Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 243 Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form Peter Gilgen Cornell University Abstract: A central debate in recent posthumanist theory concerns the question of how to regain access to our natural surroundings or, in Quentin Meillassoux’s memorable formulation, “the great outdoors�” Some thinkers propagate a new approach to nature by undoing the Kantian transcendental turn and thus severing the correlation between subject and object, thinking and being� Doubting the viability of this suggestion, others have instead proposed a renewal of aesthetics� In their view, the constitutive intertwinement of thinking and being in aesthetic experience undoes the correlation from within� Against such speculative realist aesthetics, my essay maintains that a minimal difference and thus a correlation between subject and object irreducibly persists even in aesthetic rapture� Could not the great outdoors be conceived in terms of Kantian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s “surroundings,” the objective, but inaccessible totality of the world? Within it, every organism projects its own subjective “environment” that contains all features that are accessible to the subject� The interruption of routines suspends a subject’s habitual reliance on its perception, which is recalibrated in the process� Perhaps we ought to understand the experience of natural beauty, as described by Kant, as widening our human environment in consequence of being touched unexpectedly by entities that we habitually encounter as mere objects in the world� Only in such fleeting moments do we get a sense of the great outdoors that surrounds us� Keywords: environment, natural beauty, aesthetics, posthumanism, speculative realism, Kant … der Rosen Du Gottfried Benn 244 Peter Gilgen A central debate in recent posthumanist theory concerns the question of how to regain access to our natural surroundings or, in Quentin Meillassoux’s memorable formulation, “the great outdoors�” In order to achieve this goal, Meillassoux suggested a new approach to nature by undoing the Kantian transcendental turn and thus severing the correlation between subject and object, thinking and being� Doubting the viability of this program, other speculative realist and object-oriented theorists have instead proposed an expansive renewal of aesthetics� In their view, the correlation of thinking and being is undone from within, as it were, through their constitutive intertwinement in aesthetic experience� Against both Meillassoux’s extreme objectivism and speculative realist aesthetics, this essay maintains that a minimal difference and thus the correlation between subject and object is irreducible� In fact, it is a necessary condition even in the case of aesthetic experience, which in its emphatic sense depends on a minimal space of reflection if it is not simply to be taken as identical with the mere satisfaction of the senses� Many of the claims made in the name of speculative realism resonate with the renewed interest in aesthetics that was a noticeable feature of the nonhuman turn and the rise of posthumanism at the beginning of the third millennium� 1 This revival of aesthetics, unexpected as it was after the theoretical broadside against it in the 1980s and 1990s, 2 marked a fundamentally realist reaction to the constructivism that had become prevalent in the literary humanities in the wake of the linguistic turn� Under the impression of constructivist claims, academic projects frequently had emphasized their own political relevance and emancipatory potential on the basis of the optimistic assumption that whatever was socially constructed could be changed by constructing it differently� 3 For the most part, the intransigence of the material world and the obstinacy of objects were acknowledged merely as obstacles on the way to emancipation� Feminist body criticism and thing theory had been among the earlier paradigms that voiced dissatisfaction with this critical state of affairs, and consequently figured prominently in establishing posthumanist theory� Today, aesthetics has become a central area of research in a number of posthumanist approaches� Occasionally, it is even invoked as a panacea of sorts that promises to resolve, or at least soften, theoretical contradictions as well as long-standing metaphysical disputes about the nature of reality� Inevitably such deployment of aesthetic theory has to reckon with Kant’s substantial and foundational contributions� This poses a particular problem for speculative realism and related object-oriented theories since their foundational gesture - exemplified in Quentin Meillassoux’s influential essay After Finitude - has been a sharp critique of Kantian epistemology in general and of Kant’s so-called “Copernican turn” in particular� Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 245 This turn, the point of departure for transcendental philosophy and numerous varieties of idealism and constructivism in its wake, was brought about by Kant’s dissatisfaction with the lack of discernible progress in the field of metaphysics at a time when mathematics and the natural sciences were making great strides� The reason for the diagnosed metaphysical stagnation, Kant surmised, may well have been the lack of a point of view from which to conduct metaphysical investigations successfully� If a sudden revolution was sufficient to jolt mathematics and the sciences and put them on more solid grounding, Kant argued, the same must be possible in the case of metaphysics� To this end, he proposed a philosophical revolution that in some respects resembled the one Copernicus had brought about� The astronomer had come to the conclusion that if the movement of the heavenly bodies could not be explained convincingly on the assumption that they all revolved around the spectator, he might have better success if he assumed that the stars were actually at rest while the terrestrial observer revolved around them� In the process, the Ptolemaic, geocentric theory, including its infamous epicycles that had become necessary to accommodate the empirical data, eventually gave way to the heliocentric view� Kant identified the naive realist view “that all our knowledge must conform to objects” as the main obstacle that prevented progress in metaphysics� On the realist assumption, “all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have […] ended in failure” (B xvi)� 4 Kant proposed to turn the tables� He surmised that we would have better success if we supposed instead “that objects must conform to our knowledge” (ibid�)� On this assumption, it should be possible “to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given” (ibid�)� The Kantian revolution changed the course of philosophy fundamentally� Henceforth, the epistemological question of how we can know what we know needed to be addressed before one could advance to the traditional topics of metaphysics (ontology)� For the speculative realists, Kant’s revolution committed the original sin of idealism, which proliferated in modern thinking in sundry subjectivist and constructivist forms, all the way to the linguistic turn and beyond� Yet the question of what is to be done in order to mitigate the consequences of the Kantian revolution has found no uniform answer among the different speculative realist, materialist and object-oriented approaches beyond the generally agreed-upon assertion that we must undo transcendentalism at all costs in order to regain access to the reality of which we are a part� The most radical solution is offered by Quentin Meillassoux who announces on the opening pages of After Finitude that he intends to defend a thesis that is “resolutely pre-critical” (3)� It comes in two distinct parts: on the one hand, 246 Peter Gilgen Meillassoux concedes “that the sensible only exists as a subject’s relation to the world” - an uncontroversial and profoundly Kantian claim that serves as the starting point of diverse versions of speculative realism� On the other hand, Meillassoux throws down the gauntlet when claiming “that the mathematizable properties of the object are exempt from the constraints of such a relation, and […] are effectively in the object in a way in which I conceive them, whether I am in relation with this object or not” (3)� The original blueprint of such mathematico-ontological Platonism was provided by Meillassoux’s teacher Alain Badiou, whose thesis concerning the ontological pertinence of Cantor’s set theory is discussed in a later section of After Finitude (103-06), where Badiou’s Being and Event is praised for “us[ing] mathematics itself to effect a liberation from the limits of calculatory reason” (103)� 5 Undergirded by Badiou’s mathematical ontology, the world according to Meillassoux is indifferent to our modes of experiencing it� Evidence for this indifference is provided by the “arche-fossil,” defined by Meillassoux as “materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality […] that is anterior to terrestrial life” (10)� The actual existence of the corresponding entities preceded that of any human observer by hundreds of millions of years� Such ancestral reality, which science can only reconstruct on the basis of the remaining empirical evidence, puts the correlation between the subject’s thinking and the object’s being - the cornerstone of all post-Kantian philosophy, according to Meillassoux - to the test: it is “exposed as an extreme idealism […] incapable of admitting that what science tells us about these occurrences of matter independent of humanity effectively occurred as described by science” (18)� Meillassoux contends that science thus stretches the idealist stranglehold of the correlation to the extreme and finally breaks it completely� As a consequence, speculative thought is about to regain “the great outdoors, the absolute of pre-critical thinkers” (7)� After Finitude is a little book that aims at a big change� It advocates nothing less than a philosophical paradigm shift that would either overturn Kantian transcendentalism or bring it to its radical conclusion, which, to be sure, amounts to the same thing for Meillassoux� He sets his sights on Kant’s theoretical philosophy and, most of all, contests Kant’s Copernican analogy� In his view, the Kantian turn is better understood as a “reversal of the [Copernican] reversal” (119)� It constitutes a veritable “Ptolemaic counter-revolution” (118)� To be sure, Meillassoux is not alone with this criticism� Thus, the eminent physicist and mathematician John D� Barrow contends that adopting Kant’s approach in the physical sciences would indeed have been “a step backwards into the pre-Copernican era in which Man was the focus of all things” (Barrow 89)� In terms not unlike those of Meillassoux’s posthumanist critique, the Cambridge physicist claims that Kant’s idealism assigns to the human mind “a place at the Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 247 focus of the Universe,” whereas modern physicists situate the human being “no longer at the center of their world model” (ibid�)� However, such criticism conveniently forgets that determining the conditions of knowledge and the modern practices of the physical sciences belong to different epistemic domains� 6 Such concerns notwithstanding, Meillassoux maintains that from the transcendental viewpoint, “the condition for the conceivability of physical science consisted in revoking all non-correlational knowledge of this same world” (118)� In his view, however, scientific realism trumps epistemology, and he suggests that Copernicus’s achievement ought to be seen in the wider context of the early modern scientific revolution in the West, whose most momentous consequence was the thoroughgoing mathematization of nature� 7 The Copernican and Galilean revolutions were intimately connected, as their contemporaries recognized� The “decentering which presided over the mathematization of nature, viz�, the decentering of thought relative to the world within the process of knowledge,” writes Meillassoux (115), lay at the bottom of both and has been of far greater consequence than the proverbial decentering of the terrestrial observer� In fact, it was precisely the mathematization of nature that led to the discovery of “the eternal and frightening silence of infinite space” and thus of a “power of persistence and permanence that is completely unaffected by our existence or inexistence” (116)� 8 The philosophical equivalent of Galileo’s mathematizable world is Descartes res extensa, which in Meillassoux’s interpretation “acquires the independence of substance, a world that we can henceforth conceive of as indifferent to everything in it that corresponds to the concrete, organic connection that we forge with it” (115)� The world of modern science is thus completely detached from the human lifeworld� The most consequential achievement of science is “the paradoxical unveiling of thought’s capacity to think what there is whether thought exists or not” - a realization that makes “the thought of thought’s contingency for the world” possible (116)� As a consequence, Meillassoux postulates “a world that is essentially unaffected by whether or not anyone thinks it,” for he assumes that due to the fundamentally “dia-chronic” 9 nature of scientific statements, the question of the observer has become irrelevant (ibid�)� These contentions are debatable for at least two reasons: on the one hand, it is remarkable that Meillassoux’s argument relies exclusively on the early modern paradigm of physical science, approximately from Copernicus to Newton, without so much as a nod to more recent developments (most notably the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics) that have determined research in physics in more recent times, and which have assigned great prominence to the observer� 10 Discussing the challenges of recent discoveries in physics, Werner Heisenberg stresses that in quantum mechanics, “one cannot use the word ‘phenomenon’ 248 Peter Gilgen without at the same time stating with precision, what kind of experimental arrangement [Versuchsanordnung] or means of observation [Beobachtungsmittel] ought to be envisioned” in the respective context, and he points to the impossibility “of objectivizing the result of an observation as it is done in classical physics and in everyday experience�” 11 As Heisenberg states elsewhere, it cannot be decided whether this difficulty is situated at the level of epistemology or ontology� 12 Moreover, contemporary cosmologists as well as thinkers in the tradition of cybernetics have assigned a heightened role to the (human) observer through whom the universe is able “to see itself” (Spencer Brown 105)� 13 In a recent essay, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson - two physicists and a prominent philosopher of mind - put into question the idea “that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it” (n� pag�)� In their view, it is precisely the urge to discover “how reality is in itself” that “not only distorts the truth, but creates a false sense of distance between ourselves and the world�” Moreover, this divide is due to “the Blind Spot, which science itself cannot see� In the Blind Spot sits- experience: - the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception.” From this vantage point, Frank, Gleiser and Thompson take aim at scientific materialism with its two fundamental tenets of objectivism and physicalism, to both of which Meillassoux subscribes uncritically� In regard to scientific objectivism, the authors remind us that “[w]e never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it�” Everything - elementary particles, genes and even the arche-fossil - is “manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations�” The consequence of this state of affairs is not scientific relativism, but rather the insight that not all models and methods of investigation work equally well� Some work better, and this can be tested� Yet such tests cannot “give us nature as it is-in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things�” From this it follows that experience - and thus the subject of an experience, the observer - “is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals�” As far as the problem of physicalism is concerned, Frank, Gleiser and Thompson reject the view that there is nothing but physical reality and “that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents�” In such a picture of the world, life and mind have fallen through the cracks� Moreover, the semantics of the term “physical” has undergone significant changes since the times of Descartes and Galileo� Thus, matter “was once thought to be inert, impenetrable, rigid, and subject only to deterministic and local interactions,” but nowadays we recognize “several fundamental forces, particles that have no mass, quantum indetermina- Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 249 cy, and nonlocal relations�” And these changes may not be the end of it� We can expect further shifts in our concept of physical reality in the future� As Frank, Gleiser and Thompson see it, scientific materialists tend to forget that “[o]bjectivism and physicalism are philosophical ideas, not scientific ones” and that “immediate experience and the world can never be separated�” Meillassoux’s exaltation of the timeless mathematical laws of nature in tandem with his extreme objectivism ignores the problems into which scientific materialism has run in quantum theory - not to mention the vast field of the life sciences� In fact, his speculative materialism is yet another instance of the widespread tendency to understand science as promising absolute knowledge of reality, independent of our interactions with it� Against such doctrinal prejudice, Frank, Gleiser and Thompson defend what they call “the necessity of experience�” 14 In Meillassoux’s telling, philosophy since Kant has been bewitched by the idea that “we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (5)� The primacy of epistemology over ontology in modern philosophy derives from the alleged inevitability of the correlation between subject and object� Meillassoux contends that the correlation can and ought to be broken, so that thinking and being can each stand on their own� 15 As an alternative to Meillassoux’s complete separation of subject and object, a number of speculative realists and object-oriented theorists have proposed a return to ontology, specifically a flat ontology, in which the subject holds no privileged position, but is seen as just one entity among others� The question concerning the subject’s ability to know is replaced by speculations about access between any objects in the universe� Precisely the inevitability of experience - now understood in the extended sense of any type of encounter between different objects in the world - led these theorists to reassess the claims of aesthetics� They do not consider the retreat to a resolutely pre-critical materialist ontology a promising way of addressing reality as independent and outside of human thought� Although similarly dissatisfied with modern philosophy for leaving the inanimate world “by the wayside, treated as little better than dust or rubble” (“Object-Oriented Philosophy” 94), Graham Harman distinguishes his own object-oriented ontology from Meillassoux’s speculative materialism by rejecting the latter’s deployment of natural science to combat correlationism� On the contrary, Harman maintains, modern science is profoundly correlationist and only ever manages to offer us “the thing made dependent on our knowledge and not the thing in its untamed, subterranean reality” (The Quadruple Object 54)� Unlike Meillassoux, Harman does not propose to step out of “the long shadow of Kant” (Guerilla Metaphysics 170) by reversing modern philosophy’s direction� 250 Peter Gilgen On the contrary, he aims at a radical broadening of the transcendental turn and thus a generalization of the gap between the human subject and the thing-initself - a sort of dissolution of the correlation from the inside� In Harman’s account, every object in the world is withdrawn and “translated” only partially in every encounter with another object� The condition of the human observer who only ever has access to phenomena but never to noumena, according to Kant, can thus be extended to all entities in the world: they only ever encounter each other in a limited capacity without being able to get in touch with each other’s withdrawn core or substance� Such an ontological approach amounts to a fundamental aesthetics, for unlike modes of philosophizing that have “aspired to be like science or deductive geometry in attaining knowledge, […] aesthetics relies on the non-literal character of its objects” (Harman, Art and Objects 31)� In other words, object-oriented ontology as aesthetic philosophy recognizes that objects are indeed withdrawn and thus “unparaphraseable in terms of qualities” (ibid�)� Timothy Morton, who came to recognize that his earlier ecological work was quite compatible with Harman’s philosophy, subsequently adopted the language of object-oriented ontology� He has quickly become the foremost proponent of object-oriented ecological thinking� Morton urges the rejection of the concept of “Nature,” not the least “because Nature is correlationist” (164)� If standard ecocriticism has shown too strong an adherence to an essentialized notion of nature as the totality at the bottom of all phenomena, the problem with other forms of speculative realism, according to Morton, is their stern commitment to “Non-Nature,” whether in the form of amorphous matter or flux, which amounts to a “nihilism” of sorts since such theories tend to lose sight of “objects” altogether (ibid�)� In his view, only object-oriented ontology offers an acceptable way out of this impasse� Morton approvingly quotes the following rhetorical question from an essay in which Harman for the first time stated the aims of object-oriented philosophy: “Will philosophy continue to lump together monkeys, tornadoes, diamonds, and oil under the single heading of that-which-lies-outside? ” (“Object-Oriented Philosophy” 95; qtd� in Morton 170)� The implied answer is of course that such philosophical generalizations, undesirable as they may be, may well persist in the absence of a compelling alternative� Intended as the required alternative, Harman’s and Morton’s object thinking may itself be charged with indiscriminate generalization� After all, the basic and endlessly reiterated insight of object-oriented ontology is that “‘objects’ are far more wondrous than we commonly think” because they possess a “dark side one can never know” (Morton 176)� The claim that every object possesses an “inside [that] is radically unavailable” is matched by the refusal of any reduction of (our) complex experience� In theory, object-oriented ontology does not allow heuristic discriminations� One always Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 251 must keep everything in the picture� Such confusio, in keeping with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s inaugural definition of the discipline, 16 would indeed seem to be a singularly fertile field for aesthetics, were it not for the fact that object-oriented philosophy treats aesthetics not only as foundational, but also as coextensive with the entirety of its ontological concerns� In contrast to Harman and Morton, Steven Shaviro offers a more clearly circumscribed speculative realist engagement with aesthetics and especially with Kant’s own momentous contribution to aesthetics, the Critique of the Power of Judgment� He grants that our perceptions “are responding to, and affected by, the actual properties of the actual objects” (Shaviro, Universe 117)� At the same time, he reiterates Kant’s insight that “we do not have unmediated access to these properties” (ibid�)� Our knowledge and even “[t]hinking per se” is inevitably a matter of correlation - not in the sense of a static “correspondence between an internal model and an outside state of affairs,” but as a dynamic “process of continual feedback, response, and adjustment” (118)� On this basis, Shaviro has offered a profound meditation on the posthumanist speculative potential of aesthetics� 17 Shaviro takes exception to Meillassoux’s stark dualism� In his view, the effort to liberate thinking and being by making them mutually independent pushes the “bifurcation of nature” 18 to the extreme� Doubting that such a move is possible or even desirable, Shaviro sees more promise in Alfred North Whitehead’s vision of a world that has mended this bifurcation, and in which a thing is no longer seen as merely an inert, passive object, but as “an actual entity [that] is present in other actual entities�” 19 Such an approach acknowledges that things have “powers, by virtue of which they are able to affect things other than themselves,” and “move us or force us to feel them�” This is why things “elude the correlational schemas in which we would wish to contain them�” 20 Shaviro’s disagreement with Meillassoux is not limited to the technical question of how best to overcome the limitations of correlationism� Unlike some speculative realists, Shaviro never countenances a return to a type of pre-Kantian dogmatic metaphysics as the solution to the correlationist problem� On the contrary, what is needed in his view is precisely a relational or immanent critique of sorts that would unearth contradictions and follow paths not taken in the history of philosophy in order to unsettle established positions and break through the correlationist circle� The aim is ultimately to leave behind all vestiges of idealism and regain a concrete sense of material reality� Unwilling to take on Meillassoux’s and Badiou’s heavy metaphysical baggage, Shaviro finds an ally in Whitehead� He is especially impressed by the latter’s questioning of the prominence of clear and distinct perceptions in modern philosophy, which comes at the expense of “‘perception in the mode of causal 252 Peter Gilgen efficacy,’ or the ‘vague’ (nonrepresentational) way that entities affect and are affected by one another through a process of vector transmission�” 21 Along the same lines, Whitehead also proposed to substitute the term “prehension” for “perception” in order to avoid the notion of exclusively passive reception that is implied by the latter� For Whitehead, a cause does not have “the power to define how it will cause� Nothing has the power to determine how it will matter for others�” 22 These views, we may note, indicate significant potential convergences between Whitehead’s process philosophy and the tradition of systems theory, including such predecessors as Jakob von Uexküll’s biological environmental science� Throughout, Whitehead’s larger aim is the mending of the bifurcation between “the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness�” 23 To this purpose, an account of nature is needed that assigns the same ontological status to subjective manifest images such as “the red glow of the sunset” and the objective concepts of science such as “molecules and electric waves” into which the former can be analyzed� 24 Hence Shaviro’s suggestion that the intended renewal of philosophy must privilege aesthetics� For him, “aesthetics becomes first philosophy” precisely because it offers a plausible way to bypass our habitual perceptions that continuously reproduce the bifurcation of nature� 25 Following Harman, whose speculative theory he presents in some detail and, for the most part, with tacit approval, Shaviro explicitly endorses two tenets that are of central importance for his own aesthetic philosophizing� Both of them are in evidence in a passage that is as brief as it is suggestive� “When objects in the world encounter one another,” Shaviro writes, “the basic mode of their relation is neither theoretical nor practical and neither epistemological nor ethical� Rather, before either of these, every relation among objects is an aesthetic one” (52 f�)� Aesthetic experience is construed as evading all established categories� It is conceived as an encounter with things in the world that is purely affective and free of any sort of determination� As such, it is prereflective and involves - this is Shaviro’s second point - “feeling an object for its own sake, beyond those aspects of it that can be understood or used” (53)� In addition to emphasizing the purity of the aesthetic encounter as well as its remoteness from, and irreducibility to, instrumental reason and the market, the claim that we feel an object “for its own sake” recalls and inflects Kant’s insistence on the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment� Shaviro’s passage thus not only outlines the contours of his entire aesthetic theory, but also displays a deliberate affinity with Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful�” In fact, one easily loses sight of important differences between Kant’s analytic and Shaviro’s more comprehensive adaptation of Kantian aesthetic themes within a framework that relies on Whitehead’s monist gradualism and affect theory� Yet upon closer Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 253 examination, it becomes clear that Shaviro’s adaptation of Kant in the spirit of Whitehead takes hermeneutic liberties� This is nowhere more evident than when Shaviro tacitly disregards some of Kant’s rigorous distinctions and runs roughshod over them� A brief examination of just two of these misreadings will call attention to Shaviro’s fundamental misunderstanding of the Kantian notions of beauty and aesthetic judgment, which has considerable consequences for the viability of his own theory of aisthesis� As a consequence, we will be forced to find a more coherent way to deploy Kant’s insights in posthumanist terms� The first example concerns Shaviro’s confusion of aesthetic ideas and beauty� According to Shaviro, “Kant defines beauty as ‘an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate’” (154)� 26 This leads him to the conclusion that for Kant “beauty involves an immediate excess of sensation: something that stimulates thinking but that cannot be contained in, or expressed by, any particular thought” (ibid�)� The problem with this claim, in addition to its implausibility, is that Kant is not speaking of beauty at all in the quoted passage� Rather, he compares the novel concept of aesthetic ideas to ideas of reason, which are familiar from the first Critique� Neither type of idea can be converted into cognition because in both of them concepts and intuitions are at odds with each other, albeit in distinct ways� An idea of reason - e�g�, “God” - contains “a concept (of the supersensible) for which no suitable intuition can ever be given” (AA 5: 342)� It is something that can be thought, but it is not something within the bounds of sense and thus of our experience� We cannot know the object that is designated by such an idea� As Kant states in no uncertain terms, such an idea is “an indemonstrable concept of reason” (ibid�)� In the case of an aesthetic idea the situation is reversed� This peculiar idea - and not beauty, as Shaviro would have us believe - is defined by Kant as “an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate” (ibid�)� It is an “inexponible representation of the imagination,” which is to say that the understanding, “by means of its concepts, never attains to the complete inner intuition that the imagination has and connects with a given representation” (AA 5: 342f�; translation modified)� The reference to genius as “the faculty of aesthetic ideas” in the following paragraph makes clear that the context of Kant’s discussion is art� Works of art, especially poetry, exhibit aesthetic ideas, 27 which exceed and therefore cannot be translated into concepts of the understanding� Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful,” which primarily deals with natural beauty, includes but a single mention of ideas in § 17, where Kant discusses “the ideal of beauty�” This ideal is linked to the human image and moral vocation� In contrast, an “ideal of beautiful flowers” - and, in fact, of natural beauty tout court - “can- 254 Peter Gilgen not be conceived” (AA 5: 233)� Shaviro’s conflation of aesthetic ideas and beauty is thus not supported by Kant’s argument� The point is not to dismiss Shaviro’s reading of Kant as shoddy, but to stress that his tacit transfer of the definition of aesthetic ideas to beauty has the most un-Kantian consequences of reducing the latter to pure intuition and calibrating aesthetics to the taste of the senses� The second example of Shaviro’s willful reading of some of Kant’s more important distinctions picks up where the first one left off� The distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable is operative throughout Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment and is, in fact, foundational for any such critique� Yet when it comes to the difference between the taste of reflection and the taste of the senses, Shaviro’s account is inconsistent at best� On the one hand, he wishes to assign a critical function to aesthetics� “The beautiful is not anything like […] an individual (or consumer) ‘preference,’” he writes after having explained that, according to Kant, the beautiful must be distinguished from the agreeable (149)� However, this agreement does not last long� The more Shaviro attempts to bring Kantian aesthetic judgment in line with Whitehead’s comprehensive notion of “feeling,” the more he is forced to erase the boundary between the taste of reflection and the taste of the senses - a boundary without which there is no aesthetic theory to speak of� In the process, aesthetic judgment gives way to “aesthetic feelings” (153) and, as we saw above, beauty is premised on “an immediate excess of sensation” (154)� Occurring “without phenomenological intentionality or ‘aboutness,’” Shaviro’s aesthetic encounter is ultimately predicated on prereflective affects (153)� The fundamental distinction that determines Kant’s project of a “critique of aesthetic judgment” - namely, the distinction between the “merely agreeable” and the “beautiful” - hinges on the precise relation between feeling and judgment� A clarification of this relation was necessary since Kant’s novel conception of aesthetic judgment on the basis of a transcendental critique had to contend with the aesthetic empiricism of such thinkers as Burke and Diderot, and thus the subjectivism of the purely agreeable� Shaviro’s levelling of Kant’s distinction has the effect of stripping aesthetic judgment of its claim to subjectively universal validity in favor of the pure subjectivism of qualia and the senses - a consequence that becomes apparent in Shaviro’s declared aim of overcoming the division between subject and object in strictly subjective affective terms� But if pure, primordial affectivity determines all taste, the space of reflection between the subject and the object that is judged beautiful collapses� If the historical situation in the late 18th century required a differentiation between aesthetic, moral, and cognitive judgements, 28 the distinction that is most pertinent from the point of view of Kant’s systematic aims is drawn between the beautiful and the agreeable, that is, the taste of reflection and the taste of Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 255 the senses� For only if this distinction can be established convincingly - a point that to this day has been frequently put into question by critics of Kant - can there be aesthetic judgment� In contrast to Shaviro’s binary distinction between the cognitive regime, under which he groups all reasoning and judging, and a more fundamental level of prereflective experience that includes affect and feeling, Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” traces the contours of a third space, in which a type of judgment takes place that is neither objective as in the case of cognition, nor simply coincides with sensation, which would be equivalent to being no judgment at all� The “expectation of a universal assent” (AA 5: 240) that is contained in the aesthetic judgment requires that one observe one’s own observations� This reflection is free of interest and cognitive constraints� In terms of communication, the judgment “x is beautiful” would thus amount to the demand to suspend the objectivity of the object and instead “observe one’s own mode of observation under the conditions of this suspension and thus without firm conceptual determinations” (Gilgen, “Schlüssel” 61)� It is thus not simply the physical object as such that keeps the aesthetic communication going� Rather, the object’s peculiar “appellative character” (ibid�) distinguishes the aesthetic situation� In Kant’s original wording, the judging subject’s expectation of universal assent amounts to more than just an expectation: it is an imposition (Zumutung) on all others� In a manner of speaking, the judging subject is similarly imposed upon - namely, by the irresistible appeal of the beautiful object, an appeal that unfolds its full potential only in the second-order reflection it instigates, and which cannot be reduced to the mere gratification of the senses� Those who are, in Kant’s words, “intent only on enjoyment” are too closely attached to the object of their desire� Their satisfaction “presupposes not a mere judgment about [an object] but the relation of its existence to [the subject’s] state insofar as it is affected by such an object [durch ein solches Objekt affiziert wird]” (AA 5: 207)� Kant thus goes to great lengths when differentiating aesthetic judgment from merely being affected by an object� Those who relish the latter, as Kant puts it succinctly, “put themselves above all judging” (AA 5: 207)� To be sure, experiencing beauty is irreducibly tied to the body� For this reason, Kant is critical of “intellectual beauty or sublimity” because they are “kinds of aesthetic representation that would not be found in us at all if we were simply pure intelligences” (AA 5: 271)� Critiques of Kant’s conception of aesthetic pleasure “as completely desensualized” are mistaken� 29 Experiences that are not accompanied by bodily awareness cannot be called “aesthetic” in the Kantian sense� Both the body and the mind play an irreducible role in a genuine aesthetic experience� Kant never wavers on this point� 256 Peter Gilgen Early on in The Universe of Things, Shaviro makes it clear that we are not suffering from too few connections with things in the world� Today, “our fundamental condition is one of ubiquitous and inescapable connections� We are continually beset by relations, smothered and suffocated by them,” most of all by “the overcodings of ubiquitous flows of capital” (33)� Under such circumstances, the actual challenge is to find “a space that is open for decision” (34) and not already under the spell of relentless consumerism� Our examination of aesthetic pleasures indicates that such a space, above all, would have to be conducive to aesthetic judgment� Eli Friedlander has suggested that Kantian formalism ought not to be understood primarily as a matter of the spatio-temporal form of the object� In his reading, the “space of form” opens between the subject and the object in an aesthetic encounter� This much, as Friedlander shows, can be derived from the third moment of Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful,” in which judgments of taste are examined in regard to “the relation of the ends [Zwecke] that are taken into consideration in them” (AA 5: 219)� Unlike its determining counterpart, reflecting judgment does not subsume the particular object under a universal concept� Rather, it aims at finding the terms that capture the object in its particularity (cf� AA 5: 179)� This means, as Friedlander puts it, that we want to do more than just say something right: “we feel the demand to account for that singularity just right in words, as though the concepts deployed strive to come together as a proper name” (30)� Rather than attempting to pin down beauty conceptually, we “allow it to grow on us by deploying reflection that is true to singularity” (31)� It is important to distinguish the opening of the space of form from the receptivity of the senses� In an aesthetic encounter, our active engagement with the object through the free play of our cognitive powers creates this space� As Friedlander points out, the space of form is actually opened by the movement of the mind, yet at the same time it also depends on the object� “We have in effect,” he concludes, “the formation of a space which is neither wholly in the mind nor wholly in the object but rather […] a space in which the capacity of the mind is identified by the involvement with the object and the form of the object revealed by the movement of the mind” (39)� In short, the object of our contemplation must possess some suitable structure or composition in order to keep our attention preoccupied� It must lend itself to the free play of our cognitive powers, the imagination and understanding, which provides the determining ground of the aesthetic judgment� This “formal purposiveness” of the object, as Kant calls it (AA 5: 222), creates the necessary reflective distance for the space of form to open� In contrast, mere “charms” (Reize) provide no such distance� They are agreeable, and as such, they are quickly absorbed and consumed� 30 Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 257 On what basis, then, can Kant’s free play without a concept actually unfold? There is no agreement in the vast scholarship on this question� Paul Guyer groups the different interpretations that have been suggested under three headings: “precognitive,” “multicognitive,” and “metacognitive” (147)� To be sure, all three interpretations have some support in Kant’s text� The precognitive reading - of which Shaviro provides a forceful example - stresses that the harmony of the imagination and understanding comes about when the subjective conditions of cognition are satisfied, but no “subsumption of the representations of an object under a determinate concept” takes place (148)� The multicognitive reading interprets the harmony of the cognitive powers as “a condition in which it seems to us as if we are simultaneously cognizing the object under a number of different concepts” (ibid�)� Guyer argues that neither of these readings, common as they are among readers of Kant, provides a complete and sufficient definition of Kant’s free play� They both fail to explain how a judgment of beauty about a particular object may be made without a determinate concept� To remedy this fundamental shortcoming, Guyer proposes a third, metacognitive interpretation of Kantian free play� He acknowledges that “for Kant all consciousness of an object must involve its subsumption under some determinate concept” (149)� We must be able to state which object we find beautiful when making an aesthetic judgment� It is “the you of the roses,” to use the poet Gottfried Benn’s felicitous formulation, that addresses us and that we address in turn, not some amorphous material substrate at the bottom of all phenomena� Although Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s theory of aesthetic behavior frequently parts company with Kant, he agrees on this premise� Schaeffer maintains that all our basic experiences, including aesthetic ones, “are always categorically specified�” Whatever else they may be, they are always also “acts of identification” and thus involve our cognitive powers (106)� Shaviro’s aesthetic theory, in contrast, is resolutely precognitive� 31 As a consequence, it levels the free play of the cognitive powers and cannot provide a sufficient criterion to distinguish the experience of beauty from merely agreeable affects� This is a major shortcoming, considering the foundational role that aesthetics plays for him and others intent on formulating a version of speculative realism or object-oriented thinking that provides a viable alternative to Meillassoux’s relentlessly “eliminativist” approach� 32 This flaw is no accident� The framework of speculative realism, for which the problem of correlationism is paramount, necessarily excludes the space of form (as well as Shaviro’s own hoped-for “space that is open for decision”)� Logically, there are only two ways of overcoming correlationism: either through complete elimination of the correlation, as in Meillassoux, or through the erasure of the boundary between subject and object that undoes the bifurcation of nature that Whitehead 258 Peter Gilgen diagnosed� As Shaviro points out, the former approach ultimately leads to “a stark dualism of an absolute thought without being and a being entirely devoid of thought” and thus merely reaffirms the bifurcation (113 f�)� But neither can Shaviro’s adaptation of Whitehead’s comprehensive aisthesis avoid levelling the space of form� Experiences of beauty as described by Kant are irreducibly correlationist, precisely because a certain reflective distance is necessary for the emergence of the required space of form� In Whitehead’s and Shaviro’s accounts, the aesthetic judgment has tacitly been absorbed by aesthetic contact, which is said to happen “on a level beneath the threshold of conscious perception or beyond its capacities to recognize or relate” (Shaviro 148)� The point about beauty is not that there are some mystical moments when human observers forget themselves and unconsciously slip into modes of interacting with the world that lie “on the hither side of conscious perception” (Gilgen, “Intimations” 137)� 33 The experience of beauty is not reducible to a mere affect below the threshold of conscious perception� It is not precognitive in its totality� Rather, the experience of beauty “arises in a moment of encounter that momentarily suspends the organization of our perception�” In other words, it lies “on the far side of everyday perception” (138)� Shaviro is quite right when pointing out that aesthetic experience cannot be enlisted without further qualifications in the diverse projects of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology� After all, such experience is of necessity asymmetrical, for it is “posed in terms of a subject” that encounters objects merely as “a world of experiencings” (63)� Yet for no less an aesthetic theorist than Adorno the beauty of nature, although dependent on the subject’s receptivity, is precisely “not reducible to the subject,” but “points to the primacy of the object in subjective experience,” without which there would be no beauty at all (Adorno 71)� For Shaviro, however, the consequence of the stated asymmetry is his commitment to Whitehead’s gradualism and, more generally, the orientation of speculative posthumanism, when he suggests that we rather should “be open to the prospect that ‘having-experience’ is already intrinsic to all existing actual entities” (64)� In his view, the mere being-acted-upon or being-affected by other entities qualifies as “having-experience�” Consequently, the status of subject-of-an-experience is conferred to any entity that is acted upon by another, and all entities in the world are considered conscious in a rudimentary sense� From the viewpoint of such panpsychism, correlationism appears as a pseudo-problem� For, as Shaviro points out, “only when our experience has been sundered in two,” does the “need for a correlational structure in order to put it back together again” arise (65)� The bifurcation of nature, its division into subject and object, is the primary problem, of which the correlation between Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 259 our thinking and the things in the world is the putative solution� In contrast, panpsychism eliminates the problem before it even arises� 34 As much as Meillassoux, albeit for different reasons, Shaviro rejects Kant’s transcendental solution and calls it a “critical sleight of hand” that mainly “reinforce[s] the solipsistic primacy of thought thinking only about itself” and keeps us barred from the “great outdoors” (66)� However, as our argument has shown, no deeper understanding of our ecological being-in-the-world is gained by denigrating our natural perceptional limits and thinking of them merely in terms of an imprisonment rather than as our windows on that world, the enabling perceptual frames that allow us to make sense of what we perceive� After all, as Mary Midgley remarks, “we do see rivers and trees, not just impenetrable sense-data” (278)� Whereas the mathematically oriented speculative realists, such as Meillassoux, may be willing to bite the bullet and thus end up in a very abstract and grey world indeed, their aesthetically oriented peers, such as Shaviro and Harman, have a hard time explaining why a certain “objective” layer of reality - namely the one that contains and is articulated in terms of rivers and trees - is far more prominent in our experience of the world than the dance of subatomic particles, let alone addressing the question whether such distinct epistemic regions can be integrated in one unified metaphysics� Perhaps it is better to think of Meillassoux’s “great outdoors” as the equivalent of what the biologist and idiosyncratic Kantian Jakob von Uexküll called the “surroundings” (Umgebung), the objective totality of the world that encompasses all organisms, but as such remains inaccessible to any subject-in-the-world� In contradistinction to the unbounded inclusiveness of our “surroundings,” Uexküll proposes the term “environment” (Umwelt) for the specific perceptual “bubble” that envelops every organism and “contains all the features accessible to the subject” (43)� Uexküll draws a distinction between the “search image” and the actual “perception image” of a certain object in the world that may attract the subject’s attention� 35 If there are discrepancies between the two - for instance when a familiar object has been replaced by a comparable but different one - the perception image is “wipe[d] out” by the search image (114)� Only the interruption of routines due to a noticeable discrepancy between search image and perception image suspends the subject’s habitual reliance on the accuracy of the search image and draws renewed attention to the perception image: what is actually there? More often than not, as Uexküll points out, we do not “search for a certain object with a unique perception image,” but “for an object that corresponds to a certain effect image” (117)� If we would like to sit down, we usually are not looking for any chair in particular, but for any kind of seating� In such cases, no determinate “search image” but merely a vaguer “search tone” is involved 260 Peter Gilgen (ibid�)� Uexküll suggests that different moods can be defined as different “search tones” - that is, specific contextual dispositions towards one’s surroundings� To be sure, such tones or dispositions involve a particular orientation or directedness towards the subject’s surroundings, as the qualifier “search” in their label indicates� The features and objects in one’s surroundings are never perceived as such, as long as one’s perception is guided by a particular “search tone�” In this way, every organism accomplishes the projection of its own environment� It is a specific evolutionary achievement� The environments of primitive organisms, such as the paramecium, are impoverished in comparison with those of higher animals� They contain a much smaller number of “search tones” and are hardly amenable to expansion� This is true not only of unicellular organisms but even of such animals as the tick, the famous opening example of Uexküll’s book� Against Meillassoux’s anti-Kantian eliminativism and Shaviro’s and Harman’s boundless generalization of aesthetic contact - the two extremes of object-oriented theorizing - I would like to suggest a more modest and also more precise Uexküllian reading of Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment� In this reading, the significance of Kant’s experience of natural beauty lies in the possibility of widening our human environment, our circle of concern, as a consequence of being touched unexpectedly by entities that we habitually encounter as mere objects in the world or simply do not see as long as they have no direct relevance in our particular environments� The touch in question is of a different quality than the amorphous material resistance of the world that occasionally presses in on us and thwarts our intentions� Within the aesthetic space of form an encounter takes place: the beautiful song of a nightingale affects us; the unexpected beauty of a rose strikes us� Such experiences bring about a momentary detachment from our routines� In keeping with Adorno, natural beauty may thus be conceived as “the trace of the nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity” (73)� Such eye-opening experiences always come as a surprise� We cannot plan for them� Although we may search out places and events that are likely to generate aesthetic opportunities, the experience of beauty is not a matter of active pursuit, nor of passive waiting, but of being ready at the right moment and letting it happen� It exceeds the bounds of our environment and our language - except for the fact that we have the name “beauty” at our disposal to designate such moments of unexpected transcendence or excess� 36 In other words, whenever we experience beauty it is as if a crack had opened in the bubble that is our habitual environment� That’s where the light gets in� In such exceptional moments, our world stands illuminated� It appears in a different light� Once the space of form draws us in, our mood and our attunement to the world are intensified, and our awareness of them is heightened� That is what experiencing beauty means� We are in the thrall of beauty, and the object that Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 261 attracts our attention addresses us as an unassimilable other, rather than the mere target of our actions and reflections� We are called upon and captivated by the beauty of particular things and events in the world, and in such moments, short-lived as they are, we can imagine a way of being in the world that exceeds our habitual ways of living and eschews the deadening routines that reinforce the dominant ecological and political arrangements� This aesthetic opening of the human is no mere inflection of, or addition to, an existing concept� Rather, it marks a fundamental human potentiality: an historical possibility, a development in time, a certain malleability that exceeds the present bounds of human existence at any given moment� The experience of natural beauty points to a greater range of possibilities of being-in-the-world than the ones that are realized in our actual lifeworld� Consequently, beauty also puts into question an impoverished and narrow account of human experience premised exclusively on cognition, calculation, and consumption� The truly posthumanist potential of Kantian natural beauty consists in awakening and enlivening our mental powers, which have been lulled and blunted in the execution of everyday routines� We are called to respond to the beauty of nature with a kind of judgment that cannot be defined in strictly objective, narrowly epistemological terms� The touch of beauty sets our cognitive powers on high alert at a moment’s notice� On such fleeting occasions, we catch a glimpse of a far richer and infinitely variegated world and get a sense of the great outdoors - the abundance of nature that surrounds and exceeds our environments� Notes I would like to thank Carsten Strathausen, Johannes Wankhammer, and Melissa Zinkin for their useful suggestions and critical questions that have greatly improved this essay� 1 In general, “posthuman” and “posthumanism” have become the comprehensive terms to refer to critical approaches that put into question human exceptionalism and pay close attention to the ontology of all kinds of objects, including animals, plants, nonorganic systems, machines, cyborgs, ecosystems, the environment and such hard-to-grasp distributed or hyperobjects as the climate and the natural environment at large� However, as Richard Gruisin has pointed out, speaking about the nonhuman as opposed to the posthuman turn has the advantage of not being committed to an implicit teleology, “in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman, after or beyond the human” (see Gruisin ix)� Regardless, “posthuman” and “posthumanism” have by now established themselves as the critical terms of choice� 262 Peter Gilgen 2 Aesthetics was rejected as part and parcel of the ideological apparatus that undergirds a distinctly modern hegemonic technology of power� At one end of the theoretical spectrum, aesthetics was chastised for uncritically propagating phenomenality without scrutinizing its textual material constitution (de Man); at the other end, it was unmasked as a compensatory strategy that hides social differentiations and class antagonisms (Eagleton, Bourdieu)� 3 As Rebekah Sheldon puts it: “Against the racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia justified through recourse to an authorizing and law-giving nature, we do the good work of unveiling its construction” (197)� 4 All references to Kant are by volume and page to the Akademieausgabe (AA), with the exception of the Critique of Pure Reason, where the page numbers of the A (first) and B (second) editions are cited� The multi-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant contains page references to the Akademieausgabe, except in the case of the Critique of Pure Reason, where the A and B editions are cited in the margins� 5 For a forceful critique of Badiou’s attempt to derive an ontology and a politics from set theory see Ricardo L� Nirenberg and David Nirenberg, who write: “Alain Badiou calls himself a Platonist and proclaims the revolutionary political power of his philosophy of numbers� […] We can embrace the politics if we so wish� But we should not confuse this choice with mathematics, nor can we call it philosophy” (612)� I thank Carsten Strathausen for bringing this review to my attention� 6 In particular, we should not forget that Kant distinguishes the transcendental from the empirical level� Transcendental idealism does by no means entail empirical idealism� On the contrary, for Kant it is entirely compatible with empirical realism (in both scientific and ordinary experience), as Henry E� Allison shows� 7 This understanding of early modern science and its deeper philosophical impact is neither new nor particularly controversial� See, e�g�, Husserl and Koyré� Meillassoux calls the latter “indispensable” (136, note 1), whereas Husserlian phenomenology is treated rather superficially as a further stage of “correlationism” that attempts to solve the problem of the “dia-chronicity of scientific discourse” simply by “eternaliz[ing] the correlation,” which is to say, by its “eternalization of the transcendental ego” (122)� 8 The pathos of this passage is curiously reminiscent of Pascal, who is, however, not mentioned at all in After Finitude. 9 When Meillassoux speaks of “dia-chronicity,” he has in mind the disconnect that characterizes “statements about events that are anterior or ulterior to every terrestrial-relation-to-the-world” (112) - events that occurred in times and places that exceed the human presence in the universe� His most Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 263 elaborate example is the “arche-fossil�” Meillassoux believes that all correlationist philosophy founders on that rock� 10 Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything,” is of course correct when pointing out that Heisenberg’s observer is “not a subject per se, but a measuring device involving photons or electrons (or whatever)” and that in the process of observing or measuring “one aspect [namely, either the position or momentum] of the observed is occluded” (180)� Yet, as Frank, Gleiser and Thompson point out, the results of such measuring procedures are “our measurements, models and manipulations” (emphasis added)� 11 Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze 127 (all translations from Heisenberg are my own)� 12 See Heisenberg, Physik und Philosophie 32� 13 The calculus of form begins with the injunction “draw a distinction” (3), which, as Spencer Brown points out, could be equally well expressed as “let there be a distinction” (84)� Everything else follows from this initial “cut” that divides the world “into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen” (105)� We therefore “cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order […] to see itself” (85) - which is to say, to see itself through the eyes of an observer, who is “made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes” (ibid�), but is nonetheless distinct from that which she observes insofar as she draws a distinction� Spencer Brown’s calculus strongly influenced second-order cybernetics and systems theory -both decidedly constructivist theories that reject the ontological realism propagated by Meillassoux and other speculative realists� Along similar lines, Frank, Gleiser and Thompson make their case for “a new scientific culture, in which we see ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding” (n� pag�)� 14 Frank, Gleiser and Thompson provide a concise description of how the scientific method works that stands in marked contrast to Meillassoux’s scientism: “First, we set aside aspects of human experience on which we can’t always agree, such as how things look or taste or feel� Second, using mathematics and logic, we construct abstract, formal models that we treat as stable objects of public consensus� Third, we intervene in the course of events by isolating and controlling things that we can perceive and manipulate� Fourth, we use these abstract models and concrete interventions to calculate future events� Fifth, we check these predicted events against our perceptions�” In their view, the problem arises “when we start to believe that this method gives us access to unvarnished reality� But experience is present at every step� Scientific models must be pulled out from observations, often mediated by our complex scientific equipment� They are idealisations, not actual things in the world�” 264 Peter Gilgen 15 It should be said, that Meillassoux distinguishes between the correlation of subject and object and the one between thinking and being� It is the latter that is the “more originary,” which is the reason why a mere critique of representation does not break decisively with correlationism (8)� However, this distinction is meaningful only if direct access to being outside the correlation can be established� To be sure, Meillassoux’s idiosyncratic understanding of science and especially its peculiar temporality, which via his argument concerning the “arche-fossil” is declared to be independent of consciousness, does nothing of the sort� 16 See esp� § 7 of Aesthetica, Baumgarten 4� 17 Shaviro’s engagement with aesthetics spans his two books Without Criteria and The Universe of Things. The latter includes a complex concluding meditation on “aisthesis” and will be at the center of my reading� All further references to this book will be indicated parenthetically� 18 Whitehead introduces this term in The Concept of Nature 30f� 19 Shaviro 8, quotes Whitehead, Process and Reality 49f� 20 Shaviro 8, refers to Whitehead, Process and Reality 57-59 here� It is noticeable that the recourse to affect bundles many of Shaviro’s references to, and borrowings from, affect theory in both Without Criteria and The Universe of Things� Moreover, his insistence on the specific powers of things is also reminiscent of Bennett’s meditation on “thing power,” with which Shaviro engages in passing� 21 Shaviro 28, summarizes and quotes a longer argument in Whitehead’s Process and Reality, esp� 61-70 and 120-22� It also should be noted that the term “vector transmission” is borrowed from epidemiology and indicates further affinities of Shaviro’s thinking with Bennett’s vital materialism� 22 As has been pointed out by Isabelle Stengers 40, quoted by Shaviro 38� 23 The Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena, Wilfrid Sellars’s distinction between “manifest image” and the “scientific image,” and the traditional distinction between secondary and primary qualities are all examples of the “bifurcation of nature” that Shaviro, following Whitehead, hopes to remedy (1 f�)� 24 Whitehead, The Concept of Nature 29, quoted by Shaviro 2� 25 Harman, “On Vicarious Causation” 205� This fundamental tenet of Harman can be found in different iterations in many of his publications� Shaviro quotes Harman’s pithy statement repeatedly in The Universe of Things (13, 42, 53), not without offering his own justification of aesthetics as prima philosophia� 26 The Kant passage is from AA 5: 342� Natural Beauty: From Speculative Realism to Kantian Form 265 27 As Kant puts it: “it is really the art of poetry in which the faculty of aesthetic ideas can reveal itself in its full measure” (AA 5: 314)� 28 On this differentiation see Guyer, “Kant on the Purity of the Ugly” 147-51� 29 Schott 150� A similar, widely influential critique that mainly targets Kantian “disinterestedness” in opposition to “the body” is voiced by Eagleton� 30 See Kant’s discussion in §§ 13 and 14 (AA 5: 223-26)� 31 To be sure, some of his descriptions of aesthetic experience would also lend themselves to a multicognitive interpretation� 32 The term was proposed by Shaviro 91� 33 Compare Shaviro, who insists that aesthetics “must be situated before - or better, on the hither side - of knowledge” (148)� 34 Shaviro discusses the merits and, as he sees it, inevitability of panpsychism at length in chapters 4 and 5 of The Universe of Things. 35 See esp� the chapter “Search Image and Search Tone” (113-18)� 36 This is one of the reasons why the grammatical form of aesthetic judgments calls for an explanation, as Schaeffer contends (159)� Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� Aesthetic Theory� Ed� and trans� Robert Hullot-Kentor� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997� Allison, Henry E� Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Introduction and Defense� New Haven: Yale UP, 1983� Badiou, Alain� Being and Event. 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