Date: Sat, 09 Nov 1996 12:48:05 -0500 From: John Young <jya-AT-pipeline.com> Subject: Aesthetic Ideology 1 The New York Times Book Review, November 10, 1996, p. 18. An Artful Theorist: Paul de Man argues for the connections between art and politics, art and science. AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY By Paul de Man. Edited by Andrzej Warminski. 196 pp. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $19.95. By Alan Ryan It is no doubt true that a lot of the dislike of recent literary criticism and a lot of the abuse hurled at university departments of literature is essentially political. But the feebleness of the response, and the shortage of enthusiastic defenders, owes a good deal to a widespread feeling that what we want from critics in the arts is the enhancement of our experience, not a disquisition on the transcendental conditions of its possibility. Like other famous -- or moderately famous -- figures whose youthful misdeeds come to light only at their death, Paul de Man is now almost impossible to see clearly. The lurid glow cast by the opportunistic anti-Semitism of the wartime years obscures his intellectual interests and achievements. For that reason, and only for that reason, the uninitiated reader might find a struggle with "Aesthetic Ideology" mildly rewarding. There can be no ulterior political interest. Although the central argument of this collection, which has been compiled by Andrzej Warminski, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, is precisely that there is the closest possible connection between esthetics and politics -- and between esthetics and scientific knowledge -- the essays' implications for, or entanglement with, everyday politics are minimal. De Man spends most of his time grappling with Kant and Hegel, two central figures in the philosophy of art, and two exceedingly ambiguous figures into the bargain. Kant's "Critique of Judgment" is the least discussed of his three "critiques" -- the analyses of reason, morality and taste -- and not least so because it is a work that somehow skirts topics in religion, politics and our understanding of history without quite focusing on them. Hegel's "Aesthetics" is much less read than his "Phenomenology" or his "Philosophy of Right" -- the first a wonderfully rich, if rambling and unstructured, sketch of a philosophical system that is intended to show the inner rationality of the entire development of human consciousness, the second a rather dour and middle-aged but also an illuminating and thought-provoking inquest into the nature of law and politics in the modern world. The trouble, so to speak, with philosophical esthetics is a simple one. It is always in danger of belittling the work of art in favor of the philosophical, or semi- philosophical, description of what the work of art is about. If it avoids that rock, it runs the equal and opposite risk -- that of making the work of art deeply irrational and mysterious, and so suggesting that esthetic experience is just beyond the reach of rational analysis altogether. In an interesting essay on Kant and Schiller, de Man brings out quite neatly the strain that any attempt to theorize about our experience of art is under -- Kant has difficulties making sense of the particular pleasure we take in art, because it will not fit into the categories of science and morality, while Schiller, who was a practicing poet and playwright, can show us what he does but cannot explain it. Or as de Man puts it, "So there is a total lack, an amazing, naive, childish lack of transcendental concern in Schiller, an amazing lack of philosophical concern." The final question, of course, is whether the reader, theatergoer, ballet watcher and lay listener to Bach and Beethoven, Sondheim and Springsteen is much assisted by any of this. On the whole, I think not. The generalizing urge of theory is at odds with one of the obvious purposes of art, which is to make us listen to this set of sounds, or these lines of verse, to make us attend to the particular characters and understand their particular fates. In this sense, the "resistance to theory" that de Man was concerned with has a rather reasonable basis. It is no doubt true that a lot of the dislike of recent literary criticism and a lot of the abuse hurled at university departments of literature is essentially political. But the feebleness of the response, and the shortage of enthusiastic defenders, owes a good deal to a widespread feeling that what we want from critics in the arts is the enhancement of our experience, not a disquisition on the transcendental conditions of its possibility. A modest knowledge of applied chemistry is useful for both cooks and consumers; an elaborate acquaintance with the history of the philosophy of science is not. Or to put it somewhat differently, any rational person would rather go to the theater with Schiller than with Kant. ----- Alan Ryan's most recent book is "John Dewey: And the High Tide of American Liberalism." [End] --- from list avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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