ABSTRACT
In Chapters 1 and 2, my narratives skipped directly from Kant to Nietzsche, neglecting all other nineteenth-century thinkers. In this chapter, the key transitional figure will be Marx, whose critique of philosophical quietism prompted continental philosophers to reformulate Kant’s hope question. Ideally, a separate section would also be devoted to the work of the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), whose On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, 1795; rev. 1801) opened up the aestheticist approach to what I am calling the problem of the relationship between immanence and transcendence. Kant’s distinction between the immanent realm of phenomena (to which reason in its speculative employment is restricted) and the transcendent kingdom of ends (to which reason in its practical vocation transports us) underlies his formulation of the eschatological question, “What may I hope?” To ask what I may hope is to ask what I am entitled to believe in order for the highest good to be attainable. According to Kant, this question can only be answered by religion, which promises divine assistance not only for the eventual apportionment of happiness in accordance with moral worth but also for the individual’s striving for perfect virtue (or holiness of will). But Schiller, taking his cue from the conceptions of beauty and sublimity that Kant presents in the first part of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, suggests that not religion but art promises the attainment of the highest good, conceived as the harmonization of inclination and reason. Instead of projecting the object of human aspiration onto a transcendent future life, as religion does, art anticipates an immanent reconciliation in the course of human history. Kant claimed that through divine assistance in nature (i.e., providence) the highest good in human history would eventually be achieved. Picking up on this idea, the German idealists characterized history as the dialectical overcoming of the dichotomy between the immanence of the human and the transcendence of the divine. But after the death of Hegel-who rejected Schiller’s valorization of art in favor of a valorization of philosophy as the self-comprehension of the truth of religion-his successors split into two rival camps. For the so-called “Old Hegelians,” the task of philosophy was to articulate already established religious truths. But for Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), the most celebrated of the “Young Hegelians,” the task of a genuinely critical philosophy was to
free an alienated humanity from the religious dichotomy between the immanent and the transcendent. Marx agrees with Feuerbach that all of the great Kantian dualisms are so many symptoms of alienation, but he argues that religion is not the cause but merely the effect of underlying social conditions, and that the highest good can only be achieved in communist society. Marx characterizes communist society on the model of Schiller’s aesthetic utopia, that is, as a world in which the human capacity for aesthetic play will have finally been achieved. In bourgeois society, art can only exist in a stunted form. This aesthetic dimension of Marx’s thought became the salient point of reference for critical theorists such as Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, and Marcuse. For each of these thinkers, art inherits the burden of reconciliation that religion once fulfilled. Hence the problem of the relationship between transcendence and immanence becomes the problem of the relationship between the sublime and the beautiful. Insofar as this Kantian dualism admits of two complementary ordered conflations, it opens up one of the points of heresy within the House of Continental. For critical theorists such as Benjamin and Adorno, art exhibits a beautiful sublimity that serves as a placeholder for a religion that is in some sense still to come. By contrast, for hermeneuticians such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, art exhibits a sublime beauty that symbolizes religious truth. A comparable point of contention separates Arendt from Lyotard, the one modeling political discourse on aesthetic quarrels about the beautiful; the other on attestations to the sublime. Habermas attempts to overcome these dilemmas by preserving Kant’s three-fold distinction between cognitive, moral, and aesthetic claims, while Žižek seeks to revive the aspirations of critical theory by radicalizing-rather than undermining-this very distinction.
