Purposiveness without Purpose: Art, Autonomy, and Morality

Abstract Right illiberalists and left illiberalists find common cause when they censure the teaching of art and literature on moral grounds. The philosopher Immanuel Kant dedicated his career to categorical clarification, exhaustively defining morality and aesthetics as separate realms of human activity. Today, right illiberalists and left illiberalists confuse or conflate the categories and conceive of aesthetics in morally instrumentalist terms, turning the response to works of art from an individual, subjective experience into a collective, social experience. Among the many developments in the pre-Kantian era was the idea derived from Horace's Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry) that art might have the dual purpose of providing both pleasure and usefulness. Horace's offhand comment hardened into dogma in the eighteenth century, whereupon Kant thought through the problems that attend to cognition (pure reason), morality (practical reason), and aesthetics (judgment). Kant's categorical separation of aesthetic satisfaction from both logical procedures and moral prescriptions had the effect of isolating art from those domains, of course, but it also made it seem that the experience of art necessarily had to be removed from any social context whatsoever. The neo-Kantian Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling addressed this issue, but in doing so he began to collapse the Kantian categories, arguing that the cognitive realm and the aesthetic realm become merged in the work of art. This maneuver did nothing to prevent a like fusion involving the realm of practical reason, whether in its individual manifestation as morality or its collective manifestation as politics, thereby opening the way to the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's ecstatic claim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The assertion is at odds with Shelley's Hegelianism, since Hegel himself had scant use for art in comparison to that far more important human enterprise, the philosophical pursuit of truth. Hegel concluded that anyone who asserts that “art has to serve as a means for moral ends” is taking a “false position.” The true position—that is, that art is not a means for moral ends—was taken up by Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Pater, neo-Hegelians both, who made similar arguments, albeit in very different language, about the removal of morality from both art and appropriate human behavior. Nietzsche and Pater help us to understand that, while moral judgment may have a place in aesthetic understanding, moral prohibition does not.