Libra Guo’s “Aesthetics of Existence”:Kant-Nietzsche-Foucault
First, some housekeeping: When I led the two colloquia on Lacan’s ideas three or four years ago, I was using the Alan Sheridan translation of Écrits [Norton, 1977]; that translation has now been superceded the Bruce Fink translation, also published by Norton, 2002.
Second, I couldn’t be happier than to be presenting here the ideas of one of our students. I have always wanted to involve the students somehow in these presentations of interesting, influential ideas, but I understand it’s complicated, students are busy, it’s very trying to listen to complex stuff in a foreign language, etc., etc. Notwithstanding that, it has finally happened, and I am delighted to co-present the argument of our own Libra Guo. I’m especially delighted because I myself had some murky inkling of a genealogy that links Kant to Nietzsche to Foucault, but when I read Guo’s paper I saw the genealogy with complete clarity. Consequently, I am going to offer a commentary on Guo’s thesis regarding Kant and Nietzsche and extrapolate some things which her thesis now allows me to think; she herself will then talk about Foucault. I urge you to read the entirety of her senior thesis. Feel free to question us intently because she and I are currently still working with these issues in two different fields (Libra: the ‘culture industry’ and I: problems of immanence).
Guo’s argument proceeds in three steps: from Kantian passivity, to Nietzschean activity, to Foucault’s attempt to bring them together.
To begin with some background, Guo is correct to stress that Kant radically and “abruptly departed from the Christian view of the world” that had dominated philosophical thinking for hundreds of years (Guo 1-2 and 9-10). A central part of that Kantian departure was the role to be played by aesthetics. For the medieval theologian, beauty was treated with suspicion as it may lure the soul to perdition; epistemology and ontology were more dominant issues since these involved the possibilities knowledge of and the Being of God which would be essential for salvation. The Renaissance rediscovery of classical philosophy turned more seriously to aesthetics but was largely concerned with a single text, Aristotle’s Poetics, because there was a concern for correct rules for imitation, for the production of artworks. Some original thinking was done on the nature of the imagination itself (Hobbes described imagination as “decaying sense” or phantasm (Leviathan I, ii) and Coleridge made some fascinating distinctions between imagination (as a power, kraft) and fancy as kind of un-power, but the Cartesian obsession with a unified epistemology was of generally greater philosophical interest. It was Kant who, at the age of 66 (when most philosophers have long since run out of original ideas), out of the blue, after having already written two seminal works, his first two Critiques, gave a central role to aesthetics for philosophy because aesthetics was the bridge that would cross the abyss that lay between Pure and Practical Reason: between theory and practice, between what is thinkable and what is applicable, or, between what is thinkable and what may perhaps be—most importantly, what should be. The 2nd and 3rd Critiques, morality and aesthetics must be thought together (Guo 5), just as in Foucault, aesthetics and ethics must be brought together, side by side, but without blurring into one another. This double emphasis is essential for understand Guo’s thesis. The same is true for Nietzsche, as Guo implies in her section on him, even though he is does not use the terms morality or ethics. (I will try to elaborate later.)
This “bridge” however, has proven to be both highly enigmatic and provocative. Nietzsche himself said that Kant had “broken open the cage of metaphysics”. He opened the door to a good deal of Nietzsche’s thinking (this is what I learned from Guo; in fact, I can no longer read Nietzsche except as another ‘version’ of Kant—and vice versa—in spite of their obvious differences in style and temperament), to all of German Romanticism (on this point see Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute), to post-modernism (Lyotard’s work on the sublime, e.g.), and more. The “bridge” metaphor should be understood rigorously: theory and practice are not unified; they are precisely kept apart; brought into a state of utmost tension, but not dialectical conflict. The enigma of Kant’s 3rd Critique is that the bridge between two postivities—what is thinkable and what is do-able—tends to detach itself from either and becomes its own autonomy. This was Kant’s final gift to modern thought. In my opinion it has not been superceded, though many—cognitive science, genetic research, evolution theory, mathematical physics, cosmological speculation, etc.—have tried and are still trying with sometimes amazing vehemence. That is, the ambitions of the sciences and cosmology are to claim that what is properly thinkable or experience-able must be and therefore there is no need for a bridge, for a medium between the two. Put differently (and this is why Kant (and the Kant-Nietzsche-Foucault genealogy that Guo makes explicit) remains lively), the sciences and cosmology wish to reduce aesthetic experience and creativity to being an epiphenomenon of a prior deep and unified ground. Aesthetics and creativity would be quantum evidence for the existence of a unified field of some kind. Kant would reject this.
1. How does it all work out? Guo, following Kant closely, gets right to the point, the initial enigma, and proceeds rapidly (but I will try to slow things down a bit): “The beautiful, as Kant defines it in his third critique, is ‘an object of satisfaction without interest’”. This includes “without having an interest in its existence” (Guo 2). To have an interest in the existence of that which I feel to be beautiful introduces desire, and desire “even the least desire—for something will make us misjudge” (Guo 2, emphasis mine). Desire and Cognition are, from the beginning subtracted, suspended, irrelevant. (Because existence is irrelevant, there is nothing to cognate and nothing to desire.) This apparently stark proposition—I see a flower which fills me with a feeling of beauty yet I do not even desire (or care at all) that it (the flower) may exist—is actually the most quotidian experience for us readers of literature. When we read do we find ourselves thinking, ‘yes, but all the same, the Trojan War wasn’t really like that; or, all the same, there never was a guy named Hamlet; or, all the same, white whales don’t really exist…?’ For Coleridge, this experience was a “suspension of disbelief”; but for Kant it is a suspension of interest in existence altogether, and thus belief or disbelief are irrelevant from the beginning. (That has to be kept in mind; Kant is not asking for a Cartesian or phenomenological epoche: an active suspension or a mental experiment; he is pointing toward a disinterest, a negligence prior to any activity.) In §2 Kant gives the example of “green meadows” in three stages of the process of judgment: 1-When I judge that the meadow is green I am being objective; 2-When I judge that the meadow is agreeable to me and that I would like to experience this agreeableness more often, I desire that this meadow or such meadows exist as an object of my gratification; but 3-In pure aesthetic judgment that object drops out, and I take for my new object agreeableness itself. The feeling itself is the object—that is to say the subject is the object, or, more exactly, the subjective feeling. This feeling moreover is uncontaminated by charm or emotion, §13. As such it would be a feeling that is not felt (or not yet felt), a kind of youth without age, and it relates to a feeling for purposiveness without determinate purpose, which Kant gets to elsewhere, §11. The judgment of beauty is purely subjective, as Kant repeatedly says, but, in a further twist, §3, this judgment “does not serve for any cognition at all, not even that by which the subject cognizes itself” [italics mine]. This is what is enigmatic: the subjective is the object of the judgment but not the existence of the subject. Whenever Kant insists that the aesthetic judgment is purely subjective, this means that both the existence of the object and the subject are suspended. That is, it is not a case of someone saying ‘this or that is pleasing to me’. In a formulation that is bound to be confounding, but that must be taken seriously (somehow), in aesthetics I experience a subjectivity of which I am neither the subject nor the object. All my cognition is ruled out: there is nothing for me to know about beauty, nothing to understand. I do not know myself to be having an aesthetic experience; the experience is cognitively and experientially irrecuperable (and immemorial: I can’t desire it, and I can’t get it back (in memory, in photographs, etc.)). In the 3rd movement of judgment, this strangely evacuated experience is formalized by the second affirmation. Let us call it a formalized distinction (the feeling alone is distinguished from all other interest) and a formalized negligence (existence, desire, and objectivity are formally ruled out as dis-interesting.) Gratification may be animal (chemical, natural, physiological); the assent to the gratification, however, is not—it is an inner experience whose content is animal (gratification) mixed with formal assent to create a hybrid (and perhaps even contradictory) experience called the aesthetic (which, in a way I that have been trying to work out (and which Nietzsche tries to work out), may be apart from either animal or human. It may be a Wittgensteinian form-of-life, a ‘grammar’, or, a formula-of/for-life. As we shall see below, Guo has already anticipated this possibility.).
Cognition is not thereby abolished, extinguished; it simply has nothing to do, thus I have nothing to do. I can take no interest in what is nonetheless happening to me. I don’t frankly even care if I exist or if the object exists. Kant has separated out an autonomous realm—free of interest, of desire, free of knowledge—which in fact is common to everyone because everyone feels pleasure, displeasure: everyone possesses taste. It is the most everyday of feelings: I like…I don’t like…and without the slightest desire to either justify or understand why. And indeed when pressured into answering the question why, the judgment of taste is famously unaccountable: ‘there’s no accounting for taste’ as the saying goes. Taste, while remaining purely subjective, is nonetheless absolutely common and thus, in principle, universalizeable and is thus a kind of medium for morality which would be pure, free of interest, desire, or even existence (Guo 3-4). But just like money, which is intended to act as a pure medium of exchange for goods and services (a bridge between buyer and seller) and whose own existential qualities are negligible (what do I care if the bills are red or green or have an image of the Taiwan Little League team on them or George Washington?), the aesthetic bridge tends to become its own realm (money, in the modern market becomes in itself a valuable commodity; money can be exchanged for money and acquire additional value without itself becoming a thing useful to do something with). For Kant, his exploration into aesthetics was significant as a condition for the possibility of morality: the end of all activity, of all application: that which is an end in itself, purposive in itself, good in itself. The aesthetic feeling is preliminary to pure moral feeling with which it shares the same characteristics of disinterest (Guo 3). It was Nietzsche who went back into this autonomous realm prior to its recuperation by Kant’s categorical morality and explored more fully what Kant himself, right away in §1, saw (but then ignored): that the feeling of pleasure/displeasure is just another way of saying: the subject’s “feeling of life” (which Nietzsche would then recuperate “immorally” and which I will come back to).
2. Certainly, for Foucault (and Deleuze) Nietzsche is the great philosopher of life; but not life as such, not life per se, instead the feeling of life. For Nietzsche, this feeling of life is the ground (a groundless ground, not an objective ground) of valuation, re-valuation, and the creation of values, which is his robust expansion of the Kantian “judgment” (Deleuze, in particular, is a great explicator of Nietzsche’s “valuations”). Nietzsche saw that the judgment ‘this is pleasant’ is, at a certain level, a valuation, not a declaration of adjudged, subjective fact.
Guo, with Nietzshe, is correct to emphasize that Kant’s aesthetics tends toward passivity, receptivity. The Kantian subject tends to occupy the “spectator” position, the “contemplator” (indeed, Guo wonderfully resuscitates the seldom used term ‘spectatoritis’ to emphasize the point, 6). This in fact goes back to the 1st Critique and the spontaneous receptivity to/forming of that which is to be known: the ‘art’ hidden deep in our souls. Kant is concerned to delimit the conditions for the possibility of experiencing and knowing what is: a passivity prior to the activity of knowing. Nietzsche is going to emphasize the spontaneous forming power along with the feeling of life as valuing power. It is a double emphasis. For Nietzsche the issue is not just how it is that human mind can fashion that-which-is (that which is unknowable in-itself) into a that-which-can-be-known, but how the mind can fashion a that-which-is-valuable and simultaneously feel its own life become itself in so doing. Guo characterizes this as an “enhancement” of life, which she flatly says is “real life” (8).
Hence, Nietzsche’s subject is not passive but artistic, creative, spontaneous, and free. It was Kant’s achievement to have separated out an autonomous realm, an ungrounded realm, a realm that can only be formed and/or created in feeling, but which cannot be recuperated for use since that would destroy the feeling altogether because I would transform the feeling into a mere object of gratification. Aesthetic experience is a realm outside any cognition (there is nothing to know about it, just as there is nothing to know about grammar; grammar is simply an assent to the way things are phrased, a formalization of what actually happens in everyday language; grammar is everyday language plus a kind of void), hence aesthetic experience is outside Truth. It will never have been true that this or that experience was pleasant/unpleasant (and from this Nietzsche will derive his “powers of the false” and “fictioning powers of Reason”, etc.). Knowledge and Truth, in fact are dead (as God is dead)—that is, not filled with life, not creating, and indeed ugly. Truth is ugly as dead things are ugly; they are objects of repulsion. (Nietzsche is not an atheist; he is repulsed by God, Truth.) For Nietzsche the question is not the Kantian contemplative disinterest in existence but the redeeming of life from its subordination to Truth, God—i.e. that which is dead, lifeless. Hence Nietzsche’s interest in the fashionable and unfashionable, style in general. In Nietzsche, art and life collapse into each other as an obvious consequence of Kant’s (distinctly un-metaphysical) insights into aesthetics, and Nietzschean ethics is an assent, a saying yes, to this collapsing. Guo says:
In his book Ecce Homo, Nietzsche is convinced that people can redeem themselves by means of transforming their lives into a “work of literature”. That is Nietzsche’s insistence. Suppose we view our own lives as if we were audiences, doing nothing but watching, we will not be able to make any changes to our lives. For this reason, Nietzsche insists that only by being an active creator of life, instead of a Kantian passive spectator, can art, or life as a work of art, be properly presented (7-8, emphasis mine).
I am emphasizing here that Guo says “creator of life”. For Guo, Nietzsche and Foucault, life is not a given which can then be modified, improved, altered for better or worse. Life is created—by us. She is clearly and properly Nietzschean in this striking affirmation. Now, this has nothing to do with Mary Shelly. Guo is not talking about creating a person. Dr Frankenstein may have wanted to create life, but he ended up with a monstrous electro-chemically animated body. I grant you that this word ‘life’ requires a lot of unpacking. Preliminarily, I will say that what Nietzsche aims at is something built up from the third moment of Kantian judging: the assent to the subjective feeling, an assent that formalizes the feeling and creates its own void which for Kant was ‘pure’ (and that was the end of it), but which for Nietzsche was a threshold. In a Nietzschean formulation this secondary assent is called becoming as in his famous command to ‘become who you are’ which means, at the most schematic level: redouble who you are (assent to who you are, or will who you are) and in so doing you will, believe it or not, create yourself, create your life. But not because you will have made contact with an obscurely unified vitalism; rather, you create a life that is not found in nature, is not given: new life, or, a novelty, as Nietzsche was indeed, and still is, a novelty (and just as the novel was a new ‘form’ of literature which was “made up of” more or less every possible kind of literature that had existed since antiquity and which certain writers, beginning in the 17th century, simply said ‘yes’ to. A novel is epic, lyric, dramatic, meditative, confessional, garrulous, oneiric (dream-like), epistletory, etc. Indeed, through the novel, literature as such, suddenly appeared. Sophocles, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer knew nothing of ‘literature’ per se. With the invention of the novel, literature became a new ‘thing’, a new form-of-art, a newly existing aesthetic realm whose success we are all aware of.)
In the various sections of Nietzsche I provided and to the content of which Guo refers to in her text, there is a clear enthusiasm in the writing. I want to call attention to the enthusiasm. This enthusiasm is not added on to a prior cogently philosophical position; the enthusiasm is part of the positioning, part of the thinking: it is Nietzsche becoming Nietzsche, the living Nietzsche (hence my use of present tense in referring to him). Passive, contemplative Kantian assent is dramatically, combustively enlarged into a Nietzschean enthusiasm. It is a process, not a truth, and insofar as it is enthusiastic, it is valuable. What I mean is: The dynamic coupling of enthusiasm with valuation distinguishes the Nietzschean from the common drunk for whom anything at all is assented to as long as he or she remains in a drunken state. For Nietzsche, the valuation intensifies the enthusiasm which creates the value. It is a kind of probity [redlichkeit] (Nietzsche’s “immoral” ‘version’ of the Kantian categorical imperative). It accounts for Nietzsche’s amazing, guileless candor (“God is dead”; “Truth is ugly”; George Sand is a “milk-cow”; Luther was a “lout”; etc.). (A Nietzschean-Foucauldian-Guoean litmus test might be to ask whether you feel yourself to be enthusiastic about your thinking, your life, or whether you feel vehement about it. If I may say so, cognitivists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker tend to be vehement; whereas a cognitivist like Oliver Saks tends to be, by turns, contemplative, meditative, enthusiastic, affirmative, and ultimately lively. I think that that difference has to be affirmed as essential; one’s style of thinking is not an accident of personality, circumstances, or subject area of research.)
Here we draw close to Foucault and the notion of an aesthetics of existence, a ‘care of self’ (le souci de soi) and a further complication. Nietzsche tends to forget the essential prior passivity that is part of the aesthetic experience. Aesthetic feeling is a strange movement, or being moved, without a place and without a person. It is an experience indifferent to places and persons—almost a metempsychosis. On the one hand, I can’t make myself have an aesthetic experience and hence experience a quickening of life and a threshold to creation, to new life; but on the other hand, is the experience sheerly accidental, fleeting, gratuitous: i.e., I just happen to stumble into a green meadow and feel—beauty, life, detachment, disinterest, freedom—as Kant seems to imply? Are there techniques and practices of self that can bring the two poles, passive and active, into communication? (Note that I do not say the self; the odd grammar is important to Guo’s explication of Foucault.)
This is the issue Foucault takes up.
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