Kant and the Power of Imagination (CUP 2007 - Additional Information

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 

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Cambridge University Press 

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK 

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York 

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© Jane Kneller 2007 

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of 

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without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. 

First published in print format 2007 

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ISBN-10 0-521-85143-2 hardback 

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Contents 

Preface and acknowledgments page vii 

Introduction 1 

1 Kant and Romanticism 20 

2 The power of imaginative freedom 38 

3 The interests of disinterest 60 

4 Aesthetic reflection and the primacy of the practical 72 

5 The failure of Kant’s imagination 95 

6 Imaginative reflections of the self in Novalis and 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.


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 


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


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 


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 12 

Ibid., pp. 31–32. Helfer, The Retreat of Representation, p.88.


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 


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).


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 


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.


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 


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) inFeminist 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.


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’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


of postulates of God and immortality which have proven to be so 

problematic for Kant, and it also suggests the possibility of a Kantian 

ethics less hostile to imagination and sensibility. 

Chapter 3, ‘‘The interests of disinterest,’’ then moves from the historical 

framework of Kant’s aesthetics to the theory itself. Here I deal with 

Kant’s notion of the pure judgment of taste, or the judgment about the 

beautiful, in light of his claim that the central element of his justification 

of such judgments – the universal communicability of ‘‘disinterested’’ 

feelings of pleasure – ‘‘must already carry with it an interest’’ for human 

beings. This chapter examines Kant’s account of the nature of these 

interests and follows the thread of his argument to show its potential for 

establishing a link between morality and sensibility. Insofar as Kant is 

able to make a case for a close analogy between aesthetic and moral 

interest, he may argue for a psychological transition from the former to 

the latter. Hence he could make ‘‘love of the beautiful,’’ and the fashioning 

of conditions where it may be experienced by all, a kind of moral 

imperative. This chapter then explores the ways in which Kant’s conception 

of the interests of disinterested reflection on the beautiful and his 

views on genius might lead to a higher valuation of art and even human 

embodiment than Kant himself seems to allow. 

Chapter 4, ‘‘Aesthetic reflection and the primacy of the practical,’’ 

refocusses the discussion from Kant’s theory of beauty to the larger role 

that his aesthetics plays within his theory of value. Having argued for a 

larger systematic role for aesthetic judgment on historical and textual 

grounds, I here address the largest challenge to such a reading – the fact 

that Kant’s critical philosophy turns on the ‘‘primacy of the practical,’’ 

and should be interpreted as a system within which all value ultimately 

derives from practical reasoning. Onora O’Neill and Christine Korsgaard 

have given powerful and influential accounts of the methodological primacy 

of practical reason in Kant’s philosophy, and I look at each of these 

in turn and offer criticisms. Yet, even if methodological primacy accounts 

are inadequate, it is possible that practical reason is primary for Kant’s 

overall account of human valuation in some other sense. I then address 

Karl Ameriks’ account of what I label the ‘‘metaphysical’’ primacy of 

practical reason, as well as Richard Velkley’s and Susan Neiman’s different 

approaches to the issue of the unification of reason. Finally I argue 

for an alternative understanding of the structure of Kant’s philosophy that 

is neither founded upon nor ordered ‘‘under’’ a principle of the primacy 

of practical judgment. This chapter claims that Kant’s philosophy is 

better understood as an attempt at a comprehensive account of nature (as

16 


known by rational, embodied beings) and of morality (as practiced by 

rational agents) mediated by a freely reflecting imagination. The unification 

of these accounts, I argue, is accomplished not by placing one 

under the jurisdiction of the other, as is suggested by primacy of the 

practical accounts. Rather, the two domains are mediated and, in this 

sense only, ‘‘united,’’ by reflective aesthetic judgment and the value of 

hope to which it gives rise. 

In chapter 5, ‘‘The failure of Kant’s imagination’’ I address a challenge 

to any interpretation that would try to center an account of human 

experience in Kant’s theory around the faculty of imagination. The 

challenge was famously laid down by Heidegger, and taken up again in 

recent times by Gernot and Hartmut Böhme and by some feminist 

philosophers as well. It consists, in a nutshell, of the claim that Kant was 

constitutionally incapable of granting so much importance to the faculty 

of imagination. Heidegger reads the second edition of the Deduction of 

the Categories, wherein Kant subsumes the imaginative capacity under the 

faculty of Understanding, as proof of this. The Böhmes agree, and take 

the argument from the first Critique to the third, by arguing that even 

here, in his theory of taste, Kant relegates the role of imagination to mere 

‘‘play.’’ Chapter 5 examines these criticisms and responds by arguing that 

the third Critique account of imagination goes well beyond a theory of 

taste and fine arts criticism. I argue that Kant’s account of the Ideal of 

beauty and of aesthetic ideas suggests an important role for imagination 

in moral development, as do his comments on the importance of moral 

enthusiasm, made in his lectures on Anthropology and in the late essay 

‘‘An old question raised again: is the human race constantly progressing?’’ 

This chapter concludes with a discussion of the extent to which Kant 

himself opposed the metaphysical attitude in philosophizing. It argues 

that in fact, Kant was not unsympathetic to the desire for a unified 

account of subjectivity – and, indeed, found a place for it in his aesthetic 

theory. 

Chapter 6, ‘‘Imaginative reflections of the self in Novalis and Hölderlin,’’ 

takes up the question of the imagination and subjectivity in the 

philosophical and poetic work of the early German Romantics, arguing 

for a continuity between the latter and Kant’s third Critique views on 

imaginative power. It lays out the departure of Novalis and Hölderlin 

from Fichte’s attempt to give an account of the self that claims to present 

an ultimate ground or foundational account of its unity. It argues that 

Novalis’ and Hölderlin’s accounts bear a closer affinity to Kant’s views 

than to those of Fichte’s idealism inasmuch as they reject the possibility of


giving a positive account of the unity of subjectivity. Instead, both 

embrace a fundamentally negative account of the unity of the natural and 

‘‘absolute’’ in the subject: in the case of Novalis, the resemblance to 

Kant’s account of the experience of the sublime is striking. In Hölderlin 

there is an explicit reversion to an account of non-conceptual aesthetic 

experience of beauty that owes much to Kant’s, and that in the end, like 

Kant’s, remains skeptical about the possibility of knowing our absolute 

nature. 

Finally, in chapter 7, ‘‘Novalis’ Kantianism and Kant’s Romanticism,’’ 

I return to discuss in more detail the problem of unified subjectivity in 

the philosophical work of Novalis, examining the influence of Kant’s 

philosophy on it. I argue that although Novalis, like other early 

Romantics, is apparently more disturbed by the problem of unified 

subjectivity than Kant, his metaphysical position is not in the end much 

different from Kant’s. Novalis upholds the Kantian doctrine of the 

unknowability of the absolute self and is hence neither an idealist nor an 

irrationalist. What both share is a commitment to the faculty of creative 

imagination as link between the inner world of freedom and the outer 

world of nature in the human subject. The second part of this chapter 

picks up on Novalis’ notion of the ‘‘genius of genius’’ to inquire more 

deeply into the nature and the role such an understanding might play in 

Kant’s aesthetic theory. Kant’s views on the nature of genius are explored 

first in terms of his account of unconscious ideation discussed in the 

Anthropology, and Kant’s mention there of the nature of the performer of 

the ‘‘free fantasia.’’ The phenomenon of the ‘‘free fantasia’’ in Kant’s time 

is discussed, along with Kant’s analysis of the mental state of the musical 

performer of this genre and its relationship to ordinary cognitive activity 

and genius. This chapter concludes that once one-sided characterizations 

of both these thinkers are corrected, their views can no longer be seen as 

antithetical to each other. The differences, in other words, are more 

differences in attitude than in method and substance. 

For all its importance in the history of the philosophy of art, Kant’s 

aesthetics is far more than a theory of art and beauty. This book presents 

other aspects of his aesthetics, and the theory of creative imagination 

upon which it is based, as both a central, integrating component of his 

larger philosophical enterprise and as a keystone in the bridge between 

eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century moral aesthetics in German 

philosophy. It is a reading Kant himself suggested, when in the introductions 

to the Critique of Judgment he argued that both his aesthetics 

and his account of teleological judgment would help close the great

18 


chasm between the theories of morality and cognition established in the 

first two Critiques. Certainly a bridge between human need and human 

obligation was central to German Enlightenment aesthetics, beginning 

with Gottsched and carried forward by Lessing’s work, and it became 

even more crucial (and more politicized) in the early German Romantics. 

Kant’s aesthetics is not typically associated with his thoughts on 

Enlightenment, but it is the point of this book to show how they enabled 

the development of the German tradition of aesthetic education theory, 

transforming it in the process into a critical theoretical enterprise. 

Historical periods are difficult, arguably impossible, to delineate and 

define, and although the Enlightenment has been a remarkably resilient 

historical category (perhaps because, as Foucault emphasized, it named 

itself) the question of what truly characterizes this period is still a matter 

of contention. Broadly speaking, then, the task of this book is to grasp the 

shape of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism by, as it were, studying 

their interface. If Kant’s philosophy is taken as an exemplar (many would 

say the exemplar) of the late German Enlightenment and Novalis’ philosophy 

as paradigm of the early German Romantic movement, then the 

interface of the two is of real historical significance. It is all the more 

important since the standard view of these two positions sets them up as 

diametrically opposed. In examining the historical and conceptual connections 

between, on the one hand, a philosophy often viewed as rigidly 

rationalist and formalist in its overall contours and, on the other hand, 

one that is often taken to be so inchoate and fantastical as to be no 

philosophy at all, I hope to bring into relief important dimensions of 

both. I have long been convinced that if one looks closely at Kant’s 

analysis of the faculty of imagination, especially as foregrounded, developed, 

and expanded in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,’’ a good deal 

of the criticism of his ethics and anthropology becomes moot. During the 

course of study of Novalis and the immediate post-Kantian philosophical 

context in Germany, I have come to appreciate the continuities of early 

German Romanticism with Kant’s work and to see the distortion and 

tired caricatures of that movement as an impediment to understanding 

important aspects of Kant’s aesthetics. Looking at Kant’s philosophy 

from the perspective of his view of imaginative freedom is surprisingly 

disruptive of standard views of Kantianism, but it also undermines stereotypical 

accounts of Romanticism. On philosophical turf, an important 

recent debate has centered around the question of whether Romanticism 

is to be characterized as a continuation of German Idealism or as


Idealism’s most ‘‘decisive’’ opponent. 22 This book skirts that issue, in part 

because there are any number of questions about what constitutes 

‘‘German Idealism’’ in general, and more specifically because there are 

equally many questions raised by calling Kant an ‘‘idealist.’’ 23 My aim is 

simply to look at the question of whether Romanticism, as characterized 

by one of its leading exponents, is to be found at all in the work of 

Immanuel Kant, and if so, what aspects of Kant’s enlightenment thought 

might be seen as partially constitutive of the early Romantic point of 

view. At stake is the possibility of enlivening and enriching enlightenment 

commitments to human equality and freedom with the early Romantic 

emphasis on community and creativity. The chapters that follow trace a 

path from Kant’s views on imaginative creativity and the connection 

between aesthetic reflection and morality to late eighteenth-century 

Romanticism in Germany. In so doing the book suggests an alternative 

trajectory to Kant’s aesthetics that will, I hope, bring attention to its 

continuing relevance for theories of social transformation. 

22 Ernst Behler, Review of Manfred Frank’s Einführung in die Frühromantische Ästhetik, Athenäum, 3, 

1993. Also see Karl Ameriks’ Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (see n. 

13), esp. pp. 10–13, ‘‘Idealism and Romanticism.’’ 

23 Ameriks, Introduction, pp. 1–10.

chapter 1 

Kant and Romanticism 

The very idea of connecting Kant and Romanticism has raised and no 

doubt will continue to raise hackles among some Kant scholars. These 

critics typically view Kant as the last great defender of Enlightenment 

values in the modern era of philosophy, while viewing Romanticism as a 

reactionary, counterenlightenment development expressing irrationalist 

tendencies and forces whose aims are anathema to the spirit of liberty and 

equality. This view continues to prevail in the face of much new scholarship 

documenting the broad spectrum of Enlightenment positions and 

controversies, 1 and in spite of the fact that Kant himself was a great 

admirer, and in some cases friend, of several major counterenlightenment 

figures. 2 Kant did not directly engage the so-called ‘‘Jena school of 

Romantics’’ that included the Schlegels, Schelling, and Novalis. Yet his 

philosophy loomed so large in the German academic context that there 

can be no question of his influence on them. Indeed one could argue that 

it is in the claim to be Kant’s successor and remediator that Fichte 

attracted and fascinated the early Romantics. Kant repudiated Fichte’s 

appropriation of his philosophy, 3 and Fichte’s Doctrine of Scientific 

Knowledge was criticized by the early Romantics. 4 They quickly came 

to reject Fichte’s basic assumptions. It is a major contention of the latter 

part of this book that this rejection, most forcefully stated in Novalis’ 

Fichte Studies, is fundamentally a rejection on Kantian grounds and bears 

the mark of Kant’s aesthetic theory. This chapter will serve to introduce 

1 

See for instance James Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and 

Twentieth Century Questions (Riverside: University of California Press, 1996). 

2 

Most notable here is Kant’s great admiration of Rousseau, but he was also on friendly terms at one 

time or another with Hamann and Jacobi. 

3 

Kant’s ‘‘Open Letter on Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre’’ (August 7, 1799), in Arnulf Zweig, Kant: 

Philosophical Correspondence 1759–99 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 253–254 is 

decisive, if also somewhat peevish. 

4 

Most famously by Novalis (Novalis: Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller, Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2003). 

20

Kant and Romanticism 21 

this argument, along with some of the book’s other major themes, by 

juxtapositing Novalis’ definition of Romanticism with key aspects of 

Kant’s philosophy. 

kant and novalis 

Kant and Novalis both gave shape to their philosophical programs of 

Enlightenment and Romanticism, respectively, in the form of dicta that 

became mottoes for these movements. Kant’s ‘‘Sapere aude!’’ – ‘‘Think for 

yourself !’’ – was a call to arms for Enlightenment theory and practice, 

and so, in its own way, was Novalis’ demand that: ‘‘The world must be 

romanticized.’’ Controversial as it may sound, in many ways early 

German Romantic philosophy carried Kant’s Enlightenment banner 

longer and higher than those who named themselves heir to Kant’s 

philosophy. Even more controversial, but equally plausible, is that Kant’s 

own philosophy moved in the direction of carrying out a program of 

‘‘romanticization’’ in accordance with Novalis’ dictum. To make this last 

claim is sure to upset Kant scholars, especially those in the Anglo- 

American tradition who for decades have labored hard to reconstruct an 

analytic, empiricist-friendly reading of Kant as primarily responding to 

Humean skepticism. Certainly, to associate Kant with mysticism, irrationalism, 

and otherworldly utopianism is false, and would be anathema 

to the no-nonsense humanism of ‘‘the Prussian Hume.’’ 5 Yet characterizing 

early German Romanticism in these terms is itself a gross misrepresentation 

of its most lively and central tendencies. Moreover, in the 

mid-twentieth century rush to make Kant palatable to Anglo-American 

analytic philosophers, much that was central to Kant’s own work was 

initially ignored, down-played, or simply dismissed. No one denies that 

the so-called ‘‘Copernican revolution’’ and the ethics founded on a 

Categorical Imperative remained basic to all his most important work, 

but it is equally true that Kant wrote about far more than the conditions 

of cognitive knowledge and the foundations of moral obligation. Recent 

scholarship on Kant’s ‘‘impure’’ ethics, 6 aesthetics, anthropology, methodology, 

politics, and social theory has virtually exploded, and our ability 

to bring Kant’s philosophy into sharper historical focus has increased 

proportionally. 

5 Lewis White Beck’s term in ‘‘A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant?’’ in Essays on Kant and Hume 

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). 

6 The term is due to Robert Louden and is the title of his book on Kant’s Anthropology: Kant’s Impure 

Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

22 


Let us begin by looking at what Novalis means when he defines the 

movement known as Romanticism in terms of ‘‘romanticizing.’’ As it 

turns out, he has in mind something quite specific: to romanticize is to 

convert what is ordinary and mundane into something extraordinary and 

mysterious, and conversely, to make what is unknown, known: 

The world must be romanticized. In this way one rediscovers the original 

meaning. Romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative raising to a higher power 

[Potenzirung]. The lower self becomes identified with a better self. Just as we 

ourselves are such a qualitative exponential series. This operation is still quite 

unknown. Insofar as I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the ordinary a 

mysterious countenance, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite an 

appearance of infinity, I romanticize it. The operation is precisely the opposite 

for the higher, unknown, mystical and infinite – these are logarithmized by this 

connection – they become common expressions. Romantic philosophy. Lingua 

romana. Alternating elevation and lowering. (II: 545, #105) 

Novalis characterizes romanticizing as a two-part process. As Ernst Behler 

explains it, it is ‘‘a dual, counteractive movement ... in which romanticizing 

constitutes the expansion of the mind into the mysterious and 

unknown, yet eventually reverses itself into a return into the ordinary and 

familiar.’’ 7 

The first part of this process – giving the commonplace a higher 

meaning, mystifying the ordinary – is stereotypically associated with 

Romanticism. But it is equally important in understanding Novalis and 

early German Romanticism that equal weight be placed on the second 

part of the process – lowering or ‘‘logarhythmizing’’ [‘‘logarythmisirt’’] the 

mystical. Andrew Bowie points out that 

The neologism ‘‘logorhythmised’’, which combines the sense of rational ordering, 

verbalisation and mathematical progression with the sense of the music 

inherent in the use of everyday language, epitomises the Romantic position. 8 

Bowie goes on to argue that for Novalis, as for Friedrich Schlegel, 

romanticizing by no means meant a ‘‘surrender to indeterminacy.’’ 9 While 

Novalis certainly sympathized with the urge to idealize, he was insistent 

that although a ‘‘tendency to seek the universal’’ [Universaltendenz] is 

essential to the scholar, 

7 Ernst Behler, German Romantic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 207. 

8 Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory 

(London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 80. 

9 Ibid., pp. 78ff and p. 313, n.19.


one must never, like a phantast, seek the undetermined – a child of fantasy – an 

ideal. One proceeds from determinate task to determinate task. An unknown 

lover of course has a magical charm. Striving for the unknown, the undetermined, 

is extremely dangerous and disadvantageous. Revelation must not be 

forced. (3: 601, #291) 

This fragment may serve to remind contemporary eighteenth-century 

scholars that a genuine appreciation of the ‘‘practical, technical and real’’ 

(Novalis, 3: 600, #291) in science was not the sole property of Enlighteners. 

In fact, on Novalis’ account of romanticizing, a reductionist 

approach in the sciences can be viewed as a legitimate and integral part of 

the romantic program. 

Recognizing the ‘‘naturalizing’’ side of the process of romanticizing 

helps to correct the misreading of Novalis’ program as irrationalist, but it 

is just as important to emphasize that even the expansive side of the 

process is not a call for mystification. To make the familiar unfamiliar is 

not to seek cognitive oblivion, but simply to learn to look at the world 

again with wonder. Understood in this way, then, there is certainly a very 

general sense in which Kant, along with other great philosophers before 

him, ‘‘romanticized’’ in both these senses of the term. The very procedure 

of Kantian ‘‘critique’’ is one of painstaking analysis and ordering of 

mental phenomena that had previously been considered ‘‘unknown’’ or 

mystical. For example, one could say without exaggeration that, in Kant’s 

view, he was demystifying Hume’s hand-waving conception of the causal 

connection as a ‘‘gentle force’’ or Descartes’ mystical ‘‘stamp of God’’ 

view of innate ideas, or Locke’s substance – a ‘‘somewhat, I know not 

what.’’ One might very well characterize the analytic of the Critique of 

Pure Reason as a process of demystification of formerly metaphysical 

notions like substance, causal connection, possibility, and necessity, and 

the very notion of ideas knowable a priori. Certainly in Kant’s own time, 

the depressingly deflationary nature of Kant’s transcendental move was 

clear, as was attested to in the famous case of Kleist’s ‘‘Kant crisis.’’ Even 

where it seemed impossible to reduce phenomena to functions of human 

cognition – for instance, in the case of the uniformity of natural 

appearances and the systematic regularity of nature, as in the appearance 

of systematic interconnectedness of nature according to empirical laws, or 

in the existence of natural organisms (entities with purposes) – Kant 

pushed the critical philosophy to its limits, introducing ‘‘regulative’’ 

principles, or principles of reflection (in the third Critique) as necessary 

conditions of our recognition of these contingencies.

24 


Even the human tendency to ‘‘surrender’’ to the infinite is analyzed as a 

psychological phenomenon by Kant in the Dialectic of the first Critique, 

and can thus be viewed as a ‘‘logarythmizing’’ of the unknowable in the 

various forms in which Reason seeks it. Kant does not deny the existence 

of reason’s irrepressible desire to strive to know the unknown and the 

infinite. But by carefully cataloguing the various specific traps and pitfalls 

that human reason is liable to, he systematically reduces the search for the 

unknown itself to a part of human cognitive functioning. Where this 

desire to surrender to the infinite is aestheticized, as in our fascination 

with that in nature which appears infinitely large or powerful, Kant also 

gives a detailed analysis of the cognitive functions involved. He assures his 

readers that the sublime is really not to be located in natural objects 

themselves, but rather 

all we are entitled to say is that the object is suitable for exhibiting a sublimity 

that can be found in the mind. For what is sublime, in the proper meaning of the 

term, cannot be contained in any sensible form but concerns only ideas of 

reason, which ... can be exhibited in sensibility. (V: 245–246). 

Kant goes on to explain in great detail the way in which the imagination 

attempts to estimate in intuition the magnitude and power of vast, even 

infinite nature, and how this striving eventuates in a feeling (of inadequacy 

or fear) that refers us to an aspect of ourselves that is ‘‘independent 

of nature.’’ This reference itself gives rise to a second feeling of overcoming 

the inadequacies of our imagination. In other words, Kant 

proffers a highly nuanced and complex psychological account of the 

origins of our feeling of the mysteries and majesty of nature. And, beyond 

the theory of the sublime, as Rudolf Makkreel points out, Kant’s account 

of reflective judgment and imagination in the third Critique also attempts 

to analyze and explain ‘‘one of the greatest metaphysical mysteries – the 

fact that matter can at times partake of life’’ by way of aesthetic pleasure. 10 

To be sure, as Behler (echoing Friedrich Schlegel) points out, Kant 

recognized a ‘‘dark’’ and mysterious element of the human psyche in the 

guise of the faculty of imagination. 11 It was for him the ‘‘blind but 

indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no 


Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). This book is an excellent 

account of Kant’s developed theory of imagination and severely undermines any argument that 

Kant had an impoverished account of imagination that placed it at the very lowest level of 

philosophical inquiry, as suggested by, e.g., ‘‘Ernst Behler über Manfred Frank,’’ Buchbesprechung, 

Athenäum, 1 (1991). 

11 Behler, Review of Manfred Frank’s Einführung, p.249.


knowledge but of which we are scarcely ever conscious’’ (Critique of Pure 

Reason A78/B103). Yet it does not follow even from this characterization 

that Kant was unwilling to admit the possibility of the scientific study of 

the ‘‘dark’’ side of imagination, e.g. in unconscious ideation, or what he 

called ‘‘obscure ideas.’’ When he talks about unconscious ideas in the 

Anthropology he says that ‘‘the theory of obscure ideas belongs only to 

physiological ... anthropology’’ (VII: 136), suggesting that although 

these may be inaccessible to investigation a priori, and hence beyond the 

reach of critique, still there is room for empirical study of these phenomena. 

12 This view is completely compatible with transcendental idealism 

and also in keeping with the naturalist side of Novalis’ 

Romanticizing program. 

That Kant’s work could be seen as deflationary, a bringing down to 

earth, or naturalizing of metaphysical and previously mysterious notions, 

ought not to be too surprising, of course. More strange, and certainly 

more likely to offend traditional Kant-scholarly sensibilities, is the suggestion 

that Kant performed the ‘‘romantic operation’’ in the first sense 

outlined by Novalis. Can it plausibly be maintained that Kant ‘‘made of 

the ordinary and commonplace something mystical and profound?’’ We 

have only to consider, for a start, the extent to which Kant’s project 

involved ‘‘denying knowledge to make room for faith.’’ I argue in chapter 4 

that contemporary Kantians who take Kant’s theory of practical reason to 

be the absolute center and determining focus of his philosophy go too far, 

but it is undeniable that Kant’s concern for this ‘‘unknowable’’ side of 

human experience was a central concern. Kant devotes a great deal of 

theoretical energy to explaining and analyzing moral judgment, yet he 

explicitly states that, morally speaking, the foundation of that investigation 

lies in the dignity and absolute worth of humanity as an end in itself. 

This is not to say that the recognition of individual human dignity is a 

mystical experience, but rather that, in the tradition of making what is 

most familiar into something that appears fresh and new, Kant’s philosophy 

‘‘re-enchants’’ our humanity, makes us marvel in awe at the ‘‘moral 

law within.’’ 

Similarly Kant’s notorious ‘‘fact of reason,’’ ultimately allows of no 

explanation, practical or theoretical: 

12 I have examined this aspect of Kant’s theory of imagination and creativity in two papers, ‘‘Kant’s 

Apology for Sensibility,’’ delivered at the APA Pacific Division in New Orleans in 1999, and also in 

‘‘Fantasts and Fantasias: A Kantian Theory of Imaginative Free Play,’’ delivered at the Evelyn 

Dunbar Early Music Festival Symposium, Northwestern University (February 2003). A discussion 

also appears in chapter 7 of this volume.

26 


The consciousness of this fundamental law [the Categorical Imperative, the 

moral law] may be called a fact of reason, since one cannot ferret it out from 

antecedent data of reason such as the consciousness of reason (for this is not 

antecedently given), and since it forces itself on us as a synthetic proposition ‘‘a 

priori’’ based on no pure or empirical intuition. It would be analytic if the 

freedom of the will were presupposed, but for this, as a positive concept, an 

intellectual intuition would be needed, and here we cannot assume it. In order to 

regard this law without any misinterpretation as given, one must note that it is 

not an empirical fact, but the sole fact of reason, which by it proclaims itself as 

originating law (sic volo, sic iubeo)[This is my will and my command, from 

Juvenal: Satire]. (Critique of Practical Reason, V:31) 

In other words, consciousness of the law is a given, and no account, 

transcendental or empirical, can suffice to explain it. Kant was no poet, 

but the few passages that come close to poetry in his work are those that 

refer to the dignity, the ‘‘jewel-like’’ radiance, of the good will in 

humanity. And although in contemplating the ‘‘moral law within,’’ Kant 

allows his mind to ‘‘expand into the mysterious reaches of the unknown,’’ 

it is an expansion that any ordinary human being can accomplish, consciousness 

of which is a given. 

So even though in his theoretical work Kant clearly exemplifies the 

‘‘logorythmizing’’ or reductionist tendency of ‘‘natural philosophy,’’ his 

moral philosophy provides the complementary enlargement that completes 

the twofold contraction – expansion dynamic of Romanticism 

described by Novalis. Properly understood, Novalis’ dictum covers the 

critical philosophy in spirit and in letter: Kant made the unknown 

known, reducing cognition to functions of judgment discoverable to 

philosophical inquiry; and in the very process of humanizing the cosmos, 

he transformed the most intimate aspects of human nature into an 

unknowable but awesome thought: a ‘‘thing-in-itself.’’ 

Of course, it may be objected that there is a perfectly good sense in 

which all pathbreaking philosophy will qualify for the label ‘‘Romantic’’ 

if taken in the sense just outlined, since all progress in philosophy may be 

understood as a kind of elevation of certain fundamental assumptions to 

‘‘foundational,’’ ‘‘original,’’ or ‘‘primitive’’ notions that remain unquestioned, 

while at the same time reducing and making ‘‘mundane’’ other 

phenomena that then are explained by these assumptions. In this sense, 

one could say that Descartes, Plato, even Hume, also ‘‘romanticized.’’ 13 

In response it may first of all be pointed out that indeed, on Novalis’ 

13 I thank Michael Losonsky for first raising this objection, and also an anonymous reviewer at 

Cambridge University Press for making the same point.


account, they did. For Novalis, philosophizing is a variety of romanticizing, 

wherein we search for a ground, for an absolute: 

Philosophizing must be a unique kind of thinking. What do I do when I 

philosophize? I reflect upon a ground. The ground of philosophizing is thus a 

striving after the thought of a ground ... All philosophizing must therefore end 

in an absolute ground. Now if this were not given, if this concept contained an 

impossibility – then the drive to philosophize would be an unending activity – 

and without end because there would be an eternal urge for an absolute ground 

that can be satisfied only relatively and that would therefore never cease. 

Unending free activity in us arises through the free renunciation of the absolute – 

the only possible absolute that can be given us and that we only find through our 

inability to attain and know an absolute. This absolute that is given to us thus 

can only be known negatively, insofar as we act and find that what we 

seek cannot be attained through action ... This could be called an absolute 

postulate. All searching for a single principle would be like the attempt to square 

the circle. (#566) 

Novalis goes on to distinguish the activity of doing philosophy from 

Philosophy as product of that activity: 

Philosophy, the result of philosophizing, arises accordingly through interruption 

of the drive towards knowledge of the ground – through standing still at the 

point where one is. (#566) 

Hence all true philosophers are indeed driven by the same motive force, 

and their work will be characterizable as the attempt to reduce previously 

inflated notions to simple ones while at the same time simply assuming as 

given an ‘extraordinary’ point towards which that reduction is aimed, and 

which itself cannot be proven or further explained. Philosophizing is itself 

a conceptual version of the expansion and contraction process of 

romanticizing. At least, it is until it becomes ‘‘Philosophy’’ – i.e. the point 

at which the philosopher ‘‘interrupts’’ herself, and claims to have finally 

found ‘‘the answer’’ and, in so doing, quits the activity. 

Thus, although in one interesting sense for Novalis, philosophers 

always ‘romanticize’ in the process of their thought, they also cease to do 

so at that point where they declare that they have uncovered or produced 

a systematic solution. Kant, like most philosophers, claimed to have 

found ‘‘the answer’’ in his Copernican turn and the systems of cognitive 

and moral experience that eventuate from that turn, and perhaps to that 

extent he too ceased ‘‘romanticizing’’ in favor of ‘‘standing still at the 

point where he was.’’ What is unique about Kant, and what connects him 

directly to Novalis and the system-eschewing early Romantics in a way 

that other philosophers are not so connected, is that the revolution in

28 


philosophizing that his approach articulated involved the self-conscious, 

methodical recognition of both the limitations of human knowledge (our 

inability to know either nature or ourselves in their entirety), and at the 

same time of the ineliminable, natural human drive to surpass those 

limitations. In the third Critique, Kant explicitly takes on the project of 

bringing these two aspects of human nature together in a coherent 

account. A particularly good example of his ‘‘romanticizing’’ here is the 

use that he makes of the notion of the ‘‘supersensible’’ (das Übersinnliche) 

14 or what he earlier called the ‘‘noumenal.’’ In the third Critique the 

idea of a substrate that underlies and makes possible objects of knowledge 

and ‘‘good-willed’’ action is problematized, since, Kant worries, 

an immense gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, the 

sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible, so that no 

transition from the sensible to the supersensible ... is possible, just as if they 

were two different worlds, the first of which is to have no influence on the 

second; and yet the second is to have an influence on the first, i.e., the concept 

of freedom is to actualize in the world of sense the purpose enjoined by its 

laws. (V: 175–176) 

Kant goes on to argue that it must therefore be possible to think of 

nature as amenable to our moral purposes, 

So there must after all be a basis uniting the supersensible that underlies nature 

and the supersensible that the concept of freedom contains practically, even 

though the concept of this basis does not reach cognition ... though it does 

make possible the transition from our way of thinking in terms of principles of 

nature to our way of thinking in terms of principles of freedom. (V: 176) 

Odd as this language may sound, 15 the talk of a noumenal ‘‘realm that 

is unbounded but that is also inaccessible to our entire cognitive power’’ 

should be understood, as Kant himself suggests, as simply an assumption 

which serves as a necessary basis for our ‘‘way of thinking [Denkungsart].’’ 

We can think ‘‘in terms of principles of nature’’ (based on the assumption 

of something that is first given to experience that we can never know in 

itself) and ‘‘in terms of principles of freedom’’ (based on the concept of 

freedom, which we must postulate in order to act). The question posed 

14 Again, I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer at Cambridge University Press for this point. 

15 Werner Pluhar, in his Introduction to his edition of the Critique of Judgment makes the concept of 

the supersensible and its determinability into a Leitfaden (guiding thread) for interpreting the whole 

of the book and its place in the Critical project. He begins with the importance of the aesthetic 

reflective judgment in this regard, and points out that although Kant appears to be introducing three 

‘‘supersensibles’’ (whatever that could mean!) in this passage, he is suggesting rather three ideas of one 

supersensible (Pluhar, Translator’s Introduction, p. lxiii).


by the third Critique is: ‘‘On what basis, can we move seamlessly in 

thought from one way of thinking to the other; from thinking in terms of 

nature to thinking in terms of freedom?’’ Or, more accurately, how do we 

combine both ways of thinking to effect moral improvement in nature, 

including in our ‘‘natural’’ selves? 16 

Kant’s answer is complicated, indeed, ‘‘obscure’’ even by his own 

standards, as he admits in his Preface (V: 170). The ability to transition 

from one way of thinking to another rests upon an experience of what 

appears to be nature’s purposiveness for the human mind, an experience 

that is itself neither cognitive nor moral, but contains elements of both. It 

is an experience that involves perception of nature, but that goes beyond 

immediate sensory input to linger over and play with these perceptions in 

imagination. Such ‘‘play’’ makes no claims to know and no demands to 

act, but simply eventuates in a judgment that the object is beautiful, a 

claim that at its core expresses a feeling of pleasure that we derive from 

contemplating nature’s harmonious forms. This is a special pleasure, an 

aesthetic reflective pleasure that for Kant, might be rooted in noumenal 

ground: ‘‘the basis that determines the judgment lies, perhaps, in the 

concept of what may be considered the supersensible substrate of 

humanity’’(V: 340). The supersensible ‘‘substrate,’’ or basis, is the aesthetic 

counterpart to the cognitive and moral notions of the thing-in-itself 

and to the postulate of freedom. It is in essence twofold, befitting its role 

as mediating ‘‘principle’’: It involves feeling that is disinterested (i.e. not 

self-interested), similar to the feeling of respect that the moral law elicits 

in us, and it also refers to nature, both in ourselves (pleasure is after all an 

animal sensation) and in the world around us. 

Details of Kant’s account of the connection between the moral and the 

beautiful will be discussed in the chapters that follow. What is important 

here is the way in which Kant both demystifies the human being’s ‘‘two 

world split’’ by reference to a way of adjudicating reflectively, while 

recognizing at the same time the ultimate inscrutability of this process: 

As for the subjective principle – i.e., the indeterminable idea of the supersensible 

in us – as the sole key for solving the mystery of this ability [the capacity to 

16 Felicitas Munzel’s book Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘‘Critical’’ Link of Morality, 

Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) deals with the 

issue of a ‘‘moral Denkungsart’’ and ‘‘moral Gesinnung’’ – the rational and sensible sides of human 

character – in great detail. Her focus is upon the positing and development of moral character in the 

individual, but much of her discussion, some of which will be noted later in the book, is relevant to 

issues of reason’s unity with itself. Since her focus is on the unity of character in the individual, the 

‘‘external’’ problem of the human being with the world is not taken up in the same detail.

30 


experience the beautiful and express it in a judgment of taste] concealed from us 

even as to its sources, we can do no more than point to it; but there is nothing we 

can do that would allow us to grasp it any further. (V: 341, emphasis added) 

Or, as Novalis would later say, such an idea is ‘‘just a little connecting 

hook used for hanging things on pro forma – it only appears [to connect 

things] – it just grasps a handful of darkness’’ (FS: #3, 6). It may be 

useful to recall a claim that Kant made much earlier, in discussing the 

nature of human cognition in the deduction of the categories in the 

Critique of Pure Reason. Kant here admits that his analysis must simply 

assume the independence, or ‘‘givenness,’’ of that which is intuited and 

synthesized by cognition: 

This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce ‘‘a priori’’ unity of 

apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is 

as little capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other 

functions of judgment, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible 

intuition. (B: 145–146) 

It is a given that we have an understanding that structures but is not the 

original, controlling source of the sensible world. It is similarly a given ‘‘fact 

of reason’’ that we have a will that imparts to the sensible world the form of 

a supersensible rational-moral system (V: 43). What the analysis of taste and 

beauty add to these unquestionable claims is a third ‘‘given’’ that mediates 

the other two: We are capable of sensible feelings, shareable with other 

human beings, of nature’s possible attunement to a supersensible rational – 

moral system. Kant assumes, ironically and (early) romantically, an 

extraordinary, unknowable purpose that is grasped in ordinary human 

feeling (a sensus communis aestheticus). This feeling is the natural 

expression of supersensibility – and is the vehicle for our human ability to 

think from nature to morality and back again: It is at once both elevated 

and everyday. 

kant and rousseau 

Considerations of this sort will serve as an initial argument for the claim 

put forward in what follows: that aesthetic considerations shape Kant’s 

overall philosophical program, a program that is proto-romantic in many 

respects. Novalis’ philosophical insights are deeply indebted to Kant. The 

former’s romantic imperative, like the latter’s Enlightenment one, issued 

a challenge to philosophy to self-consciously present and carry out a 

new program. Precisely this self-consciousness characterizes the critical 

philosophical project, which was in Kant’s own mind, epoch-making. His


‘‘mission,’’ stated explicitly, was to dethrone the queen of the sciences, 

metaphysics, and set up in her place a more humble ruling body, namely, 

the principles of human cognition in general. 17 At the same time Kant 

recognized the inevitability of human striving for the absolute, for a final 

unification of knowledge under a single principle, and as we shall shortly 

see, embraced this striving to a far greater degree than Novalis himself 

would have allowed, if we take Novalis’ fragment from the observations 

on medicine and physics seriously. 

For all his anti-metaphysical posturing, Kant embraced the view that 

metaphysical ‘‘Schwä rmerei’’ has an important role to play in the development 

of human cognitive faculties and of progressively better social 

institutions. We shall examine the role of enthusiasm and imagination in 

transforming society in what follows, especially in chapter 5. The first 

claim, that imaginative speculation might itself develop our abilities, is 

made in the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, in a footnote to a 

discussion of a transcendental definition of the feeling of pleasure. The 

note will serve as something of a guiding thread in the chapters that follow. 

It deals with the question of why, in Kant’s words, ‘‘nature has given us the 

predisposition to such fruitless expenditure of our forces as we see in 

empty wishes and longings (which certainly play a large role in human 

life).’’ Kant recognizes that human beings in fact often long for the 

absolutely impossible. Such dangerous longings ‘‘are often nourished by 

novels and sometimes also by mystical presentations, similar to novels, of 

superhuman perfections and fanatical bliss.’’ But even as he is attacking the 

‘‘Roman’’ (the novel, one of Kant’s own cherished pastimes was reading 

them) and other devices of mystification, he is suggesting that such projects 

have a natural role to play in human intellectual development: 

It seem s to me that here, as in all else, nature has made wise provisions . For if we 

had to assure ou rselves that we can in fact produce the object, b efore the 

present ation of it could determin e us to apply our force s, our forces woul d 

presuma bly remain largely unu sed. For usually we do not come to know what 

force s we have except by tryin g them out. So nature has provided for the 

connec tions betw een the determ ination of our force s an d the presentati on of the 

object [to be there] even before we know what ability we have, and it is often 

precisely this effort which to that very mind seemed at first an empty wish, that 

produces that ability in the first place. Now wisdom is obligated to set limits to 

17 See Frederick Beiser’s description of Kant’s attack on metaphysics in ‘‘Kant’s Intellectual 

Development: 1746–1781,’’ chapter I of The Cambridge Companion to Kant (New York: Cambridge 

University Press, 1992).

32 


that instinct, but wisdom will never succeed in eradicating it, or [rather] it will 

never even demand its eradication. (XX: 231) 

This passage will be referred to again, and it is crucial to the arguments 

that follow in this book. Kant suggests here, first, that natural, 

‘‘instinctive’’ forces – forces not identified as rational – drive creativity 

and the development of our cognitive capacities. The ‘‘power of imagination, 

that blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which 

we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely 

ever conscious’’ (A78/B103), is the force that makes human intellectual 

development possible. Imaginative striving – we might call it a kind of 

‘‘straining to understand’’ what appears impossible – allows us to 

recognize in theory and then possibly to realize in practice what ‘‘seemed 

at first an empty wish.’’ Without this natural impulse surely no progress 

of reason is possible. It is this impulse that is also at the heart of Novalis’ 

program, and constitutes the Romantic debt to Kant. 

Kant was profoundly aware of the role that nature plays in human 

experience and progress. 18 Considering the source for Kant’s revolutionary 

turn in ethics, the Urromantic Rousseau, this should come as no 

real surprise. Kant’s Rousseauistic turn is well known, especially his 

famous claim in the ‘‘Remarks’’ on the Observations on the Beautiful and 

Sublime that reading Rousseau ‘‘set him straight’’ and taught him to 

honor humanity above all else. 19 Richard Velkley has made a strong case 

for the pervasive influence of Rousseau not only on Kant’s moral and 

political views, but for his view of reason in general. 20 Velkley takes the 

defining moment of Kant’s project to arise from Rousseau’s characterization 

of the problem of reason as the problem of the relationship of 

human reason to human happiness. If, as Rousseau so forcefully argues, 

becoming progressively more rational only makes us progressively more 

miserable (the more we know, the more we desire), then how can the 

development of reason as humanity’s ‘‘vocation’’ or destiny be asserted? 

Recognition of Rousseau’s problem with reason, Velkley argues, forces 

Kant to attempt a ‘‘theodicy of reason.’’ He argues that Kant’s philosophy 

is driven by the need for an account of Reason’s final purpose, and that 

18 No one, in my opinion, has argued more persuasively for this awareness, and the systematic 

connection of Kant’s naturalism with his ethics than Allen Wood, in Kant’s Ethical Thought 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 

19 Ak XX: p. 44. 

20 Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: on the Moral Foundations of Kant’s Critical 

Philosophy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)


the need to articulate that purpose leads Kant on a quest for what Velkley 

calls ‘‘the teleological consummation of reason in a new legislation of the 

order of the soul’’: an order that ‘‘proceeds in the direction’’ of ‘‘one form 

of human perfection’’ and that ‘‘can be achieved only through a certain 

kind of willing’’(p. 66). The need for a theodicy of reason, according to 

Velkley, leads Kant to assert the primacy of practical reason in these 

terms: ‘‘The moral foundation of Kant’s critical philosophy can be 

uncovered in the manner in which this ‘primacy’ determines the 

content and direction of all inquiries belonging to the ‘criticism’ of 

reason’’ (p. 2). 

This is a dramatic claim, to which I will return in chapters 2 and 4. At 

the very least, Velkley’s argument shows that Kant’s sense of urgency about 

the need for philosophy to justify reason as the final arbiter of truth owes as 

much to Rousseau as to Hume, and it is persuasive in making its case that, 

in important respects, the Rousseauian turn in his thinking was even more 

definitive of Kant’s overal critical program. Rousseau’s worry about vindicating 

Reason as a final moral court of appeal was certainly a wakeup call 

for Kant, who had no intention of abandoning the tribunal of reason as the 

moral final court of appeal. On Velkley’s account, Kant’s moral philosophy 

takes on epic, (if not Quixotic) proportions consistent with a 

romanticizing of philosophy in the expansive direction. However, it does 

not follow from the centrality of this issue that Kant’s expansion of reason 

beyond the theoretical can be billed as the saga of his quest for the Holy 

Grail of the unity of reason, nor even as a quest to unify Reason under the 

conception of an ideal of practical willing, as Velkley argues. In chapters 

that follow, I argue against reading Kant as identifying the ‘‘philosophic 

life’’ with ‘‘seeking the perfection of the will’’ (p. 66). In other words, it is a 

very different tendency in Kant’s later philosophical work that this book 

explores. Kant’s views on aesthetic (imaginative) reflection and its role in 

morality undermine single-focus, idealist readings of the sort Velkley 

advocates – i.e. readings that situate Kant at the foundation of Germanic 

philosophical system-building beginning with Fichte. Of course there are 

conceptual and historic continuities, but Kant himself disowned the 

Fichtean system and, I am convinced, would have disavowed the view 

of philosophy as an epic quest for the Holy Grail of a single, unifying 

teleological account of human nature. As Allen Wood puts it: 

For Kant, the task of philosophy is not (as it is for Hegel) to reconcile us to the 

human condition. Kant thinks that as rational creatures our condition must be 

one of dissatisfaction, self-alienation, and endless striving. Philosophy should not

34 

try to transcend that condition but only to help us live with its inevitability, and 

more important, to make progress in the painful tasks it sets us. 21 

This does not preclude that for Kant, as Wood also claims, the task of 

philosophy ‘‘in an age of enlightenment is to make [rational collective 

ends] explicit and then to look for social institutions and historical tendencies 

that promote them.’’ 22 But Kant’s insistence on the regulative 

nature of all such accounts, and his increasing attention in the later 

Critical philosophy to the sensible and contingent conditions of moral 

judgment and human creativity is continuous, not with idealist systembuilding, 

but with the more modest and ironic approach of early German 

Romanticism. For all its insight into the connection of Kant’s philosophy 

to Rousseau, I would disagree with Velkley’s central claim. A final 

theodicy of reason for Kant was never fully worked out, and for a very 

good reason: it could not be accomplished on Kant’s own terms. No 

concrete, ‘‘substantive’’ notion of the end of Reason could ever be 

delivered solely by reason to itself. Reason can regulate but never, by 

itself, create these ends. 

Although Velkley claims that the principle of reason’s final end, to be 

realized historically, is a regulative one not in conflict with individual 

choice (p. 162), there are several places in the book that suggest that he has 

something more substantive in mind. He claims that ‘‘In light of this 

ideal,’’ all of reason comes under the legislation of the critical philosopher 

so as to secure the grounds for humanity’s unobstructed progress toward a 

final practical goal – the achievement of a definitive ‘‘culture’’ that 

embodies the ideal (p. 15), and he speaks of ‘‘the practical advance of 

humanity toward a consummate ‘‘culture’’(p. 43). Towards the end of the 

book (p. 161) he argues that, for Kant, reason must reshape human 

happiness itself: ‘‘the individual’s conception of happiness has not kept 

pace with reason’’ and ‘‘the individual is in great measure himself to 

blame if he is at odds with the species’ rational advance.’’ ‘‘Moral obligation 

taken in a very wide fashion, thus includes the effort to refine the 

concept of happiness’’ and ‘‘The final system of culture must rest on a 

plan that dictates the mode of pursuing happiness if not its content ... A 

culture organized on a moral plan requires that happiness be grounded in 

rational self-activity and not in passive enjoyment.’’ There is certainly 

textual evidence in Kant to support this view of the Highest Good, but it 

also ignores Kant’s views on the importance of contemplative, aesthetic 

(passive?) pleasures – moments of happiness that are not ‘‘dictated’’ by 

21 Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, p.334. 


22 Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, p.309.


pure reason, but partake in the contingencies of the world outside human 

control. 

Hence in the second Critique, at the very place where he also describes 

the ‘‘primacy of the practical,’’ Kant also feels obliged to resort to the 

postulation of a higher power to lend hope to reason’s demand that we 

strive for individual virtue and community justice. The chapters that 

follow explore the possibility that it was the inadequacy of this theological 

turn as a theory of motivation for human moral behavior that motivated 

Kant’s attempts in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ to uncover, 

among the contingencies of human feeling and imagination, a more 

human ‘‘bridge’’ to the moral. 

I do not want to argue that Kant actually built the bridge, nor that an 

aesthetic theory of moral development can be entirely successful. Whether 

the experience of imaginative freedom and of beauty in all its manifestations 

can indeed resolve the crisis is a matter for debate. It may be that 

in the attempted resolution to the problem of making reason accountable 

to human nature and happiness, in the words of Lacoue-Labarthe and 

Nancy, ‘‘an abyss opens where a bridge should have been built’’(p. 30). 23 

The point, however, is that Kant’s philosophy, especially as articulated in 

the third and final Critique, becomes a signpost pointing away from 

Fichte and rationalist–idealist resolutions to the problem. As Lacoue- 

Labarthe and Nancy put it: 

in the absence of a subject whose self-presence is guaranteed by originary 

intuition and whose mathesis of this first evidence organizes the totality of 

knowledge and the world more geometrico, the system as such, although it is 

deeply desired by Kant ... is continually lacking precisely where it is in greatest 

demand. (p. 32) 

Their point is that Kantian practical reason requires (‘‘desires’’) a systematic 

connection between nature and intellect if the human moral 

agent is to have an effect on the world (including upon her own character). 

But knowledge of a natural moral system (hence also, knowledge 

of our ‘‘moral substance’’) is impossible on Kant’s account. Denying 

knowledge of this unified moral natural realm famously cleared a space 

for belief in it (since the denial also includes denial of knowing its 

nonexistence), but at the cost of rendering the moral furniture of this 

23 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, The 

Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (Albany: State University of 

New York Press, 1988).

36 


space intangible. Kant thus created a tension that is not resolved by the 

postulation of freedom, God, and immortality. In explaining the link 

between the third Critique and the early German Romantics, Lacoue- 

Labarthe and Nancy continue: 

this ‘‘subject’’ of morality can only be defined negatively, as a subject that is not 

the subject of knowledge ... as a subject without mathesis, even of itself. It is 

indeed posited as freedom, and freedom is the locus of ‘‘self-consciousness.’’ But 

this does not imply that there is any cognition – or even consciousness – of 

freedom, for freedom in turn is posited only as ratio essendi of the moral law 

within us, which, because it is only a fact ... can provide only a ratio cognoscendi 

of freedom, which produces no cognition. This fact (the imperative, the universality 

of the law) is neither an intuition nor a concept. As a moral subject, in 

sum, the subject recovers none of its substance. (p. 31) 

In other words, early Romantic doubts about the analyzability of the ‘‘I’’ – 

that is, of the human subject, and their concomitant skepticism about a 

final, total system within which it resides, are continuations of a trajectory 

set by Kant’s philosophy, not a break with it. Interpretations that fix Kant 

within the Idealist tradition ignore this trajectory. 

Nevertheless, focussing as Velkley does on Rousseau’s problematizing 

of reason and its impact on Kant helps make sense of aspects of Kant’s 

aesthetic theory that formalist readings ignore. 24 Kant’s acknowledged 

and profound debt to that earliest of early romantics is certainly a driving 

force, but not, I argue, behind an attempt to unify reason in a single 

teleological principle. Rousseau’s insight, I would suggest, spurred him to 

expand aesthetics beyond the conventional theory of ‘‘taste’’ towards a 

theory of imagination as a creative force in human motivation and in 

nature. Whatever other influences it had on his contemporaries and 

successors in German philosophy, Kant’s philosophy, especially his aesthetic 

theory with its pathbreaking new view of the power of imagination, 

contained the seeds of early German Romanticism. As such it continued 

to propagate a strain of German moral philosophizing that had been 

developed throughout the century by philosophers and literary theorists 

24 Reception of Kant’s aesthetics in the mid-twentieth century focussed on Kant’s arguments for a 

disinterested attitude on the part of the judging subject, and on definition of the aesthetic object 

purely in terms of its formal characteristics (design, figure, etc.). It tended to ignore or dismiss 

other aspects of the text that struggled to connect aesthetic reflection with moral interest and 

feeling. Donald Crawford’s work, as well as that of Paul Guyer, began to move analytic approaches 

to Kant’s aesthetics towards a more serious analysis of these sections of the third Critique. Donald 

Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974); Paul Guyer, 

Kant and the claims of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).


who saw the potential for enlightening the populace through art. In 

chapter 2, I examine aspects of this pre-history in Germany, and argue for 

reading Kant’s theory of imaginative freedom as being of a piece with his 

German predecessors. Their concerns for human emancipation through 

aesthetic education were certainly an important influence, like that of 

Rousseau, on Kant’s own views of human nature and morality.

chapter 2 

The power of imaginative freedom 

Just as the concept of freedom is central to the political and moral 

philosophy of the Enlightenment, it is also important to the aesthetic 

theory of this period. This is clearly true of the German Enlightenment. 

Beginning with Baumgarten, the concept of the autonomy of the imagination 

in aesthetic judgment and artistic production becomes an 

essential feature of German aesthetic theory, culminating in Kant’s 

detailed account of the free activity of the imagination in judgments 

about the beautiful. 

A study of Kant’s notion of imaginative freedom also reveals a continuity 

in German philosophy from Lessing to Schiller that is not apparent in other 

approaches to his aesthetic theory. That is, in spite of an apparent break with 

the German enlightenment tradition created by Kant’s insistence that 

aesthetics is essentially irrelevant to morality, his account of imaginative 

freedom suggests the possibility that political and moral progress may be 

intimately connected with our ability to make universally valid aesthetic 

judgments. This in turn suggests that Kant’s system left room for an 

‘‘enlightened’’ commitment to the view that our experience of beauty and 

art may have an indispensable role to play in our moral improvement. 

In what follows, I first briefly trace the development of the concept of 

imaginative freedom from Baumgarten to Lessing and then go on to outline 

Kant’s account of this concept. In the last section I argue that Kant’s account 

of imaginative freedom provides a solution to the problem of how reason 

can command us to strive to bring about the highest good – that is, a moral 

world – on earth. I conclude by suggesting that in view of the possibilities 

that his notion of imaginative freedom hold out to morality, Kant’s aesthetic 

theory may be seen as a ‘‘missing link’’ between Lessing’s views on the 

didactic nature of art and Schiller’s views on aesthetic education. 1 

1 Lewis White Beck first suggested the phrase and provided much helpful advice in improving earlier 

drafts of this chapter. I am also grateful to members of James Schmidt’s NEH 1989 summer seminar 

38

The power of imaginative freedom 39 

imaginative freedom from baumgarten to kant 

Aesthetics as a distinct philosophical discipline was first developed, and 

the term ‘‘aesthetics’’ first coined, by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, a 

student of the rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff. Although Baumgarten 

was a loyal disciple of Wolff and a committed rationalist, he 

nevertheless argued that there was a need within this tradition for an 

account of the logic of judgments about sensation. For Wolff’s philosophical 

predecessor, Leibniz, sense perception was too unclear and indistinct 

to give rise to a systematic structure of its own. In Leibniz’s words: 

‘‘Taste as distinguished from understanding consists of confused perceptions, 

for which one cannot give an adequate reason. It is something 

like an instinct.’’ 2 For Wolff, too, sensation is only confused perception 

and hence belongs to the ‘‘lower’’ cognitive faculties. To the extent that 

sense perception exhibits order, it is for these philosophers imposed from 

‘‘above’’ by reason. The problem, as Baumgarten saw it, was that sensory 

knowledge in the rationalist tradition is thus either equated with something 

like instinct (and is not knowledge at all) or is seen as an inferior 

species of knowledge. 

Baumgarten was a poet as well as a philosopher, and he wanted to 

secure for art an objective validity and a claim to truth that was equal to 

that of cognition. In his Meditationes Philosophicae ... (Reflections on 

Poetry), published in 1735, Baumgarten claimed that the so-called lower 

faculties of sensation, memory, and imagination had a logic of their own 

analogous to, but not identical with, that of reason. 3 Reason’s method 

involves making sensations clear and distinct through abstraction, definition, 

and demonstration. But beauty is destroyed by the tools of reason 

precisely because these processes minimize the sensuous, concrete, and 

individual nature of the beautiful. The ‘‘analogon of reason,’’ as Baumgarten 

called the combined faculties of sensation, memory, and imagination, 

has a logic of its own specific to judgments of beauty and free 

‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ for further commenting on the chapter and encouraging me to pursue 

the argument outlined here. Finally, I am grateful to John Fisher and Rudolf Makkreel for valuable 

criticisms and suggestions. 

2 ‘‘Le goût distingué de l’entendement consiste dans les perceptions confusés, dont on ne saurait assez 

rendre raison. C’est quelque chose d’approchant de l’instinct’’ (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 

Philosophische Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt [Berlin, 1875–90], III, 420); trans. from Philosophical 

Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy Loemker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), II, 

1031. 

3 Alexander G. Baumgarten, Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (Halle, 

1735), trans. K. Aschenbrenner and ed. W. B. Holther as Reflections on Poetry (Berkeley: University 

of California Press, 1954).

40 


from the laws of abstraction, definition, and demonstration that reason 

imposes on cognition. 4 Thus the birth of rationalist aesthetics in 

Baumgarten’s philosophy clears the way for a philosophical account of 

aesthetic judgment in which exemption from the constraints of cognitive 

judgment is a dominant theme. 

The movement in German philosophy for the emancipation of beauty 

from cognition was an echo of what had begun earlier in German literary 

circles. Bodmer and Breitinger, the so-called ‘‘Swiss Critics of Zurich,’’ 

had been critical of the rule-fetishism of the ruling rationalist literary and 

dramatic theory associated especially with J. C. Gottsched. Gottsched 

took his task to be the improvement of the German literary niveau, and 

to that end he rigidly applied rules originally laid down by Horace and 

Aristotle and adapted by recent French aesthetic theorists such as Boileau. 

Gottsched’s insistence on a literal application of classicist rules led to such 

absurd prescriptions as, for instance, banning monologues (‘‘‘Intelligent 

people are careful not to speak aloud when they are alone’’) and asides 

(‘‘It is then as if those present had lost their hearing for this short time’’) 

on the grounds that they were ‘‘unnatural’’ and ‘‘improbable.’’ 5 Exclusive 

emphasis on ‘‘reasonableness’’ (Vernünftigkeit) and insistence on following 

specific rules was taken by Gottsched’s critics to be a denial of the 

importance of imagination and of artistic creativity. Bodmer and Breitinger, 

like Baumgarten, remained rationalists. That is, they did not deny 

the need for rulegovernedness in aesthetic experience and creation, but 

they believed that the imagination of both artist and critic could and 

should be free to play a greater role in art and criticism. 6 

By far the greatest exponent of artistic freedom in Germany, however, 

was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He is perhaps better known for his 

advocacy of religious freedom and tolerance in such works as Die 

Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts and Nathan der Weise, but aesthetic as 

well as religious freedom was extremely important to him. In terms of his 

personal philosophical development, the literary arguments came first 

4 Alexander G. Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Hildesheim, 1961), Sect. I and 555–565. Cf. also Lewis White 

Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of 

Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 279–280. 

5 ‘‘Kluge Leute aber pflegen nicht laut zu reden, wenn sie allein sind’’ and ‘‘es wäre denn, dass die 

anwesende Person auf eine so kurze Zeit ihr Gehör verloren hatte’’ (J. C. Gottsched, Versuch einer 

Critischen Dichtkunst: Ausgewählte Werke, eds. Joachim Birke and Birgitte Birke [New York, 1973], 

p. 353). 

6 Cf. J. J. Bodmer and J. J. Breitinger, Von dem Einfluss und Gebrauche der Einbildungs-Kraft; Zur 

Ausbesserung des Geschmackes; Genaue Untersuchung Aller Arten Beschreibungen, Worinne die 

ausserlesenste Stellen der berühmtesten Poeten dieser Zeit mit gründtlicher Freyheit beurtheilt werden 

(Frankfurt, 1727).


and, I would argue, helped shape his later works on religion. Lessing, like 

Bodmer and Breitinger before him, reacted sharply to the excessive 

rationalism of German literary theory, and his polemics against Gottsched 

are well known. Great art, Lessing argues, is the result not of 

following recipes but of genius, and genius is its own rule. In his famous 

‘‘Seventeenth Letter on Literature’’ published in a series that ran from 

1759 to 1760, Lessing argues that the Germans, rather than looking to the 

overly ‘‘delicate’’ and ‘‘polite’’ drama of the French, would do better to 

turn their attention to British drama, especially to Shakespeare, whose 

genius lay in his ability to excite passion in his audience. 7 

Thus Lessing entered the fray in the debate over the role of rules in 

artistic production and criticism, and he went far beyond Baumgarten 

and the Swiss critics in urging the centrality of feeling to art and insisting 

on the freedom of the artist to arouse feeling in whatever manner was 

most effective. 8 In the Laokoon, published in 1766, Lessing argues that the 

poet ought to evoke feelings by whatever would require the reader to use 

his or her imagination. The means available to the painter are different 

from those of the poet; the painter works with bodies in space, the poet 

with events in time. But the end goal of both painter and poet is to 

produce in the audience an imaginative response. ‘‘That alone is fruitful,’’ 

Lessing says, ‘‘which allows the imagination free play.’’ 9 For Lessing, 

imaginative freedom is important because it allows for the strongest 

possible emotional response to a work of art. Since for Lessing imaginative 

freedom is also the key to the success of the artist, to insist on 

mechanical application of rules in art is not to improve it but to guarantee 

its continued mediocrity. And yet Lessing does not go so far as to say that 

artistic genius is subject to no rule, but rather that genius has its own 

inner logic. He says: ‘‘Not every critic is a genius, but every genius is a 

born critic. Genius has the proof of all rules within itself.’’ 10 Genius 

demonstrates its autonomy not by ignoring all rules, but by deriving the 

rules from itself. Sensation (Empfindung) and intuitive knowledge must 

be capable of being expressed in words – of being generalized – if genius 

7 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Briefe. Die neueste Literatur betreffend (1759), Werke, ed. Herbart G. 

Göpfert (Munich, 1973), V: 71ff. 

8 Indeed, the Laokoon may be read as primarily a plea for the freedom of the poet from the 

emotional constraints of Winckelmann’s neo-classicism. 

9 Lessing, Laokoon, Werke, ed. Herbart G. Göpfert (Munich: x, 1973), VI, 25–26, Sect. III: ‘‘Das 

jenige aber nur allein ist fruchtbar, was der Einbildungskraft freies Spiel lässt.’’ 

10 Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Werke, ed. Herbart G. Göpfert (Munich: x, xxxx), IV, no. 96, 

673. ‘‘Nicht jeder Kunstrichter ist Genie; aber jedes Genie ist ein geborner Kunstrichter. Es hat die 

Probe aller Regeln in sich.’’

42 

is to improve on its own first attempts: ‘‘Who reasons correctly also 

invents, and who wishes to invent must be able to reason.’’ 11 Thus Lessing 

by no means rejects rationalist aesthetics altogether, and for Lessing as 

much as for the rationalists the final purpose of art is education. 

Lessing’s account of the autonomy of genius bears some resemblance to 

Kant’s account of moral freedom, according to which the freedom of the 

individual consists not in ignoring law but in giving the law to oneself as a 

rational being and thereby to all rational creatures generally. On Lessing’s 

account, genius follows its own law but in such a way as to be able to 

communicate its inventions with its audience. Given Lessing’s strong 

conviction that art should educate, one might expect to find in his theory 

some sort of aesthetic counterpart to Kant’s categorical imperative for 

morals. Nothing of the kind, however, is to be discovered. Lessing’s 

famous dictum, ‘‘The most sympathetic person is the best person,’’ 12 

comes closest to giving generalized expression to his own first principle of 

dramatic invention – that the writer should attempt to produce sympathy 

in the audience. Yet it is not stated explicitly as a formula universally valid 

for all artistic production; nor is this surprising, since Lessing was not 

concerned to produce a systematic aesthetic. 13 Although he believed that 

the goal of all art was to further human moral progress, his more specific 

interests in dramatic theory no doubt made the need for a detailed 

account of artistic imagination seem less urgent. Yet Lessing’s essentially 

rationalist belief in the didactic nature of art would seem to require that 

some such account be possible if the precise role of aesthetics in the 

education of human beings is to be described. It is therefore somewhat 

surprising that this account first appears in the aesthetic theory of Kant, 

where the view that art and beauty should serve the purpose of moral 

perfection is abandoned. Nevertheless, it is not until Kant that the 

creative possibilities of imaginative freedom first receive detailed 

systematic treatment in German aesthetic theory. 

11 


‘‘Wer richtig räsoniert, erfindet auch; und wer erfinden will, muss räsonieren können’’ (Werke, ed. 

Herbart G. Göpfert, IV, no. 96, 675). 

12 ‘‘Der mitleidigste Mensch ist der beste Mensch, zu allen gesellschaftlichen Tugenden, zu allen 

Arten der Grossmutt der aufgelegteste’’ (letter to Nicolai, November 1756, Werke, ed. Herbart G. 

Göpfert, IV, 163). 

13 Cf. a typical statement in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie Werke, ed. Herbart G. Göpfert, no. 95, 

670: ‘‘Ich erinnere hier meine Leser, dass diese Blätter nichts weniger als ein dramatisches System 

enthalten sollen. Ich bin also nicht verpflichtet, alle die Schwierigkeiten aufzulösen, die ich 

mache.’’ (Here I remind my reader that the last thing that I intend these pages to contain is a 

dramatic system. I am therefore not obliged to solve all the difficulties that I create.)


Kant’s account of moral freedom is well known. In the Foundations of 

the Metaphysics of Morals Kant gives what he calls a negative and a positive 

account of this concept. On the one hand it means freedom from causation 

by the lower, sensuous desires; on the other it means freedom to 

act according to a law of practical reason that we give to ourselves as 

rational beings. 14 In the circle of concepts that make up the core of Kant’s 

moral theory, the moral law stands at the very center. However, Kant 

says, aesthetic reflective judgment has its own ‘‘territory,’’ within which, 

although not sovereign, it still enjoys freedom from the constraint of 

administering laws of cognition and morality. 15 That is, in aesthetic 

reflection, judgment is not immediately subject to the legislation of the 

understanding (i.e. to the categories). It is free of cognitive determination – 

it does not involve predicating empirical concepts of the object. Nor is 

judgment concerned directly with applying the Categorical Imperative in 

aesthetic reflection. It is therefore free of moral determination: we may 

not ask, in the context of a purely aesthetic experience, whether or not 

this object is virtuous or promotes virtue. So although judgments about 

beauty must always be ‘‘directed to cognition in general’’ 16 and no activity 

based on aesthetic judgment may violate the Categorical Imperative, 

judgment in its reflective capacity is not compelled to apply a rule of 

either cognitive or moral judgment. Moreover, aesthetic experience of the 

beautiful is also free from what Kant calls ‘‘mere’’ subjectivity – that is, 

the desires of the senses for immediate pleasurable response are not 

determining factors in the perception of beauty. Thus aesthetic freedom, 

like moral freedom, is characterized by a lack of determination by 

sensuous and selfish desires. 

The foregoing may be called Kant’s ‘‘negative account’’ of imaginative 

freedom. But Kant also has a positive account of imaginative freedom, 

and it is here that the radical nature of this sort of freedom can be seen. 

For within the territory of aesthetics judgment takes a holiday from moral 

and cognitive work; no concepts must be applied, no commands must be 

followed. Our judgments about the beautiful are not determined by these 

laws. Rather, the object of an aesthetic reflective judgment is determined 

solely by the ‘‘mental state in which we are when the imagination and the 

14 

Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. 4: 446; Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, V: 

28–29. 

15 

Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, V:177. 

16 

Cf. Section 9,V:217, and also Section 22,V:240–241, where Kant speaks of the ‘‘free lawfulness of 

the imagination’’ (freie Gesätzmässigkeit der Einbildungskraft), and argues that imagination in pure 

judgments of taste is free from any compulsion to ‘‘proceed according to determinate law’’ but is 

not thereby self-legislating (autonomous).

44 


understanding are in free play.’’ 17 Imaginative free play may occur either 

in ‘‘merely judging’’ the object in a wholly disinterested way, allowing my 

imagination to play freely with the forms that the object presents to 

perception; or it may occur in ‘‘productive’’ form in the artist, where it is 

used to produce and exhibit ‘‘aesthetic Ideas’’ – indeterminate ‘‘inner 

intuitions’’ that ‘‘prompt much thought’’ but cannot be grasped discursively. 

18 In both cases judgment determines its object in accordance 

with feeling rather than objective law. 19 

But what is the ultimate value of this radical freedom – this lack of 

constraint described by Kant’s aesthetics? It is quite clear that moral 

freedom is priceless, as Kant would say. It has an absolute value as a 

necessary condition of virtuous behavior. But the time off for free play 

that Kant grants the imagination within the carefully circumscribed territory 

of reflective judgment at the same time suggests a certain immaturity 

and lack of importance relative to those realms of human endeavor 

that are capable of self-governance and autonomy. 

To be fair, Kant, like Lessing, allows that beautiful art is valuable as a 

means to civilizing human beings (V: 433–434). Moreover, Kant believes 

that our experience of the beautiful is social – that is, our interest in the 

beautiful actually arises only in society, where the possibility of communicating 

aesthetic feelings exists (V: 296ff, V: 205n.). And although 

Kant argues that aesthetic experience does not make us more virtuous, he 

holds that respect for objects in nature may facilitate respect for our 

fellow human beings (V: 354). Nevertheless, at best it seems that for Kant 

the exercise of our imagination in aesthetic judgment of the beautiful may 

socialize us by producing in us a sense of the worth of other human 

beings as part of the natural world. 20 

But it can and should be objected at this point that a feeling of 

harmony produced in us by imagination’s freely reflecting upon the 

beautiful and actually being free and in harmony with the world around 

17 

Kant, Section 9, V:217–218.: ‘‘der Gemüthszustand in dem freien Spiele der Einbildungskraft und 

des Verstandes.’’ 

18 

Cf. Section 48, V:313 for the distinction between taste and artistic production, and Section 49, 

V: 313–314 for the introduction of the notion of aesthetic Ideas. 

19 

The sense in which feeling can be the determining ground of a judgment of taste is discussed in my 

article ‘‘Kant’s Concept of Beauty,’’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 3 (1986): pp. 311–324. 

20 

In ‘‘Imagination and Temporality in Kant’s Theory of the Sublime’’ ( Journal of Aesthetics and Art 

Criticism 42 [1984], pp. 303–315) Rudolf Makkreel argues quite convincingly that Kant’s account of 

the imagination’s judgments of the sublime may play an important role in the integration of the 

faculties in Kant’s overall theory. If I am correct, then the imagination’s function in making 

judgments about beauty must also have a key role to play in reintegrating imagination. 

understanding, and practical reason.


us are two different things. Moral freedom is no illusion because it is 

based on a requirement of practical reason – it is necessary for the possibility 

of any moral action whatsoever. But freedom of the imagination 

on Kant’s account is the precondition only of our being able to look at 

the world as if it were orderly and in harmony with our understanding. 

Imaginative freedom does not constitute this order and harmony. In fact, 

as moral agents we are constantly faced with evidence that the natural 

world is not well ordered with respect to our best efforts. That is, we are 

regularly faced with the sight of moral virtue going unrewarded. It seems 

the best thing an imagination ‘‘at play’’ can offer is a way of forgetting 

this fact for the time it takes us to judge an object in a wholly disinterested, 

‘‘playful’’ manner, since during the time in which we are contemplating 

the beauty of an object we are free from all interest. The 

judgment that something is beautiful is not made for the purpose of 

producing an interest (V: 205n.). Kant’s aesthetic theory is unique in the 

Enlightenment insofar as it gives up the rationalist view that the ultimate 

purpose of art is the perfection of humanity. So the challenge for Kant 

remains: Does the freedom of the imagination have any value beyond 

providing a temporary respite from a morally hostile world? 

imagining the highest good 

Already in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant shows some discomfort over 

the apparently unbridgeable gap that his philosophy creates between the 

human being as a causally determined member of the sensible world and 

the human being as a free member of an intelligible world or ‘‘realm of 

ends.’’ The problem emerges here in the following form: practical reason 

tells me what I ought to do – i.e., what is moral – in the command: ‘‘Do 

that through which you become worthy of happiness.’’ But if I do so act, 

may I therefore hope to obtain happiness in this world? The answer must 

be ‘‘yes,’’ Kant says, for in our thinking about morality it is necessary ‘‘to 

assume that everyone has reason to hope for happiness to the extent to 

which they have, through their conduct, become worthy of it ... The 

system of morality is therefore inseparably ... bound up with that of 

happiness.’’ 21 In the intelligible world – a world of purely rational creatures 

– happiness would necessarily be proportionate with morality, since 

in such a world our only desire would be a rational one – namely, the 

21 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A809/B837.

46 


desire to be reasonable. In such a world moral freedom would itself be the 

cause of happiness. 

But Kant immediately qualifies his claim that the hope for happiness in 

proportion to virtue is a necessary assumption with the reminder that 

‘‘such a system of self-rewarding morality is only an Idea, the carrying out 

of which rests on the condition that everyone do what they ought’’ (A801/ 

B838). Our moral obligations remain binding, however, even if others do 

not behave morally; and in the natural world, where motives and forces 

other than reverence for the moral law are at work, there is no guarantee 

that the consequences of our moral actions will be happy ones. So, Kant 

concludes here, ‘‘The alleged necessary connection of the hope of happiness 

with the necessary endeavor to render the self worthy of happiness 

cannot, therefore, be known through reason.’’ 

The existence of a moral world cannot be known, and yet in the 

Critique of Practical Reason Kant tells us that obedience to the moral law 

requires that we adopt the highest good (summum bonum) as our goal, 

where the highest good is interpreted as ‘‘the systematic connection of 

morality as the supreme good [bonum supremum] with the totality of 

other goods (summed up as ‘happiness’).’’ 22 In other words reason 

commands us to try to create the moral world on earth even though this is 

an end whose practical possibility cannot be known. If morality requires 

that we strive to bring about the highest good, and yet we cannot know 

the present or future existence of such a world, then, Kant says, we must 

at least be able to believe it is possible to bring it about, for otherwise the 

moral law itself would be illusory: ‘‘If, therefore, the highest good is 

impossible according to practical rules, then the moral law which commands 

that it be furthered must be fantastic, directed to empty imaginary 

ends, and consequently inherently false’’ (V: 114). 

Our hope to bring about the highest good can be founded only on a 

rational belief in its possibility; and this in turn is possible, Kant argues, 

only if we postulate the immortality of the soul (so that, since the highest 

good is conditional on the moral perfection of individuals, something 

that can be completed only in an ‘‘infinite progress’’ can be rendered 

practicable) and the existence of a supreme being capable of seeing to it 

that the realm of ends is actualized in a life hereafter (V: 122, 124). 

22 Critique of Practical Reason, V:110–111. Allen Wood’s explanation (in Kant’s Ethical Thought, 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) of the summum bonum in the second Critique is 

exceptionally clear and helpful in laying out the relationship of the concept’s component parts. See 

chapter 9 Sect. 4.2, ‘‘The highest good,’’ pp. 311–313.


This move is highly problematic within the context of the Critical 

philosophy, however. First of all, it reintroduces into the heart of Kant’s 

ethics fundamental concepts of speculative metaphysics that had been 

discredited by critical reason, a deeply inconsistent move on the surface of 

it. We shall return to this issue in chapter 5. Lewis White Beck argues that 

Kant does loosen the strictures of critique at this point, allowing the truth 

of the postulates a role in theoretical reasoning, if only a very small role: 

‘‘I think there can be no doubt that he regarded his argument as an 

argument for that which was posited in this way and not merely as an 

argument for the necessity of this positing’’(p. 264), although Beck also 

points out that ‘‘all that Kant’s argument, if otherwise valid, entails is the 

necessity of making certain postulations as acts, and not the truth of the 

postulates thus made’’ (p. 263). 

Rather than accept this methodological inconsistency on Kant’s part, it 

is tempting to see the introduction of God and immortality as strategically 

placating the reactionary forces coming to power in Prussia at that 

time. Thus, Frederick Beiser suggests that at a juncture in the Critical 

philosophy where they might be seen as doing least ‘‘harm,’’ religious 

doctrines are used in a way calculated to put the censors off and allow 

Kant to make the more pressing argument for freedom of speech. 23 

Certainly, as Beiser points out, the introduction of a supernatural power 

to hold out the promise of accomplishing what ought to be a human task 

constitutes a deep betrayal of his political values, suggesting that a just 

state can be accomplished only with the help of God, in the hereafter. 

Susan Neiman agrees that Kant’s postulation of God and immortality 

amounts to an admission of the impossibility of accomplishing the 

command of the moral law to create a moral state within nature. She 

takes issue with claims, made by Velkley and Yovel, that the notion of the 

highest good is intended by Kant to be realizable in this world, even if 

only in the course of a long history towards progress. Neiman sees Kant as 

profoundly skeptical about the possibility of this realization. Even if 

human beings could manage to perfect themselves as moral agents and do 

everything right, the cosmic injustice of natural evil remains to thwart our 

plans and dash our moral hopes of instituting the highest good within the 

world of nature. At the same time, Kant recognizes that ‘‘restructuring 

human affairs according to [reason’s] laws would go a long way toward 

23 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press, 1992). He calls it, and not without some justice, ‘‘a compromise with the 

status quo’’ on Kant’s part, p. 53.

48 


achieving it’’ and therefore, she says, Kant ‘‘emphasizes’’ it. 24 Thus she 

argues that there is simply an irresolvable tension in Kant’s critical 

philosophy that the invocation of the concept of the ideal of the highest 

good and the postulation of God and immortality does not alleviate. The 

adoption of postulates of progress might serve better, Neiman argues, to 

solve the needs of practical reason for rational hope by ‘‘substituting faith 

in human progress for faith in God’’: 

Since rational faith does not concern the objects themselves but our moral needs 

and capacities, Kant might well allow that the content of the postulates could 

change while the form of the argument for their necessity remained the same. 

Thus it might be the case that reason’s needs have changed to the point that we 

do not, two hundred years after Kant, need to represent to ourselves a personal 

God to sustain our moral convictions but can make do with some more general 

assumption. The extreme indeterminacy of Kant’s postulate of God’s existence 

lends weight to this idea ... Might this very minimal postulation of God’s 

existence be replaced by the postulate that the world as a whole is progressing 

toward the best? There is some reason to think so. Kant connects the latter 

postulate with the former one and holds its assertion to be a need of practical 

reason. (p. 179) 

In other words, what matters to morality is not what we postulate so 

much as how we postulate it. Neiman argues that the postulates’ function 

is not to make truth claims about the world, but to regulate our attitude 

and consequent behavior. What matters is not that we assert the existence 

of some particular object (although, as Beck points out, in fact we do) but 

that we adopt an attitude or ‘‘Denkungsart’’ – a way of thinking – that 

involves trust or confidence in our own abilities. Kant’s definition of 

rational faith in the ‘‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’’ lends support to 

this interpretation: 

‘‘Faith (as habitus, not as actus [as attitude, not as an act]) is reason’s moral way of 

thinking in assenting to what is not accessible to theoretical cognition. It is the 

mind’s steadfast principle to assume as true what we must necessarily presuppose 

as a condition for the possibility of achieving the highest moral final purpose, 

and to assume this because of our obligation to this final purpose and despite the 

fact that we have no insight into whether achieving it is possible (nor consequently, 

into whether the conditions are possible under which alone we can 

conceive of achieving that aim). (V: 471–472) 

24 

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

p. 178.


Felicitas Munzel makes the parallel argument with respect to the conditions 

required for the perfection of character and rational faith, namely 

that character development requires putting our trust in the ‘‘promises’’ 

of reason. In Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, she argues that the aim 

of the postulates is steadfastness of character such that we may fulfill our 

duties to ourselves and to the world around us without faltering. Arguing 

that feeling will not do, Munzel defends the view that the rational faith of 

the postulates is just the application of the reflective principles of judgment 

– i.e., adopting belief in God’s existence or in our own immortality 

are simply applications of the maxim of rational faith that Kant defines in 

the Critique of Judgment. As she puts it: 

In view of the moral task, practical reason in a reflective mode of judgment avails 

itself, against the doubts raised through the failure of speculative attempts at 

demonstration, of the subjective principle of ‘‘regarding as true what is inaccessible 

to theoretical cognition,’’ but necessary from a moral point of view. To 

do so is just what it means to have rational faith. (pp. 206–207) 

Munzel’s account skirts the issue of whether the postulates make an 

existence claim and its attendant difficulties. Like Neiman, she sees the 

issue as one of adopting an attitude or ‘‘conduct of thought’’: Adoption of 

the postulates, on Munzel’s account, is the adoption of a ‘‘moral Denkungsart,’’ 

or way of thinking in which the ‘‘human subject’’ makes a 

decision about how to think, not about the world, but about herself. In 

Munzel’s words, ‘‘she invokes the maxim of rational faith’’ and thus 

‘‘reconfirms’’ her moral resolve: 

What this renewed steadfastness consists in, what judgment has brought about, is 

a relationship of inner trust between practical reason and the human agent, a 

trust that undergirds the proactive working toward the good by the morally good 

character in the world. (p. 213) 

The judgment made by the individual subject is, on Munzel’s account, a 

kind of contract or ‘‘promise’’ with her own practical reason: ‘‘it is an 

inner promissory note’’ with reason promising the realizability of the 

good in nature, and the subject accepting and responding to the promise 

by striving ‘‘steadfastly’’ to fulfill it. In essence, Munzel’s account sees the 

postulates as the subject’s morally motivated leap of faith into the abyss of 

human reason, an act of trust that energizes the mind for the long trudge 

down the road of moral rectitude. 

There is much to be said for this de-ontologized account of the 

doctrine of rational faith and the postulates. It avoids the issue of Kant’s

50 


‘‘betrayal’’ of the Critical view of metaphysical speculation, and 

emphasizes what was surely an important point for Kant, namely that if 

the moral law commands us to do something, we are necessitated to act, 

and that means adopting whatever conditions are themselves necessary for 

that action. It is easy to move from Neiman and Munzel’s insight that the 

conditions themselves are not Kant’s concern so much as the attitude of 

steadfastness that they make possible, to the conclusion that the conditions 

themselves are internal: They involve setting up a relationship of 

trust with one’s own reason. Faith in God on these accounts becomes just 

one version of what is at bottom a faith in reason. 

As appealing as this move is, I think it misses one crucial aspect of the 

problem: the postulates, in order to work, must connect us to the world 

in all its contingent variability. It is after all this world that causes the 

problem for reason, both with respect to developing our moral character 

over a lifetime and to developing a more just social environment over the 

course of history. Whether in this world or the next, it is hard to see how 

any mere postulate of reason, whether as a belief in God and immortality, 

or in human progress in history, or as a pact with reason itself, really 

solves the problem for Kant, because the problem is not just one of 

attitude, but of rational motivation: It is a matter of having good reason to 

imagine ourselves achieving what reason demands, of feeling that possibly 

we ourselves can accomplish a just world. I might decide to believe in 

God, try to believe in God, but if I don’t really feel or can’t imagine that 

God exists, there is, on this view, no hope for me. It may be true that 

some people do feel God exists, and imagine that they know God, but 

one person’s revelation is another’s delusion, and no amount of moral 

commanding can force a feeling on the unbeliever. What is needed is 

really twofold: First, some concrete, natural evidence that the world is 

rational and amenable to our moral projects, and second, evidence that 

we can, ourselves, accomplish them. 

Kant was painfully aware of the lack of such evidence in most of 

human experience. Neiman correctly points out that Kant was no optimist, 

arguing that nonetheless for him ‘‘optimism becomes ... a moral 

obligation’’ (p. 181). But hope is not a purely rational attitude – it is an 

incentive, and incentives involve feelings. 25 Feelings cannot simply be 

adopted at will, much less rightfully commanded. True, the moral law 

25 That is, with one notable exception: the moral law can be an incentive, although ‘‘why it supplies 

an incentive’’ is an ‘‘insoluble problem for human reason.’’ But the moral laws’ effects can be felt 

and hence can be motivating in a negative way, since the suppression or eradication of feeling is 

also felt – as pain (V: 72–73).


demands that we mortals strive to bring about the highest good, and 

consequently our hope to achieve this end must rest on a belief in our own 

ability to do so. But it will not do merely to ‘‘postulate’’ that a God exists 

who will complete the task for us, or that we have an infinite amount of 

time in which to accomplish our goal, since such a position amounts to 

admitting the hopelessness of our quest as mere mortals. 26 Finally, even 

(following Neiman’s suggestion) postulating as a regulative idea that ‘‘the 

world as a whole is progressing toward the best,’’ remains a hopeless belief 

if we do not really feel that it is true. Reason’s command, Kant says, is that 

we strive to bring about the highest good here, in the world and on our 

own power. Unless we can imagine ourselves accomplishing progress for 

ourselves, sooner or later we will be overcome with despair over the Sisyphian 

dimension of the task reason has set for us to accomplish. Lewis W. 

Beck’s somewhat dismissive position would thus appear to be the only 

friendly interpretative option: Kant’s claim that reason commands us to 

seek the highest good could amount to no more than a reiteration of the 

command to obey the Categorical Imperative, and ‘‘[the concept of the 

highest good] is not important in Kant’s philosophy for any practical 

consequences it might have.’’ 27 

It may be argued that postulating God’s existence does not relieve 

human beings of their duty to work for a better world here and now, 

because God is only postulated as the necessary ground and guarantor of 

the possibility of our eventual success. Yirmiyahu Yovel argues this way in 

Kant and the Philosophy of History: ‘‘At most, God helps us to help 

ourselves. The solution that Kant suggests to the antinomy is to be found 

in the ability not of God but of man, although man’s ability presupposes 

the existence of God and cannot be deduced from his own immanent 

characteristics.’’ 28 But, again, this is a solution to the antinomy only if we 

can give a plausible, genuinely motivating account of how it is possible 

that we ‘‘help ourselves’’ create a moral world. I want to suggest that 

Kant’s account of imaginative freedom in the Critique of Judgment 

provides the material for such an account. 

Kant’s purpose in introducing the postulates of God and immortality 

was to provide a rational ground for our hope for the possibility of 

26 

John R. Silber, ‘‘Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good as Immanent and Transcendent,’’ 

Philosophical Review 68 (1959), pp. 474–475, makes a similar criticism of Kant’s argument. See 

Allen Wood’s response to this article in Kant’s Ethical Thought, p.407, n34. 

27 

Lewis White Beck, Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 1996), p. 245. 

28 

Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 

p. 96.

52 


bringing about the highest good, so that it is not, in Yovel’s words, ‘‘just a 

delusion of the imagination and the faculty of desire.’’ 29 But in the third 

Critique imagination is not treated as a faculty of illusion, but as a 

powerful creative faculty, a capacity to reform nature: 

For the imagination (as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when it 

creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives 

it ... In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association ... for 

although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process 

that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses 

nature. (V: 314) 

Through imagination we are capable, in thought at least, of taking what 

nature gives us and working it up into ‘‘another nature.’’ As natural 

physical beings we are bound by the laws of nature, as moral agents by the 

law of practical reason, but as imaginative creatures we are constrained by 

neither and thus have creative power. 

This suggests that Kant’s account of imaginative freedom in the third 

Critique offers a solution to the problem of grounding our belief in the 

possibility of bringing about the highest good. The existence of a moral 

world presupposes agency that can bring it about, and the command to 

seek it presupposes that we can believe it possible through our own 

agency. Our ability to represent such a world in imagination would allow 

us to believe in the possibility of a moral world on earth and in ourselves 

as creators of that world. 30 Human beings as members of the natural 

realm are in a position, to some extent at least, to rearrange the physical 

and social order of which they are a part. Moreover, as beings capable of 

reflective sensuous response to that world – that is, as beings with imaginations 

– it is open to us to represent intuitively a natural world in 

which individual human needs are met to such a degree that we all behave 

rationally and are happy. 31 Such a world would be the highest good – a 

perfectly moral world. 

Kant grants that we are able to think the highest good as a rational Idea 

and to represent in imagination a world that ‘‘surpasses nature.’’ But this 

29 Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, p.59. 

30 Here I am in agreement with Yovel’s account of the development of the concept of the highest 

good in Kant: It is with the third Critique that this concept takes on great practical significance for 

human action and becomes ‘‘the summit of the historical enterprise.’’ Yovel, Kant and the 

Philosophy of History, p.75. 

31 Allen Wood, in Kant’s Ethical Thought, pp. 314 ff., points out that achieving a moral world for 

Kant necessarily requires acting in concert with others. This then would become part of any 

imaginative construction of the highest good: that it is carried out with others in community.


is all that is needed for the activity of trying to bring it about: the concept 

(in this case the Idea) of what we want, and the motivation to act on it. 

All Kant needs in order to claim that the Idea of the highest good is a 

necessary condition of morality is that we can believe it to be possible. To 

reword Lewis W. Beck’s account of the postulate of God’s existence: 

‘‘acknowledgment of the moral law ... requires only that I believe in the 

highest good’s [possible future] existence. Even if it does not exist and will 

not exist, the practical consequences for obedience to the moral law are 

the same.’’ 32 A major contribution of the third Critique is the argument 

that feelings of a special sort – aesthetic ones resulting from the free play 

of the imagination – can be universally communicable and valid for all. 

Thus the felt possibility of the highest good in imagining it may be all 

that is required to justify reason’s command that we try to bring it about. 

To make the point in yet another way, the ‘‘productive’’ imagination, 

in Kant’s account of empirical knowledge, serves the function of providing 

schemata for concepts – that is, of taking purely intellectual 

concepts and fitting them to intuitions. Why not suppose, then, that the 

imagination, when allowed freedom in aesthetic reflection to produce 

what Kant calls aesthetic Ideas, ‘‘inner intuitions’’ (V: 314), may thereby 

be capable of ‘‘schematizing’’ rational ideas like that of the highest good? 

Kant himself points out that the two are counterparts. Aesthetic ideas 

have no adequate concept, rational ideas no adequate intuition – both 

point beyond the realm of nature (V: 314). In Kant’s own language of 

schematism, the one ‘‘fits’’ the other. 

In his discussion of genius and the production of beautiful art Kant 

says that poetry ‘‘lets the mind feel its ability to use nature on behalf of 

and, as it were, as a schema of the supersensible’’ (i.e. of the intelligible or 

rational) (V: 326). He also says that aesthetic Ideas lend a ‘‘semblance of 

reality to rational ideas’’ (V: 314). Moreover, as we saw, Kant believes that 

the human imagination is powerful enough to envision new worlds. He 

says that imagination in poetry, for instance, ‘‘ventures to give sensible 

expression to rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, the 

realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on’’ (V: 314, emphasis mine). But 

if the imagination can represent these exalted ideas, why not also the 

realm of ends existing on earth? 

At this point, however, a problem arises. In the penultimate section of 

the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ (§ §59) Kant talks of beauty as a 

symbol of morality. Reflective aesthetic judgment may symbolize 

32 Beck, Commentary, p.262.

54 


morality, he says, inasmuch as it presents morality by analogy to beautiful 

natural forms. But, he continues, it cannot schematize morality; it cannot 

provide the sensible representations adequate to the task of representing a 

natural world that is also moral. A state, Kant tells us, can only be 

represented (vorgestellt) symbolically – for instance, as an animate body if 

it is ruled by constitutional law, or by a handmill if it is despotic – thus 

suggesting that no portrait – that is, no concrete representation – of the 

moral condition of society is possible. 

Yet it is difficult to see why Kant insists on the complete inability of 

imagination in free play to portray moral Ideas, given what he has already 

said about its creative power in reflective judgment. Part of the problem 

may lie with his definition of schemata as provided by imagination only 

for concepts of the understanding (Categories), together with his claim 

that ‘‘all intuitions supplied for concepts a priori are either schemata or 

symbols. Schemata contain direct, symbols indirect, exhibitions of the 

concept.’’ 33 Thus Kant quite emphatically precludes the possibility of any 

other type of schematization than that discussed in the first Critique. Yet 

at section 17 of the third Critique he suggests that a judgment is possible 

in which the imagination is in free play and at the same time directed to 

representing something in a non-symbolic way: 

Idea properly means a rational concept, and ideal the representation [Vorstellung] 

of an idea. Hence that archetype of taste, which does indeed rest on reason’s 

indeterminate Idea of a maximum, but which still can be represented [vorgestellt] 

not through concepts but only in an individual exhibition [Darstellung], may 

more appropriately be called the Ideal of the beautiful. Though we do not have 

such an Ideal in our possession, we do strive to produce it within us. But it will 

be merely an ideal of the imagination, precisely because it does not rest on 

concepts but rests on an exhibition, and the power of exhibition is the 

imagination. (V: 232) 

Later in this same section Kant suggests that some degree of success in 

exhibiting the Ideal of beauty is possible if ‘‘pure ideas of reason are 

united with a very strong imagination’’ in the viewer or the artist. Here 

Kant does not seem to have in mind mere symbolic representation of the 

beautiful. The Ideal of beauty has two components (Stucke): the rational 

Idea and the ‘‘aesthetic normal idea’’ (Normalidee, V:233). In explicating 

the empirical component of normalcy, Kant is quite clear that here there 

33 V: 352–359: ‘‘Alle Anschauungen, die man Begriffen a priori unterlegt, sind also entweder Schemate, 

oder Symbole, wovon die erstern directe, die zweiten indirecte Darstellungen des Begriffs 

enthalten.’’


will be definite (non-symbolic) characteristics to represent although these 

will vary relative to the collective experiences of particular groups of 

people. His discussion of the possibility of ‘‘making visible’’ moral 

attributes like ‘‘goodness of soul, or purity, or fortitude, or serenity etc.’’ 

and an earlier footnote in the same section (V: 235) make it quite clear 

that Kant has ordinary portraiture, not symbolism, in mind. Granted, 

here he argues that only humanity in the individual can be an Ideal of the 

imagination. But if the moral law requires us not only to be virtuous as 

individuals but also to attempt to bring about a moral society, then we 

must add social virtues to the list of human virtues that can be portrayed 

in imagination. Portraits of the truly moral human being must therefore 

also somehow convey the context within which individual morality can 

become effective: that is, such an art work would portray, if only 

implicitly, a moral world. At the very least it would seem that if the ideal 

of beauty can embody morality in individual human beings, then it 

should be equally possible (if not equally easy) to portray the social 

dimension of morality in the human community. If this is the case, then 

the imagination in its free reflection may be ‘‘applied’’ in the service of 

the ideal of beauty to enable us to believe in the possibility of the highest 

good as a result of human agency alone. 

Thus Kant could have used his account of imaginative freedom to 

reintegrate the sensuous and moral aspects of human nature. He does not 

do so, however, and it is important to ask why. It seems to me that Kant 

shrinks from the implications of his theory of imaginative freedom for at 

least two reasons. 34 One is that his concern in the third Critique is 

primarily with contemplation of natural beauty, while it is in the creative 

power of the imagination that its possible value for the moral realm first 

becomes evident. Of the sixty sections that make up the ‘‘Critique of 

34 There are, of course. many possible accounts of why Kant relies solely on the postulate of a 

supernatural being as ground of our hope to bring about the highest good. Yovel points to Kant’s 

determination to make the finite nature of human reason the Leitmotif of his philosophy (Kant and 

the Philosophy of History, p.24) . It may also be argued that Kant intended to combat enthusiasm 

(Schwärmerei) not only in such irrationalists as Jacobi but also even in ‘‘rationalist’’ philosophers 

like his friend Mendelssohn, who relied on the notion of an unexplained and apparently 

inexplicable ‘‘common sense’’ as the only check on the speculative flights of reason. To the extent 

that imagination is for Kant bound up with the notion of a common aesthetic sense and to the 

extent that imagination remains for him a ‘‘blind but indispensable function of the soul’’ (CPR 

A781B1O3), it may be argued that Kant feared letting enthusiasm into philosophy through the 

door of imaginative fiction masquerading as ‘‘common sense.’’ Cf. Kant’s essay ‘‘Was heisst. Sich 

im Denken orientiren?’’ VIII: 133–147. ‘‘What is Orientation in Thinking?,’’ in Critique of 

Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, Lewis White Beck, ed. (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 293–305. Thanks to James Schmidt for suggesting this last 

explanation.

56 


Aesthetic Judgment’’ only eleven are given over to a discussion of art and 

genius. Moreover, Kant believes that ‘‘a direct interest in the beauty of 

nature is always a mark of a good soul’’ since it involves respect for 

nature’s products. Interest in beautiful art, he states flatly, is no proof at 

all that someone is inclined to be moral. But he gives no argument for the 

last claim and he exhibits a general lack of appreciation for the fine arts. 

So his failure to draw out the consequences of the power of reflective 

imagination may be due simply to bias. What Kant could have said about 

art’s possible contribution to morality will be taken up in chapter 3. 

Another possible explanation for Kant’s failure to develop the implications 

of his theory of imaginative freedom for social change is by 

reference to his problematic views on obedience to the authority of the 

state and the nature of legitimate social change. Although he sympathized 

with bourgeois revolution in the American colonies and in France, Kant 

remained a vocal supporter of Frederick the Great and the Prussian state 

under that king. And although what is most egalitarian and humanistic in 

Kant’s ethics is due to Rousseau rather than Frederick, the Prussian leader 

exercised a strong influence on the intellectuals of his time, including 

Kant. 35 In ‘‘On the Common Saying, ‘That may be right in Theory, but 

it doesn’t work in Practice’ ’’ he argues that the claim that there is a right 

of public resistance would involve a contradiction inasmuch as no 

institutionalized power can provide for its own destruction, and in the 

‘‘Metaphysical Elements of Justice’’ he argues for the same reason that ‘‘it 

is the people’s duty to endure even the most intolerable abuse of supreme 

authority.’’ 36 Kant’s ‘‘Rousseauistic revolution’’ 37 in morals thus appears 

to be followed by a ‘‘restoration’’ in his political thought, where respect 

for outside authority seems to win out on both moral and legalistic 

grounds. A number of biographical explanations are possible, of course. 

In Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, Frederick Beiser argues 

that political conditions in Prussia at the time forced Kant to prioritize 

his political values, and that the strategy he opted (or in Beiser’s view, 

coopted) for in the end was to call for freedom of the press at the cost of 

35 In the third Critique Kant even quotes one of Frederick’s poems to illustrate a point about the way 

in which genius animates rational ideas (Section 49, V:315–314 [184]). 

36 ‘‘Uber den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein. taugt aber nicht für die Praxis’’ 

VIII: 303; the Rechtslehre of Metaphysik der Sitten. VI: 319 (trans. John Ladd as The Metaphysical 

Elements of Justice [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1965], p. 85); and Ak. VI: 372 (140–141). 

37 Cf. Lewis White Beck, ‘‘Was haben wir von Kant gelernt?,’’ in 5. Intemationaler Kant Kongress, 

Akten II (Bonn, 1982), p. 8 and ‘‘What Have We Learned from Kant?,’’ in Self and Nature in Kant’s 

Philosophy, ed. Allen W. Wood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 22.


suppressing his support for revolution. 38 Manfred Kuehn suggests that in 

Kant’s own mind, there was a distinction to be made between a right to 

rebellion and the case of the French revolution, which technically was not 

a rebellion and hence permissible on legal grounds. 39 

But however we explain Kant’s failure to attribute a ‘‘visionary’’ role to 

imaginative freedom – and this question will be taken up further in 

chapter 5 – we can nevertheless carry one step further the view, put forth 

by Beck and more recently by Allen Wood, Richard Velkley, and others, 

that Kant’s sympathetic attitude toward those revolutions that had 

already occurred was consistent with his teleological account of history. 40 

If Kant can argue that it is part of nature’s plan that humanity progress 

morally even through such ‘‘evils’’ as revolution, it would be plausible for 

him to hold that human imagination in its aesthetic reflective role is 

equipped literally to envision this progress – that is, to exhibit it in the 

imaginative Ideal of a moral human community. In other words, Susan 

Neiman’s suggestion that the highest good could rest on a secular postulation 

of human progress could actually become a vehicle for hope, but 

only once it is ‘‘embodied’’ in an imaginative and concrete vision of this 

society. 41 That Kant did not propound this solution need not be attributed 

to the requirements of either his moral or aesthetic theory but, in the 

end, may be due to the problematic nature of his views on political 

authority. Too much imaginative freedom can threaten the established 

order, and good Bü rger that he was, Kant could applaud Frederick the 

Great’s imperative ‘‘Think for yourself!’’ and yet comfortably follow up 

with ‘‘But do as you are told.’’ 42 Still, the concept of steadfast obedience 

to authority come what may was by no means Kant’s philosophical view, 

and such attitudes were already suspect in Kant’s time. A younger generation 

of poets and visionary reformers, both within Germany and 

outside its borders, was relying on Kant’s aesthetic theory to provide the 

groundwork for a metaphysics of social change. I hope to have shown that 

their use of that aesthetics was based on a consistent application of Kant’s 

38 Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, chapter 2, p.53. 

39 Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 375. 

40 Lewis White Beck. ‘‘Kant and the Right of Revolution,’’ Journal of the History of ldeas x 32 (1971), 

pp. 417ff.; Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant’s 

Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 

41 Neiman, The Unity of Reason. 

42 Cf. Kant. ‘‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufkläirung?’’ (Ak. VIII: 33–42) and in Lewis White 

Beck, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (pp. 85–92). For an interpretation of Kant as 

somewhat less of a conservative, see John Christian Laursen, ‘‘The Subversive Kant: The 

Vocabulary of ‘Public’ and ‘Publicity,’ ’’ Political Theory 14 (1986), pp. 584–603.

58 


account of aesthetic freedom to his moral theory, whether or not Kant 

himself would have condoned this application. 

I began by suggesting that Kant’s account of aesthetic freedom provides 

an important link between Lessing and Schiller, and it should now be 

easier to see how this could be so. Schiller was among the earliest and 

most important artist–philosophers to be influenced by Kant and to 

advocate the importance of aesthetics to the moral progress of the human 

race. Although Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man are 

typically viewed as the mature philosophical result of his coming to terms 

with Kant’s moral philosophy, Schiller was first introduced to Kant 

through the latter’s philosophy of history, and it was through it that 

Schiller first came to know Kant’s moral theory. 43 Moreover, his serious 

study of Kant began with the Critique of Judgment, and it was Kant’s long 

first introduction to this work that served as his introduction to the 

Kantian edifice as a whole. 44 It is thus plausible, in light of the course of 

his Kant study alone, to read Schiller’s views on aesthetic education as a 

working out of Kant’s teleological notion of historical progress in terms 

of theories advanced in the third Critique. Although the letters On the 

Aesthetic Education of Man involve a rejection of Kant’s emphasis on the 

absolute autonomy of moral experience in favor of a more integrated 

account of human nature, this is not necessarily an outright rejection of 

Kant’s views on morality. As we have seen, Kant himself brings the 

process of repatriating citizens of the moral world into the realm of nature 

by claiming in the second Critique that reason commands us to seek the 

highest good. Moreover, he provides the means according to which this 

repatriation may be carried out by outlining an extremely powerful 

notion of imaginative creativity as a human faculty capable of transcending 

nature without separation from nature. 

In light of this aspect of Kant’s philosophy, the Letters may be seen as a 

further development of the notion of imaginative freedom first given life 

by Lessing and philosophical depth by Kant. Schiller’s analysis of the 

formal and sensuous aspects of human life, and his account of a mediating 

and humanizing drive to ‘‘play’’ (der Spieltrieb) would have been 

impossible without Kant’s account of the free play of the imagination and 

the disinterested nature of judgments of taste. The crucial difference 

between Kant and Schiller lies in the latter’s claim that reconciling 

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

44 Buchwald, Schiller, p.174.


the rational and natural aspects of human nature is a requirement of 

reason: 

Reason must make this demand because it is reason – because it is its nature to 

insist on perfection and on the abolition of all limitation, and because any 

exclusive activity on the part of either the one drive or the other leaves human 

nature incomplete and gives rise to some limitation within it. Consequently, as 

soon as reason utters the pronouncement: Let humanity exist, it has by that very 

pronouncement also promulgated the law: Let there be beauty. 45 

Kant argues only that taste may enable us ‘‘to make the transition from 

sensible charm to a habitual moral interest without making too violent a 

leap’’ (V: 354). Yet the requirement of reason that we strive to attain the 

highest good, being a command both to strive for moral perfection and to 

try to reward that perfection with material happiness, really amounts to no 

more or less than the command that we strive to be fully human; or in 

Schiller’s words, it amounts to the pronouncement, ‘‘Let humanity exist.’’ If, 

as I have argued, the possibility of perfected humanity rests on the ability to 

represent this perfection in imagination, then Schiller simply gives voice to a 

view implicit in Kant’s philosophy – that reason requires the imaginative free 

play typical of our contemplation of beauty to fulfill its command. 

In concluding, it should be noted that On the Aesthetic Education of 

Man, in a Series of Letters (hereafter, Letters) is more than an explicit 

working out of a line of reasoning available to Kant in the third Critique. 

It is also an instantiation of an imaginative portrayal of the highest good. 

More often than not, Schiller’s Letters is read as a work of visionary 

literature, and rightly so. Even though by 1793, when the original letters 

were written, Schiller was thoroughly suspicious of artists with revolutionary 

intentions, still the Letters is clearly meant to be a portrait of a 

possible human community dominated by neither physical nor moral 

force. 46 Schiller’s ‘‘Aesthetic State’’ is an attempt to portray in Kant’s 

terms an ‘‘Ideal of the imagination.’’ 47 In so doing he embodies a position 

that Kant appeared unwilling to work out fully: ‘‘The human being has 

no need to flee the material world in order to prove himself as spiritual 

being.’’ 48 It would be left to one of Schiller’s most brilliant students, 

Friedrich von Hardenberg, later known as Novalis, and his Jena cohort to 

turn this insight into a poetic philosophical program. 

45 

Friedrich Schiller. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. 

Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 15th letter, para. 4, 

p. 103. 

46 

Cf. Letters, p.197 and commentary, pp. 286–287. 

47 48 

Letters, p.219. Letters, p.189.

chapter 3 

The interests of disinterest 

Kant’s deduction of our ‘‘peculiar ability’’ (sonderbares Vermögen, V:281) 

to make universally valid judgments about particulars without the aid of 

concepts and based solely on a feeling is as well known as his ‘‘deduction 

of judgments of taste’’ in the Critique of Judgment. Less familiar is his 

contention that this aesthetic reflective capacity involves certain demands 

on how we value the world around us. Having just presented his 

deduction, Kant claims that we can more readily understand the judgment 

of taste’s demand for agreement if we see that the mere ‘‘universal 

communicability as such of our feeling must already carry with it an 

interest for us’’ (V: 296). 1 That is, judgments of taste make demands on 

us analogous to the demands of morality, because, like moral interest in 

the good, aesthetic interests are bound up with a kind of duty. However, 

these interests of disinterest are more important to Kant than just as 

vehicles for explaining why taste can command the assent of everyone, 

and they clearly have implications beyond the justification of judgments 

of taste. In what follows, I want to suggest that Kant’s discussion of the 

interests of disinterest has significance for his views on art and morality, as 

well as for his position on how we ought to value nature. 

moral interest and intellectual interest 

in the beautiful 

Before looking at the broader implications of his views, it is necessary to 

discuss briefly Kant’s doctrine of ‘‘interest’’ and also to look closely at his 

arguments in Sections 41 and 42 to the effect that beauty gives rise to 

interests in us. 

1 This interest, Kant says, helps us to understand why we demand of others that they feel the pleasure we 

do in the beautiful. That is, we understand that reason has an interest in the morally good, and that this 

interest is bound up in certain ways with our duty to be moral. Similarly, our interest in the beautiful 

will be bound up with an analogous duty to be ‘‘aesthetic’’ (sensitive to beauty) (V: 296). 

60

The interests of disinterest 61 

‘‘[A]ll interest consists in pleasure in the existence [ ein Lust an der 

Existenz] of an object’’ (V: 296). Interest, therefore, is aesthetic in character. 

As we know already from Kant’s moral theory, interest is ‘‘that 

through which reason becomes practical’’ (reason becomes ‘‘a cause 

determining the will’’) (IV: 459). Thus an interest is practical and volitional 

in nature: ‘‘To will something and to have a liking for its existence, 

i.e., to take an interest in it, are identical’’ (V: 209). Here Kant further 

identifies the will with ‘‘the power of desire determined by reason,’’ so 

that it follows that to take an interest in something is rationally to desire 

the existence of the thing, or, to phrase it in such a way as to preserve its 

aesthetic aspect, to take an interest in something is to feel the need for the 

existence of something, where this feeling is itself determined by reason. 

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant defines ‘‘interest’’ to include a desire for 

the existence of something that is conditioned ‘‘pathologically’’ – that is, 

determined directly by some positive stimulus rather than by reason. 

Here, a sensation arouses a desire for the object, as in the case of the spicy 

dish that Kant is inclined to eat even though he knows, ‘‘by reason’’ that 

it will lead to bad consequences for his digestion (V: 207, 208 ). 2 

An interest can be either ‘‘direct’’ or ‘‘indirect [mittelbar, unmittelbar]’’ 

(IV: 459, V: 208). That is, something is desired for its own sake, or for its 

usefulness to some other desired end. The pathological (sensuous) kind of 

interest is ‘‘direct’’ – we like the thing as ‘‘good in itself [ an sich gut ]’’ – 

but, being conditioned by contingent factors, it is not capable of being 

universal. Other interests may be ‘‘indirect’’ – when we like something 

because it is useful to us – that is, when we consider it ‘‘instrumentally 

good.’’ But there are two kinds of interest which are both direct and 

capable of universalization: the morally good, which Kant says, ‘‘carries 

with it the highest interest’’ (V: 209), and the beautiful (V: 208: ‘‘What 

we call beautiful is also liked directly’’). A great deal has been written on 

the interest in the morally good that in the Foundations Kant says is the 

only pure (non-empirical) interest. 3 It is the notoriously difficult notion of 

a moral feeling of respect, a sensuous feeling itself conditioned only by ‘‘a 

mere thought containing nothing sensuous’’ (IV: 460) that motivates 

the truly moral action. In what follows, I will bracket the problems 

surrounding this doctrine in Kant’s moral theory in order to look more 

closely at the noteworthy fact that in the Critique of Judgment Kant no 

2 

In the Foundations he called these mere ‘‘sensuous impulses’’ (sinnliche Antriebe), not interests at all 

(IV: 459). 

3 

A very helpful summary of Kant’s ‘‘phenomenology of respect’’ is given in Henry E. Allison, Kant’s 

Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990 , chapter 6 , especially pp. 123 ff.).

62 


longer holds that the moral feeling of respect is the only direct nonempirical 

interest of which we are capable. 

For Kant, our pleasure in the object of the judgment of taste is not 

bound up with the desire for the existence of the object. This is what it 

means to say that we take a disinterested pleasure in the beautiful. ‘‘But,’’ 

Kant says, ‘‘it does not follow from this that, after the judgment has been 

made as a pure aesthetic one, an interest cannot be connected with it.’’ 

He continues somewhat cryptically: 

This connection, however, must always be indirect. In other words, we must 

think of taste as first of all connected with something else, so that with the liking 

of mere reflection on an object there can [then] be connected, in addition, a 

pleasure in the existence of an object ... For what we say in the case of cognitive 

judgments (about things in general) also holds for aesthetic judgments: a posse ad 

esse non valet consequentia [An inference from possible to actual is not valid]. 

(V: 296) 

This may be glossed as follows: In order for there to be an interest, there 

has to be an object whose existence is desired, but the ‘‘object’’ of a 

judgment of taste is the mere form of an actually existing object. This 

form may or may not really exist (I could be having a beautiful hallucination). 

Thus the disinterested pleasure (Wohlgefallen) in the form of 

the object (judgment of taste) must give rise to (be ‘‘connected’’ (verknüpft) 

with) the interested pleasure (Lust) 4 in the existence of that object 

via something other than this mere formal presentation. Kant allows two 

possibilities for this mediating connection of disinterest to interest: one 

‘‘empirical’’ and the other ‘‘intellectual.’’ In the first case, the pleasure in 

the existence of the object arises because of an ‘‘inclination inherent in 

human nature’’ to ‘‘sociability.’’ Because taste allows us to communicate 

even a feeling, it naturally furthers this inclination that all human beings 

have, and thus we are naturally interested in the object of the judgment of 

taste on these grounds. Kant uses contractarian metaphors (‘‘the concern 

for universal communicability is something everyone expects and 

demands from everyone else on the basis, as it were, of an original 

contract dictated by our very humanity’’ (V: 297)), but the ‘‘empirical 

interest in the beautiful’’ may be understood as a natural social urge that 

we have to share our delight in the beautiful object with others. This urge 

runs so deep that, Kant argues, we would cease to seek the beautiful in the 

4 All pleasures are in themselves the same for Kant, and can be distinguished only by the conditions 

that give rise to them. Thus the terminology is somewhat arbitrary (cf. Werner Pluhar, 

‘‘Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment,’’ trans. Werner Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge: 

Hackett, 1987, p.49n.).


absence of others with whom to share it. He does not argue that we 

would cease to be capable of experiencing beauty altogether, however. It 

is simply that my disinterested delight in the formal features of an object 

naturally gives rise to a pleasure in its existence because I want to bring 

others to it to share in my initial aesthetic pleasure. 

Having introduced the notion of an empirical interest in the beautiful, 

Kant divulges that he is now turning away from the deduction of taste to 

ask whether taste can be used ‘‘purposively’’ as a ‘‘transition from sense 

enjoyment to moral feeling’’ (V: 297–298). Because the empirical interest 

is just an inclination, albeit a very deeply rooted one, it is easily confused 

with other social inclinations and passions, and ‘‘can provide only a very 

ambiguous transition from the agreeable to the good.’’ So, in Section 42, 

he turns his attention to the other possibility available for connecting the 

pleasure of taste with a pleasure in the existence of the beautiful object: 

namely, a non-empirical connection. This connection of the two sorts of 

pleasure is intellectual, made a priori via ‘‘the will’s property of being 

determinable a priori by reason’’ (V: 296). 

The argument at Section 42 is one of Kant’s more fascinating ones, and is 

far-reaching in its implications if it succeeds. A great deal actually hangs on it, 

not only for his account of moral development but also for the problem of 

the unity of human subjectivity. As Kant himself says, if taste can be used 

purposively, ‘‘we would also be showing that judgment is the mediating link in 

the chain of humanity’s a priori powers’’ (V: 298). What Kant wants to do here 

is to show that the interest connected with the beautiful is sufficiently like 

that of moral interest to allow a kind of psychological transition-throughclose-association 

from aesthetic values to moral values. He wants to do this 

by showing that a direct (non-instrumental) interest in the beautiful ‘‘is 

always a mark of a good soul’’ and ‘‘indicates at least a mental attunement 

favorable to moral feeling.’’ (That he limits this to the beautiful in nature, 

excluding art, is a point that I shall return to shortly.) He does not want to 

show that interest in the beautiful, even an a priori interest, is identical to 

moral interest: ‘‘the feeling for the beautiful is distinct in kind from moral 

feeling’’ (V: 298). The similarity is that, like aesthetic reflective judgment, 

moral judgment is not based on an interest. 

We know from Kant’s ethical theory that moral judgment gives rise to 

an interest that we call ‘‘moral feeling’’: an interest in obeying the moral 

law or, Kant says ‘‘respect for the moral law itself’’ (V: 75ff., 80): 

But [this feeling of respect] is a feeling which is directed only to the practical and 

which depends on the representation of a law only as to its form and not on

64 


account of any object of the law; thus it cannot be reckoned either as enjoyment 

or as pain, and yet it produces an interest in compliance with the law which we 

call moral interest, just as the capacity to take such an interest in the law (or 

respect for the moral law itself) is the moral feeling properly speaking. (V: 80) 

This practical interest of reason in the moral law is also an interest in 

fulfilling it: that is, in doing what the law commands. Although pure 

practical moral interest – respect for the law – is not a feeling of pleasure 

or pain in the presence of ‘‘the object’’ of the law, it does depend on there 

being at least a possibility of our being able to bring about that which the 

law demands. As we saw in chapter 2, in the Antinomy of Pure Practical 

Reason (V: 113ff.), Kant insists that reason requires us to strive to bring 

about the highest good, understood by him as the greatest possible 

connection of moral virtue with happiness in this world. Reason has an 

interest, as Kant puts it, in the ‘‘objective reality’’ of its moral ideas. Kant 

returns to this issue in his aesthetics, arguing at Section 42 that when we 

contemplate the beautiful it cannot be a matter of complete indifference 

to us that nature here ‘‘shows a trace or gives a hint that it contains some 

basis or other for us to assume’’ an orderliness that may be conducive to 

the state of justice we morally desire. ‘‘Hence,’’ Kant says, ‘‘if someone is 

directly interested in the beauty of nature, we have cause to suppose that 

he has at least a predisposition to a good moral attitude’’ (V: 300–301). 

Thus a direct interest in natural beauty is akin to, but not identical 

with, moral interest in the good. Caring for beauty in nature suggests that 

a person is moved by the possibility that she belongs there, too. The 

difference is that intellectual interest in the beautiful is ‘‘free’’ while 

intellectual interest in the moral is based immediately upon ‘‘objective 

laws’’ (V: 301). Indeed, this difference is precisely why we can call our 

interest in the beautiful a direct interest: we do not care about the existence 

of the object because of its instrumental link to our own moral 

interests (e.g. the moral idea of the highest good), but rather we care for it 

just for what it contingently is. Kant says here that what we are (directly) 

interested in is ‘‘rather the beauty’s characteristic in itself of qualifying for 

such a link, which therefore belongs to it intrinsically [die ihr innerlich 

zukommt].’’ 

This can be illustrated in the following way: In the process of making 

an aesthetic reflective judgment about the beauty of an object I am also 

(concurrently, as a moral being) feeling the need for the existence of this 

object for its own sake. This direct interest in the object is possible 

because I am charged by my own reason with the task of bringing 

moral order into the natural world – a severe demand on my nature


that hardly seems possible. As such I am ‘‘morally’’ interested in finding 

that nature outside me, because of what appears to be the rational 

orderliness and purposiveness of the object I am contemplating, may be 

suited to beings like myself. Thus my disinterested aesthetic reflection 

upon the object also gives rise to my caring about the object, wanting it to 

exist, for its own sake, even though it may be of no use to me, or 

may even cause me harm. I take a direct interest in it. Kant explains as 

follows: 

Cons ider som eone who is all b y himse lf (and has no intention of communi cating 

his observ ations to oth ers) and who contem plates the bea utiful shape of a wild 

flower, a bird , an insect, etc., out of admi ratio n and love for them, and woul d 

not want nature to be entirely witho ut them even if th ey provid ed him no 

prospec t of benefit but instead perha ps even som e harm . Such a person is takin g 

a dire ct inte rest in the beauty of na ture, and this interes t is inte llectual. That is, 

not only does he like nature ’s product for its form, but he also likes its existe nce, 

even tho ugh no cha rm of sen se is involve d; and he also does not connec t that 

existenc e with any purpose whatever. (V: 299 ) 

The reason I am capable of desiring the natural object for its own sake, 

however, has to do with my intellectual/moral need to find at least a 

‘‘hint’’ in nature that my moral actions will not be in vain. My interest in 

the object is direct – it is not for the sake of morality that I admire and love 

it and desire its existence – rather that direct interest that Kant also calls 

‘‘admiration’’ and ‘‘love’’ is ‘‘at least an attunement favorable to moral 

feeling.’’ 5 Love of nature, in other words, is a climate of the spirit within 

which respect for our duty flourishes. 6 

Kant ends this section with the remarkable claim (for him) that we can 

and do require this admiration and love for nature of everyone: 

for we conside r som eone’s way of thinking to be coa rse and ignoble if he has no 

feeling for bea utiful nature ... and sticks to the enjoyments of me re sense that he 

gets from meals or the bottle. (V: 302–303) 

5 See Karl Ameriks, ‘‘On Paul Guyer’s Kant and the Experience of Freedom,’’ Philosophy and 

Phenomenological Research, 60 (2) (1995), 361–367. 

6 See Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘‘Critical’’ Link of Morality, 

Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 , chapter 5 , 

‘‘Moral Spiritedness and the Relation of Aesthetic and Moral Cultivation’’). Munzel’s account still 

insists on the ‘‘hierarchical’’ nature of the aesthetic response (feeling) to moral reason. She does not 

see love of nature – i.e., this climate of spirit – as a source for moral heartiness and cheerfulness – 

i.e., for moral hope. (See, esp., p. 305.)

66 


intellectual interests in nature, art, 

and other people 

To summarize so far: I have tried to unravel and make somewhat more 

intuitive Kant’s distinction between moral interest and intellectual 

interest in the beautiful. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to focus 

on this last claim that we ‘‘can’’ and ‘‘do’’ require a feeling of love for 

nature. I use the term ‘‘love’’ here intentionally, for, as we saw, it is the 

term Kant himself uses, following Burke (V: 277) for the feeling we have 

for nature when we value it for its own sake. 7 The claim that love can be 

required is a startling one in light of Kant’s sharp division between 

pathological and practical love: 

for love as an inclination cannot be commanded. But beneficence from duty, 

even when no inclination impels it and even when it is opposed by a natural and 

unconquerable aversion, is practical love, not pathological love; it resides in the 

will and not in the propensities of feeling, in principles of action and not in 

tender sympathy [in schmelzender Teilnehmung]; and it alone can be commanded. 

(Foundations IV: 399) 

Where does the love for nature that we can and do require of others fit 

into this division? It cannot be an inclination. That much we already 

know from what Kant tells us about the nature of an interest in the 

beautiful, which is based on contemplative pleasure and not mere sense 

stimulation. Hence it is not pathological. Yet it is based on feeling – a 

disinterested feeling, to be sure, not tender sympathy – but a pleasure 

nonetheless. And although it is an interest that involves the will – that is, 

it is a desire determined by reason – still it cannot be called practical or be 

said to lie in ‘‘principles of action.’’ The love of nature (the direct interest 

based on disinterested pleasure) is not practical love (although the 

capacity for practical love may be a necessary condition for it), but is itself 

based rather on contemplation. It seems as if Kant has made theoretical 

room for a third kind of love, neither practical nor pathological: a kind of 

‘‘reflective’’ love for nature. 

Given that Kant has already argued that we may ‘‘demand agreement’’ 

for judgments of taste based on their reflective nature, it is not surprising 

that he would argue that reflective as well as practical love can be commanded. 

Kant seems to suggest as much when he claims that we require 

that others take a direct interest in beautiful nature. But this command 

cannot be a categorical imperative, because the conditions under which 

7 See also V: 267: ‘‘The beautiful prepares us for loving something, even nature, without interest.’’ 

Here Kant should be read as meaning ‘‘indirect’’ or instrumental interest. See also V: 380.


such an interest are first made possible are contingent on our experience 

of beautiful nature. Kant tells us that ‘‘the mind cannot meditate about 

the beauty of nature without at the same time finding its interest aroused’’ 

(V: 300). But that ‘‘the mind’’ finds itself in the presence of beautiful 

nature in the first place, or has the leisure to meditate upon it when in its 

presence, is not entirely within our control. Growing up in a povertystricken 

urban environment might very well preclude the possibility of 

contact with beautiful nature. Whereas Kant would argue that even the 

most deprived human being, so long as she retains her ability to reason at 

all, can always turn inward for the motivation necessary to be moral, there 

may well be situations where natural beauty is simply not accessible. If 

there is a command, it would, like the interest itself, have to be of a 

different type than any Kant has so far distinguished: it would have to be 

commanded on the condition that beautiful nature exists and is accessible 

for contemplation. 

Given Kant’s view that a direct intellectual interest in the beautiful 

explains the possibility of ‘‘a transition from sense enjoyment to moral 

feeling’’ (V: 297), it might also follow that we have a moral obligation to 

develop a love for nature in ourselves. 8 It may also follow that, if love of 

nature furthers and develops moral feeling, and if, as Kant suggests in the 

Groundwork (IV: 417), ‘‘Whoever wills the end ... wills also the indispensably 

necessary steps to it,’’ then we may have an obligation to bring 

about the conditions under which reflective judgment of beautiful nature is 

possible for others as well as for ourselves. All of which suggests interesting 

refutations of those who malign Kant’s philosophy as inimical to a serious 

environmental ethic because Kant has no room for intrinsic value in nature. 

9 But Kant’s notions of aesthetic reflective interest have implications for 

two other areas where Kant is often criticized, namely his views on the 

value of art relative to nature and of the value of human embodiment. 

Kant’s claim that an intellectual love for nature is associated with a 

moral attitude came to have a certain intuitive value in the early twentieth 

century, when baser human instincts put wilderness so seriously at risk all 

over the globe. (Although, had Kant had occasion to speak with some 

twentieth-century proponents of ‘‘deep ecology’’ he might have seen that 

love of nature and respect for humanity are not necessarily conjoined.) 

What does not make sense is his insistence, in the same passage, that love 

8 See Paul Guyer’s argument in Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 

9 I discuss these issues at length in ‘‘Beauty, Autonomy and Respect for Nature,’’ L’Esthétique de 

Kant/Kants Ästhetik/Kant’s Aesthetics (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995).

68 


for art is no indication whatsoever of a ‘‘beautiful soul.’’ Of course, even 

among philosophers Kant is accused of being something of a Philistine 

when it came to art. Certainly he maintained a certain contempt for the 

bourgeois man of taste: 

virtuosi of taste, who not just occasionally but apparently as a rule are vain, 

obstinate, and given to ruinous passions, can perhaps even less than other people 

claim the distinction of being attached to moral principles. (V: 298) 

By ‘‘taste’’ in this context, however, Kant is not referring to pure judgments 

of taste, but rather to the ability to ‘‘judge the products of fine art 

with the greatest correctness and refinement.’’ Such connoisseurship is of 

course not the result of simple aesthetic reflection, but requires a great 

deal of theoretical knowledge of art, and finesse in applying it. For Kant, 

such knowledge apparently taints the connoisseur’s interest in the object 

so that it is never valued purely for its own sake, but always for its use 

only. The sheer bias of Kant’s position is apparent when his view of artists 

is contrasted with his view of scientists. The parallel case of the scientist’s 

theoretical knowledge does not, it seems, interfere with his ability to 

admire and love the object being studied for its own sake. In the Critique 

of Practical Reason (V: 160) he recounts approvingly the tale of Leibniz 

carefully replacing the insect upon its leaf after studying it as proof of how 

an ‘‘observer of nature finally comes to like objects that at first offended 

his senses.’’ 

Perhaps Kant’s views were occasioned by his own lack of interest. He 

does give an argument for why we may require others to take a direct 

interest in nature, but no such requirement holds for a direct interest in 

art. This is so, he says, for one of two reasons: Either because art is such a 

good imitation that it is deceptive – it fools us into taking it to be nature, 

so that our liking for it is really a (deluded) direct interest in nature; or we 

are aware of it as art and hence aware of the intention to please that went 

into its making. In the latter case, he concludes, our interest is only 

indirect – we desire the existence of the object not for the sake of the 

object in itself, but for the sake of the intentions (to please) that brought 

it into existence. What is missing from the art object, he asks, that makes 

us value it so differently from the natural object? In other words, why is it 

not possible to value an art object for its own sake? His answer is that the 

regularity in nature which we crave as moral agents seeking to be effective 

in nature is ‘‘hinted’’ at by beautiful natural objects, but not by art 

objects. Art objects are the product of ‘‘art’’ after all, and so cannot 

provide a clue of any sort about the world of nature in which we must


operate. They can tell us only about human intentions (when they are not 

altogether deceiving us). Thus they may ‘‘minister to vanity and perhaps 

to social joys,’’ but they cannot interest in a direct way. 

What is truly odd about this position is that Kant follows it almost 

immediately with a theory of fine art that defines it as ‘‘the art of genius, 

and genius as ‘‘the innate mental predisposition [he also calls it a ‘‘natural 

endowment’’ eine Naturgabe] through which nature gives the rule to art’’ 

(V: 307). Shortly thereafter he repeats that ‘‘nature in the subject gives the 

rule to art’’ (V: 307). So, fine art is the product of a gift from ‘‘the hand of 

nature’’ (V: 309) through which nature gives the rule to art. That practically 

makes the object of fine art a natural object; at least as much as a 

beautiful waterfall obeying laws of physical nature. It certainly mitigates 

the sharp division between natural and art objects, thus also mitigating 

the distinction between kinds of possible interest. After all, a beautiful 

artifact that cannot be explained by the artificer’s intentions, being the 

result of her natural inspiration, might be just as worthy of our interest on 

the grounds that some intrinsic natural order is manifested by it. That is, 

a work of natural genius ought to suggest ‘‘a trace or give a hint that 

[nature] contains some basis or other for us to assume in its products a 

lawful harmony with [our moral feeling]’’ (V: 300). In that case, however, 

Kant could conclude that fine art should be interesting (loved by us) for 

its own sake, and that a feeling for beautiful art would after all indicate 

‘‘at least a mental attunement favorable to moral feeling.’’ 

Finally, on moral grounds Kant may be able to conclude that love of 

art could be ‘‘required’’ of everyone in the same sort of way that love of 

nature is required, as a kind of duty that we have if and when we are 

exposed to the arts. It might then follow, as in the case of natural beauty, 

that we have obligations to ourselves and to others to cultivate the conditions 

necessary for aesthetic, artistic experiences. Reflective exposure to 

the arts, like reflective exposure to nature, might then turn out to be a 

demand made upon us by our moral nature. 

Kant, as we saw, called reflective interest in nature ‘‘love’’ for nature for 

its own sake. This sort of love, though not pathological, is also not what 

Kant labels practical love, because it is not determined by ‘‘principles of 

action.’’ It is, as I said earlier ‘‘reflective love,’’ and I have suggested that 

Kant’s own theory of fine art allowed extension of this sort of interest in 

nature to one in art. But when Kant speaks of ‘‘love’’ in the context of 

obligations, as when he insists that love as an inclination cannot be 

commanded, he is typically thinking of love of others. Thus he speaks of 

‘‘tender sympathy,’’ ‘‘sympathy with the lot of others,’’ as ‘‘pathological.’’

70 


Kant also speaks of duties of mutual aid and beneificence, but these are 

dictated by the Categorical Imperative – that is, they are purely practical, 

and need not involve any sympathetic feelings towards others. And of 

course, insofar as Kant assumes that sympathetic love is a mere inclination, 

there can be no requirement of feeling for others. 

What I want to suggest, in closing, is that the argument in Section 42 

of the third Critique, which ends by asserting a requirement of everyone 

that they have some feeling for beautiful nature, suggests the theoretical 

possibility of an analogous requirement for a feeling (of love) for others. 

In ‘‘Radical Virtue Ethics’’ Kurt Baier suggests in passing that it may be 

that for Kant a third kind of duty is in order, a duty ‘‘to cultivate or 

develop or preserve such feelings [of pathological love] to the extent we 

can do so.’’ 10 I think something like this might fall naturally out of Kant’s 

argument at Section 42. By analogy it would go as follows. Reason has an 

interest in finding a trace or hint of order in nature that would suggest 

that our efforts to create a more moral world are not necessarily in vain. 

The ‘‘starry heavens above’’ provide such a hint, but so, too, does the 

moral law embodied within myself and my fellow human beings. The 

latter may arouse pure practical interest, but it also may be contemplated 

aesthetically by reflecting on the form of the ‘‘objects’’ involved. Here it is 

important to recall Kant’s position, stated in Section 17 of the ‘‘Critique 

of Aesthetic Judgment,’’ on the aesthetic contemplation of the human 

figure: ‘‘It is the human being [der Mensch], alone among all objects in the 

world, who admits of an ideal of beauty’’ (V: 233): 

we must still distinguish the ideal of the beautiful, which for reasons already 

stated must be expected solely in the human figure. Now the ideal in this figure 

consists in the expression of the moral; apart from the moral the object would 

not be liked universally and in a positive way [nicht allgemeine and dazu positiv 

gefallen würde]. (V: 235) 

Kant believes that it is not possible to make a purely disinterested aesthetic 

judgment about human forms. (Which is not to suggest that the quality 

or ‘‘correctness’’ of the presentation – e.g. in a portrait or sculpture – 

cannot be appreciated, as he says, ‘‘negatively’’ (by ‘‘virtuosi of taste’’).) 

But an aesthetic reflective response ‘‘taken from experience’’ of a concrete 

visible human form is possible in which a ‘‘great’’ intellectual interest is 

produced. 

Kant drops the discussion to go on with the analysis of judgments of 

taste, and does not elaborate on the sort of interest involved in aesthetic 

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


reflection on human forms. But it is clearly an intellectual interest, and it 

is similar to that sort of interest of reason that we are required to take in 

all beautiful objects of nature. It is a kind of reflective ‘‘love and 

admiration’’ for the natural embodiment of moral order. It should follow 

that for Kant the same sort of (conditioned) requirement holds: Given 

the chance and the leisure to contemplate ‘‘beautiful humanity’’ aesthetically, 

we ought to take a direct interest in it: ‘‘we consider someone’s 

way of thinking to be coarse and ignoble if he has no such feeling for 

human beings.’’ This is not ‘‘tender sympathy’’ or sentimentality, still less 

a prurient interest. But it is also not merely moral respect for the other as 

a rational end. It is a ‘‘positive’’ feeling, a desire for the existence of the 

‘‘object,’’ this beautiful embodiment of human virtue, for its own sake. 

Again, as with natural beauty, Kant could conclude that an intrinsic 

valuing (a rational desire for the existence of, a direct interest in) human 

beings, even if they ‘‘provide ... no prospect of benefit but instead 

perhaps even some harm’’ is required, but only on the condition that we 

have opportunities to see humanity portrayed in beautiful ways. And 

again, it might follow, as in the case of natural beauty, that we have 

obligations to ourselves and others to cultivate the conditions necessary 

for aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of human beings in various stages 

and of various types, ages, etc. The cultivation of this sort of aesthetic/ 

intellectual love for others might then turn out to be a demand made 

upon us by our moral nature. 

Of course, the last two arguments for a requirement that we take a 

direct intellectual interest in both art and in human beings qua physical 

beings, go well beyond what Kant himself said. In the case of art I doubt 

he would ever concede such an interest, in spite of his proto-Romantic 

account of genius. But I am inclined to think that in his account of an 

Ideal of beauty Kant was moving, perhaps in spite of himself, towards 

finding a place in his philosophy for a reflective love for human beings, 

bodies and all.

chapter 4 

Aesthetic reflection and the primacy 

of the practical 

Chapter 3 argued that aesthetic reflection produces interests, and that 

those interests might well issue in obligations on how we value ourselves 

and our world. This sort of claim poses a certain challenge to interpretations 

of Kant that reduce his account of value to moral or purely 

practical value. Since in recent years this view has had some very persuasive 

and powerful advocates, this chapter engages the topic of the role 

aesthetic reflective imagination might play in understanding the ‘‘primacy 

of the practical’’ in Kant’s philosophy. The notion of the primacy of 

practical reason, which Kant introduces explicitly in the second Critique, 

has been adopted by a number of Kantians as the correct lens for viewing 

Kant’s philosophy as a whole. This development has in many respects 

been a much-needed pendant to what might be called ‘‘second-wave’’ 

Kantianism in the US, when mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophers 

began a serious re-evaluation of the first Critique for developments in the 

history of modern theories of knowledge and metaphysics. The turn 

towards interpretive strategies that prioritize the practical philosophy, due 

in large part to Rawls, 1 has allowed scholars to put the theory of 

knowledge in context, and has provided the motivation and basis for 

further important developments in contemporary theories of moral 

constructivism and Kantian-type ethics. 

While acknowledging the enormous contribution to ethical and political 

theory that these interpreters have made, the tendency to read Kant 

as primarily an ethical theorist who subsumed all theory to practice is 

misleading. Exclusive emphasis of the moral dimensions of Kant’s 

thought may in fact lead scholars away from much that is fascinating 

and philosophically innovative in his theory of value, including in his 

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

72

Aesthetic reflection and the primacy of the practical 73 

theory of moral value. In particular, Kant’s account of aesthetic value has 

been ignored or subordinated by the recent stress on the ‘‘primacy of the 

practical’’ in his system. In what follows, I make a case for closer consideration 

of Kant’s incorporation of aesthetic reflection into the critical 

edifice. In doing so, I hope to undercut to a certain extent the view that 

Kant’s theory of practical reason has absolute pride of place in his philosophy. 

the primacy of the practical: methodological 

In an essay entitled ‘‘Kant, Fichte, and the Radical Primacy of the Practical,’’ 

Karl Ameriks suggests three ways of understanding the primacy 

attributed to Kant’s account of practical reason by various interpretors. He 

argues that pure practical reason may be understood as primary for Kant in 

the sense of having special significance because it is the sole source of 

revelation to us of ‘‘what is of unconditional interest and value, the moral 

will.’’ It may also be primary in the sense of revealing, through the postulates 

of pure practical reason, a ‘‘positive and relatively ‘filled in’ version 

of our ultimate destiny.’’ Ameriks goes on to reject a third possible sense of 

primacy – namely, what he calls a ‘‘methodological primacy’’ that attributes 

to practical reason the ability to ‘‘set the fundamental conditions of 

philosophical argument.’’ 2 I shall return to Ameriks’ first two senses of 

primacy in the next section, but want first to look at two important recent 

interpretations of Kantian practical reason that attribute what Ameriks calls 

‘‘methodological primacy’’ to practical reason in Kant. 

Some of the strongest arguments that Kant’s philosophy must be seen 

as fundamentally practical have come in recent years from the camp of 

neo-Kantian constructivists following more or less in the footsteps of 

John Rawls. Of the many important contributions, Onora O’Neill, in 

particular, has argued most strenuously that Kant’s entire philosophy 

must be understood as procedurally practical to its very core. She argues 

that since Kant has repudiated Cartesian introspective procedures, he 

must launch his entire project in a novel way: 

Where does Kant start? If he can’t begin by vindicating philosophical method, 

where can he begin? The motto offers the clue that we must see the enterprise as 

practical: It is a task, not a body of opinions, and moreover a task that has to be 

2 Karl Ameriks, ‘‘Kant, Fichte, and the Radical Primacy of the Practical,’’ in Kant and the Fate of 

Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 190.

74 


shared. The first move must then presumably be to recruit those others who will 

form the task force. 3 

O’Neill argues later that ‘‘The central point that Kant makes with these 

analogies is that reason’s authority must (since it receives no antecedent or 

transcendent vindication) be seen as a practical and collective task, like that 

of constituting political authority.’’ 4 Furthermore, ‘‘Critique of reason is 

possible only if we think of critique as recursive and reason as constructed 

rather than imposed.’’ 5 

Reason’s method is essentially practical, the exercise of autonomous 

agency, and this autonomy is also its vindication, according to O’Neill. 

The Copernican revolution is not itself a method but a preliminary 

‘‘trial.’’ It is a hypothesis that leads to an ‘‘estimate or inventory’’ or 

assembling of materials available for use in the actual ‘‘tasks’’ of reason. 

The real unveiling of methodology comes only later, after the preliminary 

assemblage of materials: 

At the beginning we had no ‘‘material’’ to discipline; now a hypothesis about 

how we might embark on the tasks of reason has supplied some material, but has 

not shown how this material is to be combined into the edifice of knowledge. It 

has, however, provided a vantage point for a reflexive task, which could not be 

undertaken initially, but only retrospectively, reflectively, toward the end. 6 

Because the Doctrine of Elements of the Critique of Pure Reason inventories 

materials but does not provide ‘‘a determinate account of their 

integrated deployment,’’ O’Neill argues, in the end that, ‘‘maxims to 

regulate the use of these capacities in thinking and acting’’ must be 

adopted. The supreme principle of reason is identified with that of 

practical reason. It is, in fact 

the requirement that any fundamental principles of thought and action we 

deploy be ones that it is not impossible for all to follow ... Here we begin to 

understand why Kant held that the Categorical Imperative was the supreme 

principle not just of practical but of all reasoning. 7 

O’Neill proposes interpreting Kant’s critical philosophy as a generalized 

version of the social contract theory for all aspects of human experience 

and valuing. In this dramatic reconstruction of Kant’s project, the critical 

edifice is seen as a sort of all-encompassing compact drawn up by rational 

individuals who take the Categorical Imperative as their sole procedural 

principle. This is a bold interpretive move and, not surprisingly, it suggests 

3 

Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 8. 

4 

Ibid., p. 18. 

5 

Ibid., p. 27. 

6 

Ibid., pp. 13–14. 

7 

Ibid., pp. 19–20.


some novel interpretive results. The analogy to social contract theory, 

some versions of which view social and moral values as only first becoming 

possible upon agreement of the parties to the terms of contract, raises 

questions. Does it then follow that the values of all rationality, expressed 

generally by the terms of the rational contract as autonomy in thought and 

action, but including cognitive and aesthetic value, must likewise wait 

upon the contract itself? O’Neill’s reading seems to suggest that all rational 

value is socially constructed, including even the ‘‘truth value’’ of the 

categories, principles, etc. ‘‘inventoried’’ in the first Critique , insofar as 

reason itself is vindicated only later, in the course of the constructive 

process. 

In general, it is an odd feature of this reading of the priority of the 

practical that it relegates the Copernican turn in the theory of knowledge 

to the status of a mere hypothesis in Kant’s overall philosophical enterprise, 

and the results of the Deduction and Principles to an ‘‘inventory’’ 

of materials for knowledge, rather than granting that the theory is a 

relatively free-standing account of empirical knowledge. The subordination 

of Kant’s theory of cognition to the project of practical reason also 

seems to pull the rug out from under Kant’s stance that he has ‘‘had to 

deny knowledge to make room for faith’’ (including autonomous freedom). 

The ‘‘denial’’ of knowledge is of course not a repudiation or 

subordination of cognition, but an explicit claim that the method and 

purposes of a theory of cognition are in an important sense external to 

theories of human moral practice. A prior and independent account of the 

conditions of the possibility of cognition, most of which take place in us 

without our explicit awareness, is the very locus from which Kant discovers 

a space outside or beyond those conditions where practical reason 

might operate. To interpret the work of the Analytic as mere hypothesis 

and inventory on the way to an account in which knowledge is defined as 

reflexive social practice undermines the self-standing nature of Kant’s 

account of empirical knowledge, and with it the stance from which to 

‘‘deny’’ that knowledge. In sum, it is hard to square O’Neill’s claims for 

the methodological primacy of practical reason with Kant’s stated need to 

establish separate domains for the various applications of reason. 8 

For Kant, vindicating reason not only requires a methodological distinction 

between principles of thought (knowledge) and of action 

8 See Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical 

Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 4 , for a general criticism along 

these lines of all claims for methodological primacy of the practical. Ameriks argues convincingly 

that these approaches follow in the footsteps of Fichte’s idealism rather than Kant’s philosophy.

76 


(morality), but the introduction of a third ‘‘faculty,’’ (Vermögen des 

Gemuths), namely feeling, along with its own principle [of judgment]. 9 Far 

from identifying theory and practice under a single principle, Kant 

reiterates their separation, and then seeks to show how they can possibly be 

reunited in the human subject through the mediation of a reflective 

concept of purpose and its human manifestation in a universally communicable 

feeling. 10 Because O’Neill sees the problem for reason as that of 

uniting thought and action under a single principle, she tends to neglect 

Kant’s own characterization of his third and final Critique as ‘‘mediating 

the connection of the two parts of philosophy to [form] a whole’’(V: 176)– 

i.e. that of finding a mediating principle to negotiate and harmonize, not 

under which to subsume, the two capacities of reason. 

O’Neill’s interpretation is motivated by a commitment to Kant’s 

Enlightenment political values and especially to the value of non-coercive 

public discourse. 11 She assumes that ‘‘critique of reason is only possible if 

we think of critique as recursive [reflexive] and reason as constructed 

rather than imposed.’’ 12 She repeatedly poses the following dilemma: 

Reason must be the product of a ‘‘never passive’’ constructive enterprise 

carried out in accordance with the generalized Categorical Imperative (all 

principles employed must be ones that all can follow), or it is tyranny. On 

this account, if rationality is not actively constructed by us, it is imposed on 

us. There is no alternative. 13 

9 ‘‘Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment,’’ trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis and 

Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), V: 198. 

10 Cf. ‘‘Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment,’’ and also the First Introduction to the Critique of 

Judgment (published separately as vol. XI of the collected works, and included as an appendix in 

Pluhar’s translation). 

11 Cf. O’Neill, ‘‘Vindication Reason,’’ chapter 9 of The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul 

Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 293. 

12 O’Neill, Constructions of Reason, p.27. 

13 Even if we agree that this contract, or procedural model of reason is appropriate, it may still be 

objected that, as with any contract theory, the question of who is to be party to the original 

contract is not irrelevant: to whom do we refer when we say that ‘‘all’’ must be able to follow the 

principles of reason adopted? O’Neill argues that the political analogy should not be pressed too 

far, that the contract ‘‘need not be taken literally, or as referring to historical events’’(Constructions 

of Reason, p.18). But the many and varied postmodern attacks on the notion of the tribunal of 

reason and of Enlightenment optimism in general have underscored the importance of the 

question of origins. Who will be admitted to the all-important team constructing reason? Who will 

be excluded? What about questions of development? How will the rationally immature be 

distinguished from the mature thinker, and who will train them for maturity? What methods will 

be used by the trainers to ensure that their trainees become autonomous? Those who cannot or 

will not submit to the discipline of reason as already constructed at any given historical 

moment will presumably never be party to the process. For a collection of essays expressing these 

sorts of criticisms, from both Kant’s own time and from contemporary authors, see What is 

Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, James Schmidt, ed.


I want to suggest in what follows that for Kant, at any rate, this 

formulation harbors a false dilemma. If ‘‘construction’’ is understood as 

any activity of the mind that in any way shapes our experience it may be 

true for Kant, but as O’Neill appears to understand him, active construction 

involves self-legislation, self-legislation means giving the law to 

oneself, and the latter involves the ‘‘willful’’ activity of reason. The picture 

is one of a struggle for rational self-definition against external, 

‘‘alien’’ forces, an image that Kant himself surely encourages in many 

places. Yet in the third Critique, especially in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic 

Judgment,’’ Kant’s concern is with a less interventionist, less defensive 

mode of rational engagement with the world of nature and with others. 

His account of aesthetic contemplation is certainly about mental activity. 

Reflecting on beauty, however, is not willful activity, nor the imposition 

of form on nature. It is mere imaginative ‘‘play’’ with natural forms, and 

in this sense, at least, might be considered more passive. Still, Kant takes 

this activity to be the connecting link between reason in its cognitive/ 

theoretical and in its moral capacities. Interpretations that unify reason 

under practical reason and the autonomy of the will fail to account for the 

centrality of reflection in Kant’s overall account of human reason. The 

sense in which reflective judgment defines rationality will be explored 

later. First, however, it will be useful to turn briefly to another important 

recent argument for the primacy of practical reason that does take 

account explicitly of the role of contemplation in relation to practical 

reason. 

Christine Korsgaard also interprets Kant’s overall account of rationality 

in terms ultimately of practical reasoning, the spirit of which she traces to 

his humanism. That is, she argues, for Kant the source of all value is 

ultimately humanity itself – or, to be more precise, humanity insofar as it 

is capable of ‘‘full rational autonomy’’(p. 241). Like O’Neill, she, too, sees 

practical reason as the fundamental source of all values and, like O’Neill, 

she believes that choices, to be truly human, can be determined only by 

practical reason, and not inclination and pleasures: 

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant claims that good is a rational concept. 

This means that if ends are to be good, they must be determined by reason, not 

merely inclination or pleasantness ... Behind the assumption that if every 

rational being could acknowledge something to be good ... then it is indeed 

(Riverside: University of California Press, 1996). For a feminist version of these sorts of criticisms 

and a suggestion for reconstructing Kant’s aesthetics as a part of the solution, see my ‘‘The 

Aesthetic Dimension of Kantian Autonomy,’’ in Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, ed. 

Robin May Schott (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 173–190.

78 


good ... is the idea that it is rational beings who determine what is good; 

rational nature confers value on the objects of its choices and is itself the source 

of all value. 14 

Korsgaard then argues that rational nature for Kant must be understood 

as fundamentally practical. Theoretical knowledge is limited to the 

mechanism and not the ends of nature, while speculation about final 

causes is also banished from the realm of knowledge. Thus Korsgaard 

argues, theoretical reflection relinquishes any claim to being the source – 

i.e. ultimate justification – of human values. For this reason, she says, 

Kant’s rationalism, unlike Aristotle’s, values agency over contemplation, 

and ‘‘Morality replaces metaphysics as the highest expression of our 

rational nature.’’ 15 

Since Korsgaard’s account of Kant’s subordination of the contemplative 

side of human nature to the practical dovetails with O’Neill’s 

view that practical reason unites all aspects of reason under a single 

principle, a response to Korsgaard’s arguments against contemplation also 

raises questions for O’Neill. Korsgaard outlines two Kantian arguments 

against contemplation as the source of value. The first she takes from the 

Critique of Judgment, Section 86 ‘‘On Ethicotheology,’’ in which Kant 

states that 

it is not by reference to man’s cognitive power (theoretical reason) that the 

existence of everything else in the world first gets its value, i.e., it is not [because] 

(say) there is someone to contemplate the world. For if all this contemplation 

offered to man’s presentation nothing but things without a final purpose, then 

the fact that the world is cognized cannot make its existence valuable; only if we 

presupposed that the world has a final purpose, could its contemplation itself 

have a value by reference to that purpose. 16 

Korsgaard reads this as follows: 

while speculative reason hopes vainly to discover or prove that this ideal of reason 

is already realized in the world, practical reason – or morality – is the attempt to 

impose this ideal on action and on the world insofar as action shapes the world. 

The argument against contemplation as a source of value she summarizes 

concisely as 

The world must have a final purpose in order to be worth contemplating, so 

contemplation cannot be that final purpose. 17 

14 

Christine M. Korsgaard, ‘‘Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value’’, in Creating the Kingdom of 

Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 241. 

15 16 

Ibid., p. 246. Kant, Critique of Judgment, (V: 442). 

17 

Korsgaard, ‘‘Aristotle and Kant,’’ p. 241.


This is a good summary of Kant’s point, but it does not follow from the 

claim that contemplation cannot be the final purpose of the world that it 

also cannot be a source of value. Contemplation, like moral judgment, is 

an activity. Final purposes or ends are objects of desire. It may well be 

that the highest end or final purpose of humanity is essentially moral 

without it following that our method of creating or producing it be 

essentially practical. In fact, in this section of the ‘‘Critique of Teleological 

Judgment’’ Kant is speaking about the way in which even the 

most ordinary mind meditates (nachdenkt) about the existence of things. 

The citation Korsgaard uses occurs in a context in which Kant is concerned 

to explain teleological reflection upon the universe, and to argue, 

as Korsgaard points out, that there is a moral component to this reflection. 

The reflective product, the judgment itself, however, does not rest 

on determinant principles of judgment, either cognitive or moral, but on 

a principle of reflective judgment that, as Kant has already argued, is 

independent of both: 

The effect [at which we are to aim] according to the concept of freedom is the 

final purpose which (or the appearance of which in the world of sense) ought to 

exist; and we [must] presuppose the condition under which it is possible [to 

achieve] this final purpose in nature (in the nature of the subject as a being of 

sense, namely, as a human being). It is judgment that presupposes this condition 

‘‘a priori,’’ and without regard to the practical, [so that] this power provides us 

with the concept that mediates beween the concepts of nature and the concept of 

freedom: the concept of a purposiveness of nature, which makes possible the 

transition from pure theoretical to pure practical lawfulness, from lawfulness in 

terms of nature to the final purpose set by the concept of freedom. For it is 

through this concept [of the purposiveness of nature] that we cognize [erkennen] 

the possibility of [achieving] the final purpose, which can be actualized only in 

nature and in accordance with its laws. 18 

Korsgaard argues that Kant rejects contemplation as the source of value, 

but in fact all he really rejects is the claim to know anything through 

contemplation, in the very limited sense of knowledge characterized by 

him in the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason. She claims that ‘‘for 

Kant ... teleological thinking is not knowledge, and such grounding as it 

has lies in practical religious faith and so in ethics.’’ 19 But as we have just 

seen, teleological thinking is grounded in a concept of reason that is 

neither theoretical nor practical, but that belongs nonetheless to the 

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

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

80 


system of the faculties of the mind a priori. It is grounded in reflective 

judgment. 

Korsgaard then goes on to conclude that ‘‘we cannot, through theoretical 

thinking, participate in the final purpose of the world. We can only 

do this in practice.’’ 20 Here she presents her own version of what I have 

suggested is the false dichotomy in O’Neill’s constructivism: either we 

think theoretically, or we act according to the principles of practical 

reason. There is no alternative. Kant’s account of the relatively independent 

mediating activity of reflection on both thinking and acting is 

simply ignored. 21 

Korsgaard’s second argument for the devaluation of contemplative 

activity in Kant is taken from the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant claims 

that intellectual pleasures are no different in kind from physical pleasures, 

since the possibility of both rests on feeling, and feeling, being a mere 

passive susceptibility to causes, is ‘‘firmly divorced’’ from autonomy. 22 It 

is certainly undeniable that Kant tends to belittle the contribution of 

feeling to rationality, but it ought to be noted immediately that charges of 

‘‘passivity’’ will apply equally to all sorts of feeling, including not only 

pleasures of the sense and intellect, but also to the satisfaction we take in 

the moral. The latter type of feeling is one that Kant certainly neither 

wants to deny nor belittle. Kant’s tendency to characterize pleasure always 

as a kind of contingent a posteriori feeling vanishes with the advent of the 

theory of reflective judgment. In the third Critique, Kant’s claim is that 

‘‘the feeling of pleasure and displeasure is only the subject’s receptivity to a 

[ certain] state.’’ 23 Pleasure in itself is only receptivity, indeed, but always a 

reception of a certain state of mental activity. Thus, for Kant pleasures are 

not all created equal: they are to be distinguished in terms of the conditions 

which give rise to them, and the important new contribution of 

the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ is to introduce and argue for 

pleasures of reflection whose conditions are universal and a priori. Such 

pleasures are the result of the conditions that hold a priori of a form of 

contemplation, albeit not an intellectual one: aesthetic reflective judgment. 

The argument from passivity does not in the end constitute an 

20 Ibid. 

21 Kant refers to this relative independence as the ‘‘heautonomy’’ of judgment, in which it gives the 

law only to itself, not to nature or freedom, for reflection upon nature. Cf. Critique of Judgment,V: 

185, and First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, XI: 225. 

22 V: 185–186, XI: 225. 

23 First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (XX: 208). See also the Critique of Practical Reason 

(V: 75) where Kant has already made this point about the origins of the feeling of respect for the 

moral law.


argument against the pleasures of contemplation as a source of value, 

since some pleasures are ‘‘conditioned’’ only by activities of judgment 

that are universal and a priori. In part, Korsgaard’s arguments against 

contemplative reason as a source of value rest on a conflation of Kant’s 

account of theoretical reason and speculative metaphysics with contemplation. 

Kant, however, has a more fine-tuned account of reason’s 

activities. Theoretical reason needs to speculate upon the unconditioned, 

and this need, for Kant, should, for the most part, be sublimated to 

practical reason. But Kant’s account of contemplative thought, or 

‘‘reflective judgment,’’ is a different sort of thinking altogether, whose 

function is not to subordinate theoretical to practical reason, but to 

negotiate the rift between them. 

Korsgaard’s and O’Neill’s readings of Kant’s overall theory are in many 

respects inspired, and stand in their own right as important Kantian 

reconstructions. Still, based on the arguments just presented, I believe 

that any accounts that locate the source of all value, and define rationality 

itself, primarily in terms of practical reason fail to do justice to one of 

Kant’s greatest insights, namely, that reason is a system of the interplay of 

both thinking and acting. A fully developed critique of reason must 

therefore provide an account of this connection – the interface as it were – 

of theoretical and practical reason. 24 The third Critique, where Kant 

argues that this interface is just the mediation of reflective judgment, 

must be taken seriously. Whatever else reflective judgment is – and it has 

many aspects and various applications both practical and theoretical, it is 

not of itself practical or ‘‘constructive.’’ It is contemplative, where this 

always presupposes a reflective principle of purposiveness ‘‘without regard 

to the practical.’’ 

the primacy of practical reason: metaphysical 

To argue that practical reason is not primary or prior in the sense of being 

the origin or justificatory source of all value is not to suggest that there is 

no sense in which practical reason and agency are primary for Kant. In his 

comparative study of Kant and Fichte, Karl Ameriks argues that the 

values of practical reason are primary in the sense of having somehow 

more significance for human beings than either cognitive or aesthetic or 

24 This is in no way to deny that in some sense reason is a unity for Kant. But I would argue for the 

position that Dieter Henrich and many others have advocated, that it is crucial to Kant’s 

philosophy that the unifying basis of reason itself cannot be known.

82 

other values. Ameriks suggests that pure practical reason ‘‘in Kant’s 

philosophy has a kind of preeminence because it discloses the basic 

sources and goals of what is valuable’’ and he argues that the moral law 

for Kant is 

the most significant object of our attention in the sense that it alone reveals what 

is of unconditional interest and value, the moral will. Although Kant recognized 

that mere theoretical and prudential activities also have considerable positive 

value, he insists that by themselves they are rooted in secondary interest that 

[has] nothing like the incomparable worth of morality. 25 

The language of revelation and disclosure is important here. Ameriks’ 

understanding of the primacy of the practical depends on a metaphysical 

interpretation of transcendental idealism that is the polar opposite of 

O’Neill’s constructivism. For Ameriks, the Copernican turn and its 

‘‘denial of knowledge to make room for faith’’ is not the end of metaphysics 

but simply its redirection from the theoretical to the practical 

realm. The transcendental idealist account of nature is the methodological 

condition of our discovery, as moral agents, of a new practical 

metaphysics. It provides our ticket out of determined nature into another 

realm: 

the spatiotemporal laws covering all the ordinary appearances of our life need not 

constrain our inner or noumenal reality, and so, rather than having to give up 

morality in the face of a law-governed nature, we can and should accept morality 

as the guide to a nonspatiotemporal realm that exists and is more fundamental 

than nature. 26 

Ameriks goes on to argue that transcendental idealism has thus provided 

for ‘‘the only escape from ‘nature’ ... .’’ So that, on this reading, our 

noumenal being is revealed to us as a result of our denial of knowledge, in 

a sort of Critical reversal of the fall from grace. The details of this new 

moral landscape are a further disclosure of practical reason, given in the 

form of the postulates of God, freedom, and immortality. 27 

Ameriks is correct in pointing to the fact that Kantian practical reason 

depends on his account of the limitations of theoretical reason and, hence, 

in the overall structure of his philosophy, cannot be methodologically or 

logically prior. Yet Amerik’s unrepentant metaphysical account of the 

practical leaves it open to a criticism that Kant himself wanted very much 

25 Ameriks, ‘‘Kant, Fichte,’’ p. 190. 


26 Ibid., p. 191. 

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


to avoid. That is, it portrays human beings as hopelessly alienated from 

themselves – if not at war with their own physicality, then at least seriously 

alienated from their own basic nature as embodied ‘‘beings of 

need.’’ 28 There can be no doubt that recognition of this concern in Kant’s 

philosophical enterprise is key to understanding him. Both versions of his 

introduction to his third and final Critique mention the need to reconnect 

nature and reason and, as we have already seen, the need to connect 

the rational/ethical and the theory of nature is urgent on moral grounds. 

In the last section of this chapter, I shall argue that Kant is also concerned 

about theoretical reason’s stake in this reconnection. 

As we saw earlier, Kant was painfully aware of this potential problem 

in Chapter III of the second Critique, when he assumes that the moral law 

must have an effect on the will of human beings through some natural, 

subjective path – that is, through some sensuous impulse. Here, Kant 

allows for such a feeling, albeit a rather tortured one caused by the 

frustration by reason of sensuous inclination: 

For all inclination and every sensuous impulse is based on feeling, and the 

negative effect on feeling (through the check on the inclinations) is itself feeling. 

Consequently, we can see a priori that the moral law as a ground of determination 

of the will, by thwarting all our inclinations, must produce a feeling 

which can be called pain. Here we have the first and perhaps the only case 

wherein we can determine from a priori concepts the relation of a cognition 

(here a cognition of pure practical reason) to the feeling of pleasure or 

displeasure. 29 

Assuming the plausibility of this move, it is still not much of an answer to 

the criticism that a bifurcated account of reason leads Kant inevitably to a 

notion of moral being that is essentially alienated from its natural self. 

Humiliation, even when rechristened as a feeling for the majesty of duty, 

as Kant himself puts it, ‘‘has nothing to do with the enjoyment of life.’’ 30 

Even with the addition of an account of moral feeling, the doctrine of the 

primacy of the practical interpreted as resting on a metaphysical ‘‘escape’’ 

from nature, as Ameriks claims it does, leaves us with a rather disintegrated 

and desolate picture of the human condition. It is surely to avoid 

that portrait that Kant, even already at the end of the second Critique, 

begins to move towards the theoretical incorporation of other sorts of 

28 

Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Macmillan: 1988), V: 61. 

29 30 

Critique of Practical Reason, V:72–73. Ameriks, ‘‘Kant, Fichte,’’ p. 88.

84 


‘‘case[s] wherein we can determine from a priori concepts the relation of a 

cognition to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.’’ 31 

Another account of the metaphysical primacy of practical reason that 

explicitly recognizes the depth of the alienation problem for Kant, is 

Richard Velkley’s teleological reading in Freedom and the End of Reason. 

Velkley argues that the problem of the unity of nature and reason was first 

apparent to Kant after his reading of Rousseau’s account of humanity’s 

progressive alienation from its own nature: 

The difficulties are subsumed under the heading of the ‘‘teleological problem’’ in 

the modern ‘‘individualistic’’ emancipation of the passions. If reason has no 

other end than to serve the passions aiming at freedom and mastery, what 

prevents reason, as a modifiable and expanding power, from unfolding in ways 

that exacerbated the passions and that increase human servitude to socially 

generated and factitious desires? By suggesting that the whole modern emancipatory 

effort may be self-defeating, Rousseau initiates the later modern criticism 

of the modern world as the realm of ‘‘alienation’’ in which man is subjugated by 

his own creations. 32 

In Velkley’s view, Kant solves the problem by asserting the primacy of 

practical reason, which Velkley interprets as the position that Kant’s 

philosophy has an ‘‘overarching moral project’’ that is actually a continuation 

of the modern project of the emancipation from nature: 

the modern critique of speculation is not neutral to all human purposes or human 

finality. The rejection of metaphysical first causes is to make room for the 

supremacy of human final causes. The order of cosmic final causes is replaced by 

the legislated order or by the ideal construct supported only by human volition – 

the establishment of a new universal nomos that promotes the maximum of human 

freedom from the evils and unwelcome constraints of the natural order ... Kant’s 

own critique is quite clearly a continuation of this emancipatory project. 33 

Whether or not the characterization of replacing cosmic order with ‘‘the 

legislated order or ... the ideal construct supported only by human 

volition’’ is true to the intentions of modern philosophy prior to Kant, it 

is certainly true that Kant follows Rousseau in foregrounding the problem 

of reason, and as a result is moved by the need for a ‘‘theodicy of reason’’ 

31 In the ‘‘Methodology of Pure Practical Reason,’’ Kant outlines two ‘‘exercises’’ for enabling moral 

cultivation that are rough sketches of his account of judgments of taste and the sublime. Cf. 

Critique of Practical Reason, V:160–161. 

32 Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant’s Critical Philosophy 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 13–14. 

33 Ibid., pp. 18–19.


to establish that ‘‘reason is a beneficent force in human life’’ (p. 2). 

According to Velkley, Kant ultimately finds that justification in the 

view that ‘‘reason is governed by a single organizing principle or telos’’(pp. 

17–18), and already in the 1760s Kant was beginning to see the 

‘‘subjective need that human reason has of the metaphysical concepts of 

substance, force and causality, which is above all a moral need – the 

inexorable concerns with the fate of the soul, God and freedom ...’’ 

(pp. 119–120). Velkley thus sees ‘‘the ‘core’ of metaphysics shift[ing] to its 

practical‘telos-giving part and away from theoretical inquiry’ in Kant’s 

philosophy’’(p. 119). Ultimately, Velkley claims, Kant developed a 

‘‘practical metaphysics’’ that has been revived in recent twentieth-century 

idealisms: 

One can say Kant’s idealism marks the high point of a certain effort that has 

been renewed, but not surpassed, by later phenomenological and hermeneutical 

definitions of the ‘‘horizon’’ of experience. It would confine the reflection on the 

absolute (whose meaning and content are ultimately moral), within the sphere of 

human freedom and practice ... that is kept distinct from the speculative 

noumenal realm of modern idealism. (p. 135). 

The primacy of the moral end, for Kant, limits ‘‘the true metaphysical 

whole’’ (pp. 112–113) and since philosophy is only critique, not discovery, 

‘‘theoretical inquiry is primarily self knowledge’’ so that ‘‘the true calling 

of humanity is to legislate unity where disunity reigns’’ (p. 116). Of 

course, it is in nature that disunity appears to reign. Thus Velkley 

characterizes Kant’s solution as a triumph of reason – i.e., of the will – 

over nature: Rousseau’s emphasis on the ‘‘unnaturalness’’ of the will 

(p. 74), of its increasingly greater separation from nature, posed the 

problem of reason, but also set forth its solution: the will can be free of 

natural impulses, hence ‘‘autonomous’’ and hence capable of acting as a 

‘‘restorative’’ for the ordering of the human soul: ‘‘Kant tends toward 

a single form of perfection in the teleological consummation of reason in 

a new legislation of the order of the soul’’ (p. 66). 

For all its historical insight, Velkley’s interpretation of Kant is, in my 

view, flawed in two important ways. First, he presents a version of a flight 

from nature in Kant’s philosophy that ignores the importance of aesthetic 

judgments about natural beauty in Kant’s notion of teleology. These are 

not less important than his account of teleology in the second half of the 

third Critique, and indeed, Kant suggests that methodologically they are 

more fundamental to his account of the connection of nature and reason, 

and of practical and theoretical aspects of human functioning. The

86 


Preface to the second Introduction to the Critique of Judgment ends with 

a short paragraph in which Kant says ‘‘With this I conclude my entire 

critical enterprise.’’ The directly preceding paragraphs are devoted to 

explaining why a transcendental account of the ‘‘aesthetic power of 

judgment’’ is necessary, and the role this power plays in solving the riddle 

of finding a principle for the power of judgment. Kant’s ‘‘entire critical 

enterprise,’’ in other words, comes to an end with an account of how 

judgment ‘‘whose correct use is so necessary and universally required that 

this power is just what we mean by sound understanding’’ (V: 169) itself 

relies on an account of aesthetic – i.e, feeling-based – reflection. To insist 

that Kant’s enterprise was intended ultimately to overcome or transcend 

nature ignores the mediating role that imagination, disinterestedness, and 

pleasure play in his critical enterprise. Certainly in the ‘‘Critique of 

Teleological Judgment’’ Kant is concerned with human culture and 

progress, and is aware of the ever-increasing artificial desires that technical 

development brings. But precisely this concern sends him ‘‘back to nature’’ 

in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,’’ where he focuses on the 

need to reconnect directly (non-instrumentally, but also non-morally) 

with nature, in such a way that we come to feel, via the pleasure of 

reflection on perceptual forms, the possibility of nature’s conforming to 

our moral calling. Velkley’s reading leaves no room for this direct connection 

to nature, privileging instead the rational projection of a unitary 

ideal of human freedom that not only elides but in fact ‘‘overcomes’’ 

nature in human subjectivity. It is exceedingly difficult, then, to see how 

the problem of the alienation of reason from nature that Velkley so 

carefully traces from Kant back to Rousseau, is solved on this reading. 

A second problem with this interpretation, in my opinion, is that it 

places extraordinary power in the hands of the philosopher. On Velkley’s 

reading, it is that elite group that plans a global ‘‘revolution in theoretical 

and moral foundations’’: 

According to Kant, the philosopher is to be defined as a legislator, not as a mere 

theoretician. His legislation establishes the architectonic order of reason wherein 

the various investigations of philosophy and science are to take their places and 

in which they are to be viewed as collectively furthering the ultimate end that the 

philosopher defines. In other words, the philosopher legislates the systematic 

unity of reason as governed by a single organizing principle or telos. The revolution 

taking place in the foundational inquiries of theoretical and moral philosophy 

has a principal architect – the philosophy as legislator. That is to say that 

the ‘‘local’’ revolutions in theoretical and moral foundations are reflecting a 

larger, more comprehensive revolution planned and initiated by the legislative 

activity of the critical philosopher. (p. 18)


Philosophy takes on far more importance, on Velkley’s reading of Kant, 

than the limiting function Kant claims for it in the first Critique. For 

Velkley, this is part of Kant’s response to Rousseau, who questioned 

whether ‘‘modern philosophy [can] maintain its position as the dominant 

force in human affairs and continue to promote the emancipation and 

enlightenment of humanity’’ (p. 13). An ideal ‘‘definitive culture’’ is to be 

determined by philosophy as part of this answer, which according to 

Velkley involves an overwhelming commitment to practical concerns over 

theoretical ones: ‘‘all supersensible realities and causes are understood as 

subordinated to freedom’s essential projects ... Kant could not state 

more directly the primacy of the practical in the profoundest sense in 

which he intends it; the practical determines the direction of and even the 

content of theoretical inquiry’’ (p. 144). 

Velkley’s notion of the primacy of the practical is not to be accused of 

escapism, as Ameriks’ might, but it is all the more worrisome for that very 

reason. Freedom of inquiry and belief themselves seem to disappear in the 

all-encompassing quest for unity of reason. This is surely too high a price 

to pay for conquering alienation, and it is hard to believe that Kant 

himself would entertain, let alone subscribe to, such a vision. Indeed, the 

very spirit of the ‘‘Rousseauistic revolution’’ in his way of thinking about 

ordinary humanity appears to give way, on this account, to an extreme 

paternalism that is precisely the wrong answer to the question ‘‘What is 

Enlightenment?’’ Paradoxically, on this account the elevation of the 

practical over theory opens the door to the very authoritarianism it was 

supposed to combat. As we shall see shortly, Kant was aware of the danger 

of letting practical reason take over all aspects of human experience, and 

wanted to block the possibility of its dictating content to theory. 

Richard Eldridge, in The Persistence of Romanticism, also sees Kant’s 

philosophy as centrally engaging the alienation problem, but he is less 

inclined to read Kant as assigning the role of instituting a higher moral 

culture on earth to the philosopher: 

Kant regards his own philosophical writing as advancing this work, helping to 

free us from tutelage or service to our animal nature so as to achieve collective 

rational freedom. His articulation of the principle of morality is to help to move 

us first to found a liberal state and then further, through culture, to bring our 

ends into rational harmony with one another. This advance toward freedom first 

through politics and then through culture is not however, the work of philosophy 

alone. Art has a crucial role to play in this development. 34 

34 Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 38.

88 


Eldridge takes the separation of nature and freedom problematized in the 

third Critique to be an expression of a latent ‘‘deep anxiety’’ in Kant 

about the possibility of actually manifesting our freedom in the world 

(p. 36). Kant’s ‘‘imaginative narratives’’ about the (possible) progress of 

human history are ways of dealing with that angst, and perhaps even of 

combatting the miserable human conditions that cause it. Moreover, he 

points out, the artist’s imaginative and communicable work might do the 

same. In ‘‘How is the Kantian Moral Criticism of Literature possible?,’’ 

he discusses Kant’s characterization of the domain of philosophy – i.e. of 

the overall human condition – in the second introduction to the third 

Critique. 35 Eldridge glosses Kant’s worry as follows: ‘‘we will not rest 

content with an empty, speculative freedom that is not intelligibly 

actualizable and we must somehow come to see the world as supporting 

the actualization of freedom’’ (p. 75). Eldridge recognizes, in other words, 

that the third Critique takes up the problem of alienation, and presents a 

third way between metaphysical accounts of morality (whether noumenal 

or politically ideal) and first-person practical reasoning approaches, both 

of which only perpetuate the alienation of human freedom from human 

nature. ‘‘It is too little recognized,’’ Eldridge writes, ‘‘that Kant began in 

his last writings, particularly in the Critique of Judgment, to rethink the 

problem of how there can be morality and freedom in the sensible world’’ 

(p. 75). 

Eldridge is particularly interested in the role that genius plays in 

actualizing freedom through art, and I shall return to this point in later 

chapters. For now, his point about the role of the third Critique is well 

taken: By the time he wrote his final critical work, Kant had changed his 

views about the role of the sensible, of feeling, and of imagination with 

respect to morality. What he had declared impossible in the first Critique 

and unlikely in the second, became the focus of the entire first half of the 

third Critique: the possibility of pleasures – not painful humiliations – 

based on conditions that were universal and a priori. There he argues that 

reflection gives rise in aesthetic judgment to a feeling whose universal 

validity depends upon its independence from practical and theoretical 

determination. Since aesthetic reflection itself involves the conditions of 

cognition in general (imagination and understanding in free play) the 

resulting feelings have a pedigree every bit as pure as that of the humbled 

feeling of respect for the moral law. Some reflective feelings, like the 

35 Ibid., pp. 71–84.


feeling of the sublime, involve the faculty of pure practical reason and our 

recognition of our moral autonomy in the face of purposeless nature. But 

others, and indeed the paradigm case of aesthetic feeling – namely, our 

feelings for the beautiful – depend entirely on conditions of cognition in 

general. Such feelings not only are independent of practical reason, but 

their very right to claim universal validity depends on this independence. 

36 

the mediated primacy of practical reason 

I want now to return to the problem of alienation raised by what I have 

been calling metaphysical readings of the priority of the practical, and 

Kant’s initial attempt to bring the practical back into the realm of nature. 

Kant went on to address the issue of the causal efficacy of the moral in the 

Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason, by introducing the conception of the 

Highest Good as the necessary objective of practical reason. The moral 

law, Kant argues, demands that we strive to produce, in nature, a state in 

which ‘‘happiness [is] in exact proportion to morality.’’ 37 But if we are 

incapable of so doing, then the moral law itself must be ‘‘fantastic, 

directed toward imaginary ends, and consequently inherently false.’’ 38 

The famous solution to this problem of the potentially debilitating moral 

alienation from our natural selves was of course the postulates of practical 

reason – of immortality and of God. It is as a springboard for this 

dangerous leap of reason, which in effect involves breaching the 

boundaries of theoretical reason for the sake of practice, that Kant 

explicitly argues for the primacy of practical reason. Having looked at 

several interpretations of Kant’s doctrine, it is perhaps time to examine 

his own account. 

Unfortunately, Kant’s own statement of the primacy of the practical 

turns out to be far from transparent. To begin, as already mentioned, its 

placement in the Critique is clearly strategic, if not ad hoc. To preserve 

the doctrine of the highest good, and the need for a more integrated 

account of morality that motivates it, Kant has taken up a precarious 

position. He has allowed reason to suspend the Copernican turn in order, 

36 

Cf. Paul Guyer, ‘‘Feeling and Freedom: Kant on Aesthetics and Morality,’’ in Kant and the 

Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–47, esp. pp. 46–47. 

Guyer sees this independence as ultimately serving pure practical reason. The argument of this 

chapter is slightly different – namely, that this independence does also serve pure practical reason. 

It is not, however, independence for the sake of morality. 

37 38 

Critique of Practical Reason, V:110. Ibid., V: 114.

90 


for the sake of practice, to make the bald metaphysical claims of the 

postulates. 39 To prepare the ground for this un-Critical move, he argues 

that under certain circumstances speculative reason ought to 

take up these principles [of practical reason] and seek to integrate them, even 

though they transcend it, with its own concepts, as a foreign possession handed 

over to it ... It must assume them indeed as something offered from the outside 

and not grown in its own soil, and it must seek to compare and connect them 

with everything which it has in its power as speculative reason. It must remember 

that they are not its own insights but extensions of its use in some other respect, 

viz., the practical; that this is not in the least opposed to its interest, which lies in 

the restriction of speculative folly. 40 

The interests of practical reason, where they are ‘‘inseparably bound’’ to 

it, trump the interests of theoretical reason, but only because the former’s 

interests are not ‘‘in the least’’ opposed to the latter’s. They are just 

different from them, and Kant says, ‘‘It is not a question of which must 

yield, for one does not necessarily conflict with the other.’’ 41 Yet practical 

reason’s ability to trump speculation is not as powerful as it might seem. 

Although he claims that ‘‘if the speculative and the practical were 

arranged merely side by side (coordinated),’’ a conflict would arise, his 

argument for the need to give preference to practical rather than theoretical 

needs is based on a worry that, without a specified hierarchy of 

interests, either side might take over: 

the first [speculative reason] would close its borders and admit into its domain 

nothing from the latter [practical reason], while [practical reason] would extend 

its boundaries over everything and, when its needs required, would seek to 

comprehend [speculative reason] within them. Nor could we reverse the order 

and expect practical reason to submit to speculative reason. 42 

The point here seems to be that giving certain interests of practical reason 

primacy is legitimate to the extent that it maintains a reasonable balance 

and harmony between theoretical and practical reason, including keeping 

practical reason itself under control. Kant’s own account of the primacy 

of the practical is thus a far more mitigated sort of preference than many 

commentators, including both O’Neill and Korsgaard, and even Ameriks, 

seem to want to attribute to Kant. Moreover, it suggests that Kant is 

39 

Yirmiyahu Yovel, in Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 

1980), pp. 287ff, makes a strong case for the untenability of Kant’s incorporation of the postulates 

in his system. 

40 41 42 

Critique of Practical Reason, V:120ff. Ibid. Ibid., V: 121.


already groping for the sort of mediating faculty that he would soon 

suggest in the Critique of Judgment as a way of coordinating without 

subordinating either. 

It is worth looking more closely at what Kant seems to want at this 

point in the Critique of Practical Reason, and in particular to note his 

concern that practical reason ‘‘would extend its boundaries over everything 

and, when its needs required, would seek to comprehend 

[speculative reason] within them.’’ His worries about placing speculation 

over pure practical reason – moral autonomy – are well known. They date 

back to his first awakening, thanks to Rousseau, to the incomparable 

value of humanity, and the concern that a dogmatic preference for the 

theoretical could render one blind to that value. Here, however, he 

expresses a parallel concern that if practical reason is not suitably 

restrained it will become ideological, bending theory to suit its purposes. 

This is an important insight that is unfortunately obscured by his call for 

theory to borrow the principles of practical reason ‘‘and seek to integrate 

them ... as a foreign possession’’ to be compared and connected with 

everything that it can, for the purposes of lending support to morality. To 

be sure, this is permitted only if and when the ‘‘borrowed’’ principle is 

shown to be inseparably bound up with the needs of pure practical 

reason, so that no mere ‘‘pathological interest,’’ or (we might say) 

ideology, is at its root. 

Kant’s intention at this point in the second Critique is to set the stage 

for the postulates of God and immortality, which ‘‘reason holds out to us 

as the supplement to our impotence to [realize] the highest good.’’ The 

problem with Kant’s explanation of how postulating metaphysical 

notions will provide the rational hope necessary to fulfill our moral 

obligations has already been examined in chapter 2: How could Kant 

suspend the entire critical apparatus for the sake of bringing back theological 

metaphysics? 43 And even if he could get away with that on 

practical grounds, does the introduction of supernatural aids really solve 

the problem of how we can rationally hope to bring about the highest 

good in nature, as the moral law commands that we do? 44 Moreover, if 

the primacy of practical reason was introduced as a doctrine in order to 

make sense of the arguments for the postulates, and the latter fail, of what 

systematic use is the primacy claim? 

Again, the third Critique, and Kant’s account of the independence of 

aesthetic value, are crucial to the final story. There is indeed a sense in 

43 Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History. 

44 See chapter 2 in this volume.

92 


which for Kant the practical is primary, but it has to do neither with the 

claim that all values are ultimately constructed by us, nor with the need 

for a practical procedure that serves as guide for all such construction. 

Neither does this primacy have to do with discovering the source of all 

value in an inner world transcending nature, nor in a unifying definitive 

telos of human reason. What appears to be motivating the primacy claim 

in the second Critique is the need to link morality in its pure rational 

form to the fact of human beings’ finitude and embodiment. Kant was 

keenly aware in the second Critique that his moral theory required of 

human beings a feeling of hope if it was to provide a plausible account of 

how we could possibly be required to implement its demands in the 

natural world. But humiliation, God, and immortality were not enough. 

In The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Susan Neiman argues that, for 

Kant, the alienation human beings feel as moral beings in the world of 

nature is ‘‘so fundamental that it can never be fully overcome.’’ She 

claims that ‘‘If philosophy involves coming of age [as Kant claims in 

‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’], it also involves an acceptance of loss of the 

unreflective sense of unity that children feel toward their world.’’ 45 I think 

she is right to recall the depth of Kant’s realization of the pervasive 

disharmony and unease between human reason and its embodiment. At 

the same time, however, it is the case that Kant sought some kind of 

connection of the two, and clearly intended his analysis of judgment of 

beauty to help serve that purpose. A naive, unreflective sense of unity had 

to be outgrown, as Neiman rightly points out, but in fact Kant found a 

mature version of that unity in the development of a reflective aesthetic 

sense for nature’s objects. That it is also contingent, as we saw in chapter 

3, on human beings having the access to nature and leisure to reflect upon 

it does not make it any less important as a remedy for alienation, and as I 

have already suggested, may make the experience of beauty a crucial 

part of moral development. At the very least it reintroduces human 

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

p. 202. Neiman’s view of the primacy of the practical is that it comes down to a primacy of the 

moral world in terms of its power and application relative to that of theoretical reason. She equates 

theoretical reason with science, and argues that theoretical reason is crucially dependent on the 

cooperation of the world. Practical reason, by contrast, can achieve its ends alone. She goes on to 

argue that the objects of practical reason, because they are our own ends, are breathtakingly simple 

to realize (pp. 128–129). Of course, if the Highest Good is an end of reason, and we are indeed 

required to try to make it real in the world in the face of an utter lack of reason to think that is 

even possible for us, then developing the right internal attitude towards our duty becomes a real 

problem for reason. (See chapter 2 for further discussion of Neiman’s account of the highest good 

and the postulates.)


imaginative, creative capacities into our navigation between the two 

aspects of our human selves. 

We have seen that several sections of the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic 

Judgment’’ may be read as an account of how reflective aesthetic valuing 

can serve the purposes of moral judgment in precisely the sort of way that 

Kant needed, by embodying values of practical reason. A passage quoted 

earlier from Section 42 of the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ is worth 

looking at again, because it offers the possibility of an aesthetic reflective 

approach to the alienation problem that was never really solved by the 

postulation of God and immortality. If we were somehow to be able to 

sense or feel that nature had a place for moral beings – that beings with 

purpose belonged there, and that nature itself had a purpose – then we 

would have something of the feeling of hope that we need to make 

following its strict law possible and even natural: 

reason also has an interest in the objective reality of the ideas (for which, in 

moral feeling, it brings about a direct interest), i.e., an interest that nature should 

at least show a trace or give a hint that it contains some basis or other for us to 

assume in its products a lawful harmony with that liking of ours which is 

independent of all interest (a liking we recognize ‘‘a priori’’ as a law for everyone, 

thus we cannot base this law on proofs). Hence reason must take an interest in 

any manifestation in nature of a harmony that resembles the mentioned harmony, 

and hence the mind cannot meditate about the beauty of nature without 

at the same time finding its interest aroused. 46 

But that is something that we can achieve only indirectly through moral 

ideas. That is, in order for the connection of nature and moral interest to 

occur, our attention and our feeling must be directly connected with 

nature itself, apart from any moral interest. It is only disinterested, 

contemplative, non-practical but direct interest in nature’s forms that 

makes possible the indirect link to morality: 

it is not this link [between nature’s beauty and moral ideas] that interests us 

directly, but rather the beauty’s own characteristic of qualifying for such a link, 

which therefore belongs to it intrinsically. 47 

Kant’s insight is in a way quite simple: If we want proof that our moral 

nature is compatible with ourselves as embodied finite creatures – that 

rationality and animality belong naturally together, and that we can 

therefore hope to achieve our highest moral goals in this world – then the 

world must present us with at least a ‘‘hint’’ that it is possible that our 

moral purposes have a place in it. Disinterested contemplation and a 

46 Critique of Judgment, V:300. 

47 Ibid., V: 302.

94 


consequent direct interest in nature gives us an independent reason, 

however tentative, to believe in our capacity to bring morality to the 

world. Kant’s solution to the problem of the gulf between the two uses of 

reason here amounts to a suspension of the moral for the sake of the 

moral. Aesthetic values are not fundamental conditions of the moral law, 

nor the source of all value, but they are the source of an independent and 

very special value, without which fulfilling our moral duty would be a 

grim and desperate undertaking. It is this insight that is buried by 

overemphasizing the primacy of the practical in Kant’s philosophy. Such 

emphasis amounts to neglecting a fundamental aspect of Kant’s 

humanism: its focus on ‘‘the nature of the subject as a being of sense, 

namely, as a human being.’’ 48 

48 Critique of Practical Reason, V:196. I would like to thank Henry Allison for comments on my 

reading of Section 42 ‘‘On the Intellectual Interest in the Beautiful,’’ that helped me clarify the 

relationship of moral to aesthetic value there. For a sustained account of the independence of 

aesthetic value from moral value, but the ultimate subordination of this independence to morality, 

the reader is referred to Guyer’s introduction and the essays collected in Kant and the Experience of 

Freedom. Guyer’s book, (Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness, Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2000), however, is less centrally concerned with aesthetic value, and indeed, in 

arguing for a normative conception of freedom as ‘‘our fundamental value’’ Guyer seems to be 

moving away from his earlier emphasis on the independence of aesthetic value in its relation to 

moral value.

chapter 5 

The failure of Kant’s imagination 

In a well-known account of the role of transcendental imagination in 

Kant’s philosophy, Martin Heidegger practically accused Kant of intellectual 

cowardice. Heidegger argued that Kant’s refusal in the second 

edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to grant that the imagination was a 

fundamental faculty was a result of Kant’s having originally identified the 

transcendental imagination with the ‘‘common root’’ of sensibility and 

understanding, and of his subsequently being unwilling to grant such 

basic status to a faculty whose obscure nature frightened him: ‘‘He saw 

the unknown,’’ Heidegger says, and ‘‘he had to draw back.’’ 1 

In what has become a classic critique of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation, 

Dieter Henrich’s ‘‘Die Einheit der Subjektivität’’ (‘‘On the Unity of 

Subjectivity’’) 2 takes up his challenge to the integrity of the Kantian 

enterprise and defends Kant on the grounds that his refusal to explore the 

common root of both sensibility and understanding really has nothing to 

do with Kant’s attitude toward the imagination, but rather represents his 

adoption of the view, already promulgated against Christian Wolff by 

Christian August Crusius, that subjectivity cannot be traced to a single 

basic faculty or principle. Far from suggesting the need to identify any 

common root of human subjectivity, Henrich argues, Kant denies outright 

the possibility of ever knowing such a basic power and is agnostic 

about the existence of such a power even apart from the conditions of 

1 See Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York, 1929), Introduction, 

A15/B 29: ‘‘there are two stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and understanding, which 

perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown, root.’’ And see also Heidegger, Kant and the 

Problem of Metaphysics (KPM), trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: University of Indiana 

Press, 1962), pp. 41–42, 173. 

2 Dieter Henrich, ‘‘Die Einheit der Subjektivität,’’ Philosophische Rundschau 3 (1955), pp. 28–69. 

Trans. Gunter Zöeller as ‘‘On the Unity of Subjectivity,’’ in Dieter Henrich, The Unity of Reason: 

Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Richard Velkley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 

The translations in this chapter are Zöeller’s. 

95

96 


human knowledge. 3 Since Kant ultimately ‘‘renounces’’ a positive answer 

to the question of what conditions the possibility of human subjectivity, 

the ‘‘unknown’’ common root that Kant refers to in the introduction to 

the Critique of Pure Reason cannot be any known faculty and hence 

cannot be the imagination. 4 The imagination is not suppressed or ‘‘displaced’’ 

in Kant’s philosophy, but is simply not central. 

Historically, the notion that human subjectivity must be unified on the 

basis of its stemming from a common source in that which mediates 

sensibility and understanding was a theme worked out in Johann Gottlieb 

Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel and voiced again, Henrich 

argues, in Heidegger. But for critical philosophy such unity was 

unknowable and could be explained regulatively only in terms of some 

sort of ‘‘intrasubjective’’ purposiveness: 5 

The unity of subjectivity, in Kant’s final construction of it, is conceived as 

teleological. Kant feels compelled to look beyond what is immediately given in 

consciousness, ‘‘to look beyond the sensible to the supersensible as the point 

where all our a priori powers are reconciled, since that is the only alternative left 

to us for bringing reason into harmony with itself.’’ 6 

But so far as knowledge is concerned, the structural unity of the faculties 

is contingent. If this is Kant’s view, then of course no account could be 

established for the primacy of imagination as the original source of 

knowledge. The imagination is only one of the faculties of the mind, all 

of which can only be encountered ‘‘derivatively’’ through experience. 7 

This, Henrich argues, explains Kant’s turn away from any attempt to 

‘‘deduce’’ the faculties in the first edition of the Critique to a ‘‘logical 

analysis’’ of the conditions of knowledge in the revised second edition. 

Not a fear of the unknown source of reason, but rather a recognition of its 

unavailability, led Kant to focus on the conditions of the understanding, 

whose structures – the logical forms of judgment – unlike imagination or 

sensibility, he was convinced were available for examination. Hence, 

according to Henrich, Kant became increasingly cautious about any 

3 Henrich, ‘‘Die Einheit der Subjektivität,’’ pp. 32–39. 

4 If any faculty is to be viewed as most fundamental to the structure of human subjectivity, Henrich 

argues, it is ‘‘apperception and its categories’’ (p. 44). Henrich does admit that this renunciation of 

hope for grounding subjectivity did not come easily to Kant (p. 46). 

5 Henrich, ‘‘Die Einheit der Subjektivität,’’ pp. 44–45. The search for a unifying principle is seen by 

Kant to be a necessary subjective condition of reason, and hence the notion of a fundamental faculty 

or power is a regulative idea. 

6 Ibid., p. 46. The quotation from Kant is from the Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar 

(Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987) V:341. 

7 Ibid., p. 50.

The failure of Kant’s imagination 97 

attempt to explain the exact nature of sensibility or the relationship of the 

imagination to the understanding. Since the unity of the faculties in any 

absolute sense is unknown to human beings, the mediating role of the 

imagination must be understood as merely ‘‘the unity of activities that are 

required in addition to the objective principles of knowledge in order to 

render intelligible the actuality of knowledge.’’ 8 Viewing the imagination 

in this operational sense explains Kant’s move, in the second edition of 

the Critique, to assimilate it to the understanding as one of its functions. 

Henrich’s argument seems historically correct. Few would argue 

against the claim that the idealists’ move to extend knowledge to an 

account of its ultimate origins constituted a decisive break with Kantian 

philosophy, even if not all its proponents saw it as such at the time. Yet 

the success of Henrich’s ‘‘epistemological’’ approach has had the effect of 

pushing interesting aspects of Heidegger’s reading into a corner to gather 

dust. In particular, Kant scholars have tended to neglect what Heidegger, 

on his reading, was able to appreciate – namely, the fact that Kant was 

unusually struck by what he took to be the mysterious nature of the 

imagination and that, even in the realm of cognition (not to mention 

human action and motivation) Kant did appear suspicious of the imagination’s 

inscrutability. 9 

Yet a third wrinkle has been added to the fabric of the debate by 

Hartmut Böhme and Gernot Böhme, in their book Das Andere der 

Vernunft. They agree with Henrich that the critical turn in some sense 

necessitated Kant’s move away from viewing the imagination as a separate 

faculty, but take this shift to be grounds for criticizing the entire Kantian 

enterprise. 10 They argue that, whatever his philosophical reasons, Kant’s 

unwillingness to grant the imagination any sort of autonomous status was 

rooted in psychological misapprehensions of phobic proportions. And 

while subconscious fears of the imagination and its close association with 

feeling and the body were typical of the Enlightenment psyche, they were 

by no means ‘‘healthy.’’ After some very illuminating and entertaining 

textual analysis, the Böhmes conclude that the critical turn was an 

8 Ibid., p. 54. 

9 See, e.g., CPR, A78/B103: ‘‘Synthesis in general ... is the mere result of the power of imagination, 

a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge 

whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.’’ And A123: ‘‘That the affinity of 

appearances ... and so experience itself, should only be possible by means of this transcendental 

function of imagination, is indeed strange, but is nonetheless an obvious consequence of the 

preceding argument.’’ 

10 Hartmut Böhme and Gernot Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft: Zur Entwicklung von 

Rationalitätsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996).

98 


anxiety-driven swerve away from philosophical engagement with creative 

and enriching aspects of human experience. On a more sinister note, they 

suggest that Kant’s philosophy sealed the fate of any such philosophizing 

in the future: 

Although the imagination had always been met with caution ... even into the 

seventeenth century it still had its ancestral place among the faculties of 

knowledge. It lost this position with Kant – once and for all, one might say, if 

one views the philosophy of the Romantics as an intermezzo. 11 

The Böhmes see the critical turn as symptomatic not simply of Kant’s 

‘‘angst’’ as a typical eighteenth-century man of reason but of much that 

ails contemporary ‘‘modern’’ thought generally. In what follows, I would 

like to make an initial attempt at adjudicating the debate between those 

who, like the Böhmes, 12 believe that critical philosophy’s antipathy to 

imagination and sensibility in general ought to undermine its significance 

and those (typically Kant scholars) who view such critiques as misplaced 

psychologizing that misses the point of the critical enterprise. 13 

Henrich argues that the unity of the faculties for Kant can be understood 

only ‘‘teleologically,’’ hence the move to the imagination as 

transcendental origin is ruled out, and any attempts to rewrite Kant’s 

account of subjectivity in terms of the imagination could only be misguided. 

The Böhmes argue that Kant was pathologically averse to giving 

the imagination any genuine status next to the understanding and reason 

and hence could not find a proper place for it in his account of knowledge. 

Henrich’s account is a methodological explanation of the ‘‘displacement’’ 

of imagination in Kant’s critical philosophy, the Böhmes’ is a 

psycho-social one. Both may contain elements of truth – and they are by 

no means mutually exclusive – but, I believe, neither view can be the last 

word on the subject. For, as I will argue in what follows, it is not clear 

that, in the final analysis, the imagination was entirely displaced in Kant’s 

philosophy, nor is it clear that he continued to hold that all functioning 

of imagination a priori must be subsumed under the understanding. 

Two considerations support the view that the role of imagination was 

not displaced in Kant’s overall theory. First, the role of teleological 

11 Ibid., p. 231. 

12 Robin May Schott’s book, Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (Boston: Beacon 

Press, 1988), presents another statement of this position from a feminist perspective. 

13 The three-way debate between the Böhmes, Henrichians, and Heideggerians must be waived for 

the sake of space here. It is hinted at, however, in the insert to the Böhmes’ chapter on the 

imagination in Das Andere der Vernunft (see n. 10), ‘‘Heideggers Philosophische Rehabilitierung 

der Einbildungskraft,’’ pp. 243–245.


judgment came to have significance as a transcendental condition of 

human judgment for Kant, and his concern with it eventually resulted in 

the capstone of critical philosophy with the publication of the Critique of 

Judgment. Here, in the final phases of his mature philosophy, the imagination 

plays a pivotal role in Kant’s account of the nature of human 

experience reflectively (teleologically) organized. Second, Kant was not 

uniformly negative in his view of the imagination, even of what he perceived 

to be its excesses. And at least one of these excesses – viz. 

enthusiasm – plays an important role in his later social theory. 

A third consideration is also important in evaluating the extent to 

which Kant’s philosophy was tainted by problematic motivations. 

Scholars have argued that a crucial motivating force behind Kant’s 

‘‘rejection’’ of metaphysics was his reading of Rousseau and his consequent 

radical revision of the prevailing instrumentalist conception of 

reason. 14 To the extent that this interpretation of the critical turn rests on 

Kant’s deeply felt conviction that metaphysical speculation led to an 

‘‘elitist’’ picture of morality, it clearly represents an additional element for 

consideration in any complete analysis of the motives underlying the 

critical philosophy. I look at each of these considerations in turn and 

conclude with an assessment of the Bö hmes’ contribution to Kant’s 

interpretation in the light of them. 

im aginative reflection and taste 

The Bö hmes’ claim that the imagination lost its place as one of the 

faculties of knowledge in Kant’s philosophy is relatively uncontroversial, 

if one considers the fate of the imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason. 

In the second edition of the Critique , Kant defines the imagination as 

‘‘the faculty of presenting [vorstellen] in intuition an object that is not itself 

present ’’ (B151). 15 Such an activity may involve the representing of an 

object in accordance with laws of association, so that the images involved 

14 See Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant’s Critical 

Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), and Frederick C. Beiser, ‘‘Kant’s 

Intellectual Development: 1746–1781,’’ chapter I of The Cambridge Companion to Kant (New York: 

Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 26–61. 

15 I have purposely avoided the use of ‘‘represent’’ to translate vorstellen. This is to avoid any 

misleading literal reading of the English term, which would suggest that whatever the imagination 

is presenting in intuition must have been present before (literally, is being ‘‘re-presented’’). The 

German word vorstellen when read also in literal fashion does not carry the same meaning 

(but means literally, to ‘‘place in front of’’). See also, Pluhar, translator’s note in Critique of 

Judgment, p.14.

100 


depend on what is, or was, given to the senses. Or, alternatively, the 

subject, apart from any particular experience, represents the object of 

intuition in accordance with the categories a priori. In the former case, 

imagination is an effect determined empirically and is thus contingent in 

a way that renders it opaque to transcendental analysis. In Kant’s words, 

this empirical manner of representing intuitions is ‘‘reproductive’’ and 

‘‘contributes nothing to the explanation of the possibility of a priori 

knowledge’’ (B152). This sort of imaginative activity, Kant says here, falls 

within the domain of psychology, but not transcendental (i.e., critical) 

philosophy. 

In the latter case, where, in the process of intuitively presenting an 

object the mind is active, Kant calls the activity ‘‘productive.’’ It is the 

‘‘first application’’ of the understanding to objects of possible intuition. 

Here the mind is creative in that it spontaneously presents an object in 

intuition; that is, the mind presents the object independently of empirical 

conditions. Kant holds that the only avenue for this sort of spontaneous 

‘‘production’’ (synthesis) is via the categories of the understanding. Hence 

this sort of imaginative production is seen as ‘‘an action [Wirkung] of the 

understanding on the sensibility’’ (B152), and the ‘‘transcendental act of 

imagination’’ is identified with the ‘‘synthetic influence of the understanding 

upon inner sense’’ (B154). Since Kant has already declared the 

understanding to be the sole source of all acts of combination (‘‘synthesis,’’ 

B130), the condition of all synthetic knowledge a priori can only be 

the understanding, one of whose tasks is to be productively imaginative. 

The imagination simply has no independent status here. 

For Kant, as already mentioned, all acts of synthesis are acts of the 

understanding. Moreover, he claims that all acts of the understanding are 

judgments (A69/B94) and labels the understanding the ‘‘faculty of 

judgment’’ (A69/B94), as if to suggest that no other judgment is possible 

except judgments synthesizing representations in accordance with categories 

of the understanding. But, strictly speaking, it does not follow that 

all acts of judgment are acts of the understanding, or of synthesis. All that 

follows from the claims mentioned (at A69/B94) is that all acts of 

synthesis are judgments. True, Kant’s claim in the second (B) edition of 

the ‘‘Transcendental Deduction’’ is a strong one: ‘‘All possible perceptions, 

and therefore everything that can come to empirical consciousness, 

that is, all appearances of nature, must, so far as their connection is 

concerned, be subject to the categories’’ (B164–165). But even this strong 

claim does not rule out that human beings have a further capacity for 

non-synthetic judgment involving the imagination. Obviously human

eings are capable of analytic judgments but, apart from this, we may also 

contemplate our (already synthesized) experience. We are capable of 

making judgments about judgments of experience – that is, about already 

categorized experience. There is no need to suppose that such ‘‘higherorder’’ 

judgments themselves involve application of the categories just 

because they take synthetic judgments for their material. If such judgments 

are possible, as it were, ‘‘upon’’ synthetic judgments of the 

understanding, it may be that imagination is required by this other sort of 

non-synthetic judgment, 16 in which case imagination could not be 

assimilated to the understanding. If such judgments are taken to be of any 

importance in the analysis of human experience, then there may be a 

place, after all, for the imagination as an independent faculty in Kant’s 

philosophy. 

Of course, this is precisely what happens in Kant’s account of reflective 

judgment. In the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant 

allows that ‘‘judgment is not merely an ability to subsume the particular 

under the universal (whose concept is given), but also, the other way 

round, an ability to find the universal for the particular,’’ 17 and he goes on 

to argue that the principle for performing the latter task cannot come 

from the understanding. The task of finding universals for particulars is 

the task of ‘‘reflective judgment’’: ‘‘To reflect (or consider [belegen]) is to 

hold given presentations [Vorstellungen] up to, and compare them with, 

either other presentations or one’s cognitive power [itself], in reference to 

a concept that this [comparison] makes possible’’ (X: 211). Imagination, 

‘‘the faculty of presenting in intuition an object that is not itself present’’ 

(B151), obviously will have a role to play here insofar as given presentations 

are to be compared to (but not combined with) ‘‘other presentations’’ 

not themselves present. What these ‘‘other’’ presentations might be 

will be discussed in what follows, but it is clear that, whatever they are, 

the imagination, as the faculty of ‘‘presenting’’ what is not present, will 

have to be involved. 

Moreover, the ‘‘object’’ of reflective judgment is not an object of 

experience but rather a ‘‘purposive arrangement of nature in a system’’ 

(XX: 214), so that this purposiveness is not the result of the application of 

a category. In Kant’s words, it has ‘‘no basis ... in terms of the universal 

laws of the understanding’’ (XX: 216). Whatever work Kant holds that the 

16 On Kant’s definition, analytic judgments require no imagination since their ‘‘objects’’ are already 

there, as it were, in the concept being analyzed, and, in any case, intuition is not involved. 

17 First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (Ak XX), trans. Werner Pluhar, in Critique of 

Judgment, XX: 210. 

The failure of Kant’s imagination 101

102 


imagination performs in such judgments, he does not want to say that 

reflective imagination is merely a task of the understanding. For this 

reason, reflective judgment cannot be constitutive of knowledge. It does 

not determine cognition but deals with appearances in an entirely different 

manner: 

So when reflective judgment tries to bring given appearances under empirical 

concepts of determinate natural things, it deals with them technically rather than 

schematically. In other words, it does not deal with them mechanically, as it 

were, like an instrument, guided by the understanding and the senses; it 

deals with them artistically, in terms of a principle that is universal but also 

indeterminate: the principle of a purposive arrangement of nature in a system. 

(XX: 213–214) 

This sort of judging, for Kant, is more holistic than the ‘‘determining’’ 

judgments of the understanding, and at the same time more tentative. Its 

principle is ‘‘only a necessary presupposition’’ while that of the understanding 

is ‘‘law’’ (XX: 215). To borrow Rudolf Makkreel’s terminology 

in Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, reflective judgment may be 

called interpretive. 18 It involves technique and is an ‘‘art,’’ while the synthesizing 

activity of cognitive judgment proceeds ‘‘schematically’’ and is 

thus more ‘‘mechanical’’ in nature. In light of all this, it is reasonable to 

wonder if the Böhmes’ claim that Kant’s is a philosophy of suppressed 

imagination is not a bit too hasty. Their point can perhaps be made for 

the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and even more plausibly 

made for the Critique of Practical Reason, for that matter. 19 But in writing 

about reflection in the third Critique Kant demonstrates a willingness to 

consider a far more ‘‘imaginative’’ sort of judgment. 

The Böhmes are of course aware of this defense and do consider the 

importance of the imagination in one kind of reflection – namely, in 

aesthetic reflective judgments of taste. They argue that although in these 

judgments the imagination is given a more independent role, still, Kant 

in effect finds in taste a ‘‘safe,’’ segregated arena for the imagination, 

where the creative work of this faculty is reduced to mere ‘‘play’’: 

But it can still be established, that also here, where the independence of the 

imagination is at least accepted as play, the joy taken in this play occurs precisely 

where it is well mannered, that is, where it conforms to the understanding. 

Classicism delights in the allegorized and domesticated figures of Greek 

mythology-figures that once were gripping and overwhelming powers. The 


Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 

19 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, V:69.


imagination itself is turned from Eros into Cupid (Putto), into a child that one 

delights in because it does of its own accord what one would otherwise ask of it. 

(Das Andere der Vernunft, pp. 238–239) 

With respect to Kant’s theory of taste, the Böhmes’ assessment is apt – 

and, indeed, they could have said a good deal more. Taste, for Kant, 

although he hints at a substantive connection with morality, is closely 

associated with culture, and serves (at best) to tame and discipline people 

by cloaking them in the appearance of morality. 20 Kant’s account of taste 

is heavily invested in eighteenth-century British accounts, and to the 

extent that he departs from these theories in an attempt to find an a priori 

grounding for judgments of taste, he does so by insisting that in these 

judgments the ‘‘harmonious’’ activity of imagination and understanding 

‘‘belongs to cognition in general’’ (‘‘zu einem Erkenntnis uberhauptgehört’’ 

(V: 219)). Imagination is not absolutely free, but rather is ‘‘freely lawful,’’ 

21 with the understanding setting its limits: ‘‘And yet to say that the 

imagination is free and yet lawful of itself, i.e., that it carries autonomy with 

it, is a contradiction. The understanding alone gives the law’’ (V: 241). 

At Section 50 in the third Critique, Kant sets up a dichotomy between 

genius/spirit/imagination, on the one hand, and discipline/taste/understanding, 

on the other. In judgments of taste, although the understanding 

is not the only operative faculty, it clearly is the defining one: 

In order for a work to be beautiful, it is not necessary that it be rich and original 

in ideas, but it is necessary that the imagination in its freedom be commensurate 

with the lawfulness of the understanding. For if the imagination is left in lawless 

freedom, all its riches produce nothing but nonsense, and it is judgment that 

adapts the imagination to the understanding. (V: 319) 

Here Kant disassociates imagination from judgment, implicitly defining 

the latter as the ability to subject the imaginative faculty to the 

20 

E.g. see Anthropology (Anthr.) (Ak VII), trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 11–12/ 

244: ‘‘Ideal taste has a tendency to promote morality in an external way. Making a man [Mensch] 

well-mannered as a social being falls short of forming a morally good man, but it still prepares him 

for it by the effort he makes, in society, to please others (to make them love or admire him).’’ And 

also V: 210: ‘‘To show taste in our conduct (or in judging other people’s conduct) is very different 

from expressing our moral way of thinking. For this contains a command and gives rise to a need, 

whereas moral taste only plays with the objects of liking without committing itself to any of 

them.’’ For a discussion of the parallels between Kant’s views on taste and femininity, see Kneller, 

‘‘Discipline and Silence: Women and Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Taste,’’ in Aesthetics in 

Feminist Perspective, eds. Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Bloomington: University of 

Indiana Press, 1993), pp. 179–192. 

21 

Kant speaks of the ‘‘freie Gesetzmüßigkeit der Einbildungskraft’’ (free lawfulness of imagination) 

(V: 240).

104 


understanding. ‘‘Judgment ... will sooner permit the imagination’s 

freedom and wealth to be impaired than that the understanding be 

impaired’’ (V: 320). Thus, Kant argues, fine art requires ‘‘imagination, 

understanding, spirit, and taste,’’ and it is the fourth condition – namely, 

taste – that sees to it that the other three elements are so ordered that 

imagination never gets the upper hand (V: 320 n. 55). Thus it would 

appear that the Böhmes are correct in saying that ‘‘the freedom of the 

imagination in art is also only apparent.’’ 22 

imaginative excess and moral progress 

To view these aspects of Kant’s theory of taste as a sort of final critical 

blow to the imagination would, however, be to overlook the fact that even 

if Kant wanted the imagination to be ‘‘tamed’’ by taste, he also seemed 

willing to permit the imagination’s enthusiastic overflow in some 

instances. Kant’s aesthetic theory involves more than just a theory of taste, 

as I have already argued. 23 And, as we have already seen, in Section 17 of 

the Critique of Judgment, Kant also defends the view, albeit briefly, that ‘‘a 

very strong imagination’’ (later in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’’ 

he speaks of ‘‘spirit’’ or ‘‘genius’’) may form a partnership of sorts with 

reason. Kant argues for the possibility of artistic genius exhibiting the 

rational idea of humanity ‘‘as an aesthetic idea fully in concreto (in a 

model image)’’ (V: 233), and in the last paragraph of this section Kant 

argues unequivocally for the possibility of ‘‘the visible expression of moral 

ideas’’ through imagination, in a manner that, while ‘‘taken only from 

experience,’’ nevertheless transforms that experience into a presentation of 

something new: 

These moral ideas must be connected, in the idea of the highest purposiveness, 

with everything that our reason links with the morally good: goodness of soul, or 

purity, fortitude, or serenity, etc.; and in order for this connection to be made 

visible, as it were, in bodily expression (as an effect of what is inward), pure ideas 

22 Das Andere der Vernunft, p.329 (see n. 10). 

23 I am here setting aside Kant’s theory of the sublime, which I have discussed in ‘‘Kant’s Immature 

Imagination,’’ in Modern Engendering: Critical Feminist Readings in Modern Western Philosophy, ed. 

Bat Ami Bar-on (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). Although in it the imagination is allowed to ‘‘run 

wild,’’ the role assigned to imagination vis-à-vis reason is no less problematic than that assigned to 

it vis-à-vis the understanding in judgments of taste. In the end it must be ‘‘humiliated’’ by reason, 

as the Böhmes argue in Das Andere der Vernunft, pp. 215–223 (see n. 10). I have also given a critique 

along feminist lines in ‘‘Kant’s Immature Imagination,’’ in Modern Engendering: Critical Feminist 

Readings in Modern Western Philosophy, ed. Bat Ami Bar-on (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 

pp. 141–153.


of reason must be united with a very strong imagination in someone who seeks 

so much as to judge, let alone exhibit, it. (V: 235) 

Moral considerations and a ‘‘mighty’’ (mächtige) imagination are also 

introduced into aesthetic experience in Kant’s discussion of aesthetic 

ideas – that is, of intuitive presentations of the imagination that ‘‘prompt 

much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever ... can 

be adequate’’ (V: 314). And as we saw earlier, aesthetic ideas are said to 

complement rational ideas since the latter are ‘‘concepts to which no 

intuition (presentation of the imagination) can be adequate’’ (V: 314). 

Aesthetic ideas are imaginative ‘‘excesses’’ that 

prompt ... so much thought as can never be comprehended within a determinate 

concept and thereby the presentation aesthetically expands the concept 

itself and sets the power of intellectual ideas (i.e., of reason) in motion: it makes 

reason think more ... than what can be apprehended and made distinct in the 

presentation. (V: 315) 

Thus aesthetic ideas can be said to express a rational idea in sensible form. 

In Makkreel’s formulation, the imagination, through aesthetic ideas, 

complements reason by striving to complete reason’s ideas in experience. 

‘‘Thought, which is a function of reason, is here [in the presence of an 

aesthetic idea] occasioned by an excess of intuitive content that cannot be 

contained within the concepts of the understanding.’’ 24 Kant says that 

such creative imaginative presentations ‘‘make us add to a concept the 

thoughts of much that is ineffable, but the feeling of which quickens our 

cognitive powers and connects language, which otherwise would be mere 

letters, with spirit’’ (V: 316). That the expression of imaginative ‘‘excess’’ 

might have important implications for human life and creativity is an 

idea that is new to Kant in the third Critique, where he grants the 

imagination a ‘‘transformative’’ (umbildende) power. It is certainly an 

argument for the claim that imagination had not lost its place in Kant’s 

critical philosophy. We need only recall Kant’s claim at V: 314: 

For the imagination ([in its role] as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty 

when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature 

gives it. We use it to entertain ourselves when experience strikes us as overly 

routine. We may even restructure [umbilden] experience; and though in doing so 

we continue to follow analogical laws, yet we also follow principles which reside 

higher up, namely, in reason (and which are just as natural to us as those which 

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

106 


the understanding follows in apprehending empirical nature) for although it is 

under that law [of association] that nature lends us material, yet we can process 

that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses 

nature. (V: 314) 

Here Kant is describing a kind of ‘‘judging’’ – in the case of ideas of 

reason, one might call it ‘‘moral daydreaming’’ – in which imagination 

constructs presentations that ‘‘surpass’’ (übertreffen) without transcending, 

nature. In commenting on this passage, Makkreel puts it as follows: 

Kant’s use of the term ‘‘surpass’’ points to a significant difference in the way 

rational and aesthetic ideas may be said to go ‘‘beyond’’ the limits of experience. 

Rational ideas transcend nature, and aesthetic ideas surpass it by transforming 

and enriching experience. 25 

The result of such presentations is that the imagination ‘‘enlivens’’ the idea 

of reason by making it present in intuition – that is, imagination is capable 

of making the rational idea ‘‘feel real.’’ Whenever such presentations are 

expressed in concrete form, in a way that communicates itself to others, a 

‘‘mixed-mode’’ experience of the sort discussed in the ideal of beauty occurs. 

That is, an experience that permits the subject to feel what in the rational 

(moral) ideal alone could only be thought takes place. 

The elevated role of imagination in these cases suggests, if not a unity 

of sensibility and reason in the human subject then at least a higher place 

for the latter in human moral experience. In the (mixed-mode) aesthetic 

experiences that Kant allows for beyond taste, rationality and sensibility 

(via the imagination) are both involved. But, unlike in the judgment of 

taste, the imagination is not restrained and ‘‘disciplined.’’ In fact, it is 

precisely imaginative excess, in the ‘‘multiplicity of partial presentations’’ 

(V: 316), that meets a need on the side of reason. This profligate presentation 

prompts in the subject a ‘‘lively interest’’ in reason’s ideas, and 

as we saw in chapter 4, an interest in their being actualized. 

For Kant, judgments involving what might be called ‘‘idealistic’’ 

imagination connect intuitive presentations with a moral idea, giving rise 

to a concrete, sensible ideal and to a kind of moral liveliness or interest 

that does not result from the intellectual idea alone. As we have already 

seen, such moral ‘‘imaginings’’ might arguably serve as a subjective basis 

for a rational hope for moral progress; that is, they may enable belief 

in the possibility of realizing moral ideas. In the exhibition of its 

object, imagination makes the realization of that object subjectively 

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


possible – ‘‘imaginable.’’ Perfect human virtue may be an unattainable 

ideal, but ‘‘a very strong imagination’’ can give this intellectual notion a 

flesh and blood quality that it did not have before, bringing it down to 

earth, as it were, and enabling human beings to envision actually attaining 

that which moral reason requires them to strive for. 

We saw in chapter 2 that imagination’s capacity to enliven morality is 

especially relevant in the case of Kant’s doctrine of the Highest Good – 

that is, of a moral ‘‘world in which virtue and happiness are commensurate, 

or at least in which human beings make every effort to maximize 

the correspondence of happiness to virtue.’’ 26 I argued there that, given 

the difficulties attendant on what has been called the ‘‘theological’’ 

doctrine of the Highest Good in Kant, which requires postulation of the 

existence of God to ground such hope, it is worth looking at the accounts 

of aesthetic moral experiences in Kant’s third Critique as a possible 

alternative to this metaphysical leap of faith in the second Critique. 27 

That is, if, as Kant argues in the third Critique, we have the aesthetic 

reflective capacity to literally ‘‘make sense’’ of rational ideas like the 

Highest Good, why could not this capacity itself serve to ground our hope 

(not our certainty) that we ourselves could bring it about? In light of 

Kant’s very strong claims for the imagination’s creative and enlivening 

powers in the third Critique, the question seems reasonable, and yet Kant 

does not go so far, in either the discussion of the ideal of beauty or of 

aesthetic ideas, as to suggest that these are necessary ingredients in human 

efforts to moral improvement. 28 

26 Scholars have debated whether or not the notion of the highest good involves, in Harry van der 

Linden’s words, ‘‘the union of universal virtue and universal happiness’’ or the far more modest 

‘‘moral society in which human agents attempt to make one another happy, but do not necessarily 

succeed’’ (Kantian Ethics and Socialism, Indianapolis: Hackett, (1988, pp. 42ff.). Also see Andrews 

Reath, ‘‘Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant,’’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 

(4) (1988), pp. 593–619. Van der Linden distinguishes between a teleological conception (the 

‘‘highest good desirable’’) and a moral conception (the ‘‘highest moral good’’). Reath makes a 

similar distinction between a ‘‘theological’’ and a ‘‘secular (or political)’’ conception of the highest 

good (pp. 594ff.). 

27 The term is Andrews Reath’s (see n. 26). Although I find both their accounts extremely useful in 

sorting out the different strands in Kant’s thought, both Reath and van der Linden are inclined to 

dismiss the ‘‘spiritualized’’ account of the Highest Good in Kant. This, it seems to me, has the 

unfortunate effect of disconnecting Kant’s notion from the felt response that is part of the 

happiness component of the Highest Good. In Kant’s account, the postulate of God’s existence on 

the ‘‘theological’’ reading served to do more than ground rational belief in a future paradise. It also 

channeled desire for such a state of affairs into faith in God. The virtue of finding a role for the 

imagination in grounding efforts to bring about the ‘‘highest good desirable’’ is that it provides a 

this-worldly channel, and hence a justification, for the desire to do so. 

28 Kant does suggest that beauty might serve as a symbol of morality and thus act as a sort of bridge 

to the moral from taste, because the beautiful arouses sensations that are ‘‘somehow analogous’’ to

108 


There is a parallel here to Kant’s essay ‘‘An Old Question Raised 

Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’’ where Kant raises 

much the same question for rational hope in human social institutions 

and moral progress: 

There must be some experience in the human race which, as an event, points to 

the disposition and capacity of the human race to be the cause of its own advance 

toward the better, and ... toward the human race as being the author of this 

advance. 29 

Kant uses the question of moral progress to take the opportunity to 

express his own support for the goals of the French Revolution. Yet the 

‘‘event’’ that indicates the human capacity for moral progress is not 

the Revolution itself, but rather ‘‘the mode of thinking [Denkungsart] of 

the spectators.’’ That is, the event that indicates human ability to be the 

‘‘author’’ of a moral society is the publicly expressed, non-opportunistic 

(uneigenützig) sympathy for those who participate in struggles to end 

human oppression. The glimmer of hope that history holds out to those 

seeking reason to believe in moral progress is the spectators’ ‘‘wishful 

participation that borders on enthusiasm’’ (VII: 85), an enthusiasm that 

Kant identifies as a ‘‘passionate participation in the good’’ (VII: 86). 

Felicitas Munzel’s work on Kant’s notion of moral character and the 

‘‘revolution in Denkungsart’’ that precipitates it underscores the centrality 

of a kind of unconditional ‘‘adoption of resolve’’ to do what is right come 

what may that lies at the heart of the enthusiasm that Kant admires 

here. 30 On this reading, the spectator’s response could itself be an indication 

that humanity may possess the means to accomplish moral progress. 

But what exactly is this mode of thinking that ‘‘borders on 

enthusiasm’’ and is a ‘‘passionate participation in the good’’? 

the feeling present when we make moral judgments (CJ, 230/354). But even apart from the 

vagueness of his arguments, the point here is that Kant fails to follow up on the much more 

intimate relationships between morality and aesthetic experience suggested in the ‘‘ideal’’ and in 

his account of aesthetic ideas. For a different reading of the connection between taste and morality, 

see Paul Guyer, ‘‘Feeling and Freedom: Kant on Aesthetics and Morality,’’ Journal of Aesthetics and 

Art Criticism 48 (2) (1990), pp. 137–146. 

29 The essay, although complete in its own right, was included as the second part of the 1798 

publication entitled Streit der Fakultäten. The translation here is from Kant on History, ed. Lewis 

White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1986), pp. 137–154. The citation is from VII: 84. 

30 See Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘‘Critical’’ link of Morality, 

Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 330. 

Munzel’s account of the voluntary nature, the positing, as it were, of the moral self in an act of 

resolve followed by the development and maintenance of character, is insightful. Emphasizing this 

aspect of moral character helps make clear why, for Kant, moral enthusiasts were so valuable: they 

are flamboyant, visible examples of the radical choice of the moral. Like fictional characters, 

however, they could also be dangerous for the same reason (see CPR: A570/B598).


In this same passage (VII: 85) Kant makes an anthropological point 

that he repeatedly made in his lectures on the subject: ‘‘Genuine 

enthusiasm always moves only toward what is ideal and, indeed, to what 

is purely moral, such as the concept of right.’’ In student notes from his 

anthropology lectures taken during the 1770s, we find Kant telling his 

students that ‘‘an enthusiast is always a noble Fantast, full of life and 

strength, and so, in addition, inclined to virtue. Indeed, much that is good 

disappears from the land where they are purged.’’ 31 In the published 

anthropology lectures, he defines an enthusiast as a visionary or fantast 

and the latter as a person who ‘‘fails to collate his imaginings with laws of 

experience.’’ In the same place he adds that, when accompanied by 

‘‘passion’’ (Affect), fanaticism becomes enthusiasm (VII: 202). That is, 

enthusiasm is the condition of passionate participation in moral ‘‘imaginings’’ 

that fail to ‘‘harmonize with concepts’’ (VII: 48/172) but are 

rather bound up with rational ideals. In the Reflections on Anthropology 

Kant identifies two kinds of ‘‘fantasts’’: those of sensibility and those of 

reason. The former are people who mistake their own ideas for actual 

perceptions (XV.1: R#498: as in hallucinations, presumably). They are 

wahnsinnig: taking what is merely in one’s thoughts to be perceived 

through the bodily senses. Fantasts of reason are ‘‘visionaries’’ who 

mistake their own ideas for reality (even if not perceptual; also at R #499; 

Schwärmer: taking what is sensed ‘‘mentally/spiritually’’ (geistig) for real). 

Fantasts of both sorts confuse what is in their imagination with the things 

themselves (R #499). Kant claims that both Plato and Rousseau were 

enthusiasts of reason. Arguably then, the spectators of the Revolution, 

whose sympathetic fervor ‘‘borders’’ on enthusiasm, are experiencing 

something like the ‘‘noble fantast’’ experiences in their ability to imagine 

and desire a rational ideal. These spectators are a source of hope precisely 

because their own moral way of thinking is embodied in passion and 

imagined participation in great social ideals. They imbue abstract conceptions 

of justice with a desire and longing that is palpable. The creative 

imagination and its play of aesthetic ideas in the third Critique discussion 

31 Brauer notes, MS p. 88. Based on the notes taken by a student, Theodor Friederich Brauer, dated 

1779, taken from transcripts at the Philips-Universität, Marburg. I would like to thank Werner 

Stark for assistance in the use of these materials and for helpful information about the historical 

context in which they were written. Although these sources are from student transcriptions of 

Kant’s lectures and are therefore not the final word on any disputed question in Kant 

interpretation, nothing that I rely on here is essentially new to Kant, but rather corroborates views 

on enthusiasm expressed elsewhere. I have relied only on passages from Brauer that also appear in 

notes taken down by other students during that time.

110 


of genius comes to mind: spectators whose own moral character finds 

expression in an excess of imaginative participation resemble the artistic 

genius who embodies an excess of thought in a single physical expression 

of it. 

Yet Kant was not unequivocal in his praise of moral enthusiasm. In 

connection with his comments from the anthropology lectures and the 

late comment from the ‘‘An Old Question,’’ it is interesting to note his 

position expressed in the Critique of Practical Reason: Kant argues that the 

‘‘typic’’ of pure practical judgment guards against ‘‘the mysticism of 

practical reason, which makes into a schema that which should serve only 

as a symbol, i.e., proposes to supply real yet nonsensuous intuitions (of an 

invisible kingdom of God) for the application of the moral law and thus 

plunges into the transcendent’’ (V: 70–71). Nevertheless, he contrasts this 

mystic plunge with the ‘‘empiricism of practical reason’’ to the benefit of 

the former: 

The protest against empiricism of practical reason is much more important and 

commendable, because mysticism is compatible with the purity and sublimity of 

the moral law; and as it is not natural to ordinary ways of thinking [Denkungsart] 

to stretch its imagination to supersensuous intuitions, the danger from this side 

is not so general ... [E]mpiricism [of practical reason] is far more dangerous 

than all mystical enthusiasm, which can never be a lasting condition for any great 

number of persons. (V: 70–71) 

Here Kant expresses a thoroughly ambivalent attitude to the imagination 

when used to present ideas of reason. Whereas he is quite clear that 

practical reason based on empirical principles is degrading because it is 

generally allied with (sensuous) inclination, he is tolerant of imagination 

‘‘stretched’’ to the supersensuous only because it is less likely to occur. 

The ‘‘rationalism of practical reason’’ is a safer bet, if one had to choose. 

Thus, in one brief passage in the heart of his mature moral theory, Kant 

manages to both criticize and defend the enthusiast (e.g., Swedenborg) 

and, at the same time, Kant’s own rationalist forefathers. So far as moral 

theory is concerned, passionate rationalist speculation about the good is 

less dangerous than dwelling on ‘‘empirical interest, with which inclinations 

generally are secretly in league’’ (V: 71). Mystical enthusiasm will 

only ever be ‘‘a lasting condition’’ for a small number of persons, and 

even then is compatible with the purity and sublimity of the moral law 

because it involves imaginative transcendence of inclinations and sensibility. 

On balance, and in conjunction with Kant’s other claims about the 

positive moral value of enthusiasm, it appears that he always maintained 

a certain regard for visionaries that went beyond simply enlightened

tolerance. His rejection of Swedenborg, and of metaphysics, was more 

nuanced than the Böhmes suggest. 32 

Kant held that attempts at imaginative transcendence by ordinary 

people are bound to fail, and in the third Critique he argues that this very 

failure of imagination may give rise to an appreciation of reason’s 

superiority to imagination (and sensibility). This appreciation is, of 

course, the feeling of the sublime: At Section 29, ‘‘On the Modality of a 

Judgment about the Sublime in Nature,’’ Kant says that 

The [sublime] is what genuinely characterizes man’s morality, where reason must 

exert its dominance over sensibility, except that in an aesthetic judgment about 

the sublime we present this dominance as being exerted by the imagination itself, 

as an instrument of reason. (V: 268–269) 

And also: 


the [imagination], acting in accordance with principles of the schematism of 

judgment[,] ... is an instrument of reason and its ideas ... In this reflection of 

the aesthetic power of judgment [i.e., of imagination], by which it seeks to 

elevate itself to the point of being adequate to reason ... we present the object 

itself as subjectively purposive, precisely because objectively the imagination, 

[even] in its greatest expansion, is inadequate to reason. (V: 269) 

Here the imagination appears to be grasping the transcendent, only to be 

humiliated and give way to the higher moral calling of the subject. In a 

kind of moral bait-and-switch, the promise of metaphysical insight is held 

out as the goal that imagination attempts to reach (in contemplation of 

the overwhelming might or size of natural objects), only to be replaced by 

the feeling of the transcendence of reason. 

So we find Kant on the one hand admiring and defending the 

‘‘enthusiast of reason’’ who takes his imagined moral visions to be reality 

and also, in his aesthetic theory, propounding a theory of imagination 

that suggests that such visions could have significant moral worth. At the 

same time, he conspicuously refrains from making a strong, explicit 

argument for the need for such an imagination to support moral judgment 

and action. Once again we must ask why. 

Kant’s hesitancy to embrace a natural consequence of his own views 

about the imagination may be traced, I believe, to two quite different 

32 For a defense of the view that Kant never fully rejected rationalist metaphysics, see Karl Ameriks, 

‘‘The Critique of Metaphysics: Kant and Traditional Ontology,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to 

Kant, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 249–279.

112 


motivations, one of which has historical and (if the Böhmes are correct) 

personal psychological roots in his concerns about the dangers of 

imaginative distractions. The other motivation is not so obviously 

lamentable. Kant’s aversion to moral elitism led him to reject the 

notion of any sort of intuitive access to the rational (moral), even if he 

did not totally reject those who claimed to have it. Kant was convinced 

that morality itself proscribed taking oneself to be better equipped to 

grasp moral principles and hence to set oneself up as a moral authority 

over others. The very heart of his moral theory requires knowing oneself 

(honestly evaluating one’s maxims) so as to prevent self-deception from 

paving the way to making an exception for oneself morally. 33 Whatever 

else it is, such self-knowledge ought not to be ‘‘creative.’’ Moreover, 

imagination, Kant felt, is not given to all in the same measure (although 

everyone has some potential for developing it). Genius is a gift of 

nature, ‘‘an innate mental predisposition’’ (V: 308) that belongs to 

artists whose ideas are ‘‘rich in fancy and yet also in thought’’ (V: 309). 

Kant was willing to allow that certain enthusiasts (notably Plato and 

Rousseau) were able to combine their gift for fantasy with an equally 

great gift for philosophical thought. But neither they nor any other 

genius could claim, just on the basis of their genius, to be more or less 

moral than any other person. The reason for this is that the distinguishing 

mark of genius is its inability to be shared – literally communicated 

– with others. For this reason, Kant argues that a great 

discoverer like Newton was not, in his scientific work, exhibiting genius, 

since Newton could ‘‘show how he took every one of the steps he had 

to take in order to get from the first elements of geometry to his great 

and profound discoveries ...to everyone else as well ...allowing others 

to follow.’’ On the other hand a Homer or a Wieland did exhibit 

genius precisely because their work, based in their own rich fantasy, was 

inexplicable even to themselves, let alone communicable to others. They 

could not lay out rules for others to follow in order to accomplish what 

they themselves accomplished. 

In chapter 7 I shall argue that, on Kant’s own account of aesthetic 

reflection, genius may be seen as more common among human beings 

33 See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1991), VI: 441. Andrews Reath argues convincingly for the centrality of this aspect 

of Kant’s ethics in ‘‘Two Conceptions,’’ and more recently Jeanine Grenberg has written 

extensively on Kant’s conception of humility and the role it plays in his moral theory (Kant and the 

Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption and Virtue, Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2005).


than his distinction between Newton and Homer suggests. Here the 

point to be made is simply that Kant did present this distinction as 

unproblematic. In this respect, he is simply reiterating the trend in 

German aesthetics, culminating in Lessing’s work, discussed in chapter 2. 

That is, Lessing argued for granting the artist greater artistic freedom 

and less constraint by rules of criticism, on the ground that genius is a 

rule unto itself. And, as we saw in chapter 3, the artistic imagination for 

Kant, as for Lessing, is itself a product of nature. But for that very reason 

Kant felt it could not be a necessary condition of human moral experience; 

hence Kant’s suspicion of the claims of metaphysical visionaries. 

These ‘‘artists of the absolute,’’ as we might call them, could never 

provide rules for others to follow in order to duplicate their own 

experiences. Their fantasies are not universally communicable, in other 

words. 34 

the imaginative dimension of metaphysical 

speculation 

In Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, and his article ‘‘Kant’s 

Intellectual Development 1746–1781’’ for The Cambridge Companion to 

Kant, Frederick Beiser emphasizes Kant’s ambivalent feelings toward 

metaphysics throughout his life and writings. Beiser points to Kant’s own 

metaphor of metaphysics as his (Kant’s) seductive mistress, 35 mapping 

Kant’s intellectual development through several stages, including infatuation, 

disillusionment, partial reconciliation, and divorce. He argues 

that Kant’s view of the philosophical enterprise, and consequently of the 

importance of metaphysics, had changed in 1765 after his reading of 

Rousseau. Kant famously claimed that from then on he was to be 

committed to practical concerns: 

I am myself by inclination a seeker after truth. I feel a consuming thirst for 

knowledge and a restless desire to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every 

step I take. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the 

34 Neiman points out another problem with visionaries, for Kant, namely their tendency to force 

their views on others, (The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 

1994, p.169). 

35 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Ak II: 367: ‘‘Die Metaphysik, in welche ich das Schicksal habe verliebt zu 

sein, ob ich mich gleich von ihr nur selten einiger Gunstbezeugungen ruehmen kann, leistet 

zweierlei vorteile.’’

114 


honor of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. 

Rousseau set me right. This pretended superiority vanished and I learned to 

respect humanity. I should consider myself far more useless than the common 

laborer if I did not believe that one consideration alone gives worth to all others, 

namely, to establish the rights of man. (Remarks on the ‘‘Observations on the 

Beautiful and Sublime’’ XX: 44) 

In Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, Beiser sees the concern 

expressed by Kant that his philosophizing be ‘‘useful’’ as a concern shared 

generally by later Enlighteners in Germany: 

The Aufklärung was a practical movement insofar as its purpose was not to 

discover the first principles of reason – most Aufklärer believed that this task had 

already been achieved by thinkers such as Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant – but to 

bring them into daily life. In short, its aim was to surmount the gap between 

reason and life, theory and practice, speculation and action ...Most thinkers of 

the late eighteenth century saw themselves as Aufklärer, not only older figures 

such as Kant, Herder, and Wieland, but also younger ones such as Schlegel, 

Hölderlin, and Novalis. 

This turn to the practical explains, according to Beiser, why Kant 

comes to manifest a ‘‘complete skepticism toward metaphysics.’’ It is so 

deep, Beiser says, that in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, ‘‘he likens metaphysics 

to the dreams of the visionary or spirit-seer’’(‘‘Kant’s Intellectual 

Development,’’ p. 45) and (in ‘‘The Politics of Kant’s Critical Philosophy’’) 

he also claims that for Kant ‘‘Both metaphysicians and spirit 

seers live in a private fantasy world and chase after illusory abstractions 

...the aim of [Kant’s] skepticism [about metaphysics] is to expose 

the vanity of speculation, so that we direct our efforts toward finding 

what is truly useful for human life’’(Enlightenment, Revolution and 

Romanticism, p.28). With this favoring of practical over theoretical 

reason, Beiser suggests, the honeymoon with metaphysics is over for 

Kant. 

I have argued in chapter 4 that in fact Kant did not ‘‘prefer’’ practical 

to theoretical reason, but saw the two as intertwined, connected by 

reflective judgment. Beiser himself maintains, I believe quite correctly, 

that the supposed ‘‘divorce’’ with speculative theory was never fully 

carried out, and that ‘‘the flames of the old love affair burnt to the bitter 

end’’ of Kant’s life (‘‘Kant’s Intellectual Development,’’ p. 57). Beiser 

finds the old flame burning most strongly in Kant’s hypostatization in the 

second Critique of the conditions under which human beings could hope 

to bring about a just world – the highest good (Enlightenment, Revolution


and Romanticism, p.55), that is, in the postulates of metaphysical notions 

of God and immortality. As we saw earlier, Beiser argues that this return 

to metaphysics constitutes a ‘‘deep betrayal’’ of the radical spirit of his 

republican politics, and an inconsistency in his philosophy (p. 55). 

Although Beiser is surely correct to point to Kant’s disillusionment with 

metaphysics in 1765, and even before, I believe that, like the Böhmes, he 

overstates the situation in labeling Kant’s view of speculative metaphysics 

one of ‘‘complete skepticism.’’ While it is true that Kant castigates 

metaphysics for being schwärmerisch, and prone to fanaticism, as we have 

just seen, Kant was not himself immune to ‘‘enthusiasm,’’ nor was he 

ashamed to admit that fact. The oft-cited passage from the ‘‘Remarks’’ is 

certainly indicative of Kant’s own susceptibility to Schwärmerei, for both 

knowledge and morality: he confesses to a ‘‘consuming thirst for 

knowledge and a restless desire to advance it’’ that only gave way after 

reading Rousseau to an even more consuming desire ‘‘to establish the 

rights of man.’’ 36 

As we saw, in certain cases, Kant actually embraced metaphysical 

Schwärmerei in the service of morality and eventually even found a 

limited place for this enthusiasm in the critical system. I want to conclude 

this chapter by arguing that Kant did intend to return metaphysics to the 

Critical Philosophy, and that he did so in an interesting and defensible way 

that would not require recourse to the postulates. The postulates were, I 

would agree, a failed reintroduction of metaphysical entities that did not, 

and were not in any case intended to, preserve the autonomy of metaphysical 

speculation. But skeptical as Kant was about ‘‘enthusiasts,’’ he 

also believed that the pleasure of disinterested metaphysical speculation – 

i.e., the pleasure of doing metaphysics not in the service of morals or politics – 

is a natural and perhaps even necessary mechanism for the advancement 

of humanity. The arguments of the previous section suggest that there is 

another dimension to Kant’s relationship to metaphysics – an aesthetic 

dimension. 

Kant associates Rousseau with imaginative enthusiasm for moral ideas: 

And yet it was Rousseau who awakened him from his dogmatic metaphysical 

slumbers and caused him to divorce himself from ‘‘elitist’’ 

metaphysical speculation in favor of the practical. There is a certain irony 

in this that may have prompted Kant to find a systematic place for the 

36 See Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason, pp. 6–8, 32–43 and Beiser, ‘‘Kant’s Intellectual 

Development,’’ pp. 43–46, and also Dieter Henrich, ‘‘Kant und Hegel,’’ in Selbstverhältnisse 

(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), pp. 183–184, on Rousseau’s influence on the ‘‘emotional and imaginative 

side’’ of Kant’s thought.

116 


‘‘noble fantast’’ who strives for perfection and ideals that lie at the heart of 

the rationalist metaphysics Kant sought to abandon. In this regard it is 

worth recalling our earlier discussion (chapter 3) of the third Critique at 

Section 17 (‘‘On the Ideal of Beauty’’). Kant here describes a kind of 

judging that involves the connecting of intuitive presentations with a 

moral idea, producing a concrete presentation of what is merely a rational 

idea. In chapter 2 I argued that such moral ‘‘imaginings’’ might even serve 

as a subjective basis of rational hope for moral progress – that is, they may 

enable belief in the possibility of realizing moral ideas, supplanting the 

hypostatisizations of the postulates. In the exhibition of this idea ofreason, 

imagination makes the realization of that idea subjectively possible – 

‘‘imaginable.’’ Interestingly enough, Kant hints that this will not be 

found in all people: 

in order for this connection to be made visible, as it were, in bodily expression 

(as an effect of what is inward), pure ideas of reason must be united with a very 

strong imagination in someone who seeks so much as to judge, let alone exhibit 

it (V: 235) 

The similarities in this section of the third Critique to Kant’s account of the 

‘‘pathological’’ state of Schwärmerei are clear: the person judging according 

to an ideal of beauty is seeing genuine reality in his/her idea. And yet here 

Kant is in no way suggesting that taking ideas for reality is deranged. It is 

simply a way of putting aesthetic judgment to moral use, although presumably 

only a few will have the requisite powers of imagination to literally 

produce this ideal. In all these cases, Kant’s abandoned metaphysical 

longings seem to have found a new home on the borders of his practical 

philosophy; and it is far less alienated than the postulation of the existence 

of God and the ‘‘fact’’ of human immortality. 

In addition to embracing and even incorporating metaphysical longings 

into his practical philosophy, Kant also finds a way to value metaphysical 

urges even where they are not directly connected with moral 

concerns. The judgment that involves the ideal of beauty involves an 

interest of reason, and hence is not itself a purely aesthetic judgment, but 

what I called earlier a kind of ‘‘mixed mode’’ that involves practical as 

well as aesthetic elements (V: 236). This distinguishes it from the pure 

judgments of taste, which are by definition impractical – they involve 

disinterested pleasure. As we saw in chapter 3, however, Kant believes that 

we can become interested in the objects of aesthetic reflective judgment 

‘‘after the judgment has been made as a pure aesthetic one’’ (V: 296). Kant 

allows two possibilities: one ‘‘empirical’’ and the other ‘‘intellectual.’’ In


chapter 4 I argued that the intellectual interest in the beautiful is an 

interest in the embodiment of the idea of a world that is fitted to our 

moral needs, and here again Kant’s repressed desire for metaphysics 

emerges: Since reason has an interest, as Kant puts it, in the ‘‘objective 

reality’’ of its moral ideas it cannot be a matter of complete indifference 

to us, when contemplating the beautiful, that nature here ‘‘shows a trace or 

gives a hint that it contains some basis or other for us to assume’’ an 

orderliness that may be conducive to, or at least not out of sync with, our 

moral desires. As we saw, Kant is suggesting that in the process of making 

an aesthetic reflective judgment about the beauty of an object we may come 

to care for the nature of which it is but a part, and we may come to value the 

whole of the natural world for its own sake. As moral beings we are charged 

with the task of bringing moral order into the natural world – a demand on 

human nature that hardly seems possible. Thus we are intellectually 

interested in finding evidence that nature outside us, in what appears to be 

the rational orderliness and purposiveness of her beauty, may be suited to 

the nature ‘‘within.’’ But nevertheless, for Kant this desire/interest/pleasure 

in the orderliness of nature manifested in beauty is not itself a moral 

interest. It is intellectual, a kind of Platonic love, as it were. Contemplation 

of the beautiful may give rise to a ‘‘love’’ or admiration for nature in itself, 

apart from any connection to our moral nature. 

But what is this pleasure in the ‘‘hint’’ of transcendent rational order 

but a sort of metaphysical enthusiasm, suitably distanced by aesthetic 

reflection? The person who comes to love the whole of nature based on 

disinterested contemplation of nature’s formal properties bears a close 

resemblance to the ‘‘noble fantast’’ – to Plato’s philosopher gazing out of 

the cave, or Rousseau surveying the state of nature, or even Kant himself, 

awed by the starry heavens above. Taking an intellectual interest in the 

beautiful is a deeply ‘‘metaphysical’’ feeling. 

That the desire for metaphysical speculation is inevitable and unavoidable 

is, of course, a recurring theme in the first Critique. Reason seeks 

the unconditioned by its very nature. The danger is believing that one 

has found it. Tough-minded resistance and staying close to home (staying 

close to the rocky shores of the phenomenal and avoiding the open sea 

of the noumenal) are the only ways to avoid the lures of the imagination 

and the threat of fanaticism. But I hope to have shown that Kant’s 

attitude toward fanaticism is not uniformly negative. Chapter 1 already 

introduced the idea that, for Kant, the mental powers are capable 

of imaginative development and growth – of progress, we might say. It is 

worth quoting in full the passage mentioned there in passing. In a

118 


footnote in the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (Section 

XIII, ‘‘On the Aesthetic of the Power of Judging, Comment’’ (in reference 

to finding a definition of a feeling of pleasure that is tied to sources a 

priori)) Kant makes the following surprising admission: 

In fact man can desire something most fervently and persistently even though 

he is convinced that he cannot achieve it, or that it is perhaps even 

[something] absolutely impossible ... and it is indeed an important article for 

morality to warn us emphatically against such empty and fanciful desires, 

which are often nourished by novels and sometimes also by mystical 

presentations, similar to novels, of superhuman perfections and fanatical 

bliss. But some empty desires and longings ...do have their effect on the 

mind ...It is indeed a not unimportant problem for anthropology to 

investigate why it is that nature has given us the predisposition to such 

fruitless expenditure of our forces as [we see in] empty wishes and longings 

(which certainly play a large role in human life). It seems to me that here, as in 

all else, nature has made wise provisions. For if we had to assure ourselves that 

we can in fact produce the object, before the presentation of it could 

determine us to apply our forces, our forces would presumably remain largely 

unused. For usually we do not come to know what forces we have except by 

trying them out. So nature has provided for the connection between the 

determination of our forces and the presentation of the object [to be there] 

even before we know what ability we have, and it is often precisely this effort, 

which to that very mind seemed at first an empty wish, that produces that 

ability in the first place. Now wisdom is obligated to set limits to that instinct, 

but wisdom will never succeed in eradicating it, or [rather] it will never even 

demand its eradication. 

A ‘‘predisposition’’ to ‘‘empty wishes and longings’’ that appears to be a 

‘‘fruitless expenditure of our forces’’ could in fact be an enabling 

mechanism – part of nature’s plan for advancing human capacities 

unbeknownst to them. Something akin to the historical progress enabled 

by nature via unsocial sociability is at work on the microlevel in individuals, 

with the imagination goading reason into a development that 

rational critique would itself only stymie. Here too nature’s mechanism, a 

kind of ‘‘unrational rationality’’ perhaps, is something Kant not only 

tolerates but to a certain extent applauds. Consider the following passage 

from the ‘‘Critique of Teleological Judgment,’’ in which Kant illustrates 

what he calls ‘‘intellectual purposiveness’’ and describes the way in which 

it can naturally lead to ‘‘Schwärmerei’’: 

It is a true joy to see how eagerly the ancient geometers investigated these 

properties of such lines, not letting themselves be disconcerted if asked by


narrow minds of what use such knowledge might be ...While these geometers 

were thus unwittingly working for posterity, they took delight in a purposiveness 

which, though it belonged to the nature of things, could still be exhibited 

completely ‘‘a priori’’ in its necessity. Plato, himself a master of this science, was 

overcome by enthusiasm [Begeisterung] [when he saw] that the original character 

of things is such that it can be discovered without any experience whatever, and 

that the mind is able to derive the harmony of beings from their supersensible 

principle ...It was this enthusiasm that lifted Plato above empirical concepts to 

ideas that he thought could be explained only by an intellectual community 

[between ourselves and] the origin of all beings ... Surely it is pardonable if, as 

the result of a misunderstanding this admiration gradually increased to the point 

of fanaticism [Schwärmerei]. 

Kant seems to have finally settled on the view that the desire for metaphysics 

is useful, and may be embraced by Enlightenment, even if 

metaphysics – the Absolute itself – is off limits. At the same time, this 

desire is not an interest in morals, politics, or utility (Kant also mentions 

‘‘the properties of numbers, with which the mind plays in music’’ in this 

passage). It is, in other words, a disinterested desire for knowledge for its 

own sake that leads us to discover apparent purposiveness which in turn 

‘‘expands the mind’’ and Kant says, ‘‘makes us suspect ...that there is 

something else above and beyond those presentations of sense, something 

which, although we do not know it, might hold the ultimate basis for that 

harmony [between the form of sensible intuition and our power of 

concepts].’’ 

In both these passages Kant again is advocating, or at least ‘‘apologizing’’ 

for, a kind of intellectual disinterested pleasure, that is a complete 

absorption, ‘‘love,’’ or ‘‘delight’’ taken in the nature of the object 

studied, and a lack of concern for the usefulness, gratification, or even 

goodness the object might bring. Even where that pleasure leads to 

fanaticism, Kant is willing to be tolerant. It is difficult not to see 

something autobiographical in these passages, some latent reference to the 

self-avowed infatuation with metaphysics in the remarks of 1765. Certainly 

it does not represent a return to his former love, if that meant 

embracing the existence of objects that transcend experience. Although he 

flirts with it in the postulates of God and immortality in the second 

Critique, what Kant does in the third Critique is far more subtle. What 

returns here is not the substance of metaphysical speculation but the 

recognition and repositioning of a legitimate desire for it. 

Thus Kant’s imagination did not fail, but rather returned as a real force 

in the final chapters of the Critical opus. In this respect the Böhmes’

120 


critique is too strong. And, to the extent that Kant did not develop his 

theory further, the motivation is not entirely bad: Intuitive access to the 

moral may indeed be creative and important, but it is not unproblematic. 

Imagination may accompany all sorts of ‘‘undesirable’’ characteristics, just 

as may understanding. Enormously creative persons may also be perfectly 

self-centered, and genius can be evil. Certainly Kant was correct, for these 

reasons, to hold that the way in which imagination functioned in conjunction 

with other capacities was central to deciding its value. 

It is in answering the question of just how Kant characterizes the 

possible ‘‘conjunctions’’ of the imagination and other faculties that the 

Böhmes’ critique cannot be ignored. They are right to point out that 

Kant never seemed entirely comfortable with the notion of an ‘‘equal’’ 

relation between imagination and reason, even though in his critical 

aesthetic theory he had worked out an account of imaginative creativity 

compatible with such a relation. The question arises yet again: Why did 

Kant not push the notion of the ideal of beauty, or of aesthetic ideas, 

further? Why did he not find a more pronounced place for the imagination 

in the moral? The role enthusiasm plays in Kant’s social theory, as 

a glimmer of hope in the human quest for moral progress, is a way of 

doing precisely this, but Kant himself never seems fully convinced. 37 It is 

therefore quite possible that part of the answer lies in the Böhmes’ 

hypothesis. In laying out the motivation for Kant’s theoretical development, 

we should not dismiss the possibility that, for subconscious reasons 

that are all too transparent two centuries later, Kant simply may not have 

been able to bring himself to unequivocally grant the imagination a status 

equal to that of the ‘‘law-governed’’ branches of human experience. It 

was, after all, a faculty associated on the transcendental level with ‘‘lawlessness’’ 

and, on the empirical level, with the contaminating influences of 

the body, its feelings, and desires. There may well be a sense in which 

Heidegger was after all right about one thing: It was not the failure of 

Kant’s imagination that prevented his finally embracing the ‘‘lower’’ 

faculty, but rather a failure of nerve. 

In sum, Kant was tempted by, and therefore perhaps extremely cautious 

about, enthusiastic, imaginative excess – it was ‘‘not to be wholly esteemed, 

since passion as such deserves censure’’ (VII: 86) and was one of 

37 The Böhmes’ claim that Romanticism is an ‘‘intermezzo’’ is thus not entirely accurate. See ‘‘The 

‘Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism’ (Berne, 1796): an Ethics,’’ trans. H. S. Harris, in 

Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 510–513. 

On pp. 249ff., Harris also discusses the fragment’s origin, proposing his own view that it was 

authored by Hegel.


‘‘two rocks’’ between which critical philosophy must navigate (in the first 

Critique (B128)). Such caution was not shared by Kant’s ‘‘enthusiastic’’ 

followers. The ‘‘System-Programme’’ fragment (attributed by various 

scholars to either Hegel or Hölderlin or Schelling, or to all three, or to 

some combination thereof) is a good example of an attempt to carry out in 

practice some of Kant’s views on the modeling of the ideal in art: ‘‘I am 

now convinced,’’ says its author(s), ‘‘that the highest act of Reason, the one 

through which it encompasses all Ideas, is an aesthetic act.’’ 38 Although its 

authorship is uncertain, seen in light of Kant’s views on the power of 

imagination, the early Romantic period for which this fragment is a kind of 

manifesto is easily seen as an extension of Kant’s aesthetic theory. 

38 In Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State 

University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 154–156.

chapter 6 

Imaginative reflections of the self in 

Novalis and Hölderlin 

The early ( Jena) period of German Romanticism is closely identified with 

early German Idealism, and with the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb 

Fichte. The reason for this is obvious enough. Fichte began lecturing at 

the university in Jena in the spring (Summer semester) of 1794, and work 

preliminary to his major work, the Wissenschaftslehre, appeared in that 

same year. 1 His arrival at Jena was anticipated with great excitement, and 

among the Jena cohort of scholars and students who were inspired by his 

forceful presence were some whose names were to become inseparably 

bound up with German Romanticism. The Schlegels, Schelling, Tiek, 

Novalis, and also Hölderlin 2 all were part of the Jena milieu in which 

Fichte’s work was avidly studied and discussed. 

Fichte’s philosophy was of course very much influenced by Kant’s 

Critical philosophy (he was hired at the University at Jena as a ‘‘Kantian’’ 

1 Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre, and the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, Parts I 

and II, were published in September 1794. Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre had 

already been completed and was published in May 1794. Cf. Daniel Breazeale, trans. and ed., Fichte: 

Early Philosophical Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 47–49 for a list of 

Fichte’s publications and lectures during the Jena period. 

2 The question of whether to consider Hölderlin a ‘‘Romantic’’ is somewhat difficult to answer. On 

the one hand, he is typically classified in German literature schoolbook texts as part of the late 

‘‘Klassik,’’ and many scholars would resist labeling him a Romantic. Cf., for example, Manfred 

Frank: ‘‘Hölderlin ... gehört aber nach der gewöhnlichen Meinung nicht in den Rahmen der 

Frühromantik; und ich will ihn auch nicht durch einen hermeneutischen coup de force zu einem 

geistigen Mitbewohner der Jenaer Wohngemeinschaft machen, der er nicht war.’’ In Einführung in 

die Frühromantische Ästhetik: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 249. On the other hand, 

he is characterized by Ricarda Huch in Die Romantik: Blütezeit, Ausbreitung und Verfall (Hamburg: 

Rowholt, 1985 [1951]) as a Romantic by disposition (pp. 484ff.). In Die Romantische Schule (Berlin: 

Gaertner, 1870), Rudolf Haym sees the germ of Romantic philosophy in Hölderlin’s ideas, and 

argues that he belongs for this reason in a history of Romanticism (p. 305) although Hölderlin is 

called ‘‘eine Seitenlinie der Romantik’’ (an offshoot of the Romantic), in contrast to Novalis’ 

‘‘Hauptlinie’’ (p. 324). 

122

Imaginative reflections in Novalis and Hölderlin 123 

to replace Reinhold 3 ), and by Fichte’s concern that a stronger defense of 

the possibility of practical reason was needed than Kant himself gave. 4 

The need for such a move is suggested by Kant himself in the third 

Critique, where he speaks of a ‘‘gulf’’ separating nature and freedom, and 

the need for a ‘‘principle of purposiveness’’ if a causality of freedom is to 

be seen as effective in the natural realm. 5 As we have seen, this principle 

for Kant is never more than regulative, however, and the question of a 

common principle uniting theoretical and practical reason in a single 

system necessarily remains open for Kant. But for Fichte, a defense of 

freedom required more. The discovery of a unitary account of subjectivity – 

that is, an account founded upon a single ‘‘constitutive’’ principle – 

appeared necessary so that practical reason might be firmly situated 

within the constitution of an overarching system. 6 

To the extent that Hö lderlin’s and Novalis’ projects are taken to be 

searches for an account of how human desire and feeling may be united 

with reflection and reason – that is, to the extent that they are instances of 

what Dieter Henrich calls ‘‘ Vereinigungsphilosophie’’ 7 – it is plausible to 

see both authors as part of a post-Kantian attempt to ‘‘repair’’ difficulties 

raised by Kant’s view that subjectivity is irreducibly dual-natured – that 

is, part nature and part freedom. It may also be plausible to claim for 

these writers a decisive influence on the course of German idealism. 8 

Certainly in the case of both Hö lderlin and Novalis, the ‘‘reunification’’ 

of nature and self was an important theme. And yet, this longing for a 

unification of self and nature ought not to be confused with the project of 

giving a unified systematic account of the self based on a single basic 

principle of consciousness. The latter was Fichte’s project, and one to 

which, I will argue, neither Novalis nor Hö lderlin were committed. 

3 

Dieter Henrich points out that even though Kant was still teaching at Kö nigsberg, by 1792 it was 

the University at Jena that was the center of ‘‘Kantian’’ philosophy (Konstellationen: Probleme und 

Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), p. 229. 

4 

Cf. Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

1990 ), chapter 1. 

5 

Critique of Judgment, V:175–176. 

6 

That is, Fichte was not content with either a mere regulative principle, or an alleged ‘‘fact’’ of the 

consciousness of the moral law. Fichte’s concern was also rooted in his discontent with Kant’s 

doctrine of the ‘‘fact of reason’’ in the second Critique. See Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory, pp. 21–29. 

7 

Cf. Dieter Henrich, ‘‘Hegel und Hölderlin,’’ in Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 

1987), pp. 12ff. ‘‘Vereinigungsphilosophie’’ is the term Henrich uses to refer to the strand of thought 

exemplified in modern times by neoplatonism – for instance, by Shaftesbury in England, and by 

Hemsterhuis and Herder in Germany. 

8 

As Henrich does with Hölderlin, ‘‘Hegel und Hölderlin,’’ pp. 21–22, inKonstellationen, and most 

fully in Der Grund im Beweßtsein: Hölderlins Denken in Jena (1794–95) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 

1992).

124 


If this were not the case – that is, if it were assumed that Hölderlin and 

Novalis are at one with Fichte in attempting a unified account of the 

self – then the fact that they do not do so can only be seen as a philosophical 

failure. Moreover, identifying these writers’ goals with Fichte’s 

obscures the very close affinity between Kant’s later writings on morality 

and aesthetics and an important strand of Romanticism. In what follows, 

I shall argue that both Novalis and Hölderlin developed conceptions of 

the self that were in fact far more in the spirit of Kant than of Fichte, and 

that their criticisms of Fichte ought to be read as a sort of poetic Kantian 

response to Fichte’s revisionism. 9 Both Novalis and Hölderlin, I shall 

argue, adopted positions that are best seen as espousing an essentially 

Kantian agnosticism about the ability of the human self to know the 

ultimate ground of its own unity. 10 

In the ‘‘Doctrine of Virtue’’ Kant claims that ‘‘Only the descent into the 

hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness’’ 11 :‘‘Erforsche, ergründe 

dich selbst!’’ (‘‘Explore, fathom yourself!’’). The self-knowledge that Kant is 

speaking of here is self-cognition (Selbsterkenntnis), but in this context it is 

not, or not simply, a theoretical knowledge of the self that Kant is prescribing. 

It is rather the sort of knowledge that would answer the questions: 

‘‘What am I, by nature?’’ and ‘‘What do I really want?’’ ‘‘What is really 

9 Charles Larmore, in ‘‘Hölderlin and Novalis,’’ also points out that both of these poet– 

philosophers were critical of Fichte’s account of self-knowledge and its original ground in an 

intellectual intuition, but stops short of labeling this a Kantian insight. He sees the influence of 

Niethammer at work on both philosophers, especially in their view of philosophical method as an 

unending task. This may be true, but it is also a very Kantian notion of philosophy, as I have 

argued in chapter 1. Larmore sees Kant’s main contribution to early Romanticism to be via his 

moral theory and the ideal of freedom, by contrast with Schiller’s aesthetic theory and the ideal of 

unity. Kant’s ultimately rigorist rejection of the role of feeling (‘‘Hölderlin and Novalis,’’ p. 143) 

sets up the tension that early Romantics addressed and attempted to ease. He does not consider 

Kant’s theory of aesthetic reflective imagination, which this book argues constitutes an important 

conceptual connection between Kant and the early Romantics (in The Cambridge Companion to 

German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 141–160). 

Richard Eldridge, in The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), does see a conceptual continuity between 

Kant’s insistence on both the fact of human freedom and our inability to know it, and the 

Romantic enactment of this ‘‘impossible aspiration to freedom’’ (p. 19). In ‘‘The Kantian Moral 

Criticism of Literature,’’ he explicates Kant’s views of genius and moral hope by reference to 

literature in ways that are fully compatible with early Romantic accounts of bridging the gap 

between freedom and nature. 

10 As we saw in chapter 5, the classic discussion of this problem in Kant, worked out against 

Heidegger’s reading, is to be found in Dieter Henrich, ‘‘The Unity of Subjectivity,’’ first published 

in Philosophische Rundschau 3 (1955), pp. 28–69 as ‘‘Über die Einheit der Subjektivität’’ and trans. 

G. Zöller in Henrich, The Unity of Reason, ed. R. Velkley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 

Press, 1994), pp. 17–54. 

11 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1991), VI: 441.


motivating me?’’ These are the questions that for Kant are fundamental to 

the task of becoming moral and, hence, fully human. Answering them is 

the project that all human beings are obliged to set for themselves. In this 

same passage, Kant says that all human wisdom (Weisheit) ultimately 

consists in the agreement of wants and desires with the human being’s final 

purpose, and the path to this final end requires descent into the murky 

depths of human nature and motivation. Human wisdom for Kant 

involves both theoretical (including empirical) and practical knowledge: 

knowledge of what we are, and knowledge of what we should be. 12 Fichte’s 

revision of the Kantian project of ‘‘fathoming’’ the self was an important 

driving force behind Hölderlin’s and Novalis’ philosophical conceptions of 

the self. It is, therefore, important to sketch Fichte’s account of selfknowledge 

before going on to assess the link between the project as Kant 

conceived it, and the Romantic response to Fichte. 

fichte’s project 

Although Kant showed concern in the third Critique for bridging the gap 

between theoretical and practical reason in his own philosophy, he never 

rescinded the separate accounts of these two sides of reason given in the 

first two Critiques. His call for self-knowledge in the ‘‘Doctrine of Virtue’’ 

is intended as a call for individuals to come to know themselves for the 

purposes of a practical reason whose necessary systematic connection to 

theoretical reason has not been demonstrated. But Fichte, setting about to 

redeem the Kantian project for morality, was determined to give a unitary 

account of the underlying structure of all consciousness. Thus, what was 

for Kant a call to ‘‘know thyself’’ for the purposes of practical reason 

involved, for Fichte, giving an account of the very structure of all selfconsciousness. 

An important motivation for Fichte’s account was 

prompted by criticism of the view attributed to Kant by Reinhold that all 

consciousness is representational. 13 On this view, self-consciousness is to be 

understood as a representing of ourselves to ourselves, and it therefore 

12 The distinction has a contemporary counterpart in Ernst Tugendhat’s distinction between 

Selbstbewußtsein and Selbstbestimmung. Cf. his Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. 

Paul Stern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 18–38. 

13 Cf. Neuhouser Fichte’s Theory, pp.70ff. Neuhouser characterizes the difficulty as an infinite regress of 

knowing subjects. Also see Dieter Henrich ‘‘Fichte’s Original Insight’’ (in Contemporary German 

Philosophy, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982, pp. 15–53), where it is argued 

that ‘‘reflection theory’’ was seen by Fichte to be untenable because it led to circularity and was 

question-begging. Fichte responded to the charges directed against Reinhold’s version of Kant’s theory 

by G. E. Schulze in Aenesidemus, in a review published in 1794 (in Breazeale, Fichte, pp.59–77).

126 


comes to be seen on the model of a subject examining an object, in this case 

itself. But this, so the criticism went, appears to involve a vicious regress of 

subjects. That is, the representational account assumes that self-awareness 

requires that I view myself not only as the object of my examination but also 

as subject, as examiner. And the question arises: ‘‘What is the nature of this 

examining subject?’’ At this point, the subject conducting the examination 

becomes the object of examination and so on ad infinitum. It follows, 

according to the criticism, that if we model self-awareness on our awareness 

of tables and chairs and other objects in our world, an account of our own 

subjectivity is literally always just beyond reach. 

Whether Kant himself held such a view, and whether a representational 

account must lead to vicious infinite regress may be questioned. What is 

important, however, is that Fichte took these problems seriously. His 

response was to maintain, first of all, that self-consciousness is not a 

matter of representing the self to the self – it is not a case of consciousness 

of an object. Rather, the ‘‘I’’ of self-consciousness, what I discover when I 

examine my own consciousness, is an activity that is at the same time an 

accomplishment, eine Tathandlung. This ‘‘fact-act’’ 14 of immediate, nonrepresentational 

self-awareness, this intellectual intuition, is what Fichte 

calls ‘‘self-positing.’’ The subject capable of representational knowledge is 

not itself a representation but rather just is, in Fichte’s words ‘‘that act 

which does not and cannot appear among the empirical states of our 

consciousness, but rather lies at the basis of all consciousness and alone 

makes it possible.’’ 15 The task of philosophy is to ‘‘reflect on what one 

might at first sight take it to be, and to abstract from everything that does 

not really belong to it.’’ 16 

The result of this process of reflection and abstraction is an account of 

self-consciousness outlined by Fichte in three ‘‘principles.’’ First, the self 

posits itself absolutely, and this positing is its existence. 17 For Fichte, the 

activity of self-positing does not produce an effect that is distinct from its 

activity. 18 Rather the self is to be understood as essentially identical with 

14 

This is Neuhouser’s rendering of Tathandlung, Fichte’s Theory, p.106. 

15 

Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. by Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Meredith, 1970), 

p. 93. 

16 

Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, ibid. 

17 

Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p.98: The word ‘‘I’’ is to be understood as ‘‘the self as 

absolute subject. That whose being or essence consists simply in the fact that it posits itself as 

existing ... As it posits itself, so it is; and as it is, soitposits itself.’’ 

18 

‘‘It is at once agent and the product of action; the active, and what the activity brings about; action 

and deed are one and the same, and hence the ‘I am’ expresses an Act (Tathandlung)’’ (Heath and 

Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p.97).


this activity. Second ‘‘opposition in general is posited absolutely by the 

self.’’ 19 This means that the self, in addition to positing itself posits ‘‘the 

not-self ’’ that is opposed to itself. 20 Third, ‘‘Both self and not-self 

are posited as divisible.’’ Both self and not-self are posited as partial 

negations of each other, they are thus limited by each other, but not 

annihilated. These principles exhaust what can be accomplished by philosophical 

investigation of the self, Fichte says. The outcome of the 

investigation, in Fichte’s words, is that ‘‘In the self I oppose a divisible 

not-self to the divisible self.’’ 21 The first moment expresses an immediate 

consciousness of the self, an intellectual intuition, a self-positing. The 

second and third occur as two aspects of one act: the act of division (or 

‘‘limitation’’) ‘‘occurs immediately, within and alongside the act of 

opposition, both are one and the same, and are distinguished only in 

reflection.’’ 22 For Fichte, 

The self is to be equated with, and yet opposed to, itself. It is all one consciousness, 

but a consciousness that involves an absolute self, on one hand and 

divisible limited self on the other. 23 

This, in very rough outline, is how the theory of self-consciousness stood 

with Fichte in Jena in 1795. Fichte’s own later revisions need not concern 

us here. Hölderlin attended Fichte’s lectures in the last months of 1794, 

and resumed attendance in the following January, during which time he 

‘‘engaged in a thorough and critical study of his [Fichte’s] philosophy.’’ 24 

During this time Hölderlin was hard at work on his novel Hyperion, and 

also produced his only philosophical work, four essay-fragments including 

one implicitly critical of Fichte’s conception of absolute being, 

‘‘Urteil und Sein.’’ 25 At the same time (early in 1795) that Hölderlin was 

writing this piece, Novalis was preparing his Fichte-Studien, a large collection 

of observations and commentary that is, in the words of Manfred 

Frank, ‘‘the most important philosophical contribution of early 

Romanticism.’’ 26 

19 

Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p.103. 

20 

Cf. Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p.104. 

21 


22 


23 


24 

David Constantine, Hölderlin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 48. 

25 

See Henrich, Konstellationen, pp. 59–63, for a discussion of the dating of this important fragment 

(‘‘Judgment and Being’’), and for an argument that it dates from Hölderlin’s Jena period (1794–5). 

26 

Manfred Frank, Einführung in der Frühromantische Ästhetik: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: 

Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 248.

128 


Central to both Hölderlin’s and Novalis’ reception of Fichte was 

dissatisfaction with Fichte’s claim that self-consciousness must be 

understood as originating in an act of self-positing, and that the subject 

that is created and maintained by this act is not knowable reflectively via a 

representation, but is rather identified as an immediate consciousness, an 

‘‘intellectual intuition.’’ In other words, both took issue with Fichte’s 

‘‘First, Absolutely Unconditioned Principle.’’ As Manfred Frank points 

out, both Hölderlin and Novalis found the notion of absolute selfpositing 

inadequate to the task of explaining a genuine unity of 

subjectivity, since the very notion of the ‘‘self-positing itself’’ would seem 

to involve a further reflexive act. That is, in Frank’s terms ‘‘immediacy 

and self-reference are incompatible notions.’’ 27 An account of the 

immediately present self cannot be a self-referential account. This disagreement 

led, in the works of Novalis and Hölderlin, to doubts about 

the possibility of a unified account of subjectivity, and to challenges to 

Fichte’s attempt at such an account. I want now to examine each of these 

challenges in turn. 

Novalis 

In May 1795, Novalis spent an evening in Jena with Fichte and Hölderlin at the 

house of Friedrich Niethammer, publisher of the influential Philosophisches 

Journal. Niethammer noted in his diary that they talked much about religion and 

revelation and concluded that philosophy faced many unanswered questions. 28 

This meeting apparently convinced Novalis of the need to come to terms 

with Fichte’s philosophy, a conviction which resulted in over 500 

manuscript pages of notes, his Fichte-Studien, begun during the fall of 

1795 and finished the following summer. But although these studies 

certainly do represent a kind of homage to the dynamic professor, they 

also contain a strong critique of a central aspect of Fichte’s work. 

Novalis’ problem with Fichte’s account of self-consciousness depends 

on the view that, in his words, ‘‘The I must posit itself as representing 

[darstellend].’’ 29 That is, in a very important sense, for Novalis, selfconsciousness 

must be representational. Insofar as self-consciousness is a 

reflection on consciousness, it involves thought, and thought can only 

grasp an object. But Fichte’s ‘‘I’’ is supposed to be non-representing, an 

original fact-act that can only be described as immediate consciousness, or 

27 28 

Frank, Einführung, p.250. John Neubauer, Novalis (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 22. 

29 

Fichte-Studien,inNovalis Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Verlag W. 

Kohlhammer, 1969), II: 282, # 633: ‘‘Das Ich muß sich, als darstellend setzen.’’


‘‘intellectual intuition.’’ In his discussion of Novalis, Frank argues that 

the very term ‘‘intellectual intuition’’ suggests that, whatever else it may 

be, this way of characterizing ‘‘absolute’’ unity cannot truly be absolute, 

because it involves two distinct components, one intuitive and the other 

intellectual or conceptual. So for Novalis, intellectual intuition is viewed 

rather as a reflection that is directed toward an intuition, or what for 

Novalis is the same, a feeling. 30 Because it is only an attempt to reach an 

intuition (feeling) in thought, the best it can accomplish is still only a 

reflection of this intuition (feeling). But this is not identical to the feeling 

itself. 

With Fichte’s complex account of a unitary self-consciousness that 

contains a divided self in mind, Novalis speaks of ‘‘the famous struggle 

within the I.’’ 31 It is found already in the (allegedly) ‘‘absolute Urhandlung’’ 

of self-positing, which is, Novalis argues, nothing more than a 

necessary deception of a mediated I that is attempting to be absolute – 

that is, unmediated – and thus comes into conflict with itself. Hence, 

what Fichte takes to be an immediate act of self-positing is in fact a 

mediated act. Manfred Frank takes Novalis’ metaphor of the ‘‘mirror of 

reflection’’ (Fichte Studies, #11) and his talk of reversal (#36) to heart and 

explains the theory as an account of the mind’s attempt to grasp itself 

through an act of mirroring : 

‘‘Reflection’’ indeed, means mirroring, and all mirror images are laterally 

reversed. If I hold an object in front of a mirror, right is reflected to me as left 

and left as right. Also the light rays that approach the glass appear to move into 

the distance and head off in the other direction. Should it be any different with 

the reflection with which we recognize our self-consciousness? Novalis asks. 

This is an interesting counter to the interpretation of Romanticism made 

canonical by Meyer H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp, wherein it is 

argued that the Romantic conception of the mind is that of a lamp that 

shines upon and transforms its object. 32 In The Romantic Legacy, Charles 

Larmore balks at this reading of Romanticism for reasons similar to those 

I outlined in chapter 1 for Novalis’ definition of romanticizing. In Larmore’s 

view, the role played by the mind – or, more specifically, by the 

imagination – is both reflective and transformative on the Romantic view. 

30 31 

Frank, Einführung, p.253. Fichte-Studien, II: 127, #32. 

32 

The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). See also Abrams’ Natural 

Supernaturalism Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 

1973), esp. chapter 7.2, ‘‘Freshness of Sensation,’’ where he points to Novalis’ notion of what 

Abrams calls ‘‘an unlocalized irradiation of consciousness and an incandescent item of sense 

perception’’ (p. 387).

130 


In his words, it has a ‘‘dual, creative-responsive function’’ that operates 

‘‘at one and the same time.’’ 33 Although his argument is intended to hold 

for Romanticism generally, it is especially true of Novalis who, as we 

should recall, defined ‘‘romanticizing’’ as a two-pronged movement from 

the ordinary to the extraordinary (corresponding to Larmore’s ‘‘creative’’ 

function) and at the same time from the extraordinary and mysterious to 

the ordinary (Larmore’s ‘‘responsive’’ function). 

Since the latter move is rarely attributed to Romanticism, Frank’s 

account of the mind as ‘‘mirroring’’ ourselves in Novalis is particularly 

insightful. For Novalis, he argues, we ‘‘see’’ self-intuition (‘‘Selbstgefühl ’’) 

reflected in the mirror of thought and conclude that we have reached it. 

But, in fact, we are fooled: We have only the ‘‘mirror image’’ of selfintuition, 

not that intuition itself. Like any mirroring, self-reflection 

presents us with an illusion of ourselves that, Novalis says, requires a 

second act of reflection if we are not to be misled into thinking we have 

attained objective knowledge of what is essentially non-objective. This 

second reflective act ‘‘corrects’’ the illusion of the first act that we had of 

ourselves, and shows us, not the self, but our ignorance of it. Novalis’ 

romantic–philosophic conception of the self holds that we are incapable 

of grasping the absolute ground of the self. Since Novalis believes that 

‘‘striving after the thought of a ground is the ground of philosophy’’ and 

‘‘all philosophizing must end in an absolute ground,’’ 34 this would seem 

to spell the end of all philosophizing, and for Novalis, in one sense this is 

true: ‘‘The borders of feeling are the borders of philosophy.’’ 

But in another sense, he argues, philosophy may recognize its own 

absolute when it recognizes that no absolute ground is given. Even in the 

face of giving up the search for the absolute – or rather, precisely because 

of giving it up – the ‘‘drive to philosophize’’ can never be satisfied, and 

there arises an ‘‘unending free activity.’’ This ‘‘unending free activity in 

us,’’ Novalis says, is ‘‘the only possible absolute that can be given us.’’ 35 

Thus philosophy can only ever provide a negative account of the self: The 

drive to unify feeling and thought is the only unifying characteristic of the 

self. 36 But since this negative characteristic is indeed one aspect of our 

nature, it is at least not a falsified account of the human self. Where 

philosophy must stop, however, poetry may begin. 

There is no definitive answer to whether or not Novalis believed that 

poetry could do what philosophy could not – that is, unveil the absolute, 

33 

Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 21, 31. 

34 

Fichte-Studien, II: 269, #566. 

35 

Ibid. 

36 

Cf. Fichte-Studien, II: 126–127, #32.


and portray its very essence. 37 It seems unlikely that he intended to 

accomplish so much in his own work. Rather, Novalis’ poetic achievement 

is his ability to portray artistically what he believed followed from 

his views on the essentially negative nature of self-consciousness. That is, 

his literary work is not an ‘‘unveiling’’ of the absolute, but rather an 

attempt to do ‘‘poetic philosophy’’ 38 – to understand the self and its 

world not in abstractions but by romanticizing them. ‘‘Romanticizing’’ 

and ‘‘Romantic philosophy,’’ on Novalis’ definition, is the ‘‘operation’’ of 

portraying the unexpected, of ‘‘interrupting’’ ordinary life by ‘‘potentializing’’ 

the objects of the world, showing them not for what they are but 

for what they are not – what they are only potentially. On this approach, 

the ordinary is always seen in the light of the ‘‘unending’’ and, by the 

same token, the unknown, mysterious, and unending, are portrayed as 

ordinary. 39 Such a world is a ‘‘Verkehrung,’’ an inversion, but it is also a 

setting right, just as the second reflection of self-consciousness sets right 

the illusion of self-recognition. 

‘‘Die Welt muß romantisirt werden,’’ ‘‘The world must be romanticized,’’ 

says Novalis. 40 Romanticizing, because it portrays what is merely 

potential, and hence in effect portrays what it is not, is an illusion or 

inversion that sets right the original illusion of being at home in the 

world. 

Heinrich von Ofterdingen, with its simple straightforward narrative style 

used to depict a free-floating, kaleidoscopic set of illusion, dream, and 

symbols, is a perfect example of Novalis’ doctrine of corrective inversion. 

Perhaps because it is quite literally a model of Novalis’ idea of romantic 

philosophizing, and hence of theory in practice, the secondary literature 

on this novel is voluminous. 41 Here I will simply suggest how Heinrich, 

the protagonist of this piece, can be said to ‘‘figure’’ Novalis’ conception 

of the self. Heinrich is no ordinary protagonist, in spite of the fact that he 

is indeed the central figure of the novel. Heinrich’s ‘‘development’’ is 

almost entirely an internal, subjective one, and he is passive to the point 

of near absence in many of the chapters. Much, if not most, of the action 

of the novel does not involve him – or, perhaps it is better to say, it 

involves him only as the blank screen on which the fables, allegories, and 

magical images that constitute the bulk of the work are played out. 

37 

Cf. Herbert Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis: Werk und Forschung (Stuttgart: 

Metzler, 1991), p. 118. 

38 39 

Ibid. Cf. Frank, Einführung, pp. 272ff., and Fichte-Studien, II: 545, #105. 

40 41 

Fichte-Studien, ibid. See Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, pp. 389ff.

132 


Indeed, Heinrich has practically no ‘‘psychological profile’’ – he is 

rather a world unto himself in which dream, fantasy, and reality blur – or, 

better, in which it makes no difference which is which. Heinrich is a 

vessel whose only anchor, if it can even be called that, is his own passive 

subjectivity. But if Novalis’ Heinrich is a romanticized, unanchored, and 

even alienated self-consciousness compared to the full-blooded and 

many-faceted character one comes to expect in novels, still Heinrich’s is a 

‘‘pleasantly’’ alienated self-consciousness. 42 

It includes occasional 

moments of ecstatic feeling that occur most often in dreams, or in love, 

when the self (not always Heinrich) recognizes something ‘‘unending’’ in 

itself. These moments, for Novalis, are the result of a reinversion of our 

inverted sense of self and as such they are moments (‘‘Augenblick’’ )of 

insight into the absolute. The self, in these felicitous moments of 

‘‘renunciation of the Absolute,’’ when it recognizes its own inability to 

attain transcendence through reflection, produces in itself 

the unending free activity ... the only possible absolute that can be given to us, 

and which we find only through our inability to attain and to recognize an 

Absolute. 43 

This pleasurable negative experience of the absolute bears little resemblance 

to Fichte’s original Tathandlung. It does, however very closely 

resemble the Kantian sublime: 

For what is sublime in the proper meaning of the term, cannot be contained in 

any sensible form but concerns only ideas of reason, which though they cannot be 

exhibited (dargestellt) adequately, are aroused and call to mind this very inadequacy, 

which can be exhibited in sensibility. 44 

A little further on, Kant emphasizes that the sublime is an experience of 

what is absolutely great in us. Our inability to represent to ourselves the 

absolutely great outside us is the condition of this recognition: 

Yet this inadequacy is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have within us a 

supersensible power, and what is absolutely great is not an object of sense, but is 

the use that judgment makes naturally of a certain object so as to [arouse] this 

(feeling). 45 

One might say that Novalis’ Ofterdingen is full of just these sorts of 

‘‘negative’’ epiphanies – momentarily transcendent experiences that 

amount to ‘‘sublimations’’ of the self. 

42 

III: 685–688: ‘‘Die Kunst, auf eine angenehme Weise zu befremden, einen Gegenstand fremd zu 

machen und doch bekannt und anziehend, das ist die romantische Poetik.’’ 

43 44 

Fichte-Studien, II: 269, #566. Critique of Judgment, p.245 (emphasis added). 

45 

Critique of Judgment, V:250.


hölderlin 

At the time of their meeting at Niethammer’s home, Hölderlin was on 

the verge of departure from Jena, had already attended Fichte’s lectures in 

the Winter semester, and had almost certainly already developed his 

influential critique of the latter in the fragment ‘‘Judgment and Being.’’ 

Hölderlin came to his study of Fichte immersed in questions of aesthetics 

from his recent engagement with Kant’s third Critique and Plato’s 

Phaedrus, and Schiller’s ‘‘Über Anmuth und Würde.’’ 46 In one of the 

philosophical fragments dating from this time, he is concerned to account 

for the unity of ‘‘necessity and freedom, the restricted and the unrestricted, 

the sensuous and the sacred’’ in the faculty of desire. 47 Here he 

speaks longingly of a ‘‘morality of instinct’’ that resembles a kind of 

intellectual intuition, an attunement of imagination and desire that 

naturally conforms to the moral law, uncoerced. But, he also admits, such 

‘‘attunement would then be merely contingent, a matter of fortune.’’ The 

longed-for unity, though possible contingently, is for that very reason 

unfit for systemic development. At least at this period in his philosophical 

development, Hölderlin seems at once driven by what Henrich called 

‘‘Vereinigungsphilosophie’’ and at the same time by skeptical doubts about 

its possibility. 

Doubts about the possibility of a systematic account of a ‘‘morality of 

instinct’’ underlie Hölderlin’s disagreement with Fichte. But these doubts 

must be seen in light of his explication of ‘‘Being’’ in the fragmentary 

essay ‘‘Judgment and Being’’: 

Being – expresses the connection between subject and object. Where subject and 

object are united altogether and not only in part, that is, united in such a manner 

that no separation can be performed without violating the essence of what is to 

be separated, there and nowhere else can be spoken of Being proper, as is the case 

with intellectual intuition. 48 

From this, it follows that Fichte’s account of intellectual intuition must 

be incorrect, because it refers not to a primordial, essentially indivisible 

consciousness of Being, but only to a self-positing activity that involves an 

act of opposition and reunification through a concept of limitation or 

divisibility. 49 The unity of Fichte’s is thus, for Hölderlin, a derivative 

unity: an identity, but not an absolute unity. 

46 

Cf. Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University 

of New York Press, 1988), p. 11, and Haym, Die Romantische Schule, pp. 301–302. 

47 

‘‘On the Law of Freedom,’’ in Hölderlin, Essays, pp. 33–34. 

48 49 

Hölderlin, Essays, p.37. Cf. Heath and Lachs, Science of Knowledge, p.110.

134 


The fact that Fichte did not intend to suggest this sort of ‘‘primordial 

coherence’’ 50 is of less importance here than is the fact that Hölderlin felt 

that such primordial coherence was necessary to ground the conception of 

a unified self, and that without it the self was, quite literally, lost. Given 

such constraints on what can count as an integrated self, 51 it is no surprise 

that for Hölderlin it is not clear that the self can ever come to know itself. 

To the extent that self-knowledge is possible, it must involve that which 

‘‘antedates any structure of synthesis, identity and consciousness.’’ 52 That 

means, for Hölderlin, that self-knowledge must be aesthetic. Influenced 

by his reading of Kant’s theory of beauty, and by his friendships with 

Schiller and Schelling, Hölderlin developed a ‘‘doctrine of beauty’’ that 

made the aesthetic the unifying principle of human experience. Beauty, 

for Hölderlin, is the ideal – the visible model of perfected humanity. In 

the Hyperion he speaks of ‘‘beings of beauty, or what is the same thing, 

human beings.’’ 53 Beauty bespeaks the divinity in the human being: ‘‘The 

human being is a god as soon as he is human. And once he is a god, he is 

beautiful.’’ 54 For Hölderlin, the experience of the beautiful is the only 

integrating experience for the self at odds with itself. 

This doctrine does not set Hölderlin apart from Schiller or Schelling. 

What is distinctive to Hölderlin is his emphasis on the attainment of the 

beautiful being only a contingent matter, depending as it does on nature 

and the degree of sensitivity of the individual: 

Beauty forsakes the life of men, flees upward into Spirit; the Ideal becomes what 

Nature was ... By this, by the Ideal, this rejuvenated divinity, the few recognize 

one another and are one.’’ 55 

Unity of subjectivity is not granted everyone, by any means. The ‘‘few’’ of 

whom Hölderlin speaks here, of course, are artists – they are the most 

deeply sensitive of souls. ‘‘The first child of divine beauty is art.’’ 56 And 

though in Hyperion the hope is expressed that these few great souls will 

inaugurate a ‘‘second age,’’ this utopian enthusiasm is edged throughout 

50 

Hölderlin, Essays, pp. 20ff. 

51 

This aspect of Hölderlin’s thought, Henrich points out, probably owes much to his ‘‘projection of 

Spinoza onto the Science of Knowledge’’ (Konstellationen, p.74). 

52 

Hölderlin, Essays, p.26. 

53 

Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece, trans. W. R. Trask (New York: Ungar, 

1965), p. 90. 

54 55 

Hyperion, p.91. Hyperion, p.76. 

56 

Hyperion, p.91.


with a sense of disillusionment. In a remarkable chapter early in the 

novel, Hyperion writes to Bellarmin, ‘‘What is man?’’: 

How does it happen that the world contains such a thing, which ferments like a 

chaos or moulders like a rotten tree, and never grows to ripeness? ... To the 

plants he says: I, too, was once like you! And to the pure stars: I shall become like 

you in another world! – meanwhile he falls to pieces and keeps practicing his arts 

on himself, as if, once it had come apart, he could put a living thing together 

again like a piece of masonry ... yet what he does will always be artifice. 57 

Even the artistic self – or, rather, especially the artistic self, who has ‘‘feasted 

at the table of the gods’’ and felt ‘‘full, pure beauty’’ must face the inescapable 

fact of its own fragmented condition. The poet is bound to be 

disillusioned, Hyperion tells his friends, because, having known the feeling 

of the beautiful, that which is thought is revealed to be disharmonious, full 

of contradiction and imperfection. Beauty is never thought. 58 

Hölderlin did not see beauty as a consolation, nor, like Novalis, as 

something to be attained in moments of poetic exaltation; a gift that, 

when received lends a feeling of coherence to the self, redeeming it in 

moments of poetic magic: ‘‘Overall [the poet] must accustom himself not 

to try to attain within individual moments the totality that he strives for 

and to bear the momentarily incomplete.’’ 59 For Hölderlin, unlike 

Novalis, the poetic can never be a purely pleasant alienation because it 

rests on feeling, and feeling is suffering as well as pleasure. Indeed, in the 

novel, the experience of suffering seems to be assigned to Hyperion, if not 

as a duty, then as a matter of necessity for his romantic spirit. In the 

second part of the novel, Hyperion asks his correspondent: ‘‘Why do I 

recount my grief to you, renew it ... ?’’ 60 

The entire novel is a narrative of alternating suffering and rejoicing, an 

attempt to portray the depths and heights that human feeling can attain. 

Feeling, Hölderlin says, is the poet’s ‘‘bridle and spur.’’ 61 Thus it is 

tempting to conclude that feeling is what redeems the self, for Hölderlin, 

and that even if the aesthetic is not always a consolation to the divided self 

it may still, in a more heroic sense, save it. But this, too, would fail to 

capture Hölderlin’s stance. Although elevated, intense feeling may give 

the artistic spirit glimpses of absolute Being, it is ultimately unable to 

unify the individual self, and in this very important sense cannot be 

57 58 

Hyperion, p.57. Cf. Hyperion, p.93. 

59 

‘‘Reflection,’’ in Hölderlin, Essays, p.46 

61 

‘‘Reflection,’’ in Hölderlin, Essays, p.45. 

60 Hyperion, p.114.

136 


redemptive. In his sketch ‘‘The Ground for ‘Empedocles,’’’ he says of his 

hero’s fate: 

In order to organize life, he had to strive seizing it with his being at its innermost; 

with his spirit he had to try to master the human element, all tendencies and 

drives, their soul, the inconceivable, the unconscious, the involuntary in them; 

precisely in so far as his will, his consciousness, his spirit, transcended the ordinary 

and human boundaries of knowledge and effectiveness, it had to lose itself and 

become objective ... the objective resounded the more purely and deeply within 

him the more open his soul lay, precisely because the spiritually active man had 

given himself away, and this in the particular as well as in the universal. 62 

The experience of unified consciousness, in those rare moments when it 

occurs, for Hölderlin is also tragic because it forces the individual to the 

universal, and hence beyond what the individual can ever be. To paraphrase 

Cassirer, the vessel through which the self announces itself must, 

because it is singular and limited, itself be broken. 63 Unified consciousness 

is also the death of the individual. If Hölderlin’s project is the quest 

for such unity, then its success would appear to be the death of the self. 

One feels this in the protagonist Hyperion, who in the course of the 

entire novel never becomes a fully fledged character. He is a heroic 

struggling ‘‘figure’’ but never an integrated personality. The only 

redemption may lie, for Hölderlin, in the poetic process itself. Here at 

least, the artist may create, in Eric L. Santner’s words, ‘‘the possibilities of 

new modes of discoursing and being, new modes of fortifying the self for 

its dialog with the other.’’ 64 

conclusion 

Almost as if he had Hölderlin and Novalis in mind (in fact, he was often 

thinking of Klopstock), Kant proclaimed time and again the dangers of 

the novel, the Roman. Too much of this sort of reading, he warns, loosens 

one’s grip on reality, and leads to fantasizing, which is closely related to 

enthusiasm and even madness. As we have already seen, Kant advocated a 

guarded attitude towards ‘‘empty and fanciful desires, which are often 

nourished by novels and sometimes also by mystical presentations, similar 

62 ‘‘The Ground for ‘Empedocles,’ ’’ in Thomas Pfau, Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on 

Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 60. 

63 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, ‘‘Hölderlin und der deutsche Idealismus,’’ in Hölderlin: Beiträge zu seinem 

Verständnis in unserm Jahrhundert, Alfred Kelletat, ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1961), p. 115. 

64 Eric L. Santner, Introduction to Friedrich Hölderlin: Hyperion and Selected Poems (New York: 

Continuum, 1990), pp. xxxv–xxxvi. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer at Cambridge University 

Press for suggesting this way of interpreting Hölderlin’s project in a less dismal light.

to novels, or superhuman perfections and fanatical bliss.’’ 65 But then, 

almost as if he knew there would be no holding back the Romantic quest 

for a unified consciousness, he added the claim already examined in 

chapter 5 – namely, that it is important ‘‘to investigate why it is that 

nature has given us the predisposition to such fruitless expenditure of our 

forces as [we see in] empty wishes and longings (which certainly play a 

large role in human life).’’ His hypothesis was that if we had to be sure 

that attaining an object was within our power before we let ourselves 

desire it, many powers we in fact have would remain unused. Thus, 

nature wisely provides us with desires that call forth great effort ‘‘even 

before we know what ability we have, and it is often precisely this effort, 

which to that very mind seems at first an empty wish, that produces 

that ability in the first place.’’ It is wise to be on guard, but equally 

wise to recognize that nature’s provisions should be respected, Kant 

concludes. 

It is natural to conclude from this that ‘‘wisdom’’ will desire what 

Novalis would later call the ‘‘drive to be an ‘I.’ ’’ 66 Since Kant believed, as 

we saw at the outset, that wisdom also requires that we fathom ourselves, 

it is a very good thing for him that we also have the drive to do so. The 

works of both Hölderlin and Novalis embody this tendency to strive for 

what is not, to overstep, ‘‘in a fruitless expenditure of forces,’’ the bounds 

of what may be reasonably desired. Hence, for this very reason their 

Romantic contributions appear to be a step along the Kantian path to 

self-knowledge, and a natural and important continuation of the Kantian 

project. 

These poet-philosophers may be seen as following the injunction to 

fathom the self, to determine what the self is not, but could be, in order 

to further the Kantian project of determining what the self should be. But 

as Kant was acutely aware, this drive to self-knowledge has its costs. 

Hölderlin’s and Novalis’ Romanticism holds out the promise of discovering 

new forms of consciousness, and hence of ‘‘refiguring’’ the self, 

but where it is not suitably tempered by a sense of its own limitations it 

risks the erasure of the very ‘‘self’’ it attempts to fathom. Novalis’ insistence 

on the momentary nature of imaginative epiphanies, and on the 

corresponding recognition of the ordinary, was one approach to the 

problem that vexed Kant. In the case of Hölderlin, the solution was to be 

65 Critique of Judgment, p.420. 


66 Fichte-Studien, II: 126–127, #32.

138 


found in art, in his case in the process of poetry. It was a solution that 

depended on artistic genius, and as his own final tragedy suggests, was 

only partially successful. In the concluding chapter 7 we shall examine the 

degree to which Novalis’ and Kant’s views on imaginative genius converge 

and finally gesture towards a new understanding of philosophy itself 

in early German Romanticism.

chapter 7 

Novalis’ Kantianism and Kant’s Romanticism 

Doch das Paradies is verriegelt und der Cherub hinter uns; wir 

müssen die Reise um die Welt machen, und sehen, ob es vielleicht 

von hinten irgendwo wieder offen ist. 

(Kleist, ‘‘Über das Marionetten Theater’’ (On the Marionette Theater)) 

(Paradise is barred and the cherub behind us; we must travel around the 

world, and see if maybe somewhere it is open again from the back.) 1 

Kleist summed up the mix of awe and profound disappointment that 

many intellectuals in the 1780s and 1790s must have felt in the wake of 

Kant’s philosophy. For although in it human cognitive activity takes on 

new constitutive powers that define the boundaries of the real, the cost of 

shifting this constitutive power to human subjectivity was high: loss of 

access to a world beyond appearances. In spite of Kant’s claim to have 

made ‘‘room for faith,’’ knowledge of the world of things ‘‘in themselves’’ 

was barred, so it seemed, once and for all. In his fictional essay ‘‘On the 

Marionette Theater,’’ Kleist frames the philosophical problem of 

knowledge as a problem within the context of performance art. His 

narrator interviews a renowned dancer who aims to move with absolute 

grace across the floor, freely and without alienation, but recognizes that 

the impossibility of achieving his goal is rooted in self-consciousness. The 

great dancer tells Kleist’s narrator that the artist should look to the 

marionette as a model of unselfconscious expression of absolute, unalienated 

movement. 

The dancer’s remarks are, of course, a metaphor for human striving 

after that which is beyond the pale of possible human experience: absolute 

knowledge and perfect self-expression. Kleist’s essay captures the problem 

that seemed almost without exception to plague philosophers in the 

immediate wake of Kant’s relativization of knowledge to the human 

capacity for it. Kleist is not typically classified as a Romantic, but his call 

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

139

140 


for a ‘‘back-door’’ strategy is characteristic of much of Early German 

Romanticism, and describes the major project of this movement’s most 

fascinating figure, Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Kant’s 

philosophy was a fact of life for Novalis and the philosophers and poets of 

the famous Jena circle. Indeed, the ‘‘Copernican’’ paradigm in philosophy 

was so well entrenched that in his encyclopedic ‘‘Allgemeine Brouillon’’ 

Novalis could speak of the Copernican turn as established fact: 

Here Kant played the role of Copernicus and explained the empirical I along 

with its outer world as a planet, and placed the moral law or the moral I at the 

center of the system – and Fichte has become the Newton – the second 

Copernicus – the inventor of the laws of the system of the inner world (III: 335). 2 

Novalis was as convinced as was Kant that the latter’s new philosophy of 

the subject had dissolved past errors in philosophy once and for all. Along 

with most of the intellectuals of his circle, Novalis abandoned the 

vaulting structures of Leibnizian and Wolffian rationalism for shelter in 

the Kantian alternative account of what the human mind can know. Kant 

himself recognized that human beings would forever be tempted to strive 

after the absolute, or ‘‘unconditioned,’’ but in the end his tendency was to 

be rather sanguine about the fact that everyday cognition, science, and 

even ethics, would have to do without final metaphysical answers. At the 

same time, as we saw in chapter 5, this great purveyor of rationalist 

humanism betrayed a fondness, even sympathy for metaphysical fantasizing 

that has been almost wholly ignored by commentators on his 

work. 3 In the last section of this chapter I shall return to Kant to examine 

the place that metaphysical speculation retains in his system, and to 

conclude the argument of this book for the continuity between his system 

and early German Romanticism. 

It has become a cliché that German idealism with its pyrotechnical 

metaphysics jettisoned Kantian limits on knowledge. Early German 

Romanticism is typically cast in this same unflattering role, with the 

additional offense of ‘‘irrationalism and mysticism’’ added to the 

indictment. In fact, however, many if not all of the early German 

Romantics associated with the Jena circle renounced metaphysical 

2 All references to Novalis’ works are to Novalis Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs eds. 

Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1965). The second and 

third volumes, ed. Richard Samuel together with Hans-Joachim Mähl and Gerhard Schulz, contain 

Novalis’ philosophical writings, published in 1981 and 1983, respectively. 

3 Kant was not always comfortable with this attitude; throughout his life he was fascinated by 

apparently ‘‘supernatural’’ phenomena. See Hartmut Böhme and Gernot Böhme’s Das Andere der 

Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), and chapter 5 of this book.

Novalis’ Kantianism and Kant’s Romanticism 141 

knowledge claims and speculative thinking in harsher terms than did 

Kant himself. 4 No one better exemplifies this strict adherence to the 

Copernican turn than does Novalis, whose philosophical efforts culminate 

in the elevation of aesthetics and the practice of art as the embodiment 

of human freedom. I will begin, then, with a look at the 

surprisingly modest metaphysical underpinnings of this great Romantic 

poet and philosopher. In so doing I hope to exonerate Novalis, and by 

extension the early German Romantic circle, of charges of metaphysical 

excess and irrationalism. In the second part of the chapter I look at the 

consequences of Novalis’ views for an account of the nature of ordinary 

cognition. 

novalis’ kantianism 

As we saw in chapter 6, in1795–96 Novalis undertook a serious study of 

Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) after having met Fichte, 

along with Hölderlin, in the home of a mutual friend in Jena. The set of 

notes on Fichte which comprised the bulk of the large handwritten 

manuscript produced by Novalis has been called ‘‘the most significant 

philosophical work of early Romanticism.’’ 5 In it, Novalis comes to grips 

with the early philosophy of this thinker who had claimed ascendancy to 

Kant’s throne in German philosophy. There is no doubt that Fichte’s 

philosophy was of great importance to Novalis, yet what emerges in the 

Fichte Studies is not a student’s reworking of the master’s ideas, but rather 

a persistent criticism of the fundamental assumption of Fichte’s major 

work. Whereas Fichte had argued that the inner world of the self may be 

accessed initially via an intellectual intuition of self-activity, in his Fichte 

Studies Novalis repeatedly insists that no immediate knowledge of the 

self, as it is in itself, is possible. Chapter 6 discussed Novalis’ metaphor of 

mirroring as an account of human self-knowledge, but he also argues that 

self-observation is a kind of ‘‘eavesdropping on the self’’ in order to learn 

about it. By ‘‘learning,’’ he says, 

4 In this book I deal only with Novalis and his circle of early German Romantics. The later 

Romantics, especially those associated with Heidelberg, but even including Schlegel and Tieck in 

their later period are not under discussion here. 

5 Manfred Frank, in Einführung in die Frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 

1989), p. 248. Novalis’ work, which included the so-called ‘‘Fichte Studies’’ and ‘‘Kant Studies’’ 

comprised about 500 pages of handwritten notes that were left unpublished until 1901, when Ernst 

Heilborn brought out a substantial selection of the notes. The entire set, however, remained 

unpublished and was lost to scholarship for thirty years between 1930 and 1960, when it resurfaced 

at an auction in New York.

142 


we mean absolutely nothing but intuiting an object and impressing it along with 

its characteristics upon ourselves. It [the self] would thus become an object again. 

No, philosophy cannot be self-observation, because it would not then be what 

we are after [i.e., it would not be immediately known as subject: JK]. It is 

perhaps self-feeling. What then is feeling? ... It can only be observed in 

reflection – the spirit of feeling is then gone. The producer can be inferred from 

the product in accordance with the schema of reflection.(II: 113–114, #15) 

Novalis goes on to argue that since feeling cannot represent itself, and 

reflection can only represent feeling in thought, our intuition of our Self is 

never of a thing as it is ‘‘in itself.’’ It is necessarily always mediated or 

‘‘inferred,’’ a synthetic product of feeling and reflection (II: 114, #16). 

Novalis may have honored Fichte with the title of the ‘‘second Copernicus,’’ 

but this did not prevent his rejecting the Fichtean central assumption 

of the inner world of the self, namely that the ‘‘absolute’’ self can be known. 

Not only does Novalis reject claims of access to the ‘‘absolute I,’’ his 

‘‘positive’’ account of the self resembles Kant’s notion of the noumenal, or 

thing in itself, as a limiting notion. As von Molnár points out, Novalis 

typically refers to the concept of the ‘‘I’’ as a regulative one: 6 

I – has, perhaps, like all ideas of reason merely regulative, classificatory use – 

Nothing at all in relation to reality. (II: 258, #502) 

Referring to Fichte’s notion of a Tathandlung, the originary intuitive act 

of positing of the self, Novalis says, 

Every state, every fact-act [Tathandlung] presupposes an other ... all quest for a 

First [genus] is nonsense – it is a regulative idea. (II: 254, #472) 

Novalis’ reaction to Fichte places limitations on the power and reach of 

the intellect that are essentially Kantian in spirit. Especially as a student of 

the natural sciences, Novalis was critical of metaphysical speculation, and 

as we saw in chapter 1, he insisted that although a ‘‘tendency to seek the 

universal’’ [Universaltendenz] is essential to the scholar, 

One must never, like a phantast, seek the undetermined – a child of fantasy – an 

ideal. One proceeds from determinate task to determinate task. An unknown 

lover of course has a magical charm. Striving for the unknown, the undetermined, 

is extremely dangerous and disadvantageous. Revelation must not 

be forced. (III: 601, #291) 

Given these strong views on the unknowability of the self as it is in itself, 

it is not surprising that Novalis’ intense study of Fichte led him back 

6 Geza von Molnár argues for this point in Novalis’ ‘‘Fichte Studies’’: The Foundations of His Aesthetics 

(The Hague: Mouton, 1970), pp. 41–42.


again to a study of Kant. The very short collection of notes and commentary 

now collected under the title the ‘‘Kant Studien’’ (1797) was 

found together with a group of notes on the Dutch philosopher Hemsterhuis 

(1721–90). 7 Probably his renewed interest in Kant’s views on the 

natural sciences was piqued by Hemsterhuis’ frequent reference to the 

Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences in Hemsterhuis’ 

‘‘Metaphysics of Nature,’’ but given his abrupt turn away from Fichtean 

idealism it is likely that he turned to Kant’s works to support his 

developing views on the limits of philosophizing about metaphysical 

matters. 8 

However, a set of very brief notes in this collection suggests that it 

could also have been another Kantian text, and a far more obscure one, 

that may have provided Novalis with impetus for the further development 

of his philosophy as well as his artistic enterprise. Amidst the notes 

on Kant’s philosophy were also found notes on Kant’s reply to Samuel 

Thomas Sömmerring, a well-known medical doctor and physiologist 

from Frankfurt. Sömmerring’s book ‘‘Über das Organ der Seele’’ raised 

the question of the ‘‘seat of the soul [der Sitz der Seele],’’ or the location of 

the mind in the body. The book was published with a short appendix 

written by Kant and sent to Sömmerring specifically for the book: 9 

If I am supposed to make the place of my soul, that is, of my absolute self, 

intuitable somewhere in space, then I must perceive myself through that very 

same [spatial intuition] through which I also perceive the matter right around 

me ... Now the soul can only perceive via inner sense, but the body (whether 

internal or outer) can only perceive through outer sense; hence it can determine 

absolutely no place for itself, because in order to do this it would make itself the 

object of its own outer intuition and would have to transpose [versetzen] itself 

outside itself – which is a contradiction. So the desired solution of the problem 

of the seat of the soul which is demanded of metaphysics leads into an impossible 

dimension ...; and one can, with Terence, call to those who would undertake 

it: ‘‘You wouldn’t succeed any more than if you were to try to be rationally 

insane’’ [‘‘Nihilo plus agas, quam si des opera ut cum ratione insanias’’]. (Kant, letter 

to Sömmerring, 1796) 

7 

See Hans-Joachim Mähl’s introduction to the Kant and Eschenmeyer Studies, Novalis Schriften II: 

334. According to Mähl, based on the handwriting and the type and format of the paper, these 

notes and commentary were probably written during or immediately following his work on 

Hemsterhuis, and within a year after finishing the Fichte Studies in 1796. 

8 

Mähl, p. 332. The fact that his focus of study seems to have been primarily the Preface and 

Introduction to the first Critique as well as the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science also 

supports this view. 

9 

See the letter to Sömmerring dated August 10, 1795, Kants gesammelte Schriften, Prussian Academy 

edition, XII.3: 30–35.

144 


To Sömmerring’s question, Kant replies that the spatial location [der Ort] 

of the soul, where ‘‘soul’’ is understood as ‘‘my absolute self’’ would have 

to be perceived in the same way we perceive matter around us, namely 

through outer sense (this includes our physical ‘‘insides’’ as well). But the 

absolute self can perceive itself only through inner sense, non-spatially, 

and therefore cannot determine a spatial place for itself. For the soul to 

make itself the object of its own outer intuition would mean that it would 

have to set [versetzen] its non-spatial being ‘‘outside’’ itself in space – and 

that is a contradiction, Kant says. The demand that metaphysics solve the 

problem of the seat of consciousness leads it into incoherence, Kant 

continues, and he admonishes would-be metaphysical speculators with a 

quotation from Terence, the context of which involves advice to a 

spurned lover to give up on the idea of winning the heartless object of his 

desire through reasoning. 

The question of the ‘‘seat’’ of consciousness raised by Sömmerring, as 

well as an apparent dissatisfaction with Kant’s deflationary response, 

might well be explained by Novalis’ strong emphasis on the importance 

of feeling as a central aspect of self-knowledge. Although Novalis makes 

no independent comment in his notes on the Sömmerring passage, later 

in his notes on the first Critique the question of the ‘‘seat’’ of consciousness 

is addressed obliquely: 

The concept of sense. According to Kant, pure mathematics and pure natural 

science refer to the form of outer sensibility – What science refers to the form of 

inner sensibility? Is there yet extra-sensible knowledge? Is there still another way 

open for getting outside oneself and to get to others, or to be affected by them? 

(II: 46) 

This getting ‘‘outside ourselves’’ is in all probability a reference to Kant’s 

claim in the reply to Sömmerring, that the self cannot without contradiction 

be said to set itself outside itself. Later, in his well-known work Pollen 

[Blütenstaub], Novalis picks up this thought in the following fragment: 

The seat of the soul is there, where the inner world and the outer world touch 

[sich berühren]. Where they permeate – it is in every point of the permeating. 

(Novalis, II: 418, #20) 

The ‘‘inner world’’ is the world that Fichte tries to elucidate by recourse 

to intellectual intuition of an original act of self-consciousness, an 

account that, as we saw, Novalis rejected on Kantian grounds. 10 At the 

10 Although Novalis appeared to believe that some sort of phenomenology, a science of inner sense, is 

possible. As we saw, he also took Fichte to be the ‘‘Newton’’ of this science. See Allgemeine 

Brouillon, Novalis Schriften, III: 335 (#460).


same time, Novalis is unhappy with Kant’s refusal to countenance any 

possibility for ‘‘externalizing’’ the inner world of the self. What Novalis 

seems to suggest here is a third option involving the redefining of selfconsciousness 

as the interface between the inner world of self-feeling and 

the outer world of objective self-consciousness. This redefinition, he 

suggests, might also involve a way of reaching others and in turn being 

affected by them. 

Novalis’ insistence on the centrality of feeling to self-consciousness and 

hence to philosophy in general was very likely due in part to the influence 

of Hemsterhuis’ philosophy. The latter’s emphasis on desire, feeling, and 

the importance of poesy in understanding the sciences must have 

appealed greatly to the poet. 11 A strong commitment to the importance of 

feeling to knowledge certainly helps explain the following exasperated 

comment in the midst of Novalis’ Kant Studies: 

The whole Kantian method – the whole Kantian way of philosophizing is onesided. 

And it could with some justice be called Scholasticism. (II: 392 #50) 12 

In another fragmentary note just prior to his pondering the possibility of 

another way of getting ‘‘outside ourselves,’’ Novalis suggests that the 

practice of philosophy itself, and practical reason, must move into a new, 

aesthetic dimension: 

Philosophizing is just scientizing [wissenschaften], thinking through thought, 

knowing knowledge – treating the sciences scientifically and poetically. Should the 

practical and the poetic be one – and the latter simply signifies absolute practice 

made specific? (II: 390, #45) 

Now, whatever it would mean to find another way, an extra-sensible 

knowledge, for Novalis, cannot involve abandoning the real world or 

embracing some noumenal thing in itself as known: 

Everything absolute must be ostracized from the world. In the world one must 

live with the world. 13 

11 Cf. Mähl’s introduction, II: 314ff. 

12 The reference to Kant’s scholasticism also appears in Kant’s ‘‘Open letter on Fichte’s 

Wissenschaftslehre,’’ where Kant quotes from Fichte’s earlier correspondence with him. Kant had 

written to Fichte that he (Fichte) would do better to devote his energies to applying the teachings 

of the Critique of Pure Reason rather than attempting to rewrite them. Fichte’s reply ‘‘politely’’ 

assures Kant that he will not ‘‘make light of scholasticism.’’ See Arnulf Zweig, Kant: Philosophical 

Correspondence – 1759–99 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967) (XII: 370–371). 

13 This is taken from the ‘‘Fragmentblatt’’ found along with the Kant notes (Schriften, II: 395, #55). 

It follows a remarkable passage in which Novalis suggests, presumably in opposition to Fichte’s 

notion of an originary self-postulation or Tathandlung, that ‘‘the true philosophical act is 

suicide ... only this act corresponds to all the conditions and characteristics of the transcendental 

act’’ – i.e., we can’t bring ourselves into being, but we can take ourselves out.

146 


Beneath all Novalis’ comments and criticisms of Kant, his underlying 

metaphysical assumption remains Kantian: the unknowability of the 

thing-in-itself is no longer up for debate. In fact, he makes the rather 

condescending claim that Kant’s belaboring of the issue can appear too 

obvious, ‘‘superfluous and wearisome’’ to thinkers of Novalis’ generation, 

unless they keep in mind the historical context within which Kant 

worked. 14 Kant’s anti-speculation doctrine had become ‘‘scholasticism’’ 

for Novalis and his cohort. So when Novalis speaks of discovering an 

extra-sensible knowledge, he is by no means taking issue with Kant’s 

circumscription of cognitive experience. For Novalis, finding a way to get 

‘‘outside’’ ourselves is not a matter of conflating the spheres of the cognitive 

and moral self that Kant had so carefully separated. 15 The path 

outside the self is an altogether different approach, and is already 

becoming apparent to the young philosopher–poet as he finishes the 

Fichte Studies and works on Kant and Hemsterhuis. It is the path of the 

artist, and requires making concrete and tangible in art that inner world 

based on immediate self-feeling that is impossible to capture purely 

reflectively. Novalis’ ‘‘other way’’ of locating the seat of consciousness in 

the world is through its embodiment in art. 

I suggest that what Novalis finds lacking in Kant is not metaphysical, 

but imaginative commitment. As we saw in chapter 5, Kant was deeply 

ambivalent about the role of imagination and of attempts to realize ideals 

through it. The transposition of the self that Novalis seeks and fails to 

find in Kant’s one-sided approach is, for Novalis, an imaginative transformation. 

Novalis’ impatience with Kant appears to stem from his view 

that Kant fails to see the possibility of poeticizing the world – or, as he 

would soon come to say – of ‘‘romanticizing’’ it, as discussed in chapter 1: 

The world must be romanticized. In this way one rediscovers the original 

meaning. Romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative raising to a higher power 

[Potenzirung]. The lower self becomes identified with a better self. Just as we 

ourselves are such a qualitative exponential series. This operation is still quite 

unknown. Insofar as I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the ordinary a 

mysterious countenance, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite an 

appearance of infinity, I romanticize it. The operation is precisely the opposite 

for the higher, unknown, mystical and infinite – these are logarithmized by this 

14 ‘‘Kant-Studien,’’ II: 392, #49. 

15 See Fichte Studies #649: ‘‘we are also in a sphere outside time’’ – Novalis retains Kant’s view that 

to be human means to be able to ‘‘transport’’ oneself into a realm of intellect.


connection – they become common expressions. Romantic philosophy. Lingua 

romana. Alternating elevation and lowering. 16 

This activity was, for Novalis, something Kant failed to theorize in his 

‘‘one-sided’’ attempt to explain human knowledge in terms of ‘‘pure 

reason.’’ Novalis did not reject Kant’s most profound insights, but rather 

complemented and tried to complete the Critical turn through his notion 

of romanticizing. In this sense, Novalis saw himself as opposing Kant, 

who could certainly come off as an old Scholastic in the mind of a 

twenty-four-year-old poet, by wanting to give free rein to the imagination 

as a vehicle for externalizing and hence realizing what could only be felt. 

Imagination, Novalis believed, would produce poetry that would be literally 

the embodiment and external vehicle for taking the self where it 

needed to be – outside itself and into the world. Therein lay Novalis’ 

philosophical solution to Kleist’s Kant-induced dilemma: The key to the 

back door to paradise would be aesthetic. 

I have argued that Novalis’ position in no way betrays Kant’s 

‘‘Copernican’’ revolution and does not embrace a metaphysical noumenal. 

Novalis is not an idealist in this sense. But the view that art is a 

supersession of philosophy appears to lend credence to another common 

criticism of Romanticism – namely, that it embraces irrationalism and 

mysticism. Yet this, too, is an unfair characterization of Novalis’ own 

views. To see why, it is important to begin with Novalis’ characterization 

of the nature of philosophy itself. 

Given Novalis’ views on the regulative nature of the ‘‘I’’ and his 

renunciation of an ‘‘absolute’’ in any but a negative sense, one might 

expect him to read Kant’s letter to Sömmerring with approval. However, 

as we just saw, the ‘‘seat of the soul’’ discussion appears to have sent 

him in another direction, one that marks a departure from Kant’s views 

on self-knowledge. Novalis’ philosophical account of self-knowledge 

depends crucially on the view that our ‘‘inner’’ sense of ourself – selffeeling 

– is absolute and immediate, but that our knowledge of it, being 

reflective, is never absolute and immediate. For Novalis, the intellectual 

intuition that Fichte postulated as the basis of knowledge is replaced by 

what could be called ‘‘reflected self-feeling.’’ Novalis argues that thinking 

about our self-feeling does not give us direct access to this immediate selfexperience, 

but it does gesture in the right direction, reminding us of it in 

an image: ‘‘Consciousness is an image of being within being’’ (II: 106, #2). 

As Manfred Frank puts it, for Novalis, reflected self-feeling becomes 

16 2: 545, #105.

148 


the ‘‘orientation towards, or better, the longing for, the absolute.’’ 17 In the 

Fichte Studies, this longing is taken by Novalis to be the very heart of 

philosophy, or rather philosophizing – the ‘‘unique kind of thinking’’ 

that is the activity of doing philosophy. We should recall Novalis’ own 

account of the activity of philosophizing: 

What do I do when I philosophize? I reflect upon a ground. The ground of 

philosophizing is thus a striving after the thought of a ground ... All philosophizing 

must therefore end in an absolute ground. Now if this were not given, if 

this concept contained an impossibility – then the drive to philosophize would 

be an unending activity ... Unending free activity in us arises through the free 

renunciation of the absolute – the only possible absolute that can be given us and 

that we can only find through our inability to attain and know an absolute. This 

absolute that is given to us can only be known negatively, insofar as we act and 

find that what we seek cannot be attained through action. ( II: 269, #566) 

Novalis’ view of the activity of philosophy is that it involves a conscious 

recognition that it ‘‘absolutely’’ cannot attain its goal. But he also suggests 

that human consciousness cannot ultimately live with this paradoxical 

situation. Towards the very end of the Fichte Studies he calls for a free 

creative response to the limitations philosophy recognizes in reason: 

Objects must not do violence to us – They must not hem us in, not determine 

[bestimmen] beyond the borders ... We must seek to create an inner world that is 

an actual pendant to the outer world – that insofar as it is in direct opposition to 

[the outer world] at every point, constantly increases our freedom ... All 

determinations proceed outward from us – we create a world out of ourselves 

... The more we determine, the more we lay out what is in us – the freer – 

more substantial – we become – we set aside, as it were, more and more that 

which is inessential and approach the thoroughly pure, simple essence of our I. 

Our creative power gets as much free play as it has world under it. But since our 

nature, or the fullness of our being, is unending, we can never reach this goal in 

time – But since we are also in a sphere outside time, we must reach it there in 

every moment, or better, if we want, in this sphere we are able to be pure simple 

substance. Here is morality and peace of mind, because an endless striving after 

what hovers ever out of reach before us seems unbearable. (II: 287–288, #647) 

These musings recall Kant’s view that the human being has a higher 

vocation, a ‘‘standpoint’’ in an intellectual realm where it is possible at 

any time to transport oneself. 18 But whereas Kant says that we can only 

think ourselves into this world, or at best postulate the time and power to 

create it, Novalis argues that the power of imagination can create a 

17 Cf. Frank, Einführung, p.253. 

18 E.g. in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, IV: 452ff.


‘‘sphere outside time.’’ Moreover, he claims that it is in this imaginative 

world that we first ‘‘approach the ... pure simple essence of our ‘I’.’’ The 

passage is cryptic, leaving the reader to speculate further on the nature of 

this world. But Novalis’ notes seem to suggest a kind of moral oppositional 

consciousness – a utopian vision – a world of what ought to be as 

opposed to what is. It is ‘‘unreal’’ and unattainable, but we nevertheless 

can dwell in it because we are its imaginative architects. It is a sphere to be 

accessed ‘‘in every moment’’ precisely because it is ‘‘outside’’ time and 

place, in our imagination. 

Two points need to be made about this matter of ‘‘world-making’’ in 

Novalis. First, it is not a mystical or transcendent account. Novalis is 

quite clear that the ‘‘inner’’ imaginative world is a ‘‘pendant’’ to the outer. 

It is oppositional and for that very reason dependent upon the world of 

objects, as any part depends on its counterpart. There is thus nothing 

ineffable about it. In Pollen, he writes: 

It is the most arbitrary prejudice that it is denied to human beings to be able to 

be outside themselves, to have consciousness beyond the senses. Humans may at 

any moment be supersensible beings. Without this ability they could not be 

citizens of the world, they would be animals. Of course the composure and selfdiscovery 

in this state is very difficult since it is so perpetually, so necessarily, 

bound up in the alternation of our other states. The more we are able to become 

conscious of this state, the livelier, more powerful and enjoyable is the conviction 

that arises from it; the belief in genuine spiritual revelation. (II : 421, #22) 

Novalis goes on to describe this ‘‘appearance’’ as a kind of emergent 

experience rooted in ordinary life, the ‘‘incandescence’’ referred to by 

Abrams in his account of ‘‘moments’’ in Romanticism: 19 Novalis claims: 

It is not a sight, a sound or feeling; it is all three together, more than all three: a 

sensation of immediate certainty, an insight into my truest, most characteristic 

life ... the appearance [Erscheinung] strikes us particularly at the sight of many 

human forms and faces, especially in a glimpse of some eyes, some demeanors, 

some movements, or at the hearing of certain words, the reading of certain 

passages, certain perspectives on life, the world and fate. Very many coincidences, 

many events in nature, especially times of the year and day, deliver such 

experiences to us. Certain voices are particularly well-suited to producing such 

revelations. Most of them [revelations] are momentary, a few last awhile, a very few 

endure. (II: 421, #22) 

19 Meyer H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature 

(New York: W.W. Norton, 1973).

150 


Novalis then says that different people will have different experiences of 

‘‘revelation,’’ depending on their propensities towards sensibility or 

understanding, and he also allows that this ability to ‘‘get outside oneself’’ 

is capable of becoming pathological when a person’s senses and understanding 

are out of balance. Romanticism’s detractors may or may not 

agree that this is a case of being ‘‘outside’’ oneself, but it is what Novalis 

means by the phrase, and it is a far cry from an irrationalist mystic’s 

description of consciousness. 

This leads to a second observation about Novalis’ doctrine of imaginative 

world-making: It is an account of at least one important aspect of 

ordinary human cognition. Very typically his work, along with that of 

other romantics, is characterized as obsessed by the notion of individual 

genius. Novalis speaks as if he is characterizing ordinary human consciousness, 

the objection might proceed, but if self-discovery of what he 

called the ‘‘pure, simple I’’ depends so heavily on imagination, and an 

artistic one at that, can this account be true for ordinary people? Or is it a 

description of the elite domain of artistic consciousness? 

There is no doubt that in this section of the Fichte Studies Novalis was 

working out the rudiments of a theory of artistic process for himself. But 

in this connection it is important to keep in mind his subsequent views 

on artistic genius and talent, since they are far more liberal than is generally 

attributed to Romanticism. In his Mixed Remarks, for instance, he 

advances the view that genius is a universal human faculty. He argues that 

genius is the ability to treat imagined objects as real and that it should be 

distinguished from the talent for presentation and precise observation 

that is necessary for the development of genius. He then quite explicitly 

states: 

Without geniality, none of us would exist at all. Genius is necessary for everything. 

What is usually meant by genius however, is the genius of genius. 20 

This is unequivocal. For Novalis, as for Fichte and Kant as well, imagination 

is a universal, necessary condition of human cognitive experience. 

It is precisely the naturalness of the capacity that he finds significant 

for self-knowledge. Revelation itself is natural, and ‘‘must not be forced.’’ 

It is this capacity for momentary, everyday transcendence (as in reverie) 

that defines the human: a being to be found ‘‘there, where the inner 

world and the outer world touch.’’ 

20 II: 420, #22.


kant’s romanticism 

In seeking to connect Kant’s aesthetic theory with Romanticism, I have 

mostly been swimming against the current in Kant scholarship. However, 

there is one aspect of Kant’s philosophy that most scholars would agree is 

a precursor of Romanticism, and that is his notion of genius. It is also 

seen as something of a side issue for Kant, given the way it is positioned 

after his extensive account of taste in the ‘‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.’’ 

21 I want to end this chapter by looking more closely at the way in 

which this is and is not true. I shall do so by juxtaposing Kant’s notion of 

the creative process with Novalis’ views. 

Kant is rather notorious for the view, discussed in chapter 3, that 

artistic products are secondarily or derivatively beautiful, since all art 

objects are produced with a concept of the final product in mind. 22 That, 

by definition for Kant, was what it means to create art, and artistic 

creativity, by extension it would seem, must be understood as only 

derivatively creative since the artist has a purpose or concept in mind. In 

aesthetic experience of beauty in nature, however, we do not look for a 

specific purpose or rule according to which the object was constructed. 

There is no purpose in nature, at least none that we can ever know. So we 

simply ‘‘play’’ in our minds with the sights or sounds nature presents, 

letting them take us fleetingly from one thought to the next, never 

stopping to ‘‘finish’’ the job by labeling what we are seeing or hearing. 

The point is not to categorize, or apply rules, but rather to enjoy the 

sustained feeling of our mental powers in ‘‘playful’’ harmony with each 

other. Or, as Kant also says, it is to experience the pleasurable ‘‘quickening’’ 

or ‘‘enlivening’’ of our cognitive forces (Section 9). On the other 

hand, art, which by definition is purposive, can only imitate nature in this 

respect. It can at best ‘‘come off’’ as if it were purposeless and ‘‘artless.’’ 

Still, superimposed, as it were, on Kant’s aesthetics is a remarkable 

account of artistic genius and ‘‘originality’’ that became enormously 

influential for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theory of 

21 See Henry Allison’s discussion of the role of Kant’s account of genius in the third Critique. Looked 

at closely, he argues, Kant’s conception really amounts to two conceptions: one ‘‘thick’’ notion that 

is a special talent that no rule can capture, but that instead gives the rule to nature and that is able 

to actually produce beautiful objects of art. The other is a ‘‘thin’’ conception of genius that ‘‘seems 

to be limited merely to an imaginative capacity and therefore does not itself involve understanding, 

judgment or taste.’’ This distinction, appears to be the very same that Novalis uses when he speaks 

of the ‘‘genius of genius.’’ In Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2001), chapter 12, ‘‘Fine Art and Genius,’’ p. 301. Allison’s analysis suggests that 

Kant’s conception of genius is completely distinct from that of taste only in the ‘‘thin’’ case. 

22 Critique of Judgment, Section 46 (V: 307–308).

152 


art. As we saw in chapter 1, this account bears the mark of earlier German 

aesthetic theory, in particular Lessing’s account of the role of imaginative 

freedom in artistic genius. This account identifies creative genius as a 

phenomenon of nature, thus rendering the activity and product of genius 

as ‘‘original’’ as the beauty in natural objects. In Section 49, ‘‘On the 

Powers of the Mind that Constitute Genius,’’ Kant distinguishes between 

tastefulness on the one hand and spirit on the other. Tastefulness involves 

order and agreeableness but does not, by itself, move us. On the other 

hand, spirit ‘‘in an aesthetic sense, is the animating principle in the 

mind’’(V: 313). Kant identifies genius with ‘‘spirit’’ or the power to animate 

or enliven the soul. Genius is, in his words, the power to ‘‘impart to 

[the mental powers] a purposive momentum, i.e., to impart to the mental 

powers a play which ... sustains itself on its own and even strengthens 

them for such play’’ (V: 313). Genius animates the mind of the listener by 

drawing on and communicating what Kant calls ‘‘aesthetic ideas’’: 

‘‘presentations of the imagination which prompt much thought’’ but that 

cannot be conceptually represented (i.e., they do not follow rules). 

There is no rule for the creation and communication of aesthetic ideas. 

The animating power of genius cannot be learned by following formulae, 

Kant says. At best it can be imitated, just as a (non-genius) artist imitates 

the spontaneous productions of nature. Artistic genius proceeds ‘‘naturally’’ 

– without ‘‘distinctly known rules that determine the procedure’’ 

although it has in mind some idea of the purpose of the work of art and 

also some idea of the way that is to be manifested in a sensory medium. 

(V: 310, 318). Training is of course necessary, but it is not sufficient for 

genius. ‘‘Genius is the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through 

which nature gives the rule to art,’’ but this rule is ‘‘indeterminate’’: 

Genius is a [natural endowment] for producing something for which no 

determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition consisting of a skill for 

something that can be learned by following some rule or other; hence the 

foremost property of genius must be originality. (V: 307–308) 

This notion of genius, what Allison in Kant’s Theory of Taste calls Kant’s 

‘‘thin’’ notion of genius, is imaginative freedom or simply creative 

thought. 23 Creativity for Kant is not rule-governed, and in the Anthropology, 

23 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste. Brigitte Sassen in ‘‘Artistic Genius and the Question of Creativity’’ 

in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 

2003), argues that the free play of the imagination is not creativity properly so called: ‘‘For the 

creative process centers on how those ideas can be brought to presence.’’ Sassen, like Allison, is 

identifying Kant’s conception of genius with a ‘‘thick’’ sense that Novalis would call the ‘‘genius of 

genius.’’


his description of genius sounds very much like the descriptions of primary 

process regression used by contemporary cognitive scientists. 24 There Kant 

discusses the natural process of artistic creation as a kind of immediate, 

non-conceptual awareness of ideas that we have without being conscious of 

them. He has, that is to say, a notion of unconscious ideation, that 

resembles closely contemporary discussions of primary process. In his lectures 

to his Anthropology class, which he taught for over twenty years at the 

University in Königsberg, Kant always included a session on what he called 

‘‘obscure representations’’ – ideas that we have unconsciously. To illustrate 

this phenomenon to his students, he chose the example of an organist 

playing a free fantasia. 

Before looking at Kant’s own comment, it will be useful to make a few 

preliminary historical remarks. The free fantasia was an art form that 

gained great popularity in Kant’s time and one of the few musical forms 

that Kant mentions anywhere. Kant, like every educated man and woman 

of his time, was well aware of the phenomenon of the free fantasia, which 

was at the height of its popularity during the period of Kant’s mature 

scholarship in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Kant was not 

particularly well versed in the fine arts, and knew little about music 

theory, and so the fact that he refers to the fantasia at all speaks to the 

ubiquity and importance of the genre to the general educated public of 

eighteenth-century Germany. The free fantasia, according to Peter 

Schleuning’s The Fantasia, is a peculiarly eighteenth-century phenomenon, 

and moreover, ‘‘a purely German phenomenon for the entire 

period of its existence – until about 1800.’’ 25 It finds its prototype in 

J. S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, which combined elements of 

seventeenth-century genres (such as the prelude, toccata, and capriccio) 

that had themselves inherited the compositional freedoms of the fantasia 

of an earlier period. Johann Mattheson (a Hamburg music scholar) 

defined it further, when he argued that music in the ‘‘fantastic style’’ 

24 The creative process has received a great deal of attention recently from cognitive psychologists, 

and one view, espoused by Colin Martindale among others, argues that artistic originality can be 

understood in terms of the artist’s ability to ‘‘regress’’ to ‘‘primary process cognition,’’ or what 

Martindale prefers to call ‘‘primordial’’ cognition. That is, on this account the creative artist 

temporarily abandons conceptual cognition which is ‘‘abstract, rational and reality-oriented’’ to 

regress to cognition that is ‘‘concrete, irrational, and autistic’’ – to ‘‘the thought of dreams and 

reveries.’’ Martindale says that ‘‘Primordial cognition is free-associative. It thus increases the novel 

combinations of mental elements, which form the raw material for a work of art. This raw material 

must then be put into final form in a rational or conceptual state of mind.’’ (‘‘How Can we 

Measure a Society’s Creativity?,’’ in Dimensions of Creativity, ed. Margaret A. Boden, Cambridge, 

MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 163–164.) 

25 The Fantasia I: 16th to 18th Centuries, trans. A. C. Howie (Cologne: Arno Volk Verlag, 1971), p. 17.

154 


(Stylus Phantasticus) should have ‘‘no theme and subject to be worked ... 

there is nothing so opposed to it as order and restraint’’ (p. 15). One of these 

problematic restraints was the juxtaposition of the fantasia with the fugue as 

a sort of ‘‘corrective’’ to the fantasia’s anarchic character. Another constraint 

thatwastobeoverthrownwastheimpositionofaunityoffeeling,of 

a single emotive theme, throughout a movement. By mid-century 

C. P. E. Bach had refined Mattheson’s principle of freedom for the fantasia 

to include the freedom from thematic emotional constraints; the task of the 

musician was ‘‘to excite and to calm many affections in close succession’’ 

and ‘‘to effect the sudden unexpected change from one affection to the 

other’’ so as ‘‘to master the emotions of the audience’’ (p. 16). 

Given the development of the fantasia towards ever greater freedom 

from formal constraints, it thus stands to reason, as Schleuning points 

out, that ‘‘the extempore performance was the essential medium of the free 

fantasia’’ (p. 17). If the free fantasia is defined as improvisational, notating 

these pieces would of necessity alter the very nature of the piece: 

It is to be observed from an examination of the formal structure of the free 

fantasia that a free, random, erratic and ‘‘capricious’’ structure such as would 

have been the case in the improvised, hour-long fantasias could not have been 

effected to the same extent in the pieces which were written down. On the 

contrary, the necessity to reach a conclusion after a relatively short time compelled 

the composer to sacrifice a part of the pleasant and continual dreamlike 

character of the fantasia ... for the sake of some kind of symmetry, so that the 

ending could have a meaningful effect. (p. 20) 

There are strong similarities between Kant’s account of genius and what 

is demanded of the performer of the free fantasia by Mattheson and 

C. P. E. Bach. Like Kant’s genius, the performer proceeds ‘‘naturally’’ and 

through inspiration without ‘‘distinctly known rules that determine the 

procedure’’ moving easily and artlessly from one musical idea or 

expression to the next without end goal or purpose. Just as nature exhibits 

purposive purposelessness, so too does the performer of the fantasia. At 

the keyboard she is a kind of natural phenomenon. For Kant, the problem 

of the composed fantasia might be understood, then, as the problem 

of how to retain the ‘‘hand of nature’’ (V: 309) in the writing down of the 

free fantasia, since the free fantasia, with its utter freedom of expression 

and lack of predictable outcome – indeed with its lack of outcome at all – 

would be rather more like a natural phenomenon than it is like a ‘‘work’’ 

of art. As we have already seen, Kant has a ‘‘natural’’ account of what 

artistic genius involves. One way to deal with the musician who sits down


to play the fantasia might be to regard her, too, as a natural phenomenon, 

and Kant does say something very much along these lines: 

In man (and so in beasts too) there is an immense field of sensuous intuitions 

and sensations we are not conscious of, though we can conclude with certainty 

that we have them ... If a musician plays a fantasia on the organ with ten fingers 

and both feet, while talking with someone nearby, in a matter of seconds a host 

of ideas is awakened in his soul; and in selecting each of them he must make a 

particular judgment about its appropriateness, since a single stroke of the finger 

out of keeping with the harmony would at once be perceived as discord. And 

yet the whole turns out so well that a musician, when he improvises freely, 

would often like to transcribe some of his happy improvisations, which he 

might otherwise never hope to bring off so well, no matter how hard he tried. 

[Kant: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Section 1, Bk. 1, ‘‘On the 

representations that we have without being conscious of them’’] 

Kant’s point was that this example illustrates that there is a ‘‘wide field’’ 

of representations in the mind of the musician (and in all of us, for that 

matter), that although very much part of cognition, are nevertheless not 

clearly and distinctly present to consciousness. What is special in the case 

of the musician is that she has the requisite technical skills to express these 

ideas behaviorally, as it were, in her impromptu but nevertheless nonrandom 

harmonic choices. That these choices are the product of 

unconscious processes is shown by the fact that the musician could only 

come up with these combinations by somehow being able to shortcut the 

conscious, deliberative process of rule-governed composition. In fact, 

Kant suggests, the more diligently and attentively (i.e. self-consciously) 

she tried to reproduce these afterwards on paper (‘‘with real diligence and 

attention (‘‘mit allem Fleiß,’’)), the less likely she would be to capture the 

free fantasy. And yet at the same time, he characterizes this process as one 

involving discriminations: every stroke of the keyboard or pedal involves 

judgments about its appropriateness, Kant says, and one bad choice 

would produce discord. 26 

Though he knew little about music theory, Kant is obviously intrigued 

by the cognitive state that underlies the free fantasia. Interestingly, he 

does not seem particularly bothered by the fact that the ‘‘happy 

26 Kant’s characterization of the cognitive state of the musician playing the free fantasia and the 

subsequent attempt to recapture it in notation is an early version of the dilemma or paradox that 

Schleuning describes. (The musician while improvising is working with musical ideas that, while 

not random or arbitrary, are also neither predictable nor purposive. A composition, on the other 

hand, must have some coherent structure (at least a beginning, middle, and end) and in this sense, 

a purpose. To stay true to the essence of the original this structure must be put together in a way 

that is neither predictable nor reproducible.)

156 


improvisations’’ are by his definition not really works of art. He is more 

concerned to characterize the nature of the process by which an artistic 

virtuoso creates beautiful music. The organist who improvises is a kind of 

phenomenon of nature, and the improvised piece is thus itself more of a 

natural than an artificial object whose aesthetic value can be explained 

along the lines of natural beauty: it results from the interplay of musical 

forms and the free play of the imaginations of the listeners for whom the 

improvisor plays. And so far as the musician is concerned, a naturalistic 

account of her role is also available. Just as a beautiful natural object can 

be explained scientifically, the causal story of the organist’s inner state can 

be told by reference to a kind of ‘‘regression’’ or dreamlike access to ideas 

that are not immediately present to consciousness. 

This causal story as Kant tells it, is the story of ‘‘fantasy,’’ the term 

Kant prefers to use instead of imagination when referring to ‘‘images 

produced involuntarily’’ or what he has called ‘‘unconscious ideas’’: 

Before an artist can present a physical form (tangibly, as it were), he must have 

already made it in his imagination; and this form is then called invention. If it is 

produced involuntarily (as in dreaming) it is called fantasy and lies outside the 

artist’s proper realm; but if it is governed by choice it is called composition, 

fabrication. (VII: 174ff.) 

The ‘‘proper realm’’ of the artist for Kant is by definition a realm of 

purpose and technique for implementing and realizing it in a medium. 

The free fantasia is not of course a mere dream, but it is a case of what 

Kant sees as fantasizing nonetheless, because it involves loss of control – 

or, as he puts it, it involves the imagination ‘‘playing with us.’’ He says, 

‘‘we like to play with our imagination and often do; but imagination (in 

its role of fantasy) plays with us just as often.’’ The difference between the 

fantasia performer and the daydreamer for Kant is the fact that the 

organist has developed great technical skills to such a level that they can 

be accessed kinesthetically, i.e. nearly unconsciously. There is then a sense 

in which the improvising musician is not a ‘‘conscious’’ artist. Rather, she 

is an artist who has consciously chosen a dream-like state in order to let 

her imagination ‘‘play’’ with her decisions about what musical ideas to 

express. The result is a natural, not a ‘‘composed,’’ object. 

Something along these lines holds for philosophical creativity, for 

Kant, as well. Kant has more to say about the free play of the imagination 

with natural objects like fire and babbling brooks, and it seems to me the 

reverie he describes on these occasions is precisely the reverie that 

C. P. E. Bach hoped to induce in himself and his listeners in the


performance of the free fantasia. Here is a an excerpt from Kant’s 

Anthropology, where he speaks of the free play of imagination with ‘‘the 

changing, moving forms’’ of flickering flames or a babbling brook; 

imagination plays with ‘‘a host of ideas of a quite different kind (than 

those of sight) [or of hearing]’’ and ‘‘becomes lost in reverie’’: 

Even music can fulfill this function, provided we do not listen to it as connoisseurs; 

it can put a poet or a philosopher into a frame of mind such that he 

can snatch and even master thought relevant to his business or his fancy, which 

he would not have caught so luckily had he sat down alone in his room [and 

tried to come up with them]. (V: 173–174) 

Thought is facilitated and ‘‘animated’’ by the focus of our attention on a 

single strand of sensation to the exclusion of other sensations, because the 

imagination is then conserved for the purpose of the ‘‘strenuous and 

persistent activity ... of providing material for its intellectual ideas.’’ (In 

other words, it is conserved for the production of aesthetic ideas.) The 

imaginative power is able to focus on its work by fixating: zeroing in on 

one set of sensations that occupy, even transfix, our outward perception. 

Kant’s account helps make sense of how artistic creativity works, at its 

best: By eschewing predictability, it renders the artist (and the audiences, 

even the connoisseur) an amateur again, a ‘‘natural’’ as it were. The 

element of surprise and unruliness will pleasantly disorient the savant so 

that he or she can see or hear it with ‘‘fresh’’ eyes and ears, as it were, and 

restore the kind of originality that the amateur enjoys. Like the play of the 

flames in fire, works like the free fantasia level the aesthetic playing field 

of their audience. 

Before turning to Novalis, I want to go back to something Kant says 

about the imagination in the Critique of Judgment discussion of the 

powers of the mind that constitute genius that fits hand in glove with his 

discussion of unconscious ideation in the Anthropology: 

the imagination ([in its role] as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty 

when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature 

gives it. We use it to entertain ourselves when experience strikes us as overly 

routine. We may even restructure [umbilden] experience; and though in doing so 

we continue to follow analogical laws, yet we also follow principles which reside 

higher up, namely, in reason (and which are just as natural to us as those which 

the understanding follows in apprehending empirical nature). In this process we 

feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical use 

of the imagination); for although it is under that law that nature lends us 

material yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, 

into something that surpasses nature. (V: 314)

158 


Let us return to Novalis, keeping in mind some of the points just made 

about Kant’s view of the creative process. First, Kant’s theory of creativity 

involves a central reference to non-rational, or sub-rational processing. 

This is not altogether clear in the third Critique, but when read in 

conjunction with the passage from his Anthropology on unconscious 

ideation and the free fantasia, it seems obvious that this is what he has in 

mind when he speaks of the creative power of imagination to create 

another nature out of the one that is actually given, doing so to relieve 

boredom ‘‘when experience strikes us as overly routine.’’ Second, 

although it occurs within the context of his characterization of genius, in 

this particular passage he refers to everyone’s power of imagination ‘‘when 

experience strikes us as overly routine.’’ This suggests that he is thinking 

of ordinary daydreaming or reverie, wherein it is possible for ‘‘us’’ 

(humans, presumably) to creatively ‘‘process’’ the materials of nature into 

something ‘‘that surpasses nature’’ and thereby feel our freedom from the 

‘‘empirical use of the imagination.’’ In other words, Kant intimates here 

that genius is a capacity common to all, the ability to produce aesthetic 

ideas – ‘‘inner intuitions to which no concept can be completely adequate.’’ 

But he then goes on, somewhat confusingly, to say that genius is 

the special capacity to find ideas that prompt so much thought that they 

expand a concept ‘‘in an unlimited way’’ (V: 315). 27 Kant leaves unclear 

the relationship between ordinary consciousness and the creative process 

of genius, perhaps because, for him the two are not so easily separated in 

the first place. 

And, finally, we should notice that in this section (V: 314) Kant makes 

the rather surprising claim that in ‘‘productive’’ imaginative reflection, we 

are capable of surpassing nature. For Kant, to surpass (übertreffen) nature, 

of course, suggests entering the realm of the supersensible, or the moral, 

not in any metaphysical sense, but in the sense of entering a realm of what 

ought to be as opposed to what is. I have already argued that this little 

paragraph gestures towards a view that Kant himself didn’t adopt, but 

perhaps should have. It opens the possibility that morality is directly 

linked to aesthetic reflection insofar as moral law requires us to project 

the possibility of creating the highest good – happiness commensurate 

27 

And then in concluding he says: 

Hence genius actually consists in the happy relation ... allowing us, first, to discover ideas for a given 

concept, and second, to hit upon a way of expressing these ideas that enables us to communicate to 

others ... the mental attunement that those ideas produce. (V: 317) 

suggesting that it is the ability to communicate that makes for genius, since originality alone can 

amount to ‘‘original nonsense.’’


with virtue on earth. Kant didn’t follow through to say that aesthetic 

creativity is needed for just this sort of projection, but Novalis, along with 

other early Romantics, did. 

In a sense, Novalis’ entire philosophical and poetic project is intended 

to both embody and explain the creative process. Given his view that 

‘‘Without geniality, none of us would exist at all. Genius is necessary for 

everything,’’ it is no wonder. Genius for Novalis, as we saw, is ‘‘the ability 

to treat imagined objects as real,’’ and thought of in this way, his claim 

that it is ‘‘necessary for everything’’ is not all that exaggerated. Does Kant 

also subscribe to this notion of ‘‘ordinary’’ genius? I think in his discussion 

of the primordial cognition that is involved in improvisational art – 

that is, in art that is closest to nature and therefore genuinely original – he 

came close to expounding the ubiquity of genius. But he placed restrictions 

on the notion in the third Critique account that reserves the term 

‘‘genius’’ to refer only to the ability to successfully communicate primordial 

or ‘‘unconscious’’ ideas. In other words, although he came very 

close to an understanding of creativity as a necessary part of human 

cognitive functioning, he ended up discussing only what Novalis calls the 

‘‘genius of genius.’’ It is not entirely clear why. Perhaps he believed that 

the extraordinary power of imagination of the ‘‘genius of genius’’ was so 

much further developed than the ordinary person’s that they become 

qualitatively different – belonging to a class by themselves. Or perhaps he 

was afraid to defend the virtues of daydreaming. 

Novalis had no such worries. He recognizes the ordinariness of genius, 

or the genius of the ordinary, we might say. Revelations, he said, are 

natural, and ‘‘cannot be forced.’’ 28 Surely there is truth in this position: It 

is this capacity for momentary, everyday transcendence – the ability to 

daydream – that develops our powers. Our propensity for ordinary, if not 

always productive, creativity is what allows us to transpose ourselves 

outside ourselves, and meet each other, as Novalis says, ‘‘there, where the 

inner world and the outer world touch.’’ 

conclusion 

Kant, like Novalis, firmly believed that longing and striving for the 

absolute, the unconditioned, was an essential characteristic of human 

28 ‘‘One must never, like a phantast, seek the undetermined – a child of fantasy – an ideal. One 

proceeds from determinate task to determinate task. An unknown lover of course has a magical 

charm. Striving for the unknown, the undetermined, is extremely dangerous and disadvantageous. 

Revelations cannot be forced’’ (3: 601, #291, Observations on the Physical).

160 


reason that neither could nor should be entirely suppressed. Both also 

agreed that no knowledge of the absolute could ever be attained, and that 

claims to have done so were necessarily in error. The difference between 

Kant and Novalis was thus not a difference over the value of unattainable 

rational ideals or the need to avoid transcendent delusions. Throughout 

this book I have argued that Kant and Novalis were closer philosophically 

than is canonically assumed. And assuming Novalis to be a central 

spokesman for the early German Romantics, Kant is in many ways closer 

to this movement than to the Idealism with which he is so often associated. 

But the two are certainly not identical. What really separates Kant 

from Novalis and the early German Romantic movement, I believe, is his 

relatively sanguine acceptance of the limitations of human reason and 

hence of philosophy. Novalis took this resignation to be a kind of 

‘‘scholasticism’’ – a ‘‘one-sided’’ approach that assigned philosophy to the 

domain of reason alone. Novalis’ innovation, and that of his cohort in 

Jena, was to redefine philosophy itself as an ‘‘unending, free activity’’ that 

at its limits becomes an aesthetic, creative endeavor, driven by an 

expanded power of imagination first described by Kant in the third 

Critique.

Bibliography 

References to Kant’s work in this book (except references to the Critique of Pure 

Reason, which following long practice are to the pagination of the original 

German editions) are to Kants Gesammelte Schriften edited by the Königliche 

Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, the ‘‘Academie edition,’’ by volume 

and page number. English translations of most of these exist in a standard format 

in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. The Akademie pagination 

is provided in all of these. 

Except where otherwise noted, references to Novalis’ works are to Novalis 

Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, eds. Paul Kluckhohn and 

Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1965). References are to 

volume, page, and, when applicable, to paragraph number of that edition. The 

second and third volumes, edited by Richard Samuel together with Hans- 

Joachim Mähl and Gerhard Schulz, contain Novalis’ philosophical writings, 

published in 1981 and 1983, respectively. English editions now available include the 

Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: The Universal Brouillon, trans. David Wood 

(Albany: SUNY Press, 2007); Novalis: Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2003); Novalis: Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret 

Mahoney Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). 

kant works cited (followed by akademie 

edition number) 

Kritik der praktischen Vernunft/Critique of Practical Reason (V) (also ‘‘Second 

Critique’’); Kritik der reinen Vernunft/Critique of Pure Reason (also ‘‘First Critique’’) 

(A & B editions); Kritik der Urteilskraft/Critique of Judgment (V) (also 

‘‘Third Critique’’); Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht/Anthropology from a 

Pragmatic Point of View (VII); Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?/An 

Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (XIII); Bemerkungen zu den 

Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen/Remarks on the Observations 

on the Beautiful and Sublime (XX); Briefwechsel/Correspondence (XII); 

Erste Einleitung in der Kritik der Urteilskraft/First Introduction to the Critique of 

Judgment (XX); Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten/Groundwork of the 

Metaphysics of Morals (also Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals) (IV); 

161

162 

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(II); Vorlesungen über Anthropologie/Lectures on Anthropology (XXV). 

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Abrams, M. H. 129, 149 

absolute, the (the unconditional) 140, 148 

tendency to seek 119 42, 159 

see also self-knowledge 

aesthetic ideas 16, 44, 53, 104, 105 7, 108, 

109, 120, 152 

aesthetic reflection see reflection 

aesthetics 

German 1 3, 113, 152 

German Enlightenment 1, 1 6, 18, 38 45 

Kant’s see Kant’s aesthetic theory 

and rationalism in (Germany) 1, 2 3, 40, 

41, 42 

rules for 40 1, 152 3, 155, 157 

alienation 83, 84 6, 87 9, 89 94, 116, 139 

Allison, Henry 3, 8, 61, 94, 151, 152 

Ameriks, Karl 7, 13, 19, 73, 75, 81 4, 87, 90, 

111 

Arendt, Hannah 8 

art 44, 53, 56, 134, 151 

and nature 56, 67 9, 151, 154, 156 

as superseding philosophy (Novalis) 

autonomy, rational 74, 77, 80, 85 

Auxter, Thomas 8 

Bach, C. P. E. 154, 156 

Bach, Johann Sebastian 156 

Baier, Kurt 70 

Bauemler, Alfred 1, 2, 7 

Baumgarten, Alexander G. 2, 14, 38 40 

beauty, the beautiful 15, 17 19, 35, 39, 44 

‘‘doctrine of’’ see Hölderlin 

ideal of 16, 70 1, 107, 108, 116, 120 

judgments of 15 

see judgments of taste 

natural (of nature) 64 

as symbol of morality 53, 107 

Beck, Lewis White 21, 38 58, 47, 51, 57 

Behler, Ernst 19, 22, 24 

Beiser, Frederick 7, 31, 47, 56, 113 15, 120 

Bernstein, Jay 7 

Index 

168 

Bodmer and Breitinger 1, 14, 40 

Böhme, Gernot and Hartmut 16, 97 104, 98, 

115, 120 

Bowie, Andrew 5, 7, 22, 28 

Brandt, Reinhard 8 

Burke, Edmond 66 

Cassirer, Ernst 136 

common sense/sensus communis 44 

common aesthetic sense/sensus communis 

aestheticus 44 

communicability, universal 44, 53, 60 

community 10, 19, 35 

consciousness 

primary process accounts 153 8 

see also unconscious ideas/ideation 125, 

128 

self-consciousness 125 38, 145 

see also self-knowledge 

unconscious ideas/ideation 153 8 

contemplation see reflection 

creativity 19, 92 

see also imagination 

Crusius, Christian August 95 

Darstellung 4 

daydreaming 156, 158, 159 

disinterest/disinterested pleasure 4, 15, 24, 45, 

58 9, 60 71, 93 4, 116 

in metaphysical speculation 115, 119 

Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism 

120, 121 

Eldridge, Richard 87 8, 124 

elitism (moral, philosophical) 87, 112, 

115 

embodiment 70 1, 92, 117 

end(s), see purpose 

enlightenment, German 1, 18, 21, 38, 114 

enthusiasm/enthusiast 13, 16, 55, 99, 108 13, 

136, 119 42

Fantast see enthusiasm 

fantasy 156, 157 

see also imagination 

feelings 50, 53, 61, 80, 83, 86, 129 

in art 41, 135 6 

for beautiful nature 65, 66 7 

for belonging in nature/nature’s 

purposiveness 93 

as central to self-knowledge (Novalis) 144, 

145 6 

faculty of 76 

in Hölderlin 135 6 

and imagination 44, 53 

as an intuition 129 

metaphysical 117 

moral 63 4, 65, 66 7, 83 

in Novalis, defined 142 

universal communicability of 76, 88 

feminist critiques of Kant 12 

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 13 17, 20, 33, 35, 96, 

122 8, 140, 141, 145, 150 

Frank, Manfred 7, 122, 127 8, 129 30 

Frederick the Great 56, 57 

free fantasia 17, 153 7 

freedom 

of imagination see imagination 

moral/practical 45, 123 

Fricke, Christel 8 

Frierson, Patrick 8 

genius 13 17, 53 

Kant’s view of 13, 69, 104, 109, 112 13, 124, 

151, 154 

Lessing’s view of 41 2, 152 

Novalis’ view of 150 

see also Novalis 

Ginsborg, Hannah 8 

Gottsched, J. C. 1, 18 

Grenberg, Jeanine 112 

Guyer, Paul 7, 67, 89, 94, 108 

Hardenberg, Friedrich von 13 


Haym, Rudolf 122 

Hegel, G. W. F. 96, 120, 121 

Heidegger, Martin 16, 95 7, 120, 124 

Helfer, Martha 4 

Hemsterhuis, Frans 123, 143, 145 

Henrich, Dieter 2, 3, 7, 81, 95 8, 115, 123, 124, 

125, 127, 133, 134 

Herder, Johann Gottfried 114 

highest good/summum bonum 9, 38, 64, 66 7, 

89, 107, 114 

Index 169 

reason’s command to bring about 46 59, 64, 

89, 117 

supreme good (distinguished from highest 

good) 46 

Hölderlin 7, 16 17, 114, 121, 122 38, 141 

doctrine of beauty 134 

Hyperion 127, 134 

Homer 112 

hope, rational 9, 14, 46, 92, 106 8, 116, 120, 124 

feeling of 92, 93 

Huch, Ricarda 122 

Idealism, German 19, 33 6, 97, 122, 143 

Kant as idealist 33 6 

imagination, Kant’s theory of 1 6, 14 

association with feeling and embodiment 97, 

120 

as common root of sensibility and 

understanding 95 8 

creative 19, 52, 92, 105, 109, 120, 151 60 

as dangerous 13, 112, 120 

distinguished from fantasy (involuntary 

invention) 156 

free play of imagination and understanding 2, 

29, 44, 58 9 

freedom of (imaginative freedom) 35, 37, 

38 59, 103 

as inscrutable 13, 25, 29, 97, 149 

as mediating faculty 4, 15 16, 29, 92 

and metaphysics 13, 31 2 

productive 53, 100, 158 

reproductive 99 

role in cognition 2, 3, 99 100, 105, 150, 151 

schema/schemata/schematism 53 5 

as subordinate 13, 16, 95 

as transformative/reforming power/visionary 

13, 14 15, 57, 104, 105 7, 129, 148 9 

improvisation 154 

interest 15, 116 

of aesthetic reflective judgments (judgments of 

taste, judgments of beauty) 44, 60 71, 63 

direct 61, 63, 64 5, 68, 71, 75 93 

doctrine of 60 2 

empirical 62 3, 116 

indirect 61, 93 

intellectual 62, 63 5, 116 

moral 60, 61, 63 4, 

in nature 64, 76 93 

of universal communicability 60 

intuition 6 

as feeling (Novalis) 129, 147 

inner, outer perception (nonspatial, spatial) 

143, 147

170 

intuition (cont.) 

original/intellectual 6, 26, 112, 126, 127, 

128 30, 133, 141, 144, 147 

moral 120 

Jacobi 55 

Jena Circle see romanticism 

judgments of taste see taste 

Kant 

anthropology 8 

as Copernicus 140 

and metaphysics 31 2, 47, 50, 82, 99, 113 19, 140 

‘‘theodicy of reason’’ 32 

Kant’s aesthetic theory 1 4, 7, 17 19 

and environmentalism 67 9 

influence on romanticism 

see romanticism and metaphysics 16 

as ‘‘missing link’’ in German eighteenthcentury 

theory 38 

Kant’s romanticism 23 6 

see also romanticism 

Kleist, Heinrich von 139 40, 147 

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 136 

Korsgaard, Christine 77, 90 

Kühn, Manfred 57 

Lacou-Labarthe, Philippe and Nancy, Jean-Luc 

5, 6, 35 6 

Larmore, Charles 4, 124, 129 

Laursen, John Christian 57 

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 39, 114, 140 

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 14, 18, 38, 40 2, 58, 

113, 152 

see also genius 

Longueness, Beatrice 3 

Louden, Robert B. 8, 21 

love 66 

for nature 66 7, 117 

pathological 66, 69 

practical 66, 69 

reflective 66, 69, 71, 117 

Mähl, Hans-Joachim 143 

Makkreel, Rudolf 11, 24, 39, 44, 102, 105 6 

Martindale, Colin 153 

Mattheson, Johannes 153 

Mendelssohn, Moses 55 

metaphysics 

see Kant and metaphysics 

see Novalis and metaphysics 

Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth 32 

Munzel, Felicitas 11, 29, 49 50, 65, 108 

mysticism of practical reason 108 10 

see also enthusiasm 

Index 

nature 

and freedom 123 

see also nature and reason 

and reason, unity of 83, 84 6, 88 9, 

123 

see also alienation 

Neiman, Susan 15 16, 47 8, 57, 92, 113 

Newton, Sir Isaac 112 

Niethammer, Friedrich 124, 128, 133 

Novalis 7, 13 14, 16 17, 20, 58 9, 114, 

122 38, 140 60 

critique of Kant 145, 146 9, 160 

Fichte Studies 127, 128 31, 141, 148 

genius 16 17, 150, 151, 152, 159 

Heinrich von Ofterdingen 131 2 

Kant Studies 143 

logarythmizing 22, 24 6 

and metaphysics 142 3, 146 

philosophy (distinguished from 

philosophizing) 27 

philosophizing 27 

potentializing (Potenzierung) 131, 146 

romanticizing 14, 21, 22 3, 146 

suicide 145n 

novel, the (der Roman) 31, 136 7 

O’Neill, Onora 12, 73 7, 76 93, 90 

philosophy 

distinguished from philosophizing (Novalis) 

27 

for Fichte 126 

for Novalis 130 1, 145, 148 

philosophical creativity (Kant) 148 

as ‘‘poetic’’ 131, 140 1, 145 

systematic 27 

Plato 109, 117, 119, 133 

pleasure 24, 29, 80 1, 88 

see also disinterest, interest 

Pluhar, Werner 28 

postulates of practical reason 9, 10, 15, 35, 

46 52, 82, 89 90, 91, 115, 116, 119 

practical reason 25, 72 94 

command to implement highest good 

see highest good/summum bonum 

metaphysical 15 

methodological 15, 73, 75 

primacy of 12, 15 16, 33, 35, 72 94 

progress, moral and social 9, 10, 32, 38, 42, 48, 

57, 106 8, 116, 120 

imagination 117 19 

purpose/purposiveness 

final 78 80, 84, 125 

principle of 79 80, 81, 86, 123, 155

purposiveness of nature 117 

purposiveness without purpose 154 

Rationalism 110, 116, 140 

see also aesthetics 

Rawls, John 72, 73 

reason 

fact of 25, 123 

practical see practical reason 

problem of reason 32, 45 6 

unity of see unity of reason 

Reath, Andrews 107 

reflection, reflective judgment 11, 23, 81, 101 2 

aesthetic; aesthetic reflective judgment 15 16, 

33, 43 4, 86, 107, 116 17 

as mirroring (Novalis) 129 30 

as source of value 78 

see principle of purposiveness 

technic/technique 102 

regulative principle(s) 6, 23, 34, 123, 142, 147 

Reinhold, Karl 13, 123, 125 

Riley, Patrick 8 

romanticism, German 1, 98, 121, 122, 140 

as irrationalist 1, 14, 16 19, 20, 23, 140, 147, 

150 

Jena Circle (early German romanticism) 13, 

20, 58 9, 122, 140 1, 160 

Kant’s influence on 4 7, 16 19, 20 36 

late romanticism (Heidelberg School) 141 

as naturalizing 22 3, 25 

romantic conception of mind 129 

Romanticizing 14, 22 3, 129 30, 131 


Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14, 32 6, 109 117 

influence on Kant 32 3, 56, 99, 113 14, 115 

‘‘Rousseauistic’’ revolution 87 8, 91 

revolution 56 7 

French Revolution 57, 108 10 

‘‘Rousseaustic’’ see Rousseau 

Santner, Eric 136 

Sassen, Brigitte 152 

Schelling, F. W. J. 20, 96, 121, 134 

schema/schemata/schematism see imagination 

Schiller, Friedrich 7, 13, 14, 38, 58 9, 

128 34 

Schlegel, Friedrich 7, 20, 24, 114 

Schleuning, Peter 153, 155 

Schmidt, James 12, 20, 38, 55 

Schott, Robin May 12, 98 

Schulze, G. E. 125 

Schwärmerei see enthusiasm 

self-deception 112 

self-knowledge 124 

Index 171 

absolute self (knowledge) 127, 129, 130, 141, 

143 

in Fichte 125 7 

self-positing (Tathandlung, ‘‘fact-act’’) 126, 

142, 144, 145 

see also Fichte; intellectual 

intuition 

three principles of 126 7 

in Hölderlin 134 

in Kant 124 5, 142 

in Novalis 128 34, 141, 142, 144 

the seat (location) of the soul (Sitz der Seele) 

143 5, 147 

self as regulative concept 142 

see also consciousness 

Seyhan, Azade 7 

Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) 1, 

123 

Silber, John R. 51 

sociability 62 

Sömmerring, Samuel Thomas 143 4 

Spinoza, Benedict de 134 

spirit see genius 

Stark, Werner 8, 109 

sublime, the 17, 24, 111, 132 

supersensible, the 14, 28 30, 96, 149, 158 

Swedenborg, Emanuel 110 11 

taste 2, 60, 103 4, 106 

as discipline 103 

distinguished from genius (spirit) 152 

pure judgments of taste 15, 60, 116 

autonomy 11 

teleology/teleological judgment 8, 10, 98 

see also purpose 

Tugendhat, Ernst 125 

unconscious ideas/ideation 25 

unity of reason 15, 33, 76, 86 

see also unity of the subject 

unity of the subject/subjectivity 5, 14, 35 6, 

38 58, 63, 95, 96 119, 123, 124 38, 

130 

contingency of 96, 133 

distinguished from unity of self and nature 123 

regress of subjects 126 

‘‘weakening of the subject’’ 6 

Vereinigungsphilosophie 123, 133 

unsocial sociability 9, 118 

van der Linden, Harry 107 

Velkley, Richard 15 16, 32 6, 47, 57, 84 7, 115 

von Molnár, Geza 142

172 

Wieland, Christoph Martin 112, 114 

Wilson, Holly 8 

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 41 

Wolff, Christian 2, 39, 95, 114, 140 59 

Wood, Allen 8, 32, 35, 46, 52, 57 

Index 

Wood, David 7 

Yovel, Yirmiyahu 8, 47, 51 2, 55, 90 

Zammito, John 7, 8

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