Critique of Judgment
An elaboration on an issue I thought I’d since put to rest, but to which I find I am obliged to return.
Reading Kant, I am drawn in by his use of the word "critique". As Immy uses it, critique is more than a merely negative response to something, more than an outright rejection of the object of study. Rather, critique is an investigative effort to establish the limits of the object. In the case of my reading, Kant is trying to develop an understanding of aesthetic judgment, to establish its boundaries and limits as a form of cognition. And, yes, all you avid Kant scholars who read me religiously, I know that Kantian metaphysics separate cognition and judgment. Sue me.
So, if he can do it, why Kant I?
I’ll pause for your laughter.
Faithful readers know the struggle I had with surrendering the urge toward critique last semester. I’m still not confident that I’m critique-free (or maybe critique-ready) but this Kant gives further reason to say yes to the text and resist critique. If we accept the Kantian model of critique, the engagement with the text (for Kant, aesthetic judgment) becomes literally limiting, an effort to restrain the text under our imposed cognitive rubrics. (I admit, as always, a probably ill-defined understanding of Kant, so maybe let’s say I’m freestyling on his work.)
Why does this pose such a danger? Well, two reasons spring to mind, somewhat inter-related. First, limiting the text perhaps isolates it as well. When limited by critique, the text, and our response to it, are all more the resistant and recalcitrant when called upon to work intertextually with other texts–it is as though we have to drag them from a medieval castle surrounded by a moat. Second, if our engagement with the text is limited to its (perceived) inadequacies, confines, and (again) limits, we miss the possibilities for invention inherent in every text. Critique does not lend itself to inspiration, which (as I’ve modeled them before) leads to imitation which leads to invention. Who’s inspired by a text when all they acknowledge of it is its limits? And, a third point that has been addressed before but bears repeating: who am I to say I know a text’s limits at this point in the game? I might at some point, but can I make that claim with confidence now?
At the very least, what I’ve found helpful is the dictum that JR espouses, courtesy of Vitanza: "Say yes to the text first." This is not to say one overlooks omissions, contradictions, oversights in a text but rather these instances do not become the sites of critique. Instead, they become sites for invention: questions, invitations, a summons into the discourse of the text.
Oh, and I love the idea of being summoned by the text–there’s something to play with later.
