From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: openings onto the preface
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2002 07:13:49 -0500


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Comrades!;
 
Without going into all the politico-social-historical reasons why, under
the sign of Kant, philosophy was conceived of as a tribunal of reason,
and the philosopher went from being a nonconformist sage who lived in a
barrel off the Agora to a crusty old barrister, complete with wig and
robes, let me say that this orientation remains to a certain extent in
"The Differend".  The chief difference between Kant and Lyotard is that
the latter is more suspicious of the universality of the verdicts. He is
a kind of renegade judge, if you will, in a kangaroo court, siding with
those who cannot defend themselves.
 
I also want to underscore the fact that the concept of judgment Mark
described in his preface is only one of several kinds of judgments Kant
discusses. What Mark described is called the determinative judgment and
it is used by pure theoretical reason to establish the conditions of
reality.  A tension remains, however, because the totality of the
universe is a idea in the Kantian sense, and such ideas outstrip the
scope of determinative judgment leading to the possibility of
transcendental illusions.  (I jumping ahead slightly, but see articles
3-5 in the first chapter of TD for a brief discussion of these themes.)
 
The reason why Kant matters for Lyotard, however, is also due to the
fact that he is the philosopher of "the conflict of the faculties" as
well.  Kant saw quite clearly that the realms of pure reason (science),
practical reason (politics and ethics) and judgment (aesthetics and
teleology) operate in a heterogeneous fashion, what Lyotard names
variously as genres or archipelagos.  Lyotard switches from the language
of faculties to that of phrases to deal with these. Thus, we have the
ostensive phrase (descriptive), the prescriptive phrase
(ethico-political) and the performative phrase (loosely, aesthetic).
The problem is that no one universal rule can bridge these various
realms and the differend tends to operate as a kind of phrase marker
indicating that at a certain unknown point we have strangely entered
into another far country.
 
Take prescriptive phrases, for example.  As Kant demonstrates in his
Critique of Practical Reason the ethical judgment differs from the
determinative judgment in a significant way.  He writes: "The faculty of
judgment of pure practical reason, therefore, is subject to the same
difficulties as that of the pure theoretical, though the latter had a
means of escape, It could escape because in its theoretical use
everything depended upon intuitions to which pure concepts of the
understanding could be applied, and such intuitions can be given a
piori..the morally good, on the contrary, is something which, with
respect to its object, is supersenuous; nothing corresponding to it can
be found in sensible intuition."
 
In the Critique of Judgment, Kant discusses both beauty and the sublime
as aesthetic judgments. In the case of beauty there is a reflective
judgment at work. Kant distinguishes reflective judgment from
determinative judgment insofar as the former, unlike the latter, has no
concepts. In making the judgment that this rose is beautiful, I use no
rule or regulative form to determine my judgment. It is simply a matter
of taste. In making this judgment, however, I do not intend something
subjective. This judgment of beauty is universal insofar as any one else
perceiving this rose would agree of necessity that it was beautiful.
This links in some resects to what Lyotard describes in "Just Gaming" as
judging without a criteria and aspects of this reflective judgment will
be found in TD as well.
 
I will not go into detail at this point about the sublime.  Let me just
mention that the judgment of the sublime, whether mathematical or
dynamic, differs from the reflective judgment of beauty insofar the
supersenuous again emerges into the processes of judgment. In this
sense, the sublime is closer in some respects to the realm of the
ethical rather than that of the  beautiful.
 
I mention this supersenuous in order to link back to what Rod said about
the ontological interests of The Differend. If it is true that there is
a tension between non-being/being and not-present/present(~p/p), then
prescriptive and performative phrases differ from descriptive ones,
insofar as they attempt to present something that cannot be presented,
i.e. the supersenuous in the Kantian sense, something that no
representation can do justice to and, hence, will in relation to the
unpresented, in some sense, will always do a wrong.  As Lyotard says in
his essay "Newman, the Instant":
 
"This beginning is an antinomy. It takes place in the world as its
initial difference, as the beginning of its history. It does not belong
to this world because it begets it, it falls from a prehistory or from
an a-history. The paradox is that of performance, or occurrence.
Occurrence is the instant which 'happens', which comes unexpectedly but
which, once it is there, takes its place in the network of what has
happened."
 
In some strange way, Lyotard philosophy is related to Heidegger's,
insofar as both see aesthetic concerns originating in ontological ones.
In the Ereignis (or event) of Saying, something always remains unsaid.
The terror remains that it will not speak again, will not happen again,
will never find anything ever again to link onto.  However, the event
isn't waiting for us, we merely come when it arrives. It isn't even the
Lord of the Great Advent.
 
Thus, the pagan can laugh at this edifying confusion at the same time
she feels terror and fear - an agitating emotion, perhaps, one akin to
what both Lyotard and Kant (or even Burke, for that matter) have named
the sublime. (In the end the sublime is an ontological term even more
than it is an aesthetic one!)
 
eric
 
 

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