The influence of Kant on our upbringing can hardly be overstated. Kant turned the Cartesian Method—Descartes’s blueprint for cogitation—into a system ready for universal consumption, opening the door to Hegel’s World History and so for our own Global Society. The key reason why we habitually underestimate Kant’s “Cartesian influence” on our lives is that the Founding Fathers of modernity present thought as an essentially progressive activity geared toward historical resolutions, as opposed to the investigation of its own roots. In Kant’s words, we cannot reason about the foundations of our freedom; what we can do, instead, is augment our freedom by building or contributing to the building of a world in which our freedom may thrive. The link between freedom and truth (as original given) is not dispassionately rational, then, pertaining rather to sentiment. It is in “art” as conceived by Kant in terms of the experience of the sublime that freedom meets truth. Thinking is not going to help us, here, unless tangentially insofar as it can help us build a world in which we are allowed to dedicate ourselves to experiencing the sublime.
With Kant a new thinking is posited as foremost guarantor of artistic freedom. The new thinking is that of “the critique of the pure reason,” which is to say of the analysis of the structure or formal limits of our consciousness. Artistic freedom and so the pursuit of the sublime is to be secured on the basis of an anatomy of mind allowing us to work collectively towards the establishment of a world consonant with or reflecting the structure of our consciousness undefiled by the contents of our consciousness. Epistemology, the science of the formal limits of our knowledge, would serve as foundation for a politics focused on fostering epistemology (broadly speaking, today’s “science”); a scientific politics or a science of politics (as per Hobbes) fit for a scientific society that alone can guarantee the expression of artistic freedom and thereby our right to expose our sentiment in public. Hence the rise of our modern conception of a public sphere in which everyone is entitled, at least in principle, to voice an opinion.
Evidently, Kant’s promotion of freedom goes hand in hand with the epistemologist’s defining, or rather redefining of the formal limits of freedom, whereby the contents of our consciousness are conceived in terms of sentiment or subjectivityopen to the sublime as non-rational experience of reality (the noumenon as things-themselves beyond mere phenomenal appearances). Our access to the sublime is disclosed by our freeing the contents of our consciousness, our own interiority, from any rationality and thus from thought. Hence Kant’s denial that we can reason about the content of our freedom. The content of art—as of any expression of our interiority—must be non-rational. Only by being non-rational, can our freedom thrive, albeit within the formal boundaries of our scientific society, a rational society guaranteeing freedom of expression of the non-rational contents of consciousness.
In sum, in the wake of Kant, we face a split between reason and sentiment or imagination, whereby the former is abstracted symbolically to set the latter free within the strictures of a purely rational society. Yet, freedom is limited, here, in a twofold manner, being emptied of reason and bound to a new formal reason devoid of interiority, a mechanical reason governing/structuring freedom from without.
The reason that had once been sought “Platonically” at the heart of our freedom is now being imposed from outside of our freedom, purportedly for the sake of securing our freedom. Herein do we find the essence of the project of establishing an Enlightened “open” Society of strict rules and regulations serving as mechanical guarantor of freedom for all. To thrive in this peculiarly modern society, we must learn to forsake the Platonic quest for a reason providentially at work at the heart of the imagination; upon exploring our “self,” we must learn to apply rules that allow for the fueling and channelling of our feelings within the strictures of our global society. The rules we should apply allow us to be fully integrated in and so fit for our liberal societies without attempting to express our interiority outside of the strictures of modernity’s “new science” (Galileo’s nuova scienza). We must give up the Platonic-like effort of articulating meaningfully any original link between our interiority and truth. Meaningful articulation is to yield, here, to an inherently non-rational experience, even a thrill expressed within the formal limits of Kantian epistemology and the society “enlightened” by it.
We are certainly allowed to seek an “ultimate truth,” albeit not rationally. Rational truth is the formal one based on rules and regulations purged of subjective feelings; a mechanically acquired truth and so inevitably a machine in its own right. Rational truth will be the truth of the society of machines, the truth of a universal deus ex machina: God as consummate machine.
Somehow, beyond the machine, we are allowed, even incited to pursue truth “subjectively,” in a sublimity in which art and religion come to coincide; whence the rise of modernity’s “spirituality”. And yet, not “everything goes” in art as in religion, insofar as everything “goes” within the limits of the machine of modernity. “Everything goes” by fitting in, by abiding by the dictates of a mechanically structured society in which everyone is identified “objectively” or “scientifically” as a numerical entity independently of any properly human interiority.
Art will not be abandoned to anarchy, insofar as it will have to respond to the formal structures of human consciousness as incarnated by our scientific society, the stage on which the expression of freedom is mechanically governed for all and so governed in the face of chance and necessity devoid of any cognitive interiority. Art will be ruled by a trans-humanist marketplace representing the logic of human consciousness, as necessary boundary for our otherwise irrational pursuits—not least of them, that of survival in the face of the threat of violent death.
The appeal to early-modern formalism is still permitted, today, provided we bow to the historical evolution of early-modern formalism into the marketplace of today’s technological society. Thus may we continue rehashing sets of formal, Kantian-like rules defining what art is, or should be; what “true” art is; what deserves to be praised as art, as opposed to being shunned as, say, trash. All such formalisms are welcome in our liberal societies, even though what defines art concretely, today—what defines value in art—remains the market-machine, or the mercantile if not altogether mercenary logic of technocracy.
While the dominion of the contemporary mercantile machine over art is the direct consequence of the conventional success of a Kantian epistemology, this one is in turn based on a Cartesian formalization of an anthropology we find propounded already by Machiavelli, Spinoza’s vir acutissimus (“most insightful man”), who had redefined man as eminently capable of making ideological use of nature. The Machiavellian and by extension modern project to “use nature” (not simply to use nature’s gifts on a natural foundation) entails, not merely a mechanistic or materialist conception of nature, but a conception in which—as Shakespeare showed most accurately in his Julius Caesar—the chance of ancient Epicureanism and the necessity of ancient conventional Stoicism are synthesized ideologically, or in the context of the attempt to establish a new world in which mechanical necessity stands as supreme guarantor of fleeting pleasure.1 In such a world, the mechanical structures of nature are to be somehow replicated or transferred into social-bureaucratic ones that can propel and orient hedonism towards an ideal, this being ultimately a Realm of Freedom (as per Marx) in which pleasure is universally enjoyed.
Machiavelli’s presentation of man in terms of a power capable of mastering or making strategic use of nature is discernible at the heart of Descartes’s own “ego,” a fictional “thing” (res) that is supposed to think autonomously in its world, gaining authority by appropriating its universe in symbolic forms and in this respect by mastering nature, inscribing it progressively within a cage of rules and regulations defined by the new “I”.2
As long as we accept Machiavelli’s anthropology and therewith the Florentine’s rejection of divine providence, or of “mind in nature,” we condemn ourselves to accepting, if only unwittingly, the demands of technocracy’s marketplace as defining the “objective” value of all art. Transcending subjection to those trans-human(ist) demands would require a return to a non-Machiavellian and more precisely Platonic-like anthropology that sees man as naturally seeking meaning in nature itself, not to be sure in terms of an irrational experience, but as thought rationally, by relating “fallen nature” or “the physical” back to “integral nature” (natura integra) or essentially intelligible being.3
1See my five-part study of the Caesar published by Voegelin View (April 26-28, June 15, 22, 2022) at https://voegelinview.com/author/marco-andreacchio/.
2For a detailed exploration of the problem at hand, see Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. Mineola (NY): Dover, 1992 [1934-36]: 197-211.
3See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 4.35; and Giambattista Vico, De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno, Book 1.10, 14-15, 21-26, 31-35. For a recent antidote to technocracy’s spell on all art, see my Medieval Teachers of Freedom, New York: Routledge, 2023.
Kommentare