PAUL KLEE and KANT: AESTHETICS
Channel: Journalism Now
Date: 2010-01-25

A reading of modernist artist (Bauhaus school) Paul Klee's writing on art illustrating Kant's controversial but influential view that the subjective emotional response to art is a gateway to a higher realm of non-rational, non-empirical sublimity and moral truth. A stark opposition to the realistic/rationalist view of art, perception and understanding which came from the enlightenment. This is posted here to illustrate some points in the lecture and seminar discussion of German idealism in the 19th century - Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Fauerbach and the associated romantic movement in poetry, music and art. (Notably in the visual arts the increasing trend to abstraction under the influence of Kantian aesthetics). Note the contradiction between empiricist 'sense' and romantic 'sensibility' which mirrors Kant's epistemological division of the contingent universe into the noumenal and the phenomenal - each object having a nature 'in itself' which is beyond (ordinary) human perception (perhaps 'visible' only to artists or religious aesthetes) and a perceived, mundane ordinary phenomenal existence. This divide is central to European high culture from the time of Kant onwards.