Kant's Æsthetics: A Critique of "The Critique of Judgement"; Or, Why Modern Art is So Ugly

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the modern era, and his three critiques on pure reason, practical reason, and judgement are part of the foundation of modern ideas about faith, morality, and art. Long influential in the secular western world, Kant's theories blew into the Church through the windows opened during the era of the Second Vatican Council. Kant is perhaps most famous for formulating a precise definition of the Golden Rule, in his "Categorical Imperative'", but his view of God is agnostic to an extreme degree and is nearly synonymous with modern liberal religionism. Likewise, contemporary institutional art worldwide is a direct product of Kant's ideas about æsthetics, which is found in "The Critique of Judgment".

Kant begins:

"If we wish to discern whether anything is beautiful or not, we do not refer the representation of it to the Object by means of understanding with a view to cognition, but by means of the imagination (acting perhaps in conjunction with understanding) we refer the representation to the Subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure."

Kant immediately starts with his theory of beauty. He makes the distinction between the art object itself, and the subject: which here means you, the viewer of the art object. Kant also makes the distinction between cognition (the gaining of knowledge) and imagination (mental visualization). Beauty, or its lack, says Kant, comes from the imagination and is not knowledge.

He continues:

The judgment of taste, therefore, is not a cognitive judgment, and so not logical, but is æsthetic — which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective.

This is modern art theory in a nutshell. Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder, and what is beautiful for me necessarily isn't beautiful for you. And this shows the modern narrowing of reason: æsthetics and logic are kept separated and do not interact.

And then Kant restates his thesis:

Every reference of representations is capable of being objective, even that of sensations (in which case it signifies the real in an empirical representation). The one exception to this is the feeling of pleasure or displeasure. This denotes nothing in the object, but is a feeling which the Subject has of itself and of the manner in which it is affected by the representation.

Kant tells us that everything about art — except beauty or ugliness — is objective. This idea has enormous consequences for art: we are told that we should just keep our mouth shut about beauty, it isn't even open to discussion. Those of us with a classical conception of beauty, who often find modern art ugly, are told that this feeling is irrelevant. And if we keep insisting on beauty, we are sneered at, since we obviously are ignorant of modern art theory. This is why modern art is so ugly. A modern work of art may be universally praised by the art critics even though everyone may find it ugly and repulsive.

Suppose that an artist intentionally makes an ugly artwork, completely out of a spirit of spite and hatred, and places this ugly artwork in a very public place, where it causes universal nausea. Kant's theory of art cannot and will not explain this action, and it completely exonerates the artist from any responsibility of its effect on its viewers.

Practically, this theory removes the discussion of beauty from philosophy; beauty is merely changing opinion, which makes it only interesting to sociologists and marketers and not to art critics. And so, society's conditioners attempt to socially-construct mass opinion of beauty: which film starlet or popular singer has the fashionable look these days? And these opinions of beauty are typically divorced from anything objectively real.

Traditionally, beauty is transcendental, that is, having universal significance and reality, while Kant's theory denies this. Catholic theology tells us that beauty goes all the way up, to God, and that beauty extends throughout Creation.

Like so much of modern philosophy, Kant's theories stop at subjective feelings and don't look beyond them into objective reality. The classical theory of beauty attempts to discover why something looks beautiful. Kant's theory, which is very highly elaborated beyond what I've shown, attempts to have it both ways, but seems to end up with just tastemakers imposing their arbitrary views on everyone else: which is exactly the situation we are experiencing today.

I am willing to agree that emotional response to art has much ambiguity, and some people's taste is very difficult to explain. But if we follow Kant's theory, then art becomes boring and uninteresting, since if we don't pursue beauty, then we most certainly won't get it. Furthermore, Kant says:

If anyone asks me whether I consider that the palace I see before me is beautiful, I may, perhaps, reply that I do not care for things of that sort that are merely made to be gaped at.

Perhaps I am taking Kant's quote out of context, or perhaps it is translated poorly, or maybe I just don't understand what he means; however, it seems to me that Kant doesn't like beauty at all. Could it be possible that this major philosopher, and even perhaps his modern followers, could possibly reject beauty, or have a hatred of it?

Perhaps this theory is part of the reason why so much of modern life is so ugly.

National Council of Churches Under Secularist Influence?

I received this note from an Evangelical friend:

IRD MEDIA ADVISORY
The Institute on Religion and Democracy

January 5, 2007

Contact: Loralei Coyle (lcoyle {at} ird-renew [dot] org)

Upcoming IRD Press Conference
On Controversial National Council of Churches Funding

“The National Council of Churches, a body founded to pursue Christian unity, is no longer supported principally by its member churches. Secular left-leaning foundations have stepped in to save the council, thus artificially amplifying the voice of the declining religious left.”
-Alan Wisdom, IRD Vice President

WHO: Report Authors and Church Renewal Movement Leaders:

• Alan Wisdom, author
• John Lomperis, author
• The Rev. Parker Williamson, editor emeritus, The Presbyterian Layman
• Fr. John Reeves, Orthodox Church in America priest
• The Rev. Keith Almond, United Methodist pastor


WHAT: Release of new IRD report “Strange Yokefellows: The National Council of Churches and Its Growing Non-Church Constituency.”

WHEN: 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, January 10th (Duration Approximately 45 minutes)

WHERE: Murrow Room of the National Press Club, 529 14th St. NW, 13th Floor - Washington, DC

The Institute on Religion and Democracy, founded in 1981, is an ecumenical alliance of U.S. Christians working to reform their churches’ social witness, in accord with biblical and historic Christian teachings, thereby contributing to the renewal of democratic society at home and abroad.

www.ird-renew.org

The National Council of Churches was founded in 1950, and is made up of numerous mainline Protestant denominations and Orthodox Churches, and has been most notable for its lack of Catholic participation. Nominally an ecumenical organization, it is instead most known for pursuing socialist policies, including the funding of Marxist guerrillas. The NCC is also criticized for not denouncing Communist countries that persecute Christians. Membership in the NCC's mainline denominations have been sharply declining over recent decades due to their loss of faith in Christ, instead, the group now gets much of its funding from organizations such as the Ford Foundation. Orthodox members have never been comfortable with the NCC, and some are leaving the group; some say that an alliance is instead needed with the Catholic Church.

Epiphany

At Pope Saint Pius V Church, in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Archbishop Burke to Ordain Institute Preists in Saint Louis

Here is a letter, Priestly ordinations at the Cathedral of St. Louis:

3 January 2006


Dear friends,

It is my great joy to officially announce that the Archbishop of Saint Louis, His Grace Raymond L. Burke, will ordain two of our Deacons to the Holy Priesthood in the Cathedral of Saint Louis on the Feast of the Sacred Heart on Friday, June 15, 2007, at 1:00 p.m. This will be the first time that the priests of the Institute are ordained in the United States.

The Ordinations will take place in the presence of our Prior General, Monsignor Gilles Wach, and a large number of seminarians from Gricigliano, who will travel to the United States for this special occasion.

All are cordially invited to attend this joyous occasion of great solemnity.

Yours very truly in Christ the King,

Msgr. R. Michael Schmitz
Vicar General in the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest
Provincial Superior for the Institute in the United States

Archbishop Burke ordained two priests of the Institute in 2006, and three in 2005, both times at the Institute's seminary in Gricigliano, Italy.

The Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest (Latin: Institutum Christi Regis Summi Sacerdotis) is an international apostolate that celebrates the Latin liturgy in the form that existed before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. It also has a traditional priestly formation program. The Institute follows the charitable attitude of one of its co-patrons, Saint Francis de Sales, who said "One drop of honey attracts more bees than a barrel of vinegar." The Institute is a patron of traditional Catholic arts, and operates Saint Francis de Sales Oratory in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Letter found at AMDG.

Real Reason for Mainstreaming?

BACK WHEN I WAS IN PUBLIC SCHOOL, there was a new educational trend called "mainstreaming" that brought students with severe disabilities into the general schools. Before this time, disabled individuals were segregated into their own institutions. Mainstreaming in public education was paralleled by a similar movement to reintegrate mentally disabled persons into society, and not keeping them segregated in mental hospitals.

The professed reason for doing this was basically an appeal to society's liberality: as fellow human beings, why should these disabled students be kept hidden from view? Also, perhaps mainstreaming would help develop tolerance in the general population, as well as provide broader horizons for the disabled themselves. Now we know that Catholic moral theology teaches us that liberality is a necessary virtue for sanctity, and so as a matter of moral imperative, we must have generosity towards those with difficulties, even if it might be inefficient or cause disruption. But what was initially an appeal to public morality became instead federal law in the United States with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, first legislated in 1975.

Back in school I noticed that some disabled students were incapable of keeping up with the mainstream: these students were apparently not learning much, nor were they interacting with others. They were alone among the crowds. Thankfully, most of the mainstream students (even the schoolyard bullies) were polite enough not to physically abuse the most disabled children, but instead they would avert their eyes, treating the disabled as a shock and a horror.

This reminds me of an avant-garde definition of art: "the purpose of art is to shock and enrage". Shock the mainstream or bourgeois, that is. It did not seem to me that the disabled students were being well served by being mainstreamed. Likewise, when mainstreaming closed down many residential mental hospitals, we ended up with a tremendous problem of homelessness. Instead, it seems that "mainstreaming" was designed to primarily influence the mainstream population and not help the disabled.

Consider this: the same people who promote mainstreaming also promote abortion on demand. And a major trend in modern abortion is the elimination of birth defects: defects that were precisely those suffered by the mainstreamed disabled students. As it seems that the primary effect of this mainstreaming was the inducement of shock in the general population: a shock that would perhaps strongly influence people to consider 'therapeutic' abortion?

Abortion of disabled children is a win/win situation for both the political left and right in the U.S.: the elite of both parties want to make the productive percentage of the population as high as possible. Eliminating the feeble is a seemingly guaranteed method of increasing productivity for both commerce and higher government revenue. The United States government is not so crude as to actually round up and kill the disabled, but I would not discount more subtle methods of doing the same thing.

Traditionally, the physically and mentally disabled were kept segregated and hidden from general society. While this may have been promoted by many to avoid the unpleasantness of seeing people who were not beautiful, these asylums were primarily designed for the benefit of the disabled themselves. Hopefully, they would be living with others who were sympathetic to their needs. The disabled in asylums were not treated as if they were invisible. Clearly, there were many problems in the asylums, especially in the large government-funded institutions, but perhaps they served their charges better than mainstreaming.

Nowadays, mainstreaming is seen more as a way of making money: disabled students typically generate about 60% more revenue per student than does general education. Attention Deficit disorders are classified as a disability, although this so-called disorder seems instead to be the average behavior of boys. Nowadays, mainstreaming advocates no longer appeal to our liberality, but instead say that this technique generates measurable positive results. However, since so many objectively normal students are classified as "disabled", I don't think that these results are reliable. Now if they would just invent a new disability called Attention Surfeit Syndrome, then they would be able to classify 100% of the student population as "disabled"!