Nature and Chaos: One in the Same?

In taking up the subject of philosophical taste as a capacity to judge the beautiful, I find it altogether difficult to part ways from a Kantian perspective. But as the case with almost all of Kant’s philosophy, you’re enticed by his philosophy as much as you are repulsed. Granted his examples (particularly that in art) are meager and lacking in any real substance, but he compensates so well through his thorough explanations that read more scientific than they do philosophical. I don’t mean “scientific” in actual sense, but rather from Kant’s astute, methodical observations of “nature” that characterize his philosophy. The mere fact that he was able to publish three volumes on the subject philosophy is symbolic enough of his immense understanding the human mind. I mean, whether you disagree with him or not, the fact remains how he singlehandedly revolutionized modern philosophy – undoubtedly so, too.

The more I trek through the Third Critique, the more I realize how influential – to an almost inescapable degree – his philosophy has been even amidst those hailed as the more contemporary of thinkers. Such is evidenced is our reading of What is Philosophy by Deleuze and Guattari. The most sticking similarity I’ve come to find between Kantian philosophy and D&G’s distinction between the three modes of thinking lies is found in their respective understanding of art. In particular, the similarity between nature and chaos. For Kant, nature is our apparatus for understanding everything that “exist” in time and space. All things sensible come from nature and our intuitions are a product of nature’s being, more or less, constantly upon us. In application to aesthetics, nature is where we find/discover beauty. The simple pleasures and pains which arise from nature presenting itself to us thus become the basis for our “liking” of beauty and moreover ground the subjectivity of our empirical encounter with nature. What we call beautiful, therefore, derives from our “disinterested” – perhaps better phrased “neutral”—pleasure which nature invokes from us. Our capacity for making this pleasure known is called taste, and everyone has taste. The artist, then, to whom nature has given a certain, ability, skill, or talent (denoted as genius), is the one who can effectively communicate taste through means of nature.

The same is true of the aesthetic figure in art. In art’s struggle with chaos (nature?), at a certain moment it is able to extract from chaos, in the form of a chaoid compound, a pure sensation that is able is capable of standing up on its own. The astonishing similarity I find between Kant’s imagination, where nature presents itself to us via the senses, and D&G’s understanding of art is that way in which both extract from the world private sensations that can be communicated as something universal. In this way chaos and nature are one in the same. They both inexplicably yield sensations to us which that we the capable of communicating to the world via art. Thus, I honestly think you’re right, Austin, the aesthetic figure is to chaos as the genius is to nature. So it seems, at least.

This is Genius: http://www.nowness.com/day/2011/3/18/1371/sebastian--embody