Kant as propagator: Reflections on observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 455-468

  Shell, Susan ^a  

^a BOSTON COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 60950655036     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2002.0032     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. See, however, Willi Goetschel, Constituting Critique: Kant's Writing as Critical Praxis, trans. Eric Schwab (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 58-78. This neglect is all the stranger, given the popularity of the work, which went through seven printings in Kant's lifetime. (I am indebted to John Zammito for drawing my attention to this fact.)
2. See Kurt Stavenhagen, Kant und Königsberg (Göttingen: Deurlichsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1949)
3. Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Königsberg: Kanter, 1764)
4. reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußische [later Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer; later, De Gruyter, 1900- ), 20: 44; all further references to Kant are in parantheses to this edition; translations are my own
5. For a fuller consideration, see Shell, "Kant's 'True Economy of Human Nature': Rousseau, Count Verri, and the Problem of Happiness,'" in Cambridge Companion to Kant's Lectures on Anthropology (forthcoming)
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Galimard, 1959- ), 1: 573
7. The Collected Writings of Rousseau, trans. Christopher Kelly (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1995), 5:480
8. Rousseau, Emile, in Oeuvres complètes, 4: 241
9. see also Andrew Norris, "The Pleasures of Morality," in New Essays on the Precritical Kant, ed. Tom Rockmore (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001), esp. 90-92
10. See, for example, Kant, "Conjectural Beginning of Human History' (8: 116-117)
11. L. E. Borowski, R. B. Jachmann, and A. Ch. Wasianski, Immanuel Kant: Sein Leben in Darstellungen von Zeitgenossen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgeselschaft, 1998), 32
12. Beauty needs sublimity to move; sublimity without beauty "soon tires." Kant's later formulations, by way of contrast, stress the tirelessness (or constancy) of the sublime, able, like no other feeling, to "rise constantly" (see, for example, Critique of Judgment, 5: 272-3). In this early essay, but not later, beauty (especially in women) plays a necessary role in maintaining the exalted feeling that Kant associates throughout with virtue proper
13. Compare Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5: 235
14. See Hamann's review, reprinted in Johann Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Josef Nadler (Vienna: Herder, 1952), 4: 289-92. Hamann appears to pun on the double meaning of predicament as both formal predication and unpleasant difficulty
15. For a fine discussion of Kant's treatment of the temperaments, see Mark Larrimore, "Substitutes for Wisdom: Kant's Practical Thought and the Tradition of the Temperaments," Journal of the History of Philosophy 39 (April 2001): 258-87
16. see also Goetschel, Constituting Critique, 67-8)
17. see Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation and Community (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), chap. 8
18. See also Kant's "Announcement of the Program of [Kant's] Lectures for the Winter Semester, 1765-1766" (2: 311-2), where he describes the (Rousseauian) ideals of natural and noble simplicity as the two opposing models of human perfection
19. The principle obstacle to female education (and with it, the moral improvement of mankind as a whole) can thus be understood to be the dry pedantry of the "schools," against which Kant's efforts at this time are largely directed. On the historical context of those efforts, see G. Felicitas Munzel, "Menschenfreundschaft: Friendship and Pedagogy in Kant," Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (1998-9): 247-59
20. See Ernst Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 51-2
21. Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], Schriften, ed. J. Minor (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1923), 3: 387: "Nothing is more romantic than what is commonly called world and destiny."
22. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5: 267. In Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason, Kant will show in greater detail how the "attunement" of the sublime might be understood to counter "radical evil," or the misattunement of our power to estimate and esteem the good. (See my "Freedom within the Boundaries of Reason," forthcoming.)
23. On Kant's treatment of enthusiasm more generally, see Fenves's introductory essay in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique of Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993)
24. Earlier versions of this essay appeared in New Essays on the Precritical Kant, ed. Tom Rock-more (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2001), 66-85
25. The Political Science Reviewer 30 (2001): 34-57