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Fiction, Criticism and Transcendence: On Carazan's Dream in Kant's <i>Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime</i>

2011; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 126; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2011.0045

1080-6598

Jonathan Luftig,

Philosophical Ethics and Theory

Fiction, Criticism and Transcendence:On Carazan's Dream in Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime Jonathan Luftig (bio) According to a familiar narrative, Kant's practical transformation was linked to his reading of Rousseau: I myself am by inclination an inquirer. I feel in its entirety a thirst for knowledge and yearning restlessness to advance along this way along with satisfaction with each forward step. There was a time when I thought that this alone [theoretical inquiries] would constitute the honor of mankind, and I scorned the masses, who know nothing. Rousseau set me upright. This blinding preference vanishes. I learn to honor human beings, and I would find myself far more useless than the common worker if I did not believe this consideration could bestow value to all the others, to establish the rights of mankind.1 [End Page 614] Yet a further look into the remarks Kant inscribed into his own copy of the pre-critical Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime indicates that, even as Rousseau set Kant upright and taught him to honor human beings, this insight into the principle of human dignity comes at a considerable price, as it is accompanied by the more disturbing insight not only that man's essential dignity may have been corrupted or denatured, but also that the philosopher is not in possession of the measure of human dignity. That Rousseau's teaching is at all necessary, after all, is the surest indication that man is already corrupted. Given the absence of "fixed points of nature that man can never disturb" or even "marking signs concerning the bank on which he has to hold himself,"2 the thought of man's essential dignity is thus also initially the thought of this essential groundlessness, a question mark linked to the name Rousseau. If, in this 1764 text, Kant distinguishes the "moral virtues, which are simply pleasurable and beautiful, from true virtue which [is] based on general principles"3—a distinction that, as Ferdinand Alquié has argued, anticipates his subsequent thinking of practical reason—the question as to how such a distinction might be disclosed or even recognized remains unanswered. Moreover, although Kant uses a Rousseauian language of feeling in the Observations, it soon becomes clear that feeling as it is traditionally conceived, even by Rousseau, will be insufficient for such a disclosure.4 It is in this context that I will focus on Kant's surprising claim, in the Observations, that human dignity is "grounded" in a "shudder,"5 first in the context [End Page 615] of Kant's treatment of the melancholic temperament, and then in "Carazan's Dream," an anonymous story cited by him as an extended example of the "terrifying sublime" (Schreckhaft-Erhabene[n]).6 At stake in both ethical shudders, it turns out, is the relation between fiction, transcendence and the very first stirrings of Kant's practical turn. An Ethical Shudder As breezy as it may be stylistically, Kant's Observations presents several difficulties from the outset. Although, as is to be expected in a pre-critical text, there is no methodical distinction between the ethical and the pathological, this distinction is everywhere at work in Kant's discussion of virtue grounded on "principles" (Grundsätze).7 Both the melancholic and the sublime are associated with such virtue. Although both the sublime and the beautiful—the two types of the "finer feeling" (feinere[s] Gefühl) that is the focus of his discussion8—are initially presented as complementary, the balance tips in favor of the sublime once the discussion turns to Kant's ethical concerns. Indeed, Kant goes to pains to separate out the sublimity of ethical action from any principles motivated by sympathy, compassion, or even kindness. Such feelings, associated in this text with the beautiful, are, however well-meaning they may be, also "weak" (schwach) and "always blind" (jederzeit blind).9 They are, in short, insufficient to drive the "inert human nature" (die träge menschliche Natur) to action.10 Yet, because they extend further than the "specific grounds of compassion" (besonderen Gründe des Mitleidens)—that felt sympathy associated with the beautiful—sublime principles...