegel, and the Invention of Aesthetics:
Naturalism, Idealism, and the Dialectics of Art
Fall 2020
Course: FREN 5120-001
Instructor: Chris Braider
Teaching Method: In-Person
Meets: T 3-5:30pm
An endemic paradox of the European Enlightenment is the persistence of traditional moral, philosophical, and artistic high-mindedness in a culture whose most advanced aesthetic and epistemological paradigms assert the primacy of empirical experience and the reductive picture of Nature this implies. 18th-century thought, art, literature, science, and historiography are characterized by what looks at first glance like the thoroughgoing repudiation of the idealisms of the Renaissance, baroque, and neoclassical eras. Where their 16th- and 17th-century forebears remained agonistically and yet (with rare if telltale exceptions) consistently loyal to values and virtues grounded in the metaphysics of Platonized Christian transcendence, 18th-century novelists, historians, painters, and philosophers embraced a metaphysics of immanence and the naturalistic, skeptical, and ironic habits of expression and thought that the perspective of immanence enjoins. However, not only did these new habits fail to eliminate the idealisms they did so much to discredit; they regularly placed themselves in their service, as moral, stylistic, and ontological boundary conditions designed to ensure a spontaneous yet in principle non-contingent exhibition of the transcendence they showed to be impossible. The priority of natural experience as a causal, historical, and behavioral test did not preclude but rather reframed the Belle Nature inherited from the moralized Renaissance, baroque, and neoclassical aesthetics of ut pictura poesis. Similarly, the experimental insistence on the supremacy of the body over the mind, and the related conception of the body itself as a material machine entirely accounted for by naturalistic means, did not eliminate but rather gave fresh moral and aesthetic impetus to the self-directed dressage by which the human animal was seen to transform itself into the autonomous rational Person of sentimental fiction, Academic painting, Kant’s “categorical imperative,” and even the self-actualizing Spirit of Hegelian rational idealism.
The course explores a variety of ways in which period writers, thinkers, and artists attempted to negotiate, mediate, and resolve these contradictions, with special emphasis on the central role played by the doctrine of the Aesthetic and its presumed experimental organ, the faculty of Taste. In addition to reviewing developments in visual art, and in particular in the paintings and engravings of Watteau, Fragonard, Chardin, Vernet, Greuze, Constable, Reynolds, and Hogarth, students will undertake readings in the work of the Britons Addison, Burke, and Hume, the Germans Lessing, Kant, Schiller, and Hegel, and their French contemporaries, Diderot and Rousseau. Representative themes will be: 18th-century doctrines of the beautiful and the sublime; the pictorial dialectics of “theatricality and absorption” and its role in the portrayal of moral feeling in visual art; the emergence of the proto-Romantic Imagination and of “aesthetic feeling” as a means of reconciling moral and natural modes of experience; the invention of the faculty of “moral taste” in both conjunction with and deviation from the standards of the new-minted “critical” taste deployed in both philosophy and journalism; Kant and the professionalization of aesthetics as a subfield of philosophy; and, finally, Hegel and the historicization of aesthetic activity and experience.