Courtship

… consistency becomes a constraint if it leaves sensitivity unexercised or evidence unexplored.

… The self cannot be handed over to any rule or system of belief which we already have, or which we might have, any more than it can be regarded as the mere locus of urgencies and sensations.

… the restraining of impulse is a condition of our imaginativeness and correspondingly imaginativeness induces restraint.

 

This is from The Critical Historians of Art by Michael Podro (1982). I posted from the Introduction to this book way back in March of this year. That post explains what Podro is trying to do in this book. Today, from his first chapter I am focusing on his contrast of Kant and Schiller. But first one segment to set that up:

 

… What is required, someone might answer today, for the alien spectator to have a serious involvement with the art of a culture which he did not share, is a preparedness to learn — a preparedness to exercise a sensitivity which his own immediate culture did not demand or make possible, so that he felt his own beliefs and imagination under pressure. Other people’s beliefs do not have to be genuine alternatives for us, that is, they do not have to be part of a way of life or belief system that we may really adopt, for us to be exercised and involved by them or by the art embedded in them.

 

But this is not to meet the problem raised by Schnase in the early nineteenth century any better than saying that one can at least recognise the artistry of alien works. For learning about another culture and sensitizing yourself to its art already presupposes that you have a cultural institution of such learning, rather as the Aztec priests, as part of their religious culture, had a negotiating mechanism for dealing with conquerors whose religious systems were different. They assumed that at least there would be someone corresponding to a priest or spokesman and if they submitted with respect to some religious practices they would be allowed to keep others. It is a crucial factor in the work of the critical historians — but under internal rather than external pressure — that they had to forge just such a mechanism, to devise ways in which they could extend their sense of art beyond its inherited classic or Gothic norms — norms which had become a second nature through education, convention and religious involvement.

 

Now, on to Kant:

… Kant sustains the distinction between the satisfaction of appetite — part of our causally conditioned relation to the world — and the aesthetic judgement’s free relation to the world, not only by pointing to the universality of the latter (which would be rather inconclusive) but by the way he relates aesthetic judgement to material objects: for Kant the satisfaction expressed by pure aesthetic judgement is satisfaction in a spontaneous activity of the mind concerned with itself, it is not concerned with the material outside the mind, except insofar as the material provides the occasion for the mind’s exercise. When we said of something that it was beautiful, this was not something we said about the object as an object. The concept of the beautiful, he said, did not extend to the object, by which he seems to have meant that the object is of interest only because the mental activity it affords is of interest. The aesthetic judgement is not — it seems — saying something about the object but doing something with it. The mere verbal utterance ‘This is beautiful’ signals what you are doing and that it is going well. In this way Kant envisages an activity of mind playing upon the sensory world yet neither constructing it as an object of knowledge nor changing it in response to natural urgencies.

… What could be included within the order of art, and how that order could be related to other concerns, was a problem recognised even by Kant himself. He allowed that the pure aesthetic judgement, or judgement of taste, did not comprehend the whole interest of art; and he acknowledged that the exercise of the mind in the judgement of taste would soon become boring if it were not attached to moral concerns.

Compare that to Schiller:

… why should we isolate thought from that fabric of encountering, responding, anticipating? One answer is that our language requires consistency of meaning, and so, insofar as we see our responding and anticipating as exemplified pre-eminently in the use of our language, we direct our attention upon the conservation of meaning from utterance to utterance, and upon compatibility and incompatibility of statements.

… in Naive and Sentimental Poetry, [Schiller] wrote:

The understanding of the schools, always fearful of error, crucifies its words and its concept upon the cross of grammar and logic, and is severe and stiff to avoid uncertainty at all costs . . .

… consistency becomes a constraint if it leaves sensitivity unexercised or evidence unexplored. Insofar as we identify the freedom of the self with our reason, ‘we need,’ Schiller says in Letter XIII, ‘to preserve the sense of life against the encroachments of freedom.’ We could lose our freedom not only by being inundated with sensations or carried away by feeling, but also by vesting our judgement in some general rule. With our finite minds our rules may always be too narrow.

What Schiller is arguing for is a redefinition of what constitutes the judging self. The self cannot be handed over to any rule or system of belief which we already have, or which we might have, any more than it can be regarded as the mere locus of urgencies and sensations.

… The second way of overcoming the dichotomy of sense and reason is by ceasing to place the mind’s spontaneous activity exclusively in the domain or reason. It is when the mind is at play, he says in Letter XXIII, when it is engaged aesthetically with the world, ‘that the autonomy of reason is opened up within the domain of sense.’ What Schiller means by this is first of all that there is a constructive activity of the mind (pre-eminently exemplified in works of art) through which we weave together elements from the world, by analogy, by suggestions, by relations which are not those of literal connections. The activity of the mind is no longer Kant’s ordering unconcerned with — abstracted from — the character of things ordered. The objects and sensuous stuff of the world are now actively felt for, celebrated and elaborated upon.

The third way in which the duality of reason and sensation is understood is as the opposition of actuality and potentiality, our actual condition and an ideal we set ourselves. In a work of art, in Schiller’s view, we overcome the responses which the material or subject matter most readily precipitate; the construction of the artist enables us to reflect on and evaluate the material, even to evaluate it in reciprocally curtailing ways. By virtue of the play of the imagination the actual is set in the context of the ideal, by which Schiller means that the actual is seen from the most comprehensive viewpoint.

… But the ideal of comprehensiveness is not a matter of judgement cut free from behaviour. Throughout, Schiller’s concern with aesthetic education is conceived as informing, even governing, our social behavior. The point is reinforced in the last letter, where Schiller talks of the elaboration of play. On the one hand there may be an elaboration of artefacts beyond the demands of function, and on the other the articulation of our exuberance and feeling by giving it order:

Unco-ordinated leaps of joy turn into dance, the unformed movements of the body into graceful and harmonious gesture; confused and indistinct cries of feeling become articulate, begin to obey the laws of rhythm, and to take on the contours of song.

So elaboration may order and control our exuberance, or celebrate the objects of need, and the two procedures may converge. In particular, both are involved in courtship. For Schiller the restraining of impulse is a condition of our imaginativeness and correspondingly imaginativeness induces restraint.

To be continued …

-Julie

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