데리다 이후의 칸트 미학

Abstract

This article aims to see how Kant's aesthetics has been reinterpreted since modernism, to explain why it is criticized these days, especially by Derrida, and to inquire into how it could defend itself from such critique and then be newly interpreted. With this, this paper eventually intends to arouse people's attention to the fact that the analysis and explanation of aesthetic experience, based upon the insight into the self referential activity of subject, i. e., Kant's analysis and explanation, can still be meaningful even in the discourse of contemporary aesthetics. Clement Greenberg regards Kant as the typical one whose philosophizing stands for the intrinsic nature of modernism painting. Greenberg holds that the essence of modernism painting consists in the self critical attitude toward its own property, and that Kant's philosophy represents such characteristic feature of modernism painting. However, Greenberg's understanding of art do not come up to the tendency in art after Warhol, according to which everything can be an artwork. Therefore, Kant's aesthetics also seems to be meaningless after Warhol's Brillo Box. However, that is not the case. Rüdger Bubner, on the basis of Kant's aesthetic experience, tries to draw out a possibility of autonomous aesthetics in the process of art after the 20th century where the crisis of the concept of artwork is widely spread to people. Thierry de Duve also reinterprets Kant's aesthetics, precisely speaking, Kant's analysis and explanation of aesthetic antinomy, as a key to solve a kind of contradictory situation with respect to the identity of art where two tendencies (Joseph Kosuth's and Clement Greenberg's interpretations of art) confront each other oppositely. So, we can say that Kant's aesthetics still has its vitality even in the process of art after modernism. Nevertheless, after Derrida, we can not be optimistic about Kant's aesthetics. Derrida tries to deconstruct Kant's aesthetics. According to Derrida, Kant's aesthetic experience is virtually nonexistent. In other words, the experience has nothing to do with an existing thing. This alludes to impossibility of the aesthetic experience grounded on Kantian analysis. Besides, while Derrida reads Kantian sublime, he says that through the aesthetic experience of sublime, we can not achieve the passing from the sensual into the supersensual world. However, scrutinizing Kant's text and Derrida's reading of it, we can easily find out that there is all the difference between the general understanding and Derrida's understanding of Kantian aesthetic experience. First of all, Kant's disinterested pleasure has nothing to do with nonexistence. Secondly, Kant's aesthetic sublime allows aesthetic subject to transcend into the supersensual world. This does not means that Kant's aesthetics has no problem. His aesthetics must be complemented so that it can be more actual. Above all, the assertion that aesthetic experience has nothing to do with any concept must be revised. On this reinterpretation of Kant's aesthetics, Andrea Kern's attempt should be an outstanding one. Kern redefines aesthetic play, based on Gadamer's hermeneutics. She replaces the process of aesthetic reflection unaccompanied by any concept with the one of hermeneutic understanding accompanied by some conceptual determination. This is very significant. However, there is a serious problem with her reinterpretation of Kantian aesthetic experience. The problem lies in her interpreting the state of aesthetic play as a kind of undecidable situation. According to her, the aesthetic play she considers as the essence of aesthetic experience takes place just in the undecidable situation where we have to determine the whole process of hermeneutic understanding as a meaningful totality and at the same time can not do it. However, as Kant says, the play of aesthetic experience comes into existence not under the condition of such undecidability, but under the condition of subject's subjective purposive activity, namely of a peculiar completion of subject's self referential activity. Kant calls it the subjective play of facilities of mind. And in the experience of sublime, this aesthetic play or subjective purposiveness shows its higher status. In other words, in an aesthetic experience of sublime, the subject stays in the extremely dramatic state of aesthetic play. In sum, Kant's analysis and explanation of aesthetic experience contains a meaningful element even in the conditions of aesthetics after Derrida, even though it must be complemented in some respects.