Kant and the Power of Imagination

K A N T A N D TH E P O W E R O F I M A G I N A T I O N

In this book Jane Kneller focusses on the role of imagination as a creative power in Kant’s aesthetics and in his overall philosophical enterprise. She analyzes Kant’s account of imaginative freedom and the relation between imaginative free play and human social and moral development, showing various ways in which his aesthetics of disinterested reflection explains moral interests. She situates these aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory within the context of German aesthetics of the eighteenth century, arguing that his contribution is a bridge between early theories of aesthetic moral education and the early Romanticism of the last decade of that century. In so doing, her book brings the two most important German philosophers of Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kant and Novalis, into dialog. The book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in both Kant studies and German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jane Kneller is Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. She is editor and translator of Novalis: Fichte Studies (2003) in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series.

KANT AND THE POWER OF IMAGINATION JANE KNELLER Colorado State University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521851435 © Jane Kneller 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 ISBN-13 ISBN-10

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Contents

Preface and acknowledgments

page vii

Introduction

1

1 Kant and Romanticism

20

2 The power of imaginative freedom

38

3 The interests of disinterest

60

4 Aesthetic reflection and the primacy of the practical

72

5 The failure of Kant’s imagination

95

6

Imaginative reflections of the self in Novalis and Ho¨lderlin

122

7 Novalis’ Kantianism and Kant’s Romanticism

139

Bibliography

161

Index

168

v

Preface and acknowledgments

This book contains work that has been in process for over fifteen years, and during that time I was greatly aided by the encouragement and advice of wonderful colleagues and students in many places: philosophers and scholars too numerous to mention here, but some of whom will perhaps recognize their influence in parts of the book that follow. Let this serve as a gesture of my thanks and deep appreciation for their time and thoughtful discussions. Three constellations of scholars deserve mention in connection with this book, all tied in one way or another to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): The NEH Summer Seminar ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ conducted by James Schmidt at Boston University during the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the NEH Workshop ‘‘Figuring the Self ’’ conducted by David Klemm and Gu¨nter Zo¨ller at the University of Iowa over the Spring semester of 1992, and the NEH Summer Institute for College Teachers on ‘‘Nature, Art and Politics after Kant: Reevaluating Early German Idealism’’ directed by Karl Ameriks and myself at Colorado State University in 2001. The participants at these NEH venues were truly inspired and inspiring, and without them much of this book would have remained unwritten, even unconceived. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the faculty at the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures for the very formative time I spent there doing MA studies in German literature and aesthetics. They were amazingly tolerant of an Ausla¨nderin from Philosophy, a new PhD in Kantian aesthetics who insisted on turning every term paper into another philosophy essay. I want to thank especially Richard Schade for introducing me to the beauty of the German Baroque, and the humor of the German Enlightenment, and for entrusting me with a stint on the Lessing Yearbook as assistant editor. I hope he has forgiven me for returning to the philosophical fold. The romanticism of this book was profoundly influenced by the instruction of vii

viii

Preface and acknowledgments

Hans-Georg Richert and Helga Slessarev, and (since they were not particularly fond of Kant) I dedicate the Novalis sections of this work to their memory. Several of the chapters in this book contain material published earlier. I would like to thank the following publishers for granting permission to reprint parts of the following: ‘‘Imaginative Freedom and the German Enlightenment,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 51, 1990; Marquette University Press, for ‘‘The Interests of Disinterest,’’ from Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, ed. Hoke Robinson, Marquette University Press, ª 1995, Marquette University Press Reprinted with permission of Marquette University Press; ‘‘The Failure of Kant’s Imagination,’’ in ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’: Texts and Interpretations, ed. James Schmidt, The Regents of the University of California, University of California Press, 1996 ª 1996, University of California Press, 1996; ‘‘Romantic Conceptions of the Self in Ho¨lderlin and Novalis,’’ reprinted by permission from Figuring the Self: Subject, Individual, and Spirit in Classical German Philosophy, ed. by David E. Klemm and Gu¨nter Zo¨ller, The State University of New York Press, ª 1997, State University of New York, all rights reserved; ‘‘Aesthetic Value and the Primacy of the Practical in Kant’s Philosophy,’’ Journal of Value Inquiry, 36, 2002 and ‘‘Novalis’ Other Way Out,’’ in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. Nikolas Kompridis, Routledge, 2006. I owe a special debt of gratitude once again to Hilary Gaskin at Cambridge University Press for her ever-helpful advice and guidance throughout the publishing process, and to Jackie Warren for her able handling of the final stages of production. Barbara Docherty’s keen eye for detail was absolutely invaluable in the copy-editing of the book and I want to thank her in particular for the time and care she took with it. Finally, to the three philosophers closest to me – Michael, Miroslav, and Rosavera: thank you, respectively, for your healthy skepticism about claims to objectivity, your critical attitude towards all established doctrine, and your ability to make ordinary things magical. I hope I’ve captured some of that, at least in theory, here.

Introduction

This book situates Kant’s aesthetic theory within the context of his overall philosophical enterprise and also within German aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century. Although the aim of the book is not primarily historical, I have found it useful to frame the analysis of Kant’s theory of imagination historically, by locating his views within a line of German aestheticians from the early German Enlightenment through early German Romanticism. Kant is not often viewed as an advocate of the didactic value of aesthetics nor as a precursor to early German Romanticism, but the chapters at the beginning and end of the book (chapters 1 and 7) argue that these are important aspects of his aesthetic project. In so doing they situate Kant’s aesthetic theory between rationalist aesthetic pedagogy and early German romantic aesthetics in a way that brings into relief certain commonalities of these otherwise very different theories. Given a prevailing attitude that casts Romanticism as an irrationalist mysticism with sinister inheritors, connecting it to rationalist philosophies at all may sound implausible. This book aims to show that by focussing on certain important but neglected aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory, a window is opened on the common link between both perspectives in German aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century. That link is the recognition and gradual elevation of the power of imagination. Rationalist aesthetics and art criticism in Germany prior to Kant was principle-bound and rigid in many ways, so that Alfred Bauemler could say of Gottsched and Bodmer and Breitinger and their circles that the concept of criticism (Kritik), which Shaftesbury ‘‘handles with a fine sense of humanity, becomes in Leipzig and Zurich an instrument of punishment for poetical sinners.’’1 Yet Enlightenment concern for education required a reconciliation, if not an overcoming, of the divide between the ‘‘higher’’ and ‘‘lower’’ cognitive faculties of reason and of sensation, 1

Alfred Bauemler, Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1923), pp. 97–98.

1

2

Kant and the power of imagination

perception, and inner feeling. The role of the imagination gradually took on great significance as a mental power that interfaces with these aspects of human experience.2 Thus we find the imagination playing an especially crucial role in Kant’s account of cognition, and that role in turn being adapted and incorporated into his theory of beauty. Dieter Henrich points out that, since Kant regularly taught Baumgarten’s Metaphysics text, and in his Anthropology course worked directly from the section of that text that dealt with empirical psychology, including the doctrine of the lower cognitive faculties including the imagination: ‘‘Therefore it is no surprise that Kant had developed his own aesthetics before he came to terms with the problems he intended to solve in the Critique of Pure Reason.’’3 Although for a time after writing the first Critique, Kant denied the possibility of a critique of taste – i.e. a critique of the power of imagination in judgments about beauty – he changed his mind once he realized that he could provide an account of the universal elements of such judgments, specifically the generic relation of harmonious play between the power of imagination and the understanding, without appeal to determinate empirical or a priori rules. Henrich argues for a certain continuity in Kant’s view of imagination between his pre-critical and final critical view that taste could claim justification a priori: When he rethought the epistemology of the Critique of Pure Reason he quickly saw that his epistemological theorems about the relationship between imagination and understanding would allow him to produce an explanation of aesthetic judgment whose sources would not be empirical throughout but rather derived from the explanation of the possibility of our knowledge of objects. Hence the new explanation would have the ‘‘a priori’’ status of a transcendental insight. We can now understand why Kant felt he could carry out his plan, once conceived, with little trouble. Most of the content of his aesthetics had been available to him for a long time. Its views and its conceptual apparatus of the cognitive activities had only to be transferred to a new context.4

Kant did not invent or change rationalist notions of the faculties involved so much as make them more precise, Henrich argues. Thus in the 2

3

4

This becomes apparent in Baumgarten’s attempt to discover a special ‘‘logic’’ of the lower cognitive faculty, which included imagination. Bauemler points out that Wolff already prepared the way for this move in his discussion of the ‘‘expectation of similar cases’’ (‘‘Erwartung a¨hnlicher Fa¨lle’’) as a function of inference (induction) based in the lower cognitive faculties. Ibid., pp. 188–197. See also Bauemler’s Das Irrationalita¨tsproblem im a¨sthetischen Denken des 18. Jahrhunderts (Halle, 1923; republished Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967) for an account of the ascendency of the imagination in this period. Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 33. Ibid., pp. 34–35.

Introduction

3

first Critique Kant carefully delineates the nature and operation of imagination in cognition: it operates subconsciously, at least in part, and is the source of all combinations of the sensible manifold, but not of the rules that prescribe its combinatorial activity.5 Kant’s aesthetic theory in its final form still utilizes the apparatus of rationalist psychology, but in a more articulated way. One can also add to Henrich’s point, however, that this refinement of the faculty theory of psychology had dramatic consequences for German aesthetic theory: Kant’s new articulation of the functions of imagination undermined the hierarchical structuring of the older rationalist approaches. In the third Critique Kant theorizes a new sort of relationship between imagination and understanding, one in which the former is ‘‘freed’’ from the latter – in other words, in which the imagination is seen as capable of operating independently of its function of processing the material of sensation into the products of experience via concepts a priori. It does not follow that imaginative freedom in this sense operates free of experiential backdrop, but simply that within the context of an already synthesized experience, imagination can function in a different capacity so as to reflect upon a sensory manifold without ‘‘determining’’ an object. The result is, instead, a certain kind of feeling.6 One important result of Kant’s more complex account of imaginative functioning is a new appreciation for the way in which imaginative freedom contributes to an overall awareness in us, as individual subjects, of our own cognitive (including moral) operations. Kant’s theory, that is, highlights the fact that the power of imagination produces a ‘‘feeling of life,’’ making us aware of ourselves via pleasure that ‘‘forms the basis of a very special power of discriminating and judging’’(V: 204, 277). This complex notion of imagination’s functioning is the essence of reflective aesthetic judgment, and takes as its object (which is to say, it determines a priori) the feeling of pleasure and pain (XX: 208).

5 6

Ibid., p. 37. An important issue emerges here involving the question of the cognitive role of reflection. Henrich, on historical grounds, distinguishes reflection from reflective judgment. The former is a ‘‘primitive’’ capacity of unconscious ideation, that concurs with the operations of the mind, keeping them distinct, and allowing an ‘‘awareness’’ of the operations of the mind. This process is discussed in the context of genius and fantasy in chapter 7 of this volume, but the overall role of such processes and their relationship to cognitive and aesthetic judgments must be postponed here. Important work on the prior function of reflection has been done by Beatrice Longueness, in Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). See also Henry Allison’s discussion of Longueness’ views on reflection with respect to reflective judgment, in Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 1, pp. 14ff.

4

Kant and the power of imagination

As such, the power of imagination takes on a central role in the mediation of the theoretical and the practical a priori (XX: 206–208). Giving the imagination a lead role is not to say it is the only star of the human show, and Kant never contended that it was. But it certainly opens the way for a philosophical turn towards viewing imagination as the main player on the human mental stage. This is the connection to Romanticism that Kant’s refinement of rationalist faculty psychology makes possible. The early Romantic theorists in Germany took the complex imaginative function as their central explanatory concept in analyzing human subjectivity. Charles Larmore, in The Romantic Legacy, suggests that Kant’s primary influence on Romanticism was the view that the mind actively determines human experience. Yet it was not simply Kant’s ‘‘Copernican’’ insight that had such an influence on Romanticism. Romanticism also took its cue more specifically from Kant’s recognition of a special mental activity that (somehow) connects with the ‘‘matter of sensation’’ (the given), and is itself neither pure understanding nor pure practical reason. Charles Larmore points out that, for the Romantics, imagination came to mean more than a faculty of imaging and association, but was centrally ‘‘the enrichment of experience through expression.’’ But this formulation also nicely captures Kant’s account of the imaginative ‘‘free play’’ in reflective aesthetic judgment resulting in a special, ‘‘disinterested’’ pleasure that is universally communicable and expressed in judgments of taste and the sublime. Larmore goes on to point out that ‘‘Typically the Romantics considered the imagination, so understood, not as one mental faculty among others, and certainly not as a mere organ of make-believe, but rather as the very essence of the mind.’’ The arguments of this book make the case that the move from Kant’s third Critique account of imagination as a central, mediating faculty to the early Romantic view of it as the primary faculty is a logical next step, not an irrational leap, in the philosophy of human subjectivity. In her account of the concept of Darstellung (literally: a ‘‘placing before,’’ usually translated as ‘‘representation’’ or ‘‘presentation’’) Martha Helfer sketches the development of this notion in Kant’s philosophy as ‘‘a technical term that designates the mediation of the imagination between sensibility and understanding.’’ She argues that this Kantian notion of imaginative mediation is of great significance to subsequent philosophical and aesthetic thought: Thus Darstellung constitutes an essential point of tangency for German Idealism and Romanticism, and the critical exposition of this Kantian notion of representation in various disciplines results in a tremendously productive interplay of

Introduction

5

philosophy, aesthetics, literature and linguistic theory in German critical discourse around 1800.7

Helfer argues that Kant’s notion of Darstellung creates problems for him in three related ways, the first of which is the heart of his problem, and results from the fact that imaginative synthesis in cognition for Kant is ‘‘a hidden art in the depths of the human soul’’: there is a breakdown at a crucial juncture in Kant’s argument for the underlying synthetic unity of intuition and understanding in cognition . . . Because the synthetic unity of apperception falls beyond the limits of the transcendental Critique, the sensible subject cannot represent itself to itself as it really is, as a moral subject of reason. The fact that reason imposes these limits on the scope of philosophical investigation points to the third problem that Kant encounters, the problem of the rhetorical presentation or representation of his philosophical system.8

I shall explore the degree to which Kant himself saw these aspects of his account of imaginative mediation, or reflection as ‘‘breakdowns’’ in his system in chapter 5. Helfer is quite right to understand Kant’s notion of (re)presentation as imaginative mediation, but it is not clear that Kant was concerned to give an account of the underlying source or foundation of this faculty, nor that he felt it necessary to provide a unified theory of subjectivity in a strong sense. If imaginative reflection, as I argue in chapter 4, is to be seen as performing the task of mediation in the sense of providing an interface or bridge between sensibility and reason such that human beings can move from one aspect of their selves to the other, it may not necessarily be the case that in Kant’s mind, at least, these aporiae are so thoroughly problematic as the Romantics themselves came to believe. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, as well as Andrew Bowie and others who see Kant as a catalyst for Romanticism, also tend to emphasize the lack of a thoroughgoing account of unity between subject and object, moral demands and natural laws, and the practical and the theoretical as the jumping off point for Romantic philosophy. Thus Bowie, like Helfer, argues that Kant left a major problem for his own theory unsolved thanks to his inability to give an account of knowledge of freedom while simultaneously demanding that we must act in accordance with a belief in it: ‘‘In both the theoretical and the practical parts of his philosophy, then, Kant leaves a gaping hole where the highest principle is 7

8

Martha Helfer, The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of Darstellung in German Critical Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 10 Ibid., p. 11.

6

Kant and the power of imagination

located.’’9 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy explain the Romantic debt to Kant, along similar lines, as the problem of what they refer to as the ‘‘weakening of the subject’’ as a result of Kant’s denying the possibility of an ‘‘original Intuition’’ – i.e., an intuition that produces its own ‘‘given’’: As a result, all that remains of the subject is the ‘‘I’’ as an ‘‘empty form’’ . . . that ‘‘accompanies my representations.’’ This is so because the form of time, which is the ‘‘form of the internal sense’’ permits no substantial presentation. As is well known, the Kantian ‘‘cogito’’ is empty.10

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy view Kant’s valorizing of morality as a sort of compensation for the weakened cognitive subject, but here again the problem becomes one of the reality of the subject: ‘‘As a moral subject, in sum, the subject recovers none of its substance. Quite to the contrary, the question of its unity, and thus of its very ‘being-subject’, is brought to a pitch of high tension.’’ This tension is also referred to more dramatically by them as the ‘‘crisis’’ that Romanticism takes as its starting point.11 All of these scholars are surely right to point to precisely these issues as catalysts to Romanticism, and yet by dramatizing the problem as a ‘‘gaping hole’’ or ‘‘crisis,’’ they tend to downplay the degree to which the younger generation of poetic philosophers adapted and developed some of Kant’s best attempts to solve these very problems. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy grant the point that Kant did try to solve the problem in the third Critique, but they view that solution as failed, thanks to the merely regulative nature of the principles Kant relies on in his attempt to unify subjectivity. Yet in the case of Novalis, at least, the regulative nature of philosophy was precisely all that philosophy could be and, for him, this was not in itself a problem. Helfer herself, commenting on the fact that Novalis sees philosophy resolved in ‘‘poesy,’’ points out that ‘‘Poesy, however, does not supplant philosophy in Novalis aesthetic program: ‘‘Without philosophy the poet is incomplete . . . (II: 531, #29).’’12 An important aim of this book is to show that Kant’s own solutions went a long way in the direction of Novalis’ and the early Romantics’ views: Kant’s theory enabled entertaining the importance of creative, reflective imagination in general as a possible source for the realization of substantive changes in the world. 9

10

11

Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 22. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 30. Ibid., pp. 31–32. 12 Helfer, The Retreat of Representation, p. 88.

Introduction

7

Making that case requires not only a careful look at Kant’s views on the power of imagination and its roles beyond judgments of taste, but also a less one-sided view of Romanticism. Much of the argument of this book hinges on viewing early German Romanticism as a philosophical position – and, moreover, one that is close enough in spirit to the anti-speculative position of Kantianism to be able to easily connect with it. Recent work has established this view on solid scholarly ground. Philosophers and literary critical theorists have gone a long way toward correcting the caricature of the early German Romantics as mystical irrationalists, and the case has been made for some time now that philosophically the early and late period of Romanticism in the German tradition are quite distinct.13 At the same time there has been a flowering of new studies in the past twenty-five years or so dealing with Kant’s philosophy in a multitude of ways that go beyond the first Critique and his moral theory as famously, if also misleadingly at times, summarized in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.14 Kant’s political theory, his social and anthropological 13

14

The most influential work in this regard is Manfred Frank’s Einfu¨hrung in die Fru¨hromantische A¨sthetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), trans. Elizabeth Milla´n-Zaibert as The Foundations of Early German Romanticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004). See also Karl Ameriks’ introduction to The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 13: ‘‘The greatest problem for the philosophical appreciation of German Romanticism may be simply the word romanticism itself.’’ Part III on ‘‘Idealism and romanticism’’ is a very useful summary introduction to the ‘‘Fru¨hromantik.’’ Several newly translated texts of philosophical writings of early German Romanticism have appeared, including my own Novalis: Fichte Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and an English edition of Novalis’ Allgemeine Brouillon, ed. David Wood, is forthcoming from SUNY Press (2007). Jay Bernstein’s edition of Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) includes selections from earlier German theorists of art (Lessing, Moritz) and devotes large sections to works from Ho¨lderlin and Novalis as well as Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel. Frederick Beiser’s edition of works from this tradition, The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), as well as his important contribution to the politico-philosophical history of the era in Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) bear witness to a growing philosophical interest in the early German Romantics. At the same time, literary philosophical interest in these thinkers is growing, with works like Azade Seyhan’s Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) and Andrew Bowie’s From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997) being two fine studies in this area. Enormous recent interest in Kant’s aesthetics is reflected in new translations of the third Critique, (including even a new translation of the title of the book itself) and several major new Englishlanguage interpretive works on the Critique of Judgment that pay equal attention to the aesthetic theory (John Zammito’s The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, is a fine example). English-language studies of Kant’s aesthetic theory tend to focus primarily on Kant’s theory of taste in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,’’ the first half of his Critique of Judgment. Paul Guyer’s landmark earlier treatment, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1979) along with other, less comprehensive accounts, were typical in this regard. More recent work has paid attention to the connection of morality and aesthetics,

8

Kant and the power of imagination

studies, his theory of history, and his overall methodological approach have been the subjects of interesting and close textual analytic research in several languages and scholarly traditions.15 Focus on Kant’s philosophically ‘‘lesser’’ works that were nevertheless written during the critical period has proved enormously helpful in filling in gaps, accounting for inconsistencies; and, perhaps most important, the new focus has in many cases corrected common caricatures by disclosing the complexity of Kant’s theories. Allen Wood has perhaps gone as far as any scholar in this regard.16 Focussing especially on Kant’s writings on religion and history, he has been able to counter many standard criticisms of Kant by showing the compatibility of Kant’s moral theory with naturalist and materialist accounts of human development, progress, and culture. By carefully explicating the details of Kant’s teleological conception of nature and humanity, and by reconstructing Kant’s account of the coordination of ‘‘ends of nature’’ with human rational ends in promoting culture, Wood debunks criticisms of Kant’s moral theory that see it as oriented towards a noumenal realm outside nature, individualistic in its prescriptions, and insensitive to material human conditions in its rigorism. A complete summary of Wood’s comprehensive account is beyond the scope of this introduction, but in skeletal outline, the argument hinges on natural mechanism as the initial catalyst of human cultural development. Kant’s

15

16

especially Guyer’s Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Henry Allison’s Kant’s Theory of Taste (see n. 6) devotes a section to the link between morality and the theory of taste in Kant. Hannah Ginsborg’s The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition (New York: Garland Press, 1990) looks at the connection between aesthetics and knowledge, as does Christel Fricke’s Kants Theorie des reinen Geschmacksurteils (Kant’s Theory of the Pure Judgment of Taste, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990). John Zammito’s excellent book on the genesis of the third Critique (see n. 14) links it to his Anthropology as well as to the younger generation of ‘‘aesthetic idealists.’’ English-language works dealing with Kant’s political writings and their connection to issues of teleology include Patrick Riley, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1983), Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), and Thomas Auxter, Kant’s Moral Teleology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982). Important studies on Kant’s anthropological writings include work, in addition to Allen Wood, by Holly Wilson, Robert B. Louden, Patrick R. Frierson, among others. Representative samples of some of their work is included in B. Jacobs and P. Kain, Essays in Kant’s Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 2003). John Zammito traces the historical development of the concept in the case of the conflicting views of Herder and Kant, in Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark have both published important work on Kant’s Anthropology and have been largely responsible for the rise of interest in this area thanks to their painstaking work in compiling and editing, at the Kant Archiv at the Philips-Universita¨t, Marburg, the lecture notes of students in Kant’s Anthropology classes. Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is one of the most well-known attempts to link Kant’s aesthetic theory to political theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See his Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Introduction

9

well-known notion of ‘‘unsocial sociability’’ captures the drive of the species towards greater and greater freedom, equality and community arising out of natural self-interested inclinations and resulting social struggle. Human social progress is to be interpreted (regulatively) as a purpose of nature: ‘‘Nature’s own purposes require that human beings should emerge at a certain point from the tutelage of nature and begin to set rational collective ends’’ (p. 298). Wood gives a compelling account of the connection Kant sees between nature and human reason in terms of their ends: Because human beings are the only beings in nature that can set a final end, they may be considered as the ultimate end of nature insofar as they do set a final end. Nature has no ultimate end except through human beings; or, what comes to the same thing, it has no ultimate end at all until human beings give it one by setting a final end . . . Kant’s philosophy of history can be regarded as a theodicy or theory of divine providence, as he himself also regularly regards it. But if so, it is a highly novel and perhaps unorthodox one. For in Kant’s view, the plan of providence remains incomplete until we human beings complete it. (p. 311).

The problem of the institution of a just social order – the ‘‘highest good’’ that Kant says is a direct command of morality – involves the impossiblesounding demand that we ourselves coordinate natural ends with moral ones, so that, simply put, moral goodness and happiness are systematically proportional. Wood points out that this demand for systematic proportionality of natural and rational ends is not just a baroque, ‘‘architectonic’’ feature of Kant’s theory, but is fundamental to his ethics. Kant insists that the moral law commands that humans in concert, as a species, attempt to create this system as the only means of guaranteeing systematic progress towards morality. Drawing on the Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Wood argues that for Kant ‘‘The pursuit of my own morality can be distinguished from the moral progress of the human race, but [Kant argues that] the two ends are necessarily linked in their pursuit. Human beings must join in free community to accomplish the task.’’ And he adds, ‘‘The moral progress of the human race, in Kant’s view is possible only through the progressive extension of such a free moral community to more and more people, until it eventually encompasses the entire human race’’ (p. 315). The problem with this demand is that it asks the individual to commit to a project only the species as a whole can fulfill. This leads, in Kant’s moral theory (V: 114ff.) to the (in)famous postulates of God and immortality, belief in which is a necessary condition of the rational hope each individual requires to shoulder his or her part of the burden of this enormous command. This issue is examined

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Kant and the power of imagination

in more detail in chapter 2, but here I will simply point out that Wood explains Kant’s appeal to the postulates of God and immortality as ways of turning, not to the ‘‘beyond’’ for hope, but to an enlightened human community of free believers that is not associated with the coercion of the state. Wood rightly points out that the community of rational faith that Kant envisioned is so far removed from the social reality of our own time that it is nearly impossible to see how one could take heart and carry on social reform in any ‘‘really existing’’ religious community. Wood pleads for historical understanding of Kant’s case: In an era of guarded Enlightenment optimism, Kant had reason to hope for the formation of a freely affirmed, rational religious community. Interpreting Kant in this way might suggest a kind of socialist ideal, and such a suggestion is not off target, Wood argues, if it does not expect cataclysmic change: such a view would be Kantian in holding that if we are to fulfill our collective historical vocation, we will need to find (or invent) a form of ethical community that is capable of gradually reshaping our deeply corrupt social life by revolutionizing and uniting the hearts of individuals through the free power of reason. For Kant himself, however, the human race can no more expect to fulfill this moral vocation apart from organized religion than it can expect to achieve justice through anarchy. (p. 320)

What Wood’s account shows, I believe, is how problematic the religious ‘‘postulate’’ has become, and thus how unlikely it is for people to band together in heart and mind to effect change in contemporary societies. If religion, even a ‘‘socialist’’ version, is the only alternative community, and a rational public can no longer envision belonging to it, then a new vision must be possible or moral progress is doomed. But if it is the case that we cannot hope for apocalyptic change, is it not equally impossible, after decades and centuries of possibilities closed and social reforms laid waste, rationally to hold on to hope for gradual change in the long term? I want to propose, in the chapters that follow, that Kant’s natural teleology provides a ‘‘fallback’’ option when moral vision becomes clouded. The contingently available experience of beauty and its attendant interests, produced via a creative imagination, might also make it possible for despairing individuals to join with others in communities aimed at change. If no model is available at a given point in time, it is at least possible to model a new community in imagination, and like artists of any medium, to find ways to ‘express’ this community in concrete experience. That it seems to me, is the moral promise of imaginative freedom, and the real power of the imagination in Kant.

Introduction

11

Turning to Kant’s aesthetic theory is a useful and interesting way to solve some of the difficulties his moral theory generates for social progress theories. Interest in the relevance of Kant’s aesthetic theory to the rest of his system is certainly growing, yet much of this work to date has focused predominately on the pure judgment of taste and the sublime.17 By contrast, the chapters in this volume foreground the role of the power of imagination as a creative activity and the interests to which that activity gives rise. Hence, although this volume discusses the nature of the ‘‘pure’’ disinterested judgment of taste in some detail in various sections, I pay special attention to Kant’s third Critique account of the interested judgments that Kant says aesthetic disinterest may produce, and to the role of the imagination in such judgments. I concentrate on Kant’s elevation of the function of imagination to the status of creative faculty, and to his account in ‘‘lesser’’ texts (the Anthropology, and ‘‘occasional’’ essays) of the dangers and potential of this power. The chapters that follow thus do not dispute the autonomy claim of pure judgments of taste, a claim that Kant is quite insistent upon. Indeed, focussing on interested judgments of aesthetic reflection depends on seeing ‘‘pure’’ aesthetic reflective judgments that comprise a realm of human experience independent of moral cognitive judgment as a condition of the interests involved. These chapters represent a sustained focus on the specific ways in which the notion of imaginative independence serves Kant’s larger purpose of describing a mediating faculty between the ‘‘is’’ of nature and the ‘‘ought to be’’ of morality. In this respect they elaborate a theme argued for in great detail in Rudolf Makkreel’s Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, that ‘‘imagination is a power that both exhibits and overcomes the limits of experience.’’18 This book was in many ways pathbreaking in studies of Kant’s aesthetics for its breadth and depth of analysis of the role of imagination, and the thesis that reflective judgment is interpretive judgment. Makkreel’s reading of Kant as a proto-hermeneuticist brought to light aspects of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment that were previously ignored, and his 17

18

Felicitas Munzel’s detailed work showing how moral character is chosen, developed, and sustained via complex interaction with morality, pedagogy, and aesthetics come closest to the sort of point I am making here. However, her focus is primarily on moral character formation in the individual, and her analysis of the role of aesthetics in this formation rests on the role of taste and sublimity in moral education and does not rely on an account of imagination, but rather on the feeling. The chapters in this book focus more on the role imagination plays in the production of that feeling, and the role that feeling (of hope) plays in supporting social morality. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘‘Critical’’ Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

12

Kant and the power of imagination

work connects Kant scholarship that focuses on theoretical aspects of his social and cultural views with other philosophical accounts of its connection to Romanticism. A problem for such a view, however, is that Kant seems to want to give a kind of systematic privilege to practical reason over all other kinds of experience. The chapters in this book defend the view that the imagination in reflective judgment serves as an equally important power (of mediation), arguing explicitly against influential views that presume the ‘‘primacy of the practical’’ in Kant. Finally, the work that follows takes into account and responds to another problem for the view that imagination can be understood as a central faculty in Kant’s account: the accusation of some postmodernist or post-Enlightenment positions, and of some feminists,19 that Kant’s philosophy could not truly value imagination given his philosophical and even cultural and personal antipathy towards sensibility and the realm of emotion and feeling. This issue has most recently been underscored by texts such as the anthology edited by James Schmidt, ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions.20 I take these arguments seriously, arguing in the end that Kant is nevertheless far less hostile to the significance of imaginative freedom than he sometimes appears to be. Thus I find Kant’s compatibility with early German Romanticism to lie not only in his actual philosophical innovations with respect to the nature of the imagination and its freedom, but also, to a certain extent, I find their aesthetic theories temperamentally compatible. In other words, Kant was not as far removed from the ironic sensitivities of early Romanticism as one might think, based on standard ‘‘one-sided’’ accounts of both Kant and Early German Romanticism. general overview The book is composed of a series of chapters, each of which reads Kant’s aesthetic theory as mediating between his moral theory and his account of 19

20

For a sustained feminist critique of Kant along these lines, see Robin May Schott’s Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), and also ‘‘The Gender of Enlightenment,’’ in Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, ed. Robin May Schott (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 319–37. My ‘‘The Aesthetic Dimension of Kantian Autonomy’’ (pp. 173–189) in Feminist Interpretations attempts to adjudicate some of these issues in terms of Kant’s aesthetic theory and by contrast to Onora O’Neill’s response to such criticisms, in Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Riverside: University of California Press, 1996.

Introduction

13

human knowledge. The key to this reading is Kant’s conception of the power of imagination, and especially of what I will call the ‘‘transformative’’ power of imagination that Kant first develops only in the third Critique. Aesthetic reflective judgment, I argue, extends beyond the narrower goals of deduction and analysis of judgments of taste in the third Critique. Kant’s aesthetics argues for interests that attach to aesthetic reflective judgment that surpass their purely aesthetic value. However, reading Kantian aesthetics as part of a larger moral project runs into certain difficulties, one might even say ‘‘hostilities,’’ within Kant’s account of imagination. Kant frequently expresses a dim view of the faculty of imagination that may perhaps be diagnosed as extraphilosophical, but which nevertheless militates against taking human imaginative capacities to be central to Kantian moral and social concerns. In chapter 5 I address criticisms of Kant’s motivation in characterizing the imagination as subordinate faculty, or as mysterious and even dangerous. This chapter argues that, in the end, such criticisms may be countered by the fact that Kant’s attitude toward ‘‘undisciplined’’ creative imaginative power was not uniformly negative. His defense of the ‘‘enthusiast’’ and his self-avowed love affair with metaphysics have a continued influence on his philosophy that re-emerge, I argue, in scattered attempts to find a secure place for speculative metaphysical imaginings in his finished philosophical system. Finally, given this reading of Kant’s aesthetic theory, I argue for the claim (made on historical grounds in chapter 2) that there is substantive continuity between the Enlightenment values of Kant’s critical enterprise and the values of early German Romanticism. The main focus here is upon the paradigmatic central figure of that movement, Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Novalis was a student and friend of Schiller’s in Jena and, along with the rest of the so-called ‘‘Jena Romantic circle,’’ was party to the lively debate surrounding Fichte’s revision of Kantianism. Moreover, it was in Jena that Kant’s philosophy became a centerpiece of philosophical discussion, thanks to Reinhold’s enormously successful popularizing work in the late 1780s and early 1790s at the university there. Recent work has underscored the importance of Jena as the first site of sustained study and argument over Kant’s philosophy, and to the development of Fichtean and later German idealism (see Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy).21 Yet little has been written on the relation of 21

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Kant and the power of imagination

Kant’s work to the philosophy of the early German Romantics who were central to the debate over Kantianism in Jena at the time. Chapters 6 and 7 in this book brings these two remarkable philosophies into dialog by exploring Novalis’ reception of Kant together with Kant’s own interest in questions about the role of imagination in uniting nature and morality in the human subject. These questions, and some of Kant’s answers, I contend, became central to the Romantic project. ov erview o f the book Chapter 1, ‘‘Kant and Romanticism,’’ introduces the overall theme of the book, that Kant’s theory of imagination is not so far removed from Novalis’ definition of ‘‘romanticizing.’’ By showing what Novalis means by this term, and the extent to which his meaning is at odds with stereotypical distortions of Romanticism as mystical and otherworldly, I set the stage for looking at Kant’s views on such ‘‘mystical’’-sounding ideas as that of the ‘‘supersensible.’’ In the same way that ‘‘romanticizing’’ for Novalis is a process of both recognizing the ordinary in the mysterious, and demystifying the extraordinary, I argue, Kant’s views also involve this twofold procedure. Kant’s commitment to the possibility of expanding and developing our mental powers themselves is discussed, along with the influence of Rousseau on his overall view of the value of re-creating ourselves and our world. Chapters 2–4 place Kant’s views on aesthetics in historical context and situate them also within the larger context of his philosophy as a whole. chapter 2, ‘‘The power of imaginative freedom,’’ sets the stage with an examination of the concept of freedom in the aesthetic theory of Germany beginning with Baumgarten. In particular it looks at three early and mid-eighteenth-century German accounts of the freedom of imagination that may be seen as precursors to Kant’s: those of Baumgarten, Bodmer and Breitinger, and Lessing. I argue that Kant’s theory provides a link between these earlier more didactic theories and the visionary aesthetics of Schiller and other early Romantic poets. The argument is based on the new role that Kant assigns the imagination in the third Critique, where he argues that it is capable of transforming nature and exhibiting human ideals in concrete form. Given that such exhibitions would provide a basis for rational hope when directed towards social ideals, I argue that it is possible in Kant’s later thought to ground a rational hope for bringing about a just world in such imaginative visions. This move would obviate the need for the questionable reintroduction of metaphysics in the form

Introduction

15

of postulates of God and immortality which have proven to be so problematic for Kant, and it also suggests the possibility of a Kantian ethics less hostile to imagination and sensibility. Chapter 3, ‘‘The interests of disinterest,’’ then moves from the historical framework of Kant’s aesthetics to the theory itself. Here I deal with Kant’s notion of the pure judgment of taste, or the judgment about the beautiful, in light of his claim that the central element of his justification of such judgments – the universal communicability of ‘‘disinterested’’ feelings of pleasure – ‘‘must already carry with it an interest’’ for human beings. This chapter examines Kant’s account of the nature of these interests and follows the thread of his argument to show its potential for establishing a link between morality and sensibility. Insofar as Kant is able to make a case for a close analogy between aesthetic and moral interest, he may argue for a psychological transition from the former to the latter. Hence he could make ‘‘love of the beautiful,’’ and the fashioning of conditions where it may be experienced by all, a kind of moral imperative. This chapter then explores the ways in which Kant’s conception of the interests of disinterested reflection on the beautiful and his views on genius might lead to a higher valuation of art and even human embodiment than Kant himself seems to allow. Chapter 4, ‘‘Aesthetic reflection and the primacy of the practical,’’ refocusses the discussion from Kant’s theory of beauty to the larger role that his aesthetics plays within his theory of value. Having argued for a larger systematic role for aesthetic judgment on historical and textual grounds, I here address the largest challenge to such a reading – the fact that Kant’s critical philosophy turns on the ‘‘primacy of the practical,’’ and should be interpreted as a system within which all value ultimately derives from practical reasoning. Onora O’Neill and Christine Korsgaard have given powerful and influential accounts of the methodological primacy of practical reason in Kant’s philosophy, and I look at each of these in turn and offer criticisms. Yet, even if methodological primacy accounts are inadequate, it is possible that practical reason is primary for Kant’s overall account of human valuation in some other sense. I then address Karl Ameriks’ account of what I label the ‘‘metaphysical’’ primacy of practical reason, as well as Richard Velkley’s and Susan Neiman’s different approaches to the issue of the unification of reason. Finally I argue for an alternative understanding of the structure of Kant’s philosophy that is neither founded upon nor ordered ‘‘under’’ a principle of the primacy of practical judgment. This chapter claims that Kant’s philosophy is better understood as an attempt at a comprehensive account of nature (as

16

Kant and the power of imagination

known by rational, embodied beings) and of morality (as practiced by rational agents) mediated by a freely reflecting imagination. The unification of these accounts, I argue, is accomplished not by placing one under the jurisdiction of the other, as is suggested by primacy of the practical accounts. Rather, the two domains are mediated and, in this sense only, ‘‘united,’’ by reflective aesthetic judgment and the value of hope to which it gives rise. In chapter 5, ‘‘The failure of Kant’s imagination’’ I address a challenge to any interpretation that would try to center an account of human experience in Kant’s theory around the faculty of imagination. The challenge was famously laid down by Heidegger, and taken up again in recent times by Gernot and Hartmut Bo¨hme and by some feminist philosophers as well. It consists, in a nutshell, of the claim that Kant was constitutionally incapable of granting so much importance to the faculty of imagination. Heidegger reads the second edition of the Deduction of the Categories, wherein Kant subsumes the imaginative capacity under the faculty of Understanding, as proof of this. The Bo¨hmes agree, and take the argument from the first Critique to the third, by arguing that even here, in his theory of taste, Kant relegates the role of imagination to mere ‘‘play.’’ Chapter 5 examines these criticisms and responds by arguing that the third Critique account of imagination goes well beyond a theory of taste and fine arts criticism. I argue that Kant’s account of the Ideal of beauty and of aesthetic ideas suggests an important role for imagination in moral development, as do his comments on the importance of moral enthusiasm, made in his lectures on Anthropology and in the late essay ‘‘An old question raised again: is the human race constantly progressing?’’ This chapter concludes with a discussion of the extent to which Kant himself opposed the metaphysical attitude in philosophizing. It argues that in fact, Kant was not unsympathetic to the desire for a unified account of subjectivity – and, indeed, found a place for it in his aesthetic theory. Chapter 6, ‘‘Imaginative reflections of the self in Novalis and Ho¨lderlin,’’ takes up the question of the imagination and subjectivity in the philosophical and poetic work of the early German Romantics, arguing for a continuity between the latter and Kant’s third Critique views on imaginative power. It lays out the departure of Novalis and Ho¨lderlin from Fichte’s attempt to give an account of the self that claims to present an ultimate ground or foundational account of its unity. It argues that Novalis’ and Ho¨lderlin’s accounts bear a closer affinity to Kant’s views than to those of Fichte’s idealism inasmuch as they reject the possibility of

Introduction

17

giving a positive account of the unity of subjectivity. Instead, both embrace a fundamentally negative account of the unity of the natural and ‘‘absolute’’ in the subject: in the case of Novalis, the resemblance to Kant’s account of the experience of the sublime is striking. In Ho¨lderlin there is an explicit reversion to an account of non-conceptual aesthetic experience of beauty that owes much to Kant’s, and that in the end, like Kant’s, remains skeptical about the possibility of knowing our absolute nature. Finally, in chapter 7, ‘‘Novalis’ Kantianism and Kant’s Romanticism,’’ I return to discuss in more detail the problem of unified subjectivity in the philosophical work of Novalis, examining the influence of Kant’s philosophy on it. I argue that although Novalis, like other early Romantics, is apparently more disturbed by the problem of unified subjectivity than Kant, his metaphysical position is not in the end much different from Kant’s. Novalis upholds the Kantian doctrine of the unknowability of the absolute self and is hence neither an idealist nor an irrationalist. What both share is a commitment to the faculty of creative imagination as link between the inner world of freedom and the outer world of nature in the human subject. The second part of this chapter picks up on Novalis’ notion of the ‘‘genius of genius’’ to inquire more deeply into the nature and the role such an understanding might play in Kant’s aesthetic theory. Kant’s views on the nature of genius are explored first in terms of his account of unconscious ideation discussed in the Anthropology, and Kant’s mention there of the nature of the performer of the ‘‘free fantasia.’’ The phenomenon of the ‘‘free fantasia’’ in Kant’s time is discussed, along with Kant’s analysis of the mental state of the musical performer of this genre and its relationship to ordinary cognitive activity and genius. This chapter concludes that once one-sided characterizations of both these thinkers are corrected, their views can no longer be seen as antithetical to each other. The differences, in other words, are more differences in attitude than in method and substance. For all its importance in the history of the philosophy of art, Kant’s aesthetics is far more than a theory of art and beauty. This book presents other aspects of his aesthetics, and the theory of creative imagination upon which it is based, as both a central, integrating component of his larger philosophical enterprise and as a keystone in the bridge between eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century moral aesthetics in German philosophy. It is a reading Kant himself suggested, when in the introductions to the Critique of Judgment he argued that both his aesthetics and his account of teleological judgment would help close the great

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Kant and the power of imagination

chasm between the theories of morality and cognition established in the first two Critiques. Certainly a bridge between human need and human obligation was central to German Enlightenment aesthetics, beginning with Gottsched and carried forward by Lessing’s work, and it became even more crucial (and more politicized) in the early German Romantics. Kant’s aesthetics is not typically associated with his thoughts on Enlightenment, but it is the point of this book to show how they enabled the development of the German tradition of aesthetic education theory, transforming it in the process into a critical theoretical enterprise. Historical periods are difficult, arguably impossible, to delineate and define, and although the Enlightenment has been a remarkably resilient historical category (perhaps because, as Foucault emphasized, it named itself) the question of what truly characterizes this period is still a matter of contention. Broadly speaking, then, the task of this book is to grasp the shape of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism by, as it were, studying their interface. If Kant’s philosophy is taken as an exemplar (many would say the exemplar) of the late German Enlightenment and Novalis’ philosophy as paradigm of the early German Romantic movement, then the interface of the two is of real historical significance. It is all the more important since the standard view of these two positions sets them up as diametrically opposed. In examining the historical and conceptual connections between, on the one hand, a philosophy often viewed as rigidly rationalist and formalist in its overall contours and, on the other hand, one that is often taken to be so inchoate and fantastical as to be no philosophy at all, I hope to bring into relief important dimensions of both. I have long been convinced that if one looks closely at Kant’s analysis of the faculty of imagination, especially as foregrounded, developed, and expanded in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,’’ a good deal of the criticism of his ethics and anthropology becomes moot. During the course of study of Novalis and the immediate post-Kantian philosophical context in Germany, I have come to appreciate the continuities of early German Romanticism with Kant’s work and to see the distortion and tired caricatures of that movement as an impediment to understanding important aspects of Kant’s aesthetics. Looking at Kant’s philosophy from the perspective of his view of imaginative freedom is surprisingly disruptive of standard views of Kantianism, but it also undermines stereotypical accounts of Romanticism. On philosophical turf, an important recent debate has centered around the question of whether Romanticism is to be characterized as a continuation of German Idealism or as

Introduction

19

Idealism’s most ‘‘decisive’’ opponent.22 This book skirts that issue, in part because there are any number of questions about what constitutes ‘‘German Idealism’’ in general, and more specifically because there are equally many questions raised by calling Kant an ‘‘idealist.’’23 My aim is simply to look at the question of whether Romanticism, as characterized by one of its leading exponents, is to be found at all in the work of Immanuel Kant, and if so, what aspects of Kant’s enlightenment thought might be seen as partially constitutive of the early Romantic point of view. At stake is the possibility of enlivening and enriching enlightenment commitments to human equality and freedom with the early Romantic emphasis on community and creativity. The chapters that follow trace a path from Kant’s views on imaginative creativity and the connection between aesthetic reflection and morality to late eighteenth-century Romanticism in Germany. In so doing the book suggests an alternative trajectory to Kant’s aesthetics that will, I hope, bring attention to its continuing relevance for theories of social transformation. 22

23

Ernst Behler, Review of Manfred Frank’s Einfu¨hrung in die Fru¨hromantische A¨sthetik, Athena¨um, 3, 1993. Also see Karl Ameriks’ Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (see n. 13), esp. pp. 10–13, ‘‘Idealism and Romanticism.’’ Ameriks, Introduction, pp. 1–10.

chapter 1

Kant and Romanticism

The very idea of connecting Kant and Romanticism has raised and no doubt will continue to raise hackles among some Kant scholars. These critics typically view Kant as the last great defender of Enlightenment values in the modern era of philosophy, while viewing Romanticism as a reactionary, counterenlightenment development expressing irrationalist tendencies and forces whose aims are anathema to the spirit of liberty and equality. This view continues to prevail in the face of much new scholarship documenting the broad spectrum of Enlightenment positions and controversies,1 and in spite of the fact that Kant himself was a great admirer, and in some cases friend, of several major counterenlightenment figures.2 Kant did not directly engage the so-called ‘‘Jena school of Romantics’’ that included the Schlegels, Schelling, and Novalis. Yet his philosophy loomed so large in the German academic context that there can be no question of his influence on them. Indeed one could argue that it is in the claim to be Kant’s successor and remediator that Fichte attracted and fascinated the early Romantics. Kant repudiated Fichte’s appropriation of his philosophy,3 and Fichte’s Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge was criticized by the early Romantics.4 They quickly came to reject Fichte’s basic assumptions. It is a major contention of the latter part of this book that this rejection, most forcefully stated in Novalis’ Fichte Studies, is fundamentally a rejection on Kantian grounds and bears the mark of Kant’s aesthetic theory. This chapter will serve to introduce 1

2

3

4

See for instance James Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions (Riverside: University of California Press, 1996). Most notable here is Kant’s great admiration of Rousseau, but he was also on friendly terms at one time or another with Hamann and Jacobi. Kant’s ‘‘Open Letter on Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre’’ (August 7, 1799), in Arnulf Zweig, Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759–99 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 253–254 is decisive, if also somewhat peevish. Most famously by Novalis (Novalis: Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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21

this argument, along with some of the book’s other major themes, by juxtapositing Novalis’ definition of Romanticism with key aspects of Kant’s philosophy. kant and novalis Kant and Novalis both gave shape to their philosophical programs of Enlightenment and Romanticism, respectively, in the form of dicta that became mottoes for these movements. Kant’s ‘‘Sapere aude!’’ – ‘‘Think for yourself !’’ – was a call to arms for Enlightenment theory and practice, and so, in its own way, was Novalis’ demand that: ‘‘The world must be romanticized.’’ Controversial as it may sound, in many ways early German Romantic philosophy carried Kant’s Enlightenment banner longer and higher than those who named themselves heir to Kant’s philosophy. Even more controversial, but equally plausible, is that Kant’s own philosophy moved in the direction of carrying out a program of ‘‘romanticization’’ in accordance with Novalis’ dictum. To make this last claim is sure to upset Kant scholars, especially those in the AngloAmerican tradition who for decades have labored hard to reconstruct an analytic, empiricist-friendly reading of Kant as primarily responding to Humean skepticism. Certainly, to associate Kant with mysticism, irrationalism, and otherworldly utopianism is false, and would be anathema to the no-nonsense humanism of ‘‘the Prussian Hume.’’5 Yet characterizing early German Romanticism in these terms is itself a gross misrepresentation of its most lively and central tendencies. Moreover, in the mid-twentieth century rush to make Kant palatable to Anglo-American analytic philosophers, much that was central to Kant’s own work was initially ignored, down-played, or simply dismissed. No one denies that the so-called ‘‘Copernican revolution’’ and the ethics founded on a Categorical Imperative remained basic to all his most important work, but it is equally true that Kant wrote about far more than the conditions of cognitive knowledge and the foundations of moral obligation. Recent scholarship on Kant’s ‘‘impure’’ ethics,6 aesthetics, anthropology, methodology, politics, and social theory has virtually exploded, and our ability to bring Kant’s philosophy into sharper historical focus has increased proportionally. 5

6

Lewis White Beck’s term in ‘‘A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant?’’ in Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). The term is due to Robert Louden and is the title of his book on Kant’s Anthropology: Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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Let us begin by looking at what Novalis means when he defines the movement known as Romanticism in terms of ‘‘romanticizing.’’ As it turns out, he has in mind something quite specific: to romanticize is to convert what is ordinary and mundane into something extraordinary and mysterious, and conversely, to make what is unknown, known: The world must be romanticized. In this way one rediscovers the original meaning. Romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative raising to a higher power [Potenzirung]. The lower self becomes identified with a better self. Just as we ourselves are such a qualitative exponential series. This operation is still quite unknown. Insofar as I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the ordinary a mysterious countenance, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite an appearance of infinity, I romanticize it. The operation is precisely the opposite for the higher, unknown, mystical and infinite – these are logarithmized by this connection – they become common expressions. Romantic philosophy. Lingua romana. Alternating elevation and lowering. (II: 545, #105)

Novalis characterizes romanticizing as a two-part process. As Ernst Behler explains it, it is ‘‘a dual, counteractive movement . . . in which romanticizing constitutes the expansion of the mind into the mysterious and unknown, yet eventually reverses itself into a return into the ordinary and familiar.’’7 The first part of this process – giving the commonplace a higher meaning, mystifying the ordinary – is stereotypically associated with Romanticism. But it is equally important in understanding Novalis and early German Romanticism that equal weight be placed on the second part of the process – lowering or ‘‘logarhythmizing’’ [‘‘logarythmisirt’’] the mystical. Andrew Bowie points out that The neologism ‘‘logorhythmised’’, which combines the sense of rational ordering, verbalisation and mathematical progression with the sense of the music inherent in the use of everyday language, epitomises the Romantic position.8

Bowie goes on to argue that for Novalis, as for Friedrich Schlegel, romanticizing by no means meant a ‘‘surrender to indeterminacy.’’9 While Novalis certainly sympathized with the urge to idealize, he was insistent that although a ‘‘tendency to seek the universal’’ [Universaltendenz] is essential to the scholar,

7 8

9

Ernst Behler, German Romantic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 207. Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 80. Ibid., pp. 78ff and p. 313, n. 19.

Kant and Romanticism

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one must never, like a phantast, seek the undetermined – a child of fantasy – an ideal. One proceeds from determinate task to determinate task. An unknown lover of course has a magical charm. Striving for the unknown, the undetermined, is extremely dangerous and disadvantageous. Revelation must not be forced. (3: 601, #291)

This fragment may serve to remind contemporary eighteenth-century scholars that a genuine appreciation of the ‘‘practical, technical and real’’ (Novalis, 3: 600, #291) in science was not the sole property of Enlighteners. In fact, on Novalis’ account of romanticizing, a reductionist approach in the sciences can be viewed as a legitimate and integral part of the romantic program. Recognizing the ‘‘naturalizing’’ side of the process of romanticizing helps to correct the misreading of Novalis’ program as irrationalist, but it is just as important to emphasize that even the expansive side of the process is not a call for mystification. To make the familiar unfamiliar is not to seek cognitive oblivion, but simply to learn to look at the world again with wonder. Understood in this way, then, there is certainly a very general sense in which Kant, along with other great philosophers before him, ‘‘romanticized’’ in both these senses of the term. The very procedure of Kantian ‘‘critique’’ is one of painstaking analysis and ordering of mental phenomena that had previously been considered ‘‘unknown’’ or mystical. For example, one could say without exaggeration that, in Kant’s view, he was demystifying Hume’s hand-waving conception of the causal connection as a ‘‘gentle force’’ or Descartes’ mystical ‘‘stamp of God’’ view of innate ideas, or Locke’s substance – a ‘‘somewhat, I know not what.’’ One might very well characterize the analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason as a process of demystification of formerly metaphysical notions like substance, causal connection, possibility, and necessity, and the very notion of ideas knowable a priori. Certainly in Kant’s own time, the depressingly deflationary nature of Kant’s transcendental move was clear, as was attested to in the famous case of Kleist’s ‘‘Kant crisis.’’ Even where it seemed impossible to reduce phenomena to functions of human cognition – for instance, in the case of the uniformity of natural appearances and the systematic regularity of nature, as in the appearance of systematic interconnectedness of nature according to empirical laws, or in the existence of natural organisms (entities with purposes) – Kant pushed the critical philosophy to its limits, introducing ‘‘regulative’’ principles, or principles of reflection (in the third Critique) as necessary conditions of our recognition of these contingencies.

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Even the human tendency to ‘‘surrender’’ to the infinite is analyzed as a psychological phenomenon by Kant in the Dialectic of the first Critique, and can thus be viewed as a ‘‘logarythmizing’’ of the unknowable in the various forms in which Reason seeks it. Kant does not deny the existence of reason’s irrepressible desire to strive to know the unknown and the infinite. But by carefully cataloguing the various specific traps and pitfalls that human reason is liable to, he systematically reduces the search for the unknown itself to a part of human cognitive functioning. Where this desire to surrender to the infinite is aestheticized, as in our fascination with that in nature which appears infinitely large or powerful, Kant also gives a detailed analysis of the cognitive functions involved. He assures his readers that the sublime is really not to be located in natural objects themselves, but rather all we are entitled to say is that the object is suitable for exhibiting a sublimity that can be found in the mind. For what is sublime, in the proper meaning of the term, cannot be contained in any sensible form but concerns only ideas of reason, which . . . can be exhibited in sensibility. (V: 245–246).

Kant goes on to explain in great detail the way in which the imagination attempts to estimate in intuition the magnitude and power of vast, even infinite nature, and how this striving eventuates in a feeling (of inadequacy or fear) that refers us to an aspect of ourselves that is ‘‘independent of nature.’’ This reference itself gives rise to a second feeling of overcoming the inadequacies of our imagination. In other words, Kant proffers a highly nuanced and complex psychological account of the origins of our feeling of the mysteries and majesty of nature. And, beyond the theory of the sublime, as Rudolf Makkreel points out, Kant’s account of reflective judgment and imagination in the third Critique also attempts to analyze and explain ‘‘one of the greatest metaphysical mysteries – the fact that matter can at times partake of life’’ by way of aesthetic pleasure.10 To be sure, as Behler (echoing Friedrich Schlegel) points out, Kant recognized a ‘‘dark’’ and mysterious element of the human psyche in the guise of the faculty of imagination.11 It was for him the ‘‘blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no 10

11

Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). This book is an excellent account of Kant’s developed theory of imagination and severely undermines any argument that Kant had an impoverished account of imagination that placed it at the very lowest level of philosophical inquiry, as suggested by, e.g., ‘‘Ernst Behler u¨ber Manfred Frank,’’ Buchbesprechung, Athena¨um, 1 (1991). Behler, Review of Manfred Frank’s Einfu¨hrung, p. 249.

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knowledge but of which we are scarcely ever conscious’’ (Critique of Pure Reason A78/B103). Yet it does not follow even from this characterization that Kant was unwilling to admit the possibility of the scientific study of the ‘‘dark’’ side of imagination, e.g. in unconscious ideation, or what he called ‘‘obscure ideas.’’ When he talks about unconscious ideas in the Anthropology he says that ‘‘the theory of obscure ideas belongs only to physiological . . . anthropology’’ (VII: 136), suggesting that although these may be inaccessible to investigation a priori, and hence beyond the reach of critique, still there is room for empirical study of these phenomena.12 This view is completely compatible with transcendental idealism and also in keeping with the naturalist side of Novalis’ Romanticizing program. That Kant’s work could be seen as deflationary, a bringing down to earth, or naturalizing of metaphysical and previously mysterious notions, ought not to be too surprising, of course. More strange, and certainly more likely to offend traditional Kant-scholarly sensibilities, is the suggestion that Kant performed the ‘‘romantic operation’’ in the first sense outlined by Novalis. Can it plausibly be maintained that Kant ‘‘made of the ordinary and commonplace something mystical and profound?’’ We have only to consider, for a start, the extent to which Kant’s project involved ‘‘denying knowledge to make room for faith.’’ I argue in chapter 4 that contemporary Kantians who take Kant’s theory of practical reason to be the absolute center and determining focus of his philosophy go too far, but it is undeniable that Kant’s concern for this ‘‘unknowable’’ side of human experience was a central concern. Kant devotes a great deal of theoretical energy to explaining and analyzing moral judgment, yet he explicitly states that, morally speaking, the foundation of that investigation lies in the dignity and absolute worth of humanity as an end in itself. This is not to say that the recognition of individual human dignity is a mystical experience, but rather that, in the tradition of making what is most familiar into something that appears fresh and new, Kant’s philosophy ‘‘re-enchants’’ our humanity, makes us marvel in awe at the ‘‘moral law within.’’ Similarly Kant’s notorious ‘‘fact of reason,’’ ultimately allows of no explanation, practical or theoretical: 12

I have examined this aspect of Kant’s theory of imagination and creativity in two papers, ‘‘Kant’s Apology for Sensibility,’’ delivered at the APA Pacific Division in New Orleans in 1999, and also in ‘‘Fantasts and Fantasias: A Kantian Theory of Imaginative Free Play,’’ delivered at the Evelyn Dunbar Early Music Festival Symposium, Northwestern University (February 2003). A discussion also appears in chapter 7 of this volume.

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The consciousness of this fundamental law [the Categorical Imperative, the moral law] may be called a fact of reason, since one cannot ferret it out from antecedent data of reason such as the consciousness of reason (for this is not antecedently given), and since it forces itself on us as a synthetic proposition ‘‘a priori’’ based on no pure or empirical intuition. It would be analytic if the freedom of the will were presupposed, but for this, as a positive concept, an intellectual intuition would be needed, and here we cannot assume it. In order to regard this law without any misinterpretation as given, one must note that it is not an empirical fact, but the sole fact of reason, which by it proclaims itself as originating law (sic volo, sic iubeo)[This is my will and my command, from Juvenal: Satire]. (Critique of Practical Reason, V: 31)

In other words, consciousness of the law is a given, and no account, transcendental or empirical, can suffice to explain it. Kant was no poet, but the few passages that come close to poetry in his work are those that refer to the dignity, the ‘‘jewel-like’’ radiance, of the good will in humanity. And although in contemplating the ‘‘moral law within,’’ Kant allows his mind to ‘‘expand into the mysterious reaches of the unknown,’’ it is an expansion that any ordinary human being can accomplish, consciousness of which is a given. So even though in his theoretical work Kant clearly exemplifies the ‘‘logorythmizing’’ or reductionist tendency of ‘‘natural philosophy,’’ his moral philosophy provides the complementary enlargement that completes the twofold contraction – expansion dynamic of Romanticism described by Novalis. Properly understood, Novalis’ dictum covers the critical philosophy in spirit and in letter: Kant made the unknown known, reducing cognition to functions of judgment discoverable to philosophical inquiry; and in the very process of humanizing the cosmos, he transformed the most intimate aspects of human nature into an unknowable but awesome thought: a ‘‘thing-in-itself.’’ Of course, it may be objected that there is a perfectly good sense in which all pathbreaking philosophy will qualify for the label ‘‘Romantic’’ if taken in the sense just outlined, since all progress in philosophy may be understood as a kind of elevation of certain fundamental assumptions to ‘‘foundational,’’ ‘‘original,’’ or ‘‘primitive’’ notions that remain unquestioned, while at the same time reducing and making ‘‘mundane’’ other phenomena that then are explained by these assumptions. In this sense, one could say that Descartes, Plato, even Hume, also ‘‘romanticized.’’13 In response it may first of all be pointed out that indeed, on Novalis’ 13

I thank Michael Losonsky for first raising this objection, and also an anonymous reviewer at Cambridge University Press for making the same point.

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account, they did. For Novalis, philosophizing is a variety of romanticizing, wherein we search for a ground, for an absolute: Philosophizing must be a unique kind of thinking. What do I do when I philosophize? I reflect upon a ground. The ground of philosophizing is thus a striving after the thought of a ground . . . All philosophizing must therefore end in an absolute ground. Now if this were not given, if this concept contained an impossibility – then the drive to philosophize would be an unending activity – and without end because there would be an eternal urge for an absolute ground that can be satisfied only relatively and that would therefore never cease. Unending free activity in us arises through the free renunciation of the absolute – the only possible absolute that can be given us and that we only find through our inability to attain and know an absolute. This absolute that is given to us thus can only be known negatively, insofar as we act and find that what we seek cannot be attained through action . . . This could be called an absolute postulate. All searching for a single principle would be like the attempt to square the circle. (#566)

Novalis goes on to distinguish the activity of doing philosophy from Philosophy as product of that activity: Philosophy, the result of philosophizing, arises accordingly through interruption of the drive towards knowledge of the ground – through standing still at the point where one is. (#566)

Hence all true philosophers are indeed driven by the same motive force, and their work will be characterizable as the attempt to reduce previously inflated notions to simple ones while at the same time simply assuming as given an ‘extraordinary’ point towards which that reduction is aimed, and which itself cannot be proven or further explained. Philosophizing is itself a conceptual version of the expansion and contraction process of romanticizing. At least, it is until it becomes ‘‘Philosophy’’ – i.e. the point at which the philosopher ‘‘interrupts’’ herself, and claims to have finally found ‘‘the answer’’ and, in so doing, quits the activity. Thus, although in one interesting sense for Novalis, philosophers always ‘romanticize’ in the process of their thought, they also cease to do so at that point where they declare that they have uncovered or produced a systematic solution. Kant, like most philosophers, claimed to have found ‘‘the answer’’ in his Copernican turn and the systems of cognitive and moral experience that eventuate from that turn, and perhaps to that extent he too ceased ‘‘romanticizing’’ in favor of ‘‘standing still at the point where he was.’’ What is unique about Kant, and what connects him directly to Novalis and the system-eschewing early Romantics in a way that other philosophers are not so connected, is that the revolution in

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philosophizing that his approach articulated involved the self-conscious, methodical recognition of both the limitations of human knowledge (our inability to know either nature or ourselves in their entirety), and at the same time of the ineliminable, natural human drive to surpass those limitations. In the third Critique, Kant explicitly takes on the project of bringing these two aspects of human nature together in a coherent account. A particularly good example of his ‘‘romanticizing’’ here is the ¨ bersinnuse that he makes of the notion of the ‘‘supersensible’’ (das U 14 liche) or what he earlier called the ‘‘noumenal.’’ In the third Critique the idea of a substrate that underlies and makes possible objects of knowledge and ‘‘good-willed’’ action is problematized, since, Kant worries, an immense gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible, so that no transition from the sensible to the supersensible . . . is possible, just as if they were two different worlds, the first of which is to have no influence on the second; and yet the second is to have an influence on the first, i.e., the concept of freedom is to actualize in the world of sense the purpose enjoined by its laws. (V: 175–176)

Kant goes on to argue that it must therefore be possible to think of nature as amenable to our moral purposes, So there must after all be a basis uniting the supersensible that underlies nature and the supersensible that the concept of freedom contains practically, even though the concept of this basis does not reach cognition . . . though it does make possible the transition from our way of thinking in terms of principles of nature to our way of thinking in terms of principles of freedom. (V: 176)

Odd as this language may sound,15 the talk of a noumenal ‘‘realm that is unbounded but that is also inaccessible to our entire cognitive power’’ should be understood, as Kant himself suggests, as simply an assumption which serves as a necessary basis for our ‘‘way of thinking [Denkungsart].’’ We can think ‘‘in terms of principles of nature’’ (based on the assumption of something that is first given to experience that we can never know in itself) and ‘‘in terms of principles of freedom’’ (based on the concept of freedom, which we must postulate in order to act). The question posed 14 15

Again, I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer at Cambridge University Press for this point. Werner Pluhar, in his Introduction to his edition of the Critique of Judgment makes the concept of the supersensible and its determinability into a Leitfaden (guiding thread) for interpreting the whole of the book and its place in the Critical project. He begins with the importance of the aesthetic reflective judgment in this regard, and points out that although Kant appears to be introducing three ‘‘supersensibles’’ (whatever that could mean!) in this passage, he is suggesting rather three ideas of one supersensible (Pluhar, Translator’s Introduction, p. lxiii).

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by the third Critique is: ‘‘On what basis, can we move seamlessly in thought from one way of thinking to the other; from thinking in terms of nature to thinking in terms of freedom?’’ Or, more accurately, how do we combine both ways of thinking to effect moral improvement in nature, including in our ‘‘natural’’ selves?16 Kant’s answer is complicated, indeed, ‘‘obscure’’ even by his own standards, as he admits in his Preface (V: 170). The ability to transition from one way of thinking to another rests upon an experience of what appears to be nature’s purposiveness for the human mind, an experience that is itself neither cognitive nor moral, but contains elements of both. It is an experience that involves perception of nature, but that goes beyond immediate sensory input to linger over and play with these perceptions in imagination. Such ‘‘play’’ makes no claims to know and no demands to act, but simply eventuates in a judgment that the object is beautiful, a claim that at its core expresses a feeling of pleasure that we derive from contemplating nature’s harmonious forms. This is a special pleasure, an aesthetic reflective pleasure that for Kant, might be rooted in noumenal ground: ‘‘the basis that determines the judgment lies, perhaps, in the concept of what may be considered the supersensible substrate of humanity’’(V: 340). The supersensible ‘‘substrate,’’ or basis, is the aesthetic counterpart to the cognitive and moral notions of the thing-in-itself and to the postulate of freedom. It is in essence twofold, befitting its role as mediating ‘‘principle’’: It involves feeling that is disinterested (i.e. not self-interested), similar to the feeling of respect that the moral law elicits in us, and it also refers to nature, both in ourselves (pleasure is after all an animal sensation) and in the world around us. Details of Kant’s account of the connection between the moral and the beautiful will be discussed in the chapters that follow. What is important here is the way in which Kant both demystifies the human being’s ‘‘two world split’’ by reference to a way of adjudicating reflectively, while recognizing at the same time the ultimate inscrutability of this process: As for the subjective principle – i.e., the indeterminable idea of the supersensible in us – as the sole key for solving the mystery of this ability [the capacity to 16

Felicitas Munzel’s book Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘‘Critical’’ Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) deals with the issue of a ‘‘moral Denkungsart’’ and ‘‘moral Gesinnung’’ – the rational and sensible sides of human character – in great detail. Her focus is upon the positing and development of moral character in the individual, but much of her discussion, some of which will be noted later in the book, is relevant to issues of reason’s unity with itself. Since her focus is on the unity of character in the individual, the ‘‘external’’ problem of the human being with the world is not taken up in the same detail.

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experience the beautiful and express it in a judgment of taste] concealed from us even as to its sources, we can do no more than point to it; but there is nothing we can do that would allow us to grasp it any further. (V: 341, emphasis added)

Or, as Novalis would later say, such an idea is ‘‘just a little connecting hook used for hanging things on pro forma – it only appears [to connect things] – it just grasps a handful of darkness’’ (FS: #3, 6). It may be useful to recall a claim that Kant made much earlier, in discussing the nature of human cognition in the deduction of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant here admits that his analysis must simply assume the independence, or ‘‘givenness,’’ of that which is intuited and synthesized by cognition: This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce ‘‘a priori’’ unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is as little capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functions of judgment, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible intuition. (B: 145–146)

It is a given that we have an understanding that structures but is not the original, controlling source of the sensible world. It is similarly a given ‘‘fact of reason’’ that we have a will that imparts to the sensible world the form of a supersensible rational-moral system (V: 43). What the analysis of taste and beauty add to these unquestionable claims is a third ‘‘given’’ that mediates the other two: We are capable of sensible feelings, shareable with other human beings, of nature’s possible attunement to a supersensible rational – moral system. Kant assumes, ironically and (early) romantically, an extraordinary, unknowable purpose that is grasped in ordinary human feeling (a sensus communis aestheticus). This feeling is the natural expression of supersensibility – and is the vehicle for our human ability to think from nature to morality and back again: It is at once both elevated and everyday. kant and rousseau Considerations of this sort will serve as an initial argument for the claim put forward in what follows: that aesthetic considerations shape Kant’s overall philosophical program, a program that is proto-romantic in many respects. Novalis’ philosophical insights are deeply indebted to Kant. The former’s romantic imperative, like the latter’s Enlightenment one, issued a challenge to philosophy to self-consciously present and carry out a new program. Precisely this self-consciousness characterizes the critical philosophical project, which was in Kant’s own mind, epoch-making. His

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‘‘mission,’’ stated explicitly, was to dethrone the queen of the sciences, metaphysics, and set up in her place a more humble ruling body, namely, the principles of human cognition in general.17 At the same time Kant recognized the inevitability of human striving for the absolute, for a final unification of knowledge under a single principle, and as we shall shortly see, embraced this striving to a far greater degree than Novalis himself would have allowed, if we take Novalis’ fragment from the observations on medicine and physics seriously. For all his anti-metaphysical posturing, Kant embraced the view that metaphysical ‘‘Schwa¨rmerei’’ has an important role to play in the development of human cognitive faculties and of progressively better social institutions. We shall examine the role of enthusiasm and imagination in transforming society in what follows, especially in chapter 5. The first claim, that imaginative speculation might itself develop our abilities, is made in the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, in a footnote to a discussion of a transcendental definition of the feeling of pleasure. The note will serve as something of a guiding thread in the chapters that follow. It deals with the question of why, in Kant’s words, ‘‘nature has given us the predisposition to such fruitless expenditure of our forces as we see in empty wishes and longings (which certainly play a large role in human life).’’ Kant recognizes that human beings in fact often long for the absolutely impossible. Such dangerous longings ‘‘are often nourished by novels and sometimes also by mystical presentations, similar to novels, of superhuman perfections and fanatical bliss.’’ But even as he is attacking the ‘‘Roman’’ (the novel, one of Kant’s own cherished pastimes was reading them) and other devices of mystification, he is suggesting that such projects have a natural role to play in human intellectual development: It seems to me that here, as in all else, nature has made wise provisions. For if we had to assure ourselves that we can in fact produce the object, before the presentation of it could determine us to apply our forces, our forces would presumably remain largely unused. For usually we do not come to know what forces we have except by trying them out. So nature has provided for the connections between the determination of our forces and the presentation of the object [to be there] even before we know what ability we have, and it is often precisely this effort which to that very mind seemed at first an empty wish, that produces that ability in the first place. Now wisdom is obligated to set limits to

17

See Frederick Beiser’s description of Kant’s attack on metaphysics in ‘‘Kant’s Intellectual Development: 1746–1781,’’ chapter I of The Cambridge Companion to Kant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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that instinct, but wisdom will never succeed in eradicating it, or [rather] it will never even demand its eradication. (XX: 231)

This passage will be referred to again, and it is crucial to the arguments that follow in this book. Kant suggests here, first, that natural, ‘‘instinctive’’ forces – forces not identified as rational – drive creativity and the development of our cognitive capacities. The ‘‘power of imagination, that blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious’’ (A78/B103), is the force that makes human intellectual development possible. Imaginative striving – we might call it a kind of ‘‘straining to understand’’ what appears impossible – allows us to recognize in theory and then possibly to realize in practice what ‘‘seemed at first an empty wish.’’ Without this natural impulse surely no progress of reason is possible. It is this impulse that is also at the heart of Novalis’ program, and constitutes the Romantic debt to Kant. Kant was profoundly aware of the role that nature plays in human experience and progress.18 Considering the source for Kant’s revolutionary turn in ethics, the Urromantic Rousseau, this should come as no real surprise. Kant’s Rousseauistic turn is well known, especially his famous claim in the ‘‘Remarks’’ on the Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime that reading Rousseau ‘‘set him straight’’ and taught him to honor humanity above all else.19 Richard Velkley has made a strong case for the pervasive influence of Rousseau not only on Kant’s moral and political views, but for his view of reason in general.20 Velkley takes the defining moment of Kant’s project to arise from Rousseau’s characterization of the problem of reason as the problem of the relationship of human reason to human happiness. If, as Rousseau so forcefully argues, becoming progressively more rational only makes us progressively more miserable (the more we know, the more we desire), then how can the development of reason as humanity’s ‘‘vocation’’ or destiny be asserted? Recognition of Rousseau’s problem with reason, Velkley argues, forces Kant to attempt a ‘‘theodicy of reason.’’ He argues that Kant’s philosophy is driven by the need for an account of Reason’s final purpose, and that 18

19 20

No one, in my opinion, has argued more persuasively for this awareness, and the systematic connection of Kant’s naturalism with his ethics than Allen Wood, in Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Ak XX: p. 44. Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: on the Moral Foundations of Kant’s Critical Philosophy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)

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the need to articulate that purpose leads Kant on a quest for what Velkley calls ‘‘the teleological consummation of reason in a new legislation of the order of the soul’’: an order that ‘‘proceeds in the direction’’ of ‘‘one form of human perfection’’ and that ‘‘can be achieved only through a certain kind of willing’’(p. 66). The need for a theodicy of reason, according to Velkley, leads Kant to assert the primacy of practical reason in these terms: ‘‘The moral foundation of Kant’s critical philosophy can be uncovered in the manner in which this ‘primacy’ determines the content and direction of all inquiries belonging to the ‘criticism’ of reason’’ (p. 2). This is a dramatic claim, to which I will return in chapters 2 and 4. At the very least, Velkley’s argument shows that Kant’s sense of urgency about the need for philosophy to justify reason as the final arbiter of truth owes as much to Rousseau as to Hume, and it is persuasive in making its case that, in important respects, the Rousseauian turn in his thinking was even more definitive of Kant’s overal critical program. Rousseau’s worry about vindicating Reason as a final moral court of appeal was certainly a wakeup call for Kant, who had no intention of abandoning the tribunal of reason as the moral final court of appeal. On Velkley’s account, Kant’s moral philosophy takes on epic, (if not Quixotic) proportions consistent with a romanticizing of philosophy in the expansive direction. However, it does not follow from the centrality of this issue that Kant’s expansion of reason beyond the theoretical can be billed as the saga of his quest for the Holy Grail of the unity of reason, nor even as a quest to unify Reason under the conception of an ideal of practical willing, as Velkley argues. In chapters that follow, I argue against reading Kant as identifying the ‘‘philosophic life’’ with ‘‘seeking the perfection of the will’’ (p. 66). In other words, it is a very different tendency in Kant’s later philosophical work that this book explores. Kant’s views on aesthetic (imaginative) reflection and its role in morality undermine single-focus, idealist readings of the sort Velkley advocates – i.e. readings that situate Kant at the foundation of Germanic philosophical system-building beginning with Fichte. Of course there are conceptual and historic continuities, but Kant himself disowned the Fichtean system and, I am convinced, would have disavowed the view of philosophy as an epic quest for the Holy Grail of a single, unifying teleological account of human nature. As Allen Wood puts it: For Kant, the task of philosophy is not (as it is for Hegel) to reconcile us to the human condition. Kant thinks that as rational creatures our condition must be one of dissatisfaction, self-alienation, and endless striving. Philosophy should not

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try to transcend that condition but only to help us live with its inevitability, and more important, to make progress in the painful tasks it sets us.21

This does not preclude that for Kant, as Wood also claims, the task of philosophy ‘‘in an age of enlightenment is to make [rational collective ends] explicit and then to look for social institutions and historical tendencies that promote them.’’22 But Kant’s insistence on the regulative nature of all such accounts, and his increasing attention in the later Critical philosophy to the sensible and contingent conditions of moral judgment and human creativity is continuous, not with idealist systembuilding, but with the more modest and ironic approach of early German Romanticism. For all its insight into the connection of Kant’s philosophy to Rousseau, I would disagree with Velkley’s central claim. A final theodicy of reason for Kant was never fully worked out, and for a very good reason: it could not be accomplished on Kant’s own terms. No concrete, ‘‘substantive’’ notion of the end of Reason could ever be delivered solely by reason to itself. Reason can regulate but never, by itself, create these ends. Although Velkley claims that the principle of reason’s final end, to be realized historically, is a regulative one not in conflict with individual choice (p. 162), there are several places in the book that suggest that he has something more substantive in mind. He claims that ‘‘In light of this ideal,’’ all of reason comes under the legislation of the critical philosopher so as to secure the grounds for humanity’s unobstructed progress toward a final practical goal – the achievement of a definitive ‘‘culture’’ that embodies the ideal (p. 15), and he speaks of ‘‘the practical advance of humanity toward a consummate ‘‘culture’’(p. 43). Towards the end of the book (p. 161) he argues that, for Kant, reason must reshape human happiness itself: ‘‘the individual’s conception of happiness has not kept pace with reason’’ and ‘‘the individual is in great measure himself to blame if he is at odds with the species’ rational advance.’’ ‘‘Moral obligation taken in a very wide fashion, thus includes the effort to refine the concept of happiness’’ and ‘‘The final system of culture must rest on a plan that dictates the mode of pursuing happiness if not its content . . . A culture organized on a moral plan requires that happiness be grounded in rational self-activity and not in passive enjoyment.’’ There is certainly textual evidence in Kant to support this view of the Highest Good, but it also ignores Kant’s views on the importance of contemplative, aesthetic (passive?) pleasures – moments of happiness that are not ‘‘dictated’’ by 21

Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, p. 334.

22

Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, p. 309.

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pure reason, but partake in the contingencies of the world outside human control. Hence in the second Critique, at the very place where he also describes the ‘‘primacy of the practical,’’ Kant also feels obliged to resort to the postulation of a higher power to lend hope to reason’s demand that we strive for individual virtue and community justice. The chapters that follow explore the possibility that it was the inadequacy of this theological turn as a theory of motivation for human moral behavior that motivated Kant’s attempts in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ to uncover, among the contingencies of human feeling and imagination, a more human ‘‘bridge’’ to the moral. I do not want to argue that Kant actually built the bridge, nor that an aesthetic theory of moral development can be entirely successful. Whether the experience of imaginative freedom and of beauty in all its manifestations can indeed resolve the crisis is a matter for debate. It may be that in the attempted resolution to the problem of making reason accountable to human nature and happiness, in the words of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘‘an abyss opens where a bridge should have been built’’(p. 30).23 The point, however, is that Kant’s philosophy, especially as articulated in the third and final Critique, becomes a signpost pointing away from Fichte and rationalist–idealist resolutions to the problem. As LacoueLabarthe and Nancy put it: in the absence of a subject whose self-presence is guaranteed by originary intuition and whose mathesis of this first evidence organizes the totality of knowledge and the world more geometrico, the system as such, although it is deeply desired by Kant . . . is continually lacking precisely where it is in greatest demand. (p. 32)

Their point is that Kantian practical reason requires (‘‘desires’’) a systematic connection between nature and intellect if the human moral agent is to have an effect on the world (including upon her own character). But knowledge of a natural moral system (hence also, knowledge of our ‘‘moral substance’’) is impossible on Kant’s account. Denying knowledge of this unified moral natural realm famously cleared a space for belief in it (since the denial also includes denial of knowing its nonexistence), but at the cost of rendering the moral furniture of this

23

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

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space intangible. Kant thus created a tension that is not resolved by the postulation of freedom, God, and immortality. In explaining the link between the third Critique and the early German Romantics, LacoueLabarthe and Nancy continue: this ‘‘subject’’ of morality can only be defined negatively, as a subject that is not the subject of knowledge . . . as a subject without mathesis, even of itself. It is indeed posited as freedom, and freedom is the locus of ‘‘self-consciousness.’’ But this does not imply that there is any cognition – or even consciousness – of freedom, for freedom in turn is posited only as ratio essendi of the moral law within us, which, because it is only a fact . . . can provide only a ratio cognoscendi of freedom, which produces no cognition. This fact (the imperative, the universality of the law) is neither an intuition nor a concept. As a moral subject, in sum, the subject recovers none of its substance. (p. 31)

In other words, early Romantic doubts about the analyzability of the ‘‘I’’ – that is, of the human subject, and their concomitant skepticism about a final, total system within which it resides, are continuations of a trajectory set by Kant’s philosophy, not a break with it. Interpretations that fix Kant within the Idealist tradition ignore this trajectory. Nevertheless, focussing as Velkley does on Rousseau’s problematizing of reason and its impact on Kant helps make sense of aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory that formalist readings ignore.24 Kant’s acknowledged and profound debt to that earliest of early romantics is certainly a driving force, but not, I argue, behind an attempt to unify reason in a single teleological principle. Rousseau’s insight, I would suggest, spurred him to expand aesthetics beyond the conventional theory of ‘‘taste’’ towards a theory of imagination as a creative force in human motivation and in nature. Whatever other influences it had on his contemporaries and successors in German philosophy, Kant’s philosophy, especially his aesthetic theory with its pathbreaking new view of the power of imagination, contained the seeds of early German Romanticism. As such it continued to propagate a strain of German moral philosophizing that had been developed throughout the century by philosophers and literary theorists

24

Reception of Kant’s aesthetics in the mid-twentieth century focussed on Kant’s arguments for a disinterested attitude on the part of the judging subject, and on definition of the aesthetic object purely in terms of its formal characteristics (design, figure, etc.). It tended to ignore or dismiss other aspects of the text that struggled to connect aesthetic reflection with moral interest and feeling. Donald Crawford’s work, as well as that of Paul Guyer, began to move analytic approaches to Kant’s aesthetics towards a more serious analysis of these sections of the third Critique. Donald Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974); Paul Guyer, Kant and the claims of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

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who saw the potential for enlightening the populace through art. In chapter 2, I examine aspects of this pre-history in Germany, and argue for reading Kant’s theory of imaginative freedom as being of a piece with his German predecessors. Their concerns for human emancipation through aesthetic education were certainly an important influence, like that of Rousseau, on Kant’s own views of human nature and morality.

c h ap t e r 2

The power of imaginative freedom

Just as the concept of freedom is central to the political and moral philosophy of the Enlightenment, it is also important to the aesthetic theory of this period. This is clearly true of the German Enlightenment. Beginning with Baumgarten, the concept of the autonomy of the imagination in aesthetic judgment and artistic production becomes an essential feature of German aesthetic theory, culminating in Kant’s detailed account of the free activity of the imagination in judgments about the beautiful. A study of Kant’s notion of imaginative freedom also reveals a continuity in German philosophy from Lessing to Schiller that is not apparent in other approaches to his aesthetic theory. That is, in spite of an apparent break with the German enlightenment tradition created by Kant’s insistence that aesthetics is essentially irrelevant to morality, his account of imaginative freedom suggests the possibility that political and moral progress may be intimately connected with our ability to make universally valid aesthetic judgments. This in turn suggests that Kant’s system left room for an ‘‘enlightened’’ commitment to the view that our experience of beauty and art may have an indispensable role to play in our moral improvement. In what follows, I first briefly trace the development of the concept of imaginative freedom from Baumgarten to Lessing and then go on to outline Kant’s account of this concept. In the last section I argue that Kant’s account of imaginative freedom provides a solution to the problem of how reason can command us to strive to bring about the highest good – that is, a moral world – on earth. I conclude by suggesting that in view of the possibilities that his notion of imaginative freedom hold out to morality, Kant’s aesthetic theory may be seen as a ‘‘missing link’’ between Lessing’s views on the didactic nature of art and Schiller’s views on aesthetic education.1 1

Lewis White Beck first suggested the phrase and provided much helpful advice in improving earlier drafts of this chapter. I am also grateful to members of James Schmidt’s NEH 1989 summer seminar

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39

imaginative freedom from baumgarten to kant Aesthetics as a distinct philosophical discipline was first developed, and the term ‘‘aesthetics’’ first coined, by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, a student of the rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff. Although Baumgarten was a loyal disciple of Wolff and a committed rationalist, he nevertheless argued that there was a need within this tradition for an account of the logic of judgments about sensation. For Wolff’s philosophical predecessor, Leibniz, sense perception was too unclear and indistinct to give rise to a systematic structure of its own. In Leibniz’s words: ‘‘Taste as distinguished from understanding consists of confused perceptions, for which one cannot give an adequate reason. It is something like an instinct.’’2 For Wolff, too, sensation is only confused perception and hence belongs to the ‘‘lower’’ cognitive faculties. To the extent that sense perception exhibits order, it is for these philosophers imposed from ‘‘above’’ by reason. The problem, as Baumgarten saw it, was that sensory knowledge in the rationalist tradition is thus either equated with something like instinct (and is not knowledge at all) or is seen as an inferior species of knowledge. Baumgarten was a poet as well as a philosopher, and he wanted to secure for art an objective validity and a claim to truth that was equal to that of cognition. In his Meditationes Philosophicae . . . (Reflections on Poetry), published in 1735, Baumgarten claimed that the so-called lower faculties of sensation, memory, and imagination had a logic of their own analogous to, but not identical with, that of reason.3 Reason’s method involves making sensations clear and distinct through abstraction, definition, and demonstration. But beauty is destroyed by the tools of reason precisely because these processes minimize the sensuous, concrete, and individual nature of the beautiful. The ‘‘analogon of reason,’’ as Baumgarten called the combined faculties of sensation, memory, and imagination, has a logic of its own specific to judgments of beauty and free

2

3

‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ for further commenting on the chapter and encouraging me to pursue the argument outlined here. Finally, I am grateful to John Fisher and Rudolf Makkreel for valuable criticisms and suggestions. ‘‘Le gouˆt distingue´ de l’entendement consiste dans les perceptions confuse´s, dont on ne saurait assez rendre raison. C’est quelque chose d’approchant de l’instinct’’ (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt [Berlin, 1875–90], III, 420); trans. from Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy Loemker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), II, 1031. Alexander G. Baumgarten, Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (Halle, 1735), trans. K. Aschenbrenner and ed. W. B. Holther as Reflections on Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954).

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from the laws of abstraction, definition, and demonstration that reason imposes on cognition.4 Thus the birth of rationalist aesthetics in Baumgarten’s philosophy clears the way for a philosophical account of aesthetic judgment in which exemption from the constraints of cognitive judgment is a dominant theme. The movement in German philosophy for the emancipation of beauty from cognition was an echo of what had begun earlier in German literary circles. Bodmer and Breitinger, the so-called ‘‘Swiss Critics of Zurich,’’ had been critical of the rule-fetishism of the ruling rationalist literary and dramatic theory associated especially with J. C. Gottsched. Gottsched took his task to be the improvement of the German literary niveau, and to that end he rigidly applied rules originally laid down by Horace and Aristotle and adapted by recent French aesthetic theorists such as Boileau. Gottsched’s insistence on a literal application of classicist rules led to such absurd prescriptions as, for instance, banning monologues (‘‘‘Intelligent people are careful not to speak aloud when they are alone’’) and asides (‘‘It is then as if those present had lost their hearing for this short time’’) on the grounds that they were ‘‘unnatural’’ and ‘‘improbable.’’5 Exclusive emphasis on ‘‘reasonableness’’ (Vernu¨nftigkeit) and insistence on following specific rules was taken by Gottsched’s critics to be a denial of the importance of imagination and of artistic creativity. Bodmer and Breitinger, like Baumgarten, remained rationalists. That is, they did not deny the need for rulegovernedness in aesthetic experience and creation, but they believed that the imagination of both artist and critic could and should be free to play a greater role in art and criticism.6 By far the greatest exponent of artistic freedom in Germany, however, was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He is perhaps better known for his advocacy of religious freedom and tolerance in such works as Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts and Nathan der Weise, but aesthetic as well as religious freedom was extremely important to him. In terms of his personal philosophical development, the literary arguments came first 4

5

6

Alexander G. Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Hildesheim, 1961), Sect. I and 555–565. Cf. also Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 279–280. ‘‘Kluge Leute aber pflegen nicht laut zu reden, wenn sie allein sind’’ and ‘‘es wa¨re denn, dass die anwesende Person auf eine so kurze Zeit ihr Geho¨r verloren hatte’’ (J. C. Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst: Ausgewa¨hlte Werke, eds. Joachim Birke and Birgitte Birke [New York, 1973], p. 353). Cf. J. J. Bodmer and J. J. Breitinger, Von dem Einfluss und Gebrauche der Einbildungs-Kraft; Zur Ausbesserung des Geschmackes; Genaue Untersuchung Aller Arten Beschreibungen, Worinne die ausserlesenste Stellen der beru¨hmtesten Poeten dieser Zeit mit gru¨ndtlicher Freyheit beurtheilt werden (Frankfurt, 1727).

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and, I would argue, helped shape his later works on religion. Lessing, like Bodmer and Breitinger before him, reacted sharply to the excessive rationalism of German literary theory, and his polemics against Gottsched are well known. Great art, Lessing argues, is the result not of following recipes but of genius, and genius is its own rule. In his famous ‘‘Seventeenth Letter on Literature’’ published in a series that ran from 1759 to 1760, Lessing argues that the Germans, rather than looking to the overly ‘‘delicate’’ and ‘‘polite’’ drama of the French, would do better to turn their attention to British drama, especially to Shakespeare, whose genius lay in his ability to excite passion in his audience.7 Thus Lessing entered the fray in the debate over the role of rules in artistic production and criticism, and he went far beyond Baumgarten and the Swiss critics in urging the centrality of feeling to art and insisting on the freedom of the artist to arouse feeling in whatever manner was most effective.8 In the Laokoon, published in 1766, Lessing argues that the poet ought to evoke feelings by whatever would require the reader to use his or her imagination. The means available to the painter are different from those of the poet; the painter works with bodies in space, the poet with events in time. But the end goal of both painter and poet is to produce in the audience an imaginative response. ‘‘That alone is fruitful,’’ Lessing says, ‘‘which allows the imagination free play.’’9 For Lessing, imaginative freedom is important because it allows for the strongest possible emotional response to a work of art. Since for Lessing imaginative freedom is also the key to the success of the artist, to insist on mechanical application of rules in art is not to improve it but to guarantee its continued mediocrity. And yet Lessing does not go so far as to say that artistic genius is subject to no rule, but rather that genius has its own inner logic. He says: ‘‘Not every critic is a genius, but every genius is a born critic. Genius has the proof of all rules within itself.’’10 Genius demonstrates its autonomy not by ignoring all rules, but by deriving the rules from itself. Sensation (Empfindung) and intuitive knowledge must be capable of being expressed in words – of being generalized – if genius 7

8

9

10

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Briefe. Die neueste Literatur betreffend (1759), Werke, ed. Herbart G. Go¨pfert (Munich, 1973), V: 71ff. Indeed, the Laokoon may be read as primarily a plea for the freedom of the poet from the emotional constraints of Winckelmann’s neo-classicism. Lessing, Laokoon, Werke, ed. Herbart G. Go¨pfert (Munich: x, 1973), VI, 25–26, Sect. III: ‘‘Das jenige aber nur allein ist fruchtbar, was der Einbildungskraft freies Spiel la¨sst.’’ Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Werke, ed. Herbart G. Go¨pfert (Munich: x, xxxx), IV, no. 96, 673. ‘‘Nicht jeder Kunstrichter ist Genie; aber jedes Genie ist ein geborner Kunstrichter. Es hat die Probe aller Regeln in sich.’’

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is to improve on its own first attempts: ‘‘Who reasons correctly also invents, and who wishes to invent must be able to reason.’’11 Thus Lessing by no means rejects rationalist aesthetics altogether, and for Lessing as much as for the rationalists the final purpose of art is education. Lessing’s account of the autonomy of genius bears some resemblance to Kant’s account of moral freedom, according to which the freedom of the individual consists not in ignoring law but in giving the law to oneself as a rational being and thereby to all rational creatures generally. On Lessing’s account, genius follows its own law but in such a way as to be able to communicate its inventions with its audience. Given Lessing’s strong conviction that art should educate, one might expect to find in his theory some sort of aesthetic counterpart to Kant’s categorical imperative for morals. Nothing of the kind, however, is to be discovered. Lessing’s famous dictum, ‘‘The most sympathetic person is the best person,’’12 comes closest to giving generalized expression to his own first principle of dramatic invention – that the writer should attempt to produce sympathy in the audience. Yet it is not stated explicitly as a formula universally valid for all artistic production; nor is this surprising, since Lessing was not concerned to produce a systematic aesthetic.13 Although he believed that the goal of all art was to further human moral progress, his more specific interests in dramatic theory no doubt made the need for a detailed account of artistic imagination seem less urgent. Yet Lessing’s essentially rationalist belief in the didactic nature of art would seem to require that some such account be possible if the precise role of aesthetics in the education of human beings is to be described. It is therefore somewhat surprising that this account first appears in the aesthetic theory of Kant, where the view that art and beauty should serve the purpose of moral perfection is abandoned. Nevertheless, it is not until Kant that the creative possibilities of imaginative freedom first receive detailed systematic treatment in German aesthetic theory.

11

12

13

‘‘Wer richtig ra¨soniert, erfindet auch; und wer erfinden will, muss ra¨sonieren ko¨nnen’’ (Werke, ed. Herbart G. Go¨pfert, IV, no. 96, 675). ‘‘Der mitleidigste Mensch ist der beste Mensch, zu allen gesellschaftlichen Tugenden, zu allen Arten der Grossmutt der aufgelegteste’’ (letter to Nicolai, November 1756, Werke, ed. Herbart G. Go¨pfert, IV, 163). Cf. a typical statement in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie Werke, ed. Herbart G. Go¨pfert, no. 95, 670: ‘‘Ich erinnere hier meine Leser, dass diese Bla¨tter nichts weniger als ein dramatisches System enthalten sollen. Ich bin also nicht verpflichtet, alle die Schwierigkeiten aufzulo¨sen, die ich mache.’’ (Here I remind my reader that the last thing that I intend these pages to contain is a dramatic system. I am therefore not obliged to solve all the difficulties that I create.)

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Kant’s account of moral freedom is well known. In the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant gives what he calls a negative and a positive account of this concept. On the one hand it means freedom from causation by the lower, sensuous desires; on the other it means freedom to act according to a law of practical reason that we give to ourselves as rational beings.14 In the circle of concepts that make up the core of Kant’s moral theory, the moral law stands at the very center. However, Kant says, aesthetic reflective judgment has its own ‘‘territory,’’ within which, although not sovereign, it still enjoys freedom from the constraint of administering laws of cognition and morality.15 That is, in aesthetic reflection, judgment is not immediately subject to the legislation of the understanding (i.e. to the categories). It is free of cognitive determination – it does not involve predicating empirical concepts of the object. Nor is judgment concerned directly with applying the Categorical Imperative in aesthetic reflection. It is therefore free of moral determination: we may not ask, in the context of a purely aesthetic experience, whether or not this object is virtuous or promotes virtue. So although judgments about beauty must always be ‘‘directed to cognition in general’’16 and no activity based on aesthetic judgment may violate the Categorical Imperative, judgment in its reflective capacity is not compelled to apply a rule of either cognitive or moral judgment. Moreover, aesthetic experience of the beautiful is also free from what Kant calls ‘‘mere’’ subjectivity – that is, the desires of the senses for immediate pleasurable response are not determining factors in the perception of beauty. Thus aesthetic freedom, like moral freedom, is characterized by a lack of determination by sensuous and selfish desires. The foregoing may be called Kant’s ‘‘negative account’’ of imaginative freedom. But Kant also has a positive account of imaginative freedom, and it is here that the radical nature of this sort of freedom can be seen. For within the territory of aesthetics judgment takes a holiday from moral and cognitive work; no concepts must be applied, no commands must be followed. Our judgments about the beautiful are not determined by these laws. Rather, the object of an aesthetic reflective judgment is determined solely by the ‘‘mental state in which we are when the imagination and the 14

15 16

Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. 4: 446; Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, V: 28–29. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, V: 177. Cf. Section 9, V: 217, and also Section 22, V: 240–241, where Kant speaks of the ‘‘free lawfulness of the imagination’’ (freie Gesa¨tzma¨ssigkeit der Einbildungskraft), and argues that imagination in pure judgments of taste is free from any compulsion to ‘‘proceed according to determinate law’’ but is not thereby self-legislating (autonomous).

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understanding are in free play.’’17 Imaginative free play may occur either in ‘‘merely judging’’ the object in a wholly disinterested way, allowing my imagination to play freely with the forms that the object presents to perception; or it may occur in ‘‘productive’’ form in the artist, where it is used to produce and exhibit ‘‘aesthetic Ideas’’ – indeterminate ‘‘inner intuitions’’ that ‘‘prompt much thought’’ but cannot be grasped discursively.18 In both cases judgment determines its object in accordance with feeling rather than objective law.19 But what is the ultimate value of this radical freedom – this lack of constraint described by Kant’s aesthetics? It is quite clear that moral freedom is priceless, as Kant would say. It has an absolute value as a necessary condition of virtuous behavior. But the time off for free play that Kant grants the imagination within the carefully circumscribed territory of reflective judgment at the same time suggests a certain immaturity and lack of importance relative to those realms of human endeavor that are capable of self-governance and autonomy. To be fair, Kant, like Lessing, allows that beautiful art is valuable as a means to civilizing human beings (V: 433–434). Moreover, Kant believes that our experience of the beautiful is social – that is, our interest in the beautiful actually arises only in society, where the possibility of communicating aesthetic feelings exists (V: 296ff, V: 205n.). And although Kant argues that aesthetic experience does not make us more virtuous, he holds that respect for objects in nature may facilitate respect for our fellow human beings (V: 354). Nevertheless, at best it seems that for Kant the exercise of our imagination in aesthetic judgment of the beautiful may socialize us by producing in us a sense of the worth of other human beings as part of the natural world.20 But it can and should be objected at this point that a feeling of harmony produced in us by imagination’s freely reflecting upon the beautiful and actually being free and in harmony with the world around 17

18

19

20

Kant, Section 9, V: 217–218.: ‘‘der Gemu¨thszustand in dem freien Spiele der Einbildungskraft und des Verstandes.’’ Cf. Section 48, V: 313 for the distinction between taste and artistic production, and Section 49, V: 313–314 for the introduction of the notion of aesthetic Ideas. The sense in which feeling can be the determining ground of a judgment of taste is discussed in my article ‘‘Kant’s Concept of Beauty,’’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 3 (1986): pp. 311–324. In ‘‘Imagination and Temporality in Kant’s Theory of the Sublime’’ ( Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 [1984], pp. 303–315) Rudolf Makkreel argues quite convincingly that Kant’s account of the imagination’s judgments of the sublime may play an important role in the integration of the faculties in Kant’s overall theory. If I am correct, then the imagination’s function in making judgments about beauty must also have a key role to play in reintegrating imagination. understanding, and practical reason.

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us are two different things. Moral freedom is no illusion because it is based on a requirement of practical reason – it is necessary for the possibility of any moral action whatsoever. But freedom of the imagination on Kant’s account is the precondition only of our being able to look at the world as if it were orderly and in harmony with our understanding. Imaginative freedom does not constitute this order and harmony. In fact, as moral agents we are constantly faced with evidence that the natural world is not well ordered with respect to our best efforts. That is, we are regularly faced with the sight of moral virtue going unrewarded. It seems the best thing an imagination ‘‘at play’’ can offer is a way of forgetting this fact for the time it takes us to judge an object in a wholly disinterested, ‘‘playful’’ manner, since during the time in which we are contemplating the beauty of an object we are free from all interest. The judgment that something is beautiful is not made for the purpose of producing an interest (V: 205n.). Kant’s aesthetic theory is unique in the Enlightenment insofar as it gives up the rationalist view that the ultimate purpose of art is the perfection of humanity. So the challenge for Kant remains: Does the freedom of the imagination have any value beyond providing a temporary respite from a morally hostile world? imagining the highest good Already in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant shows some discomfort over the apparently unbridgeable gap that his philosophy creates between the human being as a causally determined member of the sensible world and the human being as a free member of an intelligible world or ‘‘realm of ends.’’ The problem emerges here in the following form: practical reason tells me what I ought to do – i.e., what is moral – in the command: ‘‘Do that through which you become worthy of happiness.’’ But if I do so act, may I therefore hope to obtain happiness in this world? The answer must be ‘‘yes,’’ Kant says, for in our thinking about morality it is necessary ‘‘to assume that everyone has reason to hope for happiness to the extent to which they have, through their conduct, become worthy of it . . . The system of morality is therefore inseparably . . . bound up with that of happiness.’’21 In the intelligible world – a world of purely rational creatures – happiness would necessarily be proportionate with morality, since in such a world our only desire would be a rational one – namely, the

21

Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A809/B837.

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desire to be reasonable. In such a world moral freedom would itself be the cause of happiness. But Kant immediately qualifies his claim that the hope for happiness in proportion to virtue is a necessary assumption with the reminder that ‘‘such a system of self-rewarding morality is only an Idea, the carrying out of which rests on the condition that everyone do what they ought’’ (A801/ B838). Our moral obligations remain binding, however, even if others do not behave morally; and in the natural world, where motives and forces other than reverence for the moral law are at work, there is no guarantee that the consequences of our moral actions will be happy ones. So, Kant concludes here, ‘‘The alleged necessary connection of the hope of happiness with the necessary endeavor to render the self worthy of happiness cannot, therefore, be known through reason.’’ The existence of a moral world cannot be known, and yet in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant tells us that obedience to the moral law requires that we adopt the highest good (summum bonum) as our goal, where the highest good is interpreted as ‘‘the systematic connection of morality as the supreme good [bonum supremum] with the totality of other goods (summed up as ‘happiness’).’’22 In other words reason commands us to try to create the moral world on earth even though this is an end whose practical possibility cannot be known. If morality requires that we strive to bring about the highest good, and yet we cannot know the present or future existence of such a world, then, Kant says, we must at least be able to believe it is possible to bring it about, for otherwise the moral law itself would be illusory: ‘‘If, therefore, the highest good is impossible according to practical rules, then the moral law which commands that it be furthered must be fantastic, directed to empty imaginary ends, and consequently inherently false’’ (V: 114). Our hope to bring about the highest good can be founded only on a rational belief in its possibility; and this in turn is possible, Kant argues, only if we postulate the immortality of the soul (so that, since the highest good is conditional on the moral perfection of individuals, something that can be completed only in an ‘‘infinite progress’’ can be rendered practicable) and the existence of a supreme being capable of seeing to it that the realm of ends is actualized in a life hereafter (V: 122, 124). 22

Critique of Practical Reason, V: 110–111. Allen Wood’s explanation (in Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) of the summum bonum in the second Critique is exceptionally clear and helpful in laying out the relationship of the concept’s component parts. See chapter 9 Sect. 4.2, ‘‘The highest good,’’ pp. 311–313.

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This move is highly problematic within the context of the Critical philosophy, however. First of all, it reintroduces into the heart of Kant’s ethics fundamental concepts of speculative metaphysics that had been discredited by critical reason, a deeply inconsistent move on the surface of it. We shall return to this issue in chapter 5. Lewis White Beck argues that Kant does loosen the strictures of critique at this point, allowing the truth of the postulates a role in theoretical reasoning, if only a very small role: ‘‘I think there can be no doubt that he regarded his argument as an argument for that which was posited in this way and not merely as an argument for the necessity of this positing’’(p. 264), although Beck also points out that ‘‘all that Kant’s argument, if otherwise valid, entails is the necessity of making certain postulations as acts, and not the truth of the postulates thus made’’ (p. 263). Rather than accept this methodological inconsistency on Kant’s part, it is tempting to see the introduction of God and immortality as strategically placating the reactionary forces coming to power in Prussia at that time. Thus, Frederick Beiser suggests that at a juncture in the Critical philosophy where they might be seen as doing least ‘‘harm,’’ religious doctrines are used in a way calculated to put the censors off and allow Kant to make the more pressing argument for freedom of speech.23 Certainly, as Beiser points out, the introduction of a supernatural power to hold out the promise of accomplishing what ought to be a human task constitutes a deep betrayal of his political values, suggesting that a just state can be accomplished only with the help of God, in the hereafter. Susan Neiman agrees that Kant’s postulation of God and immortality amounts to an admission of the impossibility of accomplishing the command of the moral law to create a moral state within nature. She takes issue with claims, made by Velkley and Yovel, that the notion of the highest good is intended by Kant to be realizable in this world, even if only in the course of a long history towards progress. Neiman sees Kant as profoundly skeptical about the possibility of this realization. Even if human beings could manage to perfect themselves as moral agents and do everything right, the cosmic injustice of natural evil remains to thwart our plans and dash our moral hopes of instituting the highest good within the world of nature. At the same time, Kant recognizes that ‘‘restructuring human affairs according to [reason’s] laws would go a long way toward 23

Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). He calls it, and not without some justice, ‘‘a compromise with the status quo’’ on Kant’s part, p. 53.

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achieving it’’ and therefore, she says, Kant ‘‘emphasizes’’ it.24 Thus she argues that there is simply an irresolvable tension in Kant’s critical philosophy that the invocation of the concept of the ideal of the highest good and the postulation of God and immortality does not alleviate. The adoption of postulates of progress might serve better, Neiman argues, to solve the needs of practical reason for rational hope by ‘‘substituting faith in human progress for faith in God’’: Since rational faith does not concern the objects themselves but our moral needs and capacities, Kant might well allow that the content of the postulates could change while the form of the argument for their necessity remained the same. Thus it might be the case that reason’s needs have changed to the point that we do not, two hundred years after Kant, need to represent to ourselves a personal God to sustain our moral convictions but can make do with some more general assumption. The extreme indeterminacy of Kant’s postulate of God’s existence lends weight to this idea . . . Might this very minimal postulation of God’s existence be replaced by the postulate that the world as a whole is progressing toward the best? There is some reason to think so. Kant connects the latter postulate with the former one and holds its assertion to be a need of practical reason. (p. 179)

In other words, what matters to morality is not what we postulate so much as how we postulate it. Neiman argues that the postulates’ function is not to make truth claims about the world, but to regulate our attitude and consequent behavior. What matters is not that we assert the existence of some particular object (although, as Beck points out, in fact we do) but that we adopt an attitude or ‘‘Denkungsart’’ – a way of thinking – that involves trust or confidence in our own abilities. Kant’s definition of rational faith in the ‘‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’’ lends support to this interpretation: ‘‘Faith (as habitus, not as actus [as attitude, not as an act]) is reason’s moral way of thinking in assenting to what is not accessible to theoretical cognition. It is the mind’s steadfast principle to assume as true what we must necessarily presuppose as a condition for the possibility of achieving the highest moral final purpose, and to assume this because of our obligation to this final purpose and despite the fact that we have no insight into whether achieving it is possible (nor consequently, into whether the conditions are possible under which alone we can conceive of achieving that aim). (V: 471–472)

24

Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 178.

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Felicitas Munzel makes the parallel argument with respect to the conditions required for the perfection of character and rational faith, namely that character development requires putting our trust in the ‘‘promises’’ of reason. In Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, she argues that the aim of the postulates is steadfastness of character such that we may fulfill our duties to ourselves and to the world around us without faltering. Arguing that feeling will not do, Munzel defends the view that the rational faith of the postulates is just the application of the reflective principles of judgment – i.e., adopting belief in God’s existence or in our own immortality are simply applications of the maxim of rational faith that Kant defines in the Critique of Judgment. As she puts it: In view of the moral task, practical reason in a reflective mode of judgment avails itself, against the doubts raised through the failure of speculative attempts at demonstration, of the subjective principle of ‘‘regarding as true what is inaccessible to theoretical cognition,’’ but necessary from a moral point of view. To do so is just what it means to have rational faith. (pp. 206–207)

Munzel’s account skirts the issue of whether the postulates make an existence claim and its attendant difficulties. Like Neiman, she sees the issue as one of adopting an attitude or ‘‘conduct of thought’’: Adoption of the postulates, on Munzel’s account, is the adoption of a ‘‘moral Denkungsart,’’ or way of thinking in which the ‘‘human subject’’ makes a decision about how to think, not about the world, but about herself. In Munzel’s words, ‘‘she invokes the maxim of rational faith’’ and thus ‘‘reconfirms’’ her moral resolve: What this renewed steadfastness consists in, what judgment has brought about, is a relationship of inner trust between practical reason and the human agent, a trust that undergirds the proactive working toward the good by the morally good character in the world. (p. 213)

The judgment made by the individual subject is, on Munzel’s account, a kind of contract or ‘‘promise’’ with her own practical reason: ‘‘it is an inner promissory note’’ with reason promising the realizability of the good in nature, and the subject accepting and responding to the promise by striving ‘‘steadfastly’’ to fulfill it. In essence, Munzel’s account sees the postulates as the subject’s morally motivated leap of faith into the abyss of human reason, an act of trust that energizes the mind for the long trudge down the road of moral rectitude. There is much to be said for this de-ontologized account of the doctrine of rational faith and the postulates. It avoids the issue of Kant’s

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‘‘betrayal’’ of the Critical view of metaphysical speculation, and emphasizes what was surely an important point for Kant, namely that if the moral law commands us to do something, we are necessitated to act, and that means adopting whatever conditions are themselves necessary for that action. It is easy to move from Neiman and Munzel’s insight that the conditions themselves are not Kant’s concern so much as the attitude of steadfastness that they make possible, to the conclusion that the conditions themselves are internal: They involve setting up a relationship of trust with one’s own reason. Faith in God on these accounts becomes just one version of what is at bottom a faith in reason. As appealing as this move is, I think it misses one crucial aspect of the problem: the postulates, in order to work, must connect us to the world in all its contingent variability. It is after all this world that causes the problem for reason, both with respect to developing our moral character over a lifetime and to developing a more just social environment over the course of history. Whether in this world or the next, it is hard to see how any mere postulate of reason, whether as a belief in God and immortality, or in human progress in history, or as a pact with reason itself, really solves the problem for Kant, because the problem is not just one of attitude, but of rational motivation: It is a matter of having good reason to imagine ourselves achieving what reason demands, of feeling that possibly we ourselves can accomplish a just world. I might decide to believe in God, try to believe in God, but if I don’t really feel or can’t imagine that God exists, there is, on this view, no hope for me. It may be true that some people do feel God exists, and imagine that they know God, but one person’s revelation is another’s delusion, and no amount of moral commanding can force a feeling on the unbeliever. What is needed is really twofold: First, some concrete, natural evidence that the world is rational and amenable to our moral projects, and second, evidence that we can, ourselves, accomplish them. Kant was painfully aware of the lack of such evidence in most of human experience. Neiman correctly points out that Kant was no optimist, arguing that nonetheless for him ‘‘optimism becomes . . . a moral obligation’’ (p. 181). But hope is not a purely rational attitude – it is an incentive, and incentives involve feelings.25 Feelings cannot simply be adopted at will, much less rightfully commanded. True, the moral law 25

That is, with one notable exception: the moral law can be an incentive, although ‘‘why it supplies an incentive’’ is an ‘‘insoluble problem for human reason.’’ But the moral laws’ effects can be felt and hence can be motivating in a negative way, since the suppression or eradication of feeling is also felt – as pain (V: 72–73).

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demands that we mortals strive to bring about the highest good, and consequently our hope to achieve this end must rest on a belief in our own ability to do so. But it will not do merely to ‘‘postulate’’ that a God exists who will complete the task for us, or that we have an infinite amount of time in which to accomplish our goal, since such a position amounts to admitting the hopelessness of our quest as mere mortals.26 Finally, even (following Neiman’s suggestion) postulating as a regulative idea that ‘‘the world as a whole is progressing toward the best,’’ remains a hopeless belief if we do not really feel that it is true. Reason’s command, Kant says, is that we strive to bring about the highest good here, in the world and on our own power. Unless we can imagine ourselves accomplishing progress for ourselves, sooner or later we will be overcome with despair over the Sisyphian dimension of the task reason has set for us to accomplish. Lewis W. Beck’s somewhat dismissive position would thus appear to be the only friendly interpretative option: Kant’s claim that reason commands us to seek the highest good could amount to no more than a reiteration of the command to obey the Categorical Imperative, and ‘‘[the concept of the highest good] is not important in Kant’s philosophy for any practical consequences it might have.’’27 It may be argued that postulating God’s existence does not relieve human beings of their duty to work for a better world here and now, because God is only postulated as the necessary ground and guarantor of the possibility of our eventual success. Yirmiyahu Yovel argues this way in Kant and the Philosophy of History: ‘‘At most, God helps us to help ourselves. The solution that Kant suggests to the antinomy is to be found in the ability not of God but of man, although man’s ability presupposes the existence of God and cannot be deduced from his own immanent characteristics.’’28 But, again, this is a solution to the antinomy only if we can give a plausible, genuinely motivating account of how it is possible that we ‘‘help ourselves’’ create a moral world. I want to suggest that Kant’s account of imaginative freedom in the Critique of Judgment provides the material for such an account. Kant’s purpose in introducing the postulates of God and immortality was to provide a rational ground for our hope for the possibility of 26

27

28

John R. Silber, ‘‘Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good as Immanent and Transcendent,’’ Philosophical Review 68 (1959), pp. 474–475, makes a similar criticism of Kant’s argument. See Allen Wood’s response to this article in Kant’s Ethical Thought, p. 407, n34. Lewis White Beck, Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 245. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 96.

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bringing about the highest good, so that it is not, in Yovel’s words, ‘‘just a delusion of the imagination and the faculty of desire.’’29 But in the third Critique imagination is not treated as a faculty of illusion, but as a powerful creative faculty, a capacity to reform nature: For the imagination (as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it . . . In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association . . . for although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature. (V: 314)

Through imagination we are capable, in thought at least, of taking what nature gives us and working it up into ‘‘another nature.’’ As natural physical beings we are bound by the laws of nature, as moral agents by the law of practical reason, but as imaginative creatures we are constrained by neither and thus have creative power. This suggests that Kant’s account of imaginative freedom in the third Critique offers a solution to the problem of grounding our belief in the possibility of bringing about the highest good. The existence of a moral world presupposes agency that can bring it about, and the command to seek it presupposes that we can believe it possible through our own agency. Our ability to represent such a world in imagination would allow us to believe in the possibility of a moral world on earth and in ourselves as creators of that world.30 Human beings as members of the natural realm are in a position, to some extent at least, to rearrange the physical and social order of which they are a part. Moreover, as beings capable of reflective sensuous response to that world – that is, as beings with imaginations – it is open to us to represent intuitively a natural world in which individual human needs are met to such a degree that we all behave rationally and are happy.31 Such a world would be the highest good – a perfectly moral world. Kant grants that we are able to think the highest good as a rational Idea and to represent in imagination a world that ‘‘surpasses nature.’’ But this 29 30

31

Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, p. 59. Here I am in agreement with Yovel’s account of the development of the concept of the highest good in Kant: It is with the third Critique that this concept takes on great practical significance for human action and becomes ‘‘the summit of the historical enterprise.’’ Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, p. 75. Allen Wood, in Kant’s Ethical Thought, pp. 314 ff., points out that achieving a moral world for Kant necessarily requires acting in concert with others. This then would become part of any imaginative construction of the highest good: that it is carried out with others in community.

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is all that is needed for the activity of trying to bring it about: the concept (in this case the Idea) of what we want, and the motivation to act on it. All Kant needs in order to claim that the Idea of the highest good is a necessary condition of morality is that we can believe it to be possible. To reword Lewis W. Beck’s account of the postulate of God’s existence: ‘‘acknowledgment of the moral law . . . requires only that I believe in the highest good’s [possible future] existence. Even if it does not exist and will not exist, the practical consequences for obedience to the moral law are the same.’’32 A major contribution of the third Critique is the argument that feelings of a special sort – aesthetic ones resulting from the free play of the imagination – can be universally communicable and valid for all. Thus the felt possibility of the highest good in imagining it may be all that is required to justify reason’s command that we try to bring it about. To make the point in yet another way, the ‘‘productive’’ imagination, in Kant’s account of empirical knowledge, serves the function of providing schemata for concepts – that is, of taking purely intellectual concepts and fitting them to intuitions. Why not suppose, then, that the imagination, when allowed freedom in aesthetic reflection to produce what Kant calls aesthetic Ideas, ‘‘inner intuitions’’ (V: 314), may thereby be capable of ‘‘schematizing’’ rational ideas like that of the highest good? Kant himself points out that the two are counterparts. Aesthetic ideas have no adequate concept, rational ideas no adequate intuition – both point beyond the realm of nature (V: 314). In Kant’s own language of schematism, the one ‘‘fits’’ the other. In his discussion of genius and the production of beautiful art Kant says that poetry ‘‘lets the mind feel its ability to use nature on behalf of and, as it were, as a schema of the supersensible’’ (i.e. of the intelligible or rational) (V: 326). He also says that aesthetic Ideas lend a ‘‘semblance of reality to rational ideas’’ (V: 314). Moreover, as we saw, Kant believes that the human imagination is powerful enough to envision new worlds. He says that imagination in poetry, for instance, ‘‘ventures to give sensible expression to rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on’’ (V: 314, emphasis mine). But if the imagination can represent these exalted ideas, why not also the realm of ends existing on earth? At this point, however, a problem arises. In the penultimate section of the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ (§ §59) Kant talks of beauty as a symbol of morality. Reflective aesthetic judgment may symbolize 32

Beck, Commentary, p. 262.

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morality, he says, inasmuch as it presents morality by analogy to beautiful natural forms. But, he continues, it cannot schematize morality; it cannot provide the sensible representations adequate to the task of representing a natural world that is also moral. A state, Kant tells us, can only be represented (vorgestellt) symbolically – for instance, as an animate body if it is ruled by constitutional law, or by a handmill if it is despotic – thus suggesting that no portrait – that is, no concrete representation – of the moral condition of society is possible. Yet it is difficult to see why Kant insists on the complete inability of imagination in free play to portray moral Ideas, given what he has already said about its creative power in reflective judgment. Part of the problem may lie with his definition of schemata as provided by imagination only for concepts of the understanding (Categories), together with his claim that ‘‘all intuitions supplied for concepts a priori are either schemata or symbols. Schemata contain direct, symbols indirect, exhibitions of the concept.’’33 Thus Kant quite emphatically precludes the possibility of any other type of schematization than that discussed in the first Critique. Yet at section 17 of the third Critique he suggests that a judgment is possible in which the imagination is in free play and at the same time directed to representing something in a non-symbolic way: Idea properly means a rational concept, and ideal the representation [Vorstellung] of an idea. Hence that archetype of taste, which does indeed rest on reason’s indeterminate Idea of a maximum, but which still can be represented [vorgestellt] not through concepts but only in an individual exhibition [Darstellung], may more appropriately be called the Ideal of the beautiful. Though we do not have such an Ideal in our possession, we do strive to produce it within us. But it will be merely an ideal of the imagination, precisely because it does not rest on concepts but rests on an exhibition, and the power of exhibition is the imagination. (V: 232)

Later in this same section Kant suggests that some degree of success in exhibiting the Ideal of beauty is possible if ‘‘pure ideas of reason are united with a very strong imagination’’ in the viewer or the artist. Here Kant does not seem to have in mind mere symbolic representation of the beautiful. The Ideal of beauty has two components (Stucke): the rational Idea and the ‘‘aesthetic normal idea’’ (Normalidee, V: 233). In explicating the empirical component of normalcy, Kant is quite clear that here there 33

V: 352–359: ‘‘Alle Anschauungen, die man Begriffen a priori unterlegt, sind also entweder Schemate, oder Symbole, wovon die erstern directe, die zweiten indirecte Darstellungen des Begriffs enthalten.’’

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will be definite (non-symbolic) characteristics to represent although these will vary relative to the collective experiences of particular groups of people. His discussion of the possibility of ‘‘making visible’’ moral attributes like ‘‘goodness of soul, or purity, or fortitude, or serenity etc.’’ and an earlier footnote in the same section (V: 235) make it quite clear that Kant has ordinary portraiture, not symbolism, in mind. Granted, here he argues that only humanity in the individual can be an Ideal of the imagination. But if the moral law requires us not only to be virtuous as individuals but also to attempt to bring about a moral society, then we must add social virtues to the list of human virtues that can be portrayed in imagination. Portraits of the truly moral human being must therefore also somehow convey the context within which individual morality can become effective: that is, such an art work would portray, if only implicitly, a moral world. At the very least it would seem that if the ideal of beauty can embody morality in individual human beings, then it should be equally possible (if not equally easy) to portray the social dimension of morality in the human community. If this is the case, then the imagination in its free reflection may be ‘‘applied’’ in the service of the ideal of beauty to enable us to believe in the possibility of the highest good as a result of human agency alone. Thus Kant could have used his account of imaginative freedom to reintegrate the sensuous and moral aspects of human nature. He does not do so, however, and it is important to ask why. It seems to me that Kant shrinks from the implications of his theory of imaginative freedom for at least two reasons.34 One is that his concern in the third Critique is primarily with contemplation of natural beauty, while it is in the creative power of the imagination that its possible value for the moral realm first becomes evident. Of the sixty sections that make up the ‘‘Critique of 34

There are, of course. many possible accounts of why Kant relies solely on the postulate of a supernatural being as ground of our hope to bring about the highest good. Yovel points to Kant’s determination to make the finite nature of human reason the Leitmotif of his philosophy (Kant and the Philosophy of History, p. 24) . It may also be argued that Kant intended to combat enthusiasm (Schwa¨rmerei) not only in such irrationalists as Jacobi but also even in ‘‘rationalist’’ philosophers like his friend Mendelssohn, who relied on the notion of an unexplained and apparently inexplicable ‘‘common sense’’ as the only check on the speculative flights of reason. To the extent that imagination is for Kant bound up with the notion of a common aesthetic sense and to the extent that imagination remains for him a ‘‘blind but indispensable function of the soul’’ (CPR A781B1O3), it may be argued that Kant feared letting enthusiasm into philosophy through the door of imaginative fiction masquerading as ‘‘common sense.’’ Cf. Kant’s essay ‘‘Was heisst. Sich im Denken orientiren?’’ VIII: 133–147. ‘‘What is Orientation in Thinking?,’’ in Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, Lewis White Beck, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 293–305. Thanks to James Schmidt for suggesting this last explanation.

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Aesthetic Judgment’’ only eleven are given over to a discussion of art and genius. Moreover, Kant believes that ‘‘a direct interest in the beauty of nature is always a mark of a good soul’’ since it involves respect for nature’s products. Interest in beautiful art, he states flatly, is no proof at all that someone is inclined to be moral. But he gives no argument for the last claim and he exhibits a general lack of appreciation for the fine arts. So his failure to draw out the consequences of the power of reflective imagination may be due simply to bias. What Kant could have said about art’s possible contribution to morality will be taken up in chapter 3. Another possible explanation for Kant’s failure to develop the implications of his theory of imaginative freedom for social change is by reference to his problematic views on obedience to the authority of the state and the nature of legitimate social change. Although he sympathized with bourgeois revolution in the American colonies and in France, Kant remained a vocal supporter of Frederick the Great and the Prussian state under that king. And although what is most egalitarian and humanistic in Kant’s ethics is due to Rousseau rather than Frederick, the Prussian leader exercised a strong influence on the intellectuals of his time, including Kant.35 In ‘‘On the Common Saying, ‘That may be right in Theory, but it doesn’t work in Practice’ ’’ he argues that the claim that there is a right of public resistance would involve a contradiction inasmuch as no institutionalized power can provide for its own destruction, and in the ‘‘Metaphysical Elements of Justice’’ he argues for the same reason that ‘‘it is the people’s duty to endure even the most intolerable abuse of supreme authority.’’36 Kant’s ‘‘Rousseauistic revolution’’37 in morals thus appears to be followed by a ‘‘restoration’’ in his political thought, where respect for outside authority seems to win out on both moral and legalistic grounds. A number of biographical explanations are possible, of course. In Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, Frederick Beiser argues that political conditions in Prussia at the time forced Kant to prioritize his political values, and that the strategy he opted (or in Beiser’s view, coopted) for in the end was to call for freedom of the press at the cost of

35

36

37

In the third Critique Kant even quotes one of Frederick’s poems to illustrate a point about the way in which genius animates rational ideas (Section 49, V: 315–314 [184]). ‘‘Uber den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein. taugt aber nicht fu¨r die Praxis’’ VIII: 303; the Rechtslehre of Metaphysik der Sitten. VI: 319 (trans. John Ladd as The Metaphysical Elements of Justice [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1965], p. 85); and Ak. VI: 372 (140–141). Cf. Lewis White Beck, ‘‘Was haben wir von Kant gelernt?,’’ in 5. Intemationaler Kant Kongress, Akten II (Bonn, 1982), p. 8 and ‘‘What Have We Learned from Kant?,’’ in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Allen W. Wood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 22.

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suppressing his support for revolution.38 Manfred Kuehn suggests that in Kant’s own mind, there was a distinction to be made between a right to rebellion and the case of the French revolution, which technically was not a rebellion and hence permissible on legal grounds.39 But however we explain Kant’s failure to attribute a ‘‘visionary’’ role to imaginative freedom – and this question will be taken up further in chapter 5 – we can nevertheless carry one step further the view, put forth by Beck and more recently by Allen Wood, Richard Velkley, and others, that Kant’s sympathetic attitude toward those revolutions that had already occurred was consistent with his teleological account of history.40 If Kant can argue that it is part of nature’s plan that humanity progress morally even through such ‘‘evils’’ as revolution, it would be plausible for him to hold that human imagination in its aesthetic reflective role is equipped literally to envision this progress – that is, to exhibit it in the imaginative Ideal of a moral human community. In other words, Susan Neiman’s suggestion that the highest good could rest on a secular postulation of human progress could actually become a vehicle for hope, but only once it is ‘‘embodied’’ in an imaginative and concrete vision of this society.41 That Kant did not propound this solution need not be attributed to the requirements of either his moral or aesthetic theory but, in the end, may be due to the problematic nature of his views on political authority. Too much imaginative freedom can threaten the established order, and good Bu¨rger that he was, Kant could applaud Frederick the Great’s imperative ‘‘Think for yourself!’’ and yet comfortably follow up with ‘‘But do as you are told.’’42 Still, the concept of steadfast obedience to authority come what may was by no means Kant’s philosophical view, and such attitudes were already suspect in Kant’s time. A younger generation of poets and visionary reformers, both within Germany and outside its borders, was relying on Kant’s aesthetic theory to provide the groundwork for a metaphysics of social change. I hope to have shown that their use of that aesthetics was based on a consistent application of Kant’s 38 39 40

41 42

Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, chapter 2, p. 53. Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 375. Lewis White Beck. ‘‘Kant and the Right of Revolution,’’ Journal of the History of ldeas x 32 (1971), pp. 417ff.; Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Neiman, The Unity of Reason. Cf. Kant. ‘‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufkla¨irung?’’ (Ak. VIII: 33–42) and in Lewis White Beck, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (pp. 85–92). For an interpretation of Kant as somewhat less of a conservative, see John Christian Laursen, ‘‘The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of ‘Public’ and ‘Publicity,’ ’’ Political Theory 14 (1986), pp. 584–603.

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account of aesthetic freedom to his moral theory, whether or not Kant himself would have condoned this application. I began by suggesting that Kant’s account of aesthetic freedom provides an important link between Lessing and Schiller, and it should now be easier to see how this could be so. Schiller was among the earliest and most important artist–philosophers to be influenced by Kant and to advocate the importance of aesthetics to the moral progress of the human race. Although Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man are typically viewed as the mature philosophical result of his coming to terms with Kant’s moral philosophy, Schiller was first introduced to Kant through the latter’s philosophy of history, and it was through it that Schiller first came to know Kant’s moral theory.43 Moreover, his serious study of Kant began with the Critique of Judgment, and it was Kant’s long first introduction to this work that served as his introduction to the Kantian edifice as a whole.44 It is thus plausible, in light of the course of his Kant study alone, to read Schiller’s views on aesthetic education as a working out of Kant’s teleological notion of historical progress in terms of theories advanced in the third Critique. Although the letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man involve a rejection of Kant’s emphasis on the absolute autonomy of moral experience in favor of a more integrated account of human nature, this is not necessarily an outright rejection of Kant’s views on morality. As we have seen, Kant himself brings the process of repatriating citizens of the moral world into the realm of nature by claiming in the second Critique that reason commands us to seek the highest good. Moreover, he provides the means according to which this repatriation may be carried out by outlining an extremely powerful notion of imaginative creativity as a human faculty capable of transcending nature without separation from nature. In light of this aspect of Kant’s philosophy, the Letters may be seen as a further development of the notion of imaginative freedom first given life by Lessing and philosophical depth by Kant. Schiller’s analysis of the formal and sensuous aspects of human life, and his account of a mediating and humanizing drive to ‘‘play’’ (der Spieltrieb) would have been impossible without Kant’s account of the free play of the imagination and the disinterested nature of judgments of taste. The crucial difference between Kant and Schiller lies in the latter’s claim that reconciling

43 44

Reinhard Buchwald, Schiller (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1954), II, p. 173. Buchwald, Schiller, p. 174.

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the rational and natural aspects of human nature is a requirement of reason: Reason must make this demand because it is reason – because it is its nature to insist on perfection and on the abolition of all limitation, and because any exclusive activity on the part of either the one drive or the other leaves human nature incomplete and gives rise to some limitation within it. Consequently, as soon as reason utters the pronouncement: Let humanity exist, it has by that very pronouncement also promulgated the law: Let there be beauty.45

Kant argues only that taste may enable us ‘‘to make the transition from sensible charm to a habitual moral interest without making too violent a leap’’ (V: 354). Yet the requirement of reason that we strive to attain the highest good, being a command both to strive for moral perfection and to try to reward that perfection with material happiness, really amounts to no more or less than the command that we strive to be fully human; or in Schiller’s words, it amounts to the pronouncement, ‘‘Let humanity exist.’’ If, as I have argued, the possibility of perfected humanity rests on the ability to represent this perfection in imagination, then Schiller simply gives voice to a view implicit in Kant’s philosophy – that reason requires the imaginative free play typical of our contemplation of beauty to fulfill its command. In concluding, it should be noted that On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters (hereafter, Letters) is more than an explicit working out of a line of reasoning available to Kant in the third Critique. It is also an instantiation of an imaginative portrayal of the highest good. More often than not, Schiller’s Letters is read as a work of visionary literature, and rightly so. Even though by 1793, when the original letters were written, Schiller was thoroughly suspicious of artists with revolutionary intentions, still the Letters is clearly meant to be a portrait of a possible human community dominated by neither physical nor moral force.46 Schiller’s ‘‘Aesthetic State’’ is an attempt to portray in Kant’s terms an ‘‘Ideal of the imagination.’’47 In so doing he embodies a position that Kant appeared unwilling to work out fully: ‘‘The human being has no need to flee the material world in order to prove himself as spiritual being.’’48 It would be left to one of Schiller’s most brilliant students, Friedrich von Hardenberg, later known as Novalis, and his Jena cohort to turn this insight into a poetic philosophical program. 45

46 47

Friedrich Schiller. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 15th letter, para. 4, p. 103. Cf. Letters, p. 197 and commentary, pp. 286–287. Letters, p. 219. 48 Letters, p. 189.

chapter 3

The interests of disinterest

Kant’s deduction of our ‘‘peculiar ability’’ (sonderbares Vermo¨gen, V: 281) to make universally valid judgments about particulars without the aid of concepts and based solely on a feeling is as well known as his ‘‘deduction of judgments of taste’’ in the Critique of Judgment. Less familiar is his contention that this aesthetic reflective capacity involves certain demands on how we value the world around us. Having just presented his deduction, Kant claims that we can more readily understand the judgment of taste’s demand for agreement if we see that the mere ‘‘universal communicability as such of our feeling must already carry with it an interest for us’’ (V: 296).1 That is, judgments of taste make demands on us analogous to the demands of morality, because, like moral interest in the good, aesthetic interests are bound up with a kind of duty. However, these interests of disinterest are more important to Kant than just as vehicles for explaining why taste can command the assent of everyone, and they clearly have implications beyond the justification of judgments of taste. In what follows, I want to suggest that Kant’s discussion of the interests of disinterest has significance for his views on art and morality, as well as for his position on how we ought to value nature. moral interest and intellectual interest in the beautiful Before looking at the broader implications of his views, it is necessary to discuss briefly Kant’s doctrine of ‘‘interest’’ and also to look closely at his arguments in Sections 41 and 42 to the effect that beauty gives rise to interests in us. 1

This interest, Kant says, helps us to understand why we demand of others that they feel the pleasure we do in the beautiful. That is, we understand that reason has an interest in the morally good, and that this interest is bound up in certain ways with our duty to be moral. Similarly, our interest in the beautiful will be bound up with an analogous duty to be ‘‘aesthetic’’ (sensitive to beauty) (V: 296).

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‘‘[A]ll interest consists in pleasure in the existence [ein Lust an der Existenz] of an object’’ (V: 296). Interest, therefore, is aesthetic in character. As we know already from Kant’s moral theory, interest is ‘‘that through which reason becomes practical’’ (reason becomes ‘‘a cause determining the will’’) (IV: 459). Thus an interest is practical and volitional in nature: ‘‘To will something and to have a liking for its existence, i.e., to take an interest in it, are identical’’ (V: 209). Here Kant further identifies the will with ‘‘the power of desire determined by reason,’’ so that it follows that to take an interest in something is rationally to desire the existence of the thing, or, to phrase it in such a way as to preserve its aesthetic aspect, to take an interest in something is to feel the need for the existence of something, where this feeling is itself determined by reason. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant defines ‘‘interest’’ to include a desire for the existence of something that is conditioned ‘‘pathologically’’ – that is, determined directly by some positive stimulus rather than by reason. Here, a sensation arouses a desire for the object, as in the case of the spicy dish that Kant is inclined to eat even though he knows, ‘‘by reason’’ that it will lead to bad consequences for his digestion (V: 207, 208).2 An interest can be either ‘‘direct’’ or ‘‘indirect [mittelbar, unmittelbar]’’ (IV: 459, V: 208). That is, something is desired for its own sake, or for its usefulness to some other desired end. The pathological (sensuous) kind of interest is ‘‘direct’’ – we like the thing as ‘‘good in itself [an sich gut]’’ – but, being conditioned by contingent factors, it is not capable of being universal. Other interests may be ‘‘indirect’’ – when we like something because it is useful to us – that is, when we consider it ‘‘instrumentally good.’’ But there are two kinds of interest which are both direct and capable of universalization: the morally good, which Kant says, ‘‘carries with it the highest interest’’ (V: 209), and the beautiful (V: 208: ‘‘What we call beautiful is also liked directly’’). A great deal has been written on the interest in the morally good that in the Foundations Kant says is the only pure (non-empirical) interest.3 It is the notoriously difficult notion of a moral feeling of respect, a sensuous feeling itself conditioned only by ‘‘a mere thought containing nothing sensuous’’ (IV: 460) that motivates the truly moral action. In what follows, I will bracket the problems surrounding this doctrine in Kant’s moral theory in order to look more closely at the noteworthy fact that in the Critique of Judgment Kant no 2

3

In the Foundations he called these mere ‘‘sensuous impulses’’ (sinnliche Antriebe), not interests at all (IV: 459). A very helpful summary of Kant’s ‘‘phenomenology of respect’’ is given in Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, chapter 6, especially pp. 123ff.).

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longer holds that the moral feeling of respect is the only direct nonempirical interest of which we are capable. For Kant, our pleasure in the object of the judgment of taste is not bound up with the desire for the existence of the object. This is what it means to say that we take a disinterested pleasure in the beautiful. ‘‘But,’’ Kant says, ‘‘it does not follow from this that, after the judgment has been made as a pure aesthetic one, an interest cannot be connected with it.’’ He continues somewhat cryptically: This connection, however, must always be indirect. In other words, we must think of taste as first of all connected with something else, so that with the liking of mere reflection on an object there can [then] be connected, in addition, a pleasure in the existence of an object . . . For what we say in the case of cognitive judgments (about things in general) also holds for aesthetic judgments: a posse ad esse non valet consequentia [An inference from possible to actual is not valid]. (V: 296)

This may be glossed as follows: In order for there to be an interest, there has to be an object whose existence is desired, but the ‘‘object’’ of a judgment of taste is the mere form of an actually existing object. This form may or may not really exist (I could be having a beautiful hallucination). Thus the disinterested pleasure (Wohlgefallen) in the form of the object (judgment of taste) must give rise to (be ‘‘connected’’ (verknu¨pft) with) the interested pleasure (Lust)4 in the existence of that object via something other than this mere formal presentation. Kant allows two possibilities for this mediating connection of disinterest to interest: one ‘‘empirical’’ and the other ‘‘intellectual.’’ In the first case, the pleasure in the existence of the object arises because of an ‘‘inclination inherent in human nature’’ to ‘‘sociability.’’ Because taste allows us to communicate even a feeling, it naturally furthers this inclination that all human beings have, and thus we are naturally interested in the object of the judgment of taste on these grounds. Kant uses contractarian metaphors (‘‘the concern for universal communicability is something everyone expects and demands from everyone else on the basis, as it were, of an original contract dictated by our very humanity’’ (V: 297)), but the ‘‘empirical interest in the beautiful’’ may be understood as a natural social urge that we have to share our delight in the beautiful object with others. This urge runs so deep that, Kant argues, we would cease to seek the beautiful in the 4

All pleasures are in themselves the same for Kant, and can be distinguished only by the conditions that give rise to them. Thus the terminology is somewhat arbitrary (cf. Werner Pluhar, ‘‘Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment,’’ trans. Werner Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987, p. 49n.).

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absence of others with whom to share it. He does not argue that we would cease to be capable of experiencing beauty altogether, however. It is simply that my disinterested delight in the formal features of an object naturally gives rise to a pleasure in its existence because I want to bring others to it to share in my initial aesthetic pleasure. Having introduced the notion of an empirical interest in the beautiful, Kant divulges that he is now turning away from the deduction of taste to ask whether taste can be used ‘‘purposively’’ as a ‘‘transition from sense enjoyment to moral feeling’’ (V: 297–298). Because the empirical interest is just an inclination, albeit a very deeply rooted one, it is easily confused with other social inclinations and passions, and ‘‘can provide only a very ambiguous transition from the agreeable to the good.’’ So, in Section 42, he turns his attention to the other possibility available for connecting the pleasure of taste with a pleasure in the existence of the beautiful object: namely, a non-empirical connection. This connection of the two sorts of pleasure is intellectual, made a priori via ‘‘the will’s property of being determinable a priori by reason’’ (V: 296). The argument at Section 42 is one of Kant’s more fascinating ones, and is far-reaching in its implications if it succeeds. A great deal actually hangs on it, not only for his account of moral development but also for the problem of the unity of human subjectivity. As Kant himself says, if taste can be used purposively, ‘‘we would also be showing that judgment is the mediating link in the chain of humanity’s a priori powers’’ (V: 298). What Kant wants to do here is to show that the interest connected with the beautiful is sufficiently like that of moral interest to allow a kind of psychological transition-throughclose-association from aesthetic values to moral values. He wants to do this by showing that a direct (non-instrumental) interest in the beautiful ‘‘is always a mark of a good soul’’ and ‘‘indicates at least a mental attunement favorable to moral feeling.’’ (That he limits this to the beautiful in nature, excluding art, is a point that I shall return to shortly.) He does not want to show that interest in the beautiful, even an a priori interest, is identical to moral interest: ‘‘the feeling for the beautiful is distinct in kind from moral feeling’’ (V: 298). The similarity is that, like aesthetic reflective judgment, moral judgment is not based on an interest. We know from Kant’s ethical theory that moral judgment gives rise to an interest that we call ‘‘moral feeling’’: an interest in obeying the moral law or, Kant says ‘‘respect for the moral law itself’’ (V: 75ff., 80): But [this feeling of respect] is a feeling which is directed only to the practical and which depends on the representation of a law only as to its form and not on

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account of any object of the law; thus it cannot be reckoned either as enjoyment or as pain, and yet it produces an interest in compliance with the law which we call moral interest, just as the capacity to take such an interest in the law (or respect for the moral law itself) is the moral feeling properly speaking. (V: 80)

This practical interest of reason in the moral law is also an interest in fulfilling it: that is, in doing what the law commands. Although pure practical moral interest – respect for the law – is not a feeling of pleasure or pain in the presence of ‘‘the object’’ of the law, it does depend on there being at least a possibility of our being able to bring about that which the law demands. As we saw in chapter 2, in the Antinomy of Pure Practical Reason (V: 113ff.), Kant insists that reason requires us to strive to bring about the highest good, understood by him as the greatest possible connection of moral virtue with happiness in this world. Reason has an interest, as Kant puts it, in the ‘‘objective reality’’ of its moral ideas. Kant returns to this issue in his aesthetics, arguing at Section 42 that when we contemplate the beautiful it cannot be a matter of complete indifference to us that nature here ‘‘shows a trace or gives a hint that it contains some basis or other for us to assume’’ an orderliness that may be conducive to the state of justice we morally desire. ‘‘Hence,’’ Kant says, ‘‘if someone is directly interested in the beauty of nature, we have cause to suppose that he has at least a predisposition to a good moral attitude’’ (V: 300–301). Thus a direct interest in natural beauty is akin to, but not identical with, moral interest in the good. Caring for beauty in nature suggests that a person is moved by the possibility that she belongs there, too. The difference is that intellectual interest in the beautiful is ‘‘free’’ while intellectual interest in the moral is based immediately upon ‘‘objective laws’’ (V: 301). Indeed, this difference is precisely why we can call our interest in the beautiful a direct interest: we do not care about the existence of the object because of its instrumental link to our own moral interests (e.g. the moral idea of the highest good), but rather we care for it just for what it contingently is. Kant says here that what we are (directly) interested in is ‘‘rather the beauty’s characteristic in itself of qualifying for such a link, which therefore belongs to it intrinsically [die ihr innerlich zukommt].’’ This can be illustrated in the following way: In the process of making an aesthetic reflective judgment about the beauty of an object I am also (concurrently, as a moral being) feeling the need for the existence of this object for its own sake. This direct interest in the object is possible because I am charged by my own reason with the task of bringing moral order into the natural world – a severe demand on my nature

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that hardly seems possible. As such I am ‘‘morally’’ interested in finding that nature outside me, because of what appears to be the rational orderliness and purposiveness of the object I am contemplating, may be suited to beings like myself. Thus my disinterested aesthetic reflection upon the object also gives rise to my caring about the object, wanting it to exist, for its own sake, even though it may be of no use to me, or may even cause me harm. I take a direct interest in it. Kant explains as follows: Consider someone who is all by himself (and has no intention of communicating his observations to others) and who contemplates the beautiful shape of a wild flower, a bird, an insect, etc., out of admiration and love for them, and would not want nature to be entirely without them even if they provided him no prospect of benefit but instead perhaps even some harm. Such a person is taking a direct interest in the beauty of nature, and this interest is intellectual. That is, not only does he like nature’s product for its form, but he also likes its existence, even though no charm of sense is involved; and he also does not connect that existence with any purpose whatever. (V: 299)

The reason I am capable of desiring the natural object for its own sake, however, has to do with my intellectual/moral need to find at least a ‘‘hint’’ in nature that my moral actions will not be in vain. My interest in the object is direct – it is not for the sake of morality that I admire and love it and desire its existence – rather that direct interest that Kant also calls ‘‘admiration’’ and ‘‘love’’ is ‘‘at least an attunement favorable to moral feeling.’’5 Love of nature, in other words, is a climate of the spirit within which respect for our duty flourishes.6 Kant ends this section with the remarkable claim (for him) that we can and do require this admiration and love for nature of everyone: for we consider someone’s way of thinking to be coarse and ignoble if he has no feeling for beautiful nature . . . and sticks to the enjoyments of mere sense that he gets from meals or the bottle. (V: 302–303)

5

6

See Karl Ameriks, ‘‘On Paul Guyer’s Kant and the Experience of Freedom,’’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60 (2) (1995), 361–367. See Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘‘Critical’’ Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, chapter 5, ‘‘Moral Spiritedness and the Relation of Aesthetic and Moral Cultivation’’). Munzel’s account still insists on the ‘‘hierarchical’’ nature of the aesthetic response (feeling) to moral reason. She does not see love of nature – i.e., this climate of spirit – as a source for moral heartiness and cheerfulness – i.e., for moral hope. (See, esp., p. 305.)

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Kant and the power of imagination intellectual interests in nature, art, and other people

To summarize so far: I have tried to unravel and make somewhat more intuitive Kant’s distinction between moral interest and intellectual interest in the beautiful. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to focus on this last claim that we ‘‘can’’ and ‘‘do’’ require a feeling of love for nature. I use the term ‘‘love’’ here intentionally, for, as we saw, it is the term Kant himself uses, following Burke (V: 277) for the feeling we have for nature when we value it for its own sake.7 The claim that love can be required is a startling one in light of Kant’s sharp division between pathological and practical love: for love as an inclination cannot be commanded. But beneficence from duty, even when no inclination impels it and even when it is opposed by a natural and unconquerable aversion, is practical love, not pathological love; it resides in the will and not in the propensities of feeling, in principles of action and not in tender sympathy [in schmelzender Teilnehmung]; and it alone can be commanded. (Foundations IV: 399)

Where does the love for nature that we can and do require of others fit into this division? It cannot be an inclination. That much we already know from what Kant tells us about the nature of an interest in the beautiful, which is based on contemplative pleasure and not mere sense stimulation. Hence it is not pathological. Yet it is based on feeling – a disinterested feeling, to be sure, not tender sympathy – but a pleasure nonetheless. And although it is an interest that involves the will – that is, it is a desire determined by reason – still it cannot be called practical or be said to lie in ‘‘principles of action.’’ The love of nature (the direct interest based on disinterested pleasure) is not practical love (although the capacity for practical love may be a necessary condition for it), but is itself based rather on contemplation. It seems as if Kant has made theoretical room for a third kind of love, neither practical nor pathological: a kind of ‘‘reflective’’ love for nature. Given that Kant has already argued that we may ‘‘demand agreement’’ for judgments of taste based on their reflective nature, it is not surprising that he would argue that reflective as well as practical love can be commanded. Kant seems to suggest as much when he claims that we require that others take a direct interest in beautiful nature. But this command cannot be a categorical imperative, because the conditions under which 7

See also V: 267: ‘‘The beautiful prepares us for loving something, even nature, without interest.’’ Here Kant should be read as meaning ‘‘indirect’’ or instrumental interest. See also V: 380.

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such an interest are first made possible are contingent on our experience of beautiful nature. Kant tells us that ‘‘the mind cannot meditate about the beauty of nature without at the same time finding its interest aroused’’ (V: 300). But that ‘‘the mind’’ finds itself in the presence of beautiful nature in the first place, or has the leisure to meditate upon it when in its presence, is not entirely within our control. Growing up in a povertystricken urban environment might very well preclude the possibility of contact with beautiful nature. Whereas Kant would argue that even the most deprived human being, so long as she retains her ability to reason at all, can always turn inward for the motivation necessary to be moral, there may well be situations where natural beauty is simply not accessible. If there is a command, it would, like the interest itself, have to be of a different type than any Kant has so far distinguished: it would have to be commanded on the condition that beautiful nature exists and is accessible for contemplation. Given Kant’s view that a direct intellectual interest in the beautiful explains the possibility of ‘‘a transition from sense enjoyment to moral feeling’’ (V: 297), it might also follow that we have a moral obligation to develop a love for nature in ourselves.8 It may also follow that, if love of nature furthers and develops moral feeling, and if, as Kant suggests in the Groundwork (IV: 417), ‘‘Whoever wills the end . . . wills also the indispensably necessary steps to it,’’ then we may have an obligation to bring about the conditions under which reflective judgment of beautiful nature is possible for others as well as for ourselves. All of which suggests interesting refutations of those who malign Kant’s philosophy as inimical to a serious environmental ethic because Kant has no room for intrinsic value in nature.9 But Kant’s notions of aesthetic reflective interest have implications for two other areas where Kant is often criticized, namely his views on the value of art relative to nature and of the value of human embodiment. Kant’s claim that an intellectual love for nature is associated with a moral attitude came to have a certain intuitive value in the early twentieth century, when baser human instincts put wilderness so seriously at risk all over the globe. (Although, had Kant had occasion to speak with some twentieth-century proponents of ‘‘deep ecology’’ he might have seen that love of nature and respect for humanity are not necessarily conjoined.) What does not make sense is his insistence, in the same passage, that love 8

9

See Paul Guyer’s argument in Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). I discuss these issues at length in ‘‘Beauty, Autonomy and Respect for Nature,’’ L’Esthe´tique de Kant/Kants A¨sthetik/Kant’s Aesthetics (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995).

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for art is no indication whatsoever of a ‘‘beautiful soul.’’ Of course, even among philosophers Kant is accused of being something of a Philistine when it came to art. Certainly he maintained a certain contempt for the bourgeois man of taste: virtuosi of taste, who not just occasionally but apparently as a rule are vain, obstinate, and given to ruinous passions, can perhaps even less than other people claim the distinction of being attached to moral principles. (V: 298)

By ‘‘taste’’ in this context, however, Kant is not referring to pure judgments of taste, but rather to the ability to ‘‘judge the products of fine art with the greatest correctness and refinement.’’ Such connoisseurship is of course not the result of simple aesthetic reflection, but requires a great deal of theoretical knowledge of art, and finesse in applying it. For Kant, such knowledge apparently taints the connoisseur’s interest in the object so that it is never valued purely for its own sake, but always for its use only. The sheer bias of Kant’s position is apparent when his view of artists is contrasted with his view of scientists. The parallel case of the scientist’s theoretical knowledge does not, it seems, interfere with his ability to admire and love the object being studied for its own sake. In the Critique of Practical Reason (V: 160) he recounts approvingly the tale of Leibniz carefully replacing the insect upon its leaf after studying it as proof of how an ‘‘observer of nature finally comes to like objects that at first offended his senses.’’ Perhaps Kant’s views were occasioned by his own lack of interest. He does give an argument for why we may require others to take a direct interest in nature, but no such requirement holds for a direct interest in art. This is so, he says, for one of two reasons: Either because art is such a good imitation that it is deceptive – it fools us into taking it to be nature, so that our liking for it is really a (deluded) direct interest in nature; or we are aware of it as art and hence aware of the intention to please that went into its making. In the latter case, he concludes, our interest is only indirect – we desire the existence of the object not for the sake of the object in itself, but for the sake of the intentions (to please) that brought it into existence. What is missing from the art object, he asks, that makes us value it so differently from the natural object? In other words, why is it not possible to value an art object for its own sake? His answer is that the regularity in nature which we crave as moral agents seeking to be effective in nature is ‘‘hinted’’ at by beautiful natural objects, but not by art objects. Art objects are the product of ‘‘art’’ after all, and so cannot provide a clue of any sort about the world of nature in which we must

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operate. They can tell us only about human intentions (when they are not altogether deceiving us). Thus they may ‘‘minister to vanity and perhaps to social joys,’’ but they cannot interest in a direct way. What is truly odd about this position is that Kant follows it almost immediately with a theory of fine art that defines it as ‘‘the art of genius, and genius as ‘‘the innate mental predisposition [he also calls it a ‘‘natural endowment’’ eine Naturgabe] through which nature gives the rule to art’’ (V: 307). Shortly thereafter he repeats that ‘‘nature in the subject gives the rule to art’’ (V: 307). So, fine art is the product of a gift from ‘‘the hand of nature’’ (V: 309) through which nature gives the rule to art. That practically makes the object of fine art a natural object; at least as much as a beautiful waterfall obeying laws of physical nature. It certainly mitigates the sharp division between natural and art objects, thus also mitigating the distinction between kinds of possible interest. After all, a beautiful artifact that cannot be explained by the artificer’s intentions, being the result of her natural inspiration, might be just as worthy of our interest on the grounds that some intrinsic natural order is manifested by it. That is, a work of natural genius ought to suggest ‘‘a trace or give a hint that [nature] contains some basis or other for us to assume in its products a lawful harmony with [our moral feeling]’’ (V: 300). In that case, however, Kant could conclude that fine art should be interesting (loved by us) for its own sake, and that a feeling for beautiful art would after all indicate ‘‘at least a mental attunement favorable to moral feeling.’’ Finally, on moral grounds Kant may be able to conclude that love of art could be ‘‘required’’ of everyone in the same sort of way that love of nature is required, as a kind of duty that we have if and when we are exposed to the arts. It might then follow, as in the case of natural beauty, that we have obligations to ourselves and to others to cultivate the conditions necessary for aesthetic, artistic experiences. Reflective exposure to the arts, like reflective exposure to nature, might then turn out to be a demand made upon us by our moral nature. Kant, as we saw, called reflective interest in nature ‘‘love’’ for nature for its own sake. This sort of love, though not pathological, is also not what Kant labels practical love, because it is not determined by ‘‘principles of action.’’ It is, as I said earlier ‘‘reflective love,’’ and I have suggested that Kant’s own theory of fine art allowed extension of this sort of interest in nature to one in art. But when Kant speaks of ‘‘love’’ in the context of obligations, as when he insists that love as an inclination cannot be commanded, he is typically thinking of love of others. Thus he speaks of ‘‘tender sympathy,’’ ‘‘sympathy with the lot of others,’’ as ‘‘pathological.’’

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Kant also speaks of duties of mutual aid and beneificence, but these are dictated by the Categorical Imperative – that is, they are purely practical, and need not involve any sympathetic feelings towards others. And of course, insofar as Kant assumes that sympathetic love is a mere inclination, there can be no requirement of feeling for others. What I want to suggest, in closing, is that the argument in Section 42 of the third Critique, which ends by asserting a requirement of everyone that they have some feeling for beautiful nature, suggests the theoretical possibility of an analogous requirement for a feeling (of love) for others. In ‘‘Radical Virtue Ethics’’ Kurt Baier suggests in passing that it may be that for Kant a third kind of duty is in order, a duty ‘‘to cultivate or develop or preserve such feelings [of pathological love] to the extent we can do so.’’10 I think something like this might fall naturally out of Kant’s argument at Section 42. By analogy it would go as follows. Reason has an interest in finding a trace or hint of order in nature that would suggest that our efforts to create a more moral world are not necessarily in vain. The ‘‘starry heavens above’’ provide such a hint, but so, too, does the moral law embodied within myself and my fellow human beings. The latter may arouse pure practical interest, but it also may be contemplated aesthetically by reflecting on the form of the ‘‘objects’’ involved. Here it is important to recall Kant’s position, stated in Section 17 of the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,’’ on the aesthetic contemplation of the human figure: ‘‘It is the human being [der Mensch], alone among all objects in the world, who admits of an ideal of beauty’’ (V: 233): we must still distinguish the ideal of the beautiful, which for reasons already stated must be expected solely in the human figure. Now the ideal in this figure consists in the expression of the moral; apart from the moral the object would not be liked universally and in a positive way [nicht allgemeine and dazu positiv gefallen wu¨rde]. (V: 235)

Kant believes that it is not possible to make a purely disinterested aesthetic judgment about human forms. (Which is not to suggest that the quality or ‘‘correctness’’ of the presentation – e.g. in a portrait or sculpture – cannot be appreciated, as he says, ‘‘negatively’’ (by ‘‘virtuosi of taste’’).) But an aesthetic reflective response ‘‘taken from experience’’ of a concrete visible human form is possible in which a ‘‘great’’ intellectual interest is produced. Kant drops the discussion to go on with the analysis of judgments of taste, and does not elaborate on the sort of interest involved in aesthetic 10

Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988), pp. 126–135.

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reflection on human forms. But it is clearly an intellectual interest, and it is similar to that sort of interest of reason that we are required to take in all beautiful objects of nature. It is a kind of reflective ‘‘love and admiration’’ for the natural embodiment of moral order. It should follow that for Kant the same sort of (conditioned) requirement holds: Given the chance and the leisure to contemplate ‘‘beautiful humanity’’ aesthetically, we ought to take a direct interest in it: ‘‘we consider someone’s way of thinking to be coarse and ignoble if he has no such feeling for human beings.’’ This is not ‘‘tender sympathy’’ or sentimentality, still less a prurient interest. But it is also not merely moral respect for the other as a rational end. It is a ‘‘positive’’ feeling, a desire for the existence of the ‘‘object,’’ this beautiful embodiment of human virtue, for its own sake. Again, as with natural beauty, Kant could conclude that an intrinsic valuing (a rational desire for the existence of, a direct interest in) human beings, even if they ‘‘provide . . . no prospect of benefit but instead perhaps even some harm’’ is required, but only on the condition that we have opportunities to see humanity portrayed in beautiful ways. And again, it might follow, as in the case of natural beauty, that we have obligations to ourselves and others to cultivate the conditions necessary for aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of human beings in various stages and of various types, ages, etc. The cultivation of this sort of aesthetic/ intellectual love for others might then turn out to be a demand made upon us by our moral nature. Of course, the last two arguments for a requirement that we take a direct intellectual interest in both art and in human beings qua physical beings, go well beyond what Kant himself said. In the case of art I doubt he would ever concede such an interest, in spite of his proto-Romantic account of genius. But I am inclined to think that in his account of an Ideal of beauty Kant was moving, perhaps in spite of himself, towards finding a place in his philosophy for a reflective love for human beings, bodies and all.

chapter 4

Aesthetic reflection and the primacy of the practical

Chapter 3 argued that aesthetic reflection produces interests, and that those interests might well issue in obligations on how we value ourselves and our world. This sort of claim poses a certain challenge to interpretations of Kant that reduce his account of value to moral or purely practical value. Since in recent years this view has had some very persuasive and powerful advocates, this chapter engages the topic of the role aesthetic reflective imagination might play in understanding the ‘‘primacy of the practical’’ in Kant’s philosophy. The notion of the primacy of practical reason, which Kant introduces explicitly in the second Critique, has been adopted by a number of Kantians as the correct lens for viewing Kant’s philosophy as a whole. This development has in many respects been a much-needed pendant to what might be called ‘‘second-wave’’ Kantianism in the US, when mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophers began a serious re-evaluation of the first Critique for developments in the history of modern theories of knowledge and metaphysics. The turn towards interpretive strategies that prioritize the practical philosophy, due in large part to Rawls,1 has allowed scholars to put the theory of knowledge in context, and has provided the motivation and basis for further important developments in contemporary theories of moral constructivism and Kantian-type ethics. While acknowledging the enormous contribution to ethical and political theory that these interpreters have made, the tendency to read Kant as primarily an ethical theorist who subsumed all theory to practice is misleading. Exclusive emphasis of the moral dimensions of Kant’s thought may in fact lead scholars away from much that is fascinating and philosophically innovative in his theory of value, including in his

1

See in particular A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

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theory of moral value. In particular, Kant’s account of aesthetic value has been ignored or subordinated by the recent stress on the ‘‘primacy of the practical’’ in his system. In what follows, I make a case for closer consideration of Kant’s incorporation of aesthetic reflection into the critical edifice. In doing so, I hope to undercut to a certain extent the view that Kant’s theory of practical reason has absolute pride of place in his philosophy. the primacy of the practical: methodological In an essay entitled ‘‘Kant, Fichte, and the Radical Primacy of the Practical,’’ Karl Ameriks suggests three ways of understanding the primacy attributed to Kant’s account of practical reason by various interpretors. He argues that pure practical reason may be understood as primary for Kant in the sense of having special significance because it is the sole source of revelation to us of ‘‘what is of unconditional interest and value, the moral will.’’ It may also be primary in the sense of revealing, through the postulates of pure practical reason, a ‘‘positive and relatively ‘filled in’ version of our ultimate destiny.’’ Ameriks goes on to reject a third possible sense of primacy – namely, what he calls a ‘‘methodological primacy’’ that attributes to practical reason the ability to ‘‘set the fundamental conditions of philosophical argument.’’2 I shall return to Ameriks’ first two senses of primacy in the next section, but want first to look at two important recent interpretations of Kantian practical reason that attribute what Ameriks calls ‘‘methodological primacy’’ to practical reason in Kant. Some of the strongest arguments that Kant’s philosophy must be seen as fundamentally practical have come in recent years from the camp of neo-Kantian constructivists following more or less in the footsteps of John Rawls. Of the many important contributions, Onora O’Neill, in particular, has argued most strenuously that Kant’s entire philosophy must be understood as procedurally practical to its very core. She argues that since Kant has repudiated Cartesian introspective procedures, he must launch his entire project in a novel way: Where does Kant start? If he can’t begin by vindicating philosophical method, where can he begin? The motto offers the clue that we must see the enterprise as practical: It is a task, not a body of opinions, and moreover a task that has to be

2

Karl Ameriks, ‘‘Kant, Fichte, and the Radical Primacy of the Practical,’’ in Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 190.

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shared. The first move must then presumably be to recruit those others who will form the task force.3

O’Neill argues later that ‘‘The central point that Kant makes with these analogies is that reason’s authority must (since it receives no antecedent or transcendent vindication) be seen as a practical and collective task, like that of constituting political authority.’’4 Furthermore, ‘‘Critique of reason is possible only if we think of critique as recursive and reason as constructed rather than imposed.’’5 Reason’s method is essentially practical, the exercise of autonomous agency, and this autonomy is also its vindication, according to O’Neill. The Copernican revolution is not itself a method but a preliminary ‘‘trial.’’ It is a hypothesis that leads to an ‘‘estimate or inventory’’ or assembling of materials available for use in the actual ‘‘tasks’’ of reason. The real unveiling of methodology comes only later, after the preliminary assemblage of materials: At the beginning we had no ‘‘material’’ to discipline; now a hypothesis about how we might embark on the tasks of reason has supplied some material, but has not shown how this material is to be combined into the edifice of knowledge. It has, however, provided a vantage point for a reflexive task, which could not be undertaken initially, but only retrospectively, reflectively, toward the end.6

Because the Doctrine of Elements of the Critique of Pure Reason inventories materials but does not provide ‘‘a determinate account of their integrated deployment,’’ O’Neill argues, in the end that, ‘‘maxims to regulate the use of these capacities in thinking and acting’’ must be adopted. The supreme principle of reason is identified with that of practical reason. It is, in fact the requirement that any fundamental principles of thought and action we deploy be ones that it is not impossible for all to follow . . . Here we begin to understand why Kant held that the Categorical Imperative was the supreme principle not just of practical but of all reasoning.7

O’Neill proposes interpreting Kant’s critical philosophy as a generalized version of the social contract theory for all aspects of human experience and valuing. In this dramatic reconstruction of Kant’s project, the critical edifice is seen as a sort of all-encompassing compact drawn up by rational individuals who take the Categorical Imperative as their sole procedural principle. This is a bold interpretive move and, not surprisingly, it suggests 3 4

Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 8. Ibid., p. 18. 5 Ibid., p. 27. 6 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 7 Ibid., pp. 19–20.

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some novel interpretive results. The analogy to social contract theory, some versions of which view social and moral values as only first becoming possible upon agreement of the parties to the terms of contract, raises questions. Does it then follow that the values of all rationality, expressed generally by the terms of the rational contract as autonomy in thought and action, but including cognitive and aesthetic value, must likewise wait upon the contract itself? O’Neill’s reading seems to suggest that all rational value is socially constructed, including even the ‘‘truth value’’ of the categories, principles, etc. ‘‘inventoried’’ in the first Critique, insofar as reason itself is vindicated only later, in the course of the constructive process. In general, it is an odd feature of this reading of the priority of the practical that it relegates the Copernican turn in the theory of knowledge to the status of a mere hypothesis in Kant’s overall philosophical enterprise, and the results of the Deduction and Principles to an ‘‘inventory’’ of materials for knowledge, rather than granting that the theory is a relatively free-standing account of empirical knowledge. The subordination of Kant’s theory of cognition to the project of practical reason also seems to pull the rug out from under Kant’s stance that he has ‘‘had to deny knowledge to make room for faith’’ (including autonomous freedom). The ‘‘denial’’ of knowledge is of course not a repudiation or subordination of cognition, but an explicit claim that the method and purposes of a theory of cognition are in an important sense external to theories of human moral practice. A prior and independent account of the conditions of the possibility of cognition, most of which take place in us without our explicit awareness, is the very locus from which Kant discovers a space outside or beyond those conditions where practical reason might operate. To interpret the work of the Analytic as mere hypothesis and inventory on the way to an account in which knowledge is defined as reflexive social practice undermines the self-standing nature of Kant’s account of empirical knowledge, and with it the stance from which to ‘‘deny’’ that knowledge. In sum, it is hard to square O’Neill’s claims for the methodological primacy of practical reason with Kant’s stated need to establish separate domains for the various applications of reason.8 For Kant, vindicating reason not only requires a methodological distinction between principles of thought (knowledge) and of action 8

See Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 4, for a general criticism along these lines of all claims for methodological primacy of the practical. Ameriks argues convincingly that these approaches follow in the footsteps of Fichte’s idealism rather than Kant’s philosophy.

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(morality), but the introduction of a third ‘‘faculty,’’ (Vermo¨gen des Gemuths), namely feeling, along with its own principle [of judgment].9 Far from identifying theory and practice under a single principle, Kant reiterates their separation, and then seeks to show how they can possibly be reunited in the human subject through the mediation of a reflective concept of purpose and its human manifestation in a universally communicable feeling.10 Because O’Neill sees the problem for reason as that of uniting thought and action under a single principle, she tends to neglect Kant’s own characterization of his third and final Critique as ‘‘mediating the connection of the two parts of philosophy to [form] a whole’’(V: 176) – i.e. that of finding a mediating principle to negotiate and harmonize, not under which to subsume, the two capacities of reason. O’Neill’s interpretation is motivated by a commitment to Kant’s Enlightenment political values and especially to the value of non-coercive public discourse.11 She assumes that ‘‘critique of reason is only possible if we think of critique as recursive [reflexive] and reason as constructed rather than imposed.’’12 She repeatedly poses the following dilemma: Reason must be the product of a ‘‘never passive’’ constructive enterprise carried out in accordance with the generalized Categorical Imperative (all principles employed must be ones that all can follow), or it is tyranny. On this account, if rationality is not actively constructed by us, it is imposed on us. There is no alternative.13 9

10

11

12 13

‘‘Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment,’’ trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), V: 198. Cf. ‘‘Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment,’’ and also the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (published separately as vol. XI of the collected works, and included as an appendix in Pluhar’s translation). Cf. O’Neill, ‘‘Vindication Reason,’’ chapter 9 of The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 293. O’Neill, Constructions of Reason, p. 27. Even if we agree that this contract, or procedural model of reason is appropriate, it may still be objected that, as with any contract theory, the question of who is to be party to the original contract is not irrelevant: to whom do we refer when we say that ‘‘all’’ must be able to follow the principles of reason adopted? O’Neill argues that the political analogy should not be pressed too far, that the contract ‘‘need not be taken literally, or as referring to historical events’’(Constructions of Reason, p. 18). But the many and varied postmodern attacks on the notion of the tribunal of reason and of Enlightenment optimism in general have underscored the importance of the question of origins. Who will be admitted to the all-important team constructing reason? Who will be excluded? What about questions of development? How will the rationally immature be distinguished from the mature thinker, and who will train them for maturity? What methods will be used by the trainers to ensure that their trainees become autonomous? Those who cannot or will not submit to the discipline of reason as already constructed at any given historical moment will presumably never be party to the process. For a collection of essays expressing these sorts of criticisms, from both Kant’s own time and from contemporary authors, see What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, James Schmidt, ed.

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I want to suggest in what follows that for Kant, at any rate, this formulation harbors a false dilemma. If ‘‘construction’’ is understood as any activity of the mind that in any way shapes our experience it may be true for Kant, but as O’Neill appears to understand him, active construction involves self-legislation, self-legislation means giving the law to oneself, and the latter involves the ‘‘willful’’ activity of reason. The picture is one of a struggle for rational self-definition against external, ‘‘alien’’ forces, an image that Kant himself surely encourages in many places. Yet in the third Critique, especially in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,’’ Kant’s concern is with a less interventionist, less defensive mode of rational engagement with the world of nature and with others. His account of aesthetic contemplation is certainly about mental activity. Reflecting on beauty, however, is not willful activity, nor the imposition of form on nature. It is mere imaginative ‘‘play’’ with natural forms, and in this sense, at least, might be considered more passive. Still, Kant takes this activity to be the connecting link between reason in its cognitive/ theoretical and in its moral capacities. Interpretations that unify reason under practical reason and the autonomy of the will fail to account for the centrality of reflection in Kant’s overall account of human reason. The sense in which reflective judgment defines rationality will be explored later. First, however, it will be useful to turn briefly to another important recent argument for the primacy of practical reason that does take account explicitly of the role of contemplation in relation to practical reason. Christine Korsgaard also interprets Kant’s overall account of rationality in terms ultimately of practical reasoning, the spirit of which she traces to his humanism. That is, she argues, for Kant the source of all value is ultimately humanity itself – or, to be more precise, humanity insofar as it is capable of ‘‘full rational autonomy’’(p. 241). Like O’Neill, she, too, sees practical reason as the fundamental source of all values and, like O’Neill, she believes that choices, to be truly human, can be determined only by practical reason, and not inclination and pleasures: In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant claims that good is a rational concept. This means that if ends are to be good, they must be determined by reason, not merely inclination or pleasantness . . . Behind the assumption that if every rational being could acknowledge something to be good . . . then it is indeed (Riverside: University of California Press, 1996). For a feminist version of these sorts of criticisms and a suggestion for reconstructing Kant’s aesthetics as a part of the solution, see my ‘‘The Aesthetic Dimension of Kantian Autonomy,’’ in Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, ed. Robin May Schott (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 173–190.

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good . . . is the idea that it is rational beings who determine what is good; rational nature confers value on the objects of its choices and is itself the source of all value.14

Korsgaard then argues that rational nature for Kant must be understood as fundamentally practical. Theoretical knowledge is limited to the mechanism and not the ends of nature, while speculation about final causes is also banished from the realm of knowledge. Thus Korsgaard argues, theoretical reflection relinquishes any claim to being the source – i.e. ultimate justification – of human values. For this reason, she says, Kant’s rationalism, unlike Aristotle’s, values agency over contemplation, and ‘‘Morality replaces metaphysics as the highest expression of our rational nature.’’15 Since Korsgaard’s account of Kant’s subordination of the contemplative side of human nature to the practical dovetails with O’Neill’s view that practical reason unites all aspects of reason under a single principle, a response to Korsgaard’s arguments against contemplation also raises questions for O’Neill. Korsgaard outlines two Kantian arguments against contemplation as the source of value. The first she takes from the Critique of Judgment, Section 86 ‘‘On Ethicotheology,’’ in which Kant states that it is not by reference to man’s cognitive power (theoretical reason) that the existence of everything else in the world first gets its value, i.e., it is not [because] (say) there is someone to contemplate the world. For if all this contemplation offered to man’s presentation nothing but things without a final purpose, then the fact that the world is cognized cannot make its existence valuable; only if we presupposed that the world has a final purpose, could its contemplation itself have a value by reference to that purpose.16

Korsgaard reads this as follows: while speculative reason hopes vainly to discover or prove that this ideal of reason is already realized in the world, practical reason – or morality – is the attempt to impose this ideal on action and on the world insofar as action shapes the world.

The argument against contemplation as a source of value she summarizes concisely as The world must have a final purpose in order to be worth contemplating, so contemplation cannot be that final purpose.17 14

15 17

Christine M. Korsgaard, ‘‘Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value’’, in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 241. Ibid., p. 246. 16 Kant, Critique of Judgment, (V: 442). Korsgaard, ‘‘Aristotle and Kant,’’ p. 241.

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This is a good summary of Kant’s point, but it does not follow from the claim that contemplation cannot be the final purpose of the world that it also cannot be a source of value. Contemplation, like moral judgment, is an activity. Final purposes or ends are objects of desire. It may well be that the highest end or final purpose of humanity is essentially moral without it following that our method of creating or producing it be essentially practical. In fact, in this section of the ‘‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’’ Kant is speaking about the way in which even the most ordinary mind meditates (nachdenkt) about the existence of things. The citation Korsgaard uses occurs in a context in which Kant is concerned to explain teleological reflection upon the universe, and to argue, as Korsgaard points out, that there is a moral component to this reflection. The reflective product, the judgment itself, however, does not rest on determinant principles of judgment, either cognitive or moral, but on a principle of reflective judgment that, as Kant has already argued, is independent of both: The effect [at which we are to aim] according to the concept of freedom is the final purpose which (or the appearance of which in the world of sense) ought to exist; and we [must] presuppose the condition under which it is possible [to achieve] this final purpose in nature (in the nature of the subject as a being of sense, namely, as a human being). It is judgment that presupposes this condition ‘‘a priori,’’ and without regard to the practical, [so that] this power provides us with the concept that mediates beween the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom: the concept of a purposiveness of nature, which makes possible the transition from pure theoretical to pure practical lawfulness, from lawfulness in terms of nature to the final purpose set by the concept of freedom. For it is through this concept [of the purposiveness of nature] that we cognize [erkennen] the possibility of [achieving] the final purpose, which can be actualized only in nature and in accordance with its laws.18

Korsgaard argues that Kant rejects contemplation as the source of value, but in fact all he really rejects is the claim to know anything through contemplation, in the very limited sense of knowledge characterized by him in the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason. She claims that ‘‘for Kant . . . teleological thinking is not knowledge, and such grounding as it has lies in practical religious faith and so in ethics.’’19 But as we have just seen, teleological thinking is grounded in a concept of reason that is neither theoretical nor practical, but that belongs nonetheless to the 18

Kant, Critique of Judgment, V: 195–196.

19

Korsgaard, ‘‘Aristotle and Kant,’’ p. 245.

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system of the faculties of the mind a priori. It is grounded in reflective judgment. Korsgaard then goes on to conclude that ‘‘we cannot, through theoretical thinking, participate in the final purpose of the world. We can only do this in practice.’’20 Here she presents her own version of what I have suggested is the false dichotomy in O’Neill’s constructivism: either we think theoretically, or we act according to the principles of practical reason. There is no alternative. Kant’s account of the relatively independent mediating activity of reflection on both thinking and acting is simply ignored.21 Korsgaard’s second argument for the devaluation of contemplative activity in Kant is taken from the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant claims that intellectual pleasures are no different in kind from physical pleasures, since the possibility of both rests on feeling, and feeling, being a mere passive susceptibility to causes, is ‘‘firmly divorced’’ from autonomy.22 It is certainly undeniable that Kant tends to belittle the contribution of feeling to rationality, but it ought to be noted immediately that charges of ‘‘passivity’’ will apply equally to all sorts of feeling, including not only pleasures of the sense and intellect, but also to the satisfaction we take in the moral. The latter type of feeling is one that Kant certainly neither wants to deny nor belittle. Kant’s tendency to characterize pleasure always as a kind of contingent a posteriori feeling vanishes with the advent of the theory of reflective judgment. In the third Critique, Kant’s claim is that ‘‘the feeling of pleasure and displeasure is only the subject’s receptivity to a [ certain] state.’’23 Pleasure in itself is only receptivity, indeed, but always a reception of a certain state of mental activity. Thus, for Kant pleasures are not all created equal: they are to be distinguished in terms of the conditions which give rise to them, and the important new contribution of the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ is to introduce and argue for pleasures of reflection whose conditions are universal and a priori. Such pleasures are the result of the conditions that hold a priori of a form of contemplation, albeit not an intellectual one: aesthetic reflective judgment. The argument from passivity does not in the end constitute an 20 21

22 23

Ibid. Kant refers to this relative independence as the ‘‘heautonomy’’ of judgment, in which it gives the law only to itself, not to nature or freedom, for reflection upon nature. Cf. Critique of Judgment, V: 185, and First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, XI: 225. V: 185–186, XI: 225. First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (XX: 208). See also the Critique of Practical Reason (V: 75) where Kant has already made this point about the origins of the feeling of respect for the moral law.

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argument against the pleasures of contemplation as a source of value, since some pleasures are ‘‘conditioned’’ only by activities of judgment that are universal and a priori. In part, Korsgaard’s arguments against contemplative reason as a source of value rest on a conflation of Kant’s account of theoretical reason and speculative metaphysics with contemplation. Kant, however, has a more fine-tuned account of reason’s activities. Theoretical reason needs to speculate upon the unconditioned, and this need, for Kant, should, for the most part, be sublimated to practical reason. But Kant’s account of contemplative thought, or ‘‘reflective judgment,’’ is a different sort of thinking altogether, whose function is not to subordinate theoretical to practical reason, but to negotiate the rift between them. Korsgaard’s and O’Neill’s readings of Kant’s overall theory are in many respects inspired, and stand in their own right as important Kantian reconstructions. Still, based on the arguments just presented, I believe that any accounts that locate the source of all value, and define rationality itself, primarily in terms of practical reason fail to do justice to one of Kant’s greatest insights, namely, that reason is a system of the interplay of both thinking and acting. A fully developed critique of reason must therefore provide an account of this connection – the interface as it were – of theoretical and practical reason.24 The third Critique, where Kant argues that this interface is just the mediation of reflective judgment, must be taken seriously. Whatever else reflective judgment is – and it has many aspects and various applications both practical and theoretical, it is not of itself practical or ‘‘constructive.’’ It is contemplative, where this always presupposes a reflective principle of purposiveness ‘‘without regard to the practical.’’ the primacy of practical reason: metaphysical To argue that practical reason is not primary or prior in the sense of being the origin or justificatory source of all value is not to suggest that there is no sense in which practical reason and agency are primary for Kant. In his comparative study of Kant and Fichte, Karl Ameriks argues that the values of practical reason are primary in the sense of having somehow more significance for human beings than either cognitive or aesthetic or 24

This is in no way to deny that in some sense reason is a unity for Kant. But I would argue for the position that Dieter Henrich and many others have advocated, that it is crucial to Kant’s philosophy that the unifying basis of reason itself cannot be known.

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other values. Ameriks suggests that pure practical reason ‘‘in Kant’s philosophy has a kind of preeminence because it discloses the basic sources and goals of what is valuable’’ and he argues that the moral law for Kant is the most significant object of our attention in the sense that it alone reveals what is of unconditional interest and value, the moral will. Although Kant recognized that mere theoretical and prudential activities also have considerable positive value, he insists that by themselves they are rooted in secondary interest that [has] nothing like the incomparable worth of morality.25

The language of revelation and disclosure is important here. Ameriks’ understanding of the primacy of the practical depends on a metaphysical interpretation of transcendental idealism that is the polar opposite of O’Neill’s constructivism. For Ameriks, the Copernican turn and its ‘‘denial of knowledge to make room for faith’’ is not the end of metaphysics but simply its redirection from the theoretical to the practical realm. The transcendental idealist account of nature is the methodological condition of our discovery, as moral agents, of a new practical metaphysics. It provides our ticket out of determined nature into another realm: the spatiotemporal laws covering all the ordinary appearances of our life need not constrain our inner or noumenal reality, and so, rather than having to give up morality in the face of a law-governed nature, we can and should accept morality as the guide to a nonspatiotemporal realm that exists and is more fundamental than nature.26

Ameriks goes on to argue that transcendental idealism has thus provided for ‘‘the only escape from ‘nature’ . . . .’’ So that, on this reading, our noumenal being is revealed to us as a result of our denial of knowledge, in a sort of Critical reversal of the fall from grace. The details of this new moral landscape are a further disclosure of practical reason, given in the form of the postulates of God, freedom, and immortality.27 Ameriks is correct in pointing to the fact that Kantian practical reason depends on his account of the limitations of theoretical reason and, hence, in the overall structure of his philosophy, cannot be methodologically or logically prior. Yet Amerik’s unrepentant metaphysical account of the practical leaves it open to a criticism that Kant himself wanted very much 25

Ameriks, ‘‘Kant, Fichte,’’ p. 190.

26

Ibid., p. 191.

27

Ameriks, ‘‘Kant, Fichte,’’ pp. 190–91.

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to avoid. That is, it portrays human beings as hopelessly alienated from themselves – if not at war with their own physicality, then at least seriously alienated from their own basic nature as embodied ‘‘beings of need.’’28 There can be no doubt that recognition of this concern in Kant’s philosophical enterprise is key to understanding him. Both versions of his introduction to his third and final Critique mention the need to reconnect nature and reason and, as we have already seen, the need to connect the rational/ethical and the theory of nature is urgent on moral grounds. In the last section of this chapter, I shall argue that Kant is also concerned about theoretical reason’s stake in this reconnection. As we saw earlier, Kant was painfully aware of this potential problem in Chapter III of the second Critique, when he assumes that the moral law must have an effect on the will of human beings through some natural, subjective path – that is, through some sensuous impulse. Here, Kant allows for such a feeling, albeit a rather tortured one caused by the frustration by reason of sensuous inclination: For all inclination and every sensuous impulse is based on feeling, and the negative effect on feeling (through the check on the inclinations) is itself feeling. Consequently, we can see a priori that the moral law as a ground of determination of the will, by thwarting all our inclinations, must produce a feeling which can be called pain. Here we have the first and perhaps the only case wherein we can determine from a priori concepts the relation of a cognition (here a cognition of pure practical reason) to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.29

Assuming the plausibility of this move, it is still not much of an answer to the criticism that a bifurcated account of reason leads Kant inevitably to a notion of moral being that is essentially alienated from its natural self. Humiliation, even when rechristened as a feeling for the majesty of duty, as Kant himself puts it, ‘‘has nothing to do with the enjoyment of life.’’30 Even with the addition of an account of moral feeling, the doctrine of the primacy of the practical interpreted as resting on a metaphysical ‘‘escape’’ from nature, as Ameriks claims it does, leaves us with a rather disintegrated and desolate picture of the human condition. It is surely to avoid that portrait that Kant, even already at the end of the second Critique, begins to move towards the theoretical incorporation of other sorts of

28 29

Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Macmillan: 1988), V: 61. Critique of Practical Reason, V: 72–73. 30 Ameriks, ‘‘Kant, Fichte,’’ p. 88.

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‘‘case[s] wherein we can determine from a priori concepts the relation of a cognition to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.’’31 Another account of the metaphysical primacy of practical reason that explicitly recognizes the depth of the alienation problem for Kant, is Richard Velkley’s teleological reading in Freedom and the End of Reason. Velkley argues that the problem of the unity of nature and reason was first apparent to Kant after his reading of Rousseau’s account of humanity’s progressive alienation from its own nature: The difficulties are subsumed under the heading of the ‘‘teleological problem’’ in the modern ‘‘individualistic’’ emancipation of the passions. If reason has no other end than to serve the passions aiming at freedom and mastery, what prevents reason, as a modifiable and expanding power, from unfolding in ways that exacerbated the passions and that increase human servitude to socially generated and factitious desires? By suggesting that the whole modern emancipatory effort may be self-defeating, Rousseau initiates the later modern criticism of the modern world as the realm of ‘‘alienation’’ in which man is subjugated by his own creations.32

In Velkley’s view, Kant solves the problem by asserting the primacy of practical reason, which Velkley interprets as the position that Kant’s philosophy has an ‘‘overarching moral project’’ that is actually a continuation of the modern project of the emancipation from nature: the modern critique of speculation is not neutral to all human purposes or human finality. The rejection of metaphysical first causes is to make room for the supremacy of human final causes. The order of cosmic final causes is replaced by the legislated order or by the ideal construct supported only by human volition – the establishment of a new universal nomos that promotes the maximum of human freedom from the evils and unwelcome constraints of the natural order . . . Kant’s own critique is quite clearly a continuation of this emancipatory project.33

Whether or not the characterization of replacing cosmic order with ‘‘the legislated order or . . . the ideal construct supported only by human volition’’ is true to the intentions of modern philosophy prior to Kant, it is certainly true that Kant follows Rousseau in foregrounding the problem of reason, and as a result is moved by the need for a ‘‘theodicy of reason’’ 31

32

33

In the ‘‘Methodology of Pure Practical Reason,’’ Kant outlines two ‘‘exercises’’ for enabling moral cultivation that are rough sketches of his account of judgments of taste and the sublime. Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, V: 160–161. Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 13–14. Ibid., pp. 18–19.

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to establish that ‘‘reason is a beneficent force in human life’’ (p. 2). According to Velkley, Kant ultimately finds that justification in the view that ‘‘reason is governed by a single organizing principle or telos’’(pp. 17–18), and already in the 1760s Kant was beginning to see the ‘‘subjective need that human reason has of the metaphysical concepts of substance, force and causality, which is above all a moral need – the inexorable concerns with the fate of the soul, God and freedom . . . ’’ (pp. 119–120). Velkley thus sees ‘‘the ‘core’ of metaphysics shift[ing] to its practical‘telos-giving part and away from theoretical inquiry’ in Kant’s philosophy’’(p. 119). Ultimately, Velkley claims, Kant developed a ‘‘practical metaphysics’’ that has been revived in recent twentieth-century idealisms: One can say Kant’s idealism marks the high point of a certain effort that has been renewed, but not surpassed, by later phenomenological and hermeneutical definitions of the ‘‘horizon’’ of experience. It would confine the reflection on the absolute (whose meaning and content are ultimately moral), within the sphere of human freedom and practice . . . that is kept distinct from the speculative noumenal realm of modern idealism. (p. 135).

The primacy of the moral end, for Kant, limits ‘‘the true metaphysical whole’’ (pp. 112–113) and since philosophy is only critique, not discovery, ‘‘theoretical inquiry is primarily self knowledge’’ so that ‘‘the true calling of humanity is to legislate unity where disunity reigns’’ (p. 116). Of course, it is in nature that disunity appears to reign. Thus Velkley characterizes Kant’s solution as a triumph of reason – i.e., of the will – over nature: Rousseau’s emphasis on the ‘‘unnaturalness’’ of the will (p. 74), of its increasingly greater separation from nature, posed the problem of reason, but also set forth its solution: the will can be free of natural impulses, hence ‘‘autonomous’’ and hence capable of acting as a ‘‘restorative’’ for the ordering of the human soul: ‘‘Kant tends toward a single form of perfection in the teleological consummation of reason in a new legislation of the order of the soul’’ (p. 66). For all its historical insight, Velkley’s interpretation of Kant is, in my view, flawed in two important ways. First, he presents a version of a flight from nature in Kant’s philosophy that ignores the importance of aesthetic judgments about natural beauty in Kant’s notion of teleology. These are not less important than his account of teleology in the second half of the third Critique, and indeed, Kant suggests that methodologically they are more fundamental to his account of the connection of nature and reason, and of practical and theoretical aspects of human functioning. The

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Preface to the second Introduction to the Critique of Judgment ends with a short paragraph in which Kant says ‘‘With this I conclude my entire critical enterprise.’’ The directly preceding paragraphs are devoted to explaining why a transcendental account of the ‘‘aesthetic power of judgment’’ is necessary, and the role this power plays in solving the riddle of finding a principle for the power of judgment. Kant’s ‘‘entire critical enterprise,’’ in other words, comes to an end with an account of how judgment ‘‘whose correct use is so necessary and universally required that this power is just what we mean by sound understanding’’ (V: 169) itself relies on an account of aesthetic – i.e, feeling-based – reflection. To insist that Kant’s enterprise was intended ultimately to overcome or transcend nature ignores the mediating role that imagination, disinterestedness, and pleasure play in his critical enterprise. Certainly in the ‘‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’’ Kant is concerned with human culture and progress, and is aware of the ever-increasing artificial desires that technical development brings. But precisely this concern sends him ‘‘back to nature’’ in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,’’ where he focuses on the need to reconnect directly (non-instrumentally, but also non-morally) with nature, in such a way that we come to feel, via the pleasure of reflection on perceptual forms, the possibility of nature’s conforming to our moral calling. Velkley’s reading leaves no room for this direct connection to nature, privileging instead the rational projection of a unitary ideal of human freedom that not only elides but in fact ‘‘overcomes’’ nature in human subjectivity. It is exceedingly difficult, then, to see how the problem of the alienation of reason from nature that Velkley so carefully traces from Kant back to Rousseau, is solved on this reading. A second problem with this interpretation, in my opinion, is that it places extraordinary power in the hands of the philosopher. On Velkley’s reading, it is that elite group that plans a global ‘‘revolution in theoretical and moral foundations’’: According to Kant, the philosopher is to be defined as a legislator, not as a mere theoretician. His legislation establishes the architectonic order of reason wherein the various investigations of philosophy and science are to take their places and in which they are to be viewed as collectively furthering the ultimate end that the philosopher defines. In other words, the philosopher legislates the systematic unity of reason as governed by a single organizing principle or telos. The revolution taking place in the foundational inquiries of theoretical and moral philosophy has a principal architect – the philosophy as legislator. That is to say that the ‘‘local’’ revolutions in theoretical and moral foundations are reflecting a larger, more comprehensive revolution planned and initiated by the legislative activity of the critical philosopher. (p. 18)

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Philosophy takes on far more importance, on Velkley’s reading of Kant, than the limiting function Kant claims for it in the first Critique. For Velkley, this is part of Kant’s response to Rousseau, who questioned whether ‘‘modern philosophy [can] maintain its position as the dominant force in human affairs and continue to promote the emancipation and enlightenment of humanity’’ (p. 13). An ideal ‘‘definitive culture’’ is to be determined by philosophy as part of this answer, which according to Velkley involves an overwhelming commitment to practical concerns over theoretical ones: ‘‘all supersensible realities and causes are understood as subordinated to freedom’s essential projects . . . Kant could not state more directly the primacy of the practical in the profoundest sense in which he intends it; the practical determines the direction of and even the content of theoretical inquiry’’ (p. 144). Velkley’s notion of the primacy of the practical is not to be accused of escapism, as Ameriks’ might, but it is all the more worrisome for that very reason. Freedom of inquiry and belief themselves seem to disappear in the all-encompassing quest for unity of reason. This is surely too high a price to pay for conquering alienation, and it is hard to believe that Kant himself would entertain, let alone subscribe to, such a vision. Indeed, the very spirit of the ‘‘Rousseauistic revolution’’ in his way of thinking about ordinary humanity appears to give way, on this account, to an extreme paternalism that is precisely the wrong answer to the question ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ Paradoxically, on this account the elevation of the practical over theory opens the door to the very authoritarianism it was supposed to combat. As we shall see shortly, Kant was aware of the danger of letting practical reason take over all aspects of human experience, and wanted to block the possibility of its dictating content to theory. Richard Eldridge, in The Persistence of Romanticism, also sees Kant’s philosophy as centrally engaging the alienation problem, but he is less inclined to read Kant as assigning the role of instituting a higher moral culture on earth to the philosopher: Kant regards his own philosophical writing as advancing this work, helping to free us from tutelage or service to our animal nature so as to achieve collective rational freedom. His articulation of the principle of morality is to help to move us first to found a liberal state and then further, through culture, to bring our ends into rational harmony with one another. This advance toward freedom first through politics and then through culture is not however, the work of philosophy alone. Art has a crucial role to play in this development.34 34

Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 38.

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Eldridge takes the separation of nature and freedom problematized in the third Critique to be an expression of a latent ‘‘deep anxiety’’ in Kant about the possibility of actually manifesting our freedom in the world (p. 36). Kant’s ‘‘imaginative narratives’’ about the (possible) progress of human history are ways of dealing with that angst, and perhaps even of combatting the miserable human conditions that cause it. Moreover, he points out, the artist’s imaginative and communicable work might do the same. In ‘‘How is the Kantian Moral Criticism of Literature possible?,’’ he discusses Kant’s characterization of the domain of philosophy – i.e. of the overall human condition – in the second introduction to the third Critique.35 Eldridge glosses Kant’s worry as follows: ‘‘we will not rest content with an empty, speculative freedom that is not intelligibly actualizable and we must somehow come to see the world as supporting the actualization of freedom’’ (p. 75). Eldridge recognizes, in other words, that the third Critique takes up the problem of alienation, and presents a third way between metaphysical accounts of morality (whether noumenal or politically ideal) and first-person practical reasoning approaches, both of which only perpetuate the alienation of human freedom from human nature. ‘‘It is too little recognized,’’ Eldridge writes, ‘‘that Kant began in his last writings, particularly in the Critique of Judgment, to rethink the problem of how there can be morality and freedom in the sensible world’’ (p. 75). Eldridge is particularly interested in the role that genius plays in actualizing freedom through art, and I shall return to this point in later chapters. For now, his point about the role of the third Critique is well taken: By the time he wrote his final critical work, Kant had changed his views about the role of the sensible, of feeling, and of imagination with respect to morality. What he had declared impossible in the first Critique and unlikely in the second, became the focus of the entire first half of the third Critique: the possibility of pleasures – not painful humiliations – based on conditions that were universal and a priori. There he argues that reflection gives rise in aesthetic judgment to a feeling whose universal validity depends upon its independence from practical and theoretical determination. Since aesthetic reflection itself involves the conditions of cognition in general (imagination and understanding in free play) the resulting feelings have a pedigree every bit as pure as that of the humbled feeling of respect for the moral law. Some reflective feelings, like the

35

Ibid., pp. 71–84.

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feeling of the sublime, involve the faculty of pure practical reason and our recognition of our moral autonomy in the face of purposeless nature. But others, and indeed the paradigm case of aesthetic feeling – namely, our feelings for the beautiful – depend entirely on conditions of cognition in general. Such feelings not only are independent of practical reason, but their very right to claim universal validity depends on this independence.36 the mediated primacy of practical reason I want now to return to the problem of alienation raised by what I have been calling metaphysical readings of the priority of the practical, and Kant’s initial attempt to bring the practical back into the realm of nature. Kant went on to address the issue of the causal efficacy of the moral in the Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason, by introducing the conception of the Highest Good as the necessary objective of practical reason. The moral law, Kant argues, demands that we strive to produce, in nature, a state in which ‘‘happiness [is] in exact proportion to morality.’’37 But if we are incapable of so doing, then the moral law itself must be ‘‘fantastic, directed toward imaginary ends, and consequently inherently false.’’38 The famous solution to this problem of the potentially debilitating moral alienation from our natural selves was of course the postulates of practical reason – of immortality and of God. It is as a springboard for this dangerous leap of reason, which in effect involves breaching the boundaries of theoretical reason for the sake of practice, that Kant explicitly argues for the primacy of practical reason. Having looked at several interpretations of Kant’s doctrine, it is perhaps time to examine his own account. Unfortunately, Kant’s own statement of the primacy of the practical turns out to be far from transparent. To begin, as already mentioned, its placement in the Critique is clearly strategic, if not ad hoc. To preserve the doctrine of the highest good, and the need for a more integrated account of morality that motivates it, Kant has taken up a precarious position. He has allowed reason to suspend the Copernican turn in order, 36

37

Cf. Paul Guyer, ‘‘Feeling and Freedom: Kant on Aesthetics and Morality,’’ in Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–47, esp. pp. 46–47. Guyer sees this independence as ultimately serving pure practical reason. The argument of this chapter is slightly different – namely, that this independence does also serve pure practical reason. It is not, however, independence for the sake of morality. Critique of Practical Reason, V: 110. 38 Ibid., V: 114.

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for the sake of practice, to make the bald metaphysical claims of the postulates.39 To prepare the ground for this un-Critical move, he argues that under certain circumstances speculative reason ought to take up these principles [of practical reason] and seek to integrate them, even though they transcend it, with its own concepts, as a foreign possession handed over to it . . . It must assume them indeed as something offered from the outside and not grown in its own soil, and it must seek to compare and connect them with everything which it has in its power as speculative reason. It must remember that they are not its own insights but extensions of its use in some other respect, viz., the practical; that this is not in the least opposed to its interest, which lies in the restriction of speculative folly.40

The interests of practical reason, where they are ‘‘inseparably bound’’ to it, trump the interests of theoretical reason, but only because the former’s interests are not ‘‘in the least’’ opposed to the latter’s. They are just different from them, and Kant says, ‘‘It is not a question of which must yield, for one does not necessarily conflict with the other.’’41 Yet practical reason’s ability to trump speculation is not as powerful as it might seem. Although he claims that ‘‘if the speculative and the practical were arranged merely side by side (coordinated),’’ a conflict would arise, his argument for the need to give preference to practical rather than theoretical needs is based on a worry that, without a specified hierarchy of interests, either side might take over: the first [speculative reason] would close its borders and admit into its domain nothing from the latter [practical reason], while [practical reason] would extend its boundaries over everything and, when its needs required, would seek to comprehend [speculative reason] within them. Nor could we reverse the order and expect practical reason to submit to speculative reason.42

The point here seems to be that giving certain interests of practical reason primacy is legitimate to the extent that it maintains a reasonable balance and harmony between theoretical and practical reason, including keeping practical reason itself under control. Kant’s own account of the primacy of the practical is thus a far more mitigated sort of preference than many commentators, including both O’Neill and Korsgaard, and even Ameriks, seem to want to attribute to Kant. Moreover, it suggests that Kant is 39

40

Yirmiyahu Yovel, in Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 287ff, makes a strong case for the untenability of Kant’s incorporation of the postulates in his system. 41 Critique of Practical Reason, V: 120ff. Ibid. 42 Ibid., V: 121.

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already groping for the sort of mediating faculty that he would soon suggest in the Critique of Judgment as a way of coordinating without subordinating either. It is worth looking more closely at what Kant seems to want at this point in the Critique of Practical Reason, and in particular to note his concern that practical reason ‘‘would extend its boundaries over everything and, when its needs required, would seek to comprehend [speculative reason] within them.’’ His worries about placing speculation over pure practical reason – moral autonomy – are well known. They date back to his first awakening, thanks to Rousseau, to the incomparable value of humanity, and the concern that a dogmatic preference for the theoretical could render one blind to that value. Here, however, he expresses a parallel concern that if practical reason is not suitably restrained it will become ideological, bending theory to suit its purposes. This is an important insight that is unfortunately obscured by his call for theory to borrow the principles of practical reason ‘‘and seek to integrate them . . . as a foreign possession’’ to be compared and connected with everything that it can, for the purposes of lending support to morality. To be sure, this is permitted only if and when the ‘‘borrowed’’ principle is shown to be inseparably bound up with the needs of pure practical reason, so that no mere ‘‘pathological interest,’’ or (we might say) ideology, is at its root. Kant’s intention at this point in the second Critique is to set the stage for the postulates of God and immortality, which ‘‘reason holds out to us as the supplement to our impotence to [realize] the highest good.’’ The problem with Kant’s explanation of how postulating metaphysical notions will provide the rational hope necessary to fulfill our moral obligations has already been examined in chapter 2: How could Kant suspend the entire critical apparatus for the sake of bringing back theological metaphysics?43 And even if he could get away with that on practical grounds, does the introduction of supernatural aids really solve the problem of how we can rationally hope to bring about the highest good in nature, as the moral law commands that we do?44 Moreover, if the primacy of practical reason was introduced as a doctrine in order to make sense of the arguments for the postulates, and the latter fail, of what systematic use is the primacy claim? Again, the third Critique, and Kant’s account of the independence of aesthetic value, are crucial to the final story. There is indeed a sense in 43

Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History.

44

See chapter 2 in this volume.

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which for Kant the practical is primary, but it has to do neither with the claim that all values are ultimately constructed by us, nor with the need for a practical procedure that serves as guide for all such construction. Neither does this primacy have to do with discovering the source of all value in an inner world transcending nature, nor in a unifying definitive telos of human reason. What appears to be motivating the primacy claim in the second Critique is the need to link morality in its pure rational form to the fact of human beings’ finitude and embodiment. Kant was keenly aware in the second Critique that his moral theory required of human beings a feeling of hope if it was to provide a plausible account of how we could possibly be required to implement its demands in the natural world. But humiliation, God, and immortality were not enough. In The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Susan Neiman argues that, for Kant, the alienation human beings feel as moral beings in the world of nature is ‘‘so fundamental that it can never be fully overcome.’’ She claims that ‘‘If philosophy involves coming of age [as Kant claims in ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’], it also involves an acceptance of loss of the unreflective sense of unity that children feel toward their world.’’45 I think she is right to recall the depth of Kant’s realization of the pervasive disharmony and unease between human reason and its embodiment. At the same time, however, it is the case that Kant sought some kind of connection of the two, and clearly intended his analysis of judgment of beauty to help serve that purpose. A naive, unreflective sense of unity had to be outgrown, as Neiman rightly points out, but in fact Kant found a mature version of that unity in the development of a reflective aesthetic sense for nature’s objects. That it is also contingent, as we saw in chapter 3, on human beings having the access to nature and leisure to reflect upon it does not make it any less important as a remedy for alienation, and as I have already suggested, may make the experience of beauty a crucial part of moral development. At the very least it reintroduces human 45

Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 202. Neiman’s view of the primacy of the practical is that it comes down to a primacy of the moral world in terms of its power and application relative to that of theoretical reason. She equates theoretical reason with science, and argues that theoretical reason is crucially dependent on the cooperation of the world. Practical reason, by contrast, can achieve its ends alone. She goes on to argue that the objects of practical reason, because they are our own ends, are breathtakingly simple to realize (pp. 128–129). Of course, if the Highest Good is an end of reason, and we are indeed required to try to make it real in the world in the face of an utter lack of reason to think that is even possible for us, then developing the right internal attitude towards our duty becomes a real problem for reason. (See chapter 2 for further discussion of Neiman’s account of the highest good and the postulates.)

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imaginative, creative capacities into our navigation between the two aspects of our human selves. We have seen that several sections of the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ may be read as an account of how reflective aesthetic valuing can serve the purposes of moral judgment in precisely the sort of way that Kant needed, by embodying values of practical reason. A passage quoted earlier from Section 42 of the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ is worth looking at again, because it offers the possibility of an aesthetic reflective approach to the alienation problem that was never really solved by the postulation of God and immortality. If we were somehow to be able to sense or feel that nature had a place for moral beings – that beings with purpose belonged there, and that nature itself had a purpose – then we would have something of the feeling of hope that we need to make following its strict law possible and even natural: reason also has an interest in the objective reality of the ideas (for which, in moral feeling, it brings about a direct interest), i.e., an interest that nature should at least show a trace or give a hint that it contains some basis or other for us to assume in its products a lawful harmony with that liking of ours which is independent of all interest (a liking we recognize ‘‘a priori’’ as a law for everyone, thus we cannot base this law on proofs). Hence reason must take an interest in any manifestation in nature of a harmony that resembles the mentioned harmony, and hence the mind cannot meditate about the beauty of nature without at the same time finding its interest aroused.46

But that is something that we can achieve only indirectly through moral ideas. That is, in order for the connection of nature and moral interest to occur, our attention and our feeling must be directly connected with nature itself, apart from any moral interest. It is only disinterested, contemplative, non-practical but direct interest in nature’s forms that makes possible the indirect link to morality: it is not this link [between nature’s beauty and moral ideas] that interests us directly, but rather the beauty’s own characteristic of qualifying for such a link, which therefore belongs to it intrinsically.47

Kant’s insight is in a way quite simple: If we want proof that our moral nature is compatible with ourselves as embodied finite creatures – that rationality and animality belong naturally together, and that we can therefore hope to achieve our highest moral goals in this world – then the world must present us with at least a ‘‘hint’’ that it is possible that our moral purposes have a place in it. Disinterested contemplation and a 46

Critique of Judgment, V: 300.

47

Ibid., V: 302.

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consequent direct interest in nature gives us an independent reason, however tentative, to believe in our capacity to bring morality to the world. Kant’s solution to the problem of the gulf between the two uses of reason here amounts to a suspension of the moral for the sake of the moral. Aesthetic values are not fundamental conditions of the moral law, nor the source of all value, but they are the source of an independent and very special value, without which fulfilling our moral duty would be a grim and desperate undertaking. It is this insight that is buried by overemphasizing the primacy of the practical in Kant’s philosophy. Such emphasis amounts to neglecting a fundamental aspect of Kant’s humanism: its focus on ‘‘the nature of the subject as a being of sense, namely, as a human being.’’48 48

Critique of Practical Reason, V: 196. I would like to thank Henry Allison for comments on my reading of Section 42 ‘‘On the Intellectual Interest in the Beautiful,’’ that helped me clarify the relationship of moral to aesthetic value there. For a sustained account of the independence of aesthetic value from moral value, but the ultimate subordination of this independence to morality, the reader is referred to Guyer’s introduction and the essays collected in Kant and the Experience of Freedom. Guyer’s book, (Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), however, is less centrally concerned with aesthetic value, and indeed, in arguing for a normative conception of freedom as ‘‘our fundamental value’’ Guyer seems to be moving away from his earlier emphasis on the independence of aesthetic value in its relation to moral value.

c h ap t e r 5

The failure of Kant’s imagination

In a well-known account of the role of transcendental imagination in Kant’s philosophy, Martin Heidegger practically accused Kant of intellectual cowardice. Heidegger argued that Kant’s refusal in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to grant that the imagination was a fundamental faculty was a result of Kant’s having originally identified the transcendental imagination with the ‘‘common root’’ of sensibility and understanding, and of his subsequently being unwilling to grant such basic status to a faculty whose obscure nature frightened him: ‘‘He saw the unknown,’’ Heidegger says, and ‘‘he had to draw back.’’1 In what has become a classic critique of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation, Dieter Henrich’s ‘‘Die Einheit der Subjektivita¨t’’ (‘‘On the Unity of Subjectivity’’)2 takes up his challenge to the integrity of the Kantian enterprise and defends Kant on the grounds that his refusal to explore the common root of both sensibility and understanding really has nothing to do with Kant’s attitude toward the imagination, but rather represents his adoption of the view, already promulgated against Christian Wolff by Christian August Crusius, that subjectivity cannot be traced to a single basic faculty or principle. Far from suggesting the need to identify any common root of human subjectivity, Henrich argues, Kant denies outright the possibility of ever knowing such a basic power and is agnostic about the existence of such a power even apart from the conditions of

1

2

See Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York, 1929), Introduction, A15/B 29: ‘‘there are two stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown, root.’’ And see also Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (KPM), trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1962), pp. 41–42, 173. Dieter Henrich, ‘‘Die Einheit der Subjektivita¨t,’’ Philosophische Rundschau 3 (1955), pp. 28–69. Trans. Gunter Zo¨eller as ‘‘On the Unity of Subjectivity,’’ in Dieter Henrich, The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Richard Velkley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). The translations in this chapter are Zo¨eller’s.

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human knowledge.3 Since Kant ultimately ‘‘renounces’’ a positive answer to the question of what conditions the possibility of human subjectivity, the ‘‘unknown’’ common root that Kant refers to in the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason cannot be any known faculty and hence cannot be the imagination.4 The imagination is not suppressed or ‘‘displaced’’ in Kant’s philosophy, but is simply not central. Historically, the notion that human subjectivity must be unified on the basis of its stemming from a common source in that which mediates sensibility and understanding was a theme worked out in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel and voiced again, Henrich argues, in Heidegger. But for critical philosophy such unity was unknowable and could be explained regulatively only in terms of some sort of ‘‘intrasubjective’’ purposiveness:5 The unity of subjectivity, in Kant’s final construction of it, is conceived as teleological. Kant feels compelled to look beyond what is immediately given in consciousness, ‘‘to look beyond the sensible to the supersensible as the point where all our a priori powers are reconciled, since that is the only alternative left to us for bringing reason into harmony with itself.’’6

But so far as knowledge is concerned, the structural unity of the faculties is contingent. If this is Kant’s view, then of course no account could be established for the primacy of imagination as the original source of knowledge. The imagination is only one of the faculties of the mind, all of which can only be encountered ‘‘derivatively’’ through experience.7 This, Henrich argues, explains Kant’s turn away from any attempt to ‘‘deduce’’ the faculties in the first edition of the Critique to a ‘‘logical analysis’’ of the conditions of knowledge in the revised second edition. Not a fear of the unknown source of reason, but rather a recognition of its unavailability, led Kant to focus on the conditions of the understanding, whose structures – the logical forms of judgment – unlike imagination or sensibility, he was convinced were available for examination. Hence, according to Henrich, Kant became increasingly cautious about any 3 4

5

6

7

Henrich, ‘‘Die Einheit der Subjektivita¨t,’’ pp. 32–39. If any faculty is to be viewed as most fundamental to the structure of human subjectivity, Henrich argues, it is ‘‘apperception and its categories’’ (p. 44). Henrich does admit that this renunciation of hope for grounding subjectivity did not come easily to Kant (p. 46). Henrich, ‘‘Die Einheit der Subjektivita¨t,’’ pp. 44–45. The search for a unifying principle is seen by Kant to be a necessary subjective condition of reason, and hence the notion of a fundamental faculty or power is a regulative idea. Ibid., p. 46. The quotation from Kant is from the Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987) V: 341. Ibid., p. 50.

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attempt to explain the exact nature of sensibility or the relationship of the imagination to the understanding. Since the unity of the faculties in any absolute sense is unknown to human beings, the mediating role of the imagination must be understood as merely ‘‘the unity of activities that are required in addition to the objective principles of knowledge in order to render intelligible the actuality of knowledge.’’8 Viewing the imagination in this operational sense explains Kant’s move, in the second edition of the Critique, to assimilate it to the understanding as one of its functions. Henrich’s argument seems historically correct. Few would argue against the claim that the idealists’ move to extend knowledge to an account of its ultimate origins constituted a decisive break with Kantian philosophy, even if not all its proponents saw it as such at the time. Yet the success of Henrich’s ‘‘epistemological’’ approach has had the effect of pushing interesting aspects of Heidegger’s reading into a corner to gather dust. In particular, Kant scholars have tended to neglect what Heidegger, on his reading, was able to appreciate – namely, the fact that Kant was unusually struck by what he took to be the mysterious nature of the imagination and that, even in the realm of cognition (not to mention human action and motivation) Kant did appear suspicious of the imagination’s inscrutability.9 Yet a third wrinkle has been added to the fabric of the debate by Hartmut Bo¨hme and Gernot Bo¨hme, in their book Das Andere der Vernunft. They agree with Henrich that the critical turn in some sense necessitated Kant’s move away from viewing the imagination as a separate faculty, but take this shift to be grounds for criticizing the entire Kantian enterprise.10 They argue that, whatever his philosophical reasons, Kant’s unwillingness to grant the imagination any sort of autonomous status was rooted in psychological misapprehensions of phobic proportions. And while subconscious fears of the imagination and its close association with feeling and the body were typical of the Enlightenment psyche, they were by no means ‘‘healthy.’’ After some very illuminating and entertaining textual analysis, the Bo¨hmes conclude that the critical turn was an 8 9

10

Ibid., p. 54. See, e.g., CPR, A78/B103: ‘‘Synthesis in general . . . is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.’’ And A123: ‘‘That the affinity of appearances . . . and so experience itself, should only be possible by means of this transcendental function of imagination, is indeed strange, but is nonetheless an obvious consequence of the preceding argument.’’ Hartmut Bo¨hme and Gernot Bo¨hme, Das Andere der Vernunft: Zur Entwicklung von Rationalita¨tsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996).

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anxiety-driven swerve away from philosophical engagement with creative and enriching aspects of human experience. On a more sinister note, they suggest that Kant’s philosophy sealed the fate of any such philosophizing in the future: Although the imagination had always been met with caution . . . even into the seventeenth century it still had its ancestral place among the faculties of knowledge. It lost this position with Kant – once and for all, one might say, if one views the philosophy of the Romantics as an intermezzo.11

The Bo¨hmes see the critical turn as symptomatic not simply of Kant’s ‘‘angst’’ as a typical eighteenth-century man of reason but of much that ails contemporary ‘‘modern’’ thought generally. In what follows, I would like to make an initial attempt at adjudicating the debate between those who, like the Bo¨hmes,12 believe that critical philosophy’s antipathy to imagination and sensibility in general ought to undermine its significance and those (typically Kant scholars) who view such critiques as misplaced psychologizing that misses the point of the critical enterprise.13 Henrich argues that the unity of the faculties for Kant can be understood only ‘‘teleologically,’’ hence the move to the imagination as transcendental origin is ruled out, and any attempts to rewrite Kant’s account of subjectivity in terms of the imagination could only be misguided. The Bo¨hmes argue that Kant was pathologically averse to giving the imagination any genuine status next to the understanding and reason and hence could not find a proper place for it in his account of knowledge. Henrich’s account is a methodological explanation of the ‘‘displacement’’ of imagination in Kant’s critical philosophy, the Bo¨hmes’ is a psycho-social one. Both may contain elements of truth – and they are by no means mutually exclusive – but, I believe, neither view can be the last word on the subject. For, as I will argue in what follows, it is not clear that, in the final analysis, the imagination was entirely displaced in Kant’s philosophy, nor is it clear that he continued to hold that all functioning of imagination a priori must be subsumed under the understanding. Two considerations support the view that the role of imagination was not displaced in Kant’s overall theory. First, the role of teleological 11 12

13

Ibid., p. 231. Robin May Schott’s book, Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), presents another statement of this position from a feminist perspective. The three-way debate between the Bo¨hmes, Henrichians, and Heideggerians must be waived for the sake of space here. It is hinted at, however, in the insert to the Bo¨hmes’ chapter on the imagination in Das Andere der Vernunft (see n. 10), ‘‘Heideggers Philosophische Rehabilitierung der Einbildungskraft,’’ pp. 243–245.

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judgment came to have significance as a transcendental condition of human judgment for Kant, and his concern with it eventually resulted in the capstone of critical philosophy with the publication of the Critique of Judgment. Here, in the final phases of his mature philosophy, the imagination plays a pivotal role in Kant’s account of the nature of human experience reflectively (teleologically) organized. Second, Kant was not uniformly negative in his view of the imagination, even of what he perceived to be its excesses. And at least one of these excesses – viz. enthusiasm – plays an important role in his later social theory. A third consideration is also important in evaluating the extent to which Kant’s philosophy was tainted by problematic motivations. Scholars have argued that a crucial motivating force behind Kant’s ‘‘rejection’’ of metaphysics was his reading of Rousseau and his consequent radical revision of the prevailing instrumentalist conception of reason.14 To the extent that this interpretation of the critical turn rests on Kant’s deeply felt conviction that metaphysical speculation led to an ‘‘elitist’’ picture of morality, it clearly represents an additional element for consideration in any complete analysis of the motives underlying the critical philosophy. I look at each of these considerations in turn and conclude with an assessment of the Bo¨hmes’ contribution to Kant’s interpretation in the light of them. im aginative reflection and taste The Bo¨hmes’ claim that the imagination lost its place as one of the faculties of knowledge in Kant’s philosophy is relatively uncontroversial, if one considers the fate of the imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the second edition of the Critique, Kant defines the imagination as ‘‘the faculty of presenting [vorstellen] in intuition an object that is not itself present’’ (B151).15 Such an activity may involve the representing of an object in accordance with laws of association, so that the images involved 14

15

See Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), and Frederick C. Beiser, ‘‘Kant’s Intellectual Development: 1746–1781,’’ chapter I of The Cambridge Companion to Kant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 26–61. I have purposely avoided the use of ‘‘represent’’ to translate vorstellen. This is to avoid any misleading literal reading of the English term, which would suggest that whatever the imagination is presenting in intuition must have been present before (literally, is being ‘‘re-presented’’). The German word vorstellen when read also in literal fashion does not carry the same meaning (but means literally, to ‘‘place in front of’’). See also, Pluhar, translator’s note in Critique of Judgment, p. 14.

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depend on what is, or was, given to the senses. Or, alternatively, the subject, apart from any particular experience, represents the object of intuition in accordance with the categories a priori. In the former case, imagination is an effect determined empirically and is thus contingent in a way that renders it opaque to transcendental analysis. In Kant’s words, this empirical manner of representing intuitions is ‘‘reproductive’’ and ‘‘contributes nothing to the explanation of the possibility of a priori knowledge’’ (B152). This sort of imaginative activity, Kant says here, falls within the domain of psychology, but not transcendental (i.e., critical) philosophy. In the latter case, where, in the process of intuitively presenting an object the mind is active, Kant calls the activity ‘‘productive.’’ It is the ‘‘first application’’ of the understanding to objects of possible intuition. Here the mind is creative in that it spontaneously presents an object in intuition; that is, the mind presents the object independently of empirical conditions. Kant holds that the only avenue for this sort of spontaneous ‘‘production’’ (synthesis) is via the categories of the understanding. Hence this sort of imaginative production is seen as ‘‘an action [Wirkung] of the understanding on the sensibility’’ (B152), and the ‘‘transcendental act of imagination’’ is identified with the ‘‘synthetic influence of the understanding upon inner sense’’ (B154). Since Kant has already declared the understanding to be the sole source of all acts of combination (‘‘synthesis,’’ B130), the condition of all synthetic knowledge a priori can only be the understanding, one of whose tasks is to be productively imaginative. The imagination simply has no independent status here. For Kant, as already mentioned, all acts of synthesis are acts of the understanding. Moreover, he claims that all acts of the understanding are judgments (A69/B94) and labels the understanding the ‘‘faculty of judgment’’ (A69/B94), as if to suggest that no other judgment is possible except judgments synthesizing representations in accordance with categories of the understanding. But, strictly speaking, it does not follow that all acts of judgment are acts of the understanding, or of synthesis. All that follows from the claims mentioned (at A69/B94) is that all acts of synthesis are judgments. True, Kant’s claim in the second (B) edition of the ‘‘Transcendental Deduction’’ is a strong one: ‘‘All possible perceptions, and therefore everything that can come to empirical consciousness, that is, all appearances of nature, must, so far as their connection is concerned, be subject to the categories’’ (B164–165). But even this strong claim does not rule out that human beings have a further capacity for non-synthetic judgment involving the imagination. Obviously human

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beings are capable of analytic judgments but, apart from this, we may also contemplate our (already synthesized) experience. We are capable of making judgments about judgments of experience – that is, about already categorized experience. There is no need to suppose that such ‘‘higherorder’’ judgments themselves involve application of the categories just because they take synthetic judgments for their material. If such judgments are possible, as it were, ‘‘upon’’ synthetic judgments of the understanding, it may be that imagination is required by this other sort of non-synthetic judgment,16 in which case imagination could not be assimilated to the understanding. If such judgments are taken to be of any importance in the analysis of human experience, then there may be a place, after all, for the imagination as an independent faculty in Kant’s philosophy. Of course, this is precisely what happens in Kant’s account of reflective judgment. In the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant allows that ‘‘judgment is not merely an ability to subsume the particular under the universal (whose concept is given), but also, the other way round, an ability to find the universal for the particular,’’17 and he goes on to argue that the principle for performing the latter task cannot come from the understanding. The task of finding universals for particulars is the task of ‘‘reflective judgment’’: ‘‘To reflect (or consider [belegen]) is to hold given presentations [Vorstellungen] up to, and compare them with, either other presentations or one’s cognitive power [itself], in reference to a concept that this [comparison] makes possible’’ (X: 211). Imagination, ‘‘the faculty of presenting in intuition an object that is not itself present’’ (B151), obviously will have a role to play here insofar as given presentations are to be compared to (but not combined with) ‘‘other presentations’’ not themselves present. What these ‘‘other’’ presentations might be will be discussed in what follows, but it is clear that, whatever they are, the imagination, as the faculty of ‘‘presenting’’ what is not present, will have to be involved. Moreover, the ‘‘object’’ of reflective judgment is not an object of experience but rather a ‘‘purposive arrangement of nature in a system’’ (XX: 214), so that this purposiveness is not the result of the application of a category. In Kant’s words, it has ‘‘no basis . . . in terms of the universal laws of the understanding’’ (XX: 216). Whatever work Kant holds that the 16

17

On Kant’s definition, analytic judgments require no imagination since their ‘‘objects’’ are already there, as it were, in the concept being analyzed, and, in any case, intuition is not involved. First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (Ak XX), trans. Werner Pluhar, in Critique of Judgment, XX: 210.

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imagination performs in such judgments, he does not want to say that reflective imagination is merely a task of the understanding. For this reason, reflective judgment cannot be constitutive of knowledge. It does not determine cognition but deals with appearances in an entirely different manner: So when reflective judgment tries to bring given appearances under empirical concepts of determinate natural things, it deals with them technically rather than schematically. In other words, it does not deal with them mechanically, as it were, like an instrument, guided by the understanding and the senses; it deals with them artistically, in terms of a principle that is universal but also indeterminate: the principle of a purposive arrangement of nature in a system. (XX: 213–214)

This sort of judging, for Kant, is more holistic than the ‘‘determining’’ judgments of the understanding, and at the same time more tentative. Its principle is ‘‘only a necessary presupposition’’ while that of the understanding is ‘‘law’’ (XX: 215). To borrow Rudolf Makkreel’s terminology in Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, reflective judgment may be called interpretive.18 It involves technique and is an ‘‘art,’’ while the synthesizing activity of cognitive judgment proceeds ‘‘schematically’’ and is thus more ‘‘mechanical’’ in nature. In light of all this, it is reasonable to wonder if the Bo¨hmes’ claim that Kant’s is a philosophy of suppressed imagination is not a bit too hasty. Their point can perhaps be made for the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and even more plausibly made for the Critique of Practical Reason, for that matter.19 But in writing about reflection in the third Critique Kant demonstrates a willingness to consider a far more ‘‘imaginative’’ sort of judgment. The Bo¨hmes are of course aware of this defense and do consider the importance of the imagination in one kind of reflection – namely, in aesthetic reflective judgments of taste. They argue that although in these judgments the imagination is given a more independent role, still, Kant in effect finds in taste a ‘‘safe,’’ segregated arena for the imagination, where the creative work of this faculty is reduced to mere ‘‘play’’: But it can still be established, that also here, where the independence of the imagination is at least accepted as play, the joy taken in this play occurs precisely where it is well mannered, that is, where it conforms to the understanding. Classicism delights in the allegorized and domesticated figures of Greek mythology-figures that once were gripping and overwhelming powers. The 18

19

Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, V: 69.

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imagination itself is turned from Eros into Cupid (Putto), into a child that one delights in because it does of its own accord what one would otherwise ask of it. (Das Andere der Vernunft, pp. 238–239)

With respect to Kant’s theory of taste, the Bo¨hmes’ assessment is apt – and, indeed, they could have said a good deal more. Taste, for Kant, although he hints at a substantive connection with morality, is closely associated with culture, and serves (at best) to tame and discipline people by cloaking them in the appearance of morality.20 Kant’s account of taste is heavily invested in eighteenth-century British accounts, and to the extent that he departs from these theories in an attempt to find an a priori grounding for judgments of taste, he does so by insisting that in these judgments the ‘‘harmonious’’ activity of imagination and understanding ‘‘belongs to cognition in general’’ (‘‘zu einem Erkenntnis uberhauptgeho¨rt’’ (V: 219)). Imagination is not absolutely free, but rather is ‘‘freely lawful,’’21 with the understanding setting its limits: ‘‘And yet to say that the imagination is free and yet lawful of itself, i.e., that it carries autonomy with it, is a contradiction. The understanding alone gives the law’’ (V: 241). At Section 50 in the third Critique, Kant sets up a dichotomy between genius/spirit/imagination, on the one hand, and discipline/taste/understanding, on the other. In judgments of taste, although the understanding is not the only operative faculty, it clearly is the defining one: In order for a work to be beautiful, it is not necessary that it be rich and original in ideas, but it is necessary that the imagination in its freedom be commensurate with the lawfulness of the understanding. For if the imagination is left in lawless freedom, all its riches produce nothing but nonsense, and it is judgment that adapts the imagination to the understanding. (V: 319)

Here Kant disassociates imagination from judgment, implicitly defining the latter as the ability to subject the imaginative faculty to the 20

21

E.g. see Anthropology (Anthr.) (Ak VII), trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 11–12/ 244: ‘‘Ideal taste has a tendency to promote morality in an external way. Making a man [Mensch] well-mannered as a social being falls short of forming a morally good man, but it still prepares him for it by the effort he makes, in society, to please others (to make them love or admire him).’’ And also V: 210: ‘‘To show taste in our conduct (or in judging other people’s conduct) is very different from expressing our moral way of thinking. For this contains a command and gives rise to a need, whereas moral taste only plays with the objects of liking without committing itself to any of them.’’ For a discussion of the parallels between Kant’s views on taste and femininity, see Kneller, ‘‘Discipline and Silence: Women and Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Taste,’’ in Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective, eds. Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), pp. 179–192. Kant speaks of the ‘‘freie Gesetzmu¨ßigkeit der Einbildungskraft’’ (free lawfulness of imagination) (V: 240).

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understanding. ‘‘Judgment . . . will sooner permit the imagination’s freedom and wealth to be impaired than that the understanding be impaired’’ (V: 320). Thus, Kant argues, fine art requires ‘‘imagination, understanding, spirit, and taste,’’ and it is the fourth condition – namely, taste – that sees to it that the other three elements are so ordered that imagination never gets the upper hand (V: 320 n. 55). Thus it would appear that the Bo¨hmes are correct in saying that ‘‘the freedom of the imagination in art is also only apparent.’’22 imaginative excess and moral progress To view these aspects of Kant’s theory of taste as a sort of final critical blow to the imagination would, however, be to overlook the fact that even if Kant wanted the imagination to be ‘‘tamed’’ by taste, he also seemed willing to permit the imagination’s enthusiastic overflow in some instances. Kant’s aesthetic theory involves more than just a theory of taste, as I have already argued.23 And, as we have already seen, in Section 17 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant also defends the view, albeit briefly, that ‘‘a very strong imagination’’ (later in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ he speaks of ‘‘spirit’’ or ‘‘genius’’) may form a partnership of sorts with reason. Kant argues for the possibility of artistic genius exhibiting the rational idea of humanity ‘‘as an aesthetic idea fully in concreto (in a model image)’’ (V: 233), and in the last paragraph of this section Kant argues unequivocally for the possibility of ‘‘the visible expression of moral ideas’’ through imagination, in a manner that, while ‘‘taken only from experience,’’ nevertheless transforms that experience into a presentation of something new: These moral ideas must be connected, in the idea of the highest purposiveness, with everything that our reason links with the morally good: goodness of soul, or purity, fortitude, or serenity, etc.; and in order for this connection to be made visible, as it were, in bodily expression (as an effect of what is inward), pure ideas 22 23

Das Andere der Vernunft, p. 329 (see n. 10). I am here setting aside Kant’s theory of the sublime, which I have discussed in ‘‘Kant’s Immature Imagination,’’ in Modern Engendering: Critical Feminist Readings in Modern Western Philosophy, ed. Bat Ami Bar-on (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). Although in it the imagination is allowed to ‘‘run wild,’’ the role assigned to imagination vis-a`-vis reason is no less problematic than that assigned to it vis-a`-vis the understanding in judgments of taste. In the end it must be ‘‘humiliated’’ by reason, as the Bo¨hmes argue in Das Andere der Vernunft, pp. 215–223 (see n. 10). I have also given a critique along feminist lines in ‘‘Kant’s Immature Imagination,’’ in Modern Engendering: Critical Feminist Readings in Modern Western Philosophy, ed. Bat Ami Bar-on (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 141–153.

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of reason must be united with a very strong imagination in someone who seeks so much as to judge, let alone exhibit, it. (V: 235)

Moral considerations and a ‘‘mighty’’ (ma¨chtige) imagination are also introduced into aesthetic experience in Kant’s discussion of aesthetic ideas – that is, of intuitive presentations of the imagination that ‘‘prompt much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever . . . can be adequate’’ (V: 314). And as we saw earlier, aesthetic ideas are said to complement rational ideas since the latter are ‘‘concepts to which no intuition (presentation of the imagination) can be adequate’’ (V: 314). Aesthetic ideas are imaginative ‘‘excesses’’ that prompt . . . so much thought as can never be comprehended within a determinate concept and thereby the presentation aesthetically expands the concept itself and sets the power of intellectual ideas (i.e., of reason) in motion: it makes reason think more . . . than what can be apprehended and made distinct in the presentation. (V: 315)

Thus aesthetic ideas can be said to express a rational idea in sensible form. In Makkreel’s formulation, the imagination, through aesthetic ideas, complements reason by striving to complete reason’s ideas in experience. ‘‘Thought, which is a function of reason, is here [in the presence of an aesthetic idea] occasioned by an excess of intuitive content that cannot be contained within the concepts of the understanding.’’24 Kant says that such creative imaginative presentations ‘‘make us add to a concept the thoughts of much that is ineffable, but the feeling of which quickens our cognitive powers and connects language, which otherwise would be mere letters, with spirit’’ (V: 316). That the expression of imaginative ‘‘excess’’ might have important implications for human life and creativity is an idea that is new to Kant in the third Critique, where he grants the imagination a ‘‘transformative’’ (umbildende) power. It is certainly an argument for the claim that imagination had not lost its place in Kant’s critical philosophy. We need only recall Kant’s claim at V: 314: For the imagination ([in its role] as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it. We use it to entertain ourselves when experience strikes us as overly routine. We may even restructure [umbilden] experience; and though in doing so we continue to follow analogical laws, yet we also follow principles which reside higher up, namely, in reason (and which are just as natural to us as those which 24

Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation, pp. 118, 121.

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the understanding follows in apprehending empirical nature) for although it is under that law [of association] that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature. (V: 314)

Here Kant is describing a kind of ‘‘judging’’ – in the case of ideas of reason, one might call it ‘‘moral daydreaming’’ – in which imagination constructs presentations that ‘‘surpass’’ (u¨bertreffen) without transcending, nature. In commenting on this passage, Makkreel puts it as follows: Kant’s use of the term ‘‘surpass’’ points to a significant difference in the way rational and aesthetic ideas may be said to go ‘‘beyond’’ the limits of experience. Rational ideas transcend nature, and aesthetic ideas surpass it by transforming and enriching experience.25

The result of such presentations is that the imagination ‘‘enlivens’’ the idea of reason by making it present in intuition – that is, imagination is capable of making the rational idea ‘‘feel real.’’ Whenever such presentations are expressed in concrete form, in a way that communicates itself to others, a ‘‘mixed-mode’’ experience of the sort discussed in the ideal of beauty occurs. That is, an experience that permits the subject to feel what in the rational (moral) ideal alone could only be thought takes place. The elevated role of imagination in these cases suggests, if not a unity of sensibility and reason in the human subject then at least a higher place for the latter in human moral experience. In the (mixed-mode) aesthetic experiences that Kant allows for beyond taste, rationality and sensibility (via the imagination) are both involved. But, unlike in the judgment of taste, the imagination is not restrained and ‘‘disciplined.’’ In fact, it is precisely imaginative excess, in the ‘‘multiplicity of partial presentations’’ (V: 316), that meets a need on the side of reason. This profligate presentation prompts in the subject a ‘‘lively interest’’ in reason’s ideas, and as we saw in chapter 4, an interest in their being actualized. For Kant, judgments involving what might be called ‘‘idealistic’’ imagination connect intuitive presentations with a moral idea, giving rise to a concrete, sensible ideal and to a kind of moral liveliness or interest that does not result from the intellectual idea alone. As we have already seen, such moral ‘‘imaginings’’ might arguably serve as a subjective basis for a rational hope for moral progress; that is, they may enable belief in the possibility of realizing moral ideas. In the exhibition of its object, imagination makes the realization of that object subjectively 25

Makkreel makes this point in his comment on this passage, ibid., p. 120.

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possible – ‘‘imaginable.’’ Perfect human virtue may be an unattainable ideal, but ‘‘a very strong imagination’’ can give this intellectual notion a flesh and blood quality that it did not have before, bringing it down to earth, as it were, and enabling human beings to envision actually attaining that which moral reason requires them to strive for. We saw in chapter 2 that imagination’s capacity to enliven morality is especially relevant in the case of Kant’s doctrine of the Highest Good – that is, of a moral ‘‘world in which virtue and happiness are commensurate, or at least in which human beings make every effort to maximize the correspondence of happiness to virtue.’’26 I argued there that, given the difficulties attendant on what has been called the ‘‘theological’’ doctrine of the Highest Good in Kant, which requires postulation of the existence of God to ground such hope, it is worth looking at the accounts of aesthetic moral experiences in Kant’s third Critique as a possible alternative to this metaphysical leap of faith in the second Critique.27 That is, if, as Kant argues in the third Critique, we have the aesthetic reflective capacity to literally ‘‘make sense’’ of rational ideas like the Highest Good, why could not this capacity itself serve to ground our hope (not our certainty) that we ourselves could bring it about? In light of Kant’s very strong claims for the imagination’s creative and enlivening powers in the third Critique, the question seems reasonable, and yet Kant does not go so far, in either the discussion of the ideal of beauty or of aesthetic ideas, as to suggest that these are necessary ingredients in human efforts to moral improvement.28 26

27

28

Scholars have debated whether or not the notion of the highest good involves, in Harry van der Linden’s words, ‘‘the union of universal virtue and universal happiness’’ or the far more modest ‘‘moral society in which human agents attempt to make one another happy, but do not necessarily succeed’’ (Kantian Ethics and Socialism, Indianapolis: Hackett, (1988, pp. 42ff.). Also see Andrews Reath, ‘‘Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant,’’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (4) (1988), pp. 593–619. Van der Linden distinguishes between a teleological conception (the ‘‘highest good desirable’’) and a moral conception (the ‘‘highest moral good’’). Reath makes a similar distinction between a ‘‘theological’’ and a ‘‘secular (or political)’’ conception of the highest good (pp. 594ff.). The term is Andrews Reath’s (see n. 26). Although I find both their accounts extremely useful in sorting out the different strands in Kant’s thought, both Reath and van der Linden are inclined to dismiss the ‘‘spiritualized’’ account of the Highest Good in Kant. This, it seems to me, has the unfortunate effect of disconnecting Kant’s notion from the felt response that is part of the happiness component of the Highest Good. In Kant’s account, the postulate of God’s existence on the ‘‘theological’’ reading served to do more than ground rational belief in a future paradise. It also channeled desire for such a state of affairs into faith in God. The virtue of finding a role for the imagination in grounding efforts to bring about the ‘‘highest good desirable’’ is that it provides a this-worldly channel, and hence a justification, for the desire to do so. Kant does suggest that beauty might serve as a symbol of morality and thus act as a sort of bridge to the moral from taste, because the beautiful arouses sensations that are ‘‘somehow analogous’’ to

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There is a parallel here to Kant’s essay ‘‘An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’’ where Kant raises much the same question for rational hope in human social institutions and moral progress: There must be some experience in the human race which, as an event, points to the disposition and capacity of the human race to be the cause of its own advance toward the better, and . . . toward the human race as being the author of this advance.29

Kant uses the question of moral progress to take the opportunity to express his own support for the goals of the French Revolution. Yet the ‘‘event’’ that indicates the human capacity for moral progress is not the Revolution itself, but rather ‘‘the mode of thinking [Denkungsart] of the spectators.’’ That is, the event that indicates human ability to be the ‘‘author’’ of a moral society is the publicly expressed, non-opportunistic (uneigenu¨tzig) sympathy for those who participate in struggles to end human oppression. The glimmer of hope that history holds out to those seeking reason to believe in moral progress is the spectators’ ‘‘wishful participation that borders on enthusiasm’’ (VII: 85), an enthusiasm that Kant identifies as a ‘‘passionate participation in the good’’ (VII: 86). Felicitas Munzel’s work on Kant’s notion of moral character and the ‘‘revolution in Denkungsart’’ that precipitates it underscores the centrality of a kind of unconditional ‘‘adoption of resolve’’ to do what is right come what may that lies at the heart of the enthusiasm that Kant admires here.30 On this reading, the spectator’s response could itself be an indication that humanity may possess the means to accomplish moral progress. But what exactly is this mode of thinking that ‘‘borders on enthusiasm’’ and is a ‘‘passionate participation in the good’’?

29

30

the feeling present when we make moral judgments (CJ, 230/354). But even apart from the vagueness of his arguments, the point here is that Kant fails to follow up on the much more intimate relationships between morality and aesthetic experience suggested in the ‘‘ideal’’ and in his account of aesthetic ideas. For a different reading of the connection between taste and morality, see Paul Guyer, ‘‘Feeling and Freedom: Kant on Aesthetics and Morality,’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (2) (1990), pp. 137–146. The essay, although complete in its own right, was included as the second part of the 1798 publication entitled Streit der Fakulta¨ten. The translation here is from Kant on History, ed. Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1986), pp. 137–154. The citation is from VII: 84. See Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘‘Critical’’ link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 330. Munzel’s account of the voluntary nature, the positing, as it were, of the moral self in an act of resolve followed by the development and maintenance of character, is insightful. Emphasizing this aspect of moral character helps make clear why, for Kant, moral enthusiasts were so valuable: they are flamboyant, visible examples of the radical choice of the moral. Like fictional characters, however, they could also be dangerous for the same reason (see CPR: A570/B598).

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In this same passage (VII: 85) Kant makes an anthropological point that he repeatedly made in his lectures on the subject: ‘‘Genuine enthusiasm always moves only toward what is ideal and, indeed, to what is purely moral, such as the concept of right.’’ In student notes from his anthropology lectures taken during the 1770s, we find Kant telling his students that ‘‘an enthusiast is always a noble Fantast, full of life and strength, and so, in addition, inclined to virtue. Indeed, much that is good disappears from the land where they are purged.’’31 In the published anthropology lectures, he defines an enthusiast as a visionary or fantast and the latter as a person who ‘‘fails to collate his imaginings with laws of experience.’’ In the same place he adds that, when accompanied by ‘‘passion’’ (Affect), fanaticism becomes enthusiasm (VII: 202). That is, enthusiasm is the condition of passionate participation in moral ‘‘imaginings’’ that fail to ‘‘harmonize with concepts’’ (VII: 48/172) but are rather bound up with rational ideals. In the Reflections on Anthropology Kant identifies two kinds of ‘‘fantasts’’: those of sensibility and those of reason. The former are people who mistake their own ideas for actual perceptions (XV.1: R #498: as in hallucinations, presumably). They are wahnsinnig: taking what is merely in one’s thoughts to be perceived through the bodily senses. Fantasts of reason are ‘‘visionaries’’ who mistake their own ideas for reality (even if not perceptual; also at R #499; Schwa¨rmer: taking what is sensed ‘‘mentally/spiritually’’ (geistig) for real). Fantasts of both sorts confuse what is in their imagination with the things themselves (R #499). Kant claims that both Plato and Rousseau were enthusiasts of reason. Arguably then, the spectators of the Revolution, whose sympathetic fervor ‘‘borders’’ on enthusiasm, are experiencing something like the ‘‘noble fantast’’ experiences in their ability to imagine and desire a rational ideal. These spectators are a source of hope precisely because their own moral way of thinking is embodied in passion and imagined participation in great social ideals. They imbue abstract conceptions of justice with a desire and longing that is palpable. The creative imagination and its play of aesthetic ideas in the third Critique discussion

31

Brauer notes, MS p. 88. Based on the notes taken by a student, Theodor Friederich Brauer, dated 1779, taken from transcripts at the Philips-Universita¨t, Marburg. I would like to thank Werner Stark for assistance in the use of these materials and for helpful information about the historical context in which they were written. Although these sources are from student transcriptions of Kant’s lectures and are therefore not the final word on any disputed question in Kant interpretation, nothing that I rely on here is essentially new to Kant, but rather corroborates views on enthusiasm expressed elsewhere. I have relied only on passages from Brauer that also appear in notes taken down by other students during that time.

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of genius comes to mind: spectators whose own moral character finds expression in an excess of imaginative participation resemble the artistic genius who embodies an excess of thought in a single physical expression of it. Yet Kant was not unequivocal in his praise of moral enthusiasm. In connection with his comments from the anthropology lectures and the late comment from the ‘‘An Old Question,’’ it is interesting to note his position expressed in the Critique of Practical Reason: Kant argues that the ‘‘typic’’ of pure practical judgment guards against ‘‘the mysticism of practical reason, which makes into a schema that which should serve only as a symbol, i.e., proposes to supply real yet nonsensuous intuitions (of an invisible kingdom of God) for the application of the moral law and thus plunges into the transcendent’’ (V: 70–71). Nevertheless, he contrasts this mystic plunge with the ‘‘empiricism of practical reason’’ to the benefit of the former: The protest against empiricism of practical reason is much more important and commendable, because mysticism is compatible with the purity and sublimity of the moral law; and as it is not natural to ordinary ways of thinking [Denkungsart] to stretch its imagination to supersensuous intuitions, the danger from this side is not so general . . . [E]mpiricism [of practical reason] is far more dangerous than all mystical enthusiasm, which can never be a lasting condition for any great number of persons. (V: 70–71)

Here Kant expresses a thoroughly ambivalent attitude to the imagination when used to present ideas of reason. Whereas he is quite clear that practical reason based on empirical principles is degrading because it is generally allied with (sensuous) inclination, he is tolerant of imagination ‘‘stretched’’ to the supersensuous only because it is less likely to occur. The ‘‘rationalism of practical reason’’ is a safer bet, if one had to choose. Thus, in one brief passage in the heart of his mature moral theory, Kant manages to both criticize and defend the enthusiast (e.g., Swedenborg) and, at the same time, Kant’s own rationalist forefathers. So far as moral theory is concerned, passionate rationalist speculation about the good is less dangerous than dwelling on ‘‘empirical interest, with which inclinations generally are secretly in league’’ (V: 71). Mystical enthusiasm will only ever be ‘‘a lasting condition’’ for a small number of persons, and even then is compatible with the purity and sublimity of the moral law because it involves imaginative transcendence of inclinations and sensibility. On balance, and in conjunction with Kant’s other claims about the positive moral value of enthusiasm, it appears that he always maintained a certain regard for visionaries that went beyond simply enlightened

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tolerance. His rejection of Swedenborg, and of metaphysics, was more nuanced than the Bo¨hmes suggest.32 Kant held that attempts at imaginative transcendence by ordinary people are bound to fail, and in the third Critique he argues that this very failure of imagination may give rise to an appreciation of reason’s superiority to imagination (and sensibility). This appreciation is, of course, the feeling of the sublime: At Section 29, ‘‘On the Modality of a Judgment about the Sublime in Nature,’’ Kant says that The [sublime] is what genuinely characterizes man’s morality, where reason must exert its dominance over sensibility, except that in an aesthetic judgment about the sublime we present this dominance as being exerted by the imagination itself, as an instrument of reason. (V: 268–269)

And also: the [imagination], acting in accordance with principles of the schematism of judgment[,] . . . is an instrument of reason and its ideas . . . In this reflection of the aesthetic power of judgment [i.e., of imagination], by which it seeks to elevate itself to the point of being adequate to reason . . . we present the object itself as subjectively purposive, precisely because objectively the imagination, [even] in its greatest expansion, is inadequate to reason. (V: 269)

Here the imagination appears to be grasping the transcendent, only to be humiliated and give way to the higher moral calling of the subject. In a kind of moral bait-and-switch, the promise of metaphysical insight is held out as the goal that imagination attempts to reach (in contemplation of the overwhelming might or size of natural objects), only to be replaced by the feeling of the transcendence of reason. So we find Kant on the one hand admiring and defending the ‘‘enthusiast of reason’’ who takes his imagined moral visions to be reality and also, in his aesthetic theory, propounding a theory of imagination that suggests that such visions could have significant moral worth. At the same time, he conspicuously refrains from making a strong, explicit argument for the need for such an imagination to support moral judgment and action. Once again we must ask why. Kant’s hesitancy to embrace a natural consequence of his own views about the imagination may be traced, I believe, to two quite different 32

For a defense of the view that Kant never fully rejected rationalist metaphysics, see Karl Ameriks, ‘‘The Critique of Metaphysics: Kant and Traditional Ontology,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 249–279.

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motivations, one of which has historical and (if the Bo¨hmes are correct) personal psychological roots in his concerns about the dangers of imaginative distractions. The other motivation is not so obviously lamentable. Kant’s aversion to moral elitism led him to reject the notion of any sort of intuitive access to the rational (moral), even if he did not totally reject those who claimed to have it. Kant was convinced that morality itself proscribed taking oneself to be better equipped to grasp moral principles and hence to set oneself up as a moral authority over others. The very heart of his moral theory requires knowing oneself (honestly evaluating one’s maxims) so as to prevent self-deception from paving the way to making an exception for oneself morally.33 Whatever else it is, such self-knowledge ought not to be ‘‘creative.’’ Moreover, imagination, Kant felt, is not given to all in the same measure (although everyone has some potential for developing it). Genius is a gift of nature, ‘‘an innate mental predisposition’’ (V: 308) that belongs to artists whose ideas are ‘‘rich in fancy and yet also in thought’’ (V: 309). Kant was willing to allow that certain enthusiasts (notably Plato and Rousseau) were able to combine their gift for fantasy with an equally great gift for philosophical thought. But neither they nor any other genius could claim, just on the basis of their genius, to be more or less moral than any other person. The reason for this is that the distinguishing mark of genius is its inability to be shared – literally communicated – with others. For this reason, Kant argues that a great discoverer like Newton was not, in his scientific work, exhibiting genius, since Newton could ‘‘show how he took every one of the steps he had to take in order to get from the first elements of geometry to his great and profound discoveries . . . to everyone else as well . . . allowing others to follow.’’ On the other hand a Homer or a Wieland did exhibit genius precisely because their work, based in their own rich fantasy, was inexplicable even to themselves, let alone communicable to others. They could not lay out rules for others to follow in order to accomplish what they themselves accomplished. In chapter 7 I shall argue that, on Kant’s own account of aesthetic reflection, genius may be seen as more common among human beings 33

See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), VI: 441. Andrews Reath argues convincingly for the centrality of this aspect of Kant’s ethics in ‘‘Two Conceptions,’’ and more recently Jeanine Grenberg has written extensively on Kant’s conception of humility and the role it plays in his moral theory (Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption and Virtue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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than his distinction between Newton and Homer suggests. Here the point to be made is simply that Kant did present this distinction as unproblematic. In this respect, he is simply reiterating the trend in German aesthetics, culminating in Lessing’s work, discussed in chapter 2. That is, Lessing argued for granting the artist greater artistic freedom and less constraint by rules of criticism, on the ground that genius is a rule unto itself. And, as we saw in chapter 3, the artistic imagination for Kant, as for Lessing, is itself a product of nature. But for that very reason Kant felt it could not be a necessary condition of human moral experience; hence Kant’s suspicion of the claims of metaphysical visionaries. These ‘‘artists of the absolute,’’ as we might call them, could never provide rules for others to follow in order to duplicate their own experiences. Their fantasies are not universally communicable, in other words.34

the imaginative dimension of metaphysical speculation In Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, and his article ‘‘Kant’s Intellectual Development 1746–1781’’ for The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Frederick Beiser emphasizes Kant’s ambivalent feelings toward metaphysics throughout his life and writings. Beiser points to Kant’s own metaphor of metaphysics as his (Kant’s) seductive mistress,35 mapping Kant’s intellectual development through several stages, including infatuation, disillusionment, partial reconciliation, and divorce. He argues that Kant’s view of the philosophical enterprise, and consequently of the importance of metaphysics, had changed in 1765 after his reading of Rousseau. Kant famously claimed that from then on he was to be committed to practical concerns: I am myself by inclination a seeker after truth. I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless desire to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every step I take. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the

34

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Neiman points out another problem with visionaries, for Kant, namely their tendency to force their views on others, (The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 169). Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Ak II: 367: ‘‘Die Metaphysik, in welche ich das Schicksal habe verliebt zu sein, ob ich mich gleich von ihr nur selten einiger Gunstbezeugungen ruehmen kann, leistet zweierlei vorteile.’’

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honor of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This pretended superiority vanished and I learned to respect humanity. I should consider myself far more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that one consideration alone gives worth to all others, namely, to establish the rights of man. (Remarks on the ‘‘Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime’’ XX: 44)

In Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, Beiser sees the concern expressed by Kant that his philosophizing be ‘‘useful’’ as a concern shared generally by later Enlighteners in Germany: The Aufkla¨rung was a practical movement insofar as its purpose was not to discover the first principles of reason – most Aufkla¨rer believed that this task had already been achieved by thinkers such as Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant – but to bring them into daily life. In short, its aim was to surmount the gap between reason and life, theory and practice, speculation and action . . . Most thinkers of the late eighteenth century saw themselves as Aufkla¨rer, not only older figures such as Kant, Herder, and Wieland, but also younger ones such as Schlegel, Ho¨lderlin, and Novalis.

This turn to the practical explains, according to Beiser, why Kant comes to manifest a ‘‘complete skepticism toward metaphysics.’’ It is so deep, Beiser says, that in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, ‘‘he likens metaphysics to the dreams of the visionary or spirit-seer’’(‘‘Kant’s Intellectual Development,’’ p. 45) and (in ‘‘The Politics of Kant’s Critical Philosophy’’) he also claims that for Kant ‘‘Both metaphysicians and spirit seers live in a private fantasy world and chase after illusory abstractions . . . the aim of [Kant’s] skepticism [about metaphysics] is to expose the vanity of speculation, so that we direct our efforts toward finding what is truly useful for human life’’(Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, p. 28). With this favoring of practical over theoretical reason, Beiser suggests, the honeymoon with metaphysics is over for Kant. I have argued in chapter 4 that in fact Kant did not ‘‘prefer’’ practical to theoretical reason, but saw the two as intertwined, connected by reflective judgment. Beiser himself maintains, I believe quite correctly, that the supposed ‘‘divorce’’ with speculative theory was never fully carried out, and that ‘‘the flames of the old love affair burnt to the bitter end’’ of Kant’s life (‘‘Kant’s Intellectual Development,’’ p. 57). Beiser finds the old flame burning most strongly in Kant’s hypostatization in the second Critique of the conditions under which human beings could hope to bring about a just world – the highest good (Enlightenment, Revolution

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and Romanticism, p. 55), that is, in the postulates of metaphysical notions of God and immortality. As we saw earlier, Beiser argues that this return to metaphysics constitutes a ‘‘deep betrayal’’ of the radical spirit of his republican politics, and an inconsistency in his philosophy (p. 55). Although Beiser is surely correct to point to Kant’s disillusionment with metaphysics in 1765, and even before, I believe that, like the Bo¨hmes, he overstates the situation in labeling Kant’s view of speculative metaphysics one of ‘‘complete skepticism.’’ While it is true that Kant castigates metaphysics for being schwa¨rmerisch, and prone to fanaticism, as we have just seen, Kant was not himself immune to ‘‘enthusiasm,’’ nor was he ashamed to admit that fact. The oft-cited passage from the ‘‘Remarks’’ is certainly indicative of Kant’s own susceptibility to Schwa¨rmerei, for both knowledge and morality: he confesses to a ‘‘consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless desire to advance it’’ that only gave way after reading Rousseau to an even more consuming desire ‘‘to establish the rights of man.’’36 As we saw, in certain cases, Kant actually embraced metaphysical Schwa¨rmerei in the service of morality and eventually even found a limited place for this enthusiasm in the critical system. I want to conclude this chapter by arguing that Kant did intend to return metaphysics to the Critical Philosophy, and that he did so in an interesting and defensible way that would not require recourse to the postulates. The postulates were, I would agree, a failed reintroduction of metaphysical entities that did not, and were not in any case intended to, preserve the autonomy of metaphysical speculation. But skeptical as Kant was about ‘‘enthusiasts,’’ he also believed that the pleasure of disinterested metaphysical speculation – i.e., the pleasure of doing metaphysics not in the service of morals or politics – is a natural and perhaps even necessary mechanism for the advancement of humanity. The arguments of the previous section suggest that there is another dimension to Kant’s relationship to metaphysics – an aesthetic dimension. Kant associates Rousseau with imaginative enthusiasm for moral ideas: And yet it was Rousseau who awakened him from his dogmatic metaphysical slumbers and caused him to divorce himself from ‘‘elitist’’ metaphysical speculation in favor of the practical. There is a certain irony in this that may have prompted Kant to find a systematic place for the 36

See Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason, pp. 6–8, 32–43 and Beiser, ‘‘Kant’s Intellectual Development,’’ pp. 43–46, and also Dieter Henrich, ‘‘Kant und Hegel,’’ in Selbstverha¨ltnisse (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), pp. 183–184, on Rousseau’s influence on the ‘‘emotional and imaginative side’’ of Kant’s thought.

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‘‘noble fantast’’ who strives for perfection and ideals that lie at the heart of the rationalist metaphysics Kant sought to abandon. In this regard it is worth recalling our earlier discussion (chapter 3) of the third Critique at Section 17 (‘‘On the Ideal of Beauty’’). Kant here describes a kind of judging that involves the connecting of intuitive presentations with a moral idea, producing a concrete presentation of what is merely a rational idea. In chapter 2 I argued that such moral ‘‘imaginings’’ might even serve as a subjective basis of rational hope for moral progress – that is, they may enable belief in the possibility of realizing moral ideas, supplanting the hypostatisizations of the postulates. In the exhibition of this idea ofreason, imagination makes the realization of that idea subjectively possible – ‘‘imaginable.’’ Interestingly enough, Kant hints that this will not be found in all people: in order for this connection to be made visible, as it were, in bodily expression (as an effect of what is inward), pure ideas of reason must be united with a very strong imagination in someone who seeks so much as to judge, let alone exhibit it (V: 235)

The similarities in this section of the third Critique to Kant’s account of the ‘‘pathological’’ state of Schwa¨rmerei are clear: the person judging according to an ideal of beauty is seeing genuine reality in his/her idea. And yet here Kant is in no way suggesting that taking ideas for reality is deranged. It is simply a way of putting aesthetic judgment to moral use, although presumably only a few will have the requisite powers of imagination to literally produce this ideal. In all these cases, Kant’s abandoned metaphysical longings seem to have found a new home on the borders of his practical philosophy; and it is far less alienated than the postulation of the existence of God and the ‘‘fact’’ of human immortality. In addition to embracing and even incorporating metaphysical longings into his practical philosophy, Kant also finds a way to value metaphysical urges even where they are not directly connected with moral concerns. The judgment that involves the ideal of beauty involves an interest of reason, and hence is not itself a purely aesthetic judgment, but what I called earlier a kind of ‘‘mixed mode’’ that involves practical as well as aesthetic elements (V: 236). This distinguishes it from the pure judgments of taste, which are by definition impractical – they involve disinterested pleasure. As we saw in chapter 3, however, Kant believes that we can become interested in the objects of aesthetic reflective judgment ‘‘after the judgment has been made as a pure aesthetic one’’ (V: 296). Kant allows two possibilities: one ‘‘empirical’’ and the other ‘‘intellectual.’’ In

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chapter 4 I argued that the intellectual interest in the beautiful is an interest in the embodiment of the idea of a world that is fitted to our moral needs, and here again Kant’s repressed desire for metaphysics emerges: Since reason has an interest, as Kant puts it, in the ‘‘objective reality’’ of its moral ideas it cannot be a matter of complete indifference to us, when contemplating the beautiful, that nature here ‘‘shows a trace or gives a hint that it contains some basis or other for us to assume’’ an orderliness that may be conducive to, or at least not out of sync with, our moral desires. As we saw, Kant is suggesting that in the process of making an aesthetic reflective judgment about the beauty of an object we may come to care for the nature of which it is but a part, and we may come to value the whole of the natural world for its own sake. As moral beings we are charged with the task of bringing moral order into the natural world – a demand on human nature that hardly seems possible. Thus we are intellectually interested in finding evidence that nature outside us, in what appears to be the rational orderliness and purposiveness of her beauty, may be suited to the nature ‘‘within.’’ But nevertheless, for Kant this desire/interest/pleasure in the orderliness of nature manifested in beauty is not itself a moral interest. It is intellectual, a kind of Platonic love, as it were. Contemplation of the beautiful may give rise to a ‘‘love’’ or admiration for nature in itself, apart from any connection to our moral nature. But what is this pleasure in the ‘‘hint’’ of transcendent rational order but a sort of metaphysical enthusiasm, suitably distanced by aesthetic reflection? The person who comes to love the whole of nature based on disinterested contemplation of nature’s formal properties bears a close resemblance to the ‘‘noble fantast’’ – to Plato’s philosopher gazing out of the cave, or Rousseau surveying the state of nature, or even Kant himself, awed by the starry heavens above. Taking an intellectual interest in the beautiful is a deeply ‘‘metaphysical’’ feeling. That the desire for metaphysical speculation is inevitable and unavoidable is, of course, a recurring theme in the first Critique. Reason seeks the unconditioned by its very nature. The danger is believing that one has found it. Tough-minded resistance and staying close to home (staying close to the rocky shores of the phenomenal and avoiding the open sea of the noumenal) are the only ways to avoid the lures of the imagination and the threat of fanaticism. But I hope to have shown that Kant’s attitude toward fanaticism is not uniformly negative. Chapter 1 already introduced the idea that, for Kant, the mental powers are capable of imaginative development and growth – of progress, we might say. It is worth quoting in full the passage mentioned there in passing. In a

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footnote in the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (Section XIII, ‘‘On the Aesthetic of the Power of Judging, Comment’’ (in reference to finding a definition of a feeling of pleasure that is tied to sources a priori)) Kant makes the following surprising admission: In fact man can desire something most fervently and persistently even though he is convinced that he cannot achieve it, or that it is perhaps even [something] absolutely impossible . . . and it is indeed an important article for morality to warn us emphatically against such empty and fanciful desires, which are often nourished by novels and sometimes also by mystical presentations, similar to novels, of superhuman perfections and fanatical bliss. But some empty desires and longings . . . do have their effect on the mind . . . It is indeed a not unimportant problem for anthropology to investigate why it is that nature has given us the predisposition to such fruitless expenditure of our forces as [we see in] empty wishes and longings (which certainly play a large role in human life). It seems to me that here, as in all else, nature has made wise provisions. For if we had to assure ourselves that we can in fact produce the object, before the presentation of it could determine us to apply our forces, our forces would presumably remain largely unused. For usually we do not come to know what forces we have except by trying them out. So nature has provided for the connection between the determination of our forces and the presentation of the object [to be there] even before we know what ability we have, and it is often precisely this effort, which to that very mind seemed at first an empty wish, that produces that ability in the first place. Now wisdom is obligated to set limits to that instinct, but wisdom will never succeed in eradicating it, or [rather] it will never even demand its eradication.

A ‘‘predisposition’’ to ‘‘empty wishes and longings’’ that appears to be a ‘‘fruitless expenditure of our forces’’ could in fact be an enabling mechanism – part of nature’s plan for advancing human capacities unbeknownst to them. Something akin to the historical progress enabled by nature via unsocial sociability is at work on the microlevel in individuals, with the imagination goading reason into a development that rational critique would itself only stymie. Here too nature’s mechanism, a kind of ‘‘unrational rationality’’ perhaps, is something Kant not only tolerates but to a certain extent applauds. Consider the following passage from the ‘‘Critique of Teleological Judgment,’’ in which Kant illustrates what he calls ‘‘intellectual purposiveness’’ and describes the way in which it can naturally lead to ‘‘Schwa¨rmerei’’: It is a true joy to see how eagerly the ancient geometers investigated these properties of such lines, not letting themselves be disconcerted if asked by

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narrow minds of what use such knowledge might be . . . While these geometers were thus unwittingly working for posterity, they took delight in a purposiveness which, though it belonged to the nature of things, could still be exhibited completely ‘‘a priori’’ in its necessity. Plato, himself a master of this science, was overcome by enthusiasm [Begeisterung] [when he saw] that the original character of things is such that it can be discovered without any experience whatever, and that the mind is able to derive the harmony of beings from their supersensible principle . . . It was this enthusiasm that lifted Plato above empirical concepts to ideas that he thought could be explained only by an intellectual community [between ourselves and] the origin of all beings . . . Surely it is pardonable if, as the result of a misunderstanding this admiration gradually increased to the point of fanaticism [Schwa¨rmerei].

Kant seems to have finally settled on the view that the desire for metaphysics is useful, and may be embraced by Enlightenment, even if metaphysics – the Absolute itself – is off limits. At the same time, this desire is not an interest in morals, politics, or utility (Kant also mentions ‘‘the properties of numbers, with which the mind plays in music’’ in this passage). It is, in other words, a disinterested desire for knowledge for its own sake that leads us to discover apparent purposiveness which in turn ‘‘expands the mind’’ and Kant says, ‘‘makes us suspect . . . that there is something else above and beyond those presentations of sense, something which, although we do not know it, might hold the ultimate basis for that harmony [between the form of sensible intuition and our power of concepts].’’ In both these passages Kant again is advocating, or at least ‘‘apologizing’’ for, a kind of intellectual disinterested pleasure, that is a complete absorption, ‘‘love,’’ or ‘‘delight’’ taken in the nature of the object studied, and a lack of concern for the usefulness, gratification, or even goodness the object might bring. Even where that pleasure leads to fanaticism, Kant is willing to be tolerant. It is difficult not to see something autobiographical in these passages, some latent reference to the self-avowed infatuation with metaphysics in the remarks of 1765. Certainly it does not represent a return to his former love, if that meant embracing the existence of objects that transcend experience. Although he flirts with it in the postulates of God and immortality in the second Critique, what Kant does in the third Critique is far more subtle. What returns here is not the substance of metaphysical speculation but the recognition and repositioning of a legitimate desire for it. Thus Kant’s imagination did not fail, but rather returned as a real force in the final chapters of the Critical opus. In this respect the Bo¨hmes’

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critique is too strong. And, to the extent that Kant did not develop his theory further, the motivation is not entirely bad: Intuitive access to the moral may indeed be creative and important, but it is not unproblematic. Imagination may accompany all sorts of ‘‘undesirable’’ characteristics, just as may understanding. Enormously creative persons may also be perfectly self-centered, and genius can be evil. Certainly Kant was correct, for these reasons, to hold that the way in which imagination functioned in conjunction with other capacities was central to deciding its value. It is in answering the question of just how Kant characterizes the possible ‘‘conjunctions’’ of the imagination and other faculties that the Bo¨hmes’ critique cannot be ignored. They are right to point out that Kant never seemed entirely comfortable with the notion of an ‘‘equal’’ relation between imagination and reason, even though in his critical aesthetic theory he had worked out an account of imaginative creativity compatible with such a relation. The question arises yet again: Why did Kant not push the notion of the ideal of beauty, or of aesthetic ideas, further? Why did he not find a more pronounced place for the imagination in the moral? The role enthusiasm plays in Kant’s social theory, as a glimmer of hope in the human quest for moral progress, is a way of doing precisely this, but Kant himself never seems fully convinced.37 It is therefore quite possible that part of the answer lies in the Bo¨hmes’ hypothesis. In laying out the motivation for Kant’s theoretical development, we should not dismiss the possibility that, for subconscious reasons that are all too transparent two centuries later, Kant simply may not have been able to bring himself to unequivocally grant the imagination a status equal to that of the ‘‘law-governed’’ branches of human experience. It was, after all, a faculty associated on the transcendental level with ‘‘lawlessness’’ and, on the empirical level, with the contaminating influences of the body, its feelings, and desires. There may well be a sense in which Heidegger was after all right about one thing: It was not the failure of Kant’s imagination that prevented his finally embracing the ‘‘lower’’ faculty, but rather a failure of nerve. In sum, Kant was tempted by, and therefore perhaps extremely cautious about, enthusiastic, imaginative excess – it was ‘‘not to be wholly esteemed, since passion as such deserves censure’’ (VII: 86) and was one of 37

The Bo¨hmes’ claim that Romanticism is an ‘‘intermezzo’’ is thus not entirely accurate. See ‘‘The ‘Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism’ (Berne, 1796): an Ethics,’’ trans. H. S. Harris, in Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 510–513. On pp. 249ff., Harris also discusses the fragment’s origin, proposing his own view that it was authored by Hegel.

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‘‘two rocks’’ between which critical philosophy must navigate (in the first Critique (B128)). Such caution was not shared by Kant’s ‘‘enthusiastic’’ followers. The ‘‘System-Programme’’ fragment (attributed by various scholars to either Hegel or Ho¨lderlin or Schelling, or to all three, or to some combination thereof) is a good example of an attempt to carry out in practice some of Kant’s views on the modeling of the ideal in art: ‘‘I am now convinced,’’ says its author(s), ‘‘that the highest act of Reason, the one through which it encompasses all Ideas, is an aesthetic act.’’38 Although its authorship is uncertain, seen in light of Kant’s views on the power of imagination, the early Romantic period for which this fragment is a kind of manifesto is easily seen as an extension of Kant’s aesthetic theory.

38

In Friedrich Ho¨lderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 154–156.

chapter 6

Imaginative reflections of the self in Novalis and Ho¨lderlin

The early ( Jena) period of German Romanticism is closely identified with early German Idealism, and with the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The reason for this is obvious enough. Fichte began lecturing at the university in Jena in the spring (Summer semester) of 1794, and work preliminary to his major work, the Wissenschaftslehre, appeared in that same year.1 His arrival at Jena was anticipated with great excitement, and among the Jena cohort of scholars and students who were inspired by his forceful presence were some whose names were to become inseparably bound up with German Romanticism. The Schlegels, Schelling, Tiek, Novalis, and also Ho¨lderlin2 all were part of the Jena milieu in which Fichte’s work was avidly studied and discussed. Fichte’s philosophy was of course very much influenced by Kant’s Critical philosophy (he was hired at the University at Jena as a ‘‘Kantian’’

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¨ ber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre, and the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, Parts I U and II, were published in September 1794. Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre had already been completed and was published in May 1794. Cf. Daniel Breazeale, trans. and ed., Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 47–49 for a list of Fichte’s publications and lectures during the Jena period. The question of whether to consider Ho¨lderlin a ‘‘Romantic’’ is somewhat difficult to answer. On the one hand, he is typically classified in German literature schoolbook texts as part of the late ‘‘Klassik,’’ and many scholars would resist labeling him a Romantic. Cf., for example, Manfred Frank: ‘‘Ho¨lderlin . . . geho¨rt aber nach der gewo¨hnlichen Meinung nicht in den Rahmen der Fru¨hromantik; und ich will ihn auch nicht durch einen hermeneutischen coup de force zu einem geistigen Mitbewohner der Jenaer Wohngemeinschaft machen, der er nicht war.’’ In Einfu¨hrung in die Fru¨hromantische A¨sthetik: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 249. On the other hand, he is characterized by Ricarda Huch in Die Romantik: Blu¨tezeit, Ausbreitung und Verfall (Hamburg: Rowholt, 1985 [1951]) as a Romantic by disposition (pp. 484ff.). In Die Romantische Schule (Berlin: Gaertner, 1870), Rudolf Haym sees the germ of Romantic philosophy in Ho¨lderlin’s ideas, and argues that he belongs for this reason in a history of Romanticism (p. 305) although Ho¨lderlin is called ‘‘eine Seitenlinie der Romantik’’ (an offshoot of the Romantic), in contrast to Novalis’ ‘‘Hauptlinie’’ (p. 324).

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to replace Reinhold3), and by Fichte’s concern that a stronger defense of the possibility of practical reason was needed than Kant himself gave.4 The need for such a move is suggested by Kant himself in the third Critique, where he speaks of a ‘‘gulf’’ separating nature and freedom, and the need for a ‘‘principle of purposiveness’’ if a causality of freedom is to be seen as effective in the natural realm.5 As we have seen, this principle for Kant is never more than regulative, however, and the question of a common principle uniting theoretical and practical reason in a single system necessarily remains open for Kant. But for Fichte, a defense of freedom required more. The discovery of a unitary account of subjectivity – that is, an account founded upon a single ‘‘constitutive’’ principle – appeared necessary so that practical reason might be firmly situated within the constitution of an overarching system.6 To the extent that Ho¨lderlin’s and Novalis’ projects are taken to be searches for an account of how human desire and feeling may be united with reflection and reason – that is, to the extent that they are instances of what Dieter Henrich calls ‘‘Vereinigungsphilosophie’’7 – it is plausible to see both authors as part of a post-Kantian attempt to ‘‘repair’’ difficulties raised by Kant’s view that subjectivity is irreducibly dual-natured – that is, part nature and part freedom. It may also be plausible to claim for these writers a decisive influence on the course of German idealism.8 Certainly in the case of both Ho¨lderlin and Novalis, the ‘‘reunification’’ of nature and self was an important theme. And yet, this longing for a unification of self and nature ought not to be confused with the project of giving a unified systematic account of the self based on a single basic principle of consciousness. The latter was Fichte’s project, and one to which, I will argue, neither Novalis nor Ho¨lderlin were committed. 3

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Dieter Henrich points out that even though Kant was still teaching at Ko¨nigsberg, by 1792 it was the University at Jena that was the center of ‘‘Kantian’’ philosophy (Konstellationen: Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), p. 229. Cf. Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chapter 1. Critique of Judgment, V: 175–176. That is, Fichte was not content with either a mere regulative principle, or an alleged ‘‘fact’’ of the consciousness of the moral law. Fichte’s concern was also rooted in his discontent with Kant’s doctrine of the ‘‘fact of reason’’ in the second Critique. See Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory, pp. 21–29. Cf. Dieter Henrich, ‘‘Hegel und Ho¨lderlin,’’ in Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 12ff. ‘‘Vereinigungsphilosophie’’ is the term Henrich uses to refer to the strand of thought exemplified in modern times by neoplatonism – for instance, by Shaftesbury in England, and by Hemsterhuis and Herder in Germany. As Henrich does with Ho¨lderlin, ‘‘Hegel und Ho¨lderlin,’’ pp. 21–22, in Konstellationen, and most fully in Der Grund im Beweßtsein: Ho¨lderlins Denken in Jena (1794–95) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992).

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If this were not the case – that is, if it were assumed that Ho¨lderlin and Novalis are at one with Fichte in attempting a unified account of the self – then the fact that they do not do so can only be seen as a philosophical failure. Moreover, identifying these writers’ goals with Fichte’s obscures the very close affinity between Kant’s later writings on morality and aesthetics and an important strand of Romanticism. In what follows, I shall argue that both Novalis and Ho¨lderlin developed conceptions of the self that were in fact far more in the spirit of Kant than of Fichte, and that their criticisms of Fichte ought to be read as a sort of poetic Kantian response to Fichte’s revisionism.9 Both Novalis and Ho¨lderlin, I shall argue, adopted positions that are best seen as espousing an essentially Kantian agnosticism about the ability of the human self to know the ultimate ground of its own unity.10 In the ‘‘Doctrine of Virtue’’ Kant claims that ‘‘Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness’’11: ‘‘Erforsche, ergru¨nde dich selbst!’’ (‘‘Explore, fathom yourself!’’). The self-knowledge that Kant is speaking of here is self-cognition (Selbsterkenntnis), but in this context it is not, or not simply, a theoretical knowledge of the self that Kant is prescribing. It is rather the sort of knowledge that would answer the questions: ‘‘What am I, by nature?’’ and ‘‘What do I really want?’’ ‘‘What is really 9

10

11

Charles Larmore, in ‘‘Ho¨lderlin and Novalis,’’ also points out that both of these poet– philosophers were critical of Fichte’s account of self-knowledge and its original ground in an intellectual intuition, but stops short of labeling this a Kantian insight. He sees the influence of Niethammer at work on both philosophers, especially in their view of philosophical method as an unending task. This may be true, but it is also a very Kantian notion of philosophy, as I have argued in chapter 1. Larmore sees Kant’s main contribution to early Romanticism to be via his moral theory and the ideal of freedom, by contrast with Schiller’s aesthetic theory and the ideal of unity. Kant’s ultimately rigorist rejection of the role of feeling (‘‘Ho¨lderlin and Novalis,’’ p. 143) sets up the tension that early Romantics addressed and attempted to ease. He does not consider Kant’s theory of aesthetic reflective imagination, which this book argues constitutes an important conceptual connection between Kant and the early Romantics (in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 141–160). Richard Eldridge, in The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), does see a conceptual continuity between Kant’s insistence on both the fact of human freedom and our inability to know it, and the Romantic enactment of this ‘‘impossible aspiration to freedom’’ (p. 19). In ‘‘The Kantian Moral Criticism of Literature,’’ he explicates Kant’s views of genius and moral hope by reference to literature in ways that are fully compatible with early Romantic accounts of bridging the gap between freedom and nature. As we saw in chapter 5, the classic discussion of this problem in Kant, worked out against Heidegger’s reading, is to be found in Dieter Henrich, ‘‘The Unity of Subjectivity,’’ first published ¨ ber die Einheit der Subjektivita¨t’’ and trans. in Philosophische Rundschau 3 (1955), pp. 28–69 as ‘‘U G. Zo¨ller in Henrich, The Unity of Reason, ed. R. Velkley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 17–54. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), VI: 441.

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motivating me?’’ These are the questions that for Kant are fundamental to the task of becoming moral and, hence, fully human. Answering them is the project that all human beings are obliged to set for themselves. In this same passage, Kant says that all human wisdom (Weisheit) ultimately consists in the agreement of wants and desires with the human being’s final purpose, and the path to this final end requires descent into the murky depths of human nature and motivation. Human wisdom for Kant involves both theoretical (including empirical) and practical knowledge: knowledge of what we are, and knowledge of what we should be.12 Fichte’s revision of the Kantian project of ‘‘fathoming’’ the self was an important driving force behind Ho¨lderlin’s and Novalis’ philosophical conceptions of the self. It is, therefore, important to sketch Fichte’s account of selfknowledge before going on to assess the link between the project as Kant conceived it, and the Romantic response to Fichte. fichte’s project Although Kant showed concern in the third Critique for bridging the gap between theoretical and practical reason in his own philosophy, he never rescinded the separate accounts of these two sides of reason given in the first two Critiques. His call for self-knowledge in the ‘‘Doctrine of Virtue’’ is intended as a call for individuals to come to know themselves for the purposes of a practical reason whose necessary systematic connection to theoretical reason has not been demonstrated. But Fichte, setting about to redeem the Kantian project for morality, was determined to give a unitary account of the underlying structure of all consciousness. Thus, what was for Kant a call to ‘‘know thyself’’ for the purposes of practical reason involved, for Fichte, giving an account of the very structure of all selfconsciousness. An important motivation for Fichte’s account was prompted by criticism of the view attributed to Kant by Reinhold that all consciousness is representational.13 On this view, self-consciousness is to be understood as a representing of ourselves to ourselves, and it therefore 12

13

The distinction has a contemporary counterpart in Ernst Tugendhat’s distinction between Selbstbewußtsein and Selbstbestimmung. Cf. his Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 18–38. Cf. Neuhouser Fichte’s Theory, pp. 70ff. Neuhouser characterizes the difficulty as an infinite regress of knowing subjects. Also see Dieter Henrich ‘‘Fichte’s Original Insight’’ (in Contemporary German Philosophy, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982, pp. 15–53), where it is argued that ‘‘reflection theory’’ was seen by Fichte to be untenable because it led to circularity and was question-begging. Fichte responded to the charges directed against Reinhold’s version of Kant’s theory by G. E. Schulze in Aenesidemus, in a review published in 1794 (in Breazeale, Fichte, pp. 59–77).

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comes to be seen on the model of a subject examining an object, in this case itself. But this, so the criticism went, appears to involve a vicious regress of subjects. That is, the representational account assumes that self-awareness requires that I view myself not only as the object of my examination but also as subject, as examiner. And the question arises: ‘‘What is the nature of this examining subject?’’ At this point, the subject conducting the examination becomes the object of examination and so on ad infinitum. It follows, according to the criticism, that if we model self-awareness on our awareness of tables and chairs and other objects in our world, an account of our own subjectivity is literally always just beyond reach. Whether Kant himself held such a view, and whether a representational account must lead to vicious infinite regress may be questioned. What is important, however, is that Fichte took these problems seriously. His response was to maintain, first of all, that self-consciousness is not a matter of representing the self to the self – it is not a case of consciousness of an object. Rather, the ‘‘I’’ of self-consciousness, what I discover when I examine my own consciousness, is an activity that is at the same time an accomplishment, eine Tathandlung. This ‘‘fact-act’’14 of immediate, nonrepresentational self-awareness, this intellectual intuition, is what Fichte calls ‘‘self-positing.’’ The subject capable of representational knowledge is not itself a representation but rather just is, in Fichte’s words ‘‘that act which does not and cannot appear among the empirical states of our consciousness, but rather lies at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes it possible.’’15 The task of philosophy is to ‘‘reflect on what one might at first sight take it to be, and to abstract from everything that does not really belong to it.’’16 The result of this process of reflection and abstraction is an account of self-consciousness outlined by Fichte in three ‘‘principles.’’ First, the self posits itself absolutely, and this positing is its existence.17 For Fichte, the activity of self-positing does not produce an effect that is distinct from its activity.18 Rather the self is to be understood as essentially identical with 14 15

16 17

18

This is Neuhouser’s rendering of Tathandlung, Fichte’s Theory, p. 106. Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. by Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Meredith, 1970), p. 93. Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, ibid. Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p. 98: The word ‘‘I’’ is to be understood as ‘‘the self as absolute subject. That whose being or essence consists simply in the fact that it posits itself as existing . . . As it posits itself, so it is; and as it is, so it posits itself.’’ ‘‘It is at once agent and the product of action; the active, and what the activity brings about; action and deed are one and the same, and hence the ‘I am’ expresses an Act (Tathandlung)’’ (Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p. 97).

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this activity. Second ‘‘opposition in general is posited absolutely by the self.’’19 This means that the self, in addition to positing itself posits ‘‘the not-self ’’ that is opposed to itself.20 Third, ‘‘Both self and not-self are posited as divisible.’’ Both self and not-self are posited as partial negations of each other, they are thus limited by each other, but not annihilated. These principles exhaust what can be accomplished by philosophical investigation of the self, Fichte says. The outcome of the investigation, in Fichte’s words, is that ‘‘In the self I oppose a divisible not-self to the divisible self.’’21 The first moment expresses an immediate consciousness of the self, an intellectual intuition, a self-positing. The second and third occur as two aspects of one act: the act of division (or ‘‘limitation’’) ‘‘occurs immediately, within and alongside the act of opposition, both are one and the same, and are distinguished only in reflection.’’22 For Fichte, The self is to be equated with, and yet opposed to, itself. It is all one consciousness, but a consciousness that involves an absolute self, on one hand and divisible limited self on the other.23

This, in very rough outline, is how the theory of self-consciousness stood with Fichte in Jena in 1795. Fichte’s own later revisions need not concern us here. Ho¨lderlin attended Fichte’s lectures in the last months of 1794, and resumed attendance in the following January, during which time he ‘‘engaged in a thorough and critical study of his [Fichte’s] philosophy.’’24 During this time Ho¨lderlin was hard at work on his novel Hyperion, and also produced his only philosophical work, four essay-fragments including one implicitly critical of Fichte’s conception of absolute being, ‘‘Urteil und Sein.’’25 At the same time (early in 1795) that Ho¨lderlin was writing this piece, Novalis was preparing his Fichte-Studien, a large collection of observations and commentary that is, in the words of Manfred Frank, ‘‘the most important philosophical contribution of early Romanticism.’’26

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p. 103. Cf. Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p. 104. Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p. 110. Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p. 108. Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p. 109. David Constantine, Ho¨lderlin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 48. See Henrich, Konstellationen, pp. 59–63, for a discussion of the dating of this important fragment (‘‘Judgment and Being’’), and for an argument that it dates from Ho¨lderlin’s Jena period (1794–5). Manfred Frank, Einfu¨hrung in der Fru¨hromantische A¨sthetik: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 248.

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Central to both Ho¨lderlin’s and Novalis’ reception of Fichte was dissatisfaction with Fichte’s claim that self-consciousness must be understood as originating in an act of self-positing, and that the subject that is created and maintained by this act is not knowable reflectively via a representation, but is rather identified as an immediate consciousness, an ‘‘intellectual intuition.’’ In other words, both took issue with Fichte’s ‘‘First, Absolutely Unconditioned Principle.’’ As Manfred Frank points out, both Ho¨lderlin and Novalis found the notion of absolute selfpositing inadequate to the task of explaining a genuine unity of subjectivity, since the very notion of the ‘‘self-positing itself’’ would seem to involve a further reflexive act. That is, in Frank’s terms ‘‘immediacy and self-reference are incompatible notions.’’27 An account of the immediately present self cannot be a self-referential account. This disagreement led, in the works of Novalis and Ho¨lderlin, to doubts about the possibility of a unified account of subjectivity, and to challenges to Fichte’s attempt at such an account. I want now to examine each of these challenges in turn. Novalis In May 1795, Novalis spent an evening in Jena with Fichte and Ho¨lderlin at the house of Friedrich Niethammer, publisher of the influential Philosophisches Journal. Niethammer noted in his diary that they talked much about religion and revelation and concluded that philosophy faced many unanswered questions.28

This meeting apparently convinced Novalis of the need to come to terms with Fichte’s philosophy, a conviction which resulted in over 500 manuscript pages of notes, his Fichte-Studien, begun during the fall of 1795 and finished the following summer. But although these studies certainly do represent a kind of homage to the dynamic professor, they also contain a strong critique of a central aspect of Fichte’s work. Novalis’ problem with Fichte’s account of self-consciousness depends on the view that, in his words, ‘‘The I must posit itself as representing [darstellend].’’29 That is, in a very important sense, for Novalis, selfconsciousness must be representational. Insofar as self-consciousness is a reflection on consciousness, it involves thought, and thought can only grasp an object. But Fichte’s ‘‘I’’ is supposed to be non-representing, an original fact-act that can only be described as immediate consciousness, or 27 29

Frank, Einfu¨hrung, p. 250. 28 John Neubauer, Novalis (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 22. Fichte-Studien, in Novalis Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1969), II: 282, # 633: ‘‘Das Ich muß sich, als darstellend setzen.’’

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‘‘intellectual intuition.’’ In his discussion of Novalis, Frank argues that the very term ‘‘intellectual intuition’’ suggests that, whatever else it may be, this way of characterizing ‘‘absolute’’ unity cannot truly be absolute, because it involves two distinct components, one intuitive and the other intellectual or conceptual. So for Novalis, intellectual intuition is viewed rather as a reflection that is directed toward an intuition, or what for Novalis is the same, a feeling.30 Because it is only an attempt to reach an intuition (feeling) in thought, the best it can accomplish is still only a reflection of this intuition (feeling). But this is not identical to the feeling itself. With Fichte’s complex account of a unitary self-consciousness that contains a divided self in mind, Novalis speaks of ‘‘the famous struggle within the I.’’31 It is found already in the (allegedly) ‘‘absolute Urhandlung’’ of self-positing, which is, Novalis argues, nothing more than a necessary deception of a mediated I that is attempting to be absolute – that is, unmediated – and thus comes into conflict with itself. Hence, what Fichte takes to be an immediate act of self-positing is in fact a mediated act. Manfred Frank takes Novalis’ metaphor of the ‘‘mirror of reflection’’ (Fichte Studies, #11) and his talk of reversal (#36) to heart and explains the theory as an account of the mind’s attempt to grasp itself through an act of mirroring : ‘‘Reflection’’ indeed, means mirroring, and all mirror images are laterally reversed. If I hold an object in front of a mirror, right is reflected to me as left and left as right. Also the light rays that approach the glass appear to move into the distance and head off in the other direction. Should it be any different with the reflection with which we recognize our self-consciousness? Novalis asks.

This is an interesting counter to the interpretation of Romanticism made canonical by Meyer H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp, wherein it is argued that the Romantic conception of the mind is that of a lamp that shines upon and transforms its object.32 In The Romantic Legacy, Charles Larmore balks at this reading of Romanticism for reasons similar to those I outlined in chapter 1 for Novalis’ definition of romanticizing. In Larmore’s view, the role played by the mind – or, more specifically, by the imagination – is both reflective and transformative on the Romantic view. 30 32

Frank, Einfu¨hrung, p. 253. 31 Fichte-Studien, II: 127, #32. The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). See also Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), esp. chapter 7.2, ‘‘Freshness of Sensation,’’ where he points to Novalis’ notion of what Abrams calls ‘‘an unlocalized irradiation of consciousness and an incandescent item of sense perception’’ (p. 387).

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In his words, it has a ‘‘dual, creative-responsive function’’ that operates ‘‘at one and the same time.’’33 Although his argument is intended to hold for Romanticism generally, it is especially true of Novalis who, as we should recall, defined ‘‘romanticizing’’ as a two-pronged movement from the ordinary to the extraordinary (corresponding to Larmore’s ‘‘creative’’ function) and at the same time from the extraordinary and mysterious to the ordinary (Larmore’s ‘‘responsive’’ function). Since the latter move is rarely attributed to Romanticism, Frank’s account of the mind as ‘‘mirroring’’ ourselves in Novalis is particularly insightful. For Novalis, he argues, we ‘‘see’’ self-intuition (‘‘Selbstgefu¨hl ’’) reflected in the mirror of thought and conclude that we have reached it. But, in fact, we are fooled: We have only the ‘‘mirror image’’ of selfintuition, not that intuition itself. Like any mirroring, self-reflection presents us with an illusion of ourselves that, Novalis says, requires a second act of reflection if we are not to be misled into thinking we have attained objective knowledge of what is essentially non-objective. This second reflective act ‘‘corrects’’ the illusion of the first act that we had of ourselves, and shows us, not the self, but our ignorance of it. Novalis’ romantic–philosophic conception of the self holds that we are incapable of grasping the absolute ground of the self. Since Novalis believes that ‘‘striving after the thought of a ground is the ground of philosophy’’ and ‘‘all philosophizing must end in an absolute ground,’’34 this would seem to spell the end of all philosophizing, and for Novalis, in one sense this is true: ‘‘The borders of feeling are the borders of philosophy.’’ But in another sense, he argues, philosophy may recognize its own absolute when it recognizes that no absolute ground is given. Even in the face of giving up the search for the absolute – or rather, precisely because of giving it up – the ‘‘drive to philosophize’’ can never be satisfied, and there arises an ‘‘unending free activity.’’ This ‘‘unending free activity in us,’’ Novalis says, is ‘‘the only possible absolute that can be given us.’’35 Thus philosophy can only ever provide a negative account of the self: The drive to unify feeling and thought is the only unifying characteristic of the self.36 But since this negative characteristic is indeed one aspect of our nature, it is at least not a falsified account of the human self. Where philosophy must stop, however, poetry may begin. There is no definitive answer to whether or not Novalis believed that poetry could do what philosophy could not – that is, unveil the absolute, 33 34

Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 21, 31. Fichte-Studien, II: 269, #566. 35 Ibid. 36 Cf. Fichte-Studien, II: 126–127, #32.

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and portray its very essence.37 It seems unlikely that he intended to accomplish so much in his own work. Rather, Novalis’ poetic achievement is his ability to portray artistically what he believed followed from his views on the essentially negative nature of self-consciousness. That is, his literary work is not an ‘‘unveiling’’ of the absolute, but rather an attempt to do ‘‘poetic philosophy’’38 – to understand the self and its world not in abstractions but by romanticizing them. ‘‘Romanticizing’’ and ‘‘Romantic philosophy,’’ on Novalis’ definition, is the ‘‘operation’’ of portraying the unexpected, of ‘‘interrupting’’ ordinary life by ‘‘potentializing’’ the objects of the world, showing them not for what they are but for what they are not – what they are only potentially. On this approach, the ordinary is always seen in the light of the ‘‘unending’’ and, by the same token, the unknown, mysterious, and unending, are portrayed as ordinary.39 Such a world is a ‘‘Verkehrung,’’ an inversion, but it is also a setting right, just as the second reflection of self-consciousness sets right the illusion of self-recognition. ‘‘Die Welt muß romantisirt werden,’’ ‘‘The world must be romanticized,’’ says Novalis.40 Romanticizing, because it portrays what is merely potential, and hence in effect portrays what it is not, is an illusion or inversion that sets right the original illusion of being at home in the world. Heinrich von Ofterdingen, with its simple straightforward narrative style used to depict a free-floating, kaleidoscopic set of illusion, dream, and symbols, is a perfect example of Novalis’ doctrine of corrective inversion. Perhaps because it is quite literally a model of Novalis’ idea of romantic philosophizing, and hence of theory in practice, the secondary literature on this novel is voluminous.41 Here I will simply suggest how Heinrich, the protagonist of this piece, can be said to ‘‘figure’’ Novalis’ conception of the self. Heinrich is no ordinary protagonist, in spite of the fact that he is indeed the central figure of the novel. Heinrich’s ‘‘development’’ is almost entirely an internal, subjective one, and he is passive to the point of near absence in many of the chapters. Much, if not most, of the action of the novel does not involve him – or, perhaps it is better to say, it involves him only as the blank screen on which the fables, allegories, and magical images that constitute the bulk of the work are played out. 37

38 40

Cf. Herbert Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis: Werk und Forschung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), p. 118. Ibid. 39 Cf. Frank, Einfu¨hrung, pp. 272ff., and Fichte-Studien, II: 545, #105. Fichte-Studien, ibid. 41 See Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, pp. 389ff.

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Indeed, Heinrich has practically no ‘‘psychological profile’’ – he is rather a world unto himself in which dream, fantasy, and reality blur – or, better, in which it makes no difference which is which. Heinrich is a vessel whose only anchor, if it can even be called that, is his own passive subjectivity. But if Novalis’ Heinrich is a romanticized, unanchored, and even alienated self-consciousness compared to the full-blooded and many-faceted character one comes to expect in novels, still Heinrich’s is a ‘‘pleasantly’’ alienated self-consciousness.42 It includes occasional moments of ecstatic feeling that occur most often in dreams, or in love, when the self (not always Heinrich) recognizes something ‘‘unending’’ in itself. These moments, for Novalis, are the result of a reinversion of our inverted sense of self and as such they are moments (‘‘Augenblick’’ ) of insight into the absolute. The self, in these felicitous moments of ‘‘renunciation of the Absolute,’’ when it recognizes its own inability to attain transcendence through reflection, produces in itself the unending free activity . . . the only possible absolute that can be given to us, and which we find only through our inability to attain and to recognize an Absolute.43

This pleasurable negative experience of the absolute bears little resemblance to Fichte’s original Tathandlung. It does, however very closely resemble the Kantian sublime: For what is sublime in the proper meaning of the term, cannot be contained in any sensible form but concerns only ideas of reason, which though they cannot be exhibited (dargestellt) adequately, are aroused and call to mind this very inadequacy, which can be exhibited in sensibility.44

A little further on, Kant emphasizes that the sublime is an experience of what is absolutely great in us. Our inability to represent to ourselves the absolutely great outside us is the condition of this recognition: Yet this inadequacy is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have within us a supersensible power, and what is absolutely great is not an object of sense, but is the use that judgment makes naturally of a certain object so as to [arouse] this (feeling).45

One might say that Novalis’ Ofterdingen is full of just these sorts of ‘‘negative’’ epiphanies – momentarily transcendent experiences that amount to ‘‘sublimations’’ of the self. 42

43 45

III: 685–688: ‘‘Die Kunst, auf eine angenehme Weise zu befremden, einen Gegenstand fremd zu machen und doch bekannt und anziehend, das ist die romantische Poetik.’’ Fichte-Studien, II: 269, #566. 44 Critique of Judgment, p. 245 (emphasis added). Critique of Judgment, V: 250.

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ho¨ lderlin At the time of their meeting at Niethammer’s home, Ho¨lderlin was on the verge of departure from Jena, had already attended Fichte’s lectures in the Winter semester, and had almost certainly already developed his influential critique of the latter in the fragment ‘‘Judgment and Being.’’ Ho¨lderlin came to his study of Fichte immersed in questions of aesthetics from his recent engagement with Kant’s third Critique and Plato’s ¨ ber Anmuth und Wu¨rde.’’46 In one of the Phaedrus, and Schiller’s ‘‘U philosophical fragments dating from this time, he is concerned to account for the unity of ‘‘necessity and freedom, the restricted and the unrestricted, the sensuous and the sacred’’ in the faculty of desire.47 Here he speaks longingly of a ‘‘morality of instinct’’ that resembles a kind of intellectual intuition, an attunement of imagination and desire that naturally conforms to the moral law, uncoerced. But, he also admits, such ‘‘attunement would then be merely contingent, a matter of fortune.’’ The longed-for unity, though possible contingently, is for that very reason unfit for systemic development. At least at this period in his philosophical development, Ho¨lderlin seems at once driven by what Henrich called ‘‘Vereinigungsphilosophie’’ and at the same time by skeptical doubts about its possibility. Doubts about the possibility of a systematic account of a ‘‘morality of instinct’’ underlie Ho¨lderlin’s disagreement with Fichte. But these doubts must be seen in light of his explication of ‘‘Being’’ in the fragmentary essay ‘‘Judgment and Being’’: Being – expresses the connection between subject and object. Where subject and object are united altogether and not only in part, that is, united in such a manner that no separation can be performed without violating the essence of what is to be separated, there and nowhere else can be spoken of Being proper, as is the case with intellectual intuition.48

From this, it follows that Fichte’s account of intellectual intuition must be incorrect, because it refers not to a primordial, essentially indivisible consciousness of Being, but only to a self-positing activity that involves an act of opposition and reunification through a concept of limitation or divisibility.49 The unity of Fichte’s is thus, for Ho¨lderlin, a derivative unity: an identity, but not an absolute unity. 46

47 48

Cf. Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 11, and Haym, Die Romantische Schule, pp. 301–302. ‘‘On the Law of Freedom,’’ in Ho¨lderlin, Essays, pp. 33–34. Ho¨lderlin, Essays, p. 37. 49 Cf. Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p. 110.

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The fact that Fichte did not intend to suggest this sort of ‘‘primordial coherence’’50 is of less importance here than is the fact that Ho¨lderlin felt that such primordial coherence was necessary to ground the conception of a unified self, and that without it the self was, quite literally, lost. Given such constraints on what can count as an integrated self,51 it is no surprise that for Ho¨lderlin it is not clear that the self can ever come to know itself. To the extent that self-knowledge is possible, it must involve that which ‘‘antedates any structure of synthesis, identity and consciousness.’’52 That means, for Ho¨lderlin, that self-knowledge must be aesthetic. Influenced by his reading of Kant’s theory of beauty, and by his friendships with Schiller and Schelling, Ho¨lderlin developed a ‘‘doctrine of beauty’’ that made the aesthetic the unifying principle of human experience. Beauty, for Ho¨lderlin, is the ideal – the visible model of perfected humanity. In the Hyperion he speaks of ‘‘beings of beauty, or what is the same thing, human beings.’’53 Beauty bespeaks the divinity in the human being: ‘‘The human being is a god as soon as he is human. And once he is a god, he is beautiful.’’54 For Ho¨lderlin, the experience of the beautiful is the only integrating experience for the self at odds with itself. This doctrine does not set Ho¨lderlin apart from Schiller or Schelling. What is distinctive to Ho¨lderlin is his emphasis on the attainment of the beautiful being only a contingent matter, depending as it does on nature and the degree of sensitivity of the individual: Beauty forsakes the life of men, flees upward into Spirit; the Ideal becomes what Nature was . . . By this, by the Ideal, this rejuvenated divinity, the few recognize one another and are one.’’55

Unity of subjectivity is not granted everyone, by any means. The ‘‘few’’ of whom Ho¨lderlin speaks here, of course, are artists – they are the most deeply sensitive of souls. ‘‘The first child of divine beauty is art.’’56 And though in Hyperion the hope is expressed that these few great souls will inaugurate a ‘‘second age,’’ this utopian enthusiasm is edged throughout

50 51

52 53

54 56

Ho¨lderlin, Essays, pp. 20ff. This aspect of Ho¨lderlin’s thought, Henrich points out, probably owes much to his ‘‘projection of Spinoza onto the Science of Knowledge’’ (Konstellationen, p. 74). Ho¨lderlin, Essays, p. 26. Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece, trans. W. R. Trask (New York: Ungar, 1965), p. 90. Hyperion, p. 91. 55 Hyperion, p. 76. Hyperion, p. 91.

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with a sense of disillusionment. In a remarkable chapter early in the novel, Hyperion writes to Bellarmin, ‘‘What is man?’’: How does it happen that the world contains such a thing, which ferments like a chaos or moulders like a rotten tree, and never grows to ripeness? . . . To the plants he says: I, too, was once like you! And to the pure stars: I shall become like you in another world! – meanwhile he falls to pieces and keeps practicing his arts on himself, as if, once it had come apart, he could put a living thing together again like a piece of masonry . . . yet what he does will always be artifice.57

Even the artistic self – or, rather, especially the artistic self, who has ‘‘feasted at the table of the gods’’ and felt ‘‘full, pure beauty’’ must face the inescapable fact of its own fragmented condition. The poet is bound to be disillusioned, Hyperion tells his friends, because, having known the feeling of the beautiful, that which is thought is revealed to be disharmonious, full of contradiction and imperfection. Beauty is never thought.58 Ho¨lderlin did not see beauty as a consolation, nor, like Novalis, as something to be attained in moments of poetic exaltation; a gift that, when received lends a feeling of coherence to the self, redeeming it in moments of poetic magic: ‘‘Overall [the poet] must accustom himself not to try to attain within individual moments the totality that he strives for and to bear the momentarily incomplete.’’59 For Ho¨lderlin, unlike Novalis, the poetic can never be a purely pleasant alienation because it rests on feeling, and feeling is suffering as well as pleasure. Indeed, in the novel, the experience of suffering seems to be assigned to Hyperion, if not as a duty, then as a matter of necessity for his romantic spirit. In the second part of the novel, Hyperion asks his correspondent: ‘‘Why do I recount my grief to you, renew it . . . ?’’60 The entire novel is a narrative of alternating suffering and rejoicing, an attempt to portray the depths and heights that human feeling can attain. Feeling, Ho¨lderlin says, is the poet’s ‘‘bridle and spur.’’61 Thus it is tempting to conclude that feeling is what redeems the self, for Ho¨lderlin, and that even if the aesthetic is not always a consolation to the divided self it may still, in a more heroic sense, save it. But this, too, would fail to capture Ho¨lderlin’s stance. Although elevated, intense feeling may give the artistic spirit glimpses of absolute Being, it is ultimately unable to unify the individual self, and in this very important sense cannot be 57 59 61

Hyperion, p. 57. 58 Cf. Hyperion, p. 93. ‘‘Reflection,’’ in Ho¨lderlin, Essays, p. 46 ‘‘Reflection,’’ in Ho¨lderlin, Essays, p. 45.

60

Hyperion, p. 114.

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redemptive. In his sketch ‘‘The Ground for ‘Empedocles,’’’ he says of his hero’s fate: In order to organize life, he had to strive seizing it with his being at its innermost; with his spirit he had to try to master the human element, all tendencies and drives, their soul, the inconceivable, the unconscious, the involuntary in them; precisely in so far as his will, his consciousness, his spirit, transcended the ordinary and human boundaries of knowledge and effectiveness, it had to lose itself and become objective . . . the objective resounded the more purely and deeply within him the more open his soul lay, precisely because the spiritually active man had given himself away, and this in the particular as well as in the universal.62

The experience of unified consciousness, in those rare moments when it occurs, for Ho¨lderlin is also tragic because it forces the individual to the universal, and hence beyond what the individual can ever be. To paraphrase Cassirer, the vessel through which the self announces itself must, because it is singular and limited, itself be broken.63 Unified consciousness is also the death of the individual. If Ho¨lderlin’s project is the quest for such unity, then its success would appear to be the death of the self. One feels this in the protagonist Hyperion, who in the course of the entire novel never becomes a fully fledged character. He is a heroic struggling ‘‘figure’’ but never an integrated personality. The only redemption may lie, for Ho¨lderlin, in the poetic process itself. Here at least, the artist may create, in Eric L. Santner’s words, ‘‘the possibilities of new modes of discoursing and being, new modes of fortifying the self for its dialog with the other.’’64 conclusion Almost as if he had Ho¨lderlin and Novalis in mind (in fact, he was often thinking of Klopstock), Kant proclaimed time and again the dangers of the novel, the Roman. Too much of this sort of reading, he warns, loosens one’s grip on reality, and leads to fantasizing, which is closely related to enthusiasm and even madness. As we have already seen, Kant advocated a guarded attitude towards ‘‘empty and fanciful desires, which are often nourished by novels and sometimes also by mystical presentations, similar 62

63

64

‘‘The Ground for ‘Empedocles,’ ’’ in Thomas Pfau, Friedrich Ho¨lderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 60. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, ‘‘Ho¨lderlin und der deutsche Idealismus,’’ in Ho¨lderlin: Beitra¨ge zu seinem Versta¨ndnis in unserm Jahrhundert, Alfred Kelletat, ed. (Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1961), p. 115. Eric L. Santner, Introduction to Friedrich Ho¨lderlin: Hyperion and Selected Poems (New York: Continuum, 1990), pp. xxxv–xxxvi. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer at Cambridge University Press for suggesting this way of interpreting Ho¨lderlin’s project in a less dismal light.

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to novels, or superhuman perfections and fanatical bliss.’’65 But then, almost as if he knew there would be no holding back the Romantic quest for a unified consciousness, he added the claim already examined in chapter 5 – namely, that it is important ‘‘to investigate why it is that nature has given us the predisposition to such fruitless expenditure of our forces as [we see in] empty wishes and longings (which certainly play a large role in human life).’’ His hypothesis was that if we had to be sure that attaining an object was within our power before we let ourselves desire it, many powers we in fact have would remain unused. Thus, nature wisely provides us with desires that call forth great effort ‘‘even before we know what ability we have, and it is often precisely this effort, which to that very mind seems at first an empty wish, that produces that ability in the first place.’’ It is wise to be on guard, but equally wise to recognize that nature’s provisions should be respected, Kant concludes. It is natural to conclude from this that ‘‘wisdom’’ will desire what Novalis would later call the ‘‘drive to be an ‘I.’ ’’66 Since Kant believed, as we saw at the outset, that wisdom also requires that we fathom ourselves, it is a very good thing for him that we also have the drive to do so. The works of both Ho¨lderlin and Novalis embody this tendency to strive for what is not, to overstep, ‘‘in a fruitless expenditure of forces,’’ the bounds of what may be reasonably desired. Hence, for this very reason their Romantic contributions appear to be a step along the Kantian path to self-knowledge, and a natural and important continuation of the Kantian project. These poet-philosophers may be seen as following the injunction to fathom the self, to determine what the self is not, but could be, in order to further the Kantian project of determining what the self should be. But as Kant was acutely aware, this drive to self-knowledge has its costs. Ho¨lderlin’s and Novalis’ Romanticism holds out the promise of discovering new forms of consciousness, and hence of ‘‘refiguring’’ the self, but where it is not suitably tempered by a sense of its own limitations it risks the erasure of the very ‘‘self’’ it attempts to fathom. Novalis’ insistence on the momentary nature of imaginative epiphanies, and on the corresponding recognition of the ordinary, was one approach to the problem that vexed Kant. In the case of Ho¨lderlin, the solution was to be

65

Critique of Judgment, p. 420.

66

Fichte-Studien, II: 126–127, #32.

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found in art, in his case in the process of poetry. It was a solution that depended on artistic genius, and as his own final tragedy suggests, was only partially successful. In the concluding chapter 7 we shall examine the degree to which Novalis’ and Kant’s views on imaginative genius converge and finally gesture towards a new understanding of philosophy itself in early German Romanticism.

chapter 7

Novalis’ Kantianism and Kant’s Romanticism

Doch das Paradies is verriegelt und der Cherub hinter uns; wir mu¨ssen die Reise um die Welt machen, und sehen, ob es vielleicht von hinten irgendwo wieder offen ist. ¨ ber das Marionetten Theater’’ (On the Marionette Theater)) (Kleist, ‘‘U (Paradise is barred and the cherub behind us; we must travel around the world, and see if maybe somewhere it is open again from the back.)1

Kleist summed up the mix of awe and profound disappointment that many intellectuals in the 1780s and 1790s must have felt in the wake of Kant’s philosophy. For although in it human cognitive activity takes on new constitutive powers that define the boundaries of the real, the cost of shifting this constitutive power to human subjectivity was high: loss of access to a world beyond appearances. In spite of Kant’s claim to have made ‘‘room for faith,’’ knowledge of the world of things ‘‘in themselves’’ was barred, so it seemed, once and for all. In his fictional essay ‘‘On the Marionette Theater,’’ Kleist frames the philosophical problem of knowledge as a problem within the context of performance art. His narrator interviews a renowned dancer who aims to move with absolute grace across the floor, freely and without alienation, but recognizes that the impossibility of achieving his goal is rooted in self-consciousness. The great dancer tells Kleist’s narrator that the artist should look to the marionette as a model of unselfconscious expression of absolute, unalienated movement. The dancer’s remarks are, of course, a metaphor for human striving after that which is beyond the pale of possible human experience: absolute knowledge and perfect self-expression. Kleist’s essay captures the problem that seemed almost without exception to plague philosophers in the immediate wake of Kant’s relativization of knowledge to the human capacity for it. Kleist is not typically classified as a Romantic, but his call 1

Heinrich von Kleist: Werke in einem Band (Munich: Karl Hanser Verlag, 1966), pp. 802–807.

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for a ‘‘back-door’’ strategy is characteristic of much of Early German Romanticism, and describes the major project of this movement’s most fascinating figure, Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Kant’s philosophy was a fact of life for Novalis and the philosophers and poets of the famous Jena circle. Indeed, the ‘‘Copernican’’ paradigm in philosophy was so well entrenched that in his encyclopedic ‘‘Allgemeine Brouillon’’ Novalis could speak of the Copernican turn as established fact: Here Kant played the role of Copernicus and explained the empirical I along with its outer world as a planet, and placed the moral law or the moral I at the center of the system – and Fichte has become the Newton – the second Copernicus – the inventor of the laws of the system of the inner world (III: 335).2

Novalis was as convinced as was Kant that the latter’s new philosophy of the subject had dissolved past errors in philosophy once and for all. Along with most of the intellectuals of his circle, Novalis abandoned the vaulting structures of Leibnizian and Wolffian rationalism for shelter in the Kantian alternative account of what the human mind can know. Kant himself recognized that human beings would forever be tempted to strive after the absolute, or ‘‘unconditioned,’’ but in the end his tendency was to be rather sanguine about the fact that everyday cognition, science, and even ethics, would have to do without final metaphysical answers. At the same time, as we saw in chapter 5, this great purveyor of rationalist humanism betrayed a fondness, even sympathy for metaphysical fantasizing that has been almost wholly ignored by commentators on his work.3 In the last section of this chapter I shall return to Kant to examine the place that metaphysical speculation retains in his system, and to conclude the argument of this book for the continuity between his system and early German Romanticism. It has become a cliche´ that German idealism with its pyrotechnical metaphysics jettisoned Kantian limits on knowledge. Early German Romanticism is typically cast in this same unflattering role, with the additional offense of ‘‘irrationalism and mysticism’’ added to the indictment. In fact, however, many if not all of the early German Romantics associated with the Jena circle renounced metaphysical 2

3

All references to Novalis’ works are to Novalis Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs eds. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1965). The second and third volumes, ed. Richard Samuel together with Hans-Joachim Ma¨hl and Gerhard Schulz, contain Novalis’ philosophical writings, published in 1981 and 1983, respectively. Kant was not always comfortable with this attitude; throughout his life he was fascinated by apparently ‘‘supernatural’’ phenomena. See Hartmut Bo¨hme and Gernot Bo¨hme’s Das Andere der Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), and chapter 5 of this book.

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knowledge claims and speculative thinking in harsher terms than did Kant himself.4 No one better exemplifies this strict adherence to the Copernican turn than does Novalis, whose philosophical efforts culminate in the elevation of aesthetics and the practice of art as the embodiment of human freedom. I will begin, then, with a look at the surprisingly modest metaphysical underpinnings of this great Romantic poet and philosopher. In so doing I hope to exonerate Novalis, and by extension the early German Romantic circle, of charges of metaphysical excess and irrationalism. In the second part of the chapter I look at the consequences of Novalis’ views for an account of the nature of ordinary cognition. novalis’ kantianism As we saw in chapter 6, in 1795–96 Novalis undertook a serious study of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) after having met Fichte, along with Ho¨lderlin, in the home of a mutual friend in Jena. The set of notes on Fichte which comprised the bulk of the large handwritten manuscript produced by Novalis has been called ‘‘the most significant philosophical work of early Romanticism.’’5 In it, Novalis comes to grips with the early philosophy of this thinker who had claimed ascendancy to Kant’s throne in German philosophy. There is no doubt that Fichte’s philosophy was of great importance to Novalis, yet what emerges in the Fichte Studies is not a student’s reworking of the master’s ideas, but rather a persistent criticism of the fundamental assumption of Fichte’s major work. Whereas Fichte had argued that the inner world of the self may be accessed initially via an intellectual intuition of self-activity, in his Fichte Studies Novalis repeatedly insists that no immediate knowledge of the self, as it is in itself, is possible. Chapter 6 discussed Novalis’ metaphor of mirroring as an account of human self-knowledge, but he also argues that self-observation is a kind of ‘‘eavesdropping on the self’’ in order to learn about it. By ‘‘learning,’’ he says, 4

5

In this book I deal only with Novalis and his circle of early German Romantics. The later Romantics, especially those associated with Heidelberg, but even including Schlegel and Tieck in their later period are not under discussion here. Manfred Frank, in Einfu¨hrung in die Fru¨hromantische A¨sthetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 248. Novalis’ work, which included the so-called ‘‘Fichte Studies’’ and ‘‘Kant Studies’’ comprised about 500 pages of handwritten notes that were left unpublished until 1901, when Ernst Heilborn brought out a substantial selection of the notes. The entire set, however, remained unpublished and was lost to scholarship for thirty years between 1930 and 1960, when it resurfaced at an auction in New York.

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we mean absolutely nothing but intuiting an object and impressing it along with its characteristics upon ourselves. It [the self] would thus become an object again. No, philosophy cannot be self-observation, because it would not then be what we are after [i.e., it would not be immediately known as subject: JK]. It is perhaps self-feeling. What then is feeling? . . . It can only be observed in reflection – the spirit of feeling is then gone. The producer can be inferred from the product in accordance with the schema of reflection.(II: 113–114, #15)

Novalis goes on to argue that since feeling cannot represent itself, and reflection can only represent feeling in thought, our intuition of our Self is never of a thing as it is ‘‘in itself.’’ It is necessarily always mediated or ‘‘inferred,’’ a synthetic product of feeling and reflection (II: 114, #16). Novalis may have honored Fichte with the title of the ‘‘second Copernicus,’’ but this did not prevent his rejecting the Fichtean central assumption of the inner world of the self, namely that the ‘‘absolute’’ self can be known. Not only does Novalis reject claims of access to the ‘‘absolute I,’’ his ‘‘positive’’ account of the self resembles Kant’s notion of the noumenal, or thing in itself, as a limiting notion. As von Molna´r points out, Novalis typically refers to the concept of the ‘‘I’’ as a regulative one:6 I – has, perhaps, like all ideas of reason merely regulative, classificatory use – Nothing at all in relation to reality. (II: 258, #502)

Referring to Fichte’s notion of a Tathandlung, the originary intuitive act of positing of the self, Novalis says, Every state, every fact-act [Tathandlung] presupposes an other . . . all quest for a First [genus] is nonsense – it is a regulative idea. (II: 254, #472)

Novalis’ reaction to Fichte places limitations on the power and reach of the intellect that are essentially Kantian in spirit. Especially as a student of the natural sciences, Novalis was critical of metaphysical speculation, and as we saw in chapter 1, he insisted that although a ‘‘tendency to seek the universal’’ [Universaltendenz] is essential to the scholar, One must never, like a phantast, seek the undetermined – a child of fantasy – an ideal. One proceeds from determinate task to determinate task. An unknown lover of course has a magical charm. Striving for the unknown, the undetermined, is extremely dangerous and disadvantageous. Revelation must not be forced. (III: 601, #291)

Given these strong views on the unknowability of the self as it is in itself, it is not surprising that Novalis’ intense study of Fichte led him back 6

Geza von Molna´r argues for this point in Novalis’ ‘‘Fichte Studies’’: The Foundations of His Aesthetics (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), pp. 41–42.

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again to a study of Kant. The very short collection of notes and commentary now collected under the title the ‘‘Kant Studien’’ (1797) was found together with a group of notes on the Dutch philosopher Hemsterhuis (1721–90).7 Probably his renewed interest in Kant’s views on the natural sciences was piqued by Hemsterhuis’ frequent reference to the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences in Hemsterhuis’ ‘‘Metaphysics of Nature,’’ but given his abrupt turn away from Fichtean idealism it is likely that he turned to Kant’s works to support his developing views on the limits of philosophizing about metaphysical matters.8 However, a set of very brief notes in this collection suggests that it could also have been another Kantian text, and a far more obscure one, that may have provided Novalis with impetus for the further development of his philosophy as well as his artistic enterprise. Amidst the notes on Kant’s philosophy were also found notes on Kant’s reply to Samuel Thomas So¨mmerring, a well-known medical doctor and physiologist ¨ ber das Organ der Seele’’ raised from Frankfurt. So¨mmerring’s book ‘‘U the question of the ‘‘seat of the soul [der Sitz der Seele],’’ or the location of the mind in the body. The book was published with a short appendix written by Kant and sent to So¨mmerring specifically for the book:9 If I am supposed to make the place of my soul, that is, of my absolute self, intuitable somewhere in space, then I must perceive myself through that very same [spatial intuition] through which I also perceive the matter right around me . . . Now the soul can only perceive via inner sense, but the body (whether internal or outer) can only perceive through outer sense; hence it can determine absolutely no place for itself, because in order to do this it would make itself the object of its own outer intuition and would have to transpose [versetzen] itself outside itself – which is a contradiction. So the desired solution of the problem of the seat of the soul which is demanded of metaphysics leads into an impossible dimension . . . ; and one can, with Terence, call to those who would undertake it: ‘‘You wouldn’t succeed any more than if you were to try to be rationally insane’’ [‘‘Nihilo plus agas, quam si des opera ut cum ratione insanias’’]. (Kant, letter to So¨mmerring, 1796) 7

8

9

See Hans-Joachim Ma¨hl’s introduction to the Kant and Eschenmeyer Studies, Novalis Schriften II: 334. According to Ma¨hl, based on the handwriting and the type and format of the paper, these notes and commentary were probably written during or immediately following his work on Hemsterhuis, and within a year after finishing the Fichte Studies in 1796. Ma¨hl, p. 332. The fact that his focus of study seems to have been primarily the Preface and Introduction to the first Critique as well as the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science also supports this view. See the letter to So¨mmerring dated August 10, 1795, Kants gesammelte Schriften, Prussian Academy edition, XII.3: 30–35.

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To So¨mmerring’s question, Kant replies that the spatial location [der Ort] of the soul, where ‘‘soul’’ is understood as ‘‘my absolute self’’ would have to be perceived in the same way we perceive matter around us, namely through outer sense (this includes our physical ‘‘insides’’ as well). But the absolute self can perceive itself only through inner sense, non-spatially, and therefore cannot determine a spatial place for itself. For the soul to make itself the object of its own outer intuition would mean that it would have to set [versetzen] its non-spatial being ‘‘outside’’ itself in space – and that is a contradiction, Kant says. The demand that metaphysics solve the problem of the seat of consciousness leads it into incoherence, Kant continues, and he admonishes would-be metaphysical speculators with a quotation from Terence, the context of which involves advice to a spurned lover to give up on the idea of winning the heartless object of his desire through reasoning. The question of the ‘‘seat’’ of consciousness raised by So¨mmerring, as well as an apparent dissatisfaction with Kant’s deflationary response, might well be explained by Novalis’ strong emphasis on the importance of feeling as a central aspect of self-knowledge. Although Novalis makes no independent comment in his notes on the So¨mmerring passage, later in his notes on the first Critique the question of the ‘‘seat’’ of consciousness is addressed obliquely: The concept of sense. According to Kant, pure mathematics and pure natural science refer to the form of outer sensibility – What science refers to the form of inner sensibility? Is there yet extra-sensible knowledge? Is there still another way open for getting outside oneself and to get to others, or to be affected by them? (II: 46)

This getting ‘‘outside ourselves’’ is in all probability a reference to Kant’s claim in the reply to So¨mmerring, that the self cannot without contradiction be said to set itself outside itself. Later, in his well-known work Pollen [Blu¨tenstaub], Novalis picks up this thought in the following fragment: The seat of the soul is there, where the inner world and the outer world touch [sich beru¨hren]. Where they permeate – it is in every point of the permeating. (Novalis, II: 418, #20)

The ‘‘inner world’’ is the world that Fichte tries to elucidate by recourse to intellectual intuition of an original act of self-consciousness, an account that, as we saw, Novalis rejected on Kantian grounds.10 At the 10

Although Novalis appeared to believe that some sort of phenomenology, a science of inner sense, is possible. As we saw, he also took Fichte to be the ‘‘Newton’’ of this science. See Allgemeine Brouillon, Novalis Schriften, III: 335 (#460).

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same time, Novalis is unhappy with Kant’s refusal to countenance any possibility for ‘‘externalizing’’ the inner world of the self. What Novalis seems to suggest here is a third option involving the redefining of selfconsciousness as the interface between the inner world of self-feeling and the outer world of objective self-consciousness. This redefinition, he suggests, might also involve a way of reaching others and in turn being affected by them. Novalis’ insistence on the centrality of feeling to self-consciousness and hence to philosophy in general was very likely due in part to the influence of Hemsterhuis’ philosophy. The latter’s emphasis on desire, feeling, and the importance of poesy in understanding the sciences must have appealed greatly to the poet.11 A strong commitment to the importance of feeling to knowledge certainly helps explain the following exasperated comment in the midst of Novalis’ Kant Studies: The whole Kantian method – the whole Kantian way of philosophizing is onesided. And it could with some justice be called Scholasticism. (II: 392 #50)12

In another fragmentary note just prior to his pondering the possibility of another way of getting ‘‘outside ourselves,’’ Novalis suggests that the practice of philosophy itself, and practical reason, must move into a new, aesthetic dimension: Philosophizing is just scientizing [wissenschaften], thinking through thought, knowing knowledge – treating the sciences scientifically and poetically. Should the practical and the poetic be one – and the latter simply signifies absolute practice made specific? (II: 390, #45)

Now, whatever it would mean to find another way, an extra-sensible knowledge, for Novalis, cannot involve abandoning the real world or embracing some noumenal thing in itself as known: Everything absolute must be ostracized from the world. In the world one must live with the world.13 11 12

13

Cf. Ma¨hl’s introduction, II: 314ff. The reference to Kant’s scholasticism also appears in Kant’s ‘‘Open letter on Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre,’’ where Kant quotes from Fichte’s earlier correspondence with him. Kant had written to Fichte that he (Fichte) would do better to devote his energies to applying the teachings of the Critique of Pure Reason rather than attempting to rewrite them. Fichte’s reply ‘‘politely’’ assures Kant that he will not ‘‘make light of scholasticism.’’ See Arnulf Zweig, Kant: Philosophical Correspondence – 1759–99 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967) (XII: 370–371). This is taken from the ‘‘Fragmentblatt’’ found along with the Kant notes (Schriften, II: 395, #55). It follows a remarkable passage in which Novalis suggests, presumably in opposition to Fichte’s notion of an originary self-postulation or Tathandlung, that ‘‘the true philosophical act is suicide . . . only this act corresponds to all the conditions and characteristics of the transcendental act’’ – i.e., we can’t bring ourselves into being, but we can take ourselves out.

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Beneath all Novalis’ comments and criticisms of Kant, his underlying metaphysical assumption remains Kantian: the unknowability of the thing-in-itself is no longer up for debate. In fact, he makes the rather condescending claim that Kant’s belaboring of the issue can appear too obvious, ‘‘superfluous and wearisome’’ to thinkers of Novalis’ generation, unless they keep in mind the historical context within which Kant worked.14 Kant’s anti-speculation doctrine had become ‘‘scholasticism’’ for Novalis and his cohort. So when Novalis speaks of discovering an extra-sensible knowledge, he is by no means taking issue with Kant’s circumscription of cognitive experience. For Novalis, finding a way to get ‘‘outside’’ ourselves is not a matter of conflating the spheres of the cognitive and moral self that Kant had so carefully separated.15 The path outside the self is an altogether different approach, and is already becoming apparent to the young philosopher–poet as he finishes the Fichte Studies and works on Kant and Hemsterhuis. It is the path of the artist, and requires making concrete and tangible in art that inner world based on immediate self-feeling that is impossible to capture purely reflectively. Novalis’ ‘‘other way’’ of locating the seat of consciousness in the world is through its embodiment in art. I suggest that what Novalis finds lacking in Kant is not metaphysical, but imaginative commitment. As we saw in chapter 5, Kant was deeply ambivalent about the role of imagination and of attempts to realize ideals through it. The transposition of the self that Novalis seeks and fails to find in Kant’s one-sided approach is, for Novalis, an imaginative transformation. Novalis’ impatience with Kant appears to stem from his view that Kant fails to see the possibility of poeticizing the world – or, as he would soon come to say – of ‘‘romanticizing’’ it, as discussed in chapter 1: The world must be romanticized. In this way one rediscovers the original meaning. Romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative raising to a higher power [Potenzirung]. The lower self becomes identified with a better self. Just as we ourselves are such a qualitative exponential series. This operation is still quite unknown. Insofar as I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the ordinary a mysterious countenance, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite an appearance of infinity, I romanticize it. The operation is precisely the opposite for the higher, unknown, mystical and infinite – these are logarithmized by this

14 15

‘‘Kant-Studien,’’ II: 392, #49. See Fichte Studies #649: ‘‘we are also in a sphere outside time’’ – Novalis retains Kant’s view that to be human means to be able to ‘‘transport’’ oneself into a realm of intellect.

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connection – they become common expressions. Romantic philosophy. Lingua romana. Alternating elevation and lowering.16

This activity was, for Novalis, something Kant failed to theorize in his ‘‘one-sided’’ attempt to explain human knowledge in terms of ‘‘pure reason.’’ Novalis did not reject Kant’s most profound insights, but rather complemented and tried to complete the Critical turn through his notion of romanticizing. In this sense, Novalis saw himself as opposing Kant, who could certainly come off as an old Scholastic in the mind of a twenty-four-year-old poet, by wanting to give free rein to the imagination as a vehicle for externalizing and hence realizing what could only be felt. Imagination, Novalis believed, would produce poetry that would be literally the embodiment and external vehicle for taking the self where it needed to be – outside itself and into the world. Therein lay Novalis’ philosophical solution to Kleist’s Kant-induced dilemma: The key to the back door to paradise would be aesthetic. I have argued that Novalis’ position in no way betrays Kant’s ‘‘Copernican’’ revolution and does not embrace a metaphysical noumenal. Novalis is not an idealist in this sense. But the view that art is a supersession of philosophy appears to lend credence to another common criticism of Romanticism – namely, that it embraces irrationalism and mysticism. Yet this, too, is an unfair characterization of Novalis’ own views. To see why, it is important to begin with Novalis’ characterization of the nature of philosophy itself. Given Novalis’ views on the regulative nature of the ‘‘I’’ and his renunciation of an ‘‘absolute’’ in any but a negative sense, one might expect him to read Kant’s letter to So¨mmerring with approval. However, as we just saw, the ‘‘seat of the soul’’ discussion appears to have sent him in another direction, one that marks a departure from Kant’s views on self-knowledge. Novalis’ philosophical account of self-knowledge depends crucially on the view that our ‘‘inner’’ sense of ourself – selffeeling – is absolute and immediate, but that our knowledge of it, being reflective, is never absolute and immediate. For Novalis, the intellectual intuition that Fichte postulated as the basis of knowledge is replaced by what could be called ‘‘reflected self-feeling.’’ Novalis argues that thinking about our self-feeling does not give us direct access to this immediate selfexperience, but it does gesture in the right direction, reminding us of it in an image: ‘‘Consciousness is an image of being within being’’ (II: 106, #2). As Manfred Frank puts it, for Novalis, reflected self-feeling becomes 16

2: 545, #105.

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the ‘‘orientation towards, or better, the longing for, the absolute.’’17 In the Fichte Studies, this longing is taken by Novalis to be the very heart of philosophy, or rather philosophizing – the ‘‘unique kind of thinking’’ that is the activity of doing philosophy. We should recall Novalis’ own account of the activity of philosophizing: What do I do when I philosophize? I reflect upon a ground. The ground of philosophizing is thus a striving after the thought of a ground . . . All philosophizing must therefore end in an absolute ground. Now if this were not given, if this concept contained an impossibility – then the drive to philosophize would be an unending activity . . . Unending free activity in us arises through the free renunciation of the absolute – the only possible absolute that can be given us and that we can only find through our inability to attain and know an absolute. This absolute that is given to us can only be known negatively, insofar as we act and find that what we seek cannot be attained through action. ( II: 269, #566)

Novalis’ view of the activity of philosophy is that it involves a conscious recognition that it ‘‘absolutely’’ cannot attain its goal. But he also suggests that human consciousness cannot ultimately live with this paradoxical situation. Towards the very end of the Fichte Studies he calls for a free creative response to the limitations philosophy recognizes in reason: Objects must not do violence to us – They must not hem us in, not determine [bestimmen] beyond the borders . . . We must seek to create an inner world that is an actual pendant to the outer world – that insofar as it is in direct opposition to [the outer world] at every point, constantly increases our freedom . . . All determinations proceed outward from us – we create a world out of ourselves . . . The more we determine, the more we lay out what is in us – the freer – more substantial – we become – we set aside, as it were, more and more that which is inessential and approach the thoroughly pure, simple essence of our I. Our creative power gets as much free play as it has world under it. But since our nature, or the fullness of our being, is unending, we can never reach this goal in time – But since we are also in a sphere outside time, we must reach it there in every moment, or better, if we want, in this sphere we are able to be pure simple substance. Here is morality and peace of mind, because an endless striving after what hovers ever out of reach before us seems unbearable. (II: 287–288, #647)

These musings recall Kant’s view that the human being has a higher vocation, a ‘‘standpoint’’ in an intellectual realm where it is possible at any time to transport oneself.18 But whereas Kant says that we can only think ourselves into this world, or at best postulate the time and power to create it, Novalis argues that the power of imagination can create a 17 18

Cf. Frank, Einfu¨hrung, p. 253. E.g. in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, IV: 452ff.

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‘‘sphere outside time.’’ Moreover, he claims that it is in this imaginative world that we first ‘‘approach the . . . pure simple essence of our ‘I’.’’ The passage is cryptic, leaving the reader to speculate further on the nature of this world. But Novalis’ notes seem to suggest a kind of moral oppositional consciousness – a utopian vision – a world of what ought to be as opposed to what is. It is ‘‘unreal’’ and unattainable, but we nevertheless can dwell in it because we are its imaginative architects. It is a sphere to be accessed ‘‘in every moment’’ precisely because it is ‘‘outside’’ time and place, in our imagination. Two points need to be made about this matter of ‘‘world-making’’ in Novalis. First, it is not a mystical or transcendent account. Novalis is quite clear that the ‘‘inner’’ imaginative world is a ‘‘pendant’’ to the outer. It is oppositional and for that very reason dependent upon the world of objects, as any part depends on its counterpart. There is thus nothing ineffable about it. In Pollen, he writes: It is the most arbitrary prejudice that it is denied to human beings to be able to be outside themselves, to have consciousness beyond the senses. Humans may at any moment be supersensible beings. Without this ability they could not be citizens of the world, they would be animals. Of course the composure and selfdiscovery in this state is very difficult since it is so perpetually, so necessarily, bound up in the alternation of our other states. The more we are able to become conscious of this state, the livelier, more powerful and enjoyable is the conviction that arises from it; the belief in genuine spiritual revelation. (II : 421, #22)

Novalis goes on to describe this ‘‘appearance’’ as a kind of emergent experience rooted in ordinary life, the ‘‘incandescence’’ referred to by Abrams in his account of ‘‘moments’’ in Romanticism:19 Novalis claims: It is not a sight, a sound or feeling; it is all three together, more than all three: a sensation of immediate certainty, an insight into my truest, most characteristic life . . . the appearance [Erscheinung] strikes us particularly at the sight of many human forms and faces, especially in a glimpse of some eyes, some demeanors, some movements, or at the hearing of certain words, the reading of certain passages, certain perspectives on life, the world and fate. Very many coincidences, many events in nature, especially times of the year and day, deliver such experiences to us. Certain voices are particularly well-suited to producing such revelations. Most of them [revelations] are momentary, a few last awhile, a very few endure. (II: 421, #22)

19

Meyer H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973).

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Novalis then says that different people will have different experiences of ‘‘revelation,’’ depending on their propensities towards sensibility or understanding, and he also allows that this ability to ‘‘get outside oneself’’ is capable of becoming pathological when a person’s senses and understanding are out of balance. Romanticism’s detractors may or may not agree that this is a case of being ‘‘outside’’ oneself, but it is what Novalis means by the phrase, and it is a far cry from an irrationalist mystic’s description of consciousness. This leads to a second observation about Novalis’ doctrine of imaginative world-making: It is an account of at least one important aspect of ordinary human cognition. Very typically his work, along with that of other romantics, is characterized as obsessed by the notion of individual genius. Novalis speaks as if he is characterizing ordinary human consciousness, the objection might proceed, but if self-discovery of what he called the ‘‘pure, simple I’’ depends so heavily on imagination, and an artistic one at that, can this account be true for ordinary people? Or is it a description of the elite domain of artistic consciousness? There is no doubt that in this section of the Fichte Studies Novalis was working out the rudiments of a theory of artistic process for himself. But in this connection it is important to keep in mind his subsequent views on artistic genius and talent, since they are far more liberal than is generally attributed to Romanticism. In his Mixed Remarks, for instance, he advances the view that genius is a universal human faculty. He argues that genius is the ability to treat imagined objects as real and that it should be distinguished from the talent for presentation and precise observation that is necessary for the development of genius. He then quite explicitly states: Without geniality, none of us would exist at all. Genius is necessary for everything. What is usually meant by genius however, is the genius of genius.20

This is unequivocal. For Novalis, as for Fichte and Kant as well, imagination is a universal, necessary condition of human cognitive experience. It is precisely the naturalness of the capacity that he finds significant for self-knowledge. Revelation itself is natural, and ‘‘must not be forced.’’ It is this capacity for momentary, everyday transcendence (as in reverie) that defines the human: a being to be found ‘‘there, where the inner world and the outer world touch.’’

20

II: 420, #22.

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kant’s romanticism In seeking to connect Kant’s aesthetic theory with Romanticism, I have mostly been swimming against the current in Kant scholarship. However, there is one aspect of Kant’s philosophy that most scholars would agree is a precursor of Romanticism, and that is his notion of genius. It is also seen as something of a side issue for Kant, given the way it is positioned after his extensive account of taste in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.’’21 I want to end this chapter by looking more closely at the way in which this is and is not true. I shall do so by juxtaposing Kant’s notion of the creative process with Novalis’ views. Kant is rather notorious for the view, discussed in chapter 3, that artistic products are secondarily or derivatively beautiful, since all art objects are produced with a concept of the final product in mind.22 That, by definition for Kant, was what it means to create art, and artistic creativity, by extension it would seem, must be understood as only derivatively creative since the artist has a purpose or concept in mind. In aesthetic experience of beauty in nature, however, we do not look for a specific purpose or rule according to which the object was constructed. There is no purpose in nature, at least none that we can ever know. So we simply ‘‘play’’ in our minds with the sights or sounds nature presents, letting them take us fleetingly from one thought to the next, never stopping to ‘‘finish’’ the job by labeling what we are seeing or hearing. The point is not to categorize, or apply rules, but rather to enjoy the sustained feeling of our mental powers in ‘‘playful’’ harmony with each other. Or, as Kant also says, it is to experience the pleasurable ‘‘quickening’’ or ‘‘enlivening’’ of our cognitive forces (Section 9). On the other hand, art, which by definition is purposive, can only imitate nature in this respect. It can at best ‘‘come off’’ as if it were purposeless and ‘‘artless.’’ Still, superimposed, as it were, on Kant’s aesthetics is a remarkable account of artistic genius and ‘‘originality’’ that became enormously influential for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theory of 21

22

See Henry Allison’s discussion of the role of Kant’s account of genius in the third Critique. Looked at closely, he argues, Kant’s conception really amounts to two conceptions: one ‘‘thick’’ notion that is a special talent that no rule can capture, but that instead gives the rule to nature and that is able to actually produce beautiful objects of art. The other is a ‘‘thin’’ conception of genius that ‘‘seems to be limited merely to an imaginative capacity and therefore does not itself involve understanding, judgment or taste.’’ This distinction, appears to be the very same that Novalis uses when he speaks of the ‘‘genius of genius.’’ In Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 12, ‘‘Fine Art and Genius,’’ p. 301. Allison’s analysis suggests that Kant’s conception of genius is completely distinct from that of taste only in the ‘‘thin’’ case. Critique of Judgment, Section 46 (V: 307–308).

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art. As we saw in chapter 1, this account bears the mark of earlier German aesthetic theory, in particular Lessing’s account of the role of imaginative freedom in artistic genius. This account identifies creative genius as a phenomenon of nature, thus rendering the activity and product of genius as ‘‘original’’ as the beauty in natural objects. In Section 49, ‘‘On the Powers of the Mind that Constitute Genius,’’ Kant distinguishes between tastefulness on the one hand and spirit on the other. Tastefulness involves order and agreeableness but does not, by itself, move us. On the other hand, spirit ‘‘in an aesthetic sense, is the animating principle in the mind’’(V: 313). Kant identifies genius with ‘‘spirit’’ or the power to animate or enliven the soul. Genius is, in his words, the power to ‘‘impart to [the mental powers] a purposive momentum, i.e., to impart to the mental powers a play which . . . sustains itself on its own and even strengthens them for such play’’ (V: 313). Genius animates the mind of the listener by drawing on and communicating what Kant calls ‘‘aesthetic ideas’’: ‘‘presentations of the imagination which prompt much thought’’ but that cannot be conceptually represented (i.e., they do not follow rules). There is no rule for the creation and communication of aesthetic ideas. The animating power of genius cannot be learned by following formulae, Kant says. At best it can be imitated, just as a (non-genius) artist imitates the spontaneous productions of nature. Artistic genius proceeds ‘‘naturally’’ – without ‘‘distinctly known rules that determine the procedure’’ although it has in mind some idea of the purpose of the work of art and also some idea of the way that is to be manifested in a sensory medium. (V: 310, 318). Training is of course necessary, but it is not sufficient for genius. ‘‘Genius is the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art,’’ but this rule is ‘‘indeterminate’’: Genius is a [natural endowment] for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition consisting of a skill for something that can be learned by following some rule or other; hence the foremost property of genius must be originality. (V: 307–308)

This notion of genius, what Allison in Kant’s Theory of Taste calls Kant’s ‘‘thin’’ notion of genius, is imaginative freedom or simply creative thought.23 Creativity for Kant is not rule-governed, and in the Anthropology, 23

Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste. Brigitte Sassen in ‘‘Artistic Genius and the Question of Creativity’’ in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), argues that the free play of the imagination is not creativity properly so called: ‘‘For the creative process centers on how those ideas can be brought to presence.’’ Sassen, like Allison, is identifying Kant’s conception of genius with a ‘‘thick’’ sense that Novalis would call the ‘‘genius of genius.’’

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his description of genius sounds very much like the descriptions of primary process regression used by contemporary cognitive scientists.24 There Kant discusses the natural process of artistic creation as a kind of immediate, non-conceptual awareness of ideas that we have without being conscious of them. He has, that is to say, a notion of unconscious ideation, that resembles closely contemporary discussions of primary process. In his lectures to his Anthropology class, which he taught for over twenty years at the University in Ko¨nigsberg, Kant always included a session on what he called ‘‘obscure representations’’ – ideas that we have unconsciously. To illustrate this phenomenon to his students, he chose the example of an organist playing a free fantasia. Before looking at Kant’s own comment, it will be useful to make a few preliminary historical remarks. The free fantasia was an art form that gained great popularity in Kant’s time and one of the few musical forms that Kant mentions anywhere. Kant, like every educated man and woman of his time, was well aware of the phenomenon of the free fantasia, which was at the height of its popularity during the period of Kant’s mature scholarship in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Kant was not particularly well versed in the fine arts, and knew little about music theory, and so the fact that he refers to the fantasia at all speaks to the ubiquity and importance of the genre to the general educated public of eighteenth-century Germany. The free fantasia, according to Peter Schleuning’s The Fantasia, is a peculiarly eighteenth-century phenomenon, and moreover, ‘‘a purely German phenomenon for the entire period of its existence – until about 1800.’’25 It finds its prototype in J. S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, which combined elements of seventeenth-century genres (such as the prelude, toccata, and capriccio) that had themselves inherited the compositional freedoms of the fantasia of an earlier period. Johann Mattheson (a Hamburg music scholar) defined it further, when he argued that music in the ‘‘fantastic style’’ 24

25

The creative process has received a great deal of attention recently from cognitive psychologists, and one view, espoused by Colin Martindale among others, argues that artistic originality can be understood in terms of the artist’s ability to ‘‘regress’’ to ‘‘primary process cognition,’’ or what Martindale prefers to call ‘‘primordial’’ cognition. That is, on this account the creative artist temporarily abandons conceptual cognition which is ‘‘abstract, rational and reality-oriented’’ to regress to cognition that is ‘‘concrete, irrational, and autistic’’ – to ‘‘the thought of dreams and reveries.’’ Martindale says that ‘‘Primordial cognition is free-associative. It thus increases the novel combinations of mental elements, which form the raw material for a work of art. This raw material must then be put into final form in a rational or conceptual state of mind.’’ (‘‘How Can we Measure a Society’s Creativity?,’’ in Dimensions of Creativity, ed. Margaret A. Boden, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 163–164.) The Fantasia I: 16th to 18th Centuries, trans. A. C. Howie (Cologne: Arno Volk Verlag, 1971), p. 17.

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(Stylus Phantasticus) should have ‘‘no theme and subject to be worked . . . there is nothing so opposed to it as order and restraint’’ (p. 15). One of these problematic restraints was the juxtaposition of the fantasia with the fugue as a sort of ‘‘corrective’’ to the fantasia’s anarchic character. Another constraint that was to be overthrown was the imposition of a unity of feeling, of a single emotive theme, throughout a movement. By mid-century C. P. E. Bach had refined Mattheson’s principle of freedom for the fantasia to include the freedom from thematic emotional constraints; the task of the musician was ‘‘to excite and to calm many affections in close succession’’ and ‘‘to effect the sudden unexpected change from one affection to the other’’ so as ‘‘to master the emotions of the audience’’ (p. 16). Given the development of the fantasia towards ever greater freedom from formal constraints, it thus stands to reason, as Schleuning points out, that ‘‘the extempore performance was the essential medium of the free fantasia’’ (p. 17). If the free fantasia is defined as improvisational, notating these pieces would of necessity alter the very nature of the piece: It is to be observed from an examination of the formal structure of the free fantasia that a free, random, erratic and ‘‘capricious’’ structure such as would have been the case in the improvised, hour-long fantasias could not have been effected to the same extent in the pieces which were written down. On the contrary, the necessity to reach a conclusion after a relatively short time compelled the composer to sacrifice a part of the pleasant and continual dreamlike character of the fantasia . . . for the sake of some kind of symmetry, so that the ending could have a meaningful effect. (p. 20)

There are strong similarities between Kant’s account of genius and what is demanded of the performer of the free fantasia by Mattheson and C. P. E. Bach. Like Kant’s genius, the performer proceeds ‘‘naturally’’ and through inspiration without ‘‘distinctly known rules that determine the procedure’’ moving easily and artlessly from one musical idea or expression to the next without end goal or purpose. Just as nature exhibits purposive purposelessness, so too does the performer of the fantasia. At the keyboard she is a kind of natural phenomenon. For Kant, the problem of the composed fantasia might be understood, then, as the problem of how to retain the ‘‘hand of nature’’ (V: 309) in the writing down of the free fantasia, since the free fantasia, with its utter freedom of expression and lack of predictable outcome – indeed with its lack of outcome at all – would be rather more like a natural phenomenon than it is like a ‘‘work’’ of art. As we have already seen, Kant has a ‘‘natural’’ account of what artistic genius involves. One way to deal with the musician who sits down

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to play the fantasia might be to regard her, too, as a natural phenomenon, and Kant does say something very much along these lines: In man (and so in beasts too) there is an immense field of sensuous intuitions and sensations we are not conscious of, though we can conclude with certainty that we have them . . . If a musician plays a fantasia on the organ with ten fingers and both feet, while talking with someone nearby, in a matter of seconds a host of ideas is awakened in his soul; and in selecting each of them he must make a particular judgment about its appropriateness, since a single stroke of the finger out of keeping with the harmony would at once be perceived as discord. And yet the whole turns out so well that a musician, when he improvises freely, would often like to transcribe some of his happy improvisations, which he might otherwise never hope to bring off so well, no matter how hard he tried. [Kant: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Section 1, Bk. 1, ‘‘On the representations that we have without being conscious of them’’]

Kant’s point was that this example illustrates that there is a ‘‘wide field’’ of representations in the mind of the musician (and in all of us, for that matter), that although very much part of cognition, are nevertheless not clearly and distinctly present to consciousness. What is special in the case of the musician is that she has the requisite technical skills to express these ideas behaviorally, as it were, in her impromptu but nevertheless nonrandom harmonic choices. That these choices are the product of unconscious processes is shown by the fact that the musician could only come up with these combinations by somehow being able to shortcut the conscious, deliberative process of rule-governed composition. In fact, Kant suggests, the more diligently and attentively (i.e. self-consciously) she tried to reproduce these afterwards on paper (‘‘with real diligence and attention (‘‘mit allem Fleiß,’’)), the less likely she would be to capture the free fantasy. And yet at the same time, he characterizes this process as one involving discriminations: every stroke of the keyboard or pedal involves judgments about its appropriateness, Kant says, and one bad choice would produce discord.26 Though he knew little about music theory, Kant is obviously intrigued by the cognitive state that underlies the free fantasia. Interestingly, he does not seem particularly bothered by the fact that the ‘‘happy 26

Kant’s characterization of the cognitive state of the musician playing the free fantasia and the subsequent attempt to recapture it in notation is an early version of the dilemma or paradox that Schleuning describes. (The musician while improvising is working with musical ideas that, while not random or arbitrary, are also neither predictable nor purposive. A composition, on the other hand, must have some coherent structure (at least a beginning, middle, and end) and in this sense, a purpose. To stay true to the essence of the original this structure must be put together in a way that is neither predictable nor reproducible.)

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improvisations’’ are by his definition not really works of art. He is more concerned to characterize the nature of the process by which an artistic virtuoso creates beautiful music. The organist who improvises is a kind of phenomenon of nature, and the improvised piece is thus itself more of a natural than an artificial object whose aesthetic value can be explained along the lines of natural beauty: it results from the interplay of musical forms and the free play of the imaginations of the listeners for whom the improvisor plays. And so far as the musician is concerned, a naturalistic account of her role is also available. Just as a beautiful natural object can be explained scientifically, the causal story of the organist’s inner state can be told by reference to a kind of ‘‘regression’’ or dreamlike access to ideas that are not immediately present to consciousness. This causal story as Kant tells it, is the story of ‘‘fantasy,’’ the term Kant prefers to use instead of imagination when referring to ‘‘images produced involuntarily’’ or what he has called ‘‘unconscious ideas’’: Before an artist can present a physical form (tangibly, as it were), he must have already made it in his imagination; and this form is then called invention. If it is produced involuntarily (as in dreaming) it is called fantasy and lies outside the artist’s proper realm; but if it is governed by choice it is called composition, fabrication. (VII: 174ff.)

The ‘‘proper realm’’ of the artist for Kant is by definition a realm of purpose and technique for implementing and realizing it in a medium. The free fantasia is not of course a mere dream, but it is a case of what Kant sees as fantasizing nonetheless, because it involves loss of control – or, as he puts it, it involves the imagination ‘‘playing with us.’’ He says, ‘‘we like to play with our imagination and often do; but imagination (in its role of fantasy) plays with us just as often.’’ The difference between the fantasia performer and the daydreamer for Kant is the fact that the organist has developed great technical skills to such a level that they can be accessed kinesthetically, i.e. nearly unconsciously. There is then a sense in which the improvising musician is not a ‘‘conscious’’ artist. Rather, she is an artist who has consciously chosen a dream-like state in order to let her imagination ‘‘play’’ with her decisions about what musical ideas to express. The result is a natural, not a ‘‘composed,’’ object. Something along these lines holds for philosophical creativity, for Kant, as well. Kant has more to say about the free play of the imagination with natural objects like fire and babbling brooks, and it seems to me the reverie he describes on these occasions is precisely the reverie that C. P. E. Bach hoped to induce in himself and his listeners in the

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performance of the free fantasia. Here is a an excerpt from Kant’s Anthropology, where he speaks of the free play of imagination with ‘‘the changing, moving forms’’ of flickering flames or a babbling brook; imagination plays with ‘‘a host of ideas of a quite different kind (than those of sight) [or of hearing]’’ and ‘‘becomes lost in reverie’’: Even music can fulfill this function, provided we do not listen to it as connoisseurs; it can put a poet or a philosopher into a frame of mind such that he can snatch and even master thought relevant to his business or his fancy, which he would not have caught so luckily had he sat down alone in his room [and tried to come up with them]. (V: 173–174)

Thought is facilitated and ‘‘animated’’ by the focus of our attention on a single strand of sensation to the exclusion of other sensations, because the imagination is then conserved for the purpose of the ‘‘strenuous and persistent activity . . . of providing material for its intellectual ideas.’’ (In other words, it is conserved for the production of aesthetic ideas.) The imaginative power is able to focus on its work by fixating: zeroing in on one set of sensations that occupy, even transfix, our outward perception. Kant’s account helps make sense of how artistic creativity works, at its best: By eschewing predictability, it renders the artist (and the audiences, even the connoisseur) an amateur again, a ‘‘natural’’ as it were. The element of surprise and unruliness will pleasantly disorient the savant so that he or she can see or hear it with ‘‘fresh’’ eyes and ears, as it were, and restore the kind of originality that the amateur enjoys. Like the play of the flames in fire, works like the free fantasia level the aesthetic playing field of their audience. Before turning to Novalis, I want to go back to something Kant says about the imagination in the Critique of Judgment discussion of the powers of the mind that constitute genius that fits hand in glove with his discussion of unconscious ideation in the Anthropology: the imagination ([in its role] as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it. We use it to entertain ourselves when experience strikes us as overly routine. We may even restructure [umbilden] experience; and though in doing so we continue to follow analogical laws, yet we also follow principles which reside higher up, namely, in reason (and which are just as natural to us as those which the understanding follows in apprehending empirical nature). In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical use of the imagination); for although it is under that law that nature lends us material yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature. (V: 314)

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Let us return to Novalis, keeping in mind some of the points just made about Kant’s view of the creative process. First, Kant’s theory of creativity involves a central reference to non-rational, or sub-rational processing. This is not altogether clear in the third Critique, but when read in conjunction with the passage from his Anthropology on unconscious ideation and the free fantasia, it seems obvious that this is what he has in mind when he speaks of the creative power of imagination to create another nature out of the one that is actually given, doing so to relieve boredom ‘‘when experience strikes us as overly routine.’’ Second, although it occurs within the context of his characterization of genius, in this particular passage he refers to everyone’s power of imagination ‘‘when experience strikes us as overly routine.’’ This suggests that he is thinking of ordinary daydreaming or reverie, wherein it is possible for ‘‘us’’ (humans, presumably) to creatively ‘‘process’’ the materials of nature into something ‘‘that surpasses nature’’ and thereby feel our freedom from the ‘‘empirical use of the imagination.’’ In other words, Kant intimates here that genius is a capacity common to all, the ability to produce aesthetic ideas – ‘‘inner intuitions to which no concept can be completely adequate.’’ But he then goes on, somewhat confusingly, to say that genius is the special capacity to find ideas that prompt so much thought that they expand a concept ‘‘in an unlimited way’’ (V: 315).27 Kant leaves unclear the relationship between ordinary consciousness and the creative process of genius, perhaps because, for him the two are not so easily separated in the first place. And, finally, we should notice that in this section (V: 314) Kant makes the rather surprising claim that in ‘‘productive’’ imaginative reflection, we are capable of surpassing nature. For Kant, to surpass (u¨bertreffen) nature, of course, suggests entering the realm of the supersensible, or the moral, not in any metaphysical sense, but in the sense of entering a realm of what ought to be as opposed to what is. I have already argued that this little paragraph gestures towards a view that Kant himself didn’t adopt, but perhaps should have. It opens the possibility that morality is directly linked to aesthetic reflection insofar as moral law requires us to project the possibility of creating the highest good – happiness commensurate 27

And then in concluding he says:

Hence genius actually consists in the happy relation . . . allowing us, first, to discover ideas for a given concept, and second, to hit upon a way of expressing these ideas that enables us to communicate to others . . . the mental attunement that those ideas produce. (V: 317) suggesting that it is the ability to communicate that makes for genius, since originality alone can amount to ‘‘original nonsense.’’

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with virtue on earth. Kant didn’t follow through to say that aesthetic creativity is needed for just this sort of projection, but Novalis, along with other early Romantics, did. In a sense, Novalis’ entire philosophical and poetic project is intended to both embody and explain the creative process. Given his view that ‘‘Without geniality, none of us would exist at all. Genius is necessary for everything,’’ it is no wonder. Genius for Novalis, as we saw, is ‘‘the ability to treat imagined objects as real,’’ and thought of in this way, his claim that it is ‘‘necessary for everything’’ is not all that exaggerated. Does Kant also subscribe to this notion of ‘‘ordinary’’ genius? I think in his discussion of the primordial cognition that is involved in improvisational art – that is, in art that is closest to nature and therefore genuinely original – he came close to expounding the ubiquity of genius. But he placed restrictions on the notion in the third Critique account that reserves the term ‘‘genius’’ to refer only to the ability to successfully communicate primordial or ‘‘unconscious’’ ideas. In other words, although he came very close to an understanding of creativity as a necessary part of human cognitive functioning, he ended up discussing only what Novalis calls the ‘‘genius of genius.’’ It is not entirely clear why. Perhaps he believed that the extraordinary power of imagination of the ‘‘genius of genius’’ was so much further developed than the ordinary person’s that they become qualitatively different – belonging to a class by themselves. Or perhaps he was afraid to defend the virtues of daydreaming. Novalis had no such worries. He recognizes the ordinariness of genius, or the genius of the ordinary, we might say. Revelations, he said, are natural, and ‘‘cannot be forced.’’28 Surely there is truth in this position: It is this capacity for momentary, everyday transcendence – the ability to daydream – that develops our powers. Our propensity for ordinary, if not always productive, creativity is what allows us to transpose ourselves outside ourselves, and meet each other, as Novalis says, ‘‘there, where the inner world and the outer world touch.’’ conclusion Kant, like Novalis, firmly believed that longing and striving for the absolute, the unconditioned, was an essential characteristic of human 28

‘‘One must never, like a phantast, seek the undetermined – a child of fantasy – an ideal. One proceeds from determinate task to determinate task. An unknown lover of course has a magical charm. Striving for the unknown, the undetermined, is extremely dangerous and disadvantageous. Revelations cannot be forced’’ (3: 601, #291, Observations on the Physical).

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reason that neither could nor should be entirely suppressed. Both also agreed that no knowledge of the absolute could ever be attained, and that claims to have done so were necessarily in error. The difference between Kant and Novalis was thus not a difference over the value of unattainable rational ideals or the need to avoid transcendent delusions. Throughout this book I have argued that Kant and Novalis were closer philosophically than is canonically assumed. And assuming Novalis to be a central spokesman for the early German Romantics, Kant is in many ways closer to this movement than to the Idealism with which he is so often associated. But the two are certainly not identical. What really separates Kant from Novalis and the early German Romantic movement, I believe, is his relatively sanguine acceptance of the limitations of human reason and hence of philosophy. Novalis took this resignation to be a kind of ‘‘scholasticism’’ – a ‘‘one-sided’’ approach that assigned philosophy to the domain of reason alone. Novalis’ innovation, and that of his cohort in Jena, was to redefine philosophy itself as an ‘‘unending, free activity’’ that at its limits becomes an aesthetic, creative endeavor, driven by an expanded power of imagination first described by Kant in the third Critique.

Bibliography

References to Kant’s work in this book (except references to the Critique of Pure Reason, which following long practice are to the pagination of the original German editions) are to Kants Gesammelte Schriften edited by the Ko¨nigliche Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, the ‘‘Academie edition,’’ by volume and page number. English translations of most of these exist in a standard format in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. The Akademie pagination is provided in all of these. Except where otherwise noted, references to Novalis’ works are to Novalis Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, eds. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1965). References are to volume, page, and, when applicable, to paragraph number of that edition. The second and third volumes, edited by Richard Samuel together with HansJoachim Ma¨hl and Gerhard Schulz, contain Novalis’ philosophical writings, published in 1981 and 1983, respectively. English editions now available include the Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: The Universal Brouillon, trans. David Wood (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007); Novalis: Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Novalis: Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mahoney Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

kant works cited (followed by akademie edition number) Kritik der praktischen Vernunft/Critique of Practical Reason (V) (also ‘‘Second Critique’’); Kritik der reinen Vernunft/Critique of Pure Reason (also ‘‘First Critique’’) (A & B editions); Kritik der Urteilskraft/Critique of Judgment (V) (also ‘‘Third Critique’’); Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht/Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (VII); Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufkla¨rung?/An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (XIII); Bemerkungen zu den Beobachtungen u¨ber das Gefu¨hl des Scho¨nen und Erhabenen/Remarks on the Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime (XX); Briefwechsel/Correspondence (XII); Erste Einleitung in der Kritik der Urteilskraft/First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (XX); Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten/Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (also Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals) (IV); 161

162

Bibliography

Handschriftlicher Nachlass/Reflections (Anthropology) (XV); Streit der Fakulta¨ten/ Conflict of the Faculties (VII); Tra¨ume eines Geistersehers, erla¨utert durch Tra¨ume der Metaphysik/Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by the Dreams of Metaphysics (II); Vorlesungen u¨ber Anthropologie/Lectures on Anthropology (XXV).

other books and articles Abrams, Meyer H., The Mirror and the Lamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Allison, Henry E., Kant’s Theory of Freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Kant’s Theory of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ameriks, Karl, The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ‘‘The Critique of Metaphysics: Kant and Traditional Ontology,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ‘‘Kant, Fichte, and the Radical Primacy of the Practical,’’ in Kant and the Fate of Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ‘‘On Paul Guyer’s Kant and the Experience of Freedom,’’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60(2) (1995). Arendt, Hannah, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Auxter, Thomas, Kant’s Moral Teleology. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982. Baier, Kurt, ‘‘Radical Virtue Ethics,’’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988), pp. 126–135. Bauemler, Alfred, Das Irrationalita¨tsproblem im a¨sthetischen Denken des 18. Jahrhunderts. Halle, 1923; republished Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967. Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft. Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1923. Baumgarten, Alexander G., Aesthetica. Hildesheim, 1961. Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus. Halle, 1735, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and ed. William B. Holther as Reflections on Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Beck, Lewis W., Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ed., Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969.

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Essays on Kant and Hume. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. ‘‘Kant and the Right of Revolution,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 32, 1971 Kant on History. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. ‘‘What have we learned from Kant?,’’ in Self and Nature in Kant’s philosophy, ed. Allen W. Wood. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Behler, Ernst, German Romantic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ‘‘Review of Manfred Frank’s Einfu¨hrung in die Fru¨hromantische A¨sthetik, Athena¨um’’ 3, Paderborn: F. Schohningh 1993 Beiser, Frederick C., The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. ‘‘Kant’s Intellectual Development: 1746–1781,’’ chapter I of The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Bernstein, Jay, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bodmer, J. J. and J. J. Breitinger, Von dem Einfluss und Gebrauche der Einbildungs-Krafft; Zur Ausbesserung des Geschmackes; Genaue Untersuchung Aller Arten Beschreibungen, Worinne die ausserlesenste Stellen der beru¨hmtesten Poeten dieser Zeit mit gru¨ndtlicher Freyheit beurtheilt werden. Frankfurt 1727. Bo¨hme, Hartmut and Bo¨hme, Gernot, Das Andere der Vernunft: Zur Entwicklung von Rationalita¨tsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Bowie, Andrew, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1997. Breazeale, Daniel, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Buchwald, Reinhard, Schiller. Wiesbaden, 1954. Cassirer, Ernst, ‘‘Ho¨lderlin und der deutsche Idealismus,’’ in Ho¨lderlin: Beitra¨ge zu seinem Versta¨ndnis in unserm Jahrhundert, Alfred Kelletat, ed. Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1961. Constantine, David, Ho¨lderlin. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. Crawford, Donald, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974. Eldridge, Richard, The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, Early Philosophical Writings, Daniel Breazeale, trans. and ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

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Science of Knowledge, Peter Heath and John Lachs, ed. and trans. New York: Meredith, 1970. Einfu¨hrung in die Fru¨hromantische A¨sthetik: Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989, English trans. Elizabeth Milla´n-Zaibert, The Foundations of Early German Romanticism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004. Fricke, Christel, Kants Theorie des reinen Geschmacksurteils. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990. Frierson, Patrick R., Freedom and Anthropology in Kant’s Moral Philosophy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Ginsborg, Hannah, The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition. New York: Garland Press, 1990. Gottsched, J. C., Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst: Ausgewa¨hlte Werke, eds. Joachim Birke and Birgitte Birke. New York, 1973. Gregor, Mary J., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974. Grenberg, Jeanine, Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption and Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Guyer, Paul, ‘‘Feeling and Freedom: Kant on Aesthetics and Morality,’’ in Kant and the Experience of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Harris, H. S., Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Haym, Rudolf, Die Romantische Schule. Berlin: Gaertner, 1870. Heidegger, Martin, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1962. Helfer, Martha, The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of Darstellung in German Critical Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Henrich, Dieter, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. ‘‘Die Einheit der Subjektivita¨t,’’ Philosophische Rundschau 3 (1955), ‘‘On the Unity of Subjectivity,’’ trans. G. Zo¨ller, in The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Richard Velkley, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. ‘‘Fichte’s Original Insight’’ (in Contemporary German Philosophy, ed. Darrell E. Christensen et al. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982, pp. 15–53).

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Index

Abrams, M. H. 129, 149 absolute, the (the unconditional) 140, 148 tendency to seek 119 42, 159 see also self-knowledge aesthetic ideas 16, 44, 53, 104, 105 7, 108, 109, 120, 152 aesthetic reflection see reflection aesthetics German 1 3, 113, 152 German Enlightenment 1, 1 6, 18, 38 45 Kant’s see Kant’s aesthetic theory and rationalism in (Germany) 1, 2 3, 40, 41, 42 rules for 40 1, 152 3, 155, 157 alienation 83, 84 6, 87 9, 89 94, 116, 139 Allison, Henry 3, 8, 61, 94, 151, 152 Ameriks, Karl 7, 13, 19, 73, 75, 81 4, 87, 90, 111 Arendt, Hannah 8 art 44, 53, 56, 134, 151 and nature 56, 67 9, 151, 154, 156 as superseding philosophy (Novalis) autonomy, rational 74, 77, 80, 85 Auxter, Thomas 8

Bodmer and Breitinger 1, 14, 40 Bo¨hme, Gernot and Hartmut 16, 97 104, 98, 115, 120 Bowie, Andrew 5, 7, 22, 28 Brandt, Reinhard 8 Burke, Edmond 66

Bach, C. P. E. 154, 156 Bach, Johann Sebastian 156 Baier, Kurt 70 Bauemler, Alfred 1, 2, 7 Baumgarten, Alexander G. 2, 14, 38 40 beauty, the beautiful 15, 17 19, 35, 39, 44 ‘‘doctrine of’’ see Ho¨lderlin ideal of 16, 70 1, 107, 108, 116, 120 judgments of 15 see judgments of taste natural (of nature) 64 as symbol of morality 53, 107 Beck, Lewis White 21, 38 58, 47, 51, 57 Behler, Ernst 19, 22, 24 Beiser, Frederick 7, 31, 47, 56, 113 15, 120 Bernstein, Jay 7

Darstellung 4 daydreaming 156, 158, 159 disinterest/disinterested pleasure 4, 15, 24, 45, 58 9, 60 71, 93 4, 116 in metaphysical speculation 115, 119

Cassirer, Ernst 136 common sense/sensus communis 44 common aesthetic sense/sensus communis aestheticus 44 communicability, universal 44, 53, 60 community 10, 19, 35 consciousness primary process accounts 153 8 see also unconscious ideas/ideation 125, 128 self-consciousness 125 38, 145 see also self-knowledge unconscious ideas/ideation 153 8 contemplation see reflection creativity 19, 92 see also imagination Crusius, Christian August 95

Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism 120, 121 Eldridge, Richard 87 8, 124 elitism (moral, philosophical) 87, 112, 115 embodiment 70 1, 92, 117 end(s), see purpose enlightenment, German 1, 18, 21, 38, 114 enthusiasm/enthusiast 13, 16, 55, 99, 108 13, 136, 119 42

168

Index Fantast see enthusiasm fantasy 156, 157 see also imagination feelings 50, 53, 61, 80, 83, 86, 129 in art 41, 135 6 for beautiful nature 65, 66 7 for belonging in nature/nature’s purposiveness 93 as central to self-knowledge (Novalis) 144, 145 6 faculty of 76 in Ho¨lderlin 135 6 and imagination 44, 53 as an intuition 129 metaphysical 117 moral 63 4, 65, 66 7, 83 in Novalis, defined 142 universal communicability of 76, 88 feminist critiques of Kant 12 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 13 17, 20, 33, 35, 96, 122 8, 140, 141, 145, 150 Frank, Manfred 7, 122, 127 8, 129 30 Frederick the Great 56, 57 free fantasia 17, 153 7 freedom of imagination see imagination moral/practical 45, 123 Fricke, Christel 8 Frierson, Patrick 8 genius 13 17, 53 Kant’s view of 13, 69, 104, 109, 112 13, 124, 151, 154 Lessing’s view of 41 2, 152 Novalis’ view of 150 see also Novalis Ginsborg, Hannah 8 Gottsched, J. C. 1, 18 Grenberg, Jeanine 112 Guyer, Paul 7, 67, 89, 94, 108 Hardenberg, Friedrich von 13 see also Novalis Haym, Rudolf 122 Hegel, G. W. F. 96, 120, 121 Heidegger, Martin 16, 95 7, 120, 124 Helfer, Martha 4 Hemsterhuis, Frans 123, 143, 145 Henrich, Dieter 2, 3, 7, 81, 95 8, 115, 123, 124, 125, 127, 133, 134 Herder, Johann Gottfried 114 highest good/summum bonum 9, 38, 64, 66 7, 89, 107, 114

169

reason’s command to bring about 46 59, 64, 89, 117 supreme good (distinguished from highest good) 46 Ho¨lderlin 7, 16 17, 114, 121, 122 38, 141 doctrine of beauty 134 Hyperion 127, 134 Homer 112 hope, rational 9, 14, 46, 92, 106 8, 116, 120, 124 feeling of 92, 93 Huch, Ricarda 122 Idealism, German 19, 33 6, 97, 122, 143 Kant as idealist 33 6 imagination, Kant’s theory of 1 6, 14 association with feeling and embodiment 97, 120 as common root of sensibility and understanding 95 8 creative 19, 52, 92, 105, 109, 120, 151 60 as dangerous 13, 112, 120 distinguished from fantasy (involuntary invention) 156 free play of imagination and understanding 2, 29, 44, 58 9 freedom of (imaginative freedom) 35, 37, 38 59, 103 as inscrutable 13, 25, 29, 97, 149 as mediating faculty 4, 15 16, 29, 92 and metaphysics 13, 31 2 productive 53, 100, 158 reproductive 99 role in cognition 2, 3, 99 100, 105, 150, 151 schema/schemata/schematism 53 5 as subordinate 13, 16, 95 as transformative/reforming power/visionary 13, 14 15, 57, 104, 105 7, 129, 148 9 improvisation 154 interest 15, 116 of aesthetic reflective judgments (judgments of taste, judgments of beauty) 44, 60 71, 63 direct 61, 63, 64 5, 68, 71, 75 93 doctrine of 60 2 empirical 62 3, 116 indirect 61, 93 intellectual 62, 63 5, 116 moral 60, 61, 63 4, in nature 64, 76 93 of universal communicability 60 intuition 6 as feeling (Novalis) 129, 147 inner, outer perception (nonspatial, spatial) 143, 147

170

Index

intuition (cont.) original/intellectual 6, 26, 112, 126, 127, 128 30, 133, 141, 144, 147 moral 120 Jacobi 55 Jena Circle see romanticism judgments of taste see taste Kant anthropology 8 as Copernicus 140 and metaphysics 31 2, 47, 50, 82, 99, 113 19, 140 ‘‘theodicy of reason’’ 32 Kant’s aesthetic theory 1 4, 7, 17 19 and environmentalism 67 9 influence on romanticism see romanticism and metaphysics 16 as ‘‘missing link’’ in German eighteenthcentury theory 38 Kant’s romanticism 23 6 see also romanticism Kleist, Heinrich von 139 40, 147 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 136 Korsgaard, Christine 77, 90 Ku¨hn, Manfred 57 Lacou-Labarthe, Philippe and Nancy, Jean-Luc 5, 6, 35 6 Larmore, Charles 4, 124, 129 Laursen, John Christian 57 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 39, 114, 140 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 14, 18, 38, 40 2, 58, 113, 152 see also genius Longueness, Beatrice 3 Louden, Robert B. 8, 21 love 66 for nature 66 7, 117 pathological 66, 69 practical 66, 69 reflective 66, 69, 71, 117 Ma¨hl, Hans-Joachim 143 Makkreel, Rudolf 11, 24, 39, 44, 102, 105 6 Martindale, Colin 153 Mattheson, Johannes 153 Mendelssohn, Moses 55 metaphysics see Kant and metaphysics see Novalis and metaphysics Milla´n-Zaibert, Elizabeth 32 Munzel, Felicitas 11, 29, 49 50, 65, 108 mysticism of practical reason 108 10 see also enthusiasm

nature and freedom 123 see also nature and reason and reason, unity of 83, 84 6, 88 9, 123 see also alienation Neiman, Susan 15 16, 47 8, 57, 92, 113 Newton, Sir Isaac 112 Niethammer, Friedrich 124, 128, 133 Novalis 7, 13 14, 16 17, 20, 58 9, 114, 122 38, 140 60 critique of Kant 145, 146 9, 160 Fichte Studies 127, 128 31, 141, 148 genius 16 17, 150, 151, 152, 159 Heinrich von Ofterdingen 131 2 Kant Studies 143 logarythmizing 22, 24 6 and metaphysics 142 3, 146 philosophy (distinguished from philosophizing) 27 philosophizing 27 potentializing (Potenzierung) 131, 146 romanticizing 14, 21, 22 3, 146 suicide 145n novel, the (der Roman) 31, 136 7 O’Neill, Onora 12, 73 7, 76 93, 90 philosophy distinguished from philosophizing (Novalis) 27 for Fichte 126 for Novalis 130 1, 145, 148 philosophical creativity (Kant) 148 as ‘‘poetic’’ 131, 140 1, 145 systematic 27 Plato 109, 117, 119, 133 pleasure 24, 29, 80 1, 88 see also disinterest, interest Pluhar, Werner 28 postulates of practical reason 9, 10, 15, 35, 46 52, 82, 89 90, 91, 115, 116, 119 practical reason 25, 72 94 command to implement highest good see highest good/summum bonum metaphysical 15 methodological 15, 73, 75 primacy of 12, 15 16, 33, 35, 72 94 progress, moral and social 9, 10, 32, 38, 42, 48, 57, 106 8, 116, 120 imagination 117 19 purpose/purposiveness final 78 80, 84, 125 principle of 79 80, 81, 86, 123, 155

Index purposiveness of nature 117 purposiveness without purpose 154 Rationalism 110, 116, 140 see also aesthetics Rawls, John 72, 73 reason fact of 25, 123 practical see practical reason problem of reason 32, 45 6 unity of see unity of reason Reath, Andrews 107 reflection, reflective judgment 11, 23, 81, 101 2 aesthetic; aesthetic reflective judgment 15 16, 33, 43 4, 86, 107, 116 17 as mirroring (Novalis) 129 30 as source of value 78 see principle of purposiveness technic/technique 102 regulative principle(s) 6, 23, 34, 123, 142, 147 Reinhold, Karl 13, 123, 125 Riley, Patrick 8 romanticism, German 1, 98, 121, 122, 140 as irrationalist 1, 14, 16 19, 20, 23, 140, 147, 150 Jena Circle (early German romanticism) 13, 20, 58 9, 122, 140 1, 160 Kant’s influence on 4 7, 16 19, 20 36 late romanticism (Heidelberg School) 141 as naturalizing 22 3, 25 romantic conception of mind 129 Romanticizing 14, 22 3, 129 30, 131 see also Novalis Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14, 32 6, 109 117 influence on Kant 32 3, 56, 99, 113 14, 115 ‘‘Rousseauistic’’ revolution 87 8, 91 revolution 56 7 French Revolution 57, 108 10 ‘‘Rousseaustic’’ see Rousseau Santner, Eric 136 Sassen, Brigitte 152 Schelling, F. W. J. 20, 96, 121, 134 schema/schemata/schematism see imagination Schiller, Friedrich 7, 13, 14, 38, 58 9, 128 34 Schlegel, Friedrich 7, 20, 24, 114 Schleuning, Peter 153, 155 Schmidt, James 12, 20, 38, 55 Schott, Robin May 12, 98 Schulze, G. E. 125 Schwa¨rmerei see enthusiasm self-deception 112 self-knowledge 124

171

absolute self (knowledge) 127, 129, 130, 141, 143 in Fichte 125 7 self-positing (Tathandlung, ‘‘fact-act’’) 126, 142, 144, 145 see also Fichte; intellectual intuition three principles of 126 7 in Ho¨lderlin 134 in Kant 124 5, 142 in Novalis 128 34, 141, 142, 144 the seat (location) of the soul (Sitz der Seele) 143 5, 147 self as regulative concept 142 see also consciousness Seyhan, Azade 7 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) 1, 123 Silber, John R. 51 sociability 62 So¨mmerring, Samuel Thomas 143 4 Spinoza, Benedict de 134 spirit see genius Stark, Werner 8, 109 sublime, the 17, 24, 111, 132 supersensible, the 14, 28 30, 96, 149, 158 Swedenborg, Emanuel 110 11 taste 2, 60, 103 4, 106 as discipline 103 distinguished from genius (spirit) 152 pure judgments of taste 15, 60, 116 autonomy 11 teleology/teleological judgment 8, 10, 98 see also purpose Tugendhat, Ernst 125 unconscious ideas/ideation 25 unity of reason 15, 33, 76, 86 see also unity of the subject unity of the subject/subjectivity 5, 14, 35 6, 38 58, 63, 95, 96 119, 123, 124 38, 130 contingency of 96, 133 distinguished from unity of self and nature 123 regress of subjects 126 ‘‘weakening of the subject’’ 6 Vereinigungsphilosophie 123, 133 unsocial sociability 9, 118 van der Linden, Harry 107 Velkley, Richard 15 16, 32 6, 47, 57, 84 7, 115 von Molna´r, Geza 142

172 Wieland, Christoph Martin 112, 114 Wilson, Holly 8 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 41 Wolff, Christian 2, 39, 95, 114, 140 59 Wood, Allen 8, 32, 35, 46, 52, 57

Index Wood, David 7 Yovel, Yirmiyahu 8, 47, 51 2, 55, 90 Zammito, John 7, 8