Rachel Zuckert

This chapter treats Reid’s claim that beauty consists in expression of mental excellence. It reconstructs his two major arguments for this claim: an inductive survey of objects actually found beautiful and an argument that only in this way can one satisfy the demands of aesthetic realism, the grounds for which are also discussed. It argues further that Reid’s expressivism (like his realism itself) also attempts to capture the phenomenology of experiences of beauty: as of a value beyond ourselves, which leads us to investigate the object further or to aspire to attain that value ourselves.

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.

ABSTRACT In his essay, “Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts,” Adam Smith discusses two examples, topiary and false jewels, apparently coming to opposed conclusions: that aesthetic value is, and that it is not, independent of market value. I unpack the reasoning behind these conclusions, arguing that Smith’s position is consistent: he recognizes that aesthetic value can be occluded by market prices—as when one dismisses the beauty of something cheap out of snobbery—or heightened by them, as in the case of the aesthetic value of magnificence. Because aesthetic value can thus be heightened or corrupted by market value on Smith’s analysis, I suggest, speculatively, that for Smith the bad influence of economic considerations in aesthetic matters (faulty snobbery or an economically-derived corruption of taste) is identified by reference to moral, not purely aesthetic criteria.

Though he was deeply influenced by and admiring of Kant when he studied with him in Königsberg, in his later career J.G. Herder wrote bitter anti-Kantian polemics, Metakritik and Kalligone, against Kant’s first and third Critiques respectively. In these works, Herder emphatically rejects Kantian Critique – the project of “critical philosophy” – as such. As in these polemics, however, Herder is in a less technical sense, a thoroughly critical thinker: his works are often formulated as responses – usually reactive, corrective, critical -- to other works and writers. In this paper, I shall argue that these aspects of Herder’s view, his writerly and philosophical practice, and his anti-Kantian, anti-Critical polemics, may be combined to form a Herderian conception of philosophical critique. That is, on the one hand, Herder objects to Kant’s personified abstractions of the “I think” or “Reason”: such expressions both refer to hypostasized capacities that have no existence apart from persons who have or use them. For Herder, then, use of such expressions to characterize Kant’s own thought thereby amounts to a denial of his own status as a singular, embodied person, as one instance among many of reasoning or self-consciousness. Correspondingly, Herder positions his own thought not as abstracted or hypostasized positions, but rather explicitly as responsive to and on the same “level as” that of other interlocutors, treated as persons with whom he is conversing, from whom he differs (perhaps necessarily, as another individual), against whom he raises objections. In short: philosophically justifiable critique for Herder is and must be interpersonal conversation.

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).

Modifying a proposal made by Axel Honneth (in his 2007 paper, “The Irreducibility of Progress,”), I argue that Kant’s history writings are engaged in (at least) two projects, with distinct yet complementary aims. On one hand, Kant’s most famous accounts of historical progress, driven by unsocial sociability, aim to address a Rousseauean concern about the evils brought about by “civilization” (technological advancement and ever-increasing social complexity and interdependence). I name this concern the problem of ambiguity: it may appear that the historical self-development of reason is both necessary for moral and political progress and yet also impedes such progress (by producing the evils Rousseau identifies). To address this problem, Kant sketches how the impediments themselves might bring about morally desirable ends over the course of history, and thereafter might be redirected in less morally problematic ways (as trade competition, for example). But, I argue, this account generates a new problem for the morally committed subject whom Kant addresses: loneliness. That is, on Kant’s account, history is driven by unsocial sociability, not by moral agency. The morally committed agent may be thereby consoled that morally questionable historical actors will not (ultimately) prevent the achievement of ends of which she approves, but she may also feel shut out of historical action. Hence the other, distinct aim of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” and “A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question, ‘Is the Human Race Continually Progressing?’”: they treat the character of engaged moral action, in social solidarity. They address the moral agent’s loneliness.

In his discussion of grace in the Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant appears to consider grace to be akin to the postulates of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. God’s grace is a supplement that allows the agent fully to live up to the moral demands on her, making up for her moral shortcomings. Thus, Kant argues, grace is at once merited (based on the agent’s moral striving), yet also transcends that merit, going beyond the agent’s actual moral achievement. The agent should believe in (postulate) such grace, it appears, to support a belief in the realizability of her moral aims (here, self-improvement) and thus her commitment to acting to achieve them. Kant’s account thus appears to inherit difficulties with the concept of grace in the Christian tradition (e.g., how to avoid undermining moral striving if moral worth is ultimately endowed by an external agent). It also appears potentially otiose within his own morally grounded philosophy of religion. If one already postulates the immortality of the soul, and thus the possibility of infinite moral striving, as well as God’s judgment of that infinite striving as approximating full moral achievement – in accord with Kant’s arguments – then why postulate grace as well? In response to these concerns, I propose a different understanding of the moral grounds for the postulate of grace: not to guarantee that the agent’s moral aims may be realized, but rather to guard against moral self-righteousness, to ward off the Kantian agent’s temptation to believe that her own practical-rational consciousness of the moral law and her striving to act accordingly could be infallible, successful purely on their own. I suggest, then, that the doctrine is not meant to make up for, but rather emphatically to draw the agent’s attention to, her own moral fallibility. Drawing on Lucy Allais’ work on forgiveness, I conclude the paper with a few reflections concerning why, for Kant, forgiveness or criticism by human others might not suffice to support this attitude of moral humility, requiring rather that one postulate supernatural divine grace.

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.

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.