| Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment | Is the world suitable for human purposes? This is the question Kant takes up in his third Critique (1790), the work that concludes his attempt at developing an integrated conception of the human mind. In it Kant argues that the world of experience is amenable to morality as well as to natural-scientific systematization. His argument centers on the ways in which we discern intelligible order in concrete particulars, and especially in beautiful things and living organisms. •
More than any other theoretical work of its time, the third Critique has remained open to conflicting interpretations. Its reception has shaped artistic practices and theories of art from Romanticism to the present, as well as notions of biological life, speculative metaphysics and vitalist thought. By virtue of the connection it draws between beauty and organic life, it is one of the most stimulating works for thinking about the affinities between the humanities and the sciences. Here are some of the subsidiary questions it deals with:
• Are there feelings of pleasure and displeasure that are in some sense “valid” for everyone?
• Does aesthetic pleasure respond to the singularity of the object at hand or is it primarily a matter of our prior disposition and stance towards the object?
• If the pleasure we take in a beautiful thing is neither a piece of knowledge nor the fulfillment of a moral obligation, why are we still disappointed when someone we care for does not share our pleasure in the object at hand? And if aesthetic disagreements cannot be settled through conceptual demonstration, what is the point of discussing our divergent responses to art? Should other people’s aesthetic preferences influence one’s taste? What is art criticism good for?
• Is there an eternal canon of aesthetic worth or is taste intrinsically historical? What do we mean when we call a work or an artist a "classic"?
• How can unpleasant feelings occasion pleasure on a “higher,” reflective level?
• Why are artists often surprised by their own creations? Must such creative genius challenge the “common sense” of taste?
• How can the natural-scientific worldview accomodate the purposiveness of organic life?
• What sort of analogies and correspondences obtain between nature and art? Do these analogies justify the view that nature is the artifact of a divine creator?
• Given Kant’s anchoring of taste in cognitive functions of the mind, what is the role of bodily life in aesthetic pleasure? What is the relation between the reflective discernment of biological life and the enhancement of mental life through reflection on beautiful forms? Does the Kantian account support or contradict the view that only beings alive in a biological sense can have a mental life?
• In reflecting on the limitations of the human standpoint, are we tacitly assuming that we have access to an absolute standpoint from which such limitations might be recognized?
• Through careful reading of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, we will try to get a sense of how these seemingly disparate questions hang together. We shall also ask how close the third Critique comes to propounding a metaphysics, i.e. whether it ends up overstepping the limits stipulated by Kant’s basically modest, "critical," framework. We may also consider influential responses to the third Critique (by Hegel, Gadamer, Arendt, Lyotard etc). Readings and discussion in English.
| Aut |
| The Invention of Experience | As a result of changes in the Western sense of history, a new understanding of experience begins to emerge in the early 19th century. Rather than a mere preliminary to scientific knowledge of an unchanging natural order, experience in its very historicality comes to be seen as a crucial source of orientation, something to be valued for its own sake irrespective of its contribution to propositional knowledge or happiness. We will consider problems arising from this development: the contrast between lived and cumulative experience; why experience is always a kind of crisis and how the crises of (post)modernity affect the capacity for experience; experiential openness and the authority conferred by experience; aesthetic response as a paradigm case of experience. If it is neither pleasure nor knowledge but experience that we first and foremost seek in art, what are the consequences of this view for humanities disciplines dealing with the arts? The role of Goethe in the emergent cult of experience will be considered via part I of Faust, Elective Affinities and the essay on the latter by Walter Benjamin. Other authors include Montaigne, Hegel, Emerson, Rilke, Gadamer, Koselleck, Marquard. Readings and discussion in English. | Spr |
| Outsiders and outcasts: introduction to German prose fiction | Close reading and discussion of compelling literary works by Hebel, Tieck, Kleist, Hoffmann, Heine, Keller, Storm, R. Walser, Kafka. Attention paid to writers’ divergent responses to the artistic, ethical, and political challenges of modernity. Readings, discussion, and writing assignments in German; length of assignments adjusted to students' linguistic competence. Appropriate for students who have completed the German-language sequence at Stanford or its equivalent. | Win |
| Varieties of freedom in German culture | Changing ideas of human self-determination in works by Luther, Goethe, Kant, Kleist, Hegel, Heine, Marx, Keller, Nietzsche, Adorno/Horkheimer. For undergraduate students. Students may read assignments in English or in the original. Discussion in English. | Aut |