and overcome, as some literary critics have also argued in their own field.11 A similar thing happened in philosophy to another theory that stressed the isolation of autonomous things: the unloved doctrine of the thing-in-itself beyond all human access. Here we have crossed into the long shadow of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose three great Critiques sounded the formalist keynote in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, respectively. We will see that Kantian formalism, conveniently centered in his recurring term “autonomy,” consists of an intriguing combination of breakthroughs and deficiencies. Until the deficiencies are addressed and assimilated rather than circumvented by makeshift means, such as the vacuous claim that autonomy is inherently “bourgeois” or “fetishistic,” there is a risk that philosophy and the arts – their fates more closely linked than is commonly believed – will continue to amount to little more than an ironic contempt for formalist claims.12 I hold that this is exactly what happened in the first post-formalist philosophy (better known as German Idealism) and a century and a half later in post-formalist art. In both cases, important new possibilities were gained that had been foreclosed to formalism, but an even more crucial breakthrough was lost. One of the broadest claims of this book is that there will be no further progress in philosophy or the arts without an explicit embrace of the autonomous thing-in-itself. Moreover, we need to draw the surprising theatrical consequences of this point, despite Fried’s understandable wish to banish theatricality from art. David Wellbery restates Fried’s position with wonderfully flamboyant rhetoric:
The (essentially ‘theatrical’) instigation of a frustrated yearning, a vertiginous sense of transport toward the never-to-be-achieved completion of an additive series, elicits a form of consciousness that is essentially non-artistic. Thought, work-internal differentiation, lucidity, and selfstanding achievement are sacrificed for the sake of the frisson of a mysteriously agitated, portentous emptiness.13
Let us all stand united against “mysteriously agitated, portentous emptiness” – though I still find much of aesthetic value in Richard Wagner’s operas, which Wellbery seems to detest. The idea of theatricality defended in this book is not that of histrionic melodrama.
I took up these themes in 2016 in Dante’s Broken Hammer, a book whose first part is devoted to the Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri, and whose second part challenges the thought of that most un-Dantean figure, Kant.14 As mentioned, autonomy is perhaps the most central of Kant’s terms, unifying as it does the chief insights of all three of his Critiques. His metaphysics features the unknowable thing-in-itself, unreachable in any direct fashion; opposed to this noumenal thing is human thought, structured according to our pure intuitions of space and time and the twelve categories of the understanding.15 Each of these realms is autonomous, even if Kant speaks in contradictory fashion of the thing-in-itself as cause of the world of appearance, an inconsistency on which the master was hammered by his first wave of converts.16 In ethics, Kant’s commitment to formalism is openly declared.17 An action is not ethical if it is motivated by any sort of external reward or punishment: whether it be fear of Hell, the desire for a good reputation, or the wish to avoid a bad conscience. An act is ethical only if performed for its own sake, in accordance with a duty binding on all rational beings. Stated in technical terms, ethics must be “autonomous” rather than “heteronomous.” Contextual subtleties play no role in Kant’s ethics: in his most famous example, lying cannot be justified even when done with the best of intentions and yielding the most admirable results. Indeed, context is what must be rigorously excluded for an act to count as ethical at all.
This leads us to Kant’s philosophy of art, another triumph of formalism, even if he does not use that exact word in this portion of his philosophy.18 Beauty must be self-contained in the same manner as ethical actions, unrelated to any personal agreeableness. Here as in his ethics, what is at stake for Kant is not the art object, which cannot be grasped directly any more than the thing-in-itself, and cannot be explained at all in terms of criteria or literal prose descriptions. Instead, beauty concerns the transcendental faculty of judgment shared by all humans, which serves as the guarantor that anyone of sufficiently developed taste ought to agree on what is beautiful. The same holds for our experience of the sublime, whether it comes in the “mathematical” version of something infinitely large (the nighttime sky, the vastness of the sea) or the “dynamical” version of something infinitely powerful (a crushing tsunami, the discharge of a nuclear weapon). Here once more, Kant holds that the sublime is really about us rather than the apparently sublime entity, since the crucial feature of the sublime is that it overpowers our finite selves with an experience of infinite magnitude.
Nonetheless, Kant mixes two very different senses of formalism in a way that is fateful, in the negative sense, for modern philosophy and art theory. The important kernel of truth in his ethics should be clear enough: an action whose purpose is to gain rewards or avoid punishment is not really an ethical act, though we can never be entirely sure that any given act is free of ulterior motives. From here it is a small step toward recognizing the substantial truth of his aesthetics: an artwork is not beautiful just because it happens to please or flatter us in the manner of, say, Augustus Caesar reading Virgil’s fulsome praise of his dynasty in the Aeneid.19 Nonetheless, I hold that Kant is overly specific in his claim as to what must be separated from what in order to establish autonomy. For him as for nearly all modern Western philosophers, the two primary elements of reality are human thought on one side and everything else (a.k.a. “the world”) on the other, and it is these two realms in particular that must be prevented from contaminating each other. In my opposition to this sentiment, I follow the French philosopher Bruno Latour’s interpretation of modernity, in We Have Never Been Modern, as the impossible attempt to isolate and purify two distinct zones called human and world.20
At any rate, if the main problem with Kant is his formalist obsession with separating humans from everything else, we know which great figure in intellectual history resembles him least: that would be Dante, who wishes not to separate humans from world, but to fuse them together as tightly as possible.21 Dante’s cosmos is famously composed of love, in the sense of someone’s passion for something: whether it be good, bad, or downright evil. The basic units of reality for Dante are not free autonomous subjects, but amorous agents fused with or split from the targets of their various passions, and judged by God accordingly. This is the sense in which Kant is the perfect anti-Dante: someone who promotes cool disinterest in ethics as in art, since to do otherwise would meld thought with world when, according to Kant, these two must be kept separate at all costs.
In his admiring critique of Kantian ethics, the colorful German philosopher Max Scheler looks very much like a twentieth-century Dante for philosophy. While Scheler insists Kant is right that ethics must be self-contained and not just a tool to attain certain “goods and purposes,” he remains skeptical toward what he calls the “sublime emptiness” of Kant’s call to universal duty.22 Scheler’s alternative model displays at least two salient features missing from Kant’s theory. In the first place, ethics is less a matter of duty internal to human thought than an assessment of the things that one loves and hates, whether properly or improperly: an ordo amoris or rank order of passions.23 In the second place, Scheler finds Kant’s ethics too sweepingly universal, since any given person, nation, or historical period has a specific ethical calling that belongs to it alone. More generally, Scheler’s theory entails that the basic unit of ethics is not a thinking human in isolation from the world; rather, the unit of ethics is a compound or hybrid (the latter is Latour’s term) made up of the human ethical agent and whatever they take seriously enough to love or hate. Ethical autonomy thus gains a new meaning: no longer a clean separation of humans from world, but that of any specific human–world combination from all that surrounds it. Note that this does not amount to a regression into what the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has concisely termed “correlationism”: a type of modern philosophy that focuses on the correlative relationship between thought and world, while denying us the right to speak of either in isolation. For one thing, both humans and the objects they love remain independent of their relations, since neither
