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The Guillotine as an Aesthetic Idol and Kant’s Loathing

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Abstract

Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic ideas, along with his brief treatment of ugliness, has been the focus of some recent literature. In this paper, I employ an original approach, which nonetheless draws from Kant’s oeuvre, to pin down the phenomenological complexity of a spectacular event that took place at the inception of the French Terror—the decapitation of Louis the XVI. To this end, the first section of the essay fleshes out an interpretative framework explicating how seeing the guillotine as an aesthetic idea could serve as a means to actualise the revolutionary ideal. The second section introduces a reading of Schwärmerei and argues that this unruly genius is accountable for the creation of aesthetic idols, rendering a spurious aesthetic experience. Finally, in the last section, I argue that there is a significant distinction between Kant’s account of ugliness and loathing, and that the latter stands for neither a moral nor an aesthetic response to a morally repellent object, but rather is an extraordinary sensible response.

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Notes

  1. It is vital to underscore that I am indebted to Daniel Arasse’s (1989) The Guillotine and the Terror, the encyclopaedic manuscript, on which I draw throughout this paper so as to set the stage for my Kantian interpretation.

  2. References to the first Critique are to section number and A and B pagination of the first and second editions (A/B): KrV, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: CUP, 1998. Other references to the works of Kant are to the volume and page of the Akademie Edition. ApH, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert Louden, Cambridge: CUP, 2006; SF, The Conflict of the Faculties, in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Mary Gregor and Robert Anchor, Cambridge: CUP, 1996; KpV, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: CUP, 1996; KdU, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: CUP, 2002); IG, Idea for a Universal History, in Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge: CUP, 1991; MdS, Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: CUP, 1996; TP, On the Common Saying, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: CUP, 1996; RV, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans. by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, Cambridge: CUP, 1998; DO, What does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?, in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans. by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, Cambridge: CUP, 1998; ZeF, Toward Perpetual Piece, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: CUP, 1996;

  3. A strenuous derivation of Kant’s political theory from his moral theory and, in essence, the principle of right (or justice) from the categorical imperative goes far beyond my concerns here (see TP: 8: 289ff.; and ZeF 8: 350ff.)

  4. To be sure, Kant’s project of Aufklärung explicated how to gradually bring forth a ‘counterpart’ of pure reason into the sensible world (KpV, 5: 43; see Munzel 1999: 106). The bringing forth of the transcendent by means of insights therefore is not necessarily a matter of analogical presentation. However, for Kant, works expressing aesthetic ideas provide an alternative by throwing a metaphorical bridge, so to speak, which elucidates the transcendent in virtue of an insight expressed in the phenomenal object.

  5. To be sure, the term ‘enthusiasm’ takes various forms (which cannot always be clearly distinguished) in Kant’s corpus. For the purposes of this paper, I have developed an interpretation founded on Kant’s observation in the Anthropology, one of his latest works, written after the French Revolution. Here, Kant overtly juxtaposes genius and enthusiasm: ‘Originality of the power of imagination (not imitative production), when it harmonises with concepts, is called genius; when it does not harmonise with them, it is called enthusiasm (Schwärmerei)’ (ApH, 7: 172; see also DO, 8: 145, where Kant likens Schwärmerei to genius). Hence, Schwärmerei, like Kant’s conception of genius (KdU, 5: 316), denotes an extraordinary relation between the powerful imagination and understanding. What is striking about this formulation is that Kant does not define Schwärmerei in terms of a ‘passion’ conditioning ‘the delusion of mind’, which is a standard reading of Schwärmerei (KdU, 5; 272–275, ApH, 7: 161). Since Kant’s conception of genius is that ‘happy relation’ between the representational powers that, essentially, yields aesthetic ideas (KdU, 5: 317), I am therefore pursuing the interpretation of Schwärmerei in terms of its ability to yield aesthetic ideas. Finally, Schwärmerei can, of course, be tracked down to a single individual (e.g. Robespierre, who licensed the monarch’s execution), but, for brevity, I analyse it as a formal category.

  6. Another arresting piece exemplifying an aesthetic idol would be one of Arno Breker’s sculptures celebrating the Nazi ideals.

  7. It is notable that a number of commentators have not considered the distinctions. For example, Thompson (1992: 107) notes ‘The feeling of ugliness is a pure and disinterested disgust’ or ‘ugliness or disgust must arise when nature is perceived to be in disharmony with the assumption of judgment’ (my italics). Another example is Philips (2011: 386): ‘the ugliness of a work of art derives from our disgust at what is represented’. While, in the early papers, Wenzel (1999) and Guyer (1992) mention no concept of disgust at all.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the organisers of the ‘Philosophy, Metaphor and Violence’ workshop: Jack Reynolds for his patience and, particularly, Matt Sharpe for his encouragement and comments on an early draft of this paper.

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  1. La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

    Valerijs Vinogradovs

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Vinogradovs, V. The Guillotine as an Aesthetic Idol and Kant’s Loathing. SOPHIA 55, 101–113 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0520-6

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