| My dissertation, "Kant and the Fate of Aesthetic Experience: A Deconstructive Reading," is a rethinking of the autonomous thrust of aesthetic experience in the third Critique vis-a-vis cognitive and moral experience in the first two Critiques. My questions arise out of the disjunction between Kant's aesthetic and rational approaches to humanity (or freedom), nature, and their relationship. I hereby take issue with the widely held view of the third Critique as an extension of the doctrine of transcendental idealism in the first Critique---which renders aesthetic experience subservient to the system of reason, and seek to draw out the critical implications of aesthetic experience in order to reappraise the status of aesthetics in Kant's critical philosophy.;For this purpose, I take a deconstructive approach to Kant's critical trilogy, an approach that hinges on Kant's negative formulation of aesthetic judgment against the understanding and reason---as evident in "reflective judgment (without a universal)," "purposiveness without a purpose," "disinterestedness," etc---and thus allows us to deal with aesthetic experience in non-subordinate relation to knowledge and morality. In this vein, by investigating in detail the aesthetic institution of aisthesis, imagination, and understanding in the third Critique in contrast with their cognitive and moral institutions in the first and second Critiques, I ascertain post-Kantian or non-critical moments of aesthetic experience that would no longer collaborate with the revolutionary doctrine of Kantianism.;Then, I argue that Kant's project to establish the autonomy of aesthetic experience in the third Critique envisions a critical discourse of its own, oriented not just to dealing with problems remaining in the first two Critiques but putting forward a balanced view of humanity, nature, and their relationship, a view that could not be accessed in his rational discourses. Thus, my deconstructive reading of Kant's aesthetics turns out to be relevant for overcoming the dogmas of both noncontextualism and instrumentalism and, further, advancing a discourse that deals with a relationship between the self and the other without losing respect for the latter (such as other races, classes, faiths, sexes, and nature), which is integral to the development of post-Kantian and postmodern discourses. |
