Let us now turn to the question of how art fulfills this humanizing
function and what conditions might undermine it.
- The Central Role of Aesthetic Experience
for Art and Its Future
If art is to put us in touch with our humanity (or our identity as human
beings) and even define it, there must be a particular connection
between a given artifact and the world of human values and history;
there must be some ordered, coherent relation between the two, an order
quite unlike the order used to merely describe the world. The aesthetic
experience which a work of art opens to us is an experience of what Ruth
Lorand, in her analysis of beauty, has well captured with the notion of a
“lawless order.”^21 In order to communicate, the work of art must bring
forth an order, a way in which we can make sense of the abstract realm
of values, of goodness and beauty in particular. Any art that breaks from
the concept of order altogether will not be able to say anything to us, and
will thus endanger the very communicability of art and hence the future
of art. The order, however, cannot unfold in a lawful way, for aesthetic
judgment has to do with the freedom that comes of having an experience
with an object that does not fall under any given concept, but leads us to
search for a new way to describe our experience of that object. Kant cap-
tures this well with his notion of a reflective judgment, which is all about
the free play between the imagination and the understanding. The free
play involved in aesthetic judgment is connected to the sense of law-
lessness involved in aesthetic judgments. Since an aesthetic judgment is
a judgment, there is order involved. When the judgment is made that “x
is beautiful,” the free play of the cognitive faculties (imagination and
understanding) has come to an end, but the production of that judgment
(which is the result of a cognitive order) is the result of a kind of free
play (which is lawless).
The conversation with a work of art evokes a set of feelings, it
engages the mind in a particular way, ordered so that a coherent mean-
ing emerges, a meaning that has affective value. The affective value that
most delights us has to do with the realm of perfection, where we find
that almost holy trinity that has long captivated philosophers and poets:
the true, the good, and the beautiful. In complicated ways, truth, good-
ness, and beauty can serve as regulative ideas for the improvement of
humanity. Of course, works of art can also expose us to ugliness and
evil, and so to the realm of imperfection, but art can even present evil
in a way that is productive to our humanity, cultivating us through such
The Humanizing Function of Art 83