My paper will inquire into the transcendental conditions of possibility of technological design and use based on Kantian conceptualization of art, genius and purposiveness as found in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.
The place and the scope of art in the philosophical tradition
I will begin with a discussion about the role and the scope of art in the philosophical endeavor as developed by Aristotle and Kant. Both Kant and Aristotle divides the domain of human knowledge into theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy and art (see Aristotle, Nicomachean Etics, 1139b and Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:198). What is important from this comparison between Aristotle's and Kant's divisions of philosophical domain is the fact that both take art, techne or Kunst, as an important part, i.e. the third important part, of philosophical inquiry. The way in each of them treats art does not reach the same level of analysis as practical and theoretical philosophy. For Aristotle the term techne refers to all human endeavor that aim at producing artificial works, from forks and carriages to statues and music. For Kant, the scope of art is more or less the same, although there are some important differences. Art is strongly divided between liberal and mechanical art and craftsmanship is excluded from the domain of art. There is nonetheless a different conceptualization of art, that of Bacon and Descartes, that accentuate the mechanical part of the arts. In this case beautiful art is rejected as mere illusion that does not contribute to our capacity of knowing. Although they accentuate the importance of mechanical arts, they seldom offer an autonomous domain for art, similar to Aristotle and Kant, because they view mechanical art as applied science and every philosophical interesting problem that art poses is to be analyzed as a problem of knowledge.
The domain of art in the Critique of the Power of Judgment
When it comes to art, Kant's treatment of it greatly differs from the other two Critiques. The knowledge of the laws of nature and the exercise of freedom are extensively analyzed under the transcendental conditions that make their objects possible. Critique of the Power of Judgment on the other hand fails to take art as its proper and unique object of study. Art properly speaking is dealt with only in few paragraphs of the work, in 12 out of 91 paragraphs. Even here, Kant restricts the scope of the art only to beautiful arts and their production by genius. In the section 43 he pass from natural beauty to art in general only to immediately restrict himself in the next paragraph to beautiful arts. Nevertheless, as we will try to show, the characterization of art and the possible developments of paragraph 43 are important for a proper consideration of the transcendental conditions of technology. In paragraph 43 Kant considers art in general and from this general account we will try to reinterpret the third Critique as being extremely relevant not only to beautiful arts but also to contemporary debates on technology. By analyzing paragraph 43 we will delineate the domain of art in general. Kant draws three distinctions through which the art as a domain is demarcated. He opposes art to nature, science and craft. Considering these distinctions, art may be defined as a playful but skilled human production of artifacts. In the next paragraph Kant restricts to beautiful arts which will be the theme of his following paragraphs. Nevertheless, in his definition of art in general he includes also clock-making, furniture-making and, in general, playful but necessarily skilled production of useful artifacts. His inclusion of clock-making in the domain of art is based on the amount of talent that it requires. To make a clock, Kant implies, requires not only skill and knowledge about mechanics but also a certain amount of talent. We can further equate this talent required for making a clock with the genius required in the production of a work of beautiful art. In the following part of the paper I will deal with this sub-domain of art, the arts for which the term “beautiful art” does not apply, the domain that nowadays bears the name of technology. Kant's main argument in rejecting useful arts, or technology, is based on their extrinsic characteristic of being retributed or aiming at material gainings. But if we consider the intrinsic characteristics implied in the design and use of the artifacts produced by useful arts we will find that technology can become one of the proper subjects for the Critique of the Power of Judgment.
The Purposiveness of Technology
In the third Critique, Kant proposes a distinction that is fruitful for the consideration of technology, the distinction between mechanism and technique. This distinction is link to the concept of purposiveness. This set of concepts is applied by Kant to nature.
The reflecting power of judgment thus proceeds with given appearances, in order to bring them under empirical concepts of determinate natural things, not schematically, but technically, not as it were merely mechanically, like an instrument, but artistically, in accordance with the general but at the same time indeterminate principle of a purposive arrangement of nature in a system, as it were for the benefit of our power of judgment, in the suitability of its particular laws (about which understanding has nothing to say) for the possibility of experience as a system, without which presupposition we could not hope to find our way in a labyrinth of the multiplicity of possible empirical particular laws. Thus the power of judgment itself makes the technique of nature into the principle of its reflection a priori, without however being able to explain this or determine it more precisely or having for this end an objective determining ground for the general concepts of nature (CPJ, 17)
Nonetheless, we can apply this set of concepts to technology. A technological device can be seen primarily only as a mechanism that has no purpose. But as employed into a practice or designed to be used in a practice it acquires a purpose. This purpose is not completely determined by the mechanism of the device, but should be, in Kant terms, a consequence of applying the a priori principle of the power of judgment. In other words, a technological device has no purpose if it is not considered as a work of art, a creation of human agency. And even if it is considered as such, a technological device is primarily considered purposeful without having a specific purpose. Its purposefulness is not something objective but rest entirely on the subjective judgment about its utility. A good example for that are the Asian chopsticks which for an European absolutely ignorant of Asian culture have no specific purpose although they evidently are purposeful creations of human agency. Another example for the necessity of the a priori principle of the power of judgment in considering technology is the telephone whose purposes rest on the intentionality of its designers and users.
On this account, Alexander Graham Bell, who developed the first telephone to aid the hard-of-hearing, counts as a designer but so do later engineers, who adapted telephones for use as a general communication device, and even innovative consumers who use their telephone to listen in on their sleeping children. (Houkes and Vermaas, 2010, 3)
Like nature, technology is, as analyzed by the intellect, nothing else than a mechanism. In order to have a purpose, technology should be considered as a system. Only thus technology become purposeful and could be inserted in a practice. No technological device has a purpose as such. The fact that we take each device as fulfilling a certain purpose is due to social pressure to use a certain device in a certain way and not to intrinsic properties of the device. In Don Ihde’s terms, a device is multistable (Ihde, 1990). The necessary condition for a technological device to be purposeful is the subject’s judgment that it is so which involve the a priori capacity to ascribe a technique to a mechanism. That ascription, be it from designer or from user, involves the free play of understanding, imagination and reason, as I try to show in the next part of my paper.
Free play of understanding, imagination and reason
In analyzing the use and the the design of useful artifacts, Kant's theory of a genius may bring some new insights regarding the role of imagination and practical thinking in employing technological artifacts. As stated earlier, in the production of artifacts is involved a fair amount of talent. This talent is the main characteristic of a genius.
Genius is the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art. Since the talent, as an inborn productive faculty of the artist, itself belongs to nature, this could also be expressed thus: Genius is the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.31 (CPJ, 186)
For Kant, the genius establishes the rule of art by creating the standards of beauty. If we transfer this capacity in the domain of technology, the genius should establish the standards of usefulness. The creative designer and user creates the purposiveness of an artifact. This is one of important insights that Kant's theory can bring to the contemporary debate in the philosophy of technology. The artifact as mechanism receives a new status, a new purpose through the imposition of new rules by the genius. In this context we understand genius not in the romantic tradition of an exceptional man but only as the talent to establish some new rules of use. As in the case of the telephone, its purpose, the rules according to which it is used, is transformed by users and designers. This transformation, as I try to show, is brought about by the free play of understanding, imagination and reason. Consequently I will analyze the role that each of this faculties plays in designing and using technologies.
The design and the use of a technological device requires a fair amount of theoretical knowledge. As Kant states, the creation of work of art is not done solely through imagination.
But it is not inadvisable to recall that in all liberal arts there is nevertheless required something compulsory, or, as it is called, a mechanism, without which the spirit, which must be freed in the art and which alone animates the work, would have no body at all and would entirely evaporate (e.g., in the art of poetry, correctness and richness of diction as well as prosody and meter), since many modern teachers believe that they can best promote a liberal art if they remove all compulsion from it and transform it from labor into mere play. (CPJ, 183)
The understating of the lawfulness of the mechanism that compose the device is crucial for the ability to use it creatively. This understanding is required as a necessary condition in creating the needed mechanism, the mean, for attaining the desired technique, the end. As well, in the case of users they have to know how the device work in order to employ it into new practices.
Another important insight that is derived from Kant's theory is the importance of practical reasoning in the design and the use of artifacts. More than in the case of beautiful art, in technology the ethical thinking is a necessary requirement. The artifacts are made in order to improve human life, and this improvement in necessarily linked to the ideals of good life and the moral principles that are followed. The designer is, conscientiously or not, an ethical designer, a characteristic completely forgotten by the tradition that identify technology with applied science. The importance of ethical dimension of technological design was reaffirmed recently by Bruno Latour and Peter-Paul Verbeek.
By far, the most important characteristic of technological design and use that follows from Kant's work is the free play of imagination that, first, has to inquire into and to create the purpose of a device, second, has to correlate this purpose to the mechanisms that can be employed to attain it, third, has to inquire into the moral principles that has to be served and how to serve them by technological means, and finally has to produce, by itself, an exemplary work of useful art.
Selected Bibliography
Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge University Press.
Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. From Garden to Earth. Indiana University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press.
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2006. „The Morality of Things: A Postphenomenological Inquiry”, în Selinger , Evan (ed.). Postphenomenology. A Critical Companion to Ihde. State University of New York Press.
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2008. „Morality in Design: Design Ethics and the Morality of Technological Artifacts”, în Vermaas, Pieter E., Kroes, Peter, Light, Andrew, Moore, Steven A. Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture. Springer.
