6 Does Kant have anything to teach us about environmental ethics?

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by Marc Lucht

As we have seen, Kant holds that the determining ground of the judgment of taste can never be an interest. The pure aesthetic consciousness is a noninstrumental attitude toward beings, even nonrational beings. Thus Heidegger tells us:

   in order to find something beautiful, we must let what encounters
   us, purely as it is in itself, come before us in its own stature
   and worth. We may not take it into account in advance with a view
   to something else, our goals and intentions ... We must release
   what encounters us as such to its way to be. (21)

He interprets Kant's notion of taste as a mode of apprehending a thing such that that thing is disclosed as it is itself, rather than as mere instrumentality. A judgment that something is beautiful, insofar as it is disinterested, reveals the nondistorted being itself "in its own stature and worth," in its own intrinsic significance, rather than representing that being merely in its relation to our own possible employment of it. Heidegger says that "purely to honor what is of worth in its appearance--is for Kant the essence of the beautiful." and he claims that for Kant taste is the "release of what has worth in itself." (22) The "Kantian 'devoid of interest'" characterizing the pure aesthetic consciousness is the "magnificent discovery' of the mode of human comportment appropriate for letting a being be what it is. (23) The point here is that Heidegger takes Kant's account of the judgment of taste to be the first preliminary appearance of his own notion of letting beings show themselves from themselves or "letting beings be" (Gelassenheit). Heidegger understands Kant's aesthetic judgment to be the apprehension of the thing as it is itself, rather than of the distortion that results from the representation of the thing as a mere instrument.

What this means is that, for Heidegger, Kant provides a way of thinking about how one may reflect upon and comport oneself toward beings, even nonhuman beings, without seeking to appropriate those beings as mere instruments. Disinterested taste is a way of apprehending nature that resists the inclination to assign to nature a merely relative value on the basis of its capacity to satisfy human goals; instead, the aesthetic consciousness involves a love of (at least beautiful) objects for their own sake. In other words, the aesthetic regard of the world is a kind of noncovetous vision, a kind of nonappropriative seeing that does not operate in the service of our drive to order the world according to our purposes. This kind of seeing presupposes the suspension of what Heidegger thinks of as technological representation. My aesthetic vision does not encounter in the surrounding environment a horizon of objects organized and assigned significance according to my projects, for my typical practical engagement in the world has been bracketed. The aesthetic vision, then, is not a vision that seeks to subjugate, but it is a vision that appreciates, a vision that is receptive and responsive. What is more, Kant thinks that taste involves attending merely to what "manifests itself to the eye," thus "we must base our judgment regarding [the object] merely on how we see it.... We must not do so on the basis of how we think it." (24) The aesthetic apprehension of beings is independent of our more theoretical modes of thinking--and all the biases that orient such thought. If Heidegger is correct in thinking that metaphysical and scientific theories are guided by an agenda of mastery that has infected our commonsense attitudes toward the world by predisposing us toward the appropriation of the instrumentalist stance, then taste as Kant explicates it may give us the resources needed to resist such a technological bias. Taste is an alternative way of apprehending the world, and Kant invites us not only to regard the world from the perspectives of scientific understanding and instrumental rationality but also to adopt an attitude of openness to beings as they appear apart from our knowledge about, and designs upon, them. He suggests that aesthetic apprehension is an encounter with the world independent of theory. Theory, as Heidegger thinks of it, can distort or narrow our view of the world: the world is reduced in theoretical representation to an array of objects merely awaiting their achieving significance by being ordered and mobilized in the service of human endeavor. Kant raises the possibility that aesthetic awareness may help us avoid such simplification.