KANT AND THE POWER OF IMAGINATION In this book Jane Kneller focusses on the role of imagination as a creative power in Kant s aesthetics and in his overall philosophical enterprise. She analyzes Kant s account of imaginative freedom and the relation between imaginative free play and human social and moral development, showing various ways in which his aesthetics of disinterested reflection explains moral interests. She situates these aspects of Kant s aesthetic theory within the context of German aesthetics of the eighteenth century, arguing that his contribution is a bridge between early theories of aesthetic moral education and the early Romanticism of the last decade of that century. In so doing, her book brings the two most important German philosophers of Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kant and Novalis, into dialog. The book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in both Kant studies and German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jane Kneller is Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. She is editor and translator of Novalis: Fichte Studies (2003) in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series.
KANT AND THE POWER OF IMAGINATION JANE KNELLER Colorado State University
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521851435 Jane Kneller 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 ISBN-13 978-0-511-27455-8 ebook (MyiLibrary) ISBN-10 0-511-27455-6 ebook (MyiLibrary) ISBN-13 978-0-521-85143-5 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-85143-2 hardback Cambridge University Press 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 Preface and acknowledgments page vii Introduction 1 1 Kant and Romanticism 20 2 The power of imaginative freedom 38 3 The interests of disinterest 60 4 Aesthetic reflection and the primacy of the practical 72 5 The failure of Kant s imagination 95 6 Imaginative reflections of the self in Novalis and Hölderlin 122 7 Novalis Kantianism and Kant s Romanticism 139 Bibliography 161 Index 168 v
Preface and acknowledgments This book contains work that has been in process for over fifteen years, and during that time I was greatly aided by the encouragement and advice of wonderful colleagues and students in many places: philosophers and scholars too numerous to mention here, but some of whom will perhaps recognize their influence in parts of the book that follow. Let this serve as a gesture of my thanks and deep appreciation for their time and thoughtful discussions. Three constellations of scholars deserve mention in connection with this book, all tied in one way or another to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): The NEH Summer Seminar What is Enlightenment? conducted by James Schmidt at Boston University during the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the NEH Workshop Figuring the Self conducted by David Klemm and Günter Zöller at the University of Iowa over the Spring semester of 1992, and the NEH Summer Institute for College Teachers on Nature, Art and Politics after Kant: Reevaluating Early German Idealism directed by Karl Ameriks and myself at Colorado State University in 2001. The participants at these NEH venues were truly inspired and inspiring, and without them much of this book would have remained unwritten, even unconceived. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the faculty at the University of Cincinnati s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures for the very formative time I spent there doing MA studies in German literature and aesthetics. They were amazingly tolerant of an Ausländerin from Philosophy, a new PhD in Kantian aesthetics who insisted on turning every term paper into another philosophy essay. I want to thank especially Richard Schade for introducing me to the beauty of the German Baroque, and the humor of the German Enlightenment, and for entrusting me with a stint on the Lessing Yearbook as assistant editor. I hope he has forgiven me for returning to the philosophical fold. The romanticism of this book was profoundly influenced by the instruction of vii
viii Preface and acknowledgments Hans-Georg Richert and Helga Slessarev, and (since they were not particularly fond of Kant) I dedicate the Novalis sections of this work to their memory. Several of the chapters in this book contain material published earlier. I would like to thank the following publishers for granting permission to reprint parts of the following: Imaginative Freedom and the German Enlightenment, Journal of the History of Ideas, 51, 1990; Marquette University Press, for The Interests of Disinterest, from Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, ed. Hoke Robinson, Marquette University Press, ª 1995, Marquette University Press Reprinted with permission of Marquette University Press; The Failure of Kant s Imagination, in What is Enlightenment? : Texts and Interpretations, ed. James Schmidt, The Regents of the University of California, University of California Press, 1996 ª 1996, University of California Press, 1996; Romantic Conceptions of the Self in Hölderlin and Novalis, reprinted by permission from Figuring the Self: Subject, Individual, and Spirit in Classical German Philosophy, ed. by David E. Klemm and Günter Zöller, The State University of New York Press, ª 1997, State University of New York, all rights reserved; Aesthetic Value and the Primacy of the Practical in Kant s Philosophy, Journal of Value Inquiry, 36, 2002 and Novalis Other Way Out, in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. Nikolas Kompridis, Routledge, 2006. I owe a special debt of gratitude once again to Hilary Gaskin at Cambridge University Press for her ever-helpful advice and guidance throughout the publishing process, and to Jackie Warren for her able handling of the final stages of production. Barbara Docherty s keen eye for detail was absolutely invaluable in the copy-editing of the book and I want to thank her in particular for the time and care she took with it. Finally, to the three philosophers closest to me Michael, Miroslav, and Rosavera: thank you, respectively, for your healthy skepticism about claims to objectivity, your critical attitude towards all established doctrine, and your ability to make ordinary things magical. I hope I ve captured some of that, at least in theory, here.
Introduction This book situates Kant s aesthetic theory within the context of his overall philosophical enterprise and also within German aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century. Although the aim of the book is not primarily historical, I have found it useful to frame the analysis of Kant s theory of imagination historically, by locating his views within a line of German aestheticians from the early German Enlightenment through early German Romanticism. Kant is not often viewed as an advocate of the didactic value of aesthetics nor as a precursor to early German Romanticism, but the chapters at the beginning and end of the book (chapters 1 and 7) argue that these are important aspects of his aesthetic project. In so doing they situate Kant s aesthetic theory between rationalist aesthetic pedagogy and early German romantic aesthetics in a way that brings into relief certain commonalities of these otherwise very different theories. Given a prevailing attitude that casts Romanticism as an irrationalist mysticism with sinister inheritors, connecting it to rationalist philosophies at all may sound implausible. This book aims to show that by focussing on certain important but neglected aspects of Kant s aesthetic theory, a window is opened on the common link between both perspectives in German aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century. That link is the recognition and gradual elevation of the power of imagination. Rationalist aesthetics and art criticism in Germany prior to Kant was principle-bound and rigid in many ways, so that Alfred Bauemler could say of Gottsched and Bodmer and Breitinger and their circles that the concept of criticism (Kritik), which Shaftesbury handles with a fine sense of humanity, becomes in Leipzig and Zurich an instrument of punishment for poetical sinners. 1 Yet Enlightenment concern for education required a reconciliation, if not an overcoming, of the divide between the higher and lower cognitive faculties of reason and of sensation, 1 Alfred Bauemler, Kant s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1923), pp. 97 98. 1
2 Kant and the power of imagination perception, and inner feeling. The role of the imagination gradually took on great significance as a mental power that interfaces with these aspects of human experience. 2 Thus we find the imagination playing an especially crucial role in Kant s account of cognition, and that role in turn being adapted and incorporated into his theory of beauty. Dieter Henrich points out that, since Kant regularly taught Baumgarten s Metaphysics text, and in his Anthropology course worked directly from the section of that text that dealt with empirical psychology, including the doctrine of the lower cognitive faculties including the imagination: Therefore it is no surprise that Kant had developed his own aesthetics before he came to terms with the problems he intended to solve in the Critique of Pure Reason. 3 Although for a time after writing the first Critique, Kant denied the possibility of a critique of taste i.e. a critique of the power of imagination in judgments about beauty he changed his mind once he realized that he could provide an account of the universal elements of such judgments, specifically the generic relation of harmonious play between the power of imagination and the understanding, without appeal to determinate empirical or a priori rules. Henrich argues for a certain continuity in Kant s view of imagination between his pre-critical and final critical view that taste could claim justification a priori: When he rethought the epistemology of the Critique of Pure Reason he quickly saw that his epistemological theorems about the relationship between imagination and understanding would allow him to produce an explanation of aesthetic judgment whose sources would not be empirical throughout but rather derived from the explanation of the possibility of our knowledge of objects. Hence the new explanation would have the a priori status of a transcendental insight. We can now understand why Kant felt he could carry out his plan, once conceived, with little trouble. Most of the content of his aesthetics had been available to him for a long time. Its views and its conceptual apparatus of the cognitive activities had only to be transferred to a new context. 4 Kant did not invent or change rationalist notions of the faculties involved so much as make them more precise, Henrich argues. Thus in the 2 This becomes apparent in Baumgarten s attempt to discover a special logic of the lower cognitive faculty, which included imagination. Bauemler points out that Wolff already prepared the way for this move in his discussion of the expectation of similar cases ( Erwartung ähnlicher Fälle ) asa function of inference (induction) based in the lower cognitive faculties. Ibid., pp. 188 197. See also Bauemler s Das Irrationalitätsproblem im ästhetischen Denken des 18. Jahrhunderts (Halle, 1923; republished Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967) for an account of the ascendency of the imagination in this period. 3 Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 33. 4 Ibid., pp. 34 35.
Introduction 3 first Critique Kant carefully delineates the nature and operation of imagination in cognition: it operates subconsciously, at least in part, and is the source of all combinations of the sensible manifold, but not of the rules that prescribe its combinatorial activity. 5 Kant s aesthetic theory in its final form still utilizes the apparatus of rationalist psychology, but in a more articulated way. One can also add to Henrich s point, however, that this refinement of the faculty theory of psychology had dramatic consequences for German aesthetic theory: Kant s new articulation of the functions of imagination undermined the hierarchical structuring of the older rationalist approaches. In the third Critique Kant theorizes a new sort of relationship between imagination and understanding, one in which the former is freed from the latter in other words, in which the imagination is seen as capable of operating independently of its function of processing the material of sensation into the products of experience via concepts a priori. It does not follow that imaginative freedom in this sense operates free of experiential backdrop, but simply that within the context of an already synthesized experience, imagination can function in a different capacity so as to reflect upon a sensory manifold without determining an object. The result is, instead, a certain kind of feeling. 6 One important result of Kant s more complex account of imaginative functioning is a new appreciation for the way in which imaginative freedom contributes to an overall awareness in us, as individual subjects, of our own cognitive (including moral) operations. Kant s theory, that is, highlights the fact that the power of imagination produces a feeling of life, making us aware of ourselves via pleasure that forms the basis of a very special power of discriminating and judging (V: 204, 277). This complex notion of imagination s functioning is the essence of reflective aesthetic judgment, and takes as its object (which is to say, it determines a priori) the feeling of pleasure and pain (XX: 208). 5 Ibid., p. 37. 6 An important issue emerges here involving the question of the cognitive role of reflection. Henrich, on historical grounds, distinguishes reflection from reflective judgment. The former is a primitive capacity of unconscious ideation, that concurs with the operations of the mind, keeping them distinct, and allowing an awareness of the operations of the mind. This process is discussed in the context of genius and fantasy in chapter 7 of this volume, but the overall role of such processes and their relationship to cognitive and aesthetic judgments must be postponed here. Important work on the prior function of reflection has been done by Beatrice Longueness, in Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). See also Henry Allison s discussion of Longueness views on reflection with respect to reflective judgment, in Kant s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 1, pp. 14ff.
4 Kant and the power of imagination As such, the power of imagination takes on a central role in the mediation of the theoretical and the practical a priori (XX: 206 208). Giving the imagination a lead role is not to say it is the only star of the human show, and Kant never contended that it was. But it certainly opens the way for a philosophical turn towards viewing imagination as the main player on the human mental stage. This is the connection to Romanticism that Kant s refinement of rationalist faculty psychology makes possible. The early Romantic theorists in Germany took the complex imaginative function as their central explanatory concept in analyzing human subjectivity. Charles Larmore, in The Romantic Legacy, suggests that Kant s primary influence on Romanticism was the view that the mind actively determines human experience. Yet it was not simply Kant s Copernican insight that had such an influence on Romanticism. Romanticism also took its cue more specifically from Kant s recognition of a special mental activity that (somehow) connects with the matter of sensation (the given), and is itself neither pure understanding nor pure practical reason. Charles Larmore points out that, for the Romantics, imagination came to mean more than a faculty of imaging and association, but was centrally the enrichment of experience through expression. But this formulation also nicely captures Kant s account of the imaginative free play in reflective aesthetic judgment resulting in a special, disinterested pleasure that is universally communicable and expressed in judgments of taste and the sublime. Larmore goes on to point out that Typically the Romantics considered the imagination, so understood, not as one mental faculty among others, and certainly not as a mere organ of make-believe, but rather as the very essence of the mind. The arguments of this book make the case that the move from Kant s third Critique account of imagination as a central, mediating faculty to the early Romantic view of it as the primary faculty is a logical next step, not an irrational leap, in the philosophy of human subjectivity. In her account of the concept of Darstellung (literally: a placing before, usually translated as representation or presentation ) Martha Helfer sketches the development of this notion in Kant s philosophy as a technical term that designates the mediation of the imagination between sensibility and understanding. She argues that this Kantian notion of imaginative mediation is of great significance to subsequent philosophical and aesthetic thought: Thus Darstellung constitutes an essential point of tangency for German Idealism and Romanticism, and the critical exposition of this Kantian notion of representation in various disciplines results in a tremendously productive interplay of
Introduction 5 philosophy, aesthetics, literature and linguistic theory in German critical discourse around 1800. 7 Helfer argues that Kant s notion of Darstellung creates problems for him in three related ways, the first of which is the heart of his problem, and results from the fact that imaginative synthesis in cognition for Kant is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul : there is a breakdown at a crucial juncture in Kant s argument for the underlying synthetic unity of intuition and understanding in cognition... Because the synthetic unity of apperception falls beyond the limits of the transcendental Critique, the sensible subject cannot represent itself to itself as it really is, as a moral subject of reason. The fact that reason imposes these limits on the scope of philosophical investigation points to the third problem that Kant encounters, the problem of the rhetorical presentation or representation of his philosophical system. 8 I shall explore the degree to which Kant himself saw these aspects of his account of imaginative mediation, or reflection as breakdowns in his system in chapter 5. Helfer is quite right to understand Kant s notion of (re)presentation as imaginative mediation, but it is not clear that Kant was concerned to give an account of the underlying source or foundation of this faculty, nor that he felt it necessary to provide a unified theory of subjectivity in a strong sense. If imaginative reflection, as I argue in chapter 4, is to be seen as performing the task of mediation in the sense of providing an interface or bridge between sensibility and reason such that human beings can move from one aspect of their selves to the other, it may not necessarily be the case that in Kant s mind, at least, these aporiae are so thoroughly problematic as the Romantics themselves came to believe. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, as well as Andrew Bowie and others who see Kant as a catalyst for Romanticism, also tend to emphasize the lack of a thoroughgoing account of unity between subject and object, moral demands and natural laws, and the practical and the theoretical as the jumping off point for Romantic philosophy. Thus Bowie, like Helfer, argues that Kant left a major problem for his own theory unsolved thanks to his inability to give an account of knowledge of freedom while simultaneously demanding that we must act in accordance with a belief in it: In both the theoretical and the practical parts of his philosophy, then, Kant leaves a gaping hole where the highest principle is 7 Martha Helfer, The Retreat of Representation: The Concept of Darstellung in German Critical Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 10 8 Ibid., p. 11.
6 Kant and the power of imagination located. 9 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy explain the Romantic debt to Kant, along similar lines, as the problem of what they refer to as the weakening of the subject as a result of Kant s denying the possibility of an original Intuition i.e., an intuition that produces its own given : As a result, all that remains of the subject is the I as an empty form... that accompanies my representations. This is so because the form of time, which is the form of the internal sense permits no substantial presentation. As is well known, the Kantian cogito is empty. 10 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy view Kant s valorizing of morality as a sort of compensation for the weakened cognitive subject, but here again the problem becomes one of the reality of the subject: As a moral subject, in sum, the subject recovers none of its substance. Quite to the contrary, the question of its unity, and thus of its very being-subject, is brought to a pitch of high tension. This tension is also referred to more dramatically by them as the crisis that Romanticism takes as its starting point. 11 All of these scholars are surely right to point to precisely these issues as catalysts to Romanticism, and yet by dramatizing the problem as a gaping hole or crisis, they tend to downplay the degree to which the younger generation of poetic philosophers adapted and developed some of Kant s best attempts to solve these very problems. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy grant the point that Kant did try to solve the problem in the third Critique, but they view that solution as failed, thanks to the merely regulative nature of the principles Kant relies on in his attempt to unify subjectivity. Yet in the case of Novalis, at least, the regulative nature of philosophy was precisely all that philosophy could be and, for him, this was not in itself a problem. Helfer herself, commenting on the fact that Novalis sees philosophy resolved in poesy, points out that Poesy, however, does not supplant philosophy in Novalis aesthetic program: Without philosophy the poet is incomplete... (II: 531, #29). 12 An important aim of this book is to show that Kant s own solutions went a long way in the direction of Novalis and the early Romantics views: Kant s theory enabled entertaining the importance of creative, reflective imagination in general as a possible source for the realization of substantive changes in the world. 9 Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 22. 10 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 30. 11 Ibid., pp. 31 32. 12 Helfer, The Retreat of Representation, p.88.
Introduction 7 Making that case requires not only a careful look at Kant s views on the power of imagination and its roles beyond judgments of taste, but also a less one-sided view of Romanticism. Much of the argument of this book hinges on viewing early German Romanticism as a philosophical position and, moreover, one that is close enough in spirit to the anti-speculative position of Kantianism to be able to easily connect with it. Recent work has established this view on solid scholarly ground. Philosophers and literary critical theorists have gone a long way toward correcting the caricature of the early German Romantics as mystical irrationalists, and the case has been made for some time now that philosophically the early and late period of Romanticism in the German tradition are quite distinct. 13 At the same time there has been a flowering of new studies in the past twenty-five years or so dealing with Kant s philosophy in a multitude of ways that go beyond the first Critique and his moral theory as famously, if also misleadingly at times, summarized in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. 14 Kant s political theory, his social and anthropological 13 The most influential work in this regard is Manfred Frank s Einführung in die Frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989), trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert as The Foundations of Early German Romanticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004). See also Karl Ameriks introduction to The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 13: The greatest problem for the philosophical appreciation of German Romanticism may be simply the word romanticism itself. Part III on Idealism and romanticism is a very useful summary introduction to the Frühromantik. Several newly translated texts of philosophical writings of early German Romanticism have appeared, including my own Novalis: Fichte Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and an English edition of Novalis Allgemeine Brouillon, ed. David Wood, is forthcoming from SUNY Press (2007). Jay Bernstein s edition of Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) includes selections from earlier German theorists of art (Lessing, Moritz) and devotes large sections to works from Hölderlin and Novalis as well as Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel. Frederick Beiser s edition of works from this tradition, The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), as well as his important contribution to the politico-philosophical history of the era in Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) bear witness to a growing philosophical interest in the early German Romantics. At the same time, literary philosophical interest in these thinkers is growing, with works like Azade Seyhan s Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) and Andrew Bowie s From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997) being two fine studies in this area. 14 Enormous recent interest in Kant s aesthetics is reflected in new translations of the third Critique, (including even a new translation of the title of the book itself) and several major new Englishlanguage interpretive works on the Critique of Judgment that pay equal attention to the aesthetic theory (John Zammito s The Genesis of Kant s Critique of Judgment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, is a fine example). English-language studies of Kant s aesthetic theory tend to focus primarily on Kant s theory of taste in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, the first half of his Critique of Judgment. Paul Guyer s landmark earlier treatment, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1979) along with other, less comprehensive accounts, were typical in this regard. More recent work has paid attention to the connection of morality and aesthetics,
8 Kant and the power of imagination studies, his theory of history, and his overall methodological approach have been the subjects of interesting and close textual analytic research in several languages and scholarly traditions. 15 Focus on Kant s philosophically lesser works that were nevertheless written during the critical period has proved enormously helpful in filling in gaps, accounting for inconsistencies; and, perhaps most important, the new focus has in many cases corrected common caricatures by disclosing the complexity of Kant s theories. Allen Wood has perhaps gone as far as any scholar in this regard. 16 Focussing especially on Kant s writings on religion and history, he has been able to counter many standard criticisms of Kant by showing the compatibility of Kant s moral theory with naturalist and materialist accounts of human development, progress, and culture. By carefully explicating the details of Kant s teleological conception of nature and humanity, and by reconstructing Kant s account of the coordination of ends of nature with human rational ends in promoting culture, Wood debunks criticisms of Kant s moral theory that see it as oriented towards a noumenal realm outside nature, individualistic in its prescriptions, and insensitive to material human conditions in its rigorism. A complete summary of Wood s comprehensive account is beyond the scope of this introduction, but in skeletal outline, the argument hinges on natural mechanism as the initial catalyst of human cultural development. Kant s especially Guyer s Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Henry Allison s Kant s Theory of Taste (see n. 6) devotes a section to the link between morality and the theory of taste in Kant. Hannah Ginsborg s The Role of Taste in Kant s Theory of Cognition (New York: Garland Press, 1990) looks at the connection between aesthetics and knowledge, as does Christel Fricke s Kants Theorie des reinen Geschmacksurteils (Kant s Theory of the Pure Judgment of Taste, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990). 15 John Zammito s excellent book on the genesis of the third Critique (see n. 14) links it to his Anthropology as well as to the younger generation of aesthetic idealists. English-language works dealing with Kant s political writings and their connection to issues of teleology include Patrick Riley, Kant s Political Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1983), Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), and Thomas Auxter, Kant s Moral Teleology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982). Important studies on Kant s anthropological writings include work, in addition to Allen Wood, by Holly Wilson, Robert B. Louden, Patrick R. Frierson, among others. Representative samples of some of their work is included in B. Jacobs and P. Kain, Essays in Kant s Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 2003). John Zammito traces the historical development of the concept in the case of the conflicting views of Herder and Kant, in Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark have both published important work on Kant s Anthropology and have been largely responsible for the rise of interest in this area thanks to their painstaking work in compiling and editing, at the Kant Archiv at the Philips-Universität, Marburg, the lecture notes of students in Kant s Anthropology classes. Hannah Arendt s Lectures on Kant s Political Philosophy is one of the most well-known attempts to link Kant s aesthetic theory to political theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 16 See his Kant s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Introduction 9 well-known notion of unsocial sociability captures the drive of the species towards greater and greater freedom, equality and community arising out of natural self-interested inclinations and resulting social struggle. Human social progress is to be interpreted (regulatively) as a purpose of nature: Nature s own purposes require that human beings should emerge at a certain point from the tutelage of nature and begin to set rational collective ends (p. 298). Wood gives a compelling account of the connection Kant sees between nature and human reason in terms of their ends: Because human beings are the only beings in nature that can set a final end, they may be considered as the ultimate end of nature insofar as they do set a final end. Nature has no ultimate end except through human beings; or, what comes to the same thing, it has no ultimate end at all until human beings give it one by setting a final end... Kant s philosophy of history can be regarded as a theodicy or theory of divine providence, as he himself also regularly regards it. But if so, it is a highly novel and perhaps unorthodox one. For in Kant s view, the plan of providence remains incomplete until we human beings complete it. (p. 311). The problem of the institution of a just social order the highest good that Kant says is a direct command of morality involves the impossiblesounding demand that we ourselves coordinate natural ends with moral ones, so that, simply put, moral goodness and happiness are systematically proportional. Wood points out that this demand for systematic proportionality of natural and rational ends is not just a baroque, architectonic feature of Kant s theory, but is fundamental to his ethics. Kant insists that the moral law commands that humans in concert, as a species, attempt to create this system as the only means of guaranteeing systematic progress towards morality. Drawing on the Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Wood argues that for Kant The pursuit of my own morality can be distinguished from the moral progress of the human race, but [Kant argues that] the two ends are necessarily linked in their pursuit. Human beings must join in free community to accomplish the task. And he adds, The moral progress of the human race, in Kant s view is possible only through the progressive extension of such a free moral community to more and more people, until it eventually encompasses the entire human race (p. 315). The problem with this demand is that it asks the individual to commit to a project only the species as a whole can fulfill. This leads, in Kant s moral theory (V: 114ff.) to the (in)famous postulates of God and immortality, belief in which is a necessary condition of the rational hope each individual requires to shoulder his or her part of the burden of this enormous command. This issue is examined
10 Kant and the power of imagination in more detail in chapter 2, but here I will simply point out that Wood explains Kant s appeal to the postulates of God and immortality as ways of turning, not to the beyond for hope, but to an enlightened human community of free believers that is not associated with the coercion of the state. Wood rightly points out that the community of rational faith that Kant envisioned is so far removed from the social reality of our own time that it is nearly impossible to see how one could take heart and carry on social reform in any really existing religious community. Wood pleads for historical understanding of Kant s case: In an era of guarded Enlightenment optimism, Kant had reason to hope for the formation of a freely affirmed, rational religious community. Interpreting Kant in this way might suggest a kind of socialist ideal, and such a suggestion is not off target, Wood argues, if it does not expect cataclysmic change: such a view would be Kantian in holding that if we are to fulfill our collective historical vocation, we will need to find (or invent) a form of ethical community that is capable of gradually reshaping our deeply corrupt social life by revolutionizing and uniting the hearts of individuals through the free power of reason. For Kant himself, however, the human race can no more expect to fulfill this moral vocation apart from organized religion than it can expect to achieve justice through anarchy. (p. 320) What Wood s account shows, I believe, is how problematic the religious postulate has become, and thus how unlikely it is for people to band together in heart and mind to effect change in contemporary societies. If religion, even a socialist version, is the only alternative community, and a rational public can no longer envision belonging to it, then a new vision must be possible or moral progress is doomed. But if it is the case that we cannot hope for apocalyptic change, is it not equally impossible, after decades and centuries of possibilities closed and social reforms laid waste, rationally to hold on to hope for gradual change in the long term? I want to propose, in the chapters that follow, that Kant s natural teleology provides a fallback option when moral vision becomes clouded. The contingently available experience of beauty and its attendant interests, produced via a creative imagination, might also make it possible for despairing individuals to join with others in communities aimed at change. If no model is available at a given point in time, it is at least possible to model a new community in imagination, and like artists of any medium, to find ways to express this community in concrete experience. That it seems to me, is the moral promise of imaginative freedom, and the real power of the imagination in Kant.
Introduction 11 Turning to Kant s aesthetic theory is a useful and interesting way to solve some of the difficulties his moral theory generates for social progress theories. Interest in the relevance of Kant s aesthetic theory to the rest of his system is certainly growing, yet much of this work to date has focused predominately on the pure judgment of taste and the sublime. 17 By contrast, the chapters in this volume foreground the role of the power of imagination as a creative activity and the interests to which that activity gives rise. Hence, although this volume discusses the nature of the pure disinterested judgment of taste in some detail in various sections, I pay special attention to Kant s third Critique account of the interested judgments that Kant says aesthetic disinterest may produce, and to the role of the imagination in such judgments. I concentrate on Kant s elevation of the function of imagination to the status of creative faculty, and to his account in lesser texts (the Anthropology, and occasional essays) of the dangers and potential of this power. The chapters that follow thus do not dispute the autonomy claim of pure judgments of taste, a claim that Kant is quite insistent upon. Indeed, focussing on interested judgments of aesthetic reflection depends on seeing pure aesthetic reflective judgments that comprise a realm of human experience independent of moral cognitive judgment as a condition of the interests involved. These chapters represent a sustained focus on the specific ways in which the notion of imaginative independence serves Kant s larger purpose of describing a mediating faculty between the is of nature and the ought to be of morality. In this respect they elaborate a theme argued for in great detail in Rudolf Makkreel s Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, that imagination is a power that both exhibits and overcomes the limits of experience. 18 This book was in many ways pathbreaking in studies of Kant s aesthetics for its breadth and depth of analysis of the role of imagination, and the thesis that reflective judgment is interpretive judgment. Makkreel s reading of Kant as a proto-hermeneuticist brought to light aspects of Kant s theory of aesthetic judgment that were previously ignored, and his 17 Felicitas Munzel s detailed work showing how moral character is chosen, developed, and sustained via complex interaction with morality, pedagogy, and aesthetics come closest to the sort of point I am making here. However, her focus is primarily on moral character formation in the individual, and her analysis of the role of aesthetics in this formation rests on the role of taste and sublimity in moral education and does not rely on an account of imagination, but rather on the feeling. The chapters in this book focus more on the role imagination plays in the production of that feeling, and the role that feeling (of hope) plays in supporting social morality. Felicitas Munzel, Kant s Conception of Moral Character: The Critical Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 18 Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
12 Kant and the power of imagination work connects Kant scholarship that focuses on theoretical aspects of his social and cultural views with other philosophical accounts of its connection to Romanticism. A problem for such a view, however, is that Kant seems to want to give a kind of systematic privilege to practical reason over all other kinds of experience. The chapters in this book defend the view that the imagination in reflective judgment serves as an equally important power (of mediation), arguing explicitly against influential views that presume the primacy of the practical in Kant. Finally, the work that follows takes into account and responds to another problem for the view that imagination can be understood as a central faculty in Kant s account: the accusation of some postmodernist or post-enlightenment positions, and of some feminists, 19 that Kant s philosophy could not truly value imagination given his philosophical and even cultural and personal antipathy towards sensibility and the realm of emotion and feeling. This issue has most recently been underscored by texts such as the anthology edited by James Schmidt, What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions. 20 I take these arguments seriously, arguing in the end that Kant is nevertheless far less hostile to the significance of imaginative freedom than he sometimes appears to be. Thus I find Kant s compatibility with early German Romanticism to lie not only in his actual philosophical innovations with respect to the nature of the imagination and its freedom, but also, to a certain extent, I find their aesthetic theories temperamentally compatible. In other words, Kant was not as far removed from the ironic sensitivities of early Romanticism as one might think, based on standard one-sided accounts of both Kant and Early German Romanticism. general overview The book is composed of a series of chapters, each of which reads Kant s aesthetic theory as mediating between his moral theory and his account of 19 For a sustained feminist critique of Kant along these lines, see Robin May Schott s Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), and also The Gender of Enlightenment, in Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, ed. Robin May Schott (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 319 37. My The Aesthetic Dimension of Kantian Autonomy (pp. 173 189) in Feminist Interpretations attempts to adjudicate some of these issues in terms of Kant s aesthetic theory and by contrast to Onora O Neill s response to such criticisms, in Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 20 Riverside: University of California Press, 1996.
Introduction 13 human knowledge. The key to this reading is Kant s conception of the power of imagination, and especially of what I will call the transformative power of imagination that Kant first develops only in the third Critique. Aesthetic reflective judgment, I argue, extends beyond the narrower goals of deduction and analysis of judgments of taste in the third Critique. Kant s aesthetics argues for interests that attach to aesthetic reflective judgment that surpass their purely aesthetic value. However, reading Kantian aesthetics as part of a larger moral project runs into certain difficulties, one might even say hostilities, within Kant s account of imagination. Kant frequently expresses a dim view of the faculty of imagination that may perhaps be diagnosed as extraphilosophical, but which nevertheless militates against taking human imaginative capacities to be central to Kantian moral and social concerns. In chapter 5 I address criticisms of Kant s motivation in characterizing the imagination as subordinate faculty, or as mysterious and even dangerous. This chapter argues that, in the end, such criticisms may be countered by the fact that Kant s attitude toward undisciplined creative imaginative power was not uniformly negative. His defense of the enthusiast and his self-avowed love affair with metaphysics have a continued influence on his philosophy that re-emerge, I argue, in scattered attempts to find a secure place for speculative metaphysical imaginings in his finished philosophical system. Finally, given this reading of Kant s aesthetic theory, I argue for the claim (made on historical grounds in chapter 2) that there is substantive continuity between the Enlightenment values of Kant s critical enterprise and the values of early German Romanticism. The main focus here is upon the paradigmatic central figure of that movement, Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Novalis was a student and friend of Schiller s in Jena and, along with the rest of the so-called Jena Romantic circle, was party to the lively debate surrounding Fichte s revision of Kantianism. Moreover, it was in Jena that Kant s philosophy became a centerpiece of philosophical discussion, thanks to Reinhold s enormously successful popularizing work in the late 1780s and early 1790s at the university there. Recent work has underscored the importance of Jena as the first site of sustained study and argument over Kant s philosophy, and to the development of Fichtean and later German idealism (see Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy). 21 Yet little has been written on the relation of 21 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
14 Kant and the power of imagination Kant s work to the philosophy of the early German Romantics who were central to the debate over Kantianism in Jena at the time. Chapters 6 and 7 in this book brings these two remarkable philosophies into dialog by exploring Novalis reception of Kant together with Kant s own interest in questions about the role of imagination in uniting nature and morality in the human subject. These questions, and some of Kant s answers, I contend, became central to the Romantic project. ov erview o f the book Chapter 1, Kant and Romanticism, introduces the overall theme of the book, that Kant s theory of imagination is not so far removed from Novalis definition of romanticizing. By showing what Novalis means by this term, and the extent to which his meaning is at odds with stereotypical distortions of Romanticism as mystical and otherworldly, I set the stage for looking at Kant s views on such mystical -sounding ideas as that of the supersensible. In the same way that romanticizing for Novalis is a process of both recognizing the ordinary in the mysterious, and demystifying the extraordinary, I argue, Kant s views also involve this twofold procedure. Kant s commitment to the possibility of expanding and developing our mental powers themselves is discussed, along with the influence of Rousseau on his overall view of the value of re-creating ourselves and our world. Chapters 2 4 place Kant s views on aesthetics in historical context and situate them also within the larger context of his philosophy as a whole. chapter 2, The power of imaginative freedom, sets the stage with an examination of the concept of freedom in the aesthetic theory of Germany beginning with Baumgarten. In particular it looks at three early and mid-eighteenth-century German accounts of the freedom of imagination that may be seen as precursors to Kant s: those of Baumgarten, Bodmer and Breitinger, and Lessing. I argue that Kant s theory provides a link between these earlier more didactic theories and the visionary aesthetics of Schiller and other early Romantic poets. The argument is based on the new role that Kant assigns the imagination in the third Critique, where he argues that it is capable of transforming nature and exhibiting human ideals in concrete form. Given that such exhibitions would provide a basis for rational hope when directed towards social ideals, I argue that it is possible in Kant s later thought to ground a rational hope for bringing about a just world in such imaginative visions. This move would obviate the need for the questionable reintroduction of metaphysics in the form
Introduction 15 of postulates of God and immortality which have proven to be so problematic for Kant, and it also suggests the possibility of a Kantian ethics less hostile to imagination and sensibility. Chapter 3, The interests of disinterest, then moves from the historical framework of Kant s aesthetics to the theory itself. Here I deal with Kant s notion of the pure judgment of taste, or the judgment about the beautiful, in light of his claim that the central element of his justification of such judgments the universal communicability of disinterested feelings of pleasure must already carry with it an interest for human beings. This chapter examines Kant s account of the nature of these interests and follows the thread of his argument to show its potential for establishing a link between morality and sensibility. Insofar as Kant is able to make a case for a close analogy between aesthetic and moral interest, he may argue for a psychological transition from the former to the latter. Hence he could make love of the beautiful, and the fashioning of conditions where it may be experienced by all, a kind of moral imperative. This chapter then explores the ways in which Kant s conception of the interests of disinterested reflection on the beautiful and his views on genius might lead to a higher valuation of art and even human embodiment than Kant himself seems to allow. Chapter 4, Aesthetic reflection and the primacy of the practical, refocusses the discussion from Kant s theory of beauty to the larger role that his aesthetics plays within his theory of value. Having argued for a larger systematic role for aesthetic judgment on historical and textual grounds, I here address the largest challenge to such a reading the fact that Kant s critical philosophy turns on the primacy of the practical, and should be interpreted as a system within which all value ultimately derives from practical reasoning. Onora O Neill and Christine Korsgaard have given powerful and influential accounts of the methodological primacy of practical reason in Kant s philosophy, and I look at each of these in turn and offer criticisms. Yet, even if methodological primacy accounts are inadequate, it is possible that practical reason is primary for Kant s overall account of human valuation in some other sense. I then address Karl Ameriks account of what I label the metaphysical primacy of practical reason, as well as Richard Velkley s and Susan Neiman s different approaches to the issue of the unification of reason. Finally I argue for an alternative understanding of the structure of Kant s philosophy that is neither founded upon nor ordered under a principle of the primacy of practical judgment. This chapter claims that Kant s philosophy is better understood as an attempt at a comprehensive account of nature (as