Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

6 looking away
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I’ll argue, sets up structures whose unfore-
seen consequences Coleridge lives out. Coleridge becomes enamored of
optical illusions and other visual ephemera (which he calls “spectra”) because
they make no claim on his endorsement, over and against obsessive
thoughts and memories, which he experiences as immutable internal facts
(“spectres”). Although Coleridge considered himself a Kantian, his psychic
life reads like an involuntary flight from critical philosophy, with its inexorable
inner laws from which he seeks respite in the most transient and
merely apparent phenomena he can find.
In Chapter 2, I explain how Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason triggers the
interest in offbeat perception in which Coleridge participates. By normalizing
appearance (Erscheinung) and requiring its acceptance, Kant unwittingly
encourages fantasies of aberrant perception that might escape his
strictures and hence his recommended path to world-acceptance. To understand
the resistance Kant inspires, it helps to understand that the First
Critique proposes a kind of therapeutics: by establishing narrow limits for
knowledge, the Critique of Pure Reason isolates minimal responsibilities of
acceptance. What’s radical about the First Critique is how minimal Kant is
willing to be: Kant would make accepting the world bearable by miniaturizing
the endorsement due to it. Kant wants his readers to realize the given
world’s limits—in the pejorative sense of liabilities as well as boundaries—
in order to realize, secondarily, that the amount of respect we have already
paid it in this very apprehension is all we owe. What Kant succeeds in conveying,
however, is mostly that the world “as is” is necessarily appearance.
So, in the new circumstances of replete appearance that Kant furnishes, to
anyone who is not ready to accept Kant’s world aberrant appearance becomes
suddenly indispensable. This result also bears implications for post-
Kantian aesthetics. The Critique of Judgment excludes the most ephemeral
and indefinite perceptions from aesthetic experience because they cannot
sustain the thought of commonality that Kant wishes to affirm; from the
phenomenophilic point of view, however, that’s exactly the appeal of these
perceptions. Because no one can be imagined to share them, no one can be
imagined to appropriate, benefit from, or push one to endorse them. They
offer a glimpse, not of spontaneous accord but of freedom from the demand
for agreement. Of course, spontaneous accord is itself a figure of
freedom from the obligation to agree. But while Kant’s aesthetic is posi-