Kant, Autonomy, and Art for Art's Sake

Author(s): Casey Haskins

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Summer, 1990), pp.
235-237
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
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 Discussion
Even though Kafka admits, directly after, that he is
exaggerating a bit, that he actually cooperates to some
extent in these publishing ventures, if only after the
fact, the idea that some of his writings really are not
literature-are not of and for literature-regardless of
how intriguing they might appear, unless he, or his
surrogates, so conceives, designates and orients them,
seems to make sense to Kafka, if not to Kolak. 15
JERROLD LEVINSON
Department of Philosophy
University of Maryland
1. Crispin Sartwell, "A Counter-Example to Levinson's
Historical Theory of Art," Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 48 (1990): 157-158.
2. l owe this suggestion to my colleague, John Brown.
3. Lastly, the Kafka case can serve as a reminder that the notion of
art I have been at pains to analyze, one I would insist is the central one
in contemporary usage and thought, is that for which experiencers,
spectators, audiences are a sine qua non. That is to say, it is a notion
which descends from, though superseding, that according to which
art is in some fashion the production of artworks for appreciators. We
might, though, wish to recognize a secondary notion of art, centered
on creative process rather than appreciative aim, according to which
something is art if its making was the outcome of one of a class of
impulses identified as artistic, or if its making resulted in the
attainment of certain states or the release of certain energies on the
part of the maker. Clearly, on this sort of process-based (and rather
Collingwoodian) conception of what it is to be an artwork, Kafka's
texts sail through untroubled (Jerrold Levinson, "Refining Art
Historically," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 [1989J,
p. 30).
4. It is largely this secondary, creative process based
conception, that Richard Wollheim plumps for as an account
of what makes painting art when it is so, in his recent
Painting As An Art (Princeton University Press, 1987):
paintings are artworks if they have been made in a certain
way, if they are the result of a certain kind of activity. The
action that yields a painting in the artistic sense must have
been carried out under the aegis of a certain thought, a
thought which informs the action and makes it the action it
is. Note, however, that if the thought in question must
include an orientation toward past painting or even the
recognized concerns thereof, then an intention-for-reception
aspect may come back in, insofar as a painter is, for
Wollheim, always the spectator as well as the fashioner of his
work. This rightly suggests, of course, that the contrast
between a creative intention based and a creative process
based conception is perhaps not as complete as I have, for
convenience, here treated it as being.
5. This last remark suggests a way to defend the attribu-
tion of artistic intent to Kafka despite his explicit disclaimer,
namely, by emphasizing the internal evidence of such in the
meticulous fashioning of the prose, beyond what seems
required to exorcise one's private "ghosts." As a Wittgen-
steinian might hold, the intention-for-others, at least poten-
tial others, or for oneself as reader, at other times, is
transparently displayed in the text itself, is reflected in the
craft deployed and the care taken in composition. Though I
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235
think there is merit to this line, I will not pursue it further
here. I will instead try to respond to Kolak without insisting
that artistic intent must be inherent in a text such as that of
The Trial, and thus that such a text could not be the basis of
any sort of counter-example to my theory, regardless of any
external evidence of its author's stance toward it.
6. Daniel Kolak, "Art and Intentionality," Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1990), pp. 158-159.
7. I would now acknowledge that this secondary, Colling-
woodian, notion of art is perhaps more important than I had
thought, if all cases are to be comprehended. In labelling it
"secondary," incidentally, I meant simply to reaffirm its
inadequacy, in my view, to encompass the bulk of Western
art up to the present, especially the art of this century.
8. "Certain objects, due to their intrinsic exhibited prop-
erties, and completely independently of their creator's in-
tent, are artworks solelby because they evoke an appropriate
response in an audience." Kolak, "Art and Intentionality,"
p. 161.
9. Ibid.
10. Thus when I proposed, in "Refining Art Histor-
ically," that one of the special conditions licensing an
overriding of creator's intent for a text was that the text be
"inordinately valuable as literature," I was being a bit
careless; what I meant is that it would be inordinately
valuable, literarily speaking, if it were literature.
11. Kolak, "Art and Intentionality," p. 158.
12. Of course, even this opposition may be too simple.
The fact that Kafka instructed his manuscripts to be burnt,
even if done in full sincerity, wouldn't show he lacked art
intent in writing The Trial. In fact, it might suggest the
opposite-although he had striven to meet his own exacting
standards of literary quality, he hadn't attained them, and so
was embarrassed to let the evidence of that remain.
13. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir
(New York: Knopf, 1937), pp. 294-295.
14. Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (Fischer
Verlag Gmbh, 1968), p. 26, emphasis added.
15. I thank John Brown for valuable comments on a draft
of this reply.
Kant, Autonomy,
and Art for Art's Sake
In response to my article on Kant, Lawrence W.
Hyman suggests (i) that I was incorrect in thinking
that "to forge some kind of link between artistic and
moral values, Kant had to compromise his concept
of the autonomy of art"; (ii) that I mistakenly argued
from the premise that a person is the sole source of
unconditioned value to the conclusion that the value
of a work of art cannot be autonomous; and (iii) that
I was wrong in supposing that when Kant describes
works of fine art as possessing intrinsic value or
dignity, he meant to suggest that works of art ex-
emplify the moral autonomy of wills or persons.' I
will address these points in order.
(i) No concept of the autonomy of art is plainly
evident in the Critique of Judgment. Kant never uses
 236 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
any German term standardly translatable as "auton-
omy" to describe fine art, whether the latter be
understood as a product or as a practice. As I noted,
Kant does, however, use Autonomie in describing the
faculty of taste and the productive imagination. These
descriptions, I argued, do straightforwardly justify us
in imputing to Kant a kind of general autonomy
thesis. But it is a thesis about aesthetic autonomy
(with the aesthetic being understood as a general
dimension ot experience), not a specific thesis about
the autonomy of art.2 This means that any imputation
to Kant of a view about artistic autonomy will neces-
sarily be a reconstructed one.
But one of the aims of my article was precisely to
provide such a reconstructive interpretation. It of-
fered a reading of the third Critique which provides
room for using the nineteenth and twentieth century
slogan that fine art is autonomous, yet also preserves
well-known features of Kant's text which suggest that
the fine arts possess an important explanatory link
with other areas of human practice.
(ii) On this point I wrote that for Kant, the fact that
"the good will-or, as we might say elliptically, a
person-is the sole source of unconditioned value,
and that its value is the condition of all other values"
entails "that a work of art possesses at least condi-
tional or instrumental value if it possesses value at
all."3 Hyman, objecting to this inference, writes:
But Kant is, obviously, using 'autonomy' in two different
senses. Of course, art is not an end in itself in the same way
as a human being is. ... But art is autonomous as 'a mode of
representation which is purposive for itself' ... insofar as art
does not derive its value from its success in making 'man
morally better.'
But it cannot be true that Kant applies "autonomy" in
one sense to works of art, in another to human beings
if he never describes art as autonomous to begin with.
Perhaps Hyman is taking it for granted that Kant
shares his own apparent assumption that to describe
an artwork as "purposive for itself' is the same as
saying that it or its value is "autonomous." But Kant
does not treat these as equivalent expressions, and I
see no evidence of such an assumption in the text. As I
noted, Kant reserves Autonomie in the third Critique
for describing the capacity of certain mental faculties
for a priori self-legislation. Needless to say, an art-
work is not a mental faculty. Thus, even if it seems
reasonable enough to say that in general, anything
which is self-purposive is also, ipso facto, autono-
mous, it does not follow that an artwork's self-
purposive character implies its autonomy, in Kant's
sense of the latter term.
Hyman seems also to assume, in the remark just
cited, that fine art's inability to cause human beings
to act in accordance with the moral law entails that it
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is not instrumental to a moral end in any sense. Kant
affirms the premise, but not the conclusion. In section
83 of the Critique of Teleological Judgment Kant's
language suggests a clear distinction between two
senses in which a thing can be valuable as a means to
bringing about some state of affairs S. It can do so by
causing S to occur in a mechanistic sense of "cause";
or, it can do so by helping bring S about, in the sense
that one person may noncoercively help another real-
ize the latter's ends. Fine art's instrumental value and
its ultimate purpose for Kant, I argued, reside in its
functioning as a means to our moral welfare in the
second of these senses only. I did not argue from the
premise that a person is the sole source of uncondi-
tioned value to the conclusion that, as Hyman puts it,
"the value of a work of art cannot be autonomous."
(iii) I claimed that some of the language Kant uses
to talk about works of art can be construed to suggest
that the latter characteristically appear to us as if
they were ends in themselves. From this premise I
drew the conclusion that works of art could, if viewed
in the above analogical fashion, be further viewed as
if they were persons which exhibit the kind of auton-
omy Kant elsewhere without qualification attributes
to wills or persons and to ends in themselves (i.e.,
moral autonomy). This interpretation is indeed a
speculative one. It depends upon an analogy between
artworks and persons which, as I noted, is suggested
by Kant's language but which may not have been
intended by Kant himself. Hyman understands that
language differently. Referring to the same passages,
he writes that "Kant means what he says: just as man
gains his dignity by being an end in himself so art
gains its dignity by being an end in itself" (p. 377). In
other words, Kant means that the intrinsic worth of
works of art makes them ends in themselves of a
different kind than wills or persons.
But Hyman seems to want to make an even stronger
claim. He seems to be suggesting that Kant thought of
a work of art as a type of end in itself whose
unconditional value is justificatorily independent of
the unconditional value of persons, or of actions
willed in accordance with the moral law. In other
words, Kant meant to suggest that the value of art is
not in any sense conditional upon the value of moral-
ity. Yet Kant never in the third Critique asserts even
the weaker claim that works of art are ends in them-
selves. We should keep in mind that if Kant did mean
to suggest that the value of art is not conditional in any
sense upon the value of morality, then the third
Critique's theory of art represents Kant's effective
departure from an axiological thesis which lies at the
heart of his earlier critical writings on ethics, the
thesis that the morally good will is "the highest good
and the condition of all the rest. "4 Many who sym-
pathize with much of Kant's aesthetic theory but find
his ethics too austere for their taste would, I imagine,
 Discussion
be delighted (not to say amazed) to discover that Kant
modified this doctrine in the third Critique. Hyman
may be among them. But his Kant sounds to me more
like the Kant of nineteenth century writers, such as
Benjamin Constant and Victor Cousin, whose sec-
ond-hand acquaintance with the third Critique led
them to assume that when Kant spoke of Zweckmds-
sigkeit ohne Zweck he meant "art for art's sake," than
it sounds like the historical author of the Critique of
Judgment.
Hyman remarks in closing that I fail to see that "art
for art's sake does not imply any feeling that morality
is unimportant." From this I gather he is opposed in
principle to attempts to explain, as I believe Kant
attempted to do, how works of art can be valuable, as
works of art, both for what they are and for what they
do. If this is the case, then I am puzzled that he had so
little to say about the broader programmatic, and
polemical, implications of my paper. I meant to take
issue with the way in which the Critique of Judgment
has been used by nineteenth and twentieth century
"Kantians" to legitimize narrowly formalist or other-
wise overtly anti-instrumental approaches to art his-
toriography and criticism. Hyman unfortunately has
chosen to address only the textual accuracy of my
reading of the third Critique, but not the broader
issues that reading was meant to raise.
CASEY HASKINS
Department of Philosophy
SUNY, College at Purchase
1. Lawrence W. Hyman, "Art's Autonomy Is its Moral-
ity: A Reply to Casey Haskins on Kant," Journal of Aesthet-
ics and Art Criticism 47 (1989): 376-377.
2. Casey Haskins, "Kant and the Autonomy of Art," Jour-
nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (1989), p. 43, n. 3.
3. Ibid., p. 51
4. Kant, Groundwork, Ak. 396. See also Ak. 393, where
Kant remarks that it is impossible to conceive of anything
which is "good without qualification, except a good will."
Refining Not Defining
Art Historically
Jerrold Levinson says an artwork is "a thing (item,
object, entity) that has been seriously intended for
regard-as-a-work-of-art, i.e., regard in any way pre-
existing art-works are or were correctly regarded." '
One can always turn to a recursive procedure when
something proves difficult to define within a culture.
But a way in which anything can be defined becomes
trite, even if successful. A definition that runs recur-
sively back to what a culture has understood some-
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237
thing to be will provide fairly accurate taxonomy
within that culture providing one can recover suffi-
cient of that previous understanding. One does not
have to understand anything at present about how it
may be intrinsically characterized. One has a true
way within a culture to define art, but it's a true way
for everything else as well, so long as the notion
"within a culture" does not become problematic.
But, in fact, it is a central problem in any recur-
sion through history. Levinson's definition ac-
counts, as he says, for art made by someone directly
intending it for a complex of regards that just "hap-
pen to be regards past art works were properly
accorded."2 This mode of art making he terrns
intrinsical in contrast to the relational, in which art
is made in relation to specific artworks in the past
and how they are or were correctly regarded. In the
intrinsic mode, an object may become an art work
even subsequent to its creator's intending it for a
certain regard and even subsequent to the death of its
creator. As Levinson illustrates:
A naive or art-unaware creator makes an object Z at t,
which he intends for a kind of treatment or regard which is
not a correct way of regarding any art works existing prior
to t1 . However, it is a kind of treatment or regard which will
be correct for certain art works 0 existing 200 years after t 1.
... it was created and intended for just the sort of treatment
thatO's, which are recognized art works at t2, It, + 2001 are
correctly regarded. Z is art at t2 because it was intended for
a kind of regard which (unknown to its creator) turns out to
be in the stock of standard regards for art works at t2 .3
So far, with respect to the future, Levinson's defini-
tion does not proliferate art works beyond what a
culture at any given time distinguishes as art works, as
a certain limited number of art works come into being
during the 200 years. But he has not anticipated the
full history of past or alien ways art was or is correctly
regarded. Dollar bills printed by the mint to be
regarded by currency that can not be counterfeited,
for example, might be art because it is discovered in
some ancient culture that the medium of exchange
was art correctly and integrally regarded for its
qualities as such a medium; or because in some other
past culture, works of art were correctly and inte-
grally regarded for their uniqueness and ability to
resist counterfeit. This is not a case of making traffic
lights art because they were intended to be regarded
with attention to color just as impressionist paintings
were: the impressionist paintings were not integrally
so regarded; in nineteenth-century Europe, attention
was to be paid to much else in their status as art. But in
the culture postulated, the medium of exchange is
integrally regarded as art; purchases made with it,
etc., are contingent, irrelevant to its status as art.
Similarly, bottles and pots intended for regard as