Aesthetic Rationality. The Sensus Communis

I shall argue in this chapter for the existence of a rationality that arises from and expresses an essentially aesthetic orientation to the world. In the previous chapters I have attempted to outline a philosophical orientation that developed after Vico to the present day, in which the poetic was viewed as a foundation for the existence of the self within the social order. A salient feature of this orientation is that it places philosophy firmly within the context of the study of actual human development, so that, for example, the researcher can call upon anthropology and history, psychology and sociology, to situate a philosophical narrative whose central topic is traditionally that of the justification of truths reached through the exercise of reason.

This empirical foundation is to be viewed, not as an optional aside, but as an essential accompaniment to philosophical discourse in which concepts have a history and a place within a social context. The social context, in particular the idea of the sensus communis, plays a central role in Vico’s (1976) philosophy:

The human will, highly unstable as it is by nature, is rendered firm and definite by the sense common to all men with respect to what is needed by and useful to them: these are the two sources of the natural law of nations. The sense that is common to all is a judgment without reflection, universally felt by the entire group, an entire group, a whole nation or the whole of the human race. (Vico, 1976, pp. 141-142)

The poetic is linked to the pragmatic. For while it is common nowadays to experience the excitement of the aesthetic in quiet contemplation, the original and enduring sense of imagination for Vico is the capacity to exercise ingenuity in relation to the practical problematics of being human. He calls this purpose “work": it is the making of a human world responsive to our needs for survival and understanding. The first human beings, he maintains, were Herculean figures.

Hercules was the first mythical figure to humanise nature in the creation of open spaces - clearings within the forest in which humans could settle to form communities, fields for farming, and places for sacred rites. For early humanity the aesthetic makes and finds the world through drawing on metaphor which imagines and ‘names’ the human experience of the world through the identification of imagined beings such as Jove and the Greek gods; ‘their’ existence brings an order to ‘ours’. Grassi comments:

The labour of Hercules presupposes an interpretation prior to its humanisation, that is a reality serviceable to mankind, as well as an anticipated vision of success for the act in question. Work, therefor, is to be understood as a function both of conferring a meaning and making use of a meaning, never as a purely mechanical activity or a purely technical alteration of nature detached from the general context of human functions. Otherwise it would consist merely of an inexplicable act of violence to devastate nature. (1976, pp. 174-175)

The key phrase in this assertion is "the general context of human functions”, the idea that a context exists within which we must work to make in relation to nature and in order to retain our humanity, a sense common to all. This puts a great deal of weight on the significance of this common sense, and, whilst we can accept the presence of this sense in societies ordered through narratives of gods and heroes who are superhuman presentations of the ways of being human, surely there can be no such weight and force of a sense common to all in societies that lack the founding poetic identification. This is, of course, exactly Vico’s conclusion.

There can be no sensus communis in societies which exhibit the barbarism of reflection through unbridled techniques or decon- textualised objectivity and in which the aesthetic is sidelined as "creativity” or simply a form of entertainment. It is important to note that this critique is not a denial of the achievements of modern Science and Technology; nor is it simply to make a case that we have lost the aesthetic for a feeling that guides the self’s relation to the world: what follows is rather an attempt to answer the question: can we recover in a new form that aesthetic rationality which reinstates a common sense of humanity, a pragmatic poetry?

The preceding chapters outlined the major features of this third mode of understanding - it’s essential reliance upon metaphor in its exploration of the relationship between the self and its world, the pleasures of paradox, the logic of contradictory identity and of the part implicating the whole, a focus upon contemplative enlightenment and its role in binding individuals into a community of shared response ; all these features suggest a form of understanding clearly distinct from recognised canons of objectivity which relate reason to the objective world. In the present age we live in two distinct worlds, one defined by the objectivities of Science and Technology, the other that of the aesthetic enjoyed as a pleasant entertainment or at best, a temporary escape into the "other-worldly”. Keats’ idea of the aesthetic as "soul-making” no longer asserts its moral force.

My argument in this chapter is for Keats, and I begin this argument in the first part of the chapter through a comparison of a Vichian perspective with that of Kant’s Third Critique, The Critique of the Power of Judgment (2005), whose major concern is that of the aesthetic. Interest in the Third Critique has gathered pace over the last half-century and has resulted in new assessments of elements within Kantian theory which in some respects support the dynamics of Vico’s perspective. But, of course, only in certain respects. It is not Kantian philosophy, ancient or modern to commence philosophical thinking with reference to events experienced by early humans or to place metaphor and rhetoric at its centre, but, arguably, the abiding interest of the Third Critique derives, not so much from any completed and self-standing conclusions contained in the work, but from what modern philosophers viewing the Kantian project now make of it.

In Section 49 of the Third Critique Kant distinguishes between symbolic and schematic modes of representation. Schemas organise our perception through "direct presentations of the concept” in which particulars are understood within a uniting category. Presentation by means of analogy are not, therefore, schematic but symbolic: a monarchical state, he says, may be represented by a living body if it is governed by national laws, but as a machine ("a hand-mill”) if governed by an individual, absolute will. Language, Kant acknowledges, is full of such symbolic expressions which work through analogy, that is, "by the transference of reflection upon an object of intuition to a quite different concept to which an intuition can never directly correspond [my italics]”.

But the symbol is, nevertheless, intelligible. Not in the sense of a concept that determines its particulars, but that of a symbol of a unity between "an inner possibility in the subject and of the external possibility of the nature that agrees with it”, an accord of what occurs within and what lies without. Moreover, this potential unity in asserting the central claim of the aesthetic, that of the beautiful, is judged to be universal, i.e., as valid for all people; when we point to an example of the beautiful, we make a claim for its universal validity, i.e., that anyone who experiences it ‘ought’ to find it beautiful. Kant completes this section of the Critique by drawing connection between the aesthetic and ethical:

A reference to this analogy is usual even with the common Understanding, and we often describe beautiful objects of nature or art by names that seem to put a moral appreciation at their basis. We call buildings or trees majestic and magnificent, landscapes laughing and gay; even colours are called innocent, modest, tender, because they excite sensations which have something analogous to the consciousness of the state of mind brought about by moral judgments. [Aesthetic] taste makes possible the transition, without any violent leap, from the charm of Sense to habitual moral interest; for it represents the Imagination in its freedom as capable of purposive determination for the Understanding, and so teaches us to find even in objects of sense a free satisfaction apart from any charm of sense. (2005, section 59, p. 150)

But how can we justify our claiming a universal validity for the necessity and universality of any aesthetic claim for what is considered beautiful? If the aesthetic judgments were founded upon sensation per se, there would be no reason for attributing any principle to such a claim. So, says Kant (Section 20) "there must be a subjective principle which determines what pleases or displeases only by feeling and not by concepts”. These judgments must derive then from a unity, not of conceptual understanding, but from a unity of feeling. That feeling must then not be individual and private; it must be communal. But such a communal agreement cannot be based upon experience alone, since justifications of what is aesthetically pleasing contain an ‘ought’: This "ought” does not prescribe that everyone ‘will’ agree with my judgment, but that they ‘ought’.

Kant identifies this communal agreement to exist in the nature of humanity itself, calling it the sensus communis. This term should not be interpreted as a merely passive feature of humanity, since it refers to a fundamental feature of communal activity, indeed, to the very activities that define a community: the capacity to think for oneself and at the same time to think for others in relation to shared concerns. But this "thinking” of a common sense is primarily aesthetic.

Taste [the aesthetic], can be called sensus communis with more justice than sound Understanding can; and that the aesthetical judgment rather than the intellectual may bear the name of communal sense...We could even define Taste as the faculty of judging of that which makes ‘universally communicable’ without the mediation of a concept, our feeling in a given representation.

In section 40 Kant acknowledges that the formation of a common human sense derives from our setting aside the particulars of sensation in order to respect "the formal peculiarities” of this kind of representation. These formal characteristics, we may conclude, suggest the importance of the form of an identifiable aesthetic form.

The aesthetic, understood in this way, is the animating force of the imagination that unites humanity through its production of feelings that are shared in the formation of the communal. Kant argues in section 49 that aesthetic ideas are representations of the Imagination "which occasion much thought, without, however, any definite thought, i.e., any concept being able to being adequate to it”. The Imagination creates another, second, nature from the first nature. It remoulds experience in accordance with analogical laws "yet also in accordance with principles which occupy as higher place in Reason (laws too which are just as natural to us as those by which Understanding comprehends empirical nature)”.

Such an imagination contains a generalising capacity; the aesthetical idea opens up into a boundless field of similar representations. Imagination is the free play of the mind, but a play guided by its own inner rationality; it has its own order of the coherence of its parts so that we can judge a work by the order it expresses. Indeed, in the Third Critique imagination replaces the idea of intuition as that which is responsible for the most fundamental perceptual process, that of how sensations achieve the status of percepts that can become symbols so that the world in which we exist is the one that is made by us: This is Kant’s "Copernican Turn”.

There are some recent interpretations of the Third Critique, which, I believe, demonstrate some parallels between the approaches of Kant and Vico. Melissa Zinkin (Kukla, 2006) argues for a clear distinction between determinate, classi- ficatory concepts, which have extensive magnitudes in the sense that concept formation gathers its different parts under the same heading, and aesthetic judgments whose intensive magnitudes reflect a whole which constitutes a concentration of intensive, qualitative magnitudes. It is the latter that the work of art draws upon and which form its hidden complexities of a whole: in pursuit of this kind of understanding, this recovery of meaning enhances our own inwardness in the experience of its intensity.

The sensus communis, she argues, is a fundamental sense, like that of space and time, which makes communication possible. Whilst cognitive judgments are communicable without the sensus communis, for they can be assessed objectively, aesthetic judgments require the potential of universal communicability afforded by the human condition of the sensus communis. However, other commentators argue that common sense is not this fundamental and well-defined schema within which the aesthetic consciousness has to operate. On Rudolf Makreel’s (Kukla, 2006) reading of Kant, the supposed universal and a priori nature of the sensus communis should be seen as an ‘orientational’, not a grounding principle, something to be cultivated and not presupposed; it is an ideal for the way forward, one "that projects a normative universality to be arrived at by the human community” (p. 234).

John McCumber’s paper in the same volume draws the logical conclusion: that the presupposed frameworks which Kant proposes are not timeless and a priori: they are developed in the course of human history and are always open for critical revision. Moreover, as Kirk Pillow (Kukla, 2006) points out, the Kantian forms of understanding must be placed within a wider consideration of 'what Nelson Goodman called "ways of world making”. We not only categorise the world through concepts; "we also advance understanding by weighing the relevance of various judgments for different explanatory purposes, or by ordering findings variously for different practical or expressive aims” (Kukla, 2006, p. 248).

Tinguely (2018) argues that we can better understand Kant’s project today by a reliance upon the idea of the intentionality of consciousness, a direct- edness and orientation to the world that is central to the phenomenology of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, and in which "the capacity to orient ourselves is at once perceptual, cognitive, and affective” (p. 31). He suggests that, if it can be shown that perception, thinking, and feeling intermingle fruitfully in the aesthetic, then Kantian philosophy does complete itself in the consideration of the aesthetic, for, the argument of the First Critique that there is no perceptual sensing without cognitive sense-making is completed by the Third in which there is no perceptual-cognitive sense-making without the cooperation of affective sensibilities. In short, since our form of knowing the world is fundamentally aesthetic, "aesthetics is the way we come to know the world” (p. 31).

But how does affective sensibility play such a part in our knowing the world? The short answer is to assert that feeling, far from being simply an inner and therefore subjective state, is itself an orientational capacity; to feel is to interpret a situation in which three terms interact, namely, self, the object of concern, and the world itself. If a lion were to approach someone without there being any safeguarding barrier, fear would be the order of the day; a lion in its cage can be admired and pitied for its enclosure. Feeling guides response objectively through its interpretation of the world in which particular events occur: it places events within context.

Vico, you will recall, thought fear to be the feeling that originated the first symbolic responses; through their identification with Jove the first humans expressed a symbolic order in which they could place themselves, whereas the atrocities experienced by Freud’s war veterans could receive no consolation within such an expression and were thus condemned to respond through traumatic repetition. In this sense, the aesthetic is a necessary expression whose purpose is to create symbolic "fixed points” that produce an order for persons within their situations.

These ideas of feeling with its direction towards intensity and as a situational and orientational capacity subject to historical development are fully in accordance with Vico’s perspective and assist our understanding of it. We have noted that the idea of imagination in the Third Critique replaces that of intuition which features strongly in the First Critique. The world is given to us now through the former rather than the latter, and therefore imagination now carries the imprint of ‘making’ the world and not simply attending to its impressions intuitively. But Kant does not demonstrate to us, as powerfully as Vico does, that the aesthetic ‘finds’ the world through drawing upon metaphor, which imagines ‘and names’ the human experience of the world through acts of identification with imagined beings, such as Jove and the Greek gods, who bring order to our lives through that embodiment of our feeling.

Kant’s "free play of the imagination" is not to be denied. But aesthetic imagination has its own purpose and our eyes are bright with it. Vico called that purpose "work". Whilst we may talk nowadays of our quiet appreciation of works of art and take pleasure in their contemplation, the original and enduring sense of imagination for Vico is its capacity for ingenuity exercised in respect to the pragmatic aspects of staying alive and flourishing.

The sensus communis, on this reading, is the outcome of the pre-reflective power of imagination to animate and address the needs associated with human survival and well-being. It is that natural being-in-the-world, an orientational availability to the world, which makes possible our symbolic world with its achievements of science, technology, and the aesthetic. In this sense the pre- reflective represents a fundamental unity capable of differentiation through the practice of the distinct purposes of observation and experiment, the innovation of techniques, and the exploration of personal identity through the aesthetic; a communal sense that is both unchanging as a resource and historical in its development.

But we should attend here to Vico’s contention that the human sense of a possible unity of people and of perspectives is necessarily challenged by the emergence of the pursuit of equality attendant upon the "barbarism of reflection" which relegates the aesthetic to a position of minor and optional significance. This is the kind of "equality" in which the individual ceases to be an individual and becomes merely a part among identical parts within an indifferent whole. The barbarism of reflection is reflection lacking the moral force of the aesthetic. The nature of this force is the subject-matter of the next section.