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Keeping an eye on Kant

As a specialist in German philosophy, I applaud Frederick Burwick’s Feb. 24 article on the contemporary relevance of Kant. Kant’s significance has rarely been captured so lucidly. Yet each of the four Kantian doctrines Burwick points out has a downside, rendering Kant more important to us today — if also more dangerous.

As Burwick points out, Kant argues that our minds determine how we experience objects in the world. But the mind’s ordering principles are a priori — they are not from experience, but independent of it. What this means is that those basic principles cannot be changed by new experiences. The Kantian mind is thus a collection of rigidly separated powers and principles whose basic categories cannot be changed. In this inflexibility, Kant joins the very philosophers he most criticizes — the dogmatists — in their efforts to impose an atemporal, conceptual order on experience. Kant’s own concepts of space, time, cause and effect, which he considered valid for all time, have in fact largely been left behind by today’s physics.

Kant granted the imagination an important role in all forms of cognition. But this elevation subordinates imagination to the same rigid conceptual order mentioned above. Imagination is thus disciplined to a point where beauty cannot violate rational order. But where would art have been for the last century if that were true?

It is otherwise with the Kantian idea of the sublime, whose grandeur “deconstructs” the habitual order and calls us to even higher things. But Kant routinely suggests, without ever quite saying so, that the experience of the sublime is not open to women. Knowledge of higher things in women, he remarks, is about as attractive to them as a beard.

Finally, Kant’s doctrine of “art for art’s sake” derives from his rigid ordering of the mind’s powers, which places our appreciation of the beautiful into an entirely different mental sphere from cognition and practice. This, of course, begs the question of whether ethical or moral considerations are “external” to works of art. If humans, as “rational animals,” must be both rational and animal at once, why can’t art be simultaneously beautiful and moral?

None of this suggests that Burwick has gotten Kant wrong. What it does suggest is that there are other dimensions to Kant’s thought — and to its importance. The history of philosophy includes doctrines and concepts that continue to shape the discipline, and our lives, from deep within. We must not only acknowledge our gratitude to a thinker like Kant, we must also keep an eye on him!

John McCumber
Professor of Germanic languages

It is gratifying to read an appreciation of Kant in a general university publication. But I think the author took Kant’s position on “art for art’s sake” a bit too far. Kant did think that art was not to be valued for its utility or ethical content, but for what it is “in itself.” However, to conclude that his view opens the possibility of “beautiful rape” is to mistake Kant’s point. There are things we do not and should not find beautiful if our sensibility is in good order. It’s a hard issue.

Barbara Herman
Professor of philosophy