Bart Vandenabeele

While several commentators agree that Schopenhauer’s theory of ‘will-less contemplation’ is a variant of Kant’s account of aesthetic disinterestedness, I shall argue here that Schopenhauer’s account departs from Kant’s in several important ways, and that he radically transforms Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgement into a novel aesthetic attitude theory. In the first part of the article, I critically discuss Kant’s theory of disinterestedness, pay particular attention to rectifying a common misconception of this notion, and discuss some significant problems with Kant’s approach. In part two, I argue that Schopenhauer gives up Kant’s concern with the transcendental conditions of the reflecting judgement, but nonetheless retains two crucial aspects of Kant’s analysis: first, the idea that pure aesthetic pleasure cannot be based on the satisfaction of some personal desire or inclination and, second, that aesthetic experience is ultimately based on the stimulation of our cognitive powers. For Kant, too, suggests that, although our application of the predicate ‘beautiful’ be independent of the subsumption of the object under any determinate concept, it still leaves room for the imagination and the understanding to play ‘beyond’ what is regulated by determinate concepts. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic pleasure is equally the result of the cognitive freedom and expansion that the ‘will-less’ attitude affords. Schopenhauer thus transforms the Kantian transcendental analysis of beauty in terms of non-conceptual reflection’ into a psychological theory of beauty in terms of ‘non-conceptual cognition’. Hence, according to both Kant and Schopenhauer (or so I argue) a beautiful object yields a degree of harmony that cannot be reduced to the discursively rigid unity offered by conceptual knowledge. And, although Schopenhauer’s ‘idealistic’ version of aesthetic perception fails to accommodate for several valuable ways in which artworks can convey ideas, thoughts, and emotions, his account of aesthetic contemplation in terms of ‘will-lessness’ and objectivity is still rich in psychological insight

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (2001) 705-720 [Access article in PDF] On the Notion of "Disinterestedness": Kant, Lyotard, and Schopenhauer Bart Vandenabeele The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up.--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. DallowayIf the genuine aesthetic experience exists empirically--and it does--then the definition of its specific quality is at the core of any aesthetic theory that is concerned with the particularity of aesthetic appreciation. Firstly, I shall attempt to provide an acceptable interpretation of this extremely intricate issue in Kant and, moreover, question the interpretation of two philosophers--Lyotard and Schopenhauer--who both struggled with the notion of "disinterestedness" and provided a highly original (but often misunderstood) interpretation of it in their own aesthetic theories. I shall argue that Lyotard took for granted something in Kant's aesthetics that Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory tries to resolve, that is, the wide gap between the agreeable and the charming on one side, and the beautiful on the other. Kant: Disinterestedness and Existence The first moment of Kant's Analytic of the Beautiful asserts that our liking in the beautiful cannot originatefrom any interest and that in the beautiful "we are not compelled to give our approval by any interest, whether of sense or of reason" (§ 5, 52). 1 But Kant also insists that the liking in the beautiful does not createany interest in the object either. [End Page 705]What may this mean? As Kant asserts in the beginning of section 5, it means that "a judgment of taste is merely contemplative, i.e., it is a judgment that is indifferent to the existence of the object [indifferent in Ansehung des Daseins eines Gegenstandes]: it [considers] the character of the object only by holding it up to our feeling of pleasure and displeasure [nur seine Beschaffenheit mit dem Gefühl der Lust und Unlust zusammenhält]" (§ 5, 51). The requirement that a pure judgment of taste be devoid of all interest forms the foundation of Kant's important distinction between aesthetic liking and the pleasure that may accompany moral judgment or action. 2 Kant's analysis of aesthetic response calls for another discrimination, too: the separation of aesthetic liking from mere sensory pleasure, which is the distinction that will occupy us here.Objects that arouse mere sensual pleasure, such as Belgian chocolates, are said to "gratify" (vergnügen) someone, and are then called "agreeable" (angenehm). An object "which one just likes" (was ihm bloß gefällt) is called beautiful. The incentive that corresponds to this object for thought is, respectively inclination (Neigung) or favor (Gunst). Favor, thus accorded the beautiful, is "the only free liking" (das einzige freie Wohlgefallen) (§ 5, 52). 3 Only pleasure in the beautiful is free of a connection with an interest. Both inclination and rational desire are connected with interest, and "all interest either presupposes a need [Bedürfniß] or gives rise to one; and, because interest is the basis that determines approval [als Bestimmungsgrund des Beifalls], it makes the judgment about the object unfree" (ibid.). As Paul Guyer rightly remarks, "in defining the 'quality' of aesthetic judgment Kant is not making a phenomenological distinction between different kinds of feelings of pleasure, but a distinction between the ways in which different instances of pleasure may be occasioned." 4 What Kant is suggesting is "that the presence or absence of a connection to interest may serve as a criterion for the reflective classification of given pleasures" (ibid).Section 3 aims to show that "a liking for the Agreeable is connected with Interest" (§ 3, 47). Pure favor, which is connected with the beautiful, "cannot be an inclination, or else the beautiful would be agreeable and there would be no aesthetic pleasure." 5 Kant, therefore, makes a crucial (but often overlooked) distinction between two senses of "sensation." 6 In the sense of the Critique of...

In Schopenhauer’s view, the whole organic and inorganic world is ultimately governed by an insatiable, blind will. Life as a whole is purposeless: there is no ultimate goal or meaning, for the metaphysical will is only interested in manifesting itself in (or as) a myriad of phenomena, which we call the “world” or “life.” Human life, too, is nothing but an insignificant product or “objectivation” of the blind, unconscious will, and because our life is determined by willing (that is, by needs, affects, urges, and desires), and since willing is characterized by lack, our life is essentially full of misery and suffering. We are constantly searching for objects that can satisfy our needs and desires; once we have ..

This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, as well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen).

The mainstream interpretation of Schopenhauer's philosophy is dialectical and stresses the continuity between aesthetics and ethics. This interpretation has its own plausibility but is overly confident in the letter. Restricting the value of Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory to a mere propaedeutic of an ethics, wherein the ascetic ideal of the denial of willing is central, might seem fully justified at first sight, but clearly overlooks a number of crucial complexities and ambivalences. First of all, it obliterates the specificity and complexity of Schopenhauer's theoryof (aesthetic) pleasure. In the first section, aesthetic pleasure is shown to be closely linked with a peculiar form of non-conceptual insight, which is at the core of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In the second section, it is argued that aesthetic pleasure cannotbe reduced to the so-called negative pleasure that accompanies the liberation from individual willing. The dialectical reading of Schopenhauer's philosophy invariably stresses the negativity of aesthetic pleasure to argue for the 'bridge' between the aesthetic disinterestedness and the ethical denial of willing. Schopenhauer's aesthetics, however, acknowledges a kind of intrinsic and positive pleasure, which is bound up with the perception of the (Platonic) Idea in and through the concrete object and with the non-ordinary use of the cognitive faculties. The aesthetic contemplation is a peculiar kind of(non-conceptual) self-consciousness, which is itself a source of pleasure and is to some degree independent of the pleasure of relief from the demands of desire. Moreover, this dialectical interpretation avoids a detailed and radical scrutiny of Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime feeling. In the second section, the sublime feeling is contrasted with the beautiful and is shown to be a pure feeling that meets the specific conditions of an aesthetic appreciation. An attentive reading of Schopenhauer's fascinating theory of the sublime intimates a new interpretation of his philosophy, in which the fissures between aesthetics and ethics appear. The aesthetic feeling of the sublime hampers a smooth crossing from the aesthetic realm to the ethical denial of willing in asceticism, since it is not at all an harmonious feeling which accompanies the liberation from the will and does not promise an everlasting freedom from willing. The sublime feeling is an ambivalent mixture of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow and reveals a deep and unbridgeable gap in the heart of subjectivity itself. It is clearly distinct from and even contradictory to the ascetic's ideal of restraint and denial of the will

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetic Solidarity "after" Kant and LyotardBart Vandenabeele (bio)Whatever view we hold, it must be shown / Why every lover has a wish to make / Some other kind of otherness his own: / Perhaps in fact we never are alone.—W. H. AudenIntroductionUndoubtedly one of the most fascinating aspects of Kant's aesthetics is the link that the Königsberg philosopher establishes between aesthetic judging and the idea of being-together and being-in-community. This connection is developed through a subtle analysis of aesthetic communicability or shareability (Mitteilbarkeit). A judgment of beauty, what Kant terms "a pure judgment of taste,"—that is, a judgment "that is not influenced by charm or emotion (though these may be connected with a liking for the beautiful), and whose determining basis is therefore merely the purposiveness of the form" (CJ, §13, 223)1—does not postulate everyone's agreement. Yet Kant claims that it does require this agreement from everyone.The judgment of the sublime, on the other hand—which is not based on pure pleasure but on a "mixture" of pleasure and displeasure, on a rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, the same object" (CJ, §27, 258), or, as Kant writes, on "a displeasure that we present at the same time as purposive" (CJ, §27, 259)—also "demands" universal validity. But this "demand" (or "call," as Kant sometimes writes) is not as immediate (or unmediated) as in the pure judgment of taste. The universal shareability that is proper to the judgment of the sublime passes through the moral law. According to Jean-François Lyotard, this implies that "the sublime feeling is [End Page 17] neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the destruction of one by the other in the violence of their differend. This differend cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated to all thought."2 Whatever the exact meaning of these words may be, the gist seems to be that Kant's analysis of the judgment of the sublime implies the impossibility of any sort of genuine togetherness.I shall argue that this is too rash a conclusion and that a more "plastic" and pragmatic conception of "being-in-community" can be deduced from Kant's idea of the universal shareability of the judgment of the sublime—a conception lacking in Lyotard's characterizations of togetherness. In this article I merely hint at possible ways to connect the possibility of the communicability of the sublime and this more pragmatic conception of togetherness. I will try to show why Lyotard is wrong to suppose that Kant's analysis of the judgment of the sublime testifies to a crisis of being-together. If Kant's account really pertains to some sort of crisis, it may well be to the crisis of the highly contentious idea that being-together ought to be based on some harmony of feeling(s) or shared essence(s). To understand the gist and scope of Kant's complex analysis, however, we shall have to study first how pure aesthetic judgments that are grounded in the subject's pure feeling of pleasure and/or displeasure (Lust oder Unlust) can establish universally valid norms or an Idea of aesthetic solidarity without appeal to conceptual rules or rational laws. Only afterwards can we get a better view of Lyotard's misinterpretation of Kant's ideas on togetherness.The Feeling of the Beautiful: Solidarity in statu nascendiAdmiring a still life by Cézanne, one could say, "Look, that's an apple," which is a determinant judgment employing concepts. However, judging that the painting is beautiful occurs without the employment of any concepts and is completely disinterested; it reflects on the pure feeling of pleasure, which surges on the occasion of a particular empirical sensation. Our judgment is a pure judgment of taste only if the following conditions are true:1. The pleasure grounding it is not motivated by any (empirical, ethical, theoretical, or practical) interest.2. The subjective purposiveness of the pleasure we experience is not known (in contrast to the agreeable that we experience when we satisfy a desire or need).3. The judgment is singular—"this sunset in Urbana is beautiful" is an...

Since the advent and standardization of the theatrical feature length film, the audio-visual short has been more or less marginalized in the discussions on cinematic experience. Historically stretching from the ‘early cinema’ of the vaudeville, to the now obsolete ‘little films’ of YouTube and beyond, the audio-visual short traverses a wide variety of media platforms, practices and technologies, including animation, video installation art, video clips and TV commercials, as well as animated GIFs, machinima and DIY movies, made to measure for handheld devices. The widespread usage of the format suggests that short audio-visual artefacts are not an anomaly or rarity on the periphery of cinema, but rather should be put at the centre of our discussions when rethinking cinematic experience and the moving image today. Such is the request we have made to the contributors to this volume: to write a short essay on short film experience

This article discusses Kant's and Schopenhauer's analyses of the feeling of the sublime. The focus is on the relationship between their ethics and aesthetics. It is argued that the kantian-schopenhauerian analysis of the sublime reveals an insurmountable fissure at the heart of subjectivity. This points out that a dialectical interpretation of kantian-schopenhauerian aesthetics, that reduces the sublime feeling to a kind of bridge or passage (Übergang) from the beautiful to the good is not without complications. Although this is not always explicitly acknowledged by Kant and Schopenhauer, some of their remarks show that the sublime feeling confronts the subject affectively with the impossibility to coincide with itself. In the first section, it is shown that the sublime in Kant cannot be fully explained by interpreting it merely as the (preparatory) feeling of a kind of ethical superiority. Moreover, in the light of recent developments in art history (which offers sundry examples of the extremely sublime to the abject), the ethical mediation of sublime communicability as it is offered by Kant and Schopenhauer (section 2) can no longer be defended as valid alternatives. As is claimed in section 3, a deep tragic heterogeneity manifests itself in an exemplary way in the affective ambivalence typical of the sublime feeling, which cannot be ethically or dialectically recuperated

_A Companion to Schopenhauer_ provides a comprehensive guide to all the important facets of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The volume contains 26 newly commissioned essays by prominent Schopenhauer scholars working in the field today. A thoroughly comprehensive guide to the life, work, and thought of Arthur Schopenhauer Demonstrates the range of Schopenhauer’s work and illuminates the debates it has generated 26 newly commissioned essays by some of the most prominent Schopenhauer scholars working today reflect the very latest trends in Schopenhauer scholarship Covers the full range of historical and philosophical perspectives on Schopenhauer’s work Discusses his seminal contributions to our understanding of knowledge, perception, morality, science, logic and mathematics, Platonic Ideas, the unconscious, aesthetic experience, art, colours, sexuality, will, compassion, pessimism, tragedy, pleasure, and happiness