Old Masters and New Lessons - Grant Kester

the vantage point of a transcendent greater good.(23)
Although Kant is concerned to differentiate aesthetic judgment from moral judgment by
virtue of its non-instrumental or disinterested character, the very experience evoked by the
aesthetic, the intuition of a universal voice, clearly has moral and political implications about
which one could hardly remain indifferent. It is, after all, the aesthetic that claims to reconcile the
purely subjective experience of beauty with the "objective" conditions necessary for political
discourse and will formation. The unresolved relationship between the moral and the aesthetic in
Kant's philosophy is marked by his recourse to a poetics of ambiguity. Although there is no
causal relationship or "intrinsic affinity" (innere Affinitat) between morality and taste, it is
nevertheless the case that our sense of beauty is provided with a form of moral "guidance"
(geleitet, a word that also has the connotation of a military escort [Ak298]). Thus, despite Kant's
insistence on the neutrality of aesthetic judgment, there is clearly an active moral and
pedagogical element at work: the aesthetic "teaches us to like even objects of sense freely"
(Ak354), and in the act of experiencing beauty we are conscious of the fact that our mind is
"being ennobled" (Veredlung [Ak353]).(24)
This ambiguity between the moral and the aesthetic is characteristic of what philosopher
Anthony Cascardi has termed the tradition of "aesthetic liberalism."(25) It also marks Hickey's
account of a "rhetorical" beauty.(26) There are two components of Hickey's analysis that are of
particular relevance here. First is his commitment to the "work of art" as a specifically privileged
vehicle for inducing an "aesthetic" awareness, defined as a mode of cognition that provides a
conduit between somatic experience (the felt pleasure of beauty) and a ground for
intersubjective communication. This conduit itself has a highly developed symbolic value, and,
although it is often only vaguely defined, it typically makes reference to some form of social or
political consensus (in Hickey's case "democracy"). Second, the experience of the work of art is
understood as a paradigm for the construction of an exemplary subjectivity. This is an essentially
private encounter between the viewer (defined as a monadic subject) and the artwork (as the
material expression of another monadic subject), which must remain free of any external
"mediation." It is this belief in an unmediated, and essentially private, encounter that allows
Hickey to ignore any contextual distinctions between, for example, the market conditions of the