Kant and Literary Studies (Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy) 1316513025, 9781316513026

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Contributors
Introduction
Part I - Kant on Literature
Chapter 1 - “Differing Only in Degree”: Judging and Making in Kant and Wordsworth
Chapter 2 - On Power in an Extra-secular Sense: Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime
Chapter 3 - Kant and the Problem of Tragedy: from Part I - Kant on Literature
Part II - Kant, Literary Theory, and the Critical Formation of the “Human” Disciplines
Chapter 4 - “A New Light Broke upon the First Person …”: Changes in the “Way of Thinking” and the Process of Narration in Kant and Kleist
Chapter 5 - Modern Being in the World: Kant’s Philosophical Anthropology and Wordsworth’s Poetry
Chapter 6 - Voice Enjoined: Kant and Poetic Freedom
Chapter 7 - Narrative Discontinuity: Kant’s History of Religion(s)
Part III - Kant and Literature
Chapter 8 - Kleist Reading Schiller after Kant: The Fate of “Beautiful Souls”
Chapter 9 - “Critique”: Concept, Project, Literary Form
Chapter 10 - “The Shapes My Brain Holds”: Kantian Spontaneity and Woolf’s The Waves
Chapter 11 - The Poetics of a Transcendental Deduction: The Self-Erasing “I” in Kant, Tawada, and Benveniste
Chapter 12 - Ethically Speaking, or “Freedom” in Context: Poetics, Critical Economy, and Kant’s Invention of the “Category” of the “Possible”
Index

Citation preview

KANT AND LITERARY STUDIES

With original contributions from a wide range of scholars of literature and philosophy alike, Kant and Literary Studies is the first volume devoted to examining the premises and principles of Kant’s explicitly interdisciplinary philosophy in its specific relation to the defining features, means, and aims of literature. Its central explorations of the relations between experience and representation, feeling and judgment, thought and poetics, and language and freedom make the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant one of the most relevant to the understanding of literature. Organizing its analyses of Kant’s relationship to literature along intersecting lines, the three parts of the book focus, first, on the relation of central literary problems and genres to the theoretical underpinnings of Kant’s thought; second, on the epistemological, narrative, and historiographic dimensions of Kant’s critical conceptions; and third, on the formative relation of his Critique to specific literary works and of critical discourse to ethics. Claudia Brodsky  studied comparative literature at Harvard and Yale, where she taught German and comparative literature before joining the Comparative Literature Department at Princeton. From her early pathbreaking study of Kant and fiction, The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge (1987) to The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action (2021), she has pioneered the investigation of Kant’s importance to our critical understanding of literature.

C a mbr idge Studies in Liter atur e a nd Philosoph y Editor Anthony J. Cascardi, University of California, Berkeley Tracing the impact of philosophy on literature in both content and form, this series shows how a philosopher’s thinking filtered thematically and substantively into literature, as well as into the generic evolution of creative writing. Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy also provides a summation of the state of twenty-first-century knowledge on what impact a philosopher or theme has had on literature. BOOKS IN THIS SERIES: Robert Chodat and John Gibson Wittgenstein and Literary Studies Andrew Benjamin Heidegger and Literary Studies Claudia Brodsky Kant and Literary Studies FORTHCOMING BOOKS IN THIS SERIES: Kate Stanley and Kirsten Case William James and Literary Studies

KANT AND LITERARY STUDIES Edited by CLAUDIA BRODSKY Princeton University

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316513026 DOI: 10.1017/9781009071611 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2025 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. When citing this work, please include a reference to the DOI 10.1017/9781009071611 First published 2025 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brodsky, Claudia, 1955– editor. Title: Kant and literary studies / edited by Claudia Brodsky. Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2025. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2024011966 | ISBN 9781316513026 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009071611 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. | Literature – Philosophy. Classification: LCC B2798 .K22268 2025 | DDC 193–dc23/eng/20240530 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024011966 ISBN 978-1-316-51302-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Contributors

page vii

Introduction

1

Claudia Brodsky

Part I  Kant on Literature 1 “Differing Only in Degree”: Judging and Making in Kant and Wordsworth 13 Paresh Chandra

2 On Power in an Extra-secular Sense: Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime

43

3 Kant and the Problem of Tragedy

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David Martyn Robert Pippin

Part II Kant, Literary Theory, and the Critical Formation of the “Human” Disciplines 4 “A New Light Broke upon the First Person …”: Changes in the “Way of Thinking” and the Process of Narration in Kant and Kleist Rüdiger Campe

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5 Modern Being in the World: Kant’s Philosophical Anthropology and Wordsworth’s Poetry

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6 Voice Enjoined: Kant and Poetic Freedom

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Richard Eldridge

Gabriela Basterra

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vi Contents 7 Narrative Discontinuity: Kant’s History of Religion(s) Karen Feldman

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Part III  Kant and Literature 8 Kleist Reading Schiller after Kant: The Fate of “Beautiful Souls”

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9 “Critique”: Concept, Project, Literary Form

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Tim Mehigan

Willi Goetschel

10 “The Shapes My Brain Holds”: Kantian Spontaneity and Woolf’s The Waves 244 Maya Kronfeld

11 The Poetics of a Transcendental Deduction: The Self-Erasing “I” in Kant, Tawada, and Benveniste

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12 Ethically Speaking, or “Freedom” in Context: Poetics, Critical Economy, and Kant’s Invention of the “Category” of the “Possible”

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John Kim

Claudia Brodsky

Index 329

Contributors

G a br iel a Ba ster r a  is Professor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Professor and Chair of the Spanish Department of New York University, where she has served as Director of the NYU Center for the Humanities, and former Program Director, International College of Philosophy, Paris (2004–10). Gabriela Basterra is the author of Seductions of Fate: Tragic Subjectivity, Ethics, Politics (2004) and The Subject of Freedom: Kant, Levinas (2015), the coeditor of Quel sujet du politique? (2010), and the author of over a dozen articles concentrating especially on the intersection of ethics and literature, including “Unconditioned Subjectivity: Immanent Synthesis in Kant’s Third Antinomy,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 29.3 (2015); “Subjectivity at the Limit: Velázquez, Kant, Levinas,” diacritics 40.4 (2012), 46–70; “Activité au-delà de toute activité (autour de Levinas),” in Emmanuel Levinas: Les territoires de la pensée, ed. Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Bruno Clément (2007); and “Ethics, Perhaps,” in Reading Otherwise: The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism, ed. Erin Graff Zivin (2007). Cl audi a Brodsk y  is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, Senior Fellow of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (2009), Humboldt Fellow (1996–97, 2000–1), and Program Director, International College of Philosophy, Paris (1995–2005). She is the author of The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge (1987); Lines of Thought: Discourse, Architectonics and the Origin of Modern Philosophy (1996); In the Place of Language. Literature and the Architecture of the Referent (2009); Words’ Worth: What the Poet Does (2020);The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action (2021); and over sixty articles and book contributions on seventeenth- through twentieth-century German, French, English, and American literature, philosophy, and literary and aesthetic theory. She is the editor of Why Philosophy (PMLA special topic, 2016) and Kant vii

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and Literary Studies (2023) and the coeditor, with Toni Morrison, of Birth of a Nation’hood (1997) and, with E. LaBrada, of Inventing Agency: Essays in the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Subject (2016). Rüdiger C a mpe is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yale University, the author of Affekt und Ausdruck: Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (1990); The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal and Kleist (2012); Die Institution im Roman: Robert Musil (2020); and coauthor with A. Haverkamp and C. Menke of Baumgarten-Studien: Zur Genealogie der Ästhetik (2014). He is the editor of a dozen volumes of essays, including the special issue of Telos on Hans Blumenberg (2012), the coeditor, with J. Weber, of Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought (2014), and the coeditor, with H. Adler, of a special issue of Germanic Review: For a New Enlightenment/Aufklärung (2020). Pa r esh Ch a ndr a is Assistant Professor of English at Williams College, a former Dodds Fellow in Comparative Literature at Princeton, and a lecturer in English at the University of Delhi. He works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature from South Asia, Western Europe, and the Persianate Middle East and is the author of several articles on poetry and poetics in relation to questions of form and organization in literature and politics, critical and postcolonial theory, and histories of political struggle and critique. He also cowrote and coedited the Hindi documentary On the Threshold: Class Struggle in Delhi (Dahlīz par: dilli mein varg-sangharsh) in 2014. His current book project uses the concept of “occasion” as a starting point to model a comparative poetics focused on the relation between poetics and critique in Mirza Ghalib (Urdu, Persian), William Wordsworth (English), and Stephane Mallarmé (French). R ich a r d Eldr idge is Professor of Philosophy, emeritus, at Swarthmore College. He has authored and edited a dozen books and several scores of articles on philosophy, literature, and art over the course of the past fifty years, including On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism and Self-Understanding (1989); Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination (ed.) (1996); The Persistence of Romanticism (1997); An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (2003); Oxford Handbook of Literature and Philosophy (ed.) (2009); Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, Freedom, and the Human Subject (2016); and, most recently, Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2019).



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K a r en Feldm a n  is Professor of German and Chair of the German Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and was a Fulbright Fellow (1997–98) and Humboldt Fellow (2010–11). She is the author of Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger (2006); Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality (2019); “Marxism and the Frankfurt School: Rhetoric as Critique,” in Rhetorik und Philosophie, ed. Andreas Hetzel and Gerald Posselt (2015); “Formal, Figural, and Historical: On the Limits of Argumentativity,” PMLA 131.2 (2016): 415–22; “‘L’idée vient en parlant’: Kleist and Gadamer on Wheels,” Qui Parle 26.2 (2017): 330–33; and several other articles on Arendt, Benjamin, de Man, and Heidegger, among other theorists examining the relation between philosophy and literary and disciplinary conception. She is the coeditor of Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (1998) and Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion (2018). W illi Goetschel  is Professor of German, Philosophy, and Jewish Thought at the University of Toronto and the 2020 recipient of the Moses Mendelssohn Award of the City of Dessau. He is the current President of the North American Heine Society, President and Founder of the Foundation Stiftung Dialogik, and the editor of Germanic Review and Collected Works of Hermann Levin Goldschmidt. He is the author of Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (1994); Spinoza’s Modernity: Lessing, Mendelssohn, Heine (2004); The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (2012); Heine and Critical Theory (2019); and the editor of Gyatri Spivak’s Imperatives for Reimagining the Planet (1999) and Germanistik in the USA, Weimarer Beiträge (1993).; In addition, he is the author of nearly 100 articles on seventeenth-century through contemporary philosophy, the Enlightenment through twentieth-century German-language literature, and the history and practice of Jewish thought. John K im is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, German and Japanese at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of several previous articles on Kant and Tawada published in Text + Kritik, German Quarterly, Germanic Review, Positions: East Asia, Cultures, and Critique, and in Yoko Tawada: Poetik der Transformationen: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk (2010), ed. C. Ivanovic and Tales That Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in 20th- and 21st-Century German Literature and Culture (2022), ed. Y. Yildiz and B. Brandt. He is the coeditor, with R. Calichman, of The Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki

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List of Contributors Sakai (2010), and is currently at work on two forthcoming projects: Ethnic Irony: Autobiographies of the Living Dead, a monograph on conceptions of the “I” in Tawada, Kant, Hegel, Emile Benveniste, and Paul de Man; and an archival reconstruction of the trilingual “Zürich Symposium on Literary Interpretation,” completed but never published by Paul de Man, that had been slated to comprise the third volume of international papers arising from the landmark “Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” conference held at Johns Hopkins University in 1966.

M aya K ronfeld is Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University and a former Cotsen Fellow in Humanistic Studies and Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the Princeton Society of Fellows. She is currently completing Spontaneous Form: Consciousness and Philosophical Fiction, an investigation of consciousness in view of how modernist literary and jazz forms navigate between Humean empiricist and Kantian critical approaches to the mind. Her published articles have appeared in The Review of English Studies, Radical Philosophy, and Jazz & Culture; her publications include contributions to the following volumes: Philosophy in Literature (2023), The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy and Literature (2023), and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory (2023). Dav id M a rt y n is Professor of German and Russian Studies at Macalaster College. He is the author of Sublime Failures: The Ethics of Kant and Sade (2003) and a critical edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem. His recent articles include a critical essay for the new Norton Anthologies edition of Goethe’s Werther; a survey of the history of the “sublime” for the forthcoming Keywords in German Aesthetics; and an article on Jewish secularization for a recent volume on Moses Mendelssohn in the Text + Kritik series. He is currently completing Literatur als Zweitsprache von Leibniz bis Tawada: Ansätze zu einer Archeologie der Sprachigkeit. T im Mehig a n  is Professor of German and Deputy Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland and Fellow (since 2003) of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is a former president of the German Studies Association of Australia (2003–7), Humboldt Fellow (1994–95), prize winner and Visiting Professor at the University of Bonn (2013–22), and Fulbright Senior Scholar and research Fellow at the University of Chicago Committee for Social Thought (2017–18). He is the author



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of Text as Contract: The Nature and Function of Narrative Discourse in the Erzählungen of Heinrich von Kleist (1988); Robert Musil (2001); The Critical Response to Musil’s “Man Without Qualities” (2003); Heinrich von Kleist. Writing after Kant (2011); and sixty articles and book chapters on Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Coetze, the Enlightenment, the idea of Europe, and German Unification, as well as the editor or coeditor of nearly a dozen volumes on Kleist, Coetze, and German studies, literary history, and aesthetics of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Robert Pippin  is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, an elected member (2009) of the American Philosophical Society and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2016), and a former holder of the Spinoza Chair in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam (2009). He has written or served as the editor of over a dozen books, including Kant’s Theory of Form (1982); Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (1989); Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (1991); Idealism as Modernism; Hegelian Variations (1997); Henry James and Modern Moral Life (2000); Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (2008); After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictoral Modernism (2013); Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form (2020); and, most recently, Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts (2021); as well as scores of articles on continental philosophy and the arts.

Introduction Claudia Brodsky

Perhaps the most useful way to introduce a volume of original essays devoted to the relation of Kant’s critical philosophy to critical literary studies is to clarify, first, the bases of Kant’s own thoroughly original conception of the necessity to introduce criticism into philosophy. References to “critical thinking” having long descended into empty gestures, the contents of their replacement by the rapidly changing themes of “post-critical thought” have proven no less difficult to pin down. Not knowing what it is one pretends to supersede makes of any such pretense a double regression, the obviation not only of what was already there to begin with but, moreover, why it was. For this historical reason especially, the actual content and motivation, or “what” and “why,” of Kant’s foundational criticism of all previous philosophical assumptions is well worth laying bare now. Effectively inaugurating modern thought, the intervention of “critique” into the history of metaphysics transformed the scope and significance of the questions and conceptions that had shaped human inquiry within the Graeco-Roman tradition since antiquity by questioning the very principles at their foundation (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxvii, xxxvii). Rather than subordinate thinking to either its own “idealist” abstraction or projected “materialist” absence, Kant establishes our ability to negate and so reflect upon of each of these as an integral human activity. Both “theoretical” and “practical” in orientation, the tripartite “building” of the Critique provides a historically unprecedented framework for understanding how we can and do in fact think, know, experience, understand, imagine, and act within the world: an approach to conceiving all of these based in relations rather than identities, whether of empirical givens or purely intellectual ideas (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxix–xxx, B xliv, B 9). Among the fundamentally relational activities Kant analyzes are “theory” and “practice” themselves. Maintaining the categorical divisions between Ideas (eidos), reality (phusis), and representation (mimesis) first established by Plato, Kant redefines these within a new working model aligning even while 1

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“differentiating” the empirical and intellectual contents of the physical sciences, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, political action, and, by extension, human history itself (Critique of Pure Reason, B xix, B xxix). Rather than simply oppose intellect to matter and theory to practice, Kant conceived each in “positive” function of its negation of the other, thereby relating them at once systematically and chiastically. In Kant’s upending conception of the two, without the material content of practice, in all its real contingency, no theory; and without the formal lines of analysis first drawn, in all their unconditionality, in theoretical reflection, no practice: Each depends upon the other not only for its own distinctive validity and productivity but, underlying these, its overall relation to reality, whether intellectually or materially defined (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxv, B 54). By the very nature of their object, literary studies carry Kant’s binding critical chiasmus at their core. The purely verbal nature of literature is as necessarily intellectual as it is material: Every manifestation of language is just that, the perceptible manifestation of a formal intellectual production. Literature, however, underscores that productive duality by fictively – imaginatively, rather than deictically – referencing reality with its every word and act of predication. The practical theoretical premises of Kant’s Critique prove themselves to be precisely those of literature, inasmuch as anyone capable of constructing and understanding a sentence (i.e., of predicating a subject without either perceiving or intending any of the objects, actions, and states that sentence designates) unreflectively puts Kant’s power of “synthetic a priori judgment” into practice. In this, more than even the most rigorous of experimental sciences, literature may most accurately exemplify the a priori combination of formal contours with strictly representational content defining Kant’s specifically critical epistemology, and literary studies may speak most clearly to the cogency of Kant’s radical regrounding of our analytic abilities not in the pure operations of mathematical logic but the impure, “composite,” or “heterogeneous” nature of our experience within the world of sensuous phenomena (Critique of Pure Reason, B 1, B 177). Like the method of explicitly “negative” delimitation between kinds and modes of experience and action first introduced into philosophy by the Critique – the basis not only of the constitutive concerns of cognition, aesthetics, and ethics in all critical theoretical reflection to come, but every modern conception of a dialectic owing, in Hegel’s terms, not to “dogmatic” “scholastic” (“schulgerecht”) methods for “proving” a predetermined outcome, but rather the active intellectual “movement” of negation itself – Kant’s pathbreaking conjunction of an adaptable because noncontingent structure of analysis with the infinitely

Introduction

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contingent facta and data of experience continues to enable every mode and concept of theoretical analysis proposed across the disciplines today (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxiv–xxv, B xxxii–xxxiv, B xxxvii, B 87–88, B 172; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, “Preface”). Any such proposal is, in Kant’s terms, a working “hypothesis,” a theory of practice that no preceding practice or theory can dictate (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxii–xxiii). In this it is directly related to the singular object of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, its attempt to yield not an a priori synthetic foundation for both scientific and quotidian cognition but rather to “confirm” the “possibility” of “free,” fully “self-legislating” “moral” action (Critique of Practical Reason, A 54). Kant recognized that the same rigors of critique that strictly limit the reach of his representational epistemology to phenomena must reject as inherently contradictory the attribution of any delimiting cause or sensory condition to ethical action. Locating no possible basis for ethics – for practice in the only critical sense – in either idealist or materialist determination, Kant reveals the necessary and necessarily latent component of all critical thinking that critical literary studies make most evident. For, as Hegel, describing Kant’s pivotal contribution to dialectical thinking, originally acknowledged, it was in introducing the unprecedented “Idea” of “freedom” into metaphysics, explicitly defined as such by Kant himself, that Kant constituted thought’s own historical “turning point” (“Wendepunkt”), thereby altering the bases and dynamics of all subsequent reflection on human activity to come, even as, like Hegel himself, he continued to use the elements of the canonical philosophical lexicon, as he would the discursive and structural givens of language itself, so as to repurpose these into the means for reconceiving the full range of our discursive and nondiscursive capacities (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxxvi, B 48; Logic A 173, A 394; Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, “Historical Deduction of the true Concept of Art: Kantian Philosophy”). Foremost among these – and subsequent modus operandi of the dialectical act of thinking for Hegel – is the uniquely productive ability of human subjects to form, experience, and recognize nonmechanical relations with other subjects and objects in the world: The real practical capacity, all subject- or substance-centric, spiritual or ontological assertions to the contrary, both to project and undergo relations that, always intellectual in part, cannot be predetermined by either the demonstrable laws of physics (“Naturgesetz”) or “merely speculative” claims of a purely imaginary metaphysics (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxiv, B xxix, B xxxii–xxxiii, B xxviii). For Kant, that critical reconception redefines the individually unlimited tendency of each of the mutually delimiting operations whose negative

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relationships to each other compose the systematic basis for their own selfcriticism. Systematicity without positivism: In distinction to every preceding philosophical method of procedure, Kant’s “hypothetical” system is ruled neither by “transcendental” nor “empirical” presumptions but a structure defined by the active ability to critique all intellectual claims for the unilateral validity of either. A strictly relational construct “built” upon acts of negation, rather than either quantitative, conventional, or any other positive source of determination, Kant’s differentiating structure relates material givens with distinct modes of perceiving, interacting with, and acting both upon and in independence of them. As an explicitly integrated (“theoretical”) framework for understanding the (“practical”) operation of “applied” (or impure) cognitive “reason,” on the one hand, and the “pure reason” of “free” “moral” “praxis” on the other, Kant’s intellectually and empirically combinatory system defines the only truly “fictional” speculation as that which asserts the absence of any need for critical theory (Critique of Pure Reason, B xl, B 8). Much as literature and its reading are, by their very constitution, twice removed from any but an imaginary notion of the “presence” or “Being” of the things, actions, and occurrences of every possible genre and description they represent, so Kant’s Critique reproves the fantastic ascription of existence to ideas or nonexistence to things-in-themselves, replacing positive idealisms and naturalisms alike with the radically new premise of a constitutive relationality distinguishing all human perception, knowledge, and action from the mathematics of natural-mechanical causality (Critique of Pure Reason B 27, B 503, B 860– 866; Logic A 143; Critique of Practical Reason A 4). Remarkably positioned at the center of the “architectonic” “logic” underwriting this explicitly experimental system is Kant’s unprecedented conception of an inherently nonlogical “power” as an essential “capacity”  – rather than flaw or failure  – of mind (Critique of Pure Reason, B 9, 27, 503, 860; Logic A 143). “The power to judge” (“Urteilskraft”) given objects of experience in a specifically “aesthetic” rather than cognitive sense engages the speculative and ethical capacity to act in “freedom” from delimitation that makes of the mind something more than a cognizing machine. In contradiction to his rational-positivist caricature after Hegel, Kant not only introduces into the history of reflection a new, nonpositivist conception of “freedom” but describes its unlimited (“noumenal”) capacity to negate rationally delimited (phenomenal) “self-interest” as the “keystone” of the entirety of the Critique (Critique of Pure reason, B 860). Just so, the internal capacity to “feel one’s self free” – not from critical but from causal constraints – that subtends any subject’s ability to “feel” “pleasure”

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or “displeasure” in perceiving objects we “judge” “beautiful” or “sublime,” performs a singular critical function within the tripartite Critique: that of “mediating” between the otherwise mutually exclusive “realms” to which the divided activities and objects of “pure” and “practical reason” pertain (Critique of Pure Reason, B 9; Critique of Judgment, B xix, B 4, B 18). Like the critically indispensable act of aesthetic judgment in which it takes part, “Imagination” is elevated by Kant to a full-fledged capacity of mind for the first time, just as his epistemology redefines the cognitions in which imagination participates as deriving from neither innate intuitions nor transcendental ideas, but rather the “representations” our minds formally construct of the particular sensuous experiences we undergo (Critique of Pure Reason, B vi, B 60). Kant’s systematic inclusions of these and other capacities and forms previously relegated to the merely “subjective” whims of individual and social taste, effectively positions his Critique in the permanent avant-garde of aesthetic theory: If imagination is no less instrumental to the logical pursuit of objective science than to our nonlogical ability to experience objects aesthetically  – that is, “free” of our cognizing selves  – then the possible objects of aesthetic experience, as of cognition, are themselves potentially unlimited. And if, in aesthetic experience, we “feel” in such a “free,” impersonal way that, instead of “talking about” “our” “feelings,” we feel compelled to use the principal form of logic, predication, to “say” in a thoroughly impersonal way something at once definitive and strictly illogical, because undefined and undefinable, about “it” – that “it is beautiful” (or “sublime”) – then the “subjective” basis (in “feeling”) of the “power to judge” unknown objects and the “synthetic” basis of object-cognition are, at once, as qualitatively opposed to each other as they are intrinsically linked formally by their “common” dependence upon two, never wholly formally delimitable capacities: imagination and, with imagination, “communicability,” or the ability to construct “communicable” – that is, necessarily inter- and extrapersonal – acts of predication (Critique of Judgment, B 28, B 105, B 119, B 133). But perhaps most significant for the study of literature, Kant qualifies all cognitive representations, along with “thinking” itself, as explicitly and exclusively linguistic in substance  – “discursive” in their very nature (Critique of Pure Reason, B 170; “On a Newly Elevated Tone in Philosophy,” A 309; Logic, A 23) – or, as he underscores in a rare appeal to self-consciously figural language in the Prolegomena: “concepts of understanding serve only, so to speak, to spell out appearances, in order to be able to read them as experience” (Prolegomena, A 101). Further distinguishing

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“poetry” as the single art form that itself constitutes a “mode of thinking” uniquely capable of “using nature,” not as the sensible data of representational cognition but rather as nonrepresentational “schema for the supersensible,” Kant’s invention of “critique” links philosophy and literature across the central conceptual reversal that its “revolution in mode of thinking” (“Revolution der Denkart”) entails (Critique of Judgment, B 133, B 158, B 160, B 215; Critique of Pure Reason, B vii–xxx; or “transformation in mode of thinking,” B vi, B xxiii). In that its object is no object, but rather the “mode” or way in which, acting as subjects, we think about, experience, and interact with objects, including ourselves, as well as all the purely determinate conditions and materialities we are not, such a “revolution” can only be founded on a noncontingent hypothesis that, unconditionally linking a condition to a predicate, systematically relates and, therein, redefines all the entities, actions, and events it comprehends. The individual capacities and modalities first related by Kant’s theoretical reversal of all sense-based (including “commonsensical”) positivist presuppositions resemble interdependent functions more than independent identities; instead of being simply positively present to sense perception they are first constituted by their reciprocal differentiation and delimitation within the coherent framework that relates them. Such is the nature of the discursivity on whose own forms and structures Kant’s revolutionary hypothesis depends; and such is the linguistic “nature” of the only matter on which every literary formation depends. The relationship of literary theory to literature has always been analogous to that of literature to reality and equally, if somewhat less self-evidently, contentious. Both literary theory and its object employ comprehensive linguistic means to turn the mind from things – what they are believed to be in and of themselves or can be used to do for us – and the longstanding presumption of the intellectual insignificance of both similarly dismiss them as abstract and fictive replacements, respectively, for the “real” objects about which each claims to speak. By focusing instead upon the ability of the mind to move between itself and things, and back again, continually reconceiving each along with the relationship between them, Kant’s fundamentally “discursive” turn from “things in themselves” to synthetic principles of representation and formal construction prove identical to those of not only literary theory but literature itself. For, according to the chiasmus of reason laid out by the Critique, the “pure” (“theoretical”) “reason” of conceptual cognition reveals itself instead to be, like literature, “practical” or impure, that is, at once free of logical contradiction and ideational mystification alike because heterogeneously “applied” to

Introduction

7

what it itself is not – “phenomena” in the world – and “practical reason” reveals itself to be noncontingent, “pure,” that is, also like literature, “free” to act in “real” independence of phenomenal delimitation and causal logic alike, because compelled by its own “freedom” to act without respect to its agent’s own worldly existence, or what Kant calls “morally” (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxv, B xxviii, B 10, B 177). Each of the several fundamental – sometimes overlapping, sometimes reciprocally negating, but always mutually differentiating  – modes of understanding, imagination, and action reframed within Kant’s critical system – sensory experience and its “discursive” representation; representational knowledge and noncognitive “feeling”; narrative causality and “spontaneous” action; aesthetic experience and “communicability”; aesthetic judgment and ethics; difference, negation, and identity; comparison, alteration, and temporality; predication, inscription, and revolutions of thought; nature, poetic language, and the schematic art of the sublime – all pertain directly to the constitution of the imaginative discourse we call literature. Yet with rare while significant exceptions, including important studies of the romantic psychological, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of the Kantian sublime by Weiskel (1976), Martyn (2003), and McLaughlin (2014), respectively; the analysis of the relation of Kant’s epistemology and theory of freedom to the structure and lacunae of representational narrative fiction by Brodsky (1987); the exposition of the essential relationship to otherness in Kant’s understanding of the moral subject by Basterra (2015), and Brodsky’s recent investigation of the necessarily spoken constitution of acts of aesthetic judgment and unique power of poetic discourse to use the phenomenal world to represent “the supersensible” (2021), the relation of Kant’s critical foregrounding of the limits and capacities of discursivity to the discourse of literature has remained largely uninvestigated by contemporary scholars of literary form and history. While the direct influence of the Critique upon some of Kant’s leading literary contemporaries is well documented (and further explored in this volume), the historical gap in his consideration in relation to our general understanding of literature stands in inverse proportion to his evergrowing recognition as defining a turning point not only in the historical developments of continental and analytic philosophy but of modern ethical, political, aesthetic, and cultural theory as well. Whether echoing the false ascription of unbridled idealism to Kant’s critical revolution in the wake of one of its greatest inheritors, Marx, or repeating the popular “post”-Marxist convention of equating all “enlightenment” thought with instrumentality, and reducing all literary and cultural phenomena to

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mirrors of the autonomously self-totalizing power of “Power,” the stark division in the reception of Kant across the humanities is one the volume aims to redress. In exploring the pertinence of Kant’s thought to our understanding of literature in particular, each of the individual contributions to this volume focuses in a distinctive way on specific aspects of the relations between philosophy and literature that Kant’s critical revolution in metaphysics brings to the fore. Kant’s proto-romantic conception of “the art of poetry” as an independent “art [or mode] of thinking” in itself; the social dimension inhering in the development of self-knowledge described within romantic poetry and Kant’s philosophy; the potential conflict between philosophy and tragedy posed by the Critique; the relation between Kant’s theory of the sublime and political emancipation; Kant’s redefinition of religion within the context of narrative history; the representation in narrative fiction of the role of radical discontinuity in Kant’s narrative of intellectual history; the theoretical and literary reception of the Critique by its most avid contemporary readers; Kant’s conception of cognitive spontaneity and the formal performance of experiential consciousness in literature; the literary genesis of critique within the history of philosophy; the indeterminate subject of modern first-person fiction and the purely formal “I” of the Kantian “I think”; and, finally, the fundamental relation between the necessary “communicability” of judgment and Kant’s invention of the ethical category of the possible, all figure among the intersecting literary and philosophical lines of analysis the contributions address. In bringing together original work by a broad range of scholars expert in philosophy and literature alike, Kant and Literary Studies is the first volume devoted to examining the particular premises and principles of Kant’s Critique – their logic, motivation, and real practical effects – as these continue to inform the study of literature in the larger discursive context of the humanities today. In order to highlight the integration of their avenues of research, the contributions are organized into three interconnected parts. Part I, “Kant on Literature,” focuses on the mutually illuminating bases of literature and critical philosophy articulated within Kant’s works. Its contributions explore both the philosopher’s explicit discussions of literature and the larger theoretical significance of poetic, sublime, and dramatic modes of apprehension and signification explored and employed across the three individual Critiques. Part II, “Kant, Literary Theory, and the Critical Formation of the ‘Human’ Disciplines,” investigates Kant’s radical reconception of “the human” (“das Menschliche”) as the productively negative

Introduction

9

capacity for critique and the fundamental relation of that reconception to all “discursive” (or “communicable”) disciplines since Kant, from the reinvigorated investigation of literature and philosophy themselves to the invention of modern literary and aesthetic, moral and political, and social and historical theory, and new “human” histories of science, religion, and secular self-governance. Finally, Part III, “Kant and Literature,” presents analyses of groundbreaking manifestations of Kant’s critical insights in the ongoing production of literature itself, interpreting the revolutions in literary form, style, and content effected by enlightenment through romantic, modernist, and contemporary works in light of Kant’s critical “revolution in thought.” The contributors to Kant and Literary Studies approach Kant and individual and comparative literary traditions from different interpretive vantage points and bring differing critical issues to light. In Part I, Paresh Chandra analyzes Kant’s conception of poetry as a specific “mode of thinking” (“Denkungsart”) with particular reference to its direct ­relevance to our understanding of the “prosaic” poetics theorized and practiced by Wordsworth; David Martyn analyzes Kant’s aesthetic and literary ­theory of the sublime in relation to the secularization of religion under the “sign” of political emancipation; and Robert Pippin considers the bases of Kant’s criticism of the foundational literary form of tragedy so as to better ­understand the stakes of the general thesis of a necessary ­incompatibility of tragedy with philosophy that, long before Nietzsche, Kant’s view implies. Part II begins with Rüdiger Campe’s investigation of Kant’s necessarily discontinuous account of the “history” of science and philosophy from the rigorously coherent point of view of his “transcendental” epistemology, and the relation of both to the grammatically enacted peripeteias marking the discontinuous outcomes of the narratives of Kant’s great literary contemporary and avid reader, Heinrich v. Kleist. Next, Richard Eldridge compares Kant’s and Wordsworth’s accounts of the specifically social, and thus open-ended rather than purely introspective, achievement of selfknowledge by moral subjects. Gabriel Basterra follows Eldridge by investigating the fundamentally interpellative structure of ethical action in the Levinasian social sense of addressing an Other, which she identifies within Kant’s conception of “the moral law.” Finally, Karen Feldman rounds out Campe’s examination of narrative discontinuity in Kant’s account of the history of science and Martyn’s investigation of the post-Kantian replacement of effective religious narrative with the sublime of political emancipation, by scrutinizing the necessary narrative discontinuity entailed by

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Kant’s account of the history of Judaism and Christianity, according to which Christianity, if truly “new,” must regard its origin, Judaism, as merely “statutory” or no “religion” at all. In Part III, Tim Mehigan examines the influence of the “Kantian” writings of Schiller upon Kleist, demonstrating the ways in which the dramatic “Kant-crisis” of Kleist’s literary career, discussed in Part II by Campe, was in fact a kind of fiction, in that Kleist’s knowledge of the Critique had already been mediated by its literary reception by Schiller. Next, positioning Kant himself as crucial historical and conceptual mediator between the radically essayistic constitution of subjecthood by Montaigne and emphatically “post”-subject-oriented “reasons” of Spivak, Sloterdijk, and Mbembe, Willi Goetschel’s comprehensive contribution examines the rich prehistory and immediate and continuing legacy of Kant’s understanding of “critique” as “self-legislating,” “discursive” “act.” Following Goetschel, Maya Kronfeld finds in modern literature of consciousness the practical realization of Kant’s conception of the spontaneity of thought, arguing that Virginia Woolf’s dynamic representations of consciousness more closely resemble spontaneous acts of form-production than the mere aggregates of sense impressions described by Hume. John Kim then provides an incisive critical analysis of the problem of knowing the subject of Kant’s “I think” as it is directly addressed in Tawada’s German-Japanese fiction, Das Bad (The Bath)/ うろこもち). Tying first contribution to last, Brodsky’s closing essay examines Kant’s key distinction between not the noumenal and phenomenal but the phenomenal and verbal in relation both to the “use of language” by “poets” and his own specifically speech-based demonstration, in the Critique of Practical Reason, of the category of the “possible” required to think the “effectivity” of “the moral law” within us.

Part I

Kant on Literature

chapter 1

“Differing Only in Degree”

Judging and Making in Kant and Wordsworth Paresh Chandra

In his 1931 book, Immanuel Kant in England: 1793–1838, René Wellek writes seventy pages about Samuel Taylor Coleridge and fewer than three about William Wordsworth. He suggests that most of what was “distinctly Kantian” about Wordsworth was likely transmitted to him by Coleridge.1 While it is now accepted that Wordsworth had read synopses of Kant’s philosophy published in English in the 1790s, and “apparently had the Critique of Judgement in mind while composing his Guide to the Lakes,”2 he was certainly never prominent as a reader of Kant. As such, the tradition within English Romanticist scholarship of invoking Kant alongside Wordsworth has largely, and justifiably, focused upon specific passages from The Prelude which are read fruitfully in relation to Kant’s account of the sublime.3 The present chapter is different in that it reads sections of Kant’s Critique of Judgement – principally, not the “Analytic of the Sublime” – alongside Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” and reflects upon the significance that their respective attempts to think together the making of judgments and of art have for literary theory. This comparative deliberation also shows that the significance of Kant’s and Wordsworth’s contemporaneity derives from the manner in which their respective notions of aesthetic judging and making illuminate facets of one another, and from the way in which Wordsworth’s “Preface” anticipates the turns that the “critical” project would take after Kant. The key moments of the argument may be schematized thus: first, that Wordsworth’s unconventional view of the “poet” as “nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in

I wish to thank Claudia Brodsky, Yaul Perez-Stable Husni, and Marie Sanazaro for their feedback on previous drafts of this essay, without which it could not have found its present form. 1 René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931, 162. 2 Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 81. 3 One of the first and most well known among these is Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

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degree” rests upon his fundamental understanding of the concept “men”4 to mean all those who have the power to judge; second, that the idea of “genius” in Kant’s account of artistic production, in its relation to his account of aesthetic judgment, plots this very difference “in degree”; and finally, that Wordsworth’s definition of the poet as the “rock of defense of human nature”5 is to be understood as part of the then unwritten history of the “multitude of causes, unknown to former times,”6 which threatened the historical processes through which human nature, itself a puzzlingly historical, open-ended thing, is made. As such, the place that Wordsworth gives to the poet anticipates the place that “art,” in its broadest sense, will come to occupy in “critical theory.”

I  Wordsworth and the Judgment of Others An important aspect of Kant’s reconstitution of philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason was the way in which, instead of treating “aesthetics” as a distinct branch of philosophy, he included the “transcendental aesthetic” as the “science of all principles of a priori sensibility” within this First Critique.7 But when, after writing the Critique of Practical Reason, the search for a bridge between the First and the Second Critique, between delimited “phenomenal” cognition and free “noumenal” action necessitated the conception, by Kant, of a “power” of judgment, and in turn a “Third Critique” devoted to this power, he turned to “aesthetic judgments” in particular because these judgments make up the only instance of judgments that are completely pure and free of conceptual oversight. Made with reference to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and equally disinterested in the ends of cognition and morality, aesthetic judgments, Kant proffered, confirm the power to judge freely and without any prescriptions. As such, the Third Critique was the work of a philosopher arriving at the “completion” of his “critical” project, practiced in the use of a form of presentation – namely, the “critique” – that he had arrived at through 4

Cited throughout this chapter, Wordsworth’s use of the nouns, “man,” “men,” and “mankind” to signify all subjects of “human nature,” or “humanity” in general, may be compared with the contemporary use of the generic German terms, “Mensch” and “Menschen” (“human being,” “humans,” “people”) by Kant across his theoretical analyses of human capacities. 5 William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, Vol. 1, 141. 6 Wordsworth, Preface, 129. 7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 156 (A 21; B 35).



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extensive experimentation.8 The poet, on the other hand, beginning to practice poetry in a specific historical moment, and given an institution of poetic taste that he found unreceptive to his work, came to the epistemological issue of judgment and eventually to an account of the power of judgment similar to, though less developed than, Kant’s, via the problem of judgment’s socio-historically determined impairment. At the very beginning of the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth notes that he was asked to write a “Preface” by “friends” who were “anxious for the success of these Poems” and wanted him “to prefix a systematic defense of the theory” with which they were written. Wordsworth declines the offer to write such a “systematic defense,” deeming futile any attempt at “reasoning” the reader into an “approbation of these particular poems.” He goes on to say: “yet I am sensible, that there would be some impropriety in abruptly obtruding upon the Public, without a few words of introduction, Poems so materially different from those, upon which general approbation is at present bestowed.”9 Such, then, is Wordsworth’s stated reason for writing the “Preface.” He anticipates that the poems that make up the Lyrical Ballads were so unlike that to which contemporary taste was accustomed, so new, that they required an introduction. Consistent with this remark, as the “Preface” unfolds, it pursues two aims. The first of these aims is to present the poems that make up the “experiment” of the Lyrical Ballads to its readers. The second is to outline some aspects of contemporary poetic taste, with a view to explaining why its “pre-established codes of decision” did not favor the Lyrical Ballads.10 What takes the “Preface” past the limited purview of these two aims, making it “literary theory,” is that in seeking to present these poems, Wordsworth formulates a theory of poetry, and in seeking to critique contemporary taste, he proposes an accompanying theory of judgment; as the preceding quote “introducing” his and Coleridge’s collected lyrics to the public suggests, the immediate issue of the poems’ newness (or of their being “so materially different”) that it is the stated purpose of the “Preface” to address, serves to introduce and mediate between the two literarytheoretical strands Wordsworth develops within it. As Wordsworth saw it, the projected inability of contemporary taste to comprehend his and 8

9 10

For an account of Kant’s early experiments with the “essay” as form, and how they led him to the form of the “critique,” see Willi Goetschel’s Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994, and Chapter 9 in this volume. Wordsworth, Preface, 121. Ibid., 116.

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Coleridge’s poems as poems demonstrated a failure of judgment. As such, in arguing for the legitimacy of this poetic project by laying out the grounds of its claims to effectivity despite the negative reception he anti­ cipated, Wordsworth was led to question the correctness of contemporary conventions of taste. He had to demonstrate that the experiment of the Lyrical Ballads was poetry, and that, in not recognizing it as such, judgment was being misled by taste. But to make such an argument about taste, Wordsworth had to first define poetry. In other words, the new poetry of the Lyrical Ballads required an exposition of poetry as such. Finally, in submitting that in its encounter with the Lyrical Ballads, judgment must transcend contemporary taste, Wordsworth made room for a notion of judgment as a capacity, which, even if it underpinned taste in its historical existence, was distinct from it. Though Wordsworth tried to accomplish these theoretical ends in his “Preface,” it is also worth taking note of what he thought he was not trying to do. In the initial paragraph that concludes with the sentence already cited, Wordsworth admits to not treating his “subject” fully: For to treat the subject with the clearness and coherence, of which I believe it susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which, again, could not be determined, without pointing out, in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each other and without retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone, but likewise of society itself.11

A full treatment of the “subject” would require a detailed survey of its historical conditions, understood very broadly (“present state of public taste”; “revolutions of literature and society”) and an exposition of a fundamental epistemological question (“in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each other”). This juxtaposition of the epistemological question with historical ones shows how Wordsworth came upon the question of judgment, namely, via a need to account for historical failures of taste, while affirming that such failure could be transcended. These historical failures Wordsworth later ascribes to a blunting of “the discriminating powers of the mind”: For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage 11

Ibid., 121.



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torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.12

In suggesting that the blunting of the “discriminating powers of the mind” is caused by historical circumstances specific to capitalism, Wordsworth offers a rudimentary theory of “popular culture.” This blunting explains the taste for “idle and extravagant stories in verse,” as well as the cold reception that Wordsworth anticipates for his own project. Such a historically conditioned failure of judgment, accompanying the emergence of a “culture industry,” would find its most famous critical treatment nearly a century and a half later in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). What makes Wordsworth’s early formulations quasi-critical-theoretical is his ability to distance himself and, from that remove, develop a critique of contemporary taste indicating (1) that the corruption of taste could be explained by its historical conditions of possibility and (2) that taste maintains, as its own transcendental conditions of possibility, some “inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind,” which enable it to negate its transitory historical conditioning and therein ensure the possibility of something new. While (2) receives reasonably extensive, if somewhat oblique, treatment in the “Preface,” (1) is only signposted. Beyond the aforementioned gestures, Wordsworth does not give us a historico-economic account of the “emergence of” or “transition to” capitalism, a report on the then contemporary counterrevolution occurring across Europe, or a fully developed theoretical explanation of how the blunting of the mind’s discriminatory powers relates to socio-economic, political, or even cultural circumstances. In place of an inquiry into the historical conditions of the constitution of contemporary bad taste and cultural production, Wordsworth offers the story of “poetic diction,” which holds the place for such an inquiry, and in which the failure of taste is a character. This story, as will be shown shortly, helps Wordsworth name a primordial or “elementary” principle, which, defined by contrast as one of the “inherent and indestructible qualities of 12

Ibid., 129.

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the human mind,” comprises the core of his theory of judgment. This elementary principle is, in turn, the enabling condition for both the negation of contemporary taste and the receptivity of the public toward his poems. It is also the crucial point of similarity between Kant’s and Wordsworth’s conception of judgment. In the appendix that Wordsworth added to the “Preface” in 1802 specifically to clarify what he meant by “poetic diction,” he notes: The earliest Poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring and figurative. In succeeding times, Poets, and men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect, without having the same animating passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of those figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to feelings and ideas with which they had no natural connection whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially from the real language of men in any situation.13

It is not obvious what the additional qualification “and as men” means. I show later that it refers to a specific conception of human nature thought in terms of the aforesaid “elementary principle.” For now, I want to focus on the phrase “the earliest poets,” by which is meant the poets who existed at the beginning of the history of poetry and are placed outside its narrative.14 They are outside this narrative precisely because they constitute its beginning, unexplained by anything internal to the narrative. The fact that these poets existed at all, that poetry happened at all, by itself affirms within human beings the natural capacity, if not the necessity, to create poetry. Whereas the “earliest poets” wrote “naturally,” and the “daring 13 14

Ibid., 160. The idea of the “earliest Poets,” who commence the history of poetry but are outside it, plays a hermeneutic function in Wordsworth’s essay much like that assigned to the “rural life,” in which men “hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived,” and both of these themes stand in for genuinely philosophical arguments about the relations between “reality,” “language,” and “poetry,” that are implicit in the “Preface” (Wordsworth, Preface, 124). As I demonstrate, according to Wordsworth, the poet must possess a “greater power” to present “absent things,” and correspondingly, poetry requires a certain distance from the reality of “events.” The “earliest Poets” who wrote from the “passion excited by real events,” in the “real language of men” that was nevertheless “daring and figurative,” must be considered an ideal image that serves to launch the criticism of poetic diction. For a detailed exposition of the relation between “reality,” “language,” and “poetry” in Wordsworth’s “Preface” see Claudia Brodsky’s Words’ Worth: What the Poet Does, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. What I describe as the story of poetic diction constitutes another instance, within the “Preface,” in which Wordsworth uses what can only be called a (historical) fiction in place of a philosophical argument about history.



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and figurative” aspect of their language came from “powerful feeling,” the poets who followed the earliest poets – those included, that is, in the history of poetry  – wrote for fame. Heteronomy entered the history of poetry when, led by their desire for fame, the poets of “succeeding times” misjudged the real source of poetry’s “effect” and tried to replicate the language of the earliest poets mechanically. Over time, this failure of discrimination on the part of readers who became poets caused the effect of poetry to be associated on a merely secondhand, or conventional, basis with “figurative” language, and the significance of the originary connection of this language to “real events” was forgotten. Later poets could not distinguish between what rightfully belonged to poetry and what was merely “poetic diction.” Thus, “the one served as passport for the other,” instituting a tradition beginning in a failure of discrimination, that is, of judgment. This tradition shaped much of the history of (English) poetry, and a “language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially from the real language of men in any situation.” This narrative of the perversion of poetry through the accretion of errors in judgment, by elucidating the production of a poetic language “differing materially” from the “real language of men,” seemingly explains the prevailing taste in poetry in Wordsworth’s time. At another point Wordsworth admits the inevitability of “a honorable bigotry for the objects which have long continued to please them [i.e., readers]: we not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particular way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased.”15 It makes sense that if the history of poetry has fed men with bad poetry, then their “honorable bigotry” would keep them yoked to such poetry. The problem for Wordsworth was that once he had admitted the power of such inertia in the history of poetic taste, even if it began in an error of judgment, it becomes difficult to see how a reader might be led to appreciate his poetry, “so materially different from those, upon which general approbation is at present bestowed.” Yet, as I have already observed, in making such “materially different” poetry, and in writing the “Preface,” Wordsworth seems to have presupposed that the difference between the seeming appearance of poetry (denoted by the use of “poetic diction”) and the “real” and effective presence of poetry was palpable to any reader. He seems to have presupposed, in other words, that judgment could retrieve its undetermined freedom from any bigotry, no matter how honorable. As such, the abandoning of this freedom to what Wordsworth called “pre-established codes of decision” 15

Wordsworth, Preface, 157.

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emerges as a more fundamental mistake than any particular error in judgment. Once procedures of judgment are codified, the place of judgment is taken by determination according to pregiven principles. Wordsworth had earlier noted the error in this very manner of relating to poetry, when he had rejected the “selfish and foolish hope of reasoning him [the Reader] into an approbation of these particular poems.”16 Instead of trying to so “reason” with the reader, Wordsworth made a “request”: I have one request to make of my Reader, which is, that in judging these Poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others. How common is it to hear a person say, “I myself do not object to this style of composition or this or that expression, but to such and such classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous.” This mode of criticism, so destructive of all sound unadulterated judgment, is almost universal: I have therefore to request, that the Reader would abide independently by his own feelings, and that if he finds himself affected he would not suffer such conjectures to interfere with his pleasure.17

While the reader cannot be reasoned into good taste, they can be asked to exercise their capacity to judge freely, which, evidently, is all that is needed to interrupt the inertia of taste. The practice of “sound, unadulterated judgment” requires that the reader “abide independently by his own feelings” and not let anything “interfere with his pleasure.” It is the implied relation between the freedom and purity of judgment and the authenticity of the feeling of “pleasure,” along with the unstated conviction that every reader who judges with reference to their own pleasure will approve of these poems, that made Wordsworth’s understanding of the power of judgment manifestly Kantian. Wordsworth’s account of the pleasure of poetry and the “grand elementary principle of pleasure,” which in turn indicates the “inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind,” is central to his exposition of poetry and of judgment, and it approaches Kant’s account of aesthetic pleasure and judgment not only in its overall shape but also in its details.

II  Judgment and the Principle of Pleasure Kant claimed that “pleasure is the representation of the agreement of an object or of an action with the subjective conditions of life.”18 Elsewhere 16 17 18

Ibid., 121. Ibid., 155. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002, 14 (A 9; B 17).



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he described pleasure as the “feeling of life” of a subject, reference to which “forms the basis of a very special power of discriminating and judging.”19 It is not clear from such statements what the content of pleasure is or whether it even has any content. When, in a letter to Reinhold written in 1787, Kant claimed to have discovered an a priori principle for pleasure and displeasure, namely that of “purposiveness,” it became apparent that pleasure, as Kant meant it, while unmistakably dynamic, was entirely contentless, for nothing limited to a specific content, a sensation for example, is amenable to transcendental analysis and able to possess an a priori principle.20 The a priori principle of pleasure and displeasure, Kant theorized, was the basis upon which the power to judge the a posteriori object that occasions the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is activated. It is the dissociation by Kant of this a priori principle from any predetermined content that dictated the need for a critique of the power of judgment. Pleasure qua “feeling of life” names a state in which the human faculties quicken each other through their mutual coordination, and anything that brings about such coordination of the faculties constitutes a pleasurable experience. Judgments, in particular “reflecting judgments” (as distinct from “determining judgments”), in which the act of judging is not governed by a principle of the understanding, require such a coordination of the faculties of imagination and understanding. In this way, empirical reflecting judgments, in which the particulars of nature are judged with the assumption of the lawlike-ness of nature, and aesthetic reflecting judgments (or just “aesthetic judgments”), are accompanied by pleasure. Of these, it is in the case of aesthetic judgments, Kant says, that the coordination of the faculties takes the form of “free play.” The faculties are in a relation of undetermined, open-ended interaction, which, though it is suited to the ends of cognition “in general,” does not culminate in it. When pleasure belongs to the “agreeable” or the “good,” the preservation of this mental state is based in the continued existence, or the coming into existence, of the object of pleasure, and so the subject takes an “interest” in the object’s existence. Aesthetic pleasure is different because the continuation of this mental state is not based on an interest in the existence of the necessarily uncognized object. It is aesthetic pleasure’s independence from all purposes that gives aesthetic judgments their 19

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987, 44 (A 204; B 4). 20 See Rachel Zuckert, “A New Look at Kant’s Theory of Pleasure,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.3 (2002), 239–252 (239–240).

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purity: These are based on a purposiveness without a purpose. This purity, in turn, was the reason that Kant thought that it was in aesthetic judgments, and even more specifically in judgments of the beauty of nature, that judgment reveals that it possesses its own special principle. The object of aesthetic experience seems little more than an occasion for aesthetic pleasure, and the only criterion that specifies what kind of object could become an occasion for aesthetic experience is a negative one, namely that the understanding not possess a concept of it.21 The ground for this pleasure must now be sought in the action of the subject, namely, that of communicating to other subjects, as a quality (“beauty”), a noncognitive or “aesthetic” instead of phenomenal, experience of an unnamed object. Aesthetic pleasure in its internal complexity indicates a capacity within the subject which, by making possible such an act, connects the subject to the unnamed object as well as to other subjects. This complexity is analyzable into two distinguishable if inseparable parts, indicating two distinguishable though inseparable aspects of the judging subject.22 First, insofar as aesthetic pleasure signifies the free play of the faculties given an unconceptualized object, it affirms the subject’s fundamental ability to relate, noncognitively, to things in their nonidentity. Given a contingent particular of nature that falls outside the boundaries of knowledge, the subject is able to experience that contingent particular as purposive for the subject, even without identifying it. Second, aesthetic pleasure affirms the subject’s capacity to communicate universally (to all subjects), in the absence of concepts (i.e., in the absence of discursive knowledge), the experience of 21

In her reading of §9 of the Third Critique, Hannah Ginzborg contested Paul Guyer’s reading of Kant in which he had proposed a “two-act” version of aesthetic judgment. Ginzborg argued that “a single act of judgment … is responsible, both for the feeling of pleasure in the object, and for the claim that the feeling of pleasure is universally valid” (“On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1991), 290–313 [291]). Ginzborg argued that being in a state of mind in which the imagination and the understanding are in free play – the moment of pleasure – and the claim of this pleasure’s universality, which takes the form of a judgment of beauty, are two descriptions of the same process. Such a state of mind is, in effect, a claim about its own appropriateness to the object of which one does not possess a concept. As such, the free play of the faculties, the feeling of aesthetic pleasure, and the judgment of beauty which claims the universality of this pleasure are all aspects (i.e., faces) of the same unified but complex act. A consequence of interpreting Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment in this self-referential way, however, is that there remains no way to disclose an “objective” ground for it, and the investigation turns inward. For Guyer’s “two-act” theory see Kant and the Claims of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. 22 Beatrice Longuenesse, who accepts the “one-act” theory of aesthetic judgment, takes a similar tack of taking aesthetic pleasure to be “twofold.” See “Kant’s Leading Thread in the Analytic of the Beautiful,” in Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Kukla, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 207.



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an uncognized object. The judgment of beauty, made linguistically, is the communication of this essentially noncognitive perception of the object. Kant calls the universality that aesthetic judgments ascribe to aesthetic pleasure a “subjective universality,” by which he means that the judgment “X is beautiful” does not say anything about all objects that are “X,” but rather, it says that X will give such pleasure to all subjects. The quality that the subject describes as X’s beauty is what is unclassifiable about it, and as such, the judgment affirms the nonidentical in X, experienced as its beauty. Significantly, because the judgment does not communicate the content of the experience of an object, it implicitly affirms the otherness of other judging subjects. To put it schematically, in the very universality ascribed to aesthetic pleasure, two kinds of particularities are affirmed: (1) that of the object judged, because it is not replaced by any individual subject’s identification, or any systematic, abstract, and universal definition of it, but rather maintains its own concrete “place” and effectiveness, such that other judging subjects must seek an experience of it to affirm my judgment; and (2) that of all judging subjects, for they do not accept my judgment but judge for themselves, and the “universality” of my judgment inheres only in the supposition that they might, autonomously, find the object (disinterestedly) pleasurable. So, aesthetic pleasure affirms neither the primordial fittedness of the external world to human subjective-cognitive capacities, nor the essential sameness of all subjects. Rather, it indicates that a judging subject is able to form a connection with objects that are uncognized (or “new”), and with other subjects who will, necessarily, judge for themselves. This manner of understanding aesthetic pleasure as a sort of pure or paradigmatic form of pleasure,23 which indicates and affirms the human capacity for knowledge and community, is, as I suggested previously, the most significant similarity between Kant’s exposition of the power of judgment in the Third Critique and Wordsworth’s exposition of the same in the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” Much as in Kant, the bracketing out of conceptuality is a key element of aesthetic experience in Wordsworth; and if in Kant, a pleasure occasioned by an object – natural or artistic – “reveals” the a priori principle of pleasure and displeasure, in Wordsworth the pleasure of a poem “pays homage … to the grand elementary principle of pleasure.”24 23

See Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 232. 24 Wordsworth, Preface, 140. Rowan Boyson’s Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, a more ambitious account of pleasure in

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Wordsworth begins by arguing that poetry is not a “matter of amusement and idle pleasure,” and the taste for poetry is not “a thing as indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry.”25 Then, he goes on to say, Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal.26

Setting aside the question of the significance and accuracy of Wordsworth’s Aristotle citation, according to Wordsworth’s own account, the strange object of poetry is “truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative” and “not standing upon external testimony.” By itself, a truth that does not stand upon “external testimony” and is “general, and operative” might sound like an a priori principle of knowledge, that is, an inner principle that can be known independently of experience and is universal in its application in a given domain. But Wordsworth adds that this truth is “carried alive into the heart by passion.” Supposing that “passion” requires a specific experience (a “real event” to use a Wordsworthism), this truth is something “general” that nevertheless requires real experience of an object (e.g., a poem). Furthermore, it “is its own testimony,” and as such it both gives and receives “strength and divinity” from the tribunal that judges it. Such is Wordsworth’s way of describing the nature of aesthetic judgment, which accesses no universal prescriptions and only acknowledges the rules that the work judged might itself produce in the wake of its experience. The “general[ity]” of the truth of such judgments inheres in the fact that anybody who can enter upon this particular experience will recognize it. But since this truth must be “carried alive into the heart by passion,” it cannot be translated into conceptual knowledge; one is required instead to enter upon its experience. As such, the truth might be called “subjectively Wordsworth, places Wordsworth in the context of eighteenth-century philosophical ideas of pleasure in its relation to sensus communis (Rousseau, Shaftsbury, Kant). Her chapter on the Lyrical Ballads includes a discussion of the “Preface(s)” that points to the correspondence between Kant’s ideas and Wordsworth’s that is the focus of the present section of my chapter. Given the overall aims of her book, however, Boyson does not pursue this particular comparison in all its details and consequences and she is uninterested in how the structure of judgment (in Kant and Wordsworth) is replicated in their respective accounts of poiesis. 25 Wordsworth, Preface, 140. 26 Ibid.



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universal” à la Kant, since to affirm it in a judgment is to invite others to seek it in an encounter with the poem. This “subjective universality” had previously been encountered in Wordsworth’s “request” to his readers, which presupposed that the readers’ own pleasure would affirm the quality of his poems. Subjective universality distinguishes the poet’s truth from that of the “Biographer” and the “Historian.” Now, Wordsworth turns to pleasure: The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a Man. Except this one restriction, there is no object standing between the Poet and the image of things; between this, and the Biographer and Historian there are a thousand.27

The one restriction upon the poet is not simply that he give “immediate pleasure” but that he give it to a “human Being … as a Man,” not as a particular kind of man, with command over specific domains of knowledge as determined by the social division of labor. What “information” does a human being possess “as a Man”? A paragraph later Wordsworth speaks of a “knowledge” that “all men carry about them,” to which the poet attends, and which “cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance” and connects us to “our fellow beings” with “habitual and direct sympathy.”28 The information that the poet assumes in his readers, and the knowledge that he attends to and imparts, defines man in terms of his natural capacity for sociality. The clause “not as a lawyer … philosopher,” which sets aside the segmented ordering of human sociality, goes with the earlier bracketing out of historically constituted domains of discursive knowledge that accompanies such ordering. The “immediate” in “immediate pleasure”  – used only twice in the “Preface” – is worth remarking upon. While discussing Coleridge’s fragment titled “Essay on Taste,” René Wellek pauses on Coleridge’s definition of aesthetic pleasure as “a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves with the perception of external arrangement.” He wonders if Coleridge, the “amateur philologian,” was choosing to translate the German desinteressiert, in the sense of “nothing in between” as “immediate.”29 With Wellek’s comment in mind, I propose that something similar is at work 27

Ibid. Ibid., 141. 29 Wellek, Kant in England, 110. 28

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here in Wordsworth, and the “immediate” in “immediate pleasure” can be taken to mean that no “interest,” in the Kantian sense, obstructs the reader when he receives the pleasure the poet gives. As such the “immediate pleasure” that the Poet gives is not “to be considered a degradation of the poet’s art”: Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the Poet’s art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.30

By giving “immediate pleasure,” and in setting aside conceptual mediation, poetry, one might think, is a more “direct” encounter with the “universe,” whose “sincerity” of expression is predicated on such directness. But Wordsworth seems to suggest quite the reverse, since in the phrase “not formal, but indirect,” that which is “direct” is implicitly equated with the “formal”: A formal acknowledgment of nature’s beauty is direct. Such a statement makes sense if one understands conceptuality – as Kant does – to be formal. It is the formality and the concomitant universality of conceptual knowledge that allows it to be transmitted directly, that is, without the mediation of “passion,” “pleasure,” or “feeling,” just as what makes “beauty” singular among concepts is that its (noncognitive) articulation must arise a posteriori to an “immediate” or nonconceptual experience of “pleasure” undergone in the “free play” of the cognitive faculties. As such, the formal is set aside with the conceptual. What makes poetry’s acknowledgment of the “beauty of the universe” “indirect” is that it is not transmitted as the kind of knowledge (formal and universal) that requires no further meditation a posteriori, let alone the suspension of synthetic (cognitive) judgments a priori. Rather, both the making and the judging of poetry acknowledge the beauty of the universe “indirectly,” and in this inheres poetry’s “sincerity.” An aesthetic judgment does not communicate the content of the experience and is to that extent also “formal.” But it also does not transmit any discursive knowledge of the object. Instead, by inviting others to seek out the beauty of the object judged, it too is an “indirect” acknowledgment. More pertinently to Wordsworth’s argument here, poetry acknowledges the beauty of the universe in the “construction” 30

Wordsworth, Preface, 140.



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of a poem, distinct from the given universe, which makes the “unnamable” aspect of an experience and its “natural complexity” available to others. As such, by giving his readers the “immediate pleasure” of his poems, the poet, “indirectly” but “more sincere[ly],” acknowledges the “beauty of the universe.” This “task” of indirectly acknowledging the “beauty of the universe” in giving “immediate pleasure” by making poetry is “a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love.” In other words, it requires a disposition that seeks out connection (“love”). When the task is accomplished, the pleasure of a poem “pays homage” to the “native and naked dignity of man … the grand elementary principle of pleasure.” The terms “native,” “naked,” and “elementary” all serve to emphasize that the “principle of pleasure” is essential to the “dignity of man,” that is, it is what Kant might call humanity’s “substrate.” This principle of pleasure is essential because it is “by” it that man “knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.” The following sentences expand upon the significance of the principle of pleasure, to which the pleasure of poetry “pays homage”: We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone.31

Though poetry is one domain of human activity, the pleasure specific to it seems to affirm more fully than any other the “grand elementary principle of pleasure” that underlies all forms of human relationality. A clearing is created when the interdependent domains of knowledge and conceptuality are set aside in the making and in the judging of poetry, and what is felt, not cognized, is a feeling that “pays homage” to the “elementary principle” that, for Wordsworth, governs the very possibility of conceptuality (“general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts”) and sociality (“We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure”). Thus, without deploying a corresponding technical description for this state, Wordsworth firmly points to the very same aspect of aesthetic pleasure that Kant found significant in the “Analytic of the Beautiful.”32 31 32

Ibid., 141. Charles Altieri noted this similarity between Kant’s account and Wordsworth’s account of pleasure when he wrote, “Wordsworth then adapts to his own empirical language both the major claims about pleasure in Kant’s Critique of Judgment – that it indicates an essential harmony between mind

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III  Genius, or a Difference of Degree The pleasure “produced” in poetry pays “homage” to the “elementary principle of pleasure,” and, assuming no specific kind of discursive knowledge when “unadulterated,” it accompanies an act of judgment that likewise relies on no “prescriptions” or “pre-established codes of decision.” The ability to judge freely receives the same homage. The aforesaid pleasure belongs to the reader of poetry and demonstrates that the reader possesses the power to judge. Thus far, very little has been said of the poet except that the poet is able to accomplish the task of making poetry because “he” “looks at the world in the spirit of love.” If one takes “love,” as I did previously, to name the capacity for generating connections with the world, then it is the very thing that is affirmed of the reader, and hardly describes the specificity of the poet or the artist. This section will delineate this specificity as it appears in Wordsworth and Kant. Two things from Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments, discussed previously, bear directly upon the following inquiry into his account of artistic production.33 First, aesthetic experience requires a particular kind of object, even if the object’s only specification is that the understanding not possess a concept of it. Second, a judgment of beauty does not transmit the content of the beautiful object in any way whatsoever but only invites others to experience it as it already exists. Presented by Kant primarily in relation to natural beauty (“a beautiful thing”), these two aspects of the experience of aesthetic judging are also crucial to understanding the relation (homological or otherwise) and the difference between judging and making art (“a beautiful presentation [Vorstellung] of a thing”).34

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and nature and that it provides a symbol for moral goodness because the artwork ‘gives pleasure with a claim for the agreement of everyone else’” (“Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ as Literary Theory,” Criticism 18.2, 1976, 122–146 [133]). The Kantian account of judgments of beauty that is the basis for most discussions, including my own, is the one that Kant offers in the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” According to this account, when an object of which one does not possess a concept produces the experience of disinterested pleasure, indicating the free play of imagination and understanding, the object is judged beautiful. In calling an object beautiful, judgment takes the natural object as if its possibility rested on art or a technic of nature. It follows from the “as if” structure of such a judgment that the object is judged to be purposive for the subject, though no objective purpose is cognized (“relation”). The judgment of beauty is disinterested (“quality”) because interest in promoting the moral good or preserving the agreeable is taken out of play, and it is nonconceptual. As such, the judgment possesses universality (“quantity”) that is only subjective, but it affirms that this object pleases necessarily (“modality”). Empty of cognitive-conceptual content, the judgment of beauty only asserts that other human subjects, given such an object, would experience it as purposive, that is, they would experience the pleasure of the free play of the faculties and would themselves judge it beautiful. Kant, Judgment, 179 (A 311; B 189). Pluhar, whose translation of the Third Critique I have used in this chapter, translates Vorstellung as “presentation,” while Guyer translates it as “representation.” I have supplied the German term in most instances to avoid confusions.



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Kant defines the “genius” that characterizes certain kinds of making in terms of these very mental powers that are in play in judgment, but he “qualifies” them as follows: So the mental powers whose combination (in a certain relation) constitutes genius are imagination and understanding. One qualification is needed, however. When the imagination is used for cognition, then it is under the constraint of the understanding and is subject to the restriction of adequacy to the understanding’s concept. But when the aim is aesthetic, then the imagination is free, so that, over and above that harmony with the concept, it may supply, in an unstudied way, a wealth of undeveloped material for the understanding which the latter disregarded in its concept. But the understanding employs this material not so much objectively, for cognition, as subjectively, namely, to quicken the cognitive powers, though indirectly this does serve cognition too. Hence genius actually consists in the happy relation – one that no science can teach and that cannot be learned by any diligence – 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, as accompanying a concept, the mental attunement that those ideas produce. The second talent is properly the one we call spirit. For in order to express what is unnamable [Unnennbare] in the mental state accompanying a certain presentation [Vorstellung] and to make it universally communicable  – whether the expression consists in language or painting or plastic art – we need an ability [viz., spirit] to apprehend the imagination’s rapidly passing play and to unite it in a concept that can be communicated without the constraint of rules (a concept that on that very account is original, while at the same time it reveals a new rule that could not have been inferred from any earlier principles or examples).35

As with judgments of beauty, with genius too, it is the faculties of imagination and understanding that are engaged, and in both instances, imagination is free from the predetermined conceptual constraints of the understanding. In the case of genius, the imagination, instead of employing a concept of the understanding, supplies a “wealth of undeveloped material” over and above the characteristics considered meaningful for the constitution of the concept. Prompted by the materiality 35

Kant, Judgment, 185–186 (A 317; B 198) (translation modified). In the course of his discussion of “genius,” Kant uses Unnennbare twice, which is rendered as “ineffable” on both occasions in the translation by Pluhar I have been using for this chapter. Paul Guyer, in his English translation, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, uses “unnamable” to translate the term. I prefer Guyer’s more literal rendition because it captures the nonconceptuality at stake in this discussion without introducing the utter incommunicability that “ineffable” implies in English.

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of an object, the “unstudied” productive response of the imagination suspends conceptual closure while “unit[ing]” that material in an “original concept” that reveals a “new rule” and incorporates new “ideas” without altering the fundamental lawfulness of the understanding. This first talent that composes genius, which Kant calls the talent to “discover ideas for a given concept,” is the talent to employ imagination productively no matter what the given concept.36 Here, one can discern one thing that distinguishes this first talent of genius from the universal capacity to experience pleasure in the perception of a “beautiful thing”: while aesthetic experience, as explicated in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” requires that a conceptless object be given to the subject, for genius, even an object to which a cognitive concept is normatively related can become the occasion for a new aesthetic experience, based upon the “happy relation” by which “genius” conjoins and “communicates” new ideas of that object and concept. What the “second talent,” the one “properly” called “spirit,” accomplishes, can be understood in contradistinction to the power to form the linguistic statements that express aesthetic judgments. Now, what is “unnamable” is what escapes conceptuality, and as such, in the case of the aesthetic “aim” of communicating the “free” use of “imagination” through some inherently unfree, material medium, the very aspect of the “spirit” capable of shaping such a communicative object and uniting its “passing” experience under an “original” “concept” is unnamable. In the case of judgments, that is, when the statement, “It is beautiful,” is made with reference to an object, as I have already observed, nothing is transmitted of the experience itself. The content of the experience remains uncommunicated, except as the naming of an uncognizable quality that provisionally stands in for experience. Genius, however, is able not only to experience an object aesthetically, providing “a wealth of undeveloped material for the understanding” of the particular subject, but also to “express what is unnamable in the mental state accompanying a certain presentation and to make it universally communicable” through the shaping of a medium. 36

A paragraph later, Kant says that “[genius] manifests itself not so much in the fact that the proposed purpose is achieved in exhibiting a determinate concept, as, rather, in the way aesthetic ideas, which contain a wealth of material [suitable] for that intention, are offered or expressed” (Kant, Judgment, 186 [A 318; B 200]). The free rearranging of “presentations” in the productive exercise of the imagination, including of those not previously understood under a given concept, and the “discovery” of the aesthetic ideas corresponding to a new “wealth of undeveloped material,” are but two descriptions of the same process. Here, I have chosen to focus on the first of these descriptions.



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Insofar as genius “actually consists in the happy relation” of these two talents, the artist-genius performs the double duty of making an object an occasion for aesthetic experience, and then conveying the experience in a work, such that it may now be available to all possessing the power of judgment. In other words, able to disarticulate an object from its concept in order to experience it in its nonidentity, genius transmits this necessarily noncognitive experience in a new form that other subjects can experience autonomously. This very structure of poiesis, understood as a coordination of two moments, appears in Wordsworth’s Preface. Indeed, as I demonstrate, the difference between the power of judgment and “genius” maps upon the difference between “men” and “poets,” and thus not only provides a persuasive exposition of Wordsworth’s argument concerning the “difference in degree” that alone separates poets from other humans but also reveals a clear structural justification for Kant’s inclusion of an account of creative aesthetic “genius” in the Third Critique as part of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.” In elucidating Wordsworth’s idea that poetry’s acknowledgment of the “beauty of the universe” is “not formal, but indirect,” I had read the distinction between “formal” and “indirect” as designating the difference between the making of conceptual judgments, on the one hand, and the making and judging of poetry, on the other. The preceding analysis of Kant indicated that, in an important way, the phrase can also be used to demarcate the difference between the judging and making of poems. If a judgment is a statement that ascribes a quality (“beauty”) to an uncognized object, and in so doing invites others to exercise their judgment in an encounter with that object, then it, too, is “formal.” By itself, it lacks content, for it only proposes an encounter with the unnamable in the experience of the “it” of “it is beautiful.” But in proposing such an encounter, judgment is also indirect, since it does not claim to transmit any knowledge of the judged object. A poem, or an art-object in general, differs from a judgment because (one could say, drawing on Kant) it reorganizes the perceptual material associated with objects, and thus enables, by itself, an undetermined, noncognitive experience of an object made of language, or another medium, as beautiful. That is, to the extent that the poem is a reorganization of externally given perceptual material, like an aesthetic judgment, it too can retrospectively be called an indirect acknowledgment of the “beauty of the universe.” However, unlike an aesthetic judgment, as a composition of signs, a poem, is full of content rather than merely formal. Thus, my claim is that the difference between the making of judgments

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and of poetry, as laid out by Kant, is present in Wordsworth’s “Preface” too, and it is with this claim in mind that we may now turn again to Wordsworth’s understanding of “the Poet’s art”: Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, I ask what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves; whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.37

While endowed with “a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present,” the poet is, most fundamentally, Wordsworth says, at the very start of this crucial paragraph, “a man speaking to men.” In a previously discussed passage, we had read Wordsworth assert that the poet gives pleasure to “a human Being … as a Man.” These two formulations, when read together, yield: The poet is not just a man speaking to men, he is man speaking as man, to men as men, and one might add, the specificity of poetry is that it is such speech; or, it is in making such speech that somebody speaks as a man, to others as men, calling forth their capacity to judge freely with reference to their “unadulterated pleasure,” and not “the [codified] judgment of others” or arbitrarily determined “codes” of taste. But what constitutes the ability to make poetic speech? The passage quoted earlier lists qualities possessed by all men, which the poet possesses in greater quantities. Wordsworth uses “more” six times in this passage and 37

Wordsworth, Preface, 138.



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“greater” twice. This list, delineating the differences that separate the poet from other men, is summarized by Wordsworth a few paragraphs later: Among the qualities which I have enumerated as principally conducting to form a Poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in degree. The sum of what I have there said is, that the Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner.38

The first sentence of this passage condenses the basic principle that structured the previous passage, namely, that these differences are ones of degree. Yet in attributing to the poet a “greater” ability to “think and to feel” and “express thoughts and feelings” “without immediate external excitement,” Wordsworth indicates what looks like a difference in kind: He gives us the negative determination of a freedom specific to the poet. When things present themselves in the course of daily existence, they cause immediate external excitement and demand a response fitted to the needs of daily existence. The poet’s freedom derives from the ability to activate the structure of experience that produces “thoughts and feelings,” while maintaining autonomy from the immediate ends of existence, and to do so even when no object of experience appears to “him.”39 Thus, in the poet, the receptive structure by which external things present themselves to all minds (“common among mankind”) is able to receive the presentation of even those things that are absent. To be sure, Wordsworth insists that this, too, is a difference of degree (“more than other men”). Given that establishing that the “powers of language” are shared by all men is an important element in the argument of the “Preface,” Wordsworth was clearly alert to the fact that all of mankind is able to be affected by things not immediately present.40 But how is one to understand the heightened 38

Ibid., 142. This autonomy of the poet, which, as I demonstrate, allows the poet to represent an experience as a “construction,” corresponds to how poetry makes its Wordsworthian reader “surpass” the immediacy of an experience and “continue reading” (Brodsky, Words’ Worth, 8). It is important that this extrication from “immediacy” or the “everyday” does not take away from the significance of individual experience in poetry. Wordsworth takes great pains to distinguish poetry’s treatment of the external world from one in which the universe is broken down into so many “Matter[s] of Fact.” As Brodsky describes it, poetry, for Wordsworth, “strives to represent the inherently differential, temporal and eventful nature of our interaction with the material world” (Brodsky, Words’ Worth, 17). But while poetic representation makes experience “appear present by objectifying or describing it,” it also “stands in” for experience, substituting for its immediacy that of its own continuous – ideational and sensory – medium” (Brodsky, Words’ Worth, 8). 40 For an account of Wordsworth’s conception of the “power of language” that attends to its similarities with Kant’s, see Brodsky, Words’ Worth. A different account of language in Wordsworth as 39

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degree of this power in the poet? Surely, Wordsworth does not merely mean a greater ability to recall things to mind. Rather, this “greater” degree may be Wordsworth’s way of describing the poet’s ability to disarticulate the actual “present[ness]” of things from their nature as presentations to the mind. The absent thing present to the poet is not a thing lacking in materiality, that is, a thing simply removed from immediate presence to the senses. The absent thing, rather, is a thing subtracted from the predicates that give it identity, such that when it is presented by the mind to itself, it must be judged in its nonidentity. As such, this thing, of which nothing can be said in advance, becomes an occasion, or as Wordsworth says in a remarkable passage in The Prelude, a “curious prop” for the “world of thought” that is poetry.41 Not only is the poet able to be affected by absent things as if they were present but he is also able to “absent” present things, such that they may be experienced without “immediate external excitement,” as mental objects that the mind can reorganize. In addition to this power to imagine things by abstracting the potential to experience them differently from the experience of their actual, delimited presence, the poet also has, Wordsworth, much like Kant, asserts, a “greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner.” This greater power of expression is a greater power to shape language (or “to melt [it] down for his purpose”) into an independent, nonphenomenal, object of experience.42 The poet shapes language not to state what Wordsworth calls “Matter[s] of Fact,” or to make a formal statement of judgment, but rather to make poetic constructions that represent experiences, or “thoughts and feelings,” in a way that allows others to experience them, too. When a thing prompts the mind into action, the poet does not just invite others to seek the thing out in making a judgment. Rather, he constructs something, namely a poem, that enables the reader to perform the very mental procedures that constitute the experience that is purportedly the object of representation. As such, even the reader not possessing the poet’s greater powers is able to experience something of the “beauty of the universe.” Thus, understood in analogy with the “second talent” of Kant’s genius, the poet’s “greater power in expressing” completes the corresponding the “basic communal form” can be found in Charles Altieri, “Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ as Literary Theory,” Criticism 18.2 (1976), 122–146. William Wordsworth, “Book VII (1805),” in The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S. Gill, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997, 250, lines 493–495. 42 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, Vol. 1, 82. 41



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bipartite structure in Wordsworth. This structure, replicating that of aesthetic judgment at a higher plane, simultaneously supplies Wordsworth’s dictum, that poets possess “nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in degree,” with its full meaning and justifies Kant’s placement of his examination of genius within the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,”43 delivering thereby a full delineation of the relation between “poetry” and “judgment.”

IV  The Historicity of Human Nature I stated at the outset that in Wordsworth’s “Preface,” the respective accounts of the making of judgment and that of poetry are mediated by the issue of “newness.” Newness was a way of naming that aspect of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetic experiment that made it “materially different,” and thus potentially unrecognizable to contemporary taste as poetry, leading Wordsworth to make the request of his readers that they judge only with reference to their “unadulterated pleasure” and not “the judgment of others.” If, according to both Kant and Wordsworth, aesthetic experience is a noncognitive experience of the nonidentical, then newness is how the nonidentity of a work, as a singular construction – or in Kantian terms, a singular organization of presentations (Vorstellungen) – appears, calling for an undetermined exercise of judgment in the one experiencing it. Such a construction is made distinct by the set of presentations organized to form it and by the particularity of the subjective act of organization, and it is ever new because it is “unexpoundable”;44 an encounter with it will always demand free judging, canons of taste notwithstanding. 43

Wordsworth himself does not use the concept of “genius” in the “Preface,” but when the concept turns up in the later “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” it is consistent with the structure of poetic genius outlined here. In this later essay, Wordsworth begins by saying that the task of “genius” is the “widening [of] the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honour, and benefit of human nature.” Such “widening” happens through the introduction of “a new element into the intellectual universe,” or through the “the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised,” or by “the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown” (Wordsworth, Essay Supplementary, 82). This work of genius, however, cannot be accomplished without an accompanying ability to shape language. So, Wordsworth goes on to say that “the medium through which, in poetry, the heart is to be affected, is language; a thing subject to endless fluctuations and arbitrary associations. The genius of the poet melts these down for his purpose; but they retain their shape and quality to him who is not capable of exerting, within his own mind, a corresponding energy” (Wordsworth, Essay Supplementary, 82). 44 In the first “comment” in “The Dialectic of Aesthetic of Judgment” Kant turns to the distinction between rational and aesthetic ideas. He calls the former “indemonstrable concepts” and calls the latter “unexpoundable presentations [inexponible Vorstellungen]” (Kant, Judgment, 215, [A 342; B 240]). Rational ideas are concepts which the imagination is unable to exhibit exhaustively.

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Thus, as the objectification of a particular noncognitive experience of nonidentity, the work of genius that is a poem is necessarily singular, even as the singularity of the work affirms a sense that is held in common by all subjects.45 This seeming inconsistency disappears when it is clarified that what is affirmed as the commonality that makes of humanity a “kind” is a power, a power furthermore to form relations with singular others on the basis of communicating, as judgment, or as art, a noncognitive experience of beauty. The work of art tests and affirms this common basis of humankind because it is the ideal form of the singular in human experience externalized. As such, in the moment in which a work is judged and found beautiful, the absolutely particular in human experience, heretofore called its singularity, and the substrate that allows one to say “man” as the designation of a kind, are held together. When Wordsworth speaks of man “as man,” I contend, he is trying to name this holding together of contraries made possible by the poet. Therefore, Wordsworth says of the poet: He is the rock of defense of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.46

The poet is the “rock of human nature; an upholder and preserver,” but what he “carries with him” is “relationship and love.” What the poet upholds, then, is not any specific content that may be designated “human nature” but the form of relationality and connection between distinct things that human beings carry with them. The rest of the paragraph details the types of distinctions that make up humanity, which the poet binds, and these distinctions are apprehended in the phrase: “the vast empire of human Aesthetic ideas, on the other hand, refer to the power of the productive imagination to rearrange presentations that would correspond in cognition to a concept, such that the understanding, while prompted into the process of thinking, is unable to comprehend them under a concept. As such, both the object, on the one hand, and the concept, on the other, come to comprise an occasion for the productive imagination, whose activity in turn prompts the understanding into a potentially infinite exercise of thought. Thus, thinking tries to bring the given presentation of the imagination to conceptualization, which is the same as expounding. But since such a coming to concepts is never accomplished, the presentation of an “aesthetic idea” is termed “unexpoundable.” 45 In Kant’s terms, a sensus communis: “a sense shared [by all of us], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else’s way of presenting [something], in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general” (Kant, Judgement, 160, [A 293; B 156]). 46 Wordsworth, Preface, 141.



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society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.” The passage from “human nature,” of which the poet is “upholder and preserver,” to the “vast empire of human society” that the poet “binds together with passion and knowledge,” captures the fact that, on the one hand, “human nature” names those things which are transcendentally given and held in common by human subjects (such as language), and, on the other, it is a placeholder for something that is constituted historically (“over all time”) in the coordination of distinct locations (“spread over the whole earth”). It is the fact that “human nature” is not predetermined and closed in its content that makes the “binding” of society’s temporal and spatial expanse and of all the differences that comprise it, a condition for “human nature” to attain any determinateness at all. At the same time, any such binding presupposes the givenness of language as its own ­transcendental condition. There exists an evident structural correspondence between, on the one hand, the relation between the “vast empire of human society,” with all its particularities, and the linguistic condition of possibility for its binding, and, on the other, the relation – outlined earlier – between the singular, noncognitive experience of a new organization of perceptions (“beauty”) and the power to judge and articulate a judgment of it that is held in common among subjects. This correspondence is what allows Wordsworth to say that poets (or, more accurately, poems) bind the “vast empire of human society.” Wordsworth continues: The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are every where; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge – it is as immortal as the heart of man.47

Because the poet carries “every where with him relationship and love,” the “objects of the Poet’s thoughts are every where.” That is, because of the openness and receptivity of the poetic disposition, the kind of thought that belongs specifically to the poet finds its occasion anywhere at all, given that the “eyes and senses of man are … his favorite guides.” The idea that the occasions of poetic thought are ubiquitous has already been elucidated in Section III. But what does this ubiquity have to do with the poet’s role as “bind[er]” or “preserver” or “upholder” of human nature? The answer lies in the coincidence of negation and making in poiesis: The construction of a work requires the subtracting of an object from its 47

Ibid.

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pre-established conceptual place and a simultaneous reconstitution of perceptual material such that it can be experienced in its nonidentity, thus inviting the free exercise of the capacity of judgment. As I have already demonstrated, the correspondence between poiesis and judgment originates in the fact that in both cases, something of the universe is encountered in its externality – provisionally freed from its normatively prescribed concept  – in such an undetermined way that the human capacity to form a relation with what falls to it from without (“occasion”: ob- “towards” plus cadere “to fall”) is exercised and affirmed. As such, each moment of making and of judging is a “bind[ing]” of the “spread” – “every where” – of human experience in its most puzzling particularities. An open-endedness is written into this process of making-judging-as-binding, such that it does not yield a singularly determined human nature, bound once and for all, never itself to be negated. Instead, the never-ending process in which human nature is constituted as an unending series of real encounters between particulars, in which universals are produced to be determinately negated in turn, gives us an image of a real human history, upon which poetry (“first and last of all knowledge”) attends.

V  Poetry, History, and the Value-Form In his description of the poet, Wordsworth begins by calling the poet “the rock of defense of human nature.” Previously, I made note of the difference between the ways in which Wordsworth and Kant approach the question of judgment, which is made apparent in Wordsworth’s juxtaposition of an epistemological interest in judgment with an awareness of processes that seem to subdue the power to judge. The self-same difference appears once again when Wordsworth presents the poet as a defender of “human nature” against some threat that seems to have no real equivalent in Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment. Over the course of the “Preface,” this threat is first represented in those passages that describe, in socio-historic terms of enduring consequence, the “increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations” reduces them to “a state of almost savage torpor,”48 and second, as the separate but obliquely related matter of “poetic diction.” By way of concluding this chapter, I want to show that the key to understanding why “human nature” needs a “rock of defense,” and why Wordsworth might conceive the poet to be such a rock, resides in the fact that Wordsworth advances his description of the poet 48

Ibid., 129.



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in a moment of a perceived crisis of human history, that is, a crisis of the process that composes human nature in its open-endedness. In the discussion of “poetic diction,” I described how, on Wordsworth’s account, the problem with a poetry composed of congealed diction is its circumvention of experience. Poetic making that is based instead in poetic diction no longer includes a relation with externality as a necessary moment of its unfolding; seeking to be “unoccasioned” – self-same and entirely self-grounding – it produces its predictable effects from a static store of formulaic imagery, thus also suppressing its own historicity. Given the foregoing description of making and judging, and the concurrent process of the “bind[ing]” of particulars that unfolds as history, poetic diction, because of its tendency toward stasis and self-enclosure, poses a threat to poetry and consequently to human nature’s historical constitution. However, the threat of poetic diction does not exhaust the scope of Wordsworth’s concern, and at least some of the affective charge of his arguments against poetic diction is borrowed from his awareness of a corresponding process appearing on the world-historical plane as capitalism. It is significant for the present discussion that, unlike other critics of capitalism, Wordsworth does not name “loss of community” etc. as its key distinguishing mark (though that too, rightly, comes up elsewhere in Wordsworth). Rather, it is the imposition of “uniformity” and the subsequent “torpor” of this new existence that Wordsworth names. He does not suggest a direct connection between the “torpor” that besets the laboring classes of the capitalist city and that of poetic diction, and the canny separation of the passages dealing with the two preclude simplistically causal explanations. Nevertheless, as in other instances already described, here, too, the “Preface” makes use of a structural correspondence as a way of representing a possible, undisclosed connection. Insofar as poetic diction substitutes a set of empty effects, produced according to unchanging formulae, for the mediation of real, particular experience, thus suspending all external relations (all “occasions”), one can find powerful support for the meaningfulness of the aforesaid structural correspondence noted by Wordsworth in Marx’s unsurpassed exposition of the underlying logic of capitalism. In part I (“Commodities and Money”) of the first volume of Capital, Marx sought to answer a question that he claimed Aristotle, bound by the historicity of his experiences, had failed to answer, namely, how two particulars may come to be exchanged for one another.49 Marx’s answer 49

Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, London: Penguin Books, 1976, 155.

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was that such exchange is made possible by the generalized imposition of a “form” that reduces qualitative differences to quantitative ones. The instrument of this reduction, and the concomitant exchangeability of things, is represented as the “contentless and simple” value-form,50 whose absolute abstraction from all particulars is only properly measurable by the purely numerical, artificial medium of exchange and “capitalization”: money. Concrete, historical particulars never interrupt the process of this abstraction, which is always already underway – such, at any rate, is capital’s strictly idealist fantasy, studied and criticized by Theodor Adorno under the name of “identity thinking.” Marx thus names the underlying economic logic of the process that Wordsworth sought to describe in some of its visible, socio-historical symptoms (“uniformity of occupations”; “torpor”). Given a conception of human nature as a never-ending binding of particulars that unfolds as history, of poetry as a seeking after the new in human experience, and of capitalism as the reduction of difference to sameness always already underway, one can identify why, to Wordsworth, the poet begins to seem like the “rock of defense of human nature.” In the crisis of human history caused by the universal imposition of the valueform upon the historical production of interacting particulars, poetry appears as the ideal externalized form in which the particular in human experience is communicated, and which, therefore, continues to call forth the human ability to experience and judge that which is particular and new. Wordsworth’s depiction of the poet, thus, is an early example of the tendency to treat art as the unsubsumed remainder, where history, subtracted from the value-form, still appears, and which is thus charged with the power to resist the value-form.51 To be sure, no particular act of “communication” (or “binding” or “commerce of [human] nature with itself”52) produced in poetry, let alone a work of “genius” bringing new “ideas” to “expression,” or, least of all, a power capable of judging these, can itself give the lie to the value-form, and any suggestion otherwise must appear immediately suspect, another 50

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In the original German, the Preface to the First Edition says, “Die Wertform, deren fertige Gestalt die Geldform, ist sehr inhaltslos und einfach.” See Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin, 1962, 12. For another way of accounting for the place of art and judgment within critical theory see J. M. Bernstein’s The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992; also see Robert Kaufman’s “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third ‘Critique’ in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry 26.4 (2000), 682–724. William Wordsworth, “Prelude, Book V (1805),” in The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S. Gill, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997, 152, line 13.



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manifestation of a pervasive “aesthetic ideology.” Yet the first of these names “constructions” that facilitate critique and the last names the negative capacity of thought that gets actualized as critique. As such, Adorno’s appeal in Minima Moralia can be accurately appropriated for the present purpose: To identify culture solely with lies is most disastrous in the very moment in which it really devolves into lies. Such identification is eagerly courted in order to compromise every resisting thought. If material reality is called the world of exchange-value, and culture, that which refuses its rule, then, so long as that which exists continues to exist, this refusal is merely a matter of appearance. But since free and equal exchange is itself a lie, whatever disavows it stands at the same time for truth: To the lie of the world of commodities, whatever denounces it, becomes a corrective. That culture has failed to this day still does not warrant furthering its failure, scattering the store of fine flour on spilled beer like Katherlieschen.53

Bibliography Adorno, T. W. “Minima Moralia: Reflections from the Damaged Life.” Trans. Dennis Redmond. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/ mm/ch01.htm. Adorno, T. W. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973. Altieri, Charles. “Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ as Literary Theory.” Criticism 18.2 (1976), 122–146. Bernstein, Jay M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Boyson, Rowan. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Brodsky, Claudia. Words’ Worth: What the Poet Does. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 53

“Kultur einzig mit Lüge zu identifizieren ist am verhängnisvollsten in dem Augenblick, da jene wirklich ganz in diese übergeht und solche Identifikation eifrig herausfordert, um jeden widerstehenden Gedanken zu kompromittieren. Nennt man die materielle Realität die Welt des Tauschwerts, Kultur aber, was immer dessen Herrschaft zu akzeptieren sich weigert, so ist solche Weigerung zwar scheinhaft, solange das Bestehende besteht. Da jedoch der freie und gerechte Tausch selber die Lüge ist, so steht was ihn verleugnet, zugleich auch für die Wahrheit ein: der Lüge der Warenwelt gegenüber wird noch die Lüge zum Korrektiv, die jene denunziert. Daß die Kultur bis heute mißlang, ist keine Rechtfertigung dafür, ihr Mißlingen zu befördern, indem man wie Katherlieschen noch den Vorrat an schönem Weizenmehl über das ausgelaufene Bier streut.” See T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973, 68. The translation from German is mine. I have used Dennis Redmond’s previous translation for reference. See T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from the Damaged Life,” trans. Dennis Redmond, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm.

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Ginsborg, Hannah. “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 72.4 (1991), 290–313. Goetschel, Willi. Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. W. S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. W. S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kaufman, Robert. “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third ‘Critique’ in Adorno and Jameson.” Critical Inquiry 26.4 (2000), 682–724. Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Longuenesse, Béatrice. “Kant’s Leading Thread in the Analytic of the Beautiful.” In Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Kukla. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. London: Penguin Books, 1976. Marx, Karl. Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen ökonomie. Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin, 1962. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, Vol. 1. Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, Vol. 3. Wu, Duncan. Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Zuckert, Rachel. Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Zuckert, Rachel. “A New Look at Kant’s Theory of Pleasure.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.3 (2002): 239–252.

chapter 2

On Power in an Extra-secular Sense Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime David Martyn

The “sublime,” in the specific sense the term acquired in the course of the eighteenth century, denoted the curious and paradoxical delight that could be taken in what to the average spectator would have seemed anything but inducive to aesthetic enjoyment: vast and barren mountain landscapes, the dizzying expanse of the ocean or the heavens, the terrifying force of storms or volcanoes. Unlike the beautiful, the appreciation of which varied but was clearly as universal as it was ancient, the sublime was an aesthetic response of a very singular kind, one that could find satisfaction in what was clearly not beautiful: the formless, the horrifying, even the ugly.1 If ever there were a mark of aestheticism, of a turn away from the straightforward valuations of everyday life toward the aloofness of an experience available only to the selected few, it would surely be the eighteenth century’s aesthetics of the sublime, which can turn the disagreeable or horrifying into something delectable. Kant’s famous analysis of the sublime, for all its radical newness, was in this respect no exception. “[W]hat we, prepared by culture, call sublime, presents itself to the uneducated man merely as terrible,” Kant observes, and cites the case – related in a 1779 travel account  – of “the good and otherwise sensible Savoyard peasant” who “did not hesitate to call anyone a fool who fancies glaciered mountains” (265).2 The beautiful pleases directly; the feeling of the sublime, by 1

Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII–Century England [1935], with a new preface by the author, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960, 98. Monk’s magisterial study remains unsurpassed in the historical thoroughness of its treatment. 2 Immanuel Kant, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Erste Abtheilung: Werke, Vol. V, Berlin: Reimer, 1908, 265. Henceforth, page numbers in p ­ arenthesis refer to this edition. Translations are my own, but I have borrowed freely from many of the extant translations: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard, 2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 1914; Kant’s Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952; The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987; and Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. The last two of these provide page references in the margin to the edition referenced here.

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contrast, is a “pleasure (Lust) that arises only indirectly” (245), for the satisfaction it provides results from an intricate play of both “positive” with “negative pleasure” (245). Of beauty, “anyone” is likely to judge as we do; the proper judgment of the sublime, by contrast, requires “a far greater culture, not just of aesthetic judgment, but also of the cognitive faculties that lie at its basis” (264). It thus comes as quite a surprise when Kant, in a “General Remark” that arrives as a kind of coda to the “Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment,” comments explicitly on the politically emancipatory potential of this most rarified of aesthetic experiences. Precisely by means of its curious negativity that renders hollow even the grandest of sensual displays, the sublime, we learn here, may occasion such an “impetus (Schwung) of the unbounded imagination” (274) as could spell the end of many a government’s repressive control over its subjects. For governments, Kant explains, rely all too willingly on the “images and childish devices” (274) of religion in order to satiate, and thus contain, the imagination of the governed. They thus relieve their subjects of “the bother, but at the same time also of the capacity to extend the powers of their souls beyond the limits that are arbitrarily set for them and by means of which, as merely passive beings, they can more easily be dealt with” (275). As the context makes clear, the antidote to this perverse collusion of state and church to keep the people in a perpetual state of intellectual infancy is none other than the feeling Kant calls the sublime, for it alone is what can extend the powers of the soul beyond the limits set for it – by governments, by religions, indeed by any sensual representation at all. The sublime, one might say, is what pulls back the curtain on all the Wizards of Oz, revealing the tawdry pettiness at the root of grand displays of majesty and power, be they political, religious, or both. Not despite its abstruse, indirect, and negative mode of satisfaction but because of it, the sublime is a subversive and liberatory force. This sudden turn to the topic of religious and political emancipation is both unexpected and short-lived. We hear almost nothing about governments elsewhere in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,”3 let alone about what might resist governmental paternalism or tutelage, and the little passage about governments’ eagerness to keep their subjects from thinking for themselves is more reminiscent of a text such as “What Is Enlightenment” 3

Different forms of monarchy figure as examples in §59, but only at the very end of the “Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment” do we return to any explicit discussion of political institutions; there, Kant’s concern is to show that the “culture of the mental faculties” (355) required for judgments of taste is the same as that which is required for the establishment of a lasting and just commonwealth.



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(1784) than of what Kant has been discussing in this work. Small wonder that the passage has been given scant attention by commentators.4 But on reflection, the brief allusion to governmental control by means of religion seems to point up a key issue not just for Kant’s treatment of the sublime but for what is at stake more broadly in his critique of aesthetic judgment, indeed in the emergence of the new discipline of aesthetics in general. Just what is exactly the relationship of the sublime to religion? From Longinus to Burke, the question of religion was never far behind in discussions of the sublime. Longinus famously cites as an example of the sublime the opening of the Book of Genesis (“And God said, let there be light, and there was light”);5 and Burke would have no difficulty identifying the power of God as a source of the sublime.6 Kant too cites examples of sublimity taken from religion, be it Hebrew scripture (“There is perhaps no more sublime passage in the Jewish Law than: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image’”) or the sense of “pride” that is “inspired by Mohammedanism” (274). When we hear that sublime is “the name we give to what is absolutely great” (248) or that it is nature’s fear-inspiring “might” (Macht) that arouses in us the sense of the sublime (260),7 one can’t help wondering how the aesthetic satisfaction taken in what is great and powerful beyond compare relates to a devotional or religious attitude toward what is great and powerful beyond compare. The standard answer to this question will invoke the concept of the secular and of secularization. According to this common interpretative schema, religion diminishes in significance as newly autonomous social formations – science, politics, education, economics, recreation, jurisprudence, aesthetics – assert their independence from what is increasingly perceived as their religiously inflected past. The divine right of kings gives way 4

Not even Jean-François Lyotard, the commentator who, perhaps more than any other, has insisted on the political significance of the sublime, appears to have given this passage any consideration in his detailed Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, §§23–29, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. In The Theory of the Sublime: From Longinus to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 271, Robert Doran remarks on the passage briefly, noting that it comes “somewhat unexpectedly” and “is as close as Kant ever comes to detailing the political implications of sublimity in the third Critique.” The significance of the passage for the question of Kant’s orientalism is pointed out by Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 72. 5 [Longinus], On Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russel, Oxford: Clarendon, 1965, 12. The passage played a key role in the emergence of the sublime as an aesthetic category, distinct from the use of the term in rhetorics to designate an elevated style. See Monk, The Sublime, 33. 6 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958, 64–70 (II, v: “Power”). 7 “[F]or aesthetic judgment, nature can qualify as a might, and hence as dynamically sublime, only in so far as it is looked upon as an object of fear” (260).

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to the separation of church and state, making politics into a purely secular affair; artworks move from cathedrals to museums, where they can become the object of a properly aesthetic, secular, devotion. Even if we accept this interpretative schema – growing numbers of scholars do not, as we will see later– two things need to be kept in mind. The first is that the process referred to is not simply a matter of religion losing significance while everything else remains what it was, as though religion could simply be “subtracted” from the whole, but rather of a co-evolutive development in which all of the various formations are in flux.8 Notably, the modern concept of religion as a set of beliefs and practices – as “the inward persuasion of the mind,”9 as Locke defines it – emerges not before but contemporaneously with the secular state. It is not that politics divests itself of religion, but that religion, in the modern sense, and politics, in the modern sense, emerge simultaneously in a mutually interactive process.10 Similarly with aesthetics: Art does not become autonomous by simply freeing itself from its entanglements with religion and politics while remaining what it always was; rather, the aesthetics of autonomy redefines what we think of as art in ways that affect religion and politics as well. The second point to keep in mind is that in the process commonly referred to as secularization, the term “religion” becomes a master trope, a near ubiquitous term the inflationary use of which blurs the distinction between the secular and the religious even while creating the impression that there is some sort of essential difference between them. When Mill and Comte refer to their humanist ethical systems as the “religion of humanity”; when political thinkers from Rousseau to Robert Bellah speak of “civil religion” to describe the sacred authority of the modern state and its ceremonial practices; when, in the wake of Nietzsche, aestheticism raises art to the status of the sacred, to an object of worship, two things are occurring: first, humanism, the state, and art gain in value by being compared to or equated with religion, which suggests that religion is something of merit, something to be esteemed; and second, they are being categorically distinguished from religion in the literal sense of the 8

9 10

The refutation of “subtraction” theories of secularization is one of the primary objectives of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. On the co-evolution of aesethetics and religion, see Ernst Müller, Ästhetische Religiosität und Kunstreligion in den Philosophien von der Aufklärung bis zum Ausgang des deutschen Idealismus, Berlin: Akademie, 2004. John Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” in Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, 219. For a concise and forceful demonstration of this point, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 181–201.



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term (which is then devalued and relegated to the past). To speak of “art as religion” is to say that art is not religion. It also suggests that we can in fact know what the term religion “in the literal sense” refers to (for one: something that is not art). But there are good reasons to suppose that there is no such literal sense, for what lies at the basis of all of these comparisons and distinctions is the common denominator: grandeur and power, the signature attributes of the sublime. It is because grandeur and power are qualities that we are as likely to attribute to art or to the state as to the objects of religion – because art, the state, and religion are all formations that can inspire awe and admiration, a devotion or a valuation that is in some sense out of or above the ordinary – that they can be equated and distinguished in one and the same gesture.11 Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” stands at the beginning of this co-evolutive process of differentiation; more, his notion of the aesthetic as what pleases “without interest” is often seen as laying the cornerstone for the aesthetics of autonomy that will unfold from Schiller to Baudelaire and beyond. To say that what distinguishes the aesthetic satisfaction taken in what is great and powerful from religious devotion to grandeur and power is that the first is secular while the second is religious is thus to say very little: It relies on conceptual distinctions (“political,” “aesthetic,” “religious”) that are in no small measure themselves the product of what is going on in Kant’s text, of tropological substitutions and comparisons to which we have grown so accustomed that we have ceased to perceive them as tropes. The little passage about the potential of the sublime to counter the collusion of church and governments to keep their subjects in a state of intellectual infancy situates the sublime at a three-way crossroads: the point at which politics, religion, and the aesthetic – three not yet but soon to be distinct socio-discursive formations  – first meet, in order then to go their (mutually imbricated) separate ways. The sublime is the name Kant gives to the common denominator that allows the three formations to be compared and thus distinguished to begin with. It cannot be properly understood without a full accounting of this function. That is the purpose of this chapter – not simply to clarify the (important but limited) question of how the sublime relates to religion but to understand how the question of religion and the secular is central to Kant’s famous analysis of the sublime. 11

Hence it becomes possible, for example, to see the aesthetic and its philosophical theory as a quasireligious phenomenon, as a formation that runs counter to the secularization of modern society. See, for example, Doran, Theory of the Sublime, 286–287.

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I  Sublime Reversals The inflationary use of the term “sublime” since the nineteenth century has obscured for us what the eighteenth century meant by the term. If in contemporary usage, “sublime” has come to function as a mere synonym for “beautiful,” or perhaps as its superlative, in the eighteenth century, the two terms were closer to antonyms. When the British poet John Dennis, in a 1693 travel account, wrote of the strange pleasure he experienced at the sight of an Alpine landscape, he did not use the word “beauty” to describe what he saw, and we can surmise why: Such a mass of irregular forms scarcely suited the neoclassical concept of beauty. But the “delightful Horrour” and “terrible Joy” he reported experiencing at the sight of the Alps corresponded exactly to what he himself and others would later call the sublime.12 “Sublime,” in its new, aesthetic valence, thus came to fill a void by designating an aesthetic experience aroused by something that on no account could be called beautiful. Kant’s treatment too sets out by relating and differentiating the sublime and the beautiful.13 Both provide pleasure (“The beautiful and the sublime agree in this, that both please in themselves” [244]) but in very different ways: The beautiful concerns form, while the sublime is to be found in formless objects; the beautiful accords with our mental faculties, appearing to be “as it were, preadapted to our power of judgment” (245), while the sublime may appear “to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and do violence, as it were, (gleichsam gewalttätig) to the imagination” (245, emphasis added); the beautiful draws us to it and makes us want to remain with it, while in the sublime we are alternately attracted and repelled. The pleasure it affords is not positive, as with the beautiful, but rather “merits the name of a negative pleasure” (245). And unlike the delight in beauty, the sublime is “an emotion that seems to be no sport but dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination (kein Spiel, sondern Ernst)” (245). This last point is particularly salient: We are so used to thinking of aesthetics in terms of play – Schiller will make play the essential element of what he will call the “aesthetic education of Man” – and so used to thinking of enjoyment and delight as supplements, important and valuable as they may be, to the essential business of existence, that it is hard to understand how anything on the order of the aesthetic could pretend to the status of what Meredith so evocatively translates here as “dead earnest.” But by the time we arrive 12 13

See Monk, The Sublime, 207. For an illuminating analysis of the relation of the beautiful to the sublime in Kant that avoids a common tendency among critical theorists to privilege the latter, see Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, esp. 121–130.



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at Kant’s description of the sublimity of war – “War itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it” (263) – we cannot help recognizing that for Kant, the sublime is both aesthetic and of the utmost consequence. Kant presents the conflictual experience of the sublime in two different ­versions, one regarding magnitude, the other as regards force. In both cases, the encounter pits the imagination against reason, and in both cases, it is ­reason that triumphs. In the first, the mathematical sublime, the conflict is engaged when the imagination reaches its limit in the effort to grasp what is being presented to the senses “at one glance” (258), to “comprehend” it in its near-overwhelming magnitude. Hence, an Egyptian pyramid, when observed from a point not so far away that its individual stones are not distinctly visible, but not so close that it cannot be taken in all at once, will stretch the imagination to its limit and arouse the sense of the sublime. Similarly, Kant reports, though he has never himself been there, when a traveler first enters St. Peter’s Cathedral “a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the idea of a whole within which that imagination attains its maximum, and, in its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing experiences a feeling of emotional delight (ein rührendes Wohlgefallen)” (252). Kant attributes this “satisfaction” or “delight” taken in the defeat of the imagination to the superior power of reason, which is thus made palpable: reason – this is its nature in Kant – demands totality; and when the imagination cannot deliver, we experience a satisfying feeling that our demand for totality raises us above the sensible realm. We can think what the senses cannot see. “The sublime is that, the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense” (250). In its second variant, the dynamic sublime, the contest is, if anything, still more direct and earnest. It arises in confrontation with the destructive forces of nature: “volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like” (261). Here again, an initial defeat occasions a greater victory of reason. Nature’s overwhelming power shows us how trifling our own (physical) force of resistance is, but precisely in doing so, it reminds us that we are more than mere physical bodies, that we have a higher calling in our moral destiny as free and autonomous beings. The “recognition of our physical helplessness as beings of nature” reveals “a faculty of estimating ourselves as independent of nature” (261), reason in its practical employment, the faculty that furnishes us with the moral law, the categorical imperative. As in its mathematical version, the sublime here shows us the limits of the sensible realm while raising us above it.

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In both of its forms, what gives the sublime its force is dialectical tension: While the experience in itself is pleasurable, it begins with something that is at the farthest remove from anything one could call pleasure. Already in the mathematical sublime, seemingly the tamer of the two variants, we are told that the task of comprehending the successively apprehended parts of a manifold in a single intuition “does violence (Gewalt) to the internal sense” (259). “The point of excess for the imagination (towards which it is driven in the apprehension of the intuition) is like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself” (258). Similarly, in the dynamic sublime, nature can show its might only as an “object of fear” (260). But it is precisely this “negative pleasure” (245) which, like the tension in a bow, adds force to the ensuing enjoyment (Wohlgefallen) and elevation. The “momentary check to the vital forces” that triggers the feeling of the sublime is “followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful (einer … desto stärkeren Ergießung)” (245, emphasis added). The very unpurposive character of the sublime – unlike the beautiful, it appears as “contrapurposive for our power of judgment” – turns out to reveal a “higher purposiveness” (246). Small wonder that, in the experience of the sublime, pain can be the occasion of pleasure: “[T]here accompanies the reception of an object as sublime a pleasure (Lust), which is only possible through the medium of a pain” (260). The Kantian sublime thus functions by means of a kind of a rebound or ricochet, by means of reversals: displeasure allows for pleasure, the contrapurposive becomes purposive, defeat becomes victory.

II  The Vortex of the Teleological Unsurprisingly, this aspect of Kant’s sublime has more than any other earned the skepticism of his readers. In particular, the story of how the sublime occurs as a victory of reason over nature and sensibility has proven unconvincing to many. In an influential study that appeared right at the inception of what was to become, on both sides of the Atlantic, a near flood of publications on the sublime during the 1980s and 1990s by scholars of literature and critical theorists,14 Thomas 14

In the US, the more frequently cited references include studies by Thomas Weiskel, Claudia Brodsky, Neil Hertz, Suzanne Guerlac, Francis Ferguson, and Paul de Man. On this development, and for references, see the helpful review essay by Martin Donougho, “Stages of the Sublime in North America,” MLN 115 (2000), 909–940. An important addition to this literature that appeared after Donougho’s review is Gasché’s Idea of Form. Among critical theorists, the work of Jean-François Lyotard demonstrates the most sustained interest in the Kantian sublime, which furnishes him with the main distinguishing criterion of his influential notion of the



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Weiskel issued the following, often-quoted critical diagnosis of Kant’s theory of the sublime: “[T]he real motive or cause of the sublime is not efficient but teleological; we are ultimately referred not to the failure of empirical imagination but to reason’s project in requiring this failure. The cause of the sublime is the aggrandizement of reason at the expense of reality and the imaginative apprehension of reality.”15 Indeed, as naïve as the uncritical invocation of “reality” may be in this all too schematic attack on Kant’s concept of the sublime, it’s hard to shake the impression, when reading Kant’s repeated and somewhat hamfisted claims about how the sublime concerns not what we see, not the actual objects that arouse our sense of the sublime, but our mind and its supersensible calling, that what Kant has done in the “Analytic of the Sublime” is to borrow a concept from earlier authors (as well as many of their motifs and examples) and fit it to his own purposes. These included, most notably, the need to bridge the gulf between theoretical and practical reason, between the laws of nature and the moral law that governs human freedom. With its elevating movement from the natural world of the senses to the supersensible realm of moral autonomy, the Kantian sublime seems (all too) made to order for this task. But the confidence with which Weiskel feels he can attribute the sublime to a specific final cause or purpose, namely a kind of overweening solipsism of reason, gives grounds for pause.16 One of the main elements of Kantian aesthetics, indeed of the

15 16

postmodern. See his “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 38–46; “The Interest of the Sublime,” in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, Jean-François Courtine et al., trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, 109–132; Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime; and The Differend: Phases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, in which the Kantian sublime plays a cardinal role. On Lyotard’s treatment of the sublime in The Differend, see Gasché, The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 297–326; on Lyotard’s treatment of the topic more broadly, see Serge Trottein, “Lyotard: Before and after the Sublime,” and Hugh J. Silverman, “Lyotard and the Events of the Postmodern Sublime,” both in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime, ed. Hugh J. Silverman, New York and London: Routledge, 2002, 192–200 and 222–229 respectively. The work of other Continental thinkers on the Kantian sublime during this period includes the essays by Jean-Luc Nancy, Éliane Escoubas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jacob Rogozinski in Courtine et al., Of the Sublime, 1993, as well as Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 119–148. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, 41. Indeed, such a reading is only possible if one ignores the complex relationship between the phenomenal and the noumenal in the experience of the sublime and in the work of the power of judgment more generally. See Claudia Brodsky, The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, London: Bloomsbury, 2021, 147–192.

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entire third Critique, is its elaborate critique of teleology, the keystone of which is its insistence that where we observe a purposive form, this does not allow us to conclude that what we are seeing is attributable to an actual purpose. In the judgment of beauty, of a tulip, say, we admire a purposiveness of form with no thought of a purpose (236); in the judgment of the sublime, we are reminded of our own “higher purposiveness” (246), but again without gaining any clear knowledge of an underlying purpose. For as much as the evocation of a higher purposiveness in the sublime may compel us to postulate a final and highest purpose – for Kant this is the “furtherance of happiness in harmony with morality” (452) – this remains a postulate with no claim to theoretical validity.17 The lesson here is that caution is advised before attributing things to a purpose. In an early review of Weiskel’s study, Frances Ferguson, who would later contribute to the scholarship with her own important study of the sublime,18 notes that “Weiskel’s voice is that of the moralist,” and goes on to question whether attributing solipsistic motives to the sublime provides an adequate explanation for what is going on in Kant’s text: “For Weiskel, solipsism is always a major threat in the sublime, but for Kant and Burke things are otherwise.”19 Some years later, in an influential essay, Paul de Man would voice his own skepticism about Kant’s story of how the defeat of the imagination makes room for the victory of reason. “What could it possibly mean, in analytical terms, that the imagination sacrifices itself, like Antigone or Iphigenia – for one can only imagine this shrewd and admirable imagination as the feminine heroine of a tragedy – for the sake of reason?”20 Unlike Weiskel, however, what de Man finds in Kant’s sublime is a “radically nonteleological”21 vision that marks the undoing of the very syntheses and totalizations Kant’s sublime narrative was aiming for. Commenting on a remarkably unromantic description of the starry heavens as a “distant vault” and the ocean as a “clear mirror of water,” de Man comments: “No 17

See §88, particularly 454–455. The last sections of the Critique of Judgment, particularly §§83–91 and the concluding “General Remark on Teleology,” are highly relevant to an understanding of the Kantian sublime, something that has yet to be fully accounted for in the scholarship on the topic. 18 Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation, New York: Routledge, 1992. Ferguson’s study challenges the deconstructive interpretations of the sublime that were dominant at the time. 19 Frances Ferguson, Review of Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, The Wordsworth Circle 8.3 (1977), 237–242 at 237, 241. 20 Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 70–90 at 87. 21 de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” 80.



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mind is involved in the Kantian vision of ocean and heaven. To the extent that any mind, that any judgment, intervenes, it is in error.”22 By reading the sublime, as it figures in the passage he comments on here, as an antiteleological force, de Man’s reading provides a needed corrective to the uncritical attribution of purpose of the sort we can observe in Weiskel and many others. But simply turning the teleological reading on its head as de Man does is perhaps no less reductive, as is his rash claim that “no mind is involved” in Kant’s description of sea and sky.23 Revisiting de Man’s two essays on the Kantian Sublime, Lee Edelman has recently pointed out that by reading Kant’s soberingly flat description of sky and sea as destroying or dearticulating any kind of organic cohesion (and, by extension, any kind of purposiveness or teleology), de Man himself constructs, however negatively, a teleological narrative: “However hard we try to imagine the blankness of the poets’ stony gaze unconstrained by teleological determination, we reinflate the self by doing so, reaffirming, in the mode of the dynamic sublime, its ability to stand above the self.”24 In short, the more the reading tries to defeat purposiveness, the more purposiveness it ends up with; the defeat of purposiveness is its greatest victory. Clearly aware of this dynamic, one later deconstructive reading of the third Critique starts out by observing that “the teleological is not quite as readily abandoned as might be imagined.”25 22

de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” 82. Even if the prospect of sea and heaven in Kant’s account surpasses the forms of cognition, to conclude this means that the mind is not implicated at all loses sight not only of the poet whose vision we are told to imitate (“we must be able to see sublimity in the ocean, regarding it, as the poets do”) but of Kant’s main concern in the sublime, namely its connection to practical reason. In an early analysis of the same passage, Brodsky traces the noncognitive “appearance” of sky and ocean “upon the eye” of the “poet” to the invention of a term, Augenschein (that which “strikes the eye”), that, pertaining to neither “side” of the theoretical divide between the phenomenal and the noumenal, designates a kind of perception capable of seeing the “real” otherwise reserved for “mathematics and the things of morality” (“Sachen der Moral”). Cf. Claudia Brodsky, The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, 52–68. 24 Lee Edelman, “De Man’s Negativity,” symploke 26.1–2 (2018), 471–476 at 475. 25 Geoffrey Bennington, Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth, New York: Fordham University Press, 2017, x. One wonders, however, whether this study’s “quasiteleological” (viii) movement toward the point at which teleology “undoes or interrupts itself” (x) escapes the trap it sets out to avoid – whether it is any less teleological than what it critiques. While this may in fact be part of the point, it is hard to shake the impression that the “Abyss of Judgment” in which this rigorous critical analysis concludes has become a bit too dependable – a kind of transcendental foundation or final cause ex negativo. A reading that traces the subtle shifts in which a thoroughgoing loss of self (and, by extension, of any kind of purposiveness) is repeatedly recuperated in the sublime is Neil Hertz’s influential essay “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime, Neil Hertz, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, 40–60. 23

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What we can observe in all this is that the critical discourse on the Kantian sublime seems prone to repeat the very movement its object already carries out; for the sublime is, as we have seen, what can turn every nonpurposive phenomenon into a purposiveness. If, in the experience of the sublime, even the contrapurposive is judged to be purposive, it would seem to be futile to try to insist on the non- or anti-teleological status of any sublime vision: The recuperation of purposiveness will always remain possible. A way out of this (sublime?) vortex, in which the most insistent attempts to debunk teleological claims end up making them in other ways themselves, may be to stick more closely to Kant’s own critique of teleology. We can concede the purposive form of Kant’s story of reason’s victory in the sublime without attributing to it a purpose – or, and this is what is less often seen, denying it one. To say, as de Man does, that no purpose is involved in Kant’s material vision of heaven and sea would appear, at least for Kant, to be as dogmatic a judgment as any attribution of purpose. For Kant, notably, while we cannot conclude from purposiveness that a purpose is involved, it is equally invalid to conclude the opposite. This emerges most forcefully in the final pages of the third Critique, where Kant addresses, as could have been expected, the question of where all the purposiveness he has been discussing in the book ultimately leads: namely, to a highest purpose of existence, and with it to the so-called Ideas of Reason. These include, in addition to the freedom of the human will, God and the immortality of the soul. None of these purposes can be proven – but nor can they be disproven. The person who “denies all validity to those rational ideas [of God and immortality of the soul] because there is no theoretical foundation for their reality … judges dogmatically” (472). As invalid as any kind of dogmatic belief in a highest purpose may be, for Kant, “dogmatic unbelief” (472) is no less irrational. It is important to keep this in mind when considering the relationship of the sublime to religious and political power in Kant’s aesthetic theory.

III  Fearfulness without Fear The question of religion makes its first appearance in Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” in the most curious of ways: namely, obliquely, as a point of comparison, in the treatment of the dynamic sublime. At issue is the question of fear. In order to be judged sublime in the dynamic mode, Kant explains, nature must show itself to us in all its overpowering might, and in so doing it can only appear to us as an object of fear. This, however, creates the problem that fear is not an aesthetic response; indeed, it



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prohibits any kind of aesthetic appreciation at all: “it is impossible to take delight in terror that is seriously entertained” (261). Hence, the concept of the dynamic sublime requires that nature be seen as fearful without actually arousing fear – a kind of structural equivalent, it would seem, of natural beauty’s purposiveness without purpose. On a trivial level, this is achieved by aesthetic distancing: The overhanging rocks, the volcano, the waterfall are all to be observed from a safe distance, and, “provided our own position is secure” (261), we can delight in their fearful sublimity without actually fearing it. But Kant is evidently not entirely satisfied with this solution, for he also offers another, and indeed much more intriguing explanation of how we can experience fearfulness without fear, namely, through an analogy with God: But we may look upon an object as fearful (furchtbar), and yet not be afraid of it (ohne sich vor ihm zu fürchten), if, that is, our judgment takes the form of our simply picturing to ourselves the case of our wishing to offer some resistance to it and recognizing that all such resistance would be quite futile. So the righteous man fears (fürchtet) God without being afraid (ohne sich zu fürchten) of Him, because he regards the case of his wishing to resist God and His commandments as one which need cause him no anxiety. But in every such case, regarded by him as not intrinsically impossible, he recognizes Him as One to be feared. (260–261)

“So the righteous man fears God”: Nothing has prepared us for this sudden appearance of God and religion in the midst of this passage devoted to the sublime in nature or the bizarre analogy it introduces. It is bizarre for at least two reasons. One, because a perfectly sensible, phenomenal, concrete term – the fearfulness of overhanging rocks, volcanoes, etc. – is illustrated by a term that could scarcely be more noumenal or supersensible, namely the fearfulness of God. The usual logic of analogy is turned on its head, the sensible illustrated by comparison with the supersensible rather than the other way around. Two, this also helps to explain the odd reversal of the logic of illustrative analogy: The analogy is in fact not an analogy at all because the two sides share a common term. For what nature’s show of destructive might (the volcano etc.) does in order to produce in us the feeling of the sublime is to remind us of our higher calling as moral agents, in comparison to which all the might of nature is as naught. But at the basis of belief in God is, for Kant, nothing other than this very same moral calling, my self-recognition as a moral agent subject to the laws of freedom that cannot be coherently thought other than by postulating an ultimate divine justice. To be a moral agent necessarily leads me to “believe” in God – “believe,” to be sure, not in the sense of believing that, not in the

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sense of a constative statement about an object of knowledge (“God is”), but rather in the sense of the Postulates of Reason or of what Kant calls “moral belief” (moralischer Glaube) (470), a belief in which God can be known only in and through what I do as a moral being. If what is absolving me of fear in the face of nature’s destructive might in the sublime is my moral calling – and if this very moral calling lies at the root of moral faith in God, the only genuine kind of faith there is in Kant’s universe – then this “without fear” is not merely analogous to the confidence of Godfearing persons in their relationship to God, it is close to being the same thing. It is not a:b as c:d, but a:b as c:b. One effect of this is to make the analogy cut both ways: One could say we learn here as much (and as little) about what it means to fear God as we do about what it means to experience nature as the sublime. Put differently, the fearfulness without fear – be it that of nature or that of God – that is at the basis of the dynamic sublime is not susceptible of being exemplified or illustrated at all. This would help to explain, perhaps, why the question of what it means to fear God ends up occupying Kant in §28, the first and main section on the dynamic sublime, almost as much if not more than the question of what it means to experience the sublime. Near the end of the section, the discussion leads to a programmatic statement on the essence of religion, a statement of the sort that one could expect to find not in an analysis of aesthetic judgment but in Kant’s philosophy of religion: In this way alone is religion intrinsically distinguished from superstition, which latter rears in the mind, not reverence (Ehrfurcht) for the sublime, but fear (Furcht) and dread of the all-powerful Being to whose will terrorstricken man sees himself subjected, yet without holding Him in esteem. From this nothing can arise but ingratiation (Gunstbewerbung) and fawning (Einschmeichelung), instead of a religion of good conduct. (264)26

To be afraid of God is to fall prey to superstition, which is also to miss our calling as morally autonomous beings. The quid pro quo structure of superstition precludes any exercise of freedom, as everything we do is done either out of fear of punishment or out of craving for reward (or both); conduct under such conditions is not autonomous but dependent, and one’s actions are in essence no different from those of a highly trained animal. To revere God, on the other hand – to be God-fearing in the sense 26

The distinction is virtually the same as the one that Kant will make in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason: “All religions … can be divided into the religion of the pursuit of favor (of mere cult) and moral religion, i.e., the religion of the good way of life.” Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009, 58–59.



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not of superstition but of religion, the religion of “good conduct” – not only allows for freedom, it is based on it. Religion, Kant tells us at the end of the third Critique, is no more and no less than “the recognition of our duties” – the duties we recognize as self-imposed, the duties in the fulfillment of which alone we can we realize our freedom – “as divine commands” (481). Hence, what God commands of us is no more and no less than that we be free. This is why the righteous, those who exercise their freedom by fulfilling their self-given duty, need not be afraid of God, even while they revere his might. While this helps explain what, for Kant, the fear of God entails, one cannot help wondering, again, why this lesson in religion is necessary to the analysis of the sublime. The connection seems to be deeper than one of mere analogy. This impression is further strengthened when Kant, in what is clearly an allusion to Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757, German translation 1773), turns to address directly the question of the sublimity of God. Burke, as has already been mentioned, had identified the fear- or terror-inducing might of God as a mainspring of the sublime. If this were true, it would vitiate Kant’s theory, in which the experience of the sublime is produced by a sense of our own superiority vis-à-vis nature’s show of destructive might. For while this scheme may apply to an encounter with the might of nature, the idea that we could measure ourselves against the might of God is clearly pure folly. The simplest repost to this possible objection to his theory, and the one we most expect, would be for Kant to differentiate between an aesthetic response to nature and a religious one, thereby showing that “sublimity” is being used in two different senses when applied to God (or God’s manifestation in nature) and to the aesthetic response to nature. This Kant quite pointedly does not do. Nor does he question the custom of seeing God as manifesting himself and his sublimity in nature’s displays of power. Rather, he takes issue with the concept of religion that the objection is based on, showing, in essence, that it is a kind of superstition. While most religions prescribe “adoration with bowed head, coupled with contrite, timorous posture and voice” as the “only becoming demeanor in the presence of the Godhead” (263), such a submissive and timorous attitude is “far from being intrinsically and necessarily involved in the idea of the sublimity of a religion and of its object” (263). Indeed, if one is to attain to the “frame of mind for admiring divine greatness,” one may not be in an actual state of fear – any more than one may be in a state of fear, we might add, in order to appreciate the sublimity of nature. Clearly, what is going on in this passage is that the same analogy presented earlier to explain the

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paradox of fearfulness without fear is being turned on its head, putting the explanans in the position of the explanandum: Instead of applying an analogy taken from religion to explain the aesthetics of the sublime, the aesthetics of the sublime are employed to explain what religion is or should be. The passage continues: The man that is actually in a state of fear, finding in himself good reason to be so, because he is conscious of offending with his evil disposition against a might directed by a will at once irresistible and just, is far from being in the frame of mind for admiring divine greatness, for which a temper of calm reflection and a quite free judgment are required. Only when he becomes conscious of having a disposition that is upright and acceptable to God, do those operations of might serve, to stir within him the idea of the sublimity of this Being, so far as he recognizes the existence in himself of a sublimity of disposition consonant with His will, and is thus raised above the dread of such operations of nature, in which he no longer sees God pouring forth the vials of his wrath. (263–264)

Aesthetics and religion are not merely analogous; they are mutually imbricated, for they both share the same condition: fearlessness in the face of what is fearful, a fearlessness which, in both cases, derives from the consciousness of one’s “higher” calling and rectitude, of one’s own sublimity.27 Only when we “become conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus also over nature without us (as exerting influence upon us)” (264), can we experience the sublime; and it is only by presupposing this idea within us, and by referring to it, that we can arrive at the idea of the sublimity of that being who arouses deep respect in us, not just by his might as demonstrated in nature, but even more by the ability, with which we have been endowed, to judge nature without fear and to think of our vocation as being sublimely above nature. (264)

“Not just by his might as demonstrated in nature”: Kant does not question the assumption at the basis of the hypothetical objection he is responding to here that, in tempests and earthquakes, it is God who is showing his might. What he does question is that this show of might is an expression 27

In his critique of aesthetic ideology in modern Europe, Terry Eagleton finds that the Kantian sublime, even while offering the human subject a delightful sense of its status as an ethical agent, does so “without ceasing to discipline and chastise the subject, recalling it to a piously submissive awareness of the infinity where it truly belongs.” It is hard to see how this reading could account for Kant’s insistent and explicit rejection of submissiveness as the attitude suitable to either the sublime or to religion. To be fair, Eagleton’s interest is less in the text of Kant itself, which he scarcely quotes, than in its function in the broader historical narrative that is his book’s main achievement. See Terry Eagleton, “The Kantian Imaginary,” in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, 70–101 at 98.



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of wrath, to which indeed, as the objection holds, fear would be the sole fitting response. God’s might, by contrast, is nothing to be afraid of, no more than the destructive force of nature in the dynamic sublime. The point is not that religion and the aesthetics of the sublime are the same thing. Religion, as we saw, is the “recognition of our duties as divine commands” (481); the sublime, by contrast, can be experienced without reference to God. But in both, the might of nature is made to appear small, to lose its power to cause fear; and in both, it is the very same duties, and the same faculty of fulfilling them in the face of natural dangers, that are responsible for the sublime elevation over nature. It is for this reason, it would seem, that Kant can speak of the sublimity of nature and of “the sublimity of a religion and its object” all in the same breath.

IV  Momentum (Schwung) But we are not yet done with this curiously intimate relationship between religion and the aesthetics of the sublime. For fear, as important as it is, comes up only as a phenomenological index of something of still greater import, namely might, force, dominance, or power. Before getting to fear, the section on the dynamic sublime opens with the following, deceptively simple-sounding terminological distinction: Might is a power which is superior to great hindrances. The same is termed dominance if it is also superior to the resistance of that which itself possesses might. Nature, considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominance over us, is dynamically sublime. Macht ist ein Vermögen, welches großen Hindernissen überlegen ist. Eben dieselbe heißt eine Gewalt, wenn sie auch dem Widerstande dessen, was selbst Macht besitzt, überlegen ist. Die Natur im ästhetischen Urteile als Macht, die über uns keine Gewalt hat, betrachtet, ist dynamischerhaben. (260)

What here sounds like a mere difference of degree – “dominance” (Gewalt) is “the same” (eben dieselbe) as “might” (Macht), but greater, because should the two powers come into conflict, dominance will carry the day – turns out, in fact, to be a difference in kind, and an important one at that. The power that will show its superior greatness in the dynamic sublime is described variously28 as 28

And by means of different terms. As these and other quotations show, Kant’s usage of the various words for power – Macht, Gewalt, Kraft, Vermögen – does not follow the strict terminological distinction he introduces at the opening of the section on the dynamic sublime. A fuller discussion

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In the sublime, the two powers that contend with one another are those of nature and those of something that is “not of nature.” As we have noted, the simplest way to understand this is to identify this latter power with practical reason, with our ability, as moral beings, to act in accordance with purposes that are not determined by our (physical) nature – to do the good. Kant’s use of the word for faculty (Vermögen) in the first two of the preceding quotations supports this view. But if this is all that is involved, then why all the talk about might and dominance and resistance? Why the elaborate story of conflict, resistance, and the overcoming of resistance? Clearly, the sublime is not simply redundant with Kant’s moral philosophy but adds something new: a theory and explanation of power, contest, and dominance that goes beyond what he has to say about moral autonomy and its “incentives” (Springfeder) in the Critique of Practical Reason.29 Whereas there we hear about one sole motiving force, namely the feeling of respect for the law, in the sublime, we hear about a whole panoply of different emotive forces and affects to which Kant accords the status of sublimity – the very same sublimity that Kant will always ultimately refer back to the victory of reason and moral autonomy over the sensible realm. That Kant does not reject out of hand the worth of such an irrational element as affect is surprising. An affect, we are told, “is an agitation of the mind that makes it unable to engage in free deliberation about principles with the aim of determining itself according to them. Hence there is no way it can deserve to be liked by reason” (272). And nevertheless, an than I am able to provide here would need to chart this fluidity in Kant’s choice of terms with attention to each particular case. One has the sense that dominance (Gewalt: unmediated or direct violence), aside from its superlative status, is a liminal term, never quite defined and always situated on the far side of what can be positively determined. Hence, we learn, for instance, that nature has “no such dominance (Gewalt) over us,” but not what such a dominance would be. 29 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1956, 74–92 (part I, book I, chapter 3).



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affect such as enthusiasm “is sublime aesthetically, because it is a straining of our forces (Kräfte) by ideas that impart to the mind a momentum (Schwung) whose effects are mightier (mächtiger) and more permanent than are those of an impulse (Antrieb) produced by presentations of sense” (272). Beyond enthusiasm, we hear as well that “every affect of the strenuous type (such, that is, as excites the consciousness of our power [Kräfte] of overcoming every resistance [animi strenui]) is aesthetically sublime, e.g., rage (Zorn), even desperation (the rage of forlorn hope but not fainthearted despair)” (272).30 One can understand the interest in this dynamic element that could lend momentum or force to what otherwise would be the purely intellectual business of the mind’s “determining itself” “according to principles.” What is needed is something that can influence “the consciousness of the mind’s strength (Stärke) and resoluteness in respect of that which carries with it pure intellectual purposiveness (the supersensible)” (273). For this, affect, rather than thought, could indeed fill the part. But if this affect is not rationally determined, how can we know that it is, in fact, in the service of the good, of what reason prescribes? When is rage good or just rage? How can we reconcile momentum with reason? The simplest solution, of course, and one we could expect Kant to advance, would be to submit the element of force, effect, or momentum to the approval of reason: Those affects are good and just that support what practical reason can condone. But Kant does not take that route. Instead, what we get is a double dose of what we have now come to recognize as the essential “move” of the sublime, namely the logic according to which its very negation adds to its strength. It is performed here twice, first as regards affect, then as regards ideational content. After voicing such an unexpected approval, even if with reservations, of sublime affects such as enthusiasm, Kant continues: But (as seems strange) even freedom from affection (apatheia, phlegma in significatu bono) in a mind that strenuously follows its unswerving principles 30

There would be a lot to say about Kant’s mention, in this and in the previous passage, of what is “aesthetically sublime,” since the sublime is, by definition, aesthetic; some commentators have found in the section of the Analytic in which this locution is used, the “General Remark” appended to §29 on the dynamic sublime, a third variant of the sublime, over and above the mathematical and the dynamic. See, for example, Doran, The Theory of the Sublime, 266 and Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 306. This view, however, would leave the profound connections between the concerns addressed in the “General Remark” and the explanation of the dynamic sublime unexplained. Rather than reading the “General Remark” as adumbrating a new variant of the sublime, we do better to see it as developing the religious, moral, aesthetic, and, as we shall see, political implications of the sublime that has just been analyzed in both its mathematical and dynamical variants.

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From fearfulness without fear we move to something along the lines of affectivity without affect. Having borrowed the much-needed aspect of “momentum” from affect, the sublime now divests itself of affect, frees itself from this association with a less than fully rational element while retaining its momentum. Then, in a second sublime reversal, the sublime also turns a lack of any kind of suitable visual representation into something that surpasses even the most majestic imagery – this time by way of a quotation from the Bible. “Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Law than the commandment: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, &c.’” (274). Indeed, the sublime accords perfectly with this ancient prohibition. As we saw, the sublime surpasses all that the imagination could ever hope to supply; it is beyond imaginable. A religion that does away with any ideational or imagistic representation of God would thus perfectly suit the sublime. In a gesture at once admiring and deprecatory, Kant approvingly acknowledges the “enthusiasm which the Jewish people, in their moral period, felt for their religion when comparing themselves to others” as well as the “pride inspired by Mohammedanism” (274), attributing both to these religions’ prohibition against images.31 Into this august lineage, Kant, shifting to the first-person plural, then adds a third, as though to complete the series with its crowning fulfillment: “The very same holds good of our representation (Vorstellung) of the moral law and of our native capacity (Anlage) for morality” (274). “Our” representation of the moral law and “our” capacity for morality is thus every bit as sublime as the most sublime of religions. The supersessionist gesture could scarcely seem clearer: In the place of the historical religions, of Judaism and Islam, steps the purely rational ethics of Kant’s (and the readers’) Enlightenment. Enlightenment ethics inherits the power of the earlier religions while bringing this power into accordance with reason – all the more so, perhaps, because the moral law itself, for Kant, does not in fact replace religion but rather leads of itself to religion – to religion, that is, within the bounds of reason or the “recognition of our duties as divine commands” 31

The reference to Islam’s prohibition of imagery has been largely passed over by readers of the Critique of Judgment; see Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 124. On Kant’s more than simply derogatory view of Islam in this passage and elsewhere, see Battersby, The Sublime, Terror, and Human Difference, 72–76.



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(481). In the process, of course, it changes what we understand religion to be. But the force that it exercises, and that allows it to take the place of the earlier religions, is none other than the very same force of the sublime. The quotation continues: The fear that, if we divest this representation of everything that can commend it to the senses, it will thereupon be attended only with a cold and lifeless approbation and not with any moving force (Kraft) or emotion, is wholly unwarranted. The very reverse is the truth. For when nothing any longer meets the eye of sense, and the unmistakable and ineffaceable idea of morality is left in possession of the field, there would be need rather of tempering the momentum (Schwung) of an unbounded imagination to prevent it rising to enthusiasm, than of seeking to lend these ideas the aid of images and childish devices for fear of their being wanting in potency (Kraftlosigkeit). (274)

Fulfilling while taking the place of the Mosaic and of the Islamic prohibition against images, the sublimity of the law and of our moral capacity is the pure force, the pure momentum, of pure reason. The result is twofold: It ensures that this force or momentum, precisely by virtue of its blindness,32 remains in the service of what is right and just; and it renders it indomitable, superior to any resistance from competing powers.33 In the pages leading up to this passage, in the course of comparing the sublime to other forms and practices with the power to move and to motivate, Kant touches on several examples from rhetoric and poetry – the disciplines in which the sublime, as a category, had its origin – that he singles out for their vacuity. Among these are “[n]ovels, maudlin dramas, shallow homilies, which trifle with so-called (though falsely so) noble sentiments”; “a religious discourse which recommends a cringing and abject grace-begging and favor-seeking, abandoning all reliance on our own ability to resist the evil within us” (273); “a sermon in which there is no establishment 32

33

On the function of blindness in Kant’s theory of the sublime, see Ian Balfour, “The Abyss of Imagination and the Scandal of Example: Kant Writing the Sublime” (n.d.). Reading the “Analytic of the Sublime” in tandem with relevant passages in the first Critique, Balfour is able to show how a blind imagination is at the root of Kant’s aesthetics and indeed of his entire critical project. This reading thus parts ways with the much more skeptical reading of sublime affect and enthusiasm as offered, most notably, by Jean-François Lyotard in The Differend, 165–167, and in L’enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire, Paris: Galilée, 1986, 61–77. Of course, even if we accept the notion of a pure force of reason in the sublime in the abstract and acknowledge its importance, the question of how to determine when a given instance of momentum is sublime in this sense remains open. For a defense of the political implications of Kant’s aesthetic judgment against Lyotard’s reading of the Kantian sublime, see Bart Van den Abeele, “Aesthetic Solidarity ‘after’ Kant and Lyotard,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 42.4 (2008), 17–30.

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of anything (no system of good maxims)”; “a tragedy” we like to believe has edified us when in fact we are “merely glad at having got well rid of the feeling of being bored” (274). It is clear that in comparison with such mediocre novels, sermons, and tragedies, the emotionless, imageless force of the sublime presentation of the moral law not only has the truth on its side but also that it has the greater power – so much so that, if anything, its momentum (Schwung) would need to be tempered rather than supported by the kind of affect or ideational content that priests and dramatists are wont to employ or, as we read here, by “images and childish devices.” It is at this point that Kant brings in the question of politics and the state in the passage we quoted at the outset: For this reason, governments have gladly let religion be amply furnished with such accessories [as images and childish devices], seeking in this way to relieve each subject of the exertion, yet also of the ability (Vermögen), to expand his soul’s forces (Seelenkräfte) beyond the limits arbitrarily laid down for him, and which facilitate his being treated as though he were merely passive. (275)

The turn from the aesthetic to the religious, and finally to the political, should now appear less odd or unexpected than it did when we first encountered this passage. With the introduction of the dynamic sublime, one can recognize in retrospect that, already from the very opening of the “Analytic of the Sublime,” the main concern has been one of power and dominance, of resistance and its overcoming; and all along, it was clear that the seat of this power could very well be in the individual mind in its relation to external forces. The move to the political only seems sudden or unexpected if we assume, as the notion of the secular has accustomed us to doing, that aesthetic, religious, and political power are three different things. The continuity of the development we have been tracing shows a perspective in which all three of these are inflections of the same power, the power Kant calls the sublime. In all three cases – aesthetics, religion, and politics – the sublime is a force that unmasks fearful shows of force, that puts the vanity of might low. In the aesthetic judgment of nature, it exposes nature “as might that has no dominance over us” (260); in religion, it shows the “fearfulness” of God as what need not be feared (261); and in politics, as the last quoted passage makes clear, by helping us to see through the repressive use of “images and childish devices,” it lends the subject the potential to “expand his soul’s forces (Seelenkräfte) beyond the limits arbitrarily laid down for him” (275). The framework and the setting, the scenario and the dramatis personae, are different, but it is the same



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sublime power in all of these cases. Power, force, dominion – that is the sublime; aesthetics, religion, politics: These are no more, and no less, than the different modes of its exercise.34

V  In an Extra-secular Sense No more, but also no less: The point, again, is not that in the sublime, the differences between aesthetics, religion, and politics disappear, or that the borders between them begin to blur. On the contrary: Precisely because Kant shows us the working of the same power of the sublime in all of these different registers, the distinctions are made to be, if anything, still more distinct. The aesthetic judgment of the sublime, even while it induces the mind to “abandon sensibility and employ itself with ideas involving higher purposiveness” (246), is not religion, for it does not entail belief; and even if this idea of a higher purposiveness is the same as what, in religion, compels us to assume “a moral cause of the world (an author of the world)” (450), religion is not merely aesthetic judgment. In the one case, we gain a sense of our higher or “supersensible vocation” (268); in the other, we find that we cannot fulfill this vocation without what Kant calls the “practical faith” (467) that “there is a God” (450). The aesthetic judgment of the sublime is thus not a “secular” version of religious transcendence; it is aesthetics and not religion, even if it may provide a sense or a feeling that will also play a role in religion. Similarly, in the political state, while the subject’s emancipation from the tutelage of priests and rulers draws its force and its legitimation from the same “negative presentation of morality” (275) that one finds in Judaism, Islam, and “our representation of the moral law and of our native capacity for morality” (274), this does not mean that the line between religion and politics is porous, that, in this model, religion is exerting an 34

The intent of this argument is not to discount the degree to which Kant’s universalist claims for the aesthetics of the sublime are effected by means of a series of exclusions, most obviously and conveniently those based on gender, race, and “religion.” On the contrary: If Kant’s claims are being taken seriously here, they are so precisely to the extent that they themselves allow for a much-needed critique of the logic of secularism – a logic that has counted among the most effective mechanisms of racist and ethnicist exclusion since the eighteenth century, with no signs of abating, as the work of scholars such as Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Gil Anidjar has shown. For a probing critique of how Kant’s theory of the sublime operates a foreclosure of the (impossible) figure of the “native informant,” see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, 9–37. Spivak’s intent is to offer a “deconstructive politics of reading” (7) that puts the texts it critiques in the service of an anti-imperialist project while remaining aware of its own indebtedness to them. Less cautious in this regard is David Lloyd’s more recent Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics, New York: Fordham University Press, 2019, 44–68.

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influence on the political. Citizens who exercise their right of dissent are not drawing on their “religious beliefs” or their “religious enthusiasm.” Indeed, the negativity of the sublime, even while it subtends both one’s relationship to God and one’s relationship to political power, is precisely what counters the collusion between church and state that Kant calls to account. There is thus no doubt that Kant’s text is participating in a differentiation of social or cultural spheres: the differentiation, that is, of art, religion, and politics. This differentiation is often seen as a hallmark of secularization. But the differentiation we can observe in Kant is less a severing of autonomous spheres than a putting into relation. There are no “walls of separation” between the religious and the political here, nor is aesthetic judgment, for all its specificity, being cut off from religion and politics. Rather, all three of these spheres are in motion, all of them are being defined anew in relation to the power of the sublime, and all are shown in a new light as a result. Precisely because this is the case, it would be an error to see “religion” figuring here as some sort of vestige from an earlier time. Nor can we discern in Kant the beginning of a historical development in which religion will lose importance or influence.35 Read through the lens of the secularization paradigm – a lens that is so ubiquitous that we have largely lost any sense of the ways in which it influences what we see – it is easy to arrive at the conclusion, to cite a recent reading of the politics of the Kantian sublime, that the “theistic” elements of Kant’s theory of the sublime belong to what is historically obsolete in it, while acknowledging it for the possibilities it affords – once purged of its religious dimensions – for submitting social relations to rational reflection.36 But it is hard to overlook the influence 35

36

Among many secularizing readings of Kant’s sublime, see in particular the two relevant essays in Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 187–228 and 229–274. Contrasting Kant’s treatment of the sublime with those of several of his predecessors, Guyer concludes: “What Kant did was to transmute the psychological account [of the sublime] into an alternative moral account, in which humanity is elevated rather than humbled. In the experience of the sublime, we stand in awe of the power of our own reason rather than of God. Indeed, God’s creation is humbled before our own free reason, and even the sublimity of God himself can be appreciated only through the image of our own autonomy.” Certainly, Kant did give us a moral account of the sublime. But for Kant, at least, this account, as I have tried to show here, is not complete without including religion in the picture – religion, to be sure, in Kant’s sense of the term. For a more differentiated positioning of the Kantian sublime in the process of secularization, see Genevieve Lloyd, Reclaiming Wonder: After the Sublime, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, especially 191–197. See Michael Wayne, “The Sublime in Kant’s Architecture,” in Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique, Michael Wayne, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 117–139 at 137. For another recent attempt to distill the politically critical potential of the Kantian sublime from among its unsalvageable aspects, see G. S. Sahota, Late Colonial Sublime: Neo-epics and the End of Romanticism, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018, esp. 105–111.



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within this way of reading Kant of what the new critique of the secular has termed the ideology of secularism. Simply put, secularism becomes an ideology whenever it defines what religion is – when it casts religion as “a thing that has an essence or that produces certain particular and predictable effects.”37 In relegating religion to the past, the ideology of secularism cannot avoid reifying it, lending it an identity and a clarity of function and constitution that historically, religious formations have never had. Like politics and like aesthetics, religion has always been one constantly changing historical formation among others. Certainly, Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime,” alongside of his other writings, contributes to the process in which religion is being articulated in new ways during this period – as it was in all previous ones as well.38 The close relationship that the “Analytic” establishes between rational morality, religion, aesthetics, and politics, as well as the moral argument for the existence of God and the notion of “practical belief” that Kant develops in the last sections of the Critique of Judgment, have profound effects on what it means to have or to practice religion. But we have no reason – save by appeal to some transhistorical, essentialized concept of religion – to conclude that the religion Kant leaves us with is any less “religious” than other historical formations of religion.39 To see this, we have no need to assume the validity of the arguments about the “ideology of secularism” that have recently been advanced in other corners. Kant’s text itself, read just on its own terms, belies the secularist presuppositions with which it has most commonly been read. For among these is the assumption that it is possible to know what religion is, to tell a “religious” power from a political, aesthetic, or otherwise “secular” one, on the basis of identifiable characteristics or properties. But the power that is experienced in the feeling of the sublime – fearfulness 37

38

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José Casanova, “The Secular and Secularisms,” Social Research 76.4 (2009), 1049–1066 at 1051–1052. The most theoretically rigorous and far-reaching critique of secularism is provided by the work of Talal Asad, to which Casanova here refers. See Asad’s Genealogies of Religion, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 and Formations of the Secular. This point is underscored in the excellent study by Daniel Weidner, “Kants Säkularisierung der Philosophie, die politische Theologie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und die Kritik der Bibel,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistegeschichte 59.2 (2007), 97–120. As Weidner is able to show, the debt to religion and the Bible, not just in Kant’s philosophy of religion, but also in his critical and political philosophy, runs deeper than is commonly assumed. I wonder, however, whether it is possible to read this debt as an appropriation of religion for the purposes of philosophy, as Weidner does, without ultimately appealing at some level to a transhistorical concept of religion. See also Daniel Weidner, Bibel und Literatur um 1800, Munich: Wilhlem Fink, 2011, 216–236. Indeed, John Zammito concludes his magisterial study of the third Critique by insisting on the theological, and not simply moral, intent of the project. See John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 335–341.

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without fear, ­affectivity without affect, enthusiasm and the momentum of pure reason – is not susceptible to being illustrated or represented at all, let alone defined and distinguished on the basis of properties or attributes. The power of the sublime may be aesthetic, religious, political, or all three. But to call it secular would pretend to be able to represent a power that Kant’s “Analytic” in all rigor shows to be incapable of representation. In so doing, it would fall for the kind of imagery that the sublime, no less than Jewish law and the pride inspired by Mohammedanism, prohibit. Better to call the sublime neither secular nor religious but extra-secular, and thus to acknowledge its position outside the categories that would emerge in its wake.

Bibliography Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Anidjar, Gil. The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Balfour, Ian. “The Abyss of Imagination and the Scandal of Example: Kant Writing the Sublime.” n.d., in press. Battersby, Christine. The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Bennington, Geoffrey. Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Brodsky, Claudia. The Imposition of Form. Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Ed. J. T. Boulton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. Casanova, José. “The Secular and Secularisms.” Social Research 76.4 (2009): 1049–1066. Courtine, Jean-François et al. Of the Sublime: Presence in Question. Trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. De Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Doran, Robert. The Theory of the Sublime: From Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.



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Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Edelman, Lee. “De Man’s Negativity.” symplokē 26.1–2 (2018): 471–476. Ferguson, Frances. “Review of Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence.” The Wordsworth Circle 8.3 (1977), 237–242. Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gasché, Rodolphe. The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Gasché, Rodolphe. The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Experience of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1956. Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1914. Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Erste Abtheilung: Werke. Berlin: Reimer, 1908, Vol. 5. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009. Lloyd, David. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Lloyd, Genevieve. Reclaiming Wonder: After the Sublime. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. [Longinus]. On Sublimity. Trans. D. A. Russel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” In Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phases in Dispute. Trans. G. Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Lyotard, Jean-François. L’enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire. Paris: Galilée, 1986. Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Interest of the Sublime.” In Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, ed. Jean-François Courtine et al. Trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

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Lyotard, Jean-François. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, §§23–29. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Martin, Donougho. “Stages of the Sublime in North America.” MLN 115 (2000): 909–940. Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England [1935]. With a new preface by the author. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960. Müller, Ernst. Ästhetische Religiosität und Kunstreligion in den Philosophien von der Aufklärung bis zum Ausgang des deutschen Idealismus. Berlin: Akademie, 2004. Sahota, G. S. Late Colonial Sublime: Neo-epics and the End of Romanticism. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018. Silverman, Hugh J. “Lyotard and the Events of the Postmodern Sublime.” In Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime, ed. Hugh J. Silverman. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Trottein, Serge. “Lyotard: Before and after the Sublime.” In Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime, ed. Hugh J. Silverman. New York and London: Routledge, 2002, 192–200. Van den Abeele, Bart. “Aesthetic Solidarity ‘after’ Kant and Lyotard.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 42.4 (2008). Wayne, Michael. Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Weidner, Daniel. Bibel und Literatur um 1800. Munich: Wilhlem Fink, 2011. Weidner, Daniel. “Kants Säkularisierung der Philosophie, die politische Theologie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und die Kritik der Bibel.” Zeitschrift für Religionsund Geistegeschichte 59.2 (2007): 97–120. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Zammito, John H. The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

chapter 3

Kant and the Problem of Tragedy Robert Pippin

I In the 276 books in the so-called Warda list of Kant’s library at his death, there is not a single copy of a Greek or Roman or any other tragedy.1 Moreover, in the only passage I know of where Kant evaluates the significance of tragic drama, he makes it clear that he finds the art form distasteful and possible morally corrosive.2 Here is the passage, from his well-known “Theory-Practice” essay. The reference to tragic drama is hidden in most English translations because Trauerspiel is mistranslated as simply “drama.” It is a sight fit for a god to watch a virtuous man grappling with adversity and evil temptations and yet managing to hold out against them. But it is a sight quite unfit not so much for a god, but even for the most ordinary, though right-thinking man, to see the human race advancing over a period of time towards virtue, and then quickly relapsing the whole way back into vice and misery. It may perhaps be moving and instructive to watch such a drama [Trauerspiel] for a while; but the curtain must eventually descend. For in the long run, it becomes a farce. And even if the actors do not tire of it – for they are fools – the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will go on in the same way for ever. If it is only a play, the retribution at the end can make up for the unpleasant sensations the spectator has felt. But in my opinion at least, it cannot be reconciled with the morality of a wise creator and ruler of the world if countless vices, even with intermingled virtues, are in actual fact allowed to go on accumulating.3 1 2

3

A. Warda, Immanuel Kants Bücher, Berlin: Martin Breslauer, 1922. He does link the sublime with “verse tragedy” in §52 of the Critique of the Power of Judging, but says next to nothing about it. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judging, ed. and trans. P. Guyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 203 (AA, V, 325). Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘That May be True in Theory but It Does Not Apply in Practice,’” in Kant’s Political Writings, trans. H. S. Reiss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 88 (AA VII, 308). I am grateful to Terry Pinkard for drawing my attention to this passage. Kant’s moral

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This is not to say that Kant was ignorant of or simply opposed to or ignored all tragedies. In his anthropology lectures, there are several, mostly favorable references to Shakespeare and he was obviously familiar with Hamlet, King Lear, and other plays.4 Aside from some swipes at Shakespeare’s crudeness and lack of refined taste, he certainly calls him a genius. Part of Kant’s concern has to do with a complex of aesthetic issues (especially the relation between rational and aesthetic ideas), his disagreements with Herder over the bearing of Shakespeare and other artists on philosophy, and what the anthropologist might or should not learn from plays and novels. It is the anxiety Kant expresses in this quotation about the moral and philosophical relevance of tragedies that is so striking and is the subject of the following. This anxiety is first of all somewhat ironic, because Kant’s work, especially his framing of the main problem of philosophy as that between freedom and necessity, and his account of the dynamical sublime, inspired the greatest period of serious philosophical attention to tragedy in the Western tradition. Hölderlin, Schiller, the Schlegels, Schelling, and Hegel all in some way influenced by Kant, weighed in on the bearing of tragedy on philosophy, and this sort of attention continued in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and on into such figures as Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin.5 The general issue is an old one, of course. It began with the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, Plato’s banishing the poets from Kallipolis (if there is a quarrel, especially one of such seriousness, there must be a rivalry over issues claimed by both), and Aristotle’s attention to tragedy in his Poetics, his claim that poetry, tragic poetry, is more philosophical than history. (If that is so, in what sense is such poetry philosophical? It may

hesitation about tragedy also needs to be placed in a much larger eighteenth-century context. This is one in which the grip of classical tragedy is already clearly loosening for all sorts of reasons, many of which are described by Hegel. But moral concerns were prominent. Beaumarchais, for example (to some extent following Diderot), considered the representation of tragic necessity and fatalism amoral and encouraged dramas of domestic suffering closer to the ordinary and without transcendent significance. See Beaumarchais, Théâtre complet, Lettres, ed. M. Allem, Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléïasdw, 1949, 18–20. 4 See Andrew Cutrofello’s helpful article, “Kant’s Debate with Herder about the Philosophical Significance of Shakespeare,” in Philosophy Compass 3.1 (2008), 81. Moreover, Kant studied Latin and the Latin authors intently at the Collegium Fridericianum and could reportedly still recite long passages from Seneca in his old age. And he studied koine and classical Greek in the fourth and fifth years of schooling and would certainly have come across authors like Sophocles. But it all does not seem to have made much of an impression. 5 An indispensable study of these developments, to which I am much indebted, is provided by S. Gardner, “Tragedy, Morality and Metaphysics,” in Art and Morality, ed. J. Bermúdez and S. Gardner, New York: Routledge, 2003, 218–259.



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present a more general picture of human life than history but a more general picture of what in human life?) This is not to say that there is not a noticeable “tragic” dimension to Kant’s own philosophy. In his theoretical philosophy, he famously said: “Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.”6 That species is metaphysics, the field of endless controversies, and this picture of fate and failure is as tragic in its presentation of unavoidability and painfully unovercomeable limits as is his unusually literary characterization of the same issue. We can be sure, he insists, that “we will always return to metaphysics as to a beloved from whom we have been estranged, since reason, because essential ends are at issue here, must work without respite either for sound insight or for the destruction of good insights that are to hand” (700 [AA A850/B878]). Perhaps the picture of an estranged lover continually returning to a beloved, only to be estranged again, is more pathetic or at least melodramatic than tragic, but it is a remarkable picture of inescapable necessity and unavoidable failure.7 In his practical philosophy as well, there is a tone of finitude, futility, failure, and something close to possible despair. The worth of our actions depends on our intentions, but we can never be sure that we know what our intentions are; we suspect that the “covert impulse of self-love”8 is always our motivation, and we are usually right. To be sure, morally required actions need not always conflict with our interest in our own happiness, and not every moral choice must involve a struggle with inclination (Kant claims his examples of such struggles are for clarification of the true nature of moral worth, not as an omnipresent default situation),9 but our own egoism, the crooked timber from which nothing entirely straight 6

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 99 (AA III: vii). 7 Another rare literary flourish: Kant’s invocation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the Preface to First Edition of the First Critique to describe the sad and pitiable state of metaphysics now: “There was a time when metaphysics was called the queen of all the sciences, and if the will be taken for the deed, it deserved this title of honor, on account of the preeminent importance of its object. Now, in accordance with the fashion of the age, the queen proves despised on all sides; and the matron, outcast and forsaken, mourns like Hecuba: ‘Greatest of all by race and birth, I now am cast out, powerless,’” 99 (AA III: A viii–ix). 8 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. M. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 19 (AA IV: 407). 9 This is argued, successfully I think, in Alan Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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can be made, ensures that such conformity with our sensible natures is serendipitous and cannot in any sense be counted on. We know that everything of significance in our lives and the basis of any self-worth depend on the assumption that we have the capacity to direct our lives, that we are free beings, but we have no secure way of knowing that we are, or knowing how such a capacity could be possible in what we now know to be nature, the subject of Newtonian mechanics. As to the despair this situation might create, consider this remarkable passage from §87 of The Critique of the Power of Judging, “On the Moral Proof of the Existence of God.” It is the same sentiment that prompts his reflections in the Critique of Practical Reason about the indispensability for morality of the “Summum Bonum,” and so the Postulates, especially of a judging God and the immortality of the soul, but it has a distinct poignancy.10 It is long but worth quoting at length, especially since it is like a little literary narrative. He makes his point with this picture, not an argument. We can thus assume a righteous man (like Spinoza) who takes himself to be firmly convinced that there is no God and (since with regard to the object of morality it has a similar consequence) there is also no future life: how would he judge his own inner purposive determination by the moral law, which he actively honors? He does not demand any advantage for himself from his conformity to this law, whether in this or in another world; rather, he would merely unselfishly establish the good to which that holy law directs all his powers. But his effort is limited; and from nature he can, to be sure, expect some contingent assistance here and there, but never a lawlike agreement in accordance with constant rules (like his internal maxims are and must be) with the ends to act in behalf of which he still feels himself bound and impelled. Deceit, violence, and envy will always surround him, even though he is himself honest, peaceable, and benevolent; and the righteous ones besides himself that he will still encounter will, in spite of all their worthiness to be happy, nevertheless be subject by nature, which pays no attention to that, to all the evils of poverty, illnesses, and untimely death, just like all the other animals on earth, and will always 10

His formulation: “Now, since the promotion of the highest good, which contains this connection in its concept, is an a priori necessary object of our will and inseparably bound up with the moral law, the impossibility of the first must also prove the falsity of the second. If, therefore, the highest good is impossible in accordance with practical rules, then the moral law, which commands us to promote it, must be fantastic and directed to empty imaginary ends and must therefore in itself be false.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. M. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 92 (AA V: 1140). It is significant that for Kant what is so threatening to morality would be the impossibility of the highest good. But since one cannot prove a negative (and the concepts of a just God and an immortal soul are not self-contradictory), it is not clear what the implications would be if there were simply no good reason to believe in such postulates, beyond our need to believe them.



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remain thus until one wide grave engulfs them all together (whether honest or dishonest, it makes no difference here) and flings them, who were capable of having believed themselves to be the final end of creation, back into the abyss of the purposeless chaos of matter from which they were drawn. – The end, therefore, which this well-intentioned person had and should have had before his eyes in his conformity to the moral law, he would certainly have to give up as impossible.11

From a conventionally religious point of view, of course, Kant’s claim that we need such a postulate is remarkable. The assumption is clearly that there is no manifest presence, none at all, of a benevolent or loving or just God in human life. He is absent and it is just and only because he is absent that he must be postulated. The experience of human life is the experience of complete godlessness. Such a picture is not leading us toward any notion of prayer or grace or divine mercy in this life, and again, were someone not able to be convinced by the need to make some “postulated” sense of the indubitable experience of the reality of the moral law, then that would bring Kant’s picture close to something like a tragic one.12 (And, given the unconditional nature of moral obligation, and Kant’s insistence on “ought always implies can,” it is not clear that his attempt to avoid the Sisyphean picture his core moral theory has painted is coherent.) It is of course open to Kant to push these considerations to the margins, despite the existential intensity of some of his language. He could say: There is nothing crushingly tragic about the fact that, as knowers, we are finite, and so there are matters we need to know that we cannot. At least we can know why we cannot, can make comprehensible such incomprehensibility, and we at least know with a priori certainty that there is no way ever to deny the possibility of what we need to believe. We are forever ignorant of “things in themselves.” And we certainly know that morality is a matter of pure practical reason. In the midst of all this metaphysical ignorance, we can know in every case what we ought to do (there can be no tragic dilemmas, reason cannot oppose itself),13 and even if we cannot provide 11 12

13

Kant, Critique of the Power of Judging, 317 (AA V: 452). Cf. G. Lukács, “The Metaphysics of Tragedy,” in Soul and Form, trans. A. Bostock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974, 152: “A drama is a play about man and his fate-a play in which God is the spectator. He is a spectator and no more; his words and gestures never mingle with the words and gestures of the players. His eyes rest upon them: that is all. ‘Whoever sees God, dies,’ Ibsen wrote once; ‘but can he who has been seen by God continue to live?’” Like everything in Kant, this is occasionally controversial, and Kant certainly presents difficult casuistical questions which, somewhat strangely, he does not resolve for us. But the passage most often cited to show that he did deny the existence of such dilemmas (in the “Doctrine of Right” section of The Metaphysics of Morals) does seem to be dispositive. “A conflict of duties (collisio officiorum s.

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any ultimate sense of such requirements within the whole, it is open to us to hope for what we need, armed with a critical assurance that such aspirations cannot ever be foreclosed. And this is all not even to mention that Kant, however responsible he was for isolating the aesthetic domain as one of distinctive human significance, alongside the normative and cognitive domains, still strictly separates the aesthetic, as the domain of the feeling of pleasure and pain, from the experience of and reflection about the moral law14 and from any claim to knowledge (viz., “tragic insight”). But such a reaction to what we will need to explore as a tragic assessment of human life as a whole is extremely abstract, and the passage quoted earlier reveals that Kant is quite interested in the experience of such moral demands, and this “aesthetically” (as “painful” in light of our interest in happiness) within the general shape of an extended human life; interested in what it is like to live in the absence of any reason to believe there is a connection in this life between virtue and happiness and in the question of the bearability of such experiences. We can only speculate about how a Kantian account of the tragic would keep faith with the various sentiments we have noted. We might imagine that a “cathartic” reaction to a tragedy – perhaps one like his little Spinoza narrative above – would be in the spirit of his account of the sublime, especially the dynamical sublime.15 Pain at the experience of our finitude and weakness in the face of natural power and arbitrariness, represented aesthetically, might inspire the same kind of counter-reaction as in the sublime. Whatever sensible suffering is represented, we might be nevertheless inspired by the autonomy and inviolability of our “supersensible” moral vocation and come to feel that, whatever horrors are visited on us, these cannot ever determine, make impossible, the call of duty and our capacity to respond. This would be an experience of something beautiful and a form of self-affirmation. Interestingly, that is not the reaction prominent in the

14 15

obligationum) would be a relation between them in which one would cancel the other (wholly or in part). But since duty and obligation are concepts that express the objective practical necessity of certain actions and two rules opposed to each other cannot be necessary at the same time, if it is a duty to act in accordance with one rule, to act in accordance with the opposite rule is not a duty but even contrary to duty; so a collision of duties and obligations is inconceivable (obligationes non colliduntur).” Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 50 (AA VI: 224). Aside from the vaguely comforting thought that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good in section §59 of The Critique of the Power of Judging. An account that was important for Schiller in the essays written in 1792–1793, such as “On the Tragic Art,” “On the Sublime,” and “Concerning the Sublime.” Kant makes the thinnest possible connection between the tragic (and other art forms) and the sublime in The Critique of the Power of Judging, 203 (AA 5: 326).



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Moral Proof passage. We instead cry out that such unmerited suffering, Iphigenia’s, say, or Desdemona’s, be redeemed by divine justice, not by tragic heroism, however beautiful, nor by the revenge prominent in tragedies (another wrong, from Kant’s point of view),16 and we might take some solace in the possibility that we can hope for such a rebalancing of the scales of justice in an afterlife. Both reactions instrumentalize the tragic experience for the sake of morality and its absolute or unconditioned authority. Perhaps Kant is right about such authority. Perhaps he is right that morality is a matter of pure practical reason, and so there can be no such thing as the unresolvable dilemmas tragic heroes face, no having to do something wrong to do what is right, no conflict between right and right, no greatness in an attempt that transcends its moral wrongness. But the two reactions that seem to follow from such a supremacy of morality – increased respect for the self-sufficiency of our moral vocation and a rational hope for ultimate justice – are clearly ways of opposing or even defying where great tragedies “leave us.” Even if it is no easy matter to say where that is, those reactions seem an appropriation or denial of tragedy, not a response to it as it is. That evaluative category, “the tragic,” as it is, still needs a hearing. So the wager in the following is that Kant’s lack of interest in classical and modern tragedy, and in what I am assuming is his resistance to there being anything of general philosophical significance in “the tragic,” or his attempt with his Postulates to avoid, to foreclose any such possible significance, is of broader significance. Tragedy is a notion deeply foreign to him, not because of some peculiarity of Kant’s personality or even all that much as a result of his moral theory and critical philosophy, but because tragedy, understood broadly, deeply, and rightly, is foreign to philosophy as traditionally conceived, at least up until Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. But clearly, before we return to Kant, we need to say something about tragedy such that it could be a challenge to philosophy.

II This is not easy to do economically. There must be dozens of theories of tragedy, and they deal with everything from the distinctive sort of pleasure the spectator takes in watching human suffering to attempts to assess the moral dimensions of tragedy. But insofar as we want to develop a 16

Actually it is hard, and requires a great deal of imagination, to get even this far in a Kantian framework. It is hard to imagine Kant getting beyond in any sense the (for him) unqualified and absolute wrongness of what Agamemnon does to Iphigenia or what Othello does to Desdemona.

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contrast between a distinctive evaluative assessment of human life as a whole as “tragic” and a philosophical point of view like Kant’s, we need to begin by assuming that we can speak of the “tragic point of view” as involving something like such an assessment. The assumption involves the one Aristotle makes in the Poetics. Tragic dramas are not mere sad stories about particular characters. The form itself, in its repetitions, variations, and deep hold on the Western imaginary, aspires to some sort of universality. The narratives have a point, a reflective purpose, and that purpose is an illumination of some central, shared feature of human life. In the simplest sense, within such a form, some heroic effort fails, had to be undertaken and had to fail, and since the efforts often involve matters of great importance  – the possibility of justice, of love, of self-knowledge, of trust – the assumption is that a point of view is taken on the meaning of such unavoidable failure. This is obscure, not least because it seems to be an invitation to extract a lesson, a moral, an explanation from the whole course of characters and events represented. As we shall discuss in more detail, these always represent efforts to domesticate and blunt the force of tragedy. But the horrors that we feel when we read or see tragedies do seem to mean something weighty, even if any critical attempt to say what they mean can seem like a form of avoidance, repression. If we take as our paradigms of the genre Sophocles and Shakespeare, then there are some features that set off such a point of view. Tragedy is an aesthetic form of course, a genre, and it is a weighty, interesting question in itself how it differs from comedy, romance, irony, and melodrama, and what might be the significance of these various forms of aesthetic representation of life. But from a sufficiently high altitude, several features stand out that justify understanding “the tragic” in the way suggested: as a general evaluative assessment of matters of great significance in human life (still reserving the possibility that such an assessment might be that no such evaluative assessment is possible). Matters of great consequence for an entire community, a polis, a kingdom, an empire, are at stake in what the central figure in the drama, the hero or heroine, does or does not do. For Hegel, this immediately explains why any modern tragedy, with credible modern characters, is no longer possible. Once there is a modern state and so many mediated and interrelated sources of power and a vast network of human dependencies, there is no credible way of depicting modern characters on whom so much could depend.17 17

“But when there is still no state the security of life and property depends entirely on the personal strength and valour of each individual who has to provide for his own existence and the preservation



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To some degree, but not completely, he exempts Shakespeare from this judgment, largely because Shakespeare creates his own imaginary Heroic Age where these conditions still apply. Not completely because he realizes that in Shakespeare, the focus is on the inner psychological “collisions” within a modern individual. But he notes: Shakespeare, for example, has drawn much material for his tragedies out of chronicles or old romances which tell of a state of affairs not yet unfolded into a completely established organization, but where the life of the individual in his decision and achievement is still predominant and remains the determining factor. Shakespeare’s strictly historical dramas, on the other hand, have, as a chief ingredient, purely external historical matter and so they are further away from the ideal mode of representation, although even here the situations and actions are borne and promoted by the harsh independence and self-will of the characters. It is true that their independence remains again only a mostly formal self-reliance, whereas in the independence of the heroic characters what must be an essential keynote is the content too which they have made it their aim to actualize.18

And he notes one exception: I will only refer to Goethe’s Faust, the one absolutely philosophical tragedy. Here on the one side, dissatisfaction with learning and, on the other, the freshness of life and enjoyment in the world, in general the tragic quest for harmony between the Absolute in its essence and appearance and the individual’s knowledge and will, all this provides a breadth of subject-matter which no other dramatist has ventured to compass in one and the same work.19

But even in this case, the fact that this quest for harmony is “tragic” does not mean, as it properly should, that it is doomed, even if the quest is inevitable. It is very much the point of a good deal of Hegel (reflecting Schiller’s influence) that it is not doomed. And so we still find ourselves without a modern form of life in which a tragic situation could be dramatically represented as credible. Instead, in the modern world, the tragic denouement is also displayed as purely the effect of unfortunate circumstances and external accidents which might have turned out otherwise and produced a happy ending. In this case the sole spectacle offered to us is that the modern individual with the non-universal nature of his character, his circumstances, and the complications in which he is involved,

18 19

of what belongs and is due to him. Such a state of affairs is the one we are accustomed to ascribe to the Heroic Age.” G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975, Vol. I, 184–185. Hegel, Aesthetics, I, 190. Hegel, Aesthetics, II, 1224.

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This is probably what we would call melodrama, and it is un-Hegelian (if one may dare to lecture Hegel about himself) to isolate the “modern individual” as having a strictly nonuniversal character. It is quite conceivable that the form of modern bourgeois life in general might impose psychological demands on individuals that produce internal, irreconcilable “collisions.”21 Moreover, it does not seem right, or it is at least an incomplete picture, to portray a tragic point of view as simply and only past. An imagined picture of such heroic power still plays a deeply significant role in (especially) the American imaginary, as in Hollywood Westerns and film noir, contexts in which the rule of law is not yet established or has broken down. These forms isolate such imagined possibilities as imaginary, and what they imagine is either the embourgeoizement of the heroic situation (making vivid the unavailability of such a space for such heroics, and so as a painful, remembered and present, lived loss) or they blur the lines completely between the heroic and the criminal, leaving us with mere, arbitrary death, a situation beyond tragedy, beyond even meaning, as perhaps the fate that awaits us.22 They both bear on the present. Tragedies are not about ordinary life; matters of great consequence are in play. What is done by that central figure in the drama ends in failure, most often death, very often a horrific death, of the innocent, the wicked, and the hero or heroine. The failure though is not accidental, contingent. It is not just that Iphigenia, or Medea’s children, or Ajax, or Cordelia, or Desdemona die or that Oedipus or Hamlet or Macbeth or Lear or Othello seem to destroy themselves. The deaths and their own destruction are brought about by the central figure. And the most interesting feature of this is why the hero brings about these calamities. He or she cannot but bring them about. Some sort of necessity is involved, and this is put in many ways. The very qualities we admire, that make the hero heroic, are the very same qualities that insure something calamitous. What Karl 20

Hegel, Aesthetics, II, 1231. An example would be the claim that the modern demand for genuineness or authenticity is unavoidable, necessary, and yet unfulfillable. See my “Love and Class in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows,” in Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form, Robert Pippin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020, 117–146. 22 Showing this to be so is the project of my Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, and Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. 21



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Reinhardt says about Oedipus in his great book on Sophocles does not seem as limited to Attic tragedy or to the play as he suggests: “What is tragic is not annihilation as such, but rather that deliverance turns into annihilation; it is not in the hero’s downfall that tragedy takes place, but rather in the ruin with which a human being is met on the very path that he or she entered in order to escape from ruin.”23 Or, in a formulation of the issue by Seth Benardete: “Tragedy discloses the inevitability of the morally impossible for which there cannot be any expiation.”24 The necessity involved, that the morally impossible is inevitable, does not just produce a guilt without expiation (despite that necessity, for necessity does not expiate, or provide an excuse), it produces catastrophic consequences, such as the deaths listed as examples earlier. (Benardete does not much explain what he means by “the morally impossible.” It is interesting that he does not just say the necessity of the morally impermissible. Perhaps he means that tragic dramas disclose a situation where an action is both required and forbidden; hence the impossible.) But even with a sketchy picture of the tragic point of view, we are on the verge of deep paradox. Oedipus himself complains bitterly about what appears to him as well to be such a denial of moral expiation: The killing and the marriage and all my misfortunes were things I had to endure, alas, against my will. It was the way the gods wanted it, angry perhaps with my family from times past. So far as I myself am concerned, you could not find any offence to reproach me with that led me to these deeds against my self and my kin. Tell me this: if a divine oracle was given to my father, to the effect that he was to die at his son’s hand, how can you properly make that into any fault of mine, seeing that my father had as yet done nothing to give me birth, nor my mother either? At the time I was unborn. And if later my ruin became manifest, as it did, and I fought with and killed my father, not knowing what it was that I was doing, and who I was doing it to – how can you reasonably blame me for this act, which was nothing that I intended?25 23

Karl Reinhardt, Sophocles, trans. H. Harvey and D. Harvey, New York, Barnes and Noble, 1979, 108. This remark too could apply as much to Lear as to Oedipus: “Something which is peculiar to Attic tragedy as a whole, the habit of luxuriating in horror, of investing terror with a kind of voluptuousness, has in this play more than any other extended into the attitude of the tragic hero” (130). 24 S. Benardete, “On Greek Tragedy,” in The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy, S. Benardete, ed. and intro. By Ronna Burger and Michael Davis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 105. I am grateful to my colleague David Wellbery for discussions about the character of the “morally impossible” and for many other conversations about the philosophical dimensions of tragedy. 25 Roger Dawe, ed., Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Greek and Roman Classics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 20.

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If this were true of course, then Oedipus Tyrannos would be no tragedy but the sad story of a horrible mistake, the pitiable story of a well-intentioned man who unknowingly and so blamelessly killed his father and married his own mother. This is very like the somewhat tone-deaf view of Hegel, who first contrasted ancient tragedy with modern by claiming that in the former the operative agents were really vast “ethical powers” in “collision,” and individuals were mere epiphenomena of such powers. By contrast, in modern tragedy there were genuine individuals, subjects of their intentional deeds and personally responsible only for the intentional. He then suggested that the latter view was superior, and the former view, the heroic assumption of absolute responsibility for everything brought about by a subject even if not intentionally done by him was, in effect, primitive and so belonged to the past.26 Bernard Williams has the right response to Oedipus’ complaint, but it returns us to a paradox that Williams does not much acknowledge. In fact, what Williams says borders on both the right account of the genuinely tragic in this situation and yet also the deeply unintelligible: Not even Oedipus, as he is represented in his last days, thought that blinding and exile had to be the response. But should there be no response? Is it as though it had never happened? Or rather, to put the right question: Is it as though such things had happened, but not by his agency – that Laius had died, for instance, indeed been killed, but, as Oedipus first believed and then, for a short while, hoped, by someone else? The whole of the Oedipus Tyrannus, that dreadful machine, moves to the discovery of just one thing, that he did it. Do we understand the terror of that discovery only because we residually share magical beliefs in blood-guilt, or archaic notions of responsibility? Certainly not: we understand it because we know that in the story of one’s life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done.27

That seems right, “an authority exercised by what one has done.” But what is such an authority? It will not do just to point to the unacceptability of an extreme possible reaction: Oedipus, reasoning as he does, might simply shrug off what he has found out and walk away unbothered by it for the rest of life (“as though nothing happened”), beyond being sad, 26

Hegel, Aesthetics, I, 188–189. Interestingly, Hegel also indicates a dissatisfaction with the moral point of view, saying that, in antiquity, one “knows nothing of this opposition between subjective intentions and the objective deed and its consequences, while nowadays, owing to the complexity and ramification of action, everyone has recourse to everyone else and shuffles guilt off himself so far as possible” (188). 27 B. Williams. Shame and Necessity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 69.



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perhaps bitter, that all this “happened to him.” That would be, as Williams suggests, inhuman; not credible. But what is it then that Oedipus must bear? What “response” is appropriate? Should Oedipus just be haunted and horribly pained by the memory of that day on the road and by horrific memories of making love to his mother? It is clear that he is, but that is not a “response.” Oedipus says he “suffered those deeds more than he did them” and he has a point.28 There is no indication that he wants it to be “as if he had not done them” but he is raising the question of his agency, and so of the justice of any blame. Reinhardt is closer to the point when he says: And even if one were to imagine that a court composed of gods or men had acquitted Oedipus of all guilt, like Orestes in Aeschylus, it would still not help him in the least; for what meaning would such an acquittal have in the face of the contradiction between what he has imagined he is, and what he is? Nor would the opposite verdict of “guilty” add anything to his state. Orestes can be acquitted, by himself and by others, but Oedipus cannot be released from what he has recognized as the truth about himself … What we have had to consider is illusion and truth as the opposing forces between which man is bound, in which he is entangled, and in whose shackles, as he strives towards the highest he can hope for, he is worn down and destroyed.29

Reinhardt is implying, and I think he is right to do so, that there is something of powerful general significance in Oedipus’ fate and, more to the present point, there is no resolution to or consolation for being caught in this painful collision, no lesson to be drawn from it. And it is a possible, and perhaps inevitable, collision everyone faces, between who one takes oneself to be and who one might discover one is.30 To be sure, the value of Williams’ take on Oedipus is that he does not deflate or try to domesticate the genuine painfulness of the situation, but there is still a kind of rationalization in the point he makes. He thinks we see a philosophical truth in Oedipus, that we must bear the burden of what we have brought about; we cannot escape it, and our not finding what Oedipus suffers simply unfair but tragically necessary is a way for us to make an important distinction, between what we think we think (responsibility only for intentional action) and what we really think (we do 28

His remarks also make very clear that Hegel was wrong about the distinction he claims we have but the Heroic Age did not. 29 Reinhardt, Sophocles, 134. 30 Why it might be inevitable is explored in my The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

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bear responsibility for what we have brought about whether intentionally or not). And of course, it is also a use of classical tragedies by Williams to make a point he makes with great passion and incisiveness in many works, a point against what he calls “that peculiar institution”: morality.31 This rationale or lesson may be an important philosophical point but the question it raises is whether “drawing such a lesson,” or appealing to the play as evidence in this way, fully appreciates the tension or, to use that Hegelian word, the “collision” between the necessity or inevitability of “the morally impossible” and even so, even given the inevitability, the impossibility of moral expiation. That is, Williams does not domesticate the tragic in a way as egregious as the numerous moralistic accounts of tragedy. Everyone is familiar with these, from high school literature courses on. It was Oedipus’ hybris that brought about his downfall; his arrogant assumption of his riddle-solving powers and sole political responsibility. Or Oedipus is a true tyrant, confusing the public with the private. (This is Benardete’s view.) Or Agamemnon was not hesitant enough about killing his daughter, not conflicted enough. Or Creon was a tyrant, Antigone a heroine of conscience. Lear’s catastrophes were the result of his demand that private affection serve a public, political purpose. Hamlet was a melancholic, damaged soul, and so he was weak, not up to what was required of him.32 Othello could not abide the uncertainty that comes with all love; he demanded a security that is impossible, and when demanded, ruins everything. And so on with the many moral theories of the tragic. There are also more general rationalizations of the tragic perspective. Lessing’s view that tragedy transforms the feelings of pity and fear into virtues; Mendelssohn’s that our pleasure in tragedy derives from our awareness of our own engaged moral virtues.33 Even what Gardner, in quoting the passage that follows, rightly describes as “the most subtle and sensitive attempt in German idealism to square tragedy with morality,”34 Schelling’s, nevertheless does try to do just that, albeit in a highly speculative way that makes little sense without his early system. He is, though, clearly confronting head-on the basic issue. Tragedy, he writes in his The Philosophy of Art, is, 31 32 33

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B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. One of the more obtuse views in the history of commentary on Hamlet. It is G. Wilson Knight’s in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Gardner’s “Tragedy, Morality and Metaphysics” is again indispensable here, both for its summary and analysis of these attempts and for what he shows about all attempts to reconcile morality and tragedy. Gardner, “Tragedy, Morality and Metaphysics,” 255.



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necessity genuinely caught in a struggle with freedom, yet such that a balance obtains between the two […] both, necessity and freedom, emerge from this struggle simultaneously as victorious and vanquished, and accordingly equal in every respect. But precisely this is doubtlessly the highest manifestation of art, namely, that freedom elevate itself to a position of equity with necessity, and that necessity appear as the equal of freedom without the latter losing in significance in the process […] The essence of tragedy is thus an actual and objective conflict between freedom in the subject on the one hand, and necessity on the other, a conflict that does not end such that one or the other succumbs, but rather such that both are manifested in perfect indifference as simultaneously victorious and vanquished.35

Hegel of course saw that tragedy consisted in a collision of equally binding ethical powers, a so-called right vs. right view, but that view indexes such collisions to historical forms of ethical life, and he finally does deflate the paradoxical power of tragedy: The true development of the action consists solely in the cancellation of conflicts as conflicts, in the reconciliation of the powers animating action which struggled to destroy one another in their mutual conflict. Only in that case does finality lie not in misfortune and suffering but in the satisfaction of the spirit, because only with such a conclusion can the necessity of what happens to the individuals appear as absolute rationality, and only then can our hearts be morally at peace: shattered by the fate of the heroes but reconciled fundamentally. Only by adherence to this view can Greek tragedy be understood.36

For all the fame of Hegel’s theory of tragedy, it is hard for me to imagine anyone “reconciled” to the blind Oedipus, or the dead Iphigenia, or the dead Antigone, and so forth.37 It is true that, as Peter Szondi and others have pointed out, Hegel’s whole account of human spirit is a kind of tragic narrative, that the great power in that narrative is “the negative,” spirits’ own self-destruction.38 35 36

37

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F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art (1804–5), ed. and trans. D. W. Stott, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989, 249, 251. Hegel, Aesthetics, II, 1275. Hegel has often been criticized for, in effect, defusing tragedy, creating a unity where this is none. See A. C. Bradley, “Hegel on Tragedy,” in Hegel on Tragedy, ed. A. Paolucci and H. Paolucci, New York: Harper, 1962, 375; and Gardner, “Tragedy, Morality and Metaphysics,” 243. But see T. Pinkard’s view, according to which it might be possible to say that, for Hegel, the kinds of “collisions” depicted in tragedy do not have to mean the sort of ethical incoherence I am suggesting Hegel cannot accept. See “Tragedy with and without Religion: Hegelian Thoughts,” in Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity, ed. J. Billings and M. Leonard, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 137–158. P. Szondi, Versuch über das Tragische, Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1961.

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No other philosopher takes as much to heart that law laid down by Zeus in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, pathei mathos, that we “learn by suffering,”39 transforming it into a principle of world history itself, such that “[w]orld history is this divine tragedy, where spirit rises up above pity, ethical life, and everything that in other spheres is sacred to it.”40 But the collisions are essentially historical, temporary, and, in what has come to be the most controversial and very likely the least defensible aspect of his philosophy, essentially unbearable; that is, we have to say, metaphysically unsustainable. Spirit, that agentive like-mindedness that is the subject of Hegel’s historical account, cannot abide such great contradictions in its collective commitments and must seek, always seeks, to resolve them, and it always can and does. At some level (say, the level of what Hegel called “logic”), this must certainly be true, but in any full history of Spirit, there is no reason to think it is true; in the fractured cultural world of post-Hegelian Western and now World Spirit, there is plenty of reason to think it is not true; and in the persistence of a tragic dimension in much psychological drama and in such forms as tragic melodrama, there remains a challenge to Hegel’s sweeping insistence on universal intelligibility. To put it another way: There is surely a tragic dimension to Hegel’s characterization of Spirit itself as a self-inflected “wound,” but there is also a betrayal of that dimension in his claim, really nothing more than a Kantian hope disguised as metaphysics, that “[t]he wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind; it is not the deed which is imperishable, but rather the deed is repossessed by spirit into itself.”41 There is one qualification here that should be mentioned. It is possible to argue that these remarks by Hegel concern his interpretation of Greek tragedy, and need not necessarily be taken as representative of Hegel’s views on the fate of the various collisions that are well-known in modern societies as a whole, as if he were a reconciliationist in the same sense. Terry Pinkard has argued that in this latter context Hegel means to show us that we can become reconciled to living with the unresolvable political and cultural tensions that are inevitable in a social world that has achieved the 39 40 41

Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ll. 176–178. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science (1817–18), trans. J. Stewart and P. Hodgson, Berkley: University of California Press, 1995, 306–307. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. T. Pinkard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 387. See again, Pinkard, “Tragedy with and without Religion”: “What then of people who do not carry out what is required of them? Or those who openly defy them or even unwittingly violate them? It cannot be the case that they will just get away with it. The very nature of the world has to be such that justice will be restored” 142 (emphasis added). This may be Hegel’s view but it is ad hoc and unconvincing.



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level of collective self-consciousness Hegel thinks we have.42 These are tensions that arise inevitably from our being both natural and spiritual beings (we always remain, as Hegel says, “amphibian” creatures, the very image of an inherent duality that nevertheless successfully lives); they can be recontextualized in terms of practical problems to be addressed, even if this all means we must be content not with happy but at least meaningful lives. But these sorts of tensions and collisions are not “tragic” ones in the sense we have been discussing, and even Pinkard argues that Hegel has given us a way of “taming” such tensions. That may all be true, in other words, but it does not touch the challenge raised by tragedy.

III Where does this leave us? We can begin to formulate an answer by returning to the origins of much of this discussion, the first attempt to rationalize tragedy from a philosophical point of view, Aristotle’s. Recall that besides defining tragedy in terms of the plot, the reversal and recognition decisive for the hero (the moment when the harmatia is realized, already the start of a moralization), tragedy is also defined by the response of the audience: pity and fear. But according to the Rhetoric, pity and fear must work together in a tragic response.43 We pity those things happening to someone that we fear could happen to us, and we fear those things that, were they to happen to us, would make us fit subjects of pity. If we experience fear without pity, we have something like a contemporary horror or terror movie. If we experience pity without fear that it could happen to oneself, we have a mere tear-jerker or weepie. Our fear cuts off sentimental and potentially patronizing pity, and our pity reveals that we find the suffering undeserved; it blocks any indignant moralism. We find that we cannot say that the victim/hero got what he or she deserved and we find we cannot say that he was the victim of a heartless universe, for he brought about what happened himself. But this also means that, if we exclude the idea that there is some flaw or sin or defect (hamartia), as we must if we rightly emphasize the unavoidability of what the hero is called 42

43

T. Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. See also T. Pinkard, Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. In the latter, his case against reading Hegel as a simple “organicist” or social “wholist,” and this by attention to what Pinkard calls “infinite ends,” is also important in any such discussion. See the useful discussion of Rhetoric 2 in S. Salkever, “Tragedy and the Education of the Demos: Aristotle’s Response to Plato,” in Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, ed. P. Eubens, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, 294ff.

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on to do, then our judgment is completely stymied. That is, there is something we can’t make ethical sense of. And it is this that can be put in either a “Kantian” or a much more radical way. We can say that there is something we can’t make sense of. There is a possible sense to be made, or at the very least we can’t rule that out, but we are finite. It is beyond us to understand not just this event and outcome but what sort of a human world as a whole it could be, if, with deeply significant results such as these, we can’t integrate the events into any general sense of such a world. (Or, as we saw in Kant, just that absence must mean, has to mean – and what could this “requirement” be? – that there is another world, a just world of absolute meaning awaiting us.) Or, more radically and more in keeping with the tragic perspective, we could say: There is no sense to be made. The latter, tragic challenge to philosophy is not in the name of something we desperately need to know but cannot (until we finally do, in the case of Hegel) but in the name of the utter absence of anything to be known. There is no “ground” for the collisions that could account for their inevitable emergence. There is no unity intimated or pointed to that could give us some hope for resolution. This seems to us impossible to say. Agamemnon, we need badly to say, could have and should have acted otherwise; something must have gone wrong in a way that was avoidable. It makes no sense to us to say that he “had to kill” Iphigenia, even if the logic of the play as a genuine tragedy insists on it. Likewise with Medea, with Creon, with Oedipus. Lear and Cordelia, Desdemona, Banquo, all “did not have to die,” we insist; all of this was avoidable, and even if not, some sense, a lesson in humility or prudence or self-doubt, or something, should be “learned” from the suffering we see and experience in some way ourselves. Even Nietzsche, after all, tried to say that the very depth of tragic senselessness, the futility of the attempted emergence of Apollonian order out of Dionysian chaos, could provide us with “affirmation,” an “aesthetic justification,” if only by the magnificence and beauty of the futile but heroic effort itself. What we need in our response to tragedy is not understanding but strength. And then Nietzsche, perhaps prompted by reflections like these, more committed later to tragedy just as it is, rejected this Birth of Tragedy view as “romantic,” turning instead to the mysterious “Eternal Return of the Same” as a source of affirmation. One reason we feel so compelled to insist on this denial of the radically tragic, and the reason that it seems right to say that the tragic perspective, understood as radically as suggested earlier, can be understood as a challenge to philosophy itself, can be traced back to the deepest



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assumption in Western thought. The best way to understand that assumption, Parmenides’ identification of Being and Thinking, is as the assumption that to be is to be intelligible. There cannot be anything in principle unintelligible. This was put in quite a radical form by Parmenides because he turned immediately to one of the most difficult issues: nonbeing. Since nonbeing could not be, since it was alogos, anything that assumed it, such as change or differentiation, must not be either. But the assumption, no matter the complications of negative ontologies, is still deeply familiar to us. It is not an empirical truth that it is not possible to answer a question about why an event, a rise in temperature, say, occurred, that “there was no reason, no cause; it just occurred.” That cannot be. This does not mean that much of what humans do we cannot find initially unintelligible. They act irrationally. They do what they fully know they have no good reason to do, and even know they have powerful reasons not to do. But we do not accept “that they just acted,” that there is no way to account for “what led them to do that.” (There is no greater rationalist here than Freud, as another way of making the point.) However much more there is to say about this, Kant and Hegel certainly share the principle, that Greek principle, that, as Hegel recalled, “nous rules the world.” In the practical domain of human action, what renders the actions intelligible, the reasons for which people undertake them, are, in Kant, either moral or prudential. And moral rationality is absolute; prudential considerations and the deeds they motivate must be morally permissible, and many powerfully self-interested possibilities or prudentially wise deeds are proscribed if they are not morally permissible. And Kant clearly thinks that many considerations that seem innocent enough, harmlessly prudential, nevertheless have moral dimensions that must be taken into account. There is a kind of obsessiveness sometimes in his search for comprehensive moral intelligibility: why opium is more a base act than drunkenness; how much wine one might drink before it becomes morally problematic; how many guests it is proper to invite to a dinner; how various traits one might consider just character flaws in a general sense have a moral dimension – arrogance, servility, moral “flabbiness”; why it is a question of “Recht” that (male) wig-makers should have the vote but not barbers. And Hegel too thinks there is a kind of practical intelligibility, a justification, for the nuclear family, gender roles, there being a monarch, and so forth. One challenge to all this is simply the existence of contingency, and so in cases like these there being unacknowledged and wholly contingent socio-historical habits of mind behind such views. But we believe that

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that is how we render such parochial views (if that is what we think they are) intelligible, and we try to account further for why just those habits are as they are. The tragic challenge is more serious and goes well beyond similar considerations that are often confused with it: like why innocent children die or the wicked prosper. If the morally impossible is unavoidable and necessary, and yet bearing having done it is without expiation equally necessary, then there is a kind of moral incoherence that is a distinctive and disturbing form of unintelligibility. If morality makes sense or ethical life is rational, this should not be. The tragic occurs within that frame of possible intelligibility and fails to be intelligible. (By a failure of intelligibility I mean simply representing virtuous persons whose very virtue necessitates actions that are at the same time base, or representations of virtuous obligations that are necessary and unavoidable, but necessarily futile, not merely uncertain of realization.) The challenge is to a deep principle assumed since the very beginning of reflection on the good: the unity of the virtues. The challenge certainly doesn’t mean that there therefore is no such thing as morality or ethical life, but the comprehensiveness and absoluteness of such perspectives is challenged. In Kant, this would allow a distinction between morality and moralism that he cannot make.44 What Agamemnon did or what Othello did is simply and unqualifiedly morally horrific and to be absolutely condemned; end of story. In Hegel, if a conflict between right and right emerges, it cannot be permanent; a resolution can and, given the rationalist assumption just discussed, must be found. The claim that tragedy challenges any claim for complete ethical coherence is subject to so many conceivable objections, starting with the unavoidable imprecision of the concept of tragedy itself, and extending into how a literary object might be said to challenge philosophy, that it is impossible to formulate the challenge without extensive interpretive work on many individual tragedies with such a question in mind. Or at least, I find it impossible. This is not even to mention philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger who, responding to something like this challenge of comprehensive metaphysical intelligibility, set out to begin philosophy anew: still as philosophy but now as what Nietzsche called “psychology” and what Heidegger called “thinking.” I can only suggest one final way of making the main point. In his magisterial essay on King Lear, “The 44

Kant can be very clear about what he thinks of any way of representing the human fate that does not portray moral progress. See his remarks, “Concerning the Terroristic Way of Representing Human History,” in The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. M. Gregor, New York: Abaris Books, 1979, 145ff; AA VII, 81ff.



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Avoidance of Love,” Stanley Cavell is in the midst of trying to explain the unavailability any longer of an aesthetic, especially dramatic tragic point of view, something he thinks we see happening with the ending of Lear. (He is trying to make a difficult point that would require an extensive exposition, that “[t]ragedy has moved into the world, and with it the world has become theatrical.”)45 I suggest instead that we read his words as doing complete justice to the tragic point of view itself, as I have been saying, simply as it is. It has not lost its “effectiveness” in any moral or rational sense. It never had any; never could have. That is its point. That one has to die in order to become reborn is one tragic fact; that one’s wholeness deprives others of their life is another; that one’s love becomes incompatible with one’s life and kills the thing it loves is another. Lear is reborn, but into his old self. That is no longer just tragic, it suggests that tragedy itself has become ineffective, out-worn, because now even death does not overcome our difference. Here again, Gloucester’s life amplifies Lear’s. For it is one thing, and tragic, that we can learn only through suffering. It is something else that we have nothing to learn from it … Our tragic fact is that we find ourselves at the cause of tragedy, but without finding ourselves.46

Bibliography Beaumarchais, Pierre. Théâtre complet, Lettres. Ed. M. Allem. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1949. Benardete, S. “On Greek Tragedy.” In The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy, S. Benardete. Ed. and intro. Ronna Burger and Michael Davis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Bradley, A. C. “Hegel on Tragedy.” In Hegel on Tragedy, ed. H. Paolucci. New York: Harper, 1962, 246–325. Cavell, Stanley. “The Avoidance of Love. A Reading of King Lear.” In Must We Mean What We Say. A Book of Essays, Stanley Cavell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, 267–353. Cutrofello, Andrew. “Kant’s Debate with Herder about the Philosophical Significance of Shakespeare.” Philosophy Compass 3.1 (2008): 68–82. Dawe, Roger, ed. Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Greek and Roman Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Gardner, Sebastian. “Tragedy, Morality and Metaphysics.” In Art and Morality, ed. J. Bermúdez and S. Gardner. New York: Routledge, 2003.

45

S. Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say: A Book of Essays, S. Cavell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, 321. 46 Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,”313–314, 321.

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Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 Vols. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975. Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science (1817–1818). Trans. J. Stewart and P. Hodgson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties. Trans. M. Gregor. New York: Abaris Books, 1979. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judging. Ed. and Trans. P. Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Ed. and Trans. M. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. 22 Bde. Hrsg. Wilhelm Windelbrand. Berlin: Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902. Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. M. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kant, Immanuel. “On the Common Saying: ‘That May Be True in Theory But It Does Not Apply in Practice.’” In Kant, Political Writings. Ed. H. S. Reiss, Trans. J. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Kant, Immanuel. Political Writings. Ed. H. S. Reiss, Trans. J. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Lukács, György. “The Metaphysics of Tragedy.” In Soul and Form, ed. György Lukács. Trans. A. Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974. Pinkard, Terry. Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pinkard, Terry. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pinkard, Terry. “Tragedy with and without Religion: Hegelian Thoughts.” In Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity, ed. J. Billings and M. Leonard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pippin, Robert. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pippin, Robert. Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Pippin, Robert. “Love and Class in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows.” In Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form, ed. Robert Pippin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pippin, Robert. The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.



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Reinhardt, Karl. Sophocles. Trans. H. and D. Harvey. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979. Salkever, Stephen. “Tragedy and the Education of the Demos: Aristotle’s Response to Plato.” In Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, ed. P. Eubens. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Schelling, F. W. J. The Philosophy of Art (1804–1805). Ed. and Trans. D. W. Stott. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989. Szondi, Peter. Versuch über das Tragische. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1961. Warda, A. Immanuel Kants Bücher. Berlin: Martin Breslauer, 1922. Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Wood, Alan. Kant’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Part II

Kant, Literary Theory, and the Critical Formation of the “Human” Disciplines

chapter 4

“A New Light Broke upon the First Person …” Changes in the “Way of Thinking” and the Process of Narration in Kant and Kleist Rüdiger Campe I In his letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, which he starts on November 16 and finishes, probably, on November 18, 1800, Heinrich von Kleist sets forth yet another series of Denkübungen (exercises in thinking).1 He had asked her to complete such exercises ever since they had become engaged and the project of bildung began, which – mutual and yet asymmetrical – would have him learn by teaching her. This time, the exercise concerns instances of invention and discovery in the sciences and other human activities. Newton, Kleist says, is said to have once been walking through an alley and noticed apples falling. Ordinary people would not have had any further thoughts on this. “But he connected to the idea of the force that drove the apple to the earth many ensuing ideas until, through a series of conclusions, he reached the law according to which the celestial bodies maintain themselves suspended in infinite space.”2 Galileo, the next discoverer, could not avoid going to church from time to time. Instead of the verbiage of the preacher, he focused his attention on the chandeliers under the church ceiling which were swinging slightly from the lighting of the candles. Who would have paid any attention to this? “But on him whose mind was constantly pregnant with big ideas, there suddenly broke a new light, and he invented the law of the pendulum.”3 The chemist Pilâtre de Rozier standing at the window once perceived smoke rising from a smokestack. It occurred to him 1 2

3

Translations of Kleist texts are mine, if not stated otherwise. “Er aber knüpfte an die Vorstellung der Kraft, welche den Apfel zur Erde trieb, eine Menge von folgenden Vorstellungen, bis er duch eine Reihe von Schlüssen zu dem Gesetz kam, nach welchem die Weltkörper sich schwebend in dem unendlichen Raume erhalten.” (Heinrich von Kleist [HvK] to Wilhelmine von Zenge [WvZ], November 16 and 18, 1800, in: Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 4 vols, ed. Ilse-Marie Barth, Klaus Müller-Salget Stefan Ormanns, Hinrich Seeba (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987–1997), 4: 157 (hereafter: Kleist, SWuB). “Ihm aber, dessen Geist immer schwanger war mit großen Gedanken, gieng plötzlich ein Licht auf, u(nd) er erfand das Gesetz des Pendels” (Kleist, SWuB 4: 158).

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that one might attempt to use the force of the rising air for lifting other weights. “He tried that and became the inventor of aeronautics.”4 The same principle of the sudden crystallization of a new area of thinking and doing, according to Kleist, can be seen in Columbus who perceived a piece of wood washed to the beach in Portugal and then concluded that it must come from land beyond the sea and discovered America, or in a certain war prisoner who made observations about upcoming weather conditions which enabled him to give a piece of advice to the general in command and thus helped to decide a war. These exercises in thinking differ from all earlier ones in that they do not only concentrate on moral or natural phenomena but rather on the process of perception and understanding at work in observation. The object of the exercise is not gravity or motion but invention and discovery. Observing phenomena such as gravity and motion had been the subject of the private course Wilhelmine and members of the Zenge family had taken during the winter semester of 1799 and 1800 with Professor Wünsch from the University of Frankfurt, Oder, and Heinrich von Kleist as the tutor. Now, at the end of the year, Kleist would recommend again Wünsch’s Cosmological Conversations for Young Friends of the Study of Nature as valuable reading to his now fiancée. But the lessons to be learned are now about observing the very act of observation and about understanding the moment of understanding itself. This shift in the fiancé’s project of educating the fiancée and, by this token, himself makes it even more suggestive to connect them to the Preface in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant from 1787. These months in 1800 are, after all, the apogee of Kleist’s first preoccupation with Kantian philosophy. The emblematic formulations in Kant’s Second Preface read: “A new light broke upon the first person who demonstrated the isosceles triangle (whether he was called ‘Thales’ or had some other name)”5 and later on: “When Galileo rolled balls … down an inclined plane, or when Torricelli made the air bear a weight …, or when in a later time Stahl changed metals into calx …, a light dawned on all those who study nature.”6 As in Kleist’s assignment for the woman with whom he is in love, the phrase “ihm ging ein Licht auf” (“a light appeared to him,” like the sun in the morning or an artificial light in the darkness of the night) is the culmination of a paradigm of equivalent wordings in Kant’s Preface. Kant also speaks of “the happy inspiration of 4

“Er versuchte es u(nd) ward der Erfinder der Luftschiffahrthskunst.” (Kleist, SWuB 4: 158). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, transl. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B XI: 108 (hereafter: Kant, CPR). 6 Kant, CPR, B XIIf.: 108f. 5



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a single man”7 and compares turning an aggregate of knowledge into the unity of science to “the discovery of the way around the famous Cape,”8 as Kleist on his part would adduce the discovery of America by Columbus. Famously, Kant refers to “the first thoughts of Copernicus” when it comes to discussing the possibility of rendering metaphysics into science.9 No doubt, the argumentative function of “ihm ging ein Licht auf,” “the light broke upon him,” is, in Kleist, less strictly defined than Kant’s use of the phrase. But before further discussing the narrative implications of even the philosopher’s transcendental argument, it is useful to recall that the discovery paradigm has its own emphasis in Kleist. As has been mentioned, it seems to bring to a close the studies of natural phenomena, which began in the spirit of J. Chr. Erxleben and G. Chr. Lichtenberg10 with Professor Wünsch in the winter term 1799–1800. They are then updated or rather replaced by the former tutor, Heinrich von Kleist, calling for investigating the nature of experience as such. This transition corresponds to a larger development in Kleist’s letters during that year. Regarding the assignments for Wilhelmine von Zenge, a shift can be noticed from the catechetic form of questions and answers at the beginning (“What is more desirable: to have been happy for a short time or never?”11) through essays on broad topics (e.g., the meaning of enlightenment for women as different from its meaning for men)12 to the diaristic reflection on new ways of understanding and acting. These reflections may in the end turn into what Kleist calls his “magazine of ideas” (Ideenmagazin), the exercise of the daily writing down of experiences and ensuing reflections. While this is his task as man and tutor, he invites his fiancée to make her own attempts at such a practice and thus contribute to his growing corpus of notes. The reflective turn in these mutual reading and writing practices is accompanied by Kleist’s referring  – explicitly and implicitly  – to his preoccupation with Kant. In the summer of 1800, for instance, when he has embarked on a mysterious journey whose goal and purpose is never explained (the “Würzburg journey”), Kleist asks his sister to forward him, together with his books, “my memorandum on Kantian philosophy which

7 8 9 10 11 12

Kant, CPR: B XI: 107. Kant, CPR, B XI: 108. Kant, CPR, B XVI: 110. Johann Christian Polykarp Erxleben, Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre, first edition, 1772. Beginning with its third edition in 1784, the Anfangsgründe appear with supplements and corrections by Lichtenberg. HvK to WvZ, supplement, between spring and summer 1800, Kleist, SWuB 4: 62. HvK to WvZ, September 15–18, 1800, Kleist, SWuB 4: 125; supplement On the Enlightenment of Woman (Über die Aufklärung des Weibes), SWuB 3: 531–534.

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is in your possession.”13 In November of 1800 he reveals a new plan to Wilhelmine von Zenge: instead of seeking a position in the Prussian government or any other employment (“Amt”) at all, he will devote himself to a freelance writer’s life: “I could go to Paris and transplant the latest philosophy [the Kantian philosophy] to this inquisitive country.”14 These explicit references are complemented by echoes of Kantian language beginning in early 1800. For instance, Kleist speaks of understanding, judgment, and reason as human capacities, he invokes moral duty as a daily practice as well as the only basis of eternal – metaphysical – truth for humans, and he discusses what, with Kant, can be called religion within the limits of reason.15 The advice to reflect on the moment when the law of the pendulum dawned upon Galileo is in fact embedded in an even larger context in Kleist’s letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge from November 16 to 18, 1800. The letter marks a decisive step within the development of Kleist’s “life plans,” from, firstly, leaving the military to then renouncing all employment to finally deciding to live in Paris. Within the letter, a somewhat surprising transition can be noticed after the examples of invention and discovery. While these examples represent instances in which “observations enrich the sciences with truths,”16 Kleist goes on to report the moment when, in Würzburg, he encountered a vaulted archway and reflected on the coincidence of falling and stability: The archway, he remarks, stands upright “because all stones want to collapse at the same time.”17 The famous lines18 have a double function in the letter. On the one hand, they introduce a new turn in the assignments for the woman, the addressee of the letter: She is told to note those phenomena in nature which lend themselves to moral application.19 On the other hand, however, for the male writer of the letter, the observation of the vaulted archway marks a highly charged moment in his life, occurring “on the eve of the most important day of my life,” “when 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

“… meine Schrift, über die Kantische Philosophie, welche Du besitzest ….” HvK to Ulrike von Kleist (UvK), August 14, 1800, SWuB 4: 67. “Ich könnte nach Paris gehen u(nd) die neueste Philosophie in dieses neugierige Land verpflanzen” (HvK to WvZ, November 13, 1800, Kleist, SWuB 4: 153). Kleist, SWuB 3: 533. “Von Dir werde ich freilich nicht verlangen, daß Du durch Deine Beobachtungen die Wissenschaften mit Wahrheiten bereicherst” (Kleist, SWuB 4: 159). Das Gewölbe “steht, antwortete ich, weil alle Steine aufeinmal einstürzen wollen” (Kleist, SWuB 4: 159). Cf. Penthesilea, ll. 1349ff., Kleist, SWuB 2: 191. See Bianca Theisen, Bogenschluss Formalisierung des Lesens (Freiburg: Rombach, 1996), 183–187. Kleist explains this in detail in a later continuation of the letter. Examples are: Which moral meaning can we ascribe to the fact that animals lower their heads to the earth while humans are created to be upright? What may it mean that we have two ears but only one mouth? (Kleist, SWuB 4: 160–165).



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I thought that I might have to part from everything.”20 The dramatic significance of this encounter is only highlighted by the fact that it is not clear what Kleist is referring to. The most important day of his life and why he was facing the loss of everything was for Wilhelmine von Zenge as much a mystery as it is for us today after more than 200 years of Kleist scholarship. The conventional emblematic meaning to be lent to natural phenomena (as Kleist instructs his female addressee to do) and the dramatic meaning which Kleist presupposes to impose itself through them (in the course of his own, the male writer’s, life) give new importance to the moment of inventing or discovering. They certainly lead away from the Kantian function of constructing the unity of science where there had been before only the mere agglomeration of knowledge. And yet, a nuanced form of invention and discovery seems also to be required in Kleist’s instruction to his fiancée to lend moral meaning to nature, or for the grasping of such meaning regarding his own life. After his return to Frankfurt a. Oder on December 30, 1800 – “the penultimate day of the old century”21 – Kleist, as if receiving his own letter, adds a sketch of the archway, confirming thereby its definitive meaning for his life. Instead of revealing in a sudden moment of illumination the construction of science and its essential unity as required by Kant, the moral or autobiographical reading of natural phenomena constitutes the wholeness of the meaning of a human life through interpretation. Whatever the purpose of the Würzburg journey was and whichever event was to take place on the day after Kleist composed his observation on the vaulted archway, the significance of the letter in his trajectory upon leaving the military is striking. The first life plan we know of dates from March 1799 when Kleist explains to his former teacher that, instead of further pursuing the career of a Prussian officer in the army, his plan is to go to university and devote himself to philosophy, the arts, and, primarily, the sciences. In the winter semester, he arranges for the private lessons in experimental sciences, among other courses, with Professor Wünsch and the Zenge family. During this time or a little later he must have composed his memorandum on Kantian philosophy. With the plan for the mysterious journey which he starts in August, and which ends in Würzburg, he connects a deception of sorts: Letting his family believe he was aiming for a position in government and working toward a life without any position 20

21

“Ich gieng an jenem Abend vor dem wichtigsten Tage meines Lebens in Würzburg spatzieren. Als die Sonne herabsank war es mir als ob mein Glück untergienge. Mich schauerte wenn ich dachte, daß ich vielleicht von Allem scheiden müßte, von Allem, was mir theuer ist” (Kleist, SWuB 4: 159). am vorletzten Tage im alten Jahrhundert. Kleist, SWuB 4: 165.

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at all. Three days before the letter on the importance of discovery and invention in the sciences and for one’s own life, he explains his new or his true plan to his fiancée. This plan is to renounce any ambition of acquiring employment and embark on the career of a freelance writer. “[T]he whole domain of being a writer would be open to me,” he states.22 Kleist bases his confidence on rare faculties or skills he claims to have in the sciences. Proof of those faculties or skills, he maintains, is that he has already been able to make his own discoveries and inventions. While this remark foreshadows the letter on making discoveries and inventions three days later, in this earlier missive about the newest version of his life plan Kleist connects his ambition to his expertise on Kant. In order to further a freelance writing career, he envisages going to France and bringing Kant – the “latest philosophy” – to a French audience.23 In some way or other, Kleist seems to say that the “most important day of his life” he faced in Würzburg was connected to the life plan of introducing Kant in Paris. After experiencing a great deal of resistance – on the part of his family as well as his fiancée – this plan famously ends in its dramatic retraction or what we call the “Kant crisis.” In the letter from March 22, 1801, he informs Wilhelmine von Zenge, and then his sister, that the plan of bringing Kant to the French public is no longer viable. He now deems Kantian philosophy to have shaken his existence at its core. Reviewing the stages of his life planning from 1799 to 1801, it becomes obvious that in November 1800, when he writes the letter on making discoveries and inventions, Kleist had been at the pinnacle of his confidence in Kant and in himself as his promulgator. Practical circumstances provide a first impression of what is called Kleist’s Kant crisis. The very idea of the life plan which originated with his leaving the military had been intimately connected to the construction of and adherence to a purpose or goal in life (“Zweck,” with a Kantian overtone). The letter about inventions and discoveries from November 1800 is the apex of this proclamation of having such a “Zweck.” It shows his resolve to adhere to this purpose and demonstrates how to construct it. The experience of “being shaken” that Kleist claims to have undergone regarding Kantian philosophy, first, on March 22, 1801, to Wilhelmine von Zenge, and a day later to his sister, leads to exactly the opposite effect. 22 23

“Da stünde mir nun für die Zukunft das ganze schriftstellerische Fach offen” (HvK to WvZ, November 13, 1800, Kleist, SWuB 4: 153). Kleist, who considered pursuing academic studies at Göttingen University, may have known about Charles de Villers, a French scholar with close connections to academic circles in Göttingen since 1794. Villers began to introduce Kantian philosophy in France as early as 1798, with Philosophie de Kant from 1801 as his major contribution.



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Being shaken results in or even is the utter impossibility of any purpose or goal in life pursuant to this reading of Kant. Still, Kleist plans to undertake a journey and go to Paris. And in the end, he will even continue to use his time in Paris to work on the sciences. But this is then no longer the expression of a grand plan to bring the latest philosophy to the French audience. On the contrary, Kleist resigns himself to improving his skills in this or that scientific discipline. It is also no longer a plan to marry and to live with his wife in France. Instead, Kleist travels with the sister and delays his and Wilhelmine von Zenge’s marriage date, before finally breaking off their engagement. The radicality of change is even more striking since the factual consequence – traveling to Paris – remains the same. The argument about Kantian philosophy which Kleist uses to explain his change of plans – a change in what planning means – has a prelude in a letter to his sister from early February. “Even the pillar I hold onto in the vortex of life is wavering – I mean my love for the sciences.”24 “But even if my goal were merely the truth, – alas it is so sad to be nothing more than learned.”25 Apparently it is the question of knowledge and truth which is at the heart of his being shaken. In this early letter, however, it is not yet related to “Kantian philosophy” but rather to the impossibility of having a goal or purpose in life. Kleist makes the connection to Kant only in the March 22 letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge by claiming that “Kantian philosophy” takes human understanding to be subjective. Having green glasses instead of eyes is the example Kleist puts forward. The example of “green glasses”26 is in fact only proffered by Kleist as emblematic of the interpretation of nature for and by women, such as Wilhelmine, and not indicative of an argument for men, such as Kleist himself. It seems, however, that Wilhelmine von Zenge immediately senses the flaws of the example if taken as an argument. In his response, Kleist regrets having used it. In the letter to his sister whose understanding he considers nearly the equal of men’s, he does not even mention the green glasses. In other words, it is not the misunderstanding of Kantian epistemology as subjective on which Kleist bases what he calls “being shaken at his core.” Rather, it is the distinction between knowledge and truth (which, according to 24

“Selbst die Säule, an welcher ich mich sonst in dem Strudel des Lebens hielt, wankt - - ich meine, die Liebe zu den Wissenschaften.” (HvK to UvK, February 5, 1801; Kleist, SWuB 4: 199ff.) 25 “Aber auch selbst dann, wenn bloß Wahrheit mein Ziel wäre, – ach, es ist so traurig, weiter nichts, als gelehrt zu sein” (Kleist, SWuB 4: 200.). 26 On the “green glasses,” see Jutta Müller-Tamm, “Kleists grüne Gläser: Gefärbte Brillen, Blindheit und Erkenntnis um 1800,” in Blindheit in Ästhetik und Literatur (1750–1850), ed. Sabine Eickenrodt (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2012), 91–101.

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him, means eternal – absolute – truth) which comprises the argument in both letters, to his fiancée as well as to his sister. By “being shaken,” Kleist does not claim to detect a flaw or mistake in the philosophical system whose adherent and promulgator he has been. On the contrary, it consists in the experience of being shaken by what he continues to accept as being correct. Even as he states, “[i]t seems as though I have become one of the victims of the foolishness that the Kantian philosophy has on its conscience,” admitting on a visceral level, “I am disgusted by this company,” he proceeds to acknowledge within the same statement: “yet I cannot free myself from their bonds.”27 Indeed, the separation between understanding and the truth of reason, here deemed “foolishness,” is not only compatible with Kantian philosophy but its necessarily “binding” teaching. For, as Kant explains, it is only through its separation from understanding (experiential knowledge) that can we preserve reason (eternal truth) from succumbing to self-contradictory statements. We do not know whether, in March 1801, Kleist refers to any recent readings which might have triggered the shock effected by a systematic thought that he otherwise accepts. Critical readers of Kant, such as Fichte and Jacobi, have been adduced in this context, as well as Kant’s own critique of teleology  – goals and purposes  – in the Critique of Judgment.28 These suggestions all have their merits and their problems and call for further discussion. But it remains the case that Kleist, at this moment, reports a fundamental uneasiness with what he has accepted as pertinent and correct since the beginning of 1800 and, in particular, in November of 1800. Whatever may be the source of new information in March of 1801, it can only be an additional piece of information about what he had read and known all the time. Kleist does not change his convictions but is – or claims to be – shaken about the fact that he holds them. After claiming that he was deeply “shaken” and before speaking about Kantian philosophy and the separation of understanding and truth in the March 22 letter to his fiancée, Kleist tells the short “history of my soul,”29 a genealogy of his fundamental understanding of philosophy. In 27

“Es scheint, als ob ich eines von den Opfern der Thorheit werden würde, deren die Kantische Philosophie so viele auf das Gewissen hat. Mich eckelt vor dieser Gesellschaft u(nd) doch kann ich mich nicht losringen aus ihren Banden” (HvK to UvK, March 23, 1801; Kleist, SWuB 4: 207). 28 See the pioneering study by Ernst Cassirer, “Kleist und die Kantische Philosophie,” in Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, 26 Bde., ed. Birgit Recki (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998–2009), Vol. 9, 389–435; and, among more recent contributions, Bernhard Greiner, “‘Eine Art Wahnsinn’,” 74–92 in Dichtung im Horizont Kants: Studien zu Goethe und Kleist (Berlin: Schmidt, 1994), 74–91; Greiner,’ Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen: Experimente zum “Fall” der Kunst (Tübingen, Basel: Francke, 2000), 1–51. 29 HvK to WvZ, March 22, 1801, Kleist, SWuB 4: 204–206 (204).



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full agreement with all his life plans since leaving the army, Kleist describes philosophy as a process of perfection and self-perfection through bildung. Its characteristics lie in the continuity between the finite and the infinite. Every piece of knowledge acquired in finite life transfers potentially into eternal truth. Bildung is the process of this gradual and unlimited process. Pieces of knowledge acquired, in such a design of philosophy, amount to a personal “possession” which the individual accumulates and which connects human life on earth to the immortality of soul. As a source of this conviction, Kleist mentions the influence of an early work by Wieland (arguably, Sympathies30). With this hint, he points to a highly eclectic conception which connects Stoic with Epicurean elements, the importance of the self with the goal of acquiring happiness in sensual life. But it seems that it is not the theory of self or happiness or any other single theme which matters in this “history of my soul” but rather the form of perfectibility as such. In the perfectibility model of philosophy, knowledge is as much the means as the end of the philosophical process. Acquiring pieces of knowledge is an internal part of moral perfection, and moral perfection results in the possession of knowledge qua understanding as truth qua reason. Wieland’s work can be seen as representing for Kleist a tradition in which theoretical philosophy is part of what Pierre Hadot, with reference to Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, has called philosophy as a form of life. Kleist’s shock, then, is not a disagreement with Kantian epistemology – which, on the contrary, he continues to accept – but with rendering epistemology, or the theory of science, the definition of philosophy as such. In November 1800, Kleist had thought he could adapt the Kantian “change in the way of thinking” as merely a moment or step within the overarching goal of the perfection of knowledge and thus integrate it into a person’s, and indeed his own, life plan. We do not know, and probably will never know, the exact meaning or occasion of the Kant crisis Kleist announces to his fiancée and his sister in March 1801. Whether a serious crisis or the pretext for changing plans, Kleist obviously wants to make his case, and the case is based not on any doubts in Kant’s arguments but on recognizing that what Kant would have philosophy accomplish is not what Kleist assumes is philosophy’s nature or purpose. Rendering metaphysics into a science is not in line but rather in conflict with a plan-of-life 30

The Platonic sensibility of Wieland’s early work is encapsulated in the formula that “we are created for the eternal contemplation of the eternal,” Sympathien, in Christoph Martin Wieland, Gesammelte Schriften, Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vol. 1, part 2, ed. Fritz Homeyer, 1909; reprint (Hildesheim: Weidmann 1986), 446–495 (469).

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conception of philosophy. The “Kant crisis”  – whatever it meant for Kleist – is the realization that, with the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he was confronted with a fundamentally different understanding of what to expect from philosophy. While it remains an object of curiosity to identify any new readings Kleist might have in mind while writing to his fiancée and his sister of the fundamental conflict between Kant’s and his own understanding of what philosophy is about, it suffices to point to the Preface of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. For that text, we at least have the cue of Kleist adapting Kant’s emblematic figure of speech for “the change”31 or, alternatively, the “revolution in the way of thinking.”32 In what follows, the “Kant crisis” is understood not as the moment of a decision (or change of decision) in March 1801 but, instead, as a process playing out between epistemological argument and narrative adaptation. This process – such is the underlying hypothesis – has its roots in Kant’s Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason (Section II of this chapter) and continues to make itself manifest in various differing ways in Kleist’s literary modes of narrating “changes in the ways of thinking” (Section III of this chapter).

II In an annotation to his copy of Baumgarten’s Metaphysics scribbled between 1776 and 1778, Kant remarks: “Initially I saw this doctrine as if in twilight. I tried quite earnestly to prove propositions and their opposite, not in order to establish a skeptical doctrine, but rather because I suspected I could discover thereby where an illusion of the understanding was hiding. The year ’69 gave me a great light.”33 The issue here is not to speculate about what Kant’s “great light of the year ’69” exactly refers to. For the purpose at hand, it suffices to follow most commentators in two points: First, in reading “this doctrine” as the problem of metaphysics and, second, in recognizing Kant’s distinction of the sensible from the intelligible as separate sources of experience – manifested in his dissertation De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et principiis (1770) – as an essential part of the “great light.”34 In any event, the process of receiving the light 31 32 33 34

Kant, CPR, B XVI: 110. Kant, CPR, B XI: 107f. Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman Paul Guyer, Frederick Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), No. 5037, 207 (translation modified). Henry Allison, Kant’s Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 176–178.



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and the temporal structure of its appearance in this remark about his own work and development differ clearly from the light which, in the Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, dawns upon Thales. The advent of the great light in Kant’s remark about himself and his first step toward reforming metaphysics is stretched out between the evening twilight and the appearance of the great light (i.e., daylight).35 This gradual appearance over time is linked, one way or the other, to the various attempts Kant claims to have undertaken to unravel the source and detect the location of the illusion. It is, after all, the capacious extension of a year that grants the day light which follows evening twilight. In his reflection, Kant assures himself of the position in thinking he has reached by evoking the lived experience of the light granted to him. And yet, as radical as the “Platonic” separation of the intelligible from the sensible in ’69 is in Kant’s own understanding of his thinking, it is still a lived experience and can hence be narrated in an autobiographical remark. In contrast, “the light which dawned upon him” in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason from 1787 marks the moment of a flash that exists only in the crystallized form of cognition without extension in time or space, a turn of phrase rather than a narration. The “great light” articulates a reflection back on what it meant in 1769 for the philosopher to understand that he had to make sure that the way sensibility works does not infringe upon the domain of thinking, that is, understanding. This position remains still fundamental for the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. “The light broke on him,” in contrast, relates to the sudden, individual moments in history when aggregates of knowledge turn into the unity of science, and thus all reference to an object is restricted to the realm of experience. This further claim is adopted only with the second edition. This, however, is no longer a reflection by Kant about his own development but an intrinsic reflection of philosophy on itself. This is to say that the narrative character of “the light which dawned upon him” in the Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason is limited or, more precisely, confined by an anti-narrative principle. The confined narrative of the light that breaks on someone is applied in the Second Preface, however, only to mathematics and natural science. Mathematics and natural (i.e., experimental) science are framed in that Preface by the development of logic on the one hand and metaphysics on the other. Logic, Kant states, has traveled a “secure course” since we have known 35

“Great light” suggests sunlight as opposed to the evening twilight (Dämmerung).

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of its existence.36 Logic, as soon as it exists, is or rather has always been what it is. Metaphysics, in contrast, does not have a “course” or history proper since it has not yet come into being as a science. There is no doubt that the critique of pure reason he is revising, in Kant’s view, aims at an analogous “change in the way of thinking” for metaphysics and, in some sense, performs it. But metaphysics’ becoming science is brought about only reflexively, by applying the models of mathematics and natural sciences and their histories as examples to be followed by metaphysics.37 The revised Critique of Pure Reason is the thought experiment of this application.38 This is why metaphysics, strictly speaking, does not have a history as mathematics and the natural sciences have in their respective ways. Logic and metaphysics thus function as the beginning and the end of the history of practices of knowledge becoming science – a beginning and an end which are nonnarrative and nonhistorical in themselves.39 Logic preempts narratable history because history as “change of the way of thinking” is already behind it. Metaphysics as science is premised on experimentally applying the histories of mathematics and natural sciences to itself. Only, but importantly, the middle of this history of how practices of knowledge turn into science, that is, mathematics and the experimental sciences, has a “course” or is historical for itself. But it is obviously the narratability of mathematics and natural sciences’ becoming science that constitutes the narrative character of the whole, that is, of the beginning, middle, and end of knowledge becoming scientific. The possibility and the necessity of narrating how scattered practices of knowledge turn into science comes from nonnarration and ends in the nonnarration of an experiment which consists, however, in the secondorder use of narration. This is not surprising as the “change in the way of thinking”40 in question consists in isolating knowledge as science against narratable circumstances. Indicating and, at the same time, limiting the scope of narration in the proverbial turn of phrase  – “the light broke 36

Kant, CPR, B VIII: 106. Kant, CPR, B XVI: 110 and B XVIIIff.: 111n. 38 Eckart, Förster, The Twenty-Five Years: A Systematic Reconstruction, trans. Brady Bowman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 103–113. 39 Here and in what follows “history” is used as the shorthand for what Kant, in spatial metaphors, calls most of the time the (secure or groping) “course” (Gang) or “path” (Weg) a certain field of knowledge has taken. In addition to this meaning, “history” implies narration and in particular the importance of events, action and actors as well as circumstances in narration. Kant speaks of the “history of this revolution in the way of thinking” when he refers to mathematics and compares its becoming science to the “discovery of the way around the famous Cape” (Kant, CPR, B XI: 108). 40 Kant, CPR, B XVI: 110. 37



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upon him”  – is thus the exact expression of the theoretical situation. This situation might be called “confined narration.” Eckart Förster has shown in detail how this situation has come about in the stages of Kant’s revising the meaning of transcendental philosophy between the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason from 1781 and the second edition in 1787. It suffices here to summarize Förster’s account for the purpose at hand: The first-edition project of transcendental critique was, according to Förster, aimed at investigating the ways of referencing objects a priori through the three faculties of sensibility (intuition), understanding (concepts), and reason (ideas). Förster calls this the a priori reference problem. In this project, all three ways of referencing an object  – through sensibility, understanding, or reason  – are instances of referencing an object and can and must be explored regarding their a priori nature. In the second edition  – as prepared by the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783)  – the transcendental investigation is restricted to objects given in empirical experience. With this move, the starting point is the possibility of a priori synthetic propositions, that is, a priori knowledge within empirical knowledge. It is this shift that bases the question of “how is metaphysics possible?” upon the prior question of “how is science possible?” Certainly, even with this shift from the first to the second edition, the possibility of metaphysics remains the final purpose of transcendental critique. But with the second edition, all reference to an object is restricted to sensibility and understanding, and that means to the conditions of experience in science. The confined narration of scattered knowledge turning into science and its unity is the exact expression of the revised project. Even if – and exactly because – the project begins with the nonnarrative status of logic and ends in the experiment of treating metaphysics as if it had the history of a “revolution in the way of thinking” as the sciences have, the project must take its way through the middle part of confined narratives. While logic’s status of being a science is made clear through the simple absence of narration (there is nothing to narrate about the “secure course” it has “traveled” to science),41 metaphysics is subjected to narration in the vein of mathematics and natural science by analogy. Narration, that is, history proper, is reserved for those forms of knowledge which pose the problem of referencing objects exclusively in the form of a priori synthetic propositions. These are the modern sciences proper.

41

Kant, CPR, B VIII: 106.

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With mathematics and the natural sciences Kant explores or tests, one might say, the possibilities and the boundaries of confined narration. In the case of mathematics, only one event is referred to (the demonstration of the isosceles triangle) and only one name is given in the role of the one on whom the light has broken (Thales). But this one event and one character in the narrative is, Kant underlines, not secured by historical testimony. Thales is an individual to point at, but he matters only as the example of individual agency. “A new light broke upon the first person who demonstrated the isosceles triangle (whether he was called ‘Thales’ or had some other name).”42 By contrast, natural sciences’ becoming science is represented with individual lead characters positively affirmed. But their function as individual protagonists is balanced by the enumeration of three of them. This renders them cases of a pattern they share.43 When Galileo rolled balls of a weight chosen by himself down an inclined plane, or when Torricelli made the air bear a weight that he had previously thought to be equal of a known column of water, or when in a later time Stahl changed metals into calx and then changed the latter back into metal by first removing something and then putting it back again, a light dawned on all those who study nature.44

Even the nonnarrative parts of the entire discussion of how knowledge becomes science, the beginning and ending of the discussion, prove nevertheless to be affected by the narrative in their middle. Kant ascribes individual names even to the beginning and end. In the case of logic, Kant invokes Aristotle, the philosopher’s name. Aristotle does not, however, appear as the agent of any activity regarding logic but rather as the mark for a point in time. “[S]ince the times of Aristotle” logic “has not had to go a single step backwards.”45 With metaphysics, a name is introduced at the end, too. It is referenced, however, not for any work in metaphysics but rather in the sciences, someone therefore who appears only in analogy in order to illustrate the science of metaphysics that is coming into being. “This would be like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried 42

Kant, CPR, B XIXI: 108. The pattern is linked to the name of Bacon. It took natural science longer than mathematics, Kant remarks, “to find the highway of science; for it is only about one and a half centuries since the suggestion of the ingenious Francis Bacon partly occasioned this discovery and partly further stimulated it” (Kant, CPR, B XII: 108). 44 Kant, CPR, B XIIf:, 108f. 45 Kant, CPR, B VIII, 106. 43



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to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest.”46 Within the narrative middle, there is a palpable trade-off between the narrative example being unique but uncertain (Thales and the triangle) and the historically secured but serialized examples of the three researchers working in different areas of science (Galileo, Torricelli, and Stahl).47 The increase in individualizing historical detail with Galileo, Torricelli, and Stahl is counterbalanced by the decrease in the importance of the examples provided. The unique protagonist Thales is a first person in the old, Greek and Roman, sense of the primus inventor, the one who stands at the beginning of a genre, discipline, or form of art. Thales is in fact a “first” in several respects. He is the first figure touched on by Diogenes Laertius in Lives of Eminent Philosophers.48 Within the section on Thales, the first philosopher, Diogenes details again a long list of “first inventions” beginning with Thales’ being the first to study astronomy and predict eclipses of the sun, to his treatment of the triangle, including in this case extensive remarks about others to whom the same invention has been ascribed.49 Galileo, Torricelli, and Stahl, by contrast, emerge in the Preface to the second edition from very different sources and discourses. Kant may have taken their stories from any number of works, in particular Erxleben’s (and, later, Lichtenberg’s) handbook on experimental sciences.50 These are not first inventors in the ancient sense but modern-age researchers who made scientific and technical discoveries. The difference between the one first inventor and those who made discoveries mirrors, in the Preface, the slightly different nature of how they operate

46

Kant, CPR, B XVI: 110. One may note that Copernicus’ experiment, like the experiment to be performed on metaphysics, is a thought experiment, even if on a subject of physical science. Cf. Jens Lamanski, “Galilei, Torricelli, Stahl: Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Physik in der B-Vorrede zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant-Studien 107 (2016), 451–484. 48 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. Robert Drew Hicks (revised ed. Cambridge, London: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 1: 22/23–46/47. 49 The end of the list of Thales’s works and philosophical accomplishments reads: “Pamphila states that, having learnt geometry from the Egyptians, he was the first to inscribe a right-angled triangle in a circle, whereupon he sacrificed an ox. Others tell this tale of Pythagoras, amongst them Apollodorus the arithmetician. (It was Pythagoras who developed to their furthest extent the discoveries attributed by Callimachus in his Iambics to Euphorbus the Phrygian, I mean ‘scalene triangles’ and whatever else has to do with theoretical geometry.)” (Diogenes, Lives 1: 24/25–26/27) 50 In Erxleben, Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre, Göttingen and Gotha: Dieterich 1772, for the inclined plane, free fall, and Galileo, see §90, 75f.; for the air and its weight, see §§220–233, 180–190 (on Torricelli 189); for the calcination of metal, see §488, 392 (without mentioning Stahl). With the Stahl discovery, Kant returns as it were to cast doubt on historical facticity. In a footnote he writes: “Here [with Stahl] I am not following exactly the thread of the history of the experimental method, whose first beginnings are also not precisely known” (Kant, CPR, B XIII: 109). 47

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in their respective inventions and discoveries,51 that is, how they carry out what, in metaphysics’ reflection back on these narrative models, is described by the phrase “that we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them.”52 The underlying method in geometry and mathematics – which is always one and the same but not attributable with certainty to a precise historical moment – is construction. The method in the empirical studies of nature – procedures which can be historically ascribed to individual researchers but are manifold and different among themselves – is experimentation. Construction and experimentation are both restricted to the realm of a priori synthetic propositions and hence ways of connecting intuition and concept. The construction is, each time it is executed, an individual but always the immediate performance of one and the same rule. Experiments, in contrast, are utterly different modes of performance according to a certain general protocol of how to do things, a protocol which is however not identical with any one of the individual experimental setups. Construction and experiment are different shades of what one might call individual in general.53 A unique protagonist whose identity doesn’t matter in the history of a first invention or several protagonists whose identities are secured in the stories of various technical-scientific discoveries – these are the alternatives circumscribing the tight breathing room for Kant’s confined narration. The “light that broke on him” is either the moment of construction which, as such, is as if untainted by space and time, or it can be the event of discovery by experimentation which occupies a meticulously crafted place in space and time, even if now many individuals are credited with various discoveries. In Crisis of the European Sciences, a quite different philosophical undertaking in a much later period, Husserl investigats the interior of this tight but complex narrative space or nonspace.54 In the Critique of Pure Reason, the reader finds only a few pages devoted to such history. This comes in the last chapter of the “Doctrine of Method” and the last of the work altogether. The chapter is entitled “The History 51

52 53

54

This difference is rooted in how mathematics and “physics” (experimental sciences) determine their objects a priori: “the former entirely purely, the latter at least in part purely but also following the standards of sources of cognition other than reason” (Kant, CPR, B X: 107). Kant, CPR, B XVIII: 111. Kant emphasizes that the revolution in mathematics was brought about “by the happy inspiration of a single man” (Kant, CPR, B X, 107) although the identity of the individual is unclear and of no concern to him. It may be mentioned that Denkungsart, manner or way of thinking, is related in Kant to the theory of person and freedom, see G. Felicitas Münzel, Kant’s Conception, of Moral Character: The “Critical” Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflexive Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 23–70. See David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 47–67.



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of Pure Reason.” In the ways described so far, the question of a history of pure reason imposes itself only through the revisions of the second edition. Kant addresses it here, however, from the standpoint of the first edition. It would, therefore, be wrong to read too much into the opening statement that the title of a “history of pure reason” “stands here only to designate a place that is left open in the system and must be filled in the future.”55 The place of this “history of pure reason” is not left open because it constitutes a particular problem. As Kant’s short remarks show, what he has in mind under this heading is not the internal history of the revolution in a certain field of knowledge which is outlined in the Second Preface. In his remarks, Kant insists indeed that a history of pure reason would have to be on the level of the transcendental investigation and cannot simply refer to philosophical schools, historical periods, or other traditional forms of canonization. In his brief outline, Kant says, he is to present “only the difference of the ideas which occasioned the chief revolutions.”56 The term “revolutions” may, at first sight, evoke the “revolution in the way of thinking” from the Second Preface. And yet, “chief revolutions” in the plural are different from the one and only revolution of knowledge turning into science in the Second Preface. The underlying meaning of the transcendental in the “History of Pure Reason” is, according to Förster, that of the a priori reference to objects in general from the first edition and not targeted to science and objects of experience exclusively as in the second edition. The “three points of view” Kant details are, accordingly, responsible for the “chief revolutions” in metaphysical thinking, which are themselves plural. First, with regard to objects, there is the alternative of either sensual or intellectual philosophy; second, with regard to the origin of cognition, that of empirical or nological theories’ and, finally, with regard to method, of a naturalist or scientific orientation. Departing from this last “point of view” – method – Kant goes on to specify the place of his own transcendental philosophy. The scientific option allows for the further alternative of either a dogmatically or a skeptically scientific method, with the transcendental finally emerging as a third option under the scientific orientation. The (Ramist) mechanism of dichotomies comes to a halt with this third option. This indicates that, while transcendental philosophy cannot be subsumed under the alternatives of the two other “points of view” (those regarding the object and the origin of cognition), it is only according to the “point of view” of method that the critique of pure reason emerges as a defined third option and thus an end of 55 56

Kant, CPR, A852/B880: 702. Kant, CPR, A853/B881: 702.

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all dichotomies. In the original understanding of the transcendental, according to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, history is a series of decisions between alternatives, a series that ends in the moment in which the possibility of transcending these choices as such opens up. The endgame of the “third option” is to leave behind such historical divisions for good. Kant does not revise the “History of Pure Reason” according to what he explains in the Second Preface. The question about a history of pure reason would now have to be a question about the – confined – narratability of the story or history of knowledge becoming science. With the two versions of “the light broke upon him,” the Preface in the second, new edition has already formulated the stakes of a possible history of pure reason long before it becomes a theme marked out for further discussion at the end of the work. But that history would not only be a history of philosophy per se, but rather a philosophical reflection on the possibility of its own historicity.

III The following remarks on Kleist’s poetic and essayistic works are a followup to the cues given in Kleist’s lessons in attention training for Wilhelmine von Zenge. The assumption is that the Galileo on whom the light breaks when discovering the laws of the pendulum in the notes to Kleist’s fiancée is heir to the inventors and discoverers in Kant’s Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason: Thales, Torricelli, Stahl, and the Galileo of the inclined plane. Philosophy and literature differ from each other, the critic Clemens Lugowski has stated, in that each statement in philosophy is a general statement and each statement in a literary work concerns an individual.57 Even statements on individuals are general in philosophy, and, in the literary work, even general statements made by the characters or the narrator can be traced in their meaning to individual voices. In the Second Preface, Kant is utterly diligent about this. Thales is an individual protagonist, but it is far from sure and indeed irrelevant whether the story is about him. Torricelli and the other discoverers are the true protagonists in their 57

Clemens Lugowski, Form, Individuality, and the Novel: An Analysis of Narrative Structure in Early German Prose, Cambridge: Polity Press 1990. The dichotomy of philosophical generality and literary individuality, as distinguished from Aristotle’s three-way distinction between philosophy (general), history (singular), and poetry (verisimilar), is itself a result of the transcendental turn (in its revised meaning). A more explicit version of the argument would state that Kleist, by following Kant’s transcendental argument even if reluctantly, performs the dichotomous order in his writings. They thus become literary as opposed to philosophical.



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stories, but the stories are essentially many. They are examples of some general rule to be illustrated through them. This means that the transcendental story is narration only in the contained manner of an exemplary story. The confined narrative uses narrative examples to make a nonnarrative argument and therefore carefully controls its own circumstantial individuality. The Galileo who discovers the law of the pendulum in Kleist’s supplement to his letter appears in a series of related cases as well. And yet the story of his discovery, as short as it is, does not repress but instead emphasizes the individuality of the personal character and the specificity of the circumstances (going to church, being distracted during a sermon, noticing the chandelier which happens to be gently swinging, etc.). And yet the increased individuality of the narration only highlights the inexplicable nature of the light breaking on Galileo. Knowing the circumstances, we feel even more so – Kleist tells his fiancée – that we ordinary people would never have discovered the law of the pendulum. The amplification in the circumstances of the breakthrough moment in Kleist’s story of the individual corresponds to the quasi-neutralization of the individual character in Kant’s story meant to illustrate a general point. The transcendental story of the breaking light makes it necessary to confine the narration, whereas the empirical story of the same breaking light cannot help turning toward the amplification of narrative circumstances. In this juxtaposition, confinement and amplification acquire a principal, qualitative meaning. The confined narration is meant to neutralize the narrative status as such, reducing it to its function as an example. The amplification of circumstantial narration, both in expression and in plot construction, transcends its exemplifying function and turns narration into its own, irreducible complexity. The claim here is not that the stories or narrative moments of “breaking light” in Kleist are transcendental or philosophical in nature. On the contrary, philosophy in the Kantian sense of a scientific discourse is separated from the intrinsic individuality of literature as by a glass wall, as it were, and this transparent wall remains intact with Kleist. Rather, he reacts in a unique way to his (feigned or existential, horrified or amused) discovery of that difference.58 In the narrative form of the “breaking light,” the glass wall becomes even more visible (if the paradox is permitted) as the narratives in philosophy and in literature, in this very moment, are so similar. Confined and amplified narratives resemble each other closely in 58

Kleist, it should be emphasized again, is the first to discover that Kant just invented this wall of glass.

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this moment. A certain fixation on “breaking light” moments which can be observed on Kleist’s part is motivated by Kantian philosophy but, in a specific sense, is anti-Kantian in nature. Kleist accepts and abhors the turn59 from knowledge in the service of metaphysics and the good life to philosophy which makes the self-centeredness of science its condition of entry as Kant does in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The first work to consult in this context is Kleist’s essay On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking. The essay concerns the production of thoughts by using, among other examples, the discussion of a historical event from the French Revolution (the moment at the Jeu de Paume when the ancien régime parliament constitutes itself as the representation of the nation) and of Lafontaine’s fable Les animaux malades de la peste (a critical reflection on the origins of the ancien régime in the times of Louis XIV). The thought whose production is under consideration is characterized at the beginning of the essay as the solution of a problem. Such thought can be the formula required to solve a mathematical problem or the legal category needed to successfully treat a juridical case. Kleist then discusses the historical events at the Jeu de Paume and the Lafontaine fable as two cases in which a problem and its solution present themselves in narrative fashion. Determining the formula that solves the problem or the legal aspect that frames the case are certainly not transcendental operations. And yet there is a striking equivalence in the fact that the mathematical formula and the legal term redefine the conditions under which a certain problem can be organized in such a way as to make it solvable in the first place. The narrative equivalents can be described in poetical parlance as peripeteias. These turning points reframe the ways in which a certain segment of reality is seen so that what seemed an inescapable difficulty is reorganized and brought to a solution. One may speak regarding The Gradual Production of Thoughts of only a procedural equivalent to the “change in the way of thinking”: first, the reframing does not concern the conditions of thinking as such but only a particular set of problems and possible solutions; second, the production of the thought occurs not within thinking but through the asynchronous coordination of thinking and speaking. Thus, what Kleist offers are strategies and operations – procedures60 – instead of transcendental philosophy, but in response to transcendental philosophy. 59

This is not meant to imply that Kleist noticed the changes between the 1781 and 1787 editions of The Critique of Pure Reason. 60 Cf. Rüdiger Campe, “Verfahren: Kleists allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” Sprache und Literatur 110 (2011), 2–21, on “Gradual Production” and the notion of process or



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In The Gradual Production of Thoughts, Kleist not only tells a story and retells a literary work but also functions in both cases as the critical commentator of his telling and retelling. In the case of the Jeu de Paume episode preceding the French Revolution, he begins by having Mirabeau respond to the king’s order to dissolve the parliament: “‘Yes’ Mirabeau replied, ‘we have heard the king’s command.’” As commentator he adds: “I am certain that beginning thus humanely he had not yet thought of the bayonets with which he would finish.”61 By thus pairing narrating and commenting the events and the words spoken, Kleist continues until he reaches the point of reframing the situation. The king demands the dismissal of the assembly and Mirabeau fumbles at the best next words. “‘But by what right,’ he continued, and suddenly a source of colossal ideas is opened up to him, ‘do you give us an order here? We are the representatives of the nation.”62 By declaring the parliament of the three estates to be the representatives of the nation, he changes the constitutional ground on which the king and the members of the parliament meet each other. It is the revolution as constitutional act. Kleist articulates the reframing of the political constitution by connecting “suddenly a source of colossal ideas is opened up to him” – an obvious variation of the “breaking light” theme – with a preceding “he continued.” By combining the gesture of breaking up with continuation, Kleist highlights the paradox of the moment of reframing in narration. In narration, the “change in the ways of thinking” must also be continuation. Only that which connects is able to disrupt and redefine. In addition, Kleist uses here, in an unmediated clash of tenses, the past for the continuation together with the present tense for the breaking light moment (in the parlance of linguists “the historical present”).63 The unexpected use of present for past tense is in fact a standard narrative technique for quasi-transcendental peripeteias in Kleist. It might briefly be added that the other story commented on in The Gradual Production of Thoughts, Lafontaine’s fable about the fox in times of the plague, involves an obvious variation of the continuation-peripeteia procedure (Verfahren). It may be noted that the term Verfahren is used by Kant in the Second Preface as related to but distinct from method. Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, ed. and transl. David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 406 (hereafter: Kleist, SW). 62 Ibid. 63 The metastasis temporum is repeated in the ensuing comments. After Mirabeau’s declaring the parliament to be the assembly of national representatives, the commentator continues: “That was what he needed!” (past tense). After the follow-up declaration, “The nation does not take orders. It gives,” he remarks, “Which launches him there and then to the highest pitch of boldness” (present tense, Kleist, SW, 406). 61

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structure. When in Lafontaine’s fable the plague befalls the realm of the animals, the lion, their king, offers himself as the sacrificial victim for the sins he committed by killing and eating sheep and sometimes even the shepherd. This he does, however, on the condition that no greater sinner among the animals can be found. The fox understands the potential threat for himself. He begins by exculpating the lion: ‘… What if you have done a sheep or two to death? Or a dog, a vile creature? And: ‘quant au berger,’ he continues, for this is the chief point, ‘on peut dire,’ though he still does not know what, ‘qu’il méritoit tout mal,’ trusting to luck, and with that he has embroiled himself, ‘étant,’ a poor word which buys him time, ‘de ces gens là,’ and only now does he hit upon the thought that gets him out of his difficulty, ‘qui sur les animaux se font un chimérique empire.’64

Once the victim is turned into perpetrator, the fox has redefined the discourse of guilt in such a way that, at the end, he can nominate the donkey for sacrificial animal. Albeit without the play of the tenses, yet significantly refining the back and forth between continuation and peripeteia, this one sentence forms an intricate echo to the real events in the France of the Fronde. Read in conjunction with each other, the Mirabeau episode about the first act leading to regicide and revolution and the Lafontaine fable of avoiding the regicide in the malicious violence of scapegoat politics form the contours of an intriguing account of French political history, from the heyday of absolutism to the Grand Revolution. For the rich and varied repertory of reframing peripeteias in Kleist’s literary work which, at the same time, secure narrative continuity, two features from The Gradual Production of Thoughts are typical. The one is the rhetorical use of metastasis temporum, the present for past tense; the other is the insertion of the rhetorical present in the narrative flow and often even an explicit, technical or juridical, procedure. These phenomena, distinct from each other as they are, can be seen as representative for the two sides of the breaking light narration in Kleist: absolute change on the one hand and procedural connection on the other. In the literary narrative of the breaking light, which is expansive and potentially excessive in the nature and presentation of circumstances and events, the tension between the two sides is intrinsic to the narration. This stands in contradistinction to the transcendental narration which, by its nature, must leave the consequences of that tension confined. 64

Kleist, SW, 407.



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Three examples from Kleist’s work may help to illustrate the point. The first one is from Improbable Veracities. Like The Gradual Production, this piece assembles various stories under a common theme, even if the frame about veracity often being improbable is more of a literary nature than the rather theoretical discussion of the emergence of thoughts in Gradual Production. The third story in Improbable Veracities concerns an episode from the Dutch war of liberation against the Spanish in the seventeenth century: the siege of Antwerp. The relevant passage reads: The duke had blocked the Schelde river by means of a bridge of ships, and the Antwerpers were working on their side, under the leadership of a talented Italian, to explode the bridge by means of fire boats which they launched against it. In that moment, gentlemen, in which the vessels float down the Schelde to the bridge, there stands, observe well, a cadet officer on the left bank of the Schelde right next to the Duke of Parma: now, you understand, now the explosion takes place, and the cadet … stands on the right bank.

The narrator then interrupts the flow of his story and turns to the audience asking: “Did you understand?”65 The redefinition of what can be deemed to be true coincides in this case with the reframing of the military situation. While the narration, far beyond what is rendered here, obsessively details the technical efforts of both parties, the reframing moment is again marked by the change of the past to the present tense. As in The Gradual Production, the narrator functions as commentator. In this case, however, he does not make observations about the narrated story but rather addresses the audience. The present tense of the narration thus coincides with the present of telling the story. The redefinition of the acceptability of the story thus coincides with the appeal to the audience’s capacity or willingness to understand (to apprehend regarding the event told or the way it is told). A second example of turning-point moments in the present tense, even if of a different nature, can be found throughout the legal and metaphysical comedy The Broken Jug. Without an exception, they all occur in testimonies on the various events and aspects that surround the breaking of the jug. The first such testimony comes from Judge Adam himself, still in an informal setting. The clerk of the court, Licht or Light by name, asks the judge when he contracted his various injuries. “LICHT. When did this 65

Kleist, “Improbable Veracities,” trans. Carol Jacobs, in Carl Jacobs, Uncontainable Romanticism, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 197–200 (199). See Jacobs’ reading of the story, 181–196.

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event take place? ADAM. Now, in this very moment when I am coming down from my bed. While I still had the morning tune in my mouth, I stumble into the morning, and before I can even start the business of the day, our Lord already dislocates my foot.”66 In the back and forth with the past tense the present tense marks the defining moment in a double sense: the moment when the event takes place on which the comedy pivots, and the moment when Adam settles on his testimony on that event (it remains unclear whether he can remember or not, whether he knows or does not know he is lying). The last and concluding testimony comes from Frau Brigitte: BRIGITTE. Gentlemen, Ruprecht, if I may, and please don’t get me wrong, / Probably, it was not him. Since when, the last night, / I go to the outlying parts of the house, to my cousin / Who is heavily in childbed, I heard, in the rear of the garden, the damsel lowly berating someone; / Anger and fear seem to rob her of her voice.67

The same back and forth from the past to the present tense introduces this last testimony, which brings the final truth out about the one event at issue in the play, the breaking of the jug. Between these two testimonies, Frau Marthe and Ruprecht both give their versions in the court scene, with their own peripeteias and changes of past to present tense. In all cases, as with Judge Adam, the eruption of the present tense upon the past marks the pivotal moment as well as the moment in which the witnesses settle on their testimony. The moment in narration is a moment with a defined place in giving testimony. In the third example to be mentioned, the present tense used for the past does not merely mark an event that is defining through its procedural context. Instead, the procedure itself becomes the peripeteia narrated in the present tense. In the short narrative The Beggarwoman of Locarno we are told that a nobleman, the Marquis, once ordered a beggarwoman whom his wife had allowed to lay down in his house “to get up from the corner in which she was lying and remove herself to behind the stove.”68 After falling on her 66

“LICHT. Wann trug sich die Begebenheit denn zu? ADAM. Jetzt, in dem Augenblick, da ich dem Bett’ / Entsteig’. Ich hatte noch das Morgenlied / im Mund’, da stolpr’ ich in den Morgen schon, / Und eh’ ich noch den Lauf des Tags beginne, / Renkt unser Herrgott mir den Fuß schon aus” (ll. 16–20; Kleist, SWuB 1: 287). 67 “FRAU BRIGITTE. Ihr Herrn, der Ruprecht, mein’ ich, halt zu Gnaden, / Der war’s wohl nicht. Denn da ich gestern Nacht / Hinaus auf’s Vorwerk geh’, zu meiner Muhme, / Die schwer im Kindbett liegt, hört’ ich die Jungfer / Gedämpft im Garten hinten jemand schelten: / Wut scheint und Furcht die Stimme ihr zu rauben” (ll. 1665–1670; Kleist, SWuB 346f.). 68 Kleist, SW, 351.



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way across the room, the woman finally sank down at the place assigned to her and died. This episode was replicated years later in ghostly fashion, experienced by a guest as a nighttime acoustic hallucination. The Marquis then decided to investigate the effect “by a decisive procedure [Verfahren].”69 He spent the night in the room, first alone, then with his wife and a servant, and both times witnessed the acoustic effects without detecting any visible cause for them. The third time, the Marquis and his wife allowed a dog to be part of the experimental setup. While the story so far is given in the past tense, the third trial or experiment is narrated in the present tense from the beginning (“Man and wife (…) seat themselves (…) each on a separate bed”)70 to its catastrophic end (“But flinging together a few belongings, she [the Marquis’ wife] has scarcely rattled out of the gates when she sees the house going up in flames from every quarter”).71 After that, the story returns to the past to tell in a flashback how the Marquis, stricken by horror, had burned down his own house. In this third trial, the Marquis and his wife not only hear the sounds but they witness the animal  – the dog  – obviously experiencing the bodily presence of someone (“just as if someone were advancing” the dog “backs away, towards the stove”).72 Presentness and the proceduralism in this peripeteia are one and the same: The couple witnesses the animal witnessing what they are unable to witness but are enabled and forced to witness through the animal. For a fuller discussion of Kleist’s narrative work – including narration in drama – it would, however, be appropriate to go beyond such explicit cases of the present tense for the past connected to procedural continuity. In such a broader field of narrative phenomena, the peripeteia is not bound to appear in conjunction with a change of tenses, and the continuity may well lack the explicit experimental or legal proceduralism. In conclusion, a more comprehensive typological enterprise may be sketched out. The effects of mirroring Kant’s delimited transcendental narration are less visible in these cases. But by moving farther away from the one transcendental change in the way of thinking, the structural power of expansive narration is reinforced in directions which are essential to the nature of narrative amplification or even excess: perversion and ubiquity. The example of perverted breaking light is The Foundling, arguably the darkest among Kleist’s narratives. In many respects, the plot is a 69

Ibid., 352 (translation modified). Ibid., 352. 71 Ibid., 353 (translation modified). 72 Ibid., 352 (translation modified). 70

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counterpart to The Chilean Earthquake. In both narratives, natural and social catastrophes are the background and occasion for the adoption of a child. The Chilean Earthquake ends with the adoption as a promise for the future; The Foundling begins with it and makes it the starting point for a process that destroys the family, adopting parents as well as adopted child. The narrative is full of grim episodes, Gothic scenery, and sudden reversals. The growing conflict develops around the Oedipal motive of the son falling in love with the mother. But in this case the son is a stepson, and the stepfather lives with his wife in a childless second marriage where she devotes all her emotional feeling to a man, now dead, she had loved. The pivotal moment comes when the stepson – Nicolo – is led to believe that he is in fact the one his stepmother is in love with and whose name is Colino. A box of ivory letters emerges from his childhood days with only six letters left in it. At first sight, they form his own name, Nicolo. Now when Nicolo took up the letters, which had been lying on the table for some days, and whilst he, resting his arm on the surface and sunk in troubled thoughts, was idling with them he discovered – quite by chance, for he himself was indeed more astonished than ever in his life before – the combination which spelled the name: Colino.73

The discovery – which triggers the eventual destruction of the family – is groundless. To the extent that it changes Nicolo’s way of thinking it is a total deception. The anagrammatic rearrangement is  – if one my say so – the literal perversion of a minimal but catastrophic Copernican revolution. Through it, the name of the titular character, and with it the whole story, is read differently. Instead of the proverbial “breaking light” the reader is confronted with a parenthesis excessively detailing the aspects of the emerging change in reading. The excessiveness in the narration of the reversal in understanding, in this case, resides in its utter groundlessness and lack of meaning. The other direction in which Kleist’s amplified use of reversals and breaking points in narration mirrors but moves away from Kant’s confined narration renders the redefining peripeteia ubiquitous. What can be called excessive here is the striking recurrence of the device. The narrative forms of “A was going on when, suddenly, B happened” and “A was still unfolding when B, disruptively, intervened” emerge frequently in Kleistian narration.74 They encapsulate in a syntactical manner the coincidence of 73 74

Ibid., 362 (translation modified). The form, which resurfaces also in A Foundling, already punctuates Kleist’s first major narrative Michael Kohlhaas, in particular in the concluding fortune-telling episode, Kleist, SW 1: 119, ll. 15–31



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sudden, decisive change within the longue durée of a usual practice or lasting mode of being. Such devices do not necessarily redefine the understanding of the characters, the narrator, or the reader but they rearrange what can count as coherence for character, narrator, or reader. The emblematical realization of this form is the beginning of The Chilean Earthquake. The form appears twice with Jeronimo, and these two instances encompass the form’s emergence in connection with Josephe. It is as though the form were announced in the first sentence: “In Santiago …, at the very instant of the great earthquake of 1647 … a Spaniard by the name of Jeronimo Rugera, stood by a pillar of the prison (…), and was about to hang himself.”75 But the construction is left unfinished in this moment, a “when” referring to “at the very instant” being amiss. A page later it is taken up and completed. “He was standing, as we have said, by a pillar …, when suddenly the greater part of the town … sank and buried under its rubble everything that lived and breathed.”76 In between the announcement and the fulfillment of the form’s appearance with Jeronimo, the narrator (maybe following Jeronimo’s thoughts while standing by the pillar) embeds a flashback to what has happened before to Josephe. What has happened to Josephe (who has been imprisoned for being pregnant without marriage) comes, however, in the same form: “the young sinner … was fetched away to jail forthwith and no sooner was her confinement over than … she was subjected to the harshest rigor of the law.”77 After the earthquake, manifesting the force of sudden change, has freed Jeronimo and Josephe, both repeat the form again in their respective escape into the open of the destroyed city. Jeronimo “was scarcely out when the whole street … fell in completely as the earth moved for a second time.”78 Again, the corresponding development for Josephe, occurring earlier, according to the story told, is related later: “Josephe, on her way to death, had already come close to the place of execution when suddenly the whole procession was flung asunder by the thunderous collapsing of the city’s buildings.”79 Each redefinition of how things used to be or be seen – as catastrophic as it is for itself – brings about a new order of things (the translation, Kleist SW 265, does not show the change of tenses). In the history of the novel, the device goes back to the Hellenistic novel and its revival in the baroque. Kleist may have encountered it in its parodied form in Voltaire’s novels and narratives (cf. Mikhail M. Bakthin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist transl. Caryle Emerson, Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas press, 1981), 84–258, 87–97. 75 Kleist, SW, 312. 76 Kleist, SW, 313. 77 Ibid., 312. 78 Ibid., 313. 79 Ibid., 315.

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in this story, mostly for the better. In this sense, The Chilean Earthquake is the counterpart of The Foundling. Its optimism lies in the practical use the characters make of the many peripeteias as opposed to the one abysmal change of the ways of thinking in The Foundling. Kleist’s narratives are structured in many, different ways by moments of reversal that mirror Kant’s “change in the ways of thinking.” While performing decisive changes in understanding – for the characters in the narratives as well as the narrator and the reader – they not only exhibit but also, in another sense, revoke Kantian transcendentalism. By unfolding Kant’s confined narration of the change in the way of thinking – a narration that aims at neutralizing narrativity – Kleist amplifies its narrative implications. The amplification has its roots in the tension between continuation and rupture inherent in peripeteia, the narrative equivalent of the change in the ways of thinking. Kleist’s narratives can be read as the insistent exploration of the consequences of this tension. They become apparent in his, in many instances, excessive use of the present tense for the past in moments of reversal, as well as in the utter groundlessness of a change in the ways of thinking in the Gothic Foundling or the clustering of reversals in narratives where the change in the ways of thinking grows into a moment within the everyday. The further Kleist’s literary narratives diverge from the exemplary, nonnarrative narration of the transcendental revolution in the way of thinking, the more they attest to the structural force of Kant’s exemplary, nonnarrative narratives in the Second Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Bibliography Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Bakthin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist, transl. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981. Campe, Rüdiger. “Verfahren: Kleists allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden.” Sprache und Literatur 110 (2011), 2–21. Carr, David. Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2009. Cassirer, Ernst. “Heinrich von Kleist und die Kantische Philosophie.” In Gesammelte Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Birgit Recki. Hamburg: Meiner 1998–2009, Vol. 9, 389–435. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. 2 vols. Trans. Robert Drew Hicks. Revised ed. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1938. Erxleben, Johann Christian Polykarp. Anfangsgründe der Naturlehre. Göttingen and Gotha: Dieterich, 1772.



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Förster, Eckart. The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Trans. Brady Bowman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Greiner, Bernhard. Eine Art Wahnsinn – Dichtung im Horizont Kants: Studien zu Goethe und Kleist. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1994. Greiner, Bernhard. Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen. Experimente zum “Fall” der Kunst. Stuttgart’: Francke, 2000. Jacobs, Carol. Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kleist. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1989. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998. (CPR) Kant, Immanuel. Notes and Fragments. Ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Kleist, Heinrich von. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. 4 Bde. Ed. Ilse-Marie Barth, Klaus Müller Salget, Stefan Ormanns, and Hinrich Seeba. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987–1997. (SWuB) Kleist, Heinrich von. Selected Writings. Ed. and trans. David Constantine. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2004. (SW) Lamanski, Jens. “Galilei, Torricelli, Stahl – Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Physik in der B-Vorrede zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft.” Kant-Studien 107 (2016), 451–484. Lugowski, Clemens. Form, Individuality, and the Novel: An Analysis of Narrative Structure in Early German Prose. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Müller-Tamm, Jutta. “Kleists güne Gläser. Gefärbte Brillen, Blindheit und Erkenntnis um 1800.” In Blindheit in Ästhetik und Literatur (1750–1850), ed. Sabine Eickenrodt. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. Münzel, G. Felicitas. Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The “Critical” Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Theisen, Bianca. Bogenschluss. Kleists Formalisierung des Lesens. Freiburg: Rombach, 1996. Villers, Charles de. Philosophie de Kant, ou principes fondamentaux de la philosophie transcendentale. Metz: Collignon, 1801. Wieland, Christoph Martin. “Sympathien.” In Gesammelte Schriften. Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften Hrsg Fritz Homeyer. Reprint. Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1986 [1909], Vol. 1, Part 2, 446–495. Wünsch, D. Christian Ernst. Kosmologische Unterhaltungen für junge Freunde der Naturerkenntniß. 2 Bde. Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1791, 1794.

chapter 5

Modern Being in the World

Kant’s Philosophical Anthropology and Wordsworth’s Poetry Richard Eldridge

I In what is arguably the most famous summary phrase in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that he “had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”1 Here the faith that Kant has in mind is not the sort of subjective fideism that is characteristic of Jacobi (and other German readers of Hume) and, later, Kierkegaard. Instead, we are actively to use reason, and more specifically the self-critique of reason that will establish its limits, in order both to pursue delimited theoretical understanding through active experimental-mathematical inquiry and to get on with the rationally irrefutable project of inaugurating and maintaining a kingdom of ends on earth or a community of reciprocal respect. Or, as Susan Neiman aptly puts it, “recognizing the limits of our knowledge allows us to realize [both to become aware of and effectively to actualize] our real power: to use the ideas of reason to judge, evaluate, and transform experience.”2 “Human reason has,” that is to say, “the peculiar fate” – das besondere Schicksal, where Schicksal carries, from its root in schicken (to send), the sense of sending or mission  – that it is both prone to overreaching or the enthusiastic claiming of dogmatic knowledge of ultimate realities and able to rein in that overreaching while establishing the legitimate scope of reason’s authority in worldly practice (p. 99 [III: Avii]). This fate or sending is particular or peculiar (besondere) both in requiring self-conscious, 1

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 117; Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 23 Bde., Hrsg. Wilhelm Windelbrand, Berlin: Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902–), Vol. III: B xxx. Corresponding passage-location and volume numbering standardized by Akademie edition of Kant’s complete works cited between parentheses after page number of translation in subsequent references to this work. 2 Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 38.

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self-limiting activity on our part in order to fulfill it, rather than occurring as a causally determined development (as an acorn naturally develops into an oak tree), and in being peculiar to human beings: Only we among all the earthly organisms and stuffs have this kind of sending. This power of reason to engender self-conscious, self-limiting activity (despite its tendency toward overreaching) is bound up with the fact that human beings and only human beings are able to stand back reflectively from their judgments as well as their inclinations and tendencies. Only we can entertain a wide range of reflective attitudes – belief, doubt, wish, hope, fear, and all their cousins – directed toward syntactically structured objects (judgments or propositions) that are semantically evaluable as true or false; and only we can stop to ask whether what we most strongly want or wish or tend to do at a given moment is in fact the right thing to do. That we can do these things is not only or simply a matter of fact; a correct, active, but limited use of our interwoven powers of reflection, self-consciousness, reasoning, and judgment is also supposed to shape our judgments, intentions, and actions in significant ways. As Kant goes on to put it in the A-Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, it “was not the purpose of our reason’s natural vocation” [nicht die Absicht der Naturbestimmung unserer Vernunft] that we should indulge in “dogmatically enthusiastic lust for knowledge” [dogmatischschwärmende Wissbegierde] pursued “though magical arts” [durch Zauberkünste] (p. 101, with modifications for accuracy [III: Axiii]). It was Plato’s mistake to introduce an obscure and untrustworthy method, dialectic, for acquiring philosophical knowledge of putative eternal realities in a misbegotten effort to leave behind the world of the senses, a mistake under which “he made no headway by his efforts” [er bemerkte nicht, dass er durch seine Bemühungen keinen Weg gewönne] (p. 140 [III: A5/B9]). Here the language of nature’s intent in giving us distinctive powers and of the vocation or determination that we are to use them correctly is deeply rooted and consistent in Kant’s thought. It echoes both Platonic-Aristotelian and theological language of final causes, and it anticipates the Freudian language of feeling oneself as an agent to be under the command of a superego. This language of an inherent vocation involving the correct use of our powers might seem unscientific and hence untrustworthy, were it not for the fact we are aware of and take pride in our powers of reflection and care in thought, judgment, and action. Whatever the source of our rational powers, it is difficult to repudiate the thought that we have them and the thought that they have correct uses (yet to be circumscribed), at least in many situations.

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In “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant describes a human “propensity and calling [Hang und Beruf] to think freely.”3 The etymology of Hang, like that of the Latinate “propensity,” suggests a persistent natural leaning that may not yet have reached a tipping point; Beruf stems from rufen, to call, just as the Latinate vocation stems from vocare, to call. A calling, vocation, or Berufung is something to which one is summoned by, as it were, internal authoritative powers that are picking up on and responding to possibilities of worldly action. The natural antonyms of these terms are hobby and avocation, matters of idly passing time. Though we have the determination or vocation to think freely we are also prone to fall into “self-incurred minority” (selbst verschuldete Unmündigkeit) (p. 17, [VIII: 35]). To be unmündig or in tutelage is to be not yet of legal age for contracting, voting, and other possibilities of public life and citizenship. The root of unmündig in Mund (mouth) suggests both that one is not yet able to speak for oneself and a sense of powers somehow blocked or failing to flow. (Like English, German also uses Mund, mouth, for the opening of a river into a sea, where a river that lacks a mouth is one that has stagnated, dried up, or failed to reach its destination, like the Colorado River in most years recently.) Tutelage or immaturity, consisting in blocked or otherwise unused or misused powers for free thinking, manifests itself in the form of deference, where we look to others to “undertake the irksome business” of directing our lives for us (p. 17 [VIII: 35]). Once this deference is in place, it is very difficult to undo it, as we become both fearful and prone to prop up our self-esteem by attending to baseless flattery propounded by soidisant authorities and to their fear-mongering. That by far the greatest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should hold the step toward majority to be not only troublesome but also highly dangerous will soon be seen to by those guardians [Vormünder] who have kindly taken it upon themselves to supervise them; after they have made their domesticated animals dumb and carefully prevented these placid creatures from daring to take a single step without the walking cart [Gängelwagen: child’s walker] in which they have confined them, they then show them the danger that threatens them if they try to walk alone. (p. 17 [VIII: 35])

Or one may fail to think aptly by instead striking out enthusiastically on one’s own, as Plato and Leibniz did, and failing to pay attention to the actual empirical characters of life and experience. 3

Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” trans. Mary J. Gregor, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 22 (VIII: 41).



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Overall, Kant’s account of reason pictures it in Aristotelian terms as a dynamis  – a second-order power, potential, or capacity somehow built into the human being that is to be actualized into an explicit firstorder ability (energeia) as a result of active interaction with others. For Aristotle it makes sense to say (as it in fact makes sense to say) that I have a natural power or potential (dynamis) to speak Urdu, since I have learned other languages and am in general a language-using animal, but that I lack the actual ability (energeia) to speak it, since I haven’t learned a word of it. Yet, unlike Aristotle, Kant does not accept a theory of natural objects in general as having fixed forms, potentials or powers, and natural ends to be achieved through development. Kant is a fully modern, post-Galilean-Cartesian-Newtonian thinker for whom nature (apart from human beings) is disenchanted or inert, in being stripped of ends and powers and consisting only of quanta of physical stuff in interaction according to physical laws. For Kant and for the moderns, physics is the fundamental science, and biological processes are ultimately explicable in terms of chemical and ultimately physical processes; for Aristotle the fundamental science was biology, and projectile motion was modeled, mistakenly, on biological development. According to Kant, the physical world consists ultimately of a fixed quantum of matter that “is neither increased nor diminished in nature” (p. 299 [III: B 224]) and “all alterations [in nature] take place in accordance with the law of cause and effect” (p. 304 [III: B 232]). Hence nature, the physical world, is to be known by carefully designing controlled experiments that test for the effects of independent variables and produce data that will enable the formulation of physical laws. Galileo, Torricelli, and other experimenters, as Kant puts it, comprehended that reason [must] compel nature to answer its questions, rather than letting nature guide its movements by keeping reason, as it were, in leading-strings; for otherwise accidental observations, make according to no previously designed plan, can never connect up into a necessary law, which is yet what reason seeks and requires (III: B xiii).

Cognitively, we are not simply to gape and grow in situ naturale but instead actively to resist mere tendencies to believe by self-critically performing careful replicable experiments. Morally, we are to achieve autonomy as rule over ourselves according to self-legislated principle, rather than succumbing passively to the force of inclination. Human reasoning, reflection, criticism, and understanding, to be exercised in both theory and practice, comprise the sole active doings that elude the nomological net of

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physical nature. Or, as Kant puts it in the Preface to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, a full account of our rational powers must “be able at the same time to present the unity of practical with speculative reason, since there can, in the end, be only one and the same reason, which must be distinguished merely in its application.”4 That we have such powers is evident to us, Kant argues, in immediately available reflection on the distinctive structure of our consciousness. Unlike an omniscient and omnipresent God, who possesses complete intuitive understanding of the whole of reality, with no need to locate objects in space and time and no need to sort them into classes, and unlike other higher mammals, who possess less structured, largely sensuous forms of awareness, our awareness, at least beyond a certain age, is discursively structured. We synthesize a product – a syntactically organized judgment – out of the unstructured stream of sensory input. The contents of our consciousness are typically expressible in the form of a judgment that has the form of a that-clause: that that object a is F, or that here are things that are F and G, or that possibly there are Fs, and so on. In virtue of their ­structure or internal articulation, some judgments explicate substantive relations: All red things are colored, or all bachelors are unmarried. Hence analytic a priori knowledge is available to us when we reflect on these internal ­relations. We are conscious under concepts of empirical objects, located in space and time, as substantial bearers of accidental or necessary properties: that sample of gold is liquid; Gold is the element with atomic number 79. We can form a range of attitudes toward judgmental contents: We can believe, doubt, wish, hope, fear, know (and so on) that such and such is the case. That is, we can actively evaluate judgmental contents semantically as true or false, probable or improbable, necessary or contingent, to be desired or to be avoided, and so on. Most important, we have continuing apperceptive awareness over time, at least implicitly, of the fact that it is oneself as a subject who actively forms judgmental contents and takes up attitudes toward them. It is always possible for us, in the course of making any judgment, to “step back” in reflection and become aware that “it is I who judge thus-and-so” (that a is F, etc.), even if we typically do not pause to do this consciously and explicitly.5 4 5

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, 47 (IV: 391). In laying out these features of our actively discursively structured consciousness, I am much influenced by Robert Brandom’s account of (human, discursive) sapience vs. (other) animal sentience or less structured sensory awareness. According to this account, it is essential to a product’s being a



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All this points to modes of activity that lie at the heart of the form of consciousness that we produce and maintain, where these modes of activity can be engaged in either well, in a disciplined way, or badly (overreaching and claiming too much knowledge; believing, wishing, and choosing lazily or inauthentically; and so on). In virtue of always already engaging (whether well or badly) in the activity that is the fount of our distinctive form of consciousness, we are, as it were, summoned toward fuller, more disciplined, more autonomous activity by powers that lie within us. [T]he human being, who is otherwise acquainted with the whole of nature solely through sense, knows himself also through pure apperception, and indeed in actions and inner determinations which cannot be accounted at all among impressions of sense; he is obviously in one part phenomenon, but in another part, namely in regard to certain faculties, he is a merely intelligible object, because the actions of this object cannot at all be ascribed to the receptivity of sensibility. We call these faculties understanding and reason; chiefly the latter is distinguished quite properly and preeminently from all empirically conditioned powers, since it considers its objects merely according to ideas. (p. 540 [III A 546–7/B 575–6], emphases added)

Beings within the empirical natural world though we are (“in one part phenomenon”), we are also determined by inchoate, nascent rational powers within us (exemplified, for example, in the free making of valid inferences and more broadly in the free making of judgments) toward fuller activity. Ultimately, this fuller activity is to consist in progressively inaugurating and maintaining human cultural life according to reason – a kingdom of ends, wherein each member sets ends for itself while respecting the ends of others. Our rational capacity for self-conscious, reflective distance on our judgments directs us toward and demands its own realization within a fully free and lawful order of its own devising: a kingdom of ends. Reason does not give in to those grounds [for judgment or action] which are empirically given, and it does not follow the order of things as they are presented in intuition, but with complete spontaneity it makes its own order according to ideas, to which it fits the empirical conditions and according to which it even declares actions to be necessary [bindingly to be done] that have not yet occurred and perhaps will not occur, presupposing however judgment that it is syntactically structured, semantically evaluable, and the occupant of an inferential role. See Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, especially 1–9 and 520–529. Brandom, of course, developed this account by drawing on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars, and he argues that not only original endowments, but also social interactions, are required in order to actualize this form of consciousness.

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As Neiman puts it, then, theoretical reason, the effects of whose activity in us are initially evident in the free making of inferences and in the formation of judgments as objects of various reflective attitudes, “is already practical, concerned not with contemplation but with directing us to realize its ideas.”6 This always already present (albeit sometimes dormant and sometimes misused) activity of reason gives objective reality to the idea of a moral world of freedom – not as given object of either divine intellectual or human empirical intuition but rather as something to be brought about in practice in the sensible world. I call the world as it would be if it were in conformity with all moral laws (as it can be in accordance with the freedom of rational beings and should be in accordance with the necessary laws of morality) a moral world. … The idea of a moral world … has objective reality, not as if it pertained to an object of an intelligible intuition (for we cannot even think of such a thing), but as pertaining to the sensible world, although as an object of pure reason in its practical use and a corpus mysticum of the rational beings in it, insofar as their free choice under moral laws has thoroughgoing systematic unity in itself as well as with the freedom of everyone else. (pp. 678–679 [III A808/ B836], final emphasis added)

Reason that is already actively present in us is to purify and perfect itself in and through its own activity, ultimately the activity of forming and sustaining a moral world. One is always already participating, well or badly, in a joint cognitive, moral, and social project of the achievement of clarity, unity (with oneself and with others), and meaningful life – as if one were already both hearing and playing along with an improvising jazz ensemble, where one had only to join in, and the ensemble itself had to uncover for itself its proper score through its own activity, with a set of broad, structural shared harmonic assumptions. Recognizing and making progress in this practical project will require the suspension or bracketing of the authority of instrumental reason, the 6

Neiman, The Unity of Reason, 126. See also Onora O’Neill, “Vindicating Reason,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 280–308, esp. 287: “If we view principles of reason as precepts for the conduct of thinking, acting, and their coherent connection, hence as ways of achieving an active grasp rather than a passive response to the manifold of life, then although we will never regain the heights that rationalist conceptions of reason claimed to conquer, we can unite a wide range of our experience and actions without lapsing into contradiction” (emphasis added). And see Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.



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suspension or bracketing of the usual business of getting and spending only for the sake of satisfying one’s own desires and inclinations. It can result only from what Kant in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason calls “a revolution in the disposition of the human being [eine Umkehrung in der Gesinnung]” and “a change of heart” [eine Änderung des Herzens] that require “incessant labor and becoming”7 away from egoist instrumentalism and toward the cultivation of rational dignity and reciprocity under reformed institutions. All of this – the “effect … of a causality of freedom” – “is to take place in the world [in der Welt geschehen soll].”8 Here one may well wonder: “according to whom” is this effect to take place? In light of Kant’s strictures against theoretical knowledge of God’s existence and will, however, the answer can only be: “according to us, we who are to exercise this causality.” Given the abstractness of Kant’s postulation of and appeal to rational powers and a change of heart, it is also natural to wonder exactly how the taking effect of this causality of freedom is concretely to take place in the world. There are, of course, no natural causal laws and no historical laws that can explain this. Effort, transformation, and free action on the parts of individual agents will be required. Yet we may still naturally wonder what the relevant free actions might look like within the sensible world. Here Kant offers a number of distinct yet interrelated suggestions. Through original exercises of imagination, artists, especially poets, may “make … rational ideas sensible,”9 and their efforts may help to make a new world. The imagination (as a productive cognitive faculty) is, namely, very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature, out of the material which the real one gives it. We entertain ourselves with it when experience seems too mundane to us; we transform the latter … in accordance with principles that lie higher in reason; … [in such a way that nature] can be transformed by us into something entirely different, namely into that which steps beyond nature [as the sensible realm of law].10 7

8 9 10

Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni, in Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 92 (VI: 47–48). For an excellent study of Kant on responsibility for one’s character and the requirement of revolution in one’s disposition, see G. Felicitas Münzel, Kant on Moral Character, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Paul Guyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 81 (V: 195). Kant, Critique of Power of Judgment, 192 (V: 314, A191/B192). Ibid. (V: 314, A190–191/B193–194).

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Art can contribute to making within sensible nature a cultural world – a world of second nature – that is good enough to live in. Second, existing religious institutions, especially and primarily Protestant ones – if and only if they are reformed and freed from superstition, dogmatism, and enthusiasm – can serve as “preparations” for “the victory of the good over the evil principle and the founding of a kingdom of God on earth” in the form of an ethical commonwealth.11 Membership in such a “visible church”12 can help to orient the will away from egoism and to promote (but not cause) a free change of heart, issuing ultimately in respect for the moral law and the practice of a universal moral religion of conscience, stripped of all vanity, power-seeking, and disregard for others.13 Third, the free and open public use of reason can address issues about how to approach practices and institutions of reciprocally free life through reform. “As a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers,” one may advance, develop, respond to, and test arguments and reasons for actions that all might freely endorse and so “clarify [one’s] insight” about what is to be done.14 People may “gradually work their way out of barbarism [Rohigkeit] of their own accord if only one does not intentionally contrive to keep them in it.”15 Writing in 1784, Kant notes – poignantly, in light of the subsequent French Revolution’s turn to terror – that the public “may compel itself to remain under [the yoke of the guardians (Vormünder)],” if it is “suitably stirred up by some of its guardians who are themselves incapable of any enlightenment.”16 Nonetheless, with sufficient courage on the part of many to produce and respond to public arguments, there is some hope that enlightened free life may be at least approached, if not fully secured. “We at present live,” Kant supposes, if not in “an enlightened age [eine aufgeklärte Zeitalter]” at least in “an age of Enlightenment [eine Zeitalter der Aufklärung].”17 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 135 (VI: 101); 129 (VI: 93). Ibid., 152 (VI: 122). For a fuller account of both the virtues and the prejudicially sectarian vices of this suggestion, see Richard Eldridge, Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, Freedom, and the Human Subject, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, chapter 3, “Cultivating the Ethical Commonwealth: Kant’s Religion and Reason in History.” Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” 18 (VIII: 37), 20 (VIII: 40). Ibid., 21 (VIII: 41). Ibid., 18 VIII: 26). Ibid., 21 (VIII: 40). Compare the Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the First Edition: “Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect



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There are a number of closely interrelated objections that might be entered against this picture of human being in the world and its possibilities of development. One might, with Kant’s immediate successors, worry that it is ungrounded. Talk of human rational faculties or powers and their fit expression might be seem to be, in Lewis White Beck’s famous phrase, “suspended from nothing in heaven and supported by nothing on earth.”18 Perhaps we would do better to turn either to an account of how we have become what we are in virtue of the requirements for the development of Spirit (Hegel’s turn: suspended from heaven) or, more plausibly, to a fully explanatory, natural scientific, ultimately physical account of our powers and their evolution (supported by something on earth), in either case eschewing nonexplanatory, stipulatory talk of faculties. One might similarly find the contrasts Kant sketches between human beings, with the possibilities for the achievement of autonomy that their spontaneity, reason, and discursive consciousness enable, and other animals, who lack all these things, to be too sharply and absolutely drawn. Surely other higher mammals are capable of some forms of intelligence, mood, and even personality that might also be present and forceful in their lives and also in ours, insofar as we, too, are animals. Or one might worry that Kant’s picture of the development of human powers is too individualist and internalist, underrating the importance of institutions, cultures, and social interaction with their perhaps transindividual logics, in favor of too much stress on moral progress as a result primarily of revolutions within individual consciousnesses. Yet it seems paradoxically self-refuting to deny actively that we are ­capable of making judgments and shaping our lives causally, on the basis of r­ easons, at least to some extent. The facts of the possession of structured ­contents of consciousness toward which we possess attitudes, of the ­possibility of choice, and of responsibility for one’s character and mode of life (at least en mésure) seem irrefutable.19 Nor does Kant deny the force of human animality and human historicity. The major point of the Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason is that we cannot know that we exist as immortal, substantial souls, so that we should repudiate that thought in favor of focusing on our actual existence in space, time, and history as biological animals with

18 19

that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination” (100–101, [VIII: A xi]). Lewis White Beck, Essays on Kant and Hume, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978, 30. For a wonderful explication and defense of this last irrefutable claim as Hegel argues for it, see Alasdair MacIntyre, “Hegel on Faces and Skulls,” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre, New York: Doubleday, 1972, 219–236.

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­ istinctive powers. There is no detailed, specific recipe for the correct exerd cise of these powers. Though there are general principles to guide rational practical activity normatively – the Categorical Imperative, the precepts that Kant lists in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (“think for yourself,” “think in the position of everyone else,” and “think in accord with oneself” [be consistent]),20 and “put questions to nature by doing experiments involving measurements made under controlled conditions”21 – in each case these general principles require further specification in contexts where there are always risks of misunderstanding what is going on. We must live and, as Neiman puts it, attempt to “find satisfaction in what might seem to be a perpetual dissatisfaction, forever exercising … freedom in seeking an end [we] cannot obtain,”22 doing the best we can in both practice and theory to act rationally, under the guidance of both general principles and the more specific interpretations we have developed in order to bring them to bear on real empirical and historical situations.23 In developing this vision of human being in the world and of the correct use and partial actualization of rational powers, whatever else he is doing (arguing for the correctness of a broadly scientific view of nature, working out a moral theory), Kant is also both articulating and furthering a view of human life as actively reformulable in and through the making of culture – a view that is increasingly lived on the ground from at least the early modern era onwards, as human beings develop better systems of transportation and communication, open up trade routes, congregate in increasingly larger cities, and engage in wars between emerging nation-states. As markets open up and varieties of skills and goods proliferate, it becomes increasingly possible and likely for more and more individuals to leave the manor and to build a way of life based on mastery of a skill or trade. Kant’s father was himself a petty bourgeois guild member and master craftsman of bridles and reins. In a letter, Kant wrote that “my two parents (from the class of tradesmen) were perfectly honest, morally decent, and orderly. They did not leave me a fortune (but neither did they leave me any debts).”24 20

Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 174 (V: 294, A156/B158). See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 108 (III: B xii–xiii). 22 Neiman, The Unity of Reason, 92. 23 On the continuing needs for both interpretations of one’s moral situation and of recommitment to principle and its requirements in contexts in the moral life, see Richard Eldridge, On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-Understanding, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, especially the Epilogue, 181–188, and Richard Eldridge, “Acknowledging the Moral Law,” in Why Be Moral?, ed. Robert B. Louden and Beatrix Himmelmann, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015, 199–216. 24 Draft of Letter to Lindblom, October 13, 1797 (Ak. 13: 461), cited in Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 31. 21



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After a good secondary school education centering on Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Lutheran religion, but also including geography, history, French, music, mathematics, calligraphy, and philosophy, Kant was able to enter the local university at Königsberg at the age of sixteen as a result of doing well in a competitive entrance examination.25 A normal course of study at the university would have prepared Kant to become a secondary school teacher and, later, a pastor or perhaps a professor of theology. Kant resisted this, however, and, apart from required courses, elected to study logic, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, rhetoric, poetry, and history, apparently planning to become a university professor of natural philosophy (science).26 That is, he was prepared and preparing to live by his intelligence in a competitive world after a considerable period of training. Exactly how to discipline his reason – both in the conduct of daily life and in the realm of theoretical inquiry – so as to maintain a certain measure of independence and to find satisfaction and recognition in contributing to the growth of knowledge must have been much on his mind throughout his years as a university student (1740–1748) and well into his career as a private tutor (1748–1754) and then as a beginning university lecturer without any fixed appointment (1757–1770). Though he kept at his course of work with considerable energy, discipline, and self-confidence, he did not really achieve a settled position until he was appointed as the professor of logic and metaphysics at Königsberg, three weeks before his 46th birthday. “What form of self-shaping self-discipline would enable him, distinctively, to build a life and a career in a competitive environment?” must have been a master practical question (with theoretical content, including issues about how to do science, metaphysics, and logic) for him from his adolescence to his early middle age. In all this, Kant’s itinerary is, if not typical of modern human experience in general, at least paradigmatic for members of an emerging and increasing managerial-intellectual class building lives on the bases of schooling and skill. For such individuals, questions such as “Who am I?” and “How am I to become successfully who I (inchoately) am?” are unavoidable. Kant’s philosophy is not directly determined by his social experience but it is structured as a reflection on it. What makes or can make it count for us is not simply whether its arguments are sound but also whether it productively addresses a set of problems of “becoming who one is” that are increasingly widely shared, responses to which can productively inform joint social life. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy ascribe to Kant what they call a “weakening of the subject” – the fracturing or opening up of an 25 26

Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, 45–50, 62. Ibid., 73–87.

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always already given sense of who one is and what one’s life is all about – that is “accompanied by an apparently compensatory ‘promotion’ of the moral subject” – that is, a subject that must raise and settle for itself the question of who or what it is to be. “As a moral subject, … 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” as an unavoidable, never fully resolved question and problem.27 Can I live both freely and aptly, continuously achieving both success and recognition through appropriately disciplined activity? For an increasing number of people – though not for all, or not for all right away – this question becomes one that is always already on the agenda as a challenge to be addressed in various ways by taking up various occupations and by maintaining appropriate moral and political relations with others, all within an emerging market economy. The answer to this question is, of course, unclear, since the answer will be yes only if one can achieve at least fairly generalized, not distinctly tribal or narrowly local recognition for one’s disciplined activity and its fruits, within a society in which there is reciprocal recognition. But it is not an idle question; it is one that is genuinely lived, as we, or many, experience and address it both individually in taking up particular social roles and together in participating in institutions that structure joint social life. As Dieter Henrich argues in commenting on how the French Revolution and German philosophy inform and shape each other, in the eighteenth century and on into the present: It is exactly this modern [Kantian] idea of freedom [as successfully actualized autonomy] that needs by itself and from itself to be placed in the context of an explicitly articulated conceptual system. One must achieve a description of the world within which the primary abstract, nonintuitive evidence [that we are capable of reflection and choice] could justifiably occupy a central position – a description of the world in which the project of a life conducted in freedom must be able to acquire legitimacy and a well-founded, coherent dynamic. Classical German philosophy, in fact, developed and opened such a context for the notion of freedom. This was not effected through an octroi [a concession or privilege granted by a sovereign] or through a concern simply for the appropriate means of justification. Rather it was brought about through an intellectual effort that came entirely out of an identification with the spontaneously developing activity of reason and that gained its own orientation from this. … A thinking that took its departure and orientation from the freedom of a spontaneously 27

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, 31.



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developing life of reason thus converges with the organization and maintenance of political freedom within modern states and modern conditions of production, to form a single task whose nature, difficulty, and weight have not become a thing of the past for us.28

Here thought and practical life inform and shape each other, as we attempt individually and collectively to work out the terms of, and lead, lives in which we can find satisfaction in the practical actualization of our rational powers, while the lonely hour of the last instance never comes. Self-knowledge, so far as it is available and matters, consists not in the deliverances of introspection but rather in an ongoing story that provides an account of how one is developing and deploying rational powers in activity – a happy story that makes manifest how standing good reasons inform one’s mode of life, or a tragic story that makes manifest their absence, or, more likely for most of us most of the time, a tragicomic story in which good reasons are piecemeal and intermittently manifest but never quite comprehensive and secure in wholly informing how one lives.

II That Kant’s description of the human being – cast out from naturalness into willed exercises of rational powers that might shape courses of activity self-consciously but with no clear recipe for doing so in view – is fundamental to the modern sense of self and to the literature that tracks its development is nowhere more powerfully and poignantly evident than in Wordsworth. The affinity between Wordsworth’s sense of his being in the world and Kant’s is more than merely accidental. Partly it is shaped by similarities in the circumstances of their respective upbringings and early adulthoods. Wordsworth’s father John was the land agent – a kind of “nonstop campaign manager, … ward heeler, vote canvasser, election rigger, briber and payer off of innkeepers” as well as estate overseer for Sir James Lowther, “the fifth baronet Lowther.”29 This was a middle-class position, unsupported by inherited wealth; and successful occupancy of 28

Dieter Henrich, “The French Revolution and Classical German Philosophy: Toward a Determination of Their Relation,” trans. Wayne Martin, Sven Bernecker, and Hans Sluga, in Dieter Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992, 95, 98–99. 29 Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998, 22, 19. Further biographical details in this paragraph are drawn variously from this work and from the Chronology printed in William Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1965, xxi–xxiv.

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it depended on its holder’s wits and skill. As a result of his father’s death in 1783, Wordsworth became an orphan at the age of thirteen, subject to the guardianship of his uncles. He entered Cambridge in 1787 as a scholarship student, continually obliged to borrow money from his wealthier relations, with an expectation of a modest inheritance of roughly £1,000, to arrive upon settlement of a lawsuit concerning his father’s estate. In this position, and with his inheritance long delayed until payment in installments in 1802–1804, Wordsworth was expected by his remaining family and teachers to prepare for ordination and life as a village pastor. Like Kant, however, Wordsworth instead largely studied what he pleased, and he declined to take the entire roster of exams that were required for receiving a fellowship beyond his initial BA degree. He left Cambridge in January 1791, without honors, more or less determined to make his way in life as a poet. But exactly how to do that – what kind of poetry to write and how to make a living from poetry at all – remained a pressing issue. As Kenneth R. Johnston rephrases the account that Wordsworth gives in Book IX of The Prelude, “In Blois [France, in Spring 1792] [Beaupuy] and Wordsworth were talking about the difficulty of advancing in the kinds of careers their families and training had set before them.”30 Service at court was no longer possible, and orthodox, rural ministry was unappealing. Possessed, like Kant, of ambition and a sense of nascent power intensely felt, Wordsworth, too, like Kant, took these to be of more than merely personal or private significance. Fit exercises of these powers might speak to like powers in others and so, as Wordsworth proposes in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, awaken his readers from their “savage torpor” and “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” into a fuller, more authentically human way of life.31 “The actual working ‘plan’ of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads,” as Johnston puts it, was “to incorporate a metaphysical faith in spontaneous grace  – symbolized by images of natural beauty  – with an ethic of concern for all human beings. … And he was failing in this effort, for the very good reason that such a connection is very difficult to establish logically, outside some system of belief – Christianity, for example.”32 Christianity was to be modified and replaced – its promise of meaningful life transfigured – by poetry. Or, as Coleridge later characterized the mission he assigned to Wordsworth in conversations at Alfoxden in 1798, in light of his recognition of Wordsworth’s ambition and poetic 30 31 32

Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, 305. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800),” in Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 449. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, 572.



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power, and in what amounts to a virtual précis of the task of the Critical Philosophy, Wordsworth was to treat man as man … in contact with external nature, and informing the sense from the mind, and not compounding the mind out of the senses … thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration.33

Partly under the prompting of Coleridge, Wordsworth spent the ­winter of 1798–1799 in Goslar, Germany, nominally learning German and reading Kant and Fichte in order to prepare for this great task, but in fact writing the intensely personal “Lucy” and “Matthew” poems. Like his recurrent recoils from The Recluse project, these are essentially efforts at recovery of a sense of the possession of poetic power, efforts at reestablishing a sense of contact with a power to direct one’s life actively, as a human life led rather than as a course of passive suffering. In Johnston’s formulation: The idea of gain snatched from loss, triumph from failure, applies to Wordsworth’s entire German sojourn, but most of all to the “mass” of poems (as Dorothy described them) he wrote in five winter months at Goslar. … All these poems are concerned with the origins of Wordsworth’s imaginative growth – and, almost as much, with a fear of losing contact with those sources. … They are determinedly joyful overcomings of strong initial feelings of depression and dejection: essentially Wordsworth’s mood in Goslar.34

The accent here should fall on determinedly; Wordsworth’s efforts are willed in the face of disappointment and foundering hope, in a pattern that persists throughout his career, as he continues to undertake “a desperate search for assurance: … a very important part of [his] greatness is the way he lets his poetry reveal conflicts he cannot wholly resolve.”35 33

34 35

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, London: John Murray, 1835, Vol. 2, 70–71. This great commission of Coleridge to Wordsworth, its foundering but existent actualization in The Recluse, and Wordsworth’s repeated recoils from it into autobiography is the great subject of Kenneth R. Johnston’s masterful Wordsworth and The Recluse, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, 636, 637. Ibid., 776, 139. This reading of Wordsworth as caught up in modulations or alternations between sudden elation in accession to poetic power and recurrent dejection in its loss or passing traces to Geoffrey Hartman’s reading of successive moments of apocalypse (the unbinding of creative imagination) and akedah (rebinding to the common) in Wordsworth’s poetry, especially The Prelude, in his epochal Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1864. I have drawn

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No doubt this is all somewhat more overtly anxious and agonized than Kant’s more general theoretical writing. And yet one can hear at times a slight undertone of self-doubt in passages in which Kant turns to describing explicitly exactly how rational powers might be exercised in shaping a life: Now let us stop at this point and assume it is at least possible that reason actually does have causality in regard to appearances. … Suppose now that one could say that reason has causality in regard to appearances; could reason’s action then be called free even though in its empirical character … it is all precisely determined and necessary? … Now I say that the human being and in general every rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that will.36

Wordsworth enacts and reenacts this kind of self-doubt accompanying and bound up with intermittent conviction.37 In doing so he displays a Kantian sense of the human subject that is arguably the sense of the human subject that is predominant in modern experience, or whenever human beings live with a salient sense of powers-to-be-actualized but subject to doubt in the absence of a specifically articulated metaphysico-social script. Insofar as we may come to identify with the Wordsworthian persona, Wordsworthian literature affords us the opportunity to acknowledge this ongoing sense of power crossed with doubt, and Kant’s philosophical anthropology continues to provide the most powerful, systematic general description of its nature and roots.

Bibliography Beck, Lewis White. Essays on Kant and Hume. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Brandom, Robert. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge. London: John Murray, 1835, Vol. 2. Eldridge, Richard. “Acknowledging the Moral Law.” In Why Be Moral? ed. Robert B. Louden and Beatrix Himmelmann. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015.

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on and developed Hartman’s reading in my The Persistence of Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, where I trace also a similar pattern in Hölderlin’s poetry. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 541 (III: A548–549/B576–577); 542 (III: A551/B589); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 79 (IV: 428 [first four emphases added]). For a detailed account of this structure of alternating, interwoven doubt and conviction in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” see Richard Eldridge, Literature, Life, and Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, 85–98.



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Eldridge, Richard. Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, Freedom, and the Human Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Eldridge, Richard. Literature, Life, and Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Eldridge, Richard. On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Eldridge, Richard. The Persistence of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hartman, Geoffrey. Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1864. Henrich, Dieter. “The French Revolution and Classical German Philosophy: Toward a Determination of Their Relation.” Trans. Wayne Martin, Sven Bernecker, and Hans Sluga. In Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Johnston, Kenneth R. The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. Johnston, Kenneth R. Wordsworth and The Recluse. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Ed. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. 22 Bde. Hrsg. Wilhelm Windelbrand. Berlin: Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902. Kant, Immanuel. “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.” In Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.” Trans. George di Giovanni. In Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. “What Is Enlightenment?” In Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. MacIntyre, Alasdair. “Hegel on Faces and Skulls.” In Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre. New York: Doubleday, 1972. Münzel, Felicitas. Kant on Moral Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Neiman, Susan. The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. O’Neill, Onora. “Vindicating Reason.” In The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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Velkley, Richard. Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965.

chapter 6

Voice Enjoined

Kant and Poetic Freedom Gabriela Basterra

Kant’s writing on genius and art in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” has seduced some of its readers because of its eloquent way of expressing the exhilaration of producing and enjoying fine art. This exhilarating feeling is at once subjective and universally communicable. A “quickening of the mind” that makes reason think more,” this animating impulse carries the imagination to create, “as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it.”1 A lot is at stake in Kant’s account of aesthetic reflective judgment, the beautiful in nature and art, and the artistic originality of “genius.” Yet, for all the emphasis the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” places on subjective feeling and on genius as the harmonious attunement of a subject’s mental powers, it is difficult to find in Kant’s critical project an explicit and sustained theory of the subject2 that might help its readers gain a better understanding of what it is that makes the artistic creation of genius so unique. Indeed, what inspires genius to create? What is this subject who – graced with this rare gift of creation through which nature expresses itself in art – can produce artworks with the potential to set in motion something new? The possibility of introducing an unprecedented beginning, “the foremost property of genius,”3 is what Kant calls originality, itself an extraordinary causal term associated with freedom. Therefore, understanding what originality means, what conceptions of subjectivity it presupposes, and how it makes itself felt in the material world requires looking back to the first and second Critiques, where originality does not appear in an artistic sense. 1

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987; Gesammelte Schriften, 23 Bde., ed. Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902–, V: 315 §49, 183 and 314 §49, 182. (Henceforth, references to Kant’s work will include the page number of the translation, followed by the volume and page number of the original, as printed in the edition of Kant’s works referenced here.) 2 See Avery Goldman, Kant and the Subject of Critique: On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012. 3 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §46, 175, Ak. V: 308.

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This chapter traces in each of Kant’s three Critiques a notion of subjectivity inhabited by otherness that traverses his critical project.4 Since this subjectivity is not addressed systematically in a single place, we approach it by following the impulse of Kant’s thinking closely, pursuing what his reasoning presupposes beyond what it claims to achieve. As we trace out the itineraries of the subject in Kant’s critical thinking, we will discover that the freedom of artistic creation and the originality of art owe to the otherness that inhabits subjectivity. This element of otherness also allows reason’s idea of the world – the very context in which the effect of original works of art would be felt – to cohere. Thus, our exploration begins neither in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” which opens the Critique of Judgment, nor in the Critique of Practical Reason, but rather at the heart of Kant’ Critique of Pure Reason, in the chapter of the Transcendental Dialectic titled “The Antinomy of Pure Reason.” This is the moment when Kant must rescue reason from falling into a deadly contradiction with itself.

I  Subjectivity as Relationship The third antinomy of pure reason aims to explain how all effects are linked to their causes as it aspires to derive a natural universe through synthesis. It asks: Are all the events in the world produced by natural causes (antithesis), or do some of them originate in freedom (thesis)? Here reason famously rehearses the tensions between freedom and natural necessity, and between spontaneity and receptivity, and thus plays out the paradox whereby the thinking I, the spontaneous active subject that turns what it experiences into things and events it can know, can only intuit itself as a passive being affected by what it receives through its senses. Throughout the first Critique, Kant insists on the precariousness (if not impossibility) of a subject’s self-positing and indicates that the thinking “I,” the unity of transcendental apperception, does not amount to a subjectivity. Rather, the “paradoxical relationship” this “I” has with its passive inner sense underscores its inability to extend to itself the synthetic activity through which it determines the given.5 And yet, Kant’s explicit solution to the antinomy reiterates the paradox. The contradiction disappears, he claims, if we attribute antithesis and thesis to two different standpoints: an empirical 4 5

For an extended treatment of the subject of the first three sections of this essay, see Gabriela Basterra, The Subject of Freedom: Kant, Levinas, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Kant addresses the paradox of transcendental apperception and inner sense at the end of the 1787 edition of the “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding,” Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996, Ak. III: 192–196, B 153–159.



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perspective,  that of  the  sensing subject, from which there is only natural causality; and an intelligible standpoint, that of the thinking subject, from which there could be freedom. What this solution does, in sum, is transfer the conflict of laws from the world (or rather, from the theoretical attempt to conceive a causal world) to the subject, thus reasserting a subjectivity split between a self that thinks and self that senses and feels.6 This inaugurates a tradition of subjective alienation that runs through Western modern philosophy and is still influential today.7 The trouble reason runs into when it strives to picture a world in which every thing, event, action, or state would be linked to a cause has to do with the need to imagine a free beginning. As theoretical reason endeavors to present the world to itself, it structures phenomena in sequences of linked elements, each of them conditioned by a previous one. In order to complete the causal series, reason needs to imagine a free beginning, an exceptionally unconditioned cause that bounds the series and stops this indefinite regress. Hence the antinomy or conflict of laws that jeopardizes reason: the rule of successive regression on which the unity of experience depends clashes with the simultaneity of completion.8 It seems impossible, in other words, to conceive of series of phenomena whose causality may be attributed both to natural determinism and to freedom. Since one cannot grasp a diachronic regression as a synchronic whole, the world turns out to be a self-defeating concept.9 Kant’s explicit solution to the third antinomy relies on a subject alienated from itself, a conception of a split subjectivity that is linked to a dialectic reduction of freedom. But we don’t need to be satisfied with Kant’s explicit solution, for in the course of his explanation, he presupposes another way of conceiving the subject.10 This subject is not a standpoint but rather an element of natural causality that plays an exceptional role in it, the uncaused cause or beginning by itself Kant calls “unconditioned.” A closer look at the antinomy affords valuable insights into how 6

7

8 9 10

Although one may be tempted to say this tradition turns anti-nomy (conflict of laws) into autonomy (self-legislation), conflict into the self-determining self, this conflict of laws emerges in the dialectical clash between a dogmatic metaphysical argument and an empiricist one and has no origin in or bearing on the physical world. As this essay shows, Kant’s reasoning invites us to explore a way of thinking that is not dialectical. See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. For an extended study of how modern theories of subjectivity follow a tragic pattern, see Gabriela Basterra, Seductions of Fate: Tragic Subjectivity, Ethics, Politics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. See Joan Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec, London: Verso, 1994, 16–44 (30). Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” 30–31. For a more detailed elaboration of the argument in this section, see Basterra, The Subject of Freedom, 47–65.

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the unconditioned works, what it reveals about beginnings, what conception of originality it sets in motion, and what role it assigns to the subject. Its thesis – “The causality according to laws of nature is not the only causality, from which the appearances of the world can thus one and all be derived. In order to explain these appearances, it is necessary to assume also a causality through freedom”11 – is, according to Kant, only apparently contradicted by the antithesis: “There is no freedom, but everything in the world occurs solely according to laws of nature.”12 The thesis of the third antinomy introduces the possibility of unconditioned beginnings when it affirms that at least some events could originate in freedom. Unlike every other element in the natural causal series, which is conditioned by a previous one, the unconditioned is a cause that produces effects but doesn’t itself have a cause.13 If by analogy we were to imagine a cause for the unconditioned, it would be absent from the phenomenal series, lying outside. In lying both outside and inside, at the boundary, the unconditioned is the site of a relationship between two heterogeneous and otherwise unconnectable spaces. One of them is the sequence of phenomenal things and events, linked to each other as cause and effect. The other, which reason conceives as the intelligible realm of freedom, cannot be experienced; we can only imagine it as an empty space beyond what we can cognize, an empty space whose main importance lies in the fact that it introduces a boundary. The unconditioned is thus a boundary and relationship between the series and its outside, between what can be cognized and what is other to conceptual thought. Now, what allows us to assume that some events may be free and that they begin by themselves instead of following from previous causes? This seemingly simple question turns our attention to a Kantian conception of 11 12 13

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 473, Ak. III: A 444/B 472. Ibid., Ak. III: A 445/B 473. In the thesis of the third antinomy, the unconditioned functions in the second of the two senses Kant attributes to the term. In his introduction to the “System of Cosmological Ideas” at the beginning of the Antinomy chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between two ways of thinking of the unconditioned: Either one thinks of it as consisting merely in the whole series, in which therefore all members would without exception be conditioned and only their whole would be absolutely unconditioned; and then the regression is called infinite. Or the absolutely unconditioned is only a part of the series, a part to which the remaining members of the series are subordinated but which itself is not subject to any other conditioned (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 451, Ak. III: A 417/B 445). In the second case, the one at stake in my analysis here, “[T]here is a first member of the series, which is called … with regard to causes, absolute self-activity (freedom)” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 452, Ak. III: A 418/B 446).



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the subject that usually goes unremarked. If freedom can have a presence in the world, if its effects can reverberate in the natural causal series, it is because freedom is in the subject. The subject is, so to speak, an unwitting bearer of freedom. Although this subject has no conscious access to the freedom that traverses it, it can nevertheless introduce the effects of freedom in the world. An element of natural causality, the subject is also related to the intelligible by unwittingly harboring freedom. The intelligible is imagined, as we just said, as an empty space beyond what can be consciously conceived; more simply put, the intelligible, like freedom, is other to its necessarily restricted conception – freedom is other to conceptual thought. What constitutes the subject, itself a phenomenon of nature, is its exceptional relationship with that outside. Thus, when Kant writes of “[t]his subject” that it “begins its effects in the world of sense on its own,”14 he adds a puzzling qualification: “without the action’s beginning in the subject itself.”15 The subject begins its own effects in the world, but nothing begins in the subject because even those actions that might originate in freedom appear, from the perspective of the understanding, as a result of natural causes.16 Although in his solution to the antinomy, Kant claims he has reached his goal, an important challenge is left unaddressed. How is the subject related to that element of excess? Indeed, how would freedom, were it to exist, act through the subject? Let us thus sustain our attention beyond the relationship that explicitly occupies Kant here, the coexistence of nature and freedom in the series, to consider also the other relationship on which that coexistence rests, the relationship we call unconditioned. Kant’s statement carries the echo of this presupposed relationship, that is, the impulse of his thinking incites us to entertain but that theoretical reason cannot explain without trespassing its bounds (not even when reason thinks its own being practical in the second Critique). The subject begins its effects in the world, but nothing begins in the subject because the subject is not freedom – the subject is not the other it harbors – but rather a relationship to the other. Think of this subject not as an agent but as the site of an encounter, as what holds together the copresence of two incommensurable realms, nature and freedom. “Unconditioned subjectivity,” as I have proposed to call it,17 is a relationship to what exceeds our conscious identification of the subject, and of freedom itself, with autonomy. 14 15

16 17

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 541, Ak. III: A 541/B 569. Kant’s exact wording is: “Of this subject we would say quite correctly that it begins its effects in the world of sense on its own, without the action’s beginning in the subject itself” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 541, Ak. III: A 541/B 569). Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 541, Ak. III: A 541/B 569. See Basterra, “Unconditioned Subjectivity,” in The Subject of Freedom, and “Unconditioned Subjectivity: Immanent Synthesis in Kant’s Third Antinomy,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29.3 (2015), 314–323.

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The subject plays the role of the unconditioned. By unwittingly inserting acts of freedom constituting new beginnings in the flow of the causal sequence (beginnings in medias res), unconditioned subjectivity repeatedly anchors the series, enabling it to reach fleeting moments of closure. Each subjective intervention – each act of freedom – may be envisioned as a new initiating cause that retroactively reconfigures the linkage of all elements in the chain. Unconditioned subjectivity, a relational term, names, in short, the relationship and bounding that allows the phenomenal series to cohere contingently – to form an immanent synthesis – time and again. Taking shape in the third antinomy are thus both subject and world: not a self-positing subject that, having secured its own unity, can now constitute a world by identifying with an abstract universality at the price of self-alienation but rather the inseparable coming into existence of subject and world in a process that is repeatedly reconfigured. What ultimately coheres here is not a causal world but rather the thinking that thinks it, a thinking endlessly exposed to its own incompletion. It is worth noting that in order for an element in the series exceptionally to effect a synchronic substitution, as unconditioned subjectivity does, it must be traversed by the other for which it substitutes itself. To express this in terms of tropes and their role in producing signification: Only by virtue of being metonymically affected, animated, or traversed by what is other (by freedom, in this case) can unconditioned subjectivity become the site of a metaphoric substitution.18 Furthermore, this meeting of the diachronic and the synchronic (the metaphoric and the metonymic) does not take place as a punctual crossing but rather as an extended interaction where diachrony is repeatedly anchored. What makes unconditioned subjectivity a unique element of nature is its simultaneous belonging in the diachronic series even while being in relation to what is incommensurate with the series, other to it. Unconditioned subjectivity can play the role of beginning by itself and introduce the effects of freedom in the world only insofar as it embodies a relationship to what is other. But doesn’t the antithesis neutralize this notion of the unconditioned by denying freedom and submitting all phenomena to natural causality? “There is no freedom, but everything in the world occurs solely according 18

Kant’s way of figuring reason’s presentations in terms of time, space, and causality anticipates the discursive character of thought. The productive tension between the diachronic and the synchronic at play in the third antinomy is also at work in processes of the determination and completion of meaning: the interplay of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of language, including interactions between metonymy and metaphor, whose production of signification reaches its utmost intensity in poetic (verbal and visual) arts.



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to laws of nature.”19 As it turns out, this conception of unconditioned freedom would not work without the collaboration of the antithesis. In negating freedom, this second judgment constructs freedom as an excluded element that enables a certain sense of completion: “everything in the world.”20 In effect, the negation of freedom in the antithesis logically creates a “boundary concept” by opening up the outside in which it locates the excluded element, freedom.21 This exclusion brings about the imaginary space in which the thesis can place the absent causality of the  unconditioned. At the same time, the negation of freedom bounds the phenomenal field, making it a full space, “everything in the world,” that is, the realm of objects we can experience and cognize. Without this antithetical gesture, then, the thesis could not imagine the unconditioned as relationship and as boundary. The unconditioned role freedom plays is crucially determined in the interplay of thesis and antithesis, rather than in the thesis alone, as is generally assumed. What initially appeared as two judgments canceling each other turns out not to form an antinomy after all, unless antinomies lend themselves to be examined in a different way. The significance of this way of reading this antinomy is difficult to overstate: Freedom and nature are not opposed to each other; freedom is liberated from its dialectical opposites (determinism, necessity, and constraint), and the subject is neither split between two alienated parts nor bound to identify with an abstract universality.22 Instead of two judgments contradicting each other, what the third antinomy brings forth is an interplay between two asymmetrical operations (one logical and the other one relational)23 where each 19

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 473, Ak. III: A 444–445/B 472–473. See Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” 37. 21 The counterpart in logic of this negative use of the noumenon is indefinite judgment (the kind of judgment Kant uses to reformulate the first mathematical conflict in non-antinomic terms). As Kant defines it in the Logic, indefinite judgment excludes the subject from the sphere of the predicate; it transfers it to a sphere outside the predicate, which “is really no sphere at all but only a sphere’s sharing of a limit with the infinite, or the limiting itself” (Immanuel Kant, “The Jäsche Logic,” in Lectures on Logic, trans. J. Michael Young, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 600, §22,Ak. IX: 104). Through the bounding affected by indefinite judgment, the realm of objectivity (the “sphere” of knowable objects) achieves a certain sense of completion. 22 Notice that we no longer need to attribute the truthfulness of the thesis to an intellectual perspective and that of the antithesis to an empirical one, as Kant famously does in his explicit solution to the dynamic antinomy (Critique of Pure Reason, 541, Ak. III: A 541/B 569). In just a few pages, Kant qualifies this coexistence of nature and freedom’s causalities in the subject from three slightly different perspectives: as “a two-fold side” (intelligible and sensible) from which the subject’s causality may be considered (Critique of Pure Reason, 539, Ak. III: A 538/B 566), as the two characters of any efficient cause (539–540, Ak. III: A 539/B 567), and as two viewpoints from which “the human being” cognizes itself (544, Ak. III: A 547/B 557). 23 The antithesis performs a logical exclusion in the form of indefinite judgment, and the thesis presupposes a synchronic substitution where the subject, as a bearer of freedom, plays the role of the unconditioned. 20

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party contributes something unique. The antithesis creates a boundary, and the thesis formulates it as a relationship. This is how Kant’s third antinomy opens up new conditions for thinking. It invites us to imagine a subjectivity understood not as a thinking “I”  – not as the faint “I” of transcendental apperception – but as the embodiment of the relationships that enable thinking. To insist, this subject is not a standpoint (whether intelligible or empirical, as Kant’s explicit solution has it) but rather the site of a relationship between nature and freedom, between the phenomenal series and its outside, and between what can be cognized and what is other to conceptual thought. Keeping this in mind will prove important as we approach the autonomy of the ethical subject and the originality of works of art.

II  Reason Enjoined This reading of the third antinomy also brings to the fore the fact that a Critique of Practical Reason is required by theoretical thinking for the sake of its own speculative coherence. For as we consider the subject as playing the role of the unconditioned, can we simply assume that this subjectivity is constituted by freedom? If freedom can manifest itself in the world, it is only insofar as freedom is an excess that inhabits the subject. This excess has to do with the being practical of pure reason, with the fact that pure reason is practical and has to act.24 Thus, the second Critique is charged with the formidable task of explaining how reason – now a reason that “does not reason”25 – is addressed, affected, motivated, and enjoined. Although the Critique of Practical Reason offers no further insight into freedom, freedom manifests itself through the moral law, whose existence, affirms Kant, we do know.26 Freedom being actual means that it motivates subjects to act. This motivation to action is among the most counterintuitive contributions of Kant’s critical thinking. In Kant’s practical philosophy being free amounts to being traversed by a causality one does not understand. We find ourselves and others responding to something unconditionally, without knowing to what. More exactly, freedom manifests itself as a power of obligation that affects and moves a subject’s desire 24

Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Le Katègorein de l’excès,” in L’impératif catégorique, Paris: Flammarion, 1983, 18–19, 19, trans. James Gilbert-Walsh and Simon Sparks as “The Kategorein of Excess,” in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 2003, 142. 25 Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: The Athlone Press, 1984, 28. 26 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002, 5, Ak. V: 4n.



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through the moral law. If in the third antinomy unconditioned freedom was a beginning by itself (a bounding able to anchor a causal series through the mediation of the subject), in the second Critique the unconditioned beginning of the causality of freedom in the subject is the moral law. The unconditionality of the law manifests itself affectively as the law’s unprecedented ability to motivate.27 At this point, though, as Kant shifts his critical focus from theoretical to practical reason, his reasoning faces at least two formidable challenges. On the one hand, it will have to address how the law enjoins the subject. On the other, it will need to prove that the subject of freedom – the subject that harbors freedom – is itself unconditioned, namely, that this subject’s initiative does not rest on any previous cause. Let us begin by this second route, the need to prove the unconditionality of the subject of freedom. In the third antinomy, the unconditioned had the potential to insert beginnings in the midst of the causal sequence. That role could be imagined to be played by subjects that unwittingly insert free acts (unwittingly because freedom is an excess that inhabits them). But in order for this reasoning to work, wouldn’t the causality of freedom that animates the subject have to be itself unconditioned? And doesn’t this presuppose that the subject would have had to choose to harbor freedom, thus introducing with this free choice the unconditioned cause of the causality through freedom that constitutes her subjectivity? The challenge Kant must meet at this juncture consists in explaining how one can have freely chosen something of which one is not even aware, that is, how one can unwittingly author one’s own emergence as a subject of freedom. It is almost impossible to express this without dislocating causality and temporality, since having chosen to be constituted by freedom’s causality is not a conscious act oriented toward the future but rather a retroactive obligation that refers one to a past that is irretrievable through memory. Hence Kant’s insistence that this act of the power of choice must have occurred not in a temporal but rather in a causal past.28 Just imagine, for a moment, you are that subject of freedom. You are inhabited by this free causality you don’t even understand that you must 27

28

Kant addresses the difficult question of how the law affects the subject in “On the Incentives of Pure Practical Reason,” the concluding chapter of the Analytic in the Critique of Practical Reason. There he defines the subject’s relationship to the law through the notion of respect (Achtung), a singular feeling that does not originate in sensibility but in practical reason. For a detailed analysis of Kant’s chapter on respect that explains his allusions to the law’s threatening gaze and voice, see Basterra, “Affect of the Law,” in The Subject of Freedom. Immanuel Kant, “On the Inherence of the Evil alongside the Good Principle, or, On the Radical Evil in Human Nature,” in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009, 49, Ak. VI: 40.

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have, moreover, chosen freely. This is to say that you must have begun your own subjective itinerary “by yourself.” You must have authored yourself as a subject of freedom by choosing to harbor this freedom that constitutes you, a freedom that is other.29 But how? How could one have chosen one’s own free beginning? This is the question Kant raises in his essay “On the Inherence of the Evil alongside the Good Principle, or, On the Radical Evil in Human Nature,” the first chapter of the Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793). How does the subject become the unconditioned cause of her own causality? Indeed, how does one choose one’s ethical disposition (Gesinnung) and come to harbor the ultimate ground within oneself that assures that every action one takes is motivated always and only by the moral law? Notice that here, where the causality at stake is the itinerary of the subject (and no longer that of nature), the unconditioned element that bears witness to freedom is the moral law. In order to explain what may otherwise appear as a circular causality, Kant resorts to a causal rather than temporal “out of time.”30 One must have indeed adopted one’s ethical disposition, but this adoption was not a “time-act of the power of choice” (Zeit-Actus der Wilkür).31 Since this choice didn’t happen in time (in der Zeit), it remains “inscrutable” (unerforschlich) to the very subject who made it.32 What the subject chooses, let’s insist, is to be motivated only by the law; the subject adopts the unconditioned law as the initiating cause of her own subjective itinerary. This free act of choice introduces the boundary reason needs for the causality of freedom in the subject to cohere. Let us take note of what Kant is saying here. Although the causality of freedom in the subject is unconditioned, the subject plays the role of the unconditioned – the subject begins “by herself” – by choosing the causality of freedom that traverses her.33 Freedom is inseparable from obligation, from a responsibility that in no present has one chosen to assume.34 The subject’s unconditionality comes, in short, from the unconditionality of the law. What the Critique of Practical Reason crucially brings forth, in sum, is a law that obligates the subject without alienating her, a law that inaugurates the subject’s initiative by constituting her as its addressee. 29 30 31 32 33 34

Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, 26, Ak. VI: 25. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, 49, Ak. VI: 40. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, 26, Ak. VI: 25. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, 21, Ak. VI: 21. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, 26, Ak. VI: 25. This obligation is aroused neither by coercive commands nor by a heightening of conscience. See, for example, Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 111, Ak. V: 86.



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III  Becoming the Author The moral law must be the only motivation, the ultimate ground or cause that, affecting the subject, impels every subjective act. The unconditionality of this subject, we just said, comes from the unconditionality of the law. And now we understand that the categorical imperative is so much more than a test of the universality of maxims. It is the imperative to act in a legislative sense,35 to universalize. Given that the imperative form of the law is the most familiar aspect of Kant’s legacy, its radically ethical potential may be easily missed. We recall Kant’s famous distinction between following the law by the letter (acting according to the law: legality) and fulfilling its spirit (or acting because of the law: morality). The law, he writes, appears to us, finite human beings, in the form of an imperative (its force has to do with intonation, intensity, tonality). What may elude us is that the spirit of the law, its unconditioned motivating power, lies literally in its letter, in the fact that the law takes the form of an imperative address. Indeed, the spirit and letter of the law name two inseparable ways in which the law exerts its impact on subjectivity, namely, the power of the law to motivate the subject unconditionally (setting in motion a free beginning, the beginning of a subjective itinerary constituted by freedom), and the power of the law to enjoin the subject through its form of address. The spirit has to do with unconditionality and the letter with address. Let’s first turn to the law as address. That the law addresses (and that it addresses imperatively and categorically) means that its addressee, the subject, is not the one who chooses, is not the one who makes a decision, but rather the one who is enjoined, who finds the law in herself. The law would be something in the subject but not of the subject, what in a subject exceeds and addresses the subject as would an other.36 The imperative, let’s insist, is an instance of enunciation, a saying that interpellates the subject from its alterity. This may come as a surprise, for doesn’t Kant’s reference to the law as a fact of reason (factum rationis) mean that reason is the origin of the law one chooses to give oneself? It is not the case that the law originates in reason (a conception that runs the risk of missing the ethical charge of autonomy). Rather, the law befalls reason,37 affects reason, and 35 36

37

Nancy, “Le Katègorein,” 13–14 / “The Kategorein,” 138. Dieter Henrich describes respect as belonging to “that class of accomplishments in which an identification with something of one’s own takes place which is at the same time encountered as the other” (Dieter Henrich, “Ethics of Autonomy,” trans. Louis Hunt, in The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Richard L. Velkley, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, 110. See Nancy, “Le Katègorein,” 19/“The Kategorein,” 142. Nancy, “Le Katègorein,” 19/“The Kategorein,” 142.

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enjoins reason to act. In exposing reason to the alterity and unconditionality of the law, the fact of reason (Faktum) names one’s awareness of being affected and motivated, the consciousness that the law is in us.38 As for the law being unconditioned, what the unconditioned law commands is unconditionality, a beginning by itself. Although the law is indeed its own cause (causa sui), only the subject can give it its power as cause, as free beginning or motivating force of her own subjective itinerary.39 In the imperative, then, reason’s theoretical and practical tasks come together: “Act so that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time [zugleich] as a principle of a universal legislation [Gesetzgebung].”40 What the imperative enjoins rational beings – affected subjects – to do is, again, to act in a legislative sense. Now we understand that acting in a legislative sense means playing the role of the unconditioned. The imperative would enjoin the subject to begin a series of events even though nothing begins in the subject,41 thus bringing about a universe in which freedom and nature can coexist. Universalization in this sense is a duty, the ever necessary task of inserting a new beginning by acting. “Act” as the contingent intermediary of freedom, so that (through you) freedom can begin something by itself. “Act” so that the other can manifest its impact on the world. Ultimately, what reason imagines retroactively as a subject’s initial choice to be free marks the emergence of autonomy, a notion suffused by responsibility through and through. Autonomy is indeed self-legislation. It is literally, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “a legislation by the self” in which the self does not preexist the legislation,42 since unconditioned subjectivity is itself, precisely, what the law commands. This law that addresses us, that “thrusts itself upon us on its own” as a fact of reason,43 will be, through the enigma of autonomy, the same law we believe we give ourselves. Autonomy thus consists in becoming the author of what I have received,44 38

“The consciousness of this basic law may be called a fact of reason (Faktum), because one cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason – for example, from the consciousness of freedom (for this is not antecedently given to us) – and because, rather, it thrusts itself upon us on its own as a synthetic a priori proposition not based on any intuition, whether pure or empirical” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 46, Ak. V: 31). 39 Alenka Zupančič, L’éthique du réel: Kant avec Lacan, Caen: Nous, 2009, 68. 40 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 45, Ak. V: 30. 41 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 541, Ak. III A 541/B 569; cf. Basterra, The Subject of Freedom, 55–59. 42 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, 107. 43 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 46, Ak. V: 31. 44 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998, 148.



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a law that gives itself, that addresses me. It entails the ­responsibility of casting my singularity, the fact that I am the one who has been addressed and enjoined, as my free act. Only in this relational sense may we say that the subject becomes the author of the free causality that animates her subjectivity. As autonomous, the subject is enjoined to act freely – unconditionally – in this originary sense. Autonomy thus consists in taking oneself for the origin of what has no origin, in standing for a beginning that is always preceded. This originary duty of the subject of freedom, inserting an unconditioned beginning, has its aesthetic counterpart in the unprecedented making and reception of original works of art.

IV  Poetic Freedom Believing oneself the author of something one has received, as we just referred to autonomy, is also a literal definition of being inspired.45 Inserting beginnings in the flow of a natural causal sequence by acting freely suggests, in turn, a reinscribed sense of the “originary” that allows reason in the third antinomy to form a whole in progress. This theoretical conception of beginnings in medias res relies on the relationship between nature and freedom embodied by unconditioned subjectivity, itself an element of the natural series that is at the same time heterogeneous to it. From a practical perspective, this interplay between incommensurate elements constitutes a subject who is ethically moved by freedom. Freedom is, again, an element of excess that traverses the subject and calls on her to act in an originary sense. Motivated by a law that enjoins her to respond, believing herself the author of the otherness that addresses her – that is, embodying at the same time the positions of addressee, intermediary, and source – this subject begins, “by herself,” something of which she is not the origin. Inspiration and originality come to the foreground in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” the first and larger part of the Critique of Judgment. Here a subject enters the scene as a human being endowed with the artistic productivity Kant calls “genius.” This notion of subject graced with genius is still inflected by the theoretical and practical conceptions of subjectivity we have traced out so far: a being affected through the senses who, intellectually aroused by nature – including by herself, as nature – and ethically moved by freedom, embodies the copresence of the two. Genius is a 45

Ibid.

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potential to be “aroused to a feeling of [one’s] own originality,”46 a “talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given.”47 Exalted by Kant as “the foremost property of genius,”48 originality informs the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” as an exceptional causal term related to freedom that can, as such, introduce unconditioned beginnings. Yet, given Kant’s primary focus on the free play amongst cognitive activities, the “feeling” their attunement produces in the subject, and its role in completing his system of reason, it will be important to keep in mind that the subject endowed with genius is conceived, first and foremost, as an encounter of nature and freedom that precedes and exceeds this aesthetic play. Bearing witness to the causality of freedom that informs artistic creation, the original works of genius may challenge, alter, or reconfigure the context of their appearance. The need to underscore the subject’s relation to freedom in the context of Kant’s third Critique may come as a surprise. Isn’t the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” known precisely for its emphasis on the imagination’s power of free reflection and its insistence that nothing should interfere with an artist’s creative freedom, not even artistic form?49 Doesn’t nature, on the other hand, play a fundamental role in Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful and the Sublime,” its relevance ever increasing when Kant turns his attention to something as artificially created as fine art?50 As it turns out, the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” doesn’t have much to say about nature (the object of the understanding in the first Critique) or freedom (the object of reason in the second Critique); however, these terms participate exhilaratingly in the “Analytik” of judgment laid out in this book, because Kant’s focus now shifts. When he alludes to the free play of the artist’s mental powers or to the “freedom that [her] imagination has even in its lawfulness,”51 the term “freedom” primarily adopts the restrictive sense of “freedom from” constraint.52 When he affirms, in turn, that “nature gives the rule to art,53 this ruling “nature” will soon be revealed to refer to what Kant calls the “nature of the subject,” namely, the harmonious exercise of a subject’s mental powers. Proving that the various subjective faculties are able to take each other to the limit while collaborating 46

Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 187, Ak. V: 318. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §46, 175, Ak. V: 308. 48 Ibid., emphasis in original. 49 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §48, 180–181, Ak. V: 312–313. 50 Kant, Critique of Judgment §45, 173, Ak. V: 306. 51 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §60, 231, Ak. V: 355. 52 See, for example, §49, 182, Ak V: 314. 53 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §46, 174, Ak. V: 307. 47



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freely (instead of submitting to each other’s legislation) becomes an ultimate goal of the third Critique.54 This balanced engagement of the faculties requires a different modality of thinking that, no longer tasked with addressing any cognitive or moral goals, takes shape in a nonlegislative form of judgment Kant calls “reflective.” Beyond ensuring the necessarily legislative character of knowledge (based on natural laws) and ethics (based on the law of freedom), reflective judgment would mediate between their heterogeneous realms, allowing cognition and morality to communicate with each other.55 Hence the focus of the Critique of Judgment is neither nature nor freedom (though the subject endowed with genius is indeed constituted by both), neither the power of knowledge nor the power of desire (though these powers animate the subject), but rather a­esthetic reflective judgment itself. Strictly speaking, the “quickening of the mind” Kant associates with aesthetic reflective judgment is neither about freedom nor about the beautiful natural or artistic forms that prompt it. Although this pleasurable feeling is enticed by the object of which “is pleasing” is predicated, Kant famously ascribes this feeling to the collaboration between “the imagination in its freedom and the understanding in its lawfulness, as they reciprocally quicken each other.”56 What a freely delineated aesthetic object “renders perceptible to the senses,” in Claudia Brodsky’s words, “is nothing other than the internal state of the subject capable of perceiving it – for Kant, any subject who, suspending practical knowledge of the identity and use of an object, instead feels pleasure (or displeasure) in the conceptually unsubordinated appearance of ‘traits’ whose dynamic ‘intertwining’ the senses actively record and trace.”57 Rather than being affected by the object, the subject is affected by her own state.58 What is experienced in this aesthetic encounter with an aesthetic object, in short, is the affection of thinking as it perceives its own activity.59 Indeterminate, neither concerned with an object’s existence nor with the ways existing objects act on one’s senses, expressing a disinterested liking deemed by the 54

55 56 57 58 59

The fact that the different faculties could collaborate by submitting to each other’s legislation in the other two critiques (to the understanding’s in the first, to reason’s in the second), Kant now argues, was premised on the possibility of a free play among them. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Introduction, 13–14, Ak. V: 175–176. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §35, 151, Ak. V: 287. Claudia Brodsky, The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, 56. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §40, 162, Ak. V: 296. See Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994, 10.

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judging subject to be universally shareable,60 aesthetic judgment reflects the subject of judgment itself, but not the particular subject enunciating it. Judging as a subject and not as an individual, the subject of judgment does not say “I” (“I like …”)61 but declares “it is pleasing” in the third person “as if beauty were a characteristic of the object and the judgment were logical (namely, a cognition of the object through concepts of it), even though in fact the judgment is only aesthetic and refers to the object’s presentation merely to the subject.”62 As if to emphasize that “taste” is not a matter of individual taste, in sum, a judgment of taste excludes both the object that prompts it and the subject who enunciates it, as Brodsky points out.63 Hence aesthetic judgment must be general enough to garner common agreement, a speech act that must stop short of saying anything about a particular object (beyond stating its likeability) or about the speaking subject herself. As Kant moves from the reception of aesthetic objects to the making of art, a challenge opens up. Art is not given but created; yet it must seem “at the same time [zugleich] to be nature.”64 We must be conscious of art’s madeness; yet “the purposiveness in its form must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature.”65 Kant conceives of art as the site in which the freedom from rules that characterizes natural beauty and human artifice coexist. This coexistence could only take place if nature were to act through the subject in the form of a given endowment through which nature expresses itself in art. Genius is precisely this, “the innate mental disposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.”66 At first view, the idea of a nature that is able to give the rule seems to mark a refreshing departure from its being construed as an object of knowledge or a psychological motivation for action in the other two Critiques. Kant soon clarifies, however, that this rule-giving nature is none other than 60

Kant, Critique of Judgment, §6, 53–54, Ak. V: 211. Kant eventually entertains the possibility that the universal assent required by aesthetic judgment – “the ought, i.e., the objective necessity that everyone’s feeling flow along with the particular feeling of each person” – may be just a demand of reason that “would signify only that there is a possibility of reaching such agreement” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, §22, 90, Ak. V: 240). 61 Brodsky, The Linguistic Condition, 118. 62 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §6, 54, Ak. V: 211. And since – unlike the logical judgment it resembles “inasmuch we may presuppose it to be valid for everyone” – its universality cannot ensue from concepts, “a judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality” (§6, 54, Ak. V: 212). 63 Brodsky, The Linguistic Condition, 117–118. 64 “Fine art is an art insofar as it seems at the same time [zugleich] to be nature” (Critique of Judgment, §45, 173, Ak. V: 306). 65 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §45, 173, Ak. V: 306. 66 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §46, 174, Ak. V: 307, emphasis in original.



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the “nature of the subject,” which he defines aesthetically as the balanced play of the mind’s faculties. If natural “purposiveness” (which Kant qualifies as subjective and “without a purpose”) refers to the proportioned activity of the mind as it represents nature’s beautiful forms,67 art, following nature, should induce in the subject a similar inner state of purposiveness. Kant accomplishes his reasoning’s transition from the mind’s aesthetic encounter with nature to the creation of art by attributing that proportion to genius itself.68 Genius consists in a “happy relation” between imagination and understanding,69 a free interaction inspired and animated by spirit (Geist), enriched by the imagination, balanced by the understanding, and guided or tempered by taste.70 As they interact aesthetically, imagination and understanding push one another to the limit. The imagination, now released from the cognitive task of processing (schematizing) empirical data, freely provides the understanding with “a wealth of undeveloped material.”71 The understanding, in turn, expands itself in order to impart lawful unity to the products of the imagination’s unrestrained activity. Instead of determining concepts, as it did in cognition, the understanding must now give shape to an overflow of undeveloped imagined material while still providing an organization akin to that achieved by principles, so that an object can cohere. The resulting presentation, which Kant names aesthetic idea, must strike a delicate balance between expanding the concept in an unlimited way and ensuring that it is still recognizable as a form. 67

“[W]hen we judge certain of its products,” writes Kant, “nature allows us to perceive in the relation of our mental powers an inner purposiveness” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, §58, 224, Ak. V: 350). Subjective and “without a purpose,” purposiveness names, writes Kant, “the harmony, within the subject, of the imagination’s presentation of the object with the essential principles of judgment as such.” This “subjective purposiveness is a purposive harmony manifesting itself on its own, contingently and without a purpose – with the needs of our power of judgment when dealing with nature […]” (Critique of Judgment, §58, 221, Ak. V: 347). 68 Although the term “genius” is often used as shorthand for “a subject endowed with genius,” genius is not a subject. Rather, Kant conceives genius as a natural mental disposition that graces only those who are born with the vocation to produce works of fine art. 69 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 185, Ak. V: 317. 70 However tempting it may be to express the creative process associated with genius in a narrative sequence – spirit breathes ideas in genius, it is the “ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas” that “impart […] a purposive momentum” (Critique of Judgment, §48, 181–182, Ak. V: 313–314), “an ability […] to apprehend the imagination’s rapidly passing play and to unite it in a concept” (Critique of Judgment §49, 186, Ak. V: 317), etc. – Kant’s text resists narrative interpretation. In fact, the productive parties involved in the creative process – imagination, understanding, and spirit – are likely to play the role of grammatical subject indistinctly at different moments of Kant’s account. This narrative ambiguity that traverses the passages on genius underscores the fact that the relationships between imagination, understanding, spirit, and taste are not causal but interactive. 71 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 185, Ak. V: 317.

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Establishing a purely formal comparison of aesthetic and rational ideas, Kant depicts aesthetic ideas (presentations of the imagination to which no concept can be adequate) as the “counterpart” of rational ideas (concepts to which no intuitions of the imagination can be adequate).72 If rational ideas are concepts without intuitions (i.e., thoughts that can never become cognition because no empirical objects correspond to them), aesthetic ideas are, in turn, intuitions without a concept (i.e., sensible beings that cannot reach the unity of an object). In poetry, which Kant singles out as the foremost instance of genius’s creation,73 the sensible/ conceptual and the rational formally expand each other either by giving rational ideas experiential density or by extending the magnitude of empirical events beyond the limits of experience. A poet may either treat rational ideas (such as “the realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation”) as if they were sensible or may extend empirical events (such as “death, envy, […] love, fame”) to a magnitude that cannot be found in experience by “reaching for a maximum and aspiring to completion,” that is, by emulating reason.74 Kant’s ­characterization of aesthetic ideas as the “counterpart” of rational ones underscores what both types of ideas share: their lack of something fundamental that prevents them from becoming cognition.75 Just as in the case of a rational idea the imagination with its intuitions does not reach the given concept, so in the case of an aesthetic idea the understanding with its concepts never reaches the entire inner intuition that the imagination has and connects with a given presentation. Rational ideas lack an experiential base, whereas aesthetic ones lack a concept that is large enough to encompass the imagination’s wealth of partial presentations or “kindred” associations. The notion of poetry that emerges as a result may be conceived as shaping a void that “expands the mind” by connecting it with something “no language can 72

Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 182, Ak. V: 314. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §53, 196, Ak. V: 326. 74 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 183, Ak. V: 314. Treating ideas that can only be thought as if they were empirical, as the poet does in the first case, corresponds to the positive use of the noumenal that is expressly forbidden in the 1787 edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Critique of Pure Reason, 317, B 307). The “example of reason” the imagination follows in the second case by “go[ing] beyond the limits of experience” and “reaching for a maximum” was treated in the dialectic of the first Critique as a negative example, as the very trespassing of their bounds that made reason’s ideas fails. This failure is demonstrated in the three long chapters of the “Dialectic of Pure Reason,” where Kant undertakes a thorough critique of the transcendent in order to liberate the possibilities of the transcendental. 75 Indeed, as Kant points out in the Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment, “An aesthetic idea cannot become cognition because it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which an adequate concept can never be found. A rational idea can never become cognition because it contains a concept (of the supersensible) for which no adequate intuition can ever be given” (Critique of Judgment, §57, 215, Ak. V: 342). See also §57, 216–217, Ak. V: 344. 73



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express […] completely and allow us to grasp.”76 Deemed to be freely delineated forms independent from conceptualization, “presentation[s] of the imagination which prompt[…] much thought,”77 aesthetic ideas “quicken the mind” that thinks them – the mind of the poet, the mind of poetry’s listeners and readers – and “make reason think more”78 by virtue of the sensation thinking feels when representing their form. Insofar as aesthetic ideas expand the way we think, argues Kant, they also serve cognition – albeit indirectly – by inciting us to “add to a concept the thought 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.”79 What imparts creative impulse to the artist is therefore not an unprecedented idea that her ­thinking might welcome. It thus manifests itself to the mind as a different “way of ­thinking,”80 “not as thought but as the inner feeling of a purposive state of the mind,”81 the sensation of thinking freeing itself. This feeling of thinking freeing itself is what the artist’s genius is called to materialize. She must “hit upon a way of expressing these ideas that enables us to communicate to others, as accompanying a ­concept, the mental attunement that those ideas produce,”82 bringing the talent we “properly … call spirit” fully into play.83 (Spirit [Geist], the ­“animating principle” of this creative process, inspires ideas in genius, imparts impulse and momentum, and moves genius to give the ­attunement of the ­mental powers that defines it material shape in works of art through which ­others may receive its exhilarating effects). The c­hallenge the ­artist is called to meet consists in conveying this exhilarating ­expansion of ­ thinking ­ performatively by creating artworks whose modes of ­expression – verbal, visual, auditory, spatial, tactile, synesthetic, and so on – exert an impact that others can feel. Originality enters Kant’s argument at this point. What is “ineffable” becomes communicable by being embodied in a created object that emerges as original. An original work is one that materializes purposiveness (“in language or painting or plastic art”) without being constrained by rules “while at the same time [zugleich] it reveals a new rule that could 76

Kant, Critique of Judgment, §53, 196, Ak. V: 326, and §49, 182, Ak. V: 314. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 182, Ak. V: 314. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 183, Ak. V: 315. 79 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 185, Ak. V: 316. 80 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §40, 161, Ak. V: 295. 81 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §40, 162, Ak. V: 296. 82 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 186, Ak. V: 317. 83 Ibid. 77 78

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not have been inferred from any earlier principles or examples.”84 The product of genius, in sum, begins by itself. Its originality becomes manifest historically, Kant writes, as a call that traverses time and space because it is materialized in a free-standing artwork.85 The “exemplary originality” of genius and her products calls other geniuses into being by arousing them “to a feeling of [their] own originality.”86 Inspired by their own genius to act as that “through which nature [the nature of the subject] gives the rule to art,”87 other artists are impelled to produce their own original works. Kant’s introduction of originality at this juncture reveals something extraordinary in what concerns the organizing principle of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.” So far, we have seen how Kant’s analyses of natural beauty and art insist on the notion of purposiveness. Indeed, purposiveness is accorded an important architectural role in Kant’s edifice of reason – not the keystone, which he reserves for freedom, but a “substrate” or foundation of sorts. In the “Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment,” Kant associates the “nature of the subject” that gives the rule to art to with “the supersensible substrate (unattainable by any concept of the understanding) of all his powers.”88 Correspondingly, purposiveness (“that aesthetic but unconditioned purposiveness in fine art that is to lay […] claim to everyone’s necessary liking”) can only be supplied by “that by reference to which we are to make all our cognitive powers harmonize […] namely, the ultimate purpose given us by the intelligible [element] of our nature.”89 Taken by itself, Kant’s description of genius ultimately relies on the conception of this supersensible substrate, a subjective principle or indeterminate idea he draws on to solve the antinomy of taste that arises in the “Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment.”90 Looking “against our will […] beyond the sensible to the supersensible,” he acknowledges, “is the only alternative left to us for bringing reason into harmony with itself.”91 While Kant’s account 84

Ibid. According to Deleuze: “Genius is a summon sent out to another genius; but taste becomes a sort of medium between the two, allowing a waiting period if the other genius is not yet born (Critique of Judgment, §49)” (Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 57). 86 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 186–187, Ak. V: 318. 87 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §46, 174, Ak. V: 307, emphasis in original. 88 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §57, 217, Ak. V: 344. 89 Ibid. 90 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §56, 211, Ak. V: 338–339. 91 “So we see that the elimination of the antinomy of aesthetic judgment proceeds along lines similar to the solution of the antinomies of pure theoretical reason in the Critique of Pure Reason, and we see here too – as well as in the Critique of Practical Reason – that the antinomies compel us against our will to look beyond the sensible to the supersensible as the point [where] all our a priori powers 85



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of genius focuses on purposiveness, the causality of freedom, which bears witness to the presence of the other and had already been introduced with inspiration, comes to the foreground with originality. The fact that two organizing principles, aesthetic purposiveness and the causality of freedom, collaborate in the making and reception of art might explain why the causal coherence of Kant’s account of genius appears to be disjointed at times. Although it seems to place all the weight on aesthetic purposiveness, in effect originality – which does not exist in nature, only in art – is an exceptional causal notion, just like the freedom that defines it.92 Originality also names an artwork’s potential to insert something new in the living context of its appearance. As we said at the beginning, the subject endowed with genius already embodies a relationship to the other, whether we consider it theoretically as unconditioned subjectivity (third antinomy of pure reason) or as a subject constituted by freedom (“Analytic of Pure Practical Reason”). Kant’s conception of the artistic subject is therefore more capacious than the free attunement of the faculties as it finds its maximum expression in genius. This subject is, again, a member of the natural series traversed at the same time by the causality of freedom and can therefore play the role of the unconditioned. The third antinomy is unique, we recall, because in it the unconditioned lies both outside and inside the series and can thus function as an exceptional cause. Significantly, freedom is the only rational idea that does not fail in the “Dialectic of Pure Reason” because it affects the subject. In affecting the subject, freedom renders possible an immanent conception of subjectivity that enables the third antinomy to mediate between the sensible and the intelligible; this mediation or intermediary – a relationship between incommensurate parties – is the subject itself: “Solely the concept of freedom permits us to find the unconditioned and intelligible for the conditioned and sensible without needing to go outside ourselves.”93 Although in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” the unconditioned comes to the foreground when Kant qualifies genius and its products as original, unconditionality was, in fact, present in Kant’s account of art from the very beginning: “By right we should not call anything art are reconciled, since that is the only alternative left to us for bringing reason into harmony with itself” (§57, 214, Ak. V: 341). 92 The presence of the causality of freedom in the artist’s creation also explains why the boundaries between activity and receptivity no longer hold in Kant’s aesthetic theory. No longer in disjunction, spirit’s receptivity and activity collaborate in genius as she creates an original artifact that carries the potential to inaugurate something new. 93 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 134, Ak. V: 105.

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except a production through freedom, that is, through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason.”94 Freedom is, again, an exceptional causal concept. If one reads Kant’s reflections on art focusing primarily on purposiveness, the “free play” of the imagination that expands thinking does not fully comprehend the freedom at stake in artistic creation. When one broadens one’s perspective to consider the unconditionality of the subject endowed with genius – the subject as encounter of nature and freedom, as relationship to what is other – freedom adopts its full sense of “freedom to.” As conceived theoretically, this is a subject that “begins its effects in the world of sense on its own, without the action’s beginning in the subject itself.”95 As  addressed by the moral law, this is a subject enjoined to act freely  – unconditionally  – in an originary sense. As inspired aesthetically, this subject is able to produce works of art whose originality – whose ability to introduce unprecedented beginnings – adopts a consequential and tangible sense. This sense of originality, informing Kant’s theory of art, may go unnoticed because of its more explicit emphasis on the originality of genius. Indeed, genius is called to originality as a subject traversed by freedom: in genius meets a subject’s (legislative) ethical and (creative) aesthetic freedom. It is through genius that originality manifests itself in the work. As a “production through freedom,” a work of art is original in an originary sense. A freestanding material form, a sensible object that affects the subjects who make it and receive it, this artwork can begin something by itself because it is the meeting place of other voices, silences, and voids. Originality in the products of genius thus manifests itself as a potential to become originary. At once intermediary and beginning, this created object can initiate something in medias res (insert beginnings in the midst), subtly reconfiguring the context in which it now exists as a material form, and the ways in which it will be received. Its materiality distinguishes the creativity of original art from that of free acts. Kant depicts the artist “painstakingly touching the form up”96 and the poet laboring with “prosody and meter” in order to give spirit, inspiration, a material body.97 With originality, the 94

Kant, Critique of Judgment, §43, 170–171, Ak. V: 303. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 541, Ak. III: A 541/B 569. 96 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §48, 180, Ak. V: 312. 97 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §43, 171, Ak. V: 304. “Without this the spirit [Geist], which in art must be free and which alone animates the work, would have no body at all and would evaporate completely. The reminder is needed because some of the more recent educators believe that they promote a free art best if they remove all constraint from it and convert it from labor into mere play” (§43, 171, Ak. V: 304). 95



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nature that affects the subject as would an other, the nature of which the subject is part and in which the work of art now inheres, also comes to the foreground. A free-standing material presence in the world, a coming together of the relationship between nature and freedom and the affection of thinking, the work of art communicates what its author has received as an impact that others can feel.

Bibliography Basterra, Gabriela. Seductions of Fate: Tragic Subjectivity, Ethics Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Basterra, Gabriela. The Subject of Freedom: Kant, Levinas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Basterra, Gabriela. “Unconditioned Subjectivity: Immanent Synthesis in Kant’s Third Antinomy.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29.3 (2015), 314–323. Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Copjec, Joan. “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason.” In Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec. London: Verso, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: The Athlone Press, 1984. Goldman, Avery. Kant and the Subject of Critique: On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012. Henrich, Dieter. “Ethics of Autonomy.” In The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Richard Velkley. Trans. Jeffrey Edwards, Louis Hunt, Manfred Kuehn, and Guenter Zoeller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. 23 Bde. Hrsg. Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902. Kant, Immanuel. “The Jäsche Logic.” In Lectures on Logic, ed. Immanuel Kant. Trans. J. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Lyotard, Jean-François. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.

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Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Experience of Freedom. Trans. Bridget McDonald. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Le Katègorein de l’excès.” In L’impératif catégorique. Paris: Flammarion, 1983. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Kategorein of Excess.” In A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Zupančič, Alenka. L’éthique du réel: Kant avec Lacan. Caen: Nous, 2009.

chapter 7

Narrative Discontinuity

Kant’s History of Religion(s) Karen Feldman

I  Introduction: The Discontinuous Imperative In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), Kant argues that Judaism and Christianity are unrelated, that is, that Christianity embodied an utterly new and distinct doctrine. This argument entails, as other scholars have noted, distorting and dehistoricizing both Judaism and Christianity, in line with longstanding distortions dating back to the fourth century ce.1 The purpose of the present analysis is to investigate the narrative counterpart to Kant’s doctrinal argument. That is, the absolute doctrinal difference that Kant asserts between Judaism and Christianity seems to demand as its fabulated corollary a thoroughgoing historical discontinuity between them. Kant thus narrates a story in which the historical appearance of Christianity is asserted to be essentially independent of the conditions in which it arose. Kant attempts to show that both “the germ and the principles [de[r] Keim und die Prinzipien]” of Christianity, that is, its historical origin and its essential doctrines, have nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism.2 1

Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, provides a meticulous account of how entirely “continuous” and even overlapping “Judaism” and “Christianity” were through the fourth century ce and that a pronounced divergence of historically hybridized practices, beliefs, and identities (e.g., “Jewish Christians”) happened only afterward and was projected backward to the earlier centuries of the common era. In a related vein, Boyarin’s Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018, argues that the notion that Judaism is a religion at all should be understood to be an invention by Christians and only later taken up by Jews ­themselves. Kant’s view falls squarely within the legacy of this invention. 2 Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 39–216 (154); “Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft,” Bd. 7 of Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 23 Bde., ed. Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902–, 6–202 (125). (Henceforth references to Kant’s work will include the page no. of the translation, when used, followed by the volume and page no. of the original, as printed in the edition of Kant’s works referenced here.)

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The assertion of a thoroughgoing doctrinal disparity is crucial for Kant’s explanation of the properly religious essence of Christianity. The task of describing the supposed doctrinal newness of Christianity, however, turns out to be entangled with the demands of historical narrative; and in the brief historical account of the origin of Christianity in Religion within the Boundaries, it proves difficult for Kant to maintain his thesis of discontinuity. That difficulty is encapsulated in Kant’s claim that Christianity arose “suddenly but not unprepared” from its Jewish context (156 [VI: 128]). This somewhat divided phrasing reflects a set of interrelated dilemmas concerning the claims for the doctrinal and historical newness of Christianity, and Kant’s rendition of the relationship of religion and history understood more generally. Its wording both acknowledges a certain relationship between Judaism and Christianity, as evidenced by the double-negative qualifier, “not unprepared” – which could refer to either a doctrinal or historical relationship, or both – and suggests a break in historical continuity, as denoted by the adverbial term, “suddenly.” The phrasing thus ends up acknowledging a strand of continuity while insisting on its utter insignificance, thereby allowing the argument of the work to return to doctrinal concerns, precisely where historical and narrative demands interfere with the attempt to sever Christianity from Judaism entirely. In the following pages I examine Kant’s attempts to characterize what he designates “the germ and the principles” of Christianity and show that his philosophical claims are entangled in a narrative problem, namely, how to represent the appearance in history of a supposedly entirely new doctrine. In order to assert the essential discontinuity between Judaism and Christianity, Kant famously argues that Judaism is not even a religion, drawing on longstanding Christian tropes concerning the “external” character of Judaism.3 That claim in its turn rests on an origin story of Judaism, that is, a proposed historical account. For Kant’s purposes, the statement that Judaism did not originate in history as a religion at all corresponds to his philosophical argument that its “principles” are entirely distinct from those of Christianity. As a corollary to this, Kant fabulates an account in which the historical “germ” of Christianity does not lie in Judaism, and thus there is no actual historical connection between them. While Kant strives thoroughly to dissociate the principles of Christianity from those of Judaism by narrating a supposed historical break between them, his attempts result both in idiosyncratic claims about the “germ” of 3

Kant thus writes, for instance, that Judaism’s commands “deal only with external actions” (155 [VI: 126]).



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Christianity as well as that of Judaism, and contradictory gestures toward maintaining an absolute distinction between their “principles.” For the purposes of the present argument, what is significant is that having defined Judaism in this way, namely, as a nonreligion, Kant then has the distinctly narrative problem of explaining how Christianity came into existence historically. For how can a genuine and moral religion, which is how Kant defines Christianity, come to be if it arises out of a nonreligion? Kant’s argument for the absolute doctrinal and historical novelty of Christianity illustrates the Kantian prehistory of Arendtian notions of freedom and new beginnings and their applications in her work to historical events. Kant emphasizes, as Arendt would after him, that freedom is marked by spontaneity. It is unconditioned by what comes before and hence is bound to newness.4 The causality of nature, in contrast, is one in which every event is entirely conditioned by what came before; hence an u ­ nbroken and ­ continuous causality governs nature. Freedom involves instead an entirely distinct “principle” of causality, a nondetermined, spontaneous one that for Kant is grounded in what he called “the pure (practical ) use of ­reason.”5 It is  the condition of morality because only in the sphere of ­freedom, as opposed to nature, can action be considered moral or immoral. This is s­ ignificant to Kant’s considerations of religion in several respects. For Kant, Christianity embodies the principles of moral freedom, hence “moral faith must be a free faith” (146 [VI: 115]). The unconditioned spontaneity of freedom, however, is not only a matter of Kant’s interpretation of Christian doctrine. A certain unconditional character also belongs to the historical appearance of Christianity for Kant. Christianity, in other words, must be historically new as well as historically unconditioned if its doctrinal content is to be as free and unconditioned as morality would seem to dictate. It is a complicated matter to narrate absolute novelty, however. Narrative form per se produces continuity even where discontinuous events are supposed to be portrayed. Thus Kant attempts to reinforce the claim of a doctrinal discontinuity between Judaism and Christianity with a story that, even while remaining a story, is designed to show that there is no direct and essential historical relationship between them. Kant would like his historical and doctrinal analyses to accord with each other in representing an absolute break between Christianity and Judaism in both respects, but 4

5

Examples abound of Arendt’s interest in newness. See, for instance, Arendt’s discussion of revolution in chapter 1 of On Revolution, New York: Viking, 1963; and of action in part V of The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xxv (III: 30).

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continuity reasserts itself indirectly in that narrative. What is more, as I show, Christianity and Judaism both come to be characterized as developing over historical stages during which their most proper “principles” are not consistent with their various historical manifestations. In other words, the divide that Kant portrays as existing between Judaism and Christianity inadvertently spills over, such that discontinuity and division come to be ascribed to the separate histories of Judaism and Christianity themselves. What Kant describes as the essences of Judaism and Christianity turn out, in his account, not consistently to inhabit their historical formations. In the cases of both Judaism and Christianity, as Kant portrays them, “germ” and “principles” do not reliably coincide.

II  The As-If of Narrative Before turning to Kant’s treatments of Judaism and Christianity, let us contextualize the present analyses with respect to this volume’s broader inquiry into the significance of Kant for literary studies. To begin with, the centrality of the “as-if” named by neo-Kantian Hans Vaihinger in Die Philosophie des “als ob” goes a long way toward explaining the significance of Kant to literary studies.6 For insofar as, according to Kant, the noumenon – roughly speaking, an actual object “out there” – is an unknowable X, all our knowledge of the world is thus a matter of the “representations” (Vorstellungen) produced by our faculties of cognition. The unknowability of the noumenon, in other words, means that there is a constitutive gap between our representations and the things themselves. We are barred from direct knowledge of the noumenal world, and that epistemological gap is mediated by our representations. Representation is therefore the crux of Kant’s epistemological enterprise, for which reason his thought is of interest to theorists of representation, including literary theorists. While Kant’s investigations into the operations of representation make him a philosophical focus of literary studies, the Critique of Judgment is in turn the literary focus of Kant’s corpus. Its explorations of the subjective conditions of aesthetic judgment refine the treatment in the Critique of Pure Reason of the centrality of representation to cognition, but with a specific focus on beauty and aesthetics. The Critique of Judgment also incorporates concrete examples taken from art and nature. The discussion of hypotyposis

6

Hans Vaihinger, System der theoretischen, praktischen und religiösen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus, mit einem Anhang über Kant und Nietzsche, Berlin: Reuther, 1911.



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in section 59 of the Critique of Judgment is paradigmatic.7 In the context of exploring why beauty is taken to be a symbol of morality, Kant describes how supersensible ideas that exceed experience, such as immeasurable magnitudes and a vocation higher than self-preservation, come to be represented in sensible fashion, in effect leaping over the divide between the supersensible and sensible realms. The leap from supersensible to sensible by way of hypotyposis has implications for the leap from noumenon to representation. It suggests that figurality, as in the instance of hypotyposis, is one way to understand the operations of cognition – another boon to scholars and theorists of literature. Kant can be seen to render figurality, representation, and operations of imagination – quintessential themes in literary studies – central topics of philosophy. The epistemological-representational conundrum that makes Kant central to literary studies pertains also to theories of history, as shown in Kant’s essay “On the Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” When considering the production of historiography, Kant is drawn into examinations of historical representation and its narrative conditions – but also into considerations of representation’s narrative cousins, fictionalization and fabulation. For insofar as worldly events are temporal instantiations of the noumenal idea of freedom, their representation involves a narrative dimension that mediates the epistemological gap in “as if” fashion. In “Idea of a Universal History” the question is raised regarding how we might represent to ourselves the mass of events that make up the history of humankind.8 As Kant comes to explain, by means of the idea of progress we are able to conceive of human history as a coherent whole. The idea of progress comes from reason rather than from empirical knowledge or concepts of understanding. Indeed one of reason’s functions, as explained in the “Analytic of the Sublime” of the Critique of Judgment, is precisely to conceive unimaginable – because immeasurable – extensions, sequences, or wholes (e.g., the whole temporal extension of history, or the infinite sequence of numbers) as if these could be objectified, unified, and grasped as a whole. In addition, unlike numbers or lines, the events of humankind are an incomprehensible, utterly disordered mass of data that, without the application of reason’s idea of progress, cannot be rendered into a coherent sequence. 7

See Rüdiger Campe, “Vor-Augen-stellen: Über den Rahmen rhetorischer Bildgebung,” in Poststrukturalismus: Herausforderung an die Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Gerhard Neumann, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997, 208–225; and Rodolphe Gasché, “Some Reflections on the Notion of Hypotyposis in Kant,” Argumentation 4.1 (1990), 85–100. 8 Immanuel Kant, “On the Idea of Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, 41–54; Immanuel Kant, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht,” 8: 385–411.

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We see the progress of humankind, however, only in an “as-if” fashion. Progress as such is not visible but instead an interpretive lens imposed upon the data of history. We bring the concept of progress to the events of humankind, thanks to reason, and indeed for Kant we must see history according to a concept if we are to conceive of it as a coherent whole. The concept of decline could in principle achieve the same unifying end, for example, but progress provides an effective red thread, actually furthering progress, according to Kant (“Idea,” p. 52). Whether it is a story of decline or progress, however, the principles of coherent historical narrative are not far removed from those of literary narrative. Hence it has been argued that the historical appearance of the genre of the novel was an aesthetic condition of the emergence of universal history.9 Historiography thus belongs to the constellation that connects Kant to literary studies of narrative and theories of representation. What holds events together in a narrative is something other than the events themselves, taken as individual data points, because the connections between events are not directly visible but always only represented or implied. The representation of narrative connection takes various forms. There is on the one hand an overall trajectory that sustains a large-scale narrative connective thread – with the concept of decline, progress, or some other overarching, plot-like principle that explains the course of historical events. On the other hand, events within a narrative are represented as connected one by one. Causality is ascribed to individual events, explaining those events as a sequence of occurrences related to each other. For both of these principles of connection – the large-scale emplotment and the one-to-one sequence – discontinuity is troubling. The connection by overarching trajectory brooks no discontinuity, because the overarching plot or trajectory connects the narrative as a coherent whole. The one-by-one principle of causal connection permits discontinuity, but at the risk of arbitrariness and incoherence. For modern historical narrative, the deus ex machina – even if no actual “deus” or agential external factor is invoked – is not a comfortable narrative device.

III  “Merely Statutory” Judaism Kant’s attempts at producing a historical narrative that asserts an absolute discontinuity between both “the germ and the principles” of Judaism and Christianity evoke the dilemmas just described concerning the narration 9

See for instance Daniel Fulda, Wissenschaft Aus Kunst: Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen Geschichtsschreibung 1760–1860, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996.



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of novelty and the representation of historical discontinuity. With regard to the essential doctrinal disconnection that Kant asserts in Religion within the Boundaries between Judaism and Christianity, what is first significant for the present argument is Kant’s assertion that Judaism is not a religion. Kant’s argument is replete with problematic claims about “the principles” of Judaism. In order to reinforce its noncoincidence with Christianity, Kant turns to a brief speculation on the origins of Judaism, in order to explain what he qualifies as its exclusively political germ. He makes the famous claim that “the Jewish faith, as originally established, was only a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state” (154 [VI: 125], emphasis added), a constitutional theocracy whose constitution was not religious per se. The descriptions of priestly responsibilities in Leviticus illustrate what Kant calls Judaism’s “aristocracy of leaders.” The point is to establish that Judaism is a political formation: a set of laws binding on a particular community. This origin story of Judaism supports Kant’s claim for the novelty of Christian doctrine, for it renders Christianity a “real” religion, in stark contrast to the “merely statutory laws” that define Judaism.10 Kant’s claim that Judaism is not a religion can be seen to rest not on the origin story he briefly narrates, but on longstanding Christian tropes. The Jewish commandments are said to be “directed simply and solely to external observance” (155 [VI: 126]). Arguing that “they deal only with external actions,” Kant concludes that the commandments that govern Judaism lack the inward quality of a truly “moral disposition” that is essential to true religion (155 [VI: 126]). Instead, such “external” commandments are akin to laws that states impose, hence they are “statutory” rather than religious. Other reasons that Kant cites for viewing Judaism as something other than a religion pertain to the kinds of consequences that it projects. The worldliness of Jewish commandments, that is, their concrete prescriptions for specific behaviors, is underscored by Kant to argue that Judaism was never a religion proper but instead a statutory arrangement. Kant claims that because the consequences that Judaism proclaims, whether for fulfilling commandments or failing to do so, are consequences “in this world,” Judaism cannot be considered a genuine religion which, on his 10

The present essay deals with “Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason” and the logical and narrative components of that essay’s treatment of Jews and Judaism. This treatment contrasts with Kant’s reference in the Critique of Judgment to the sublimity of the commandment against graven images in the Hebrew Bible, an anomalous instance in Kant of historical and aesthetic evidence of the predisposition toward morality in human nature. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 156; Kritik der Urteilskraft, V: 167–484 (274).

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definition, requires a faith in the visitation of consequences in a future life beyond this world (155 [VI: 126]). Although Kant grants that “the Jews too must have had a faith in a future life, hence had their heaven and hell,” his assertion that, nonetheless, “the lawgiver of this people, though portrayed as God himself, did not wish to show the least consideration for a future life,” constitutes for Kant “an indication that his intention was to found only a political and not an ethical community” (155 [VI: 126, emphasis added). Kant further notes that the rewards and punishments that appear in Jewish Scripture are of the sort that befall people in their worldly lives (i.e., various forms of prosperity and destruction), implying thereby that, according to a Jewish ­perspective, we would not know in any particular moment of joy or suffering whether we are being rewarded or punished by God, or rather experiencing the happenstances of human life. The absence of any obvious connection in Judaism – in Kant’s rendition of it – between our actions and what will happen to us after we die as a result of them is, on his view, a sign that Judaism is not per se moral. Although Kant highlights the moments in Jewish Scripture in which it is said that for certain transgressions, punishments will also be visited on subsequent generations, this also would not be moral, in Kant’s assessment, because it would include punishing the innocent. The threat to subsequent generations, Kant further remarks, is indeed effective for producing obedience (155 [VI: 126]). However, obedience to an external authority is precisely not the essence of morality in Kant’s own account. Morality instead requires a respect for duty, a free submission to duty, not out of obedience but out of an autonomous, rational recognition of its goodness. In that respect obedience runs counter to the essence of morality. For this reason, Kant suggests that a god who wills obedience to commands that do not produce moral improvement (defined in Kantian terms) is not a moral god. A moral god, and a corresponding concern for a moral disposition, however, are required for religion (155 [VI: 126]). According to Kant, “pure” Judaism has no sense of virtue per se, does not command its adherents to an improved moral attitude, and by implication Jewish Scripture does not represent God as moral (156 [VI: 128]). Kant’s requirement that a genuine religion have a moral god, one concerned with moral attitude, leads him to a striking and strange conclusion: A moral polytheism would be more properly “religious” than Judaism (156 [VI: 127]), the first – original and foundational – monotheistic religion. As others have observed, Kant thereby follows a Christian – and specifically Protestant – trope in which the “worldliness,” “obedience,” and “externality” of Judaism render it not



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properly moral. For all of the reasons noted, Kant writes that “Judaism as such, taken in its purity, entails absolutely no religious faith” (155 [VI: 126]). This declaration, of course, does not comport with multitudinous doctrinal components, interpretations, and historical movements within Judaism. It is nonetheless crucial for Kant’s assertion of Christianity’s novelty, for Kant’s argument turns on “faith alone” as the very definition of religion, in line with a Protestant emphasis. Outward practice is in this context superfluous to “moral religion” in Kant’s model, which requires autonomy rather than obedience. His descriptions of Judaism provide a basis for numerous claims that anti-Semitism is a central feature of Kant’s thought and German Idealism.11 For Paul Lawrence Rose there is something distinctly German linking the German revolutionary mentality and German anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism, according to Rose, universally derives from a resentment of Jews as a distinct, chosen, separate people. Within German philosophy, however, that seeming separateness rendered Jews “somehow morally ‘against humanity’ because they suffered from a defect of truly human feelings, notably love and freedom.”12 David Mackie examines in detail how Judaism exemplified heteronomy for Kant, explaining that Kant “attempted to remove Christianity’s Judaic foundations” for fear that it would otherwise suffer from a Jewish “scriptural infection” and “contagion.”13 Mackie also writes that Kant fabricated a pseudotheological, “immutable” version of Christianity “whose construction seems to depend on its oppositional correlation to a fantasized image of a Jewish national character.”14 Of course, Kant is not original in this attempt. The description of Judaism as a religion of sheer obedience, external commandment, and ultimately as not a proper religion is a classic, and classically problematic, trope. This trope, as David Nirenberg has exhaustively detailed, belongs to 11

12 13 14

For discussions of anti-Semitism in Kant, see among others Micha Brumlik, “Kants Theorie des Judentums,” in Micha Brumlik, Deutscher Geist und Judenhass, Munich: Luchterhand, 2000; Jacob Katz, “Kant and Judaism,” Tarbiz 41 (1971), 219–237 (Hebrew); George Y. Kohler, “Against the Heteronomy of Halakhah: Hermann Cohen’s Implicit Rejection of Kant’s Critique of Judaism,” Dine Israel 32 (2018), 189–209; Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner AntiSemitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003; Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 22–74; Nathan Rotenstreich, The Recurring Patterns, New York: Horizon Press, 1964, 23–47. Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism, xvi. Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew, 25, 31, 36. Mack, German Idealism and the Jew, 35.

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the Pauline and Lutheran theological legacy, out of which Kant’s thought develops. Nirenberg emphasizes the strategic uses of anti-Jewish tropes – for example, insofar as Luther indicts Roman Catholicism with his invectives against Jews.15 For this reason, Nirenberg explains, Kant tries “to translate Saint Paul’s distinctions (between inner and outer circumcision, between hearers and doers of the law) into the secular language of philosophy.”16 Kant thus belongs to a lineage of theologians who “discovered the difficulty, in this world, of fully overcoming law, letter, and other categories stigmatized as ‘Judaizing’. … They had tried to contain those difficulties by pouring concepts associated with law and the material world into Jewish vessels.”17 In effect Nirenberg deemphasizes the specificity of the anti-Judaism that Mackie and Rose ascribe to German Idealism, instead conceiving of it as the repetition of a trope whose history includes the confusion of literal Jews with a strategically deployed representation of Judaism. Nathan Rotenstreich’s analysis in the less-known The Recurring Pattern: Studies in Anti-Judaism in Modern Thought examines the connection of Judaism to philosophy’s attitude toward historical reality in a vein that is relevant to the present argument. He ascribes to Kant very little interest in historical thinking and its presuppositions; Kant is said to take up “traditional views” on Judaism as it pertained to historical reality rather than attempting to formulate a genuine historical thesis.18 In other words, “Kant’s approach to historical religions was not historical.”19 Rather, for Kant historical religions “served as illustrations of theoretical possibilities.”20 The topic of the anti-Semitism that can be understood to determine the relationship of Judaism to Christianity, Protestantism, and German Idealism in general has been covered at length in the previously mentioned works and elsewhere. For the purposes of the present argument, what is significant is that having defined Judaism in this way, that is, as a nonreligion, Kant then has an unacknowledged narrative problem in explaining how moral Christianity came into historical existence. For how does a genuine, universal, and moral religion, which is how Kant 15

David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, New York: Norton, 2013, 251–263. Rose characterizes Luther’s hatred of Jews as “specifically German,” pointing to “German lineaments” including “self-pity, feelings of victimization, xenophobia, paranoia, the condemnation of the hated as the haters” (Revolutionary Antisemitism, 8). 16 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 393. 17 Ibid., 394. 18 Rotenstreich, Recurring Pattern, 14. 19 Ibid., 15. 20 Ibid., 15.



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defines Christianity, come to be? What is the proper narrative strategy for describing something that is supposed to be utterly disconnected from the context out of which it came?

IV  “From a Judaism Such as This” The foregoing sections have laid out in detail the reasons for which Kant claims that Judaism is not a proper religion. In contrast, he considers Christianity not only a religion but the true religion. In that regard there is, in Kant’s rendition, an essential doctrinal discontinuity between Judaism and Christianity, a difference between a political formation and a proper religion based on Christian faith and rational morality. Their supposed utter difference, a thoroughgoing discontinuity between them, raises questions about the historical connection between them. The claim for a religious-theological discontinuity makes for a complicated narrative of any historical connection between Judaism and Christianity. Nonetheless, in the context of actual historical events it is impossible for even Kant to deny, at a minimum, the bare historical contiguity between Judaism and the origins of Christianity. Kant’s narrative solution to maintaining the thesis of discontinuity between them is to state that Christianity arose in the context of Judaism but with no actual relationship to “Judaism as such, taken in its purity” (155/6: 126). In other words, Christianity is said to have sprung quasispontaneously out of its historical context. Within the history of human existence it represents an unprecedented step toward a moral existence; and its revolutionary character is defined precisely by its lack of relationship to Judaism. Thus Kant writes, “it is apparent, first of all, that the Jewish faith stands in absolutely no essential connection” with Christianity, “even though it immediately preceded it and provided the physical occasion [die physische Veranlassung] for the founding of this church (the Christian)” (154/6: 125). Here Kant acknowledges the “physical occasion” for the foundation of the Christian church but denies any “essential connection [wesentliche Verbindung].” A “physical occasion” is as minimal a connection as one can imagine. The phrase acknowledges a historical contiguity, except it is only an “occasion.” For this reason Kant also writes: “We cannot, therefore, begin the universal history of the Church … anywhere but from the origin of Christianity, which, as a total abandonment of the Judaism in which it originated, grounded on an entirely new principle, effected a total revolution in doctrines of faith” (156/6: 127). Christianity, in other words, is its own origin, “a total revolution,” “a total abandonment of Judaism,” and it has no beginning apart from itself.

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The claim for a break between a Judaism “taken in its purity” and a “revolutionary” true Christianity postulates a lacuna at the point of their historical relation. Kant’s presentation of the emergence of Christianity, however, includes conflicting descriptions. One description involves a developmental strand. He writes that, for instance, “the history of the church which from the beginning bore within it the germ and the principles of the objective unity of the true and universal religious faith to which it is gradually being brought nearer” (154/6: 125, emphasis added). In this instance Kant suggests a “gradualist” or developmental story of Christianity, in which its telos was already present in its beginning and is gradually approaching its fruition, but earlier stages were not yet embodiments of “true” religion. This fits with Kant’s formulation in the universal history essay of the necessity of an idea of progress in composing a history of humankind. The gradualism that Kant ascribes to the arc of Christianity, however, undermines the “purist” description of Christianity as essentially and historically true and universal. In stating that Judaism provides the “physical occasion” of the origin of Christianity, Kant concedes a historical relationship, if not a causal connection, between them. Given the energy Kant expends in severing their historical and doctrinal connection, it is remarkable that when it comes to the “essence” of Christianity, he concedes that Christianity appears to have historical and doctrinal ties to Judaism. He proposes, however, that these seeming ties are not genuine connections. Instead he argues that Christianity’s founders strategically pointed to continuity as part of a plan to make the newer religion more appealing: The care that the teachers of Christianity take, and may even have taken from the very beginning, to link it to Judaism with a connecting strand, in wishing to have the new faith regarded as only a continuation of the old one which contains all its events in prefiguration, shows all too clearly that their only concern in this matter is, and was, about the most apt means of introducing a pure moral religion in place of an old cult to which the people were much too well habituated. (156) Die Mühe, welche sich die Lehrer des [Christenthums] geben, oder gleich zu Anfange gegeben haben mögen, aus beiden einen zusammenhängenden Leitfaden zu knüpfen, indem sie den neuen Glauben nur für eine Fortsetzung des alten, der alle Ereignisse desselben in Vorbildern enthalten habe, gehalten wissen wollen, zeigt gar zu deutlich, daß es ihnen hiebei nur um die schicklichsten Mittel zu thun sei oder war, eine reine moralische Religion statt eines alten Cultus, woran das Volk gar zu stark gewöhnt war, zu introduciren. (6: 127)

The “connecting strand” could be seen as both a cosmetic and rhetorical maneuver on the part of the Church fathers, or, in Nirenberg’s paraphrase



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of Kant’s view, “a lamentable but understandable pedagogical confession.”21 Even the central notion of prefiguration is described here as a strategic formulation, by which an historical and doctrinal disconnection is said to have been concealed by a strategic and disingenuous claim of connection. In another twist, Kant suggests that there was an actual continuity, such that Christianity did in some sense come from Judaism, with a major caveat. In Kant’s account, the Judaism out of which Christianity originated, and to which it was in fact related, was no longer purely Jewish. Kant writes that Christianity emerged “from a Judaism no longer patriarchal and uncontaminated, no longer standing solely on a political constitution …; from a Judaism already mingled … with a religious faith because moral doctrines had gradually gained public acceptance within it” (156 [VI: 128]). The suggestion is that in the course of its history, Judaism did become more moral in Kant’s very own sense. But this moral component did not belong to the essence of the “cult” of Judaism, and thus was not part of its “purity.” Specifically, the Judaism from which Christianity sprang emerged at “a juncture when much foreign (Greek) wisdom had already become available to this otherwise still ignorant people” (156 [VI: 128]; parenthetical insertion in the original). For Kant, the infusion of Greek philosophical wisdom into Judaism was alone responsible for providing the “moral doctrines” that did not exist within Judaism on its own. As a result, Kant speculates, “this [Greek] wisdom presumably had had the further effect of enlightening [the people] through concepts of virtue.” The implication is that Judaism had had no concepts of virtue before having them imposed by way of a “contamination” by Greek thought. This infusion of Greek thought also had the effect of “making it ready for revolutions” (156 [VI: 128]). For Kant, that Greek element remained foreign to Judaism per se and did not constitute a proper part of its essence. Hence Kant is able to conclude that “it was from a Judaism such as this that Christianity suddenly though not unprepared arose” (156 [VI: 128]). The “preparation” for Christianity in Judaism was not actually Jewish. This portion of Kant’s historical narrative sounds rather Hegelian in its dialectical implications. Namely, it proposes that Judaism itself had been a purely statutory construct and not a proper religion; in absorbing certain elements of Greek thought, principles of virtue and morality were imported into Judaism; and those Greek elements thereafter existed 21

Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 359.

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within Judaism but did not form a proper part of it. This dialectically composed Greek-Jewish religion was the connection to Christianity rather than Judaism proper. The Greek component would provide the point of continuity between Judaism and Christianity, but in turn would be doctrinally (but not historically) distinct from Judaism. The Greek element seems to be the “preparation” for Christianity, but Christianity’s emergence only “suddenly” happens. Complicating matters further, at another point Kant speaks against the notion that the emergence of Christianity can be known at all. He describes how the Romans at the time of Christianity’s origins produced a record “neither of the miracles nor of the equally public revolution which these caused (with respect to religion) … though they were contemporary witnesses” (158 [VI: 130]). Instead, “[o]nly later, after more than one generation, did they institute research into the nature – but not into the history of the origin – of this change in faith” (158 [VI: 130]). The generation in which Christianity arose (referring to the interval between Christ’s life and the gospels) is not actually available to us. What this means, Kant concludes, is that “from its origin until the time when Christianity developed a learned public of its own, its history is obscure” (158 [VI: 130]). That obscure origin of Christianity thus can neither be historically known to be spontaneous nor thus known to be historically unrelated to Judaism. Indeed Kant’s concession that the origin of Christianity is part of an obscure history reinforces this chapter’s suggestion that his origin-revolution story of Christianity serves as a fabulated corollary to the doctrinal argument. If we know nothing directly about the history of Christianity’s origin, then how can Kant be sure that the rise of Christianity was sudden, was more Greek than Jewish, or was abrupt rather than gradual?

V  “The Germ and the Principles”: History and the Narrative of Essence Kant’s descriptions of the transition from Judaism to Christianity, as has been shown, are fraught with complications. He declared that Judaism provided a mere “physical occasion” for Christianity’s appearance; described a Judaism that, once infiltrated by Greek thought, did provide a preparation for Christianity; and stated that Christianity’s origins are obscure. Let us also note that Christianity’s appearance is itself represented as taking place within a temporality of deferral and stops and starts. For Kant portrays the very history of Christianity as containing lengthy stretches that are



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not properly Christian – according to his own definition of the “germ and the principles” of Christianity. He describes the evolution of Christianity as including numerous strands of a nonreligious  – because nonmoral  – nature. For instance, the celibate practices of hermits and monks “renders individuals useless to the world,” which is intrinsically devoid of any moral dimension; sketchy miracles have been proclaimed that serve to appeal to blind superstition rather than faith and moral deliberation; a church hierarchy developed; and, with the appearance of the Orthodox churches, Christendom split, which de facto contradicts the universal character that is supposed to be the quintessence of Christianity (158 [VI: 130]). These historical moments, along with the Crusades and schisms in Christianity, resulted from an “ecclesiastical faith which rules despotically” (159 [VI: 131]). Ultimately Kant opposes to ecclesiastical faith “the pure faith of religion, based entirely on reason, which can be recognized as necessary and hence as the one which exclusively marks out the true church” (146 [VI: 115], emphasis in original). Insofar, however, as ecclesiastical structure has defined the church, and its history has been a conflicted one, the church has not been true to its “germ” nor its “principles.” Likewise when Kant considers the emergence of Christian factions and bloodthirsty “feuds among themselves” (159 [VI: 131]), he is forced to conclude that these historical moments are not part of Christianity per se but instead constitute only a “so-called universal Christianity” (159 [VI: 131], emphasis added). This non-universal, factional, and even violent Christianity, according to Kant, is precisely un-Christian, he declares, because it is erected upon a “historical faith.” The term “historical” in this context derives from an opposition in the tradition of logic between historical and rational knowledge.22 In this context historical knowledge has less to do with the past than with experience. Here, similarly, historical faith has less to do with the stories of the past (e.g., the life of Jesus) than with empirical grounds in general. Kant describes historical faith, therefore, as “based on revelation as experience” (146 [VI: 115]). The faith is what is moral; the empirical “facts” of crucifixion and resurrection are not in themselves at the heart of what saves the souls of Christians, and the narrative of Christianity is inessential. Christian narrative, for example of the gospels, interferes with the essence of Christian doctrine. Rotenstreich points out that Scripture itself is a problem in this context, because the document is a historical record of revelation, which speaks 22

See my chapter on cognitio historica in Kant and Georg F. Meier in Karen S. Feldman, Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.

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against the rational religion Kant wants Christianity to embody.23 To conclude, let us note the remarkable suggestion that for Kant the historical origination of Christianity is not at all coincident with the development of true Christianity – despite his painstaking attempts to describe “the germ and the principles” of Christianity and Judaism in order to guarantee the former’s historical discontinuity from the latter, owing to the moral-doctrinal discontinuity Kant proclaims. Kant’s attempts to fabulate a pure, self-generated origin of Christianity illustrate that narratives of newness embody a specific problem. That is, the disconnection of an event from foregoing narrated events, if it is to be absolute, requires the dissolution of any figural, narrative, and causal connecting elements. There are, however, formal difficulties that arise here, as has been shown. Even if a “new” event or entity is presented without figural, narrative, or causal connecting elements, the very genre of narrative reintegrates it and thereby undercuts its newness, just as the very notion of a revolutionary revelation, defined as faith in another eternal world, cannot arise outside the course of narratable human events.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1963. Boyarin, Daniel. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Boyarin, Daniel. Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Brumlik, Micha. “Kants Theorie des Judentums.” In Deutscher Geist und Judenhass, Micha Brumlik. Munich: Luchterhand, 2000. Campe, Rüdiger. “Vor-Augen-stellen: Über den Rahmen rhetorischer Bildgebung.” In Poststrukturalismus: Herausforderung an die Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Gerhard Neumann. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997. 2. Feldman, Karen. Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. Fulda, Daniel. Wissenschaft Aus Kunst: Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen Geschichtsschreibung 1760–1860. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996. Gasché, Rodolphe. “Some Reflections on the Notion of Hypotyposis in Kant.” Argumentation 4.1 (February 1990), 85–100. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. 23 Bde. Hrsg. Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902. 23

Rotenstreich, Recurring Pattern, 38.



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Kant, Immanuel. “On the Idea of Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” In Political Writing, Immanuel Kant. Ed. Hans Reiss, Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in Religion and Rational Theology. Ed. and Trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Katz, Jacob. “Kant and Judaism.” Tarbiz 41 (1971): 219–237. Kohler, George Y. “Against the Heteronomy of Halakhah: Hermann Cohen’s Implicit Rejection of Kant’s Critique of Judaism.” Dine Israel 32 (2018): 189–209. Mack, Michael. German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New York: Norton, 2013. Rose, Paul L. Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Rotenstreich, Nathan. The Recurring Patterns. New York: Horizon Press, 1964. Vaihinger, Hans. System der theoretischen, praktischen und religiösen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus, mit einem Anhang über Kant und Nietzsche. Berlin: Reuther, 1911.

Part III

Kant and Literature

chapter 8

Kleist Reading Schiller after Kant The Fate of “Beautiful Souls” Tim Mehigan

I Little known in his own day, the playwright, essayist, and novelist Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) is often regarded today as one of Germany’s most important writers. In a concentrated period of literary activity encompassing little more than a decade, Kleist produced works of great profundity that reflected an intellectual loss – the loss of the kind of rational optimism that had characterized much of the German eighteenth century. Kleist’s fate as a writer and thinker was to reach maturity at the precise moment when the intellectual supports for this type of optimism had been removed. A series of letters written to his would-be bride, Wilhelmine von Zenge, in 1800–1801 provides an eloquent record of the crisis that befell the young Kleist as the dimensions of loss became clear to him. The confidence in the rational arrangement of the world was quickly replaced by a sense of despair. It was not that the world suddenly ceased to be rational; it was rather that Kleist understood there to be no warrant for finding his world rationally disposed or otherwise. The letters he wrote in February and March 1801 as a mood of despair descended upon him describe an epistemological crisis – one doubtless felt by many others in his age, though perhaps not with the same intensity. For Kleist, this crisis was linked to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.1 Under his own steam or 1

Extensive work on Kleist’s “Kant crisis” has been undertaken in the secondary literature. Assessment of this crisis essentially falls into one of two camps – those who hold to the underlying importance of the crisis for an understanding of Kleist’s work (among them: Ernst Cassirer, Heinrich von Kleist und die Kantische Philosophie, Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1919; Ludwig Muth, Kleist und Kant: Versuch einer neuen Interpretation, Cologne: Kölner Universitätsverlag, 1954; Bernhard Greiner, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen: Experimente zum “Fall der Kunst,” Tübingen und Basel: A. Francke, 2000; James Phillips, The Quivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007; Tim Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist: Writing after Kant, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), and those who find the crisis to have been overstated or even to be quite unimportant (among them, Peter Ensberg, “Das Gefäß des Inhalts: Zum Verhältnis von Philosophie und Literatur am Beispiel der ‘Kantkrise’ Heinrich von Kleists,” in Beiträge zur Kleist-Forschung, ed. Wolfgang Barthel

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via a source that scholarship has not been finally able to determine, Kleist appears to have comprehended Kant’s clarification of epistemological problems in his critical philosophy as a direct challenge to the rationalist worldview. In a single image from a passage in his letter to Wilhelmine of March 22, 1801 – that of the “green glass eyes” (grüne Gläser)2 – Kleist captured the epistemological problem of property attribution under the terms of Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in thinking. As Kleist put it in this letter, it is not possible to determine if an object seen through these glass eyes has the property attributed to it (namely the color green) or whether this property is projected onto the object as a result of a prejudice issuing in the subject that distorts that subject’s viewpoint (the prejudice arising from the nonremovable green glasses). As a point of entry to Kant’s philosophy, admittedly, this problem marks no more than a beginning, a moment when the epistemological implications arising from the turn toward the viewpoint of the subject first become apparent. But for Kleist it signaled an end – the catastrophic loss of certainty arising from an established intellectual outlook for which he was never to find an adequate replacement. Though the event of intellectual crisis was naturally to lose its sharp edge over time, Kleist was never able to shake off the sense of a collapsed worldview that the crisis brought with it. Kleist’s entire literary output, as a result, bears the imprint of intellectual crisis in some shape or other. For this reason, it is entirely legitimate to view Kleist’s career as a writer as the attempt to find a form of thought that might stand as a bulwark against the shock of epistemological crisis with which Kleist’s early encounter with Kantian thought had become associated. This attempt to answer Kant’s philosophy on some level informs the approach I take in the following. The assumption I make is that the dramatist, poet, and essayist Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) became important to Kleist on account of the conscientious reckoning Schiller, for his part, undertook in his middle years and Hans-Jochen Marquardt, Frankfurt an der Oder: Kleist-Gedenk- und Forschungsstätte, 1991; and Gerhard Schulz, Kleist: eine Biographie, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007). A range of other opinions, too numerous to specify here, falls somewhere between the two. A separate line of inquiry has arisen in regard to the actual source of Kleist’s crisis, assuming that it is unlikely that Kleist read a particular work of Kant’s himself. On this question, the most likely suspects appear to be Kantians such as Fichte (Cassirer, Kleist und die Kantische Philosophie, 1919) or Reinhold(Ulrich Gall, Philosophie bei Heinrich von Kleist: Untersuchung zu Herkunft und Bestimmung des philosophischen Gehalts seiner Schriften, Bonn: Bouvier, 1977), with opinion further divided about which texts of these philosophers Kleist might have consulted or been led to by others. 2 Quotation from Kleist is taken from the following two-volume edition: Heinrich von Kleist: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2 Bde., Hrsg. Helmut Sembdner, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983, II: 634. References appear hereafter with volume and page number in the main text.



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with respect to Kant’s philosophy. While scholarship has noted the fact of Schiller’s interest for Kleist, Schiller’s Kantian writings have only rarely been understood as an important source of philosophical orientation for Kleist in the years following his early encounter with Kant. My aim in the following is not only to review these writings of Schiller but also to evaluate the extent to which Kleist put to examination certain ideas that Schiller developed in response to his detailed investigation of Kant’s philosophy. These ideas took on importance for Kleist in his attempts to continue his own reckoning with Kant and to formulate a possible bulwark against epistemological crisis that, I contend, remained the overriding concern for the author until his early death in 1811.

II When Kleist took his first decisive steps as a writer, Schiller’s status on the German stage was canonical and may already have exceeded that of Klopstock and Lessing. Like Schiller, it was the dramatic medium Kleist cultivated and this same medium that remained the source of his distinctiveness as a writer. Kleist’s early interest in Schiller’s dramas would therefore have to be taken as given. Yet as much as Schiller’s dramas held significance for Kleist as successful illustrations of the playwright’s craft, Schiller’s aesthetic writings seem to have been even more important to him. In a series of extended reflections written between 1791 and 1795, Schiller used Kant’s formulations about art and “aesthetic judgment” as a point of departure to develop his own ideas about the mission of the artist and the type of moral vision art is capable of articulating. Schiller was one of the first thinkers in the context of the Kantian aftermath to have responded to Kant’s moral thought, and he was the first outright to respond in depth to Kant’s aesthetic theories. Schiller was accordingly important for the movement of German Romanticism, which, as Ziolkowski has shown, was ushered into life in Jena in the early to mid 1790s during Schiller’s tenure as a professor of history at the University of Jena.3 While Schiller was not the only intellectual presence in Jena of note during this period – the Kantian exegete K. L. Reinhold and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his successor in the Chair of Philosophy, were just as important – Schiller was the first established literary figure of the age to delve in detail into Kant’s thought and arrive at an independent response to it. Without this effort of a literary mind at constructing a bridge to Kant’s 3

Theodore Ziolkowski, Das Wunderjahr in Jena: Geist und Gesellschaft 1794/95, Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1998.

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philosophy, the age might never have produced poets of such major significance as Hölderlin and Novalis – poets who, in part on the strength of the example provided by Schiller, developed their own access to Kantian thought and its transformative value as a philosophy.4 By the 1790s Schiller had an established literary reputation as a poet and thinker in the tradition of Enlightenment thinking. Early plays such as Don Carlos and The Robbers (Die Räuber) as well as his sympathy for the literary movement of “storm and stress” (Sturm und Drang) had put him on the radical fringes of this tradition and turned him into a sympathizer for the aspirations of the French Revolution, at least up to its constitutional phase of 1790–1791. Schiller’s interest in Kant’s philosophy after this period may well have been motivated by his increasing disenchantment with the course of the Revolution. But there would have been additional reason in Jena to continue such an interest. The University of Jena had become known across the German lands for its more or less systematic dissemination of Kant’s critical philosophy, and strategic appointments such as Reinhold and, later, Fichte further enhanced this reputation. The moment that proved pivotal for Schiller, however, was doubtless the publication in 1790 of Kant’s seminal contribution to aesthetic thinking, the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft), a work that appeared to complete the project of “critical philosophy.” Schiller seems immediately to have held this work in high esteem, though it is also fair to say that he found more and more reason over time to disagree with it. It is that rising disagreement with Kant, I argue here, that would later become of interest to Kleist. Despite his underlying respect for Kant’s philosophy on many levels, then, Schiller did not consider Kant’s theories beyond reproach. The critical position that Schiller increasingly moved to over time arose from the insight that Kant had generally not done justice to the factor of human feeling – in Schiller’s eyes the wellspring of all worth and dignity in the human being. This was no trifling reservation but a clear objection against a set of moral teachings built on intellectually rationalist assumptions about “right” behavior. Once he had understood what he considered the shortfall of Kant’s rationalist project in 4

This is particularly so in the case of Hölderlin, who actively sought out Schiller as a mentor during Hölderlin’s residence in Jena (Ziolkowski, Das Wunderjahr in Jena). Though Schiller’s qualities as a thinker have been highlighted by many critics and philosophers (e.g., Peter-André Alt, Schiller: Leben–Werk–Zeit, 2 Bde, Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2000; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, New York and London: Continuum, 2006; Rüdiger Safranksi, Schiller oder die Erfindung des Deutschen Idealismus, Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004; and Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-examination, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Schiller’s special significance for the movement of early German Romanticism is still underappreciated in scholarship on the period.



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the area of morality, Schiller set about addressing it by advocating a limited sensualization of Kant’s ethics that argued for a more complete account of human nature and a more genuine responsiveness of morality toward the legitimate demands of such a nature. While Kant’s attempt at supplying a foundation for ethics in the Foundation for the Metaphysics of Moral Civility (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785) seems to have been the primary target of Schiller’s critique, especially in his later essays on Kant, Schiller, as suggested earlier, also cannot have been attracted to the restricted account of aesthetics Kant provides in the Critique of Judgment. This account of aesthetics may even in the end have come to constitute Schiller’s principal focus, for much of Schiller’s critical augmentation of Kant’s moral thought seems motivated by a desire to overcome Kant’s guarded stance in that work toward the moral claims of the artwork. Schiller’s project, particularly in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1795), is directed against such guardedness, where his ambition overall is to strengthen the bridge between art and morality at the conceptual level. It is not by accident, then, that Schiller uses the essayistic medium to argue his case for the moral content of the artwork. This medium is crucial for the type of attention he seeks to garner for the moral program he advocates and the kind of general argument about art he wishes to launch. Admittedly, there is no direct evidence that Schiller’s Kantianism had been involved in the intellectual crisis that befell Kleist in 1801 as a result of contact with Kant’s philosophy. It is likely, however, that Schiller was important for the budding writer’s recovery from crisis, particularly as Schiller presented an example of how a literary sensibility, attuned to the discipline of conceptual thought, might be enriched by the insights of philosophy without losing all contact with the creative impulse. While the lack of hard evidence in this regard makes any opinion on the matter conjectural, the indirect testimony relating to themes and concerns in Kleist’s works makes a strong case for influence at least from 1805, when Kleist sought to extend his literary range to include the essay, the anecdote, and the aphorism.5 In the short stories that began to appear from 1808 and which Kleist continued to produce until his death in 1811, the case for influence, I believe, is stronger and might even be adjudged compelling. In writings initially composed for journalistic purposes that do not eschew the kind of prurient interest that fits with these purposes, Kleist seems to have delved into Schiller’s thought in an open and direct way. 5

Kleist’s brilliant unpublished essay “On the Gradual Completion of Thoughts while Speaking” (Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden) dates from this time.

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In the following I set out the contention that Schiller was the source of key ideas found in almost all of Kleist’s narratives. Particularly important for Kleist was Schiller’s attempt to respond to Kant’s moral theory in the essay On Grace and Dignity (Über Anmut und Würde, 1793) in the middle of Schiller’s Kantian phase. Since Kleist had his own reasons for wanting a clear response to Kant, Schiller’s reflections on Kant’s thought were naturally of deep interest to him. The question I raise here is whether Kleist found any cause to modify the position in the crisis letters of 1801 that maintained, more or less, that Kant’s philosophy could not be got around if one were minded to make Kant’s Copernican turn toward the problem of the subject’s involvement in the construction of knowledge. As I have argued elsewhere,6 a first casualty of this problem is the kind of pan-rationalist project in the vein of Leibniz and Wolff to which Kleist had been attracted as a young intellectual.7 That Schiller had offered criticism of Kant’s moral theories, however, seemed to suggest the prospect of disagreement with Kant from a new quarter. This disagreement might be framed in the following way: If Schiller was right and Kant’s moral theory is compromised by its partial view of human beings and specifically its failure to accord full significance to the “sense drive” in human beings,8 then Kleist would have reason to diminish the authority of Kantian precepts over his thinking. Kleist, in other words, would be in a position either to move beyond Kant or, at the very least, shed some of the implicit “agreement” with him that animates the crisis letters and the period that follows them. This agreement, admittedly, continued to be fruitful for his writing since it gave Kleist many of the themes and conceptual dilemmas his works examine. Yet, as Heine was later to suggest, a study of Kant’s teachings not only involved the upside of general clarification and “enlightenment” about human thinking and the need to observe critical limits when practicing it; it also contained a weighty downside in that it abolished conceptual worlds and the old absolutisms they tended to rely on.9 For Kleist, then, the stakes were high: Schiller had found a source of disagreement 6

Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist. An example of this interest in rationalist sentiment is contained in Kleist’s early essay Attempt at Finding the Secure Path to Happiness (Aufsatz, den sichern Weg des Glücks zu finden …) of 1799. 8 This is the term, following Reinhold, that Schiller uses in the Aesthetic Letters for the kind of responsiveness to environment that he considers to be of vital importance for the construction of the aesthetic viewpoint (cf. Schiller, Aesthetic, 15th letter, 614–619). 9 For this reason, Heine reinforced Mendelssohn’s early characterization of Kant as the “universal pulverizer” (Alleszermalmer) by referring to Kant’s “destructive and world-pulverizing thought” which “vastly exceeded Robespierre’s terrorism” (Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie, 3rd Book, 8th and 9th Para [my translations]). 7



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with Kant that was crucial for Schiller’s own capacity to sustain his literary vision and to continue writing. Would Kleist, as a result of engagement with Schiller’s aesthetic ideas, also find grounds for such a productive disagreement with Kant? In pursuing this question in Section III, I examine Schiller’s notion of the “beautiful soul” in his essay On Grace and Dignity. The argument about the beautiful soul constitutes a challenge to Kant’s moral theory and offers an alternative outlook on the nature of human striving and the prospect of happiness and fulfillment that comes into view for human beings.10 In the remaining part of my remarks, I then consider Kleist’s treatment of the notion of the “beautiful soul” in his short stories. My argument here  – so much can be said now  – is that Kleist takes the beautiful soul as a litmus test for a provisional anti-Kantian position in which he naturally has strong interest. If the beautiful soul were to stack up as an answer to Kant, then, following Schiller, Kleist would have discovered grounds for some form of independence from Kant. As a psychological corollary of this position, however, Kleist would equally have found a reason to qualify, if not abandon, the kind of intellectual project on which his literary reputation as a writer of genius had already come to depend. In the Section IV, I consider some of the intellectual consequences to arise from Kleist’s engagement with Schiller’s Kantianism. If the argument I present has merit, the implication that flows from it will either entail some form of reliance on the thought of Schiller that would cut against Kleist’s unique outlook as a critical spirit and “project maker,”11 or an unbroken general adherence to the spirit of a Kantianism whose application would inevitably entail some form of diminishment of the moral independence of the writer.

III “In Kant’s moral philosophy,” Schiller notes, halfway through his 1793 essay On Grace and Dignity, “the idea of duty is put forward with a rigidity from which the graces themselves shrink and which could tempt a weak mind to seek moral perfection in the pursuit of a dark and monkish 10

11

An excellent overview of the intellectual background to the notion of the “beautiful soul” from antiquity to the nineteenth century is provided by Ralf Konersmann, “Die Schöne Seele: Zu einer Gedankenfigur des Antimodernismus,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 36 (1993), 144–173. This is Blamberger’s term for Kleist in his recent biography of the author. Günter Blamberger, Heinrich von Kleist: Biographie, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011.

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asceticism.”12 Despite this polemical opening, what follows is not an outright condemnation of the argument that led Kant to this moral teaching so much as a reasoned contextualization of it, but a contextualization, nevertheless, that does not save Kant from the charge of a peevish monasticism. In the succeeding passages Schiller refers on three occasions to the need to see Kant’s moral doctrines as a manifestation of the needs of the age – albeit an age separated from his own by less than a decade (in regard to the Foundation, published in 1785, and the Critique of Practical Reason [Kritik der praktischen Vernunft], which appeared in 1787). In connection with a pre-revolutionary period noted for its licentiousness and libertinism, Kant offered, Schiller contends, a set of teachings designed to stiffen the backs of moral weaklings and provide an antidote for the excesses they are wont to indulge in. Now, just a few years later and with that licentious age already past, Schiller notes the injury that Kant visited, without fully meaning to, on stronger spirits – those in need of no compulsion to act morally and realize the purposes of higher humanity in line with a properly purposed voluntarism. This is how Schiller states his most telling objection to Kant’s categorical imperative: How can […] feelings for beauty and freedom go together with the austere spirit of a law that is led more by fear than confidence [in the human being] and that always aims at isolating that which nature has unified and that only by awakening mistrust of one part of his being against him is able to secure its dominance over the other part?13

There are two objections in these remarks to the moral strictures imposed by Kant’s categorical imperative. The first is the charge that Kant’s moral law works by inducing fear in its adherents, cowering them through a mistrust of likely excesses, constraining them by imposing a type of dominance over their baser instincts. The second is the charge that Kant’s moral law divides humanity against itself, pushing human individuals into a state 12

13

“In der Kantischen Moralphilosphie, ist die Idee der Pflicht mit einer Härte vorgetragen, die alle Grazien davon zurückschreckt und einen schwachen Verstand leicht versuchen könnte, auf dem Wege einer finstern und mönchischen Asketik die moralische Vollkommenheit zu suchen.” Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, 5 Bde., Hrsg. Wolfgang Riedel, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004, V: 465. All quotations from Schiller are taken from this edition of Schiller’s works and be cited hereafter in the main text with volume and page number. Translations from Schiller are my own. “Wie sollen sich […] die Empfindungen der Schönheit und Freiheit mit dem austeren Geist eines Gesetzes vertragen, das ihn mehr durch Furcht als durch Zuversicht leitet, das ihn, den die Natur doch vereinigte, stets zu vereinzeln strebt, und nur dadurch, daß es ihm Mißtrauen gegen den einen Teil seines Wesens erweckt, sich der Herrschaft über den andern versichert?” (Schiller, V: 467; emphasis in original).



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of isolation, thereby negating the spirit that draws human beings together and fosters community. Though Schiller does not dwell on this second point, an implication of his argument is that Kant had journeyed too far along the road of anti-communitarianism in his moral philosophy. Could it have been this charge that impelled Kant to write his essay On Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden)14 and thereby to make clear his communitarian commitments? Either way, Schiller reveals the social costs that seem to him to be bound up with the platform of “austerity” that Kant’s moral law defends. In contrast to this restricted view, as Schiller contends, human nature is in truth a “verbundeneres Ganze,” which is to say, “a more connected whole,” than Kant, or philosophers in general, are able to allow. The casualty of the failure to value the human whole with its mixture of feeling sensibility and reasoned responses to the world is the prospect that no state of civility will in fact be realized: “If sensual nature were always only the suppressed and never the participatory party in moral civility, how could [such a nature] release the full fervour of its feelings for a triumph that is celebrated over itself?”15 Schiller’s main objection against Kant’s moral doctrine in the essay On Grace and Dignity, then, is this: Kant has thrown out the civil baby with the moral bathwater. In constructing his moral law, Kant has moved against the sensuality of human beings on the implicit grounds that such sensuality will lead to moral depravation. But this step disqualifies this same nature from playing an active role in the construction of the higher state of moral civility (Sittlichkeit). Without feeling, Schiller says, there can be no moral feeling and therefore no passionate motivation to bring about the broader state of social morality in the first place. Moreover, as he also points out, even from the viewpoint of “analytical understanding” (Verstand), sensual drives could not be overcome without perpetrating an act of violent separation (Gewalttätigkeit) on them. Any such violence can only do harm to the cause of human freedom on which Kantian doctrines otherwise rely. Schiller reminds Kant of the injury he does to such a cause when he appears to indulge in a campaign against “the 14

15

What would strengthen such a view, aside from the appearance of the first edition of On Perpetual Peace in 1795, fewer than two years after Schiller’s essay, is that fact that Kant repeatedly addresses what he calls the “dispute between politics and morality” throughout that work. See Kant, Werke in Sechs Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. (Reproduction of Insel Verlag edition of 1964.) Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998, VI: 191–251). “Wäre die sinnliche Natur im Sittlichen immer nur die unterdrückte und nie die mitwirkende Partei, wie könnte sie das ganze Feuer ihrer Gefühle zu einem Triumph hergeben, der über sie selbst gefeiert wird?” (Schiller, V: 467).

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voice of the physical drive” (die Stimme des Triebes) each time a human being seeks to perform an action with moral implications (468). Schiller considers such a campaign not just unnecessary but, with reference to the cause of human freedom, morally defeatist and objectionable. Though Schiller is close to assuming a polemical tone in these remarks, his interest is not to throw over completely the type of morality Kant is committed to so much as to drive home the need to redirect it. Schiller’s argument, accordingly, does not come to dwell on these objections but aims to move the moral argument as a whole to higher ground. The high moral ground on which Schiller’s revision of Kant comes to settle is found at the meeting point of ethical voluntarism and ethical lawfulness. Schiller brings both interests together in an ideal he calls the “schöne Seele,” the “beautiful soul.” In Schiller’s conception, such a soul is not just an abstract value in a taxonomy of ideal behavior but, as the term “soul” implies in English no less than German, a fully realized aspect of character indwelling in a single human being: One speaks of a beautiful soul when moral feeling has encompassed all emotions of the human being to the point where it may put all affective feeling in the hands of the will and never runs the risk of standing in conflict with the decisions the will reaches. Thus with such a soul every individual action is actually not moral so much as the entire character [of this soul]. […] The beautiful soul has no other merit than that it exists.16

The function of the beautiful soul, on one level, is to provide a convincing response to Kant’s categorical imperative. For one thing, the beautiful soul provides a picture of fully sensual humanity, one internally reconciled at the level of the will with its competing inner drives and urges. It knows of no calculus about morality – for example, the need to act in harmony with the dictates of a moral law – but simply acts. In acting, it nevertheless demonstrates attunement to a higher value. This value is beauty, not morality. In substituting beauty for morality, the force of this argument is to render moral precepts redundant, at least insofar as they function as a discrete source of orientation for human beings. Actions inspired by beauty, Schiller then suggests, are those actions that bring “sensuality and reason, duty and inclination” into harmonious alignment, and their chief 16

“Eine schöne Seele nennt man es, wenn sich das sittliche Gefühl aller Empfindungen des Menschen endlich bis zu dem Grad versichert hat, daß es dem Affekt die Leitung des Willens ohne Scheu überlassen darf und nie Gefahr läuft, mit den Entscheidungen desselben im Widerspruch zu stehen. Daher sind bei einer solchen Seele die einzelnen Handlungen eigentlich nicht sittlich, sondern der ganze Charakter ist es. […] Die schöne Seele hat kein andres Verdienst, als daß sie ist” (Schiller, V: 468).



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expression is the virtue measure of Grazie, “grace,” not anything deducible from the operation of moral consciousness alone: “A beautiful soul radiates […] an irresistible grace and often it is this grace one sees triumph over the weaknesses of nature.”17 The beautiful soul, then, has in-built defenses both against the tendency to intellectualize morality in the shape of the moral law and to hypostasize the will with its prejudicial interest in matters of the flesh. The substitute ideal Schiller constructs renders it impervious to attempts to “game” morality from either perspective. In erecting this ideal, Schiller does not mean to revert to classical hierarchies of virtue morality and thereby somehow to “overcome” Kant. Kant’s moral teaching remains squarely of interest, though Schiller appears to contend that the categorical imperative should not, in fact, be thought of as categorical. To this end, Schiller’s overall aim appears to be not only ratification of Kant’s basic moral trajectory but augmentation of it for those “children of the house” who do not require a teaching fit only for the “servants” (Knechte) of that house (cf. 466). In the essay On Grace and Dignity, for this reason, Schiller does not break with Kant but rescues him onto higher ground. On this ground, as Schiller puts it, the beautiful soul knows nothing of its own motivation, and certainly not whether any of its actions should meet the definition of the beautiful. The only thing that speaks for the beautiful soul, he contends, “is that it is” (468). Kleist’s interest in Schiller’s aesthetic ideas and in the notion of the beautiful soul in particular has certainly been remarked upon in Kleist scholarship.18 At the same time, this interest in Schiller’s thought, insofar as that thought constitutes a constructive response to aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy, has almost completely escaped attention. The real reason for Kleist’s 17 18

“Eine schöne Seele gießt […] eine unwiderstehliche Grazie aus, und oft sieht man sie selbst über Gebrechen der Natur triumphieren” (Schiller, V: 469). Considerable attention has been given to Kleist’s deployment of the notion of the “schöne Seele” in his story The Betrothal in St. Domingo (Die Verlobung in St. Domingo). See, for example, Sigrid Weigel, “Der Körper am Kreuzpunkt von Liebesgeschichte und Rassendiskurs in Heinrich von Kleists Erzählung Die Verlobung in St. Domingo,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (1991), 202–212; Wolfgang Wittkowski, “Gerechtigkeit und Loyalität, Ethik und Politik. Kleists Verlobung in St. Domingo und Goethes teilweiser Widerspruch in der Belagerung von Mainz,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (1992), 152–171; Elisabeth Bronfen, Die schöne Seele: Erzähltexte von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann und anderen, Munich: Goldmann-Verlag, 1992; Hans Richard Brittnacher. “Das Opfer der Anmut. Die schöne Seele und das Erhabene in Kleists Die Verlobung in St. Domingo,” Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft für die Klassisch-Romantische Zeit 54 (1994), 167–189; and Greiner, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen. Of these approaches, only Greiner sets out to assess the Kantian background which also serves as the starting point for my own ­consideration of Kleist’s intentions. Whereas Greiner uses Kleist’s stories to gauge Kleist’s ­responsiveness to aesthetic ideas advanced by Kant, my approach is psychological and puts forward the view that Kleist’s main concern was to provide a compelling response to Kant’s epistemology.

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focus on Schiller, I contend, concerns certain argued positions of Schiller which, when taken together, amount to a revision of Kant’s moral theory. By his own admission, the sufferer of a crisis occasioned by contact with Kantian thought had every reason to investigate a set of essays that appear at variance with the account of morality that Kant provides in Kant’s two key writings on moral matters (the Foundation and the Critique of Practical Reason). The prospect of finding grounds to revise Kant’s moral theory, I argue, would certainly have been attractive to Kleist. One sees evidence of this attraction in Kleist’s essay On the Puppet Theatre (Über das Marionettentheater), an essay whose vocabulary and many of whose conceits seem indebted to On Grace and Dignity, as other scholars have also maintained.19 Less apparent is the extent to which Kleist additionally sought to respond to Schiller’s notion of the beautiful soul in almost all his narrative works. So one should not only recognize Kleist’s indebtedness to Schiller in specific works such as On the Puppet Theatre and the story The Betrothal in St. Domingo but also ask whether Kleist’s enigmatic stories, and, indeed, the project of the stories as a whole, draw much of their special atmosphere from the attempt to appraise Schiller’s notion of the beautiful soul and specifically the question of whether such a notion truly answers Kant. Can it be said, Kleist appears to ask, that the beautiful soul really does exist? And if it does, will beauty on its own be enough to supply the missing piece in the puzzle that seeks to lay down a binding rationale for the entire region of morality? If beauty, in the shape of the beautiful soul, covers for the problem of right action, then Kant will have been refuted on a core aspect of his morality. To obtain purchase on these questions, we must now turn to Kleist’s short stories.

IV The stories are a product of Kleist’s literary “maturity.” We must be careful in assigning such a status to a writer who scarcely achieved his 34th birthday. Nevertheless, the stories belong to the second half-decade of a 19

See esp. Paul de Man, “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, ed. P. de Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984; Constantin Behler, “‘Eine unsichtbare und unbegreifliche Gewalt’? Kleist, Schiller, de Man und die Ideologie der Ästhetik,” Athenäum 2 (1992), 131–164; Gail K. Hart, “Anmut’s Gender: The Marionettentheater and Kleist’s Revision of Anmut und Würde,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture 10 (1995), 83–95, Bernhard Greiner, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen: Experimente zum “Fall der Kunst,” Tübingen und Basel: A. Francke, 2000; and Ulrich Johannes Beil, “‘Kenosis’ der idealistischen Ästhetik. Kleists Über das Marionettentheater als Schiller-réécriture,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (2006), 75–99.



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concentrated period of literary activity before Kleist’s death that is comparable in intensity as well as artistic significance with that of Mozart in the area of music composition. In this second half-decade (i.e., 1806/7–1811) Kleist was constrained by the need both to establish the importance of his standing as a dramatist and to ensure a regular flow of income. In the event, though Kleist committed all his energies to their realization, neither goal was achieved. Of the two genres in which Kleist exercised his talent, it was the stories that were devised with more prosaic needs in view. In a period in German literature when the short story had been practiced to rich effect, particularly by the authors of Romanticism, Goethe’s later ­definition of the novella as an “occasioned unheard-of event” (sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit)20 fits best of all with Kleist’s pioneering deployment of the medium in his narrative writing. Accordingly, it may well have been Kleist’s contributions to the genre that Goethe was thinking of in ­arriving at his definition of the novella. On these formal grounds alone, Kleist put an imprint on the short story in the German language that remains ­undiminished to the present. What is “unheard of” in Kleist’s treatment of the novella is not just a set of unusual circumstances that precipitates an uncommon event – for example, the miraculous escape of Jeronimo from a prison cell at the very moment when, in desperation, he was ­fastening a noose around his neck to end his life (The Earthquake in Chile [Das Erdbeben in Chili]), or, in The Marquise of O … (Die Marquise von O …), the decision of the heroine of the story to advertise in the local newspaper in order to learn the identity of a man who, in an event of which she has no recall, had apparently made her pregnant. As singular as these events appear to be, it is also the manner of their resolution that ranks as unprecedented in the construction of these stories. The project quality of the stories, indeed, relates to precisely this intention to illustrate the factor of radical contingency in the world, in contrast to the studied atmosphere of an age of rational Enlightenment that had suggested the potential “readability” of all events that take place in the world. Schiller, as will have become clear in the foregoing, is no straightforward proponent of any such model of rational reading. Indeed, as I have maintained, he only becomes of deeper interest to Kleist in view of attempts in his Kantian writings to resist unbridled rationalist sentiment about the world. Central to such interest is the question Schiller raises about the beautiful soul  – a notion that underscores the importance of aesthetic 20

Cf. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Fritz Bergemann, 2 vols. Munich: Insel Verlag, 1981, I: 207–208.

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considerations in life beyond anything that Kant himself was minded to entertain. If such beautiful souls truly exist, then the categorical imperative will have lost at least part of its significance in the region of morality. Beautiful souls, in Schiller’s conception of them, since they act instinctively out of a unity of purpose and feeling, are always already moral and require no test of motivation set out in advance by way of a moral law. As Schiller pithily puts it, the beautiful soul “just is.” Since it is, Schiller concludes, it already knows how to act. Kleist’s early short story The Earthquake in Chile follows the assumption that not only a single beautiful soul but, indeed, a community of such souls can be imagined. The middle section of the story’s three-part plot is given over to a description of this community, which is spontaneously brought into being when an earthquake completely razes the town but spares, apparently at random, a small number of its citizens. This is the vision of the new community Kleist conjures for the reader: And indeed, in the midst of these frightful moments in which all earthly goods of human kind were destroyed and all of nature was threatened with extinction, there ascended the human spirit itself like a beautiful flower. On fields as far as the eye could see one beheld humans of all classes lying among one another, princes and beggars, matrons and farm women, civic officials and day labourers, convent men and women: who pitied one another, offered mutual help and joyfully shared what they had saved for the preservation of their lives, as if everything that had escaped general misfortune had come together to create one family.21

As has often been observed in Kleist scholarship of this passage, the community that gathers in a secluded valley beyond the fringes of the town after the tumult of the earthquake has subsided puts the reader in mind of the thought of Rousseau.22 The idea of nature’s providential interest in the human being, after all, seems self-evident. But, in truth, the 21

“Und in der Tat schien, mitten in diesen gräßlichen Augenblicken, in welchen alle irdischen Güter der Menschen zu Grunde gingen, und die ganze Natur verschüttet zu werden drohte, der menschliche Geist selbst, wie eine schöne Blume aufzugehn. Auf den Feldern, so weit das Auge reichte, sah man Menschen von allen Ständen durcheinander liegen, Fürsten und Bettler, Matronen und Bäuerinnen, Staatsbeamte und Tagelöhner, Klosterherren und Klosterfrauen: einander bemitleiden, sich wechselseitig Hülfe reichen, von dem, was sie zur Erhaltung ihres Lebens gerettet haben mochten, freudig mitteilen, als ob das allgemeine Unglück alles, was ihm entronnen war, zu einer Familie gemacht hätte” (Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2 Bde, Hrsg. Helmut Sembdner, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983, II: 152 [emphasis in original]; all translations from the original my own). 22 Among those who foreground the importance of Rousseau for Kleist are Oskar Xylander, Heinrich von Kleist und J. J. Rousseau, Berlin: Matthiesen, 1937 and Christian Moser, Verfehlte Gefühle: Wissen–Darstellen–Begehren bei Kleist und Rousseau, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1993.



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reader has more grounds to think of Schiller, for, when one examines this passage more closely, it turns out that it is not nature that is the author of this idyll but beauty: The coming together of the community in the valley is compared at the beginning of this passage to “a beautiful flower.” While the general comportment of this community – its altruism, its spontaneous joy at the thought of helping others, and the easy congress of otherwise distinct and separate social classes – might suggest that a principle of association in line with a “social contract” is being proposed, Kleist makes it clear in the image of the beautiful flower that the survivors of the earthquake in the valley, acting apparently without forethought, aim at nothing more than compliance with the standard of beauty. If the emergence of an ideal community is premised on the idea of beauty, in the final third of the story it is a picture of the beautiful soul that clearly comes into view. The bearer of such a soul in the story is not the two lovers who are condemned to death at the start for initiating a liaison across rigid class barriers, nor is it the prescient Donna Elisabeth, a ­member of the new community, who warns against a return to the Dominican church to give thanks for the gift of life. Rather, it is Don Fernando, the patrician son of the town’s commandant, who leads the small party on its journey into town. As it turns out, this decision to act in fidelity to some higher motivation, rather than on the practical grounds of prudence Donna Elisabeth appears to commend, costs the lives of many of the party, including those of the two lovers, who are stoned to death in a scene of frenzied violence at the end of the story for allegedly calling forth divine wrath upon the town. Despite this, the child from their liaison miraculously survives, and that it does so can be sheeted home to the heroic actions of Don Fernando, who, in a fierce battle with an angry mob he largely conducts on his own, loses his own son but saves that of the lovers. If there is a candidate for the status of the beautiful soul who, under extreme adversity, instinctively does what is right, it is Don Fernando, for it is through his actions that something good is said to emerge from manifestly horrific events at the end of the story (“and thus it almost seemed to him as if he would have to be joyful” [II: 159]). This examination of the question of the good in the figure of the beautiful soul in The Earthquake in Chile, nevertheless, remains incomplete. For one thing, the idea that Don Fernando, for all his heroic virtue, might have acted improperly by not heeding Donna Elisabeth’s warning is explicitly countenanced. As the bloody denouement at the end of the story indicates, the decision to proceed with the journey to the Dominican church was at the very least risky. For this reason, some importance attaches to

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the reaction of Donna Elvire, Don Fernando’s wife, after Don Fernando’s return to the community. With the thought of her feelings uppermost in his mind, Don Fernando, indeed, delays his return to his community, as we are told, “under a false pretext” (unter falschen Vorspiegelungen, II: 159). It is only after Donna Elvire “cries out her motherly pain in a quiet moment,” and thus becomes privately reconciled to the loss of her child, that she is able to embrace her husband after his return and, for her part, affirm the measure of guarded joy that is remarked upon in the story’s coda. We would surely take this joy at face value, along with its implicit endorsement of the beautiful soul, were it not, in the middle of this carefully curated description, for the narrator’s sideways reference to “the remainder of a glistening tear.” This tear is Donna Elvire’s, a lingering effect of her maternal pain. But in its staged quality, in its veiled hint at a self-regarding moral consciousness, does this single tear not undercut the sense of the beautiful soul that the story has labored long and hard to bring about and make convincing? The lingering tear of Donna Elvire gestures toward the ambition of the short stories to convene a tribunal on Schiller’s notion of the beautiful soul. It reminds us that we cannot be sure whether such souls exist, or, if they do exist, whether we should endorse them as an alternative to Kant’s moral law. Not even Don Fernando, who could lay claim to being such a soul, is sure that his actions are morally unimpeachable. And if these actions in turn demand endorsement from a further instance (in this case, Donna Elvire), are we not already in a state of infinite regress? For who will endorse Donna Elvire’s assessment of an outcome where a roll of the dice has spared one child from violent death but cost the life of another? Such endorsement can only come from the reader, who finally stands alone in her response to the narrative. In the hermeneutic space of reading, we are no closer to a “backstop” position that will free us from the infinite regress Kleist’s open tribunal confers on the question of morality. If we consider whether a development occurs in the project character of the narratives over time, we are left equally short of a definitive position. In some stories, such as The Duel (Der Zweikampf) and The Marquise of O …, things come out right and the virtue of heroines, arguably versions of Schiller’s beautiful soul, is upheld. But on closer inspection matters are not so clear. Littegarde’s honor in The Duel, it is true, is successfully defended. But the improbable outcome of the story in which a “blacksouled” villain, apparently victorious, succumbs to an initially non lifethreatening injury, and a vanquished defender of honor, against all odds, overcomes his severe injuries and survives, would only be truly moral if, as



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the concluding words of the story remind us, we knew it indubitably to be “God’s will” – but, of course, we don’t. In the second story, The Marquise of O …, the heroine gets to enjoy a moral victory of sorts at the end, but only because she makes her own move against transcendent morality by accepting that the paternity of her child has a morally flawed source: The Marquise of O …, it should be noted, consents to marry her rapist. Though her pure moral sense is not thereby directly impeached, her mind must acquaint itself with circumstances that demand awareness, as the conclusion of the story has it, that devils and angels may coexist within the one person. Kleist thus reaches yet another open finding on the question of the beautiful soul. Souls may well be beautiful, but what is their use if the arrangement of the world – a world Kleist persistently calls “fragile” (gebrechlich)23 – does not allow us to assert their authority?

V Perhaps the most compelling analysis of these issues is undertaken in Kleist’s masterful story The Betrothal in St Domingo, one of the last stories that Kleist wrote before his death. The story draws directly on Schiller’s argument regarding the beautiful soul, as scholarship has already noted. The narrative is set on the island of Haiti/Santo Domingo (known as St. Domingo in Kleist’s day) during an indigenous struggle for independence. A “mestiza,” Toni, falls in love with a Swiss man, Gustav, who is seeking to secure the escape of his party from the island as the rebellion against the colonizer gains ground. Toni’s father, Congo Hoango, has joined the rebellion and is accordingly not at home when Gustav, under the cover of darkness, seeks shelter and provisions for his party. Surprised by the arrival of what they are obliged to take as an enemy intruder, yet vulnerable in case he is not unaccompanied, Toni and her mother Babekan must find ways of detaining Gustav at the house long enough to deliver him into the hands of Hoango upon his return. But it is Toni herself who soon resists this campaign of deception against the intruder. She quickly falls for Gustav, as Gustav self-interestedly desires, and therefore must begin to plot against all outward circumstances and parties: against her mother, who is the author of the treacherous plan to entrap Gustav, and, later, against Gustav himself, when matters unexpectedly come to a head at 23

The signature phrase “the fragile constitution of the world” (“die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt”) or versions of it occur in the stories Michael Kohlhaas, Die Marquise of O …, and the play Penthesilea (see II: 2, 15; II: 126; II: 421, respectively).

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Hoango’s sudden return to the house. Striking out on her own in defiance of her mother and her father, who are dedicated to the cause of the rebellion and the death of the colonizer, Toni must hope that Gustav can vest ultimate trust in the actions of a beautiful soul. The unusual tribunal convened by Kleist on the matter of the beautiful soul does not just concern the capacity of the human being to sustain belief in an ideal. It also thematizes the fact of hermeneutic complexity conditioning what belief itself must be taken to amount to in modern times. Two substories related by Gustav deal with such hermeneutic complexity: The first indicates how a man can be treacherously betrayed by his lover; the second contradicts the lesson of the first by showing that a technical act of “betrayal” may well be motivated by the reverse intention, the desire to save a life. These substories serve as its hermeneutic reference points for the intimacy of the lovers. They detail the extent of knowledge of the male protagonist of a duplicitous world – the sort of world, indeed, into which he has now strayed. The second of these substories doubles as an introduction to the presence of the beautiful soul, since the lover of this second story, Mariane Congreve, though she denies knowledge of her companion (Gustav) at the scaffold, secures his survival but also ensures her own death. Gustav refers to her as “the truest soul under the sun” (174). Mariane thereby comes to possess modular status as a beautiful soul in the narrative – a status that is passed on to Toni when Gustav hangs a small golden cross, “a gift from the true Mariane” (175), around Toni’s neck to seal their betrothal. Yet this betrothal, in the end, is broken, and the beautiful soul neither successfully achieves the survival of her lover in the manner of Mariane Congreve, nor, of course, does she survive herself. In the carefully crafted denouement, in which, on one side, Hoango’s sudden appearance at the house is balanced, on the other, against the proximity of Gustav’s party and their advance toward what they believe to be their imminent safety, Toni, in accordance with her blended ethnic origins, oscillates in a state of heightened anxiety between the two parties. Her actions aim both to strengthen the belief of one side in the prospect of their deliverance from grave danger and to ameliorate the suspicion of the other side that she has fallen under the influence of the colonizer. Toni’s binding of the sleeping Gustav to secure his survival and thus to placate her father is the compromise that she is led to. Against all odds her plan is successful and Gustav and his party finally attain their freedom, yet not before Gustav, in the midst of confusion about the true meaning of the events he has been drawn into, seizes a gun in a fit of anger and fires a shot through Toni’s



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heart, so bringing the story to its dramatic finale. Toni lives long enough to lament Gustav’s gross misunderstanding of her actions: “Oh,” Toni cried, and these were her last words: “You shouldn’t have mistrusted me!” And with that her beautiful soul breathed its last. Gustav pulled at his hair. Certainly! he said, as his friends dragged him away from her body: I should not have mistrusted you; for you were sworn to me through a solemn vow although we did not exchange any words about it!24

VI In this way, Kleist’s tribunal on Schiller’s notion of the beautiful soul reaches a fateful conclusion: “You should not have mistrusted me.” Thus, even if we assume that beautiful souls might exist in the world, they cannot successfully deal with the task of navigating through the complex spaces of modern life. Gustav, Toni’s lover, therefore agrees with the verdict that serves as an epitaph to the story: he should not have mistrusted Toni, nor should he have compromised their betrothal, whose terms were implicitly sworn on the cross of Mariane Congreve. These were symbolic terms, as Gustav points out, that should not have required any words to vouch for them. Yet in the turn toward the new complexity that Kleist’s stories anticipate, it is precisely words that are needed, because the readability of concepts, signs, and symbols – the currency of the old world – no longer suffices as a point of orientation for understanding. With the demise of the wordless underpinnings of the old world comes the need, in a beckoning modernity, to unify the order of words, the textual order, with the semantic order of concepts and thus ensure that a more sophisticated capacity of understanding  – one fit for the complexity that will characterize this modernity – can be brokered. The task of arriving at an agreement between textual and conceptual order, where the letter of communication will be needed as much as its spirit, would become the core concern of the new age that Kleist’s stories, and The Betrothal in St Domingo in particular, directly anticipate. In spelling out the premises of such an age, Kleist takes his leave of a previous age in which the notion of the beautiful soul is no longer capable of performing the moral work assigned to it. The formal abandonment of 24

“‘Ach’, rief Toni, und dies waren ihre letzten Worte: ‘du hättest mir nicht mißtrauen sollen!’ Und damit hauchte sie ihre schöne Seele aus. Gustav raufte sich die Haare. Gewiß! sagte er, da ihn die Vettern von der Leiche wegrissen: ich hätte dir nicht mißtrauen sollen; denn du warst mir durch einen Eidschwur verlobt, obschon wir keine Worte darüber gewechselt hatten!” (Kleist, II: 193).

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this notion occurs in the late essay On the Puppet Theatre. In this essay the proposition that a wooden puppet can execute a dance of graceful proportions and thus qualify – albeit in an ironic way – for the status of a beautiful soul is put to discussion. If a puppet can lay claim to such a status, Kleist appears to be saying, then its “grace” will be inanimate and accordingly “amoral.” One might conclude from this persiflage of Schiller’s essay On Grace and Dignity that matters concerning morality must default back to Kant’s moral law. But this would be to deny Kleist’s independence as a thinker. Hans-Georg Gadamer was not wrong, after all, when he located in Kleist’s thought the essential outline of the hermeneutical psychology,25 which, in Schleiermacher’s pioneering attempts at grounding a new type of intellectual project in the early nineteenth century, aimed precisely at a unification of letter and spirit, or, as he called it, the factor of language and “the grammatical” and the factor of the psychological.26 If Gadamer is also right about Schiller’s importance for this same thought,27 then it is to an immanent hermeneutics, and not to any kind of beautiful soul, that we must look to square the ledger again between Kleist and Schiller and thereby reestablish a more complete account of the lines of connection that undoubtedly obtain between these two writers and thinkers. In the matter of the tribunal convened to appraise Schiller’s thesis of the beautiful soul, however, Kleist finds against Schiller. Neither beauty, on its own, nor the beautiful soul on its own, as Kleist sees it, ultimately commands respect at the level of morality. In Kleist’s eyes, then, Kant’s moral theory survives Schiller’s attempt at a conceptual revision of it on assumptions that the sense drive must be accorded a central role in the ethical domain. Even before the movement of early German Romanticism had emerged from the kind of argument that Schiller’s Kantian essays prepared for it, Kleist sees past the Romantic interest in beauty to something more intractably problematic – a morality that will have no truck with beauty, and a beauty, equally, that will have no truck with morality. In the vision of the new world that Kleist fashions for us in his essay on the puppet theater, there will either be grace but no morality (the wooden puppet) or else moral consciousness but no grace (the thorn puller). If the thrust of the Romantic vision, in line with Schiller’s thinking, was to imagine a genuine meeting point of grace and morality under the aegis of beauty, 25

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 552. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, 79. 27 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 102ff. 26



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Kleist deconstructs this vision, ironizing it as “the last chapter in the story (Geschichte) of the world.” Without the prospect of an art-led beauty which would also be moral, we are left, if we follow Kleist, with a stark choice: Either we fall back on the categorical imperative and thereby abandon the Romantic understanding of the writer’s moral vocation or else we fall forward toward something far less certain – the open horizons of hermeneutic thought, perhaps, where words and concepts are both needed to provide prosthetic support for the task of living. Could this uncertain prospect be what Kleist was referring to in On the Puppet Theatre when he spoke of the need to undertake a “journey around the world” to a “back door” that, if we get lucky, might just have been left ajar?28

Bibliography Alt, Peter-André. Schiller: Leben–Werk–Zeit. 2 Bde. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2000. Behler, Constantin. “‘Eine unsichtbare und unbegreifliche Gewalt’? Kleist, Schiller, de Man und die Ideologie der Ästhetik.” Athenäum 2 (1992), 131–164. Beil, Ulrich Johannes. “‘Kenosis’ der idealistischen Ästhetik. Kleists Über das Marionettentheater als Schiller-réécriture.” Kleist-Jahrbuch (2006), 75–99. Beiser, Frederick C. Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-examination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Blamberger, Günter. Heinrich von Kleist: Biographie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011. Brittnacher, Hans Richard. “Das Opfer der Anmut. Die schöne Seele und das Erhabene in Kleists Die Verlobung in St. Domingo.” Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft für die Klassisch-Romantische Zeit 54 (1994), 167–189. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Die schöne Seele: Erzähltexte von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann und anderen. Munich: GoldmannVerlag, 1992. Cassirer, Ernst. Heinrich von Kleist und die Kantische Philosophie. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1919. De Man, Paul. “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater.” In The Rhetoric of Romanticism, ed. P. de Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Ed. Fritz Bergemann. 2 vols. Munich: Insel Verlag, 1981. Ensberg, Peter. “Das Gefäß des Inhalts: Zum Verhältnis von Philosophie und Literatur am Beispiel der ‘Kantkrise’ Heinrich von Kleists.” In Beiträge zur Kleist-Forschung, ed. Wolfgang Barthel and Hans-Jochen Marquardt. Frankfurt an der Oder: Kleist-Gedenk- und Forschungsstätte, 1991. 28

“Doch das Paradies ist verriegelt und der Cherub hinter uns; wir müssen die Reise um die Welt machen, und sehen, ob es vielleicht von hinten irgendwo wieder offen ist” (Kleist, II: 342).

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Frank, Manfred. “Unendliche Annäherung”: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Gall, Ulrich. Philosophie bei Heinrich von Kleist: Untersuchung zu Herkunft und Bestimmung des philosophischen Gehalts seiner Schriften. Bonn: Bouvier, 1977. Greiner, Bernhard. Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen: Experimente zum “Fall der Kunst.” Tübingen und Basel: A. Francke, 2000. Hart, Gail K. “Anmut’s Gender: The Marionettentheater and Kleist’s Revision of Anmut und Würde.” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture 10 (1995), 83–95. Heine, Heinrich: Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. Project Gutenberg. https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/zur-geschichte-der-religion-​undphilosophie-in-deutschland-378/1. Kant, Immanuel. Werke in Sechs Bänden. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Reproduction of Insel Verlag edition of 1964. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. Kleist, Heinrich von. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. 2 vols. Ed. Helmut Sembdner. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983. Konersmann, Ralf. “Die Schöne Seele: Zu einer Gedankenfigur des Antimodernismus.” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 36 (1993), 144–173. Mehigan, Tim. Heinrich von Kleist: Writing after Kant. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Moser, Christian. Verfehlte Gefühle: Wissen–Darstellen–Begehren bei Kleist und Rousseau. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1993. Muth, Ludwig. Kleist und Kant: Versuch einer neuen Interpretation. Cologne: Kölner Universitätsverlag, 1954. Phillips, James. The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Safranski, Rüdiger. Schiller oder Die Erfindung des Deutschen Idealismus. Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 2004. Schiller, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke. 5 Bde. Hrsg. Wolfgang Riedel. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutik und Kritik. Ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. Schulz, Gerhard. Kleist: Eine Biographie. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2007. Weigel, Sigrid. “Der Körper am Kreuzpunkt von Liebesgeschichte und Rassendiskurs in Heinrich von Kleists Erzählung Die Verlobung in St. Domingo.” Kleist-Jahrbuch (1991), 202–217. Wittkowski, Wolfgang. “Gerechtigkeit und Loyalität, Ethik und Politik. Kleists Verlobung in St. Domingo und Goethes teilweiser Widerspruch in der Belagerung von Mainz.” Kleist-Jahrbuch (1992), 152–171. Xylander, Oskar. Heinrich von Kleist und J. J. Rousseau. Berlin: Matthiesen, 1937. Ziolkowski, Theodore. Das Wunderjahr in Jena: Geist und Gesellschaft 1794/95. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998.

chapter 9

“Critique”

Concept, Project, Literary Form Willi Goetschel

The concept of “critique” is largely familiar to us thanks to its centrality to Kant’s work. It gained notoriety as the signature activity invoked in the titles of his three foundational works (each of which came to be known by their order of publication, as the First, Second, and Third Critique, respectively). But “critique” is more than a title and more than a concept. In Kant’s work it represents a particular approach to thinking and a mode of writing with its own distinctly literary dimension. With the three Critiques, Kant inaugurated a new literary conception of what writing philosophy must entail, which is an active interrelation and interdependence between form and content  – the very foundation of Kant’s “heterogeneous,” a priori formal and a posteriori representational theory of the composition of knowledge itself. A “revolution in the mode of thinking” (“Revolution der Denkart”),1 the First Critique’s “experiment” or attempt (“Versuch”) to discover “whether we will not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that objects must conform to our cognition”2 rather than, as had always been the practice, giving objects (in themselves) first priority in the order of cognition, entails more than a mere reversal of the “pre-critical” epistemological protocol. A “Copernican” turn of its own,3 it requires the inclusion of the observer as an integral part of the process of cognition, a requirement that, due to the observer’s constitutive role, is self-reflective in nature. This turn implies the need for reflection on the critique’s own discursive and narrative conditions, a reflection that brings about a new understanding of the literary form of writing as constitutive for philosophy. As a 1

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (hereafter KrV) in Kant, Werkausgabe (hereafter Werkausgabe), ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, B xi, III: 22. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the German in this chapter are my own. 2 KrV B xvi, III: 25. 3 Ibid.

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conceptual-representational mode with its own mediation built in, critique presents itself as an act of self-legislation just like poetry.4 Both are free and self-determining operations that exist thanks to the form they give to themselves. This surprising interface between philosophy and literature is a striking reminder that literary form plays a critical role for Kant at exactly the moment his First Critique seeks to put the discursive differentiation between literature and philosophy on a secure footing. Although it eventually established itself as an exemplary discursive form, Kant’s new approach to philosophy was contested from its inception. A few years after the publication of the First Critique (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), Johann Georg Hamman responded with the short piece “Metakritik über den Purismus der reinen Vernunft,” a text that was published only posthumously.5 Almost two decades later, in 1799, Johann Gottfried Herder published Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, publicly raising the stakes for a meta-critical stance.6 But the attempt to upend Kant’s claim to critique as a concept, project, and literary genre was overpowered by the appeal the term gained with its enthusiastic adoption by the early Romantics, and then again – after a period of abandonment that prepared the way for the rise of German Idealism  – by the Young Hegelians. From Karl Marx to critical theory, and up to the present, critique has enjoyed a literary life of its own. Its rich legacy is documented by the many books and essays invoking in their titles the cachet of the wellknown phrase, “Critique of ….” Kant’s critical turn changed not only the way we think but also how we write about the way we think. His three Critiques initiated the project of critique as a mode, genre, and form with a distinct protocol that was to be formative and orient, if not serve as a model for critical thinking. The idea that, after Kant, it was impossible to return to any “pre-critical” form of thinking proved unassailable. This was because “critique” did not simply establish its claims in a conceptually compelling fashion; it also offered a new and more congenial mode of writing philosophy. Kant recognized the transformative dimension of his project and the significance of its creative momentum from the moment he set out to demarcate the project’s philosophical trajectory. But he did not operate in a vacuum. He remained astutely aware of the various writing styles that 4

Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (hereafter KU), A 213/B 215, in Werkausgabe, X: 265. Johann Georg Hamann, “Metakritik über den Purismus der reinen Vernnuft,” in Hamann’s Schriften, ed. Friedrich Roth, Leipzig: Reimer, 1825, part 7, 1–16. 6 Johann Gottfried Herder, Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1799. 5



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philosophers had used, from dialogues to didactic poetry, epistolary writing, aphorism, fictional narratives, and other forms that offered multiple entry points for his own approach. While Section I examines Montaigne’s literary project, which, as I show, serves as a model for Kant’s own work, embodying, as it does, the form of poeisis the Critiques are contingent on, Section II explores the way Kant’s distinctive voice emerges during his “pre-critical” phase. Section III then examines the form and concept of critique as distinctive twin features whose nexus defines the literary form of critique in general, and the inaugural Critique of Pure Reason in particular. Section IV highlights how the historical and political essays Kant produced after the publication of his First Critique, and hence after the “Copernican” critical turn, reflect their literary dimension in more pronounced fashion as they become more explicit about the historical literary context in which they operate. Section V offers a brief account of how critique, construed both as a mode of thought and mode of literary production with a certain style, diction, and tone, gives rise to a legacy of critical thought that can be traced from Kant to Marx, Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, and Derrida, as well as to three recent variations on the theme: Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, and Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason.7 All these seminal works reflect a striking recognition of the critical nexus between critique as a philosophical project and creative discursive genre.

I  Trial and Form: Montaigne’s Essay Kant’s so-called pre-critical phase is a period of experimenting with different genres and styles. Negotiating his position as a modern philosopher caught between the pressures of traditional university teaching and his aspirations to publish as an independent intellectual and scholar, Kant develops an approach to writing that allows him to advance his nascent philosophical project outside of institutional strictures. Through a playful engagement with form, style, and diction, Kant creates a framework for experimentation from which the distinct literary voice of “critique” will 7

Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999; Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017.

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emerge. The unique stylistic features of that voice will inform all of Kant’s later writings. While philosophical authors before Kant, including Christian Wolff and Christian Thomasius, embraced the vernacular when writing in German, their works remained captive to the conventions and rhetorical style of the academic philosophy of their time. Kant, however, showed a great interest from the beginning of his career in questions relating to modes of discursive presentation, language, genre, and style. For Kant, unlike his predecessors, the reader was more than an empty rhetorical convention. Rather, for Kant, genuine attention to the experience and expectations of the reader and the protocols for the communication of ideas became of decisive concern in assessing not only how knowledge could be most effectively shared but also how it could be produced in the first place. And in further distinction from the academic philosophers of his time, Kant looked for models for formulating his philosophical thoughts outside the institutional conventions of academic writing. For Kant, the imaginative and essayistic discursive styles of Montaigne, Rousseau, and Hume became exemplary of a new approach to writing philosophy. While original in their conceptions, all three authors wrote with a distinctly literary flair, suggesting thereby that philosophical thought would not progress without reflecting on the mode and medium of its expression and presentation. Because he is inspired by its centrality to the remarkable reorientation of philosophy by Montaigne in particular, Kant comes to prefer the essay to other literary genres as he develops what will eventually crystalize into the project of critical philosophy. Indeed, Kant held Montaigne – “his favorite”8 from early on – in such high esteem that he recommended his Essais for continuous study.9 Next to Erasmus of Rotterdam, Kant is reported to have said, no metaphysician had done as much good in the world as Montaigne had.10 The essays produced during his early period of experimenting were modeled on and develop the radically explorative epistemological-critical experimentation of Montaigne’s Essais. The decisive nexus of self-observation and running self-commentary that weaves through the Essais, transforming each into a continuous exercise in epistemological reflection on the self and its limits, suggests that language and the literary mode could no longer be detached and independent from the operations of philosophical reflection; rather, 8 9 10

Kant in Rede und Gespräch, ed. Rudolf Malter, Hamburg: Meiner, 1990, 114. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 19.



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they were to be intimately tied together.11 Montaigne’s introduction of the essay as an open form of investigation made it possible to articulate philosophical concerns without the limitations of academic conventions and expectations.12 Read with Montaigne’s Essais in mind, Kant’s play with the authorial “I” in his pre-critical essays becomes legible as an exercise in self-exploration and self-reflection, a Montaignian style of speculative inquiry that returns in one of the last texts Kant was to publish, the strikingly self-absorbed concluding section of his Conflict of the Faculties, which I discuss in Section IV. While occasionally inclining toward hypochondria, Montaigne’s project of self-observation involves anything but worship of the self. Rather, it highlights the incessant effort of tracking an elusive “I” that registers only in spotty and fragmentary fashion in writing, yet is the condition upon which all we say, think, imagine, and do relies. For Montaigne, writing serves above all as a device for self-assurance, literally a bookkeeping that accounts for the various and changing aspects of the “I’s” forms of appearance. Precisely because of the ever-elusive character of their self-divided authorial “I,” the Essais end up tracing the movements of the object (“moi”) constituting the subject (“je”) that continually records them:13 To this child, such as it is [i.e., the Essais], what I give I give purely and irrevocably, as one gives to the children of one’s body. The little good I have done for it is no longer at my disposal. It may know a good many things that I no longer know and hold from me what I have not retained and what, just like a stranger, I should have to borrow if I came to need it. If I am wiser than it, it is richer than I.14 [A celluy cy [the book of the Essais], tel qu’il est, ce que je donne, je le donne purement et irrevocablement, comme on donne aux enfants corporels; ce peu de bien que je luy ay faict, il n’est plus en ma disposition; il peut sçavoir assez de choses que je ne sçay plus, et tenir de moy ce que je n’ay point retenu et qu’il faudroit que, tout ainsi qu’un estranger, l’empruntasse de luy, si besoin m’en venoit. Il est plus riche que moy, si je suis plus sage que luy.15] 11

12 13 14 15

For an illuminating discussion of the critical merits of the literary form of Montaigne’s essays, see the concluding chapter of Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, 3rd ed., Tübingen and Basel: Francke 1993, 305–349. For the concept of the open form, see Friedrich, Montaigne, 312–315 and 327–330. Cf. Friedrich, Montaigne, 307–309. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters (hereafter Complete Works), trans. Donald M. Frame, New York: Knopf, 2003, 355. Montaigne, Essais (hereafter Essais), Vol. 2, chapter 8 in Montaigne, Œuvres complètes, 3 vols., ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat, Paris: Gallimard, 1962, II: 383.

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The inherently bilateral logic of recording the activity of self-reflection proves decisive for Kant. Montaigne calls this playfully associative “style” of thinking “vagabonding”: “My style and my mind alike go roaming.”16 (“Mon stile et mon esprit vont vagabondant de mesme.”17) This roaming or “vagabonding” method is not the result of mere whim but has a particular purpose: It is methodical in that it literally “follows the way” (as the meaning of the Greek μετηοδος suggests) of the mind in writing. Montaigne’s titular concept “essais,” on which Kant will model his own Versuche, thus not only names a new form or genre of self-reflection but indicates that self-reflection may itself constitute a method. Montaigne’s apparently informal title thus aptly expresses the book’s project of selfobservation: that of experiencing and representing in propria persona one’s faculties and their limits, figuring thereby the self.18 Montaigne makes this point by highlighting the programmatic meaning that the experiential aspect of “making an essay” or “attempt” assumes in his writing: As for the natural faculties that are in me, of which this book is the essay, I feel them bending under the load. My conceptions and my judgment move only by groping, staggering, stumbling, and blundering.19 [Quant aux facultez naturelles qui sont en moy, dequoy c’est ici l’essay, je les sens flechir sous la charge. Mes conceptions et mon jugement ne marche qu’à tastons, chancelant, bronchant et chopant.20]

Just as Kant will do in his essays and in a different register in the Critique of Pure Reason, Montaigne examines the faculties of his mind and body by a form of self-inspection that follows, probes, and observes their performance. Montaigne’s essays open up the process of thinking to the wide field of experimentation with radical introspection. They present the labyrinth and laboratory in which the philosopher’s self-observations serve as the means to reflect on the precarious conditions and limits of the process of knowledge production. As Kant breaks new ground, moving from a skeptical position to a critical one, his choice of genre also changes from the essay to the critique – a new concept and literary form more appropriate for his new approach. However, like the essay, whose explorative form of writing, with its distinct literary mode and style, made Kant’s critical breakthrough possible in the first place, the new concept of critique requires 16

Montaigne, Complete Works, 925. Montaigne, Essais, chapter 9, II: 973. 18 Cf. Friedrich, Montaigne, 319. 19 Montaigne, Complete Works, 130. 20 Montaigne, Essais, chapter 26, II: 145. 17



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its own particular literary form, mode, and style. While Kant departs from Montaigne, the scrutinizing self-reflectivity that Montaigne introduced to the practice of writing as the central moment of the epistemologicalcritical project continues to inform Kant’s critical project as a fundamental condition of its possibility.

II  Kant’s “Pre-critical” Essays Montaigne’s impulse to question the legitimacy of the foundations of our knowledge lives on and informs the architectonics of Kant’s thought. The essay remains a preferred form and mode for Kant until the end of his writing career. Many of Kant’s early nonacademic publications carry the title “essay” (Versuch) and they all incorporate some of the crucial aspects of the essay form. They know of no limit or field of knowledge that they would shy from in their insistent but playful exploration of the soundness of the claims of knowledge that epistemological interest and curiosity advance. Their critical appeal consists in the way they approach their subject matter as an issue always bound up with the subject that explores it and which, consequently, becomes one of the objects of the examination at hand. In hindsight, read from the point of view of the Critique of Pure Reason, these early writings become legible as the playground for Kant’s enactment and surpassing of old metaphysical battles  – this in a constructive variation on Uncle Toby’s fixation upon rehearsing and repeating his old battles in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, one of the novels Kant cherished most. But unlike Uncle Toby’s repetitions of past military frays, Kant’s skirmishes prepare the groundwork for a campaign set to transform philosophy from a battlefield into a peace-making project, as Kant’s “Verkündigung des nahen Abschlusses eines Traktats zum ewigen Frieden in der Philosophie” (“Proclamation of the Imminent Conclusion of a Treaty of Perpetual Peace in Philosophy”), from 1796, will suggest.21 From a literary point of view, Kant’s pre-critical phase responds to two separate but interlinked concerns. It serves as a thought laboratory that allows Kant to develop: (1) a new way of doing philosophy that brings Montaigne’s experience-based scrutinizing together with Kant’s own rigorous, academically trained reexamination of the function and purpose of philosophy; and (2) a language, mode, and style of his own that will continue to inflect – in perhaps less 21

Kant, Werkausgabe, VI: 405–416; Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 451–460.

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dramatic a way than they did the early essays but no less powerfully – the explorative, experiential thrust of the later essays. While Kant’s first essay includes the term only in the second half of its extensive title, it offers in form and content an illuminating example of Kant as an essayist. The full title of the Universal Natural History of the Heavens humorously deflates its own initial bombastic claims as it adds more humbly: … or an Essay on the Constitution and Mechanical Origin of the Whole Universe According to Newton’s Principles (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels oder Versuch von der Verfassung und dem mechanischen Ursprünge des ganzen Weltgebäudes, nach Newtonischen Grundsätzen) (1755). The essay is not merely an ambitious attempt to deliver on its promise; it displays imaginative and narrative features that resonate with those of Montaigne’s writings and are unexpected in what at first glimpse appears to be an overly ambitious scientific study. The addition of the term “Versuch” to the title artfully redirects the reader’s expectations, cautiously registering the less assertive and more experimental tone of what will turn out to be the early enlightenment equivalent of a literary space adventure. In a decisive first move, Kant foregrounds the author’s “I” as the epistemic lead character in this “attempt” at a presentation of universal history and a theory of heaven and earth.22 The speech pattern emerging around the “I” distinguishes the work from a purely scholarly discussion and establishes the Archimedean point that organizes the essay, giving structure to a text whose extravagant narrative would otherwise run aground.23 The opening paragraph of the preface alerts the reader to what is to come in this exuberant description of a speculative spacescape: I have dared to undertake a dangerous journey on the basis of a slight supposition and already see the foothills of new lands. Those who have the courage to pursue the exploration, will step onto those lands and have the pleasure of bestowing their own name upon them.24 [Ich habe auf eine geringe Vermutung eine gefährliche Reise gewagt, und erblicke schon die Vorgebürge neuer Länder. Diejenigen, welche die

22

The present discussion is based on “Cosmological Family Romance,” chapter 2 of Willi Goetschel, Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1994, 23–36. 23 For the use of the “I” as crystallization point for the organization of this text see Goetschel, Constituting Critique, 27. 24 Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Whole Universe According to Newtonian Principles, trans. Olaf Reinhardt, in Kant, Natural Sciences, ed. Eric Watson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 194.



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Herzhaftigkeit haben, die Untersuchung fortzusetzen, werden sie betreten und das Vergnügen haben, selbige mit ihrem Namen zu bezeichnen.]25

Kant’s first-person narrative approach to his endeavor highlights the intimate link between the capacity to describe the universe and the synthetic powers of the “I’s” speculative faculties. The nucleus of the essay is section 7 of part II, the somewhat grandiosely titled “On the Creation in the Whole Expanse of Its Infinitude, in Respect to Space as well as Time.” It begins with the following observation: “By its immeasurable magnitude and by the infinite diversity and beauty that shines forth from it on all sides, the universe puts us into silent astonishment.”26 (“Das Weltgebäude setzet durch seine unermeßliche Größe, und durch die unendliche Mannigfaltigkeit und Schönheit, welche aus ihr von allen Seiten hervorleuchtet, in ein stilles Erstaunen.”27) Kant does not stop, however, at this narrative account of the experience of “astonishment,” but rather travels on, making good on the promise to take the reader on a ride through the universe as the narration reaches, in the “Addition to the Seventh Section,” the outer regions of the sun. Here, Kant’s account of the universe soars, turning into an imaginative travelogue that leaves every geographic fantasy behind. The fantastic voyage leads right up to the sun’s surface where the reader is treated to “broad lakes of fire,” “raging storms,” and “burnt-out rocks that stretch their terrible peaks out of […] flaming maws.”28 The demythologization of that heavenly body most laid claim to by lofty speculations on humanity’s place in the order of the universe is a task Kant can realize only by opposing an old metaphysics to a new form of poetics that entrancingly disenchants. It is no coincidence, then, that the essay poses the question: “Who can show us the border where well-founded probability ends and arbitrary fictions begin?”29 (“Wer zeiget uns die Grenze, wo die gegründete Wahrscheinlichkeit aufhöret, und die willkührlichen Erdichtungen anheben?”30) Concluding his wild imaginative ride through the universe with a final meditation, Kant returns to Earth by regaining firm footing in Montaignian fashion; he provocatively observes: We are not even properly familiar with what a human being actually is, even though consciousness and our senses should inform us about it; how 25

Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels in Kant, Werkausgabe, I: 227. Kant, Universal Natural History, 260. Kant, Werkausgabe, I: 326. 28 Kant, Universal Natural History, 277; Werkausgabe, I: 350f. 29 Ibid., 306. 30 Kant, Werkausgabe, I: 393. 26 27

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Shot through with captivating enthusiasm and embellished with poetry from authors such as Addison, Pope, and Haller, Kant’s first nonacademic publication betrays all the ambition and aspiration of a literary author’s debut work. In the wake of this inaugural attempt, which relies solely on the narrative power of its authorial “I,” Kant’s essays assume a focused quality that prepares the way for the modern notion of the essay as a concise literary form characterized by a pointedly self-reflective thrust with an epistemological-critical edge. It is not until a few years later that the term “essay” returns in the titles of Kant’s publications. We see this occur in An Attempt at Some Reflections on Optimism33 (Versuch einiger Betrachtungen über den Optimismus [1759]),34 Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy35 (Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen [1763]), and the anonymous “Essay on the Maladies of the Head”36 (“Versuch der Krankheiten des Kopfes” [1764]).37 While the first essay serves as part of a small brochure in which Kant “announces his lectures in the coming semester”38 (“wodurch er zugleich seine Vorlesungen auf das vervorstehende halbe Jahr ankündigt”),39 the second appears as a freestanding publication, and the third essay appears in the Königsbergsche Gelehrte und Politische Zeitungen, edited by Hamann. Although this last essay appeared anonymously, as was common for newspaper articles at the time, the author’s identity was no secret to Königsberg’s reading public. Whereas the first essay offers a miniature philosophical study on optimism intended to draw the attention of future students, and the second speaks to academically schooled readers about the necessity of integrating 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Kant, Universal Natural History, 307 (translation modified). Kant, Werkausgabe, I: 395. Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. and ed. David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 67–76. Kant, Werkausgabe, II: 585–594. Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, 203–241. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden, trans. Holly Wilson, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 63–77. Kant, Werkausgabe, II: 887–901. Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, 67. Kant, II: 585.



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nonacademic modes of reasoning and writing into philosophical arguments, the third essay explores with satirical wit the need to rethink the taxonomy of reason and madness  – a particularly daunting proposition given the essay’s own suggestion that the standards for defining a wise man as someone free from the blinding powers of passion and unreason appear beyond reach. Following the lead of the next great essayist in the auto-descriptive tradition founded by Montaigne, Rousseau, the essay highlights the pathologizing effects of a cultural regime that prevents human existence from satisfying its natural needs. While acknowledging the potentially interminable dialectic that any claim about the “first” basis of reason must entail, Kant’s essay nonetheless vexes the unexamined equation of reason with normativity, suggesting instead that we have yet to understand how to constitute reason without falling prey to the madness that too quickly gains the upper hand whenever we assert a privileged claim to reason. The two most prominent essays of the pre-critical phase, however, are the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [1764]) and the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik [1766]). They introduce a more creative and open approach to philosophical problems, including aesthetics in the case of the first essay and metaphysics in the case of the second. The essayistic character of the Observations showcases the relation between observer and observed as the nexus of all matters aesthetic. Kant’s “observations” suggest that any subject is always a product of the position of the observer and the process of observing; the subject’s recourse to self-reflective introspection regarding both of these factors can only be articulated through the mediation of literary, imaginative writing, just as any observation is predicated on the form of the presentation that formulates it. Kant’s Observations embrace the literary expression of experience as a constitutive feature of subjectivity itself. With Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant goes a step further. Here, the essay’s explorative, indeed performative, aspect assumes a decisive role. In response to Moses Mendelssohn’s review of the Dreams, Kant points to the essay’s specifically literary intention to work a needed “cathartic” effect on its reader: Concerning the supply of knowledge at public disposal it is not lightheaded fickleness but sustained examination that has led me to find nothing more advisable than to remove the cloak of dogma and to deal with the preexisting insights skeptically, which admittedly is useful only in a negative way (stultitia caruisse) but prepares the way for positive uses; for

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The most enigmatic, provocative, and satirical of Kant’s early writings, the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer presents a crucial turning point in the history of literary forms of philosophical writing.41 Simultaneously satirical and self-reflective, the tone of spirited whimsy that pervades this essay gives it its particular form and edge. Its wit and exuberance set the stage for the self-reflective style of inquiry that will become the trademark of Kant’s epistemological-critical writing. With his first essay, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, Kant had taken his readers on a journey through space that was, however, limited to the realm of the imaginary. In Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant takes his readers on a journey into the unknown region between knowledge and imagination instead  – an exploration that attempts to establish the protocol for the investigation of the frontier between sound reason and that which escapes it. The essay registers the intuitions that the project of the Critique of Pure Reason will articulate in a more definitive way. Thus, while lacking the full conceptual apparatus that Kant will eventually deploy in the Critique of Pure Reason, the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer nevertheless represents, on a meta-critical level, the transformative shift in Kant’s writing toward a full-fledged critical approach. Remarkably, it is by way of the literary mode of the essay that Kant performs the critical advance beyond both ideal and skeptical suppositions of self-evidence required to enable his general critique of unmediated knowledge. The essay’s self-reflectively explorative playfulness will eventually inform Kant’s pivotal turn away from the conventions of

40 41

Immanuel Kant, Briefwechsel, ed. Otto Schöndörffer and Rudolf Maler, 3rd ed., Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1986, 52ff. For a detailed discussion of the lines of argument that weave through the text see the chapter, “Double Satire and Double Irony,” in Goetschel, Constituting Critique, 89–114.



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academic philosophical discourse toward the novel conception of critique and a correspondingly critical method and form.42 Echoing Montaigne’s skepticism about the intellectual merits of academic scholarship, an unreservedly cheeky Kant, writing under the cloak of anonymity, observes in the opening pages of the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer: The methodological babble of the university is often just an arrangement in which questions that are difficult to solve are evaded through variations in the meanings of words, simply because the comfortable and, for the most part, reasonable “I don’t know” is frowned upon in the academies.43 [Das methodische Geschwätz der hohen Schule ist oftmals nur ein Einverständnis, durch veränderliche Wortbedeutungen einer schwer zu lösenden Frage auszuweichen, weil das bequeme und mehrenteils vernünftige: Ich weiß nicht, auf Akademien nicht leichtlich gehöret wird.44]

The pre-critical Dreams of a Spirit-Seer understands its own literary performance of the transition to the critical method as a necessary use of imagined means to effect an important restitutive service for the author and his readers, or, as Kant puts it directly: “I have thus wasted my time in order to save it. I have deceived my readers, in order to serve them.”45 (“Ich habe also meine Zeit verloren, damit ich sie gewönne. Ich habe meinen Leser hintergangen, damit ich ihm nützete.”46) In this way, the essay negotiates the line between what we can know and what we cannot. That we cannot know a thing or idea, that is, conceptually grasp it as such, without the intervention of experience, Kant’s essay reminds us, does not mean it cannot exist. However, if it does exist – a matter we can neither affirm nor deny – our knowledge of it is rather limited, available only, so the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seeks to demonstrate, through the raw forms of a speculative fancy that exceed our epistemic capacities, which are ultimately grounded in the conditions of our possible experience. This call for epistemological-critical reserve is enabled by a back-and-forth movement between the apparent oppositions of fact and fiction, and reality and imagination – an operation sustained by the literary form of the essay. Rather than being contingent, then, upon the knowledge it produces, the literary character of the essay is decisive in establishing the medium 42

The essay has dazzled generations of readers from Moses Mendelssohn, who wrote one of its first reviews, to Kuno Fischer and Ernst Cassirer. Cf. Goetschel, Constituting Critique, 91f. Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, 307. 44 Kant, Werkausgabe, II: 925. 45 Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, 354. 46 Kant, Werkausgabe, II: 983. 43

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for the essay’s theoretical stance. While part of the strategy of the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer is to disentangle conflicting claims and counterclaims by sorting out the specific legitimacy of different forms of knowledge, its long-term practical effect is to single out uncritical forms of knowledge as those that falsely claim independence from the form that makes them possible. Conversely, critical knowledge, as we will see, always contains a reflection on the conditions of its own possibility, a reflection whose own presentation does not allow for separation between “form” and “content.” While the literary and imaginative dimensions of the three individual Critiques are less clearly pronounced than those of the “metaphysical dream” of a world of illusory “spirits” at once spoofed and employed by Kant as an indication of our moral desire for a world inhabited not by illusion but by reason, their constitutive function is no less significant, affecting the content and the form of the Critiques alike. With the trailblazing breakthrough of the Dreams, Kant sets the stage for the Critiques. In philosophical terms, the new Kantian concept of experience begins here, with the literary exploration of the conditions of its construction. It is through this play with openly literary form that Kant transitions from skepticism to critique, a theoretical embrace of the constitutive function of literary form that, with the Critique of Pure Reason, as we will see in Section IV, reaches a new stage. That systematically critical phase begins, however, when Kant repurposes the personal essay form into a malleable literary means of critical reflection. Although it is uncommon to find this explicitly highlighted, the “transcendental” turn that shapes all of the historical and political essays Kant produced subsequent to the Critique of Pure Reason – the turn, that is, by which one investigates the conditions of possibility of any action – is already anticipated by the constitutive function of literary form in the “pre-critical” writings.

III  Critique: Form and Concept As Dieter Henrich has argued, part of the difficulty of the Critique of Pure Reason stems from the fact that Kant formulates his ideas in a process of self-clarification at a time when his method and concepts are still works in progress.47 For Kant, form and matter are interrelated concepts that 47

Dieter Henrich, “Die Beweisstruktur der transzendentalen Deduktion der reinen Verstandesbegriffe  – eine Diskussion mit Dieter Henrich,” in Probleme der “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” ed. Burkhard Tuschling, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984, 59; and Dieter Henrich, Identität und



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c­ onstitute each other’s features reciprocally. While they can be conceptually distinguished from each other and their distinction has heuristic value, the validity of the distinction between form and matter is bound to the world of the noumenal. Two equally significant conditions are the consequences of this critical fact. First, as Kant argues in the chapter “On the Amphiboly of Reflective Concepts” in the Critique of Pure Reason, when made at the level of concepts, the heuristic distinction between form and matter has no direct consequence for the world of phenomena.48 Second, and consistent with this, its consequence can only be a negative one for the conception and execution of the Critique itself, with the result that the nexus of form and content as well as the manner of presenting the argument assume a critical function within the Critique. This presentational foundation endows the book with its particular order of parts, chapters, sections, tables, paragraphs, facing pages, etc., all of which together form an architectonic structure or “building” (“Gebäude”) equal to more than the sum of its parts. The supplementary effect of its own coherence defines the tripartite Critique’s particular literary make-up. The consideration of each part within the whole resists its reduction or isolation from the work’s at once synthetic and incremental trajectory. The distinct components of the “building” of the tripartite Critique, in other words, cannot be understood apart from their relation both to each other and to the specific context of their participation in each of the Critiques. Kant, in other words, combines the Critiques’ various parts and their respective literary genres in a way which lends the critical project a distinct mode and form; he advances critique as a genre of its own. If critique emerges with Kant as a genre and investigative discursive form which is a function of the particular interplay among its parts, it is important to bear in mind that it is also a dynamic form whose selfreflectivity includes rigorous scrutiny of its own methodological commitments. Modeled on the essay and developed into a more directly articulated program of simultaneously epistemological and self-reflective criticism, the transparent, incrementally staged, step-by-step composition that is the Critique of Pure Reason is a no less self-conscious conceit from the start. We may read that “start” in the relation between the words composing the title of the work itself. The genitive relation indicated by the notion of Objektivität: Eine Untersuchung über Kants transzendentale Deduktion, Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 1976, 9, 14. 48 See the chapter dedicated to the “Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason A 260–292; B 316–349, KrV, III: 285–307.

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a “Critique of Pure Reason” can be read in both directions: “critique” and “pure reason” can each function, alternately, as the subject or object of possession. Carefully examined, this two-directionality is suggestive of the challenge that the literary form of critique poses for its reader. The Preface to the first edition of the First Critique introduces the reader to the idea of critique as a court of justice, famously announcing that everything, throne and altar included, must submit to it without exception, and that genuine respect can henceforth only be granted to that which “withstands its free and public examination by reason.” This free and public examination, Kant notes, is the defining feature of what he calls “the genuine age of criticism (Kritik)”: Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.49 [Unser Zeitalter ist das eigentliche Zeitalter der Kritik, der sich alles unterwerfen muß. Religion, durch ihre Heiligkeit, und Gesetzgebung durch ihre Majestät, wollen sich gemeiniglich derselben entziehen. Aber alsdann erregen sie gerechten Verdacht wider sich und könnten auf unverstellte Achtung nicht Anspruch machen, die die Vernunft nur demjenigen bewilligt, was ihre freie und öffentliche Prüfung aushalten können.50]

While “free and public examination” might appear to be a purely communicative condition, careful reading of Kant’s programmatically worded statement suggests that there is more at stake. The thought stated here is that the amount of pressure exerted by the scrutiny of reason upon the powers that be will correspond to the way in which criticism is articulated in that its ability to hold the proprietors of power accountable for their claims of legitimacy depends ultimately on its own availability to “public examination.” As Kant spells out in detail three years later in “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” the very freedom to think depends on the free, uncensored publication of thought. In 1787, three years after the publication of the seminal “Enlightenment” essay, Kant returns, in the Preface to the second edition of the First Critique, to the question of how best to introduce his new approach to epistemology and thereby distinguish it from previous failed attempts to 49

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 100–101. 50 Kant, KrV, A xi, III: 13.



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surmount the challenges posed to knowledge by empirical skepticism. As a discursive endeavor inherently lacking the mathematical foundation of science, philosophy, on Kant’s account, can only continue to grope about (“Herumtappen”) rather than come to any understanding of the workings of the mind itself.51 Kant famously suggests we may “get farther” if we instead “try” (versuchen) reversing the orientation of our understanding of subject-object relations: Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.52 [Man versuche es daher einmal, ob wir nicht in den Aufgaben der Metaphysik damit besser fortkommen, dass wir annehmen, die Gegenstände müssen sich nach unserem Erkenntnis richten, welches so schon besser mit der verlangten Möglichkeit einer Erkenntnis derselben a priori zusammenstimmt, die über Gegenstände, ehe sie uns gegeben werden, etwas festsetzen soll.53]

Similar to a scientific experiment, such a trial or thought experiment, Kant explains, works like a hypothesis: This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he has assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition of objects.54 [Es ist hiermit ebenso, als mit dem ersten Gedanken des Kopernikus bewandt, der, nachdem es mit der Erklärung der Himmelsbewegungen nicht gut fort wollte, wenn er annahm, das ganze Sternenheer drehe sich um den Zuschauer, versuchte, ob es nicht besser gelingen möchte, wenn er den Zuschauer sich drehen, und dagegen die Sterne in Ruhe liess. In der Metaphysik kann man nun, was die Anschauung der Gegenstände betrifft, es auf ähnliche Weise versuchen.55]

This attempt (“Versuch,” in the sense of “essai”) to change the approach to metaphysics by achieving “an entire revolution” (eine gänzliche Revolution 51 52 53 54 55

Kant, KrV B vii, xi, xiv, xv, III: 20, 22, 24; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 106, 107, 109, 110. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 110 (B xvi). Kant, KrV B xvi, III: 25. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 110 (B xvi–xvii). Kant, KrV B xvi–xvii, III: 25.

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B xxii) in the “mode of thinking” (Revolution der Denkart B xi, xiii, xvi), Kant remarks, is the task of the critique of pure speculative reason.56 While he calls this critique a “treatise on the method,”57 the essayistic and performative qualities of the First Critique exceed the features traditionally associated with a treatise. While Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature might suggest itself as a point of comparison here, the aspect of an attempt, experiment, or essay (Versuch), which Kant appeals to as he defines his Critique, differentiates it even from its most distinctive predecessor. While essay and critique are cut from a different cloth, the developmental trajectory from the former to the latter offers important clues as to how to appreciate critique as a form that is pointedly different from a treatise. A glance at the table of contents of the First Critique reveals an argumentative trajectory produced by the synergy of all its moving parts. Kant describes the Critique as reason’s court of justice but also as the archive of all litigious disputes concerning knowledge.58 Critique thus emerges as a project that is defined by a procedure whose epistemologically critical self-justification (the juridical term at Kant’s time is deduction) advances in the form of an inquiry into the principles that underlie the process of knowledge production. It does so by radically identifying the “I” of knowing with a noncontingent (or “transcendental”) consciousness (or unity of apperception): The unity of apperception, however, is the transcendental ground of the necessary lawfulness of all appearances in an experience.59 [Die Einheit der Apperzeption aber ist der transzendentale Grund der notwendigen Gesetzmäßigkeit aller Erscheinungen in einer Erfahrung.60]

With the transcendental deduction, Montaigne’s project returns in the Critique in critically redefined form. Another crucial aspect of critique that permeates the structure of the Critique of Pure Reason is a ceaseless concern with the clarification and distinction of terms and concepts and their consistent use, an effort whose character suggests that, when it comes to determining the definitive forms of presentation, closure is impossible. With Kant, the initially technical 56

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 113 and 108, 109, 110; Kant, KrV B xxii, III: 28 and B xi, xiii, xvi, III: 22, 23, 25. Ibid., 113; Kant, KrV B xxii, III: 28. 58 Ibid., 650 and 623; Kant, KrV A 751/B 779 and A 704/B 732, IV: 640 and 605. 59 Ibid., 242. 60 Kant, KrV A 127, III: 180. 57



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philological term, “critique,” gains a broader meaning, transitioning from indicating a distinction between original and later versions of a text to distinguishing among different claims and their validity. With the extension of its semantic field, critique becomes a form of philosophical procedure and consequently of writing. Reason must subject itself to reason in all its uses.61 More radically, Kant argues, reason’s existence itself rests on critique, whose judgment consists in nothing but the agreement of all free citizens who must be able to express their reservations, if not their veto, without any hesitation.62 As Kant makes clear, censorship is no option here, for it “can never bring to an end the controversy about what is lawful in human reason”63 (“kann also die Streitigkeit über die Rechtsame der menschlichen Vernunft niemals zu Ende bringen”).64 Describing critique this way, Kant, we will see, suggests that the task of philosophy is to participate in Enlightenment discourse as the advocate of reason. This task consists in publicly defending reason’s cause, an activity involving writing and publishing, that is, participation in public discourse, which for Kant requires an engagement in the overlapping modes of critical and literary production. Importantly, the concluding paragraph of the Critique notes that “the critical path alone is still open.”65 As any succeeding critical intervention takes its authority from an explicit or implicit recourse to reason, it affirms its association with Kant’s concept of critique. To compose a critique of reason means to serve as an active participant in the activity that Kant and many of his contemporaries across the world called “enlightenment.” This requires the critic to be foremost a public theorist, one who reflects on his work as part of the open discursive environment required to constitute enlightenment in any society.

IV  Critique, Literary Activity, Publicity The significance of the necessarily open-ended character of critique comes increasingly to the fore as Kant’s engagement with the public dimension of the Enlightenment becomes more prominent. In “Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), Kant addresses enlightenment 61

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 643; Kant, KrV, A 738/B 766, IV: 630–631. Ibid. Kant, KrV, A 738–739/B 766–767, IV: 631. 63 Ibid., 656. 64 Kant, KrV A 764/B 792, IV: 648. 65 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 704; Kant, KrV A 856/ B 884, IV: 712. 62

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in terms of a project of practical critique that is intimately linked to the issues of public discourse and knowledge.66 He elaborates on the issue of public discourse while discussing what he calls “the transcendental principle of publicity” in On Perpetual Peace (1795).67 For Kant, a critic engaged in advancing enlightenment is a person who shares his thoughts by way of the only means genuine enlightenment has, in his view, at its disposal: He makes public use of reason as a man of letters (Gelehrter) and thereby refrains from imposing his ideas on a captive audience, an abuse Kant describes as the merely “private use of reason.”68 For Kant, a man of letters is essentially a writer who participates in public discourse by way of publishing “experiments” in reason that, being hypothetical in nature, advance their cause in a manner free of academic, disciplinary, or other externally imposed compositional rules and pressures, relying instead on the essay as an autonomous, self-determining, or literary form. Kant’s “Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” inaugurates a string of historical and political essays that highlight this new form of writing. Scrutinizing the conditions of the possibility of free thought and speech from a position that sees its foundation in the public sphere, these essays literally rewrite the distinction between philosophy and fiction. In doing so they affirm the point that the Critique had made with epistemological urgency: that both philosophy and literature necessarily rest on a self-generating Archimedean point. At this decisive juncture in the history of the discursive differentiation of philosophy and literature, Kant’s critical turn reminds us of their deep and irreducible nexus. It is this notion of an unrestricted, open, and self-regulating sphere of letters that serves Kant as he advances the concept of public discourse as a constitutive feature of the “work in progress” that is “the Enlightenment.” According to Kant, the protocol of enlightenment is based on the open exchange between men of letters in the forum of an open discursive realm 66

For a discussion of the essay see Goetschel, Constituting Critique, 144–166, and Willi Goetschel, “‘An Experiment of How Coincidence May Produce Unanimity of Thoughts’: Enlightenment Trajectories in Kant and Mendelssohn,” in The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought, Willi Goetschel, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 210–229. 67 See the Second Appendix in Toward Perpetual Peace in Kant’s Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 311–351, 347–351. For a more detailed discussion see Willi Goetschel, “Kritik und Frieden: Zur literarischen Strategie der Schrift Zum Ewigen Frieden,” in Proceedings of the 8th International Kant Congress, ed. Hoke Robinson, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995, Vol. 2, 821–827. 68 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, James Schmidt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, 53–58, 59–61; Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” in Kant, Werkausgabe, XI: 55–57.



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imagined as a public literary scene. In other words, for Kant, there is more to enlightenment than the intimacy, secrecy, and rumormongering of the coffee house. For him, genuine acts of enlightenment presuppose the free and open air of a public sphere constituted by potentially unlimited inclusivity. Unlike communication in small circles, Kant’s public sphere reaches well beyond the confines of geographical, political, social, and cultural limitations. Enlightenment creates the public realm through an open circulation of ideas; for Kant this means through the free and unrestricted agency of authors and the circulation of their publications. Rather than presupposing the existence of a public sphere gifted to the people by the state, Kant envisions the creation of critical enlightenment practices as a work in progress carried on within the public sphere that these very practices constitute. As he famously notes in his “Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”: I understand, however, under the public use of his own reason, that use which anyone makes of it as a man of letters before the entire public of the reading world.69 [Ich verstehe aber unter dem öffentlichen Gebrauche seiner eigenen Vernunft denjenigen, den jemand als Gelehrter von ihr vor dem ganzen Publikum der Leserwelt macht.70]

Unlike the soldier in uniform, the cleric in gown, or the teacher in the lecture hall, the man of letters speaks “through his writings […] to the proper public, namely the world” (“durch Schriften zum eigentlichen Publikum, nämlich zur Welt”).71 In his last significant publication, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), Kant identifies the philosopher as the free agent in charge of the enlightenment of the people (“Volksaufklärung”),72 an enlightenment he calls public instruction (“öffentliche Belehrung”).73 Unlike the representatives of the faculty of law, philosophers are the free teachers of the law (“freie Rechtslehrer”).74 By dint of the freedom of the pen, they risk becoming objectionable (“anstößig”)75 to the state, which desires only to rule. However, as they respectfully address the state and the powers that be by 69

Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” 54. Translation slightly modified to underscore the public aspect of the term, Gelehrter, as a man of letters rather than academic scholar. Kant, Werkausgabe, XI: 55. 71 Ibid., 55 and 57. Translation slightly modified to preserve the sense of Kant’s German text. 72 Kant, Werkausgabe, XII: 362. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 363. 70

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way of turning to the public at large, they claim a right the state cannot refuse without undoing its own legal foundation.76 For the same reason, professors of the lowest-ranked faculty, the faculty of philosophy, serve as state officials who, in their free capacity as authors, shall nevertheless be considered authorized – out of office and extra muros – to publicly address the reading public. With the act of publication, they produce the public sphere that makes enlightenment possible. But how does this authorization ultimately authorize itself? In concluding The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant reclaims philosophy’s voice against that of the claims of medicine in a first-person essay format highly reminiscent of Montaigne. Kant’s introspective ruminations celebrate hypochondria as the virtue of self-observation. “On the Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution” (“Von der Macht des Gemüts, durch den blossen Vorsatz seiner krankhaften Gefühle Meister zu sein”) is a study in self-authorization, which Kant argues he can only provide by talking about himself,77 or, as the German has it, by “giving voice to his own ‘I’” (“mein Ich laut werden zu lassen”).78 But besides reclaiming the right to practice (intimate) self-observation as a platform for resisting medicine’s overreaching claims to manage the human body, this text lends itself – partly because of its self-reflectively essayistic character – to reflections on the subject of the institutional authority of the university, as Derrida has suggested.79 If the “pre-critical” essays figure as a literary playground for Kant’s development of an explicitly critical agenda, the later texts point to the enduring, paradigmatic significance of the essay as the literary genre that catalyzes the formation of “critique” as public intervention. Critique, in other words, creates the public sphere through the public exposition of its own discursive “Versuche” or “essais.”

V  The Literary Legacy of Kant Gaining foundational significance with Kant, critique rises to unprecedented prominence in philosophy and the philosophically invested literary criticism of early Romanticism spearheaded by Friedrich Schlegel. 76

Ibid., 363. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor, in Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 233–328, 314. 78 Kant, Werkausgabe, XI: 372. 79 Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos – ou le conflit des facultés,” in Du droit à la philosophie, Jacques Derrida, Paris : Galilée, 1990, 397–438. 77



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Hegel’s introduction “Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt und ihr Verhältnis zum gegenwärtigen Zustand der Philosophie insbesondere,” written with the assistance of Schelling and published in 1802 in the inaugural issue of the journal Kritisches Journal der Philosophie (edited with Schelling), signaled the appropriation of critique in a postrevolutionary context by the post-Kantian generation.80 Around the same time, critique became the catchword for Schlegel’s project of literary criticism (“Literaturkritik”). However, the widespread currency of the term came at the cost of containing the political connotation that had already informed the concept in the First Critique. With the post-Kantian turn, Kant’s transcendental push is assimilated to the project of German idealism and its political agenda is domesticated. As a result, its protocol of epistemological-critical self-reflection is sublimated, and the project of critique is replaced by a stocktaking – entrusted to both philosophical idealism and romantic literary criticism – of a general cultural inventory. It is not until the 1840s that critique81 regains its momentum as a project openly associated with a politically conscious agenda, when it becomes the watchword of a whole new generation of Young Hegelians.82 With Marx, the term returns as a radical and politically committed form of practical thinking. Marx notes in a letter to Arnold Ruge, published in the DeutschFranzösische Jahrbücher in 1844, that philosophy must become “the ruthless critique of everything that exists, ruthless in two senses: The critique must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.”83 Marx and Engels applied further pressure to the increasingly inflationary use of Kritik, as a trademark of progressive post-Hegelian discourse, with their book The Holy Family. In that work, Marx and Engels settled the score with Bruno Bauer, Proudhon, and others, invoking a doubling of critique in their subtitle: Kritik der kritischen Kritik (Critique of Critical Critique).84 80

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980, II: 171–187. For Schlegel see Walter Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1920, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, 116–200. 81 The German word Kritik is often rendered in English as criticism. I use the term critique, rather than criticism, to retain the philosophically and theoretically more radical cachet that the thrust of the Kantian project, so intimately associated with the term, carries for the German ear. 82 See Kurt Röttgers, s.v. Kritik, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, IX vols, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982, III: 651–675, esp. 668–672. 83 The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker, New York and London: Norton, 1978, letter by Marx to Arnold Ruge from September 1843, 13. 84 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, 44 vols., Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, Berlin: Dietz, 1956–1968, II: 3–223.

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From his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844) and the Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (the Grundrisse 1857–1858) to Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), Marx recaptures the political edge that for Kant had always been inseparable from critique’s epistemological and metaphysical agenda. Read with the Kantian emancipatory agenda in mind, Marx’s project becomes legible as critical in the Kantian sense: It recovers, while lending new meaning to, Kant’s scrutiny of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge as a critical epistemological practice. Turning to the material base of consciousness, Marx recuperates the materially radical edge of Kant’s epistemologically critical project and brings it to its fruition. As he notes: “Genuine critique does not analyze […] the answers but the questions.” (“Die wahre Kritik analysiert […] nicht die Antworten, sondern die Fragen.”85) Crucial motifs from Kant’s critical reflection on the conditions of the possibility of knowledge continue to live on in Nietzsche and Freud. In their wake and following the neo-Kantian “return to Kant” in the last third of the nineteenth century, Kant’s critical legacy comes to inform the project of critical theory.86 Essential dimensions of critical philosophy thus return in Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. Their projects are marked by attention to the intersection of epistemological, metaphysical, social, and political concerns, which was a decisive feature of Kant’s critical thought. The distinctly literary nexus of the concept, project, and discursive form of critique is especially evident in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s respective writings. These thinkers’ dense prose styles, distinctive uses of form and diction, and syntactic, grammatical, metaphorical, and terminological idiosyncrasies are all informed by a critical reflection on their own conditionality. Their writings perform a critical turn discernible at every level of analysis and argumentation. As a result, close attention to the subtleties of their composition is a prerequisite to grasping the full implications of their individual critical projects. Benjamin’s dissertation, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik [1920]), though often viewed as no more than a youthful scholar’s exercise in compliance with the protocols for academic advancement, in fact effectively revises the nationalist narrative of German Romanticism by reintroducing the 85 86

Marx and Engels, Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, 379. It goes without saying that the rallying call by Otto Liebmann that inaugurates the neo-Kantian movement with the publication of his Kant und die Epigonen is subtitled Eine kritische Untersuchung, Stuttgart: Schober, 1865.



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Romantic concept of Kunstkritik (art criticism) into the critical examination of Romanticism at large.87 While Benjamin asserts repeatedly that his use of the term Kritik in the dissertation is limited to art alone,88 its theoretically provocative implications invite the reader to attend to the more profound consequences of any analysis whose object contains the action of critique within it. “Of all the technical terms of philosophy and aesthetics in the writings of the early Romantics, the words ‘criticism’ [Kritik] and ‘critical’ are easily the most often encountered,” Benjamin writes, adding that, thanks to “Kant’s philosophical work, the concept of criticism [Kritik] […] acquired for the younger generation an almost magical meaning.”89 In addition to the ability to judge, this meaning, he notes, encompasses an objectively productive and creative capacity. This was true of the conception of critique embraced by the Romantics and by speculative philosophy in general. Criticism and Kantian critique share this reflective and self-reflective operation, on Benjamin’s view, and are in this regard indistinguishable. The positive inflection Benjamin lends to the concept of critique deviates less from Kantian usage than might be assumed,90 in that the double Romantic meaning of critique as concept and self-reflective medium was already present in Kant. The Romantics extend Kant’s “revolution in mode of thought” by recognizing it as an ongoing project, rather than a frozen, historical philosophical concept. Just as criticism is process as well as a product of its own formation (Gebilde),91 the form of its presentation is constitutive of Kantian critique. Benjamin’s rerouting of the genealogy of critique through a conception of Romanticism centered on Schlegel and, secondarily, Novalis, bypasses canonical narratives of Hegel’s ascendancy which neutralize critique in favor of a grand teleology of world history. Benjamin recovers the emancipatory momentum of Kant’s project of critique partly by tracing the trajectory 87

For an illuminating discussion of the project of the dissertation see “Critizability/Calculability,” chapter 3 of Sam Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, 20–30. 88 Walter Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2006, I: 116– 200, 117, and 186 n. 4 for Benjamin’s footnote regarding his use of the term criticism (Kritik); Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der Romantik, in Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser in collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1999, I: 7–122, 13 (hereafter GS). 89 Benjamin, Selected Writings, I: 142; GS I: 51. 90 Ibid., 52. 91 Ibid., 109. (The English translation in Selected Writings renders Gebilde as “product.”)

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of its empowering force from early Romanticism through to the Young Hegelians and Marx, as well as to his own project of criticism as a form. In his “Critique of Violence,”92 written just a few years after his dissertation, Benjamin suggests: “The task of a critique of violence can be summarized as that of the representation (‘Darstellung’) of its relation to law and justice.”93 (“Die Aufgabe einer Kritik der Gewalt läßt sich als die Darstellung ihres Verhältnisses zu Recht und Gerechtigkeit umschrei­ ben.”94) In the opening of the essay’s concluding paragraph, Benjamin makes essentially the same point in a different register: “The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history.”95 (“Die Kritik der Gewalt ist die Philosophie ihrer Geschichte.”96) While the title of critique carries with it a certain theoretical prestige, Benjamin avers that its actual force rests in the way its presentation reflects upon itself, scrutinizing the interrelation between violence and critique that, reflected in the Romantics’ take on Kant, was in turn devalued by Hegel and reactivated by Marx. While Horkheimer’s programmatic paper “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937) pledges allegiance to “the dialectical critique of political economy” rather than to the “idealistic critique of pure reason”97 – a distinction that ignores the genealogical link between the two projects – Adorno, in a resolute return to Kantian critique, recognizes the task of critical thinking. Kant serves beside Hegel as one of Adorno’s central interlocutors. He is ubiquitous in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and, in fact, informs his critical trajectory as a whole. The imperative for critical thinking assumes, in Adorno, a pointedly meta-critical turn: His notion of “critical models” align the Kantian project itself with a critique of Kant, making it possible for Adorno to move beyond what he describes as Kantian “blocks.”98 The critical impulse at the foundation of the Frankfurt School to exceed and challenge Kant’s own limitations is in this way in 92

Benjamin, Selected Writings, 236–252; the German title is the more cautiously Kantian: “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” in GS IV: 179–203. Benjamin, Selected Writings, I: 236, translation modified. 94 Benjamin, GS IV: 179. 95 Benjamin, Selected Writings, I: 251. 96 Benjamin, GS IV: 202. 97 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, New York: Continuum, 1982, 188–243, 206. 98 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York and London: Continuum, 1983. See especially the sections on the “Kantian Block” 386. And chapter 1 of “Part III: Models” titled “Freedom: On the Metacritique of Practical Reason,” a rigorous critical examination of Kant’s concept of freedom. As a section title, critique is only used in “Part II: Critique of Positive Negation,” thereby aligning Kant with the central critical gesture of moving past Hegel’s positive use of dialectics toward negative dialectics. 93



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vigilant alliance with Kant. Adorno makes this point while explicitly associating his version of dialectic with Kant’s project of critique: “Dialectic is not a third standpoint but rather the attempt, by means of an immanent critique, to develop philosophical standpoints beyond themselves and beyond the despotism of a thinking based on standpoints.”99 For Foucault, philosophical reason itself is part of the field of power. In “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984), in which Foucault reconfigures Kantian critique as a means of articulating his own distinct philosophical project, he nonetheless implicitly represents Foucaultian critique itself as similarly open to new metamorphoses. In pointed departure from Kant, he asserts that his own mode of critique “is not transcendental and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible.”100 Rather than consist in a search for “the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action,” Foucault states, his discourse is instead “genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method.”101 Still, in that Foucaultian critique involves the subject’s critical reflection on the historically contingent forms of power which constitute subjectivity at any moment and which condition, and hence enable, its historicity, its debt to Kant remains clear. By thinking its own conditions (in Foucault’s terms, by performing an “archaeology” of subjectivity), and by reflecting on the historical processes which generated them and reveal their contingency (i.e., by revealing its own “genealogy”), the subject transforms these conditions, thereby transforming itself, along with the cultural/historical medium with which it intersects. It thinks the form of contemporary existence and the form of its own existence; and this thinking gives existence new content and, hence, a new form, which will itself become the object of the subject’s critical reflections. “Enlightenment,” Foucault writes – directly echoing Kant’s essay – “is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude – that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.”102 Jacques Derrida’s writing displays a remarkable affinity with Kantian critique as well. Depending on how one interprets Kant’s conception of critique, Derrida’s insistence on the impossibility of a closure of the 99 100 101 102

Theodor W. Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy?” in Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 5–17, 12. Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon, 1984, “What is Enlightenment?” 32–50, 46. Rabinow, Foucault Reader, 46. Ibid., 42.

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transcendental can be seen as a stance which either staunchly resonates with the Kantian project or subverts it. Derrida suggests the latter when he states: All the same, and in spite of appearances, deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique and its translation would have to take that into consideration. It is not an analysis in particular because the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a simple element, toward an undecomposable origin. These values, like that of analysis, are themselves philosophemes subject to deconstruction. No more is it critique, in a general sense or in a Kantian sense. The instance of krinein or of krisis (decision, choice, judgment, discernment) is itself, as is all the apparatus of transcendental critique, one of the essential “themes” or “objects” of deconstruction.103

It is Kant himself, however, who, in the Critique of Pure Reason, and with regard to Plato’s concept of the idea, famously observed that “it is not at all unusual to find that we understand [an author] even better than he understood himself.”104 Derrida’s entire deconstructive project underwrites this point; this is especially so if we take “better” in the statement to point to the kind of rereading that Derrida would practice. While Derrida is opposed in principle to architectonics and system building, Kant’s critical impetus nevertheless aligns well with the Derridian resistance to discursive containment. For, as is most explicitly articulated in the later political and historical essays, the entire critical trajectory of Kantian thought, from the pre-critical works onward, is based in a consistent resistance to closure. As Derrida himself points out, in his engagement with Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, the magisterial Chair of Philosophy, as Kant describes it, must ultimately remain vacant.105 While Derrida does not display any explicit interest in the particular issues of form developed in Kant’s Critiques, Kant’s unique attention to the affected “tone” of self-proclaimed “philosophers” – not to mention their mortal effect upon the otherwise inherently deferred ends of philosophy itself – is not lost on him in the least: In fact, if Kant did have the audacity, very singular in history, to concern himself systematically with a certain tone in philosophy, we must immediately moderate the praise we would like to give him on this. […] Nevertheless – this fact is far from insignificant – the first time a philosopher comes to speak of the tone of self-styled philosophers, when he comes to inaugurate this theme and names it in his very title [Kant’s “Of an 103 104 105

Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” in Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, 1–6, 4. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 396 (A 314; B 370). Jacques Derrida, “Chaire vacante: censure, maîtrise, magistralité,” in Derrida, Du droit à la philosophie, Paris : Galilée, 1990, 343–370.



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Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy”], it is to be frightened or indignant faced with the death of philosophy.”106

Derrida’s interest in Kant’s warning that a certain pretention of philosophers – namely, to surpass the bounds of discourse itself – may mean the short-circuiting or “death of philosophy” itself should give pause to any reader eager to exclude Derrida from the Kantian legacy or oppose his own fundamentally interminable project to Kant’s. Various variations on the theme of the title Critique of Pure Reason have been adopted by contemporary theorists as they offer one or another substitute for the aporetic structure of “pure” reason. These titular permutations guarantee immediate cachet and notoriety while adding to each work the promise of radical thinking introduced by Kant’s original conception of “critique” as an experimental project. Recently, three works in particular have illustrated the potential of the unfinished project that is critique: Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), Gayatri C. Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), and Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason (2013) all highlight the promise posed by Kant’s project of open-ended critique that – contrary to philosophical myth-making – was never conceived to be completed at a specific historical juncture called “the Enlightenment.” Whereas Sloterdijk suggests that Kant’s critical project was neutralized in the course of the two centuries of its reception and eclipsed by the rise of its travesty, “cynical reason,” which calls for a distinct form of criticism, Spivak shows how the racist bent of Kant betrays a theoretical blindness to the exigencies that “postcolonial reason” articulates and that go to the heart of his critical project. Similarly, Mbembe highlights how the failure to address reason’s other – “black reason” – points to a dimension of reason we can no longer afford to ignore. Remarkably, all three interventions are enabled by features of critique itself, whose emancipatory impulse they seek to recover. They allow us to appreciate Kant’s project as a construction site that, even as it demarcates the “building” of an “architectonic” “system,” continues to testify to the unremittingly critical thrust of the terms they renegotiate. Reason, when it seeks the genuine critical challenge of scrutinizing both self and other, must return to the thick contexts in which it is put to the test. If we indict Kant’s claim to a priori universalism in the Critique on the basis of the blind spots, exclusions, and pejorative characterizations 106

Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism 23 (1982), 63–97 (66, 67).

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that severely mar his writings, it is his unrelentingly discursive understanding of the contingent conditioning of history – of which his own, by definition a posteriori, views of different localized human customs and habits are themselves the “anthropological” effects  – that allows his project of critique to continue to be reimagined, reinvented, adapted, and adopted across borders. When the sedimentation, for instance, of naturalized views on race, gender, and culture occurs, it is critique that provides the remedial resources needed, first making it possible to expose the egregious confusion of any historical ideology – a posteriori by definition – with a justifiable a priori claim. Understood as a philosophical program that knows itself to be contingent on its medium and, like all great literary texts, to first create the sphere in which it moves, critique can be recognized as a self-reflective operation that works with concepts while scrutinizing the limits marked by the nonconceptual. Tracking these limits, critique, which both articulates and reflects on that which concepts cannot address, rejects the closure (or “death of philosophy”) that “pure” conceptualization would impose, and whose critique brings the Critique itself close to literature in its inherently discursive (and thus “heterogenous” or “impure”), “delimited,” yet dynamic medium and form. Literary form, we might say, makes possible what the concept alone tends to suppress: the openness of the emancipatory impulse that critique continues to carry beyond the delimitations that it successfully hypothesized and that constitute a prerequisite for the progress of scientific cognition. Meanwhile, critique’s conceptual framework of delimitation and separation, dividing applied scientific knowledge from pure ethical action, and both of these from the verbal acts of aesthetic judgment that link them,107 serves to ground critique, lending it traction. Its ultimate validation, though, lies in the radical, forward-looking gesture of challenging the hidden assumptions of any un-self-critical account of knowledge. This open-endedness grants critique its permanent capacity for reenactment, one that rests on an act of self-conscious reflection, and therein, ongoing access to mediation. In the concluding chapter of his The Reality of the Mass Media, titled “Second-Order Cybernetics as Paradox,” Niklas Luhmann notes: Whoever opts for “critical” (as do most intellectuals) must have an affirmative attitude towards the distinction itself. Whoever opts for “affirmative” must accept a distinction which also allows one to adopt a critical attitude. 107

For the linguistic acts that judgments require see Claudia Brodsky, The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, London: Bloomsbury, 2021. See also Willi Goetschel, “Kant and the Christo Effect: Grounding Aesthetics,” New German Critique 79 (2000), 137–156.



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This is why observers who choose this distinction must remain invisible. At best, they can say: I am the paradox of my distinction, the unity of what I claim is different.108

Kant and those who follow his cue respond to this paradox with a purposefully discursive, self-critically experimental strategy that allows for a de-paradoxification of the project of critique. This happens with each variation on the theme of the Critique of Pure Reason that plays to the inherently delimiting and creative, and thus by definition literary, tradition of discursive mediation, of concept and experience, or reason and nonreason, that it continues by reinventing it. Reiteration of that fundamental critical gesture is possible only thanks to the varying contents and forms that critique assumes, which, through the process of self-critical reflection, so effectively articulate the paradox that drives it.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor A. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York and London: Continuum, 1983. Adorno, Theodor W. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften, 7 Bde. Hrsg. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser in collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1999. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2006. Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Brunner, Otto, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 9 Bde. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism 23 (1982), 63–97. Derrida, Jacques. “Mochlos – ou le conflit des facultés.” In Du droit à la philosophie, Jacques Derrida. Paris: Galilée, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Friedrich, Hugo. Montaigne, 3rd ed. Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 1993. Goetschel, Willi. Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1994. 108

Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, 121.

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Goetschel, Willi. The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Goetschel, Willi. “Kant and the Christo Effect: Grounding Aesthetics.” New German Critique 79 (2000), 137–156. Goetschel, Willi. “Kritik und Frieden: Zur literarischen Strategie der Schrift Zum Ewigen Frieden.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Kant Congress, ed. Hoke Robinson. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995. Hamann, Johann Georg. “Metakritik über den Purismus der reinen Vernnuft.” In Hamann’s Schriften, ed. Friedrich Roth, Hrsg. Leipzig: Reimer, 1825. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke. 30 Bde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980. Henrich, Dieter. Identität und Objektivität: Eine Untersuchung über Kants transzendentale Deduktion. Heidelberg: Winter, 1976. Henrich, Dieter. “Die Beweisstruktur der transzendentalen Deduktion der reinen Verstandesbegriffe  – eine Diskussion mit Dieter Henrich.” In Probleme der “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” ed. Burkhard Tuschling. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1799. Horkheimer, Max. “Traditional and Critical Theory.” In Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Max Horkheimer. Trans. Matthew J. O’Connell. New York: Continuum, 1982, pp. 188–243. Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology, History, and Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Trans. Holly Wilson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Kant, Immanuel. Briefwechsel, 3rd ed. Ed. Otto Schöndörffer and Rudolf Maler. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1986. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. Trans. and ed. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Rede und Gespräch. Ed. Rudolf Malter. Hamburg: Meiner, 1990. Kant, Immanuel. Religion and Rational Theology. Ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kant, Immanuel. Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Trans. and ed. David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kant, Immanuel. Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kant, Immanuel. “Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Whole Universe According to Newtonian Principles.” Trans. Olaf Reinhardt. In Natural Sciences, Immanuel Kant. Ed. Eric Watson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.



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Kant, Immanuel. Werkausgabe, 12 Bde. Hrsg. Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. Liebmann, Otto. Kant und die Epigonen: Eine kritische Untersuchung. Stuttgart: Schober, 1985. Luhmann, Niklas. The Reality of the Mass Media. Trans. Kathleen Cross. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Marx, Karl. The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York and London: Norton, 1978. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Werke, 44 Bde. Institut für MarxismusLeninismus beim ZK der SED. Berlin: Dietz, 1956–1968. Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Trans. Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters. Trans. Donald M. Frame. New York: Knopf, 2003. Montaigne, Michel de. “Essais.” In Œuvres complètes, Michel de Montaigne. Ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Spivak, Gayatri. Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Weber, Sam. Benjamin’s Abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

chapter 10

“The Shapes My Brain Holds”

Kantian Spontaneity and Woolf’s The Waves Maya Kronfeld

Stream of consciousness fiction is often recruited to enforce empiricist paradigms of the mind. I contest this view and argue here that Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), by its very form, discloses what Kant called the mind’s spontaneity – that active power we all have to shape, organize, and synthesize the stream of sensory impressions that comes at us. I draw primarily on Kant’s first Critique, wagering that cognitive spontaneity in its theoretical sense has an untapped potential for literary aesthetics. While Woolf is universally considered a novelist who deeply explored consciousness, she’s almost exclusively been interpreted as an empiricist, due in part to her famous programmatic statement: The mind receives a myriad impressions [sic] – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms … Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.1

In this classic passage from “Modern Fiction,” Woolf reconciles the aspirations of fiction with something like the requirements for an account of the mind. In her typical image for impressionism, the mind – as extension of the retina – is conceived as a receptacle.2 Woolf’s novelistic poetics have been inextricably linked with British empiricism: The language of receptivity and the primary unit of the impression, soon figured in terms of

Early versions of this chapter were presented at the University of California, Berkeley Department of Comparative Literature, the Philosophy and Literature Series at Stanford University, and the Kant Colloquium of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division. I am grateful to Stephen Best, C. D. Blanton, Judith Butler, Grant Bartolome Dowling, Hannah Ginsborg, Robert Kaufman, Colin Marshall, and Robert Pippin for their feedback. 1 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, London: Hogart, 1994, Vol. 4, 154. 2 Impressionism has been termed “the retinal view.”

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atomism, all seem to corroborate this reading.3 Seldom, however, is the passage considered in the context of the empiricist impasse that underscores the insufficiency of atomistic premises while being unable to dispense with them.4 Here this tension appears in the guise of a compound metaphor that stretches the limits of imagistic visualization: The “gig lamps symmetrically arranged” seem to recapitulate the discrete character of the “atom”; at the same time, the atoms are “innumerable,” which already complicates the aggregative scheme.5 At the other end of this calculus of fundamental units, we find a “halo,” which is then immediately placed in apposition with a “semi-transparent envelope.” As Elizabeth Abel asks: “How does she get from the atoms to the halo?”6 Woolf brings together two contradictory positions: invoking the empiricist picture, without being limited by its terms. In fact, Woolf is radically unorthodox in her use of the impressionist principle of passive receptivity.7 Another way of putting this is that there is an element of constructivism in her impressionism.

3

A classic study of Woolf by Maria DiBattista emphasizes the “form-engendering power of the mind” even in this programmatic atomistic statement. Maria DiBattista, Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, 5. Recent groundbreaking work by Dora Zhang emphasizes the disconnect between Woolf’s theory and her descriptive practices. Dora Zhang, “Feeling with Woolf,” in Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, Dora Zhang, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020, 117–143. 4 A major counterexample is the account of “literary impressionism” that proceeds from the point of reference of visual art, and its accompanying interpretation of empiricism. Maria Kronegger argued that “impressionism is born from the fundamental insight that our consciousness is sensitive and passive; … consciousness faces this world as pure passivity, a mirror in which the world inscribes or reflects itself.” Quoted in Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism, 178. For contemporary assessments of literary impressionism, taking Kronegger as a point of departure, see Richard M. Berrong, “Modes of Literary Impressionism,” Genre 39.2 (2006), 203–228. Berrong describes the influence on literature of “impressionist painters” who “claimed that their canvases represented unanalyzed (i.e., passive) first impressions of the world around them.” See also art critic John Canady: “the impressionist does not analyse form but only receives the light reflected from that form onto the retina of his eye and seeks to reproduce the effect of that light, rather than the form of the object reflecting it.” John Canady, Mainstreams of Modern Art: David to Picasso, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959, 182. 5 This is not the only time that Woolf implicitly draws an analogy between a philosophy of mind and an urban space; see later in the chapter. 6 Personal correspondence, June 23, 2018. 7 As is no doubt the case for many other impressionists, literary and visual, who explore the limits of impressionism, which I am linking to its empiricist underpinnings. See Chana Kronfeld’s discussion of Paul Cézanne in the course of her treatment of Yiddish and Hebrew introspectivist modernism: “[Halpern and Fogel] launched poetic/critical explorations of the limits of impressionism. In the process, they pushed the impressionist prototype to its outer boundaries, to the place where, turning back on itself, impressionism becomes expressionism … the postimpressionist painting style of Paul Cézanne, who took impressionism so seriously he made it reach beyond itself, and in the process became the great deviant paragon whose work is now taken to be one giant prolepsis of all the highmodernist trends that were to follow” (Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism, 178).

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If Woolf’s productive ambivalence about the sensory atom makes her a constructivist impressionist, then this moment in modernism clarifies, in practice, some of the crucial questions at issue in the transition from Hume to Kant. But it is her later, and most formally experimental work, The Waves, where she moves beyond the empiricist conceit of naturalistic narration; and it is here that I take Woolf’s work to be most Kantian, or at least working in the impasse between Hume and Kant. I pursue here the thesis that The Waves is illuminating for the philosophy of mind because it does not present mental contents but rather is pitched at the level of form – that is, at the internal abstractions underlying the appearance of objects. This, I argue, with Kant, requires a type of representation different from description, since what is being rendered has not yet taken the form an object. Thus a Kantian point about the awareness of form (and indeed, about form as awareness) can be put into dialogue with a point of stylistic technique central to modernism. The general form of The Waves is a series of short dramatic utterances initially spoken by a group of six children that turn into longer soliloquies as they grow older: “I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.” “I see a slab of pale yellow,” said Susan, “spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.” “I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.” “I see a globe,” said Neville, “hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.”8

In these early pages, are the children having a dialogue, or do we have here serial monologues? For the most part, neither. Are they engaged in “parallel play” or are these perception-utterances, as I call them, in some intermediary mode between soliloquy and dialogue, “trading fours” as jazz musicians do?9 Furthermore, the word “said” is used here in a very unnaturalistic sense – not necessarily performing its usual role of introducing dialogue but still invoking that usual function. The developmental psychology notion 8 9

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, New York: Harcourt, 1959, 9 (hereafter cited in text as “W.”). “Trading fours” refers to a structural activity of improvisation or “spontaneous composition” where members of a musical ensemble trade four-bar phrases that “triangulate,” so to speak, around the common form. As I show in “Toni Morrison’s Jazz as a Theory of Knowledge,” a chapter in Spontaneous Form: Consciousness and Philosophical Fiction, currently in preparation, jazz can be used to sharpen and correct existing models of consciousness: The form, held in common and ­“intersubjectively” triangulated, indexes the objective dimension of mental spontaneity.



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of “parallel play” in early childhood, proposed by Mildred Parten around the time The Waves was published, makes it a little more socially acceptable to imagine dialogue that takes place this way, in blatant violation of the norms of conversation.10 Still, it is not clear how the children’s speaking fits into the dramatic situation. The speech verb, “said,” conventionally introduces a dialogue, but here the voices don’t seem to be addressing one another, if they’re speaking at all. We get dramatic indicators for a situation that cannot be dramatized. Throughout her work, Woolf expresses a profound understanding of mental interaction, whether through the “dialogic” dimension of parallel interior monologues or through the triangulation of perception around a common object. Holding open the question as to whether triangulation is ever fully achieved, the children are nevertheless already involved in relations of responsiveness that they cannot fully account for but that their “utterances” (realistic or not) attest to. One challenge posed by Woolf’s radically unfamiliar form, then, which becomes clearer in the course of the work, is simply that the conventions for reporting speech have themselves been reconfigured.11 Something very strange is going on in Woolf’s passage – which at the same time is something very real. To get at what is real here, notice that Woolf does not shape distinct characters according to distinct mental idiolects (as is the norm in so-called stream of consciousness fiction). Rather, the different consciousnesses take different stands on the conditions of possibility underlying the appearance of objects, including themselves. Let’s revisit what this means through the consciousness that Woolf calls “Rhoda” – for whom discontinuity is a permanent condition. Although we don’t yet see it in this early scene, Rhoda will not always be able to join the children’s “chorus” of perception. That is, she cannot allow herself to presuppose the object constancy upon which they depend for their perception-utterances. As they all grow up, Rhoda assumes what I take to be a radically Humean position on herself and the world. She cannot make herself conform to the requirements of narrative sequence. Here’s a quotation from her later on: “Nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. You did not see me come” (W, 10

11

Before children can play with each other, they engage in “parallel play.” M. B. Parten, “Social Participation among Preschool Children,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 27.3 (1932), 243–269. But I am suggesting, in a Romantic and Kantian vein, that the “play” in question belongs to perception alone. Not one of H. Paul’s Grice’s four conversational maxims are met, for example. “Logic and Conversation,” in Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole and J. Morgan, New York: Academic Press, 41–58.

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130). Rhoda’s observation about what her friends do not see does justice in the most technical philosophical sense, to the true, and tragic, nature of perception in Humean terms. For Hume, the basic facts of life expressed in phrases such as “fire warms” and “water refreshes” are what he calls “fictions” that pave over the gaps in our experience.12 Through Rhoda, Woolf imagines a painful view of reality unfictionalized, on Humean terms. And in doing so, Woolf uses the imagination of a fiction writer in ways that Hume could not account for. Rhoda goes on: “I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do – I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and If I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces” (W, 130). Rhoda’s inability to participate in the “fictions” of object constancy provokes a serious reevaluation of experience itself. How can one live in the moment when one moment does not lead to another? The sensory impression as an epistemological unit is literally unlivable for Rhoda, foreshadowing her suicide and Woolf’s – the “perpetual flux and movement” of impressions shocks her with its unintegrated concatenations. Hence, it is not a “stream” of consciousness at all. The form of The Waves itself consists in a concatenated series of soliloquies whose various moments do not form a coherent sequence. What looks like a statement of modernist poetics implicit in the novel’s form, however, also lays bare the very interventions of the imagination in the service of continuity which were the basis of Kantian critical epistemology, and in particular its debt to Hume’s skepticism about the continuity of experience. The skeptical impasse to which empiricism leads, for Hume, was never stated more poignantly than by Rhoda: “all violent, all separate” (W, 130). And this is where Kant picks up precisely on the Humean problem of disaggregation that Rhoda makes so painfully clear. Here is Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason: “If each representation were completely foreign to every other, standing apart in isolation, no such thing as knowledge would ever arise.”13 Kant acknowledges the deep epistemological problem suggested by Rhoda’s Humean alienation, but Kant does not accept radical disaggregation as the final resting place in the philosophical elaboration of mental life. Rather, he makes a bold case for the unity that must be 12 13

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, 270 (1.4.7.11). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1929, A97 (hereafter cited in text as CPR).



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presupposed in any act of mental representation. In the second Paralogism, Kant writes: “Now it is, indeed, very evident that I cannot know as an object that which I must presuppose in order to know any object” (CPR, A402).14 I cannot enter here into the question of whether Kant’s statement (which he considers “evident,” and therefore analytically valid) is really as categorically true as he presents it to be and on what grounds. But I want to foreground the distinctness that Kant affords to form. He suggests that we grasp the formal unity of our thought differently from the way we grasp objects whose apprehension is made possible by that formal unity. What does it mean, then, to grasp a form, rather than grasping an object?15 These questions are shared by Kant’s first Critique and the high phase of Woolf’s modernism. For both, the study of consciousness necessarily moves us beyond naturalistic descriptions.16 The question of what it means to grasp the form of appearance (as opposed to grasping the objects that such forms enable) is difficult and suggests that aesthetic form as such in Woolf’s The Waves expresses truths not yet “cognizable” in the form of a judgment. Now let’s return to the first dramatic passage in The Waves: “I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.” “I see a slab of pale yellow,” said Susan, “spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.” “I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.” “I see a globe,” said Neville, “hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.” 14

15

16

This is from a passage in the Paralogisms where Kant’s immediate topic is the self. He warns against mistaking the unity of thought for the unity of the thinker. However, I am taking Kant’s statement to have a significance beyond the specific conclusion about the self that he is trying to support. Robert Pippin also reads this same remark at A402 as part of a larger trend in Kant’s thinking whereby he “often explicitly and deliberately stresses the formal and epistemological nature of his enterprise.” Robert Pippin, Kant’s Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982, 14. Similar Kantian problematics were explored by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus and taken in a different direction. I thank Daniel Warren for these insights. “Grasping the form” of Woolf’s text sheds light on what it means to “grasp the form” in our own minds, a mode of acquaintance which for Kant is quite primary, and which Kant sets apart from other forms of knowing, for example the mode of knowing involved in grasping an object. Indeed, if modernist fiction is self-conscious about form, the link with the Kantian notion of mental forms in the mind can stand to be explored further. Specifically, “form” for Kant is linked with apperception: An awareness of form makes possible our awareness of objects. The form of our cognition does not only “act on us,” but it is something that we have a sense of participating in and being aware of. Barry Stroud, “Naturalism and Skepticism in the Philosophy of Hume,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hume, ed. Paul Russell, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

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In this choral evocation of sensory perception, the natural world is defamiliarized through the consciousness of the children who redescribe and reconstrue it effortlessly in the very act of receiving what is empirically given. Contrary to the theory of ideas inherited by Hume, there may be no “simple impression” here, although this passage is often read that way. Instead, the children evince a “consciousness of creative cognitive activities,” to quote Patricia Kitcher.17 They are an example of perceivers who “consciously combine.” And they are like us.18 The children are taking a stand on what they perceive; they are at some level conscious of themselves as combiners (“I see x”). This reflexive aspect corresponds to Kant’s insight: Our awareness of our own spontaneous form makes possible our awareness of objects.19 By dwelling at the level of object construction, Woolf has come up with a new way of narrating the mind, beyond the empirical level of what appears in it; and in doing so, I argue, she has foregrounded what Kant called the mind’s “spontaneity.”20 By “spontaneity” I mean what Robert Pippin refers to as that “enigmatic synonym for thinking” in Kant’s system.21 Classically, spontaneity is defined as “an action of the mind or will that is not determined by a prior external stimulus.”22 I call this the “agency” side of spontaneity because it means that we cognizers aren’t wholly determined by the sensory materials that we cognize (although we are still answerable to those sensory materials). But there is another aspect of spontaneity that I call the “reflexive” 17

Patricia Kitcher, “Kant on Self-Consciousness,” The Philosophical Review 108.3 (1999), 345–386. See also Kitcher, Kant’s Thinker, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 146; Kitcher, “Guyer on the Value of Freedom,” in Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity, ed. Kate Moran, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 95. 18 Kitcher, “A Kantian Critique of Transparency,” in Kant and the Philosophy of Mind: Perception, Reason and the Self, ed. Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 170. 19 Hannah Ginsborg has powerfully elaborated the claim that even in mere “perceptual experience” prior to judgment, the operation of the understanding is still evident in the perceiver’s sense of the “appropriateness of their synthesis.” Thus, Ginsborg’s account secures a role for understanding (and for spontaneity) even in the mere presentation of experience, and a “non-trivial” reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is vindicated. Hannah Ginsborg, “Kant and the Problem of Experience,” Philosophical Topics 34.1–2 (2006), 59–106. 20 Beyond its engagement with particular empirical contents, Woolf’s opening passage communicates a picture of perception as a creative act, and not just as passive sensibility. The way Woolf’s text itself participates in a meta-reflection on how perceivers shape representations in the process of “receiving” sensory impressions is exactly what I am calling, with Kant, the spontaneous dimension of perception. In what follows, I have something to say about the way in which Woolf transforms sense perception into a speech act, which seems to do something more than merely report on these acts of mind and thereby also transforms the dilemma which left Hume with no way out at the end of the day but to forget philosophy in order to re-enter into the absorptions of everyday life. 21 Pippin, “Spontaneity,” 43. 22 Kate Moran, “Introduction,” in Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity, ed. Kate Moran, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.



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aspect. The sense of participation in her own cognition, a sense that the cognizer herself enjoys, is linked with her awareness of what she’s doing. She doesn’t just organize sensory data but is also capable at least in principle of becoming aware that she is organizing it. The agency dimension and the reflexive dimension are mutually implicated in the spontaneous acts of taking the world to be such and such. Woolf uses experimental literary form to foreground a nascent awareness of spontaneous synthesizing, an awareness enacted on the page as a co-creation of the reader and the fictional consciousness encountered by her. If Woolf’s text discloses cognitive spontaneity in action, then it also allows us, at a more general level, to glimpse the narrative operation of a key philosophical notion. And because the notion in question – spontaneity  – itself elaborates what it means to make something of what is given, Woolf’s text also provides us with an opportunity to account for a relationship between mental structure and literary form that is different from “narrative,” traditionally construed. That is, The Waves gives form to an active, self-conscious synthesizing that is different from the narrative tendencies to weave coherence – for example, the “fictions” that Hume warned against.23 As Anthony J. Cascardi observes about the philosophical implications of novelistic form in general: “The novel sheds light on the formation (discursive and otherwise) of the insights that philosophy regards as achieved, and, with that, articulates those things that philosophy tends to leave largely unspoken.”24 Further, what Cascardi refers to as the “novelistic representation of reality” indicates “the possibility of a range or region of knowledge which might be available where epistemology fails.”25 Spontaneity does not consist in nor is it essentially tied to the freedom to choose one form of synthesis over another, or to apply one concept rather than another. It is therefore not an exercise of free will as we often construe it – not even at the level of thought. This construal of spontaneity may be contrary to tendencies that, common in the aftermath of the voluntarist tradition, are frequently read back into Kant, according to Daniel Warren.26 Indeed, even in those cases where there is only one right way 23

I thank Judith Butler for this formulation. Anthony J. Cascardi, “The Novel,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Eldridge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 167; quoted in Emily Dalgeron, “Reality and Perception: Philosophical Approaches to To the Lighthouse,” in The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse, ed. Allison Pease, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 69. 25 Though for Cascardi the “novelistic representation of reality” is diametrically opposed to the epistemological strategies for grappling with skepticism offered by Kant. Anthony J. Cascardi, The Bounds of Reason, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. See also Cascardi on “Kant’s articulation of the problem of aesthetic judgment” as “the point at which the Kantian critical system encountered the impossibility of achieving closure” (Consequences of Enlightenment, 6). 26 Personal conversation, August 8, 2016. 24

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to do – or see – something, spontaneity is still exercised, on the Kantian account. It is exercised insofar as our deployment of concepts involves a reflexive awareness that plays an active role in the cognitive process at work. Elsewhere, I have suggested that the primitivist and implicitly racist discourse on spontaneity that is so common in Western culture  – associating it with the irrational, formless flow of “anything goes”  – does violence to subjectivity as such by excluding from it all structure and epistemic value.27 Conversely, valorizing spontaneity in art and expression has been used to pit it against theoretical reflection, giving thought itself a bad name by equating it with rigid pre-determination. In resuscitating neglected aspects of Kant’s theory of mind, my goal – with Robert Pippin, Hannah Ginsborg, Claudia Brodsky, Robert Kaufman, and others  – is to combat the appropriation of cognitive spontaneity and its dissolution into cliché. In different formations, these clichés have attended the reception and perception of jazz improvisation as well as of literature, skewing, for example, the romantic, spontaneous poetic expression of emotion and modernist renditions of the vagaries of consciousness. The result is the limited visibility of the alternative, more nuanced accounts of cognition that are encoded within these artistic practices and trends. In The Waves, Woolf upends a similar reductive view of children’s spontaneous perception by staking out new territory for the mind’s activity between the reified polarities of unmediated sense impression and hyperintellectualized rational deliberation. Ginsborg’s most recent account of Kantian self-consciousness focuses on young children’s capacity for sorting toys – and taking a normative stand on the rightness of their sorting – as a paradigm case of “spontaneity without rationality.”28 She thus debunks the longstanding and misguided equation between Kantian spontaneity and full-blown rational deliberation: The children are too young to make explicit judgments, and yet their cognition fits within Kant’s model of the human mind as perpetually in excess of the materials upon which it operates. If some of the nuances of Kant’s notion of the mind’s spontaneity have often fallen out of view in its afterlife, the same can be said of the reductive construal of Romanticist notions of spontaneity tout court, as is most clearly shown in the reception of Wordsworth’s theory of poetry. Claudia 27

28

Maya Kronfeld, Spontaneous Form: Consciousness and Philosophical Fiction (book manuscript in preparation); M. Kronfeld, “Structure in the Moment: Rhythm Section Responsivity,” Jazz and Culture 4.2, Jazz in the Present Tense (2021), 14–22; M. Kronfeld, “The Philosopher’s Bass Drum: Adorno’s Jazz and the Politics of Rhythm,” Radical Philosophy 2.5 (2019), 34–47. Hannah Ginsborg, “Spontaneity Without Rationality: A Kantian Approach to Self-Consciousness and Perceptual Content,” in Perceptual Knowledge and Self-Awareness, ed. Andrea Giananti et. al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.



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Brodsky has emphasized that what has come down to us as Wordsworth’s famous formulation that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is a distorted half-quotation. The full statement is: “For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.”29 As Brodsky notes, “the truncated version of Wordsworth’s definition has long been the single lens through which his own work is most readily, while disparately viewed.”30 Her philosophical analysis captures the significance of Wordsworth’s “divided definition” for theories of both poetry and cognitive judgment in general: Wordsworth “directly conjoins ‘spontaneous overflow’ to the opposing poetic necessity of a diachronic experience of ‘thought.’”31 In refuting the deformation of what is known as Wordsworth’s “theory of poetry … into a kind of anti-theory opposing ‘thought’ of any kind,”32 Brodsky also refutes the reductive treatment of Kantian spontaneity: Overcoming the opposition between the poetic and the cognitive, the instantaneous and the reflective, Wordsworth’s “internally divided definition … immediately directs the reader to read beyond the ‘powerful feeling’ it names.”33 In her studies of Wordsworth, Kant, and the problem of judgment and agency in general,34 Brodsky demonstrates the close affinity between Wordsworth’s explicit and implicit poetics and Kant’s theory of judgment.35 In fact, I argue, what Brodsky identifies as the innovative “confluence of philosophy of mind with poetry in Wordsworth’s poetic theory” lays the Romantic foundation for the kind of modernist experimentation under discussion here, which Woolf continues.36 Mobilized to debunk Romanticism in the name of modernism, perhaps to be replaced by Eliot’s objective correlative, the reductive reception of spontaneity reveals the tendentiousness of literary history, what Chana 29

William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, I: 127 (emphasis added); original cited in Claudia Brodsky, Words’ Worth: What the Poet Does, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, 29. 30 Brodsky, Words’ Worth, 27. 31 Ibid., 28n1. 32 Ibid., 29n1. 33 Ibid., 29–30. 34 See Brodsky, Words’ Worth and its companion work, Claudia Brodsky, The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 35 Brodsky, The Linguistic Condition, 138. 36 Brodsky, Words’ Worth, 9 n. 5. I discuss Woolf’s own allusions to Wordsworth in The Waves in my Spontaneous Form.

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Kronfeld calls a “selective modeling” of romanticism that became necessary in order to make room for the modernist rebellion.37 In focusing on the spontaneity of the faculty of understanding in Kant, and its link to apperception, I am seeking to overcome the binary oppositions into which spontaneity has figured.38 If vulgar versions of Romanticism equated the poem with the biographical poet’s “spontaneous” feelings, common views of stream of consciousness fiction centered on fluidity and associative (rather than logical) flow as paradigmatic features for which stream of consciousness fiction came to be known.39 But as we have seen, Woolf’s new narrative strategy in The Waves repudiates any ideal of naturalistic verisimilitude to outer or inner realities right away and in her opening pages. As we have seen, the opening of the The Waves immediately involves us in a set of utterances whose status cannot be easily settled. “Said” is the ultimate novelistic descriptor, because it purports to give you the content of an utterance – as if the content of the mind is just unuttered speech. But it is equally implausible that the utterances are externalized speech as it is that they should be taken as “sentences in the head” of children.40 Indeed, as many critics have noted, what child talks – let alone thinks – that way?41 “Even the most precocious children would never talk like this,” points out J. W. Graham, who edited Woolf’s holographic drafts. He continues: Because Virginia Woolf makes no attempt to distinguish the style of one speaker from that of any other, it is difficult to read the speeches as stream-of-consciousness; and this difficulty is increased when we perceive that the rhythm, sentence structure, and vocabulary of any one speaker do 37

Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; see especially chapter 1, “Modernism through the Margins: From Definitions to Prototypes,” 21–34. 38 Most clearly evident in “Tintern Abbey” and the Prelude. 39 See Anne Fernihough, “Consciousness as a Stream,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, ed. Morag Shiach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 78. 40 The notion of “sentences in the head” is one way of construing Jerry Fodor’s “language of thought” hypothesis. Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975. 41 See also David Lodge, who criticizes The Waves for failing to meet the very criterion of verisimilitude that I argue Woolf is calling into question: Transpose these sentences [from Mrs. Dalloway] into the first person, and they would sound far too literary and considered to pass for a transcription of someone’s random thoughts. They would sound indeed like writing, in a rather precious style of autobiographical reminiscence … the interior monologues of Virginia Woolf’s later novel, The Waves, suffer from such artificiality, to my mind. James Joyce was a more resourceful exponent of that way of rendering the stream of consciousness. David Lodge, “The Stream of Consciousness,” in The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts, David Lodge, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014, 45.



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not change noticeably between childhood and middle age. Yet most critics approach The Waves as an example of stream-of-consciousness writing.42

My sense is that even the most prototypical “stream of consciousness” writing will systematically fail the mimetic criteria that is sometimes imposed upon it. And yet, there is a relationship between Woolf’s experimental technique and the goal of getting right to some degree what thinking is. Catherine Addison reads The Waves within the history of prosepoetry, a tradition which “has never been very common in English” but which was the hallmark of post-Romantic experimentation in French and other languages. This is part of what makes The Waves, specifically, such an “anomal[y]” in English literature.43 Addison points out, however, that “for all this incantatory lyricism,” The Waves is still “normally regarded as a prose novel, presumably because it defers to … the conventions of prose paragraphing.” It becomes almost a matter of typography. But there is good reason to believe that Woolf has not cut ties completely to this outmoded form; rather, the “biographic style” persists as parody.44 As J. W. Graham notes in his careful study of The Waves and its formal distinctness, “in the manuscript of The Waves [Woolf] scribbled at one point the following request: ‘The author would be glad if the following pages were not read as a novel.’”45 Indeed, Woolf describes The Waves in her letters as a series of “dramatic soliloquies” or a “playpoem.” We might then ask, if in The Waves Woolf works tirelessly to supersede the “dominion of the novel,” then why does she retain the realist novel’s most conventional marker – the third-person narrator’s indicator of a “character’s” speech – the word “said”? Indeed, Woolf’s return to drama  – in this case, to the choral mode of classical Greek tragedy – can be understood as a way of trying to undo (and also relativize) the crude realistic conventions of narration which have taken hold under the banner of the novel as a genre. Woolf’s novel evokes a silence

42

J. W. Graham, “Point of View in The Waves: Some Services of the Style,” University of Toronto Quarterly 39.3 (1970), 194. Catherine Addison, A Genealogy of the Verse Novel, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, 33. 44 Indeed, the full title of Orlando (1928), the novel that immediately preceded the composition of The Waves, is Orlando: A Biography. As soon as the novel opens, Orlando is described through a parody of description: “Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodise. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore” (Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, New York: Harcourt, 1993, 16–17). 45 Graham, “Point of View,” 193. 43

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made salient by the deliberate failure of verisimilitude and of the central conceit of speech.46 I have been suggesting that Woolf – with Kant – goes against verisimilitude, against naturalistic description, in her “presentation” of consciousness. The geometric abstraction of Susan’s “slab” and “stripe” suggests a point of convergence between the naiveté of childhood and the deep intelligence embedded within subjectivity at the formal level of the conditions of perception. This is the dignity that the Kantian perspective restores to consciousness in its in-principle possibilities (or underlying enabling ­conditions), as opposed to focusing on what is empirically instantiated at any given moment. The same criticism directed at the depiction of the children was directed at Kant – that to ascribe an ­awareness of our own synthesizing activity to every act of perception is to hyper-intellectualize. But then we can respond, on behalf of Kant, and on behalf of the children, that it’s an in-principle awareness, which is not always realized empirically.47 Woolf’s opening series of perception-utterances shows that she shares the fascination of the impressionist and post-impressionist artists who make palpable the discrete, geometric strokes out of which the eye constructs the appearance of a line or constant object.48 The italicized section that opens The Waves just before giving way to the six children’s voices presents the same kind of geometric abstraction as the “slab” and “stripe,” but within the context of an utterly impersonal view of the sunrise that cannot serve as an exposition for introducing characters: Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

46

For a full analysis of the speech-verb “said” and its evolution through Woolf’s early drafts of the The Waves, see my Spontaneous Form. 47 Though this response is not always regarded as satisfactory, those who think Kant is setting too high a bar for self-consciousness may find useful Henry Allison’s distinction between reflexive and reflective self-consciousness: Reflexive self-consciousness is the first-order awareness of what one is doing; reflective self-consciousness is a second-order awareness of oneself as doing it. On this interpretation, Kant’s “I-think” involves the former kind of awareness but not the latter. See Allison, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 100. For an account that elaborates this reflexive consciousness as a consciousness of normativity, see Ginsborg, “Spontaneity without Rationality.” 48 The question of whether these various phases of impressionism, starting with Monet, are “constructivist” can be posed like this: To what extent is the activity of synthesis out of which the water lily is constructed from its constituent “simple impressions” thematized within the artwork itself?



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As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. (W, 7)

In this description, the “dark line” and “thick strokes” join the ontology of the sea and sky which they would seem to indicate or abstract from. Just as the dark line itself “lay on the horizon,” the sea already appears as painted, so that the target of description is not just the sea but the artistic modes of seeing it: basic perception as already imaginative creation. The sea and sky appear indistinguishable, as in Genesis, an evocation of the chaos that precedes creation.49 Here, in place of the God of the biblical creation story dividing sea from sky, the “dark line” itself does the dividing, giving agency to the underlying forms of perception themselves. The developmentally primary line and circle, and all the other geometric forms and shapes that underlie perception, are rediscoverable through the appearances of nature. Following the publication of The Waves, Woolf wrote in her diary: “Oh yes, between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean, I think I am about to embody at last the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning – if The Waves is my first work in my own style.”50 “I think I am about to embody at last the exact shapes my brain holds” is indeed a remarkable sentence. First, there is the suggestion of striving to overcome the dissociated r­ elationship between embodiment and the mind through the material of l­anguage. The brain “holds” shapes but does not yet “embody” them. It is as if the literary work “embodies” an abstraction that is held within the body (but which is not yet embodied by the body!) The “I” thus becomes a metonymy for the literary work. Second, Woolf construes ­mental life not in terms of empirical thought but in terms of geometric abstraction, the “shapes my brain holds.” Finally, putting the two together, the goal of writing is not to represent those shapes held by the brain but rather to embody them.51 Woolf’s appeal to “holding a shape” suggests, with Kant, that there is a ­distinct mode of knowing involved in grasping a form. This holds true for our apprehension of literary form just as it is true for the apprehension of our own form, the synthesizing activity in our own minds. And yet the structure of 49

“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters/ And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so” (Genesis 1: 6–7, KJV). 50 A. O. Bell, ed., Diary of Virginia Woolf, New York: Harcourt, 1985, Vol. 4, 53. 51 The distinction between embodiment and detachment is central to Ross Posnock’s understanding of the modernist rebellion in literature. See his Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers and Artists, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

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The Waves itself manages to “hold” together both the Kantian and the Humean picture, without glossing over the differences between them. Let’s test out, then, whether we can interpret Woolf’s experimental form – her perceptionutterances, as I like to think of them – not as “represented thought” but rather as techniques for embodying shapes held by the brain.52 Woolf’s quest for a radically new narrative form makes good on Kant’s promise of animating conditions of possibility without reifying them into objects. Let’s return to Rhoda: “‘Look at the table-cloth, flying white along the table,’ said Rhoda. ‘Now there are rounds of white china, and silver streaks beside each plate’” (W, 11). The conditions of appearance furnished by Rhoda as a child are mixed, cognitively speaking: We are presented with everyday objects at different phases of their consolidation by the viewer. The separate percepts get cognized as a unified “table-cloth,” only to get caught in motion again, “flying white.” Just as an adverbial dimension of the object is revealed, so too is the adverbial character of thought itself: Spontaneity is a way of doing things.53 The activation of color terms through their use as adverbs is just one of myriad techniques for calling attention to the conditions of the object’s appearance  – for calling attention, in other words, to form. Woolf is involved in a project of laying bare the forms of an object’s apprehension and thereby making palpable that which has become perceptually automatized. If the grammar of adverbs is a microcosmic index to (or a heuristic way into) the “formalism” underlying literary modernisms, it may not be a bad way of indexing certain insights of the first Critique either. Robert Pippin invokes the grammar of adverbs to drive home the point that spontaneity as reflexive awareness, as underpinning or presupposition of object-constitution, must be grasped “on a different plane,” so to speak, from the field in which objects appear. He puts it this way: “No later judgment about what is the case could be said to ‘add’ apperception to my experience. One way of stressing this would be to suggest … that this apperceptive feature of experience is ‘adverbial’, that when I perceive, think, imagine, and so forth, I apperceptively perceive, think, imagine.”54 52

53 54

The citational style of The Waves, rather than quoting characters’ dialogue or even transcribing their thoughts, can be interpreted as a technique for embodying various shapes held by the brain. The speech acts seem to embody the experiences that they “represent.” For an innovative philosophical framework that supplies a link between the cognitive and linguistic level of description in Kant’s theory, see Brodsky’s extended argument in The Linguistic Condition. Robert Pippin, “Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind,” in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, Robert Pippin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 43. Pippin, “Spontaneity,” 43 (emphasis in original).



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The appeal to the adverbial mode is informed by a key Kantian insight, as Pippin expresses it: “The synthetic unity of … awareness … cannot itself be a ‘content’ that is apprehended.”55 The “table-cloth flying white” recalls the grammatical revisionism in William Blake’s “Tyger tyger burning bright,” but also has strong correlates in French symbolisme. According to Françoise Meltzer, the adverbial use of adjectives was a marker of French symbolisme and by extension of later modernisms.56 For the symbolistes, the tradition of using adjectives adverbially was especially marked when it came to color terms. Meltzer reads this tradition as their reaction against Lockean empiricism and its various cultural permutations. In the context of my discussion, the adverb’s intervention is slightly different: To be sure, treating color adverbially opens up the static to the dynamic; but on a formal level, it correlates predication itself with an active doing on the part of the subject. Abstraction predominates in the image again as variations on the two developmentally primary shapes of the line and the circle: The unnamed knives and forks appear as “silver streaks” (does that mean they are “still being cognized,” or that on the contrary, they have been cognized so thoroughly that only abstraction is left?). And yet, the “round china” flanked by the abstracted silver streaks of silverware reflects an advanced level of empirical perception. No a priori category could tell you that you are looking at china. The concept goes beyond geometry to incorporate a whole history of British imperialism and table manners. It is interesting to note that in the same sentence where the “table-cloth” and “round china” are fully identified as objects, the silverware remain as “silver streaks” – a culmination in conceptual abstraction, yet one which returns us to a preconceptual state of affairs where the impressions have not yet been fully cognized. The degrees of abstraction of the “embodied shapes” of the mind, therefore, even within Rhoda’s point of view, remain utterly mixed. The writing does not respect cognitive hierarchies, either by giving a static developmental picture of one individual consciousness at a given developmental stage or by shaping distinct consciousnesses according to distinct idiolects (as is the norm in so-called stream of consciousness fiction). The simple impression, made palpable again through the consciousness of the child, thus performs, ironically, the basic work of defamiliarization – one of the key functions of art. Woolf makes perceptible again for the adult reader the layered processes by which everyday objects are formed. The 55 56

Pippin, “Spontaneity,” 45. Françoise Meltzer, “Color as Cognition in Symboliste Verse,” Critical Inquiry 5.2 (1978), 253–273.

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kinetic blurriness of the “silver streaks,” then, operates as a kind of metaphor for the deeper level of “doing” – the activity that is involved in the construction of the image. This Kantian process of construction is appreciated by Woolf’s text, revealing the underpinnings of objectivity, without, however – and this cannot be overstated – implying that “anything goes.” Unlike a Humean object, the table-cloth, for example, is not exhausted by the enumeration of its constituent parts; nor has it been ossified into the fixed form of an enduring substance, a falsifying “fiction” in Hume’s sense. Rather, something else is going on that makes it a table-cloth. But that “something else” is not really a something at all – it is rather the unifying activity of an understanding that brings all these sensory elements into spontaneous relation with one another. Indeed, one of the chief responsibilities that Kant assigns to our spontaneity is the activity of synthesis: The combination (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to us through the senses … for it is an act of the spontaneity of the faculty of representation, and, since this faculty, to distinguish it from sensibility, must be entitled understanding, all combination – be we conscious of it or not – … is an act of the understanding. To this act the general title “synthesis” may be assigned. (CPR, B130)

Spontaneity is closely linked with the capacity for “thinking things together.” As Pippin emphasizes, this is bound up with the capacity for “taking” the world to be such and such.57 Ginsborg has powerfully elaborated the claim that even in mere “perceptual experience” prior to fullblown judgment, the spontaneous operation of the understanding is still evident in the perceiver’s sense of the “appropriateness of their synthesis.”58 As the semblance of a “Kantian” object, Woolf’s verbal constructions show us the object in the process of being constituted; her fiction presents the disparate sensory elements or “impressions” but also reveals the forms according to which these are spontaneously synthesized together. What Ginsborg elaborates as a “consciousness of normativity,” the child’s sense of the rightness of her synthesis, is for Pippin correlated with a “hold[ing] open” of the validity of her construction. As Pippin puts it: Kant appears to believe it is criterial that we must be implicitly aware of our having “taken” the world to be such and such, and thereby of its possibly 57

58

To what extent this baseline spontaneity, this “taking-as,” involves explicit judgment is a matter of controversy. What is crucial, both for Kant and for Woolf, is an element that Pippin brings out in his discussion of spontaneity – that this synthesis, this ability to “think together” different perceptual events, is bound up with an “inherent reflexivity in consciousness.” Pippin, “Spontaneity,” 40. Ginsborg, “Problem of Experience,” 64.



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not being such and such. The veridicality of, say, our sensory perceptions must be able to be, at least in some weak sense, held open, in cognitive consciousnesses, and that feature of such consciousness requires, Kant appears certain, that consciousness be apperceptive.59

The reflexive awareness of what we are doing when we synthesize representations together also makes it possible for us to understand ourselves as getting the world wrong, when we do, and that’s what makes objectivity possible. Being able to attend to the status of one’s representations as representations is a necessary condition for having representations at all – or more specifically, for having the kind of representations that we ostensibly have, namely, representations that amount to “thinking about” the world.60 The ramifications for narrative theory of Kant’s formalism, his “critical limitation of knowledge to a formal knowledge of representations,” have been elaborated by Brodsky, for whom “Kant’s system of knowledge can … be seen to describe a system of narrative – and to describe experience as the narrative – par excellence.”61 Patricia Kitcher, whose elaboration of a Kantian notion of conscious combining I have already drawn on, is a persistent proponent of the ­element of reflexivity in thought, which, she argues, has fallen out of fashion in contemporary philosophy.62 She explains the Kantian insight as follows: “That is how the cognizer understands her mediate cognition as such – as a case of cognizing something through the cognition of other things.”63 While Kitcher’s examples are limited to what she calls ­“rational cognition” – examples such as counting or deducing a conclusion from premises – “conscious combining” is still a helpful gloss for the kind of synthesis that Kant finds at the bottom of perceptual judgments, generally.64 The children in The Waves make good on the Kantian picture but also stretch it, by forging conscious connections among different sensory 59

Pippin, “Spontaneity,” 42. That self-consciousness is the “highest” condition of possibility for knowledge does not imply that this condition is ever met. It only means that it would be met, were knowledge possible. 61 Claudia Brodsky, The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 10. 62 Kitcher also does not shy away from illuminating the ways in which this Kantian approach runs counter to many current trends in the philosophy of mind. She adds: “Nor is the cognition distinctive of humans widely recognized as requiring conscious acts of combining or synthesizing” (Kitcher, “A Kantian Critique,” 9). 63 Kitcher, “A Kantian Critique,” 167. 64 For a related criticism of Kitcher, see Hannah Ginsborg: “For we cannot understand Kant’s thinker without considering her also as a perceiver, given that thought, for Kant, is operative not only in self-consciously rational judgment but also in perceptual experience.” Hannah Ginsborg, “Kant’s Perceiver,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (2013), 221–228. 60

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data, through language that is both figural and abstract in the way it “combines” representations. This combining power, a power conscious of its own nascent interpretations of reality (“I see a slab of pale yellow … spreading away until it meets a purple stripe”) is a good part of what Kant’s notion of cognitive spontaneity was meant to capture. Kant writes, describing the “act of spontaneity of the faculty of representation”: “We cannot represent to ourselves anything as combined in the object which we have not ourselves previously combined” (CPR, B130, emphasis added). Indeed, “combination cannot be given” is Thomas Land’s pithy formula for what he regards as the key thesis underlying Kant’s entire notion of spontaneity.65 As a rejoinder to the given, spontaneity remains an enduring objection to empiricist models of perception, according to which sense-data could be reported without any intervention whatsoever on the part of the perceiving subject. I have been emphasizing that Woolf’s experimental form calls attention to cognitive potentialities that exceed empirical instantiation because critics have typically understood Woolf’s experimental passage as vindicating empiricist paradigms of sensory immediacy, a kind of neutral scientific data-gathering. Ann Banfield writes that, for Woolf, “the novelist must first ‘record the atoms as they fall upon the mind’ … as the painter begins with the analysis of sense-data.”66 Describing the first dramatic passage in The Waves, Bernard Blackstone writes: “These are the first impressions, the fruit of the immediate contact of senses with phenomena.”67 But then he goes on to note, quite accurately, “the word ‘said’ does not of course refer to spoken words; these are inarticulate sense-perceptions.”68 Blackstone is exactly right, but he has also presented us with a quandary, or helped us to appreciate a quandary in the center of Woolf’s text that I have already referred to: the speech verb “said,” which calls into question the inarticulateness of the primary impression, just as the notion of a primary impression in turn problematizes the viability of the verb “said.” The problem is not that “said” violates the ineffability of the sensory impression; it is rather that you cannot fully derive what is “said” from the raw material of sensory impressions. To paraphrase Chomsky’s critique of empiricism – when it comes to accounts of language-learning, the “contributions of the 65

Thomas Land, “Kant’s Spontaneity Thesis,” Philosophical Topics 34 (2006), 189–220. Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 294. 67 Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf: A Commentary, London: Harcourt, 1949, 168. 68 Blackstone, Virginia Woolf, 168. 66



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child” simply cannot be omitted from consideration.69 Woolf’s radically experimental novelistic form hence corroborates Brodsky’s reading of Kant: the unsung “relation between the synthetic speech acts of judgment and the synthesis of sensory experience and intellect.” As she puts it, “language binds ‘internal’ experience – an otherwise nonexistent content – to ‘external’ form.”70 Emilie Bojesen also astutely identifies this clash, formulating it in terms of a development in the passage from “entirely passive experiences” on the part of the children to the possibility of their “act[ing] on what they see or hear.” In her view, the passages move from “bluntly empirical … perceptions” to “analogies … abstracted consciousness.”71 Without naming Kant, Blackstone and Bojesen nevertheless implicitly abide by a strict reading of the epistemological dualism sometimes associated with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.72 I do think that these dichotomies, invoked by Woolf criticism, pick up on something very real that is invoked in her text, but I would argue that Woolf’s text engages these assumptions only in order to call them into question: We may want to read the text developmentally, from the concrete to the abstract, and from the static to the dynamic, but we can’t. It simply does not corroborate the cognitive hierarchies that it brings to the surface. In this way, Woolf’s intense study of consciousness clarifies the limits of faculty dualism, pointing toward ways that Kant might be read in the future without capitulating to those hierarchies.73 What looks like a sense-data report appears on second glance as what Kant called “little verses”  – suggesting a potential for nascent poetry in everyday cognition. Consider again the first line of dialogue: “‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, … ‘It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’” It is plausible, on the face of it, to interpret this as a neutral report that adds nothing to what Bernard immediately “sees.” As with the other perception-utterances, “ring” could be read as a sense-datum, and 69

Noam Chomsky, Review of B. F. Skinner, “Verbal Behavior,” Language 35.1 (1959), 26–58. Brodsky, Linguistic Condition, 135. 71 Emile Bojesen, “The Education of Consciousness: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,” Foro de Educación 16 (2018), 99–112. 72 Between sensible intuition and concept, with a linear progression from the concrete to the abstract; from the particular to the general. According to this implicitly developmental picture, “analogies … abstracted consciousness” arrive late on the cognitive scene, so to speak. 73 See James Conant, “Why Kant Is Not a Kantian,” Philosophical Topics 44 (2016), 75–125. As it concerns the duality between intuitions and concepts, Conant argues that Kant’s work opposes the assumption that “the capacities here in question – qua cognitive capacities – are self-standingly intelligible.” Conant’s Kant has an excellent friend in Woolf. 70

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therefore “I see a ring” as a classic empiricist report. If the ring is interpreted as an image, and not an object, then Bernard’s relationship to it is indeed one of immediate – and not mediate – apprehension. To focus on the sense-data themselves, bracketing the existence (or nonexistence) of an underlying object is characteristic of the classic report on sensedata. Philosopher Winston H. F. Barnes, writing in the 1940s against the sense-data theory proposed by Russell and others, gives the following example of what had become a recognizable philosophical idiom for that approach: “I can see a circular pinkish patch.”74 This is an idiom that Woolf would have been familiar with in the Bloomsbury circle. Indeed, the second line of dialogue in The Waves seems to echo that paradigmatic example: “‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe’” (W, 9). But here Susan’s consciousness projects an activity, a motion, which exceeds what the empiricist would be able to ascribe to the scene. Her utterance is stretching the limits of what we might call “mere report.” Woolf’s passage both invokes and gradually calls into question the empiricist suppositions of a neutral record. She infuses the classic sense-data report with the very creativity that it denies, incorporating the empiricist discourse into a modernist poetics of abstraction and figuration. The Waves is deeply epistemological but also requires an analysis of discourse, in part because of Woolf’s astonishing use of direct discourse (“said”) that is not to be taken directly. What complex interplay of perception, thought, and speech can be theorized on the basis of Woolf’s narrative form in this text? There are a number of puzzles, when we consider both the “speech act” that the children are engaged in and the intentional states (i.e., the visual and auditory experiences) that those speech acts purportedly express. Is “I see …” an assertion about the occurrence of an act of perception or is it rather the expression of an act of perception, with which it may be intimately bound up? If the latter is true, then this troubles the distinction between a statement and the conditions of satisfaction that would make it true.75 Though Kant’s theory of judgment is often taken 74 75

Winston H. F. Barnes, “The Myth of Sense-Data,” in Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing, ed. Robert J, Swartz, Berkeley: University of California, Press, 1965, 148. I’m using the technical term “conditions of satisfaction” from John Searle’s Intentionality. Conditions of satisfaction are the external conditions under which a statement is true, a perception is veridical, etc. Searle’s theory of intentional states, like visual experiences, and his speech act theory, linked as they are, help to sharpen the strangeness of Woolf’s intervention in “stream of consciousness” writing but also bring out the degree to which her thought is saturated with the philosophical problematics of propositional form. John Searle accounts for intentionality (in a Kantian vein, though he would abhor the comparison!) by claiming that whole propositional contents are



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to exclude an account of language and linguistic articulation, Brodsky’s extended argument to the contrary in The Linguistic Condition provides a Kantian justification for exactly the kind of cognitive-linguistic blend that we find in Woolf’s perception-utterances – and their felt experimentality, to this day: “Like any speech act,” Brodsky writes, “the specifically verbal nature of aesthetic as of any ‘judgment’ in Kant requires that it be articulated in a general, predicative sentence.”76 Further, “[i]t is the specifically verbal mode and not ‘mode of thought’ (Denkungsart) of judgment, its enactment in an utterance understood to be comprehensible and attributable to all, that lends it the ‘logical’ quality ‘constituting’ the constative form of ‘cognition.’”77 Let us now take a look at the conditions of appearance that Neville’s consciousness make plain. Neville’s perception-utterance begins, seemingly, with a terse subject-predicate formula that asserts the finished objectness of the object: “‘I see a globe,’ said Neville …”  – there’s nothing blurry about that statement. But after the comma is where the sentence begins to wear its implicit spontaneity on its surface: “‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’” Again, we see the recurrence of the developmentally primary geometric image-schemas78 of the “circle” and the “line” latent within all visual experience, if they are to count as real seeing. Thus, all seeing is seeing that. Hence, “I see a station wagon in front of me” becomes, if we want to make the content of the visual perception explicit, “I see that there is a station wagon in front of me.” Visual experience is never simply of an object but rather it must always be that such and such is the case. Whenever, for example, my visual experience is of a station wagon it must also be an experience, part of whose content is, for example, that there is a station wagon in front of me (40). But Searle then goes on to address the worry that in insisting on this propositional structure inherent to visual experience, he is demanding too high a degree of self-reflection on the part of the perceiver: “When I say that the content of the visual experience is equivalent to a whole proposition I do not mean that it is linguistic but rather that the content requires the existence of a whole state of affairs if it is to be satisfied.” John Searle, Intentionality, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 40. It follows from this interpretation that when Bernard says he sees a ring, he is making a real claim on the world (correct or not). 76 Brodsky, Linguistic Condition, 110–111. Traditionally, the route from Kant’s theory of judgment – understood as antecedent to the “linguistic turn” – to twentieth-century speech act theory has been tracked via Gottlob Frege. Kant’s description of judgment as an act of combining disparate representations into a unity anticipates the emphasis on the propositional dimensions of thought in later philosophy of language. But this trajectory has made it difficult to see how to integrate the cognitive with the propositional or proto-linguistic levels of description; the mapping between one domain and the next remains to some degree metaphorical (in the deep sense). By contrast, Brodsky’s reading of Kant makes it possible to understand cognitive judgment and verbal articulation as coextensive, with “I see a ring” operating both as cognitive judgment and as speech act. 77 Ibid., 66. 78 George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990.

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in the shape of the globe and the vertical trajectory of its “hanging down.” In The Waves the globe appears first in the consciousness of Neville as a child but is then transferred intersubjectively between and among various consciousnesses, suggesting a dispersed awareness of the very problem of their interrelation. The globe motif recurs numerous times throughout the work, and its meaning horizon widens. Does the “globe” name a geographical model of Planet Earth, or does it name another object altogether, whose globular shape has been abstracted? The ambiguity between the realistic registering of an object whole and the deployment of an abstract category (spherical shapes) suggests that the work of abstraction may be an essential part of all object recognition, an expression of active spontaneity.79 Andrew Brook, in his commentary on Kant, uses the term “global representation” to capture this tendency toward unity in the construction of experience. On this view, what Neville calls “globing” would on the Kantian picture be involved both in the construction of individual experiences and in their unification into “one experience.” Here is Kant: “There is only one experience, in which all perceptions are represented as in thoroughgoing and lawlike connection […] If one speaks of different experiences, they are only so many perceptions insofar as they belong to one and the same universal experience” (CPR, A110). In The Waves, the “globe” looks like it’s just one object of representation among a catalog of others, but in fact “globing” is a pretty good metaphor for  – and a metareflection on  – what it means to “unify experience at all,” quite apart from its imperial or perhaps anti-imperialist implications, which Jane Garrity demonstrates.80 The representation of spontaneous doing is reflected not only in the use of “globe” as a noun; it appears as a verb in the lexicon of Woolf’s speakers. The verb “to globe” or “globing” recurs in The Waves, suggesting a reflexive awareness of what it might have taken to arrive at the globenoun (or any other object of perception) in the first place: “‘I see a globe,’ said Neville.” In a later scene, Woolf’s six consciousnesses have reached adulthood and are meeting at a restaurant for a rare moment of literal (and not just formal) convergence of first-person perspectives. Note the 79

To quote Lanier Anderson, “the rules of cognitive synthesis … operat[e] under the aegis of a principle aiming at the maximal unity of possible experience.” R. Lanier Anderson, “Neo-Kantianism and the Roots of Anti-Psychologism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13.2 (2005), 312. 80 Jane Garrity, “Global Objects in The Waves,” in A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman, Miley, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2016, 121–137.



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reappearance and recontextualization of both Susan’s ring and Neville’s globe in the later episode, when the children have long grown up into adults and are now reuniting in a London restaurant: “Now once more,” said Louis, “as we are about to part, having paid our bill, the circle in our blood, broken so often, so sharply, for we are so different, closes in a ring. Something is made. Yes, as we rise and fidget, a little nervously, we pray, holding in our hands this common feeling, ‘Do not move, do not let the swing door cut to pieces the thing that we have made, that globes itself here, among these lights, these peelings, this litter of bread crumbs and people passing. Do not move, do not go. Hold it forever.’” (W, 145)

The passage emphasizes the fragility of what is created intersubjectively between them; the “something that is made” can by dint of its very constructedness be “cut to pieces” and may even have begun that way, in a state of fragmentation. We were presented with the “ring” on page one of The Waves as something that is immediately apprehended (“‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard”); but here we see that the “ring” is no primary impression at all but rather refers to an activity of closing a broken circle (“the circle in our blood, broken so often … closes in a ring).” Far from being perceptually “given,” the ring must be constructed – or, better, reconstructed, by putting together what is “broken.” Interestingly, one could say that it is precisely by highlighting the originary state of fragmentation from which object constancy proceeds that Woolf’s text does not take for granted the atomistic disaggregation presupposed by Hume. Louis imagines a common feeling, or imperative held in common among his friends, in the form of a unified sentence: “Do not move, do not let the swing door cut to pieces the thing that we have made, that globes itself here.” As it did for Rhoda earlier on, now for everyone, time itself cuts up the “thing that we have made,” threatening to return common objects to a state of disaggregation. The fact that the idea “globes itself” here, introducing a new reflexive verb, echoes the reflexive, spontaneous component of the Kantian picture. Woolf seems to insist on the intersubjective dimension of this spontaneity. However, it is crucial that this intersubjective component be understood not psychologically but formally. Woolf herself denied that the six voices are “characters” at all, and her engagement with and critique of stream of consciousness rejects emphatically any claim to psychological verisimilitude. In her letters, Woolf suggests that she would be happy if Bernard, Louis, and Rhoda were read all as parts of one mind – but, of course, such a reading would only provoke the problem of cognitive synthesis

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rather than resolving it.81 Indeed, when Kant remarks that spontaneity must overcome the “foreign[ness]” of representations to one another (CPR, A97), he is referring to a foreignness that must be overcome within a single mind. It takes just as much synthesis to become “I” as to become “we.” While there are many powerful reasons for identifying Kant’s philosophy with the reign of bourgeois individualism, it also seems fair to Kant to acknowledge the ways in which his project radically upends (and renders provisional) any unity that could be claimed on behalf of the subject from within. With what right do I say “I,” if all I am is a synthesizing activity? Ginsborg writes that in the first Critique, as opposed to other works, Kant treats the “I” of apperception as if it were a “disembodied locus of spontaneity.” Indeed, “to represent the I is simply to represent the spontaneous activity of thought.”82 Woolf’s experimental narrative form corresponds very closely to this minimalist interpretation of the Kantian subject. At times, Kant goes so far as to argue, rather astonishingly, that a reflexive awareness of this combining power in us is really all that can be claimed on behalf of a self at all. He writes, and in the first person no less: “I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its powers of combination” (CPR, B159). One of the striking features of Kant’s account of cognitive spontaneity is the way in which it links the formalism of reflexive awareness with the agency of doing. But on what I am calling the “minimalist” account of 81

See Sarah Copland on the “one-mind” as opposed to the “six-minds” reading of The Waves. Sarah Copland, “Conceptual Blending in The Waves,” in Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications, ed. Ralph Schneider and Marcus Hartner, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2012, 253–279. Woolf’s text is systematically ambiguous between these two interpretations and I argue that the ambiguity itself is philosophically generative. See also Woolf’s letter to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, appreciating his reading of The Waves: What you say you felt about the Waves is exactly what I wanted to convey … I did mean that in some vague way we are the same person, and not separate people. The six characters were supposed to be one. I’m getting old myself … and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia; even though the special Virginia in whose body I live for the moment is violently susceptible to all sorts of separate feelings. Therefore I wanted to give the sense of continuity, instead of which most people say, no you’ve given the sense of flowing and passing away and that nothing matters. Yet I feel things matter quite immensely … I’m annoyed to be told that I am nothing but a stringer together of words and words and words…How one longs to have done something in the world.

82

Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, ed., The Letters of Virginia Woolf, New York: Harcourt, 1982, Vol. 4, 397–398. Ginsborg, “The Appearance of Spontaneity,” 205.



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the Kantian subject, in no way does this consciousness of doing imply the consciousness of a doer. This positions Kantian spontaneity really at the opposite end of the “transcendental ego” sometimes claimed on behalf of Kantian philosophy. For Kant, the idea of spontaneity as selfconscious, synthesizing form was recruited to resolve the question of how to gain a “consciousness of the whole” without falling into those falsifying delusions that Hume called “fiction.” But this strategic move has a truth value: Kant works very hard to try to explain how experience can be unified without “fictionalizing” ourselves, in Hume’s sense, for the sake of unity. While Woolf’s form, the chorus of perception-utterances, poses a version of the binding problem, there is a systematic ambiguity in her novel between intersubjective and intrasubjective relations. This means that it is equally plausible to read the form of spontaneity that The Waves endorses, if indeed it does so at all, as an expression of intrasubjective synthesis as it is to read it as an expression of an intersubjective synthesis. The model of spontaneity retains a polyphonous quality whether it is construed intersubjectively (the “one-mind” reading) or intrasubjectively (the “six-mind” reading). This is a formal question that the work holds open in my view. Indeed, The Waves invites critical reflection on the form of intersubjective binding, or synthesis, precisely by not letting our synthesizing faculties complete their determining work. One of the key Humean challenges taken up by Kant is the fact that the picture of “consciousness as aggregate built up from smaller units” became no longer tenable. Kant illustrates the problem with the ­aggregative model by arguing as follows: “Representations that are ­distributed among different beings (for instance, the individual words of a verse) never constitute a whole thought (a verse)” (CPR, A352). The fluidity with which Kant moves between the unity of thought and the unity of the poetic line bespeaks a relationship between cognitive form and literary form that may run deeper than mere analogy; that is, the two domains may be more interconnected than previously thought. This anti-psychologistic strain in Kant, tending toward a merely formal notion of unity, is fiercely reopened on the eve of modernism.83 Indeed, William James further fleshes out Kant’s thought experiment (and metaphorical mapping between thought and text), in a passage which became highly influential in Kant studies: “Take a sentence of a dozen words, 83

Anderson, “Neo-Kantianism,” 298.

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and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.”84 James’ twelve homogenous men replicate one another as they passively read out a sentence over which none of them has a sense of “ownership,” and relatedly, which none of them can render into a whole meaning.85 James’ and Kant’s passages are a kind of shadow-text for Woolf’s The Waves, which takes six voices, male and female, and poses the problem of synthesis kaleidoscopically. Woolf’s motif of “globing” as intersubjective or intrasubjective form, resonates with what I call Kant’s “minimal” notion of spontaneity; at the same time, “globing” names a possibility for synthesis that is more provisional, more precarious. Mourning the death of the six’s common friend Percival in the episode following the dinner party scene, Neville is walking through the National Gallery, looking at art and processing his grief when he says: “Behold then, the blue madonna streaked with tears. This is my funeral service. We have no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each separate” (W, 157). In this passage, Neville suggests (with a degree of emotional ambivalence) that “ceremony” synthesizes and brings an order to, possibly making more bearable (and more conventional, less searing), that “violent” separateness of sensation. But what’s spontaneous about ceremonies? Ceremonies are institutional structures, not designed by the individuals who experience grief in their “private dirges” with “no conclusion.” They are the reified congealment of experience. Here, to go beyond the violence of disjointed sensation is either to participate in a numbing fiction, in Hume’s sense, or to subsume oneself under a deadening concept, if we take Kant’s picture. The “conclusion” (operation of the understanding, over and above sensibility) that goes beyond the “separateness” of sensation is not lauded here as a synthesizing power but on the contrary is regarded with suspicion; the “conclusions” really abandon the “separate sensations” from which they derive, rather than containing and ­incorporating them into a meaningful and articulate structure. I have argued here for a sustained dialogue in The Waves between a view of the 84 85

James, Principles, 160. See Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 459. This brings out the intimate link between the two aspects of spontaneity I named earlier; the link, that is, between nascent agency (something coming from us) and nascent awareness of what we are doing as we are doing it.



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mind that is sometimes called Kantian spontaneity (but doesn’t have to be) and a view of the mind captured by Hume’s notion of “fiction.” What is at stake for Woolf, and in a way for Kantian thinkers to this day, is whether an affirmative (nondeadening) function can still be claimed for the work of conceptualization. We must remember, when reading this passage, that when Neville says, “only violent sensations, each separate” (W, 207), he is engaged in intratextual allusion which may even be tantamount to intersubjective dialogue, and thus to bridging separateness. For Rhoda is the one, as we have seen, to whom the idea of “violent sensation” most profoundly belongs: “I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate” (W, 130). For her, experience in time lacks cohesion, and indeed all attempts to override that discontinuity are empty “ceremony” (and not spontaneous synthesis). At the same time, the very appearance of Rhoda’s private sensation in Neville’s consciousness holds them together in something possibly other than “ceremony”; something like that fragile and temporary “globing” that pieces together that “circle of blood, broken so often”  – the common circulation which may be all we have. I have argued throughout that The Waves does not present mental contents but rather is pitched at the level of form; that is, at the structural creativity underlying the appearance of objects. The challenge for the explanatory notion of spontaneity – as well as for our reading of Woolf – has been to show how such internal synthesizing abstractions, the shapes held by the brain, can be construed as points of departure for creativity rather than as rigid structures that reduplicate experience according to a prior model. The ramifications of this epistemology go beyond the technical point in analytic philosophy and in fact form a cornerstone of critical theory. What I am suggesting about Kantian spontaneity is that the caricature of conceptuality as rigid pre-determination (though rightly earned, given the terror and violence sometimes associated with “rationality” in human history) may nevertheless not do justice to all the potentiality embedded in the understanding. Woolf’s elaboration of a sense perception saturated with understanding is cognate Kant, despite their incommensurable modes of discourse. If both disclose conditions of possibility for experience, the shared artistic and philosophical problem becomes, how do you make a condition of possibility palpable? Woolf’s work with perceptual form suggests that novelistic form can “hold” or embed modes of spontaneity that are negated in everyday life – either by social numbness or because they are lost, submerged so deeply at the a priori level.

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Bibliography Addison, Catherine. A Genealogy of the Verse Novel. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. Allison, Henry. Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, R. Lanier. “Neo-Kantianism and the Roots of Anti-Psychologism.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13.2 (2005), 312. Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Barnes, Winston H. F. “The Myth of Sense-Data.” In Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing, ed. Robert J, Swartz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965. Berrong, Richard M. “Modes of Literary Impressionism.” Genre 39.2 (2006), 203–228. Blackstone, Bernard. Virginia Woolf: A Commentary. London: Harcourt, 1949. Bojesen, Emile. “The Education of Consciousness: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.” Foro de Educación 16 (2018), 99–112. Brodsky, Claudia. The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Brodsky, Claudia. Words’ Worth: What the Poet Does. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Canady, John. Mainstreams of Modern Art: David to Picasso. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959. Cascardi, Anthony J. The Bounds of Reason. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Cascardi, Anthony J. Consequences of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cascardi, Anthony J. “The Novel.” In Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Eldridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Chomsky, Noam. “Review of B. F. Skinner, ‘Verbal Behavior.’” Language 35.1 (1959), 26–58. Conant, James. “Why Kant Is Not a Kantian.” Philosophical Topics 44 (2016), 75–125. Copland, Sarah. “Conceptual Blending in The Waves.” In Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications, ed. Ralph Schneider and Marcus Hartner. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012. Dalgeron, Emily. “Reality and Perception: Philosophical Approaches to To the Lighthouse.” In The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse, ed. Allison Pease. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. DiBattista, Maria. Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Fernihough, Anne. “Consciousness as a Stream.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, ed. Morag Shiach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Fodor, Jerry A. The Language of Thought. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975.



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Garrity, Jane. “Global Objects in The Waves.” In A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman. Miley, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. Ginsborg, Hannah. “Kant and the Problem of Experience.” Philosophical Topics 34.1–2 (2006), 59–106. Ginsborg, Hannah. “Kant’s Perceiver,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (2013), 221–228. Ginsborg, Hannah. “Spontaneity without Rationality: A Kantian Approach to Self-consciousness and Perceptual Content.” In Perceptual Knowledge and SelfAwareness, ed. Andrea Giananti, Johannes Roessler, and Gianfranco Soldati. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. Graham, J. W. “Point of View in the Waves: Some Services of the Style.” University of Toronto Quarterly 39.3 (1970), 193–211. Grice, H. Paul. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover, 1950. 2 vols. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1929. Kitcher, Patricia. “Guyer on the Value of Freedom.” In Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity, ed. Kate Moran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Kitcher, Patricia. “A Kantian Critique of Transparency.” In Kant and the Philosophy of Mind: Perception, Reason and the Self, ed. Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Kitcher, Patricia. Kant’s Thinker, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kitcher, Patricia. “Kant on Self-consciousness.” The Philosophical Review 108.3 (1999), 345–386. Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Kronfeld, Maya. “The Philosopher’s Bass Drum: Adorno’s Jazz and the Politics of Rhythm.” Radical Philosophy 2.5 (2019), 34–47. Kronfeld, Maya. “Structure in the Moment: Rhythm Section Responsivity.” Jazz and Culture 4.2, Special Issue, Jazz in the Present Tense (2021), 14–22. Kronfeld, Maya. “Toni Morrison’s Jazz as a Theory of Knowledge.” In Spontaneous Form: Consciousness and Philosophical Fiction, Maya Kronfeld (ms. in preparation). Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990. Land, Thomas. “Kant’s Spontaneity Thesis.” Philosophical Topics 34 (2006), 189–220. Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. Meltzer, Françoise. “Color as Cognition in Symboliste Verse.” Critical Inquiry 5.2 (1978), 253–273. Moran, Kate. “Introduction.” In Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity, ed. Kate Moran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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Parten, M. B. “Social Participation among Preschool Children.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 27.3 (1932), 243–269. Pippin, Robert. “Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind.” In Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, Robert Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pippin, Robert. Kant’s Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Posnock, Ross. Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers and Artists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Searle, John. Intentionality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Smith, Norman Kemp. A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stroud, Barry. “Naturalism and Skepticism in the Philosophy of Hume.” In The Oxford Handbook of Hume, ed. Paul Russell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Warren, Daniel. Reality and Impenetrability in Kant’s Philosophy of Nature. New York: Routledge, 2001. Woolf, Virginia. Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Ann Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1985, Vol. 4. Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt, 1982. 4 vols. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1994, Vol. 4. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, 1993. Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. New York: Harcourt, 1959. Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 3 vols. Zhang, Dora. “Feeling with Woolf.” In Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, Dora Zhang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.

chapter 11

The Poetics of a Transcendental Deduction

The Self-Erasing “I” in Kant, Tawada, and Benveniste John Namjun Kim

I  The Transcendental, Empirical, and Material Very little in the central argument of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason would at first appear to avail itself of literary presentation (Darstellung). Presented in the “Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding,” the burden of that central argument is to demonstrate “how the subjective conditions of thinking” – the pure concepts of the understanding, or such “categories” as substance and causation – “should have objective validity, i.e., yield conditions of the possibility of all cognitions of objects.”1 Its aim is to establish the basis of the epistemological truth claims upon which subsequent claims in the spheres of “morality” in the Second Critique and “aesthetics” in the Third Critique depend. In that it holds Kant’s entire philosophical system together qua system, the philosophical stakes of the “Transcendental Deduction” are so high that little room for considerations of its intersections with the concerns of literary studies would appear possible, advisable, or worth pursuing – at least at first glance. Adding to these difficulties, the technical complications of the “Transcendental Deduction” are such that it is the lone substantive section that Kant thoroughly revised for the second edition of the First Critique in 1787 (henceforth, “the B-Deduction”), pursuant to the apparent failure of its version in the first edition in 1781 (henceforth, “the A-Deduction”) to convince Kant’s contemporaries. In spite of this revision – or, rather, 1

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 222, emphasis in original. All translations of Kant’s works are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Page citations from the “Akademie” edition of Kant’s works are also provided by volume and page number: Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (and later Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin), Berlin: Georg Reimer (and later Walter de Gruyter), 1902–, IV A89–90/III B122. Hereafter, page citations from both the English and German editions are provided parenthetically, with those from the Cambridge edition preceded by a “C” and those from the Akademie edition by an “Ak,” for example: (C 222; Ak IV: A89-90/III: B122).

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in large part precisely because of it – the legacy of the philosophical reception of the “Transcendental Deduction” has fared little better in the B-Deduction, leaving its interpreters divided, not on which of the two versions succeeds “more” but on which fails less.2 Given the necessity of accepted logical truth claims to the representational claims of fiction, the most promising form in which the “Transcendental Deduction” might lend itself to literary presentation may be in a narrative that actively performs the logical bases of Kant’s failures. However distant it may appear to Kant’s immediate concerns, Yōko Tawada’s 1989 novella Das Bad (The Bath)/うろこもち (Bearing Scales) provides just such a literary presentation in the form of an ironization of Kant’s “Transcendental Deduction” with specific respect to its structural inability to achieve its aim.3 This too, however, may appear just as infeasible as the positive correlation of the “Transcendental Deduction” with literary modes of presentation. Even as Tawada’s critical readers frequently identify a philosophical dimension of her poetically playful prose in its references to Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and occasionally, if very sparingly, G. W. F. Hegel, among others, very little in the markedly poetic style of her novella would appear to share anything with that of the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher, whose own writing style Heinrich Heine once chided as being as “gray” and “dry” as “wrapping paper.”4 Nevertheless, the first-person narrator in The Bath gestures directly 2

For a comprehensive account of the interpretive critiques of Kant’s “Transcendental Deduction” extending from Kant’s contemporaries through their successors in the early neo-Kantianisms of the 1870s through the early 1890s, see Hans Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Stuttgart, Berlin, and Leipzig: Union deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1892, Vol. 2. 3 Hereafter, all citations of Tawada’s Das Bad (The Bath)/うろこもち (Bearing Scales) are from the English translation, Yoko Tawada, “The Bath,” trans. Yumi Selden, in Where Europe Begins, Yoko Tawada, New York: New Directions Books, 2002, with modifications based on the original Japanese where noted. The publication history of this novella and differences in citation practices for East Asian language texts poses unique challenges to the practice of consistent scholarly citation. The Bath was originally published only in its German translation as Yoko Tawada, Das Bad, trans. Peter Pörtner, Tübingen: konkursbuch, 1989. It was subsequently republished in a dual-language, German-Japanese edition in Germany, as Yoko Tawada 多和田葉子 (Tawada Yōko), Das Bad/う ろこもち, trans. Peter Pörtner, Tübingen: konkursbuch, 2010, from which this chapter cites to gloss the English translation by Selden. The German-Japanese dual-language publication was the first time the Japanese original appeared in print. Citing this original publication of the Japanese text is complicated by the fact that its German translation appears in conventional European horizontal order, with the book proceeding from left to right, while the text of the Japanese original appears in conventional Japanese vertical order proceeding from right to left. As such, the page citations of the Japanese original appear in reverse numerical order, that is, descending rather than ascending. Page citations from Selden’s English translation are preceded in this essay by an “E,” those from the Japanese original by a “J.” 4 Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1966, 154.



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to the Kantian subject described in both versions of the “Transcendental Deduction,” albeit as if that subject were not a transcendental figure but the literary figure of a, strictly speaking, nonidentifiable Japanese woman living in West Germany in the 1980s. For Tawada’s subject is a first-person narrator who cannot say I without stuttering, or even say anything of herself without lying, repeatedly asserting her various social identities in one passage only to deny them in the next. In the opening chapter, the narrator awakens to find her skin transformed into fish scales, which she then scrubs off in the bath exposing oozing, rancid blisters underneath (E9/J170–E12/J158). In the next chapter, she then presents herself as a photomodel, but one who remains invisible in photographs until she is made up to look like the racialized image of a “Japanese” woman. Later, she confesses that she is “in truth” (本当は, hontō wa; translation emended) not a photomodel at all but “only a simultaneous interpreter who [is] uncertified” (E13/J154) and who translates sentences “that no one has said” (E14/J150). She then later reveals that she is “in truth” not a simultaneous interpreter at all but only sometimes pretended to be one, for “in truth I was just a typist” (E47/J30, translation emended, emphasis added), but one that “has forgotten the letters of the alphabet” (E55/J6). Finally, she asserts her last claim to a first-person “identity” at the end of the novella, “I am a transparent coffin,” but only after musing that “[t]here ought to be a curriculum vitae whose first line is the date of death” (E55/ J6, emphasis added). For Tawada’s subject, then, “the course of life” would begin with the inscription of her death. Her repeated use of the phrase “in truth” throughout the novella puts into question both what epistemological “truth” is and how one could ever know it, further undercutting the very purpose of Kant’s “Transcendental Deduction.” Whatever the nameless first-personal narrator of The Bath is “in truth,” she remains an I who questions the “truth” of the I, not in a mode of self-confession but in one of continuous self-erasure belied by the textual presence of the pronoun I. What she is “in truth,” then, is the “success” of the Kantian subject in failing to be any particular subject. As Kant argues in his B-Deduction, if his central argument were to fail, “I would have as multicolored, diverse [vielfarbiges verschiedenes] a self as I have representations [Vorstellungen] of which I am conscious” (C 242; Ak III: B134; emphasis added). Tawada’s narrator effectively does both: attributing contradictorily diverse identities to a nonetheless persistent subject “I.” In reconstructing Kant’s “Transcendental Deduction” in light of Tawada’s The Bath, the present analysis does not merely seek to show how Tawada’s narrator ironizes, through its self-representational practice, the simultaneous

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success and failure of the central argument of the First Critique. Rather, it also seeks to show how Tawada’s literary text, which recursively refers to its own textual basis in the tensions between the literal and the figural, offers the strictly Kantian reader – the philosopher – a way to reread the “Transcendental Deduction,” and especially the B-Deduction, both for its problems and out of its problems. In so doing, this analysis also seeks to show readers of literature the philosophical implications of Tawada’s narrative ironization of Kant. These two texts are tied, not only by Tawada’s thematic if subtle references to Kant, but more so by their common tension between the figures of the transcendental and those of the empirical. As Tawada’s novella suggests, the tension between the transcendental and the empirical turns on a third term that Kant does not thematically consider in either of the two versions of the “Transcendental Deduction,” namely, the textual or the material. That third term is one this analysis considers in focusing on the textual mark X before turning to the emptiness of the more volatile textual mark I.

II  The A-Deduction: X Marks the Spot In both the A- and B-Deductions, Kant faces a considerable difficulty in attempting to show that the “subjective conditions of thinking should have objectively validity” (C 242; Ak IV: A89–90/III: B122). This difficulty lies in demonstrating how the pure concepts of the understanding, or “the categories,” can have objective validity without appealing to the qualities of empirical experience or contents of cognitions (Erkenntnisse) that the application of those same concepts first makes possible. Any foundational inclusion of empirical experience would thus lead him into a vicious circle, of which his contemporaries and successors indeed charged Kant. In rough outline, Kant attempts to justify the objective validity of the categories by first explicating the necessary relation between the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition (Anschauung) and the transcendental unity of consciousness, or “transcendental apperception”: The possibility of the former is predicated on the latter, but awareness of the latter is predicated on awareness of the former. More crudely stated, there can be no object without a subject and no subject without an object. For Kant, and subsequently his early critics, the problem can be formulated in the question: Where to begin, with the object or the subject? With whichever side of the synthesis of empirical cognition Kant begins, the justification of the transcendental necessity of the pure concepts as the precondition for one’s knowledge of objects takes the form of demonstrating the necessity of the transcendental unity of consciousness.



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In the case of the A-Deduction, Kant begins the presentation of his argument with the “object,” albeit in its primordial state as the mere synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition, that is, prior to its being a proper “object” in Kant’s technical sense of that which adheres to the pure forms of intuition of space and time and to the categories. However, in executing his argument, he also goes beyond the scope of his immediate philosophical aim in this section of the First Critique. He unwittingly offers what might be called not just a “phenomenology” of reading – that is, an analysis of how reading appears in consciousness – but an allegory of reading, in which the practice of reading is described in other terms. This unwitting allegory of reading is also one of the principal points of thematic contact between the “Transcendental Deduction” and Tawada’s The Bath, whose narrator ironizes the notion of a transcendental unity of consciousness as she is taken, not as a subject, but as an object for others, who is literally marked with an X. In the A-Deduction, Kant articulates the possibility of experience in terms of a threefold synthesis of the manifold: the synthesis of “apprehension in the intuition,” of “reproduction in the imagination,” and of “recognition in the concept” (C 228–233; Ak IV: A98–110). Despite the appearance of this successive, tripartite division, Kant refers not to three distinct syntheses but to one act of synthesis with three aspects in which each successive aspect is the precondition of the preceding aspect in regressive order – namely, recognition as the precondition for reproduction and reproduction for apprehension. The first aspect of the threefold synthesis, the synthesis of apprehension, repeats a conclusion already established in the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” namely, that the manifold of intuition is necessarily subject to time as one of the two pure forms of intuition. But, in respect to the synthetic activity of the understanding, Kant adds to this temporal condition the notion that the representation of the manifold must be given over in one moment, that is, as a unity. Kant writes: “Every intuition contains a manifold in itself, which however would not be represented as such if the mind [das Gemüt] did not distinguish the time in the succession of impressions on one another; for as contained in one moment [in einem Augenblick] no representation can ever be anything other than absolute unity” (C 228– 229; Ak IV: A99; emphasis in original).5 Thus, whereas the manifold itself 5

See also, Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: An Analytical-Historical Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 209–210, for an analysis of the notion of “one moment” (einem Augenblick).

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is given over in a nondiscrete temporal series, the representation of that same manifold must take the form of absolute unity. Here, the specific act of synthesis consists in the unification of the manifold in one representation by the faculty of understanding. A manifold contains a diversity of elements, but this diversity itself could not be represented as a “diversity” unless it were already synthesized into one discrete representation. This synthesis of apprehension presupposes that of reproduction, insofar as one cannot represent to oneself the unity of the manifold of intuition without also reproducing the succession of elements of the temporal series of the manifold (C 230; Ak IV: A102). Kant’s illustrative examples on this point are taken from geometry, geophysics, and mathematics but could very well be taken from literary studies, namely, from the act of reading a sentence: [I]t is obvious that if I draw a line in thought, or think of the time from one noon to the next, or even want to represent a certain number to myself, I must necessarily first grasp one of these manifold representations after another in my thoughts. But if I were always to lose the preceding representations (the first part of the line, the preceding parts of time, or the successively represented units) from my thoughts and not reproduce them when I proceed to the following one, then no whole representation and none of the previously mentioned thoughts, not even the purest and most fundamental representations of space and time, could ever arise. (C 230; Ak IV: A102)

Though Kant’s example of measuring the time from one noon to the next requires reconsideration for his ultimate aim in the “Transcendental Deduction,” it suffices for the moment to follow the logic of his first example, the drawing of a line in thought: It would be impossible to represent to oneself line AC if one were not able to reproduce in the faculty of imagination the segment AB after one has drawn segment BC. The temporal event of drawing line AC would be impossible without reproducing the infinite series of minor segments that in total constitute line AC. In terms of reading, the preceding passage cited from Kant would be utterly illegible were it not possible for a unified consciousness to “reproduce” each of its moments, or letters or words, of the sentence upon reading its succeeding moments, for otherwise the sentence, like Kant’s imaginary line, would fall apart. Nevertheless, the possibility of synthetic reproduction presupposes the synthesis of recognition. However, unlike his analyses of the syntheses of apprehension and reproduction, Kant remains conceptually ambiguous on what is “recognized” in this synthesis. It is ambiguous because “recognition” has a dual significance. In terms of the reproduction of a thing in the imagination, such as Kant’s line being drawn, the analytically determined



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minor events, for example, segments AB and BC, must be “recognized” as identifiable components of the synthetically unified manifold that is the major event, line AC. For, otherwise, Kant’s line would not be a continuous line, but a discontinuous perforation in consciousness, just as, it should be added, each letter or word of Kant’s own text would be disassociated from the other. In other words, in order to grasp the manifold of intuition in one unified representation, it must be possible not only to reproduce the temporal series of the manifold but also to recognize the composite identity of the manifold, consisting, as it must, of each of the preceding moments of its temporal progression. At the same time, the recognition of the identity of this line throughout its drawing is simultaneously also the recognition of the transcendental unity of consciousness that makes the identity of the line possible as a continuity, rather than a perforated discontinuity. For Kant, this transcendental unity of consciousness must be presupposed already in the syntheses of apprehension and reproduction, for otherwise what is represented would be a “new representation in our current state, which would not belong at all to the act through which it had been gradually generated, and its manifold would never constitute a whole, since it would lack the unity that only consciousness can obtain [verschaffen] for it” (C 230; Ak IV: A103). This passage in the A-Deduction is a precursor to Kant’s claim in the B-Deduction, as cited in part earlier, that “only because I can comprehend [the] manifold [of representations] in a consciousness do I call them all together my representations; for otherwise I would have as multicolored, diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious” (C 247–248; Ak III: B134; emphasis in original). However, in the A-Deduction, Kant remains largely silent on the threat posed if the A-Deduction were to fail other than to note that it would be impossible to constitute a representation as a unity in the absence of the unity of consciousness. As such, his sole concern in his discussion is not what is specifically given over in the syntheses of apprehension and reproduction but its mere form as a unity. Thus, despite Kant’s illustrative examples of a line being drawn, the measuring of time from one noon to the next, or the counting of numbers, he notes that any such continuous “object must be thought of only as something in general = X” (C 231; Ak IV: A104) so as to denote “something that is distinct from all of our representations” but “is nothing for us” otherwise (C 231; Ak IV: A105; emphasis added). This “something in general = X” is “nothing for us” in the sense that it does not mark anything other than that act of transcendental consciousness – that is, the synthesis of recognition – that unifies experience under one representation but that remains distinct

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from its representation. It is an absolute otherness that remains “nothing for us” other than as a formal unity imparted by “us,” as Kant continues, “since outside of our cognition we have nothing that we could set over against this cognition as corresponding to it” (C 231; Ak IV: A104). This theme of otherness marked by an X will recur in the reading of Tawada’s The Bath. However, it is enough to note for now in terms of Kant’s concerns that the X functions as an epistemic mirror for the transcendental unity of consciousness; it is neither the soon to be empirical “object” in the manifold of intuition nor the transcendental unity of consciousness but the point at which the transcendental and empirical literally, figuratively and especially materially, intersect in the X. The X is a material or textual manifestation of the intersection or chiasm of the transcendental and the empirical. While X marks “the spot,” “the spot” itself refers in two different directions, the transcendental and empirical, as they find themselves at the “crossroads” of one and the same point.

III  X: A Crucified Japanese Woman As if directly citing Kant’s X in the A-Deduction, Tawada’s nameless firstperson narrator recounts  – in the first of her many “multicolored” and “diverse” guises as a photomodel – her reflections on the first letter of the name of her boyfriend, Xander, whom she initially presents as a professional photographer. As he poses her for a photoshoot for a travel agency advertisement, presumably to Japan, she reflects on how she did not know at first how to pronounce the X in his name in German, recognizing this letter only as a variable in her high school textbook: “Find the value of X.” If X were durchein [through one], it meant durcheinander [through one another; confused]; if it were mitein [with one], then miteinander [with one another; together] – but I couldn’t help suspecting there were even more horrifying words. When the camera’s eye stared at me head-on, I turned away in embarrassment, as if I’d been caught gazing into a mirror. The bulb flashed. After that, only the black hole of the lens remained in my field of vision. “Don’t be afraid. The camera isn’t a gun,” Xander said. The lens was trying to trap me. (E9/J170–168)

Ironizing Kant’s threefold synthesis of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition in the A-Deduction, Tawada’s narrator recounts her memories of the letter X first as an unpronounceable letter and then in the form of compound words. In this passage, X is the variable but is compounded with the constant ander (other), harking back to Kant’s X and the alterity



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it marks. In being literally compounded with the word other (ander), it marks this otherness while remaining other to it in its adjacency. In the final moment of this second chapter of the novella, however, this otherness itself becomes marked, quite literally, with an X, namely, on the face of the first-person narrator herself (E12/J158). In terms more proximate to Kant, though she can be “apprehended” in the camera’s viewfinder  – just as, in this scene, Xander urges her to allow herself to be: “Can’t you look a little more Japanese? This is for a travel poster” (E9/J168)  – Tawada’s narrator is not “reproduced” in the photos themselves, which return blank except for their background. As a solution to this problem, Xander then dyes her already-black hair black, slathers her skin with white powder, retraces her eyelids, and colors her lips “with lipstick exactly the color of my lips” (E12/J158, emphasis added), mimicking the racialized image of a Japanese woman as a geisha. As a final touch, Xander draws an X on her cheek, explaining, “When I was a child, I marked everything precious to me with an X, so it would belong to me” (E12/J158, emphasis added). It is only then that she appears in the photographs. With the flash of the photo, she recounts, “The X on my cheek dug into my flesh. It stopped the light from playing and crucified the image of a Japanese woman onto the paper” (E12/J156). In Kantian terms, she is the object confirming Xander’s “unity of consciousness” albeit through a “crucifixion” of the narrator as “his” object. In as much as Tawada represents and reflects Kant’s epistemology in a critical mode, she also affirms his critical stance toward metaphysical fictions generated by pure reason with respect, not to “God” or “freedom,” but to the existence of the “soul.” Just prior to the scene in which she is “crucified” on the photo with an X, an argument between Xander and the first-person narrator breaks out in which he argues that she did not initially appear in the photos because “you don’t have a strong enough sense of yourself as Japanese” (E11/J162), which he claims affected the color of her skin. The ensuing dispute restages the philosophical tension in Kant’s “Transcendental Deduction” between the transcendental and the empirical. As the narrator retorts first in the following exchange: “How could flesh possibly have color? There’s color in the play of light on the surface of the skin. We don’t have colors inside.” “Yes, but the light plays on your skin differently than on ours.” “Light is different on every skin, every person, every month, every day.” “Each one of us, on the other hand, has a special voice inside. There is …” “There aren’t any voices inside us. What you hear is air vibrating outside our bodies.” (E12/J158, emphasis added)

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A reference to Kant’s critique of the metaphysical fiction of the “the soul” in the “Paralogisms” in the First Critique, this exchange  – within in an actual work of fiction challenging metaphysical “truths” – also challenges the assumptions that readers may bring to a text that, at the same time, deals thematically with racialized and gendered figures of “identity.” Namely, it evokes tropes of social identity but in such a way as not to reinforce them but to critique them in an entirely Kantian sense of the term “critique.” A vocalized assertion of “identity” is just “air vibrating outside our bodies.” Yet within the racialized and gendered regime of the narrator’s “world,” she is nevertheless compelled to self-identify in racialized and gendered terms as though they were pre-constituted by a “soul.” In other words, inasmuch as Tawada’s narrator puts into question Kant’s grand attempt to secure a sure footing for the objects of possible cognition, she also remains thoroughly Kantian with respect to those transcendent ideas that are not objects of possible cognition, such as a pre-constituted “soul.”

IV  The B-Deduction: The Self-Erasing I Such a close reading of Tawada’s novella in its critical relation to the keystone of Kant’s critical system may provoke the immediate methodological objection that no work of fiction can serve as an appropriate medium for commenting upon any philosophical text, let alone one whose thesis attempts to justify the transcendental without appealing to the empirical. However fictive The Bath may be, so the objection would go, its references to Kant nevertheless remain merely empirical examples – that is, “empirical” within the narrative “world” of the novella – that, by definition, cannot reflect upon or represent Kant’s transcendental project of securing a firm “ground” upon which empirical truths can “follow.” Yet what such methodological objections to any analysis of Kant’s fundamental critical premise in relation to a work of representational fiction would miss is that this is also the primary methodological challenge that Kant faces in both Deductions, as he too appeals to empirical examples – namely, counterfactuals with all the force of factuals – to justify his transcendental claims. This is more vividly evident in his B-Deduction, the more “transcendentally” grounded of the two Deductions. Though both Deductions conclude with the necessity of the transcendental unity of consciousness as a precondition for the unity of the manifold of intuition of the empirical, the B-Deduction proceeds by reversing the order of that argument as it is presented in the A-Deduction. Rather than being exceptional, such reversibility is instead intrinsic to the structure



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of transcendental arguments. Whereas the presentation of the argument in the A-Deduction begins with the manifold of intuition and regressively – that is, transcendentally – examines its precondition in the unity of consciousness, the presentation of the argument in the B-Deduction posits the transcendental unity of consciousness as the premise for its conclusion that the unity of the manifold must appear as a “unity.” Like the A-Deduction, the B-Deduction argues for the proposition that “we can represent nothing as combined in the object without previously combining it ourselves” (C 245; Ak III: B130; emphasis added). In claiming this, Kant asserts that the combination of the manifold of intuition cannot be immediately given by the senses but must first arise through an act of the faculty of understanding. Here, in accordance with the precepts of transcendental idealism, Kant guards against the naive empiricist position that the epistemological conditions of cognizing an object are coterminous with the ontological conditions of that object, that is, that appearances are things-in-themselves. However, the B-Deduction differs from the A-Deduction in two crucial respects other than its order of presentation. It replaces the threefold synthesis of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition with the general synthesis of “combination” (Verbindung); it also does away with the X, while retaining it in other parts of the Critique. Most significantly, in a departure from the designation, X, of the empty intersection constituting the structure of the subject of cognition, it introduces the proposition I think as an “act of spontaneity” (C 246; Ak III: B132), which, in turn, is also narratively reproduced in Tawada’s The Bath. Kant asserts in the B-Deduction that an “I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representations would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing at all” (C 246; Ak III: B131–132; emphasis in original). The I of the I think is itself a representation; however, it does not itself contain a manifold and cannot be accompanied by any further representation (C 248; Ak III: B135). In a remark whose literary significance is belied by Kant’s strictly philosophical focus, Kant writes of the I: For through the I, as a simple representation, nothing manifold is given; it can only be given in the intuition, which is distinct from it, and thought through combination in a consciousness. An understanding, in which through self-consciousness all of the manifold would at the same time be given, would intuit; ours can only think and must seek intuition in the senses. I am therefore conscious of the identical self in regard to the

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For Kant’s immediate concerns, the philosophical significance of the above passage is that the I of the I think marks not only the strictly formal necessity that the manifold must be unified under one consciousness but also that this unified consciousness be able to become aware that the diversity of elements in the manifold all belong to it. As Kant also argues, “it is only because I can combine a manifold of given representations in one consciousness that it is possible for me to represent the identity of the consciousness in these representations itself, that is to say, the analytic unity of apperception is only possible under the presupposition of some synthetic one” (C 248; Ak III: B133–134; emphasis mine). Thus, one is aware of the manifold of intuition, if and only if, it is also possible for one to become aware that the diversity of elements within the manifold belongs to oneself as a numerically identical consciousness under which the diversity is unified by means of a synthetic act of the understanding. In turn, one can only become self-conscious if one is also aware of the synthetic unity of the manifold that belongs to one. Therefore, the synthetic unity of the manifold and the transcendental unity of consciousness marked by I think stand in a reciprocal relation, albeit one in which “the principle of the synthetic unity of apperception is the supreme principle of all use of understanding” (C 248; Ak III: B136). The I of the I think is conceptually prior to its object but is first thinkable through its object. Though pure apperception is not derived from or grounded upon empirical experience, it is only in the cognition of the manifold that one can become aware of the unified identity of one’s consciousness. This relation of reciprocity between the transcendental unity of consciousness and the synthetic unity of the manifold is analogous to the relation between “freedom” and the “moral law” in Kant’s Second Critique. There, Kant writes that, whereas freedom is indeed the ratio essendi of the moral law, the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom. For, had not the moral law already been distinctly thought in our reason, we should never consider ourselves justified in assuming such a thing as freedom (even though it is not selfcontradictory). But were there no freedom, the moral law would not be encountered at all in ourselves. (Ak V: 4)6 6

Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor and Allen Wood, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 140 note.



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Just as the self-imposition of the “moral law” within “us” makes evident the transcendental necessity of freedom, according to the Second Critique, the synthetic unity of the manifold furnishes the same kind of evidence in respect to unity of consciousness in the First Critique. And, conversely, just as “freedom” is the transcendental precondition of the “moral law,” the unity of consciousness is the precondition of the synthetic unity of the manifold. The consequence of this relation for the concerns of subjectivity is that one is only self-conscious insofar as one also unites one’s representations under a synthetically united consciousness; that is to say, the I think exists apart from the synthesis of the manifold but is first thinkable (denkbar) within the synthesis of the manifold, on Kant’s view. Nevertheless, it was precisely due to his view of the unity of consciousness as a precondition for the synthesis of the manifold that his contemporaries raised objections to Kant’s B-Deduction on the grounds that it appeared no less circular than the A-Deduction. This is due to an unresolved issue in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” that is only exacerbated in both versions of the “Transcendental Deduction.” At issue is the relation between appearances (Erscheinungen) and how consciousness is “affected” by them. Kant’s contemporary, correspondent, and occasional antagonist Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi raises this issue in his essay “Ueber den transcendental Idealismus” (“On Transcendental Idealism”), which was published immediately after the second edition of the First Critique in 1787: [T]he Kantian philosopher departs entirely from the spirit of his system, when he says of objects that they make impressions on the senses and thereby cause [erregen] sensations, and in this manner bring about representations. For, according to Kant’s doctrine [Kantischen Lehrbegriff ], the empirical object, which is always only an appearance, cannot be present outside of us and still be something other than a representation.7

Or, in Hans Vaihinger’s reading of Jacobi’s objection, if one takes the affecting objects as things-in-themselves, “then we encounter the contradiction already discovered by Jacobi, Aenesidemus, among others, of applying the categories of substantiality and causality, which of course only should have sense and reference [Bedeutung] within experience, outside of it [experience].”8 In other words, Kant’s fundamental revision of 7

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Ueber den transcendentalen Idealismus,” in Werke, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer d. Jüng., 1815, Vol. 2, 301–302, emphasisin original, translation mine. 8 Vaihinger, Commentar, 53. For a counter argument to Jacobi and Vaihinger, see Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 247–254.

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his argument in the B-Deduction with its new focus on the I think as an “act of spontaneity” (C 246; Ak III: B132) – that is, “freedom” in the theoretical sphere in contrast to the practical sphere – merely reverses the direction of the circular argument without doing away with the circle itself. And yet, there is another problem specific to the “literary,” or tropological, dimension of Kant’s presentation of the I think as an “act of spontaneity” that “cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility” (C 246; Ak IV: B132). In defining the I think as a representation without a manifold (C248; Ak III: B135) that “must be able to accompany all my representations” (C 246; Ak III: B131) but “cannot be accompanied by any further representation” (C 246; Ak III: B132), Kant philosophically seeks to forestall the possibility of an infinite regress of this representation, for example, against I think, “I think, ‘I think,’ …” ad infinitum. But, in so doing, he also turns this empty (i.e., manifold-less) representation, I think, into a specific kind of metaphor rendering sensible that which is strictly supersensible, namely, “spontaneity.” He thus asks his reader to come to a philosophical or hermeneutic conclusion by means of a literary or poetic reading. Yet his figural use of the I think is at odds with his literal definition of it as a representation without a manifold. The I think is not just a conceptual metaphor for supersensible “spontaneity”; it is also a text: If the I think were read literally according to the definitions he provides, it could not be read at all. It could not even be written down because in writing it down he would have provided a “manifold” in space and time subject to pure concepts. All that would or could appear is a blank space before the representation that it accompanies. It would be an I that must erase itself in order to be what it is, a phenomenally empty placeholder for the supersensible “spontaneity” of transcendental apperception. But, insofar as it is indeed written down, the words I think are themselves representations with a manifold, that is, empirical objects called “text.” As such, they must be accompanied by a further representation, namely, another I think, which, if also written down, must also be accompanied by another I think. It would unleash the same infinite regress against which Kant sought to guard his I think by turning to metaphor. This is to say that, in addition to Jacobi’s longstanding critique that appearances grounded in empirical experience circularly furnish empirical experience, Kant unwittingly encounters another empirical problem utterly outside of his immediate philosophical concerns, namely, the empirical “object” that is his own text as a text. As shall be seen in a close reading of the I in Tawada’s The Bath, Kant’s failure to see or read the linguistic basis of his argument – that is,



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that he relies on textuality to make an extra-textual point  – anticipates one of the central conceptual distinctions in literary studies taken from Émile Benveniste’s structural linguistics, that between the “subject of the enunciation” (sujet de l’énonciation) and that “of the enunciated” (sujet de l’énoncé). In his failures around the I and its empirical objects, Kant proleptically found success, not in philosophy but in literary theory.

V  I: A Multicolored, Diverse Self However counterfactually formulated Kant’s dire warning of the consequences of the B-Deduction’s failure may be, the B-Deduction nevertheless draws upon an empirical example to substantiate a transcendental conclusion: the necessity of the unity of consciousness. In arguing “only because I can comprehend [the] manifold [of representations] in a consciousness do I call them all together my representations; for otherwise I would have as multicolored, diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious” (C 247–48; Ak III: B134), Kant turns to the same counterfactual mode of argumentation to substantiate his positive claims in turning to the examples in the A-Deduction of drawing a line, measuring the time from one noon to the next and counting numbers (A102). Even as he qualifies the latter as taking place “in thought” or “thinking” alone, at least one of these three examples remains in part an empirical example that has been rhetorically made to appear as if it were nonempirical or a priori; while measuring time “in thought” alone would be nonempirical, his example is specifically about measuring time “in thought” from one noon to the next, which is based on an entirely empirical observation: the sun’s position in the sky. This empirical example functions according to what Kant would have to call, as he does in the Third Critique, “hypotyposis (presentation [Darstellung]),” namely, “making sensible [Versinnlichung]” that which is supersensible by means of examples (Ak V: 351–353).9 As Paul de Man notes in his reading of the Third Critique, “hypotyposis” is a figural use of language in which “purely intellectual concepts” are rendered sensible “by means of sensory elements.” For de Man, Kant’s citation and use of hypotyposis point to “the particular necessity which philosophy has, to take its terminology not from purely intellectual concepts but from material, sensory elements, which it then uses metaphorically and frequently forgets 9

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 225–227.

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that it does so.”10 Though any definition of what de Man calls “material” will necessarily remain controversial at best given the paucity of his elaborations upon it in his writings, it nevertheless can be understood as being “much more radical than what can be conveyed by such terms as ‘realism’ or ‘empiricism.’”11 That is, it can be understood primarily as a resistance to epistemological harmonization, in the form or body of an unassimilable remainder. In the case of Tawada’s ironization of Kant, this resistance or remainder is the “materiality” of the textual inscription of the narrative itself. Just as in the passage in which a “black hole” is left in the narrator’s field of vision upon the camera’s flash, figures of absence pervade Tawada’s The Bath wherever a human body is to be represented but is figured only by its orifices, such as a gouged-out eye socket, a mouth missing a tongue, an anus defecating, or a vagina sucking in a child. Together with its tropes of corporeal transparency or invisibility, these thematic figurations of absence imply a fundamental inversion of the classical subject defined by mind– body dualism; the “mind” may produce this dualism but the body produces its material basis. However, these figures of absence occur not only at a thematic or representational level but also in terms of language itself, especially with respect to the first-person pronoun I. That is, wherever the I is supposed to appear, it does not or cannot, ironizing Kant’s considerable philosophical investment in the pronoun in his I think in a manner that shows its stakes beyond Kant’s immediate designs for it. Though the narrative is written almost entirely in the first person from the narrator’s point of view, the first-person narrator repeatedly either is unable to say “I” or declines to do so within its dialogues. In so doing, the narrative silently shows what is at stake in the utterance I. Upon conceding that Xander was not “in truth a photographer at all, he was my German teacher” (E27/J106), the narrator recounts how the pedagogical method of her language school prescribed that students repeat whatever was said by the instructor without being given any grammatical explanation whatsoever, such as “This is a book” (E27/J104). She mimicked Xander’s words to the point that “I felt that my tongue was starting to belong to him. When Xander drew on his cigarette, I began to cough 10

11

Paul de Man, “Kant and Schiller,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 153. See also, Rei Terada, “Seeing Is Reading,” in Legacies of Paul de Man, ed. Marc Redfield, New York: Fordham, 2007, 169–172, on Kant on “hypotyposis” and de Man’s use of the term “materiality” and its cognates. Paul de Man, “Kant’s Materialism,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 121.



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and my tongue burned” (E28/J102). While the narrative suggests the ­narrator’s extreme social a­ lienation both here and throughout the story, the ­first-person ­narrator turns to the linguistic, rather than the social, as the locus of what appears to be “alienation” but is also just the condition of l­inguistic ­subjectivity: “When asked, ‘Are you Japanese,’ I would answer, ‘Yes, you are Japanese.’ The trick in this game was to change ‘you’ into ‘I,’ but I didn’t realize it. Xander laughed like a bursting balloon. I didn’t laugh. I repeated all of Xander’s words, but not his laugh. (E28/J102).” This problem of shifting between the I and the you is restaged throughout the narrative so as to draw attention not to what the narrative’s words representationally “say” but what they linguistically “do”; they draw attention to the narrative not as a story but as a text, that is, as form of enunciation. This tension between the first and second person recurs throughout the narrative from its opening chapter. The first-person narrator, who awakens to find her skin inexplicably transformed into fish scales, receives an unexpected phone call just as she exits the bathtub: Still naked, I picked up the receiver. I didn’t say anything, and from the other end of the line came a man’s voice I had never heard before. “Is it you?” I thought about this for a moment and said, “It isn’t.” “If it’s not you, then who are you?” I put down the receiver. That was my first conversation on this strange day. (E5/J182–180, translation emended, emphasis added)

As in the scene of language instruction in which you was to be turned into I but was not, this exchange turns on the material basis of language as irreducible to third-person statements alone, such as “This is a book” (E27/J104). The anonymous man’s question, “If it is not you, then who are you?” ironizes the you by treating it in its first instance as a noun or name, rather than as a pronoun, but in its second instance in its proper function as a pronominal shifter. Indeed, this irony is all the more intensified by the consideration that the question, “Is it you?” must always be answered in the affirmative by the technical demands of linguistics, for “you” just designates the addressee of the I, as even the response “It isn’t” shows; in answering, “It isn’t,” the first-person narrator tacitly affirms that she is the man’s addressee, even if not the intended one, merely by responding as the interpellated party. In these scenes of address, there is the first glimpse of why Kant’s I think entangles itself in linguistic relations beyond its intended philosophical

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scope, as shall be seen after considering the sole instance in which the firstperson narrator refers to herself as an I in a quoted dialogue. Returning to Japan from Germany after many years, the first-person narrator recounts the oddity of speaking in Japanese and in so doing initiates the linguistic tension between the pronoun I and the idea of a “self”: “Okaasan, watashi yo.” [Mother, it is I.] I hadn’t spoken Japanese in a long time. In the word okaasan (mother) I met my old self [自分; jibun], and when I said watashi (I) I felt as though I were my own simultaneous translator. (E42/J50)

While this passage can be thematically read as yet another instance of this first-person narrator’s alienation from herself, it also gestures to the problematic status of the I by turning to the figure of the translator. Can a translator say I and refer to herself? Indeed, she can but, in so doing, she is not acting as a translator or simultaneous interpreter per se exposing her problematic status within her own utterances. Arguing that the translator constitutes a “subject in transit,” Naoki Sakai notes in Translation and Subjectivity that the “‘I’ uttered by the translator does not designate the translator herself, but the original addresser as the subject of the original enunciation. And if by ‘I’ the translator indicates the subject of the secondary and translational enunciation, she will then have to designate the original addresser as ‘he’ or ‘she.’”12 As such, the figure of the translator is one that is simultaneously “there” and “not there” as the condition of possibility for the scene of translation. The figure of the translator thus constitutes “continuity in discontinuity,” in Sakai’s analysis, insofar as it creates continuity both between distinct Is and languages.13 This problematic status of the enunciations of the translator is vividly shown in The Bath, when the first-person narrator serves as a simultaneous interpreter for a group of Japanese businessmen at a luncheon with their German counterparts. One of the Japanese businessmen makes a lewd remark about the attire of one of the German women. “So the women here wear sexy clothing even to work” (E14/J152), he says. With the silence broken, the Germans turn to the narrator: “‘What did he say?’ one of them asked, apparently too excited to wait for me to speak of my own accord. ‘He is admiring that old china and says it is indeed very fine,’ I said, translating a sentence that no one had said. (E14/J152–150)’.” 12 13

Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 12–13. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 13.



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Not unlike the repeatedly invoked images of absence, such as the “black hole” left in the narrator’s field of vision by the camera’s flash, this scene of willful mistranslation evokes another moment of absence but, this time, in simultaneous presence. In the normative scene of translation, the figure of the translator is an absence-in-presence with respect to the languages she translates: She is simultaneously “there” and “not there,” rendering the discontinuous languages epistemologically continuous by virtue of erasing herself. But, in erasing herself, she also asserts herself, as in this case of intentional mistranslation. Yet she is the only one in the room who realizes this for she is the only one who knows both languages. Nevertheless, like the I of Kant’s I think, the I of Tawada’s narrator is the unseen disjunction in the field of representation; it receives predicates or representations (Vorstellungen) but its own presentation (Darstellung) is inadequate to what it “is,” an “act of spontaneity.” Said otherwise, the I initiates a disjunction in time; it produces the representation of time but is itself not in time.

VI  The Subject of the Enunciation Tawada’s Kantian “representation” of Kant’s “Transcendental Deduction” is not just a literary conceit playing off a philosophical one. It shows what Kant’s I think is “in truth,” as it were. Though Kant proposes the I think as the mode for establishing the (logically and philosophically) necessary transcendental ground for empirical truths, what he unwittingly stumbled upon was not so much such philosophical but linguistic “truth.” The I must disappear – it must erase itself – in order to be what it “in truth” is. It is indeed, as Kant claims, an “act” but not of transcendental “spontaneity.” Rather, it is an act of linguistic spontaneity that Émile Benveniste calls “enunciation,” or “the enactment of language [langue] through an individual act of use.”14 In a sense going beyond Kant’s immediate aims but nevertheless immanent to his citation of the I in a manner in keeping with his aims, the enunciation of the I immediately sets its speaker (locuteur) in a system of social relations of “appropriation” vis-à-vis its discursive “world.” Its enunciation produces its social referent by locating its speaker in relation to its addressee and their others, the third persons outside of the scene of address. As Benveniste argues: “Reference is the integrative part [partie 14

Émile Benveniste, “L’Appareil formel de l’énonciation,” Langage 17 (1970), 12–18, 12. Translation mine. A partial English translation of this seminal article is available as: Émile Benveniste, “The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation,” in The Discourse Studies Reader: Main Currents in Theory and Analysis, ed. Johannes Angermüller, Dominique Maingueneau, and Ruth Wodak, 141–145, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014, 141.

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intégrante] of enunciation.”15 What the enunciation produces, then, is a locus, a topos, that receives predicates but cannot itself be the predicate of anything else, or in Kant’s idiom, “cannot be accompanied by any further representation” (C 246; Ak III: B132), following the long philosophical tradition of Plato’s khōra (receptacle or interval) and Aristotle’s hypokeimenon (substratum or subject). But, in so doing, Kant’s conception of the transcendental subject also unwittingly grasps the literary problematic of autobiography, namely, that the “autos” (self) and “bios” (life) are nothing other than the materiality of “graphein” (to write), or writing as a form of enunciation that retroactively produces the phantasmic figure of a “living self” as though it were always already there. As Giorgio Agamben notes in his reading of Benveniste in passing reference to Kant, “the transcendental sphere as subjectivity, as an I think, is in fact founded on the exchange between the transcendental and the linguistic. The transcendental subject is nothing other than the ‘enunciator,’ and modern thought has been built on this undeclared assumption of the subject of language as the foundation of experience and knowledge.”16 Agamben’s gloss of the transcendental subject as the “enunciator” refers specifically to the critical distinction between the subject of the enunciation (sujet de l’énonciation) and the subject of the enunciated (sujet de l’énoncé), terms that are widely attributed to Benveniste but found nowhere in his published writings in the same formulation.17 This distinction arises out of Benveniste’s analysis of the I in a series of essays, most notably, “Subjectivity in Language,” in which he argues that I cannot refer to a particular individual in the same manner in which a term with an objective referent can, such as the word “tree,” as Benveniste notes. For, if I had an objective referent, “a permanent contraction would be admitted into language, and anarchy into its use.”18 “Anarchy” would ensue because each instance of an I being uttered would “refer” to one and the same objective referent, which is also why 15 16 17

18

Benveniste, “L’Appareil formel de l’énonciation,” 14. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron, London and New York: Verso, 1993, 46–47, emphasis in original. Though the terms “subject of the enunciation” and “subject of the enunciated” are widely attributed to Benveniste, as Claudine Normand has demonstrated, they do not appear in his published work; see Normand, “Les termes de l’énonciation de Benveniste,” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 8.2 (1986), 191–206. An interview with Julia Kristeva, Benveniste’s former student, suggests, however, that they are in fact concepts that he developed and taught, even if he did not formally publish work that contained these exact formulations, see Keren Mock, “The Need to Believe and the Archive: Interview with Julia Kristeva,” Dibur Literary Journal 3 (2016), 77–94, 88. Émile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” in Problems in General Linguistics, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971, 226.



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I is not interchangeable with the term “the self” or you with “the other.” Therefore, Benveniste asks: “Then, what does I refer to? To something very peculiar which is exclusively linguistic: I refers [se réfère] to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates [désigne] the speaker [locuteur]. It is a term that cannot be identified except in what we have called elsewhere an instance of discourse and that has only momentary reference.”19 Though Benveniste remains silent on his distinction between “referring” (se réfèrer) and “designating” (désigner), he nevertheless makes it clear that the referent of the I is not its speaker but the temporal moment of the speaker’s enunciation, just as Kant stresses that the manifold of intuition must be given over in “one moment [einem Augenblick].” It “refers,” in other words, to the enunciation itself as a discursively orienting action for its speaker. The enunciation I literally answers Kant’s titular question in an essay published just a year before the second edition of the First Critique of 1787, entitled “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” (Ak VIII: 133–146).20 The act of uttering I thus introduces a fundamental rupture between the temporality of saying and the temporality of meaning, between the time of the enunciation and the time or tense posited within the enunciated. This rupture, in turn, introduces the distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated, that is, between the subject making a statement and the subject posited within the statement as the agent of the verb. While this distinction is easily discerned when the subject of the enunciated is in the third person, it is less so when the subject of the enunciated is the first-person pronoun I, as it is easily confused with the subject of the enunciation. Nevertheless, as a consequence of this temporal rupture, the figure of the subject of the enunciation is structurally foreclosed to linguistic presentation (Darstellung), for if it is presented (dargestellt) then it is no longer the subject of the enunciation but the subject of the enunciated. In other words, the subject of the enunciation – namely, the living speaking subject – is a specular figure retroactively posited as necessarily being “there” on the basis of the subject of the enunciated. In this sense, Agamben’s description of the I think as the “enunciator” contains a conceptual error. While the I think is indeed conceptually 19 20

Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” 226. Immanuel Kant, “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni, 7–18, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 7.

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the “enunciator,” or subject of the enunciation, the words I think cannot themselves be designated as such without becoming the subject of the enunciated. In the same way, as the close reading of the B-Deduction showed, Kant’s own definition of the I think as a manifold-less representation (Vorstellung) that cannot be accompanied by any further representation (Vorstellung) theoretically requires Kant to put a blank space where those two words appear on the page. Or, to the extent that it can appear on the page, it would have to be, “in truth,” nothing more than a trope or figure of absence, such as Tawada’s “black hole” of the camera’s flash or her narrator’s final claim to identity in the novella, “I am a transparent coffin,” as a material mark of self-erasure.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. London and New York: Verso, 1993. Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: An Analytical-Historical Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Benveniste, Émile. “L’Appareil formel de l’énonciation.” Langage 17 (1970), 12–18. Benveniste, Émile. “The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation.” In The Discourse Studies Reader: Main Currents in Theory and Analysis, ed. Johannes Angermüller, Dominique Maingueneau, and Ruth Wodak. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014. Benveniste, Émile. “Subjectivity in Language.” In Problems in General Linguistics, Émile Benveniste. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971. de Man, Paul. “Kant and Schiller.” In Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. de Man, Paul. “Kant’s Materialism.” In Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Heine, Heinrich. Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1966. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. “Ueber den transcendentalen Idealismus.” In Werke, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer d. Jüng., 1815, Vol. 2. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. “Critique of Practical Reason.” In Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor and Allen Wood, trans. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.



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Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (and later Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin). Berlin: Georg Reimer (and later Walter de Gruyter), 1902. Kant, Immanuel. “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” In Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Mock, Keren. “The Need to Believe and the Archive: Interview with Julia Kristeva.” Dibur Literary Journal 3 (2016), 77–94. Normand, Claudine. “Les termes de l’énonciation de Benveniste.” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 8.2 (1986), 191–206. Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Tawada, Yoko/多和田葉子. Das Bad/うろこもち. German trans. Peter Pörtner. Tübingen: konkursbuch, 2010. Tawada, Yoko/多和田葉子. Das Bad. Trans. Peter Pörtner. Tübingen: konkursbuch, 1989. Tawada, Yoko/多和田葉子. “The Bath.” Trans. Yumi Selden. In Where Europe Begins, Yoko Tawada. New York: New Directions Books, 2002. Terada, Rei. “Seeing Is Reading.” In Legacies of Paul de Man, ed. Marc Redfield. New York: Fordham, 2007. Vaihinger, Hans. Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Stuttgart, Berlin, and Leipzig: Union deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1892, Vol. 2.

chapter 12

Ethically Speaking, or “Freedom” in Context: Poetics, Critical Economy, and Kant’s Invention of the “Category” of the “Possible” Claudia Brodsky

Kant’s critical theory of our ability to know things only insofar as they are the objects of perception, or “phenomena” delimited a priori by the “forms” and “categories” by which we “represent,” frame, and connect them may make his Critique appear, at best, unrelated to the challenges and aims of the “endless” activity of specifically textual interpretation that Schleiermacher famously called the “art of understanding” (“Kunst des Verstehens”1), let alone indicative of any even potential relation between ethical action and the art of specifically verbal work, or poetics. Seemingly limited by its critical reinvention of epistemology as the theory of how representations, rather than either “pure” sense impressions or intellectual ideas of the external world, are related logically to each other (rather than not at all, pace epistemological skeptics) by or “in” our minds, Kant’s project would seem to deny the purchase, let alone significance, of acts of interpretation with regard to any intellectual endeavor whatsoever, not to say any conception of “understanding” itself as an “art,” rather than fundamental capacity that, like any shared language for making and communicating representations, we all possess. If, precisely because of the strictly undelimitable nature of the perceptions, experiences, and reflections that, unlike cognitive theory and like poetics, moral theory aims to represent, ethical matters (or what Kant calls “moral things” [“Sachen der Moral”2]) are especially implicated in the post-Kantian, explicitly reflective and referential work of Romantic poets and poetic theorists in particular (work extending, in the case of the collaborative poetic and theoretical work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to general theories of knowledge and social 1

Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, Hrsg. Manfred Frank, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977, 75. 2 Immanuel Kant, Werkausgabe, 12 vols., Hrsg. Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977, Logik A 222, IV: 576.

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history, including the ideational basis of political constitutions, as well3), then Kant’s theory of formally delimited empirical knowledge “critically articulated”4 by “negative”5 constraints would seem to curtail if not negate the “infinitely” expansive thrust of verbal interpretation even before it can begin. Yet, in at least one constitutive aspect of his critical analysis, Kant can accurately be considered Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic confrère. Following a logical tradition initiated by Aristotle and revived most prominently in the neoclassical Logic of Port Royal, Kant distinguishes two kinds of definitions in his Logik: “name-definitions” or “Nominalerklärungen” and “thing-definitions” or “Realdefinitionen.” Contrary to the useful straw man since invented to stand in locus parentis (alongside a similarly fictional “Descartes”) for the entirety of the largely unread texts of the pivotal transitional period from mystic-sophistic scholasticism to modern referential or theoretically “experimental” philosophy that Kant called the “Age of Critique,”6 Kant’s critical “revolution [in mode of thought]” (“Revolution der Denkart”7) exposes the self-contradictory nature of any supposed master “Subject” of so-called transcendental knowledge (of the very kind Kant dispelled) not only by restricting all knowledge to referential “objects of experience” only knowable “nominally,” via their discursive representation as phenomena (“[o]bjects of experience only allow for nominal definitions” [“Erfahrungsgegenstände erlauben bloss Nominalerklärungen”8]), but by defining that delimited nominal knowledge itself as equally available to any experiential subject of perception whatsoever. In direct opposition to the empirico-logical basis of nominal-representational “definitions,” nonexperiential “real defintions” are instead “based upon [or taken from] the essence” or “first ground of possibility” “of a thing” (“aus dem Wesen der 3

See Chapters 1 and 5, this volume; on Coleridge on constitutions, see R. J. White, ed., The Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oxford: Foxcroft Press, 1936, esp. 109–141 (Pt. 4, “Politics,” including: “[a] Criticism of Political Thought Resulting from Mechanic Philosophy,” “[b] The Idealist Method,” and “[c] Nature and Purposes of the State”). 4 Kant, Werkausgabe, Kritik der reinen Vernunft B XXIV, III: 29. Kant’s verbal phrase for how one enacts the particular intellectual activity he was the first to call “critique” – “durch Kritik geläuterten” – can be variously translated as “articulated,” “analyzed,” “clarified,” or “elucidated through” or “by means of” or “by way of critique.” Underscoring his project’s divergence from all conflations of metaphysics with the solipsistic fictions of idealism, the object subjected to “critique” in that inaugural designation of it is nothing less than “metaphysics” itself (“durch Kritik geläuterten … Metaphysik”). (All quotations from Kant from this edition; all translations from the German throughout this essay are my own.) 5 Kant, KrV B XXIV, III: 29. 6 Ibid., III: 13. 7 Ibid., III: 22 (2x); B XIV, III: 23 (2x); B XVI, III: 25; B XXII, III: 28. 8 Kant, Logik A 222, IV: 576.

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Sache, dem ersten Grunde der Möglichkeit hergenommen”9), the “internal determinations” (“innere Bestimmungen”) or determining “internal characteristics” (“inneren Merkmalen”) “according” to which (“nach”) an object constitutes itself as “real,” rather than merely “nominal.” It is Kant’s introduction here of the term “possibility” (“Möglichkeit” ) into his Logic – itself the supposed science not of possibility but rather necessity, as determined not by applied but rather “pure reason” – that will prove pivotal to the present, double-threaded argument concerning the “category” of the “possible.” For not only will Kant name “possibility” rather than necessity as the “first ground” and “essence” of the reality of ethical action but, as we shall see, he will literally ground that first ground literarily, in the necessary relation of the intellectual faculty of “Imagination” to the poetics of speech. By contrast, the “arbitrary” naming of “objects of experience” designates not their first “possibility,” that is, their ethical or imponderable “noumenal” reality as “things in themselves,” but merely their “negative” delimitation as cognitive “phenomena,” objects of empirical sensation “externally” “differentiated” from each other so as to be rendered logically “comparable” to others likewise delimited and defined: Under mere name-explanations or nominal definitions are those to be understood which contain the meaning which one wished to give arbitrarily to a certain name, and which thus denote only the logical essence of their object, or merely serve to differentiate the same from other objects. Thingexplanations or real definitions, on the other hand, are those which suffice for the cognition of an object according to its internal determinations, in that they set forth the possibility of the object from internal characteristics. Note 1: When a concept is internally sufficient for differentiating a thing, it is also externally so; but when it is not internally sufficient, it can merely be externally so when in a certain relationship, namely, in the comparison of the definition with other definitions. Unlimited external sufficiency is, however, impossible without the internal. [Unter blossen Namen-Erklärungen oder Nominal-Definitionen sind diejenigen zu verstehen, welche die Bedeutung enthalten, die man willkürlich einem gewissen Namen hat geben wollen, und die daher nur das logische Wesen ihres Gegenstandes bezeichnen, oder bloss zur Unterscheidung desselben von andern Objekten dienen. Sach-Erklärungen oder RealDefinitionen hingegen sind solche, die zur Erkenntnis des Objekts, seinen innern Bestimmungen nach, zureichen, indem sie die Möglichkeit des Gegenstandes aus innern Merkmalen darlegen. 9

Ibid.



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Anmerk. 1. Wenn ein Begriff innerlich zureichen ist, die Sache zu unterscheiden, so ist er es auch gewiss äusserlich; wenn er aber innerlich nicht zureichend ist: so kann er doch bloss in gewisser Beziehung äusserlich zureichend sein, nämlich in der Vergleichung des Definitums mit andern. Allein die unumschränkte äussere Zulänglichkeit ist ohne die innere nicht möglich.10]

According to the “transformation in mode of thinking” (“Umänderung der Denkart”) proposed by Kant’s “hypothetical” (“hypothetisch”) “experiment in pure reason” (“Experiment der reinen Vernunft”),11 discursive or nominal definitions define experiential objects according to a priori “formal perceptual” frameworks or limits (“die Formen der sinnlichen Anschauungen”12). These are empirical objects whose necessary initiation of cognition cannot be doubted, in either the Cartesian or Humean, temporal or totalizing, skeptical sense. “That all our knowledge begins with experience, of that there is no doubt at all” (“Dass alle unsere Erkenntnis

10 11 12

Ibid., 575 (emphasis added in part). Kant, KrV B XXIII, III: 28. Ibid., 30. The tenacious misconception of Kant’s distinctive use of the term Anschauungen, newly defined by him as “forms of sensory perception” (emphasis added), rather than purely intellectual “intuitions” capable of taking the place of perceptions, has led to both broad miscategorizations of his entire critical project as merely another historical chapter in the “idealist” metaphysical tradition it was in fact formulated to combat, and widespread theoretical confusion regarding the basic tenets of Kant’s philosophical thesis, that is, how his central, anti-skeptical hypothesis, that human cognition is mediated “a priori” by the structuring forms of time and space, can be squared with an epistemology purportedly based on a traditional notion of immediate “intuitions.” If “Anschauung,” as Kant employs the term, indicated a purely internal, “intuitive” “vision” or “sense” of some kind, this contradiction would indeed be insuperable. However, Kant’s specifically critical adoption of the term “Anschauung” signifies exactly the opposite of such Neoplatonic “intuition.” Indeed, in his great late writings on the necessary interrelation of historical and moral-political with cognitive agency, Kant explicitly repurposes the Neoplatonic sense of the term into an epithet of pitchperfect mockery. His “Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie” (“On a recently prominent tone of superiority in philosophy”) (1796) skewers all those “philosophers of intuition” (“Philosophen der Anschauung”) who base their claim to philosophize on personal “inspiration” (“philosophus per inspirationem”) or their own immediate powers of “direct intuition” (“Intuition direkt”), as pretenders to a “divine understanding” (“Göttlichen Verstand”) that, “attendant only upon the oracle within themselves” (“nur das Orakel in sich selbst anhören”), endows them with in an “incommunicable” (“unmittelbar”) “Philosophy of Feeling leading directly to the thing itself!” (“Es lebe also die Philosophie aus Gefühlen, die uns gerade zur Sache selbst führt!”), a kind of “mystical illumination” that, reserved to a “club-like” (“Klubbist”) sect of “mytagogues” (“Mystagogen”), “is the death of all philosophy” (“mystische Erleuchtung … die der Tod aller Philosophie ist”). By direct, all-critical contrast, his own transformative use of the term in the First Critique returns the noun, “Anschauung,” to its concrete sensory meaning, that of a “looking at or upon,” derived from the transitive verb anschauen (“to look at [an object]”) from whose root, schauen (“to look”), the German word for dramatic play or spectacle, “Schauspiel,” similarly derives. See Kant, “Von einem neuerdings …,” A 387–427, VI: 377–397 (A 387–391, VI: 377–379; A 400–401, VI: 384; A 409, VI: 388; A 405–407, VI: 386).

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mit der Erfahrung anfange, daran ist gar kein Zweifel”13) declare the very first words of the Introduction to the First Critique, as if once and for all. Yet that opening, fundamental assertion of the necessity of experience to knowledge, so at odds with the clichéd image of “Kantianism” as the ideological apex of an anti-materialist idealism, is conditioned on the extraordinary theoretical principle that, specifically in their function as the basis of cognitions (rather than either aesthetic judgments or moral actions), sensory experiences themselves “begin” with their delimitation by the techne of perception. It is those delimiting techne of experience that, Kant repeatedly states, his critical hypothesis “wagers” (“wagen”14) against purely “positive” notions of cognition, exchanging an apparently “negative” theory of “heterogeneous”15 cognition “beginning”16 with sensory experience already necessarily formally delimited, for the unlimited, “positive” “uses” (“positive” “Nutzen”17) of “reason” acting in its sole “pure,” because “practical,” moral mode, the singularly necessary mode not of perception but unmediated action that only that exchange can protect from its own “self-contradiction.”18 Kant straightforwardly explains the new logic – of exchange rather than identity – at the basis of his radical transformation of philosophy itself into a kind of practical economy, as follows: But, it will be asked: what is this, then, for a treasure that we are proposing to leave to posterity with such a critically clarified metaphysic, one also brought by critique itself into a state of persistence? By a cursory glance at this work one will believe one perceives that its uses are evidently only negative, namely, that it never allows us to risk exceeding the limits of experience with speculative reason, and that is in fact its first use. But this immediately becomes positive when, upon closer inspection, one realizes that the principles with which speculative reason wagers to exceed its limits result inevitably not in a broadening but a contraction of our use of reason, in that it effectively threatens to extend the limits of the sensory experience that belong to it over everything, and, in so doing, to supplant the pure (practical) use of reason altogether. Thus, a Critique that delimits [the boundaries of sensory experience] is negative, but, at the same time, removes an obstacle that limits or indeed threatens to annihilate completely the pure (practical) use of reason is, in fact, of positive and very important use, as soon as one 13 14 15 16 17 18

Kant, KrV B 1, III: 45. Ibid., 26; XXV, III: 30. On the “heterogeneity” of all experiential cognition, see Kant, KrV B 176–177, III: 187. For the full citation of the opening sentence of First Critique (“That all our knowledge begins with experience” [“Dass alle unsere Erkenntnis mit der Erfahrung anfange …”]), see n. 12. Kant, KrV B XXV, III: 30. Ibid. See also Kant, KrV B 84, III: 103, on the “negative condition of all truth,” the “conditio sine qua non” of any “logical criterion of truth.”



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is persuaded that there may be an entirely necessary practical use of pure reason (the moral use), in which [pure reason] unavoidably extends over the boundaries of sensory experience, but is permitted no assistance from speculative reason, and against whose counter-effect it must be secured in order not to come into contradiction with itself. [Aber was ist denn das, wird man fragen, für ein Schatz, den wir der Nachkommenschaft mit einer solchen durch Kritik geläuterten, dadurch aber auch in einen beharrlichen Zustand gebrachten Metaphysik, zu hinterlassen gedenken? Man wird bei einer flüchtigen Übersicht dieses Werks wahrzunehmen glauben, dass der Nutzen davon doch nur negativ sei, uns nämlich mit der spekulativen Vernunft niemals über die Erfahrungsgrenze hinaus zu wagen, und das ist auch in der Tat ihr erster Nutzen. Dieser aber wird alsbald positiv, wenn man inne wird, dass die Grundsätze, mit denen sich speculative Vernunft über ihre Grenze hinauswege, in der Tat nicht Erweiterung unseres Venfunftgebrauchs zum unausbleiblichen Erfolg haben, indem sie wirklich die Grenzen der Sinnlichkeit, zu der sie eigentlich gehören, über alles zu erweitern und so den reinen (praktischen) Vernunftgebrauch gar zu verdrängen drohen. Daher ist eine Kritik, welche die die erstere einschränkt, so fern zwar negativ, aber indem sie dadurch zugleich ein Hindernis, welches den letzteren Gebrauch einschränkt, oder gar zu vernichten droht, aufhebt, in der Tat von positiven und sehr wichtigen Nutzen, so bald man überzeugt wird, dass es einen schlechterdings notwendigen praktischen Gebrauch der reinen Vernunft (den moralischen) gebe, in welchem sie sich unvermeidlich über die Grenzen der Sinnlichkeit erweitert, dazu sie zwar von der spekulativen keiner Beihülfe bedarf, dennoch aber wider ihre Gegenwirkung gesichert sein muss, um nicht in Widerspruch mit sich selbst zu geraten.19]

On Kant’s account, the “negative” work of critically delimiting the epistemological reach of “speculative” (theoretical) “reason” is directly reciprocally related to the powerful “practical” “counter-effect” it produces. That “counter-effect” is neither heterogeneous nor cognitive but homogenous in composition and moral in mode: Its “use” is what Kant calls the “positive” “use” of a “pure (practical) reason.” Such a “pure” “reason” of ethical praxis exceeds both the sensory-formal limits of the representational mode of cognition Kant attributes to “speculative reason” and the ineradicable contingency of particular sensory experience as such. Its sole content is not knowledge (of any given objects in the world) but “freedom” 20 (from all objects) enacted by any subject in the “moral” 19 20

Kant, KrV B XXV, III: 30. “If I cannot cognize freedom as the characteristic of a being to whom I ascribe effects in the sensory world …, so can I nonetheless think freedom, that is, the conception of it at least contains no

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mode which it is the purpose of the Second Critique to define, and the exchange between these “negative” and “positive” “uses” acts across the tripartite Critique like a binding syntax that is itself practically (rather than “merely” formally) operative. That is to say, by chiastically crossing, rather than simply – linearly or progressively – sequencing the “positive” and “negative” contents of each of the three Critiques, the simultaneously operative exchanges of unlimited for “limited,” and free for “unfree,” as of “pure” for “heterogeneous,” moral for cognitive, and, finally, of “practical” for “theoretical” reason itself – alongside the enactment of all these in reverse – ensure at once and across the board the differentiation, interaction, function, and integrity of each distinctly articulated part of Kant’s fully integrated “architectonic system,” the logical structure of a new economy of philosophy capable of including within its conceptual structure that which must exceed it or any system of exchange: the internal “freedom” to so act as to take oneself “off the market” of purely structural exchange.21 This is not to negate the immense practical value of that economic structure of exchange to our understanding of the powers of conceptualization itself, including the very concepts of excess and freedom defined by their nondelimitation by that structure. For, in the absence of a consequential mode for distinguishing them from each other, neither knowledge nor freedom can ever, respectively, be realized in any effective scientific or moral sense, let alone related to each other in such a comprehensive manner that the hypothetical “capacities” (i.e., “reason,” “understanding,” and “imagination”) of which they are composed can exchange positive and negative valences or, as Kant also designates these, “position” or “place” (“Platz”) within the alternating, sensuously present and absent, phenomenal and noumenal elements of his differentially or “negatively” constituted critical system.22 Excluded by definition from the realm of the causally and contradiction in itself, when our critical distinction of the two (sensory and intellectual) modes of conception has taken place” (“Ob ich … auch nicht die Freiheit als Eigenschaft eines Wesens, dem ich Wirkungen in der Sinnenwelt zuschreibe, erkennen kann …, so kann ich mir doch die Freiheit denken, d.i., die Vorstellung davon enthält wenigstens keinen Widerspruch in sich, wenn unsere kritische Unterscheidung beider [der sinnlichen und intellektuellen] Vorstellungsarten … statt hat” [Kant, KrV B XXVIII–IX, III: 31–32]). 21 “Human reason is architectonic by nature, that is to say, it considers all individual cognitions as parts of a possible system”; “under architectonic, I understand the art of system-making”; “Now, the system of all philosophical knowledge is philosophy” (“Die menschliche Vernunft ist ihrer Natur nach architektonisch, d.i. sie betrachtet alle Erkenntnisse als gehörig zu einem möglichen System”; “Ich verstehe unter Architektonik die Kunst der Systeme”; “das System aller philosophischen Erkenntnis ist nun Philosophie [Kant, KrV B 502, IV: 449; B 860, IV: 695; B 866, IV: 699]). 22 Gabriela Basterra offers a superb analysis of Kant’s notion of “clearing a space” or “place” for “freedom” in her Subject of Freedom, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015, which is, to my



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logically interrelated cognitive representations we construct, “freedom” is, conversely, “cleared a space” in “thought” from which phenomenal knowledge is excluded in turn.23 __________________ The coordination, rather than reciprocal exclusion, of the sensory and supersensory, or phenomenal and ideational, within a theoretical structure able to account for the alternating presence and absence of each, constitutes a new kind of economy for the differential combination, rather than opposition, of body and mind. The activities critically delimited and so “clarified” (by virtue of their “articulation”) within that integrated economy include not only the causal and logical interrelation of empirical phenomena on which all scientific theory and practice depend but the

23

knowledge, the first study to recognize the significance of Kant’s repeated indication of an individuation of an “other” (unfilled) space within (the a priori “synthetic” “form” of) space, a “place” outside cognitive space, conceived, on Basterra’s eloquent appraisal, as “a social space-in-progress fleetingly anchored by each subject’s relatedness to the alterity of freedom on which autonomy rests” (19). See Basterra, 20, 27, 33, 35, 37, 40–45 (esp.), 50, 52–54, 57, 59, 64. On the relation of autonomy to “excess,” or the “completely exterior,” see 8, 10, 14, 16, 18, 35, 67, 74, 80. Kant, KrV B XXIX, III: 32: “to clear from the causal mechanisms of nature a place for freedom … to at least let itself be thought” (“Freiheit … dem Naturmechanism den Platz einräumen … sich also doch wenigstens denken lasse”). In addition to Basterra’s recontextualization of what could be called Kant’s own “post-structural” use of a structural framework of exposition to enable the thinking of the other described by Emmanuel Levinas, the basic tenets of Derrida’s argument for the necessary doubling of presence by absence, and demarcation of the limits of any particular “position” by and for other positions and “possibilities” “to come,” should be evident in Kant’s unprecedented spelling out here, as elsewhere, of the identical premise: that of the “originary” generation of an outside (also designated “freedom” by both – see, in particular, Derrida’s inaugural La voix et le phénomène, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967, 10, 76, 100, 108, esp.) by a necessarily a priori structure – indeed that any working structure (such as “writing”) of conception must be a priori to any conception, including of that which escapes conceptualization. Despite the reductively conventional opposition by which they are routinely defined, perhaps in no two thinkers more than in Kant and Derrida is the requirement of artificial (“structural”) delimitation, whether in the form of arche-tectonics or demarcated différance, more critical to the “generative” act and historical course of (“post” or “extra- structural”) thinking at whose “possibility” all such delimitation aims. See in particular Derrida’s early Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990 (École Normale Supérieure diploma thesis, written 1953–1954), through the landmark essay, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Humanities,” on the “play” that the structure-generated sign first makes “possible” (The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Macksey and Donato, Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University, 1970 [written 1966], 246–264; L’écriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil, 1967, 409–428), and the pivotal essay on ethics, “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, New York: Routledge, 1992, 3–67) on the “deconstructible structure of law” and the entirely Kantian-categorical suggestion, resulting from Derrida’s language-based critique of that “structure,” of the “possibility” of “un avenir of justice,” or “justice to come,” at which, no less than Kant in his Second Preface to the First Critique, Derrida declares that his own entire philosophically critical, “deconstructive” project aims (14–15, 27).

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nonphenomenal, “real” activities practiced in “mathematics” and specifically linguistic comprehension. For, when dividing “real” from “nominal definitions” in the Logic, Kant includes under the category of “real definitions” both the fully synthetic constructions of mathematics (“RealDefinitionen gibt es in der Mathematik”) and our, for him, equally phenomenally independent ability to understand and use words about words themselves. As “real” as “real definitions,” he states, is the “declaration” of “what one understands under a word” (“was man unter einem Worte versteht”24), which is to say, what we understand about what stands under the formal capacity to signify of any word or words as such, abstractions whose construction and grammatical (rather than causal) relation operate, as do mathematical axioms, in complete independence of nature. To this clear logical division between our “nominal” knowledge of all given experiential objects and “real” knowledge of the fully constructed things of mathematics and language, he then adds the following observation regarding that for which no definition can be said similarly to exist: “In moral matters [or the things of morality] real definitions must always be sought” (“In Sachen der Moral müssen immer Real-Definitionen gesucht werden”25). “Gesucht” (“sought”) is precisely not “gibt” (“exist”), and while the “things” of literature are, by analogy, as unavailable to direct epistemological categorization as they require interpretation – representations constructed as fictions, they are neither nonreferential and “real” (“mathematical”), nor logical and merely “nominal[ly]” referential (“phenomenal”) – there is no indication in Kant that any independently defined “art of interpretation” is involved in the “search” for “definitions” of distinctly “moral,” rather than either mathematical or phenomenal, “matters” (or “things”: “Sachen”). When, in §53 of the Critique of Judgment, at the conclusion of the expository Analytics of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant assigns to “the art of poetry-making” (“Dichtkunst”) “the highest rank” (“den obersten Rang”26) and greatest “aesthetic value” of all “the different artforms” that this section of the Analytic “compares,”27 he does not base that ascription of a singularly elevated status to poetics upon any morally uplifting content the “art of poetry-making” may persuasively or pleasurably convey. Instead, like the “mode of thinking” (“Denkungsart”) Kant attributes to “aesthetic judgments” (“ästhetischen 24

Kant, Logik A 220, IV: 574. Ibid., 576. 26 Ibid., 576. 27 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft B 215, X: 265: “Vergleichung des ästhetischen Werts der schönen Künste untereinander.” 25



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Urteile”) – whose true “object,” he specifies, is “merely improperly named” (“nur uneigentlich so genannt”) whenever we make the mistake of identifying its basis with “nature,” rather than “its own proper foundation, which instead must be attributed to human nature itself” (“und eigentlich bloss der Gedenkungsart oder vielmehr der Grundlage zu derselben in der menschlichen Natur beigelegt werden müsse”28) – Kant ascribes to poetry-making a similar, dialectical ability to exchange the “object” (“Gegenstand”) of a noncognitive perception for the “subjective purposiveness” (“subjective Zweckmässigkeit”) of the act of “judging” such perception.29 That is to say, just as the “mode of thinking” (“Gedenkungsart”) at work in those experiences of sensory objects resulting not in their cognition but, rather, a subjective “feeling” of “pleasure” or “pain”30 – that “purposive” mode whose necessarily verbal constitution as impersonal act of “communication” (“Mitteilung”) “spoken” in a “general voice” (“in einer allgemeine Stimme” “sagen, es sei schön”) Kant calls “judgment”31 – is the sole “proper” “foundation” of the “sublime” according to Kant, so “the art of poetrymaking,” as Kant defines it, upends the a posteriori experiential relation of subject to object in Kant’s epistemology. For, even while employing recognizable verbal terms rather than replacing commonly understood (shared, or “common-place”) facts of speech with enigmatically elusive neologisms or a purportedly private, and thus inarguable and tautologically irrefutable “language” of its own  – by remaining instead, in Kant’s terms, “within the limits of given concept[s]” (“innerhalb den Schranken eines gegebenen Begriffs”32) – “the art of poetry,” as Kant’s Third Critique analyzes it, carries out the common language project of critical philosophy by instead using representation to exchange given conceptual contents, including that of the seat or subject of an action for its object. This is because, among the distinct but interactive intellectual and sensory capacities contributing to the “heterogeneous” composition of knowledge laid out in the First Critique, the “imagination” names our “capacity” or “faculty” (“Vermögen”) for conveying sensory data to the ­otherwise independent operations of the mind (“das Gemüt”), including both our imputed “categorical” or a priori ability to connect such data causally, and our counter-ability to act “freely” in full abstraction from sensation, or “think.”33 According to Kant, then, “the art 28 29 30 31 32 33

Ibid. (emphasis in original). Kant, KU B 133, X: 208 (emphasis added). Kant, KU §12 B 36–38 (X: 137–138). Kant, KU §21 B 65–66 (X: 157–158). See n. 14. Kant, KrV B xxvii, III: 31.

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of poetry-making” would itself define whatever it can mean to occupy “the highest rank” of the arts because, as if in imitation of the act of thinking itself, it alone “sets the imagination free” from the delimited sense perceptions required for the purpose of cognition. In so doing, ­“poetry-making” severs cognitive “representation[s]” from their phenomenal objects, and phenomenal objects from their subordination by concepts, even while maintaining the practical, cognitive limits of representational and conceptual language as such: Among all the beautiful arts the art of poetry-making (whose origin owes almost entirely to genius and wants least to be led either by prescriptive rules or examples) occupies the highest rank. It broadens the spirit in that it sets the imagination free and, within the limits of any given concept, offers, among the unlimited multiplicity of possible corresponding forms, those which link the representation of a concept with a fullness of thoughts to which no verbal expression is fully adequate, and thus raises itself aesthetically to [the realm of] ideas [Unter allen behauptet, die Dichtkunst (die fast gänzlich dem Genie ihren Urpsrung verdankt, und am wenigsten durch Vorschrift, oder durch Beispiele geleitet sein will) den obersten Rang. Sie erweitert das Gemüt dadurch, dass sie die Einbildungskraft in Freiheit setzt und innerhalb deines gegebenen Begriffs, unter der unbegrentzen Mannigfaltigkeit möglicher damit zusammenstimmender Formen, diejenige darbiete, welche die Darstellung desselben mit einer Gedankenfülle verknüpft, der kein Sprachausdruck völlig adäquat ist, und sich also ästhetisch zu Ideen erhebt.34]

In “set[ting] the imagination free,” the “representation [of any given concept]” (“Darstellung desselben”) created by the “art of poetry-making” acts to “broaden the mind” by supplanting the imagination’s service of the cognitive function to which all such concepts otherwise pertain. And just as, by an unmistakably proto-Hegelian turn, an “imagination” “set free” acts in turn to alter the capacity of the intellect it serves, for Kant, “the art of poetry-making” has the dialectical effect of transforming a mechanical function into an agent of intellectual change. For, in activating the “power” (“-kraft”) of “imagination” (“Einbildungs-”) to operate in freedom from both empirical and conceptual givens, the “art of poetrymaking” “allows” “the mind” to “feel” itself “free” to “act” “independent of natural determination,” that is, in independence from the external data that the imagination, in its epistemological function, serves to relay a posteriori to the formal, a priori capacity of “the mind” to cognize the empirical world, not as a Humean jumble of more or less fleeting sense impressions 34

Kant, KU B 214–215, X: 265 (excepting “Dichtkunst,” emphasis added).



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but as causally and comparatively interrelated representations. The “art” of employing the same “delimited concepts” of “nature” to compose not knowledge but “poetry” “allows” “the mind” to “feel itself free” to “judge and consider nature” not as phenomenal object of knowledge but – most significantly, for the entirety of Kant’s critical project  – as the nonphenomenal “appearance” of something else. Kant continues: It [the art of composing poetry] strengthens the mind, in that it allows it to feel its free, self-acting capacity, independent of natural determination, to consider and judge nature as an appearance in accordance with aspects that it [nature] does not offer from itself, whether for sense or for understanding. [Sie (die Dichtkunst) stärkt das Gemüt, indem sie es sein freies, selbsttätiges und von der Naturbestimmung unabhängiges Vermögen fühlen lässt, die Natur, als Erscheinung, nach Ansichten zu betrachten und zu beurteilen, die sie nicht von selbst, weder für den Sinn noch den Verstand in der Erfahrung darbietet.35]

Rather than attributing to poetry-making a truly “transcendent”  – whether “purely” speculative or exclusively sensuous  – power, Kant’s analysis here maintains the same critical rigor that informs his analysis of knowledge. Detaching “the mind” from its capacity to compose perceptual experience into the delimited “representations” we know, he neither sends it into an “outer” or “inner” “space” ruled by some “mystical authority”36 (of its own imagining), nor severs it from the body that depends on it, in service of an equally mystical concept of a somehow self-generating yet not biological “biopower” that, unlike all purposeful human and purposeless natural applications of force to bodies before it, “is” independent of both all autonomous (mathematical-physical) “natural mechanisms” and all politically (or merely sadistically) desirable subordinations of human bodies alike. Rather, Kant describes the mind’s “independent” capacity to “consider” the “appearance” of “nature” according to “aspects” or “views” (“Ansichten”) of it that nature “itself” does “not provide”: “views” of an apparently unnatural “appearance” of a “materiality”37 that, rather than “beginning” with sensory experience, becomes “perceptible” only upon being articulated and read. That is to say, while such “views” continue to take “nature,” perceived “as appearance” rather than “thing-in-itself,” as their referent, no “experience” (“Erfahrung”) combining “understanding” (“Verstand”) with “sensation” (“Sinn”) mediates the “aspect” of sensory 35 36 37

Kant, KU B 215, X: 265. Derrida, “The Force of Law.” On the “matter” (“Materie”) of sensory cognition, see Kant, KrV B 74, III: 97.

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phenomena that the verbal “art of poetry-making” first makes available to the mind. Because its “representation” (“Darstellung”) of the empirical world is and is not recognizable, familiar in conceptual discursive form but alien in meaning, the discourse of “poetry-making” connects the “imagination” with a noncognizable “fullness of thought,” a “widening of mind” beyond the perception and understanding of “nature,” qua quotidian or scientific object of knowledge, that no “verbal expression,” if merely nominally understood, could ever indeed “adequate[ly]” represent. On Kant’s extraordinary account, then, “the art of poetry-making” occupies the “highest rank” among the arts because, uniquely capable of “such an abstracted mode of representation” (“dergleichen abgezogene Darstellungsart”), it alone has the capacity to supersede the very means of cognition it employs: to maintain the intelligibility of discourse while exchanging the means and ends of understanding themselves.38 Replacing natural givens by discursive actions, it reverses the relation connecting

38

In keeping with this analysis, Kant directly relates the capacity of poetry, in superseding representational cognition, to make us “feel the sublime,” to what he calls the most “sublime passage” in all of Mosaic law, its verbally commanded “prohibition of images” (Bilderverbot) of the divine (or supersensible), as well as his own abrupt turn to “experience,” at the logical impasse of the Second Critique, to provide (one might argue, analogously) purely discursive “confirmation” of the (secular) “fact” of the “the moral law” (discussed in what follows). Staving off any “concern that the feeling of the sublime effected by an entirely abstracted mode of representation [dergleichen abgezogene Darstellungsart] of the sensory will be entirely negative,” he continues: [S]uch an abstracting [from the sensory] is a representation of the infinite, which we can  never represent otherwise than merely negatively, but which, however, widens the soul. Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the law book of the Hebrews than the command: You shall make for yourself no image, nor any figure, either of that which is in heaven nor on the earth, nor below the earth. This command alone can explain the enthusiasm which the Jewish people in its moral epoch felt for their religion when they compared themselves with other peoples, or explain the pride which Mohammedanism inspires. The same is true of the moral law and of the disposition to morality in us. [Man darf nicht besorgen, dass das Gefühl des Erhabenen durch eine dergleichen abgezogene Darstellungsart, die in Ansehung des Sinnlichen gänzlich negative wird, verlieren wird; den … jene Absonderung ist also eine Darstellung des Unendlichen, welche zwar eben darum niemals anders als bloss negative Darstellung sein kann, die aber doch die Seele erweitert. Vielleicht gibt es keine erhabenere Stelle im Gesetzbuch der Juden, als das Gebot: Du sollst dir kein Bildnis machen, noch irgend ein Gleichnis weder dessen was im Himmel, noch auf der Erden, noch under der Erden ist u.s.w. Dieses Gebot allein kann hen Enthusiasm erklären, den das jüdische Volk in seiner gesitteten Epoche für seine Religion fühlte, wenn es sich mit anderen Völkern verglich, oder denjenigen Stolz, den der Mohammedanism einflösst. Eben dasselbe gilt auch von der Vorstellung des moralischen Gesetzes und der Anlage zur Moralität in uns.] (Kant, KU B 125, X: 201). Cf. the discussions of this passage in Chapters 2 and 7 of this volume.



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(representing) subjects to (represented) objects by using the names of experiential objects otherwise subject to the formal, phenomenalizing ­processes of cognition, to mean “objects” defying objectification, or undelimitable “ideas,” instead. Crossing Kant’s strict division of the “nominal” and “real” objects and subjects of applied and pure reason, respectively, the discourse of “the art of poetry-making” relies on the familiar language of “delimited” “concepts” to indicate a mode of “acting” neither restricted to ­producing conceptual knowledge of, nor “freed” from all ­reference to, the natural world. Instead, “poetry-making,” as Kant describes it, uses ­referential representation for what, in the terms of Kant’s Logic, can only properly be called “real,” if unapparent purposes of its own. Neither “mathematically” “constructive” nor “logically” “nominal” in content, the discourse of poetry reconfigures the a priori and a posteriori relations linking recognizable objects to each other and to the subject who ­perceives them, “represent[ing]” the things of nature we name to mean no “nature” we can ever possibly know. This is a “nature” not of objects but of actions that, “free” and “self-activating” (“frei, selbsttätig), exceed, as they render “[in]adequate,” the same discursive “expressions” for phenomena they employ, because their “own [sublime] foundation” (“Grundlage zu derselben”) as “a capacity independent of natural determination” (“der Naturbestimmung unabhängiges Vermögen”) lies, alongside our “capacity” for “judgment,” in the expressly nonobjectifiable world of subjects – “in” that “nature” which Kant qualifies as specifically “human” in kind (“in der menschlichen Natur”39). The specific kind or epistemological category of nature differentiated as “human” here is thus perhaps most accurately understood as naturally artificial – linguistic or signifying – in “nature.” For it is the distinctive use its “representation[s]” make of discourse  – the logically applicable, “delimited concepts” employed in our investigation and knowledge of natural objects – that makes “the art of poetry-making” into the means of enacting an undelimited “fullness of thought” (“Gedankenfülle”) in the subject. And since, like that of judgment itself, the possibility of poetry rests on the specifically noncausally determined, exclusively “abstractly” constructed, “subjective condition” (“subjektive Bedingung”) of its “general communicability” (“Mitteilbarkeit”40) as discourse, the effect of poetry “broadens the mind” of any subject not only in function of the discrete contents of the objects it represents but as an immediate consequence of 39 40

See again description of “mode of thinking,” Kant, KU B 132, X: 208. Kant, KU B 28, X: 131.

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its own fundamentally intersubjective, because solely linguistic, basis. For this is a noncognitive “fullness of thoughts” enacted by way of a medium whose very existence as such must be constituted both within and without any single subject, between and among an undelimitable number of subjects, whether absent or present, whenever its verbal “communication” takes place. Just as “the art of poetry-making” is the only art form entirely “independent” of the mathematical-physical laws “determin[ing]” organic “nature” – in that, while all verbal communication has and “takes” material shape(s), those infinitely transmissible, transmutable external marks or forms are never exhaustively determined by the limits prescribed by physical laws  – so poetry-making is never, by its own purely discursive nature, entirely independent of linguistic determination, and the use of language is in no instance privative, never limited to an individual subjectivity let alone the particular capacity or incapacity of any one subject’s individual senses. When, in a passage of unparalleled poetic effect in the “General Remark” upon the “Analytic of the Sublime,” Kant himself uses referential language41 to represent to his reader “what appears immediately to or upon the eye” (“was der Augenschein zeigt” [literally: “that which its merely optical appearance” or “appearance upon the surface of the eye,” “shows”]) whenever we “see” an object in nature “as the poets do” (“wie die Dichter es tun”) – which is to say, “merely as we see it” (“bloss, wie man ihn sieht”), without subordinating such a perception to concepts – he not only theoretically aligns but enacts the essential relation between “poetry-making” and judgment, identifying such seeing with the verbal action of “nam[ing]” its noncognizing “view of the starred sky” (“den

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Kant’s purely graphic, alternatively architectonic and anti-architectonic, but in all cases equally nonphenomenal descriptions of “sky” and “ocean,” as they “appear to the eye” of “poets” and subjects of judgment alike, are, respectively, that of “a vault that encompasses all” (“ein weites Gewölbe, was alles befasst”), and, “when observed in quiet,” that of “a clear mirror of water limited only by the heavens” (“wenn er in Ruhe betrachtet wird, einen klaren Wasserspiegel, der bloss von Himmel begrenzt ist”) or, when “unquiet, like an abyss threatening to devour all” (“einen allez zu verschlingen drohenden Abgrund”) (Kant, KU B 119, X: 196). I have analyzed the inverse relation between architectonics and phenomenality, as well as Kant’s own necessary reliance on architectonics to describe the construction both of his Critique and of “logic” itself, in: “Architecture and Architectonics: The Art of Reason’ in Kant’s Critique,” Canon: Thematic Studies in Architecture, ed. Taisto Mäkelä, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1986, Vol. 3, 103–118; “Architecture in the Discourse of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche and an “Architecture of Our Minds,” ed. Irving Wohlfarth and Alexandre Kostka, The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities Issues and Debates series, Los Angeles: Getty Center, 1999, 19–34; and “Architecture in Kant and Heidegger: The ‘Building’ of Critique and the ‘House of Being,” in Recht und Frieden in Kant, 6 Bde., Hrsg. V. Rohden, R. Terra, G. A. de Almeida, and M. Ruffling, Berlin: de Gruyter Verlag, 2008, Vol. 5, 509–518.



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Anblick des bestirnten Himmels …”) or “of the ocean” (“des Ozeans”) “sublime” (“erhaben nennt”42). Like the singularly exemplary status accorded “how the poets [see]” in Kant’s analysis of the sublime, “the art of poetry-making,” on his definition, “represent[s]” “nature” as an occasion for communicating with all other subjects constituted of the “common” “capacity” (“Vermögen”) or “power” (“Kraft”) not only to know, in a delimited phenomenal way, but “to judge.” And “judging” “what the mere appearance” of nature “shows to the eye” means not knowing but reading nature as if it itself embodied the undelimited capacities of language. For enabling both reference to things and the “mirroring” or “devouring” of their imaged delimitation, while itself defined solely by the “internal determinations” and “characteristics (“innere Bestimmungen,” “innere Merkmalen”43) arising “out of [its own] essence” and “first ground of possibility” as a “thing” (“aus dem Wesen der Sache, dem ersten Grunde der Möglichkeit darlegen”44), language is at once the source of our “inadequate expressions” or images and of our critical recognition of them as such. Free to acknowledge in every instance the representational limits of the contents its forms produce because itself dependent on no particular “experience” of an object for their formation, language proves, however counterintuitively, as self-constituting as “mathematics”: the source of all names, it is itself no merely “nominal” thing; the necessary medium of all fictions, its operation is, in its own terms, as in Kant’s, as “real” as any either purely logically self-regulating or ethical “thing.” “The art of poetry-making” brings this non-nominal identity of linguistic activity to the fore by repurposing its externally applicable nominalist functions, as arbitrarily referential and conceptual system,45 into the most purely 42

Kant, KU B 119, X: 196. Cf. the early analysis of this extraordinary description by Kant of “see[ing] the way the poets do” – itself “worthy,” in Wordsworth’s words, of the attribution to its author of the “name of poet” – originally offered in the section, “The Appearance of the Sublime in the Third Critique,” Part One, of my Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, 52–68. Cf. Chapter 2, n. 23, this volume. 43 See n. 9 and n. 10 on the defining characteristics of “real definitions.” 44 Ibid. 45 Attempting to combat all exclusively nominalist views of language at large, Walter Benjamin’s remarkable early essay, “On Language as Such and the Language of Human Beings” (“Über Sprache überhaupt und die Sprache der Menschen,” written 1916; published posthumously, 1977), posits “God’s language” and “the language of Adam” as theoretical narratives of the origin of the world in language and the origin of language in the world, respectively – speculative fictions effectively reframing such a logical nominalism as Kant’s with respect to the limits of phenomenal knowledge, in the openly allegorical, biblical-historical terms of humanity’s own limited condition of epistemological exile after the fall. The present argument points, by contrast, to Kant’s own peerless accounts of the agency that language affords every human subject at any time to do what “the poets do,” that is, to cross the division between nominal and real or “logical” and “moral matters,” outlined in Kant’s Logik, in the act of

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“internal form” named throughout Kant’s entire tripartite Critique, “the schema.” First introduced in Book Two of the Transcendental Doctrine of the Faculty of Judgment, “The Analytic of Principles,” in which, having already set out the formal terms of his theory of cognitively applied “reason” in the “Analytic of Concepts,” Kant recognizes that the crux of the principle of our general capacity to “subsume” any sensuous “object” to a “concept” (“Subsumption eines Gegenstandes unter einen Begriff”46), that is, to produce cognitions by exercising the a priori forms and categories of reason empirically, cannot be assigned separately to either the a priori or empirical basis of experience alone. Unlike the “homogeneous,” because nonreferential operations of pure (mathematical) logic, the “application” (“Anwendung”) of any of the a priori forms of understanding to the “completely heterogeneous” (“ganz ungleichartig”47), because a posteriori stuff of perception must, on Kant’s own critical terms, require “some third thing” that, neither “object” nor “concept,” is “more fundamental” to the cognitive construction of sense perceptions than even “sensory images” themselves: Now it is clear, that there must be some third thing that on the one side is homogeneous with the category, and homogeneous with the phenomenon on the other, and so makes the application of the former to the latter possible. This mediating representation must be pure, without anything empirical about it, and so, on the one side, intellectual, while on the other side, sensual. Such a representation is the transcendental schema. […] In fact it is not images of objects but schemata that lie at the foundation of our pure ability to conceive sensuous objects. [Nun ist klar, dass es ein Drittes geben müsse, was einerseits mit der Kategorie, anderseits mit der Erscheinung in Gleichartigkeit stehen muss, und die Anwendung der ersteren auf die letzte möglich macht. Diese vermittelnde Vorstellung muss rein, (ohne alles Empirische) und doch einerseits intellektuell, andererseits sinnlich sein. Eine solche ist das transzendentale Schema […] In der Tat liegen unsern reinen sinnlichen Begriffen nicht Bilder der Gegenstände, sondern Schemata zum Grunde.48] articulating something they cannot “adequately represent,” whether in self-negating scenes of the “sublime,” which is to say, “freedom” (from all delimitation), or any other at once articulable yet never fully representable “fullness of thoughts” indicative of the “supersensory.” See “Über Sprache überhaupt und die Sprache der Menschen,” in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 7 Bde., 14 Teilbde, Hrsg. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989, Bd. 2.3; English translation by E. Jephcott available in: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. M. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, Vol. 1, 62–74; Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978, 314–332. 46 Kant, KrV B 176, III: 187. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. B 180, III: 189 (emphases in original).



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To return to Kant’s account of the unique operations of “the art of poetry-making”  – its ability to use language, in its “abstracted representational mode,” to produce a “fullness of thoughts” for which no “verbal expression is adequate,” thereby “rais[ing] itself to the level of ideas” – it is, in Kant’s words, “now” equally “clear” that the mode of such an “art” can no more be “grounded” in “images of objects” than the conceptual subsumptions of sense impressions required to make cognitions can be grounded in concepts themselves. It is to that same “third thing” – originally theorized out of pure necessity as the imagination- “inscribed,”49 a priori medium of all cognitive synthetic judgments in the “Analytic of Transcendental Judgment” of the First Critique – that Kant’s description of “poetry-making” at the close of the “Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Third Critique ultimately turns. Already cited in part, Kant’s account of the singular ability of “the art of poetry-making” to “broaden” and “strengthen the mind,” by so “represent[ing] nature” as to make us “consider and judge” it “independent of natural determination,” concludes: [I]t [the art of poetry-making] allows [the mind] to feel its free, selfactivating capacity, independent of natural determination … and thus to use [nature] on behalf of and, so to speak, as the schema of the supersensible. It plays with the mere appearances that it brings into effect at will, but without deceiving thereby, for it declares what it does to be mere play. [[S]ie [die Dichtkunst] es [das Gemüt] sein freies, selbsttätiges und von der Naturbestimmung unabhängiges Vermögen fühlen lässt, [die Natur] … also zum Behuf und gleichsam zum Schema des Übersinnlichen zu gebrauchen. Sie spielt mit dem Schein, den sie nach Belieben bewirkt, ohne doch dadurch zu betrügen; den sie erklärt ihre Beschäftigung selbst für blosses Spiel.50]

In distinguishing the singular capacity of “the art of poetry-making” to “use” the nominal as a “schema” of the noumenal, Kant makes additionally clear that the very effectiveness of poetry in doing so depends on its determination to pretend that it is not – to take on the opaque cloak of irony, “declaring” and disguising this most serious of all aesthetic activities instead 49

The only way that Kant “can” ultimately define the schema is by (inherently faulty) analogy with “the image.” Like and unlike a picture made imaginable by the entire history of our a posteriori perceptions, the schema, he suggests, is a kind of identifying inscription of itself, or “monogram,” left upon our a posteriori perceiving minds by an a priori power of imagination: “So much we can alone say: the image is the product of the empirical faculty of imagination; the schema of sensory concepts, the product and so to speak a monogram of the pure imagination a priori.” [So viel können wir nur sagen: das Bild ist ein Produkt des empirischen Vermögens der Einbildungskraft, das Schema sinnlicher Begirffe … ein Produkt der reinen Einbildungskraft a priori.] (Kant, KU B 181-2, III: 187) 50 Kant, KU B 215–216, X: 265–266 (emphasis added).

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as “mere play,” serious neither about itself nor about the noumenal it alone has the capacity to “use” “nature” to represent. Ironically enough, poetry does not “deceive” us (“ohne doch dadurch zu betrügen”) as to either the perceptible nature of the objects it represents or the imperceptible nature of the “supersensible” on whose “behalf” it “uses” those representations, exactly because it “declares” itself “mere play,” the composition not of cognitive phenomena but verbal fictions. These fictions are “mere appearances” (“Schein”) in the literal sense that they merely appear to be appearances, with nothing, let alone anything of consequence, at stake in what they appear to represent. “The art of poetry-making” thus turns the tables on cognitive, phenomenal representation by “playfully” employing the apparently merely phenomenal as the legible “schema” or “inner form” (“innere Form”51) not of phenomenal perception but of the imperceptible, nonappearing, or nonphenomenal; “the supersensory” (“das Übersinnliche”). While, when introducing “the schema” as an epistemologically necessary “third thing” in the “Transcendental Analytic,” Kant famously tantalizingly calls it an “art hidden in the depths of the human soul” (“eine verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele”52), the exchange between form and content, or “use” of an outside to represent something with no “sides,” that Kant powerfully ascribes to the “art of poetry,” is, however, no more – in Kant’s terms – “real” or ethical in quality than are the poetic operations of metalepsis or metaphor. Formal poetic exchanges notwithstanding, even when they cross the critical line dividing the phenomenal and experiential from the noumenal and ideational, nominalism and ethics remain as divided by the “unoverseeable chasm” (“unübersehbare Kluft”53) central to the structure of the Critique as is the chiastic, critical relation between a “pure practical reason” (of moral action) and a necessarily “heterogeneous”54 because practically “applied” or impure “reason” (of cognition).55 I have painted this tendentious but I think accurate portrait of the Kant most widely and inaccurately dismissed, in literary circles especially, as a “mere formalist,” not in order to indicate an aporia but what we might instead call the anti-aporia no less central than its own designated “chasm” to his system. For, while Kant does not elaborate, as he does in describing mathematical constructs, on the kind of discursive language in which such 51 52 53 54 55

Kant, KrV B 185, III: 193. Ibid., 190. Kant, KU B xx, X: 83. Kant, KrV B 177, III: 187. Kant, KprV A 3, VII: 107.



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“real definitions” of “moral” content would consist, it is worth remembering that which he himself highlights must be left out of his critique of knowledge. To recall the passage in the always instructive Second Preface to the First Critique in which Kant explicitly states the “negative” basis of the economy of exchange upon which his entire critical endeavor will depend, that pivotal exposition is itself prefaced by a self-mocking miseen-scène of any reasonable reader’s response to the purposefully “limited” (cognitive) returns on that endeavor: But, it will be asked, what is this, then, for a treasure, that we are proposing to leave to posterity with a metaphysics that, in being clarified by critique, is also thereby brought to a persisting condition? By a fleeting overview of this work we may believe we perceive its use to be merely negative, namely, that of warning us never to dare to step over the bounds of experience with speculative reason, and that is in fact its first use. But this [use] quickly becomes positive as soon as we realize that the principles with which speculative reason dares to step over its boundary inevitably leads not to the extension, but, upon closer inspection, to the contraction of the use of reason, in that it threatens to widen the bounds of experience, to which it really belongs, over everything, and so to supplant the pure (practical) use of reason. Thus a critique that limits the former [speculative use of reason] is, to that extent, negative; but insofar as it removes, by the same token, an obstacle that threatens not only to limit but to annihilate the latter [pure (practical)] use [of reason], so it is in fact of positive and very important use. [Aber was ist denn das, wird man fragen, für ein Schatz, den wir der Nachkommenschaft, mit einer solchen durch Kritik geläuterten, dadurch aber auch in einem beharrlichen Zustand gebrachten Metaphysik, zu hinterlassen gedenken? Man wird bei einer flüchtigen Übersicht dieses Werks wahrzunehmen glauben, dass der Nutzen davon doch nur negativ sei, uns nämlich mit der spekulativen Vernunft niemals über die Erfahrungsgrenze hinaus zu wagen, und das ist auch in der Tat ihr erster Nutzen. Dieser aber wird alsbald positive, wenn man inne wird, das die Grundsätze, mit denen sich spekulative Vernunft über ihre Grenze hinauswagt, in der Tat nicht Erweiterung, sondern, wenn man sie näher betrachtet, Verengung unseres Vernunftgebrauchs zum unausbleiblichen Erfolg haben, indem sie wirklich die Grenzen der Sinnlichkeit, zu der sie eigentlich gehören, über alles zu erweitern und so den reinen (praktischen) Vernunftgebrauch gar zu verdrängen drohen. Daher ist eine Kritik, welche die erstere einschränkt, so fern zwar negativ, aber, indem sie dadurch zugleich ein Hindernis, welches den letzteren Gebrauch einschränkt, oder gar zu vernichten droht, aufhebt, in der Tat von positive und sehr wichtigem Nutzen.56] 56

Kant, KrV B xxiv–xxv, III: 29–30.

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Now, the “in fact positive and very important use” of the formal, “negative” “limits” that Kant’s “hypothetical” critique ascribes to all necessarily fictive equations of knowledge with mere sensations57 is the prevention of the “annihilation” (“vernichten”) of “free” or “moral” action that must accompany any reduction of experience to the passive reception of sensations – the same aim of historical agency that “anti-formalists” profess liberally to defend, if without ever managing to square the circle of contextual determinism with freedom, not to speak of any ruling ideology with the unruly content of language itself. How can formal hypotheses and analyses, as Kant proposes, “convince” anyone that “a necessarily practical use of pure reason” – that of free “moral” action – “may exist” (“so bald man überzeugt wird, dass es einen schlechterdings notwendigen praktischen Gebrauch der reinen Vernunft (den moralischen) gebe”58), even while just as necessarily excluding all object-conditions from the attempt? Or rather, what – what “real,” object-independent experience or action – can the formal delineation of form from content serve to indicate? Attempting to answer that all-important question in the Second Critique, Kant meets the very same structural limits of which his exchange of negative (phenomenally and causally delimited) cognition for positive (“free” or unlimited) ethical action – like those enabling any economy or system of exchanges – is constituted. Exchange of any kind is itself a form of communication, and like any mode of communication, Kant’s Critique first makes all physio-mathematically undetermined action – which is to say, human action – possible by substituting an infinitely flexible, because comprehensive system of representations for physio-mathematical things themselves, things otherwise reduced to the purely physical binarism of either bludgeon or fodder. Can we kill and/or can we eat it are the only two queries fully nonsymbolizing beings bring to every other being and thing in the world, and these are themselves less actual queries than mechanical reflexes naturally encoded in animate existence itself. Yet, given the structural limits enabling exchange to transform utterly and beyond regression (customarily, into “essentialist” ontological fictions) the impoverished logic of binarism, any logical deduction seeking to derive the positive (whether an entirely imagined, “pure” rather than historical or experiential materialism, or, as it is also sometimes called, “Being”) from the necessarily delimiting script of the negative must find itself backed into the corner described by those limits themselves. The finitely entailed 57 58

Kant, KrV B xxii, III: 28. Ibid., 30.



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or phenomenal and infinitely unentailed or noumenal are precisely nonequivalent by definition. Their systemic exchange does not alter that fact, nor that the necessary limits hypothetically ascribed to the one are those the other just as necessarily exceeds. Just as the designation of some thing or notion as “treasure” (to use Kant’s metaphor) signifies some quality surpassing all positive measure or posited value of exchange, so employing the logically concatenated means of phenomenal cognition to “prove” the positive fact of the noumenal must prove logically impossible. It is at the moment in the Second Critique in which Kant openly encounters that impossibility that he posits a fully fictional representation in its place, a story not of the logical bases but unexpected “experience” of freedom itself: an experience specifically not of sensory objects, indeed, not even of oneself as such an object. First explaining this impossibility, of ever arriving at “freedom,” or the radically “unconditioned” (“unbedingt”), by way of the causal reasoning appropriate to investigating the “mechanisms of nature” (“Naturmechanismus”), he next invokes “freedom” itself, in the form of the “moral law” (“Sittengesetz”), as a kind of power or agency capable of acting in independence of “appearances” and “imposing itself” upon “us” (“uns aufgedrungen”). Uncannily previewing Wordsworth’s later invocation of “Imagination – here the Power so-called / Through sad incompetence of human speech” as it “rose from the mind’s abyss” (The Prelude [1850] VI: 594–596), similarly occurring when the poet suddenly finds his own “course” of action “[h]alted” (“without an effort to break through” [VI: 586, 599]) – Kant ascribes the “piece of daring” that is the “introduction” of “freedom into science” to “freedom” itself: That … the concept of freedom … poses the most insoluble of problems is already evident in the fact that nothing in appearances is explained by the concept of freedom, but rather here [with regard to appearances] the mechanisms of nature must be the only guiding thread, above which the antinomy of reason, too, becomes entangled in inconceivabilities on both sides, when it attempts to rise to the unconditioned in a casual series; and while this last does indeed have usefulness when it comes to explaining appearances, no one would ever have attempted the piece of daring of introducing freedom into science, had not the moral law and with it, practical reason not come along and imposed that concept upon us. [Dass … de[r] Begriff der Freiheit das unauflöslichste Problem aufstelle … erhellet schon daraus: dass, da aus dem Begriffe der Freiheit in den Erscheinungen nichts erklärt werden kann, sondern hier immer Naturmechanism den Leitfaden ausmachen muss, überdem auch die Antinomie der reinen Vernunft, wenn sie zum Unbedingten in der Reihe der Ursachen aufsteigen will, sich, bei einem so sehr wie bei dem

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What follows immediately upon that grammatical role reversal, in which a logically unattainable concept is said to “impose itself” upon its only possible conceiver, is a narrative concatenation of phenomena unlike any other in the Critique. Although the explanatory use of exemplary causal narratives is already a rare occurrence in Kant, when it comes to demonstrating the single “positive” “use” of his Critique – that of proving the (nonphenomenal) reality of the singularly “unconditioned” condition of moral action, “freedom,” a “concept” (“der Freiheitsbegriff”) that cannot be one because necessarily noncognitive in nature60 – he turns abruptly to the very same medium that has been the central “scientific” object of his critique, invoking “experience” as “confirming” not the formal limits and causal laws upon which he has hypothetically predicated our only possible understanding of “appearances,” but rather our own ability to deviate radically from those limits and laws when something very different from object-knowledge is our objective. Having reported, as if an involuntary party to the event, the ability of “freedom” to have “imposed itself upon us,” Kant continues: But experience also confirms this order of concepts in us. Suppose that someone pretends that his lustful inclination would be irresistible to him if the desired object and opportunity presented themselves together: [ask him] whether, if a gallows were constructed before the house in which he encounters this opportunity, so as to hang him from it immediately after he enjoyed his pleasure, he would then not conquer his inclination. One may not long wonder what he would answer. Ask him, however, whether if his sovereign demanded of him, under threat of unhesitating punishment of death, that he bear false witness against an honest man, whom he under other seeming pretexts might gladly ruin, whether he, no matter how great his love of living may be, would hold his overcoming of it for possible. Whether he would do it or not, he may not trust himself to affirm; that it would, however, be possible, he must acknowledge without reservation. He thus judges that he can [do] something because he is conscious that he 59 60

Kant, KprV A 53–54, VII: 139–140. Representing instead the singularly defining reciprocity between freedom and praxis, Kant goes on to call “freedom” “the only fact [or thing ‘made from’ (see Latin, facere)] of pure reason” (“einziger Faktum der reinen Vernunft” (Kant, KpV A 56, VII: 42).



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should, and recognizes in himself the freedom which would otherwise have remained unknown to him without the moral law. [Aber auch die Erfahrung bestätigt diese Ordnung der Begriffe in uns. Setzet, dass jemand von seiner wollüstigen Neigung vorgibt, sie sei, wenn ihm der beliebte Gegenstand und die Gelegenheit dazu vorkämen, für ihn ganz unwiderstehlich: ob, wenn ein Galgen vor dem Hause, da er diese Gelegenheit trifft, aufgerichtet wäre, um ihn sogleich nach genossener Wollust daran zu knüpfen, er alsdenn nicht seine Neigung bezwingen würde. Fragt ihn aber, ob, wenn sein Fürst ihm, unter Androhung derselben unverzögerten Todesstrafe, zumute, ein falsches Zeugnis wider einen ehrlichen Mann, den er gerne unter scheinbaren Vorwänden verderben möchte, abzulegen, ob er da, so gross auch seine Liebe zum Leben sein mag, sie wohl zu überwinden für möglich halte. Ob er es tun würde oder nicht, wird er vielleicht sich nicht getrauen zu versichern; dass es ihm aber möglich sei, muss er ohne Bedenken einräumen. Er urteilet also, dass er etwas kann, darum, weil er sich bewusst ist, dass er es soll, und erkennt in sich die Freiheit, die ihm sonst ohne das moralische Gesetz unbekannt geblieben wäre.61]

While nothing in this hypothetical narrative of interactions between sovereign and subject may “appear” to its reader’s “eye” poetic, let alone sublime in the mode of “seeing” given natural objects “as the poets do,” every act recounted in its own development is itself specifically verbal in nature. To confirm (“bestätigen”), posit, pose, or suppose (“setzten”), pretend or purport (“vorgeben”), ask (“fragen,”), threaten (“androhen”), demand (“zumuten”), bear false witness (“falsches Zeugnis ablegen”), [be or act] honestly (“ehrlich [sein]”), use false pretexts [to ruin an honest man] (“unter scheinbaren Vorwänden [einen ehrlichen Mann verderben]”), lie (“es tun”), affirm (“versichern”), acknowledge (“einräumen”) – all are words entitling actions made of words.62 And it is the practically consequential nature of these verbal actions alone that leads the subject of Kant’s experimental story to its apparently logical (“thus” [also]) conclusion, articulated in the equally verbal form of an act of “judgment”: “thus he judges that he can [do something], because he is conscious that he should, and recognizes in himself the freedom, which would have remained unknown to him without the moral law” (“Er urteilet also, dass er etwas kann, darum weil er sich bewusst ist, dass er es soll, und erkennt in sich die Freiheit, die ihm sonst ohne das moralische Gesetz unbekannt geblieben wäre”). 61 62

Kant, KprV A 54 VII: 140 (emphasis added in part) On verbal entitlement as action, see the great seminal essay of Kenneth Burke, “What Are the Signs of What? A Theory of Entitlement,” Anthropological Linguistics 4.6 (1962), 1–23.

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The “recognition,” on the part of a thoroughly mundane, “posited” subject, of the singularly indisputable while never positively given fact, that he “can” act in freedom from the causal laws determining the life and death of all phenomenal bodies, including his own, “confirms” for Kant that “freedom” is a “fact” made by, rather than derived from, “reason,” that is, neither a product of pure (mathematical) logic nor another “a priori form” of perception permitting logic to be applied to perceptions in the first place. Rather than a cognition constructed of either pure or empirically applied (“scientific”) logic, the expressly verbal act of “acknowledgment” expresses or externalizes a wholly internally recognized truth. On what basis, then, can such a noncognitive, categorically unverifiable truth be recognized? The logically divergent, yet not strictly illogical basis of the “fact” of “freedom” – singular purely “positive” product of the “negative” operations of criticism previewed in the First Critique – bears no resemblance to the central “a priori” category of causality, nor, for that matter, to the suspension of all causality signified by the concept of “free play” in the Third Critique. The “fact” of “freedom” derives here neither from some impossibly sufficient accumulation of empirical evidence nor some purely deductive, impossibly homogeneous because entirely nonempirical logical proof, but from a single arbitrary subject’s “judgment” and verbal acknowledgment of its “possibility.” Mimicking the mode of any traditional analytic category, the concept of the possibility of freedom is “acknowledged” as unconditional in application. Yet what defines the unconditionality of this particular “positive” “fact” is its categorical negation of a negation: “freedom” must be “recognized” as “possible,” in a categorical rather than empirical sense, because the contrary, its impossibility, can never be “acknowledged without reservation.” For the same reasons that the nominal and real, logical and moral, must be critically delimited from each other in order ever to come into effect, the fully categorical relation of the possibility of freedom to acts of speech is itself so unconditional that the possible might be called, specifically with regard to “Sachen der Moral,” no indefinite condition but, on the contrary, and analogous to the fundamental elements of logic, the central, linguistically conditioned a priori “category” governing critical thinking itself. Having given us the brief story of a subject who, even in the most mimetically dissuasive circumstances, finds himself incapable of denying the possibility of acting against his own sensory interests, Kant again reverses the roles of subject and object, or means and ends, exchanging the order of events in his fiction for a putative “order of concepts within us” according to which “the moral law” emerges as a kind of postscript to the



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action as its officiating signature or first condition. Unlike the extraordinary development of events represented in the story that preceded it, such circular reasoning appears formally self-serving at best. Yet precisely here it is worth recalling that Kant’s first, rightly abandoned version of “the moral law”  – the “so-called categorical imperative” (“sogenannte kategorische Imperativ”) hypothetically deduced in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals as that logico-verbal mood of utterance alone capable of ensuring the universal necessity of ethics (that no human being “use” any other “merely as a means” to personal ends63) – was similarly defined as neither categorical nor imperative in itself but, rather, as a necessary (or a priori) mode of “possibility.” Its actual – active – content consisted only in our ability to “think [it] possible – indeed even necessary” (“möglich – ja gar also notwendig, denkt”) – that we might commit ourselves to “actions that can be done only by setting aside all desires and sensuous stimulations” (“Handlungen … die nur mit Hintansetzung alle Begierden und sinnlichen Anreizen geschehen können”), which is to say, to thinking “freedom, as a negative determination” (“Freiheit, als negative Bestimmung”).64 It is in fact the “necessary” “possibility” of this “possible thought” (“Gedanke”) that, Kant states, it was the sole purpose of the Groundwork to demonstrate: “We shall thus have to investigate the possibility of a categorical imperative entirely a priori, since we do not here have the advantage of its reality being given in experience, and thus of its possibility not being necessary for its ascertainment but merely for its explanation” (“Wir werden also die Möglichkeit der kategorischen Imperative gänzlich a priori zu untersuchen haben, da uns hier der Vorteil nicht zu statten kommt, dass die Wirklichkeit desselben in der Erfahrung gegeben, und also die Möglichkeit nicht zur Festsetzung, sondern bloss zur Erklärung nötig wäre”65). Into the consequential logic necessary to both theoretical and empirical investigations of every kind, it is Kant who takes the, strictly speaking, illogical step of “daring” to “introduce” the apparently antinomic category of “possibility,” a category capable of negating any purely positive “determination” either of “freedom” or its contrary, categorical necessity. Revered or reviled for his recuperation of logic from the self-contradictory fictions of every purportedly pure empiricism, Kant “used” logic to supplement its principle cognitive category – causality – with the noncausal, yet no less fundamental ethical category of “possibility.” The category that 63 64 65

Kant, Grundlegung BA 49, VII: 49; BA 67, VII: 61. Ibid., 118–119, VII: 94–95 (emphasis added in part). Ibid., 49, VII: 49–50 (emphasis added in part).

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stands in negative, dialectical relation to “categorical thinking” of every kind, “possibility,” the “thinking possible” of “free” action, is the category that makes the act of “judgment” possible, the noncognitive action through which we “see as the poets do,” which is, to see the delimited phenomenal world as the sensory representation of a power without cognizable limits, including foremost the power of our own capacity to “see” what poetry alone can communicate. Like the man before the gallows, the linguistic actors Kant calls “the poets” live in phenomenal bodies subject at every moment to the mechanical causality of the phenomenal world of which they are a part. And like the bodies of all animate subjects, the living bodies of linguistic actors contain within them the ability to “see” or, in any other way, sense what is external to them, the sensory objects that are themselves no more than sensible effects of the causal operations of the natural world. But “to see as the poets do” is not to see those phenomenal effects, just as to hear the verbal conditions under which a worldly power commands any subject in the world to bear false witness against an honest man, or undergo the purely mechanical means visibly constructed to effect his own demise, is no longer to cognize the command of the sovereign as tantamount to the “natural mechanism” of causality itself, but rather to “recognize” one’s own (noumenal) capacity to act (“he judges that he can …”) – in causal terms – illogically within the logical-causal context of a singularly fatally designed phenomenal scene. To “judge” not the logical necessity but the necessary “possibility” of such free action even within the most causally delimiting of contexts is finally the pivotal nonlogical ability that Kant judges the “real” “moral matter” and immeasurable “treasure” of his Critique. Just as to “see” nature in such a way that seeing is instead reading  – that is, “seeing” the “entirely abstracted mode of representation” required to apprehend not a perceptible sequence of discrete phenomena but an “incomparably great,” because “all-encompassing” power that, however extensive the appearances we perceive, “threatens to devour all” – so to recognize one’s ability to act both in view of and freedom from phenomenality is not to “see” the “Idea” of “freedom,” itself as impossible as any idea we can think or thing we can sense to be perceived per se, but to see freedom enacted in the only modality in which it can be recognized, in context. And this brings us back finally to Schleiermacher. For however it manifests itself in the external, phenomenal world, the single internal activity that, across his political and historical no less than speculative writings, Kant connects most closely to – indeed, nearly identifies with – “freedom” is “thinking.” Similar to any signifying system, empirical cognition must be



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unfree in order to be cognition, both formally delimited and subject to the legislation of syntactic relations. By the same token, what must be “free” of formal delimitation is the action Kant instead calls “thinking”: “Aber denken kann ich was ich will” (“I can think, however, what I will”).66 “Was ich will” here is a “matter” neither of personal opinion nor arbitrary whim but rather of freedom as such – the first of all “Sachen der Moral” – and just as freedom, the single, necessarily unlimited or “noumenal” condition of specifically human action and history, remains unknowable in the “nominal,” logical sense, it maintains the “real” positivity of “the possible” because it is “thinkable.” Accordingly, it follows, for Kant, that, as the ability to think (“I can think, however …” [“aber denken kann …”]) must, by definition, be free (from the limits of cognition), “so freedom is, self-evidently, thus something I can think” (“so kann ich mir doch die Freiheit denken”67). That the freedom to think is ultimately the freedom to think freedom is no circle but the closest Kant comes to what we may call reading his own Critique. For freedom remains the undelimited power that every project of critique both positively requires and negatively represents, just as every causally unprecedented “Revolution der Denkart” (“revolution in mode of thinking”) constituting the history of mathematics and science narrated in Kant’s Second Preface68 is itself a “real” enactment of such freedom in the world. And, as Kant’s hypothetical fiction represents it, no less revolutionary is the thinking of the otherwise nondescript man who, commanded on pain of death to bear false witness against an honest man, “must acknowledge” (literally, “make room in his mind for” [“einräumen”]) “without reservation” (“ohne Bedenken”) the “possib[ility]” that he “can” act in freedom of the mechanical causality of self-preservation. When Schleiermacher makes room in our minds for “the art of understanding,” as opposed to the merely “positivist” “aggregation of observations” that “philology [has] historically become” (“Die Philologie ist … etwas Positives durch unsere Geschichte geworden. Daher ihre Behandlungsweise der Hermeneutik auch nur Aggregat von Observationenen ist”),69 he does so on the same bases that Kant’s hypothetical narrative grounds the necessity (“muss”) of the “possible” (“dass es ihm aber möglich sei, muss er”), itself the sole categorical ground of 66

Kant, KrV B xxvii, III: 31 (emphasis in original). Ibid., 32 (emphasis in original). 68 Cf. Rüdiger Campe’s extensive analysis of the specifically literary structure of such “revolutions in the mode of thinking,” Chapter 4, this volume. 69 Schleiermacher, HuK 75. 67

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“free” “moral action”: acts of speech. In declaring the act of “understanding discourse” or “speech” (“des Verstehens der Rede”) an “art” (“Kunst”), rather than a “positive” “aggregation of [empirical] observations,” like Kant Schleiermacher understands the content of “discourse” to be positively nonobjectifiable. This does not mean that “the art of understanding” or interpretation (“Hermeneutik”) is itself to be alternatively understood as a positive form of artistry and evaluated as such. Combining the discursive limits of our “understanding” of experience with the unlimited activity of thinking that Kant critically “understands under the word,” “freedom,” interpretation requires an equally Kantian “power of imagination” commensurate with the “entirely abstracted mode of representation” it reads. Following and distinguishing himself from both the positivist “philosophical” and “philological” methods of Wolf and Ast, respectively, Schleiermacher calls all such textual interpretation a mode of “Kritik.”70 In Kant’s tripartite Critique, the noncausal and thus uncalculating enactment of “freedom,” itself the basis of any possible interest in, let alone conception of, moral action from its “first ground” up, is also the single defining condition of the possibility of our ability not to know objects or actions in a scientifically delimited sense but to relate them purely hypothetically, to exchange, replace, and predicate them – which is to say, “to think” – and for that very reason “can” itself only be manifested and “confirmed” in acts of speech. So, in Schleiermacher’s critical hermeneutics, speech and thinking are inherently united as well. If, according to Schleiermacher, speech is, famously, “only the external side of thinking” (“nur die äussere Seite des Denkens”) and the “real” (“wirklich”) consequence of the “unity of speaking and thinking” (“Einheit von Sprechen und Denken”) is that “without words, no one can think” (“niemand kann denken ohne Worte”71), so speech  – the nonempirical “declaration” of “thoughts” described in Kant’s Logic as “what one understands under a word” (“was man unter einem Worte versteht”72) – is no less the outer side of freedom in Kant; and thinking is the one activity of whose possibility, like the internal freedom from which it is inseparable, no human being can ever be deprived. Just as the singular ability to “see” and “use” the sensory, “so to speak” (“gleichsam”73), as a “schema” for the supersensory that Kant 70

“Über den Begriff und Einteilung der philologischen Kritik” (1830), in Schleiermacher, HuK 347–360. 71 Schleiermacher, HuK 77. 72 See n612, Kant, Logik A 220, VI: 574. 73 See n. 50.



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understood to constitute poetry, and as his own fiction of the man before the gallows narrates through a series of verbal actions “confirming” the real, because purely practical “possibility” that one may refuse to lie – the positive of a double-negative constitutive, for Kant, of the at once a priori yet unknowable “fact” of “the moral law”74 – so the “positive” verbal reality of this negation of negation is the a priori “possibility” of the a posteriori “fact” (or “made thing” [“Faktum”]) of literature.

Bibliography Basterra, Gabriela. The Subject of Freedom. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, 4 vols. Ed. M. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, Vol. 1. Benjamin, Walter. “Über Sprache überhaupt und die Sprache der Menschen.” In Gesammelte Schriften, Walter Benjamin. 7 Bde; 14 Teilbde. Hrsg. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989, Bd. 2.1. Brodsky, Claudia. “Architecture and Architectonics: ‘The Art of Reason’ in Kant’s Critique.” In Canon: Thematic Studies in Architecture, ed. Taisto Mäkelä. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1986, Vol. 3. Brodsky, Claudia. “Architecture in the Discourse of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Nietzsche.” In Nietzsche and an “Architecture of Our Minds,” ed. Irving Wohlfarth and Alexandre Kostka, The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Issues and Debates. Los Angeles: Getty Center, 1999. Brodsky, Claudia. “Architecture in Kant and Heidegger: The ‘Building’ of Critique and the ‘House of Being.’” In Recht und Frieden in Kant, Claudia Brodsky. 6 Bde. Hrsg. V. Rohden, R. Terra, G. A. de Almeida, and M. Ruffling. Berlin: de Gruyter Verlag, 2008, Vol. 5. Brodsky, Claudia. The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Burke, Kenneth. “What Are the Signs of What? A Theory of Entitlement.” Anthropological Linguistics 4.6 (1962), 1–23. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. R. J. White. Oxford: Foxcroft Press, 1936. Derrida, Jacques. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Derrida, Jacques. “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Jacques Derrida. New York: Routledge, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1990; orig. ENS diplôme thesis, 1953–1954. 74

Kant, KprV A 56, VII: 141.

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Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Humanities.” In The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugene Donato. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. Kant, Immanuel. Werkausgabe. 12 Bde. Hrsg. Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutik und Kritik. Hrsg. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977.

Index

Abrams, M. H., 34n41, 40n52 Addison, Catherine, 255, 255n43 Adorno, T. W., 40, 72, 213, 234, 235n88, 236–237, 237n99, 252n27 Critical Models, 237n99 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 17 Minima Moralia, 41, 41n53 Negative Dialectics, 236, 236n98, 237n99 Aeschylus, 83, 86, 86n39 Agamben, Giorgio, 294–295, 294n16 Agamemnon, 77n16, 84, 86, 86n39, 88, 90 Ajax, 80 Allison, Henry E., 61n30, 106n34, 217n21, 251n24, 256n47, 279n5, 287n8 Altieri, Charles, 27n32, 34n40 Anderson, R. Lanier, 266n79, 269n83 Anidjar, Gil, 62n31, 65n34 Apollodorus, 111n49 Arendt, Hannah, 171, 171n4 Aristotle, 24, 39, 72, 78, 87, 87n43, 110, 114n57, 129, 294, 299 Asad, Talal, 46n10, 65n34, 67n37 Bacon, Francis, 110n43 Bakthin, Mikhail, 123n74 Balfour, Ian, 63n32 Banfield, Ann, 262, 262n66 Banquo, 88 Barnard, Philip, 138n27 Barnes, Winston H. F., 264, 264n74 Basterra, Gabriela, 7, 9, 146n4, 147n7, 147n10, 149n17, 153n27, 156n40, 304–305n22, 305n23 Battersby, Christine, 62n31, 45n4 Baumgarten, A. G., 106 Beaumarchais, Pierre, 72n3 Beck, Lewis White, 60n29, 135, 135n18 Behler, Constantin, 200n19 Beil, Ulrich Johannes, 200n19 Beiser, Frederick C., 192n4 Bellah, Robert, 46 Benardete, Seth, 81, 81n24, 84

Benjamin, Walter, 72, 134n13, 213, 233n80, 234–236, 235n87, 235n88, 235n89, 235n90, 235n91, 236n92, 236n93, 236n94, 236n95, 236n96, 276, 313–314n45, 314 Bennington, Geoffrey, 51n14, 53n25 Benveniste, Émile, 275, 289, 293–295, 293n14, 294n17, 294n18 Bermúdez, J., 72n5 Bernard, J. H., 43n2 Bernecker, Sven, 139n28 Bernstein, Jay M., 40n51 Berrong, Richard M., 245 Best, Stephen, 244 Billings, Joshua, 85n37 Blackstone, Bernard, 262–263, 262n67, 262n68 Blake, William, 259 Blamberger, Günter, 195n11, 220n36 Blanton, C. D., 244 Bojesen, Emile, 263, 263n71 Bostock, Anna, 75n12 Boyarin, Daniel, 169n1 Boyson, Rowan, 23n24 Bradley, A. C., 85n36 Brandom, Robert, 130n5, 131 Brittnacher, Hans Richard, 199n18 Brodsky, Claudia, 252 The Imposition of Form, 7, 261, 261n61 The Linguistic Condition, 7, 52n16, 159n57, 240n107, 253n34, 258n52, 263, 263n70, 265, 265n76 Words’ Worth, 18n14, 33n39, 33n40, 253, 253n29, 253n30, 253n36 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 199n18 Brook, Andrew, 266 Brumlik, Micha, 177n11 Bullock, Marcus, 233n80 Burke, Edmund, 45, 45n6, 52, 57 Burke, Kenneth, 321n62 Butler, Judith, 147n7, 244, 251n23 Callimachus, 111n49 Campe, Rüdiger, 9–10, 116n60, 173n7, 325n68

329

330 Index Canady, John, 245 Carr, David, 112n54 Casanova, José, 67n37 Cascardi, Anthony J., 251, 251n24 Cassirer, Ernst, 104n28, 189–190n1, 223n42 Cavell, Stanley, 91, 91n45, 91n46 Cézanne, Paul, 245 Chomsky, Noam, 262, 263n69 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 13, 15, 25, 35, 141, 141n33, 298, 299n3 Conant, James, 263n73 Copernicus, 99, 110, 111n46, 227 Copjec, Joan, 147n8 Copland, Sarah, 268n81 Cordelia, 80, 88 Courtine, Jean-François, 51n14 Creon, 88 Cutrofello, Andrew, 72n4 D. A. Russel, 45n5 Dalgeron, Emily, 251n24 Dawe, Roger, 81n25 de Man, Paul, 50n14, 52–54, 52n20, 53n24, 200n19, 289, 290n10, 290n11 de Rozier, Pilâtre, 97 de Villers, Charles, 102n23 Deleuze, Gilles, 152n25, 164n85 Derrida, Jacques, 213, 232, 237–238, 276 “Chaire vacante: censure, maîtrise, magistralité,” 238n105 “The Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” 305n23, 309n36 on Kant, 239 La voix et le phénomène, 305n23 “Mochlos – ou le conflit des facultés,” 232n79 “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” 239n106 Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl, 305n23 Psyche – Inventions of the Other, 238n103 The Truth in Painting, 51n14 Desdemona, 77, 77n16, 80, 88 di Giovanni, George, 169n2, 232, 295n20 DiBattista, Maria, 245 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 268n81 Diogenes Laertius, 111, 111n48 Docherty, Thomas, 51n14 Donougho, Martin, 50n14 Doran, Robert, 45n4, 47n11 Dowling, Grant Bartolome, 244 Eagleton, Terry, 58n27 Edelman, Lee, 53, 53n24 Eickenrodt, Sabine, 103n26 Eldridge, Richard, 9

“Acknowledging the Moral Law,” 136n23 Images of History, 134n13 Literature, Life, and Modernity, 142n37 On Moral Personhood, 136n23 Engels, Friedrich, 233, 233n83, 233n84, 234n85 Ensberg, Peter, 189n1 Erasmus, 214 Erxleben, Johann Christian, 99, 99n10, 111, 111n50 Escoubas, Éliane, 51n14 Eubens, P., 87n43 Euphorbus, 111n49 Faust, 79 Feldman, Karen, 9 Ferguson, Frances, 52n18, 52n19 Ferguson, Francis, 50n14, 52 Fernihough, Anne, 254n39 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 104, 141, 190n1, 191–192 Fodor, Jerry A., 254n40 Förster, Eckart, 108n38, 109, 113 Foucault, Michel, 237 Frank, Manfred, 298 Freud, Sigmund, 89, 234 Friedrich, Hugo, 215n11, 215n12, 215n13, 216n18 Fulda, Daniel, 174n9 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 192n4, 208 Galileo, 97–98, 110–111, 111n50, 114–115, 129 Gall, Ulrich, 190n1 Gardner, Sebastian, 72n5, 84, 84n33, 84n34, 85n36 Garrity, Jane, 266, 266n80 Gasché, Rodolphe, 48n13, 50–51n14, 173n7 Gill, Stephen, 34n41, 40n52 Ginsborg, Hannah, 22n21, 244, 250n19, 252, 252n28, 256n47, 260, 260n58, 261n64, 268, 268n82 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 201 Faust, 79 Goetschel, Willi, 15n8, 218n22, 218n23, 222n41, 223n42, 230n66, 230n67, 240n107 Goldman, Avery, 145n2 Graham, J. W., 254–255, 255n42, 255n45 Gregor, Mary, 73n8, 74n10, 76n13, 90n44, 128n3, 130n4, 230n67, 232n77, 286n6 Greiner, Bernhard, 104n28, 189n1, 199n18, 200n19 Grice, H. Paul, 247 Guerlac, Suzanne, 50n14 Guyer, Paul, 22n21, 28n34, 29n35, 66n35, 73n6, 126n1, 132n6, 133n8, 175n10, 226n49, 250n17, 275n1, 289n9 Hadot, Pierre, 105 Hamann, Johann Georg, 212, 212n5, 220

Index Hamlet, 72, 80, 84, 84n32 Hart, Gail, 200n19 Hartman, Geoffrey, 141–142n35 Hartner, Marcus, 268n81 Harvey, H. and D., 81n23 Heath, Peter, 217n21 Hegel, G. W. F., 2–3, 72, 79–80, 82, 85–90, 86n40, 87n42, 131, 135, 135n19, 233, 233n80, 236n98 Lectures on Aesthetics, 3, 79n17, 79n19, 82n26, 85 Phenomenology of Spirit, 3, 86n41 Heine, Heinrich, 194, 194n9, 276, 276n4 Henrich, Dieter, 138, 139n28, 155n36, 224, 224n47 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 72, 72n4, 212, 212n6 Hertz, Neil, 50n14, 53n25 Himmelman, Beatrix, 136n23 Hodgson, P., 86n40 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 72, 142n35, 192, 192n4 Holquist, Michael, 123n74 Horkheimer, Max, 17, 234, 236 Critical Theory, 236n97 Hume, David, 10, 126, 214, 228, 246, 248, 248n12, 250–251, 250n20, 260, 267, 269–271 Hunt, Louis, 156n36 Husserl, Edmund, 112, 305 Iphigenia, 52, 77, 77n16, 80, 85, 88 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 287, 287n7 Jacobs, Carol, 119n65 James, William, 269–270, 270n84 Jennings, Michael W., 233n80 Johnston, Kenneth R., 139n29, 140, 140n30, 140n32, 141n33, 141n34 Kamuf, Peggy, 238 Kant, Immanuel on aesthetic ideas, 162, 162n75 antinomies of reason, 146 and Antisemitism, 177–179 architectonics in, 4, 304n21, 312n41 on art of poetry, 307–316 category of the possible in, 323–324 on Christianity, 176 concept of “Anschauung” in, 301n12 concept of communicability in, 163, 311, 313 concept of freedom in, 319–321 concept of genius in, 28–31 concept of spontaneity in, 250, 250n17, 252, 254, 262 concept of the schema in, 313–316, 324 conception of the “Unconditioned” in, 148n13, 150–151, 154, 165, 319

331

The Conflict of the Faculties, 90n44, 231–232, 238 critique as literary form in, 211–212, 240 Dreams of a Spirit Seer, 221 on freedom, 152–153 freedom as singular “real” in critical philosophy of, 152–153, 304n22 on genius, 158, 160–161, 163, 165 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 130, 130n4, 142n36, 193, 323 heterogeneity in, 211, 302n15 on historical discontinuity, 179 on historiography, 174 hypotyposis in, 289 “I think” as act of spontaneity in, 285, 288 on idea of progress, 174 on Judaism, 174–182 Logic, 298n2, 299 nominal and real definitions in, 299–301, 306 notion of subjectivity of, 146 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 221 “On a Newly Elevated Superior Tone in Philosophy,” 5 “On a recently elevated superior tone in philosophy,” 301n12 On Perpetual Peace, 197, 197n14, 217, 230, 230n67 “On the Common Saying: ‘That May be True in Theory…,’” 71n3 “On the Idea of a Universal History,” 173 “Orientation in Thinking,” 295n20 philosophical economy of exchange in, 302, 304–305, 317–319 precritical writings of, 217–224 Prolegomena, 5 on purposiveness, 160, 307 on reflective judgment, 159 relationship to the other in, 149 on religion and the sublime, 54–59 “Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason,” 56n26, 133, 133n7, 134n11, 154, 153n28, 154n32, 169n2 revolution in mode of thinking in, 6, 109, 112n53, 113–114, 211, 228, 299, 301, 325 Schiller as mediator of, for Kleist, 190–202 on seeing as the poets do, 312–313 theory of aesthetic judgment of, 28n33 theory of aesthetic pleasure in, 20–23 theory of the sublime, 5, 7–9, 13, 43–44, 48–50, 313 theory of the sublime and religion in, 53–68 transcendental deduction in, 276n2, 278–282, 284–288 “What is Enlightenment?,” 128n3, 134n14, 134n17, 229–230, 230n68, 231n69

332 Index Katz, Jacob, 177n11 Kaufman, Robert, 40n51, 244, 252 Kierkegaard, Søren, 126 King Lear, 72 Kitcher, Patricia, 250, 250n17, 250n18, 261, 261n62, 261n63, 261n64 Kleist, Heinrich von, 97–106 The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, 200, 205, 207 The Broken Jug, 119 The Duel, 204 The Earthquake in Chile, 122–123, 201–204 The Foundling, 121–124 “fragile constitution of the world” in, 205, 205n23 influence of Schiller upon, 199–200 The Marquise of O…, 201, 204–205 Michael Kohlhaas, 122n74 On the Gradual Production of Thoughts, 116–119, 193n5 On the Marionette Theater, 200, 208 Penthesilea, 100n17, 205n23 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 191 Knight, G. Wilson, 84n32 Knox, T. M., 79n17 Kohler, George Y., 177n11 Konersmann, Ralf, 195n10 Kristeva, Julia, 294n17 Kronegger, Maria, 245 Kronfeld, Chana, 245, 254, 254n37 Kronfeld, Maya, 10, 252n27 Kuehn, Manfred, 136n24, 137n25 Kukla, Rebecca, 22n22 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 51n14, 137, 138n27 Lafontaine, Jean de, 116 Lakoff, George, 265n78 Lamanski, Jens, 111n47 Land, Thomas, 262, 262n65 Lear, 80, 81n23, 88–91 Leibniz, G. W., 128, 194 Lessing, G. E., 84, 191 Lester, Cheryl, 138n27 Levinas, Emmanuel, 146n4, 156n44, 305n23 Lichtenberg, Georg Christian, 99, 111 Liebmann, Otto, 234n86 Lloyd, David, 65n34 Lloyd, Genevieve, 66n35 Locke, John, 46, 46n9, 259 Lodge, David, 254n41 Longinus, 45, 45n5 Longuenesse, Béatrice, 22n22 Louden, Robert B., 136n23, 220n36 Lugowski, Clemens, 114, 114n57 Luhmann, Niklas, 240, 241n108

Lukács, György, 72, 75n12 Lyotard, Jean-François, 45n4, 50–51n14, 63n33 Macbeth, 80 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 135n19 Mack, Michael, 177n11 Mackie, David, 177 Mahmood, Saba, 65n34 Marshall, Colin, 244 Martin, Wayne, 139n28 Martyn, David, 7, 9 Marx, Karl, 7, 39–40, 213, 233–234, 236 Capital, 39n49, 234 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 234 Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse), 234 Kapital, 40n50 Matthews, Eric, 43n2, 175n10 Mbembe, Achille, 239 Critique of Black Reason, 213, 213n7, 239 McLeod, Ian, 51n14 Medea, 80, 88 Meerbote, Ralf, 220n33 Mehigan, Tim, 10, 189n1 Meier, Georg F., 183n22 Meltzer, Françoise, 259, 259n56 Mendelssohn, Moses, 84, 194n9, 221, 223n42, 230n66 Milton, John, 17 Mirabeau, Comte de, 117 Mock, Keren, 294n17 Monet, Claude, 256n48 Monk, Samuel, 45n5 The Sublime, 43n1, 48n12 Montaigne, Michel de, 214–217, 228 Moran, Kate, 250n17, 250n22 Moser, Christian, 202n22 Müller, Ernst, 46n8 Müller-Tamm, Jutta, 103n26 Münzel, Felicitas G., 112n53, 133n7 Muth, Ludwig, 189n1 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 51n014, 137, 138n27, 152n24, 157, 156n34 Neiman, Susan, 126, 126n2, 132, 132n6, 136, 136n22 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 46, 72, 88, 90, 234 Birth of Tragedy, 88 Nirenberg, David, 177–178, 178n15, 178n16, 178n17, 181n21 Nisbet, H. B., 173n8 O’Neill, Onora, 132n6 Oedipus, 80–84, 81n23, 81n25, 88

Index Orestes, 83 Ovid, 73n7 Owen, W. J. B., 14n5, 34n42, 253n29 Paolucci, A. and H., 85n36 Parmenides, 89 Parten, M. B., 247 Phillips, James, 189n1 Pinkard, Terry, 71n3, 85n37, 86–87, 86n41, 87n42 Pippin, Robert, 9, 244, 249–250, 250n21, 252, 258–260, 258n53, 258n54, 260n57, 261n59 Plato, 1, 72, 87n43, 105n30, 107, 127–128, 238, 294 Pluhar, Werner S., 28n34, 29n35, 43n2, 56n26, 145n1, 146n5, 152n26, 153n28 Posnock, Ross, 257n51 Pythagoras, 111n49 Rabinow, Paul, 237n100 Recki, Birgit, 104n28 Redfield, Marc, 290n10 Reinhardt, Karl, 81, 81n23, 83, 83n29 Reinhold, K. L., 21, 190n1, 191–192, 194n8, 218n24 Reiss, Hans S., 71n3, 173n8 Rogozinski, Jacob, 51n14 Rose, Paul Lawrence, 177–178, 177n11, 178n15 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 177n11, 178, 178n18, 178n19, 178n20, 183, 184n23 Rottenberg, Elizabeth, 45n4, 238n103 Röttgers, Kurt, 233n82 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 24n24, 46, 202, 202n22, 214 Russell, Bertrand, 264 Russell, Paul, 249 Safranski, Rüdiger, 192n4 Sahota, G. S., 66n36 Sakai, Naoki, 292, 292n12 Salkever, Stephen, 87n43 Schelling, F. W. J., 72, 84, 85n35, 233 Schiller, Friedrich von, 10, 47, 72, 190–192, 192n4, 196n12 criticism of Kant’s Third Critique of, 193 critique of Kant’s moral theory in, 192–200 Kleist’s critique of, 208–209 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 48, 193, 194n8, 196n13 as mediator of Kant for Kleist, 191–192 notion of the beautiful soul of, 201–202 On Grace and Dignity, 194–200, 197n14, 197n15, 198n16, 199n17 Schlegel, Friedrich, 79, 232–233, 233n80, 235 Schlegel, Friedrich and Wilhelm, 72

333

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 298n1 conception of interpretation as critique in, 325n69, 326 on relation between speech and thought, 326 Schneider, Ralph, 268n81 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 72 Schulz, Gerhard, 190n1 Searle, John, 264–265n75 Shakespeare, William, 17, 72, 72n4, 78–79 Silverman, Hugh J., 51n14 Sirk, Douglas, 80n21 Sloterdijk, Peter, 213, 213n7, 239 Sluga, Hans, 139n28 Smyser, W., 14n5, 34n42, 253n29 Sophocles, 78, 81, 83n29 Spivak, Gayatri, 65n34, 213, 239 Stahl, Georg Ernest, 111, 111n47, 111n50, 114 Sterne, Lawrence Tristram Shandy, 217 Stewart, J., 86n40 Stillinger, Jack, 139n29 Stroud, Barry, 249 Swartz, Robert J., 264n74 Szondi, Peter, 85, 85n38 Tawada, Yoko The Bath, 275–278, 282–284, 290–293 ironization of Kant, 279, 290 Taylor, Charles, 46n8 Terada, Rei, 290n10 Thales, 98, 107, 114 Theisen, Bianca, 100n17 Thomasius, Christian, 214 Torricelli, Evangelista, 98, 110–111, 111n47, 111n50, 114, 129 Trottein, Serge, 51n14 Vaihinger, Hans, 172, 172n6, 276n2, 287, 287n8 Van Den Abbeele, G., 51n14 Van den Abeele, B., 63n33 Velkley, Richard, 132n6, 156n36 Walford, David, 220n33 Warda, A., 71, 71n1 Warminski, Andrzej, 52n20, 290n10, 290n11 Warren, Daniel, 244, 251 Wayne, Michael, 66n36 Weber, Sam, 235n87 Weidner, Daniel, 67n38 Weigl, Sigrid, 199n18 Weiskel, Thomas, 7, 51–53, 51n15, 52n19 Wellbery, David, 81n24 Wellek, René, 13, 13n1, 25, 25n29 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 105, 105n30 Williams, Bernard, 82–84, 82n27, 84n31

334 Index Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 249 Wittkowski, Wolfgang, 199n18 Wolff, Christian, 194, 214 Wood, Allen, 73n9, 295n20 Wood, Allen W., 73n6, 126n1, 133n7, 169n2, 226n49, 232n77, 275n1 Woolf, Virginia intersubjectivity in, 266–270 Orlando, 255n44 treatment of color in, 258 The Waves, 244–251, 254–257, 254n41, 256n46, 264 Wordsworth, William, 252, 298 on art of poetry-making, 32–35 definition of poetry of, 253 on genius, 35n43 Imagination in Prelude of, 319 on judgment of the new vs. judgment of others, 35

poetic diction and commodity capitalism, 39–41 preclusion of judgment by “poetic diction” in, 20 “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 13–20 theory of judgment in, 15–18 theory of pleasure in poetics of, 23–28 Wu, Duncan, 13n2 Xylander, Oskar, 202n22 Young, J. Michael, 151n21 Zammito, John, 67n39 Zenge, Wilhelmine von, 97–103, 97n2, 114, 189 Zhang, Dora, 245 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 191, 192n4 Zuckert, Rachel, 21n20, 23n23 Zupančič, Alenka, 156n39