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PARTISAN REVIEW
coincidental with the "autonomous value of the aesthetic," argues for
art-aesthetic value-as an end in itself.
But the question is the extent to which the assumption of the
independence of the aesthetic can be sustained: the nature of the
ground on which the conception of tbe hermetic absoluteness of art
rests. The moment that ground is suspect, cognitive and moral consid–
erations enter into the judgment of taste. They seem more relevant to
art than they did when the subjective universality of the aesthetic
judgment of taste was guaranteed. The ground-"the metaphysical
horizon," as Gadamer calls it-on which the subjective universality of
aesthetic intuition rests, and therefore the independence of art, is "a
teleological order of being." Without the assumption of a teleological
ordering of art, its absoluteness-the autonomy of the aesthetic–
cannot be assumed. The teleological assumption disintegrates the
moment we recognize it as what Kant himself saw it to be, a "trans–
cendental illusion" satisfying the human need for completeness,
reaching beyond experience to an absolute ordering of being. Green–
berg's whole treatment of art-not particularly in his current paper,
but in his practical criticism-is permeated by a teleological approach
to
art, giving it an order which guarantees the absoluteness of his
aesthetic intuitions. He has never comprehended that this order,
seemingly "a universal ontological horizon" for art, is a pragmatic
guideline rather than a logical necessity. In Jamesian terms, it is an
expression of an intense "will to believe" in art even when there is
seemingly no existential reason to believe in it, and when it itself seems
to have no necessary reason for being. Greenberg in effect mutes the
Pascalian wager which underlies-one might even say motivates-his
whole "intuition" of art by a sense of it as a determinate order, credible
because of its universality. But that determinate universality is itself
credible only by reason of the purposiveness of art that it presupposes.
In any case, acknowledgment of the transcendental illusion on
which the assumption of the subjective universality of taste rests
destroys the concept of the autonomy of art, as well as the concept of
aesthetic intuition. The moment the absoluteness orart and aesthetic
judgment
qm
be logically denied, the particularity of works of art
reveal themselves anew, not under the auspices of a teleological
assumption, but through relative contexts and interpretations, relative
descriptions and analyses. Thus, Greenberg's conception of aesthetic
intuition turns out, in practice, to be countercritical, for it stifles
awareness of artistic particularities, and, worse yet, shows itself
to
be
anti-intellectual, for it gives short shrift to every method, however
relati ve, of generating consciousness of art. Taste is anti-intellectual
