Civic Humanities

7/29/2019 Civic Humanities

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Civic Humanities

Javier Suarez

Re-reading tradition(s)

Contemporary world is one of parricide. From Nietzsche and Freud, we live in the age of

suspicion about everything. And, of course, suspicion about our family, and especially,

about our father, the great dictator. Well, nowadays, it is easy to say lets kill God (if it is

not completely dead). Lets destroy the paternal figure because it is the space of trauma. All

authority is apparently1

banishing within this race of, for instance, Lacanian jouissance

party of deconstruction and post-modern consumption. Ok, this may seem a bit extreme (or

ever worse, too rhetorical). However, what I want to express in the following lines is not s

critique of Plato from the comfortable sofa of Ranciere, but instead I would like to

understand the Greek philosopher in connection with the potentialities and liberal

(conservative?) limitations of Kant.

Well, Plato lived in a decaying Athens, the shining splendor of the Agora was

banishing as Socrates had already prophesized. Consequently, Plato tried to save the city

(that is, of course, saving himself too as part of it) from what he believed is one of the worst

political systems at that time: democracy. He has seen the corruption of a democracy that

stinks to imperialism and corruption (cf. Thucydides). That is why he wanted to conserve

certain structures that can stabilize, or even improve, the State. From this perspective, of

course, poetry, with its appeal to emotions, can be dangerous for a city which, according to

Socrates, had been taken by his most egotistical drives. For this reason, Plato banishes the

poets from the city. It is not, as Popper have suggested, that Plato is the father of

totalitarianism. On the contrary, he is a man who is trying to save a system that he

1 Is the freedom to consume (products as well as signifiers) freedom?


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considers the best. In this sense, he is being political: he is concerned with the future of the

people he considered valuable, the aristocratic Greek. (Please, do not say that it is not

democratic or that he was the father of totalitarianism; we know that, but Plato did not

count with the two millennia experience that we have).

Poetry has power. Plato knew that. But this power can have positive or negative

effects, unless we have an essentialist understanding of poetry or art, and we just say that

art is always good, art for the sake of art. Or maybe I should restate my argument saying

that it is not art which is good or bad, but people who can act and speak. I think we need to

take into account all the power of art if we want to be honest with ourselves. The power of

art is really limited (and maybe that is its best feature). I was reading the other day that

Hitler had some of the best classics, Shakespeare for example, in his library and that he

enjoyed reading. And we know that many of the Nazis officials and supporters were highly

educated people that could appreciate art and probably they had in mind the Critique of

Judgmentwhile doing it (this is just a guess and maybe a provocation). However, artistic

education does not prevent the atrocities committed. Ok, so we should re-envisage our

understanding of art. OK. But, who would do that, the academy, the government? We need

power for that, and an educational system that enable us to introduce this understanding

of art. Maybe aesthetic experience is completely spontaneous and it does not need any

education.

So, lets go to Kant. Beauty was for him something that is disinterested, it is

different from practical reason that dictates and orders what is good and what is bad. For

Kant, the aesthetic judgment of beauty emerges from what he calls an inactive

complacence (Unttiges Wohlgefallen), a merely contemplative pleasure. And one word is

crucial for my point, inactive. From my point of view, two are the limitations of Kants


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Third Critique: his lack of intersubjectivity in the understanding of beauty and the

indifference to the world of aesthetic judgment. Before continuing, I would like to say that

what I want to do is to point out the limitations of modern and contemporary thinkers; I

agree with them in many things, but as Ranciere says, disagreement is in these cases more

productive. Lets continue. Kants ethics is based in the isolated ego that can give himself

an a priori moral law in the sense of the practical reason (morality). However, this ego is

not incarnated in the world. On the contrary, it has to go outside it and, with his reason

alone, it has to find the categorical imperative of morality. Something similar happens with

the judgment. Aesthetic judgment is indifferent to the existence of the object, it refers only

to the felling of pleasure or pain (p. 40). This reminds of a person that can be reading a

book made with human skin and feeling pleasure because of the great poems he is reading.

If we really want to understand Kant, we need to think about this indifference to the

object that is part of the Kantian formalism that also permeates its morality. Aesthetic

judgment is always connected with the object or, in any case, the object (and its history or

its stance as a document of barbarity, as Benjamin would say) must not be forgotten. And

the oblivion of objects is one of the pitfalls of Kantian aesthetics . Epistemologically, the

encounter with the work of art should bring us back to reality like a shocking thunderbolt.

Beauty impresses us, but if it take us apart from reality or bring us back to it depends on the

context. Beauty causes impression. However, from that fact it does not follow that it has a

moral value; this latter is given by its specific context. The truth of art is its context and the

recurrent calling that it makes to us saying that it deserve to be taken into account. Lets

imagine something disinterested and completely contemplative: maybe and angel. We are

not angels.


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Lets take Kant from a political perspective (and Ranciere too). Kant belongs to a

capitalist and bourgeois society; it means that he is concerned with the raising ego of the

modern subject/individual. His understanding of aesthetic contemplation (as with morality)

starts from the self, not from community or from a reciprocity of community and self, a

yosotros (I-we). That is a problem because the political potentiality of art would be

diminished by its individual and atomistic understanding of the contemplator. Some

parts of Kants Third Critique remind me of Habermas public sphere: ok, I have my

subjective universal, beauty; now, I have to convince the others about it, because it cannot

be universal as physical law or even moral law (objective universals). Well, if we were in a

Divine City of Dialogue (the Habermasian ideal) this would be possible, but not necessary.

In fact, reality is more complex and it is intertwined with interests, inclinations, etc.

But what would happen, and this is my point, lets say, if, starting from the

contemplation of beauty, an alternative absolute that is not compatible with the political

system (absolute) appears? What is more, what would happen if that aesthetic absolute is

shared but many people isolated? What would happen if they come together and want to

introduce their absolute in their life-world? (Art is never innocent.) Would that change be

possible? How can power (political absolute) permits that a different absolute (aesthetic

absolute) enters into action? It is highly admirable that art is used to reform our neoliberal

system. However, for me, the question should go deeper. What happen with all the people

who think that reform is not possible, but who believes that we need a change of the

economic system and all its consequences? Sure, if we share a(n) (ideal) public sphere, art

can reform the system; but if the problem is not the public sphere but the entire system? I

think the question is to be honest and said to ourselves if we believe in this system or if we

want to change. Is it possible a third way? I finish with two quotes that maybe can express


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some of the things I am trying to convey here; and maybe they can make us understand that

our Fathers, our tradition, have much more things to say that some contemporary

parricides:

It is sweet, however, to imagine constitutions corresponding to therequirements of reason (particularly in a legal sense), but rash to propose

them and culpable to incite the populace to abolish what presently exists.

() However late it may be, to hope someday for the consummation of apolitical product, as it is envisaged here, is a sweet dream; but that it is

being perpetually approached ill not only thinkable, but, so far as it is

compatible with the moral law, an obligation, not of the cit izens, but of

the sovereign (Kant,An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race

Constantly Progressing?).

There neither is nor ever willbe a treatise of mine on the subject. For it

does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after

much converse about the matter i tself and a li fe l ived together, suddenly

a li ght, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it fr om

another, and thereafter sustains itself(Plato, VII Letter, 341 c-d).

What do you think?

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