BETWEEN INSIGHT AND JUDGMENT: KANT’S CONCEPTION OF GENIUS AND ITS FATE IN EARLY SCHELLING A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Lara Oštarić, B.A., M.A. _________________________________ Karl Ameriks, Director Graduate Program in Philosophy Notre Dame, Indiana July 2006 © Copyright by LARA OŠTARIĆ 2006 All rights reserved BETWEEN INSIGHT AND JUDGMENT: KANT’S CONCEPTION OF GENIUS AND ITS FATE IN EARLY SCHELLING Abstract by Lara Oštarić In this dissertation it will be argued that contrary to many current views the concept of genius is of considerable importance for understanding what is most significant in the aesthetics of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In the recent literature on Kant’s aesthetics, it is commonly asserted that Kant’s discussion of genius in the Critique of Judgment is ‘parergonal,’ or merely extrinsic to his aesthetics. Part One reconstructs Kant’s conception of genius and demonstrates that genius, and the art produced by genius, has a fundamental and not only ‘parergonal’ place in Kant’s aesthetics, his moral teleology, and his philosophy of history. Drawing on the results of Part One, Part Two argues that Schelling, inspired by his early Tübingen Plato studies and Kant’s conception of genius, transformed Kant’s Lara Oštarić relatively modest conception of creative subjectivity into a much more ambitious conception of creative agency. According to Kant, there is an aspect of the genius’s production that escapes the complete determination of the understanding because neither the genius nor the observers of its products can account for the steps involved in the genius’s production. But Kant also suggests that even though the genius’s production presupposes a certain privileged intuitive state that is not reached through judgment, this state engages the genius’s rational faculties in such a way that it results in a genius’s insightful judgment which allows genius to determine whether its products meet relevant epistemic standards of intelligibility. Influenced by Plato’s account of poetic inspiration as a state of possession by something divine, Schelling soon transformed the intuitive process of the genius’s creativity in Kant into a genius’s intellectual intuition of the supersensible, leaving a genius bereft of any rational means of discussing the normative aspects of his works. By systematically establishing for the first time the significant connection between Kant’s conception of genius and Schelling’s only recently made available early studies of Plato, Part Two clarifies the still not sufficiently explored issue of the relevance of Plato’s philosophy for the origin of German Idealism. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv A NOTE ON SOURCES ................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION..................................................................................1 1.1 The Place of Kant’s Conception of Genius in Kant’s Moral Teleology............5 1.2 The Allure of the Platonic Element in Kant’s Conception of Genius for the Origins of German Idealism...............................................................................9 1.3 Preview ............................................................................................................14 PART ONE: KANT’S CONCEPTION OF GENIUS CHAPTER TWO: NATURE AS ART–KANT’S ACCOUNT OF THE SYSTEMATICITY OF NATURE AS AN INVITATION TO SELF-REFLECTION.....17 2.1 The Phenomenal and the Noumenal Sense of “Nature in Its Entirety” .......... 22 2.2 The Unity of Nature in the Ideas of Reason ....................................................25 2.3 The “Transcendent” Meaning of Nature in Reflection....................................45 2.4 From Nature as a System to Self-reflection.....................................................54 2.5 The Unity of Theoretical and Practical Reason in Nature’s Systematicity and the Feeling of Pleasure in Reflective Judgment .......................62 CHAPTER THREE: ART AS NATURE: FROM SELF-REFLECTION TO SELF-DETERMINATION................................................................................................68 3.1 Kant’s Conception of “Thin” and “Thick” Forms of Purposiveness...............71 3.2 Kant’s Conception of Genius—Ingenium or Genius? .................................... 76 3.3 Kant’s Account of Genius’s Inspiration as an Extension of Reason ...............80 ii 3.4 Genius’s Spirit as the Power for Producing Original Works of Art................90 3.5 Genius as the Bridge between the Beauty of Art and the Beauty of Nature...................................................................................................................103 CHAPTER FOUR: GENIUS AND THE “MORAL IMAGE OF THE WORLD”: THE ARTIST AND HER WORK AS A SOURCE OF MORAL MOTIVATION........116 4.1 Paul Guyer’s Recent Account of the Role of Genius in Kant’s Moral Teleology...................................................................................................120 4.2 Transformations in Kant’s Conception of the Moral Image..........................123 4.3 The Moral Image of the World and the Problem of Moral Motivation.........138 4.4 The Work of Genius in Kant as a Source of Moral Motivation.....................142 4.5 Fine Art as a Kind of Cognition.....................................................................164 PART TWO: THE FATE OF KANT’S CONCEPTION OF GENIUS IN EARLY SCHELLING CHAPTER FIVE: THE WORK OF ART AS THE “DOCUMENT” AND “ORGANON” OF PHILOSOPHY..................................................................................174 5.1 Schelling’s Essay on Poets (August 1792) ................................................... 178 5.2 Schelling’s Account of Creative Production in his Commentary on the Timaeus (1794) ........................................................................................ 184 5.3 Schelling’s Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy (1795) .......................... 203 5.4 The Fate of Kant’s Principle of Purposiveness [Zweckmässigkeit].............. 216 5.5 Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism [Philosophische Briefe Über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus] (1795) ........................................... 220 5.6 Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800)—Art as the Organon and Document of Philosophy .....................................................225 AFTERWORD.................................................................................................................233 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................237 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to a number of individuals who assisted me in completing this project. I am especially grateful to Karl Ameriks for his guidance and patience with reading many early and inchoate drafts of this dissertation. I am also thankful to my readers David O’Connor, Robert Pippin, and Fred L. Rush, Jr. for their valuable comments and conversations about the issues raised in the dissertation. I am also much indebted to Paul Franks who offered important suggestions at a very early stage of this project; to Gary Gutting and David Burrell who in many ways contributed to my progress and development in graduate school. Special thanks are owed to my fellow graduate students Christian Serafino Johnson and Benjamin Huff who offered philosophical criticism and helpful suggestions regarding my writing style. I am thankful to Günter Zöller and the participants of his Proseminar at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München for challenging philosophical discussions and a very enriching year in Munich; to Manfred Frank and Violetta Waibel for hosting me in Tübingen on several occasions and for some exciting and joyful philosophical discussions at Manfred Frank’s Stammtisch. iv I owe gratitude to the following institutions: to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, for a fellowship that freed me from duties of a teaching assistant at Notre Dame and allowed me to conduct my research in Germany; to the Schelling- Kommision der Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, especially Jörg Jantzen and Paul Ziche for sharing with me the then unpublished edition of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) edited by the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften and for generously offering advice on sources related to Schelling’s early writings. A version of Chapter Two was presented at the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division in March 2005 and I thank my commentator Béatrice Longuenesse and the audience for insightful questions and comments. An early draft of Chapter Three was presented at The North American Kant Society in April 2004 and I am indebted to the workshop participants for their suggestions and criticisms. A version of Chapter Four was presented at The Tenth International Kant Congress, Sao Paulo, in September 2005 and I would like to thank the participants for a helpful discussion. Finally, I am infinitely grateful to my parents for their unconditional love and support and to Tonci for bearing with me through all these for us difficult years. v A NOTE ON SOURCES KANT Apart from the Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason], all references to Kant’s writings are to the appropriate volume