Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 5
"Ethics and aesthetics are one"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Phil Hessler
COMMENT I
What if your only choice as an artist would be between making work guided by conviction (presumably, ethics) or making work guided by caprice (presumably, aesthetics)?
About as far from capricious as you can get, you have Immanuel Kant. Regarding his convictions…I’m not so sure. Still, Kant’s aesthetics rests on an unstable but interesting terrain of antinomies, not of his creation but against which he proposed a solution.1 Volatile, aesthetics needed Kant as much as Kant needed aesthetics.
There is no way to reverently unpack either his aesthetics or ethics with any standing in the short essay. And there is something ridiculous about trying to reconfigure Kant’s meticulously crafted logic by extracting it in fragments. But in the irreverence of trying this, there is something inconsistent, gratifying, and constructive. To twist his words, something “indirectly certain.”
Kant was fond of drilling into contradictions in order to name them and –to the extent that he could – to repair the impacted molars (the metaphor is appropriate – receiving Kant really is as painful as receiving dentistry. And I mean dentistry at the time of Kant, when dental work was not itself an aesthetic issue.)
Simultaneously locked in and locked out of the determinate and the indeterminable, Kant exposes the question of taste as a sort of paradox –aesthetic judgments of sense are “incompatible” with a dialectic. This is how a dialectic of aesthetic judgment becomes the riddle that it is – a “natural and unavoidable” cavity. As he says, “the antinomies compel us against our will.”
As circular as a Kantian argument, this comment returns to the opening question. Look at the absurdity of it. It is a preposterous set-up to think that one can extract one’s ethics from one’s aesthetics, or vice versa. And this makes aesthetics a much more serious issue than impulsive, artistic intuition, and a more complex one than a search for beauty or truth through expression.
COMMENT II
Kant addresses the idea that beauty serves as a symbol of morality, and here it is that this essay enters the terrain of the ugly, of the foul. A modern practitioner of good old muckraking, Mike Davis writes in Planet of Slums about “illusions of self-help” to reveal the bogus rationales that are held as reasons to disengage assistance from slums, to pretend to empower them, to pretend to end their misery -indirectly certain - in ways that are ultimately self-interested. 2
Ethics are writ large all over that scenario, mostly as ethical abuses, but the interesting aspect is that there is an aesthetic dimension also. As Davis rakes up more muck, he reveals that it was an architect who helped to found the beginnings of the postured slum ‘help’ administrated by Robert McNamara, a man whose other
ethical ‘achievement’ was the Vietnam War. This architect, John Turner, was taken with the ingenuity of slum housing, taken with their construction on an aesthetic level. This man helped to formulate a misguided policy in which, as Davis describes, “the slums were less the problem than the solution.” And so it goes that ethics and aesthetics find themselves in bed together again.
1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 1790, trans. Werner Pluhar, 1987, pgs. 209-220
2 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, pgs. 70-94, Verso, 2007
Volume 1, Issue 5
"Ethics and aesthetics are one"
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Phil Hessler
COMMENT I
What if your only choice as an artist would be between making work guided by conviction (presumably, ethics) or making work guided by caprice (presumably, aesthetics)?
About as far from capricious as you can get, you have Immanuel Kant. Regarding his convictions…I’m not so sure. Still, Kant’s aesthetics rests on an unstable but interesting terrain of antinomies, not of his creation but against which he proposed a solution.1 Volatile, aesthetics needed Kant as much as Kant needed aesthetics.
There is no way to reverently unpack either his aesthetics or ethics with any standing in the short essay. And there is something ridiculous about trying to reconfigure Kant’s meticulously crafted logic by extracting it in fragments. But in the irreverence of trying this, there is something inconsistent, gratifying, and constructive. To twist his words, something “indirectly certain.”
Kant was fond of drilling into contradictions in order to name them and –to the extent that he could – to repair the impacted molars (the metaphor is appropriate – receiving Kant really is as painful as receiving dentistry. And I mean dentistry at the time of Kant, when dental work was not itself an aesthetic issue.)
Simultaneously locked in and locked out of the determinate and the indeterminable, Kant exposes the question of taste as a sort of paradox –aesthetic judgments of sense are “incompatible” with a dialectic. This is how a dialectic of aesthetic judgment becomes the riddle that it is – a “natural and unavoidable” cavity. As he says, “the antinomies compel us against our will.”
As circular as a Kantian argument, this comment returns to the opening question. Look at the absurdity of it. It is a preposterous set-up to think that one can extract one’s ethics from one’s aesthetics, or vice versa. And this makes aesthetics a much more serious issue than impulsive, artistic intuition, and a more complex one than a search for beauty or truth through expression.
COMMENT II
Kant addresses the idea that beauty serves as a symbol of morality, and here it is that this essay enters the terrain of the ugly, of the foul. A modern practitioner of good old muckraking, Mike Davis writes in Planet of Slums about “illusions of self-help” to reveal the bogus rationales that are held as reasons to disengage assistance from slums, to pretend to empower them, to pretend to end their misery -indirectly certain - in ways that are ultimately self-interested. 2
Ethics are writ large all over that scenario, mostly as ethical abuses, but the interesting aspect is that there is an aesthetic dimension also. As Davis rakes up more muck, he reveals that it was an architect who helped to found the beginnings of the postured slum ‘help’ administrated by Robert McNamara, a man whose other
ethical ‘achievement’ was the Vietnam War. This architect, John Turner, was taken with the ingenuity of slum housing, taken with their construction on an aesthetic level. This man helped to formulate a misguided policy in which, as Davis describes, “the slums were less the problem than the solution.” And so it goes that ethics and aesthetics find themselves in bed together again.
1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 1790, trans. Werner Pluhar, 1987, pgs. 209-220
2 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, pgs. 70-94, Verso, 2007
