Journal articles on the topic 'Kant ; Kantian aesthetics'

The subject of this research is the interrelation between aesthetics and metaphysics as it is reflected in the Kantian transcendentalism. In the “Critique of Judgment”, Kant assumes that the representation of perfection does not correlate with such on the sense of delight; thus, in the first introduction to the “Critique of Judgment”, he is far from considering the solutions to the problem of interrelation between perfection and aesthetic sense of delight persuasive. However, the attitude towards perfection transforms in Kant's later works, the analysis of which demonstrates that the idea of perfection, in essence, is conceived as the method for founding the entire aesthetics, its initial category of the beautiful that coincides with the meaning of the aesthetic perfection the beauty is genuine. The metaphysics of perfection, contained in considered Kant’s work, offers a new perspective on the categorical apparatus of Kantian aesthetics, formed in the “Critique of Judgment”, and broadens the representation on Kantian aesthetics as part of transcendental metaphysics. The concept of perfection implies various aspects of metaphysical research, retaining its immanent qualities in the aesthetics. In predication as an act of modern aesthetic expression, it is difficult to determine any stages and structures that can correlate specifically to perfectionism. The question concerning the field of such correlations remains controversial, inclusive of modern Russian philosophy.

This essay explores the development of Georg Simmel's interpretation of Immanuel Kant's philosophy in the context of neo-Kantianism and its preoccupation with the question of unity in modern diversity. It argues that the neo-Kantian movement can be divided into two periods: in the first, unity was addressed with regard to Kant's epistemology; in the second period, the main issue was the overall coherence of Kantian teaching. Simmel, who belonged to the younger generation of neo-Kantians, absorbed the conclusions of the previous generation that purged Kantian epistemology from its metaphysical foundations related to the noumenal world. Yet he did not share the views of his peers who considered Kant to be the philosopher of cultural plurality. On the contrary, he argued that Kant's system is thoroughly intellectualistic, and that ethics, aesthetics and religion within it are subordinated to logic. At the same time, his own philosophy presupposed cultural plurality akin to that of other neo-Kantians. In other words, Simmel abandoned Kant in order to develop his own version of neo-Kantianism.

This essay considers the sublime as a veiled form of narcissism. Both narcissism and the sublime test and reveal the limits of the concept of the self and both can be viewed as attempts to transcend the borders of the self. Yet while narcissism has been defined as a “failure of spiritual ascent” (Hadot), the sublime has been used to transcend the limitations of the self by pointing to its infinite potential. The essay explores how the sublime in Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetics relies on narcissistic impulses by creating a male inner self and protecting it from the stigma of vanity. I propose that their use of this aesthetic category helped objectify an essentially subjectivist aesthetics. Yet while Schiller follows Kant in deriding the sensual aspects of human nature as egotistical and amoral, Schiller’s dramas also challenge some of the Kantian premises. When Schiller’s protagonists sacrifice lives in the service of ethical ideas, the sublime’s oppressive spirit reveals itself.

Mi objetivo es hacer notar que existe un nexo de mutua implicación entre dos tesis kantianas: la tesis de la receptividad (nuestro conocimiento depende de que seamos afectados por los objetos) y la tesis del espacio en cuanto forma de los fenómenos. Un tratamiento completo de la tesis de la receptividad implica el idealismo trascendental de Kant en torno al espacio. Desde mi lectura, ello en absoluto afecta al realismo empírico kantiano. Para mostrar lo anterior, exploro aquí la segunda consecuencia ("b) a la que Kant arriba tras haber presentado sus argumentos en favor de la naturaleza a priori e intuitiva del espacio en la Estética Trascendental. Palabras clave: espacio, forma de la intuición, receptividad, idealismo trascendental, realismo empírico Abstract: My purpose in this paper is to point out that there is a mutual implication between two Kantian thesis: the Receptivity Thesis (our knowledge depends on being affected by objects) and the thesis of the space at a form of the phenomena; so that, a full treatment of the receptivity thesis implies Kant's transcendental idealism of space. On my reading this doesn't compromise Kant's empirical realism. In order to show this I explore here the second consequence ("b") that Kant arrives after he shows his arguments in favour of the space in the Transcendental Aesthetics. Keywords: space, form of intuition, receptivity, transcendental idealism, empirical realism

This paper is an attempt to sketch the general framework of Kant and Hegel's Aesthetics, which are dealt respectively in sections I and II. The first section considers Kant's stated aims in the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, his location of judgments of taste within the problematic of reflective judgment, his treatment of reflective aesthetic judgments in the analytic of the beautiful and the distinction between objective reality and subjective universal validity. The second section provides a sketch of Hegel's division of artistic beauty into symbolic, classical and romantic art in the attempt to explain how Hegel's restriction of the subject matter of aesthetics to fine art, may shed light on his critique of Kantian ‘subjectivism’. Kant's discussion of aesthetics is located within the problematic of reflective judgment in general, that is, within a discussion of the suitability of nature for cognition. Reflective judgments are first contrasted with determinant judgments and then divided into two kinds, aesthetic and teleological. The distinction between aesthetic and teleological reflection, captures the distinction between a kind of pleasure which arises from the conformity or harmony of imagination and the understanding, and a kind of pleasure which arises from the conformity or harmony of the understanding with reason. The fact that pleasure arises in reflective judgments in general, and is not an exclusive feature of aesthetic reflection, is not transparent from Kant's introduction, but is suggested by the claim that although the acknowledgment that the various empirical laws of nature are amenable to systematic categorization, no longer gives rise to pleasure, this is simply due to the fact that the repeated experience of the systematic unity of empirical laws, is no longer an occasion for surprise: It is true that we no longer notice any decided pleasure in the comprehensibility of nature, or in the unity of its divisions into genera and species, without which the empirical concepts, that afford us our knowledge of nature in its particular laws, would not be possible. Still it is certain that the pleasure appeared in due course, and only by reason of the most ordinary experience being impossible without it, has it become gradually fused with simple cognition, and no longer arrests particular attention.

In this article, Jenifer Presto argues that the 1908 Messina-Reggio Calabria earthquake had an impact on Aleksandr Blok no less significant than that which the 1755 Lisbon earthquake had on writers of the Enlightenment and proceeds to demonstrate how it shaped Blok's aesthetics of catastrophe. This aesthetics can best be termed the “decadent sublime, ” an inversion of the Kantian dynamic sublime with its emphasis on bourgeois optimism. Following Immanuel Kant, Blok acknowledges the fear and attraction that nature's forces can inspire; however, unlike Kant, he insists that modern man remains powerless in the face of nature, owing to his decadence—a decadence endemic to European civilization. The decadent sublime is manifested in a host of Blok's writings, ranging from “The Elements and Culture” to Lightning Flashes of Art and The Scythians; it is intensely visual and is indebted to images of ruin by artists such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Luca Signorelli.

Taking as its basis Nancy's essay ‘Why Are There Several Arts And Not Just One?’, this paper makes a case for understanding games as constituting art works bearing a specifically ludic form. It draws on aesthetic theory and philosophy – particularly Kant, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Nancy – in order to theorise the particular aesthetic potential inherent to this form, and the challenges it poses to existing concepts of art and aesthetic engagement. The paper will argue that the player's relation to a game, in contrast to the aesthetic relation as theorised in post-Kantian aesthetics, invokes an active, purposive disposition – and, moreover, that it is this active, purposive disposition itself that is brought forth into presentation by the ludic work. The conclusion reached is that the ludic aesthetic work establishes a gameworld as a sphere of existential praxis for the player, within which she lives a being-in-the-gameworld, which, in being inscribed into the unity of the game as an object distinct from the player, is itself externalised as an object of her aesthetic contemplation.

AbstractThe article consists of a brief biographical account of Immanuel Kant’s life and career, followed by a discussion of his basic philosophy, and a brief discussion of his pivotal point in the history of Rhetoric and Communicology. A major figure in the European Enlightenment period of Philosophy, hisCollected Writingswere first published in 1900 constituting 29 volumes. He wrote three major works that are foundational to the development of Western philosophy and the human sciences. Often just referred to as the “ThreeCritiques” informally, the First, the Second, and the Third. These are respectively:The Critique of Pure Reasonfocused on issues in logic, The Critique of Practical Reasonrelating ethical guidelines, andThe Critique of Judgmentexploring issues of aesthetics. He is most famous for his philosophy of transcendental idealism. This version of idealism argues that in logic statements areanalytic(subject and predicate are the same; no new information) orsynthetic(predicate differs from the subject; new information is constituted). He further argues that statements area priori(before experience) ora posteriori(a result of experience). Models of rhetoric (tropic logic), phenomenological methodology, and the contemporary Perspectives Model of interpersonal communicology are included as the Kantian legacy in the US. Notes provide a guide to edition and philological issues in the Kantian corpus, especially for the hermeneutics ofVorstellung(‘presentation’) versusDarstellung(‘representation’).

En este trabajo se desarrolla un enfoque del hecho estético entendido como un proceso experiencial y relacional, no centrado en las producciones artísticas, ni en los objetos materiales en general. En ese marco, se intenta mostrar la conexión y el parentesco entre ciertos elementos de la teoría de la experiencia estética de Schaeffer y la concepción del juicio estético de Kant. Se establece un paralelo entre la concepción de la experiencia estética como un proceso autoteleológico y despragmatizado, sostenido como tal por una interacción particular entre cognición, emociones y placer, propuesto por Schaeffer; y las tesis kantianas sobre el juego libre y desinteresado de las facultades que postula el principio trascendental de la facultad de juzgar. Hacia el final, se sugiere que debería contemplarse la injerencia de un componente moral en el complejo entramado del hecho estético. Palabras clave: hecho estético, proceso relacional, bucle homeodinámico, subrepción y desinterés, afectividad y moralidad

In recent years Nick Zangwill has gone a long way in championing a moderate aesthetic formalism in an attempt to accommodate those objects that many of us call beautiful despite their lack of any formal beauty. While there is some dispute in the literature about the extent to which Kant can be interpreted as an aesthetic formalist, the appeal of his famous distinction between free and dependent beauty should present a fairly natural ally for Zangwill's project. Indeed, such an alliance has been expressed by Zangwill, who first reaches for this ‘invaluable but misunderstood and underappreciated distinction’ in his ‘Feasible aesthetic formalism’ (1999: 613). Here, Zangwill claims that this essential distinction can be cut loose from Kant's terminology and views about aesthetic judgement. More recently he expresses more strongly that ‘Kant was also a moderate formalist, who opposes extreme formalism when he distinguished free and dependent beauty in §16 of theCritique of Judgement’ (2005: 186n). Yet, a decade on from the initial suggestion, there has been little further exploration or elucidation of this move, or indeed this potential characterization of Kant's aesthetics. It is the aim of this paper to begin to address that deficiency by identifying the extent to which a moderate formalist position is available in Kant's aesthetic. I will suggest that Kant's account does not require substantial modification in order to cast him as a moderate formalist. Taking the time to isolate the plausible grounds for characterizing Kant's aesthetic in this way, this discussion will enable us to explore some of the rival interpretations of his work such that we may also identify the kind of Kantian the moderate formalist is likely to be.

This study rationally reconstructs Novalis's linguistic theory. It traces Novaliss assessment of earlier linguistic debates, illustrates Novaliss transformation of their central questions and uncovers Novaliss unique methodological proposal. It argues that in his critical engagement with Idealism, particularly regarding problems of representation and regulative positing, Novalis recognizes the need for both a philosophy of language and the artistic language designed to execute it. The paper contextualizes Novalis's linguistic appropriation and repudiation of Kant and explains how, even while Novaliss linguistic theory issues Kantianism such a challenge, it also begins to demonstrate the application of Kantian designs to linguistic philosophy. The modernity and potential of Novaliss proposal is evaluated and its significance for discussions in linguistic philosophy and aesthetics is advocated.

Defining what an artwork is has been a recurrent theme in aesthetics, or to be more specific, in the philosophy of art. Yet this is proven to be no simple matter. Thus finding the definition of art has proven to be an elusive undertaking as works of art have always kept on eluding one definition after another. A strong definition might have proven to be illusory. An analytic aesthetician, Noël Carroll has undertaken a complex, if not ambitious, project opting to refute this conundrum in aesthetics by proposing another perspective that stems not from metaphysics but an epistemological one. He managed to show analytically that the epistemological approach is far less problematic and even offers a string of advantages at the praxis level. Carroll completed his proposal by revising two of the most powerful definition of art, that is, the Kantian aesthetic experience and the Levinsonian historical definition of art in those he emancipated the most essential foundation disinterestedness coined by Immanuel Kant, and set the modified definition in a trail of historical correctness. The mix between these two strong elements has amalgamated in a new breed proposed by Carroll in that he labels it historical narrative. This, for Carroll, is a better option over endless disputes over the speculated essence of an artwork and its criticism.

The doctrine of Kantian natural piety says that rational human animals are essentially at home in physical nature. In this essay, I apply the doctrine of Kantian natural piety directly to the natural sciences, and especially physics, by showing how they have a cognitive, epistemic, metaphysical, practical/moral, aesthetic/artistic, religious, and sociocultural/political grounding in Kantian sensibility, both pure and empirical. This is what I call Kantian scientific pietism, and it is to be directly and radically opposed to scientific naturalism

Goethe and Friedrich Schiller stand together immortalised in Ernst Rietschel's statue at the centre of Weimar. In their lifetime, Goethe and Schiller shaped the culture of German-speaking lands, not only through their poetry, plays, and novels, but also in their role as editors of journals that helped to set the intellectual tone of the period. Schiller's journal Die Horen (1795-1797) and Goethe's Propyläen (1798-1800), although short-lived, were important literary vehicles of the period and provided a forum that brought scientists, historians, philosophers, and poets into conversation with one another. The late 1700s and early 1800s were years of intense intellectual development in Germanspeaking lands; the arts flourished and aesthetics developed as a serious branch of philosophy.During the ‘Age of Goethe and Schiller’, philosophy was dominated by Kant's philosophy and its post-Kantian variations. A problem with traditional philosophical histories of this period is the overwhelmingly Hegelian reading of it, a reading that subsumes all of the so-called minor figures under the shadows of the great system builder, Hegel. Richard Kroner's influential Von Kant bis Hegel of 1921 set the tone for this reading. Silenced by such narratives are the voices of the early German Romantics, a group of thinkers whose impudence created problems for them, and whose work posed hermeneutical challenges that continue to plague a proper understanding of the movement and the worth of its contributions. As we shall see, Hegel himself began to prepare the ground for a history of philosophy that would dismiss the contributions of the early German Romantics, a dismissal that is unfair and unfortunate: unfair because it is based on false characterisations of the movement, and unfortunate because such misreadings lead us to overlook the wealth of insights offered by the early German Romantics.

Hannah Arendt is right to give prominence to Kant's Critique of Judgment—for that work contains Kant's fullest treatment of ‘ends' and purposes, and Kantian politics (embracing universal republicanism and eternal peace) is meant to be a ‘legal’ realization of moral ends (when ‘good will’ alone is too weak to produce what ought to be). But Arendt is wrong to try to extract a ‘new’ Kantian politics from Judgment's aesthetic ideas: Kantian politics is already ‘there’, and need not be squeezed out of his theory of art. She has chosen the right work, but given it a bizarre reading.

AbstractToday, Christianity is often described as a ‘worldview’, especially among Reformed evangelicals in the USA. In this article I return to the 1890 lectures where Scottish theologian James Orr adapted the concept of Weltanschauung for Christian purposes. Although it was coined by Immanuel Kant in 1790, and primarily used in subsequent decades to theorise cultural difference and evaluate aesthetic expression, Orr nevertheless claims that the idea of a worldview is ‘as old as the dawn of reflection’ and thus appropriate to articulating Christianity. I examine Orr's engagement with the Kantian and emerging historicist context, paying particular attention to his epistemological and aesthetic citations and showing how Orr both adopts and departs from the characteristic features of the Kantian subject. I conclude by assessing the philosophical and theological costs of this project that, among other things, positions Christianity for perpetual culture war within secular societies similarly shaped by the post-Kantian subject.

Wenn man nach der Beziehung fragt, in der Kunst zum Alltag steht, gilt es, bei einer wegweisenden Einsicht Kants anzusetzen. Diese besteht in dem Gedanken, dass das Schöne die Erkenntnisfähigkeit des Menschen reflektiert. Dennoch, so lege ich dar, findet sich bei Kant kein zufrieden stellender Begriff einer ästhetischen Reflexion in diesem Sinn, da es Kant nicht gelingt, den Bezug der Reflexion zur objektiven Welt zu erhellen. Dies hingegen leistet Hegel, der allerdings seinerseits nicht der Vielfalt gerecht wird, in der Kunstwerke zu einer selbstbestimmten Lebensform bei- tragen. Dennoch findet sich bei Hegel ein Hinweis, wie man einen plausiblen Begriff ästhetischer Reflexion anlegen muß: Es gilt, die Reflexion als praktisch, nicht als kognitiv zu verstehen. Eine Erläuterung ästhetischer Reflexion in Begriffen praktischer Selbstbestimmung erlaubt es zu verstehen, dass zwischen dem Alltag und der Kunst keine Lücke klafft. If one wants to determine the relationship between ordinary life and art one has to start with the groundbreaking Kantian insight that the beautiful reflects the working of the human faculties of the understanding. However, I argue that the Kantian conception of aesthetic reflection is not satisfying, for Kant doesn’t succeed in explaining the objective purport of the aesthetic reflection. I resort to Hegel to resolve this problem. But his explanation, too, falls short of grasping the multiplicity of ways in which works of art make a contribution to a self- determined way of life. However, in Hegel there is a hint how to deal with this problem: Re- flection has to be understood as practical and not as cognitive. A conception of aesthetic reflexivity in terms of practical self-determination allows grasping that there is no gap between ordinary life and art.

This article attempts to find common ground between Plato and Kant on the topic of beauty and aesthetic contemplation. The Kantian notion of “liking devoid of interest” is interpreted in such a way that it can be brought into harmony with two Platonic accounts of beauty found in the Symposium and the Hippias Major. I argue that both thinkers do justice to the relationship between desire and beauty, while also both asserting that the proper appreciation of beauty per se—whether in an object or as an essence—requires a disinterested stance.

AbstractIn his treatment of a Kantian concept of moral freedom, Schiller argues for two kinds of freedom: freedom in the spirit of autonomous practical reason and freedom in which man is considered a mixed (sensual and rational) being. It is apparent that Schiller is on a Reinholdian path. He follows Reinhold’s theory of free will in conceiving of moral freedom primarily as the capacity to decide between the material drive as a sensible, self-interested drive and the formal drive as a rational, unselfish drive. But it is also obvious that Schiller modifies Reinhold’s results in order to obtain a concept of aesthetic freedom. This project is important in view of a deeper understanding of the concept of aesthetic consciousness but is of little use in achieving a better understanding of the concept of moral freedom.

Kant says patently conflicting things about infinity and our grasp of it. Infinite space is a good case in point. In his solution to the First Antinomy, he denies that we can grasp the spatial universe as infinite, and therefore that this universe can be infinite; while in the Aesthetic he says just the opposite: ‘Space is represented as a given infinite magnitude’(A25/B39). And he rests these upon consistently opposite grounds. In the Antinomy we are told that we can have no intuitive grasp of an infinite space, and in the Aesthetic he says that our grasp of infinite space is precisely intuitive.

AbstractI give an argument against nonconceptualist readings of Kant’sFirst Critique, according to which one can enjoy a Kantian intuition without possessing any concepts, and present an alternative reading. The argument is that nonconceptualist readings are forced to construe the Transcendental Deduction in one of three ways, none of which is acceptable: The Deduction is seen either (i) as inconsistent with the Transcendental Aesthetic; or (ii) as addressing a question of fact rather than a question of legitimacy; or (iii) as articulating a position that Kant himself criticizes as a form of scepticism. Consideration of the third alternative, in particular, shows that a more promising construal of the Deduction must be based on a different interpretation of Kant’s claim that intuitions and concepts constitute two distinct kinds of representation than is assumed by proponents of nonconceptualist readings. I present such an interpretation and outline the alternative reading of the Deduction that results.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant refers often and with no apparent hesitation or sense of ambiguity to the mind (das Gemüt). He does so not only in his justly famous destruction of rationalist proofs of immaterialism, but throughout his own, positive, ‘transcendental’ account in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. In the first edition of the Critique, he even proposed what he adventurously called a ‘transcendental psychology’ and, although this strange discipline seemed to disappear in the second edition, he left in that edition all his frequent references to forms ‘lying in the mind,’ and to the mind, or the self, or the subject of experience, or the ego, doing this or that. Curiously, though, despite an extensive secondary literature, there is in that literature relatively little discussion of what these expressions, in a proper, strictly Kantian sense, are supposed to refer to. There are two imaginative, extremely suggestive articles by Sellars, some hints at connections with eighteenth century psychology offered by Weldon, a tenebrous book by Heidemann, and some recent attention to the general issue of ‘Kant's theory of mind’ by Ameriks and Kitcher.

Censorship of art implies the connection between Ethics and Aesthethics: different kind of valuations and orientations in artistic work, such as censorship as well as compliment, enlightens usual phenomena concerning autonomy, valuation, volition, abstraction and assimilation conditions of it. Therefore, our aim is to explore some fundamental Kantian features between morals and arts concerning the judgment, as well as its results (i.e. piece of art and moral act).

My plan is to examine Nietzsche's view of (what is I think) the most characteristically Kantian kind of argument, what's now often called 'transcendental argument'. I understand this as an argument in which a concept or principle or value is justified as a 'condition of the possibility' of something indisputable (or indispensable). I will look at Nietzsche's critique of this pattern of argument in Kant, but also at the ways he still uses such arguments himself, in all three of the sectors of Kant's critique: theoretical, practical, aesthetic.

AbstractI would like to know who of mycontemporaries should be more competent inKantian philosophy than me.(Schopenhauer in a letter to Rosenkranz and Schubert, 18371)In this paper the attempt is made to show how Schopenhauer's critique of Kant leads from initial disagreements to a fundamental modification, even a new formation, of the Kantian concepts of understanding, reason, imagination, perception, idea and thing-in-itself. The starting point and the core of his critique is the demand for the appreciation of intuitive knowledge which is apart from and independent of reason. The intuitive knowledge goes back to images and its highest form is aesthetic contemplation. Without a participation of concepts it is sufficient to explain objective reality. Particularly on the basis of Schopenhauer's critical examination of Kant's schematism it can be shown that his alternative conception of an image-based objectivity of experience is to be taken seriously, even if the way he presents it sometimes gives the impression of a mere misunderstanding of Kant's theory of cognition.

Abstract Kant’s account of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment has been extremely influential, prompting extensive discussion of the psychology, affect, moral significance, and relevance to artistic representation of the sublime on his provocative view. I focus instead on Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime in connection to his theoretical critical project, namely his attempt to characterize human cognitive powers and to limit human pretensions to knowledge of the supersensible. I argue, first, that his account of the psychology of the sublime is designed to explain not just its affective character (its displeasure-pleasure), but also to address challenges concerning the coherence of an experience of something as transcending one’s cognitive abilities. Thereby, I argue moreover, Kant provides an alternative, demystifying account of mystical experiences, in which humans might take themselves to intuit that which is beyond human understanding or reason, and thus to claim that they have special cognitive access to the supersensible, transcending the limits Kant claims to establish for human cognition. Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime is not merely so reductive of mystical experience, however; it also, I suggest, describes the aesthetic of Kantian critique itself.

Šiame straipsnyje susitelkiama į etinio diskurso problematiką, konkrečiai – į tai, kaip etiniame diskurse apibrėžiama subjekto tapatybė. Šiuo tikslu analizuojamos Immanuelio Kanto ir Emmanuelio Levino filosofinės pozicijos, kurias sieja etikos viršenybė teorinės prieigos atžvilgiu. Vis dėlto, nepaisant šio bendrumo, minėtos pozicijos radikaliai išsiskiria apibrėždamos etinio subjekto tapatybę. Kantiškasis etikos pagrindimas remiasi subjekto valios autonomija, o Levino aprašytas etinis santykis randasi kaip reikalavimas iš Kito pusės. Taigi pirmuoju atveju postuluojama „kieta“ subjekto tapatybė, antruoju – tapatybės netekusi pažeidžiama subjektyvybė. Straipsnyje keliamas klausimas, ar šių pozicijų radikalumas netampa kliūtimi suvokti etinį matmenį jo neredukuojant į savitą estetinį žavesį turinčią patologiją. Radikaliai tapatybės ir kitybės priešpriešai mėginama atrasti alternatyvą iškeliant kitybės manyje sampratą, grindžiamą konkretaus santykio su kitu asmeniu aprašymu.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: Kantas, Levinas, subjekto tapatybė, kitybė, kitas manyje.IDENTITY OF SUBJECTIVI TY IN ETHICAL DISCOURSEDanutė Bacevičiūtė SummaryThis article deals with the problem of the ethical discourse, specifically with the manner in which ethical discourse describes identity of subjectivity. The positions of Immanuel Kant and Emmanuel Levinas are being analysed to this end. Both philosophers give precedence to the ethical over the theoretical. However, despite this common feature, these positions radically diverge when they describe identity of ethical subjectivity. Kantian grounding of ethics appeals to the autonomous will of the subject, whereas Levinasian ethical relationship emerges with the Other’s demand. Thus in one case there was postulated “firm” identity of subjectivity, in another – vulnerable subjectivity without identity. The question is: whether the extremeness of these positions not turns into the peculiar pathology or aesthetical perversity which is perceived as obstacle for the ethical? The article makes attempt to find an alternative to the opposition of identity and alterity. The description of concrete relation with another person enables us to speak about oneself as another.Keywords: Kant, Levinas, identity of subjectivity, alterity, oneself as another.

Hannah Arendt discovers a theory of politics in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic treatise, the Critique of Judgment. However, the relationship between Kant and Arendt’s politics remains unfinished. This article seeks to present a syncretic view of Arendt’s work on politics with her work on Kantian judgment. Vital to Arendt’s politics is the concept of amor mundi, the love of the world. Yet, in order for amor mundi to resonate with groups and individuals in the world, one must view the world as beautiful and, in Arendt’s words, ‘a fit place for men to live’. In other words, one must love beauty to love the world and be prepared to execute judgment upon particulars in that world according to Arendt. Such use of this judgment, however, is likely to err in ‘dark times’. Thus, Arendt views the love of the world and beauty as an open-ended process.

Abstract By exploring the relation between the transcendental functions and the empirical and historical implications of the notion of »ornament« in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the power of judgement, this article argues that Kant tried to establish the concept of ornament as a link between the pure formality of the aesthetic judgement and concrete empirical instances of beauty. Following a discussion of Kant’s emphasis on »exemplarity« and an analysis of his choice of examples of beauty, the article explores the conflict between Kant’s notion of the human body as an »ideal of beauty« and his famous disapproval of ornamental lines in the faces of Maori people. Finally, it considers the modes of representation of leading Maori, their garments, and their facial tā moko in the late nineteenth-century portraits of Gottfried Lindauer and Samuel E. Stuart, and advocates a dual reading of these portraits as both conforming to and contradicting the Kantian model of human beauty.

Abstract François Laruelle's writing on Non-Photography is examined from its ontological condition to its desired form of a unity derived from the work of Kant, discussing precisely how the logic of transcendence and the ontology of immanence central to Laruelle's theory impact on how the photographic image is incontrovertibly involved with Kant's paradox of appearance and reality. In a context of burgeoning technoscience, which lays bare the meaning of Non-Photography for the seemingly impossible reversion to actual photography, the article goes on to consider Photo-Fiction in the context of the Real of science now yoked to an economy of technical models. But by foreclosing the Kantian Real by fractal‐virtual ratio, does not this science reify the Real of Identity and displace real photography with a photography in the Real? The article thus questions how Laruelle's' thesis hangs together in terms of its cause and the contingency of effect that infuses Laruelle's radical aesthetic.

In the 80’s, the situation after the reception of kantian philosophy was suddenly shaken by Jean-François Lyotard’s and Jacques Derrida’s approaches to the Critique of Judgement. These were so massively decisive that they reorganized the bounderies of modernity in projecting the Analytique of the sublime as the ground of legitimation of our aesthetical, ethical and political experience. For Lyotard, the sublime subject contained not only the necessary categories to think the avant-garde art but it could also offer kernels of resistance towards the political model of neocontractualism. Derrida changes the topic of negative representation of the impossible into the theorical coordinates of a new way of thinking such different themes as the hospitality, the responsibility, the justice, the decision, the gift or the death. In both authors, Kant becomes too close, so close that he is almost out of focus, especially regarding what can be unthinkable in his work.

For Kant, experience is epistemological, whereas ontological experience (Gadamer) is in the first instance poetic and Romantic (Schiller, Goethe). In contradistinction to Kantian Erfahrung, it is most often called Erlebniß. We note further that Erfahrung is cognitive experience while Erlebnis is also aesthetic experience. Dilthey and Husserl understand experience pertaining to knowledge through Erlebnis. In epistemological or classificatory knowledge the parts add up to the whole. Ontological knowledge instead is holistic in which the whole is present in each of the parts. In ontological knowledge we can know things themselves. Ontological experience is particularly important for global knowledge. This is because knowing another culture is not reducible to a culture's qualities or predicates. Culture as a way or form of life is a thingitself. A third type of experience is informational experience. This collapses the epistemological into the ontological and is also increasingly present today. This sort of experience of non-linear information theory can account for the experience of societies, of individual humans, of digital media, of neuronal networks, of phenotypes, urban forms, of cellular organisms, or of inorganic matter.

The paper deals with Fichte’s concept of education in his popular Jena Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation. There, Fichte thinks the scholar as the educator of mankind. The aim is to show that the concept of being human, as interpreted by practical philosophy, can, in Fichte’s viewpoint, only find its realization in a society based on division of labour, as a place of reciprocal perfection. His social theory is markedly contrary to Schiller’s critical evaluation of this division of labour as fragmentation and one-sidedness of humanity in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind published in 1795. Starting from the Kantian premise of human being as a project, that is as an object of practical philosophy and education, Fichte and Schiller both articulate its consequences in opposite directions: Fichte in the form of the scholar as the expression of a specialized education, Schiller in the form of the artist as the expression of an all-round and harmonic education.Der Beitrag behandelt Fichtes Begriff der Erziehung in seinen bekannten Jenenser Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten. Dort bestimmt Fichte den Gelehrten als Erzieher der Menschheit. Ziel ist es, zu zeigen, dass der praktizistisch gedeutete Begriff des Menschseins seine Realisation nach Fichtes Auffassung nur in einer arbeitsteiligen Gesellschaft als Ort wechselseitiger Vervollkommnung finden kann. Seine Gesellschaftstheorie steht damit in deutlichem Kontrast zu Schillers kritischer Bewertung dieser Arbeitsteiligkeit als Fragmentierung und Vereinseitigung des Menschseins in den 1795 erschienenen Briefen über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. Ausgehend von der kantischen Pramisse des Menscheins als Projekt, d.h. als Gegenstand von praktischer Philosophie und Erziehung, artikulieren Fichte und Schiller deren Konsequenzen gegensätzlich: Fichte in der Gestalt des Gelehrten als Ausdruck einer spezialisierten Bildung, Schiller in der Gestalt des Kunstlers als dem Ausdruck einer allseitigen und harmonischen Bildung.

The present text aims to identify in Kant’s third Critique some main figures of mediation between morals and aesthetics. In the kantian system, not only nature and reason are separated by an unbridgeable gap, but also morals and aesthetics are different domains of the rationality, which are grounded on different principles. Nevertheless the third Critique explores the possibility of some mediation figures, that can overcome the mentioned gap. This is the task of the reflexive aesthetic judgment and its systematic work. In this process of the aesthetic judgment, the figures of a universal agreement among subjectivities and the moral value of the aesthetic symbol, seem to acquire a central systematic role.

A Crítica da faculdade de julgar (1790) foi recebida com entusiasmo pelos filósofos do idealismo alemão. No caso de Friedrich Schelling, as duas partes da obra foram influentes, de modo que não só a estética kantiana, mas também a teleologia foi marcante em sua trajetória filosófica. Observaremos como o filósofo de Leonberg acolhe, na Introdução às Ideias para uma filosofia da natureza (1797), a noção kantiana de organismo como dotado de autocausalidade, mas pensa-a nos quadros de uma filosofia pós-kantiana, buscando prescindir das noções de juízo reflexionante e também da ideia de “natureza como arte” (Natur als Kunst) para se pensar o organismo. Como Schelling vincula essa noção com a proposta de se pensar a unidade entre natureza e espírito a partir do próprio sujeito, e não de algo exterior a ele? Como Kant reagiria a tal proposta?The Critique of Judgment (1790) was enthusiastically received by the German Idealists. In the case of Friedrich Schelling, both divisions of the work were influent, thus resulting that not only Kantian aesthetics, but also the teleology was a landmark in his philosophical itinerary. We attempt to observe how the philosopher of Leonberg receives, in the Introduction to the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), the Kantian conception of organism as endowed with self-causality, but at the same time thinks it within the frame of a post-Kantian philosophy, leaving aside the reflective judgment and also the idea of nature as a product of art (Natur als Kunst) in order to think the organism. How does Schelling connect this notion with the proposal to think the unity between nature and spirit based on the own subject, and not on something external to it? How would Kant react to such a proposal?

ABSTRACT Kant claims that we demand the agreement of others when making judgements of taste. I argue that this claim is part of an explanation of how the phenomenology of familiar aesthetic judgements supports his contention that judgements of taste are universal. Kant's aesthetic theory is plausible only if we reject the widespread contention that this demand is normative. I offer a non-normative reading of Kantian judgements of taste based on a close reading of the Analytic and Deduction, then argue against the three prominent normative interpretations, which force us to attribute to Kant a position that he did not accept.

Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, inwiefern der kunstästhetische Ansatz Josef Königs eine Fortsetzung des Kantischen Ansatzes mit sprachphilosophischen Mitteln darstellt. Anknüpfungspunkt hierfür ist Kants Konzeption ästhetischer Ideen, für welche Begriffe – in ihrem metaphorischen Gebrauch – eine konstitutive Bedingung darstellen. Beide Autoren gehen vom freien Spiel der Erkenntniskräfte als grundlegendem Prinzip des kunstästhetischen Vollzugs aus. Während für Kant Schönheit jedoch unmittelbar aus einer Lust hinsichtlich der Anschauung resultiert, ist diese Lust bei König über die Zweckmäßigkeit der Beschreibungen ästhetischer Wirkungen vermittelt. Zweckmäßig ist eine Beschreibung einer ästhetischen Wirkung, wenn sie durch eine treffende Metapher ausgedrückt wird. Daher ist die interpersonale Geltung dieser Beschreibung wiederum nur mittels der Resonanz rekonstruierbar. <br><br>The article poses the question to what extend Josef Koenig’s aesthetic approach represents a continuation of the Kantian approach by means of philosophy of language. Its starting point is Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas for which concepts – in their metaphorical use – are an indespensable condition. Both authors presuppose the free play of cognitive faculties as a foundational principle of aesthetic experience. While for Kant beauty immediately results from pleasure concerning a perception, for Koenig this pleasure is mediated by the purposiveness of a description of an aesthetic impression. A description is purposeful if it is expressed by an appropriate metaphor. Hence its interpersonal validity is only verifiable by resonance.

ResumenEste artículo se propone esclarecer la relación entre la fenomenología de Marc Richir y el criticismo kantiano a través de una lectura cruzada de la Analítica del gusto en la Crítica del juicio y de algunos textos del fenomenólogo belga, escritos en los años ochenta, cuando buscaba fundar su propio pensamiento a partir de una lectura original de la tercera Crítica. Será ocasión para clarificar la concepción original del fenómeno no intencional propuesta por Richir (el “fenómeno como nada sino fenómeno”), y de compararla con la concepción estética del fenómeno.Palabras clave: Fenomenología, Richir, Kant, Crítica del juicio, bello, estética. AbstractThis article proposes a clarification of the connection between Marc Richir’s phenomenology and the Kantian criticism. For this purpose, we will examine the Analitic of the Beautiful in the Critique of Judgement at the same time as selected Richirian texts of the eighties, at the time when he tried to find his own thought in an original interpretation of Kant’s third Critique. We will then be able to clarify the original conception of the non-intentional phenomenon proposed by Richir (“the phenomenon as nothing but phenomenon”), and situate it with regard to the aesthetic conception of the phenomenon.Keywords: Phenomenology, Richir, Kant, Critique of judgment, Beautiful, estectics.

Foucault’s debt to Kant is usually examined with respect to his ethos of critique. In fact, Kant’s writings on aesthetic judgment, teleological judgment, and anthropology constitute an important, if implicit, object of Foucault’s genealogical efforts to free Western culture from a scientia sexualis that oppresses sexual minorities. Comparing Foucault’s use of Kant to the use made by psychoanalytic theorists of sexual difference, this paper argues that the concept of non-teleological pleasure found in Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment may provide grounds for queer thinkers to resist and reconfigure associations between death, knowledge, and sexuality as a function of organisms—associations inherited from the post-Kantian philosophical anthropology and biological medicine of the nineteenth century.

This paper points out the relation between the notion of the sublime and the notion of the infinite in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In Kant the philosophical functions of the sublime can be related to the notion of the infinite as an idea. The paper investigates whether the imagination can be extended by the infinite, as this is not evident from Kant’s definition of the sublime. Also, the paper addresses the problem if the infinite has a role beyond the purely aesthetic dimension of Kantian philosophy.

The 12th Kant Readings at Academia Kantiana, Institute for the Humanities of Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University focused on the ethical thought of Kant and other philosophers of the Enlightenment. The reports and discussions presented an analysis of Kant's ethical concepts, new studies of the history of ethical thought in the Enlightenment, reception of Kant's ethics and Enlightenment in the Russian and Western thinking. Special attention was paid to thematic sections on interdisciplinary issues of ethics and aesthetics, the philosophy of politics and the philosophy of education. One of the most debated topics was understanding the latest trends in sci-tech development from the point of view of ethical principles of the existence of human society. It was noted that, on the one hand, the current social and intellectual conditions form a different, compared with Kant’s era, communication environment, and on the other, the concepts of the 18th century retain the value and heuristic potential for our time and are suitable for adaptation in the process of developing strategies for “New Enlightenment”.

Dos muitos problemas a serem resolvidos a partir da tese basilar kantiana, segundo a qual a natureza especificamente estética de um objeto consiste unicamente naquilo que é “meramente subjetivo”, isto é, somente no que “constitui sua relação com o sujeito” [KU, XLII], são, sobretudo, dois que se mostram absolutamente centrais para a fundamentação do juízo de gosto, a saber: o de um prazer genuinamente estético (i.e., da mera reflexão) e o da justificação da sua pretensa universalidade. Entre os diversos lugares na primeira parte da terceira Crítica, em que podemos localizar os componentes estruturais que contribuem para a fundamentação e consolidação desses dois elementos doutrinais, os mais importantes são, creio eu, aqueles poucos parágrafos onde Kant introduz e discute seu conceito chave de um “jogo livre das faculdades de conhecimento” (§9) e, diretamente ligado a este pela “ideia” de uma “voz universal” (§8), o de um “sentido comum”, ou sensus communis aestheticus (§§20-22). – Intenta-se mostrar que, apesar da clarificação suficiente do específico “estado de ânimo” a ser assumido para a realização de qualquer ajuizamento estético, é necessário também tomar em consideração as condições concretas da exiquibilidade de tal ajuizamento, e que é exatamente nesta perspectiva que a figura do ”sentido comum” pode se tornar sistematicamente relevante.

O objetivo deste artigo é demonstrar que a gênese da geografia física moderna está associada ao desenvolvimento da filosofia kantiana, particularmente a partir da Critica do Juizo. 6 a partir da relação entre estktica e teleologia da natureza que Imannuel Kant (1724-1 804) desenvolverá o juizo reflexionante teleológico, onde a forma permitirá a razão organizar a natureza, com forte impacto na Filosofia-da-Natureza de Schelling e no método morfológico de Goethe. Reflexões que tanto influenciarão Alexander von Humboldt e a sua concepção de espacialidade dos fenômenos na crosta terrestre, bem como o georelevo, ou seja, a morfologia da Terra como produto de conexões espaço-temporais entre os elementos da natureza.AbstractThe aim of this article is to demonstrate that the genesis of the modern Physical Geography is associated with the developement ofkantian Philosophy, particularly from Judgement Criticism. It is from the relation between aesthetics and nature's teleology,tha t Immanuel Kant (1724-1 804) wiII develop the teleological reflexive judgement, where the form will allow to reason to organize the nature, with strong impact in Nature Philosophy of Schelling and in Goethe's morphological method. These reflections will strongly influence Alexander von Humboldt and his conception of phenomena spaciality in the terrestrial cmst, as well as one of georelief, in means, the land morphology as product of spacetemporal connections among nature elements.

O objetivo deste artigo é demonstrar que a gênese da geografia física moderna está associada ao desenvolvimento da filosofia kantiana, particularmente a partir da Critica do Juizo. 6 a partir da relação entre estktica e teleologia da natureza que Imannuel Kant (1724-1 804) desenvolverá o juizo reflexionante teleológico, onde a forma permitirá a razão organizar a natureza, com forte impacto na Filosofia-da-Natureza de Schelling e no método morfológico de Goethe. Reflexões que tanto influenciarão Alexander von Humboldt e a sua concepção de espacialidade dos fenômenos na crosta terrestre, bem como o georelevo, ou seja, a morfologia da Terra como produto de conexões espaço-temporais entre os elementos da natureza.AbstractThe aim of this article is to demonstrate that the genesis of the modern Physical Geography is associated with the developement ofkantian Philosophy, particularly from Judgement Criticism. It is from the relation between aesthetics and nature's teleology,tha t Immanuel Kant (1724-1 804) wiII develop the teleological reflexive judgement, where the form will allow to reason to organize the nature, with strong impact in Nature Philosophy of Schelling and in Goethe's morphological method. These reflections will strongly influence Alexander von Humboldt and his conception of phenomena spaciality in the terrestrial cmst, as well as one of georelief, in means, the land morphology as product of spacetemporal connections among nature elements.

By means of an interpretation we have recently elaborated about the Kantian conception of the faculty of imagination, was obtained with the decisive aid of the Anthropology in a pragmatic point of view (1798), which determines theplace it occupies in the set of mental capacities, identifies the tasks and functions that it can achieve and registers the types of operations it performs, as well as the products it offers in different fields of his philosophy, and we show how this idea can support cogent solutions to problems frequently identified in transcendental idealism, as the reason for Kant have wrote two versions of the Deduction of the categories, the motivation and consequences of the distinction between two types of objects for us (the appearances [Erscheinungen] and the phenomena [Phaenomena]), the relationship between the triple synthesis (KrV-A) and three sensible authorship capacities (Anthropology), the meaning of “blind intuitions” (KrV: A51/B75) and its relationship with some kinds of view, the distinction between the “knowing” [kennen] of the animals and human knowledge [Erkenntnis], some basic aspects of the doctrine of schematism involved in the constitution of objects of experience (nature), and the roles played by the imagination in the theoretic and aesthetic domains.

Este trabalho propõe uma reflexão sobre a natureza humana a partir de uma perspectiva hermenêutica, relacionando-a com a Ética e a Estética nos processos que permeiam a educação enquanto experiência de formação do humano. A tese do filósofo alemão Hans-Georg Gadamer, de que educar é educar-se, não só nos remete a uma reflexão sobre a natureza humana, como está na centralidade do problema formativo do mesmo. Problema esse que nas vias de solução deixa de ser gnosiológico ou mesmo epistemológico, passando a ser de caráter ontológico, ou seja, como compreendemos, levando em consideração que a noção de sujeito não mais está assentada no cogito cartesiano e nem nas faculdades do juízo kantiana. Entretanto, podemos observar que a maioria das teorias pedagógicas encontra sua gênese estruturante nessas noções já desconstruídas de sujeito, o que acentua a crise na educação. O sujeito, para Gadamer, agora é o Dasein, herdado de Heidegger e que, em sua visão, expressa melhor anatureza humana. Surge então a necessidade de refletir sobre essa natureza, tendo em vista a proposta de ressignificação da experiência formativa do humano pela educação, a partir de uma perspectiva ontológica, levando em conta a experiência estética como articulação para uma educação Ético-Estética.Palavras-chave: Hermenêutica. Educação. Formação. Ética. Estética.CONSIDERATIONS ON HERMENEUTIC -PHILOSOPHICAL RESIGNIFICATION OF FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE: Gadamer and the ethical and aesthetic character of educationAbstract: This paper is a reflection claim about human nature from a hermeneutic perspective, relating it to the Ethics and Aesthetics in the processes that underlie education while training the human experience. The thesis of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, that education is to educate yourself not only leads us to a reflection on human nature, as is the centrality of the problem of the same formation. This problem in ways that solution no longer gnosiologic epistemological or even becoming the ontological character, that is, as we understand, considering that the notion of subject is no longer seated in the Cartesian cogito nor the faculties of judgment Kant. However, we can observe that most pedagogical theories finds its genesis structuring these notions already deconstructed the subject, which accentuates the crisis in education. The subject, for Gadamer, is now Dasein, Heidegger's legacy and that, in his view, best expressed human nature. Then comes the need to reflect on this the crisis in education. The subject, for Gadamer, is now Dasein, Heidegger's legacy and that, in his view, best expressed human nature. Then comes the need to reflect on this nature, in view of the proposed redefinition of the human formative experience for education, from an ontological perspective, taking into account the aesthetic experience as an education articulation for Ethical and Aesthetic.Keywords: Hermeneutics. Education. Training. Ethics. Aesthetics.CONSIDERACIONES SOBRE LA REDEFINICIÓN DE LA HERMENÉUTICA FILOSÓFICA-FORMATIVO EXPERIENCIA: Gadamer y la educación ética y estéticaResumen: Este trabajo tiene la intención de hacer una reflexión sobre la naturaleza humana desde una perspectiva hermenéutica, relacionándolo con la ética y la estética en el proceso de educación que impregnan durante la formación de la experiencia humana. La tesis del filósofo alemán Hans-Georg Gadamer, que la educación es educarse a si mismo no sólo nos lleva a una reflexión sobre la naturaleza humana, como está en el centro del problema de la misma formación. este problema de manera que lasolución deja de ser gnosiológica o mismo epistemológica pasando a convertirse en carácter ontológico, es decir, a nuestro entender, teniendo en cuenta que la noción de sujeto ya no está sentado en el cogito cartesiano ni las facultades del juicio Kant. Sin embargo, podemos observar que la mayoría de las teorías pedagógicas encuentra su génesis estructural en estas nociones ya desconstruídas de sujeto, lo que acentúa la crisis en la educación. El sujeto, para Gadamer, es ahora Dasein, el legado de Heidegger yque, a su juício, representa mejor la naturaleza humana. Luego viene la necesidad de reflexionar sobre esta naturaleza, a la vista de la propuesta de redefinición de la experiencia formativa del humano por la educación, desde el punto de vista ontológico, teniendo en cuenta la experiencia estética como una articulación de la educación ética y estética.Palabras clave: Hermenéutica. Educación. Formación. Ética. Estética

While the term “visual literacy” has grown in popularity in the last 50 years, its meaning remains nebulous. It is described variously as: a vehicle for aesthetic appreciation, a means of defence against visual manipulation, a sorting mechanism for an increasingly data-saturated age, and a prerequisite to civic inclusion (Fransecky 23; Messaris 181; McTigue and Flowers 580). Scholars have written extensively about the first three subjects but there has been less research on how visual literacy frames civic life and how it might help the public as a tool to address disadvantage and assist in removing social and cultural barriers. This article examines a forerunner to visual literacy in the push to create an international symbol language born out of popular education movements, a project that fell short of its goals but still left a considerable impression on graphic media. This article, then, presents an analysis of visual literacy campaigns in the early postwar era. These campaigns did not attempt to invent a symbolic language but posited that images themselves served as a universal language in which students could receive training. Of particular interest is how the concept of visual literacy has been mobilised as a pedagogical tool in design, digital humanities and in broader civic education initiatives promoted by Third Space institutions. Behind the creation of new visual literacy curricula is the idea that images can help anchor a world community, supplementing textual communication. Figure 1: Visual Literacy Yearbook. Montebello Unified School District, USA, 1973. Shedding Light: Origins of the Visual Literacy Frame The term “visual literacy” came to the fore in the early 1970s on the heels of mass literacy campaigns. The educators, creatives and media theorists who first advocated for visual learning linked this aim to literacy, an unassailable goal, to promote a more radical curricular overhaul. They challenged a system that had hitherto only acknowledged a very limited pathway towards academic success; pushing “language and mathematics”, courses “referred to as solids (something substantial) as contrasted with liquids or gases (courses with little or no substance)” (Eisner 92). This was deemed “a parochial view of both human ability and the possibilities of education” that did not acknowledge multiple forms of intelligence (Gardner). This change not only integrated elements of mass culture that had been rejected in education, notably film and graphic arts, but also encouraged the critique of images as a form of good citizenship, assuming that visually literate arbiters could call out media misrepresentations and manipulative political advertising (Messaris, “Visual Test”). This movement was, in many ways, reactive to new forms of mass media that began to replace newspapers as key forms of civic participation. Unlike simple literacy (being able to decipher letters as a mnemonic system), visual literacy involves imputing meanings to images where meanings are less fixed, yet still with embedded cultural signifiers. Visual literacy promised to extend enlightenment metaphors of sight (as in the German Aufklärung) and illumination (as in the French Lumières) to help citizens understand an increasingly complex marketplace of images. The move towards visual literacy was not so much a shift towards images (and away from books and oration) but an affirmation of the need to critically investigate the visual sphere. It introduced doubt to previously upheld hierarchies of perception. Sight, to Kant the “noblest of the senses” (158), was no longer the sense “least affected” by the surrounding world but an input centre that was equally manipulable. In Kant’s view of societal development, the “cosmopolitan” held the key to pacifying bellicose states and ensuring global prosperity and tranquillity. The process of developing a cosmopolitan ideology rests, according to Kant, on the gradual elimination of war and “the education of young people in intellectual and moral culture” (188-89). Transforming disparate societies into “a universal cosmopolitan existence” that would “at last be realised as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop” and would take well-funded educational institutions and, potentially, a new framework for imparting knowledge (Kant 51). To some, the world of the visual presented a baseline for shared experience. Figure 2: Exhibition by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna, photograph c. 1927. An International Picture Language The quest to find a mutually intelligible language that could “bridge worlds” and solder together all of humankind goes back to the late nineteenth century and the Esperanto movement of Ludwig Zamenhof (Schor 59). The expression of this ideal in the world of the visual picked up steam in the interwar years with designers and editors like Fritz Kahn, Gerd Arntz, and Otto and Marie Neurath. Their work transposing complex ideas into graphic form has been rediscovered as an antecedent to modern infographics, but the symbols they deployed were not to merely explain, but also help education and build international fellowship unbounded by spoken language. The Neuraths in particular are celebrated for their international picture language or Isotypes. These pictograms (sometimes viewed as proto-emojis) can be used to represent data without text. Taken together they are an “intemporal, hieroglyphic language” that Neutrath hoped would unite working-class people the world over (Lee 159). The Neuraths’ work was done in the explicit service of visual education with a popular socialist agenda and incubated in the social sphere of Red Vienna at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and Economic Museum) where Otto served as Director. The Wirtschaftsmuseum was an experiment in popular education, with multiple branches and late opening hours to accommodate the “the working man [who] has time to see a museum only at night” (Neurath 72-73). The Isotype contained universalist aspirations for the “making of a world language, or a helping picture language—[that] will give support to international developments generally” and “educate by the eye” (Neurath 13). Figure 3: Gerd Arntz Isotype Images. (Source: University of Reading.) The Isotype was widely adopted in the postwar era in pre-packaged sets of symbols used in graphic design and wayfinding systems for buildings and transportation networks, but with the socialism of the Neuraths’ peeled away, leaving only the system of logos that we are familiar with from airport washrooms, charts, and public transport maps. Much of the uptake in this symbol language could be traced to increased mobility and tourism, particularly in countries that did not make use of a Roman alphabet. The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo helped pave the way when organisers, fearful of jumbling too many scripts together, opted instead for black and white icons to represent the program of sports that summer. The new focus on the visual was both technologically mediated—cheaper printing and broadcast technologies made the diffusion of image increasingly possible—but also ideologically supported by a growing emphasis on projects that transcended linguistic, ethnic, and national borders. The Olympic symbols gradually morphed into Letraset icons, and, later, symbols in the Unicode Standard, which are the basis for today’s emojis. Wordless signs helped facilitate interconnectedness, but only in the most literal sense; their application was limited primarily to sports mega-events, highway maps, and “brand building”, and they never fulfilled their role as an educational language “to give the different nations a common outlook” (Neurath 18). Universally understood icons, particularly in the form of emojis, point to a rise in visual communication but they have fallen short as a cosmopolitan project, supporting neither the globalisation of Kantian ethics nor the transnational socialism of the Neuraths. Figure 4: Symbols in use. Women's bathroom. 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Source: The official report of the Organizing Committee.) Counter Education By mid-century, the optimism of a universal symbol language seemed dated, and focus shifted from distillation to discernment. New educational programs presented ways to study images, increasingly reproducible with new technologies, as a language in and of themselves. These methods had their roots in the fin-de-siècle educational reforms of John Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, and Maria Montessori. As early as the 1920s, progressive educators were using highly visual magazines, like National Geographic, as the basis for lesson planning, with the hopes that they would “expose students to edifying and culturally enriching reading” and “develop a more catholic taste or sensibility, representing an important cosmopolitan value” (Hawkins 45). The rise in imagery from previously inaccessible regions helped pupils to see themselves in relation to the larger world (although this connection always came with the presumed superiority of the reader). “Pictorial education in public schools” taught readers—through images—to accept a broader world but, too often, they saw photographs as a “straightforward transcription of the real world” (Hawkins 57). The images of cultures and events presented in Life and National Geographic for the purposes of education and enrichment were now the subject of greater analysis in the classroom, not just as “windows into new worlds” but as cultural products in and of themselves. The emerging visual curriculum aimed to do more than just teach with previously excluded modes (photography, film and comics); it would investigate how images presented and mediated the world. This gained wider appeal with new analytical writing on film, like Raymond Spottiswoode's Grammar of the Film (1950) which sought to formulate the grammatical rules of visual communication (Messaris 181), influenced by semiotics and structural linguistics; the emphasis on grammar can also be seen in far earlier writings on design systems such as Owen Jones’s 1856 The Grammar of Ornament, which also advocated for new, universalising methods in design education (Sloboda 228). The inventorying impulse is on display in books like Donis A. Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy (1973), a text that meditates on visual perception but also functions as an introduction to line and form in the applied arts, picking up where the Bauhaus left off. Dondis enumerates the “syntactical guidelines” of the applied arts with illustrations that are in keeping with 1920s books by Kandinsky and Klee and analyse pictorial elements. However, at the end of the book she shifts focus with two chapters that examine “messaging” and visual literacy explicitly. Dondis predicts that “an intellectual, trained ability to make and understand visual messages is becoming a vital necessity to involvement with communication. It is quite likely that visual literacy will be one of the fundamental measures of education in the last third of our century” (33) and she presses for more programs that incorporate the exploration and analysis of images in tertiary education. Figure 5: Ideal spatial environment for the Blueprint charts, 1970. (Image: Inventory Press.) Visual literacy in education arrived in earnest with a wave of publications in the mid-1970s. They offered ways for students to understand media processes and for teachers to use visual culture as an entry point into complex social and scientific subject matter, tapping into the “visual consciousness of the ‘television generation’” (Fransecky 5). Visual culture was often seen as inherently democratising, a break from stuffiness, the “artificialities of civilisation”, and the “archaic structures” that set sensorial perception apart from scholarship (Dworkin 131-132). Many radical university projects and community education initiatives of the 1960s made use of new media in novel ways: from Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s fold-out posters accompanying Blueprint for Counter Education (1970) to Emory Douglas’s graphics for The Black Panther newspaper. Blueprint’s text- and image-dense wall charts were made via assemblage and they were imagined less as charts and more as a “matrix of resources” that could be used—and added to—by youth to undertake their own counter education (Cronin 53). These experiments in visual learning helped to break down old hierarchies in education, but their aim was influenced more by countercultural notions of disruption than the universal ideals of cosmopolitanism. From Image as Text to City as Text For a brief period in the 1970s, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan et al., Massage) and artists like Bruno Munari (Tanchis and Munari) collaborated fruitfully with graphic designers to create books that mixed text and image in novel ways. Using new compositional methods, they broke apart traditional printing lock-ups to superimpose photographs, twist text, and bend narrative frames. The most famous work from this era is, undoubtedly, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), McLuhan’s team-up with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, but it was followed by dozens of other books intended to communicate theory and scientific ideas with popularising graphics. Following in the footsteps of McLuhan, many of these texts sought not just to explain an issue but to self-consciously reference their own method of information delivery. These works set the precedent for visual aids (and, to a lesser extent, audio) that launched a diverse, non-hierarchical discourse that was nonetheless bound to tactile artefacts. In 1977, McLuhan helped develop a media textbook for secondary school students called City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. It is notable for its direct address style and its focus on investigating spaces outside of the classroom (provocatively, a section on the third page begins with “Should all schools be closed?”). The book follows with a fine-grained analysis of advertising forms in which students are asked to first bring advertisements into class for analysis and later to go out into the city to explore “a man-made environment, a huge warehouse of information, a vast resource to be mined free of charge” (McLuhan et al., City 149). As a document City as Classroom is critical of existing teaching methods, in line with the radical “in the streets” pedagogy of its day. McLuhan’s theories proved particularly salient for the counter education movement, in part because they tapped into a healthy scepticism of advertisers and other image-makers. They also dovetailed with growing discontent with the ad-strew visual environment of cities in the 1970s. Budgets for advertising had mushroomed in the1960s and outdoor advertising “cluttered” cities with billboards and neon, generating “fierce intensities and new hybrid energies” that threatened to throw off the visual equilibrium (McLuhan 74). Visual literacy curricula brought in experiential learning focussed on the legibility of the cities, mapping, and the visualisation of urban issues with social justice implications. The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), a “collective endeavour of community research and education” that arose in the aftermath of the 1967 uprisings, is the most storied of the groups that suffused the collection of spatial data with community engagement and organising (Warren et al. 61). The following decades would see a tamed approach to visual literacy that, while still pressing for critical reading, did not upend traditional methods of educational delivery. Figure 6: Beginning a College Program-Assisting Teachers to Develop Visual Literacy Approaches in Public School Classrooms. 1977. ERIC. Searching for Civic Education The visual literacy initiatives formed in the early 1970s both affirmed existing civil society institutions while also asserting the need to better inform the public. Most of the campaigns were sponsored by universities, major libraries, and international groups such as UNESCO, which published its “Declaration on Media Education” in 1982. They noted that “participation” was “essential to the working of a pluralistic and representative democracy” and the “public—users, citizens, individuals, groups ... were too systematically overlooked”. Here, the public is conceived as both “targets of the information and communication process” and users who “should have the last word”. To that end their “continuing education” should be ensured (Study 18). Programs consisted primarily of cognitive “see-scan-analyse” techniques (Little et al.) for younger students but some also sought to bring visual analysis to adult learners via continuing education (often through museums eager to engage more diverse audiences) and more radical popular education programs sponsored by community groups. By the mid-80s, scores of modules had been built around the comprehension of visual media and had become standard educational fare across North America, Australasia, and to a lesser extent, Europe. There was an increasing awareness of the role of data and image presentation in decision-making, as evidenced by the surprising commercial success of Edward Tufte’s 1982 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Visual literacy—or at least image analysis—was now enmeshed in teaching practice and needed little active advocacy. Scholarly interest in the subject went into a brief period of hibernation in the 1980s and early 1990s, only to be reborn with the arrival of new media distribution technologies (CD-ROMs and then the internet) in classrooms and the widespread availability of digital imaging technology starting in the late 1990s; companies like Adobe distributed free and reduced-fee licences to schools and launched extensive teacher training programs. Visual literacy was reanimated but primarily within a circumscribed academic field of education and data visualisation. Figure 7: Visual Literacy; What Research Says to the Teacher, 1975. National Education Association. USA. Part of the shifting frame of visual literacy has to do with institutional imperatives, particularly in places where austerity measures forced strange alliances between disciplines. What had been a project in alternative education morphed into an uncontested part of the curriculum and a dependable budget line. This shift was already forecasted in 1972 by Harun Farocki who, writing in Filmkritik, noted that funding for new film schools would be difficult to obtain but money might be found for “training in media education … a discipline that could persuade ministers of education, that would at the same time turn the budget restrictions into an advantage, and that would match the functions of art schools” (98). Nearly 50 years later educators are still using media education (rebranded as visual or media literacy) to make the case for fine arts and humanities education. While earlier iterations of visual literacy education were often too reliant on the idea of cracking the “code” of images, they did promote ways of learning that were a deep departure from the rote methods of previous generations. Next-gen curricula frame visual literacy as largely supplemental—a resource, but not a program. By the end of the 20th century, visual literacy had changed from a scholarly interest to a standard resource in the “teacher’s toolkit”, entering into school programs and influencing museum education, corporate training, and the development of public-oriented media (Literacy). An appreciation of image culture was seen as key to creating empathetic global citizens, but its scope was increasingly limited. With rising austerity in the education sector (a shift that preceded the 2008 recession by decades in some countries), art educators, museum enrichment staff, and design researchers need to make a case for why their disciplines were relevant in pedagogical models that are increasingly aimed at “skills-based” and “job ready” teaching. Arts educators worked hard to insert their fields into learning goals for secondary students as visual literacy, with the hope that “literacy” would carry the weight of an educational imperative and not a supplementary field of study. Conclusion For nearly a century, educational initiatives have sought to inculcate a cosmopolitan perspective with a variety of teaching materials and pedagogical reference points. Symbolic languages, like the Isotype, looked to unite disparate people with shared visual forms; while educational initiatives aimed to train the eyes of students to make them more discerning citizens. The term ‘visual literacy’ emerged in the 1960s and has since been deployed in programs with a wide variety of goals. Countercultural initiatives saw it as a prerequisite for popular education from the ground up, but, in the years since, it has been formalised and brought into more staid curricula, often as a sort of shorthand for learning from media and pictures. The grand cosmopolitan vision of a complete ‘visual language’ has been scaled back considerably, but still exists in trace amounts. Processes of globalisation require images to universalise experiences, commodities, and more for people without shared languages. Emoji alphabets and globalese (brands and consumer messaging that are “visual-linguistic” amalgams “increasingly detached from any specific ethnolinguistic group or locality”) are a testament to a mediatised banal cosmopolitanism (Jaworski 231). In this sense, becoming “fluent” in global design vernacular means familiarity with firms and products, an understanding that is aesthetic, not critical. It is very much the beneficiaries of globalisation—both state and commercial actors—who have been able to harness increasingly image-based technologies for their benefit. To take a humorous but nonetheless consequential example, Spanish culinary boosters were able to successfully lobby for a paella emoji (Miller) rather than having a food symbol from a less wealthy country such as a Senegalese jollof or a Morrocan tagine. This trend has gone even further as new forms of visual communication are increasingly streamlined and managed by for-profit media platforms. The ubiquity of these forms of communication and their global reach has made visual literacy more important than ever but it has also fundamentally shifted the endeavour from a graphic sorting practice to a critical piece of social infrastructure that has tremendous political ramifications. Visual literacy campaigns hold out the promise of educating students in an image-based system with the potential to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. This cosmopolitan political project has not yet been realised, as the visual literacy frame has drifted into specialised silos of art, design, and digital humanities education. It can help bridge the “incomplete connections” of an increasingly globalised world (Calhoun 112), but it does not have a program in and of itself. Rather, an evolving visual literacy curriculum might be seen as a litmus test for how we imagine the role of images in the world. 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