EARLY KANT & A ROCOCO SPIRIT: SETIING FORTHE CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT by C. SEERVELD

The Kant of Critical Pure Reason has been so etched upon genera­ tions of academic minds that popular scholarship acts as if Kant began to exist when he was almost sixty years old. (Kant was born 1724. Kritik der reinen Vernunft was published 1781.) In a paper read at Northwestern University on the bicentenary of Kant's birth, E.F. Car­ ritt said:

Kant's pre-critical treatise Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen of 1764 is a very dull performance, which makes such classifications as that men are sublime and women beautiful, the English character sublime and the French beautiful. ... The serious business begins in 1790 with Die Kritik der Urteils­ kraft. 1

I should like to maintain the opposite in this paper, that Kant's obser­ vations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime constitute a fascinat­ ing Aufklärung essay, and I should like to begin to demonstrate that if one takes Kant's Observations seriously, one gains important insight for understanding the Critique of Judgment-power. The fact that Kant's marginalia and interleaf notes made in his own copy of the Observa­ tions during the year(s) following its publication almost equal the length of the Critique of Practical Reason shows that at least Kant took the Observations seriously at the time (KGS 20:1-192)2, even if many Kant scholars since have not. Now that the benign neglect of the third 3 Critique is ending , we need as full a picture as possible of its setting, to help us understand the 'argument'.

1 E.F. Carritt, 'The Sources and Effects in England of Kant's Philosophy of Beauty,' in Immanuel Kant, Papers read at Northwestern University on the Bicente­ nary of Kant's Birth (Chicago: Open Court Pub. Co., 1925), pp. 179-180. 2 All KGS designations refer to the edition of Kant's Gesammelte Schriften published by the Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1900-1955, 23 volumes), the volume: page-relevant/lines. Translations are my responsibility. I am happy to thank my colleague Albert Wolters for continually pulling my idiom back to literalness. 3 Cf. Hans-Georg Juchem, Die Entwicklung des Begriffs des Schönen bei Kant (Bonn, 1970), T.E. Uehling, Jr., The Notion of Form in Kant's Critique of Aesthet­ ic Judgment (Hague, 1971), Karel Kuypers, Kants Kunsttheorie und die Einheit

145 There is one simple methodological principle integral to my analysis I wish to specify. Two variables which define a thinker's position are (1) the basic con­ ceptual pattern that structures his or her interrelating matters, and (2) Zeitgeist, an informing spirit of the times. The nexus of these two variable factors normally outline the historical position from which a thinker contributes knowledge or holds mistaken theses. It is c1arifying to note that thinkers with fundamentally different problematics may share the same spirit, and thinkers of a different age or driven by a different Zeitgeist may hold to a similarly structured, basic conceptual pattern of thought. Hume and Swedenbourg shared an Enlightenment spirit, but their ways of handling problems were as different as that of an urbane empiricist and a visionary theosophist. Both Hegel and Cusanus were committed to the Heraclitan orientation of coincidentia oppositorum. But the contours of Cusanus' thought breathed a transitional, fifteenth-century spirit of trying to recapture some kind of Patristic, synthetic christian humanism in the face of both Scholasticism and Renaissance; Hegel's dialectic, on the other hand, was spirited by a surging, self-reliant Idealism that captivated many cultural formers of Europe moving into the nineteenth century. This is not the place to argue for the reality of Zeitgeist or to document examples of illuminating combinations. I mention here these two co-ordinates of a thinker's position to c1arify the heuristic device I use to analyze the development of a given man or woman's thought, a methodological principle which also helps one be more specific in delineating 'influence.'

Early Kant's moorings

As everyone knows, Immanuel grew up in one of the biggest seaports of East Prussia, solidly Lutheran Königsberg. His pious mother died when he was thirteen and had to be buried at poor-house costs, without the usual school children singing beside the coffin as it was carried to the graveyard.

My mother often took me outside the city to make me notice the great works of God. She'd stand there in a quiet rapture talking aloud about the almighty wisdom and goodness of God. She engraved on my heart a deep reverence for the Creator of all things 1'11 never forget my mother, for she planted and nourished the first

der Kritik der Urteilskraft (Amsterdam, 1972), Kar! Neumann, Gegenständlichkeit und Existenzbedeutung des Schönen (Bonn, 1973), Donald W. Crawford, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), Francis X. Coleman, The Harmony of Reason, a Study in Kant's Aesthetics (University of Pittsburg Press, 1974), a fuH day Symposium on Kant's Philosophy of Art, held at the 33rd annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, in Baltimore, 31 October 1975, with papers by Ted Cohen, Coleman, Crawford, Ingrid Stadler.

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