Critique de la raison esthétique: Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique et des ressorts de la création
Abstract
This book sets out from a commonplace: there is no disputing tastes. Far from being a thesis advanced within the debate, this maxim purports to close the debate in advance: it declares that there is nothing to be known where there is only feeling. It infers, from the de facto relativity of tastes, the absence of any validity de jure — and that inference is a paralogism. Modern physics learned not to conflate relativity with relativism: the plurality of frames of reference does not abolish objectivity but requires that it be reformulated as invariance under a regulated set of transformations. This book asks whether an analogous shift is possible in aesthetics.Its thesis may be stated thus: aesthetic value is neither a property deposited in the work nor a psychological state of the subject, but the relational invariant of a system of value-takings that are corrigible, reactivatable, and intersubjectively transportable.This proposal rests on a reconstruction of Husserlian aesthetics that I believe to be new. The Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (Hua XLIII) establish that value is given in a taking of value, a Wertnehmung, the analogue, in the affective order, of Wahrnehmung. Husserlian aesthetics must therefore be reconstructed not primarily from image-consciousness, as has generally been done, but from a general theory of affective and axiological consciousness. The Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory, which I co-translated in 2009 for the Épiméthée series, already supplied its descriptive apparatus, though I had not yet gauged its full reach.The demonstration proceeds by stages. If aesthetic feeling is a taking, it can be confirmed or disappointed; it is therefore fallible, and thereby corrigible. Yet the objectivity of value resides neither in a property of the thing nor in an empirical agreement among subjects. Kantian communicability can then be recast as covariance: what is transported from one subject to another is never the lived pleasure, which remains untransferable, but the structure of the taking. From this standpoint, Ingarden's attempt to ground the objectivity of value in the object appears as a decisive yet incomplete step, whose limits the book undertakes to determine.The hypothesis was born of a crossing. On one side, Moritz Geiger, whose study on the philosophical significance of the principle of relativity I have translated, and who glimpsed part of the solution without developing it in the axiological order. On the other, my work on Weyl and the problem of space, notably the volume produced with Julien Bernard and published by Springer in 2019, in which we examined what relativity does to the a priori of transcendental aesthetics. Weyl himself had formulated the programme: form, in works of art as in aesthetic experiences, is to be thought on the basis of structures of invariance — and he acknowledged that the adequate mathematical instruments had yet to be devised. The present book takes up that question, specifying its phenomenological conditions and limits.It also reaches back behind phenomenology. Aristotle, Hume, Burke, Smith, and Kant elaborated the concepts the demonstration requires, and I receive them before transforming them. But it is Pascal who governs: beauty, for him, is not an isolated quality but a relation between our nature and what pleases us. Diderot would refer that relation back to the understanding; this book maintains it on the side of the heart, understood as the power of taking value.