georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

History of Art, Reason 91The Kantian aesthetic is a veritable treasure-house of thought, onewhose internal developments need not be pursued here. Let’s makedo with locating some radical modifications wrought on the greatVasarian themes, on the great classic themes previously evoked. Notefirst that taste, in the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, is the faculty ofjudgment itself: a faculty of knowledge, an extremely broad subjectiveinstance—and no longer the normative object of decorum,* the absoluteexemplum of antiquity to which the academies insisted paintersswear unconditional allegiance. 13 Then note the rigor with which Kantuses the term Idea—light years away from the manipulations to whichearlier academicians resorted to ensure the triumph of a liberal saperedell’artefice over each and every painting. 14 The Idea is still there, butrestored to its original, Platonic exactingness:Plato made use of the expression Idea in such a way that wecan readily see that he understood by it something that notonly could never be borrowed from the senses, but that evengoes far beyond the concepts of the understanding (withwhich Aristotle occupied himself ), since nothing encounteredin experience could ever be congruent to it. Ideas forhim are archetypes of things themselves, and not, like thecategories, merely the key to possible experiences. ...Whoeverwould draw the concepts of virtue from experience...would make of virtue an ambiguous non-entity [Unding],changeable with time and circumstances, useless for any sortof rule. ...But Plato was right to see clear proofs of an originin Ideas . . . also in regard to nature itself. 15For Kant, however, none of this had any ‘‘Platonic’’ repercussions,in the sense of a global condemnation of artistic activity, its outrightexclusion from the world of Ideas. On the contrary, he regarded theIdea as a ‘‘necessary condition’’ of aesthetic judgment. Symmetrically,he saw beauty as ‘‘the expression of aesthetic Ideas.’’ 16 But the aestheticIdea was not the end of the matter, was not placidly grounded*convenance.