ANÁLISIS DESCRIPTIVO DE RESULTADOS DEL GRUPO CONTROL

tor Hugo as targets of attack, while the one philosopher who, for Nietzsche, em­ bodies all the worst aspects in the history of philosophical aesthetics, is seen to be

Kant. In the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche accuses Kant of

possessing the ‘naiveté of a country parson’ (KSA 5 p. 347) when it comes to un­

derstanding aesthetic experience. In The Antichrist § 11 Nietzsche observes that

‘Kant became an idiot’ adding that Kant represents a ‘mistaken instinct in every­ thing and anything, the counter-natural as instinct, German decadence as philoso­ phy’ (KSA 6 p. 177-8). In his private notes he is no less uncharitable to the great

‘Chinaman of Konigsberg’ accusing him of ‘clumsy pedantry and petty bourgeois manners’ (KSA 11: 26 [96] p. 175), and concluding that the Critique of Pure Rea­ son is ‘already the pre-existent form of cretinism’ (KSA 13: 16 [55] p. 504).

This hostile position towards Kant forms one of the paradoxes in Niet­ zsche’s thought, of course. For I have already shown in previous chapters the ex­ tent to which Nietzsche’s thinking on art derives either directly or indirectly from Kant himself. It is an ambiguous relation which Nietzsche tries all the more to hide by the virulence of his denunciations of Kant, and specifically of the latter’s aes­ thetic theory. Kant has not been without his defenders against the polemic of Niet­ zsche. Most notably, of course, Heidegger is anxious to defend Kant against the criticism levelled against him, claiming instead that Nietzsche is reading Kant through the interpretation of Schopenhauer, which is itself a highly partial misun­ derstanding of the latter’s aesthetics. More recently, other scholars such as Mi- hailo Djuric and Urs Heftrich have taken a similar line, both defending Kant and then arguing that in any case his criticisms are more relevant to the aesthetics of Schopenhauer than to those of Kant h im self.In many ways these objections can­ not be faulted, and as Heftrich demonstrates, many of Nietzsche’s criticisms of no­ tions such as disinterestedness and subjective universality are based on, at best, a careless reading of Kant, and almost certainly one that is shaped by the mediating figure of Schopenhauer.

I do not intend to discuss those precise areas where Nietzsche misreads

Kant’s Critique o f judgement, for this would be to duplicate the studies of Heftrich

and Djuric. Moreover such a detailed and in depth analysis is, it might be claimed, missing the mark. If we ask ourselves why Nietzsche is so vehement in his criti­ cisms of Kant’s aesthetic theory, we might find an answer in the fact that the name

‘Kant’ in many ways performs a metonymic function, standing as an abbreviated sign for what Nietzsche perceives as the tradition of aesthetics from Kant onwards. The significance of Kant lies in his having overturned the tradition of Wolff and

Baumgarten, transforming aesthetics from being a discipline subordinate to the .|

more masculine rigour of logic, to the core element within the architectonic of the

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ered the founder of modem aesthetics, Kant relocated the discipline at the heart of philosophical thinking, and in many respects shaped the course of all subsequent enquiry into the subject up to the present day.

By naming Kant as the target of his polemic, Nietzsche is in effect conduct­ ing a genealogy of aesthetics, bringing to prominence those elements within Kant which were to be central to subsequent thinking in the realm of the aesthetic. Hence by reading Kant through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche need not be seen as simply mis­ reading him, though that also does happen to be true of the latter’s reading. Rather he can be seen as focusing on precisely those aspects of Kant which were important to Schopenhauer, and hence to Wagner, and also to the aesthetic of I’art pour I’art. Implicit in this, too, is an attempt to distance himself from his own earlier writing, which, as I demonstrated in the previous chapter, he recognised as still labouring under the burden of Kantian and Idealist vocabulary. As in all aspects of his work, Nietzsche is not so much concerned with the past per se as with the manner in which it has shaped the present.

If we wish to analyse the specific areas where Nietzsche chooses to take is­ sue with Kant, it becomes clear that a major confrontation occurs over the notion of

disinterestedness. Significantly for the present chapter, Nietzsche forms a critique «

of the notion of disinterested aesthetic experience (and its concomitant notion of a disinterested aesthetic subject) in the name of physiology. Deriving aesthetic judgement from the physiology of the human organism, Nietzsche thus occupies a position which proves hostile to any theory which will attempt to separate out ques­ tions of beauty from those of desire^^. Before I outline in greater detail Nietzsche’s specific criticism of disinterestedness, however, I shall first describe briefly the ge­ nealogy of the idea which Nietzsche is attacking.

If we turn to the notion of disinterestedness, we have to distinguish between its initial formulation in Kant and subsequent reception by the Romantics, Schopenhauer and so forth. When Kant says that ‘Taste is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest’ he is asserting that our concern with the aesthetic object is not one based on an interest in whether or not it actually exists. In other words he is not claiming that we do have any interest per se in the beautiful object, for in a later section (§ 42) of the Third Critique, he indicates the presence of a kind of interest in the object which he terms ‘intellectual interest’, however this interest does not focus

on the existence of the object, which would be the province of desire, but rather on

its purely formal properties. This aspect of the judgement of taste is central to Kan­ t’s project, since it is linked to his contention both that the beauty of an object is not related to an end (the third moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful) and that the

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