Rachel Zuckert

In two posthumously published essays, ‘History of Astronomy’ and ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called The Imitative Arts’, Adam Smith suggests provocatively that philosophy is an ‘art of imagination’ and that we take the same ‘very high intellectual pleasure’ in appreciating systematic scientific theories and in listening to musical ‘systems’, i.e., complex works of non-programmatic instrumental music. In this paper, I reconstruct the view of imagination, as the cognitive faculty primarily responsible for perception and appreciation of such ‘systems’, that undergirds these claims, and argue that it is to be understood as aiming at ideal ends – in the first instance, at beauty or an order among variety (systematicity). Smith thus offers a distinctive view of aesthetic imagination, as neither freely playing nor imitative (two common views of imagination both in his time and ours) but rather as aiming at, and progressively realizing non-rational norms of order (again, at least in the first instance, an ideal of beauty).

This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime should be synthesized to form that experience. Lyotard recasts this difficulty as a pragmatic problem for artistic practice – how to ‘testify’ to the absolute in a non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation.

I consider a problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism if one construes it as a claim that human beings know from a particular, human perspective. Namely: ordinarily, when we speak someone seeing from a perspective, we understand other people to have other perspectives, and think that people can change their perspectives by moving away from them, to a different one. So one may recognize that one’s own perspective is a perspective: by comparing to others, by seeing a former perspective from a new vantage point. But Kant denies such plurality and variability for his human cognitive perspective. Thus one may worry that Kant’s view is incoherent: Kant claims that we can know only from one perspective, yet, in order to recognize that perspective as such, he himself must stand "outside" of it. I consider a potential Kantian response to this charge, by way of interpreting the Dialectic of the first Critique. When one attempts to know things that lie beyond experience, one attempts to exit the human perspective; in the Dialectic, Kant argues that in doing so, one falls into contradictions and empty thinking. These failed attempts, I suggest, allow human knowers (and Kant describing them) to recognize the human perspective as such – by taking up a different vantage point, as it were – but also, as failures, do not constitute a true alternative to the universally shared, necessary human cognitive perpsective. So, I propose, can one interpret Kant’s claim in the B Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason that the Dialectic is a confirming result – a “splendid touchstone” -- in an a priori experiment: it is an experimental, failed attempt to exit the human perspective.

Kant’s account of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment has been extremely influential, prompting extensive discussion of the psychology, affect, moral significance, and relevance to artistic representation of the sublime on his provocative view. I focus instead on Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime in connection to his theoretical critical project, namely his attempt to characterize human cognitive powers and to limit human pretensions to knowledge of the supersensible. I argue, first, that his account of the psychology of the sublime is designed to explain not just its affective character, but also to address challenges concerning the coherence of an experience of something as transcending one’s cognitive abilities. Thereby, I argue moreover, Kant provides an alternative, demystifying account of mystical experiences, in which humans might take themselves to intuit that which is beyond human understanding or reason, and thus to claim that they have special cognitive access to the supersensible, transcending the limits Kant claims to establish for human cognition. Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime is not merely so reductive of mystical experience, however; it also, I suggest, describes the aesthetic of Kantian critique itself.

In this book, Rachel Zuckert provides the first overarching account of Johann Gottfried Herder's complex aesthetic theory. She guides the reader through Herder's texts, showing how they relate to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy of art, and focusing on two main concepts: aesthetic naturalism, the view that art is natural to and naturally valuable for human beings as organic, embodied beings, and - unusually for Herder's time - aesthetic pluralism, the view that aesthetic value takes many diverse and culturally varying forms. Zuckert argues that Herder's theory plays a pivotal role in the history of philosophical aesthetics, marking the transition from the eighteenth-century focus on aesthetic value as grounded in human nature to the nineteenth-century focus on art as socially significant and historically variable. Her study illuminates Herder's significance as an innovative thinker in aesthetics, and will interest a range of readers in philosophy of art and European thought.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues that morality obliges us to believe in the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. I argue, however, that in two late essays – “The End of All Things” and “On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” – Kant provides moral counterarguments to that position: these beliefs undermine moral agency by giving rise to fanaticism or fatalism. Thus, I propose, the Kantian position on the justification of religious belief is ultimately antinomial. One ought, moreover, to understand Kant’s considered position concerning the immortality of the soul and the existence of God to be similar to that he proposes concerning the theoretical ideas of reason in the Appendix to the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason: they are necessary as regulative ideas guiding moral action, not endorsed or even postulated as propositions. In other words, they are subject matters not of belief, but of hope.

In this volume honouring Robert Pippin, prominent philosophers such as John McDowell, Slavoj Žižek, Jonathan Lear, and Axel Honneth explore Hegel's proposals concerning the historical character of philosophy. Hegelian doctrines discussed include the purported end of art, Hegel's view of human history, including the history of philosophy as the history of freedom, and the nature of self-consciousness as realized in narrative or in action. Hegel scholars Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Sally Sedgwick, Terry Pinkard, and Paul Redding attempt to vindicate some of Hegel's claims concerning historical philosophical progress, while others such as Robert Stern, Christoph Menke, and Jay Bernstein suggest that Hegel either did not conceive of philosophy as progressing unidirectionally or did not make good on his claims to progress: perhaps we should still be Aristotelians in ethics, or perhaps we are still torn between sensibility and reason, or between individuality and social norms. Perhaps capitalism has exacerbated such problems.

Kant’s theory of taste might suggest that there cannot be any legitimate, useful art criticism, which guides others’ art appreciation: on the Kantian view, each of us must judge for him- or herself, autonomously, not follow the judgments of others; and no empirical concepts, or empirical knowledge, is supposed to be relevant for making a judgment of taste. Thus, it would seem, we should not follow others who have superior knowledge of art, because they have such knowledge. Despite these elements of Kant’s view, I argue that there is nonetheless a role for Kantian art critics: to serve as exemplary judges, “incorporating” empirical knowledge of art into their judgments of taste, communicating the richness and playfulness of aesthetic judging, and exemplifying the claims to universality of judgments of taste.

This essay provides an overview of the philosophical aesthetics of Hegel and Schelling. Hegel and Schelling understand art to be a central human activity, one that models, rivals, or even supersedes the accomplishments of philosophy. This exalted status attributed to art rests upon a novel conception of art as a distinctive metaphysical and cognitive achievement: art presents the Absolute, ultimate being, in sensible or finite form. Their theories of art are the source, in the history of aesthetics, of the influential claim that artistic value resides in the “unity of form and content” and are also the first philosophies of art that treat art systematically, differentiated both by media (art forms) and in historical periods.

Solomon’s project is twofold: to characterize Nietzsche’s affirmative virtue ethics, and to defend Nietzsche against common moral criticisms, for example, that he is an elitist, a nihilist, a relativist, a proponent of cruelty and delight in suffering, a biological determinist and/or a fatalist, who precludes the possibility of personal responsibility or the cultivation of virtue. Solomon argues that Nietzsche provides a virtue ethics of self-cultivation, particularly the cultivation of our emotions. Like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Nietzsche’s ethical doctrines do not comprise a universal principle or absolutely grounded morality, but rather a description of admirable character traits that would characterize a fully flourishing human being and that comprise the development of our natures as teleological, “value-seeking” organisms. Nietzsche’s virtues include Aristotelian virtues such as courage and justice, though construed not as moderate “means” between extremes, but as “overflowing” emotion that allows a person to perform great deeds or overcome great obstacles. Nietzsche’s virtues include Romantic, aesthetic virtues as well—for example, exuberance and style—and comprise an open-ended collection of human possibilities that may not be reconcilable in a “unity of virtues,” nor achievable by all human beings. Rather, each individual can recognize, and cultivate, those emotional and characterological possibilities available to him.

Following suggestions of Isaiah Berlin, Charles Taylor articulates a central doctrine of late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century German philosophy: “expressivism,” viz., the view that the most valuable human life is one of self-expression. This conception has its historical roots in Rousseau’s proto-Romantic celebration of natural authenticity and in Herder’s deistic naturalism, and has had considerable influence on subsequent philosophers and Western culture broadly. Taylor suggests that this doctrine both draws from philosophical aesthetics and explains the central role aesthetics comes to play in nineteenth-century philosophy as a paradigm, perhaps the highest, realm of human existence. This paper critically investigates this doctrine and its historical-intellectual origins, specifically in connection to modern European aesthetics. I argue that Taylor’s expressivist ideal comprises several elements, which are neither necessarily connected with one another, nor obviously valuable. I propose that the coincidence and valuation of these elements in expressivism may be understood historically to derive from the combination (perhaps conflation) of two central theoretical doctrines in aesthetics concerning beauty. Though this account can explain why philosophers come to endorse something like expressivism, it does not, I suggest, resolve all of the difficulties attendant on this view.

This essay concerns the theories of the sublime proposed by Alexander Gerard, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Archibald Alison, and Dugald Stewart. All four thinkers, I argue, aim to provide a philosophical account of the unity of the concept of the sublime, i.e., to respond to the question: what might all objects, art works, etc. that have been identified as sublime (or “grand”) in the philosophical, literary, art-theoretical, and rhetorical tradition have in common? Yet because they find the objects called “sublime” to be so disparate, and because – contra Burke and Kant, the classical philosophical theorists of the sublime, they cannot identify one single feeling that could define the experience of the sublime, they ultimately endorse (what we would call) a “family-resemblance” view of the sublime: certain objects cause in us certain feelings (and so are classed together); other objects are then (for other reasons, i.e., not because they give us similar feelings) associated with some of the previous objects – and therefore we take these objects, and the feelings they may arouse, as sublime as well. Some – notably Gerard and Allison – take our act of appreciation of the sublime to be itself an act of free imaginative association, connecting the perceived object to other objects, memories, feelings, etc. The importance of association in aesthetic appreciation itself might also suggest that the category of the sublime must be a pluralistic and open one: because we may always find new objects sublime, via new associations. As a result, I suggest, these thinkers – by contrast to many other writers on the sublime – allow that art can be as sublime, or even more sublime, than natural objects and indeed can render natural objects sublime.

In this essay, I discuss Kames' aesthetic theory, as presented in his essay, ‘Our Attachment to Objects of Distress’ (concerning the problem of tragedy), and in Elements of Criticism. I argue that Kames' (non-)response to the problem of tragedy – that we find tragedies painful (not pleasing), yet are ‘attracted to them through the workings of the “blind instinct” of sympathy’ – is intended to call the standard formulation of the problem of tragedy (‘why do we find such painful things pleasing?’) into question. This standard formulation, on Kames' view, mistakenly assumes that we cannot be attracted to anything but pleasure, whereas tragedy (among other phenomena) shows that human nature is considerably more complex than this. I argue, further, that Kames' treatment of tragedy exemplifies the character of his aesthetics more broadly: aesthetic values are explained by reference to general laws governing human nature (we are attracted to this sort of thing, averse to that, etc.) – or explanatory naturalism. But Kames also argues that we can, upon reflection, judge that this instinct and this exercise of it is good (as in the case of tragedy, which is, Kames argues, morally educative because it strengthens our sympathy), by contrast to other cases where instincts may not achieve their ends. Thus Kames also proposes a normative aesthetic naturalism, according to which we should educate our instinctual affective responses so that they will be appropriate to their objects and beneficial for the human goods that they are meant to promote

I discuss an apparent tension between two aspects of Johann Gottfried Herder’s aesthetic theory: his emphasis on and endorsement of art’s cultural embeddedness and historical variation, and his reliance on natural norms of artistic value. I propose that Herder’s essay, “Shakespeare,” suggests a possible resolution to this tension, a position I call “adaptive naturalism.” On this view, aesthetic value comprises a work’s capacity to promote the exercise of human natural capacities in harmony with the (natural or social) environment. Thus such naturalistically grounded value does and must vary in form, in line with differences among social environments – and yet also may succeed or fail according to natural norms: some artworks are and promote better adaptation to their circumstances, than others.

Kant's Critique of Judgment has often been interpreted by scholars as comprising separate treatments of three uneasily connected topics: beauty, biology, and empirical knowledge. Rachel Zuckert's book interprets the Critique as a unified argument concerning all three domains. She argues that on Kant's view, human beings demonstrate a distinctive cognitive ability in appreciating beauty and understanding organic life: an ability to anticipate a whole that we do not completely understand according to preconceived categories. This ability is necessary, moreover, for human beings to gain knowledge of nature in its empirical character as it is, not as we might assume it to be. Her wide-ranging and original study will be valuable for readers in all areas of Kant's philosophy.

John Zammito, among others, argues that in his review of J.G. Herder’s Ideas, Kant criticizes Herder as a dogmatic metaphysician hypocritically: these criticisms themselves rest on dogmatic metaphysical grounds, viz. an insistence of the distinction of human beings (as souls or rational free agents) from the rest of nature, a commitment to “dead” matter and the like. Against this interpretation, I argue that Kant’s criticism of Herder is grounded not in metaphysical commitments, but in epistemological concerns articulated in the Critique of Pure Reason, i.e., in Kant’s predominant critical treatment of metaphysics. As I shall also suggest, Kant’s arguments in the review are perhaps not quite representative of his position in the CPJ either, but rather represent a transitional position in his thinking concerning the explanation of organisms.

Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume, Voltaire, and Diderot, criticized religious doctrines not only because (or when) such doctrines comprised unfounded claims to knowledge, but also because they inspired fanaticism, ensuing in sectarian violence, persecution, torture, and war. In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct Kant’s position, as part of this Enlightenment project: he too repeatedly and pejoratively characterizes various forms of belief in or behavior guided by religious (or other) conceptions of the supersensible as “fanaticism” (Schwärmerei). By comparison to many Enlightenment figures, Kant’s understanding of the relation between the human presumption to knowledge of the supersensible and the deliverances of reason is more sympathetic to the claims of religious belief and more qualified in advocating the corrective power of reason against it. I argue that Kant’s conception of fanaticism – its origins, motivations, and the nature of its error – reflects this more qualified endorsement of reason. I suggest that by contrast to many of his predecessors and contemporaries Kant does not treat fanaticism as expressing or originating wholly from sensible emotions or interests, opposed to and “overpowering” reason. Rather, though sensibility (including emotional sensibility) is central to his account of fanaticism, Kant holds that the problematic fanatical stance incorporates and depends on rational projections or aspirations, particularly those of practical reason. Moreover, Kant’s distinction between theoretical and practical reason generates an interesting, dual account of fanaticism: theoretical fanaticism, a kind of cognitive error, and practical fanaticism, a specifically practical error in our relation to the supersensible.

I argue (contra Guyer et al.) that in the Critique of Judgment Kant espouses a formal, intentional theory of pleasure, and reconstruct Kant's arguments that this view can both identify what all pleasures have in common, and differentiate among kinds of pleasure. Through his investigation of aesthetic experience in the Critique of Judgment, I argue, Kant radically departs from his views about pleasure as mere sensation in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, and provides a view of pleasure whereby we can understand pleasure itself to be ruled by an a priori principle.