The dialectics of decay: rereading the Kantian subject - interpretation of philosopher Immanuel Kant's essay 'Critique of Judgment'

The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. - Wallace Stevens, "Of Mere Being," 1955(1)

As art historians, we labor under the legacy of the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant. Indeed, Kant's Critique of Judgment, published in 1790 when the philosopher was sixty-six years old, has figured the contours and mapped the coordinates for the aesthetic experience of works of art sanctioned by our discipline.(2) In the manner of all successful intellectual inheritances, the Kantian legacy has - until very recently, at least - been seamlessly incorporated into the discourse of academic practice: we have "spoken" Kant or "performed" Kant without being conscious of our debt. Using the philosopher's own terms, we might say that our relation to his aesthetic theory has been dogmatic rather than critical. Rereading Kant, as this essay proposes to do, is thus to place the philosopher's own critique, as well as our Kantian inheritance, under critical pressure.

The ruin offers a provocative site with which to begin a critique of Kantian philosophy. Considering the immense popularity of ruins at the end of the eighteenth century, it is striking that Kant never discusses the aesthetic experience of ruins in his third Critique, especially since ruins seem obvious catalysts of the Kantian sublime. More specifically, ruins appear exemplary of the Kantian dynamic sublime, an occasion that entails a presentation of nature's unbounded force. This essay will offer an explanation for this absence by examining it within the architectonic of Kant's aesthetic theory, as well as within the framework of his philosophy of history. An investigation of the dialectics of decay will allow us to interrogate the constitution and foundational premises of the Kantian subject through the sign of his own demise.(3) Like James Ensor's imaginative projection of a body in ruin, My Portrait in 1960, an etching of 1888 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], we will strain the Kantian edifice by incorporating the ruin - as emblem and as idea - within the framework of the philosopher's own system, thereby yielding a picture of the subject in 1997 that may prove less coherent than Kant's carefully crafted image in 1790.

By inquiring into the absence of ruins from Kant's critical enterprise, I intend neither to take the philosopher to task for what he was not fascinated by nor to formulate a critique based on Kant's failure to include ruins. One could, in fact, immediately conjecture why ruins do not make an appearance in the analytic of the sublime by pointing out how, for Kant, they may involve a determinate concept, and so may suffer the same fate as architecture or sculpture in his aesthetic theory. Yet, as we shall see, in his Critique of Judgment Kant mentions certain architectural structures as examples of the sublime in nature. The inclusion of these examples does not represent a contradiction in his system, since he considers these not as architectural structures per se but the effect of them on the beholder. As I will argue, ruins may have a similar effect on the beholder, and so may be considered - along with Kant's architectural examples - as vehicles for experiences of the sublime. My query goes deeper, then, and investigates the ways in which Kant's blindness to the contemporaneous cult of ruins may be emblematic of his own unwillingness to consider the ruination of his overconfident systematics, as well as a less than idealized, or "ruined," subject. The implications of an idealized Kantian subject for the historical construction of a subjectivity defined through reason, and for the discipline of art history, as well as the corresponding location of the ruin at the underside of both subjectivity and art history, will be examined in this essay.

Seven years before he was to publish his treatise on aesthetic judgment, Kant wrote in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, "All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay." Kant's statement is a diagnosis of his own culture, yet his words are directed more toward the faculty of philosophy than the larger field of society, since what he actually announces here is "the period of the downfall of all dogmatic metaphysics."(4) Kant's vision of vanity and decay is thus presented only to be circumscribed and ultimately rectified, for, it will be remembered, the decline of metaphysics was to be reversed through his own critical method. Kant's statement charts the course and the spirit of the subject in his own philosophical enterprise: "false art" and "vain wisdom" pass away as the subject of history gropes toward the "essential end of reason," defined as an internal condition of unalloyed morality and an external state of "ethical community." Though Kant viewed this trajectory as a path toward freedom, it is a totalizing freedom - a haunting oxymoron to which we will have occasion to return - that is the goal toward which the Kantian subject is driven.(5)