Correlationist Kitsch

Here’s a post that some people won’t like, but others will really enjoy.

Kant was a very great philosopher. My current loose ranking goes like this: 1. Plato, 2. Aristotle, 3. Kant, 4. Leibniz, 5. Hegel. (Most people would have Hegel ahead of Leibniz and might not have Leibniz anywhere near the top 5. But let’s not return to this topic now.)

To repeat, Kant was a very great philosopher.

And by the same token, the great painters of the Italian Renaissance were very great painters. But that does not mean that painting was destined forever to continue the pursuit of illusionistic, three-dimensional, perspectival painting. There are a couple of obvious reasons for this.

1. A new technology appeared from outside painting itself (namely, photography) that took away much of the practical pressure for creating illusionistic portrayals of real objects using paint.

2. More generally, any style or method in any field eventually loses its innovative suppleness and degenerates into the ritualistic obedience to codified rules. The results are increasingly hollow, decadent, and academic to the point of Kitsch.

If you were a painter of real taste beginning in around 1870, you wouldn’t have wanted to paint naked Venus lying on the waves with rosy-cheeked cherubs flying overhead. You would have been interested in Manet, the Impressionists, then Van Gogh and Cézanne. You would have followed the Matisse/Picasso rivalry with interest.

To risk an analogy here that might really piss a few people off, I think the Kant/German Idealism sequence is in deep danger of becoming the Academic Painting of our time.

Do you want to spend your career writing the philosophical equivalent of the image below? Kant never painted like this, but Kantians often do. It’s time to move on.