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Kant and Hegel on Nature, Intellect and the Singularity of the Work of Art

An absolute in itself, absolute reality, whether a subject or thing in itself, the highest principle of being and thought, or the purpose and end of human life and natural processes, the history of humankind and the universe, is from the point of view of Kant's „transcendental philosophy“ unknowable. The only theoretical cognition possible is conditioned by the synthesis of an in itself indeterminate sensible manifold by apriori forms of sense intuition and categories of understanding. The necessity and universality of forms of intuition, concepts of understanding and principles of judgment are what give experience and cognition their objectivity. But these conditions of theoretical knowledge remain themselves unfathomable for theoretical cognition, since they transcend the boundaries of sense experience. The attempt at a „transcendental deduction“ makes clear how different the character of the knowledge is with which the apriori conditions of theoretical knowledge are known, than of the content of theoretical knowledge itself. The „transcendental insight“ describes only one small portion of this aspect of knowledge ; for it represents only one of a whole series of non-empirical, but for cognition foundational insights which are nowhere subject to proof or demonstration. Other important insights or assumptions of Kant’s transcendental philosophy include: the insight into our determination by moral law, (conscience or consciousness of the should, as well as the related insight into the reality of freedom) ; insight into the universality of natural mechanism as indispensable condition of explanation of the natural world and natural phenomena, insight into the indispensability of a principle of subjective or fortuitous purposiveness („purposiveness without purpose“) for the grasp of certain products of nature and art, as well as the thoroughgoing connection of knowledge of nature and the realisability of a moral world. As opposed to Hegel, Kant insists that "There is no science of the beautiful[das Schöne], but only critique ; and there is no fine [schön] science, but only fine art." (Pluhar)This assertion hints at the central conviction at the basis of Kant's interpretation of the status of the work of art, and specifically, of its singularity, which is of a particular kind (to be differentiated from the singularity of the singularity of the subject, the thing in itself, singular moral actions, and singular judgments) The key to an understanding of Kant's position lies in Kant's distinction of our mental powers and the principles which govern them as well as the objects to which each is directed: the power of cognition as legislated by the categories of understanding, the power of desire as legislated by the practical precepts of reason, each of which governs a "domain", nature and freedom, respectively, in the shared "territory" of experience, justifying thereby the division of philosophy into theoretical and practical. Finally, the power of feeling of pleasure and displeasure, which is legislated by principles of judgment. These two: the legislation of nature and of freedom and the power of understanding and of reason which pertain to them, the Critique of pure Reason showed "possible at least to think, without contradiction…as coexisting in the same subject". The "concept of nature" allows us "to present its objects in intuition, but as mere appearances rather than as things in themselves, " whereas the concept of freedom allows us "to present its object as a thing in itself, but not in intuition" (it is “inexponible). Neither concept, however, can provide theoretical cognition of its object or of the thinking subject as things in themselves.We need, nevertheless, some idea of the supersensible as basis for the possibility of experience, even if that idea but that idea can never become theoretical cognition. Hegel criticizes Kant for demanding something like a finite and sensible intuition of an idea of reason which is at once supersensible, and an exposition of the knowledge of the aesthetic in which the aesthetic is demonstrated by understanding. Instead he affirms the possibility of an intuition of the absolute identity of the sensible and supersensible. Hegel recognized the problematic nature of thought in respect to predication and the propositional form of thought, for example, in the Phenomenology (Suhrkamp 82-84), in his treatment of sense certainty, which only appears to be the richest and truest form of knowledge (when it is in fact the poorest and most abstract), when he speaks of the "Here and Now". For to speak of any particular thing in its immediacy as this or that, whether the thing or the I, is to say only that it is immediately involves us in the requirement to speak in generalities. And yet it is the particular, the absolutely individual we mean. For Hegel, the particular is an instance of the general – but do we really grasp the particular in this way? This inability to grasp the individual is embodied in Kant's determination of the impossibility of having a theoretical knowledge of the thing in itself or the subject in itself, and his consequent restriction of theoretical cognition to the realm of sense experience. This “bare particularity” (as Stern calls it) he opposes to a consciousness which unfolds in a manifold movement of thoughts and the thing which “according to a quantity of various characteristics has a rich relationship in its own right or a manifold relationship to other things” – both are lacking the “manifold mediation”, the I a manifold representation and thought, the thing a manifold characteristics and qualities. In fact however, the “this” as the “here” and “now” is always already a mediated concept, is always mediated by specific qualities (this day, this night), and is so always something general (85) is always mediated simplicity or generality. Can mediated simplicity really grasp the singular? I believe Kant discovered in the work of art and in the act of judgment which reflects upon it, the solution for this conundrum – an indirect path to the encounter of the singular work of art, which cuts through the strictures placed on theoretical and practical knowledge. The way in which we access the singular work of art thus becomes an analogy for the way in which we encounter the singular existent, the singular thing, event, the singular “I”, the singular principle and source of all.

Kant; Hegel; nature; intellect; singularity; work of art; general; particular; sense; experience; intuition; understanding; cognition; reason; idea; transcendental; subject; object; thing-in-itself

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