Neo-Kantian Reasons For Keeping Ethics Separate From Aesthetics

A philosopher of education recently presented an argument that collapsed aesthetics into ethics. I disagreed with every word she said, so much so that it turned me into a Neo-Kantian on the spot!!!!

According to Frederick Beiser's brilliant The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism 1796 -1880 neo Kantian philosophy of aesthetic education begins from a boundary. It holds firmly to the separation of theoretical and practical reason and refuses to collapse aesthetic judgement into moral judgement. On this view the arts are practices with their own aims and standards. Ethics has its own domain with its own kind of necessity. The two can and often do interact within a life and within institutions, but they do not reduce to one another. That separation is not a mere footnote to history. It is central to the identity of the tradition as philosopher Frederick Beiser reconstructs it. From the movement’s earliest formation, neo Kantians kept faith with Kant’s dualisms, with the strict limit of knowledge to experience, and with the separation of spheres. They defended the autonomy of the moral domain while they clarified the methods of the sciences. When later in the century they widened their field to address ethics and also a general outlook on life, they did not thereby erase the conceptual boundary that had given their project coherence. They broadened the agenda while maintaining the analytic distinctions that made any broadening meaningful. That same discipline must govern aesthetic education now. 

The reason for drawing the boundary is methodological rather than polemical. Neo Kantianism presents philosophy as a reflective analysis of the presuppositions and methods of established practices. It does not pretend to legislate for those practices from an armchair, and it does not equivalently surrender their standards to fashion or sentiment. In the aesthetic field this means that the task is to articulate what counts as a reason in criticism and in making, how reasons function in different arts, and how learners can be inducted into the public practice of giving and asking for such reasons. None of this requires ethical conclusion. To treat aesthetic experience as ethical by essence is to misdescribe the kind of reasons that operate within the arts. It would replace the inner grammar of the art with a different grammar appropriate to a different aim. The integrity of aesthetic education depends on resisting that move.

The early figures that Beiser restores to their central place already give us the required frame. Jakob Friedrich Fries kept the architecture of Kant’s philosophy but reconstructed the method. He read the critical project as analytic and regressive from experience to its conditions. He used psychology as a propaedeutic for locating the a priori, while insisting on the distinction between discovery and justification. This is already a discipline of boundaries. It refuses to replace the logic of a domain with explanatory narratives that belong somewhere else. It puts the facts of mind in the right place, and it keeps the norms of thought in the right place. The same insistence on method carries over when we turn to the arts. One begins from how competent judges actually argue about works and from how makers actually take decisions, and one regresses to the conditions that make such argument and such decision intelligible. That path does not pass through ethics unless the case at hand is explicitly ethical. The practice of criticism in music, painting, literature or film has its own a priori in the modest sense that there are rules of synthesis, criteria of success and failure, and aims that give those criteria a point. These can be described, taught and used in assessment without smuggling in moral claims. 

Johann Friedrich Herbart sits alongside Fries as part of the empirical and psychological line that opposed speculative system building after Kant. Beiser groups Herbart with Fries and Beneke as representatives of an alternative idealism that insisted on experience, honoured the methods of the exact sciences, and resisted grand metaphysics. The relevance for our question is plain. The arts can be taught and judged without speculative foundations and without moral translation. What is required is attention to how a practice achieves intelligibility and effect under its own rules. Herbart’s educational writings, which influenced teacher formation for generations, treat instruction as the ordered formation of ideas into a coherent system in the mind of the learner. Nothing in that idea requires moral content. It does require discipline in moving from experience to rule governed understanding. That is the template for aesthetic education understood as apprenticeship in reasons. 

Friedrich Eduard Beneke completes the early picture. He links the critical project to the broader Enlightenment ambition to develop a science of human nature. In Beiser’s account that anthropological thread helps explain how neo Kantianism could take psychology seriously without reducing logic to cause. The lesson for our dispute is again that boundaries protect both sides. Aesthetic response is a psychological fact, useful for discovery. Aesthetic judgement is a normative act, answerable to the aims and criteria of a practice. Conflating it with ethical appraisal mistakes the level at which reasons have their force. 

The later consolidation of the movement underlines the same point from a different angle. In the 1860s a new generation put Kant back at the centre and defined philosophy as theory of knowledge. They set their face against speculative idealism and also against crude materialism. They answered the identity crisis of philosophy by making epistemology first philosophy. In doing so they made a strategic choice that bears directly on our topic. They refused foundationalism and treated the sciences as autonomous facts. Philosophy could clarify their logic and limits, but it could not supply them with first principles. This refusal of imperial reach carries over to the relation between aesthetics and ethics. Aesthetic practices are autonomous in the same sense. They have their logic, their limits and their internal aims. Ethical life is autonomous in its own sense. The one can inform the other in particular cases. Neither legislates for the other as a matter of principle. When later neo Kantians broadened their agenda to include ethics and outlook on life under the pressure of Schopenhauer’s popularity, they did not abandon the architecture that made such broadening coherent. The separation of spheres remained in place even as new matter came within view. 

Named figures help to give the separation sharp edges. Eduard Zeller belongs to the formative decade and argued for philosophy as theory of knowledge. Zeller’s sobriety has a concrete implication for the arts. He suggests we treat the analysis of artistic reasons as a philosophical task, but avoid the vice of turning philosophy into a tribune that dictates what the arts must be. Artists will do that! That is the difference between articulating the logic of a practice and smuggling in alien ends. Ethics enters aesthetic debate only when the work’s aim or the context of its reception places a practical question on the table. But pure aesthetic appraisal is only answerable to standards appropriate to its medium and genre. 

Otto Liebmann sharpened the critical line with his call to return to Kant. In polemical terms he used the return as a weapon against remnants of metaphysics, most notably against hypostatised talk of things in themselves. The relevance here is the reminder that aesthetic claims do not need metaphysical props. They need the clarification of their internal standards. Invoking ethics as a universal tribunal over art is another kind of hypostasis. It replaces the question what counts as success in this practice with the question whether the work satisfies a practical norm. That replacement is often question begging. Liebmann’s discipline tells against it. 

Friedrich Albert Lange complicates another potential confusion. He naturalised large parts of the a priori by treating stable features of cognition as products of our organisation, while retaining the thing in itself as a limiting concept that marks our finitude. Lange’s vantage point helps us see why the temptation to moralise aesthetic judgement should be resisted. The limits that mark a practice are not failures to be overcome by importing other aims. They are the terms under which success in that practice is intelligible at all. The more one stresses the plurality of standpoints, the harder it is to justify erasing aesthetic reasons in favour of ethical ones whenever a work provokes strong feeling. The limit concept should discipline us to ask which standpoint we occupy when we judge. 

Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, the leading figures in the Southwestern school, press the normative turn that most directly supports the present argument. Windelband - the philosopher Becket read and extracted many of his own philosophical references - explicitly separates logic from psychology and treats logical laws as rules we ought to follow if we aim at truth. He justifies them teleologically by appeal to the ends of inquiry. Transposed to the aesthetic case, the point is not that artistic judgement is truth apt in the same way as science. It is that the right way to understand standards in a practice is to tie them to the ends internal to that practice. Ethics has ends of its own. It seeks obligations that bind and reasons that oblige in a specific form. Aesthetics has ends of its own. It seeks expressive coherence, intelligibility within a genre, the achievement of effects that can be named and defended, the handling of materials and forms in ways that serve those aims. The difference in ends is the ground of the difference in kinds of reasons. Treating aesthetic judgement as ethical erases that ground. Rickert’s value philosophy is sometimes misread as encouraging moralisation of all domains. Beiser’s contextual reconstruction resists that reading. The neo Kantian defence of the autonomy of the moral sphere depends on keeping its boundaries clear. The same holds for the aesthetic sphere. 

Alois Riehl represents a realist strand that complicates the picture without threatening the boundary. He keeps a foothold in the given and presses the point that subject activity does not generate all content. In the aesthetic domain that reminder becomes the thought that materials resist. Paint is not infinitely pliable. The body has limits in dance or in singing. Instruments impose constraints. Space and time shape possibilities. These are not ethical facts. They are conditions of making and reception that the practice internalises into standards. Riehl’s resistance to easy dissolutions of the given gives aesthetic education a way to keep craft central without metaphysical claims and without moral importation. 

Leonard Nelson’s neo Friesian revival underscores the same practical orientation. His circle gathered scientists and mathematicians while renewing the Friesian project of clarifying the logic of the sciences. The moral here is simple. Aesthetic education should learn from the sciences, not by copying methods, but by copying the discipline of stating aims, rules and limits. This is the opposite of treating art as an ethical sermon. It is the work of stating what counts and why in making and in criticism, given the materials and the genres in question. 

The Marburg school is not in Beiser’s foreground, yet its anti psychologism adds a further guard against moralisation. Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp insisted that the conditions of objectivity are not psychological facts. That insistence can be adapted to the arts by saying that the standards of judgement are not reports of felt response. They are rules that can be brought to speech and justified by their role in achieving the aims of the practice. Again, ethics is not thereby excluded from life. It is removed from a position of undue leverage over aesthetic reasons. Ernst Cassirer, who later reconceived the project as a philosophy of symbolic forms, took the plurality of cultural practices as a premise. On that premise the arts are irreducible ways of synthesising experience. They cannot be translated wholesale into practical reason any more than legal reasoning can be translated wholesale into physics. The prospect of translation exists, but it is work, and it does not abolish difference. 

From these materials we can extract a concrete programme for aesthetic education that protects the disjunct with ethics while staying answerable to public reasons. First, curriculum should be written to the internal aims of the arts being taught. In music, students learn to hear and to produce relations that count under shared criteria, and they learn to defend claims about works by appeal to those criteria. In visual arts, students learn to see compositional relations and material decisions as reasons that bear for and against a judgement. In literature, students learn to argue from textual features and context to interpretations that withstand counterexamples. In film, students learn to connect choices in framing, editing and scoring to effects that can be named and defended. Nowhere in these core tasks is a moral test required. Where a work raises ethical questions by its content or by its conditions of reception, those questions receive their own treatment under practical reason. The separation of tasks supports clarity rather than exclusion.

Second, pedagogy should be designed to stage the ascent from response to reason. A common error in aesthetic classrooms is to invite preference talk and to treat it as an endpoint. The neo Kantian approach treats it as a beginning. The teacher’s job is to bring criteria to the surface, to model how features support claims, and to require learners to revise in the light of counterexample. That is the place where studios and rehearsal rooms show their worth. They give learners experience of how changing a feature changes what can be defended. This discipline builds confidence in the public nature of aesthetic reasons and reduces the pressure to import ethical claims as the only path to seriousness.

Third, assessment must track reasons. Rubrics should name criteria proper to the medium and to the task. Commentary should make explicit where a learner has supplied reasons and where they have not. Moderation should rely on shared exemplars that display how reasons function. This discipline allows schools to be accountable without collapsing the arts into generic performance metrics or moral narratives. It also protects learners from the moralising arbitrariness that sometimes replaces criteria with gestures of ethical approval or disapproval.

Fourth, teacher education should form teachers as stewards of practice specific standards and as facilitators of reason giving. They need deep experience in making and in criticism, as well as training in how novices learn to see and to hear as practitioners do. They also need formation in professional ethics, but as a separate strand. Professional ethics governs fairness in critique, the allocation of credit, and the responsibilities that come with power in classrooms and studios. It does not provide aesthetic standards. Keeping the strands apart allows both to be taught in full strength.

Fifth, platform and tool adoption should be judged by whether a tool helps learners take part in the reasons of the practice. Tools that automate surface features while hiding the inferential structure that connects means to aims should be resisted. Tools that make that structure visible and manipulable can be adopted. This avoids two opposed errors. It avoids pretending that the arts are beyond tools. It avoids inviting moral language to carry the weight of a judgement that should have been carried by standards proper to the medium.

It will be said that such a programme ignores the history in which aesthetic and ethical discourse have often intertwined. Beiser’s narrative, however, gives us the resources to answer this worry without erasing the record. He notes that from the late 1870s the movement broadened beyond narrow epistemology to engage ethics and a general outlook on life. He also notes that neo Kantians remained critics of Kant and used his project as a resource rather than as a cage. This is precisely the attitude one needs when judging the arts in ethically charged circumstances. The boundary between spheres is not a gag order. It is a guide. It tells us which kind of reason is in play at each juncture and prevents the bad habit of treating every serious question as a moral question. It allows a critic to say that a work fails aesthetically under the standards of its practice while also saying that a different work raises ethical concerns that must be argued in another register. It also allows a critic to defend a work aesthetically without thereby endorsing any ethical claim that might be associated with it. The boundary makes articulate life possible in plural institutions.

The contrary view, which insists that aesthetics is ethical as such, should be rejected as a confusion. It either empties the ethical of its special kind of necessity by turning it into mood music for taste, or it empties the aesthetic of its standards by turning it into a mask for moral sentiment. Beiser’s map of neo Kantianism gives us many ways to avoid that mistake. The insistence on limits, the separation of theoretical and practical reason, the turn to methods and presuppositions rather than to foundations, the refusal to turn philosophy into a tribunal over other practices, the pluralism about standpoints, and the late broadening that kept its distinctions, all point in the same direction. Aesthetic education should be rigorous about its own reasons and should keep ethics in its own place. Where the two intersect in life, the intersection can be described and argued without erasing the distinction.

The practical consequence is a more honest and more demanding education. Learners come to see that there are public reasons in the arts and that they can master them. They see that moral questions can be argued with their own resources and that those resources do not decide whether a chord works in context or whether a cut serves the scene. They learn to translate between standpoints rather than to substitute one for another. They learn that disagreement in the arts is disciplined by aims and criteria, not by the loudness of moral rhetoric. They learn that institutions can hold together only if domains do their own work and learn how to speak to one another without annexation.

If one wanted a final historical reminder, it would be the way Beiser describes the victory of the empirical and psychological line over speculative idealism. That victory did not banish ethics or art from philosophy. It changed the way they could be done, by asking first about methods and limits and by refusing the fantasy that one standpoint could legislate for all others. The present argument is a continuation of that change. It is a refusal to surrender the arts either to sentiment or to moralising sermon, and it is a refusal to empty ethics by making it the name for seriousness in general. The arts deserve better, and so does ethics. A neo Kantian philosophy of aesthetic education gives both what they require.