As will perhaps become clearer in the Fourth Aura on the Metaphysics of Aesthetics, I’m working on defining a set of questions for Aesthetics.

But for now…

In The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880, Beiser says that the origins of Neo-Kantianism are shrouded in mystery. This mysterious origin seems to have resulted from the fact that the original Neo-Kantian project was psychologistic rather than Idealistic in terms of its interpretation of the relation between experience and the world. German philosophy after Kant took a notably idealistic turn and later Neo-Kantians were quite sure that psychologistic explanations of the dynamics of experience were fatally flawed. So that was two strikes against any very early Neo-Kantian works.

On the other hand, the end of Neo-Kantianism is far from mysterious. After World War I, two crises gradually percolated into the soggy visions of German Philosophy: the Crisis of Science and the Crisis of Historicism. Now I have to admit that, from the point of view of Aesthetics, sometimes things look much simpler than they do from the intricate interiors of philosophical logic. Usually, these two crises that combined to make Neo-Kantianism seem irrelevant are analyzed as having brought out some fatal “contradictions” within the schemes of Neo-Kantianism, but I think something more fundamental went wrong with the imagery Science and the whole edifice of Historicism as approached in philosophical terms.

What went wrong has to do with what you might call the Aesthetic notion of what a “crisis” is in terms of how people are interpreting their experiences. In those terms, the crisis of Historicism arose when people began to suspect that the imagery of history as the set of changes through a series of well-defined stages that led to their current world with its perfection and self-consciousness as evidenced in the lucidity of their own conscious perception of themselves was completely illusory and totally fictious at every level. Such suspicions would be sufficient to discredit Historicism, though the imagery of history as leading to one’s lucid self-perception seems have remained fairly popular and to be part of the baggage that comes with Modernism and “Western Civ.” Somewhat unfairly, Neo-Kantianism seems to have been associated the collapse of Historicism as a valid philosophical framework.

The crisis of Science is a bit stranger and more spotty, but in some ways even easier to visualize in aesthetic terms. The “crisis” was the growing implausibility of the Aether. Essentially, without an Aether in aesthetic terms there is no universal absolute Euclidian coordinate system available in which to situate a philosophical view of Science. This aethereal system apparently suggested that all was comprehensible even when it was demonstrably imaginary, useless and confusing. The fact that all the uses of relativistic (non-aethereal) formulations were far more stable, functional and relatively real than the Aether as envisioned was not acceptable for philosophy in general, though Cassirer dealt with it without much trouble. He seems to have been the only late Neo-Kantian to manage that feat. Echoes of the Aether crisis continue to this day with the ritualized tendency to evoke of strangeness of “quantum mechanics” – a “strangeness” that can be used to demonstrate the validity of any strange idea at all despite the fact that generally the supposed strangeness is a matter of a rather small, fixed set of elementary examples from work in the 1920s because that seems to be when the basic pop cultural image-making machine got stuck.

But what is really at the bottom of the “crisis of the sciences”?

A fundamental suspicion perhaps? It seems to be very much like the fundamental suspicion that doomed Historicism: that the coherence and fundamental veridicality of the thing (the Aether or Historicist History) on which you want to base everything is completely imaginary, illusory and totally fictious. Naturally, like Historicism, the Aether seems to have had a weighty connection to Modernism, which by the 1920s had been running hard for over a century and was in dire need of some mysterious (but apparently not “strange”) signals.

Like the recalcitrant Aether, the ritualized strangeness of Quantum Mechanics, and the final ossified Historicist imagery of Western Civilization, the curious image of “Modern Art” also seems to have formed in the 1920s as post-crises popular imageries detached themselves from the overall cultural trajectory leading away from Modernism, leaving popular imagery trapped in the comfortably odd constraints of Modernism. Perhaps this detachment of popular imageries occurred because at that moment, mass media emerged as something aural, something on the radio or in the “talkies” or on phonograph records. Or maybe the cataclysm of World War I (which pretty much discredited the idea that there was some kind of rational progress going on in the Big Historicist History of Western Civilization) was never processed in popular imagery, offering a kind of model for the systematic departure of popular imagery from unpleasant aspects of reality.

Moreover, once Modernism was moribund, it became more useful than ever – a very handy cultural placeholder, a useful blankness. Modernism could be evoked as a good thing (as in Mid-Century Modern) or an incomprehensibly bad thing (like “Modern Art” or “Quantum Mechanics” or “relativism”). Clearly no actual understanding of anything in particular was required only a vague gesture at a set of conventionally comic scripts that became more and more useful as they moved more and more away from ordinary life and into the strange domain of the iconographically incomprehensible – the useful boundary of what was beyond the edge of everyday life – the dangerously funny and out-of-place shell of a kind of manageably arbitrary and strangely ordinary otherness which could be adjusted as needed to include say, “French Cooking” or “Existentialism” or “Thermonuclear War” or “Genetics”.

As if by random accident from this hodge-podge, there arose a realm of transitional objects – things that were odd, but comprehensible somehow like “the Middle Ages” or “refrigeration” and combinations of those were vaguely imaginable so “the Ice Age” could be seen as kind of the Middle Ages of Refrigeration – strange, but not as unpleasant as Existentialism or Thermonuclear War.

After World War II, the symbolic edges of the unthinkable region surrounding Modernism shifted around slightly. You could have hints of total devastation hanging on the borders of your black-and-white noir-from-the-news-reels world. You could even have Film Noir suggesting a certain useful void out there in the cultural world if you could somehow manage to live in the B movie side of things and stay out of TechniColor.

Alongside Film Noir came Sci Fi with its mutants and horror and alien visitors who don’t find Western Civ to be a convincingly foundational concept.

And even, quivering on the pop cult edge of the tantalizingly unthinkable…” bikini”, a bomb-test site and a fashion statement…and “The New Look” – post-war fashion and a strategy of war emphasizing the elegance of threatening to use a lot of nukes in some modulated way. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, you could even see how “High Modernism” was entranced by its own moribund state. There in Modernist terms, the various crises piling up could only really be imagined as repetitive absences, voids, gaps, non-appearances – the unseeable, the unnamable, the unspeakable.

And all this dodgy realm of moribund modernist imagery and the rituals of quantum strangeness starts to solidify in the nineteen-twenties.

And here we are, a century later, still wondering about the conventionally incomprehensible iconography of Modernism and the ritualized strangeness of other odd things.

Sources:

Continental Divide

Becoming Historical

The Challenge of Surrealism

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics

The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880

Heidegger: The Question of Being and History

Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism

The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics World Finitude Solitude

Ether and Modernity The Recalcitrance of an Epistemic Object in the Early Twentieth Century