Kant, Immanuel
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) began his career in mathematics and natural science (physics) at the University of Königsberg and at 31 published a treatise on the origin of the universe but turned to philosophy when he was appointed to a university chair in metaphysics and logic. Through his lectures, Kant gained a reputation as the leading intellect in Germany. Philosophically, Kant was the heir equally of the modern subjectivism of René Descartes and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's sensibility for the moral law; his concept of the nature of a philosophical critique deepens in many ways the principles of method outlined in the Discourse on Method by Descartes, and his elaboration of the principles of practical reason sharpens the moral critique made by Rousseau. He was at the same time one of the most important predecessors of G. W. F. Hegel, whose much-discussed criticism of him marks the beginning of Kant's controversial philosophical reception.Within the eighteenth century, Kant was a pivotal figure. He is regarded as a paragon of Enlightenment rationalism who set in place for later generations of literary critics a series of presuppositions about the autonomy of artworks, while his commitment to the ideals of freedom, to the notion of things-in-themselves, and to the concept of genius positions him squarely within the idealist branch of Romanticism. Today, Kant is recognized as the author of three of the most important works of modern philosophy: the Critique of Pure Reason, which deals with the possibility and limits of our knowledge of the external world; the Critique of Practical Reason, which discusses moral judgment; and the Critique of Judgement, which combines the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgement" and the "Critique of Teleological Judgement" in what is recognized as the first modern treatise on aesthetics. Because of its seminal position with regard to idealist aesthetics, many of the beliefs at work in the modes of discourse that dominated criticism up to and including the work of the New Critics can be traced to Kant's third critique. Central to all three critiques, as they are to Kant's mature work in general, are the beliefs that reason can test and recognize its own limits and that the implementation of a philosophical critique in which we submit even our deepest beliefs to critical examination can save us from various forms of illusion, including the skepticism and dogmatism prevalent in Kant's own day. Thus Kant begins the Critique of Pure Reason with a call to allow reasonAt the same time, Kant recognizes that deceptions and illusions are themselves the products of reason, that is, of reason attempting to transgress its legitimate bounds:Accordingly, Kant views his primary task, and construes the nature of the philosophical critique, as delimiting the proper bounds of reason.Kant's concern with skeptical doubts concerning our knowledge of the external world was prompted by the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz and David Hume. Leibnitz had argued from a rationalist perspective that human understanding contains within it certain principles that enable us to form a complete and accurate description of the world as if from a perspectiveless stance; Hume, by contrast, had argued on empiricist grounds that reason must operate through ideas and that all ideas must be acquired through the senses. Kant regarded Leibnitz's rationalism and Hume's skepticism as wrong in equal measure: the one allowed knowledge only from a "pure" stance, one that could correspond to no actual observer; the other denied the possibility of metaphysics altogether in favor of a skeptical empiricism. Kant's response to these positions constituted what is often described as a "Copernican turn" in philosophy, entailing a reversal of the relationship between the knowing subject and the possible objects of knowledge. Whereas most philosophers had assumed that knowledge could be achieved only if we could succeed in matching our mental concepts to a world of independent, objective facts, Kant argued that we can legitimately claim knowledge of the external world by bringing that world in line with the categories of our understanding. Indeed, Kant devotes a major portion of the first critique (the "Transcendental Analytic") to a discussion of the categories through which we are able to synthesize or construct a world. Thus, while some critics (e.g., Strawson) choose to stress the objectivist interpretation of Kant, it is by the same token true that Kant deepens the subjective tendency in philosophy marked out by Descartes. For Descartes, it is the foundational principle of thought itself, the cogito, that serves as a rational bulwark against the threat of skepticism; for Kant, it is the transcendental ego, the locus of the synthetic operations referred to above, that performs this function.Throughout his work in epistemology, morals, and aesthetics, Kant accepted the fact that there may arise paradoxes or antinomies created by the operations of reason itself. These are a primary source of deception and illusion. For example, we can describe nature as a realm of regular, lawful experience as confirmed by its conformity to rules and by our ability to synthesize experience into a coherent whole. Yet this understanding of the lawfulness of nature flies in the face of our fundamental beliefs about human agents as capable of originating actions free from external constraints, hence as giving rise to changes spontaneously. Kant's solution to this and similar antinomies was made possible by recourse to the hypothesis that there exist "two worlds," the one a realm of phenomena (appearances), the other a realm of noumena, or things-in-themselves. Because Kant held that both of these realms exist, he is known both as an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist; an accurate account of his philosophy cannot separate the two.Many critics share the opinion that the most troubling aspect of Kant's thought lies precisely in the claim that things-in-themselves are knowable by the understanding but remain inaccessible to the operations of reason, which must proceed by sense impressions. There exists a similar resistance to Kant's conception of the human subject as divided between two worlds, one in which we are determined and another in which we are free. Recent speculative work has attempted to identify strategies to reconcile this breach by recourse to aesthetics. Indeed, Kant's own aesthetic theory attempts to repair the split between the realms of sense and understanding generated by his earlier work. Thus Kant begins the Critique of Judgement by recognizing, in an attempt to overcome, the division between the sensible and supersensible worlds:Kant's Critique of Judgement influenced a number of his immediate successors, including Friedrich Schiller, who saw it as offering a possible solution to the social disintegration and political divisions of the modern age. According to this interpretation, the Critique of Judgement shows that Kant himself could not rest content with the differentiations between sense and understanding, necessity and freedom, nature and mind, implicit in the earlier critiques, because he perceived these distinctions as an expression of the dichotomies inherent in modern life. Schiller follows Kant's example insofar as he is able to think of art as a means to achieve harmony in society. He expects aesthetic experience to produce a total revolution of "the whole made perception." And yet this project remains incomplete insofar as the aesthetic remains an autonomous realm, a form of pure appearance isolated from all other dimensions of reality.Indeed, many of the ideas in the Critique of Judgement have been taken, implicitly or explicitly, as sources for the belief that artworks, including works of literature, are autonomous cultural forms and must be examined without reference to the social, historical, and political interests that gather around them. The thesis of the autonomy of art was a guiding, if often unarticulated, premise of the work of Anglo-American New Critics as well as of Continental stylisticians. While both New Criticism and Stylistics may be placed within a history of idealist aesthetics that is far broader than Kant, it was Kant who first formulated the fundamental principles relating to the analysis and judgment of works of art. When Kant considers the special circumstances that obtain when we form judgments about a painting, a novel, or a play, he argues that we must not take an interest in the object as if it in fact existed. "A judgment on the beautiful which is tinged with the slightest interest," Kant writes, "is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. One must not be in the least prepossessed in favour of the real existence of the thing, but must preserve complete indifference in this respect" (43). Instead, what is required of us in aesthetic judgments is that we maintain a relationship of disinterestedness, or aesthetic distance, to the work in question. Kant understands taste not in any empirical or historical sense but from a transcendental point of view.Recognizing some of the difficulties inherent in Kant's conception of disinterested pleasure and of judgments of taste--both of which are fundamentally aligned to the aesthetic category of the beautiful--some recent theorists have tended to emphasize that portion of Kant's aesthetics that deals with the sublime. Whereas the beautiful represents the coincidence or harmony of the imagination and the understanding, the pleasure we associate with the sublime derives from representations that allow us to see some dimension of our own inadequacy; specifically, these reveal the inability of the imagination to represent ideas that can nonetheless be conceived and, indeed, "the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense" (98). For instance, we can have an idea of what the world as a totality is, but we are unable to show any successful example of it; similarly, we are able to think of something as absolutely great but remain unable to find satisfactory representations for it. Insofar as the sublime allows us to present what is, strictly speaking, unpresentable, and in so doing to confirm that it exists, it has been elevated by thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard to a principle of postmodern thought. For Lyotard, the postmodern is that which, like the Kantian sublime, "puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good [read "beautiful"] forms, . . . that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable" (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, 1984, 81). Under this conception, the postmodern thinker-artist is a descendant of Kant's genius, albeit a descendant who no longer makes reference to nature or reason, as Kant did. Kant was the first to see the paradox that while art cannot itself produce the rules by which its products may be generated, nothing can be called art for which there is not some preceding rule. Kant resolved this antinomy in the Critique of Judgement by claiming that "nature in the individual . . . must give the rule to art, i.e., fine art is only possible as a product of genius" (168, emphasis added).It must at the same time be said that exclusive emphasis on the sublime destroys Kant's interest in the faculty of taste as a means by which we are able to form valid judgments in the absence of preexisting (or a priori) concepts. Thus, some recent thinkers have attempted to restore Kant's project of a rational critique while at the same time seeking to avoid the disadvantages that follow from a concept of the knowing subject cut off from the objects of its knowledge and from the community of other like-minded subjects. Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action, which may be located in this vein, is heavily dependent on the premises of the Kantian critique, while positing intersubjective norms as part of the basic competencies and expectations attributable to all speakers who take part in discourse. To be sure, the Habermassian project has in turn met with strenuous objections, many of these from French or French-influenced poststructuralist thinkers who see in both Habermas and Kant an attempt to posit rational ideals on the basis of our membership in a "universal community of mankind" (or, in the case of Habermas, in a universal speech-community). They argue that these claims are illegitimate and serve only to strengthen the political hold of a Eurocentric discourse.In these and other ways Kant stands among the figures currently at the center of the literary-philosophical debate over aesthetic judgment, the nature of modernity, the culture of the Enlightenment, and their relationship to postmodernism. According to Kant, citizens of the Enlightenment must take up Horace's maxim and exercise the courage of reason (sapere aude!). Only this will allow our release from our "self-incurred tutelage" (Foundations 85). Modernity is for Kant a historical epoch characterized by enlightenment insofar as this means the attainment of independence (autonomy) and maturity through the use of reason. In order for reason to accomplish its task, however, the citizens of the Enlightenment require freedom. Indeed, Kant's understanding of reason is that it is essentially free. Thus in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant claims that freedom is "the keystone of the whole architecture of the system of pure reason and even of speculative reason" (3) and seeks to derive all our other concepts, including those of the highest things, such as God and immortality, from it. These are not themselves the prior conditions of the moral law but are instead derived from it: they are "conditions of the necessary object of a will which is determined by this law" (4). And in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant insists that "nothing . . . can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will" (9). In so saying, Kant reveals that his critical rationalism and metaphysical idealism rest on a concept of the will as sovereign and free and that this constitutes the "ungrounded ground" of his philosophical system.Anthony J. Cascardi
Notes and Bibliography
Anthony J. Cascardi, "From the Sublime to the Natural: Romantic Responses to Kant," Literature and the Question of Philosophy (ed. Cascardi, 1987); Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe: Two Essays (trans. James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., 1945); Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, eds., Essays in Kant's Aesthetics (1982); Francis X. J. Coleman, The Harmony of Reason: A Study of Kant's Aesthetics (1974); David Cook, "The Last Days of Liberalism," The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (ed. Arthur Kroker and David Cook, 1986); Donald W. Crawford, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (1974); Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, 1984); Gilles Deleuze, La Philosophie critique de Kant (1963, Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, 1984); Terry Eagleton, "The Kantian Imaginary," The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990); James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (1981); Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (1979); Jürgen Habermas, "Hegel's Critique of Kant," Knowledge and Human Interests (trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, 1971); Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (trans. James S. Churchill, 1962); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute (trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, 1988); Stanley Rosen, "Transcendental Ambiguity: The Rhetoric of Enlightenment," Hermeneutics as Politics (1987); P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (1966); Barry Stroud, "Kant and Skepticism," The Skeptical Tradition (ed. Myles Burnyeat, 1983); T. E. Wilkerson, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Commentary for Students (1976).
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