Fiona Hughes. Kant's Aesthetic Epistemology: Form and World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. viii + 324 pp. $100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7486-2122-4.

Reviewed by Ryan Plumley (Department of History, Cornell University)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Art as a Way of Knowing

Anyone interested in German thought and culture since the eighteenth century must inevitably come to terms with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). It is not simply that his influence on the thought of his contemporaries was perceived as epoch-defining. His works also defined the trajectories of any number of fields: philosophy, history, literature, the sciences, and so on. And his influence is still felt in present institutional arrangements: for instance, in the disciplinary division of labor that gives philosophy the unenviable task of providing the theoretical underpinnings of knowledge production in general. Philosopher Fiona Hughes's Kant's Aesthetic Epistemology: Form and World undertakes the ambitious project of using Kant's reasoning to reassert the centrality of aesthetics to thought itself. Beyond a descriptive interpretation of particular texts from Kant, her book tries to think with him about how knowledge is possible and what features it has with respect to experience, using aesthetic experience as paradigmatic.

Scholars, including historians, specialized in Kant or in post-Kantian thought will find many of her arguments relevant to their own concerns. Yet, the very institutional arrangement that identifies Kant as a philosopher confronts the more generally interested intellectual or cultural historian with the sometimes bewildering modes of scholarship in our neighboring discipline of philosophy. Refined and often subtle argumentation is the mainstay of modern philosophical work, including Kant's. But the impressively detailed reasoning of philosophers is often matched by an equally impressive disdain for any form of contextualization that might orient their thinking with respect to other fields of inquiry. Disorientation can be intellectually productive, shaking up one's assumptions and leading to questioning of one's own scholarly protocols. But, without an anchoring expertise in Kant's writings, a reader of Hughes's book may well feel at sea in her highly technical analysis. In what follows I will try to provide some navigational tips. First, I will rehearse her own sense of what her book has to offer and provide a summary of her argumentation. Then, I will point out some of the limitations of this argumentation as well as the limits of its mode of presentation.

As Hughes observes in her introduction, her own discipline is divided roughly between two major tendencies: the "analytic" philosophers--who are largely focused on epistemology, philosophy of mind, and moral philosophy--and the "continental" philosophers--who engage in the critical reception, interpretation, and development of thought in the tradition derived from the European continent. Hughes notes that analytic philosophers have demonstrated little interest in aesthetics and art, and indeed have expressed little certainty that aesthetics even belongs in modern philosophical reflection at all. On the other hand, continental philosophers have made much of the complicities and convergences between aesthetics and other forms of thought, as seen in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and so on. Hughes hopes that her book can contribute to crossing the divide by convincing those of the analytic persuasion that the commitments of continental philosophers have real purchase on their own work.

The overall argument that she develops in order to support the one group and win over the other is that aesthetic experience, whether of nature or human art, sets in motion a harmonious interplay between thinking and sensing that is exemplary for any form of thinking at all. Making sense of one's sense experience is always at least partially, but never exclusively, cognitive or knowledge-making. Likewise, cognition or knowledge production always involves sense perception, but is not delimited to it. Hughes argues that Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) helps us understand specifically aesthetic experience as paradigmatic for this more general process.

One motive for this line of reasoning, Hughes argues, is that it helps dispel the charge of "impositionalism" that has often been leveled at Kant. "Impositionalism" is the view that "the mind imposes form or order on the world" (p. 5) and it leads to the conclusion that all knowledge is fundamentally subjective. Without a fully developed account of how the world and the mind interact and mutually define one another, Kant's philosophy would amount to a kind of solipsism that traps each mind in its own view of the world. Chapters 1 and 2 are dedicated to disputing the scholars who have attributed this view to Kant (Robert Pippin and others) and showing the advances and limitations of those who have defended him against this charge (Gerd Buchdahl and others), respectively. These chapters are admirably done: clearly organized, informative about the debates, and carefully argued.

In chapter 3, Hughes begins her own work with Kant's texts. Focusing on the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and, with variants, 1787), she shows that Kant is committed to the view that our minds structure the way that we receive and process a world given outside of the mind. The process of knowing the world points both directions, toward the world and toward our minds, and a moment of affective response is the product. This affective moment of sense experience, structured by both the mind and the world, is the grounds for her argument that aesthetic experience is paradigmatic for experience as a whole.

Chapter 4 continues with a more detailed analysis of the terms of Kant's epistemology and introduces the importance of imagination for bridging the gap between an affective response and a conceptualization of one's experience. Hughes argues that Kant envisioned a complex synthesis, involving the imagination of various orientations and operations in the mind  that makes knowledge possible. Aesthetic judgments, especially insofar as they waver somewhere between sense experience and cognitive certainty, exemplify this synthesis in a particularly pointed way. This notion is really the central point of Hughes's book, and the remaining chapters deepen and expand the argument from here.

The remainder of Hughes's rather technical arguments will only be of interest to experts, so I will not rehearse them here. I will simply note a few things about the chapters that follow. In chapter 5, Kant's Critique of Judgment is incorporated more directly into Hughes's argumentation. This text was Kant's attempt to complete his system by establishing the differentiations as well as the intimate connections between aesthetic judgment and the "pure" and "practical" reason (knowledge and ethics) from the first two "Critiques." Hughes situates her conclusions from the previous chapters in Kant's own attempt to bring together his comprehensive reflection on epistemology. Chapters 6 and 7 treat more specific issues and attempt to read Kant as consistently making aesthetic judgment the model for the kind of synthetic operation in the mind that is characteristic of cognition in general. Chapter 8 concludes that aesthetic judgment "finally shows how our minds are capable of getting at something outside of ourselves in the world by revealing the process of cooperation that makes possible receptivity to the given" (p. 302). Here Hughes expands the significance of her arguments by showing how this insight suggests that the "relation in which aesthetic judgment stands to an aesthetic object is exemplary for the openness of thinking that is required in cognitive, moral and political thinking" (p. 277). That is, she contends that her account of Kant's aesthetic epistemology reveals the crucial importance of experiences of beauty to sustaining our capacity for self-critique and critical consciousness in general. In the afterword, Hughes suggests that the sublime, the complement of beauty in eighteenth-century aesthetics, could be fit within her account as the failure of a harmony between the senses and the world.

In response to Hughes, I will touch on a few objections. Initially, one might question whether she does not work from an overly homogenized view of "aesthetic judgment," one that offers no substantial qualifications for the various uses to which beauty can be put or the meanings it might have in different cultural or historical contexts. Moreover, aesthetic judgments can be altogether ideologically dogmatic as, for example. in French or American "republican" architecture. They can also involve modes of exclusion or insistence on a putative purity that serves scapegoating functions; for example, in the National Socialist aesthetics of the body, which tried to imagine a racially pure individual and national body.

With respect to her focus on Kant, I would note that throughout her book Hughes completely ignores the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), which Kant himself understood as the most important part of his philosophy. It is here that he establishes "freedom" as what he calls the "keystone" of his entire system. This surprising omission is symptomatic of analytic philosophy's inability or unwillingness to take seriously questions and intellectual concerns that fall outside of its contemporary research agendas, even those of its own objects of study. It may seem unfair to criticize Hughes for operating within the bounds of her disciplinary protocols. After all, she announces her intention to win over analytic philosophers, and in order to do so she must play by their rather constricting rules.

Although she remains almost entirely within a disciplinary myopia that sees only other philosophers as relevant interlocutors, Hughes's account of Kant does have implications beyond epistemology narrowly conceived. For instance, from the beginning, the broader intellectual and cultural stakes of German Idealism (and its cousin, Romanticism) were partly defined by the problem of the subject's apprehension of the world. Kant himself, as well as his idealist successors K. L. Reinhold (1757-1823), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854), and G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), was concerned with demonstrating that an account of the internal workings of the mind was crucial for understanding what knowledge was or what it could do. Historians of this and later periods in German intellectual history will be familiar with this context. Hughes elides the fact that all of these thinkers, perhaps especially Kant, were preoccupied with rescuing a specifically (Protestant) Christian subject from the perceived threat of a mechanical or materialist world view derived from French (Cartesian) and English (Lockean or Humian) philosophy. Far from solipsistically isolating knowledge or experience inside the mind of the subject, Idealism attempted to ground the expansive claims and orientations of a Christian world view--prominently including faith in God and the afterlife--in reason. Likewise, Kant also explicitly understood his philosophy as defining the terms in which responsible and critical (republican) citizenship could coexist with the demands of sovereign state authority: that is, what it meant to be "free" both morally and politically. Establishing that knowledge involves interplay between mind and world was intimately linked to legitimating the authority of reason with respect to both otherworldly belief and worldly institutions in a late eighteenth-century context.

Yet, following the practice of analytic philosophy, Hughes selectively reads Kant's works for putatively pure "philosophical" content, ignoring the rest as distraction or fluff. My criticism is not so much that Hughes's sophisticated analysis and largely convincing argumentation do not bear on other problems, including historical ones, but rather that the mode of thinking and writing in analytic philosophy actually makes it difficult to cogently relate this kind of philosophy to other ways of knowing. For instance, Hughes moves between various parts of various texts without even registering that Kant's thought might have developed or changed over time, much less that it was produced in a culture foreign to our own. "Philosophy," one is left to presume, is an operation that only happens in the present tense, and any part of Kant's works are equally appropriable to her project. The briefest of contextualization--even just of where and how a particular passage arises within the text of which it is part--would help give a non-expert purchase on the argumentation that she pursues. Moreover, some account of the concerns that originally animated Kant's project would go a long way toward helping the reader negotiate his or her own thinking with respect to the body of scholarly literature that preoccupies Hughes. Otherwise, one has to wonder whether Kant's texts are anything more than convenient watering holes on analytic philosophy's transhistorical march toward the truth of knowledge. This lack of orienting material is especially unfortunate, since the general thrust of Hughes's argument would seem to suggest that various ways of knowing the world actually do have much in common.

In short, the scholar generally interested in how Kant's thought on aesthetics brings together his philosophical system-building would be better directed elsewhere. John Zammito's The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment (1992), a work that treats the same problem from a somewhat wider perspective, is a good starting place. However, specialists of Kant will find this book interesting at many points, especially as a strong rebuttal of the "impositionalist" understanding of Idealism.

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Citation: Ryan Plumley. Review of Hughes, Fiona, Kant's Aesthetic Epistemology: Form and World. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23945

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