Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy: Expressive Rationality in Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Contemporary Theory 9781474211666, 9780826426734

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their help and support on this project: John Brannigan, Janet Clare, Bob Eaglestone, Jon Elek, Collette Guldimann, Jon Hackett, Paul Hamilton, Peter Howell, Susie Jordan, Jo McDonagh, Molly Macdonald, Simon Malpas, Christopher Norris and Helen O’Connell. Earlier versions of chapters 3 and 5 have appeared in Textual Practice and Studies in Romanticism, and are reprinted by permission of the editors. I want to thank my parents, Bob and Ellen Swift, for their never-ending support and kindness. And, most of all, I want to thank Heike for putting up with me: this book is for her, with love.

Abbreviations

Full references are given in the Bibliography. AI AR BI CJ CJ1 CPR CPoR DI DPE GMM J KPW PAM SC SVPA V1 V2

Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement First Introduction to the Critique of Judgement Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or The New Heloise Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract Jerome McGann, Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Man Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

INTRODUCTION

[Kant’s] attempt to reflect upon space and time as pure intuitions and upon the categories as constitutive of judgment raises precisely the problem of how to give written representation to such reflection, in the fullest depths of its philosophical significance. The mode of literary representation itself must be confronted as an object of knowledge. Only a specifically literary quality, moreover, can explain the extent and depth of the effect that the [first] Critique has exercised, and continues to exercise. For – and this is one of the Critique’s points – thought is always and eminently ‘form’. And, as such, it must be ascribed a literary quality. Willi Goetschel, Constituting Critique The central difficulty with the new historicist attack on philosophy may well be that it is insufficiently historical. Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason

KANT AND ROMANTIC CRITICISM This book explores the ways in which philosophical and political discourses in the early Romantic period empowered literature to express philosophical problems and political paradoxes which these discourses increasingly found themselves to be incapable of expressing on their own terms. Poetry, it seems by common consensus, had only recently calved away from philosophy as a distinct form of discourse in the Romantic period. Writing of the revolution controversy of 1790 around Burke and the Burkean imagination, John Barrell describes a ‘distinction between poetry and social philosophy, a distinction which underlines the degree to which the two had become progressively divided since the time of Pope and Thomson, in terms of the different talents supposed necessary to their production and the different kinds of truth they were supposed to be capable of enunciating’.1 Similarly, Tim Milnes has more recently described ‘the rise of the poet as philosophical innovator following the subduing of conventional epistemology by scepticism’, and argued that ‘just as Hume’s influence effectively paralysed conventional philosophy of knowledge in the late eighteenth century, so it gave

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rise to a philosophically intense Romantic movement in poetry and aesthetics’.2 As poetics calved away from philosophy as a separate discourse, it was immediately reinvested with a role in the regulation of ‘social philosophy’ at a time of epistemological and political crisis.3 Readings of the philosophical importance of literary texts, or the theoretical reading of those texts, have largely been out of fashion in studies of Romanticism over the past 20 years, and a critical treatment of aesthetics in particular has been conspicuously absent from many of the important recent studies of English Romantic literature. The exclusion of theory highlights its capacity to reproduce an all-pervasive Romantic ideology that, while it yields a rich plenitude of aesthetic substance through its reading practice, characteristically folds that substance back into the interiority of selfconsciousness at the expense of a positioning of literature within its historical, political or intersubjective contexts. Recently, new historicism has instead formulated a critical conflict with the literary works that it investigates (and in particular with the seductive literary qualities of Romantic poetry), by resisting their impulse to transcend the local contexts of their production, a flight from the socially real that the German idealist philosophy that is contemporary with the canonical works of English Romantic poetry seems to enable.4 New historicism claims in particular to resist the dissemination of social values that accompanies theory’s marshalling of literature to a renewed critique of metaphysics. Or, as Jerome McGann argues, in a characteristically anti-Aristotelian defence of the uniqueness of each literary work, poetry is not only more philosophical than history, but it is also more historical than history (SVPA 240). McGann’s scepticism about an Aristotelian appropriation of literature to philosophy might be countered by an iconic essay in which Paul de Man challenges the ways in which literary ‘events’ are ‘reintegrated in a historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy’.5 This book seeks to resolve this competitive appropriation of literature to opposed philosophical and historical or historicist interests, by suggesting ways in which each might serve to elucidate the interests of the other, rather than to foreclose any awareness of the importance of literature in the other field of interest. I should state at the outset, however, that this book will not engage with any of the canonical texts of English Romantic literature. Rather, it is concerned both with the reception and reconstruction of Romanticism in contemporary critical discourse, and with the rendering possible of Romanticism through developments in the intellectual and political culture of the late Enlightenment. I take the recent critical reception of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft to offer crucial paradigms for the many ways in

Introduction

3

which Romantic discourse in general has been reconstructed in contemporary criticism. Collectively, their work also contributed to the conditions of possibility of Romanticism. Kant is a key figure for this proposed reconsideration. Throughout the 1780s, Kant involved himself in a conflict with the early Romantic philosophers of the next generation, and in particular with Herder and Jacobi. For Kant, these philosophers surrendered philosophical reason to poetical lyricism and enthusiasm, and they sacrificed the public spirit of reason to what Kant saw as an effusive and irrational poetical-philosophical cult of inwardness, genius and inspiration, which threatened the hard-won intellectual freedom of the Enlightenment with a political backlash. Kant’s attack on the new Popularphilosophie of Herder seems to anticipate contemporary attacks on the Romantic ideology. This conflict then provides us with privileged access to the historical and philosophical origins of contemporary debates over the nature of Romantic thought and Romantic aesthetics. Yet contemporary Romantic literary criticism has been slow to recognize this genealogy. Notwithstanding Kant’s scepticism about the Romantic philosophy of his adversaries, Kant’s alleged ‘formalism’ has also recently been castigated as the tutelary spirit for a canonical Romantic aesthetic which shows itself to be ethically disinterested, or which hides the material conditions of its production behind a deceptive aesthetic form. Even so, the view of Kant that underwrites this attack on Romanticism is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, in light of an exciting crop of readings of Kant that are currently appearing, particularly in American Kant scholarship. Maintaining this intuitive link between Kant and the Romantics (since Herder ‘remained a Kantian of the year 1765’),6 I want to ask: What impact might the new Kant who is emerging have on the ways in which we read the philosophical and political import of Romantic literature? These recent studies of Kant offer a new bearing on the interpretation of Romantic literature by cross-fertilizing philosophy and cultural history. They show in particular that critical attentiveness to the place of Kant’s thought in its local cultural context serves to sharpen awareness of his philosophical interests, and their ongoing relevance to contemporary critical efforts. In a recent ‘archaeological’ reconstruction of the genesis of the Critique of Judgement, for instance, John Zammito writes that weaving together ‘the genetic development of Kant’s versions of the Third Critique with considerations of the context to which they represented Kant’s response sheds light on the meaning of textual passages at their more problematic junctures’.7 Such studies as Zammito’s offer a model for understanding the relation between philosophy, its textual exegesis and the particular cultural and historical circumstances in which it develops that is attentive to the nuance

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of the philosophical argument, to the textual problems of interpreting that argument, and to the ways in which philosophy engages with important cultural debates of its moment. The shift in our perception of Kant that these studies enforce also puts pressure on the pat view of Kantian formalism as a social ideology that has been central to the challenge that Romantic aesthetics has faced over recent years in the adjacent discourse of literary criticism. Recently, Criticism of Romanticism has sought to liberate itself from New Critical practices that, under the tutelage of a Kantian aesthetic, had seemed to brush over the circumstances of the production of literary work. Other studies of Kant whose insights I will seek to bring to the attention of Romantic literary criticism include Howard Caygill’s Art of Judgement, Onora O’Neill’s Constructions of Reason, Susan Meld Shell’s The Embodiment of Reason and Allen Wood’s Kant’s Ethical Thought. Following on from these works, my particular aim will be to recover the ways in which literary tropes in Kant’s work served to bridge an apparent gap between anthropology and reason, a gap which has recently proven to be a source of strenuous deconstruction. The habit of explaining characteristically Romantic tropes such as symbol and anthropomorphism as ideological functions has masked the more modest ways in which these literary devices increasingly served to legislate a public sphere that used them to reflect on the ways in which it seemed to be at odds with itself. Examining Kant’s famous claim from the third Critique that ‘beauty is the symbol of morality’, Zammito argues that by ‘drawing the aesthetic and the ethical into this analogical relation, Kant essentially established that aesthetics was only a propaedeutic concern leading to anthropology, and set the stage for a transition to reflections on man’s ethical destiny in the natural world’ (3). This strain of new readings of Kant, of which Zammito is representative here, makes it clear that attention to the effort at symbolic articulation in Kant suggests the anthropological awareness of his idea of reason, and the ethical burden of his aesthetic interests. Other readers, most notably Gayatri Spivak in a recent post-colonial deconstruction of Kant’s aesthetics, have instead diagnosed Kant’s anthropological formalism, his inattentiveness to the contingencies of human embodiment in culture, physiology and history in favour of a timeless transcendental epistemology.8 By examining the role played by literary tropes in the different intellectual discourses of this period, however, rather than by contesting their ideological baggage at the outset, a more nuanced account of their role in culture can be recovered, as well as an important contribution to the ongoing critical reflection on the relation between philosophical truth and literary figure.

Introduction

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KANTIAN SYMBOLS AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL FORMALISM Kant’s offering of a new philosophical role for recognizably literary referential patterns, such as symbol and analogy, aims, in part at least, to express the attempts of philosophical argument to accommodate a newly emergent popular readership that employed ‘common’ reason as the inner touchstone of rational judgement, in place of the imperium of the dogmatic metaphysics of the earlier school philosophy. The way in which Kant orchestrated a shift in the definition of reason from a regal to a public and judicial authority necessitated a concomitant shift in the metaphorical construction of reason, as has often been noted.9 The prefaces to the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason invoke a regicidal (and anti-feminist) metaphor to describe ‘the scandal of reason’. The honour and dignity of metaphysics, ‘once called the queen of all the sciences’, appears to have been compromised. ‘Now,’ writes Kant, ‘in accordance with the fashion of the age, the queen proves despised on all sides; and the matron, outcast and forsaken, mourns like Hecuba’ (CPR 99). In light of this scandal, the medieval authority of metaphysics must now, Kant continues to argue, be subjected to the public tribunal of critique. Such shifts in the way that reason is figured in philosophical argument, as many of Kant’s readers now assert, hold important implications for how the activity of reason itself is to be understood. For Onora O’Neill, for whom ‘a series of connected political and judicial metaphors constitute the deep structure of the Critique of Pure Reason’ (4), this scandal at the opening of the Critique aims at ‘recruiting new fellow workers to the task’ of critical reason (9), while the use of the political metaphors suggests that Kant ‘sees the problems of cognitive and political order as arising in one and the same context’ (16). For new historicists, such as Jerome McGann, in contrast, we forget as ‘a legacy of the Kantian tradition’ that ‘while imaginative work is more coherent than the world, it is no less exigent and performative in the world. Literature is not simply a symbolic or aesthetic structure, it also – and simultaneously – functions as a structure of signification’ (SVPA 7). To rest with the cognitive, symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of literature entails according it a ‘coherence’, and smoothing over the social lapses and contradictions that a setting to work of literature in a cultural frame, understanding it as a fully-functioning social ‘performative’, would otherwise disclose. Kant and the Kantian tradition stretching into New Criticism (and, for McGann, beyond into de Paul de Man’s deconstruction) has licensed this politically quietist view of literature. McGann assumes, then, a sharp distinction between theory and praxis in Kant. Such a distinction is coupled with an annexing of art to theory, to cognitive interests and the

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famously ‘disinterested’ aesthetic judgement of Kant’s third Critique. McGann challenges this cognitive understanding of art with an alternative notion of the Romantic artwork as a form of social and political work. Thus in Kant, and in the critical tradition that, according to McGann, is inspired by him, literary experience remains autonomous from social interests: Poetical discourse may deal in mythical and fictive materials, but its appearance of deception, like its modern, Kantian appearance of autonomy and disinterestedness, is merely an appearance – is merely a function of a socially-grounded determination to set poetical discourse apart from the daily praxis of communicative action in society. (SVPA, 30) The irony here is familiar: the critical claim for literature’s autonomy from social interests is itself socially licensed. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant’s claim about the ‘disinterestedness’ of our appreciation of art, to which McGann refers here, concerns the problem of an aesthetic type of judgement that is not based on concepts (nor, indeed, on taste) but that is rather ‘reflective’. This reflexivity of aesthetic judgement means that it takes its principle from the subjective presentation of the aesthetic object rather than from concepts of the object itself. Kant’s notion of reflective judgement certainly separates beauty from morality by challenging the rationalist view that ‘the concepts of the beautiful and of the good [. . .] differ only in their logical form’ (CJ 75). For Kant, there are no concepts of the beautiful. He wants to distinguish between aesthetic and moral judgement, then, because he wants to suggest a further epistemological distinction between logical and aesthetic judgement, which latter struggles to judge the fundamentally nonconceptual nature of intuitions with an epistemological machinery. Aesthetic judgement is ‘unique in kind and provides absolutely no cognition’ (CJ 75). However, Kant accords the subjective principle of reflective judgement a pseudo-conceptuality by arguing that we claim universal validity for our aesthetic judgements. This subjective judgement then seems like a report on knowledge to the extent that it claims universal assent for itself. The person making a judgement of the beautiful will ‘talk about the beautiful as if beauty were a characteristic of the object and the judgment were logical (namely a cognition of the object through concepts of it)’, even though ‘the judgment is only aesthetic and refers the object’s presentation merely to the subject’ (CJ 54). Consequently, a judgement based on concepts of moral perfection, and a subjectively universal judgement of beauty, are reunited in Kant’s statement that ‘beauty is the symbol for morality’ (CJ 225). While Kant wants to take away any objective referent from aesthetic judgement, suggesting that ‘it brings to our notice no characteristic of the object, but

Introduction

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only the purposive form in the [way] the [subjective] presentational powers are determined in their engagement with the object’ (CJ 75), he allows beauty to give an objective referent back to morality through the symbol. Despite Kant’s disclaimers about the subjective reference of reflective judgement, this movement might seem like a refashioning of the world in line with the subject’s way of apprehending it in a symbolic sleight of hand. This reflective turn in Kant could be construed as leading away from a consideration of art as embodied within and produced by a social world towards a more refined subjectivism which concentrates the definition of art in its critical reception. Our aesthetic judgement, to reiterate, supposedly has nothing in common with the structure of our moral judgement. Yet it remains a very big step from this argument to Jerome McGann’s assumption that this ‘disinterested’ aesthetic judgement necessarily entails an ethical indifference to the relationship between literature and the social world. Indeed, Kantian symbolism is in fact socially engaged, to the extent that Kant’s use of symbolism seeks to regulate the dangerous excesses of an enthusiastic public readership. To this end, Kant’s inquiry into the question of our knowledge of a ‘necessary being’ as cause of nature uses symbolism to save social philosophy from the twin dangers of sceptical indifferentism, a socially dangerous loss of belief in the possibility of objective knowledge after Hume, and a return to rational dogmatism that Kant thought was threatened by the new pantheism of Herder. Kant’s use of symbolism seeks to preserve transcendental knowledge claims without making of them a dogmatic metaphysics. Problematically, the necessary being is an ‘indispensable idea’ for the power of reason, while for the understanding it is an ‘unattainable problematic concept’ (CJ 285). The symbol, then, stands in for this imaginable (but unobtainable) concept of the necessary being, reconciling a subjectively felt human ‘need’ to think beyond the limitations of our knowledge with the laws of the understanding. The particular symbol that Kant employs offers a permissible thinking of the relation between this necessary being and nature by analogy with the love of a father for his children. This is not knowledge, Kant claims, because we could never form an idea of a sensation that might be attributable to this necessary being, but it makes the idea of this being usable for human reason. Yet for a number of Kant’s detractors, from Herder to Gayatri Spivak, Kant’s argument about the analogy between affective relations within the world and the idea of a supersensible ‘cause’ of the world, which must be thought but cannot be known, is a type of formalism.10 Kant limits anthropological expression, according to this argument, to an analogue of a purely logical relation, such that reason guards a false distinction

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between knowledge and thinking. Anthropology can, such critics argue, also be understood as shaping the identity of reason through reason’s embodiment in culture, language and physiology. Whether it is conceived as a practical science or as a metaphorical expression of reason, anthropology by this argument should not be reduced to a transparent means through which reason articulates its autonomous nature. Rather, the identity of reason depends both on a speculative theory of human nature, and on the metaphorical expression of anthropological notions. These latter are not transparent stand-ins for logical relations in the pseudo-cognition of a supersensible ‘cause’, but rather serve, through their metaphoricity, to articulate the character of reason in a significant and constitutive way. While Kant’s literary appropriations of reason aimed to license its metaphysical speculations, they also sought to prevent these speculations from attaining the status of cognition, and thereby sought to forestall the dangerous enthusiasm that would entail on the belief that an idea of this necessary being is available to human reason.11 After all, Kant could always claim (as he did in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics in 1783) that such analogies are ‘only’ the work of language, which as a phenomenon like all other empirical data tells us nothing of the noumenal ground of things.12 It is this apparent timidity on the question of language that has led, from Herder and Hamann onwards, to a tradition of interpreting Kant’s thought as dismissive of the role played by language in determining reason, or in Frederick Burwick’s words as seeking ‘quietly to subsume language within the act of reason’.13 The view of Kant’s inattentiveness to language is part of a larger and equally long-standing attack on his ethical formalism, his apparent relegation of all moral value to an unchanging noumenal realm that denies anthropology a foundational role in shaping reason. Kant has been understood by many philosophers as something of a philosophical contradiction, who scrupulously critiqued the impossibility of our knowing the origin of appearances in his theoretical philosophy while demanding that we derive the law that guides our moral action from an unmediated experience of that same ungraspable noumenal realm in his practical philosophy, in the form of the categorical imperative. For Gillian Rose, reading the legalistic metaphorics of Kant’s critical argument, the categorical imperative remains ‘an unconditioned imperium which cannot be called to account’.14 Kant’s attempt to reformulate rational authority through metaphor serves, by this argument, only to reinstitute an unknowable and forceful imperium of pure reason.15 This view of Kant’s formalism has been put under significant pressure, because of a revived interest in his mode of argument. Onora O’Neill argues in particular that Kant’s critique of practical reasoning cannot be understood in isolation from, and as derivative of, his critique of pure reasoning.

Introduction

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Even though the Critique of Pure Reason comes first historically, the activity of critique is itself primarily a practice, a form of self-examination to which reason subjects itself. ‘The initial task is practical,’ writes O’Neill. ‘The theoretical enterprise cannot get going unless standards of reason are established.’ (ix) Similarly, Willi Goetschel writes of Kant’s effort at ‘redefining the theoretical as the genuinely practical’.16 Instead of a vapid ethical formalism that derives from Kant’s scepticism about knowledge, then, O’Neill understands the theoretical enterprise as grounded in praxis. And this socially orientated thinking would not be the solipsistic self-examination of an isolated philosopher, but rather (or so Kant hoped) it would manifest itself as the broader work of culture. Reason depends on standards derived from a community of rational beings in order to keep the individual’s philosophical speculations on a self-regulated path, and to prevent the slide of thinking into enthusiasm and fanaticism. An example of this primacy of the community and thinking as a common practice can be found in the 1786 essay ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’, where Kant argues for the importance of freedom of thought and warns of the threat that the new philosophy of Herder and Jacobi constituted to this freedom. The danger of this new aesthetic movement in philosophy, for Kant, was that it set the individual over the community as an end of nature. Kant’s claim, conversely, is that freedom of thought is only possible in a public sphere; the freedom to think in the privacy of conscience that no tyrannical authority can take away from the individual does not really constitute freedom of thought: Opposition to freedom of thought comes firstly from civil coercion. We do admittedly say that, whereas a higher authority may deprive us of freedom of speech and of writing, it cannot deprive us of freedom of thought. But how much and how accurately would we think if we did not think, so to speak, in community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts and who communicate their thoughts to us! We may therefore conclude that the same external constraint which deprives people of the freedom to communicate their thoughts in public also removes their freedom of thought, the one treasure which remains to us amidst all the burdens of civil life, and which alone offers us a means of overcoming all the evils of this condition. (KPW 247) Such statements of Kant’s, even though they appear in his supposedly marginal essays on history, politics and philosophical method from the mid1780s, seem to endorse Hannah Arendt’s earlier view that Kant is committed to ethics before epistemology. For Arendt, Kant ‘would certainly be

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prepared to sacrifice truth to the possibility of human freedom: for if we possessed truth we could not be free’.17 Such claims, which valorize the political nature of Kant’s epistemology and which therefore challenge the distinction between Kant’s serious critical works and whimsical marginalia on politics and history, form an important (and often overlooked) source for the current reappraisal of Kant’s ethics and politics.18 More generally, the new approach to the relation between theory and practice in Kant studies suggests that, rather than trying to have it both ways in the critical philosophy, with theoretical scepticism and real moral values, Kant was struggling with some very real issues about critical method and the place of philosophy in the community. This revised understanding of Kant’s method, and the view of figurative language as playing a role in the articulation of a relation between knowing and doing, thinking and rational communication within a community of thinkers, will help to flesh out a new interpretation of the long-assumed impact of Kantian philosophy on literary Romanticism. Part of the recent challenge to the view of Kant’s ethical formalism offered by Onora O’Neill and others aims to demonstrate the embodiment of Kant’s thought in a culture which he also scrupulously theorized and sought to shape, in ways which seem increasingly relevant to our own ‘posttheoretical’ condition. This understanding not only offers resources for a reconsideration of the recent critique of the Romantic ideology, with its implicit claim that thinking, or more precisely the model of reflective selfconsciousness, is constitutionally uninterested in action or in the particularities of the world in which it finds itself. It will further offer a new understanding of the relation between theory and practice, and of the relation between reasoning and ethical action (and, for that matter, feeling) outside of the sceptical paradigms of literary history that have proved dismissive of their capacity to work cooperatively, or at least to engage with one another.

THE NEW ROMANTICISM The view of Kant’s ethical formalism held in common, in recent years, among his deconstructors and analytical readers alike has tended to draw, then, on a partial reading of his metaphysics of morals.19 Kant has been understood to deny the relevance of any anthropological determination to moral judgement, which finds its law outside of nature in an inaccessible, noumenal realm that is also the origin of appearances to the understanding.20 Allen Wood has recently argued that this view of Kant’s ethics is entirely fallacious, and has described instead the ways in which anthropology, and a significant empirical theory of human nature, provided a

Introduction

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‘counterweight’ to Kant’s moral reasoning in ways that make of it a psychologically generous and open-minded force (or even, as Adrian Piper has it, a ‘xenophilia’).21 According to Wood, Kantian rationality ‘values and seeks out what is other or different, because without this it would be impossible to find anything having universal validity’.22 Meanwhile, Susan Meld Shell, in The Embodiment of Reason, has described ‘today’s vehement assault upon the universal in the name of ‘‘difference’’’ as based on a common rejection among Kant’s inheritors of ‘the primacy of the moral law, a rejection partly linked to their common failure to appreciate the problem to which, for Kant, the moral law responds’.23 This problem, for Shell, O’Neill and Wood, is bound up with the question of moral imputability, or an ethic of principles of action rather than rules, which as O’Neill argues, ‘affords glimpses of neglected, and [. . .] fertile, domains of practical reasoning’ (xi). One consequence of the view of Kant’s ethical formalism in our understanding of the widest project of critical reason is to suggest reason’s commitment to intellectual power without responsibility. As this becomes more difficult to sustain (even bearing in mind what O’Neill describes as ‘the cultural myopia of [Kant’s] notorious example’ (xi)), it calls for a reassessment of the view of the unkindness of thinking in adjacent discourses that felt the impact of this partial reading of Kant and the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’. My aim in what follows will be to offer the new treatment of Kant’s philosophy within its cultural context, and the reading of Kantian reason (both theoretical and practical) as embodied within a culture of codependent beings suggested by O’Neill, Shell, Wood and others, as a model for a renewed understanding of the philosophical importance of Romantic discourse. These recent developments in Kant studies have shown that a treatment of philosophy in cultural history does not do violence to its philosophical importance; rather, the traffic between philosophical problems and broader cultural debate itself becomes encoded in philosophical reasoning through its newly discovered literary devices. For the Romantics and Romantic criticism, Kant often seems to want to have it both ways, preserving scepticism by using literary figures without the courage to commit to a literary appropriation of truth, to the ways in which linguistic devices such as symbol orient reason in constitutive rather than ornamental or merely regulative ways.24 But Romanticism might equally be taken (as it has by Stanley Cavell and, more recently, by Tim Milnes) to engage with the same problem faced by Kant, of attesting to a search after verifiable forms of knowledge that it cannot finally ground in an intuitable world, such that it is forced to figure this ground in ways that might resemble or stand in for any undisclosed actual ground in order to escape the threatened ‘indifferentism’ of scepticism.25 Such readings,

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however, leave themselves open to the accusation that they succumb to the Romantic ideology, characteristically playing the Romantic game of transcendence by mining Romanticism for parallels to contemporary or ongoing problems for philosophy at the expense of Romanticism’s historical specificity, and the particularist interests of some of its less canonical practitioners in natural location or local interpretation. But this same accusation of formalism, or indifference to context, has recently been turned back onto new historicism, and in particular against its struggle to overcome figures of knowledge in Romantic texts in an attempt to locate them in the real, and against its defence of particularity at the expense of genre. According to Frances Ferguson in her study Solitude and the Sublime, Jerome McGann’s ideology critique becomes caught on the horns of its own dilemma. In The Romantic Ideology, argues Ferguson, McGann attacks the Romantic ideology for leaving the Romantic subject trapped within the prison-house of self-consciousness, yet it is only through the resources of the same model of self-consciousness, she claims, that the sinister reach of ideology might be overcome. It is hard to see how this process of critique ‘will not itself become a version of the very self-involvement it was designed to repudiate’. McGann therefore merely recasts the Romantic preoccupation with the self in salvific terms; the ‘chief difference between his version of self-consciousness and the Romantic one that he would repudiate is that he imagines a self-conscious self that achieves its transcendence through particularity’.26 More recent studies than McGann’s have suggested that the return to a study of the historical production of Romantic writing over the past 20 years, in place of a reading of formerly dominant Romantic categories such as the visionary imagination, have tended to allow history itself to emerge as yet another privileged category, equally as unlocalized as the Romantic tropes that historicists had sought to critique and locate.27 Instead, these studies seek to bring about a recovery of the historical production of the Romantic categories themselves. This approach often involves a knowing return to the terms of debate that earlier criticism had found suspect, and a canny acceptance that the best way towards effecting a recovery of the difference of the past may be through acknowledging the stake that contemporary critical discourse still holds in its values. Recent studies in Romanticism have witnessed the opening of new directions in the historical understanding of Romantic literature, which have endeavoured to make good McGann’s appeal in The Romantic Ideology to the recovery of a concrete and particularized history of literary production, while reopening aesthetic avenues. In particular, three important studies of the history of imagination have appeared, in John Barrell’s Imagining the

Introduction

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King’s Death, John Whale’s Imagination Under Pressure and Barbara Taylor’s Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination.28 Imagination is a word that had been long outmoded in Romantic studies. Taylor’s book encapsulates this new attitude towards literary history. She at once attacks the presentism involved in contemporary readings of Wollstonecraft, which ignore the religious teleology that underlies her political radicalism, tending ‘to hurry past it to less archaic, more obviously political themes’ even as her contemporaries ‘probably took it for granted’ (4), while engaging in her own form of presentism by describing Wollstonecraft’s imagination as feminist, a move whose ‘real disadvantage lies in its implicit assimilation of Wollstonecraft’s ideas to those of her successors’ (12). The wilfully distorted perspective afforded by this anachronistic nomenclature is worth persevering with, Taylor claims, because it allows for a recovery of the difference of Wollstonecraft’s historical moment, and for a wider articulation of the problems to do with historical interpretation, through an engagement with a feminist history that we are compelled to understand her as having initiated.29 Instead of McGann’s respect for the difference and singularity of a past that turns out only to reproduce the individuated contours of contemporary knowledge, Taylor acknowledges from the outset that contemporary attitudes will continue to determine our perception of the political past. Whether or not Taylor’s description of Wollstonecraft’s feminism is intrinsic to her method of historical inquiry, her study undoubtedly offers the most nuanced view of Wollstonecraft in her historical and intellectual context to date, while it also opens a serious intervention into the question of how to read a political and literary past from which we cannot detach ourselves in such a way that we can fully reconfigure its difference. Wollstonecraft remains a fascinating figure not least because of the ways in which she has been used to construct an alternative canon, and because of what this construction can be shown to reveal about the ongoing engagement of studies in Romanticism with the problems of literary history. The recent history of Wollstonecraft’s critical reception embodies these problems, and it seems incontrovertible that a position on this critical history will impact on any reading of her work that is subsequently offered. This is not to say that this study’s interest in Wollstonecraft is necessarily more taken with the history of her reception than in recovering her argument, but that it would be naive to argue that the former can be sidelined in favour of any purer interest in the latter. New historicist feminism describes women writers of the Romantic period as already engaged in an implicit critique of the Romantic ideology.30 Wollstonecraft in particular has been understood by Anglo-American feminists as

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primarily interested in seeking out ways to historicize and to demythologize the so-called ‘sexual character’ that describes a priori differences in the nature of men and women. In this way, Wollstonecraft appears to anticipate later feminist attempts to interrogate the heroics of Romantic poetry with their displacements of history and aestheticized uses of normative gender constructions. Such criticism fashions a version of Wollstonecraft’s argument that fits with its own critical effort to combat the idealizing effects of the male Romantic canon. I want to argue, however, that through her engagement with Rousseau, Wollstonecraft demonstrated an early and sophisticated awareness of how the attempt to demystify what we now think of as the Romantic ideology necessarily contaminates itself with the ideological substance that is under investigation. This argument might be prefaced with the observation that important revisions to our understanding of canonical Romanticism also register unease with the view that they are bound by a Romantic ideology. In particular, it no longer seems quite so certain, in the light of Paul Hamilton’s recent study Metaromanticism, that canonical works of Romantic poetry were blind to the impulse to historicize the moment of their production, nor that Romanticism’s broader habits of questioning its own discursive practices were confined to its more marginalized practitioners. The first feminist studies in Romanticism were licensed by a political imperative to restore the marginalized voices of women writers of the period, but in the process they set out a clear opposition between the historical and particular interests of these marginalized figures and those who have long dominated our understanding of Romanticism. Such an opposition always risked reinforcing the gender stereotyping that it sought to overcome in literary studies, by celebrating a focus on particularity, history, narrative and affect in women’s writing in place of Romantic poetry’s philosophical and normative claims. Even so, Hamilton’s more recent claim that Romanticism in its dominant forms may already have been critiquing its own characteristic modes of thought, that the Romantics’ metaromantic impulses allowed them to voice ‘their own discontent with the prison of self-consciousness in which they find themselves’, carries the danger that the ideological awareness hitherto attributed to women writers of the period may be made into a further trope of Romantic philosophy and poetry’s selfunderstanding.31 By engaging with a more philosophically nuanced understanding of a practice of reflecting on one’s own characteristic modes of thinking which is held in common between canonical and formerly non-canonical works in the period, and between philosophical and literary texts alike, it becomes possible to attend to the period’s different literatures in ways which formulate

Introduction

15

new allegiances and points of interest between them. To describe Wollstonecraft as historicizing her moment is to suggest that her ideological awareness derives from her having resisted the impulse to temporize her thought in politically delusive, aesthetical ways. But Wollstonecraft does more than historicize the generic character of her age; she also invents a concept of female Romantic heroism, a kind of temporizing effort which, after Rousseau, seeks to draw a distinction between the responsible and irresponsible disowning of the social effects of the power of the imagination. The wrongs of woman were understood by those who read Wollstonecraft as a kind of pioneer new historicist, to be the product of bad education, and therefore to be in principle reversible through an education according to the rights of woman. But these wrongs are in some ways also ‘structural’. That is, Wollstonecraft licenses certain women to make ‘mistakes of conduct’, to cherish recognizably Romantic forms of idealism which turn out to have been misplaced and yet still productive to the advancement of female intellect (and, although she is much more sceptical here, to the development of society): There are mistakes of conduct which at five-and-twenty prove the strength of mind, that, ten or fifteen years after, would demonstrate its weakness, its incapacity to acquire a sane judgement. The youths who are satisfied with the ordinary pleasures of life, and do not sigh after ideal phantoms of love and friendship, will never arrive at great maturity of understanding; but if these reveries are cherished, as is too frequently the case with women, when experience ought to have taught them in what human happiness consists, they become as useless as they are wretched.32 The passage from Wollstonecraft’s novel The Wrongs of Woman seems antiRomantic and utilitarian in its insistence on the need to let go of an erotic idealism fostered by the Romantic imagination in the interests of learning from experience the true value of happiness. Yet Wollstonecraft herself is reluctant to let go of the notion that Romantic idealism, precisely through its conflict with an empirical world of conduct and the mistakes that it fosters, might have an improving effect on the world. Such mistakes of conduct may turn out to be signs of the potential for a greater maturity of understanding in later life if properly regulated. They will, the argument suggests, provide a retrospective vantage point on the ways in which female codes of propriety restrict the capacity of the female intellect to educate itself through experience, with all of its pitfalls, in the same way in which men are enabled to come to rational maturity. Far from critiquing a masculinist Romantic ideology which sublimates the vagaries of erotic desire into

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mature understanding, the passage seems to demand participation in the same process of development for women. Yet it is also characterized by an ambivalence about the civilizing potential of the Romantic imagination and its idealizing effects; either it will lead to a greater maturity of understanding by converting an erotic into a virtuous idealism, or, if left unregulated, it will render those who foster it ‘as useless as they are wretched’. Wollstonecraft, by the reading that I have sketched out here, attempts to convert Romantic idealism into social responsibility instead of egoism, temporizing a privileged imagination in a way which is consonant with Paul Hamilton’s claim that ‘heterodox as much as orthodox writers look for ways to redeploy an aesthetic grasp of the self whose utopian potential is too powerful to be justifiably abandoned’ (2). Consequently, Romantic criticism discovers an undisclosed potential in the Romantic imagination which has survived the strenuous deconstruction of recent years. And as the example of Barbara Taylor’s reading of Wollstonecraft goes to show, imagination is a category that critics, like their Romantic forebears, are reluctant to disband, however reconditioned the new imagination may turn out to be. It is with the category of the imagination that this study will start out, through a reexamination of Rousseau’s notion of the imagination as an ambiguous force in history. But beforehand, I want to offer a few other brief comments on the selection of my subjects for this book, which may seem odd in its juxtaposition of Paul de Man with Mary Wollstonecraft, and also of Wollstonecraft with Kant.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK Perhaps this might be approached through reference to the ‘expressive rationality’ of the title. The coupling of Romanticism with an ‘expressive’ aesthetic may seem to reconvene a view of Romanticism that is familiar from M. H. Abrams’ famous distinction between mimetic, pragmatic, expressive and objective (or autonomous) art forms from The Mirror and the Lamp, and to ignore the intervening history of qualifications to Abrams’ account of the emergence of Romanticism (a view which was itself already somewhat qualified).33 It may also seem against my purposes in that it annexes Romanticism to what Charles Taylor understands as an ‘expressive’ theory of language first enunciated by Herder, and prefiguring Hegel, whereby meaning is an intention of the linguistic act rather than a mimetic representation of an already existing reality, and whereby linguistic meaning creates a life-context by referring to ‘irreducible issues of rightness’.34 I hope that what I have argued about the use of symbolism in Kant has made

Introduction

17

it clear that my notion of an expressive rationality differs from Taylor’s view of an expressive Romanticism, at least insofar as I attempt to read back into Kant the expressive turn in language that Taylor attributes to Herder. The ‘expressive’ turn in Kant offers a dialogic, praxis-based view of language that suggests a genuinely political alternative to the poststructural ‘radicalism’ and scepticism that Taylor rightly sees Herder as preempting.35 Kant, it must be conceded, seems largely to hold to the designative view of language in his use of symbolism to represent rational concepts which are indispensable but unobtainable, a view which has been the target of language philosophies from Herder through to Wittgenstein and Derrida. But where post-structuralist pseudo-radicalism refuses distinctions between constative and performative speech acts, and while as such it appears to defend the philosophical dignity of artistic expression, it too often rules out of court the political valency of the internal difference of literary language to rational argument.36 The expressive rationality of the title also refers to the ways in which epistemology made use of figures that were self-consciously literary in order to describe the aporetic limits of knowledge, and to reflect on the kind of self-knowledge or understanding of thinking’s position within the world that emerges from such moments of performative crisis. I take all of the figures that this study engages with, Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Gayatri Spivak and Paul de Man, to engage on a relatively equal footing with the questions and options that such an expressive turn in thinking raises. A further aim of this book is then to challenge both an ongoing critical assumption of our superiority to Romanticism, our tendency to offer what de Man describes as a ‘diagnostic’ approach to literary history, and the depressing thought that we remain inside of ideological categories in ways to which our Romantic inheritance precisely blinds us.37 To reiterate, my claim is rather that an exciting new crop of readings of Kant, that challenge the ways in which he has been taken up and condemned as a formalist in recent theory and anti-theoretical, new historicist writing, offers scope for an interesting cross-fertilization with a Romantic aesthetic which has been equally castigated as formalist under Kant’s tutelary influence. Our diagnostic readings of Kant and Romanticism may, to this extent, be precisely short-circuited by an awareness of how figures like Kant and Wollstonecraft may have been ahead of our attempts to deconstruct them. The book as such traverses a distance between the statement of a certain moment in Romantic ideology, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s reception of Rousseau, considered in Chapter 1, and its resolution through the concept of a ‘reserve of reason’, which will be explored in Chapter 5. The ideological impasse set out in Chapter 1, whereby the attempt to imagine a

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better political future in Wollstonecraft is always bound by the aesthetic categories that Wollstonecraft seeks to overcome, will be resolved through an intervening reading of the symbolism in Kant’s theory of judgement and its reception in contemporary theory. The dilemma faced by Mary Wollstonecraft in her effort to critique Rousseau’s aesthetic ideology can be resolved retrospectively through the Kantian paradigm that has been established in the intervening three chapters. This book is divided into two parts. Part 1, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, foregrounds my claim. It examines the case for the evolution of a new philosophical anthropology in the work of Rousseau and Kant, and describes the ways in which Kant’s anthropological thinking is dependent on his reading of Rousseau (something the new Kant described by the crop of studies discussed earlier is very aware of ), and in particular on Rousseau’s theory of the imagination which emerges in Kant as a schematic or symbolic attempt to marry up cognitive representations with a fundamentally noncognitive world of intuition. Kant seeks to resolve sceptical dilemmas about knowledge with an anthropology of human understanding, or what might be described as a ‘transcendental anthropology’. This argument challenges significantly the popular view both of Kant and Rousseau as ahistorical and idealistic, as banishing an unavailable human identity to a noumenal realm or to an inaccessible state of nature, since it views human understanding as occupying a particular standpoint, and one that might be subject to change through the work of critique. Part 2 proceeds to challenge the view of Rousseau’s and Kant’s Enlightenment formalism through a series of approaches to modern theory that seek in particular to force it to engage with the detail of arguments that it often casually reads as formalistic. The attack on Kantian anthropology in the work of Gayatri Spivak and Paul de Man (in Chapters 3 and 4) is juxtaposed with Kant’s formulation of a philosophical anthropology in response to Herder’s lyricism, which Kant reads as guilty of a fundamental misinterpretation of Rousseau’s thought as a type of primitivism. Attacks such as Spivak’s in particular all too often expose their own implicit investment in notions of thought’s detachment from its conditions of embodiment that cannot justifiably be considered Kantian. Finally, Chapter 5 addresses accusations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s anthropological formalism, her apparent prurience and excessively ‘masculine’ rationalism, with an examination of her notion of the ‘reserve of reason’ as a conceptmetaphor that describes the necessary conditions for rational being in the world. This chapter further seeks to offer a thematic link between Kant and Wollstonecraft, through attention to how their common reading of Rousseau fostered a sense of anthropological awareness in their defences of a rational intersubjectivity.

Introduction

19

Finally, a word on this coupling of Kant and Wollstonecraft. I have described here an intuitive link between them, in terms of their shared anthropological awareness, which derives from their common reading of Rousseau. A further point of intersection may be identified in the ways in which a ‘mistakenly’ sensualized mode of reason contributes to a rationally embodied understanding of the world. The passionate productivity of mistakes of conduct in Wollstonecraft is matched, in Kant, by the mistaken form of his ‘symbolic anthropomorphism’, as Kant describes his attempt to justify the idea of a necessary being. Wollstonecraft was also aware of Kant’s work, probably from her time in Paris during the early 1790s (since Kant was barely read or discussed in England during the revolutionary decade),38 judging by a reference to his treatment of the sublime and beautiful in her posthumous fragments.39 But a further context in which a reading of Wollstonecraft through Kantian paradigms is productive concerns precisely the critical norms that this book wants to challenge. As I argue in the final chapter, an intuitive link between Kant and Wollstonecraft has in fact long been assumed in studies of Wollstonecraft, where a Kantian paradigm is often used to describe all that is wrong with Wollstonecraft’s use of reason. Again, the aim of this book will be to test how far the new Kant who is emerging in the work of a host of cultural historians and philosophers can tell us about the ways in which we read Wollstonecraft, as well as about her role in the international intellectual milieu to which she understood herself to belong.

CHAPTER 1

Stating the Case: Rousseau, Kant,Wollstonecraft

ROUSSEAU’S ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY The conjunction of Rousseau’s name with notions of ‘transparence’, ‘primitivism’, ‘individualism’ and with a pervasively anti-intellectual sentimentalism (or ‘counter-Enlightenment’ Republicanism in one recent study)1 has been relatively commonplace from the 1790s to our own moment.2 Yet on the specific issue of primitivism, Rousseau could not have been clearer about the impossibility or undesirability of returning to the state of nature: What then? Must we destroy societies, annihilate meum and teum and return to live in the forests with the bears? . . . As for men like me, whose passions have destroyed their original simplicity for ever . . . they will respect the sacred bonds of the societies of which they are members. (DI 153) It is equally something of an emerging critical commonplace that the idea that Rousseau sought transparency, that his work registers a desire to return to an unalienated and undivided state of being, misrepresents the most important parts of his thought, a misrepresentation that is often understood to derive from the way that he was taken up by the French Revolutionaries. In turn, this yields a judgement familiar from the work of Paul de Man that the broadly ‘Romantic’ interpretation of Rousseau (an interpretation from which, de Man claimed, critical modernity was only beginning to recover) fundamentally misapprehends the negativity of Rousseauvian thought. De Man argues that this misapprehension of Rousseau is instructive about the errors, or rather the ‘blindnesses’ that inhere in critical judgements, such that our ways of misapprehending Rousseau tell us much about the aims and interests of a given critical rhetoric.3 The pattern of misreadings (assuming that that is what they are), that emerge in this way might almost seem Roussseauvian themselves, given that Rousseau famously disowns the effects of his writing on the reader. He writes in the first preface to Julie

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that reading his novel cannot undo a maiden, although it may well show that she is undone.4 Such denegations of authorial responsibility,5 noticeably attractive to the generations of critics familiar with the thesis of the ‘death of the author’, suggest the capacity of Rousseau’s thought to reproduce itself in order to fit the contours of the interests of each new generation of critics, something that is particularly evident among his Francophone interpreters (the phenomenological Rousseau of Starobinski, the structuralistanthropologist Rousseau of Levi-Strauss, the post-structuralist and semiological Rousseau of Derrida).6 Yet work on Rousseau that seeks to position him more firmly within a history of ideas equally finds itself vexed by the question of Rousseau’s relationship to the thought of his own moment. In Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment, Graeme Garrard gives an exhaustive list of the attempts made by eminent Anglophone Rousseau scholars to decide on Rousseau’s relationship to the thought of the Enlightenment. There is no consensus as to whether Rousseau is for or against the Enlightenment, and indeed many critics cannot resolve the issue in their own minds, typified by Robert Wokler’s claim that Rousseau ‘at once belonged to the Enlightenment and opposed it’.7 For Garrard himself, Rousseau is of the counterEnlightenment, ‘the man who fired the first major shot in a war that has raged between the Enlightenment and its opponents for over two and a half centuries and shows little sign of abating’.8 The source of this equivocation may well lie in the question of just what these critics mean by the Enlightenment – otherwise put, the line drawn between what Enlightenment thought means for the ‘philosophical discourse of modernity’, and what the Enlightenment(s) meant for the eighteenth century seems to be blurred. Rousseau is then a particularly difficult figure to understand and to contextualize, because he plays a crucial role in both of these types of Enlightenment. He is regularly claimed, as Gerrard shows, as the father of a counter-Enlightenment spirit that runs from his own time, through Romanticism and into ours. This suggests that there is parity between the counter-Enlightenment of the second half of the eighteenth century and the counter-Enlightenment of modernity, of which Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is perhaps the iconic expression. This in turn implies that it is the same Enlightenment that is under attack in the work of Rousseau and Adorno, which means that Rousseau can be appropriated to, say, an ongoing attack on universal truth claims, on a linear view of historical progress, or on the scientific-empirical view of human knowledge, and that he can be appropriated to a sceptical attitude to the possibility of deriving an adequate theory of truth-as-reference, to an ideology-critique of representations of nature, or to any other of a number of familiar counter-Enlightenment themes. Yet this is also to assume that

Stating the Case: Rousseau, Kant,Wollstonecraft

25

these rather general notions offer an adequate characterization of the thought of the Enlightenment that is under attack.9 But the spirit of Enlightenment might also be understood in terms of dissent from rational dogmatism, as self-legislation or, as in Kant’s famous motto, as having the courage to think for oneself; and in this case Rousseau, enemy of all party programmes and the dogmatism of reason as well as of religion, seems to be thoroughly of the Enlightenment.10 These problems in the interpretation of Rousseau relate directly to the question, as yet unresolved, of the relation between Enlightenment thought and what Ju¨rgen Habermas describes as the ‘philosophical discourse of modernity’.11 Even though a hostile attitude towards, or indeed a ‘metacritique’ of, Enlightenment ‘metanarratives’ (to conflate for a moment the terms of J. G. Herder’s and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s particular varieties of counter-Enlightenment) has indeed recurred in various guises since the late eighteenth century, the attempt to annex Rousseau to this effort more often than not misrepresents the complexity of his thought. Graeme Garrard’s effort to place Rousseau in the camp of the ‘counter-Enlightenment’ runs into an equivocation that goes largely unacknowledged in his study. Understanding Rousseau’s gravitation away from the camp of the philosophes, as the founding of a counter-Enlightenment that is, Garrard implies, familiar to the philosophical discourse of modernity, conflates the French Enlightenment, with its materialist and sceptical bent, with ‘the Enlightenment’ as a tradition with which critical modernity continues to engage. Yet other attempts to historicize contemporary types of dissent that might be understood to participate in this tradition of counter-Enlightenment that Rousseau supposedly created have pointed to a genealogical line that runs between the French Enlightenment and familiar figures from this contemporary ‘counter-Enlightenment’. Thus Frederic Jameson characterizes Paul de Man as ‘an eighteenth-century mechanical materialist, and much that strikes the postcontemporary reader as peculiar and idiosyncratic about his work will be clarified by juxtaposition with the cultural politics of the great Enlightenment philosophes: their horror of religion, their campaign against superstition and error (or ‘‘metaphysics’’).’12 Demystifying the claims of the contemporary counter-Enlightenment, here, means pointing out the ways in which it appropriates an older materialist (and Enlightenment) position as if it were a poststructural radicalism. The following argument sets out from the assumption that most of the modern readings of Rousseau that appropriate him to their own version of counter-Enlightenment have followed the Hegelian reading of Rousseau, which understands him, in Garrard’s words, as ‘essentially a contract theorist in the Hobbesian tradition, who abstracted the individual from all

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ethical, social and political relationships, and asserted the absolute primacy of the individual over the community’ (43). This view of Rousseau was taken further by Marx’s historical materialism, and has dominated most of the iconic readings of Rousseau since, such as Starobinski’s, Derrida’s and Habermas’s.13 For Habermas, Rousseau ends up on the side of the counterEnlightenment due to his failure to legislate for the freedom of opinions that operate in a rational public sphere. Habermas resolves the impasse in definitions of Enlightenment through a description of this public sphere as a delimited space of bourgeois social ideology that yet contained ‘the element of truth that raised bourgeois ideology above ideology itself’.14 The pseudouniversal category of citizen is restricted, in Habermas’s ideology-critique of the notion of civil society, to the property-owning classes, but the public sphere itself maintained a radical reserve in that ‘in its deliberations it anticipated in principle that all human beings belong to it’ (85). But Rousseau, in Habermas’s reading, does not defend this public sphere, depending instead on a revitalized republican sentimentalism to purify the degraded sentiments of modernity. Thus for Habermas, in yet another view of transparence, Rousseau’s state is to penetrate all private areas of human life, in order to become a kind of modern Sparta. He writes that ‘Rousseau projected the unbourgeois idea of an intrusively political society in which the autonomous private sphere, that is, civil society emancipated from the state, had no place’ (97). The differential life of sentiment, transformed into a principle of statecraft in Rousseau’s notion of the general will, then operates in Rousseau’s argument as an anthropologically inappropriate ‘saving instinct of humanity’ (97). Habermas’s reading of Rousseau registers a philosophically ancient suspicion of feeling, and offers instead a liberal critique of personal freedom, emphasizing Rousseau’s excessive dependence on coercive statecraft orchestrated by the legislator’s licensed manipulation of emotion. Thus in Rousseau, writes Habermas, ‘unpublic opinion was elevated to the status of sole legislator, and this involved the elimination of the public’s rational-critical debate in the public sphere’ (97). Yet in his description of the changed function of the family with the birth of the public sphere, its transformation from a scene of coercion into an idealized training ground for the operation of public opinion, Habermas is precisely consonant with Rousseau. Further, while Rousseau’s celebration of ‘unpublic opinion’ may seem from a Habermasian perspective to be counter-Enlightenment in its coercively sentimental approach to rationally derived public opinion, Rousseau’s account of the emergence of the conditions for public debate out of the ‘intimate sphere’ of the family might provide an adequate account of the birth of Enlightenment, and one that is recognizably Kantian. What Kant has over

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27

Rousseau in Habermas’s early reading of them is a philosophy of history that understands how inwardly free individuals create outwardly free conditions. But this is precisely a Rousseauvian theme, as Kant was first to recognize.15 The attack on Rousseau is then an attack on a philosophy of reflection, which is guilty of hiding mediation in its search after the object in itself, unmediated by history, culture and community. Hegel’s might seem to be an adequate reading of Rousseau, if we take into consideration the conjectural history at the beginning of Rousseau’s Second Discourse, that strips man ‘of all the artificial faculties that he can have acquired only through a long process of time’ (DI 81). But there exists an alternative reading of Rousseau, that was first forwarded by Kant, and which rather than decrying culture, progress and any form of mediation, recognizes Rousseau to respond to the predicament of man’s historical situation in a way that does not seek simply to escape the trials of history, or as one critic puts it, paraphrasing Nietzsche’s critique of Rousseau’s spirit of ressentiment, that does not record ‘a desire to negate time, through the isolated moment which is beyond time and its grasp’.16 While conjectural history may seem to work backwards, progressively disrobing the civilized man until his pre-cultural or authentic essence is revealed, this process leaves contemporary man with the task of perpetually reconstructing his cultural identity, by acting as an historical agent in the light of the orientating self-knowledge that the conjecture uncovers. Or as Allen Wood writes of Kant’s essay ‘Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History’ (1786), human history ‘works backwards: It makes us rational through an irrational society, leaving us the task or remaking society through reason’.17 Kant derived this historical understanding from his reading of Rousseau. The process itself is heuristic, and both Kant and Rousseau are keen to play down the truth claims of their conjectural histories.18 But perhaps we have taken them too much at their word, by understanding them as dismissive of the role that history plays in shaping the individual in favour of an essentialized depiction of human beings outside of the touch of time. The Hegelian critique of Kant and its Marxist and deconstructive variants have overshadowed Kant’s reading of Rousseau, and the significance that this reading holds both for our understanding of Kant’s own system and for what it can tell us about Rousseau’s thought.19 Readings of a Kantian Rousseau tend in general to assume the ahistorical state of nature as a regulative ideal that is to have no material impact on culture; thus Rousseau is understood to lack the philosophy of history that, according to Habermas, Kant initiates and Hegel radicalizes. Fortunately, this is a view that is being redressed in a number of studies of Kant that are emerging,

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Wood’s among them, that seek out the importance of Rousseau for an understanding of the cultural politics of Kant’s argument. Thus Susan Shell can write that ‘following Rousseau, Kant no longer reads the ‘‘wretchedness’’ of the human situation as natural and inevitable, a consequence of our station in the universe ‘‘Halfway between reason and unreason’’ but as historical, a function of human choice and action’.20 Such claims as Shell’s suggest a quiet renaissance of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical anthropology, which offered an important articulation of the consonance between Rousseau and Kant’s thought, and which entertained seriously the notion of an embodiment of reason that is now the source of the most exciting readings of Kant. John H. Zammito has recently claimed that today ‘the crucial ideas [in Kant scholarship] are precisely those that had earlier been consigned to the periphery: unity, system, purpose, aesthetics, the primacy of practical reason, the highest good, anthropology. Underlying all of these is the problem of coming to terms with the dynamism of reason – with its spontaneity and autonomy, and with its embodiment and efficacy’.21 According to Jean Starobinski, the ‘antithesis between nature and culture can be resolved: this is Kant’s and Cassirer’s reading of Rousseau, which they would develop in their own philosophical works’.22 Perhaps, then, instead of a pervasive disenchantment about the possibility of overcoming the familiar anthropological antithesis between culture and nature, these more recent studies suggest that Kant’s responses to Rousseau recognized in him important resources for bringing about precisely such a resolution through a significant reflection on history. For Cassirer, what Kant took from Rousseau was a regrounding of philosophy in ethics, an appeal to conscience rather than metaphysical dogma as the source of reason.23 This entailed, for Kant, that being rational involved the primacy of praxis, understood as a reflection on the embodiment of the rational self in culture, biology and history. I will have much more to say over the following chapters about this ‘anthropological’ reading of Kant that is emerging in certain quarters, and its importance in adjusting the view of Kant held in literary criticism and theory, which in recent times has largely depended on a deconstruction of this nature/culture antinomy. But Shell and others also disclose a very different Rousseau as he is read by Kant, not struggling to escape historical time in the ‘isolated moment’ but rather recognizing mankind’s predicament as historical. What is the nature of this predicament? Briefly put, Rousseau is ‘counter’ a certain type of Enlightenment, namely the British Enlightenment and its radicalization in France, in that he does not think that human beings are naturally calibrated for society. But given that they find themselves in a social condition, because of the advent of private property (which he under-

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29

stands as a tragic fall from a state of primordial innocence from which we cannot go back), natural sentiments must be reformulated as social virtue. The production of such artificial sentiments is extremely difficult, however, because from the moment that society is born, the surviving passion that serves to defend the isolated pre-social individual from harm, that is Amour de Soi, develops into a pernicious form of social vanity, or Amour Propre. The historical predicament of humankind, the wretched halfway house described by Shell, derives therefore from their being born into a social condition where they should govern themselves with their power of reason, but where they continue to be dominated by passions which have corrupted them or, as Rousseau tells us in his second Discourse, that have ‘forever destroyed their original simplicity’ (DI 153). Passions take on a new face with the advent of society, acting to forestall the emergence of rational autonomy. But Rousseau judges the power of reason to be too weak to convert the rapidly corrupting nature within us to a virtuous form. It is the task of the sentiments to reform themselves, and to this extent Habermas’s reading of Rousseau’s attempt to correct feeling with feeling understands Rousseau well. But what, until recently, has less often been noted, least of all by Habermas, is that Kant inherits a very keen insight into this historical predicament in Rousseau, an insight that, as I will show in Chapter 3, Kant uses to combat the pernicious reading of Rousseau that was taken up in Herder’s counter-Enlightenment, which certainly is (according to Kant at least) primitivist and anti-rational.24 The adaptability of the complexities of Rousseauvian sentimentalism to Kant’s own critique of reason helps to resolve some of the tangled misreadings that both have been subjected to. Further (and this is often noticed, although less often examined in any detail), Mary Wollstonecraft takes from Rousseau precisely the same scepticism about the ability of the passions to reformulate themselves into social virtue, even though she allows passion, again after Rousseau, an important role in the development of reason. Like Rousseau, then, she thinks that virtuous social bonds under reason can only really be attained through the predicament of passionate attachment, and like him, too, she shares a powerful scepticism about the productive role that these passions might play in the formation of a beneficent commercial society. To this extent, she is closer to Rousseau, Enlightenment or counter-Enlightenment, than to the emergent home-grown sentimental philosophy around her, perhaps not least because of her attachments to rational dissent that gave her an altogether more marginal (or even ‘continental’) perspective on the beautiful commercial society extolled by Adam Smith.25 The last chapter of this book suggests some of the ways in which this

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common Rousseauvian inheritance allows for a ‘neo-Kantian’ reading of Wollstonecraft, against some of the less happy juxtapositions of their names in recent literary studies. I will firstly outline some of the ways in which Rousseau attempts to imagine a well-ordered society through passion brought under virtue, particularly in his elaboration of an analogy between the family and the state as structures of authority and reciprocal affection. Passing through some preliminary comments on Kant’s reading of Rousseau’s view of history, which reconfigures it as a study of the emergence of reason out of its anthropological preconditions, I will close by suggesting some ways in which Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790), initially falls foul of an attempt to articulate passion with reason in her appropriation of Rousseau’s uncomfortably lengthy analogies between the family and the state, and between the father and the ruler, to her revolutionary endeavour.

PERFECTIBILITY The assumption of Rousseau’s resentment towards history is not confined to Nietzsche and his inheritors. In what is perhaps the classic study of Rousseau’s social theory in English, Men and Citizens, Judith Shklar describes Rousseau as a ‘utopist’, claiming that he was ‘the last great political theorist to be utterly uninterested in history, past or future, the last also to judge and condemn without giving any thought to programs of action’.26 Rousseau’s two utopias are, according to Shklar, the denatured Spartan city and the society of the family. Rousseau’s family is a unique form of social collectivity in that it is a product of nature (SC 18), and in that it also exists on the basis of common utility, only for as long as its members need it. It is at once nature and culture, founded prior to all forms of civil association and yet, unlike the social contract, destined to dissolve once its members become able to attend to their own self-preservation. Thus it seems to represent a subsistence of the state of nature in civil society, insofar as parents are bound by nature to preserve their children for the period of their infancy, after which period the family becomes a form of social convention. But Rousseau asserts elsewhere that the origin of the family itself is a form of social convention, a product of property relations.27 Its relation to history is more complex than Shklar allows, although it is perhaps as contradictory as she describes it. More generally, Shklar’s Rousseau is notable for his pessimism, and for his inability to find in a contemporary world governed by imagination and memory ‘that prevent men from enjoying the present and from prolonging

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it by remaining inactive’ (28–9) any reflection of his own indifference to history. This presents a far different Rousseau from Derrida’s logocentrist, but similarly a primitivist searching for unmediated being. Coupled with Shklar’s claims of Rousseau’s indifference to history comes, then, a further claim that Rousseau denigrated the imagination. Rather than glorifying the ‘creative imagination’, she claims that Rousseau saw in this vehicle of ‘perfectibility’ the deepest source of human misery. What men need most is that sense of reality which forces them to resign themselves to necessity. Fantasy is precisely what destroys them. (54) This denigration of the imagination in Rousseau means that Shklar does not read him as a source for Romanticism. There is in Rousseau, she claims, no hint of ‘that romantic quest for originality, for the creation of new artefacts or new personalities as an end in itself’. Again, it is the assumed primitivism that is speaking through this anti-Romanticism in Rousseau, because ‘[t]he nature that is repressed in us is one that yearns for ease, not for creation’ (56). The historical sensibility of Romanticism is then implicitly coupled with an aesthetic striving that Rousseau is understood to be against. The utopia of Rousseau is, according to Shklar, profoundly anti-aesthetic; thus the ‘simple household’ is ‘composed of domesticated mediocrities and not of ‘‘beautiful’’ souls and things’. No history means no beauty; a life where needs are identifiable and satisfiable is liberated from the yearning of the aesthetic imagination. This means also that freedom, the ideal of Romantic aesthetics, is de-aestheticised and made into a practice of everyday familial life. ‘The great problem of freedom,’ writes Shklar, ‘is to avoid personal oppression by other men and dependence on things. It is not to be found in social or artistic inventiveness.’28 The family of the Golden Age, recounted in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, is utopian to the extent that it keeps in check the peculiar blend of savagery and civility that Rousseau found in the world around him, and in that it provides a prototype of man’s existence for others without giving up on his own self-interest. But once civil society is born, Rousseau argues, the family changes its meaning. From being the archetypal social form which maintains man’s existence ‘within himself’ (DI 36), the family gets displaced into a private realm that appears to be radically discontinuous with the political life that labour and property enforce. This antagonism would be resolved if civil society were to be fully denatured along the lines of the Spartan utopia which has no concept of privacy, and where family

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feeling no longer has any claim on the socialized individual. But since this denatured ideal proved unobtainable and undesirable for contemporary man, Rousseau proposed the social contract as a resolution of the antinomy between man’s individual and collective existence, his desiring life of the imagination and his existence for others as a citizen. Despite its discontinuity with public life, the private space of the family also initiates the individual into membership of a community that is intended to issue in participation in the general will. There is as such a discontinuity between the family as the first face of civil society and the social world to which it provides a private counter-image. Judith Shklar’s view of the Rousseauvian family as a utopian alternative to the Romantic aesthetic community offers a useful description of one aspect of the family, that is as a perfected state of nature. The recreated Golden Age of Clarens described in the second half of La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), which is ruled by a perfect balance of religious sentiment and rational authority as represented by Julie and M. de Wolmar, offers a literary version of this ideal. It concentrates spectacle in the ‘living eye’ of Wolmar, forestalling the development of an aestheticizing imagination in the ‘children’ of the estate, its servants. After the death of Julie’s father and her and Wolmar’s re-ordering of the domestic economy, the estate is ‘no longer a house made to be seen, but to be lived in’ (J 363). The new order is profoundly unaesthetic, if aesthetics is concerned with spectacle. The new Clarens is in fact a world of art, but art which hides its intentionality, serving to recreate the effects of nature in its apparently spontaneous production of regular form. In Julie’s pleasure garden or ‘Elysium’, the one space on the estate where use is sacrificed to pleasure, her former lover St Preux is amazed to find no trace of labour or expenditure, until Julie tells him that ‘nature did it all, but under my direction’ (J 388). Even in this space of pure pleasure, the effaced intentionality of a recreated Garden of Eden points beyond itself to a reflection of Julie’s pious vision of nature as freedom, spontaneity and diversity produced by the hidden hand of a creator. This freedom of nature is recreated under the guiding hand of authority, disguised as pleasure. Kant’s Rousseauvian essay ‘Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History’ similarly imagines a time in which ‘art, when it reaches perfection, once more becomes nature’ (KPW 231). Kant’s essay was published in 1786, but according to the Critique of Judgement that Kant was working on at the same time, the reflective judgement of art cannot be subsumed under concepts of perfection. Kant writes in the first introduction to the third Critique that the expression, ‘sensible presentation of perfection is an explicit contradiction’ (CJ1 416). What Kant presents in his essay on history

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might, then, be understood as a false historical imagination that reads the continuity of art and nature under concepts of perfection, and that does not tally with our experience of beauty, where the judgement of art is not subsumable under rational concepts. In the Elysium, Julie is licensed to offer a pious view of virtue which contradicts the rational (and atheistic) order of her husband in the interests of the sentimental education of St Preux. In a similar way, the difference of perspective afforded by Kant’s speculations on history challenges his critical treatment of artistic beauty. A teleological view of history offers a disruptive view of Kant’s critical account of aesthetic pleasure, to the extent that the aligning of art with perfection in Kant’s history re-inscribes a type of pseudo-conceptuality into the noncognitive nature of aesthetic judgement.

ROUSSEAU’S FAMILY AND THE CIVIL STATE Even the ideal society of Clarens must come to an end once it succumbs to the sublimated sexual energies that constitute it. Contra Judith Shklar, Rousseau’s utopia is governed by the tragic consequences of time, even if time is imagined as an external force. The little society of the family, writes Rousseau in his Discourse on Political Economy (1755), ‘is destined to die off’ (DPE 141) albeit to renew itself in other families. Rousseau is then alive to the historical dimension of the family as a product of civil society that equally maintains the regenerative capacities of natural species. More generally, there are two states of nature in Rousseau, an idealized primitive state to which we must look back in order to understand ourselves as historical agents, and a Hobbesian state of avarice into which civil society perpetually threatens to tumble. This state of avarice would subsist if the political economy were run as if it were a domestic economy, thereby conflating the private authority of the family with the public authority of the state. In the Social Contract, Rousseau claims that if the leader substitutes his private interests for the public good, the state of nature returns and the contract necessarily becomes tyrannical and hollow (SC 24). Thus Allen Wood usefully reminds us that ‘Kant opposes the state of nature not to a social condition but to a civil condition. A society in the state of nature is a literal historical reality at many times and places.’29 This opposition between nature and civility as an historical antinomy corresponds to the second, Hobbesian definition of the state of nature in Rousseau, where nature represents the perpetual threat of barbarism rather than a prehistorical realm of innocence. In his political works, Rousseau sets out to resolve a difficult question:

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‘How could the government of the state be similar to that of the family, whose basis is so different?’ (DPE 112) The family, as a temporary natural association, is governed by the voice of nature; but if the voice of nature is the best counsel to which a father ought to listen in order to fulfil his duties well, for the magistrate it is a false guide, working continuously to separate him from his people. Where the family and civil society are both associations that exist for the benefit of their members, the principle of authority governing each of them is opposite. For the family, the father’s instinct is what guides him; but for the ruler to follow his instinct would lead to the dissolution of the social contract. In the Discourse on Inequality, this insight leads Rousseau to challenge a peculiar analogy between family and society, which has been taken to legitimate absolute authority: As for paternal authority, from which several writers have derived absolute government and all society, it is enough [. . .] to notice that nothing on earth can be farther from the ferocious spirit of despotism than the gentleness of that authority which looks more to the advantage of he who obeys than to the interest of he who commands; to notice that by the law of nature the father is the master of the child only for such time as his help is necessary to him and that beyond this stage the two are equals [. . .] Instead of saying that civil society derives from paternal power, we ought to say, on the contrary, that the latter derives its main force from the former. No individual was recognized as the father of several children until such time as they lived in families together and settled around him. The goods of the father, of which he is truly the master, are the ties which keep his children dependent on him, and he may choose to give them a share of his estate only to the extent that they have deserved it from him by constant deference to his will. But subjects are far from having some similar favour to expect from their despot, for in belonging, with all they possess, to him as his personal property – or at least being claimed by him as such – they are reduced to receiving from him as a favour whatever he leaves them of their own goods. He bestows justice when he robs them; and grace when he lets them live. (DI 126) Rather than arguing that political authority is analogous to the authority of fathers, we ought to say that paternal authority derives from political institutions; Rousseau’s somewhat equivocal commitment to the conventional nature of the family, its status as a civil community mediated by property relations, justifies this view. But it is underwritten by a specific insight into how the father is not like a particular type of political ruler, which is the despot, who would claim ownership of the subjects themselves. Rousseau

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seems, then, to be dissociating the ruler from the father, but under cover of this apparent dissociation he is in fact drawing out the qualities of the beneficent ruler by analogy with the qualities of the father as a source of care for his children rather than as a source of authority. The analogy is not disbanded, but rather allowed to work otherwise, in order to reveal the condition of civil freedom in property ownership as analogous to love, an authority that exists for the benefit of the loved ones. Rousseau’s argument suggests, in fact, a significant transformation of the structure of the family in its relation to political society. This is a transformation that is also a central aspect of Ju¨rgen Habermas’s description of the development of the bourgeois public sphere in the later eighteenth century. With the formulation of an ideology of the civil constitution as an alternative to the classical regime, so Habermas argues, the life of the oikos is reconfigured: where in classical models it was understood as a sphere of domination, with the advent of civil society the oikos becomes the ‘intimate sphere’ that offers the first model of the free critical activity of the public sphere. This transformation of the ideology of the family from a zone of discipline into a zone of intimate freedom and education into citizenship allows the civil constitution to emerge as an alternative to the classical regime, even as Rousseau’s social contract reinvents classical notions of autonomy in line with a modern notion of personal liberty derived from property ownership.30 Rousseau’s equivocal analogy seeks to manage such a transformation. But an alternative way to interpret the apparent equivocation over the causal relation between civil society and the family, whereby the family both is and is not a model for a just civil society, is in terms of Rousseau’s need to tell different stories to different constituencies of readers. The Social Contract, aimed at a more popular audience, brushes aside the hedged comparisons of the Discourse on Inequality in order to offer an unmediated analogy: The family therefore is, so to speak, the prototype of political societies; the leader is the image of the father, the populace is the image of the children, and, since all are born equal and free, none give up their liberty except for their utility. The entire difference consists in the fact that in the family the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes for them, while in the state, where the leader does not have love for his people, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of this feeling. (SC 18) For those who freely contract into the general will, it is important that their private experience be allowed to provide them with a sentimental

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model with which to imagine the relationship that public authority holds to them. The trade-off between liberty and freedom that, Rousseau suggests, governs the family’s temporal existence, is reproduced in civil society as discipline to the needs of others. Thus from the perspective of the populace, the leader can permissibly be thought of by analogy with a benevolent father figure, who substitutes a rather ambiguous ‘pleasure of commanding’ for their own love of their families. But the leader himself is denied this noble lie. If he were to view his authority as analogous to the love of the father, when in fact his authority is unconstrained by love for the populace, he might be led to claim personal possession of them. The analogy is extraordinarily subtle and dangerous. The people can permissibly think of the benefit the leader receives in exchange for his concern for their welfare by analogy with the love that they feel for their own children; but the same analogy is strictly forbidden to the leader himself. It is precisely in the act of overcoming a direct, despotic analogy between father and leader, or more precisely through imagining a concept of social freedom as a state of civil maturity, that the problematic continuity between civil society and family as discontinuous forms of association that exist for common utility can be thought. This difference of perspective also operates in Judith Shklar’s notion that Rousseau’s metaphors contain what she describes as a ‘moment of negation’, particularly in relation to Rousseau’s concept of sovereignty: The word sovereignty has scarcely any meaning at all apart from absolute monarchy [. . .] By taking this fear- and awe-inspiring power, so wholly associated with monarchical government, and attributing it to the people Rousseau was able to tell simple men in a phrase how immense he thought their rightful claims were. (168) It is because the people already have a concept of sovereign, a concept loaded with fear and resentment as far as Rousseau was concerned, that he claims to be able to re-educate them into an awareness of their own collective strength in a society governed by the social contract. Rather than inventing a wholly new language with which to enable this self-understanding in the people, Rousseau reimagines concepts at hand, and in particular those which are the most emotive and primitive in their evocation of fear. The ideal civil freedom enabled by the general will depends on our always bearing in mind how a private or a natural will would act differently. The new concept of collective sovereignty thus bears in mind its historical precursor, found in the idea of the absolute authority of a monarch. There exists in Rousseau’s writing an anthropological version of this shift

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of meaning, in his description of the poetical origin of language in the Essay on the Origin of Languages. As for the people who discover their autonomous sovereignty through a re-education of their fearful imagining of the illegal sovereign that rules over them, so primitive man first invents a concept of himself as man after his initially mistaken designation of another man as ‘giant’: After many experiences he will recognize that as these supposed Giants are neither taller nor stronger than himself, their stature does not agree with the idea that he had first attached to the word Giant. He will therefore invent another name common to them and to him, such as the name man for example, and will leave that of Giant for the false object that had struck him during his illusion.31 By living in society (and the gaze of the two primitives at one another already forms a society of sorts), man already lives in a state of illusion, but his concepts derived from these illusions prove elastic enough to be reformulated and to become adequate conditions of truth. As in Shklar’s treatment of the concept-metaphor sovereign in the Social Contract, it is the initial passion of fear in the face of those that our natural insecurity leads us to believe to be stronger than us that leads us mistakenly to attach a concept of superiority to them. But when the experience of our senses tells us that they are no more than our equals, these giants can be renamed as fellow men. However, the concept derived from passion is not simply discarded, but is rather transposed from its primary, illusory way of making sense into a language that is understood to be properly figural: The illusory image offered by the passions being presented first, the language which corresponded to it was likewise the first to be invented. It then became metaphorical when the enlightened mind, recognizing its first error, employed the expressions only with the same passions that had produced it. 32 Metaphor, by this definition, calls up again the primitive experience of fear in a safe form because it is acknowledged to be illusory, separated from the language of truth that it has served to constitute. The language of passion survives man’s attainment of rational discourse, but takes on a new meaning by calling up once again states of illusion that the advent of truth has helped to abolish, in a form which is circumscribed by its new status as metaphor. In a similar way, when ‘sovereign’ becomes a metaphor through

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which the people reflectively understand themselves, this process requires that the metaphor bear in mind how the people had once understood their sovereign differently, as a being feared and thought to be superior. The figurative capacity of language contributes to the enlightenment of the people precisely through the correction of primary illusions of passion. This aesthetical process of the formulation of metaphor is how man properly understands the development of his historical self-awareness; the names of unknown and feared concepts of exterior entities are renamed in order to describe man’s own progressive inner potential. The social law, argues Rousseau, must match the force of nature that it strives to surmount. As he writes in the Discourse on Political Economy, ‘abuses are inevitable with their consequences devastating in every society, where the public interest and the laws have no natural force, and are continuously attacked by the personal interest and passions of both leader and the members’ (DPE 113). Yet while the perfect leader would be entirely denatured like the bloodless legislator figured by M. de Wolmar in La Nouvelle Heloise, it is equally indispensable that the citizen have a passionate attachment to society. Thus ‘a man who had no passion would certainly be a very bad citizen’ (DPE 124), so that he must instead learn to love the fatherland ‘with that exquisite sentiment that every isolated man feels only for himself [. . .] and thus to transform into a sublime virtue this dangerous disposition from which arises all our vices’ (DPE 125). Again, what is good in the savage state, man’s egoism and self-love, becomes a vice in civil society. But this corrupted goodness cannot simply be discarded in favour of concepts of pure reason. Rather, man’s sentiments must be reeducated according to the public good; the fatherland must replace the self as the object of love, as the self is displaced into a newly wrought private realm.

KANT AND ROUSSEAU It is only by reflectively grasping our nature, Rousseau wants to argue, that we can come to consciousness of ourselves as citizens. To this end, he develops an historical consciousness which recognizes that nature, good in its passivity outside of society, must be creatively transformed into virtue in order to bring about a genuinely organized social aggregate. But this virtue may only be graspable by the populace under the name of sentiment. The citizen is licensed to reimagine natural inclination as social virtue, and so the function of the family is primarily educative in the civil state – that is, the family provides the ideal training ground for this conversion of instinct

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into duty. But from the perspective of the question of legitimacy, there can be no such imagined continuity between the law of nature and civil legislation; rather, the latter must cancel out the former. Perhaps the most acute of Rousseau’s early readers, Kant recognized this apparent contradiction in Rousseau’s thinking as constitutive to a progressive historical sensibility. Kant saw behind the beguiling tragic rhetoric of the Rousseauvian view of history, interpreting Rousseau against the grain in a way that offered an urgent intervention in the intellectual life of the late Enlightenment. For Kant in his highly Rousseauvian ‘Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History’, Rousseau’s thought cannot license the primitivist dream that makes ‘tales of Robinson Crusoe and voyages to the South Sea islands so attractive’.33 Such dreams of ease ‘are symptoms of that weariness of civilised life which thinking people feel when they seek its value in pleasure alone’ (KPW 233). Rather, ‘restless reason’ stands between man and his ‘imagined seat of bliss, and does not allow him to return to the state of rude simplicity from which it had originally extracted him’ (KPW 226). Kant envisions a state of primitive ease as a threat to the historical progress of reason. To this extent, the threat of primitivism is in fact constitutive to historical perfection by driving man forward, away from his pathological laziness which, it seems, he must perpetually overcome. Kant’s argument seems highly anti-aesthetic, suggesting that reason must drive man away from the satisfactions of pleasure. Even so, the imagination is not a regressive force in Kant; rather, it serves reason’s efforts to imagine a moral future. For Kant, unlike Judith Shklar and, before her, Irving Babbitt, the attribution of this regressive primitivism to Rousseau is a category mistake.34 Instead, the imagination for Kant after Rousseau becomes a future-orientated faculty that enables our attempt to convert the imaginings of physical desire, which might always use others as means, into the setting of final ends, which acknowledges the humanity in other people. Kant understood the antagonistic view of history uncovered in Rousseau to be perspectival, in that it relates to the human capacity and need always to imagine man at once both from the perspective of his natural passions and of his rational duty. Here is how Kant resolves the antinomy in Rousseau’s work, in his ‘Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History’: In his essays On the Influence of the Sciences and On the Inequality of Man, [Rousseau] shows quite correctly that there is an inevitable conflict between culture and the nature of the human race as a physical species each of whose individual members is meant to fulfil his destiny completely. But in his E´mile, his Social Contract, and other writings, he

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attempts in turn to solve the more difficult problem of what course culture should take in order to ensure the proper development, in keeping with their destiny, of man’s capacities as a moral species, so that this [moral] destiny will no longer conflict with his character as a natural species. Since culture has perhaps not yet really begun – let alone completed – its development in accordance with the true principles of man’s education as a human being and citizen, the above conflict is the source of all the genuine evils which oppress human life, and of all the vices which dishonour it. (KPW 227–8) The purpose of history, for Kant, is to be found in man’s communal existence, which seems inevitably to conflict with the egoism of his life as a member of a natural species; a life that as the example of Rousseau goes to show is not well calibrated to sociability. For Rousseau, this conflict is resolved (temporarily, at least) by removing the influence of civility and artificially prolonging the life of nature (in E´mile), or by recreating the state of nature as a kind of benevolent police state (in La Nouvelle Heloise). For Kant, on the contrary, such a resolution demands a restraining of the influence of nature in order to make man fit for society. For Kant, primitivism is always about individualism, about wanting to absolve oneself of one’s social duty by seeking to recover a natural wholeness in the individual person. But in launching his attack on a regressive individualism, Kant does not consider himself to be in conflict with Rousseau. The ‘Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History’, as Allen Wood has convincingly argued, is a satire on Kant’s former pupil, J. G. Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, and in particular a satire on Herder’s taking up the primitivist (mis)reading of Rousseau.35 Kant argues that Herder’s misreading is blind to the perspectivism of Rousseau’s history, to Rousseau’s use of the imagination to mediate any historical understanding of the loss to the individual incurred by the perfecting process of history as a gain to the species as a potential moral whole. The individual, according to Kant has cause to blame himself for all the ills which he endures and for all the evil which he perpetrates; but at the same time, as the member of a whole (of a species), he has cause to admire and praise the wisdom and purposiveness of the overall arrangement [. . .] the very impulses that are blamed as the causes of vice are good in themselves, fulfilling their function as abilities implanted by nature. (KPW 227–8) How might such arguments function in the more radically liberational historical imagination of another of Rousseau’s readers, Mary Wollstone-

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craft? Rousseau’s history’s suggestion of a transformative potential through the re-education of degraded passions into social virtues proves equally useful for a nascent Romantic feminism, even as it mires Wollstonecraft’s early argument in the political categories that it seeks to transcend through a revisioned conception of the imagination.

WOLLSTONECRAFT, ROUSSEAU AND FEELING For Mary Wollstonecraft, in her 1790 response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France of the same year, imagination takes on the same contradictory status that governs Rousseau’s concept of history. As is well known, Burke mounts an impassioned defence of a social compact built on the unequal distribution of property through inherited wealth. He argues that this custom limits the weakening of the ‘defensive power’ of property through its distribution, but that unequal social relations are softened through innate moral sentiments in the form of the benevolence of the wealthy.36 This argument depends, according to Wollstonecraft, on an inflamed imagination (V1 37). Her aim in the Vindication of the Rights of Man, her reply to Burke, is rather to defend the ‘birthright of man’, a social compact based on the inalienable liberty of the individual, or ‘such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact’ (V1 37). Her concept of liberty is not derived from unequal property relations that, as in Burke, soften hierarchical social bonds by imagining a social organism that is innately and historically just. Rather, Wollstonecraft seeks to sever liberty from unequal ownership through the description of a universal and egalitarian notion of justice that is derived from the cultivation of reason. But her attempt to offer a rational vision of a social compact based on a redistribution of the property of the aristocracy, and the cultivation of reason and virtue, depends on an apparently contradictory attempt to imagine this new social compact along the lines of the patriarchal familial order that it seeks to abolish. Like Rousseau, Wollstonecraft describes her just society as a patriarchal order that imagines the father as a source of virtue and the just distribution of his goods among his children. This suggestion, that Wollstonecraft imagines the new order that she proposes out of the resources of the sentimental view of a traditional, patriarchal society that she condemns in Burke, is hardly a new one in Wollstonecraft studies. A great deal has been written on how Wollstonecraft opposes the virile, masculine hardness of her notions of virtue, justice and reason against the soft, overweening feminine sensibility of the age that

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Burke is taken to represent in the Vindication of the Rights of Man.37 For a whole generation of critics, this opposition highlighted the contradictions inherent in a female appropriation of reason as a masculine salve for an over-feminized society, a predicament that for Mary Poovey and Janet Todd could only be resolved through Wollstonecraft’s later turn to fictional narratives. But more recently, Barbara Taylor has read the first Vindication in particular as itself, in part, a treatise on the imagination’s ambiguous role in historical progress, thereby significantly qualifying the distinction between Wollstonecraft’s earlier ‘rationalist’ and later ‘imaginative’ works. Wollstonecraft’s notion of imagination, writes Taylor, is both ‘invidious and emancipatory; a source of corruption and of virtue’. This dual attitude to fantasy is ‘heightened by Wollstonecraft’s fierce opposition to Burke’s sentimental irrationalism’.38 A number of recent studies of the literature and politics of the 1790s have begun to offer a more nuanced understanding of the social and historical role of the imagination than some of their deconstructive and new historicist forebears. Jon Mee, John Barrell and Taylor herself have all suggested ways in which the imagination in the 1790s orchestrated a whole series of responses to the political events of the day which sought to regulate or police emotive public opinion, rather than simply to evade the political realities of the moment through poetical transcendence. In particular, the development of the Romantic imagination can no longer be understood to offer a straightforward transcendence of taxing social and historical realities. For Jon Mee, it was an increasingly theorized poetic discourse that served to regulate these realities. Contemporary theories of the imagination often used responses to the fine arts and to the beauties of nature as a means of regulating social hierarchies, such that the development of ideas around the experience of the sublime, while they seem to yield access to a spiritual realm beyond nature and human affairs by analogy with reason, often function by contrast with a more delimited, sentimental (and feminine) power of fancy. Internal divisions within the definition of the imagination served actively to enforce social distinctions. For Taylor, the imagination in the late eighteenth century maintained its traditional role of discerning in nature ‘those sensate impressions (particularly visual impressions) through which God’s handiwork was perceived’. In particular, it is ‘those possessing such expanded faculties who are best able, through poetry or music or painting, to arouse the imaginations of less gifted people, so that they may share in the divine gift of aesthetic experience, and thus also be brought closer to God’.39 Yet Wollstonecraft’s apparent regression into the sentimental imagining of a rational futurity, and her posturing use of masculine reason and virtue,

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are more deliberately contradictory than we have been willing to admit. They are signs of a form of contradiction which inheres in an attempt to understand history as a process of complex negotiation between passion and reason and that derives from Wollstonecraft’s reading of Rousseau. Rousseau is everywhere in her argument in the first Vindication, and a recovery of that presence will contribute to the more nuanced understanding of the intellectual intentions of her work that is currently apparent in some quarters. Equally, it will lead to a reflection on the critical tools that have determined our reception of Romantic notions of the imagination and of reason. A recovery of the difference of Wollstonecraft’s notion of a passionately engaged and embodied reason leads critical practice to interrogate the anachronistic notion of reason that has been used to formulate critical judgements of Wollstonecraft. It is easy to make Wollstonecraft’s argument for human relations governed by reason appear to collapse into a passion which is opposed to reason, if reason is thought to be a disembodied tool for calculation. But for Wollstonecraft, virtuous action is a manifestation of a power of reason that is enabled through an often unwieldy passionate impulse. We too often judge Wollstonecraft’s rationality to fall down by the standards of a power of reason that, as Taylor argues, owes much to an overlaid view of a disembodied rationality derived from nineteenth-century utilitarianism that was alien to her.40 In turn, this recovery of reason in its complex interactions with imagination, and in particular a notion of reason which is theologically sanctioned in Wollstonecraft, will lead to a wider challenge to the ways in which Enlightenment rationality has been represented in recent theoretical discourse, often as coercive, dominating and resistant to the particularities of embodied human existence. Wollstonecraft inherits Rousseau’s highly equivocal attitude to property, which understands the first declaration of ownership as signifying the end of a golden age that only the advent of a social contract might serve to recapture in a fully civil form. Property is the source of all our ills as social beings, yet as Judith Shklar argues ‘without property, without mutuality of rights and duties, there can be no sense of justice’ (178). Wollstonecraft’s opposing the ‘demon property’ to her notion of justice based on personal liberty might seem to lead her away from Rousseau’s contract theory, yet she is equally indebted to the Social Contract for her extended attack on slavery, which would treat persons as things.41 An important part of her attack on Burke aims at his ‘filial reverence’ for injustice, his profoundly anti-Enlightenment deference to hereditary authority rather than reason, and in particular what Wollstonecraft understands as his defence of the disinheritance of other children in favour of the first-born son as a way of maintaining the force of accumulated property.

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Wollstonecraft herself equivocates between a defence of common property in her attack on the enclosure laws, and an idealized vision of equal distribution among the poor of the land which formed the pleasure gardens of the rich. Again like Rousseau in the Nouvelle Heloise, this entails a dismantling of an aristocratic aesthetics of spectacle and decorum. Early on in the Rights of Man, she writes of how ‘truth, in morals, has ever appeared to me the essence of the sublime; and, in taste, simplicity the only criterion of the beautiful’ (V1 35). An aesthetics which is bound up, in Burke’s much earlier Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, with power and inequality, is annexed to dissenting notions of truth and simplicity. The danger of an aesthetic sensibility such as Burke’s, operative both in the Enquiry and in the Reflections, is that it will lead to historical degeneration rather than rational progress. There is no end, claims Wollstonecraft, ‘to this implicit submission to authority – somewhere it must stop, or we return to barbarism’ (V1 43). A few pages later, the threat of barbarism entails the same defence of progress that drives Kant’s philosophy of history: Every thing looks like a means, nothing like an end, or point of rest, when we can say, now let us sit down and enjoy the present moment; our faculties and wishes are proportioned to the present scene; we may return without repining to our sister clod. And, if no conscious dignity whisper that we are capable of relishing more refined pleasures, the thirst of truth appears to be allayed. (V1 46) Burke’s ‘sentimental jargon’ (V1 63) assumes a happy proportion between faculties and environment, but the assumption that we can remain at such a point of rest deludes itself, because without the imagining of ends to our actions we will regress into barbarism. We may think that we are staying still, but in fact we are going backwards. The power of the imagination, then, needs to be put to a new use, in that it must begin to create a new aesthetic consonance between truth and imaginable forms of rational pleasure. Yet this future-orientated work of the imagination is hard to put into practice because for Wollstonecraft, as well as for Kant, man is anthropologically predisposed to accept prevailing conditions, ‘warped wood’ as Kant describes him (KPW 46). Prone to exempt himself from common laws of his own making, Kant argues that man ‘requires a master to break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will under which everyone can be free’ (KPW 46). But fatally, this master too will only ever be an animal requiring a master, leading to an infinite regress in arguments about political legitimacy that Rousseau’s ambiguous political metaphor had set out to resolve.

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Wollstonecraft concurs with Burke that ‘till we can see the remote consequences of things, present calamities must appear in the ugly form of evil, and excite our commiseration’ (V1 48). In particular, our capacity for sympathy proves itself to be counter-purposive here, since it ‘compels man to feel for man, and almost restrains the hand that would amputate a limb to save the whole body’ (V1 48). Given these anthropological limitations on our capacity to see or to imagine future good where we suffer present evil, sympathetic limitations that also proscribe Burke’s reflection on the French Revolution, how do we set about deducing a virtuous and rational insight into futurity? Initially, this takes place through a challenge to the sentimental bonds that Burke claims hold society together with an innate and hereditary justice. ‘The perpetuation of property in our families is one of the privileges’ that Burke contends for; yet ‘it would not be very difficult to prove that the mind must have a very limited range that thus confines its benevolence to such a narrow circle’. Indeed, such a confining of sympathy ‘may be included in the sordid calculations of blind self-love’, because often it does not issue in kindness to the members of the family themselves, but rather in their being treated like slaves, with a demand of ‘due homage for all the property . . . transferred to them during their lives’. Like Rousseau’s Julie, the child is forced to give up on ‘sacred ties’ and ‘to do violence to a natural impulse’ in order to fulfil the contract of inheritance with parents (V1 52–3). Benevolence is not, then, the watchword for the contemporary family; and Wollstonecraft’s works are littered with tyrannical fathers, dissolute husbands and ineffectual mothers. The illusion of benevolence is that what appears to be a private and delimited act of goodness, when seen from a public standpoint, is rather an act of egoism or self-love. Viewed already as a form of society, the family both perpetuates and instantiates the injustices of society at large. Family feeling, when a social compact is based on the distribution of property, is not a ‘natural impulse’, indeed it beggars the universal benevolence that it stands in for. What Wollstonecraft proposes instead is something far more radical; a reconsideration of impulses which seem transgressive according to the laws of human sentiment as secretly prefiguring the imaginable ends of reason. The apparently natural benevolence of the family, then, is rather a denatured product of property relations that coerces family members into giving up on their natural impulses, a nuanced twist on the ambiguous social/ natural status of the family in Rousseau. Passionate attachments in the children of the family, however, at least have the virtue of being products of nature, uncorrupted by property. But Wollstonecraft stakes an even bolder claim for such passions, which seem to prefigure rational cultivation:

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The passions are necessary auxiliaries of reason; a present impulse pushes us forward, and when we discover that the game did not deserve the chace, we find that we have gone over much ground, and not only gained many new ideas, but a habit of thinking. The exercise of our faculties is the great end, though not the goal we had in view when we started with such eagerness. (V1 46) The passions that Wollstonecraft has in mind here are often socially transgressive, and so the capacity to form romantic attachments that are not sanctioned by parents might have the end result, if these passions were licensed, of leading to a more equal distribution of property. They also have the virtue of challenging the kind of Burkean sensibility whereby feeling always serves the interests of the established order of things (in this case, the social equal who is chosen by the parents as a spouse for the child, in order to maintain the bulwark of wealth). But perhaps the most interesting dimension of Wollstonecraft’s description of passion here is the way in which it yields a temporal unfolding of reason. The passions themselves may well oppose reason, in that they are based on impulses which set ends that may turn out not to have merited the effort to attain them. But the passion itself may blindly bring about the cultivation of the higher faculties, by inculcating a certain habit of thinking which remains when the passion itself subsides. In Kant’s philosophy of history, it is the very fact that our impulses contradict the end-setting capacity of reason that spurs us on to the cultivation of reason. Inclination was understood to be counter-purposive, to the extent that the threat of stagnation that it suggested encouraged the antithetical development of reason and its imagining of higher ends. As Susan Shell argues, Kant came to look favourably on the counter-purposiveness of ‘economic luxury and the female ‘‘refinement’’ of society’ as a spur to rational progress.42 In Wollstonecraft’s account of passion, what seems at first sight to be antithetical to reason, the formation of a mistaken ideal, serves in fact as an educative ‘auxiliary of reason’. Once Wollstonecraft has committed herself to this position, she faces an ambiguity in her description of the secret rational potential of passion. In effect she is proposing that reason may arise, anthropologically, through an impulsive and violent resistance to established authority which may itself turn out to be delusive, but that is valuable for the way in which it sets the rational faculties of the child in motion. Passion is conceived to be an instinct which it is the purpose of rational control to convert into virtue, and to this extent it is opposed to Burke’s notion of ‘inbred sentiments’ (V1 64). Sentiment, or refined feeling, is rather something that must be created. Wollstonecraft then commits herself to a view that instinct and appetite are

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all that humans are born with; we have no moral nature, but must rather formulate our own morality out of the capacity to reason that inheres in our social condition. ‘Children are born ignorant,’ she writes, ‘the passions, are neither good nor evil dispositions, till they receive a direction . . . called conscience’ (V1 64). The direction taken by the passions may, at best, be fostered by enlightened educational practice, or indeed they may become productively cultivated into reason through resistance to unjust familial law. But Wollstonecraft is equally prepared to entertain the notion that we have varying innate dispositions or receptivities towards the educative potential of passion. Continuing her discussion of the human capacity to mistake evil as the source of happiness, Wollstonecraft claims that ‘to labour to increase human happiness by extirpating error, is a masculine godlike affection’: Men who possess uncommon sensibility, whose quick emotions shew how closely the eye and heart are connected, soon forget the most forcible sensations. Not tarrying long enough in the brain to be subject to reflection, the next sensations, of course, obliterate them. Memory, however, treasures up these proofs of native goodness; and the being who is not spurred on to any virtuous act, still thinks itself of consequence, and boasts of its feelings. Why? Because the sight of distress, or an affecting narrative, made its blood flow with more velocity, and the heart, literally speaking, beat with sympathetic emotion. We ought to beware of confounding mechanical instinctive sensations with emotions that reason deepens, and justly terms the feelings of humanity. This word discriminates the active exertions of virtue from the vague declamation of sensibility. (V1 89) Wollstonecraft is keen here to distinguish the mechanistic physiology of sentimentalism, which involves an unhealthy storing up of previous sensations in the memory, from the conversion of sensation into virtuous action, with its concomitant act of forgetting previous sensations. Passion is only socially productive to the extent that it occurs strongly but can be overcome and converted into action rather than stored up in memory; Rousseau’s Julie provides the test case for this capacity. Just as sentimentalism is counter-purposive in terms of social development, its affecting narratives forestall the conversion of mechanical sensation into properly rational emotions. But the capacity to let go of the mistaken ideal of passion, to forget the impulse rather than to convert it into memory and store it up is itself a function of ‘uncommon sensibility’. The suggestion seems to be that certain beings are privileged with an innate capacity to convert their passions into something of higher worth.

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This indeed seems to go against the democratic tenor of Wollstonecraft’s argument, its attempt to imagine equality in property relations. Rather, it seems here that ‘uncommon sensibility’ has been substituted for Burke’s inequality in property as a form of social distinction. One potential resolution to this contradiction is hinted at slightly earlier in Wollstonecraft’s argument, and it concerns the power of imagination which, according to eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, as Barbara Taylor reminds us, enables the creative genius to allow grosser minds to share in his vision. Satirizing Burke’s earlier agitation against what he saw as King George’s interference with parliament, Wollstonecraft claims to be ‘astonished that you did not tremble at every step, lest Heaven should avenge on your guilty head the insult offered to its vicegerent’, before concluding that ‘the conscience that is under the direction of transient ebullitions of feeling, is not very tender or consistent, when the current runs the other way’ (V1 60). This attack on the waywardness of a sentimental mindset leads Wollstonecraft on into a reflection on madness (in what is also a guarded attack on Burke’s relation to the king), as a state in which ‘when reason gone, we know not where, the wild elements of passion clash, and all is horror and confusion’ (V1 60). From here, she reflects on the relation between madness and the ‘fine phrensy’ that leads to artistic creation: Poetry therefore naturally addresses the fancy, and the language of passion is with great felicity borrowed from the heightened picture which the imagination draws of sensible objects concentred by impassioned reflection. And, during this ‘fine phrensy’, reason has no right to rein-in the imagination, unless to prevent the introduction of supernumerary images; if the passion is real, the head will not be ransacked for stale tropes and cold rodomontade. I now speak of the genuine enthusiasm of genius, which, perhaps, seldom appears, but in the infancy of civilization; for as this light becomes more luminous reason clips the wing of fancy – the youth becomes a man. Whether the glory of Europe is set, I shall not now enquire; but probably the spirit of romance and chivalry is in the wane; and reason will gain by its extinction. (V1 60–1) The ‘fine phrensy’ of artistic creation is a reference to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the argument is neo-Platonic in character, in its description of artistic genius as a state of temporary or circumscribed madness licensed by reason.43 The circumscription works in two ways. Either the madness is permitted only in those who have an uncommon power of genius which is distinguished by the reality of its passions from the delusory ima-

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ginings of an overheated sensibility, or that poetic genius is historical in character, and with the steady march of reason and modernization, the genius will become a distinct human species. Wollstonecraft is in effect proposing a personified view of history, whereby mankind’s attainment of rational maturity entails the end of primitive creativity (‘the youth becomes a man’). As for the individual, so too for mankind as a whole the delusive but ‘real’ passion which sets in motion the faculties that will become rational are given up on the attainment of maturity. Hanging on to them would lead to the sourness and contradictions of Burke’s aesthetic. Wollstonecraft is then highly dismissive of contemporary art, claiming that ‘[i]n modern poetry the understanding and memory often fabricate the pretended effusions of the heart, and romance destroys all simplicity; which, in works of taste, is but a synonymous word for truth’ (V1 61). She appears to be willing to sacrifice any aesthetic productivity to the culture of reason. The attack on contemporary art is aimed primarily at Burke, and Wollstonecraft claims that ‘[t]he turgid bombast of some of your periods fully proves these assertions’ (V1 61). Burke then fits into this argument, as an example of what happens to an untimely aesthetic sensibility, how an uncommon creative capability will become bound up with tyranny and oppression in the new empire of light and reason that Wollstonecraft proposes. Yet in the context of personal development, Wollstonecraft’s argument suggests a difficulty about what to do with individuals without an uncommon sensibility, those whose passions cannot be said to prefigure reason or indeed those who refuse to give up on the memory of their passions once they subside, turning them instead into overweening sensibility. In the sphere of art, the problem is rather one of what to do with the aesthetic genius who will not give up on their aesthetic capabilities or convert them into the service of reason, and who will as such refuse to acknowledge the process of modernization around them. Perhaps Wollstonecraft is challenging the very usefulness of an aesthetic sensibility in this new society. This is where an understanding of Rousseau’s impact on her argument, and indeed an awareness of the latent presence of neo-Platonism, proves instructive. Wollstonecraft wants to suggest an opposition between imagination and reason once the category of philosophical truth has been formulated. The kind of licence that reason once allowed the frenzy of poetic creation is now proscribed, since the advent of a concept of truth seems to entail that artistic creation can only ever now be understood as illusion, and politically dangerous illusion at that. But even though Wollstonecraft is highly suspicious of the potentially dangerous role that the artistic genius might play in an age of reason, an historical understanding of art seems

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precisely to serve the interests of this rational age. Rational self- and historical development involves a capacity to overcome the limited view proposed by early passion and the productions of artistic genius, but these are not negated in their being cancelled out; rather, the historical understanding of them that is taken on allows for a persistent recognition of what an age of reason entails through a description of it in mistakenly passionate terms. Rousseau’s description of the social contract entailed, according to Judith Shklar, the use of a metaphor with a negation; because Rousseau’s use of terms such as ‘sovereign’ deliberately referred to concepts that it intended to overcome, the word could point away from the familiarity of its received meaning. This also meant, I have suggested, that Rousseau’s contradictory depictions of the family as a product and a first face of civil society were constitutive to an understanding of his sense of history. Similarly, for all of her attack on a sentimental view of truth, Wollstonecraft plays out her own regression into a sentimental depiction of a rational future. I want to suggest that rather than contradicting the formal and intellectual argument for rational truth, such depictions are similarly constitutive in their contradictions. Describing the distribution of the land of aristocracy’s pleasure gardens equally among the poor, Wollstonecraft offers a vision of the future that she is proposing: But if, instead of sweeping pleasure-grounds, obelisks, temples, and elegant cottages, as objects for the eye, the heart was allowed to beat true to nature, decent farms would be scattered over the estate, and plenty smile around. Instead of the poor being subjected to the griping hand of an avaricious steward, they would be watched over with fatherly solicitude, by the man whose duty and pleasure it was to guard their happiness, and shield from rapacity the beings who, by the sweat of their brow, exalted him above his fellows. (V1 93) Throughout the Vindication of the Rights of Man, Wollstonecraft challenges both an aristocratic aesthetics of spectacle, and a bourgeois sensibility which in the case of Burke serves to bolster the aristocratic aesthetic. But her own vision of a future governed by reason and utility imagines the authority of a sentimental father over the estate, and this form of authority is converted into a protective, rather than exploitative, impulse through an alignment of pleasure and duty. Like Rousseau in La Nouvelle Heloise and his Discourse on Inequality, Wollstonecraft challenges an aristocratic aesthetic by reimagining, rather than abolishing, the structural authority of the family that underlies this aesthetic. This imagining of a sentimental political authority of the future must be read, as in Rousseau, alongside a powerful scepticism

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about the capacity of the contemporary family to provide a model for a just society. It is important to bear in mind that Wollstonecraft is suspicious of the claims of feeling because of the dangerous and contradictory reactions engendered by the culture of sensibility, according to which a ‘mysterious instinct is supposed to reside in the soul, that instantaneously discerns truth, without the tedious labour of ratiocination’. This instinct, she tells us, ‘has been termed common sense, and more frequently sensibility’ (V1 62). But while instinctive feeling does not provide an adequate basis for rational truth (even though, as we have seen, it may well offer a first moment, if the sensibility is uncommon), this is not to say that feeling itself cannot be a product of reason: Sacred be the feelings of the heart! Concentred in a glowing flame, they become the sun of life; and without his invigorating impregnation, reason would probably lie in helpless inactivity, and probably never bring forth her only legitimate offspring – virtue. But to prove that virtue is really an acquisition of the individual, and not the blind impulse of unerring instinct, the bastard vice has often been begotten by the same father. (V1 63) Far from being a formalist who denies the contribution of feeling to reason, Wollstonecraft suggests that we must honour feelings at the least as the first, generative moment of reason, even though it seems finally unclear in the first Vindication as to how this positive generation of reason is to be distinguished from the bastard effusions of sensibility. Wollstonecraft is faced with what is fundamentally a Kantian dilemma of describing a universal truth which can only be known anthropologically through sentiment, whose law it comes to challenge. The defence of a power of reason and a notion of moral duty that is autonomous from instinct, and yet itself productive of rational feelings, governs Kant’s contemporary attack on moral sentiment, and it is to that attack that I turn in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 2

Reflective Judgement as Symbolic Cognition

DECONSTRUCTION AND REFLECTION Kant’s use of symbolic discourse in his critical philosophy describes a fundamental peculiarity of judgement, whereby it finds itself capable of subsuming a world of appearances to the a priori categories of experience (CPR 226–8), even though Kant is committed to the view that the origin of these sensible appearances is independent of the judgements of the understanding. In particular, his account of reflective judgement in the Critique of Judgement (1790) aims to resolve the aporetic account of human understanding opened up in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87) whereby judgement shows itself to be uncannily familiar with an intuitable world that is yet heterogeneous to the understanding. Symbols, firstly in the form of the schema, in the idea of the typic in the Critique of Practical Reason, and then later on in the Critique of Judgement in Kant’s anthropomorphic account of reflective judgement itself (which is ‘symbolic’ to the extent that it annexes an analogy to cognition), cover the space of this aporetic familiarity and difference between sensible appearances and the form of the understanding. For later idealism, such symbolic gestures register a failure of nerve in Kant’s account of human selfconsciousness. Kant, according to the idealist interpretation, resists the possibility that an exterior, objective world might take on its objective identity through the determination of self-consciousness, surrendering his account of consciousness instead to the impossible formalism of opposed a priori forms of intuition and the table of categories, which are mediated in a symbolic sleight of hand and through the assumption that the real ground of intuition is unthinkable.1 My contention here will be that Kant’s use of symbolism is instead performative, to the extent that it registers human judgement’s acknowledgement that the intuitable world is independent of the ways in which judgement takes it in, while also offering a type of metadescription of the ways in which judgement is prone to, and capable of, taking that world in. This entails ultimately, in the ‘Critique of Teleological

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Judgement’, that the symbol entertains the possibility that knowledge may misapprehend an opaque intuitable world that escapes the human power of judgement. Symbolic discourse therefore orientates knowledge claims that cannot justifiably be given up, while inscribing within human knowledge the imagining of its own boundaries (which entails a further imagining of what lies beyond those boundaries). These claims will be developed in full over the next three chapters. This chapter will offer a preliminary articulation of Kant’s theory of reflective judgement, and of its role in attempting to settle unresolved claims about knowledge from the first Critique by making room for morality. It will proceed initially through a demonstration of how the idealist critique of reflection has been perpetuated in contemporary critical discourse, and of how this idealist inheritance had, until fairly recently, served to foreclose any critical awareness of dimensions to Kant’s argument which might offer alternative responses to the idealist critique. The intention here will be to recover the specificity of Kant’s argument by uncovering its misapprehension in current thought. These claims will receive a full rehearsal over the next two chapters, which will demonstrate in more detail how contemporary misapprehensions of Kant’s system can often prove instructive to an attempt to recover his critical position. Indeed, the very idea that modes of misapprehension might contribute to the possibility of critical truth is implicit in Kant’s own uses of symbolic discourse, which show Kant to respond proleptically to his later deconstructors. Rodolphe Gasche´’s study of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, The Tain of the Mirror, understands the properly philosophical project of deconstruction (as opposed to the derivative, literary-critical version that developed in America – a revealing hierarchy in itself) to offer a critique of the philosophy of reflection, which philosophy Gasche´ dates from Descartes.2 According to Gasche´, reflection and reflexivity are ‘precisely what will not fit Derrida’s work – not because he would wish to refute or reject them in a dream of immediacy, but because his work questions reflection’s unthought, and thus the limits of its possibility’ (6). A few pages later, Gasche´ shows his indebtedness to Hegel for his concept of reflection: In the thinking of thinking [. . .] reflexivity serves at once as a medium, the method, and the foundation by which philosophy grounds itself within itself [. . .] In other words, self-reflection grounds the autonomy of philosophy as the knowledge that is most free. (15) In his response to Gasche´ in The Limits of Disenchantment, Peter Dews puts this position more clearly as the source of Hegel’s critique of Kantian

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reflection, which latter (according to Hegel at least) describes transcendental conditions of empirical experience in a way that makes necessary the thinking of an unthinkable ground of experience in the idea of the noumenon: Kantian categories specify transcendental conditions of the experience of objects, if by this we mean knowledge of ‘appearances.’ But they can also be seen as embodying conditions of the ‘impossibility’ of experience, if we insist that experience in the emphatic sense must involve an encounter with the world as it ultimately is, not with one aspect of a reality of which the other aspect is constitutively inaccessible. Thus Hegel asserts against Kant, in the shorter Logic: ‘It argues an utter want of consistency to say, on the one hand, that the understanding only knows phenomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this knowledge, by such statements as ‘‘Cognition can go no further’’.’3 In his description of Kant’s idea of reflection, Gasche´ bases his attack on Kant more on Hegel’s ‘first critique of the paradigm of reflection’ (21) than on any sustained encounter with Kant’s own argument. Gasche´ writes that reflection, ‘as belonging to understanding, opens differences and perpetuates them as fixed and unalterable oppositions, because understanding, or the intellect, is for Kant ‘‘the absolute immovable, insuperable finitude of human reason’’’ (26). The quotation is from Hegel’s reading of Kant rather than from Kant himself, which would seem to confirm Peter Dews’ view that Gasche´ ‘operates with an extremely trite historical account of Hegel’s relation to his predecessors, one whose outline was first made canonical by Hegel himself in his lectures on the philosophy of history’ (124). This indebtedness to Hegel might be understood as part of a wider failure on the part of philosophical deconstruction to get clear of the paradigm of reflection that it claims to be critiquing, because of its excessive dependence on Hegel’s critique of reflection and thus his definition of what reflection is. For Manfred Frank, even the ‘critics of subjectivity’ (among whom he includes Heidegger and Derrida) ‘have never seriously questioned the notion that the state of affairs ‘‘subjectivity’’ is correctly described as the auto-reflexivity of thinking’.4 For Frank, it must be stated, ‘Kant’s conception of the essence of subjectivity remained definitive for the philosophy of his successors’, but that conception is at least not reduced to its Hegelian interpretation. Like Habermas, then, Frank entertains the notion that the paradigm of reflective self-consciousness might simply be wrong, a misapprehension of how humans experience the world, and suggests that it might be abandoned wholesale.5 But in the essay quoted from above, this notion depends less on a Habermasian notion of communicative reason than

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on the suggestion that we have real knowledge of ourselves and of our mental states that is non-specular, that does not depend on reflection, and which might even have an intuitive immediacy. As Andrew Bowie has emphasized, Frank takes his notion of an immediate self-consciousness which is non-reflective, and which here seems intiuitive, from Schleiermacher’s Romanticism.6 Heidegger, argues Frank, unlike his Romantic forebears, ‘does not know the difference between reflexive self-representation (Selbstvorstellung) and the feeling of self that does not rest on representation’ (224, my emphasis), This lack of differentiation is inherited by Heidegger’s ‘neo-structuralist pupils’ (225), Derrida chief among them, in their critique of the specularity of auto-affection. But for Frank, what we call selfconsciousness is ‘not something relational at all’ (232). Rather than understanding deconstruction as an attempt to ‘think reflection’s unthought’, as does Gasche´, to bring the non-conceptual or preconceptual ‘tain’ to the mirror of reflection’s conceptuality, Frank understands philosophical deconstruction (and he shares with Gasche´ this distinction between properly philosophical and literary-critical modes of deconstruction, according Derrida some level of philosophical respect) as a sceptical response to speculative thought that keeps the paradigm of reflection in place. Thus in Derrida’s critique of auto-affection, as described by Frank, the transcendental self, in undergoing the specular process through which it claims to uncover its identity in the other, discovers that it is in fact produced in this specular movement, and so cannot get back to its transcendental identity (229). Although reflection may turn out to be, in Derrida’s argument, a barricaded street, Frank claims that he remains unwilling to think an alternative to the specular model that his argument feeds from. The deconstructive critique of reflection suffers from an excessive dependence on Hegel’s definition of what reflection is, and on a rather summary reading of Hegel. Robert B. Pippin’s book Hegel’s Idealism is important to any effort to challenge the deconstructive critique, because it frames Hegel’s own critique of reflection with an account of how Hegel fundamentally accepts the idealism that he claims to find in Kant’s system, and that he wants simply to extend. Hegel’s claim, according to Pippin, is that Kantian idealism limits its account of consciousness to the concept of a private, interior subject or spectator, which must instead be extended into a public and communal definition of spirit that rejects Kant’s a priori distinction between sensibility and intellect. But here Hegel may well have misunderstood the apparent privacy of the Kantian consciousness, or better the Kantian self. It is possible to challenge the opposition between the public and private on which, according to Pippin, Hegel’s reading of Kant proceeds. The privacy of Kantian consciousness may be already a facet of a

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common or public standpoint. Karl Ameriks, in another attempt to recapture the cultural and intellectual particularity of Kant’s argument against its misappropriations by Kant’s first readers, friends and foes alike, has described ‘the non-Cartesian pattern of Kant’s deductions, which begin not with private representations but instead with common judgements’.7 Ameriks’ claim is that the Hegelian criticism of the ‘privacy’ of the Kantian self needs to be set against Kant’s attempt to think from, and to legislate, a ‘common’ public standpoint of reason. This model might be extended through an understanding of Kant’s notion of moral self-consciousness operating at once as a private act of conscience and as a public act of legislation. More generally, Howard Caygill’s study Art of Judgement recovers crucial dimensions to our understanding of reflection as it was transformed in the German Enlightenment from a search for rational perfection into a fundamentally formative activity. For instance, in his reading of Herder’s account of reflection or Besonnenheit in his philosophies of language and history, Caygill describes how Herder’s notion of aesthetic proportion entails ‘the realization of human productive and communicative capacities through reflective judgement’,8 which effects ‘a break with the predominantly visual paradigm of perception endemic to the German enlightenment, with its corollary of a passive, policed subject’ (182). According to Manfred Frank, it is against the ongoing tyranny of the visual paradigm in the philosophy of self-consciousness, the disclosure of Being ‘via the spectacles of the model of sense perception (or intuition)’ (221) that Heidegger bases his attempt to think the difference between Being and beings. But this visual paradigm for knowledge was, by Caygill’s reading of Herder, already under significant pressure in the thinking of the late Enlightenment. This attempt to think of reflection as a mode of activity beyond rationalist paradigms of perception partly informs Kant’s polemic with Herder that ran throughout the later 1780s, as I will show in Chapter 3. Caygill’s study also then offers resources for an attempt to look outside of the idealistic interpretation of Kant that, until recently, still dominated our reception of him.

KANT ON MORAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS The ongoing critique of reflection from a phenomenological standpoint is guilty of ignoring the origins of reflection in an attempt to mediate between political, cognitive and emergent aesthetic forms of judgement, a mediation that took place partly through the development of theories of moral selfconsciousness. Hegel’s effort, described in detail by Pippin, to make of the

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‘private’ Kantian consciousness something public and communal ignores the ways in which this privacy was, for Kant as well as for Rousseau, the founding principle of a public sphere, as Rousseau’s complex political metaphors demonstrate. The same is true of Kant’s moral philosophy, in ways that have a considerable bearing on our understanding of his critique of epistemology. The Hegelian challenge to Kant, as described by Gasche´ and Peter Dews, has Kant caught up in a confusion between ‘method and formulation’, as Gasche´ puts it.9 The limits of cognition are determined through an equally determinate thinking of what lies beyond cognition that is not owned up to in Kant’s argument. In order to know that thinking can go no further, it must already have gone further. Kant’s noumenon, in other words, registers a failure of nerve in his partial idealism, a failure to think through the absolute condition of thought. In Pippin’s account of Hegel’s attempt to revise Kant’s view of the ‘objective validity’ of the a priori powers of the understanding, for example, this validity is equivocal in Kant to the extent that it ‘can mean something weaker, a proof that there can be no experience that is uncategorizable, that could conflict with the required conceptual distinctions, or something stronger, that objects do exhibit the distinctions we demand’ (38). For Kant, however, there can be no such equivocation because schematism limits concepts to a typically human way of knowing objects, defined by a form of sensibility which restricts concepts of objects to a condition of their appearing within a spatial horizon. Without the ‘restricting condition’ of the schema, it is emphatically not the case that the categories could know things ‘as they are’, not simply ‘how they appear’ (CPR 276). The schematism of time and space is what gives the very possibility of objects of knowledge. Without the schema, ‘the categories are only functions of the understanding for concepts, but do not represent any object’ (CPR 277). Perhaps the issue of reflection relates to a distinction in the culture of the Enlightenment between transcendental legislation and practice, which distinction gets elided in the later critique of reflection. In his essay ‘Ancient postmodernism in the philosophy of Rousseau’, Robert Wokler claims that ‘[b]efore all major political theorists before or after him, Rousseau distinguishes right from power, the formulation of principle from its application – in this context the moral will that determines laws from the physical force that implements them’.10 Rousseau famously separates the legislative and executive capacities of the state in the Social Contract, and insists on the sovereign legislation of the general will, such that the people never execute the laws that they institute. Each member of the sovereign formulates law through a private reflection on the general will; but if the sovereign were also executive, the

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danger would be that this private reflection on the public will might enable private interests to corrupt the purity of the laws. The ‘object of the laws is always general’; thus ‘any function [of the law] that relates to an individual does not belong to the legislative power’ (SC 37). The privacy of the reflective act of legislation is to be understood as radically distinct from the mere privacy of personal interest. Rousseau’s famously paradoxical claim that citizens are ‘forced to be free’, according to Wokler, then ‘means scarcely more than that citizens must always be bound by their own agreements, even when they feel inclined to disregard them’ (424). The characteristic of moral liberty that such a discrimination describes, argues Wokler, is ‘its peculiarly reflexive element of self-prescription’ (425) which ‘mediates a fundamentally Greek notion of ‘autonomy’ through the language of ‘conscience’ drawn from the Protestant Reformation’ (426–7). Similarly for Kant in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the autonomy of the moral will is derived from a mediation of public and private forms of judgement. A critical account of the moral law must emphasize its not being based on sensibility, even though such a separation cannot meaningfully be understood to constitute the activity of the moral will itself. The subtle relation between the deduction of the a priori law in its purity, and the application of the moral law, which application will always entangle the moral will with a practical anthropology, has been missed by many readers of Kant’s alleged ethical formalism. Allen Wood’s study Kant’s Ethical Thought offers a crucial rearticulation of this interplay between reason and nature, by arguing convincingly that ‘although Kant’s arguments are applications of an a priori law, they always rest mainly on claims about contingent, empirical matters of fact’.11 It is the intersection of a priori law and its manifestation through empirical nature, the nature of this ‘resting’ of the former on the latter, that calls forth figurative and symbolic dimensions in Kant’s moral argument. As generations of readers of Kant’s ethical formalism have found, this complex distinction between the form of determination of law and its application is prone to confusion, unless the nature of reflective thought in Kant is fully grasped. Discussing the ‘motivational overdetermination’ of Kant’s concept of moral duty, Wood has clarified precisely this distinction: Kant says that we must strive to see that no nonmoral incentive gets mixed into the ‘determination of duty’ [. . .] This might be read as saying that we act badly if we ever let nonmoral incentives move us to do our duty. But it says no such thing. To say that we must not let nonmoral incentives mix into ‘the determination of duty’ is to say that we must not let them corrupt our judgment about what our duties are. The danger

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here is not that we may ‘do the right deed for the wrong reason,’ but that nonmoral incentives may lead us to deceive ourselves about which deeds are the right ones (as when we see an action as right just because it is easy, pleasant or advantageous). (34) The characteristic of reflective thought in Kant’s ethics, according to Wood, is that it challenges the view that there may be innate characteristics of human nature that provide an adequate determination of moral duty. Rather, the determination of duty is precisely reflexive to the extent that it requires a judgement about the rational basis of our moral action, a reflection on the process of one’s own moral judgement. While any such judgement will necessarily be obscured by the positing of an innate moral sense at the basis of our will, this is crucially not to say, as Wood shows, that the will requires the resistance of inclination or instinct in order to carry out its duties. Rather than foreclosing any material component of moral action, as we will see, Kant argues that the setting of moral ends entails the production of autonomous moral feelings as a basis for moral action. But this argument depends on a symbolic or analogical philosophical imagining of the production of natural effects through moral reason, as described by Kant’s notion of the typic. Moral self-consciousness entails an apperceptive awareness of the basis of one’s actions as lying outside of sensibility, which is a component of what Kant describes in the Groundwork as ‘common rational cognition’ rather than a critique of reason. Within epistemology, the self-consciousness of apperception is an implicit component of cognition, whereby the consciousness of an ‘I’, unified over time, is a necessary condition of understanding (CPR 232), although, as Pippin argues, it is not necessarily the case that this self-consciousness is directly attended to. But what is ‘implicitly reflexive’ in consciousness of objects is an explicit component of moral judgement. In the former, as Pippin argues, ‘I can consciously follow a rule without consciously applying a rule. This must be possible if any rule following that is not an explicit application is to be distinguished, as it should, from behaviour completely accounted for by lawlike explanations.’ (21) Moral self-consciousness, however, foregrounds the reflexivity of selfconsciousness, precisely because the application of the moral law through moral judgement is at the same time a subjection of oneself to the moral law. This application may entail the withdrawing of inclination as a principle of action which yields a higher rational satisfaction in the performance of duty, or it might entail consciousness of a ‘lower’ consonance between material and rational forms of satisfaction. But what is also foregrounded in moral judgement is the way in which the apperceptive, reflexive conscious-

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ness is engaging with a world that exceeds the legislative capacity of moral self-consciousness. As Caygill glosses the pre-critical Kant, ‘[p]ractical judgements [. . .] are subject to ‘‘special difficulties’’ because their principle is rigorously distinguished from sensibility, so making it difficult to see how its principle could possibly ever conform with intuition’. (252) In his attempt to mediate this complex relation between sensibility and rational self-determination, Kant develops his notion of the typic, whereby the moral law is applied to nature schematically. According to the definition of the moral law from the standpoint of common rational cognition that takes up the first section of the Groundwork, the law in its autonomy is described by analogy with a natural cause, as expressed in Kant’s formulation: ‘duty is the necessity of an action from respect for law’. Thus, ‘[o]nly what is connected with my will merely as ground and never as effect, what does not serve my inclination but outweighs it or at least excludes it altogether from calculations in making a choice – hence the mere law for itself – can be an object of respect and so a command’ (GMM 13). But because respect, as a feeling, might normally be understood as an effect of an empirical cause, Kant is aware that he is working with a paradox in making his argument about the spontaneous causality of duty in the pure moral law. The law is the ‘object’ of respect, which is neither the law’s cause nor its effect, but a kind of sensible accompaniment to moral action. In a footnote to this section, Kant acknowledges that it could be objected that his use of the notion of respect seeks refuge ‘in an obscure feeling’, [. . .] instead of distinctly resolving the question by means of a concept of reason. But though respect is a feeling, it is not one received by means of influence; it is, instead, a feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept and therefore specifically different from all feelings of the first kind, which can be reduced to inclination or fear. (GMM 14) This attempt to distinguish the experience of the autonomous moral will from our ordinary anthropological being through appeal to respect has troubled Kant’s readers with its obscurity. Respect is schematic, in that on one side it has the qualities of a sensation, since it is a feeling, and on the other side has the qualities of a rational-moral cognition, since it is selfwrought. For Allen Wood, the ‘Formula of the Law of Nature’, ‘Act as if the maxim of your action should through your will become a universal law of nature’ was put in place to make ‘easier’ and ‘more intuitive’ the ‘very abstract’ ‘Formula of Universal Law’, ‘Act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ (79–80). The reference to a universal law of nature in the ‘Formula of the

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Law of Nature’ seems to mix up a mechanical idea of natural necessity with the rational freedom at the basis of the moral law, which we are to think of as autonomous and self-creating. Wood argues that ‘[i]t is not wholly clear what is supposed to be the force of natural necessity here, since maxims are themselves normative principles that can be acted on only by free beings, and Kant thinks that to view an action as free is necessarily different from viewing it as falling under natural necessity’ (80). For Wood, both formulae give only contingent, not universally binding content to the abstract appeal of the Categorical Imperative, which states ‘Adopt only maxims that conform to universal law as such’, by allowing the will of a rational being to determine a sensible content to universal law before Kant has argued that the will is autonomous author of objective practical laws. This he does only in the last section of the Groundwork, ‘Transition from metaphysics of morals to the critique of pure practical reason’. Wood understands Kant to have put the cart before the horse, to have stated the content of universal law before having derived it as a product of a will that gives objective moral law. He suggests that ‘[f]rom this standpoint one cannot blame Hegel and others for thinking that the Kantian moral principle is empty and that no practical conclusions can be derived from it unless some actual laws are introduced from outside to provide it with content’, laws which are provided from the deduction of the moral will itself when the argument is allowed ‘to run its course’ (82). For Wood, Kant’s error is to allow the deduction of the moral law from a ‘common’ standpoint to apply a sensible content to the moral law before Kant offers a transcendental deduction. Kant’s commitment to the view that his critique of practical reason is consonant with our everyday practical reasoning leads him into an unnecessary formalism, because Kant must later abstract this empirical content from the moral law itself as he seeks to put ‘a metaphysics of morals before practical anthropology’ (GMM 2). Kant’s argument for the autonomy of the moral law does not mean, crucially, that he is disinterested in the complexities of nature as an immediate motive or obstruction to moral action. Kant is, rather, at pains to deduce the basis of the moral law from pure practical reason in order to combat a disinclination of human reason to act in accordance with the law, such that ‘in its weariness [reason] gladly rests’ on empirical motives ‘in a dream of sweet illusions’, with which ‘it substitutes for morality a bastard patched up from limbs of quite diverse ancestry, which looks like whatever one wants to see in it’ (GMM 35). Reason itself takes on anthropological expression here, in order to distinguish between partial notions of morality derived from a misappropriation of philosophical tradition, with their dangerous capacity to assume an innate moral sense in human beings, and transcendental aware-

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ness of a single, autonomous power of reason that exceeds this lazy synthesis of the statements of tradition. The danger of assuming a moral sense is that it lends itself to relativism: any particular contingent means might be justified as an end by claiming that it expresses a desire for the good in human nature. But again, the paradox of Kant’s argument is that a sensuous form of expressive reasoning is intended to persuade us that there is no intuitable basis for moral reason. Kant then finds himself in the difficult position of justifying pure moral principles from a common standpoint, inflected by sensibility. Crucially, Kant claims that the pathological disinclination of reason from the performance of its duty is something that we are also capable of reflexively getting to know through the cultivation of moral reason, a reflexive activity that is at once formative of the individual, of human culture, and of philosophical development.

NEGOTIATING THE TRADITIONS Kant’s moral argument describes the ways in which reason takes on moral definition within a world of independent sensibility which is not finally determined by moral reason. Human nature’s disinclination to the performance of its duty helps to uncover the source of that duty in the idea of the moral will, but sensibility also provides a further analogue for the imagined basis of the moral law in the feeling of respect. Such an argument challenges accusations of Kant’s formalism by showing that the resistance of an independent realm of sensibility was crucial to the development of Kant’s idea of reflective culture under an ethic of work and productivity, which inscribes the contingency of nature into moral reflection. Kant’s concept of the autonomous feeling of respect as the subjective manifestation of the moral law suggests that he is concerned, in his understanding of the role of sensibility in constituting moral judgement, to distance himself from the British theorists of innate moral sentiment. To this end Hume’s moral philosophy is a major target of Kant’s attempt to set the tone for the metaphysics of morals. Hume argues in A Treatise of Human Nature that to suppose an idea of duty (or what he describes as ‘the mere regard to the virtue of the action’) as the motive to moral action ‘is to reason in a circle’,12 and that rather there are distinct principles in human nature that motivate moral action. By contrast, Kant argues that the good will can only be made manifest through a concept of duty, which concept includes the conflict of this will with ‘certain subjective limitations and hindrances’ (GMM 10). For Kant, absolute moral worth is derived from actions which are done only from a sense of duty, that is actions for which

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no inclination encourages the will. Rational morality registers a deficit between empirical willing and rational desire for the good, in place of their providential harmony in the theory of moral sentiments. Kant argues in this regard that ‘reason is not sufficiently serviceable for guiding the will safely as regards its objects and the satisfaction of all our needs (which it in part even multiplies) – a purpose for which an implanted natural instinct would have led us much more surely’ (GMM 10). But although this failure to satisfy man’s needs in reason’s determination of the will refutes the description of a beautiful proportion between practical needs and human nature’s capacity to satisfy them, reason reveals its antithetical relation to human nature to be naturally purposive. Insight into the purposiveness of this antithesis is what yields, in turn, a concept of moral value: and since reason is nevertheless given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that is to influence the will; then, where nature has everywhere else gone to work purposively in distributing its capacities, that true vocation of reason must be to produce a will that is good, not perhaps as a means to other purposes, but good in itself, for which reason was absolutely necessary. (GMM 10) The very antithesis between reason’s idea of the good will and the natural will, which latter cannot imagine beyond the means to satisfy its appetite, can be understood as part of nature’s design for humanity. Reason’s ability to formulate the idea of a will which is good in itself is ‘absolutely necessary’ in the natural world, by analogy with a purposive design that everywhere else is found in nature. Reason’s conflict with nature, then, can be reassimilated into a further analogue of moral to natural purposiveness: human nature purposively struggles against human nature. By contrast, a theory of the natural moral will, precisely by representing human practical interests as continuous with the rest of nature, cannot legislate any concept of the goodness of that will. Kant shares with Mary Wollstonecraft a critique of the dangers involved in arguing that certain principles of human nature, such as natural affection, are the cause of virtuous social relations, and that certain judgements of a moral sense, such as a judgement of the moral beauty of an action, guarantee the merit of such actions. For Kant, such arguments cannot legislate a universal rational basis for moral action since they set an empirical idea of human happiness as their end, which is relative to context and so cannot provide a determination of absolute moral worth.13 Both Kant and Wollstonecraft register an understanding of how human nature cannot be taken as a guarantor of moral worth through social customs. Rather, through their

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common reading of Rousseau, they understand that nature to be subject to historical transformation. Therefore, to attempt a justification of civil society by reference to a theory of moral sentiments that serve the interests of natural society is likely to lead to despotism. Hume’s argument that the cause of morality is found in human nature rather than in a rational concept of duty uses the example of the natural affection of a parent for his child.14 But as the political philosophy developed by Rousseau and Wollstonecraft goes to show, this ‘natural’ familial affection cannot in any uncomplicated way be transplanted into a description of public morality. Kant’s argument that the moral law cannot be deduced from an anthropological theory of human nature is not, as a number of commentators have claimed, predicated on a foreclosure of an empirical theory of human nature from the description of reason. Rather, the natural antithesis between reason and nature is constitutive of the identity of each in fascinating ways. This claim can be proven equally with reference to Kant’s theoretical philosophy. If the British theory of moral sense had reduced practical reason to an expression of human nature, then the rationalist tradition of Leibniz and Wolff had reduced intuitable nature to the status of an obscure expression of rational concepts. As Kant writes in the first Critique, ‘Leibniz intellectualized the appearances, just as Locke totally sensitivized the concepts of understanding’ (CPR 372). Kant’s attempts to ‘orientate’ himself between these traditions with the development of a critique of the faculty of judgement, and to formulate an awareness of the ways in which ‘this history of judgement, tangled in other histories of metaphysics, politics, pleasure, law and production’ can state the ‘aporia of judgement’ (7), are described by Howard Caygill in Art of Judgement. In particular, Caygill succinctly describes this aporia as concerning the difficulty ‘of making the transcendental distinction of sensible and intelligible elements of knowledge from within the predicament of their combination’ (198). Caygill argues that Kant’s pre-critical engagement with Leibniz and Wolff refutes the emptiness of rational judgement, which inadequately determines the relationship between concepts and intuitable objects. For the pre-critical Kant, the rationalist principles of sufficient reason and of contradiction reduce entities to logical prediction, whereas these entities possess existential characteristics which render a purely logical description of them contradictory. Kant considered these characteristics in the context of what he describes in the first Critique as the a priori forms of intuition, space and time. These forms are said to order our experience of entities through the power of imagination, according to what Caygill describes as a ‘primitive’ (i.e. pre-logical) ‘horizon’ of sensibility opened up by the schema. This primitive differentiation of objects via a priori spatial and temporal forms of

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relation undoes the Wolffian equation of being and logic as itself a rational relation, in favour of a discrimination of intutiable objects according to ‘an existential relation which resists rational determination’. But in making this distinction, Caygill argues, Kant uncovered his own ‘aporia of judgement’ which consisted in the fact that as soon as the logical and real ground of entities were recognised as distinct, the ‘distinction had to be transgressed, for it merely formalized the bias of reason by pointing to the ‘‘empty’’ immediacy of the concept and the ‘‘blind’’ immediacy of sensibility’ (206). Kant’s transcendental distinction did no more than to restate the conflict between the British and German traditions, and he was left with the problem of accounting for reason’s tendency or ‘bias’ towards bringing the primitive, existentially real quality of objects to rational determination. Kant set about describing this synthesis with the idea of the schema in the first Critique, whereby intuitable objects are brought to conceptualization through a process of representation by intuitable symbols. The characteristic of the schema, as Caygill shows, is that it restricts logical predication to the condition of spatial position. The place of entities within a spatial horizon is what restricts rational cognition to an independent world of intuition, even as it realizes the identity of those entities through their spatial differentiation from one another. Kant finds the rationalist tradition of Leibniz and Wolff to pay insufficient attention to space and time as transcendental conditions of experience. Leibniz, writes Kant in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, had ‘before his eyes solely their concepts [i.e. objects], and not their position in the intuition in which alone the objects can be given’ (CPR 372). Similarly, Leibniz’s followers ignore the condition of space as a condition of the differentiation of objects, since they ‘do not recognise any opposition except that of contradiction (through which the concept of a thing would itself be cancelled out)’ (CPR 373). Kant, however, is committed to the view that the schema, the ‘third thing’ that unites sensible impressions with concepts of the understanding, is not itself a category of the understanding, even though this creates huge difficulties for thinking it. The schema ‘must be pure (without anything empirical) and yet intellectual on the one hand and sensible on the other’ (CPR 272). Similarly, since the schema is ‘always only a product of the imagination,’ Kant is at pains to distinguish it as a general condition for intuition from any individual image that might be brought before the understanding (CPR 273). By calibrating the categories with intuition through its ‘hidden art’, the schema shows that concepts are only possible with reference to an intuitable world. Kant writes that ‘although the schemata of sensibility first realize the categories, yet they likewise also restrict them, i.e., limit them to conditions that lie outside the understanding’ (CPR 276).

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In the spheres of both the metaphysics of nature and the metaphysics of morals, Kant articulates a relation between reason and intuitable nature that is unruly and difficult to legislate. Rather than providing a more rigorously determinable relation between concepts of duty and natural affection than was offered by Hume’s theory of human nature, Kant’s attempt to describe a rational basis for the concept of moral worth only covers the ground of human nature unevenly and incompletely. Instead of dictating to human nature strictly delimited boundaries within which its needs might be satisfied, reason supplements those needs with interests of its own. These interests include (as well as respect for the law) the peculiar rational ‘contentment’ that attends the performance of a morally good action, and that renders the moral worth of an action difficult to determine, since inclination and duty prove capable of entering into all manner of relationships. In a similar way, what Kant takes away from rational philosophy with one hand, the logical determination of intuitable appearances, he gives back with the other, as the ability to determine appearances through the mysterious symbolic art of schematism which covers ‘the mystery of the origin of our sensibility’, and which lies ‘too deeply hidden for us’ (CPR 376). The schema is understood as a mode of inscription, a ‘monogram of pure a priori imagination’ (CPR 274), which covers over the mystery of our judgement of the intuitable world, a mystery that Kant will inquire into further with an analogy between symbolism and schematism in the third Critique. In the chapter on ‘Beauty as the symbol of morality’, Kant uses the symbol as a way of providing concepts of reason with a relation to intuition, even though these concepts cannot have any such relation since they concern the supersensible. Thus in symbolic representation: there is a concept which only reason can think and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate, and this concept is supplied with an intuition that judgment treats in a way merely analogous to the procedure it follows in schematizing; i.e., the treatment agrees with this procedure merely in the rule followed rather than in terms of the intuition itself, and hence merely in terms of the form of reflection rather than its content. (CJ 226) Symbolism, by this definition, operates by analogy with the ‘mysterious’ art of schematism in order to bring the speculations of reason in line with the understanding’s condition for empirical concepts (i.e. by matching the concept with an intuition, although in this case the intuition seems to be formalized, emptied of sensible content). In both the practical and theoretical philosophies, Kant’s pre-logical

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‘horizon’ of ‘being’, in Caygill’s phrase, is delivered over to logical determination as an empirical simulacrum of itself. If Kant’s interest in the sphere of morals is in taking away the anthropological basis for the moral law, then in epistemology he seeks to accord nature and natural representations an independence from our power to take them in. This unruly relation between nature and reason is rendered as a problem for knowledge and morality through an exploration of the issue of purposiveness in the Critique of Judgement. Specifically, through the development of the theory of reflective judgement, the relation between reason and its anthropological expression becomes precisely an interest of reason itself.

REFLECTIVE JUDGEMENT AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL EXPRESSION At the beginning of the ‘Dialectic of Teleological Judgement’, Kant attempts to account for the problematic power of reflective judgement by holding it up against ‘determinative judgement’ which, as the act of subsuming objects ‘under laws or concepts that are given it as principles’, could never fall into an antinomy (CJ 265). Determinative judgement brings the presentation of an object to the a priori rules of the understanding in order to form cognitions through deduction. Kant refers to the example of transcendental judgement from the first Critique, whereby sensible appearances are subsumed under the categories. This is an account of the cognition of appearances that, in the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant admitted to being satisfied with, since the table of categories, as pure concepts detached from all conditions of sense-experience, cannot fall into an antinomy. Reflective teleological judgement, however, is prone to fall into an antinomy because it is inductive. That is, reflective judgement takes the ‘problematical’ and ‘special’ concept of ‘nature as technical analogously with reason’ as an indispensable guide to the judgement of the causality of the form of natural phenomena, even though this is a concept that ‘is never met with in experience, and which is only posited by the judgement in reflecting on things in order to organize experience’ (CJ1 423–4). In order to formulate systematic knowledge of nature as a whole, in other words, reason must posit an analogy between the causality of nature and the causality of artworks (a ‘technic’) which is entirely unwarranted in terms of how we experience empirical nature, but yet is also a necessary legislative substrate to the knowledge of nature’s self-organization that we attain through science. Where determinative judgement relies on the concepts of the under-

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standing in order to realize coherent presentations, reflective judgement cannot refer to a law outside itself. It is autonomous from the power of understanding and its rules, whereas determinative judgement depends on those rules in order to form cognitions. Reflective judgement, then, is ‘a principle of reflection on certain [objects] for which we have no objective law at all, no concept of the object adequate as a principle for the cases that occur’ (CJ 265). Experience sometimes brings forth particular objects for which no objective law is given – specifically, the so-called ‘natural purpose’. In the absence of an objective transcendental law, reflective judgement has to use reason in order to find a principle for these, a principle which can only have subjective validity yet that accounts for the appearance of these problematical, oxymoronic objects that appear to be at once natural and designed. Reflection can be understood, then, almost as a stop-gap to fill in the deficiencies of human understanding, until such time as the ‘law that is not yet given’ (CJ 265) can determine the object. At the same time, our experience of these objects tells us that the kind of intelligence that could have the type of objective knowledge that we reflectively seek for in them, that is knowledge of their ‘origin’ and ‘purpose’, would necessarily differ in kind from our own, since (according to the transcendental distinction) we never have objective knowledge of the origin of sensibility. Reflection can only really tell us anything for sure about the structure of our cognitive faculties, which seem predisposed to search for a rational concept that would explain the existence and purposive form of nature as something intentionally produced, in the manner of an artwork. Kant reiterates this argument about the relation between reflective judgement and cognition in more detail later on in the ‘Dialectic of Teleological Judgement’, when he offers a digression into the field of transcendental philosophy. This account, in sections 76 and 77 of the third Critique, proved to be important reading for the next generation of German idealists in their attempt to move beyond (or to complete) Kant.15 In the course of his digression, Kant picks up on the language of the first Critique by describing how in its legislation of the antinomies of teleological judgement reason is subjected to ‘regulative ideas’, derived from its advancing where the understanding cannot go (since for the concepts of the understanding ‘objective reality must be given’). These ideas are limited by the understanding to a necessary reference to the subject, ‘yet in a universal way, i.e., [as a validity] for all subjects of our species’ (CJ 284). The restriction of reflective reason’s trajectory, which can only tell us anything for sure about the receptivity of the subject, to a condition of objectivity (i.e. universality) calls forth a speculation on the universal nature of the subject. A judgement is made about the form of the human cognitive ability, taking into account

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any concept we can form of the ability of a finite rational being as such. Thus Kant is led to make the determination that ‘all thinking must be like this and cannot be otherwise – though we are not asserting that such a judgement has its basis in the object’ (CJ 284). What is exposed, however, in this account of the universal character of the human form of cognition is the presupposition of an alternative form of understanding against which the human can be compared, in order to render its essential character. Accordingly, ‘reason forever demands that we assume something or other (the original basis) as existing with unconditioned necessity’, something which is not restricted by the characteristically human distinction between concepts of actuality and ideas of possibility. But this idea, the idea of a ‘necessary being’, is an ‘indispensible idea’ for reason, while for the understanding it is an ‘unattainable problematic concept’ (CJ 285). As Kant puts it elsewhere, ‘reason has an essential need simply to presuppose, rather than to demonstrate, the existence of a supreme being’.16 This unattainable problematic concept lies at the basis of ‘our’ form of understanding the world; and it is foregrounded when human judgement encounters the ‘natural product’, of which the very possibility of making even an empirical judgement of its form seems to demand an immediate consideration of this necessary being. It is for this reason that where ‘cognizing [certain] objects is beyond the ability of our understanding, we must think them in accordance with the subjective conditions for exercising [our] powers, conditions that attach necessarily to our [i.e. human] nature’ (CJ 286). What all of this seems to entail is an empirical reinscription of human nature at the basis of ‘our’ cognition, an expressive anthropological account of the type of human understanding and its subjective needs, in order to account for the problematical (to understanding) and yet necessary (to reason) concept/idea of an absolutely necessary being. This idea is a typic or schema of reflective judgement, an obscure condition of possibility without which a critical account of human cognition cannot, it seems, make sense of itself. Similarly, even though the subjective universality that is a presupposition of reflective teleological judgement is described partly through a reversion to the language of the theoretical philosophy, it also works by analogy with the moral law, since this is a type of judgement that also carries a universal imperative for a subjective principle that orders nature. Kant takes it as indisputable that, according to the ‘range’ and ‘limits’ of the human cognitive powers, the concept of an intention is indisputably necessary when judging certain particular forms of nature, ‘even for our empirical use of reason’ (CJ 280). In terms of our experience of natural forms, reflection opens up an antinomy between the appearance of particular

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objects of nature for which no objective law is given, and of the whole of nature as a possible law-bound system, which latter is an idea that is cognizable by the human understanding. Kant’s argument is that we also need a concept of our relationship to these ‘particular’ objects, but that this is an unattainable or problematic concept. The maxims which are drawn out of reflective judgement’s subjective principle for the encounter with such objects still, however, ‘allow us to arrive at concepts, even if these were to be concepts of reason; and reflective judgement needs such concepts whenever it seeks so much as to get to know nature in terms of its empirical laws’ (CJ 266). The universal laws of the understanding do not determine the particular forms of nature because of a contingency in the way in which the particular form is brought before the understanding (even though the understanding has a concept of the type of object brought to it), because ‘even if different things agree in a common characteristic, the variety of ways in which they may come before our perception is contingent’ (CJ 290). Or as John Zammito argues, discussing the problem of ‘empirical entailment’ in Kant’s teleological argument, ‘what can hold for all objects cannot completely determine any one in particular’.17 The necessary being is then imagined as a being for whom this contingency in the presentation of the object would not exist. It is the characteristic of the human intellectus ectypus to proceed by attempting to subsume a particular part of intuition to the analytically universal concept, whereas the alternative type of understanding, the intellectus archetypus, would proceed from an intuition of the synthetically universal to the particular. Reflection does not offer the logical stability of determinative judgement, yet it foregrounds certain problems in the original account of cognition from the first Critique, particularly in the chapter on the schema and Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’. Specifically, reflection highlights and attempts to overcome the presence of the ‘aporia of judgement’ described by Caygill, whereby the transcendental distinction between sensibility and intellect is transgressed by reason in acts of judgement. What is uncovered in reflection is that reason seems to know in advance that sensuous natural particulars will prove subsumable by concepts; the incapacity of ‘our species’ to formulate objective concepts of the existence and form of natural particulars is made up for by the pseudo-conceptuality of reflective judgement’s subjectively universal principle. In the third Critique, to reiterate, Kant discovers that the form of sensuous natural particulars resists logical subsumption, which formulates an antinomy between the cognition of nature as a whole system and the uncognizable basis of its particular forms. This antinomy affords a difference of perspective on the act of cognition, by

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simultaneously disrupting and foregrounding reason’s confidence or foreknowledge that cognition will happen. Kant’s attempts to overcome this antinomy through the theory of reflective judgement can then elucidate something of reason’s character, and in particular its ‘need’ to assume that sensuous nature will be subsumed by concepts. Reflective judgement attempts to get around the resistance of the form of natural particulars to concepts with a subjective principle that is imposed onto nature analogically, as if it were a concept.

AFTER KANT Kant’s argument has been read both as a politically libertarian description of an originary form-giving quality within sensuous nature, and as the coercive formalization of that natural heterogeneity into restrictive subjective laws that objectify themselves in a rhetorical sleight of hand. As Caygill’s description of reason’s orientation shows, Kant certainly seems to liberate sensibility from the restrictive rationalizations of Wolff through his peculiar account of the schema; yet this may belie the ways in which Kant’s system is still weighted towards rational disclosure of the basis of nature’s form or the licensing of an imagination of that basis. The anthropological expressivism of reason at these key moments of tension in Kant’s argument, its exposure of its ‘needs’, may highlight this self-confidence on reason’s part that contingent forms will prove subsumable to reason. As Kant says in his chapter on the architectonic of pure reason in the ‘Transcendental Doctrine of Method’, in the second half of the Critique of Pure Reason, ‘we will always return to metaphysics as to a beloved from whom we have been estranged’, with metaphysics understood as ‘the culmination of all culture of human reason’ (CPR 700–1). Closer attention to Kant’s relation to the new anthropological and natural sciences of his moment in recent criticism has sought, however, to recapture a sense of the autonomy which Kant accords the appearing of objects in sensibility. In metaphysical thought prior to Kant, the interaction of the faculties was simplified, according to Susan Meld Shell, through ‘traditional dichotomies’ into a hierarchical ordering of an active masculine intellect that imprints its form onto supine, passive feminine matter.18 Yet according to Caygill, this transcendental distinction undoes itself in Kant’s cooperative schematic activity of the faculties. The capacity of ‘affection’, as Caygill describes it, is more accurately seen as ‘a negotiation of activity and passivity’. For Caygill, the uncritical assumption of a ‘contrast of the utter passivity of intuition and the activity of understanding is belied by Kant’s view of

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them as specific but complementary dispositions of the same ‘faculty of representation’ (241). In a similar way, Susan Meld Shell’s rereading of Kant’s teleology focuses on the activity of epigenesis, whereby matter is ‘itself productive or able both to give form and receive it’.19 The idea is then seen as a basis for recognizing specific presentations, rather than the ‘formal’ cause of a composite whole. The subjectively universal perspective afforded by reflective judgement on natural phenomena suggests at once a prior autonomy of sensibility to logical law, its active participation in its own formalization, and a type of foreknowledge on the part of reason that the sensuous will prove subsumable. But does reason project an autonomous character onto material nature that it finds in itself, or does it attempt to legislate an epigenetically selfforming nature with the use of imperfect subjective principles? An apparent liberation of sensuous nature from its traditional passivity seems to characterize Kant’s description of reflective judgement. Kant’s argument also seems to depend on a transcendental-anthropological account of human cognition, whereby reflection historicizes cognition through the imagining of a type of judgement of the future, a future metaphysics that operates according to ‘the law that is not yet given’.20 Further, the argument operates through a comparative understanding of human intellect in relation to an intuitive intellect that is not subject to the difficulty of forming synthetic judgements of independent material and intellectual elements. This brief summary of Kant’s argument is intended to provide a context for the following reading of two critics who offer interestingly divergent attacks on the sovereignty of Kantian reason, and reconceptualizations of the world as it becomes available to philosophy as a result of their attacks. For Gayatri Spivak, the intervention of reason into cognition through reflective judgement is taken as a symptom of Kant’s ethnically and geographically biased epistemology. Subjective universality, for Spivak, may carry some suspiciously anthropological limitations. Kant’s argument that it is a characteristic of ‘our species’ to search reflectively for a practical cause of nature is questioned by Spivak; Kant’s notion of species or Gattung is taken to carry a connotation of race. She argues that non-Europeans are excluded from the domain of reflective thought and supersensible determination, and yet that they are still needed by Kantian reason as casual examples of non-autonomous subjectivity, that they figure in Kant’s argument as ‘raw’ sense data, in order to offset the rational autonomy of the European subject. In what is a wilfully mistaken anthropologization of Kant’s argument, Spivak claims that reflective judgement can be read as a theoretical validation of European cultural supremacy, and offers an ideological blueprint for the imperializing mission of the nineteenth century. Yet Spivak’s

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‘anthropological’ argument is inattentive to the anthropological expressiveness of Kant’s own argument; and consideration of this expressiveness casts Spivak’s claims in an interesting new light. For Paul de Man, who follows more closely what he describes as Kant’s ‘strictly philosophical, epistemological problem’, the question of reflective judgement leads directly to problems of figuration (AI 143). Spivak accuses de Man of excusing Kant by sticking to the problems of pure knowledge, but his reading of Kant can by no means be taken as a legitimation of the world of the critical philosophy. Indeed de Man’s argument could be said to go beyond Spivak’s attack on the sovereignty of reason, in order to question the very possibility that any rational concept of a purposive nature can be formed. De Man’s idea of a ‘material vision’ or Augenschein presents precisely the bewildering experience of a purposeless contingency that a determinative judgement of nature severed from reason’s practical analogy might describe, or what John Zammito describes as ‘a nightmare of particulars, of individual intuitions for which no classificatory empirical concepts could be found’ (160). Rather than offering a ‘mistakenly anthropomorphic’ reading of reflective judgement, as does Spivak in her reading of Kant, de Man attempts to find a sceptical ethics in Kant in the radical flatness of his depiction of a world that resists any form of symbolization. Allegory, for de Man, describes this fundamental scepticism, thereby challenging the false reconciliation of reason and understanding that Kant finds in the symbol. This chapter has begun to suggest a philosophical genealogy from Kant’s critical thought, to idealism and into deconstruction that will be elucidated in the next, along with an inquiry into Kant’s attack on Herder. Herder is a crucial and often overlooked figure in the history of this transformation of ideas. In order to consider the consequences of a common resistance to critical reason in Herder and deconstruction, then, I will turn firstly to the Spivakian anthropology, before examining the deManian allegory.

CHAPTER 3

Kant, Herder,Gayatri Spivak and the Question of Philosophical Anthropology

KANT’S ANTHROPOLOGY The last decade in Kant scholarship has witnessed a renewal of interest in what Kant’s most recent editor, Allen Wood, describes as the ‘anthropological applications’ of Kant’s thought. Recent studies of Kant by Susan Meld Shell, Howard Caygill, John Zammito and Wood himself all significantly revise the long-standing view of Kant as a dry formalist, uninterested in the question of how the contingencies of embodied human existence impact on the interpretation of the world through reason.1 These studies instead elucidate a mutually constitutive relation between reason and anthropology in Kant’s work, by describing how, to paraphrase Kant himself, anthropology provides a significant ‘counterweight’ to critical reason. The notion that the main purposes of Kantian critique were to establish the foundation for a metaphysics of morals that is cleansed of any acquaintance with anthropology, famously expressed through the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’ ‘Formula of Universal Moral Law’, and to limit the ontological claims of any possible metaphysics of nature, have been significantly qualified through closer attention to Kant’s involvement in debates about the growth of philosophical anthropology in the German academy from the 1760s onwards, and in particular during the composition of the Critique of Judgement after 1785. Kant’s ideas of the schema, the typic, and later his theory of reflective judgement itself significantly serve to inscribe anthropological interests into human reason. A view of Kantian reason begins to emerge that is, contra Kant’s counter-Enlightenment adversaries such as J. G. Herder and some of Kant’s contemporary readers, less formalistic and disembodied, but empowers anthropology to demonstrate problems of pure reasoning in a more expressive form than the Critique of Pure Reason had, in the main, allowed for. The recovery of this idea of a Kantian philosophical anthropology

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challenges the view of rationality as somehow constitutionally uninterested in the social contexts of its formation, which has yielded a number of ideology critiques of Kant and of his successors in Romanticism in recent years. Jerome McGann’s critique of the Romantic ideology depends, at a number of points throughout McGann’s work, on an attack on the ‘disinterested’ nature of Kant’s aesthetic judgement as licensing a type of Romantic poetics which famously evades history and politics.2 And where for McGann poetics sublimate history, for Gayatri Spivak, philosophy, and in particular the philosophical tradition leading from Kant through Hegel into Marx, is prone to dissimulate geography. Much of Spivak’s work is taken with an awareness of this tradition as specific to the European context of its production, and remains mindful of the dangers of imposing that tradition ‘upon large parts of the globe not historically centred in Europe’.3 A central claim of Spivak’s recent work, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, also echoes through much of her earlier critical work including the seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’: that the text of Western philosophy denies the position of narrator to the cultural other. Spivak claims in an essay on Kant, Hegel and Marx that the subjective universality of Kant’s faculty of reflective judgement, which is ‘free’ to the extent that it judges nature by analogy with the ideas of reason rather than under the authority of the understanding, is not as universal as it may seem. She argues in particular that the capacity to judge reflectively the beauty of nature and art by analogy with ideas of freedom, and the capacity to infer a sense of purpose in the organization of natural phenomena that Kant describes as characteristically human, is in fact denied to aboriginals, those who have not had the cultural training to determine their use of reason to its proper transcendental end. The kind of universality that Kant claims for his faculty of judgement comes, then, at a price: the downgrading of certain types of human existence from a definition of the rational human, in order that rational judgements can present themselves as at once universally binding and culturally instructive. The aim of Spivak’s argument is to recover a buried moment of ethnographic determination from within the self-dissimulating text of transcendental philosophy. But the new-found anthropological awareness of Kant studies shows Spivak to be pushing at an open door, since Kant is increasingly understood to have welcomed a reflection on the complex lines of intersection between anthropology and reason. Rather than diagnosing a foreclosure of the aboriginal as a precondition of critical reason, Kant actually puts the popular literary image of the savage of his day to important philosophical uses, and in particular he figures the savage as a symbol of the unknown ground of our ideas of freedom. Recent developments in Kant

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scholarship challenge some of the ways in which both literary and philosophical texts have been read over the past 25 years, as repositories of ideological blindness and rhetorical evasion. But what might a more patient recovery of the anthropological impulse from the text of critical reason tell us about the ways in which philosophical and literary texts absorb an understanding of the wider culture? In order to answer this question, it becomes necessary to track Kant’s uses of the tropes anthropomorphism, symbol and analogy in his developing critical arguments. Anthropomorphism in particular plays a crucial role in the evolution of Kant’s theory of reflective judgement, and served in his campaign to popularize the critical philosophy and to win over a reading public that was increasingly drawn to the lyrical strain in philosophy represented by his chief rival, J. G. Herder. But Kant was also aware that he was dealing with a dangerous idea here, since anthropomorphism had been associated since Hume with religious fanaticism and its attendant political dangers. Inevitably this approach will seem less pessimistic and dramatic than the claims of the critique of post-colonial reason. But anthropomorphism is also an important tool in Gayatri Spivak’s attempt to read Kant against the grain of his foreclosure of cultural difference from the text of transcendental philosophy. While Spivak may seem to inherit Herder’s defence, in his metacritique of Kant, of anthropological particularity and contingency against the assaults of Enlightenment universalism, a further argument offered here will be that she is equally indebted (albeit unwittingly) to Kant for her methodology.4 The key issue, in this context, is over competing philosophies of language in the Enlightenment, and Spivak’s inheritance of their concerns. Herder’s philosophy of history conceptualizes poetry as an authentic and original expressive language that suffers from the encroaching development of an abstract power of reason. He shares with Spivak an assumption that critical reason erases the kind of contingency that is found in poetical figures, with their authentic specificity to a life context, in its search for universal validity.5 Language, and in particular the idea of authentic speech, and the recovery of the other’s status as narrator, can then become a means of resistance to the universalizing tendencies of reason. However, rather than suggesting a disciplinarian use of reason that is inattentive to linguistic conditions of reasoning, as Spivak and Herder seem to assume, Kant attempts to stake out his own uneasy and politically quite dangerous alliance between poetry and reason through the use of the trope anthropomorphism. The turn back towards anthropology in Kant scholarship has meant that a more historically informed view of Kant the Aufkla¨rer has begun to

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emerge, defending the critical philosophy against his younger, ‘enthusiastic’ or Schwa¨rmerisch rivals from the Sturm und Drang, yet keen to adapt his critical insights to their fashionable style of writing. This work has served significantly to widen our understanding of important shifts in intellectual trends that took place in the German academy from the 1760s onwards, and points the way towards a more sophisticated understanding of the genesis of European Romanticism through the Herderian ‘counter-Enlightenment’. The conflict with Herder, which became public in 1785 with Kant’s unfavourable reviews of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, led Kant into a reflection on the proper boundary between literary and philosophical discourse, and its relevance to the ever-pressing need to articulate his own system in a more popularly accessible form. The readjustments to his system enforced by the pressure of Herderian Popularphilosophie on critical reason shows Kant to foreshadow contemporary interest in and anxiety about the presence of literary tropes and metaphors in philosophy. Kant’s conflict with Herder sets the tone for a modern distinction between ordinary language and parasitical poetic discourse and inherits a Platonic confrontation between philosophy and poetry. But it also offers resources for a co-opting of the expressive capabilities of language to a critical speculation on nature and history that have been overlooked in philosophical modernity, in its inheritance of a purely antagonistic relation between the two. It will be necessary to rehearse the grounds for the conflict between Kant and Herder over the philosophy of history and nature, before going on to show how Spivak’s wilfully ‘mistaken’ intervention into the third Critique in the name of the other needs to be understood in the context of issues over philosophical method that were raised in the course of this polemic, a polemic that determines the contexts for her own argument but that she fails to acknowledge. Finally, this will lead to a presentation of Kant’s own solution to the difficulty raised in his conflict with Herder – the difficulty of how to set about representing what is not understood or different within a reasonable and accessible philosophical discourse – in his argument for a ‘symbolic anthropomorphism.’

KANT VERSUS HERDER Kant published two reviews of Herder’s Ideas, in January and November of 1785, in C. G. Shu¨tz’s Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. Both show little mercy for his former pupil, flatly contradicting his findings both in natural science and in the philosophy of history. In effect, Kant accuses Herder of offering

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a philosophically inappropriate synthesis of British empiricism (and in particular Shaftesbury’s theory of moral sense, which had recently been popularized in Germany) and traditional German school philosophy.6 Kant defines Herder’s strategy for the interpretation of nature as based on an alignment of the perceptual with analogy and sympathetic imagination, against his own method of procedure through concepts, principles and logic. Kant claims that rather than offering ‘a logical precision in the definition of concepts or careful distinctions and consistency in the use of principles’, Herder makes use of ‘a cursory and comprehensive vision [Blick] and a ready facility for discovering analogies, together with a bold imagination in putting those analogies to use’. These two alignments, and the conflict between image and idea that they entail, broadly pit the British cult of sensation against German philosophical tradition. Herder’s appeal to his reader’s faculty of moral sense is confirmed through his ‘aptitude for arousing sympathy for his subject – which is always kept at an obscure distance – by means of feelings and sentiments [Empfindungen]’ (KPW 201). The quarrel between Kant and Herder is in part a quarrel over philosophical method and style. An enthusiastic method such as Herder’s, according to Kant, may advertise its intimacy with its objects and readers, but in fact serves only to keep them at a distance. Kant’s attack on Herder turns Herder’s own spatial metaphor against him, describing an obscure ‘distance’ [Ferne] at which his reader is kept, under cover of an apparent stylistic intimacy. In particular Kant takes issue with Herder’s form of analogy, his claim to demonstrate the spiritual nature of the human soul, ‘its enduring quality and increasing perfection’ by analogy with the ‘natural forms of matter’, but without ‘the help of any metaphysical investigations’ (KPW 208). A spiritual force (Herder’s Grundkraft) is assumed to exist, which processes matter into ever more perfect forms, culminating in man. Herder claims that the conditions of human embodiment (in particular man’s upright posture and the positioning of his head) allowed for the development of reason. Kant takes issue with Herder’s claim that the ascendance of man to a spiritual realm after death is continuous with the organization of matter by spiritual forces that are active within nature. This pantheistic argument crucially misuses the analogy of nature, by comparing a conjectural ascent of the human individual to a higher realm after death with an analytic transfer between different natural species. Kant argues that the progression beyond death is nowhere to be found within nature (the palligenetic transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly does not provide a fitting analogy, since the pupal phase is not a death), and that the Spinozist attribution of life to matter that underwrites Herder’s view of natural forces,

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or what at the time of the third Critique will be called hylozoism, contradicts any possible metaphysics of nature and morals.7 As such there is ‘not the slightest resemblance between the elevation of one and the same human being to a more perfect level of organisation in another life, and that scale of being which can be envisaged among completely different species and individuals within a single realm of nature’ (KPW 209). Against Herder’s rhapsody of the human individual as nature’s favoured, Kant argues that all that nature reveals is the ‘abandonment’ of individuals to destruction in favour of the preservation of the species. The whole hypothesis of invisible force, the analogical procedure of Herder’s pantheism sets about describing ‘what is not understood in terms of what is understood even less’. Herder retreats to provide an explanation of spirit ‘in the fertile field of poetic imagination’, under the cover of a pseudo-natural science; yet this argument ‘will still be metaphysics, indeed highly dogmatic metaphysics, however much our author, in keeping with the current fashion, rejects this implication’ (KPW 209). He allows the imagination to craft metaphors where the understanding and reason should struggle to elaborate concepts and ideas. Kant’s attack on Herder’s philosophy of history in his second review similarly comes into conflict with Herder over the question of the relation between the individual, nature’s favoured in Herder’s thought, and the species-life that was a growing source of interest for Kant, in terms of teleological arguing. Herder claims that man’s true end is to attain happiness as an individual. Kant counters that human happiness is a sign of the human species’ capacity to form a home in a variety of different cultural and physical environments, which capacity itself requires rational explanation. He makes the observation that in all eras of human history, and in all parts of society ‘we find a happiness which is precisely commensurate with the concepts and habits of the creature in question with regard to the circumstances in which it was born and grew up’. To this extent we cannot evaluate the relative happiness of these different social groups or different ages (something that Herder does surreptitiously, despite his apparent relativism, by valorizing the pathological happiness of primitives over the moderns). But what if, asks Kant, ‘the true end of providence were not this shadowy image of happiness which each individual creates for himself’, but rather ‘the ever continuing and growing activity and culture which are thereby set in motion’, and whose highest possible expression ‘can only be the product of a political constitution based on concepts of human right, and consequently an achievement of human beings themselves?’ (KPW 219). Herder’s study of the happy proportion between a human individual and his/her environment reveals itself to be a providential argument in disguise,

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in that it takes away the achievement of contentment as the work of human beings themselves. For Kant, conversely, the human ability to find contentment under differing circumstances is a sign of the capacity of humanity to adapt to different environments. This contentment is a product of humans’ fundamental capacity to set their own ends and to take pleasure in the freedom with which these ends may be chosen and fulfilled. But Kant interprets the spectacle of human history negatively from the perspective of the attainment of this state of rational contentment, as evidence of a pathological laziness that is found in the individual, the individual’s overriding anthropological tendency to accept prevailing environmental conditions rather than to change them (which would require the force of a collective). Even so, the individual’s capacity to formulate a mistakenly absolute ‘image’ of private happiness as an end for the self secretly prefigures the destiny of the species as the attainment of a political constitution based on concepts of right, a kind of communal act of imagining an end for the species which outgrows this private image of happiness. In this sense the individual’s search for happiness intersects with a cosmopolitan history both as its occasion, the mistaken setting of a private image as an end, and as the egoistic pathology that is foreclosed in favour of a common political destiny. The argument continues as follows: Thus, we read on page 206 [of the Ideas] that ‘each human individual has the measure of his happiness within him’, and that he does not yield in the enjoyment of this happiness to any of those who come after him; but as far as the value of their existence itself is concerned – i.e. the reason why they are there in the first place, as distinct from the conditions in which they exist – it is in this alone that a wise intention might be discernible within the whole. Does the author really mean that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, never visited by more civilised nations, were destined to live in their peaceful indolence for thousands of centuries, it would be possible to give a satisfactory answer to the question of why they should exist at all, and of whether it would not have been just as good if this island had been occupied by happy sheep and cattle as by happy human beings who enjoy themselves? (KPW 219–20) Herder’s historicism and cultural relativism allows him to assume that human happiness fits the measure of its environment in such a way that it resists transcendental determination. None of us, he then claims, yield up our happiness in favour of our descendents. Kant’s attack proceeds on three counts: (1) that this providential argument fails to make any distinction between the activity of humans, who take pleasure in the setting of their

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own ends, and the merely instinctive pleasures of animals; (2) that it fails to address with any degree of critical rigour the questions of the purpose and the value of historical existence; and (3) that by implication it assumes that the losses occasioned by the advent of civilization outweigh the gains. Allen Wood describes the attitude towards history that Kant satirizes here as a type of misology or hatred of reason. Kant, according to Wood, recognized in it the human tendency ‘to separate off feeling and emotion, eros and inspiration, from human reason, treating them as valuable apart from it (even as ‘correctives’ in opposition to it). For in ourselves we desperately want to see something innocent and unspoiled by reason, so that through it we may recapture some part of that elusive original happiness of which we think reason has deprived us.’8 The popular eighteenth-century cult of primitivism is by this definition a fable of an imagined separation of reason from emotion, which would even seek to use an indulged emotionalism as a means of regulating the excesses of reason. In Kant, however, any such separation of emotion from reason is purely fantastical; reason and emotion enter into complex sets of causal relations, and to understand reason as an impersonal regulator of pre-existing and asocial desires is particularly naive. Wood writes, for instance, that when reason sets ends in human action independent of inclination, ‘the end-setting act produces ‘feelings’ of pleasure accompanying the representation of the object, thus causing a desire for it. This means that the first use of reason must involve the creation of a new desire, which is a product of reason, independent of and even opposed to instinct’ (235). Kant’s attack on Herder’s primitivism denounces his failure to identify positive emotional states as products of reason, such as the peculiar rational contentment that attends the achievement of an autonomously set end that generates historical change. Instead, Herder understands reason as an aggressive reigning in of inclinations which would show themselves to be organized teleologically, if we allowed ourselves to indulge them. Kant’s argument about the happiness of the Tahitians is echoed in a passage from the ‘Dialectic of Teleological Judgement’ that is translated by Gayatri Spivak in her description of the ‘foreclosure of the native informant’. Here is the passage, in Spivak’s own translation: Grass is needful for the ox, which again is needful for man as a means of existence; but then we do not see why it is necessary that men should exist (a question which is not so easy to answer if we cast our thoughts by chance [wenn man etwa . . . in Gedanken hat] on the New Hollanders or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego). Such a thing is then [. . .] not even a natural purpose; for it (or its entire species [Gattung – the connotation of

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‘race’ as in ‘human race’ cannot be disregarded here]) is not to be regarded as a natural product. (CPoR 26) Spivak claims to recover here a buried moment of ethnography in the articulation of teleological judgement, but in the process she erases the kind of rational anthropology that governs Kant’s sense of history. Kant argues in both passages that if we regard man as a part of nature, then it becomes more and not less difficult to determine the purpose of his existence. Other parts of nature are clearly extrinsically purposeful for the development of culture (that is, these parts of nature show themselves to serve the needs of other parts of nature in a network of causal relationships: grass is useful for the ox, which in turn is useful for man), but man himself, if he is regarded as a part of nature, does not fulfil any extrinsic natural purpose. Both passages involve an implicit attack on aboriginals or ‘natural men’, the subject of popular contemporary travel narratives, as culturally useless. Spivak seizes on this implicit racism, claiming that ‘an unacknowledgeable moment that I will call ‘‘the native informant’’ is crucially needed’ by Kant, and that it is ‘foreclosed’ (CPoR 4). Kant’s claim in the third Critique that an aesthetic judgement takes the form of a logical judgement in that it claims universal validity depends, Spivak argues, upon a buried moment of ethnographical evaluation that it represses but keeps re-encountering. Kant needs to downgrade the ‘native informant’ to the status of a part of nature in order that European man can uncover his antithetically moral identity through reflective reason. The aboriginal natural man, whose existence does not have the dignity and value of the fully moral human, then becomes the source data for ethnography, in order that European man may free himself from his own anthropological determinations and offer the spectacle of a purposeful cultural existence. Spivak’s argument depends upon the assumption that Kant sought to ‘foreclose’ any anthropological determination of man from his transcendental definition of the judging subject, while antithetically constructing a counternarrative of the cultural other as native informant, or the bearer of a specific set of cultural practices to Western ethnography. But this assumption, that the Kantian transcendental subject could not also be the subject of a pragmatic anthropology, bound by inclination, habit, biology, cultural practices and empirical conditions of willing, has been challenged by much of the recent scholarship into Kant’s embodiment of reason. Spivak’s claim also foregoes any investigation of the metaphyiscal underpinnings to Kant’s argument in favour of a relatively obvious interpretation of its cultural politics. An engagement with the question of metaphysics is implicit in both passages, in Kant’s interrogation of our inherent inability as a species to

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formulate a concept of the cause of the existence of parts of nature. This metaphysical interest must be considered before any further examination of Kant’s cultural politics. This, in turn, will lead on into an examination of how Kant significantly reworks Herder’s anthropology in these politically suspect passages. Kant, like Hume before him, does not accept that mankind has yet proved capable of formulating metaphysics. Any thinker who claims to have found a logical concept of cause that accounts for the existence of entities, according to Kant, is raving with reason. ‘Being’, as Kant argues in the first Critique, ‘is not a real predicate’ (CPR 567). Both in the metaphysics of nature and of morals, Kant claims to get past Hume’s sceptical objections to a logical concept of the causal relation between entities, but he still fundamentally agrees with Hume that we cannot have a concept that adequately relates to their coming into being. Kant then accepts Hume’s refutation of rationalist metaphysics insofar as he believes that we cannot form determinate concepts of the existence of entities; what we cognize, rather, is a world of appearances. But these appearances refer us to the subjectively necessary idea of a supreme being as underlying the presentation of these appearances, the thinking of which being, as Kant put it in his 1786 essay ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’, is a subjectively universal ‘need’ (bedu¨rfnis) of reason. In the language of the first Critique, Kant then worked by analogy in his procedure beyond the transcendental conditions of the appearance of phenomena (the categories of understanding and the pure forms of intuition), to the application of dynamical principles of reason to nature in his attempt to satisfy this need of reason through a consideration of the existence of entities as well as ‘their relation to one another’ (CPR 297). Therefore Kant’s claim in the passages cited earlier that we cannot discern a concept of purpose in the existence of things must be understood from the perspective of both metaphysics and philosophy of history as just that. Humans are congenitally incapable, according to the ‘character’ of their form of understanding, of formulating a concept that adequately determines the cause of the existence of parts of nature.9 Kant’s argument is that the question of the purpose of existence is not to be answered according to any definition of man as part of nature, or through the kind of mishmash of philosophy of history and metaphysics that he found in Herder, by which ‘inner inspirations’ are dangerously ‘transformed into facts confirmed by external evidence’ (KPW 248). Rather, metaphysical inquiry will proceed through a significant decentring of the character of the human understanding, the interpretation of it as an example of a characterological ‘type’ which is comparable with another type of understanding, the famous intuitive intellect.

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Kant’s resolution of the antinomy of teleological judgement, to this extent, proceeds through what is in effect a kind of transcendental anthropology, which involves a comparison of the form of the human understanding (which all humans would share) to an imagined intuitive intellect, which would not be subject to the transcendental distinction between sensibility and intellect.10 Kant is clear in the third Critique that we do not need to prove the reality or existence of this type of intellect, but only the need of human reason to think it in order to come up with a coherent account of our reflective judgement of natural products.11 This creative reworking of anthropology from a philosophical standpoint clearly and decisively responds to Herder’s philosophical anthropology by taking man away from the centre of creation. The popular fetishizing of aboriginals as pure or uncorrupted humans in travel literature and in Herder’s philosophy is pernicious, according to Kant, because it takes away the proper cultural and political grounds from which it becomes possible to use reason in order to speculate on the purpose of our existence as a species. Under cover of a celebration of the primitive, Herder in fact serves to devalue the historical existence of man. For Kant, the pointlessness of aboriginals’ existence only refers us to the wider pointlessness of trying to understand the purpose of man’s existence according to pseudo-concepts derived from a metaphysics of nature. Just as in his reviews of Herder’s Ideas five years earlier, in the passage from the Critique of Judgement translated by Spivak, Kant uses Herder’s own mode of argument against him, and once again with politically incorrect consequences. Kant’s re-evocation of the name of the aboriginal in these arguments serves as a kind of marker, culturally motivated nonetheless, for certain founding problems in the attempt to formulate a metaphysics of nature. Kant’s ‘native informant’ symbolizes, in effect, the failure of our species to come up with a concept of the cause of the existence of objects of nature, our inability to answer the question of the purpose of our existence as a species with the use of our own metaphysical concepts. This is a failure that for Kant is congenital, a consequence of the transcendental distinction between sensibility and intellect set out in the Critique of Pure Reason that limits human cognition of the world to imperfect synthetic judgements of the cause and effect of appearances, without ever approaching their supersensible substrate. To this extent, Kant is playing Herder at his own game by mixing up problems in metaphysics with issues to do with pragmatic anthropology. Kant’s argument is a clear inversion of Herder’s equally motivated use of the native informant as a measure of the distance of rationalized, cultural man from his sensations, a kind of fetishizing of primitivism which from the Kantian perspective begins to seem patronizing.

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Kant’s argument can be decoded, Spivak claims, as a kind of unsuccessful crossing out of the native informant as ‘the example for the heteronomy of the determinant, to set off the autonomy of the reflexive [i.e. European] judgement, which allows freedom for the rational will’ (CPoR 6). Kant’s notion of the heteronomy of determinative judgement, a judgement that takes its principle from the rules of the understanding, is allegedly embodied in the figure of the native informant, and Spivak claims that this act of embodiment allows the European transcendental subject to uncover his antithetically autonomous faculty of reflective judgement, a type of judgement that operates under rational ideas of freedom. Kant’s argument can then be read as the ‘rendering (im)possible of (another) narrative’ (CPoR 6). The recovery of this narrative involves Spivak in a reinscription of the ‘anthropomorphic moment’ into a text that is said to have foreclosed it. This is a move that Spivak claims to be knowingly ‘mistaken’, an improper approach to the text of Kant’s transcendentally determined aesthetics: I will call my reading of Kant ‘mistaken’. I believe there are just disciplinary grounds for irritation at my introduction of ‘the empirical and the anthropological’ into a philosophical text that slowly leads us toward the rational study of morals as such [. . .] My exercise may be called a scrupulous travesty in the interest of producing a counternarrative that will make visible the foreclosure of the subject whose lack of access to the position of narrator is the condition of possibility of the consolidation of Kant’s position. (CPoR 9) Spivak’s ‘mistaken’ procedure depends upon an assumption that Kant’s moral reasoning has been subjected to a rigorous faculty distinction, and in particular that it is predicated on an erasure of any anthropological determination of the subject. But the discipline of Kant studies has been busy restoring anthropology to the centre of our understanding of Kant’s critical project, including its ethical and historical dimensions, for ten or so years now. How, then, are we to interpret this complex presence of the anthropological in Kant’s Critique of Judgement? In the two examples given here, Kant uses the so-called ‘native informant’, the example of the aboriginal, as a kind of symbol of the limitations of human knowledge, whether that be his scepticism about a providential and eudaemonic view of history in his reviews of Herder, or about the human incapacity to formulate a concept of the cause of the existence of nature in the third Critique. In using this highly populist ethnographic example, Kant is at once taking issue with Herder’s

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philosophy of history and science on Herder’s own ground, while trying to get across to the reading public a central sceptical insight of his Critique of Pure Reason in a more accessible form. Kant’s anthropological example, then, knows itself to be philosophically inappropriate, or at least lacking a certain dignity of tone; but precisely because it is misplaced it provides a bridge between metaphysical and cultural issues. To this extent, Kant’s argument, like Spivak’s, employs a ‘mistaken’ anthropology in order to serve its polemical end. It transgresses a perceived disciplinary boundary between serious and recreational topics of thought. But anthropology is ‘mistaken’ in an even more Spivakian way in Kant. In identifying the European as the subject of a reflective judgement, and the ‘native informant’ as the object of a determinative judgement, Spivak claims to ‘situate’ an anthropomorphic moment in Kant’s argument, a moment that she claims is irreducible ‘in any discursive practice’ (CPoR 16). The assumption is that Kant can be made to show his own blindness to this irreducibility. But the whole teleological judgement of nature proposed by Kant is itself a type of anthropomorphism, something which is clearly acknowledged throughout Kant’s argument. Towards the end of the Critique of Judgement, Kant proposes a resolution of the dialectic of teleological judgement, which inquires into the origin of our sense of a purpose in nature, by recourse to a judgement of nature’s technic or productivity by analogy with the human ability to set ends in production, which is how he defines art. Nature is judged as if it were an artwork produced by an intelligence that acts according to the idea of an end (even though the kind of intuitive intelligence that we can imagine to have created nature would have no need of ends, since it would not be restricted by the form of time and the cause-effect mechanism). In effect, then, Kant proposes a philosophically inappropriate projection of an anthropomorphic causality onto nature, an imagining of nature as the product of an intelligence analogous to that of an artist, in order to provide a kind of stop-gap for our failure to determine the cause of the existence of nature. This idea of an intelligent cause of nature offers a final recourse for human reason in its orientation towards a search for the first cause of nature. This is a search that reason cannot give up, but neither can it find the objective concept that it searches for. According to the limits of the human understanding, Kant argues, it cannot be shown definitively that what we think of as a purpose is not the result of the mechanism of nature. It is this congenital limitation that stops the ideas of reason from taking on the status of dogmatic concepts. But still reason must adjudicate between opposed interpretations of natural purposiveness, as either the product of an intelligence that stands outside of

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nature, or as the product of ‘the life of matter (where that life is either in the matter, or due to an inner animating principle, viz., a world soul); this view is called hylozoism’ (CJ 273). It is precisely this view of a principle of life immanent in matter, derived ultimately from Spinoza but revived by the Schwa¨rmerisch philosophy of Kant’s contemporaries, that his anthropomorphic theory of the first cause seeks to ward off: But in fact all we can make out is that the character and limits of our cognitive powers (which give us no insight into the first, inner basis of even this [natural] mechanism) force us to give up any attempt to find in matter a principle [that implies] determinate references [of this matter] to a purpose, so that we are left with no other way of judging nature’s production of things as natural purposes than in terms of a supreme understanding as cause of the world. (CJ 277) The anthropomorphic theory of the first cause of nature is, then, less an overreaching of human intelligence which reads the world as a reflection of its own technical causality under freedom, than an attempt to ward off the dangerous claims of ‘genius’ to have an insight into the spontaneous selfgeneration of material nature. The idea of an intelligent first cause of nature, imagined by analogy with the human artist, simply draws less of a contradiction than the idea of epigenesis with our empirical experience of nature. Kant flatly denies, then, the possibility that we can discern any intelligent purposiveness in material nature. Returning to the example of Spivak, Kant’s anthropomorphism, too, is ‘mistaken’; but the kind of critical theism it proposes is considered the lesser of two evils in the attempt to satisfy reason’s search for a first cause of nature (or for an analogy that stands in for the absent concept of that cause). If Kant is solipsistic, then the solipsism is openly admitted in the theory of reflective judgement with its analogy between different types of productivity through freedom, human and divine. The reflective teleological judgement of nature, like the figure of the native informant, expresses the transcendental limitations on human knowledge in its inconclusive search for a concept of the cause of the existence of nature, and raises up an anthropomorphic idea of divine creativity to stand in for this missing rational concept. Like Spivak’s, Kant’s anthropomorphic modelling of reflective judgement is a strategy of deliberate error, in Kant’s case put in place in order to tease out the orientation of reason towards an account of the supersensible basis of nature, beyond the restrictions of the understanding. In the ‘Dialectic of Teleological Judgement’, Kant is almost playing with the view of critical reason as impossibly formalistic and disembodied that

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was already forming, thanks to Herder, by the second half of the 1780s, by collapsing anthropology back into critical reason in such uncomfortable ways. There are three identifiable adaptations of anthropology going on in the second half of the third Critique: (1) the philosophically inappropriate use of the ‘native informant’ to symbolize problems in ontology; (2) the famous comparison of the ‘character’ of human understanding to the intellectual intuition in sections 76 and 77 of the text, which involves Kant in a type of transcendental anthropology; and (3) the mistaken assumption of an anthropomorphic first cause of nature in order to resolve the dialectic of teleological judgement. The example of the savage is then less important to Kant as a spectacle of a type of primitive species-being that Enlightened society must continually remind itself that it has overcome or that it tries unsuccessfully to cast out of the definition of the human, than as a metaphor for a threat to the culture of Enlightenment that exists within its own form; that is, the counter-Enlightenment fetishizing of primitive power.

THE ANALOGY OF LOVE Kant’s uses of anthropology set out above may seem, from a Herderian perspective, like the cranky attempts of an old Aufkla¨rer to get in on the act of the new Popularphilosophie and anthropological thinking of the late Enlightenment. But we should not be so quick to dismiss Kant’s tentative forays into the realm of poetics and analogy after the early 1780s. At the very least, attention to Kant’s own engagements with the uses of anthropomorphism from a critical perspective will help to revise the view of Kant as a linguistic formalist that is still by and large the norm. Kant made one earlier, more concerted attempt to describe the conditions under which a symbolic anthropomorphism is critically permissible, and indeed an essential supplement to critical reasoning, in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics of 1783. The Prolegomena is one of Kant’s first attempts to make his system more popularly accessible, as a scaled-down version of the first Critique that Herder had deemed unreadable.12 However, as with the example of the ‘native informant’ described above, this reversion to a philosophically inappropriate method of argument, a populist type of ‘cognition according to analogy’ rather than cognition proper is not an unmotivated and transparent translation of the hard and obscure principles of critical reason. These are transformed through their translation, in ways that are very poignant for the contemporary understanding of the relation between philosophy and literature. In the process of writing in this more accessible style,

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Kant discovered ways in which a mistaken anthropomorphism could guard his system against backsliding into precisely the kinds of poetical positions it sets itself against, and that can yet seem dangerously close to it. Kant comes close to being taken in by the position that he sets himself against; but it is testament to his critical skill that this danger, which in this case manifests itself as the potential for his system to imagine a metaphysics of nature as a type of theism, becomes a regulatory principle of critical reason itself. Towards the end of the Prolegomena, Kant sets about defining the critical terms on which he can make a foray into the Herderian realm of analogy, describing ‘what is not understood’ in terms of ‘what is understood even less’ as Kant was to put it in his reviews of Herder two years later. This foray, into a definition of the supersensible in Kantian terms, was necessary because Kant needed to get past Hume’s scepticism in metaphysics, by proving how the first Critique’s failure to determine a necessary relation between parts of nature and the supersensible ‘cause’ of nature did not invalidate the a priori reality of the concept of cause itself. Because Kant’s synthetic a priori concept of cause still fails to determine any relation between the sensible and supersensible, Kant begins to develop here the concept of symbolic anthropomorphism, a permissible thinking of this cause as a ‘supreme being’ in anthropological terms, in order to save the cognition of nature from scepticism. Kant sets about trying to describe a ‘relation’ between human knowledge and what lies beyond it, a relation which is said to exceed the expression of logical relations between appearances in order to reflect on their ‘real’ existential ground. This relation is to be expressed by analogy with relations that exist between appearances in the world of sensibility. Kant attempts to go beyond Humean scepticism by suggesting that while the supersensible ‘cause’ of nature cannot be known, we can formulate an analogy which stands in for a concept of that relation. Experience will never satisfy reason’s ‘drive’ for completion of the intuitable world with empirical concepts. Who does not feel compelled then, Kant asks, to satisfy reason’s drive ‘in the concept of a being the idea of which indeed cannot itself be understood as regards possibility – though it cannot be refuted either, because it pertains to a mere being of the understanding?’ (PAM 106) Kant’s argument rests on the notion that this procedure outside of the realm of sensibility for the benefit of metaphysical knowledge maintains a determinate boundary between the sensible and supersensible. The boundary between what is cognized by the understanding, and what is thought by reason, is itself knowable. This idea of the boundary is distinguished from the limit, and it is described by analogy with the form of an appearance:

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Boundaries (in extended things) always presuppose a space that is found outside a certain fixed location, and that encloses that location; limits require nothing of the kind, but are mere negations that affect a magnitude insofar as it does not possess absolute completeness. Our reason, however, sees around itself as it were a space for the cognition of things in themselves, although it can never have determinate concepts of those things and is limited to appearances alone. (PAM 106) Kant describes how in the ‘homogeneous’ or empirical cognitions of reason, in mathematics and natural science, human understanding reaches limits but not determinate boundaries. The expansion of mathematics, and the discovery of ‘new forces and laws’ in nature ‘goes to infinity’; but since these sciences refer only to appearances they continually reach limits that are not absolute, and never threaten human understanding with contradiction. In contrast, the dynamical concepts employed by reason in its endeavour to establish a metaphysics of nature demand a thinking of the supersensible ‘cause’, which thinking involves a transgression of an empirical boundary that human knowledge imposes on itself. The peculiarity of this demand of reason is that it involves a regression to empirical language in order to describe the inherently non-intuitable, the same regression that Kant was to criticize in his reviews of Herder two years later. There is a return to visual metaphors, as reason is able to ‘see’ beyond the boundary of sensible knowledge, a boundary that is envisaged in spatial terms. In particular, the supersensible is figured by analogy with the space that surrounds an appearance. Kant proceeds to take on Hume’s ‘irrefutable’ objections to theism. Kant claims, effectively, that Hume does not really take issue with the concept of a supreme being; rather, ‘his dangerous arguments collectively relate to anthropomorphism, of which he holds that it is inseparable from theism and makes theism self-contradictory’ (PAM 110). Hume’s claim, in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, is that both arguments that we can form an adequate concept, or even an analogy for the first cause of nature, and arguments that the nature or being of God are uncognizable by the human mind, are equally contradictory and dangerous. The position represented in Hume’s dialogues by Demea, which claims to be a consistent theism, and which refuses to attribute anthropological predicates to the supreme being, becomes indistinguishable from atheism. But similarly, the claim that we can posit anthropomorphic analogies that adequately account for the first cause immediately demand that we think a cause for our idea of that first cause. Thus, as Demea claims, ‘anthropomorphite is an appellation as invidious, and implies as dangerous consequence, as the epithet of mystic’.13 Arguments about the nature of this unknown being, as Hume puts it in the

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Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, disclose a tendency ‘tacitly to consider ourselves in the place of the supreme being’.14 Hume’s argument about the character of the deity masks his more important and, for Kant, ‘dangerous’ scepticism about the concept of cause. If it can be proven, however, that the concept of cause is realistic and not entangled with anthropomorphism, then there is no reason why an empirical idea of the supreme being should be inherently contradictory or even dangerous. Our poetical descriptions of the supreme being no longer threaten knowledge with dogmatism, but instead can be employed in order to guard against any dogmatic concept of the deity that we might want to posit. Poetics yields instead a form of measured scepticism, as this empirical imagining of the supreme being becomes the very basis for a limitation of the cognitions of human knowledge to a world of sense: For we then do not attribute to the supreme being any of the properties in themselves by which we think the objects of experience, and we thereby avoid dogmatic anthropomorphism; but we attribute those properties, nonetheless, to the relation of this being to the world, and we allow ourselves a symbolic anthropomorphism, which in fact concerns only language and not the object itself. (PAM 111) Predicates that we attach to the idea of the supreme being paradoxically serve to demonstrate its absolute difference from our power of predication. Qualities such as justice and beneficence that we might attribute to the deity do not, as in Hume, demonstrate the failure of any concept of cause to explain a teleological nature which is inherently different from us, but rather serve to measure the distance of this being from our power of understanding, dependent as that power is on synthetic a priori cognitions of intuition. As such, ‘cognition according to analogy’ does not mean, Kant goes on to argue, ‘an imperfect similarity between two things, but rather a perfect similarity between two relations in wholly dissimilar things’ (PAM 111). It attempts to overcome Herder’s principle of poetic identification between totally dissimilar entities, of spirit and matter, by recognizing that even between types of things that are different in kind (i.e. the sensible and the supersensible), the formal relations between the parts that pertain to one type are comparable to the unknown existential relations towards those parts in the other, in a purely intellectual relation. In a long footnote Kant gives a compelling example: Such is an analogy between the legal relation of human actions and the mechanical relation of moving forces: I can never do something to another

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without giving him a right to do the same to me under the same conditions; just as a body cannot act on another body with its motive force without thereby causing the other body to react just as much on it. Right and motive force are here completely dissimilar things, but in their relation there is nonetheless complete similarity. By means of such an analogy I can therefore provide a concept of a relation to things that are absolutely unknown to me. E.g., the promotion of the happiness of the children = a is to the love of the parents = b as the welfare of humankind = c is to the unknown in God = x, which we call love: not as if this unknown had the least similarity with any human inclination, but because we can posit the relation between God’s love and the world to be similar to that which things in the world have to one another. But here the concept of the relation is a mere category, namely the concept of cause, which has nothing to do with sensibility. (PAM 111) Hume’s sceptical argument about anthropomorphism serves to defend empirically verifiable knowledge from the incursions of religious enthusiasm, which incursions not only abuse reason but had shown themselves to be politically dangerous in recent English history. Kant shared this cultural fear in the very different environment of Prussia, believing that Herder’s Popularphilosophie not only misused the analogy of nature but, as John Zammito describes it, by celebrating untrammelled intellectual freedom, might also lead to ‘the ironic throttling of any freedom whatever under the tutelage of the state’, a very real fear as the reactionary Frederick William II was to ascend the Prussian throne in 1787.15 But in this uncomfortable footnote we find Kant coming dangerously close to the enthusiasm of his adversary which, as Martin Madan described it in 1763, was to ‘equal the imaginations of men to the Holy Scripture of God.’16 Kant’s argument is that if we accept the failure of human knowledge to have an insight into the cause of the existence of entities, if we were to limit our cognitions of cause to the world of experience and yet accept the concept of cause as a priori, then the kind of radical scepticism that was enforced on Hume by the political history of Britain could be overcome. A kind of regulated enthusiasm could be brought into philosophy, a deferred analogy whereby the purely intellectual relation of the supreme being to the world could be thought of by analogy with the love of a parent for a child. In this way Kant is just about touching on the kind of populist discourse on enthusiasm, in a footnote of a text that attempts to popularize the first Critique. It is difficult to imagine him going this far in any of the full critical works. In this footnote, Kant shows himself to be aware of the way in which his deferred analogy imagines a position which is in danger of succumbing to

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political despotism and intellectual dogmatism. If we were to draw a direct analogy between right and motive force in the realm of experience, then the entire metaphysics of morals would be invalidated by the Hobbesian claim that morality works through the reciprocal resistance of egoistic individual wills; but it is their intellectual relation which is compared rather than their activity. As such, the analogy reminds us that it is only because ‘I can never do something to another without giving him a right to do the same to me under the same conditions’ that determines the rule not to act only in the interests of my inclinations. It preserves, as it were, the memory of a direct despotic analogical relation between the laws of physics and moral action in order to bring about the famous decentring of inclination that has led to readings of Kant’s ethical formalism. As with the example of the happiness of the Tierra del Fuegian from the third Critique, Kant’s argument simplifies itself through analogy and symbol, it internalizes a much more pernicious and extreme form of enthusiasm in order to regulate its own forays into the realm of affect and bodily experience in the imagining of metaphysics. It almost rewrites the analogy between society and family in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, which similarly attempts to reimagine the family as a model for the freedom of citizens by bearing in mind the dangers of a direct, despotic analogy between the family and the state.17 What we are left with, as Kant describes it here, is a metaphorical (in the root meaning) ‘crossing over to theism’. The supreme being is considered as containing the basis for the rational form of things in the world, and so to operate as their symbolic cause. The being is thought of not in itself, but ‘for the sake of determining all things with the highest degree of conformity to reason’ (PAM 113). It is the fact that the teleological judgement of nature can always be read almost as a type of theism that keeps the findings of reason on their self-limiting path to expansion; and in a similar way, the metaphysics of morals uses the symbol to point to regressive social and philosophical positions held within itself, that it is in the perpetual act of overcoming. The revisions to our understanding of Kant brought about by the reconsideration of his attitude to anthropomorphism, and in particular the idea of an embodiment of reason, open up important literary dimensions in his argument. They point towards the crucial use of symbol and analogy at key points in the later critical works. Language is given a role here in figuring the other, the invisible supersensible substrate of nature. Love is an intuitable counter-image (Gegenbild) for ‘x’, the name given to the unknown supersensible cause of nature.18 The very act of providing this counterimage serves in Kant’s effort to prevent the first cause itself from becoming

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sensualized, which would allow in philosophical fanaticism and cause a violently authoritarian response on the part of the state to this new culture of ‘libertinism’, as Kant describes it in his essay ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ (KPW 249) The literary counter-image serves, then, what might be described as an important ‘regulatory’ function, following Jon Mee, in the effort to manage a relation between philosophical speculation and the wider culture.19 While the image might accord poetics a role in regulating the wider culture of Kant’s moment, it is necessary to resist the tendency anachronistically to describe this role for symbolism in society as ideology or a deceptive form of social regulation, in favour of an unpacking of its contextual significance. We need to revise our view of Kant as the linguistic formalist who struggles to liberate human rationality from inclination. Reason is a force that reflects on its antagonism with inclination as historically productive. The last 20 years of cultural criticism have been dominated by a critical impulse to uncover a set of ideological attitudes that allegedly remained buried in the classic texts of philosophy and literature. However, if their writers were knowingly manipulating the ideological motivations of these texts, then the texts themselves may turn out to have been manipulating our responses in ways that we still fail to understand. At least, though, we might learn to uncover forgotten avenues for an engagement with types of difference that have remained hidden to the persistent ideology-critiques of recent years.

CHAPTER 4

Paul de Man and the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism

SPIVAK’S IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE REVISITED I will begin here by revisiting a number of issues held in common by Gayatri Spivak’s form of post-colonial deconstruction and a recent strain in criticism of Romanticism, by which I mean criticism that since the 1980s has sought to expose and to challenge the ideological underpinnings of canonical Romantic texts. Both want to displace an earlier strain of Romantic criticism that, they argue, had uncritically inherited Romanticism’s own aesthetic interests, and that they associate with the work of Paul de Man. But while this common critical effort seeks to distance itself from Romanticism and its supposed inheritors in New Criticism and American deconstruction, it is equally enabled by de Man’s own efforts to suggest that Romanticism initiated a type of aesthetic ideology that has left an ongoing legacy of aesthetic violence. In particular, de Man suggests that this Romantic ideology offered an aesthetic representation of the world that erased its singularity and materiality through idealizing tropes such as the symbol. De Man, then, is both the symptom and the cure for an ongoing set of aesthetic threats that seem to derive from the Romantic period. The following analysis will be more concerned with tracking the rhetorically interesting stagings of his argument among a generation of critics who have grappled with de Man’s thought, than with reconstructing in any detail de Man’s own arguments. By examining these responses to the deManian legacy, it becomes possible to locate the sources of the unease of contemporary literary criticism, as it revisits the Romantic interest in aesthetic self-consciousness without the intervening fear of ideological contamination. Crudely put, what is held in common between Spivak and the ideologycritique of Romanticism is a certain intention to challenge what Spivak takes to be a pervasive ‘celebration of the self’, or more particularly of the autonomy of self-consciousness, in the privileged discourses of poetics,

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philosophy and literary criticism.1 Both in Spivak’s work and in the work of these Romantic critics, this challenge has used a psychoanalytic vocabulary in order to expose the ways in which these privileged discourses ‘foreclose’ or ‘displace’ certain forms of subjectivity (the colonial subject and the rural poor respectively) as a kind of ‘transferred desire’ of the text, and as a condition of establishing that autonomous self. In each case, the foreclosed forms of subjectivity then re-emerge against the author’s conscious wishes through the deconstruction performed on the text. This is, of course, familiar ground to post-colonial and Romantic critics alike: following Lacan, Spivak aims to ‘submit to this test [of the status of speaking]’, as she writes in an early essay on Coleridge, ‘a certain number of the statements of the philosophic tradition’. Submitting the text to this analytical challenge then leads to ‘the eruption of the Other onto the text of the subject’.2 A growing restlessness, in studies in Romanticism, with this form of ideology-critique that I have sketched out suggests that such criticism fails to get free of the Romantic model of self-consciousness that it invokes and challenges. Francis Ferguson has written of Jerome McGann’s 1983 study The Romantic Ideology that it becomes ‘a version of the very selfinvolvement it was designed to repudiate’. For Ferguson, McGann merely recasts the Romantic preoccupation with the self in salvific terms; ‘the chief difference between his version of self-consciousness and the Romantic one that he would repudiate,’ she writes, ‘is that he imagines a self-conscious self that achieves its self-consciousness through particularity.’3 More recent criticism has wisely sought to abandon the critique of the Romantic ideology wholesale, by pragmatically accepting that contamination by Romantic categories may be an intractable feature of Romantic criticism that takes an interest in the philosophical pretentions of Romantic period writing. Tim Milnes, in a recent return to Romantic epistemology that abandons the ‘drive to demystification’ of recent Romantic criticism, has written of ‘relinquishing the obsession with perfect critical hygiene which presents itself as a self-aware and cheerful celebration of contamination’.4 It may be, then, that the desire to establish an analytical or diagnostic distance between Romantic criticism and Romantic writing only serves to expose the impossibility of mediating that distance critically. Instead, we might do better simply to recognize our ongoing critical proximity to the Romantic subject. Perhaps this is a last stand for those who remain preoccupied with the philosophical pretensions of Romantic writing, and with the urge to understanding them as a source of contemporary philosophical issues. Those more directly (and, perhaps, genuinely) interested in Romantic writing’s role in its own culture were arguably never contaminated in the first place. But here Spivak may have been ahead of the Romantic criticism

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whose critique of ideology she shares. Her work has always remained cognizant of the fact that it may repeat the foreclosure of the subaltern subjectivity that, Spivak claims, has characterized the celebratory philosophical and poetical self since the Romantic period. Famously, the question in the title of Spivak’s essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ is answered in the negative: and this goes as much for Spivak’s own inquiry into subaltern consciousness as for the representations of the subaltern that she submits to the test of speaking in the course of her essay. Her inquiry into ‘the possibility of speaking of (or for) the subaltern woman’ ends in failure, as the desire of the subaltern proves unrecoverable from the analytical situation.5 The scepticism of this position sets itself against the prematurely celebratory claims of Foucault and Deleuze, to have overcome a theory of representation with a philosophy of pure desire that allows the subaltern to speak for herself. Spivak suggests that any claim to speak of, or to speak for, the subaltern, even if mediated by a notion of ideological representation, might end up in an act of ventriloquism that misrepresents this unrecoverable form of subjectivity. To this extent (and here de Man becomes essential for her) politics requires rhetorical reading in order to critique modes of representation. The danger of dispensing with a critique of representation, with a rhetorical engagement with ideology, argues Spivak, is that ‘contemporary invocations of ‘‘libidinal economy’’ and desire as the determining interest, combined with the practical politics of the oppressed (under socialized capital) ‘‘speaking for themselves’’, restore the category of the sovereign subject within the theory that seems most to question it’.6 The kind of ventriloquism that Spivak exposes in Foucault and Deleuze, the claim to allow others to speak for themselves has, arguably, also been an important object of Romanticism’s self-critique since Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. An undue predilection for the ‘dramatic form’ in Wordsworth’s poems, writes Coleridge, ends in the representation of an encounter ‘where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks’.7 Thus if the recent ideology-critique of Romanticism reproduces characteristically Romantic habits of self-transcendence, so too does Romanticism itself anticipate Spivak’s scepticism about the possibility of allowing others to speak in philosophical and poetical discourse. Or at the least, Romanticism also engages with this problem of representing other minds. It would be wrong, of course, to overstate these points of comparison. Coleridge, in his attack on the preface to the Lyrical Ballads in Biographia Literaria, defends a notion of mimesis that he attributes to Aristotle. For Coleridge, ‘poetry as poetry is essentially ideal . . . it avoids and excludes all accident’.8 For Spivak, however, the mimesis of the ‘Aristotelian stage’ that, she argues following Walter Benjamin, is the aesthetic principle of Romantic

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theatre, identifies ‘the proper and intrinsic space of dramaturgy by the strategic exclusion of its politico-economic-ideological ‘‘other’’, which underwrites its being’.9 Coleridge wants to exclude idiosyncrasy, and such acts of exclusion, writes Spivak, define the aesthetic project of the Romantic self. But this problem of representing other types of consciousness in poetic and philosophical discourse is a Romantic inheritance in Spivak, and one that Romanticism inherits from the philosophical critique of representation in the eighteenth century. What Spivak’s early essays on the Romantics have in common with McGann’s critique of the Romantic ideology is a challenge to the New Criticism, the reigning critical orthodoxy in America that was displaced by deconstruction. New Criticism, writes Spivak, quoting from Paul de Man, ‘founded itself on the implicit assumption that literature is an autonomous activity of the mind’.10 This autonomous New Critical mind, both for Spivak and for McGann, is at once the mind of the poet and the reader. It symptomatically forecloses on the ways in which other subjectivities, socially embodied, might speak through philosophical and literary texts. Thus the ‘subject’ of the text becomes lost in the transaction between the author and the reader. If Foucault and Deleuze claim to have dispensed with a theory of ideology, with the rhetoric of representation in favour of a philosophy of desire, then de Man functions in Spivak’s and McGann’s arguments, and also for John Guillory in Cultural Capital, as a ‘pure’ theorist, the purity of whose theory depends on a foreclosure of desire. Kant is taken by them as the model for this definition of the mental autonomy of both the poetical and critical acts with his famously ‘disinterested’ theory of aesthetic judgement, a judgement that, for Kant, is neither inflected through moral concepts nor through empirical taste. His is the first philosophy, as Hamann and Herder noticed early on, to fetishize the idea of a cognitively ‘pure’ reason cleansed of empirical psychology.11 But for McGann and Spivak, and for the generation of critics for which I am taking them as representative, such aesthetic ‘disinterest’ quickly becomes a kind of ethical disinterest, whereby the purely mental poetic experience is guilty of forgetting about real issues in the world with which literature might otherwise be engaging. For Spivak, this issues in Kant’s apparent indifference to the existence of aboriginal peoples in his Critique of Judgement. Similarly for McGann, historicizing the Yale school of deconstruction of which Paul de Man is representative as ‘deeply driven in the ground of modernism and New Criticism’, ‘Academic postmodernism is an effort to maintain Kantian and modernist forms below those structures of social instability which have emerged through the postmodern experience’ (SVPA 35).

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Both Spivak and McGann consequently seek to surrender a formalist conception of literary criticism to types of anthropological engagement and signification, whereby cultural others are reinscribed, awkwardly and ‘against the grain’, as it were, into the literary-critical activity. Thus McGann’s account, against the Yale school, of the material performativity of literature, its social instrumentality, is akin to Spivak’s ‘mistaken anthropomorphism’ in its account of the introduction of literacy and Christianity to the indigenous Maori peoples of New Zealand in the Romantic period. Specifically, McGann writes that ‘through Maori eyes we may see that texts have a ‘‘rhetoric of temporality’’ far different from what was described by de Man’ (SVPA 8–9). In both cases, Paul de Man’s deconstructive Romantic criticism is implicitly understood as an incomplete departure from the ‘formalist’ New Critical orthodoxy with its framework of Kantian autonomy. Instead, an imagined anthropological perspective is brought into literary criticism, in order to demonstrate, perhaps, the impossibility of that perspective in a formalist, post-Kantian critical practice. Such a surrender of literary ‘theory’ to radical ethical praxis, to a broken anthropology, assumes that ‘theory’, or an interest in the cognitive or epistemological claims of literature, is always disinterested (that is, ethically disinterested). It thinks of ideas as discreet phenomena that are cleansed of cultural matter, in order to break their purity with the reinscription of an anthropology, which it still thinks of as philosophically inappropriate. But what if these ideas never claimed such a purity for themselves, under the guise of an ethically disinterested notion of the autonomy of the artwork? Spivak’s ‘mistaken’ anthropology, or what she describes as a ‘mistaken anthropomorphism’, in fact inherits a fairly orthodox Kantian position on the relation between aesthetics and anthropology. This may mean that we need to abandon a conception of ideology critique as a kind of unmasking of social illusion, which lends itself to a view of ideological productions, such as literature and art, as forms of illusion that hide a social reality that becomes recoverable precisely through the act of unmasking the ideological productions. But what if literary expression is in fact a way of disclosing, rather than masking a social reality? What if, rather than foreclosing the voices of subjectivities other than poet and reader, literary and philosophical expression already sought to express those subjectivities in its own broken way? There exist alternative ways of thinking the social reality of ideas. In a recent attempt to rethink the potential of ideology critique, Simon Jarvis has reread Marx’s attack on the young Hegelians in The German Ideology. Marx shows, according to Jarvis, that in thinking ‘that breaking the ideas of transcendence will produce demystified social relations, the young Hegelians superstitiously attribute those ideas a power of their own, a kind of power

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which in truth belongs, for Marx, only to living human individuals’.12 The historical materialist’s desire to smash ideas in their purity may turn out to be another form of idealism, in that it has already attributed an occult power to those ideas that they never claimed to possess. Indeed, if, as Jarvis claims, it is not mystifying theories that cause systemic social illusion, then the attempt to demystify those ideas cannot dissolve the illusion; rather, ‘‘‘demystification’’ may very easily be the preferred activity of its [social illusion’s] beneficiaries’. 13

FORECLOSURES OF DE MAN The current attempt of certain Romanticists to offer what Andrew Bowie describes as ‘an orientation towards understanding the truth potential in art that is more than ideology’14 is justifiably timid about the danger of presenting itself as a setting back of the clock to a rediscovered (and all too existential) commitment to canonical Romantic literature, or to the rediscovery of deManian ‘strictly philosophical, epistemological’ (AI 143) issues in Romanticism after the praxis talk of recent years, with its interest in the ‘production’ of the Romantic ‘work’.15 De Man is a difficult figure in relation to this effort, because while he anticipated this current turn in studies in Romanticism, he has been made to represent much that was wrong with the way that things were beforehand. In particular, his work suggests a kind of aesthetic formalism (his late turn towards a consideration of ‘materiality’, ‘affect’ and ‘ideology’ notwithstanding)16 that accepts a priori distinctions between materiality and intellect, cognition and ‘the pragma of interpersonal relationships’, law and desire, or ‘the radical estrangement between the meaning and the performance of any text’ (AR 298). The following reconsideration of de Man depends, then, upon some shifts in attitude in relation to the Romantic ideology that suggest that de Man’s method of reading Romantic literature may not yet have fully run its course. But an important prerequisite of this reconsideration is a confrontation with a significant counter-argument to this proposed return to de Man. From a Romanticist perspective, the main difficulty with de Man’s methodology is a pervasive looseness in his engagement with questions of genre and periodization. De Man often claimed to offer a radical challenge to genre distinctions and notions of literary periodization, but for some readers it is less the radicalism of his claims than a pervasive form of canonicity that underlies them that is most troubling.17 In his challenge to notions of Romantic periodization in one of his most influential essays, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, de Man needs to keep in place a fairly conservative notion

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of Romanticism as characterized by the rise of a rhetoric of the symbol, over what he takes to be the older, eighteenth-century form of allegory, in order to challenge this historical scheme with the notion that older rhetorical forms in fact survived into early Romanticism. What John Guillory describes in Cultural Capital as the ‘testiness’ of de Man’s argument, which operates through ‘a certain irritation which is already a reaction to the response de Man imagines his statement will provoke’,18 allows de Man to forget that his challenges to genre and periodization do not push nearly as far as they may seem to. Instead, they have seemed to Romanticists to depend on rhetorical classifications, such as the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, which, as Guillory argues, offer ‘a suspiciously unsurprising binarism’ (221) or, in Clifford Siskin’s words, that ‘are remarkably simple and heavily normative’.19 Guillory takes de Man’s work as symptomatic of a failure to engage with the general institutional question of canon formation among the master theorists, and with the role that theory has played in extending the literary canon to non-literary texts. Not the least consequence of de Man’s inattentiveness, as Guillory understands it, to this question of institutionality is a further capacity for the radicalism of de Man’s claims to collapse before one’s eyes. Eliding the history of rhetoric, even as he claims to reinstitute an understanding of the rhetoricity of literature,20 de Man can only describe Rousseau’s political texts as ‘literary’ in a rhetorical way on condition that he forgets ‘that Rousseau’s work would never have been considered in the eighteenth century as anything but ‘‘literature’’ in the sense of ‘‘polite letters’’’ (220). Guillory further argues that scientific discourse, another major target of de Man’s deconstruction, never sought to overcome the dependence on tropes that de Man seeks to expose in it to the detriment of its truth claims: De Man characterizes scientific discourse entirely conventionally as the discourse with the largest epistemological claims, but he would also like to argue that these claims are undermined by the presence of trope: ‘Philosophers of science like Bachelard or Wittgenstein are notoriously dependent on the aberrations of poets’ (AR, 17). But why is such dependence ‘notorious’? There is no reason to assume that the expunging of trope forms any part of the epistemological agenda of either Bachelard or Wittgenstein, or of scientists in general (the mathematization of science has assured that its verbal language is nothing but trope). The fact that de Man can represent science in the way that he does marks rhetorical reading as the latest development of an antirhetorical epistemology firmly grounded in the discourses of early modernism, when a polemic against

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trope was indeed a programmatic feature of scientific discourse formation. (219–20) Guillory offers the most intelligent version of a fairly common position on de Man, whereby the relationship between literary theory and pedagogical practice or the question of institutionality, are, in de Man, of strictly epistemological or cognitive interest. This is not to say that de Man does not want to discuss institutional questions or issues about education – they are in fact surprisingly prevalent in his work21 – but that he always wants to evoke them in order to say that they are only of interest to rhetorical reading in so far as they relate to cognition, and in the way that they obscure or misrepresent literature’s cognitive interests. This ‘strict’ concern with epistemology means that the humanizing gestures of rhetoric are always in error, albeit that this is an unassailable error in that the ‘entire assumption of a non-verbal realm governed by needs may well be a speculative hypothesis that exists only . . . for the sake of language’ (AR 210). Anthropological rhetoric, the dependence of critical discourse on a language of ‘need’ becomes a mistake that philosophy can’t help but make. But the perpetual recuperation of ideological aberration into this sceptical epistemology, and what Guillory reads as a concomitant fetishizing of the possibility of a form of epistemology cleansed of the conditions of its institutional and rhetorical functioning, exposes its own derivativeness when thinking is subjected to a critically sociological analysis. Guillory takes on Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘revisionary sociology’ (viii) supplemented with Lacan’s theory of transference and Althusser’s notion of ‘symptomatic reading’, in order to offer a social critique of the ‘charisma’, ‘pathos’ and ‘rigor’ of de Man’s pedagogy which is utterly compelling but leaves the intellectual content of de Man’s work largely untouched as a matter of principle. Symptomatic reading always has to step outside of the text in order to explain its contradictions; thus ‘Althusser suggests that a symptomatic reading of a text reveals that the text provides an answer to a question which does not itself appear in the text’ (180). But to this extent the ‘inside’ of the text is immediately surrendered to a certain deManianism. Guillory’s approach figures the possibility of an engagement with (or ‘reading’ of) de Man’s texts as the threat of giving in to what would already manifest itself as a certain form of deManianism, against which the solidification of rhetorical reading into the revised sociological-psychoanalytic ‘close examination’ that Guillory proposes offers the best defence: Such a reading will entail a close examination of the text of de Man, not in order to discover there the contradictions or lapses that will disprove

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the argument of deconstruction, but in order to discover what problem within the discipline of literary criticism becomes manifest as the symptomatology of the de Manian oeuvre. (179) Such gestures, and in particular the diagnosticity of ‘close examination’ (as opposed to de Man’s own methodology of ‘rhetorical reading’, and the ‘close reading’ that implicitly underwrites it) indicate the dangers one faces as soon as one attempts to engage with the detail of deManian argument, a danger that survives even the symptomatic reading of Guillory. What I mean by this is that in effectively signalling the dangers of an engagement with de Man’s argument on its own terms, or at least within the context of the epistemological issues that it claims to evoke, Guillory’s symptomatology may unwittingly reconstitute de Man’s own theme of the threat that rhetorical reading offers to the practice of literary criticism.22 Again, examining de Man’s reading of Proust from Allegories of Reading, which reinvents the familiar structuralist distinction between metaphor and metonymy for de Man’s critique of the Romantic ideology, Guillory writes, ‘I shall not be concerned directly with the validity of this reading’ (221). Assessing the ‘validity’ of the argument is, perhaps, to have already surrendered to the deManian methodology, from which perspective it will become impossible to maintain the critical distance needed to diagnose the symptoms. This entails, however, a completely oppositional stance in order to offer a critical confrontation with de Man. Such cautious gestures even afflict those few who are still prepared to defend de Man for thinking of the possibility of an aesthetic experience which is not already bound by ideology. Thus, writing of de Man’s, along with Adorno’s and Hazlitt’s, ‘weakness for the indemonstrable (or even perhaps for the demonstrably false) claim’, Simon Jarvis writes: The scrupulous reading which replies that these claims cannot really be proved, or which shows that there is a good chance of disproving them, is less than scrupulous as a reading of these claims, because it mishears what might be described, not as their literally syntactical, but as their cognitive, mood. They are not really propositions offered as corresponding adequately with a state of affairs. They are a kind of disenchanted echo of performative or apotropaic speech.23 Accepting de Man’s claim that the truth-content or the ‘cognitive’ moment of the aesthetic is found beyond a correspondence theory of truth, the epistemological content of de Man’s own work remains performatively bracketed here. This is a form of truth which exists beyond syntax, even beyond dis-

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cursivity (rather, in a form of poetical performance). What I am suggesting is that there is a peculiar tendency among de Man’s readers, friends and foes alike, to bracket the epistemological content of his work, when de Man’s own repeated declarations of a ‘strictly epistemological’ interest in the text of philosophy and the experience of pedagogy claimed to bracket everything else. Attention to this interest will either contaminate the close sociological examination with the ideological substance it seeks to expose, or it will misrecognize or ‘mishear’ the voice of truth that de Man’s performative statement itself exposes, by retranslating it into a correspondence theory of truth that is precisely the object of the deconstruction. We might legitimately ask at this stage if it is at all possible to offer a critical reading of de Man that does not already figure itself as a threatening deManianism, and that does make contact with the detail of his argument. Guillory’s argument about de Man’s pedagogy offers some hope here. Guillory proposes an examination of a scene of transference between de Man as teacher and his ‘disciples’. The transmission of de Man’s methodology depends, argues Guillory, on the inadmissibility of a mutual love that ‘has no place at all in whatever reading [. . .] might eventuate from it, and [. . .] is paradoxically not ‘‘expressed’’ there at all’ (183). The methodology of rhetorical reading might only survive if this love remains unspoken. This means, argues Guillory, that the master–disciple love can only break out in anecdote, and particularly in the anecdotes about de Man’s charismatic pedagogical practice that emerged in the immediate aftermath of his death. The inadmissibility of desire is of course a topic of de Man’s work, which, in the essay ‘Kant and Schiller’, figures the representation of desire in the field of epistemology as error. It would seem only just, in fact, that the foreclosure of desire (as Derrida at least has noticed) be acknowledged as a ‘theme’ of de Manian rhetorical reading, before it becomes a silence that we might try to recover by placing that methodology into its wider institutional framework of transference and counter-transference.24 To this end, Rei Terada has recently suggested that we might see deconstruction ‘as providing alternatives to classical concepts of transference and transformation instead of simply lacking them’.25 De Man’s argument about a foreclosure of desire is figured most immediately for my purposes in his description of the ‘strictly epistemological interests’ of Kant’s aesthetics, their having nothing to say about ‘the pragma of the relationship between human beings’ (AT 14–13). This argument involves claims about an aesthetics that is critically liberated from ideology, and most interestingly it necessitates a consideration of the challenges that emerge in the relationships between de Man and other ‘disciples’ such as Gayatri Spivak, Paul Hamilton and even Jerome McGann. These relation-

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ships are far more canny, complex and interesting than the open-and-shut cases that Guillory reads out of the homage to de Man published by his former students in a special edition of Yale French Studies after his death. By far the most intriguing responses to de Man, then, are found in critical work that seeks, in its own turn, to foreclose his philosophical and critical importance. This analysis of such acts of foreclosure will seek to turn around Gayatri Spivak’s reading of the foreclosure of the native informant in Kant’s third Critique, the subject of the previous chapter. Quoting from Laplanche, Spivak defines foreclosure as the process by which ‘the ego rejects [verwirft] the incompatible idea together with the affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all’ (Spivak’s italics). She uses the concept in order to ‘direct us into the dis-locating of psychoanalytic speculation from practical science (for which specialized training is recommended) to ethical responsibility (a burden of being human)’ (CPoR 4–5). The passage from a scientific theorizing to radical ethical praxis, which redemptively reinscribes affect into thinking, is a familiar turn against de Man. Spivak’s approach, however, involves its own foreclosure of de Man, whom Spivak reads as precisely such a speculative mind that needs to be surrendered to radical praxis. And as with Spivak’s own definition of foreclosure, by which, pursued into a Lacanian lexicon, ‘what has been foreclosed from the Symbolic reappears in the Real’ (CPoR 5), so a certain deManianism re-emerges into her text. Before engaging with these attacks on de Man any further, and with the scene of transference described by Guillory in particular, it is necessary to examine briefly de Man’s own ideas about sign, symbol, allegory and ‘poetic vision’, in particular as they appear in his readings of Kant and Rousseau. Like Spivak in her ‘mistaken anthropomorphism’, de Man’s treatment of symbol may read Kant more closely than de Man himself realizes. Similarly, this excavation of Kantian symbols in relation to their deManian treatment allows the Kantian perspective to speak back to the engagements with de Man offered by Spivak, Guillory and others.

SIGN AND SYMBOL For Guillory, the often-noted survival of a psychoanalytical vocabulary into de Man’s rhetorical reading suggests that the ‘‘‘transference’’ of the self or its agency onto language is finally the means by which all the relevant psychoanalytic concepts – displacement, resistance, substitution, the unconscious – are replicated in rhetorical reading, at the cost (or benefit) of preserving the phenomenological self of self-reflection’ (194). But it is pre-

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cisely de Man’s aim to disarticulate this phenomenological and reflecting subjectivity. De Man’s quarrel with modern interpreters of Kant in his paper ‘Kant’s Materialism’ is that they fail to recognize an epistemological moment in aesthetic experience, concentrating instead on its ‘apparent frivolity [. . .] and, hence, its vulnerability to moral censure’, which entails their ‘underestimating its powers of cognition’. Such an approach has led, in the history of Kant’s reception, to a reading of the Critique of Judgement that concentrates ‘on the notion of aesthetic as free play at the expense of the aesthetic as pure reason’ (AI 120). For Jerome McGann, the problem with free aesthetic pleasure is not resolved in de Man: The problem of de Man’s conception of ‘the text’ occurs, I think, because he wants to resist the pressure of his own critical logic, which inclines to turn the literary event into ‘the mere play of the signifier’ and the ‘disinterested play’ of a Kantian-type aesthetic. (SVPA 4) De Man argues that a number of Kant’s readers, Foucault and M. H. Abrams in particular, assume that Kant’s aesthetics fail to get beyond a reading of the aesthetic as pathological and frivolous, an understanding of the aesthetic that Kant had already criticized in his predecessors. De Man’s claim, then, is that Foucault criticizes Kant for having committed the same error that Kant had already condemned in the empiricist aesthetics of the British Enlightenment. Kant’s ‘critique of representation’ is understood by Foucault, according to de Man, as a ‘return of the empirical’ (AI 121). This judgement of Foucault might usefully be juxtaposed with a quotation from Kant where, de Man claims, he ‘finds fault with the methodology of empiricism’ because, in Kant’s words, it will ‘never be able to reach the a priori principle [. . .] that underlies judgements of taste by tracking down the empirical laws that govern the fluctuations of our moods’ (AI 120). The critical reception of Kant, then, according to de Man at least, is guilty of repeating the error that it diagnoses in Kant’s own aesthetics, of failing to raise the aesthetic out of the contingent realm of mood; but this too is the source of Kant’s critique of empiricism. For McGann, with his notion of ‘disinterested’ aesthetic ‘play’, de Man is also guilty of resting with this pleasure-based notion of aesthetic experience, even though his late work resists this pressure with a turn towards notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘materiality’. It turns in particular against Schiller’s aesthetic education which precisely looks for a cognitive value in the idea of play. For de Man, the notion of aesthetic pleasure is early on associated with the symbol, a mode of artistic representation which he also understands to

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be bound up with violence. In his late essay ‘Sign and symbol in Hegel’s aesthetics’, de Man distinguishes between the ‘citational’ nature of the sign as a general way of representing objects through abstract qualities, and the symbol’s capacity to foreclose this citationality. The sign is citational in that it describes, as a condition of its representational activity, how an ‘implicit subject’ is making the sign stand in for what it signifies. Invoking a ‘scholastic terminology’, de Man writes that the sign functions as an ‘actus signatus: it presupposes an implicit subject (or I) which frames the statement and makes it into a quotation’ (AI 96). A distinction between the sign and what it signifies is maintained through the sign’s referring us to its artificial character, such that the sign can never be taken to refer in any direct, immediate or natural way to the object of representation. But this predicative or citational nature of the sign is always bound up with a potential to erase the particularity and contingency of the world in the act of representing it through a system of signs that bear no relation to the qualities of the objects that they designate: To the extent that the sign is entirely independent with regard to the objective, natural properties of the entity towards which it points and instead posits properties by means of its own powers, the sign illustrates the capacity of the intellect to ‘use’ the perceived world for its own purposes, to efface (tilgen) its properties and to put others in their stead. This activity of the intellect is both a freedom since it is arbitrary, and a coercion, since it does violence, as it were, to the world. (AI 96) This capacity for ‘violence’ is bound up with the predicative nature of any act of representation through signs. It has nothing to do specifically with art or artistic consciousness, but rather with the capacity of the predicating subject to reform the perceived world according to a system of signs that re-describe the world from a subjective viewpoint; although the citationality of the sign tells us that the sign is effecting this ‘effacement’. But de Man goes on to argue that in Hegel’s aesthetics the symbol is the properly artistic mode of signification, and that it has the capacity to seduce its audience into forgetting this arbitrary, artificial and citational structure of the sign itself. The essential difference between the sign and the symbol is that the symbol, unlike the sign, is non-citational, that it does not tell us (or that it even hides the fact) that a particular representation is being predicated by a subject in order to stand in for an object. De Man’s description of the way in which the symbol works on the perceived world does not follow the example of a sign which refers to a particular object in the external world, but rather uses the example of the way in

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which the self represents itself to itself in thought. In order to describe this difference between the representational qualities of sign and symbol, de Man follows Hegel’s account in the Encyclopaedia of how a thinking subject is represented to him- or herself, as the perceiving subject, via the sign ‘I’. This is an act of self-representation that, or so de Man wants to claim, ‘leads at once to predictable complications’: The thinking subject is to be kept sharply distinguished from the perceiving subject, in a manner that is reminiscent of (or that anticipates) the distinction we have just encountered in the differentiation between sign and symbol. Just as the sign refuses to be in the service of sensory perceptions but uses them instead for its own purposes, thought, unlike perception, appropriates the world and literally ‘subjects’ it to its own powers. More specifically, thought subsumes the infinite singularity and individuation of the perceived world under ordering principles that lay claim to generality. (AI 97) We are encouraged to think in terms of an analogy between the ‘sharp’ distinction between the perceiving subject and the thinking subject as object of representation, and the differentiation between the sign and the symbol. This then enables a further examination of what happens to the perceived world in the activity of the sign and what happens to the ‘world’ (no longer simply perceived) when it is subjected to thought. Whereas the sign is always capable of using perception ‘for its own purposes’, or, in the language of the previous quotation, of effacing the properties of the perceived world and placing others in their stead, ‘thought’ is capable of the much more extreme act of condensation involved in subsuming the infinite singularity of the world ‘under ordering principles that lay claim to generality’. Although de Man does not say it here, he seems to imply that it is the symbol that effects this greater disfiguring of the ‘infinite singularity’ of the world by subsuming it into an ‘ordering totality’. In this way, ‘the sign, random and singular at its first position, turns into symbol just as the I, so singular in its independence from anything that is not itself, becomes, in the general thought of logic, the most inclusive, plural, general, and impersonal of subjects’ (AI 97). The arbitrariness or singularity of the sign, and the individuality of the ‘I’, are then subsumed into the generality of a symbolic discourse. Although de Man does not refer to Hegel’s critique of Kant here, what he describes in the movement of Hegelian idealism is clearly the shift from the ‘privacy’ of the Kantian judging subject to the public or communal standpoint of Hegelian phenomenology implied in that critique. ‘Certainly,’

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he paraphrases Hegel, ‘since the validity of thought resides in its generality, we cannot be interested, in thought, in the private, singular opinions of the thinker but will expect from him a more humble kind of philosophical selfforgetting’ (AI 97). It is the symbol that then effects this break with ‘private’ perceptions in order to bring about the generality of thought, specifically the capacity of the mind to symbolize the world under the category of the ‘I’. The symbol, then, is the mode through which phenomenological self-consciousness generalizes its representations. The movement to phenomenology from perception described here is essentially analogous to a shift in the rhetoric of Romanticism that de Man had traced in his earlier essay, ‘The rhetoric of temporality’ (1969). Describing how in ‘the latter half of the eighteenth century [. . .] the word ‘‘symbol’’ tends to supplant other denominations for figural language, including that of ‘‘allegory’’’, de Man describes a similar erasure of the contingency of the natural world in the development of Romantic discourse as he had found in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia: The subjectivity of experience is preserved when it is translated into language; the world is then no longer seen as a configuration of entities that designate a plurality of distinct and isolated meanings, but as a configuration of symbols ultimately leading to a total, single, and universal meaning. This appeal to the infinity of a totality constitutes the main attraction of the symbol as opposed to the allegory, a sign that refers to one specific meaning and thus exhausts its suggestive potentialities once it has been deciphered. (BI 188) The symbol effects the same solipsistic defacing of the particularity of perceived entities (‘the world is then no longer seen as a configuration of entities . . .’) in favour of the unfolding of a totality that is rather a product of an autonomous or non-empirical subjectivity, the universalization of the subject found in Hegel’s phenomenology. Allegory is here equivalent to the citational sign described in the later Hegel essay, and similarly functions in this argument as a way of preserving an awareness of the difference of perceived entities, whatever ‘violence’ the signing activity might do to the perceived world itself. The symbol then subsumes this perceived infinite differentiation of entities into a stable (and apparently timeless) ‘single, total, universal meaning’ whereas allegory represents the perceived world only in temporality, ‘and thus exhausts its suggestive potentialities once it has been deciphered’. However, the movement towards symbolization and away from allegory is not a movement that takes place in Romantic writing itself; rather, the

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symbolization that de Man describes here paraphrases the evolution of Romanticism as a form of idealism that a number of critics have posited. In the passage quoted above, de Man echoes what Hans-Georg Gadamer says in Truth and Method about ‘the valorization of symbol at the expense of allegory’ in German Romanticism which, Gadamer claims, coincides ‘with the growth of an aesthetics that refuses to distinguish between experience and the representation of this experience’ (BI 188). De Man’s own view, cited earlier, is that in the latter half of the eighteenth century ‘the word ‘symbol’ tends to supplant other denominations for figural language, including that of ‘‘allegory’’’ (BI 188, my emphasis), which suggests a movement on the level of nomenclature rather than of conceptuality or, necessarily, forms of signification. De Man traces the emergence of the allegorical mode out of a symbolic moment (rather than vice versa) in a text that he takes to be crucial for the development of later Romanticism, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise. The novel is, de Man writes, crucial ‘for putting to the test the nearly unanimous conviction that the origins of Romanticism coincide with the beginning of a predominantly symbolical diction’ (BI 200). The dialectical conflict between the objective and subjective elements that is characteristic of symbolic discourse is overcome in Rousseau’s novel; rather, de Man wants to persuade us, Rousseau’s ‘language is purely figural, not based on perception, less still on an experienced dialectic between nature and consciousness’ (BI 203). This pure figurality in Rousseau is neither citational, according to the definition of the sign described with reference to Hegel (since it is ‘not based on perception’), nor is it (in fact ‘still less’) based on the subject/object dialectic that de Man wants to claim is the watchword of the misreading of Romanticism as a symbolic discourse. De Man wants to argue that Rousseau’s novel ‘could not exist without the simultaneous presence of both metaphorical modes, nor could it reach its conclusion without the implied choice in favour of allegory over symbol’ (BI 204). The dialectic between subject and object on which the misreading of Romanticism hangs, writes de Man, ‘does not designate the main romantic experience’ but rather represents a ‘temptation that has to be overcome’ (BI 204–5). Again, Romantic allegorizing involves ‘the discontinuity of a renunciation, even of a sacrifice’ (BI 205). The Protestant aesthetics of Rousseau’s novel (which de Man rather loosely reads as deriving from a tradition of Protestant allegory taken from Defoe) figure the symbol as a seductive ‘temptation’, a moment of aesthetic pleasure, that has to be overcome in the wider dialectical movement of Rousseau’s thought. In ‘Phenomenality and materiality in Kant’, another of the late pieces from the volume Aesthetic Ideology, de Man claims to find another moment

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of sacrifice or renunciation of affect, in the passage from the mathematical to the dynamical sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. It concerns the familiar response to the scene of the sublime that converts an initial feeling of shock and terror, by ‘a trick of the imagination [. . .] into a feeling of tranquil superiority’ (AI 84). This tranquillity is schematic, to the extent that it is not really an emotional or psychological response to the sublime object itself, but rather signals a particular response on the part of reason, whereby reason suspends the feeling of shock in such a way that it is able to generate a feeling of tranquillity in the mind of the perceiver. Thus, like the feeling of respect in Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which is not really an empirical emotion but rather a ‘feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept’,26 the feeling of tranquillity is, according to Kant (as de Man quotes him here) ‘backed by the satisfaction of pure reason’ (AI 85). The feeling of shock is a response to the incapacity of the faculty of understanding to take in the enormity of the sublime object, to formulate a synthetic representation of the object via the imagination; the subsequent ‘feeling’ of tranquillity indicates that reason has intervened in order to formulate a practical idea that stands in for the absent empirical concept of the sublime object. Rather than condemning this exchange between understanding and reason via the imagination, which seems to involve a formalistic schematizing of the empirical understanding, and empirical affects, through reason’s self-wrought feeling of satisfaction or tranquillity, de Man attends instead to the peculiar rhetoric of the passage. The passage involves, he claims, an attempt to move beyond the ‘frivolity’ or mere play of the empirical aesthetic, towards reason’s mastery over nature through the schema of the sublime: As long as the faculty of the imagination is considered empirically [. . .] it is free and playful, closer to what then in English is called ‘fancy’ rather than what is called ‘imagination’. By sacrificing, by giving up this freedom, in a first negative moment of shocked, but pleasurable surprise, the imagination allies itself with reason. Why this is so is not at once clear; in affective terms, it takes on the form of a reconquered mastery, a reconquered superiority over a nature of which the direct threat is overcome. (AI 85) Having failed to formulate an empirical concept of the object in alliance with the power of the understanding, the imagination now facilitates the dynamic activity of reason (it ‘allies itself with reason’), in the process giving up on or ‘sacrificing’ its empirical use. The distinction between symbolic and allegorical modes needs, at this point, to be clarified. Both in their different ways describe the dominance of

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the mind over nature or the mind’s coming to dominate over nature. The symbol sublates the objective referent in such a way that the subjective element seems to be referring only to a representation of itself, in a secondorder representation in which the sign ‘I’ has come to stand in for the world (in Hegel at least). The allegory dramatizes the moment of the mind’s victory over nature, such that the total sublation of objectivity into the subject is resisted by the temporal form of the narrative, which still describes this objectivity as something external to the victorious subjectivity. Like the sign, as opposed to the symbol in de Man’s distinction between these terms in Hegel’s aesthetics, the allegory maintains a reference to the perceived, temporal world even in the act of effacing its individuality. De Man suggests that both acts of mind erase the contingency of the world. But in his reading of Kant, de Man introduces a third element into this equation, which serves to challenge (or at the least is clearly intended to head off) accusations of Kant’s formalism. This third moment leaves open the possibility of an aesthetic representation (or, better, ‘vision’, and in any case not a phenomenological perception) of the world that does not efface its contingency, but rather that points outside of its own figuring tendency towards a materiality that cannot be figured. De Man writes that in the allegorical description of the scene of the sublime, Kant anthropomorphizes the faculties of mind such that ‘the imagination sacrifices itself, like Antigone or Iphigenia [. . .] for the sake of reason’, in such a way that his philosophical argument ‘is in fact determined by linguistic structures that are not within the author’s control’. But the passage in Kant’s sublime, with its rather suspect gendering of faculties that enables the domination of the lower, female, sensual faculty of the imagination, occurs alongside, and in juxtaposition with, a passage on ‘the material architectonics of vision . . . with which it is entirely incompatible’ (AI 87). De Man claims that this passage undoes the entire figural schema of the sublime, which clearly lends itself to a story of how nature comes to be dominated by consciousness (elsewhere de Man describes this performative moment as ‘history’)27 by affording glimpses of an object which is totally free of the dominating representations of consciousness. Yet such glimpses, which de Man finds in Kant’s description of the Augenschein or a vision of nature that regards it ‘as poets do’, are precisely the product of some sort of artistic perception. It is a vision which cannot be given up to figuration, either in artistic or phenomenological consciousness, even though it originates in an artistic vision. Kant writes, as de Man translates him, that this vision of nature is to be distinguished from the type of purposive vision of nature that poetry, through its metaphors and symbols, characteristically offers us, that is a vision of the material world that figures it as if it were

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designed as a home for mankind: For example, we sometimes think of the ocean as a vast kingdom of aquatic creatures, or as the great source of those vapors that fill the air with clouds for the benefit of the land, or again as an element that, though dividing continents from each other, yet promotes the greatest communication between them; all these produce merely teleological judgments. To find the ocean nevertheless sublime we must regard it as poets do [wie die Dichter es tun], merely by what the eye reveals [was der Augenschein zeigt] – if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded by the heavens; if it is stormy, as an abyss threatening to overwhelm everything. (AI 80) This description of the ocean perceived as the poets do flags up the peculiarity of the Augenschein in Kant, a poetic vision that, as de Man writes, is entirely devoid of teleological impact. ‘The ‘‘mirror’’ of the sea surface,’ he writes, ‘is a mirror without depth, least of all the mirror in which the constellation would be reflected.’ (AI 82–3) The reflectiveness of the nonsymbolizing symbol here is pertinent. The paradox of this poetical vision of material nature as a reflective surface is that nothing can be reflected in it; the poet does not read an image of himself reflected in the object that he describes, and neither does the philosopher uncover an analogy between natural creation and human artistic ability here, which type of reflection is the aim of the analogy of reflective teleological judgement in Kant’s third Critique. The tradition of Kant’s interpretation, writes de Man, ‘as it appears from near contemporaries such as Schiller on, has seen only this one, figural, and, if you will, ‘‘romantic’’ aspect’ of his theory of the imagination, ‘and has entirely overlooked what we call the material aspect’ (AI 83). Materiality, for de Man, is what does not figure, what is not capable of reproduction through mimesis; but it may well remain a materiality without matter. Kant’s Augenschein is then understood to ‘disarticulate’ the teleological burden of his aesthetic figuring, such that the ‘critical power of a transcendental philosophy undoes the very project of such a philosophy leaving us, certainly not with an ideology [. . .] but with a materialism that Kant’s posterity has not yet begun to face up to’ (AI 89). De Man’s argument might then be construed to show how philosophical aesthetics, in imagining the perception of the artist, discloses a possibility for art that is not always already bound up with ideological reproduction. The image of the sea as a mirror that does not reflect captures the essence of this philosophical imagining of an aesthetic practice which is free from domination.

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The artistic vision almost understands its own tendency to view natural entities as a reflection of mind, but it foregoes its own impulse to offer an anthropomorphic figuration of the world. In the language of another de Man essay, which deals with the trope prosopopeia, the Augenschein is concerned with ‘the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration’.28 Nature must be anthropomorphically figured in order that this erroneous figuring might subsequently be overcome in an act of disfiguration. But this implies that truth, insofar as it overcomes ideological illusion, emerges in de Man through the act of defacing or disfiguring an illusory (figural) truth. The vision of nature is ‘material’, writes de Man, because it cannot be described as literal, ‘which would imply its possible figuralization or symbolization by an act of judgment’ (AI 82). Or the Augenschein might be understood as resisting a distortion that it prefigures. It is a form of perception which does not intend its own figuralization, and which is as such divorced from the type of reflecting consciousness that rediscovers images of itself in the world. The Augenschein is able to describe the ‘involuntary’ tendency to figuralization that characterizes artistic consciousness, but it refuses to issue in such a re-presentation of the world; rather, it leaves suspended the possibility of imagining the world before the imagination has got to work on it by anthropomorphizing its difference. This failure to figure the world as a reflection of the human solidifies the world, or in the language of de Man’s lecture on ‘Kant and Schiller’, it marks ‘the moment when the infinite is frozen into the materiality of stone, when no pathos, anxiety, or sympathy is conceivable; it is, indeed, the moment of a-pathos, or apathy, as the complete loss of the symbolic’ (AI 127). It is a form of artistic consciousness which escapes ideological reproduction, but only by passing through the threat of figuralization.

THE ROMANTIC SYMBOL REVISITED I will not say that I have named the analyst’s desire, for how can one name a desire? Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis In his application of Lacan’s notion of transference to the phenomenon of the discipleship that grew up around de Man, an application that seeks to place de Man’s method of rhetorical reading back into ‘the psycho-pedagogy of everyday life’ (190), John Guillory diagnoses a foreclosed counter-transference as central to the charismatic effect of de Man’s work. De Man’s written

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reflections on teaching reject the notion that a flow of desire constitutes the teaching transaction. This rejection of desire as central to the experience of pedagogy, argues Guillory, is what constitutes the fascination of de Man’s method. Transference and counter-transference, writes Lacan, are ‘usually represented as an affect [. . .] It is generally assumed, not without some foundation, that the positive transference is love’.29 Guillory argues that the foreclosure of the counter-transference entails, in de Man’s work, an ‘unequivocal rejection of desire itself as a concept at all material to the practice or analysis of pedagogy’. This rejection manifests itself in numerous of de Man’s writings, both on pedagogy and philosophy. Guillory quotes de Man’s claim, in The Resistance to Theory, that ‘teaching is not primarily an intersubjective relationship between people but a cognitive process in which self and other are only tangentially involved’ (190). Equally, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak makes use of a ‘mistaken anthropomorphism’ as the means to recover the foreclosed native informant as the condition of possibility of Kant’s argument about reflective teleological judgement. In a similar way to Guillory, this strategy sets itself against what might be described as de Man’s foreclosure of desire in his reading of Kant’s aesthetics. Spivak’s diagnosis of Kant’s foreclosure of the native informant rests on a never-quite-articulated diagnosis of the foreclosure of desire in de Man. Spivak quotes from ‘Kant and Schiller’, de Man’s defence of Kant’s schema of the sublime against Schiller’s attempt to make of it a programme for aesthetic education. It is against de Man’s insistence that Kantian philosophy is strictly concerned with epistemological, rather than intersubjective or ‘anthropological’, issues that Spivak then opens her ‘mistaken’ anthropomorphic reading of the third Critique. Her reading of Kant is ‘mistaken’, in other words, by the standards of a deManian reading of Kant that Spivak still takes as normative. De Man writes, as Spivak quotes him: Kant was dealing with a strictly philosophical concern, with a strictly philosophical, epistemological problem, which he chose to state for reasons of his own in interpersonal, dramatic terms, thus telling dramatically and interpersonally something which was purely epistemological and which had nothing to do with the pragma of the relationship between human beings. (CPoR 16) As in The Resistance to Theory, de Man seeks to foreclose desire (in this case ‘the pragma of the relation between human beings’ rather than teaching as ‘an intersubjective relationship between people’) from being at all material to philosophy’s strictly epistemological issues, as those issues are

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broached in Kant’s aesthetics. What is to be made of such acts of ‘foreclosure’ in de Man? For Guillory, they allow de Man to communicate the charisma of his pedagogical practice beyond the seminar room. Guillory writes that transference ‘depends on the disciple’s taking at face value the argument of the countertransference, that the master has no desire with respect to his pupils. This proposition must be ‘believed’ in order to enter into the state of fascination, where it then becomes possible to undertake the project of awakening the master’s desire, as a slumbering leviathan’ (187). De Man’s method, by this reading, involves a peculiar seduction, its denial of desire challenging his readers to reawaken the desire of the text. In a similar way, it is the denial of desire as a concept that is material to the epistemological interests of a philosopher like Kant, even as Kant invokes a desiring language, that has left de Man’s readers spellbound. The peculiarity of the Augenschein, as I have described it above, is that it sets in motion a symbolic transference only to interrupt it before it gets on the move. De Man’s ‘pathos of uncertain agency’, to paraphrase Neil Hertz,30 allows him to claim to have uncovered a spirited anti-rhetoricism in Kant that all readers of him (and in particular his Romantic readers such as Schiller) have refused to face up to. This might turn out to be an astute reading of Kant. The ‘symbolic anthropomorphism’ that Kant allows to express God’s relation to the world in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics seems to be precisely such a form of apathy, or disarticulated pathos. This is an expression of God’s love for the world, in terms of Lacan’s category of desire in the transference, that refuses to acknowledge itself as love; rather, love is the symbolic name for an unknown causal relation between God and the world. This relation is designated in Kant’s argument by the unmotivated signifier ‘x’ ‘which we call love’. Similarly, Guillory writes that at the end of Lacan’s seminar on transference and counter-transference the analyst’s unnamed desire ‘‘‘remains an x’’, that is, it remains’ (188). Might de Man have got closer to the nature of symbolic language in Kant, precisely through his recognition of the way in which symbolic language provides a ‘counter-image’ to pure reason? By this reading, symbolic language imports material desires into the pure cognition of the world that always deviate from this pure knowledge in ways that, paradoxically, allow us to approach the epistemological questions with greater rigour. The expression of ‘strictly epistemological’ questions would to that extent be tied, in Kant as well as in de Man, to a persistent foreclosure of desire. Much might be said in this frame, also, along the lines of Guillory’s institutional and pedagogical analysis. Kant’s quarrel with Herder is arguably bound up with issues described by Guillory under the rubric of the

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foreclosed counter-transference, given the complex relation between Kant’s critical philosophy and Herder’s Popularphilosophie. The controversy between Kant and Herder, it must be borne in mind, is a controversy between a master and his former student (as is the subliminal controversy between Spivak and de Man). There is even evidence in Kant of the same kind of testiness that governs de Man’s disavowal of desire, described by Guillory as an argument which functions by ‘a certain irritation which is already a reaction to the response de Man imagines his statement will provoke’ (190–1). This ‘testiness’ in Kant is found in the deliberate political incorrectness of his teleological argument. Kant’s claim that ‘we cannot see a reason why’ aboriginal peoples should exist surely functions by imagining the irritation that it will provoke in Herder, mourner of all that man has lost through the process of Enlightenment. Rather than overstating the similarities between Kant and de Man here, it is necessary to point towards alternative ways of negotiating the relationship between desire and knowledge that were already being formulated in Kant’s critical thought. What we encounter in the ‘symbolic anthropomorphism’, and to some extent in the Augenschein, is the peculiar need to denegate the inappropriateness of desire to philosophical reasoning as a structural move of that reasoning itself. But there exist in the early Romantic period alternative ways of negotiating the problematic relations between knowledge and desire. A third effort to rewrite the deManian legacy, again in Romantic studies, is found in Paul Hamilton’s recent study Metaromanticism. Hamilton’s book often traverses the same ground as de Man, and registers an uneasiness about its need to do so (‘Let me rephrase where I think my thesis differs from de Man’s’, writes Hamilton at one point in his introduction when discussing the political potential of Romantic irony).31 This journey might lead from Schiller’s chiasmatic aesthetics to Romantic irony in Schlegel’s Lucinde, the topic of ‘Kant and Schiller’ and ‘The concept of irony’, which are published alongside one another in Aesthetic Ideology, and which also form the topic of Hamilton’s chapter ‘Sublimity to indeterminacy: dreams of a new world order’. This consonance derives from Hamilton’s argument that our definition of Romanticism as a symbolic and mystified discourse underestimates its powers of self-critique. This is a clear echo of certain deManian themes, even as it attempts to move beyond them: I argue that the truth which intermittently surfaces within romantic theory and writing is that we are natural products, and that the mind which supposedly returns upon its origins to master them as objects external to it, objects of scientific knowledge, deceives itself as to this authoritative difference and is better employed in finding ways of explain-

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ing its common ground in nature and expressing this natural orientation. Viewed as one such tactic, symbolic genres do not propose an ‘illusory’ union between consciousness and the alien constrictions of mortality; they get behind scientific differentiations of ourselves from nature in order to figure the infinitude such loss of individuation entails. The crisis in romantic temporality is then no longer de Man’s one of a repressed memento mori, but [. . .] the temporizing by which the aesthetic symbol is defined to imply that the realization of its imagined, better life is always still to come. (19) What is curious about such arguments is that the desire to go beyond de Man is always tied to the need to go back to him. In this context, Hamilton, unlike de Man, wants to rescue the critical potential of the symbol itself. Here, the symbol no longer covers over our differentiation from nature in ideologically delusive (and scientific) ways, but rather ‘expresses’ our common ground in nature and ‘orients’ our efforts to find our way in this common ground. We are to recognize this common ground through recourse to a renewed awareness of ourselves as Kantian ‘natural products’. Hamilton, in brief, replaces the solipsism in idealism with something thoroughly of the Enlightenment – respect before a spectacle of natural infinity from which we cannot detach ourselves in such a way that we can meaningfully anthropomorphize its difference. Symbols instead reflect our effort to orientate ourselves in a world that we, as ‘natural products’, cannot step outside of as a condition of getting to know it. Orientation is also a key motif of Kant’s effort to annex the expressive capabilities of symbolic language to the efforts of rational speculation to find its way in an independent world of intuition, as described by his 1786 essay ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ There exist further modes of orientation in Romantic discourse that already acknowledged the ways in which rational self-understanding implied an unstable relation to desire. My example here, in the final chapter, will be Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Rather than figuring an aesthetic ideology of foreclosure or repression, the notion of a ‘reserve of reason’ as a form of rational selforientation, which I will propose in Wollstonecraft, seeks to resolve apparent antinomies between rational law and the unruly life of the body, and between reason and desire, through a conjectural narrative of personal and political development. Wollstonecraft’s notion of rational modesty, I want to argue, offers a way of overcoming both the anti-rhetorical epistemology of de Man and its critique in the name of sociological praxis, which latter often surrenders thought to a dogmatically posited social knowledge. Reserve and modesty do not figure a correspondence theory of truth that

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needs to be challenged. Rather, these tropes suggest symbolic representation through the body and through language as a screen that tells us that the content that it at once represents and conceals, that it ‘half shades’ in Wollstonecraft’s terms, is not yet fully available to reason.32 This modest scepticism figures its own form of orientation or praxis that yet maintains confidence in reason’s capacity progressively to disclose a social reality in the interests of the whole community.

CHAPTER 5

Mary Wollstonecraft and the‘Reserve of Reason’

REASON AND SENSATION IN THE 1790s In his recent study of the ‘discourse on enthusiasm’, Jon Mee has described The Prelude as ‘an extended attempt to demonstrate that a continuity of subjectivity could survive and benefit from the transports of enthusiasm and remain grounded in the world without dissolving into it’.1 Current British studies of the intellectual culture of the 1790s, and of Romanticism and beyond, now abound with attempts to rediscover a lost relation between affect and reason, to examine the rational self’s embodiment in the world and to suggest that the self remains ‘grounded’ by resisting visionary transports by regulating emotion. The classic feminist endeavour to ‘include affect under the sign of cognition’, as Isobel Armstrong has recently put it,2 has been supplemented by the view of poetry, in Mee’s useful formulation, as a kind of ‘regulatory discourse’ that determines the circumstances under which the rational self may be ‘transported’ with enthusiasm without losing its contours in the ‘wild’ enthusiasm of the crowd or of the religious visionary. Such revisions have in turn challenged a pat view of the archetypal male rationalist of the late eighteenth century. The view of William Godwin as a kind of ‘cold fish’ inhabiting the ‘frozen zone’ of the radical Enlightenment that Wordsworth supposedly set forth in The Prelude has been significantly revised,3 while the stock view of Immanuel Kant as a dry formalist in the metaphysics of morals has been challenged by recent studies of the ‘anthropological applications’ of his thought, and his alleged ‘embodiment of reason’. Many of these studies serve to historicize affect, to look at specific and significant moments of transaction between sensation and thought, rather than to describe a decontextualized sensation either as under the tyrannical sway of reason, or as escaping it in the anarchic and unregulated impulses of popular politics and dissenting extremism.4 And far from figuring a transcendental authority that is inattentive to the differential life of embodied experience, an increasingly historicized power of reason shows itself, both for Godwin and for Kant, to foster its own dangerously

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excessive species of enthusiasm in its combined activity with an ambivalent and untrustworthy power of imagination. The worrying capacity to ‘rave with reason’ that Kant encountered in a number of his contemporaries (notably J. G. Herder) required that reason itself be regulated or, as I will suggest below, that it be oriented with reference to sensibility. But what can these revisions to our understanding of the intellectual culture of the 1790s and its attitudes to emotion, this closer attention to both the structure of reason and the structure of feeling through an account of their significant interactions, tell us about female participants in the culture of radical Enlightenment?5 Are not accounts such as Mee’s in danger of reproducing a traditionalist view of the transcendentalizing effects of poetry in the Romantic period, by describing poetry’s overcoming and regulating of an embodied particularity which for feminists such as Cora Kaplan long represented a form of resistance to the canon?6 Should we not after all be celebrating the capacity of sensibility and the life of the body to escape rational predication, to embody an eternally differential experience that escapes the domineering formalizations of reason? Yet it is not only canonical male poets who seek to regulate emotion in the revolutionary decade. As Mee reminds us, part of Mary Wollstonecraft’s polemic against Burke in the Vindication of the Rights of Men serves to attack his ‘romantic enthusiasm’, his attempt to make sentiment serve the ends of a nationalist and hierarchical domesticity against the revolutionary sophisters, economists, and calculators.7 Even so, the breathless animation of the Vindication of the Rights of Man struggles to articulate a type of passionate resistance of reason to Burke’s enthusiastic and irrational counter-revolutionary rallying call. Reason is shown to have its own emotional content here, as the appeal to the ‘rational religious impulses’ advocated by the dissenting circle to which Wollstonecraft belonged suggests.8 And as the examples of Burke and Rousseau go to show, for Wollstonecraft, as much as for Godwin and Kant, this sensualized reason shows itself to be in dire need of regulation in its engagements with an increasingly mobile power of imagination. Part of the appeal of reading reason and sentiment as antithetical in this period surely derived from the way in which the antithesis allowed for an orderly and traditionalist subordination of sentiment to reason, the kind of subjection of enthusiasm to intellect that would suggest that enthusiasm made manifest without the guiding hand of reason will always lead to irrationalism. But recent studies of the historicity of affect and the embodiment of reason suggest that rather than seeking to dominate an inherently irrational emotional life, reason is enabled through emotion, it takes on an expressive capability that allows it to be responsive to the embodied particularity of its context. Mee’s study has suggested important ways in which a

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presentist view of a largely cold and disembodied Enlightenment rationalism in a figure such as Godwin, a view of reason as seeking to transcend the contexts of its expression and to restrict the life of the body, may obscure our understanding of what for Godwin’s contemporaries was a species of ‘Enlightenment enthusiasm’. Far from being antithetical, and thus allowing for a neat historical alignment of ‘enthusiasm with Romanticism as part of a binary opposition with, say, Reason and Enlightenment’,9 the relation between reason and sensation is highly equivocal during this period. In a close parallel to readings of Godwin, Wollstonecraft was long read as a would-be rational formalist who denied that conditions of embodiment are constitutive to reason, and as a woman who struggled unsuccessfully to reconcile her commitment to reason with a torrid emotional life. This deeply patronizing view has recently been countered by studies, notably by Barbara Taylor and John Whale, of the imagination as a space within which reason is reconciled to sensibility.10 Both studies, but Taylor’s in particular, restore to Wollstonecraft the religious teleology which is central to her thought, by reconciling Wollstonecraft’s rationalism to an understanding of the Platonic eros, a sacralized form of erotic love which Wollstonecraft inherited through the commonwealth tradition. Wollstonecraft is thus replaced in a historical context that is no longer understood to be grounded in an implacable conflict between reason and sensation, and that describes the emergence of a liberated Romantic enthusiasm out of the rationalist restrictions of the Enlightenment, but that rather recognizes complementary manoeuvres and productive contradictions between the two. In what follows, I want to discuss these negotiations, and to place them in a wider context of Enlightenment rationalism, both local and European, that is attentive to the interactions rather than the opposition between reason and sensation and that seeks neither to castigate nor to defend reason. In practice this means attention to the way in which emergent forms of literature, and the use of particular literary devices and tropes in philosophical discourse, take on constitutive roles in a cultural debate about sensation and what was often understood as its dangerous capacity to expand the public sphere.

MISTAKES OF CONDUCT Jon Mee understands The Prelude as a representation of a mature self that emerges unscathed from youthful transports of enthusiasm that it retrospectively recognizes to have been excessive and yet contributory to the formation of a regulated subjectivity. This is matched by Wollstonecraft’s

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description, in her novel The Wrongs of Woman (1798), of ‘mistakes of conduct’, in a passage examined in the introduction to this book. This passage can be illuminated by the intervening reading of Kant and of his critical reception: There are mistakes of conduct which at five-and-twenty prove the strength of the mind, that, ten or fifteen years after, would demonstrate its weakness, its incapacity to acquire a sane judgement. The youths who are satisfied with the ordinary pleasures of life, and do not sigh after ideal phantoms of love and friendship, will never arrive at great maturity of understanding; but if these reveries are cherished, as is too frequently the case with women, when experience ought to have taught them in what human happiness consists, they become as useless as they are wretched.11 Wollstonecraft’s feminism articulates an ambivalent role for the imagination in personal development. The imagination is a condition of attaining a ‘maturity of understanding’ that those who ‘do not sigh after ideal phantoms of love and friendship’ would never attain. Yet this arrival at maturity is equally determined by an ability to let go of this erotic idealism fostered by the imagination. Failure to recognize the productive ‘mistake’ that the imagination engenders in female conduct, its capacity to idealize objects that later turn out not to have merited the idealization, would forestall the formation of a sane judgement. Failure to let go of the ideal, in short, means that it would have been better never to have sighed after the ideal in the first place. The attack on codes of conduct expressed here is a significant echo of an attack on conduct theories from the earlier Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). There, Wollstonecraft seeks to distinguish rationalized modesty or reserve from the ‘regulation of the behaviour’ that is usually termed modesty by ‘those who study rules of decorum’ (V2 255). Specifically, Wollstonecraft grapples with the difficult proximity of rationalized reserve, the reserve of reason, to rules of decorum that precisely forestall the development of rational judgement. The two forms of modesty, as social custom and as a form of rational intersubjective praxis, must be distinguished from one another from within the predicament of their proximity. This helps to explain Wollstonecraft’s uncomfortable valorizing of ‘mistakes of conduct’ in the passage above, where she wants to persuade us that such mistakes will lead to a later ‘maturity of understanding’ and the cultivation of fully rational modesty. Mee’s suggestion that poetics in the 1790s are ‘regulatory’ in that they attempt to memorialize states of passion that are retrospectively recognized to have been productive to the formation of the subject (but only insofar as

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they are later sublimated into the literary imagination) also raises the question of the disciplinary function of literature. Literature in the 1790s, after all (and particularly literature, like Wollstonecraft’s novel, that is written under the influence of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise) often serves to represent individuals engaging with and struggling to overcome enthusiastic ideals fostered by the imagination. But are these excesses or mistakes of conduct experiences that the reader is licensed to go through, or is the experience of reading intended to be a safe stand-in for the experience itself? Perhaps, as Wollstonecraft suggests, it is only certain individuals who will succeed in converting the mistaken conduct or the transports of enthusiasm into the anticipated reasoned self-awareness. But this would suggest that literature is a self-defeating type of discourse, in that the individual who has found their way to the disciplinary lesson has in a sense already shown the necessary intellectual refinement that would make the literary lesson precisely superfluous. By this reading, either the imagination will harm or improve us, but literature has no specific role to play in managing idealism. In John Guillory’s terms, the regulatory effect of literature falls prey to an interrelation between representation and distribution in the production of cultural capital, between the literary representation of social interests and the dissemination of social values through literature. This issue cuts across the question of canonicity, and the vexed question of the status of The Prelude, to examine the production of social value in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary forms in the period. How far do Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft represent and validate a certain type of subject’s capacity to regulate and to benefit from the excesses of passion, and how far do they seek to instruct subjects who have not yet regulated youthful passions into a type of self-control through the experience of reading? If literature is indeed a regulatory, pedagogic discourse, then it may be in danger of instructing only those who have precisely no need of the lesson. Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth both, by this reading, fall foul of a version of the paradox that Rousseau found in the mid-eighteenth-century debate over the ethical status of the novel. It is not, Rousseau argues in the preface to La Nouvelle Heloise, the reading of novels that is corrupting, but rather the intention to read them. Any maiden who opens a novel has already had her heart corrupted, and the act of reading merely represents this corruption to society and the self. Rousseau writes in his first preface to the novel that the ‘chaste maiden’ who dares to read ‘a single page of [this novel] is a maiden undone: but let her not attribute her undoing to this book; the harm was already done’ (J, 3–4). Similarly, Julie writes to St Preux, after her wedding-day conversion to virtue, of the dangers of the ‘libertine’ philosophers who seduced them both. Their arguments, she tells

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him, ‘never seduced a heart that was not already corrupted’ (J 259–6). Literature and philosophy, if they degrade the reader, only tell of that reader’s prior corruption; the corruption that they threaten is then socially useful as well as dangerous, in that it offers a test case of the purity of the reader’s heart. It is the fact of literature’s existence that fulfils its sociological purpose, the reader’s cultural awareness of literature as a form of cultural capital and of the figure of the reader as an ambiguous signifier of cultural value or moral degradation, rather than any expressive inwardness in the experience of reading itself. La Nouvelle Heloise is Rousseau’s own attempt to offer a type of discourse of regulation, to reimagine the literary as representation or distribution of social value in the way of Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth. The novel depicts the overcoming of a doctrine of transparence with which Rousseau has been associated, as Mee reminds us, since Coleridge’s caricature of Rousseau in The Friend. Julie’s experience of an immodest youthful love affair, her enthusiastic and blasphemous assumption of a transparency in her relation to her lover St Preux, produces virtue later in life. In Wollstonecraftian terms, Julie’s early mistake of conduct proves to nurture adult virtue; by allowing the youthful individual’s reason the freedom to make mistakes, the individual ultimately finds her way to the duties of virtue. But this freedom is not, according to Barbara Taylor, ‘the ability to do what one pleased – which [Wollstonecraft] would have called licence – but to act rightly, according to God’s design’.12 The experiential freedom that allows the enthusiastic individual to learn from her mistakes is authorized by the higher freedom of a religious teleology; and as such, it was perhaps never in danger of succumbing to vice through surrender to the ‘wild’ freedom of a libidinous nature. The two lovers’ transportation out of themselves, their wrongful assumption of transparence to one another, is productive in that it allows them ultimately to draw a line between themselves and the type of godly mind for which this type of transparence is reserved, which in the context of Rousseau’s novel is figured by the living eye of M. de Wolmar.13 A youthful, blasphemous passion is what engenders adult piety, and so it seems that the literary is a vehicle for the expression of this truth in personal development by representing the excesses of the imagination. Such attachments are the first stirring of reflection, through which man comes to consciousness both of a higher nature than appetite within himself, and of the teleological design of external nature. Another example of how the literary imagination validates the developmental productivity of what are mistakes before reason is found in another of Rousseau’s readers, that most unliterary of writers Immanuel Kant. While Kant is famous for his dry prose, in his attempt to defend the principles of critical reason against the enthusiastic (or Schwa¨rmeisch) philosophy

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of Herder, he was prone anxiously to allow literary ‘mistakes’ into his critical work. His 1783 attempt to popularize the Critique of Pure Reason, the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics partially undoes the argument of the Critique that our attempt to think a first cause of nature can only be satisfied by reason’s journey beyond the realm of experience, by proposing instead that we can think a first cause of nature by analogy with the love of a parent for his child. This ‘symbolic anthropomorphism’, as Kant describes it, comes close to a type of transparence that critical reason proper would avoid (PAM 111). Kant’s ‘mistaken’ symbolic cognition of the deity may be intended to distinguish between the knowing Aufkla¨rer who recognizes its transgression of the critical method and the popular audience that Kant hoped to wrest from Herder. But this raises once again the question of the pedagogic or regulatory function of literary devices in philosophy, since the ironic distance between a populist description of reason’s ‘symbolic anthropomorphism’ and the dialectic of pure reason suggests that, for Kant too, social distinctions are assumed among his readership. Perhaps Kant’s symbolic anthropomorphism is intended, like Rousseau’s narrative of transgressive transparence, to cultivate an understanding in the popular, enthusiastic reader that the transports of imagination are ultimately curtailed by the transcendental (or holy) conditions that limit human knowledge; but it seems unimaginable that he would leave open the possibility, as he appears to in his Prolegomena, that critical reason might be a type of theism. What all of these ‘mistakes of conduct’ in philosophy and literature can be taken to show is an anxiety about the expansion of the public sphere, and the role played by sensation and imagination in that expansion. They popularize a difficult formulation about personal or philosophical authenticity and veracity in a sentimental way under the pressure of a burgeoning Romantic Popularphilosophie, and they suggest that literary devices or tropes can be used to regulate experience by encouraging a readership into the pragmatic management of extreme emotions which would otherwise threaten a loss of self-identity or critical proof. In the process, they open up questions about the social dimensions of an imagined readership, and about the different social functions that reading might be intended to serve in relation to a reader’s social status or gender. But to suggest that reason merely makes room for a ‘mistaken’ world of sensation is only to tell half the story, and a story that valorizes the supremacy of an abstract reason at that. Rather, with this incorporation of populist literary descriptions into philosophy (in Kant), or the integration of romance into reason (in Wollstonecraft), or the curtailment of transparence through the reformation of romantic attachments into friendship (in Rousseau), reason discovers a significant new expressive capability.

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One of the major values of recent work such as Jon Mee’s and Barbara Taylor’s is that it replaces a presentist view of sensation that has dominated more polemical readings of 1790s literature with an understanding of the complication of the discourse on enthusiasm with the philosophy and theology of its moment. Sensation is no longer celebrated as a liberation from a dominating and formalized ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’, but rather is recognized to embody and to participate in significant cultural anxieties and debates. In terms of our understanding of a figure like Wollstonecraft, this increased critical sensitivity to context means that she can be understood once again to be participating in a version of the philosophy of the Enlightenment which no longer seems quite so villainous. This is a reflection of her growing canonical status, no doubt, but the overtly philosophical reading of her is nevertheless what many critics in the 1980s and 90s were writing against, since it allegedly showed her collaboration with a masculinist discourse of reason. By challenging a contradictory view of reason and sensation, recent criticism, then, enables a revised reading of Wollstonecraft’s participation in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, both in regional terms (her participation in Newington Green rational dissent) and in a wider European context. This enables a revision of previous antagonistic efforts to displace Wollstonecraft from the Enlightenment, by suggesting some of the ways in which an understanding of her by analogy with her contemporary, Kant, forwards our understanding of the relation between reason and sentiment, insofar as it relates to sexual difference in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Kant and Wollstonecraft can be read productively alongside one another through attention to their common engagement with the ambivalent power of the imagination in Rousseau, and its significant dealings with reason.14 For Wollstonecraft, modesty is the behavioural notion that elaborates a socially embodied power of reason out of coercive anthropological paradigms. This means that modesty has to reform itself, traversing the aporetic ground of social behaviour which confuses the concept with what Wollstonecraft describes as ‘the immodesty of affected modesty’ (V2 259), in order that it finally becomes a figure for properly rational self-restraint. The capacity to separate off a rational reserve of reason from coercive social ideologies of female propriety is a product of the individual’s capacity for reflection. Kant can aid an exegesis of this difficult manoeuvre in Wollstonecraft, since in his conjectural philosophy of history and in his essays on critical philosophical methodology, he shows how instinctive modesty converts itself into reason in order to become the name of a properly rationalized social praxis, at the time in man’s historical development when philosophy

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becomes reflective. I will effect this recovery of the ways in which Kant’s philosophy and anthropology are of central importance to such anthropological speculations by describing how notions of modesty, propriety [sittamskeit] and the notion of ‘conduct of thought’ [Denkungsart] have been appropriated in recent Kant studies in order to defend the unity of his critical system against later critics, idealist and deconstructive alike. This defence also holds important resources for the exciting new readings of Wollstonecraft that are currently underway. But this critical comparison also entails a reminder of how Wollstonecaft shares with Kant a reception of Rousseau’s anthropology. In particular, Wollstonecraft reforms the notion of female modesty that she found in Rousseau’s E´mile. She replaces Rousseau’s understanding of modesty as a regulation of the erotic male imagination fostered by civil society with a vision of communal life governed by critical distance and respect for the rational other, or what she describes as a ‘reserve of reason’. Modesty in Wollstonecraft is a trope that figures the obscurity of the other, but it strives to cultivate a respect for this obscurity rather than to attempt either to eroticize it or to penetrate it with enlightenment. As such, it furnishes an example of the genuinely new role played by literary language in philosophical and political argument in the early Romantic period. Modesty aims to regulate and to transform gender relations, but to do so through a notion of reserve or critical distance. It points towards the imagining of a new life in sensibility and the body precisely by playing with tropes of rational distance and disengagement.

GENDER AND RATIONALITY IN KANT AND WOLLSTONECRAFT Attempts to read Wollstonecraft’s feminism through the prism of Kantian critique have usually got no further than drawing surface analogies between the two. Such analogies may define an opposition between active dialectical reason and passive sensibility as synonymous with the gender stereotyping that Wollstonecraft urges her age to overcome; or conversely, they may describe her attempt to think her way out of restrictive gender roles as a bit like the scene of dialectical reason. On the former reading, the ‘negative virtues’ (V2 174) that women are expected to cultivate may seem like the restrictions that Kantian reason imposes on the understanding, so that the role of women is always to limit the expansion of male rational power and knowledge to hidden cognitive conditions that pertain to the nature of that knowledge. Just as Kantian reason investigates limitations on the activity of the understanding that inhere in human nature, limitations to which the

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understanding is productively blind, so women’s role is to manage masculine society with the private language of an essentially feminine discourse. This feminized space has cultivated knowledge and power over male society that exceeds its self-understanding, and so can manage it with a natural, and potentially tyrannical, ease. Another version of this analogy might describe how the aesthetic, in Kant’s philosophy, ‘takes on power without responsibility, joining his scientific to his moral philosophy through a kind of judgement itself somehow excluded from this otherwise mutually exclusive pair’. The result, one critic has argued, ‘looks strongly analogous to feminization within patriarchy’. Efforts to read Wollstonecraft’s political philosophy as analogous to Kantian critique scarcely get further. Timothy J. Reiss has argued that ‘the basic principles of humanity’ for Wollstonecraft are reason, virtue and knowledge, and that these ‘look extraordinarily like the three Kantian Critiques’.15 These direct analogies leave themselves open to the accusation that they attribute to Wollstonecraft values and ideals that she shared with the historical Kant (values that modernity has, of course, long overcome), and that she is therefore complicit with the type of gender stereotyping that has often been taken to characterize Kant’s concept of civil society. Wollstonecraft’s work has been read as complicit with a masculinist discourse as often as Kant has been decried as a petit-bourgeois misogynist.16 Mary Poovey, in her analysis of the ideology of female propriety in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, makes what is perhaps the classic case for Wollstonecraft’s ‘falling hostage to the very categories she was trying to escape’ in her attempt, in the first and second Vindications, ‘to delineate – and disengage herself from – masculine definitions of women’.17 Poovey’s analysis of Wollstonecraft can be shown to involve another development that seems Kantian. On the same page as she sets out this perceived failure in the two Vindications, Poovey states that ‘Wollstonecraft’s career virtually documents the way one woman moved from the status of unreflecting, passive object to that of a self-conscious, articulate and vindicating subject.’ The unreflecting early Wollstonecraft is characterized in Poovey’s argument by her failure to renounce the sentimental ideals into which her political ideas keep regressing. Once she had accepted ‘the primacy of her own feelings and the power of those feelings to engage and persuade’ (83), Poovey argues, Wollstonecraft’s use of reason could move forward in a way that seems to provide a paradigm for a much wider development in the history of philosophy: In the Letters [Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark] Wollstonecraft no longer conceives of reason as a Lockean,

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essentially passive, receiver of objective ‘clear truths.’ Rather, she now defines reason’s primary function as reflection – not the reflection a mirror might yield but the mediation of an active agent. Reason is an inwardturning faculty that allows the individual to examine his or her own prejudices [. . .] and to empathize with others as a consequence of heightened self-knowledge. (86) Overlooking for a moment (as Poovey seems to have done here) that reflection plays a role in Locke’s philosophy too, this account of the growth of Wollstonecraft’s rationalism sounds like the historical development of Kantian philosophy in reaction to British empiricism. Wollstonecraft is to overcome the contradictions of her early sentimentalism by accepting that the only proper use of reason for her is sentimental. Even so, the ‘passive’ Lockean objectivism of the first and second Vindication is replaced with an active principle of reason, which integrates the psycho-sexual life into rational thought and thereby allows a fully rounded reflective selfconsciousness to engage in sympathetic identification with other minds. This identification of Wollstonecraft’s biography with a sense of historical progress rests on an evaluation of Wollstonecraft’s later narrative works, in particular the Letters, over her earlier philosophical works. Similarly, Janet Todd has argued that through narrative ‘Wollstonecraft anatomizes the process by which gender oppresses in a specific historical time’,18 thereby escaping the false transcendence of historical truth found in the male poets of the Romantic canon, or the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ in which, Todd claims, the second Vindication becomes caught. Such assessments unwittingly put Wollstonecraft’s work back into the ideological position that she was attempting to reason her way out of. Todd’s argument reidentifies the novel form as almost a natural space for women to voice their concerns and to circumvent male Romantic poetics. She argues that the narrative form allows Wollstonecraft to achieve the expression of a truth that bodies forth the contradictions of historical conditions, and thereby circumvents both the transcendentalizing gesture of male Romantic poetics and the mimicking masculinism of the first and second Vindications. But the lack of sophistication in the thinking of history in this position reveals, once again, complicity with masculinist stereotypes of women. Their failure to transcend the particularity of their moment has become, in Todd’s argument, a source of narrative resistance to the male poetics of disengagement.19 This implicit view of narrative as the resistant responsiveness of an essential femininity can be challenged firstly by paying attention to the dependence of Wollstonecraft’s most influential political work, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, on literary tropes; and secondly by under-

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standing these tropes to play a regulatory role in her argument, by managing a difference between the definition of the human as a social and as a natural being. Understanding reason as socially embodied, and as co-opting literature into its attempt to manage sensation, opens up questions about how literature is intended to be read in the 1790s. Is it to function as a pedagogical, regulatory discourse, or to operate as a type of cultural capital which validates the individual’s claim to have managed his or her sensations and entered into a polite public sphere? Faith in reason, as the example of Godwin goes to show, did not automatically liberate the individual from a dangerous anarchic life of the body; rather, reason registered its own species of enthusiasm, its own capacity to transcend the bounds of embodied experience. This led to an inversion of the paradigm of a coercive (masculine) reason dominating recalcitrant (feminine) sensation, because reason demonstrated its own need to be regulated through concepts of sensation that are socially conditioned through literary devices. For both Kant and Wollstonecraft, literary tropes and devices aim to regulate the relation between reason and sensation, and these acts of regulation suggest ways in which (or open questions about) how reason becomes self-conscious or reflecting in the rational and embodied subject.

MODESTY AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE According to a received anthropology of sexual difference in the eighteenth century, female modesty is a social practice which fires a male imagination that is already capable of liberating itself from sexual desire. According to Rousseau, man, unlike woman, does not depend on sexual gratification for his survival in the civil state, due to his superior physical strength. Woman’s capacity to survive in a social world, by contrast, is tied to her ability to attract and to retain a man. Modesty is then a social device with which woman struggles to gain control of the free male imagination, by regulating her physical charms in such a way that enslaves his desire. Rousseau’s account of woman’s devious sexual nature in Book V of E´mile, as Joel Schwartz has described it in The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, emphasizes the greater strength of her sexual desire. She hides this through her modesty, and makes man imagine that he is overcoming resistance, so that his desire and pride are strengthened. Modesty also preserves his appetite by limiting the number of occasions on which it is satisfied. Conversely, modesty also works on the male sexual imagination in order to prepare it for rational activity. Man’s sexual desire for an eroticized and modest women forms an ideal training ground for the sublimation of his

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erotic desires into rational desires. ‘It is,’ writes Susan Meld Shell in an important recent study of Kant, ‘as Rousseau revealed, the idealization of man’s natural sexual need that lays the psychological groundwork for his moral self-transcendence. Women, more artful than men and also closer to nature, are to be men’s educators if not quite their equals.’20 The imagining of a hidden sex object is the anthropological precursor to the imagining of the hidden, transcendental object of perfection; modesty, to this extent, is a primitive social impulse on which basis the capacity for transcendental reasoning is based. As Kant describes in his playful essay ‘Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History’ of 1786, the fig-leaf in the Garden of Eden represents how ‘Refusal was the device which invested purely sensuous stimuli with an ideal quality.’ Man discovers through this use of clothing that his sexual stimulus could be ‘prolonged and even increased by means of the imagination’ if the object is ‘withdrawn from the senses’ (KPW 224). Kant conjectures that the invention of clothing engendered man’s ‘sense of decency, his inclination to inspire respect in others by good manners (i.e. by concealing all that might invite contempt)’. Cryptically, he goes on, ‘[a] small beginning such as this, which nevertheless has epochmaking effects in imparting a wholly new direction to thought, is more important than the whole endless series of subsequent cultural developments’ (KPW 225). Although gender is not a consideration of Kant’s essay, it seems that this transcendentalizing effect of desire through the withdrawal of the desired object from the senses is an effect of the male gaze; women are the objects through which the erotic imagination begins to transcend its own limitations and to imagine a greater transcendental object which exceeds the senses, but women themselves are systematically foreclosed from this sublimation of desire. Discussing the weight that Kant gives to the trope of the fig-leaf in the story of rational development, as a symbol of ‘the proper foundation of true sociability’, Allen Wood describes how, for Kant, sociability is ‘grounded on the intention to influence others by behaving toward them in such a way as to affect their attitude toward oneself’. This means, he goes on, that ‘human moral sense arose in close connection with the attempt to gain control over others through their sexual appetites while at the same time retaining their respect’, which in turn leads to what Kant understands as our need to conceal our true selves from others. This development of morality out of a sense of propriety which involves, it seems, deception and the desire for domination leads Wood to the unexpected insight that for Kant, ‘as for Nietzsche, the social origin of morality is closely related to lying, deception and pretense’. However, Kantian morality evolves out of a negation of its deceitful beginnings:

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But this is only the starting point of morality. Obviously there is a wide gap between Sittsamkeit [custom] and Moralita¨t, or between Sittlichkeit (in the sense of customary mores) and genuine morality as Kant understands it. True morality is conformity to a rational principle of autonomy or self-rule based on respect for one’s reason; this is entirely different from conforming to received customs with a view to gaining the approval of others.22 Somehow, we have to traverse the ground from the anthropological precursor to morality in a system of propriety which is based on hiding oneself in the face of the other, to a genuine morality which transposes a reflectively acquired respect for the humanity in one’s person onto the other. This transition seems to lead from opacity (hiding one’s true nature) to transparency (recognizing the humanity that one finds in oneself to inhere also in the other). The two are antithetical, and yet Kant wants to persuade us in his conjectural essay that the one is cause of the other. But according to the anthropology of sexual difference that I have sketched out above, women are precisely incapable of traversing this distance, because of both their biological make-up and their social conditioning. Due to their physical weakness, their dependence on men for survival in the social state, they are precisely incapable of wresting their desires and interests out of the realm of need, which drives this transformation. To this extent, women must remain deceptive, opaque, bound by a code of modesty in the interests of their survival, whereas men strive after the ideal of rational transparency. At the least, women remain stuck with the desire to inspire respect in others by ‘concealing all that might invite contempt’, rather than transforming this desire into a proper rational respect for the other.22 It is precisely such a naturalization of sexual inequality that Wollstonecaft’s fictional examples of woman as ‘romantic enthusiast’23 aim to legislate against. By representing ‘mistakes of conduct’ in women, by struggling to depict women’s capacity to idealize objects of desire as equal to men’s, and then representing women’s struggle to learn to live with this idealization as a ‘mistaken’ move that is yet productive for female subjectivity, Wollstonecraft inverts this dominant anthropological paradigm. It is no longer simply the male imagination which is a priori free of conditions of need and therefore obliged to liberate itself from sexual desire through the action of a transcendental imagination; women now demand to participate in this management of an idealized eros. In the process of this representation, a cultural restriction on the ideal of rational freedom is foregrounded (that is, restriction to the biological condition of being male, and therefore initially at a further step of liberation from the primitive

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realm of need). An important aim of Wollstonecraft’s fictional and political work is then to represent this ambivalent power of imagination insofar as it exists in a common male and female capacity to idealize the objects of desire, even though such acts of idealization might be constructed in different ways through culture. In the process Wollstonecraft herself is able to participate in an enlightened discussion about the role played by imagination in social development. The same ambivalence about whether the power of imagination improves or degrades humanity found in the ‘mistakes of conduct’ passage quoted earlier also appears in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): To see a mortal adorn an object with imaginary charms, and then fall down and worship the idol which he had himself set up – how ridiculous! . . . would not all the purposes of life have been much better fulfilled if he had only felt what has been termed physical love? And, would not the sight of the object, not seen through the medium of the imagination, soon reduce the passion to an appetite, if reflection, the noble distinction of man, did not give it force, and make it an instrument to raise him above this earthly dross, by teaching him to love the centre of all perfection, whose wisdom appears clearer and clearer in the works of nature in proportion as reason is illuminated and exalted by contemplation, and by acquiring that love of order which the struggles of passion produce? (V2 238–9) The problem of imagination, for Wollstonecraft as well as for Rousseau, is that we cannot decide whether it ultimately improves and enlightens our view of things by sublimating erotic love into love for the rational and perfect supreme being, or whether it finally leads us to the greater debasement in which the pure satisfaction of animal desires would have left us. Does imagination make us superhuman by forging a conduit between earthly, passionate forms of eros and love of ‘the centre of all perfection’, or worse than bestial in our idealization of pure instinct? The undecidability derives from an aporia of reflection, whereby our approach to the ideal will always be mistaken or broken, imperfectly conditioned by the contingencies of human embodiment. Mistakes of conduct may lead to moral maturity (although they will prove retrograde if they cannot be overcome); it is the ‘struggles of passion’ that ultimately lead us to ‘love of order’. The imagination functions through excess, and through the fostering of a false and passionate consciousness that is only productive insofar as we come reflectively to recognize it as false. A female imagination which has been engineered in order to arouse male desire remains obscure and inscrutable; yet

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Wollstonecraft’s fictional and political examples go to show that it grapples with the same fundamentally human problem of coping with the aftermath of an erotic idealism. To this extent, it is structured exactly like the male. Wollstonecraft’s demand that women be given access to the same experiential maturity as men, which licenses them to make the same mistakes of conduct (and which further allows Wollstonecraft herself to enter into an Enlightenment debate about the capacity of the passions to engender social progress) challenges a received sexual anthropology, whereby women are deemed incapable of idealizing their sexual desire by liberating it from the satisfaction of their needs. Women are, to reiterate, in Rousseau’s formulation (a formulation that Kant seems more or less to inherit) artful by nature, their modesty a false screen to keep men guessing. But through this analysis there is also emerging another sense in which Wollstonecraft shares Kant’s rational analysis of human development, whereby primitive instincts, the negotiation with forms of social propriety, form the first moment of a properly rational orientation towards others that has not yet been carried through. Modesty, which historically has regulated an eroticized human conduct, will begin to regulate an activity of reason which is held in common between the sexes. It will redefine the eroticized contours of epistemological obscurity and display that Wollstonecraft claims to find in Rousseau and Burke, in favour of an activity of reason that grounds intersubjective relations on respect and partial exposure of the self to the other.

MODESTY AND CRITICAL REASON Wollstonecraft’s demand that women be included in the developmental projects of reason is matched by a certain ‘feminization’ of Kantian reason among its defenders. A number of recent anthropological studies of Kantian reason show a tendency to recycle terms which are more commonly associated with the eighteenth-century code of female propriety, in order to describe the proper procedure of a self-aware critical philosophy. Kant’s method, which would balance scepticism about our knowledge of the cause of the existence of nature with a reflection on our characteristic ways of imagining this cause, suggests a need which philosophy has to ground its own methodology in anthropological notions of propriety and conduct. Critical reason, as Susan Meld Shell suggests, demonstrates a type of ‘modesty’ before the spectacle of nature. Such modesty is often taken to distinguish the Kantian rational subject from the subject’s absolute intellectual appropriation of the object in later idealism. What distinguishes Kant’s thought from Naturphilosophie for Shell is ‘above all the rigor of his modesty (in

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both senses of the word), as shown in his ‘reflective’ deference to the veil of nature’.24 Writing in particular of teleological judgement, and of ‘Kant’s unwillingness to pursue the implications of his understanding of organic life’, Shell writes the following: Kant’s reticence here is linked to the same respect and concern for individuality that underlies his biological reserve. There are some mysteries, if truly enlightened community is to be secured, that must be left in the dark, above all that out of which humanity itself emerges. The relation between the idea of reason and the progression of culture, a relation that Hegel claims to fully comprehend, retains in Kant a remembrance of and reverence for the biblical creation. (8) Shell’s position on Kantian reserve inherits Ernst Cassirer’s earlier defence of critical reason against Hegelian absolute idealism. This is a defence of what Cassirer was describing in the 1930s as ‘critical idealism’: Critical idealism puts itself a different and more modest task than the absolute idealism of Hegel. It does not pretend to be able to understand the contents and the scope of culture so as to give a logical deduction of all its single steps and a metaphysical description of the universal plan according to which they evolve from the absolute nature and substance of mind. But in spite of this critical reserve, it does not think that the single stages and processes by which the universe of culture is built up lack true and real unity, that they are nothing but disjecta membra – scattered fragments.25 Cassirer carefully avoids both a Spenglerian view of cultural physiognomy, a type of right-wing defence of cultural embodiment that inherits Herder’s organicism, and an equally reactionary pessimism about the fragmentation of contemporary culture. Cassirer argues instead that culture is neither fundamentally unified in the way of an organism nor irretrievably disarticulated, without specifying how culture is finally to be understood in an historical sense. The language of modesty, a final veiling of the ultimate ground of culture, orientates Cassirer’s endeavour. Whether as a tool used in the investigation of nature or human society, critical reason is often described as taking on a sceptical modesty or reserve vis-a`-vis its objects, a refusal to claim insight into their ultimate ground (which claim, for defenders of Enlightenment, characterizes the false insights of its idealistic children). For Kant, our ability to get on terms with nature is defined by the final veiling of its ultimate ground. This congenitally human inability to

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know the supersensible ground of things then enforces on philosophical method an attentiveness to what has recently been translated as its own conduct of thought (Denkungsart), whereby rational speculation makes room for a consideration of the embodied position of the thinker in the world.26 Kantian reason overcomes an aporia between the transcendental conditions that pertain to reasoning and the relative cultural or biological position of the thinker through the use of analogy. Reason proceeds by comparing its self-awareness to the modest or reserved conduct imposed onto eighteenthcentury women. In a similar way, Rousseau’s sense of humanity’s alienation from a state of transparence is governed by the image of the veil. In discovering that ‘we must live in opacity’, Jean Starobinski writes that Rousseau understands adulthood as a condition ‘in which the ‘‘veil’’ of separation is lowered and the world turns dark, in which minds become opaque to one another and mistrust makes friendship forever impossible’.27 The kind of modest veiling of herself that Rousseau celebrates in his Sophie also, by this reading, defines the tragic condition of man’s homelessness in the world, his dwelling with appearances. Critical reason, then, describes its procedure by analogy with the conditions of female propriety, modestly veiling a feminized nature and registering a ‘reserve’ and anthropological self-awareness in the ‘conduct’ of its thought. This language of conduct symbolizes, in a popular and communicable form, critical reason’s failure to gain insight into the absolute ground of nature, or its failure to validate a religious teleology. But can the metaphor be inverted, such that the inclusion of this language of female conduct in the description of a critical reserve of reason might be taken to involve women in the pursuit of reason’s modest goals? The veil, in Wollstonecraft’s critique of Rousseau and Burke, symbolizes the failure of politics and epistemology to cleanse themselves of an erotic gendered content. What Starobinski understands as a kind of phenomenology in Rousseau, then, is still predicated on the male sexual imagination for Wollstonecraft, since the concept of a veiled truth allows the eroticized Burkean and Rousseauvian imagination to speculate on what might lie behind it. It is a kind of false epistemological move for her, a hiding from what is really known in order to fire the imagination through artifice. But equally, it would be wrong to suggest that Wollstonecraft opposes an unwavering faith in revealed truth to what she deems to be an eroticized discourse. Rousseau fails, by her reading, to liberate the grandeur of his philosophical insights from a perverse sexual imagination as revealed in his Confessions. Yet Wollstonecraft does not propose a puritanical counter-discourse of disembodied reason, nor does she seek to offer a hitherto unimagined appropriation of reason from the position of ‘the feminine’. Rather, she advocates a position

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on passion and modesty that can seem close to Rousseau’s vision and its counter-Enlightenment scepticism about the benefits to mankind of a socialized power of imagination. It is also consonant with the complexities of Kant’s philosophy of history.

THE RESERVE OF REASON Wollstonecraft’s redefinition of modesty includes women in the communal imagining of a version of reason that is cleansed of its erotic bias. This act of communal imagining simultaneously uncovers, reflects on and transforms the practice of cultivating of a specifically female modesty in the interests of the male sexual imagination. But if modesty, in both Kant and Wollstonecraft, is to become an ideal rationalized praxis, then the interests of women must be tied to the interests of society at large. This is to be achieved precisely through a feminist appropriation of the regulatory effect of the literary imagination that can be found in Wordsworth, Rousseau and Kant. The regulation of female conduct through modesty is to be transformed into a regulation of a universally human character; to this end, tropes of female propriety will provide analogies for the imagining of an intersubjective respect between the sexes that exists under reason. As Paul Hamilton has recently argued, following Jurgen Habermas’ notion of ‘discursive ethics’, ideological dispute ‘yields up more secrets of its workings’ if we look for a ‘contemporary refiguring of individual difference from an absolute otherness into a discursive reserve necessary for communication between different individuals to be possible’.28 Any attempt at imagining a rational language of the future that might exist between the sexes will form analogies from this side of the veil in order to imagine what lies beyond; but within the transaction there exists a discursive reserve, a type of unimagined difference which forms a radical surplus to our attempts to imagine the difference by analogy with what is known. Wollstonecraft thus occupies a key position in the emergence of radical feminist discourse because she attempts to enact the transformation of relations in society from within the given discursive parameters of female propriety. While such an attempt does remain firmly attached to its class context, the concept of reserve always allows the space for an unimagined radicalism to attach itself to the historical position. With the development of literary language as a regulatory discourse in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft recasts the discourse of female conduct into an analogical and orientating description of the (as yet) fictive ends of reason, such that a coercive and gendered vocabulary for the successful and eroticized regulation of female behaviour becomes a paradig-

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matic vocabulary for the self’s integration into a public sphere under reason. In a similar way, as Jon Mee describes, the mature self in Wordsworth performs its poetical reflections on its past with a type of ‘chastened enthusiasm’.29 We are no longer led to focus on women’s ‘foreclosure’ from reason (and then to posit a space of essentialized femininity), since the procedure of reason identifies itself with an anthropological notion of woman’s behaviour. Our focus will now be on the social construction of knowledge through tropes of feminine conduct that call, unwittingly perhaps, for a reassessment of the place of women in an expanding public sphere. In her chapter ‘Modesty comprehensively considered, and not as a sexual virtue’ from the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft is in fact writing against a social concept of modesty that is still grounded in an anthropological account of woman’s sexual nature that gets disclosed as she exists in a social world, and that has been perpetuated by a common interest among men in continuing to gratify their erotic desires by overcoming a false form of resistance. Woman is, according to Rousseau, artful by nature, thus undoing a binary opposition between nature and culture, but Wollstonecraft claims that the development of her reason has been systematically forestalled in society in order that she remain infantilized and dominated by sensibility, ‘a sickly hot-house plant’ (V2 258). It is this play between social and natural concepts of modesty that led commentators to diagnose a puritan resistance to sex in the text, a view that is now being happily revised (Barbara Taylor describing the Rights of Woman as almost pornographic in its obsession with scenes of sexual disclosure).30 But Wollstonecraft’s aim is to reimagine woman’s sexual nature as a forerunner for the disclosure of her rational nature, in the same way as male erotic desire is transformed, in Kant, Rousseau and Wordsworth, into rational interest. Modesty serves as a placeholder for this rationalized nature of the future, an important trope because within its own structure it performs the logic of obscurity and disclosure that it would like to see rationalized in society. Wollstonecraftian reserve at all points separates itself from its debased social counterpart in contemporary female conduct. It is, importantly, an active virtue of the understanding (rather than a condition of woman’s social passivity, an effect of an overweening sensibility) that tends towards an intersubjective expression of mutual respect and rational self-esteem. Thus Wollstonecraft must distinguish the imagined reserve of reason from its actual sentimental counterpart from within the predicament of their combination. Yet the distinction is, she argues, self-evident to the active pious intellect, because the sentimental version resists women’s rational education, confining them to a torpid world of fantasy. ‘Purity of mind’ is ‘the delicacy of reflection, and not the coyness of ignorance.’ Thus the ‘reserve of reason’

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may easily be distinguished from ‘rustic shyness and wanton skittishness’ in that it is never seen in any degree ‘unless the soul is active’ (V2 254). Echoing the faint blasphemy of Kant’s ‘Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History’ and its paradoxical association of the withdrawal of the sex object from the senses and the evolution of moral self-consciousness, Wollstonecraft writes that ‘so far from being incompatible with knowledge’, the reserve of reason is ‘its fairest fruit’. What is encountered in contemporary society is rather ‘the affectation of it, the fig-leaf borrowed from wantonness [which] may give a zest to voluptuous enjoyments’ (V2 258). As the example of Rousseau goes to show, such voluptuous enjoyment may be epistemological as well as physical; and so for Wollstonecraft, as for Kant, the fig-leaf has become a trope which signifies the affectation of rational virtue between the sexes, the afterlife of a primitive form of propriety which should by now have been transformed into its rational-anthropological successor, the reserve of reason. These references to the first parents suggest a type of modesty which, again, refers to the supreme being as the ultimate veiled object that gets partially disclosed, in a ‘mistakenly’ anthropomorphic form, through eros. The social practice of modesty will be engendered by the modelling of knowledge on an equal reserve between different participants in discourse, rather than through the eroticized situation of maintaining women in sublime ignorance through an over-cultivation of their sensibility while men play out their epistemological and erotic fantasies. Reserve signals an Enlightened respect before the difference of objects of knowledge, its role as anthropological metaphor of reason significantly relativizing the position of the thinker while declaring that rational knowledge itself is the proper ground of human interaction. Let women only acquire knowledge and humanity, writes Wollstonecraft, and love will teach them modesty. Just as with the Kantian supersensible, we do not have a language to describe what rationalized relations between the sexes would look like and so must fall back on schematized anthropological notions which are aimed at guiding rational social conduct. Reserve functions as a type of anthropological standin for the failure of our imagination, a catachresis which defines, in its metaphoricity, our lack of knowledge.31 Entangling reason with anthropological concepts in Wollstonecraft and Kant (reserve and need respectively) demonstrates an important platform from which sensation, anthropology and the life of the body are not foreclosed from reasoning but regulate and enable it. While this new approach has engendered important studies which clarify the cultural politics of the era and the immersion of figures like Kant and Wollstonecraft in them (both of whom had been significantly dencontextualized by a previous

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generation of critics), it also suggests important philosophical implications. It does this by demonstrating how rational speculation comes to be conceptualized in the period in terms of an interplay between activity and passivity, what is known and what remains unknowable, and the relation between a relative position of embodied particularity and transcendental conditions on human knowledge. The period witnesses an increasing orientation of these opposites in relation to one another through analogy, the transformation of anthropological notions of human action into conditions on thought that register an anxious attempt to manage the expansion of the public sphere through the regulation of forms of popular and rational enthusiasm. The understanding of modesty as a concept-metaphor that regulates critical reason in relations between the sexes, that aims neither at total disclosure nor sublime obscurity but a rational reserve, forms a significant contribution to the study of regulated enthusiasm recently described by Jon Mee. Modesty no longer regulates an overly eroticized female nature, but rather serves to moderate the potential flights of reason, aided by an increasingly prominent power of imagination, towards a dangerous enthusiasm. The dangers involved in reason’s flights of imagination, and the consequent need to regulate it, could be seen clearly for Kant in Herder’s fanaticism, and for Wollstonecraft in Rousseau’s eroticism. This regulation of reason is achieved through the literary. Not only, that is, through literary examples (such as Wollstonecraft’s two novels) which represent women’s capacity to use their imagination to idealize love in a way that is comparable to men, but also (in her political work) through the use of modesty as a concept-metaphor that persistently reminds us of what it is defining itself against (notions of essential female conduct) and thereby through its metaphoricity strives to overcome coercive depictions of femininity. Through metaphor, Wollstonecraft defines a use for the literary imagination that is not limited to an imitation of the transference of erotic impulse into spiritual devotion found in Rousseau, but that causes the subject to reflect on her position within a social horizon, and that elaborates rational concepts out of coercive anthropological paradigms.

Conclusion

In his conclusion to Kant, Herder and the Birth of Philosophical Anthropology, John H. Zammito writes that ‘it would not be altogether amiss to suggest that not only the immediate reception of Kant but also its most interesting current reception seeks to reinterpret Kant’s entire opus in anthropological terms’.1 In order to elucidate the historical impact of this recent shift of interest in Kant studies, Zammito quotes Paul Guyer’s reflection on the difference of approach between his two works on Kant’s aesthetics, Kant and the Claims of Taste (1979) and Kant and the Experience of Freedom (1996): In my earlier work I was rash enough to suggest that Kant’s discussions of such topics as the sublime and genius . . . were mere concessions to the literary fashion of his day, thus not essential to his fundamental argument about the conditions under which it is epistemologically justifiable to claim the universal validity of one’s pleasurable response to a work of nature or art . . . I might now be tempted to assert the opposite . . . that the real heart of Kant’s aesthetic theory and the underlying motivation for its creation is the connection of his moral theory which appears in his discussion of the sublime, of aesthetic ideas as the content of works of artistic genius, and of beauty as the symbol of morality. (349–50) According to Zammito, analytically minded American Kant studies are succumbing to the ‘temptation’ of reading aesthetics as a pragmatic anthropological discourse in disguise, rather than reading Kant’s suggestive comments such as ‘beauty is the symbol of morality’ as literary parerga aimed at popularizing the ‘pure’ heart of the critical system. Looking at Kant from within the discipline of literary studies, I have suggested that efforts at popularizing the critical philosophy, and in particular Kant’s stylistic concessions to fashion, in fact exercised a constitutive influence on the direction of his critical thought. Instead of taking at face value Kant’s attempts to downgrade pragmatic anthropology and ethics from the autonomous sphere

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of pure and practical reason, readings such as Guyer’s, Zammito argues, have begun to develop an interest in Kant’s tantalizing suggestions about the physicality and embodiment of reason. Similarly, critics of literary Romanticism have begun to revise the recent trend of deconstructing the aesthetic ideology of the symbol, and understanding it as a deceptive aesthetic form that hides social reality, by arguing instead that symbolism offers a type of anthropological ‘orientation’, or a pragmatic human capacity to find our way in a world whose final determination escapes us. These developments in studies in Romanticism bring such studies in line with the interest of Kant’s most sympathetic readers. These readers are currently entertaining the possibility that anthropology may hold the key to an understanding of the unity of Kant’s system. The famous fourth question posed in the introduction to Kant’s lectures on logic, ‘what is man?’, is increasingly taken to be a serious and crucial articulation of the identity of critical thought.2 Zammito reads this growth of interest in Kant’s anthropology by confounding a ‘presentist’ with a ‘historicist’ interpretation. He describes how Kant won the battle with Herder over philosophical method, his critical system providing the paradigm against which all of the major figures in German philosophy post-1790 tested and measured their thought. However, while Kant interpretation undoubtedly became dominant, Zammito argues that Herder and his followers continued to resist the Kantian reception of Kant. They marked this reception in significant (and generally underacknowledged) ways, such that ‘more important than the rejection of Kant [. . .] is the mutation that Herder insinuated into the evolution of Kantianism and of Aufkla¨rung more generally’ (347). One aim of this study, consequently, has been to test out moments of continuity between Herder’s metacritique of Kant, and contemporary deconstructions of Kant’s critical system, from post-colonial and Romanticist perspectives. The kinds of questions that were asked of Kant by subsequent generations were not, according to Zammito, strictly Kantian, but had rather been coloured by the pressure that the birth of philosophical anthropology exerted on the reception of the critical system. In a similar way, contemporary readings of Kant that are generally sympathetic to the critical methodology show a tendency to return to the anthropological interests that mediate Kant’s reception into philosophical modernity. The ‘boldness’ with which Herder transgressed the boundaries of critical thought is entertained as a potential within Kant’s system that is never fully articulated. Zammito’s approach shows a certain consonance with the reading of reason and anthropology that I have developed through this study, and it undoubtedly offers an important contribution to the new anthropological

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strain that is developing in Kant studies. But this enthusiasm requires some qualification. Firstly, Zammito writes as if an interest in the sublime and symbolism were a very recent development in American readings of Kant, which is certainly true of the more analytical interpretations. But deconstruction has been engaging with the centrality of these issues about signification and embodiment at least since the late 1970s and early 80s, with the publication of Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting and Paul de Man’s late work on Kant. Secondly, the relation between the thought of Kant and Herder has only recently begun to receive the sustained attention it deserves. It is still too early to conclude what the relation between Kant and Herder, and the subterranean effects of Herder on modern philosophy and literary theory, can tell us about the ways in which we approach Kant. But these interrelations can be approached productively, I have argued, by attention to their subliminal manifestation in deconstruction. The research for this book began as an investigation into the relationship between literary and philosophical representations of reason in the early Romantic period. My aim was twofold: firstly, to examine Kant’s own understanding of the role that metaphor and symbolism play in his argument, rather than to describe the role of figurative language in critical thought as a constitutive and irreducible blindspot that modern criticism has cleverly uncovered; secondly, to investigate the impact of philosophical concepts on literary and political texts, without reducing these concepts to obscure tropes of political or sexual power. This troping of philosophical concepts in literary studies is often used to provide a summarized (and value-charged) historical context for literary texts. As a result, readings of the role that the discourse of reason plays in literary and political writings from the period have too often described conformity, formalism, and a contradiction with the literary interests of texts as the result of a pressure that the discourse of reason exerts on them. This understanding can be revised and updated through contact with a developing interest in the plurality, symbolism and embodiment of reason in Kant studies. American deconstruction’s attention to more obviously literary moments in philosophical texts has tended to describe them as covering over certain aporiae in philosophical argument, or as ornaments that attempt to hide the ideological blindness and coerciveness of critical thinking. My argument has been, rather, that it is possible to develop a more subtle understanding of the relation between the absorption of literary language in philosophy and philosophical language in the literary. Close attention to the work of Kant elucidates a mutual dependence between the philosophical and literary as a condition of thinking critically, rather than a moment of collapse or failure on both sides. Kant then provides a paradigm for a wider shift in our

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perception of other figures from the late eighteenth century who similarly straddle the increasingly formalized divide between different intellectual discourses. What Rousseau, Kant and Wollstonecraft all most obviously share is an attack on the idea that innate moral sentiments lie at the basis of our will. The danger of such a sentimental philosophy is that it justifies egoistic passions as virtuous sentiment, whereas virtue, for all three, must be selfwrought through reason. This insight guides Kant’s defence of community against the incursions of a cult of individualism and ‘genius’ in the work of Herder and the generation of pre-Romanticism. Sentiments take on an analogical function in Kant, orientating reason’s explorations and restricting them to recognizably human limitations. To this extent, what is good about the human for Rousseau, Kant and Wollstonecraft, is something that must be created rather than recovered from the incursions of an abstract power of reason. Kant’s allowing subjectivity a legislative role in moral and theoretical philosophy – his allowing it a quality of objectivity – is not formalistic. This subjectivity is not a pale analogue of logic, but rather serves to inscribe an anthropological world of sensation, need and desire into the scientific cognition of the world. This becomes clear through a reading of Kant’s ‘Critique of Teleological Judgement’, where the relationship between reason and sensibility is most intricately enunciated, alongside more familiar aesthetic themes from the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’. This relationship remains oppositional, but to the extent that the sentimental burden of Kantian symbols such as ‘love’ serve to regulate the forays of reason into metaphysics, the internal difference of this literary mode of language to Kant’s critical argument makes of this difference a constitutive contradiction. Something similar happens in Wollstonecraft’s argument about the ‘reserve of reason’. Since we cannot know the conditions of a female consciousness that is free from its shaping into an inherently ‘feminine’ form by men, Wollstonecraft looks to the social codes that instruct the obscured workings of that consciousness to overcome themselves. Modesty, like Kantian love, at once defines and distorts an anthropological space of human needs and wants. Rational modesty will allow different subjects to get to know each other through the recognition that their knowledge of other minds is always intrinsically limited. But rationally modest behaviour is too often replaced in society by an eroticized modesty, whereby men impose a sublime obscurity onto women through lack of education, in order that they may exploit this ignorance for their own ends by provoking perpetual crises in women’s sensibility. Even so, precisely through its misrepresentation of rationally determined needs, modesty can be made to refer

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to the possibility of higher forms of intersubjective knowledge. Love and modesty attempt to overcome forms of empirical coercion by foregrounding their historical complicity with coercion. Deconstruction argues that Kantian reflection cannot legislate the ground that enables humans to get beyond the limitations of their embodiment, and that Kant’s application of freedom to nature will always be contingent. But the example of Wollstonecraft goes to show that the reflective paradigm can also be turned to liberational ends, albeit that these ends may be socially restrictive. Rousseau’s treatment of ‘love’ as the name for the authority of the political leader is another version of this type of catachresis, a name for how we must think of the possibility of an ethical community, even as the name reveals a founding violence in the thinking of that possibility. It undoes the providential and tyrannical harmony in sentimental culture between the personal/affective and public/rational, in favour of a dialectical interplay and productive contradiction between the two. Rationality is defined by its never-fulfilled escape from the grasp of sentimental identification. The culture of freedom, for all of Rousseau, Kant and Wollstonecraft, can only progress through an acknowledgement of and engagement with this contradiction.

Notes

Introduction 1. John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 13. 2. Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 6. 3. For a more nuanced account of the emergence of literature as a specific discipline in the eighteenth century, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For an exciting argument about the role of poetics in ‘regulating’ culture in the Romantic period, see Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4. Cora Kaplan usefully summarizes this problem in historicist criticism and ideology critique as the problem of aesthetic pleasure, the fear among ideology critics that they succumb to the ideology they would critique if they enjoy too much its artistic expressions: Is the literature and visual art of past generations only useful to socialism as examples of the power of bourgeois ideology to narrate and depict the myth of individual freedom and autonomy within capitalism? If we enjoy it too much (while, of course, solemnly exploring its organisation of ideology) have we too been seduced by its fantasies? Do we end up unconsciously mimicking its social values and orientation, by paying too much attention to the lives and consciousnesses of the ruling groups represented in text and image? Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), p. 2. On the alliance between English Romantic poetry and German idealist philosophy, see also Paul Hamilton, ‘The new Romanticism: philosophical stand-ins in English Romantic discourse’, in Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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5. Paul de Man, ‘Shelley disfigured’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 122. 6. See John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 137–78. 7. John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 1. 8. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 9. See Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Poststructuralism and Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Willi Goetschel, Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis, trans. Eric Schwab (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1994). Further references to O’Neill will be included in the text. 10. On the attack on Kant’s noumena in the burgeoning Naturphilosophie of Herder and his followers and in speculative idealism, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); and Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997). See also Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 11. On the urge to regulate this enthusiasm in the Romantic period, see Mee. 12. See also CJ, where in the course of distinguishing between the symbol and the schema, Kant writes that they both ‘contain nothing whatever that belongs to the intuition of the object; their point is the subjective one of serving as a means of reproducing concepts in accordance with the imagination’s law of association.’ (CJ 227) 13. Frederick Burwick, ‘Kant and Hegel: organicism and language theory’, in Approaches to Organic Form: Permutations in Science and Culture, ed. Frederick Burwick (Dordrecht, Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1987), pp. 153–93 (p. 155). 14. Gillian Rose, p. 24. 15. When discussing the analogy that operates reflective judgement, Rose refers to problems in translating the analogy that might suggest what

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16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy she takes to be its basis in force rather than right: ‘The very difficulty in English of eliding Zweck as ‘‘purpose’’ in nature and Zweck as ‘‘end’’ in morality suggests that this analogy is not as enlightening as it is claimed.’ Rose, pp. 16–17. Willi Goetschel , p. 1. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (Harmandsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 27. See also Hannah Arendt on Kant’s politics in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Brighton: Harvester, 1982). For other readings of Kant’s ethical formalism, see Bernard Williams, Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1984). Kant writes at the beginning of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: ‘is it not thought to be of the utmost necessity to work out for once a pure moral philosophy, completely cleansed of everything that may be only empirical and that belongs to anthropology?’ (GMM 2) Cited in Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 302. Allen Wood, p. 302. Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 8–9. Anthony J. Cascardi writes that ‘[b]y finding the noumenon to be a (hidden) part of ordinary experience, poets sought to collapse Kant’s distinction between things-as-known and things-in-themselves.’ Cascardi, ‘From the sublime to the natural: Romantic responses to Kant’, in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Cascardi (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, c.1987) pp. 101–31 (p. 112). Manfred Frank’s work is key here in outlining how contemporary theory deviates from a Romantic dream, carried on by Habermas among others, that the ‘autonomous self’ might arrive at self-understanding through an archaeological effort to recover itself behind the levels of symbolic mediation in a ‘desymbolized discourse’. Frank, The Subject and the Text: Essays on Literary Theory and Philosophy, ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 98. See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) and Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose, 2003. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992),

Notes

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

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p. 148. See also Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). See also Steven A. Cole, ‘Evading politics: the poverty of historicizing Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 31:1 (1995), 29–49. John Whale, Imagination Under Pressure 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death. Further references to Taylor will be included in the text. One example of how a presentist understanding of Wollstonecraft’s ‘feminism’ is found in Taylor’s treatment of the ‘misogyny’ of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Taylor understands this apparent hatred of women, or desire to make them disappear as an epistemic category, as initiating a specifically feminist diatribe against the figure of the ‘bad mother’ (Taylor also uses Lorna Sage as a modern example) which leads to the formulation of the text’s ethic of care. See Taylor, pp. 12–19. On the ethic of care in feminist studies of Romanticism, see also Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000). A late and influential statement of this approach is found in Janet Todd’s Feminist Literary History: A Defence (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), which celebrates Wollstonecraft’s narrative works and their capacity to encapsulate history: ‘Through narrative Wollstonecraft anatomizes the process by which gender oppresses in a specific historical time; women are burdened with a mystification through which they must inevitably act in culture and society.’ (p. 115) Todd argues that narrative allows Wollstonecraft to overcome the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ (i.e. conflict between the strictures of reason and female sexuality) in which her vindications become ensnared, and that it provides an implicit critique of Romantic poetry’s (and in particular Shelley’s) displacements of history. This approach also allows Todd to defend what she describes as ‘American socio-historical feminist criticism’ against ‘French deconstructive and psychoanalytic theory’ (p. 1) which ‘privileges’ Romantic poetry. Critics working under the French influence typically ‘extract from the work of those male writers labelled Romantic an aesthetic transcendental component to the exclusion of other more political, less idealistic ones’ (p. 111–12). Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism, p. 2. Further references will be included in the text. Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 99.

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33. Abrams writes that the movement from the mimetic to the expressive wasn’t unitary; and most of his examples of the ‘expressive’ idea come from Mill and Carlyle rather than Wordsworth or Coleridge: ‘Even Wordsworth’s theory, it will appear, is much more embedded in a traditional matrix of interests and emphases, and is, therefore, less radical than are the theories of his followers of the 1830s.’ Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 22. Although Abrams still accepts 1800 as a convenient turning point, and the preface to the Lyrical Ballads as the point at which the mimetic and pragmatic theories of art are overcome in favour of the expressive and objective. 34. Charles Taylor, ‘The Importance of Herder’, in Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 84. 35. Taylor cites Derrida as the example of a thinker who has ‘explicitly built on post-Herderian themes’ (p. 93). 36. See, for example, Derrida’s claim that it is ‘the dream or the ideal of philosophical discourse’ to ‘make tonal difference invisible, and with it a whole desire, affect or scene that works (over) the concept in contraband’. In Derrida, ‘Of an apocalyptic tone newly adopted in philosophy’, in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshnay (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 25–71, (p. 29). 37. On the ‘tone of moral and intellectual superiority’ that always accompanies misreadings of Rousseau, see Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness’ (BI 112). 38. See Rene´ Wellek, Kant in England 1793–1838 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1931). The first mention of Kant in an English publication was in a 1793 edition of the Monthly Review, although this was not drawn from a reading of Kant but rather a Dutch magazine article on him. Glosses of Kant appear throughout the 1790s by those who had been in Germany and had heard Kant lecture, and an early translation by John Richardson appeared in 1797, but Wellek’s general argument is that these did not meet with much interest, partly because of the difficulty of assimilating Kant into the prevailing philosophical climate, and partly because of misreadings of him as a ‘Jacobin’ and ‘atheist’. Wellek quotes de Quincey’s claim about Kant’s first translators that ‘no man . . . that I ever met with had seen or heard of their books, or seen any man that had seen them’ (p. 21). 39. See Hints, the fragments of the promised second part of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman included by Godwin in the Posthumous Works of

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the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), where Wollstonecraft writes: ‘Mr Kant has observed, that the understanding is sublime, the imagination beautiful.’ In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, vol. 5 (London: William Pickering, 1989), p. 275.

Chapter 1 1. Graeme Garrard, Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes (Albany, NJ: State University of New York Press, 2003). 2. Coleridge compares Rousseau to Luther who ‘both in their radical natures referred all things to [their] own Ideal.’ Quoted in Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 8–9. On ‘Rousseau’s primitivist politics’, see Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 181. The classic study of transparence is of course Jean Strobinski’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur J. Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988). I will have more to say about the survival of these misreadings of Rousseau in what follows. 3. See in particular de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness’, in BI. 4. See the first Preface to La Nouvelle Heloise: ‘She who, despite this title, dares to read a single page of [the novel], is a maiden undone; but let her not attribute her undoing to this book; the harm was already done.’ J, pp. 3-4. 5. On such denegations of responsibility in Rousseau, see Paul Hamilton, ‘Rousseau’s Children’, in Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2003). On the notion of a Romantic aesthetic that displays a ‘modern uneasiness with ‘‘didactic’’ and ‘‘moral’’ art’, and that ‘takes its origin in the Kantian view’, see Jerome McGann, SVPA, 36. 6. Derrida reads Rousseau through a conjunction of transparence and logocentrism, whereby the violence and spatio-temporal difference of writing is intended, via a symbolic economy, to recover the ungraspable moment of transparent self-presence typified by ‘speech as it should have been’. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 141. De Man deviates from this only in his suggestion that Rousseau had an ‘insight’ into the impossibility of recovering this self-presence, an insight that is

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10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

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Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy only recuperable, however, through the blindness of Derrida’s interpretation of him. See de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness’, BI. Quoted in Graeme Garrard, p. 2. Graeme Garrard, p. x. See, for example, Frederic Jameson’s analogy: ‘But Adorno – like Rousseau in this respect, and very unlike de Man – feels able to reconstruct an external historical narrative which can account for the emergence of abstraction (resemblance in Rousseau, reason or the enlightenment ‘‘mastery’’ over nature in Adorno and Horkheimer).’ Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 230. On Jameson’s reading of de Man in relation to the discourse of Enlightenment, see below, n. 12. See Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in KPW. A further moment of confusion might be pointed out here, following Garrard, who writes that it is precisely Rousseau’s reception in Kant that makes Kant’s essay of the counter-Enlightenment. Garrard writes that ‘To a large extent Kant’s famous essay [. . .] belongs already to that critique of enlightenment which Rousseau inaugurated and which is directed against the expectation that the progress of the sciences will lead to a moral perfection of humanity’ (p. 123). Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). Frederic Jameson, p. 246. As Paul Hamilton points out, Rousseau at times seems to share the French materialist conception of nature, by describing the body as ‘notre machine’, a designation which (again) sets him against the enlightenment by associating him with ‘that other bugbear of the philosophes, La Mettrie’. Hamilton, p. 56. For an alternative view of Marx’s reading of Rousseau, see Galvano Della Volpe, Rousseau and Marx, trans. John Fraser (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978). Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 48. All further references will be included in the text. Curiously enough, as Habermas has Kant overcoming Rousseau’s coercive sentimentalism with a philosophy of history that is itself, as Habermas claims, to become public opinion, this philosophy of history depends upon its own pathological moment: as Habermas quotes Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent’, Kant argues for ‘a certain commitment of heart which the enlightened man cannot fail to make to the good he clearly understands’ (p. 116, my emphasis).

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16. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 9. 17. Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 300. 18. Kant wrties that to ‘base a historical account solely on conjectures would seem little better than drawing up a plan for a novel. Indeed, such an account could not be described as a conjectural history at all, but merely as a work of fiction’ (KPW 221). Rousseau similarly qualifies the role of his conjectural history in the second Discourse by writing of how the state of nature that he describes ‘no longer exists . . . perhaps never existed, and which will probably never exist, yet of which it is necessary to have sound ideas if we are to judge our present state satisfactorily’ (DI 68). 19. See, however, the Kantian reading of Rousseau in Andrew Levine, The General Will: Rousseau, Marx, Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 20. Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 83. 21. John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2002), p. 349. 22. Jean Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, p. 294. 23. See Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau Kant Goethe: Two Essays, trans. James Gutmann and others (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 25. 24. See Chapter 3, below. On Herder’s counter-Enlightenment, see Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2000). Berlin thought that Herder was not a primitivist, claiming that ‘Herder, in opposition to the primitivists, welcomed invention’ (p. 203), although this view must be set against his understanding of Rousseau as ‘inclined towards primitivism’ and dreaming about ‘the restoration of a simple, innocent, pure-hearted society of ‘‘natural’’ men’ (p. 277). 25. On Wollstonecraft’s relation to rational dissent, see Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On the question of the ‘continental’ strain in Wollstonecraft’s thought, see also Rene´ Wellek, Kant in England, 1793–1838 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1931). Writing on the supposed ‘insularity’ of English thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its having formulated an indigenous

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29. 30.

Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy empirical tradition after Bacon, Wellek counters that ‘England has created a fine idealist tradition rooted in the Platonic branch of European thought. On the continent of Europe one is wont to overlook this ‘‘second England’’ completely. One hears much about the lack of speculation in England, because one has defined speculation in a narrow way and is besides unacquainted with the rich English thought which fulfils the conditions of the definition’ (p. 3). Taylor makes an important case for the influence of neo-Platonism on Wollstonecraft through the dissenting circles that she frequented, and I will discuss this in Chapter 5. Taylor’s argument effectively challenges Wellek’s contention that by ‘[a]bout the middle of the eighteenth century the stream of idealism had dried up almost completely’ (p. 4). Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 1. Further references will be included in the text. Rousseau claims in the SC (18) that the family is the only natural society, but in the DI (112) he claims that the family (along with language and property) becomes established in the golden age, which is already a type of civility. Judith Shklar, p. 56. As for Rousseau, so too for Wollstonecraft, readers have suggested that she gives up on the social productivity of an ideal of beauty. John Whale argues that her work ‘raises the question as to whether aesthetic issues are important at all in the larger context of historical improvement and an increasingly technical political economy’. Whale, Imagination Under Pressure 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 68. According to Whale, aesthetic sensibilities may no longer be important to Wollstonecraft precisely because of, rather than in the absence of, a perfectibilist drive in material history. Whale finds the same reneging on aesthetics in Wollstonecraft that Judith Shklar finds in Rousseau, but for the opposite reason: because of Wollstonecraft’s acute historical sensibility. For another new historicist reading of Wollstonecraft as sceptical aesthete, see Elizabeth A. Bohls, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Anti-Aesthetics’, in Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Allen Wood, p. 249. Famously, this modelling of civil autonomy on property ownership does not entail that individuals can treat their personal liberty as something owned; it is the purpose of Rousseau’s analogy here to show this. See also SC Book 1, Chapter 4: ‘Of Slavery’.

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31. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vache (Hannover and London: University Press of New England), vol. 7, pp. 294–5. 32. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, p. 295. 33. Robinson Crusoe is famously the only book that E´mile is allowed to read prior to adulthood in Rousseau’s treatise on education. Kant’s comment here might be taken to repudiate the Herderian reading of Rousseau, which in celebrating man’s self-reliance, and therefore privileging earlier stages of human history, forgets the role that Defoe’s novel is intended to play in E´mile’s education, which aims to make him fit for society. Rousseau writes of Robinson Crusoe alone on his desert island, that this state ‘is not that of social man; very likely it is not going to be that of E´mile. But it is on the basis of this very state that he ought to appraise all the others’. Rousseau, E´mile, or on Education, trans. Allan Bloom (Harmandsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 184–5. 34. See Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1919). 35. Allen Wood, pp. 233–44. 36. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), p. 45. 37. See, for example, Tom Furniss, ‘Nasty tricks and tropes: sexuality and language in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman’, Studies in Romanticism 32 (1993), 177–209. 38. Barbara Taylor, p. 68. 39. Barbara Taylor, pp. 58–9. Taylor offers a useful summary of the intellectual background to the development of theories of the imagination in the second half of the eighteenth century, and its relevance to gender. According to Taylor, it is as a result of the seventeenth century’s revolution in epistemology that the imagination came to take on a new prominence: ‘The displacement of the classical concept of Right Reason – the intellectual attunement of the human mind to eternal Truth – by the empirical view of reason as the capacity to formulate judgements on the basis of sensory data, gave new significance to subjective consciousness.’ Taylor, p. 60. 40. See Barbara Taylor, pp. 10–12. 41. See V1 44, 59, 64, 79. 42. Susan Meld Shell, p. 104. 43. Plato is referred to at several points throughout V1, once as ‘a great philosopher’ who shows that ‘an immoderate desire to please contracts the faculties, and immerges [. . .] the soul in matter, till it becomes

16 0

Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy unable to mount on the wing of contemplation’ (V1 54). Barbara Taylor traces this neo-Platonism in Wollstonecraft’s argument to her inheritance of the British commonwealth tradition and Cambridge neoPlatonism, particularly in its consideration of the ambiguities of eros: ‘Desires that ascend toward God are to be radically distinguished from those that descend toward earthly things, yet both are designated as eros – the love which links humanity to the divine.’ Taylor, p. 109.

Chapter 2 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

On this idealist response to Kant, see in particular Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Further references will be included in the text. Rodolphe Gasche´, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Interestingly enough, part of Gasche´’s general claim is that it is by ignoring the critique of reflexivity as the foundation of Derrida’s work that American deconstructive literary criticism has misapprehended him. Further references will be included in the text. Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London: Verso, 1995), p. 120. Further references will be included in the text. Manfred Frank, ‘Is self-consciousness a case of presence a’ soi? Towards a meta-critique of the recent French critique of metaphysics’, in Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 218–34, (p. 223). Further references will be included in the text. See Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Laurrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). See Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 268. Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 177. Further references will be included in the text. See also Habermas on Hegel’s critique of ‘the organon theory of knowledge’ in transcendental epistemology: Knowledge appears mediated either by an instrument with whose help we form objects or as a medium through which the light of the world enters the subject. Both versions accord in viewing knowledge as

Notes

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

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transcendentally determined by the means of possible knowledge [. . .] For Hegel the task of the critical philosophy appears as one of ascertaining the functions of the instrument or medium in order to be able to distinguish the inevitable contributions of the subject from the authentic objective content in the judgement that is the result of the cognitive process. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), pp. 10–11. Robert Wokler, ‘Ancient postmodernism in the philosophy of Rousseau’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 418–43 (p. 424). Further references will be included in the text. Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 84. Further references will be included in the text. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 307. See Allen Wood, p. 76. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 307–8. On this relation, see in particular Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’, in KPW 243. John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992), p. 158. Further referenecs will be included in the text. Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 239. Susan Meld Shell, p. 239. Early on in the third Critique, while discussing ‘nature as harmonizing, in the diversity of its empirical laws, with our need to find universal principles’, Kant offers a further historicizing of the understanding by writing of how ‘we no longer feel any noticeable pleasure resulting from our being able to grasp nature and the unity in its division into genera and species that alone makes possible the empirical concepts by means of which we cognize nature in terms of its empirical laws. But this pleasure was no doubt there at one time, and it is only because even the commonest experience would be impossible without it that we have come gradually to mix it in with mere cognition and no longer take any special notice of it’ (CJ 27).

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Chapter 3 1. Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1996); John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1996) and Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2002). See also G. Felicitas Munzel’s Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘Critical’ Link of Morality, Anthropology and Reflective Judgement (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Ernst Cassirer’s work on cultural symbolism also seems finally to be gaining the critical attention it deserves. On Kantian anthropology, see in particular ‘Critical idealism as cultural theory’, in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935– 1945, ed. Donald Verene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). For another forgotten ‘anthropological’ reading of Kant, see Lucien Goldmann, Immanuel Kant, trans. Robert Black (London: New Left Books, 1971). 2. Jerome McGann’s claim is that Kant’s theory of reflective aesthetic judgement licenses the Romantic ideology by describing poetry as an essentially subjective experience fostering a sense of ‘harmony’ in SVPA. 3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 25. 4. On Herder’s metacritique of Kant, see Frederick C. Beiser, ‘Herder’s Philosophy of Mind’, in The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 5. See Charles Taylor, ‘The Importance of Herder’, in Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995). 6. For Kant’s own attempts to synthesize the British and German traditions in his theory of judgement, see Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement. On Shaftesbury’s absorption into German intellectual culture in the 1760s, see John H. Zammito, 2002. 7. On Herder’s Spinozism, see John H. Zammito, ‘Kant’s Attack on Spinoza in the ‘‘Dialectic of Teleological Judgment’’’, in Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and Frederick C. Beiser, ‘The Rise of Spinozism in Germany, 1680–1786’, in The Fate of Reason. On hylozoism and Kant’s desire to distinguish his system from Spinoza’s metaphysics, see CJ 273–7. Kant addresses the specific misreading of

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11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

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his system as Spinozist in ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’, KPW p. 246. Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, p. 243. Further references will be included in the text. For a full discussion of the importance of the notion of character in Kant, see G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘‘Critical’’ Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgement (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1999). See in particular the discussion of the ‘character’ of the human understanding in the famous ‘digression’ into theoretical philosophy in Sections 76 and 77 of the Critique of Judgement. This argument is discussed in Chapter 2, above, p. 69–71. Besier tells the story of the origin of the quarrel between Kant and Herder in Herder’s finding the first Critique a ‘hard bone to chew’, and Kant’s blaming Herder for its poor reception. The controversy seems largely to have been stirred up by Kant and Herder’s publisher, J. F. Hartknoch. See Beiser, ‘Kant’s quarrel with Herder’, in The Fate of Reason, pp. 149–53. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Martin Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 69. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 109. John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, p. 241. Quoted in Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 2. See Chapter 1, pp. 33–36. See in particular G. Felicitas Munzel’s Kant’s Conception of Moral Character on the notion of moral character as a counter-image: ‘the very notion of character as such connotes a counterimage found in the sensible world that inherently points to its supersensible ‘‘original’’ and makes the latter available for human intuition’ (p. 106). See Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation.

Chapter 4 1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The letter as cutting edge’, in Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 5. 2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The letter as cutting edge’, pp. 3, 9. 3. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the

16 4

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 148. Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 18–19. Milnes seems here to be responding in particular to Marjorie Levinson, who writes that ‘in the poetry of Wordsworth’s great period, those ontological and social blendings or vortices are registered as contamination and they are fiercely resisted’. Levinson, Wordsworth’s Four Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 10. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 271–313, p. 271. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, p. 278. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, vol. 7,11 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 135. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, pp. 45–6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Revolutions that as yet have no model: Derrida’s ‘‘Limited Inc.’’’, in The Spivak Reader, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (New York, London: Routledge, 1996), p. 99. This essay offers an extraordinary moment in the history of Spivak’s engagements with de Man, her former doctoral advisor, some of which I am sketching out in this study. Aristotelian dramaturgy mutates, as Spivak quotes Benjamin, into Romantic irony, which sheds the pedagogic potential of mimesis that Benjamin finds in Brecht, by dissolving into solipsism. It is a form of dramatic practice which, as Spivak quotes Benjamin, ‘has no didactic purpose; in the final analysis, all it demonstrates is the philosophical sophistication of the author, who, while writing his plays, always has at the back of his mind the notion that the world may, after all, be just a stage’ (p. 100). Spivak follows on: ‘[i]ndeed, the genius of American deconstructivism finds in Romanticism its privileged mode’, before going on to quote from Allegories of Reading on the impossibility of a historiography of Romanticism, and from Aesthetic Ideology on Schlegel’s definition of Romantic irony. But my point is that Spivak does not name de Man here; his lexicon, as she quotes him, is unmistakable, and the quotations are referenced, but it seems that this is a coded attack which is reluctant to confront its opponent. Instead, Spivak denominates de Man the ‘proper heir’ (p. 100) of Romantic irony, and offers the following valorization of Derridean ‘affirmative deconstruction’ over deManian ‘American deconstructivism’: ‘[r]ather than forging an irreducibly fragmented, untotalizable, yet

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13. 14. 15.

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‘‘positive’’ or ‘‘affirmative’’ (words often used by Derrrida) practice’, such formulations of de Man’s ‘would remind us of nothing more than the inevitability of a repetition automatism, the repetition, in fact, of an aberration’ (p. 100–1). De Man was still alive when this essay was published in 1980, which may account for Spivak’s reticence in her attack on him. Yet the Critique of Postcolonial Reason is dedicated to de Man, and declares itself to be ‘consonant’ with his version of deconstruction as well as Derrida’s (CPoR 18). This peculiarly uneasy relation to de Man’s work is found in many of Spivak’s essays, which demonstrate a paradoxical awareness of how rhetorical reading is enabling to postcolonial deconstruction even as it forecloses any consideration of anthropological difference. See also Spivak’s essay ‘Imperialism and Sexual Difference’, The Oxford Literary Review 8: 1/2, 225–40, which I would argue is a parody of de Man’s reading of Baudelaire in ‘Anthropomorphism and trope in the lyric’, reprinted in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The letter as cutting edge’, p. 3. On Kant’s ejection of empirical psychology from the architectonic of pure reason, see his chapter of the CPR on ‘The architectonic of pure reason’ (CPR 691–791). On Hamann’s review of the first Critique which invokes the virginal innocence of Kant’s analytic of pure reason, and the experience of the dynamic, see Frederick Burwick, ‘Organicism and language theory’ in Burwick, ed. Aproaches to Organic Form: Permutations in Science and Culture, (Dordrecht, Lancaster: Reidel, 1987), pp. 35–56. Simon Jarvis, ‘Old idolatry: rethinking ‘‘ideology’’ and ‘‘materialism’’’, in Between the Psyche and the Polis: Refiguring History in Literature and Theory, ed. Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (Aldershot, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 28–36, p. 22. Simon Jarvis, ‘Old idolatry’, p. 23. Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 8. For an account of this turn of studies in Romanticism towards the methodology of cultural materialism, see Jon Klancher, ‘English Romanticism and cultural production’, in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (London, New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 77–89. See also Spivak’s claim that ‘the production of theory is also a practice: the opposition between abstract and ‘‘pure’’ theory and concrete ‘‘applied’’ practice is too quick and easy’. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, p. 275. John Guillory writes that it is ‘a fact of contemporary critical discourse that the concept of the materiality of the signifier has produced no

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18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy supporting analysis of the concept of materiality itself, except as that concept is associated with the notion of the signifier. In the absence of such an analysis, ‘‘materiality’’ is nothing more than the ‘‘matter’’ of vulgar materialism.’ Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 229. Conversely, Derrida’s claim is to ‘wonder apropos of de Man, what might be a thinking of machinistic materiality without materialism and even perhaps without matter’. Derrida, ‘Typewriter ribbon: limited ink (2) (‘‘within such limits’’)’, in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen and others (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 277–360, p. 281. On de Man’s challenge to the historicizing of literature, see in particular ‘Shelley disfigured’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1984). John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1993), p. 191. Further references will be included in the text. Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 32. This recovery is signalled in the first sentences of ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, and is understood to occur by way of a recovery of the ‘traditional forms of rhetoric’ against the subjectivistic trends of the Romantic inheritance: Since the advent, in the course of the nineteenth century, of a subjectivistic critical vocabulary, the traditional forms of rhetoric have fallen into disrepute. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that this was only a temporary eclipse: recent developments in criticism reveal the possibility of a rhetoric that would no longer be normative or descriptive but that would more or less openly raise the question of the intentionality of rhetorical figures. (BI 187–8) See, in particular, the discussion of Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education in ‘Kant and Schiller’ (in AI), and ‘The resistance to theory’, in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Towards the end of the chapter, after exhaustively replacing deconstruction into the ideological and institutional context that it claims to resist, Guillory is prepared to encounter this interiority of deconstruction as an outside: ‘At this point we may go on to contextualize the entire de Manian thematic by turning it inside out, as it were, by correlating the terms which are internal to its discourse with the terms defining the conditions of its institutional practice.’ (p. 257)

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23. Simon Jarvis, ‘An undeleter for criticism’, Diacritics 32:1 (2002), 3–18 (16–17). 24. The attempt to reinscribe a thinking of desire in relation to de Man, particularly with reference to his reading of Rousseau, also governs Derrida’s difficult late effort to assess the ‘materiality without matter’ in de Man’s work. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter ribbon: limited inc (2) (‘‘within such limits’’)’ in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen and others (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Derrida also, at times, will entertain the notion of deconstruction itself as a form of transference. In the essay ‘Mnemosyne’ he writes: ‘But is there a proper place, is there a proper story for this thing [deconstruction]? I think it consists only of transference, and of a thinking through of transference, in all the senses that this word acquires in more than one language, and first of all that of the transference between languages.’ Jacques Derrida, Memoires For Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 14–15. 25. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 130. 26. See Chapter 2, p. 60. 27. ‘Kant and Schiller’ (AI 132–4). 28. Paul De Man, ‘Autobiography as de-facement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p. 76. 29. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 123. 30. See Neil Hertz, ‘More lurid figures’, Diacritics 20:3 (1990), 2–27. 31. Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2003), p. 20. Further references will be included in the text. 32. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Vindications: The Rights of Man and The Rights of Woman, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 1997), p. 252.

Chapter 5 1. Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 216. 2. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 59.

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3. Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation, p. 109. 4. In terms of sensation’s ability to ‘liberate’ itself from reason, Jon Mee discusses the projection of a peculiarly modern positive valuation of enthusiasm back onto the historical culture, such that ‘most literary critics have implied that it had come to be regarded as no bad thing by the late eighteenth century’. Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation, p. 4. 5. I am of course following Raymond Williams in referring to a ‘structure of feeling’. His term is also the starting point for Chris Jones’ and Cora Kaplan’s analyses, discussed below. 6. See in particular Cora Kaplan’s ‘Pandora’s box: subjectivity, class and sexuality in socialist feminist criticism’, in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 146–76. 7. Jon Mee, p. 60, n. 124. 8. See Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 103. 9. Jon Mee, p. 5. 10. John Whale, in Imagination Under Pressure, claims that Wollstonecraft’s writing ‘engages in a thorough-going reconstruction of the psychic economy of the individual which renegotiates the relationship between enlightened reason and refined sensibility. Within its proclaimed rationalism it re-imagines the value of emotions. Imagination lies at the heart of this ambitious project.’ (p. 68) 11. Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 99. 12. Barbara Taylor, p. 12. 13. See Jean Starobinski, The Living Eye, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 14. Paul Hamilton, ‘A shadow of a magnitude’: the dialectic of Romantic aesthetics’, in Beyond Romanticism, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 11–31 (pp. 13–14). 15. Timothy J. Reiss, ‘Revolution in bonds: Wollstonecraft, women, and reason’, in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 11–50 (p. 44). 16. See Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, ed. Robin May Schott (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). 17. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 48. Further references will be included in the text.

Notes

169

18. Janet Todd, Feminist Literary History: A Defence (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), p. 115. 19. There is little sign that more ‘theoretical’ approaches to Wollstonecraft’s feminism show any sign of reforming their view of reason. Ashley Tauchert’s recent study of Wollstonecraft pays particular attention to the relation between female embodiment and rights and citizenship, but still takes its direction from Simone de Beauvoir’s notion that rationality is founded on a ‘historical privileging of the purely conceptual or mental over the corporeal’, which Tauchert interprets as demanding ‘a simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of the body’. Enlightenment philosophy is understood to focus a primarily biological attention on women’s place in culture, leading to ‘foreclosure of definitions of equality and citizenship, epitomised by Kant’s distinction between active and passive citizenship’. Feminism is then understood to have ‘inherited’ Kant’s contradiction. Ashley Tauchert, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 2. I will suggest below ways in which the literary (and the presence of literary tropes in philosophical and political texts) can enable an understanding of the embodiment of reason in physicality and culture, which challenges the view that reason is predicated on the foreclosure of the body; in particular, the definition of ‘passive’ citizen allegedly enforced on women can be turned inside out to provide the conditions for her activation within culture. Woman’s ‘foreclosure’ from political equality, the anthropological preconditions of her ‘passive’ behaviour, come to define wider problems in human self-understanding. 20. Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 6. 21. Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, pp. 239–40. 22. It is also important to note here, however, that part of Kant’s philosophy of history involves a growing recognition of how this ‘deceptive’ femininity itself contributes to historical progress. Susan Shell writes the following: The gap in [Kant’s] later thought, between nature and reason as mediated imperfectly by history is identical to the gap between womankind, which must be characterised in terms of ‘nature’s ends’, and humankind generally, which can only be characterised in terms of the ends man chooses for himself. In keeping with his later promotion of notions of progress as vehicles of moral hope, Kant comes to look more favourably upon economic luxury and the female ‘refinement’ of society. To this extent, nature’s ‘rich’ sexual

170

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy ‘economy’, whose ‘admirable arrangements’ aim at the preservation of the species, becomes typical of providence more generally. (Shell, p. 104). Barbara Taylor, p. 115. Susan Meld Shell, p. 259. See also Karl Ameriks’ defence of ‘Kant’s modest system’ in Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Ernst Cassirer, ‘Critical idealism as a philosophy of culture’, in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–1945, ed. Donald Philip Verene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 89–90. See G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The ‘Critical’ Link of Morality, Anthropology and Reflective Judgement (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Munzel points out in a note on translation that Denkungsart has not been rendered consistently in English: At stake in Kant’s concept of Denkungsart is an activity of thought informed by certain principles (moral law plus principles of reflective judgement). The translation ‘conduct of thought’ attempts to capture this essential aspect of activity, that is, the term ‘conduct’ conveys the general sense of activity consciously informed by guiding principles. (p. xvi) The growth of interest in ideas of orientation and philosophical anthropology in Kant studies demonstrates that for Kant, the anthropological analogy that legislates reflective acts of judgement also determines the proper procedure for philosophical method. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 11. Paul Hamilton, ‘The new Romanticism: philosophical stand-ins in English Romantic discourse’, Textual Practice 11:1 (1997), pp. 109–32 (p. 113). Jon Mee, pp. 214–56. Barbara Taylor, p. 116. In my use of the terms ‘catachresis’ and ‘placeholder’, I am following the methodology of Spivak’s deconstruction. See, in particular, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).

Notes

171

Conclusion 1. John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 351. All further references will be included in the text. 2. The three questions that are taken to define human knowledge in the first Critique are: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (CPR 677).

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Index

Abrams, M.H., 16, 154n. 33 Adorno, Theodor, 24 aesthetics 2–5 in de Man 107, 109–113, 115, 117 in Kant 67–71, 145 in Rousseau 28,31,32 in Spivak 88, 102 in Wollstonecraft 50 Ameriks, Karl 56 anthropomorphism 4, 19, 79–80, 118, 129 and symbolic anthropomorphism 89–97, 119–120 Arendt, Hannah, 10 Armstrong, Isobel 123 Babbitt, Irving, 39 Barrell, John 1, 13, 42 Bowie, Andrew 55, 103 Burwick, Frederick 8 Cassirer, Ernst 28, 139 Cavell, Stanley 11 Caygill, Howard 4, 60, 64–5, 70-1, 77 on Herder 56 Coleridge, S.T. 100, 128 De Man, Paul 2, 17, 98–122, 147 and Gadamer 113 and Hegel 109–112 and Kant 73, 107, 109, 113–117, 119 and Augenschein 115–117 and Romantic ideology 103–4, 112–113, 116–117 and Rousseau, 23, 104, 113 and Schiller 116 on symbolism 98, 108–117 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 24, 31, 107, 147, 155n. 6, 167n. 24

Dews, Peter 53–4 enlightenment 3, 23–9, 79, 80, 120 124–5 130 133 139, 141 enthusiasm 3, 8, 80, 95-6, 123, 130, 134 Ferguson, Frances 12, 99 formalism 3–4, 5–10, 52, 58, 61–2, 96, 101–3, 115 147–148 Frank, Manfred 54–6 Garrard, Graeme 24–6 Gasche´, Rodolphe 54 Goetschel, Willi 1, 9 Guillory, John 101, 103–8, 119–120, 127 Guyer, Paul 145 Habermas, Ju¨rgen 25–6, 29, 35, 54, 141, 156n. 15 Hamann, J.G. 8, 101 Hamilton, Paul 14, 16, 107, 120-121, 141, 156n.12 Hegel, G.W.F., 16, 53–4 Herder, J.G. 3, 7–8, 9, 73, 77, 79–80, 101 Expressivism 16-18 Horkheimer, Max 24 Hertz, Neil 119 Hume, David 2, 7, 79 imagination 1, 12, 16, 137 in Kant 64, 65, 67, 71, 81–2, 135 in Rousseau 30-3, 127, 130 in Wollstonecraft 114–117, 124, 126, 131, 134–137, 140 Jacobi, F.H. 3, 9 Jameson, Frederic 25

18 0

Index

Jarvis, Simon 102–3, 106–7

Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois 25

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement 32, 67–70 anthropology and reason 4, 8, 11, 18, 58–61, 77–97, 77–9, 85, 87–9, 91,143–146, 148 see also reason reflective judgement 6-7, 52-3, 67–8, 70–2 Critique of Pure Reason 5, 52, 57, 86, on the schema, 64–6, 77 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 58–63, 77 Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics 8, 91–7 autonomy 6, 25, 58–61, 71-2, 88, 101–102 causality 8, 92–6 as technic, 67, 89– 91, see also anthropomorphism embodiment 28, 81, 96, 123, 140, 146, 147 ethics 9–11, 28, 59, 63, 145 expressive rationality, 17, 69, 71 and Godwin 123–4 and Herder 40, 80–4, 87, 91, 95, 119-20, 146–8 see also Herder and Hume 62–4, 86, 92-5 history 1, 3, 10–11, 27-8, 32–3, 39–41, 46, 82–5, 135 and idealism 52–3, 55, 57, 103, 138–9 on moral-self-consciousness 56–62 reason, as public tribunal 3, 56 literary descriptions of 5–11 and history 27–8, 39 and nature 58, 61–4, 66 and Romanticism 3–4 and Rousseau 27–9, 38–41, 96, 148–9 modesty 135, 138–141 see also modesty on the supreme being 69–70, 87, 92–4 symbolism 5–10, 52-3, 80, 96–7, 147 in relation to schematism 66, see also symbolic anthropomorphism and Wollstonecraft 63–6 Kaplan, Cora, 124, n.4 150

McGann, Jerome 2, 5–7, 12-13, 78, 99, and Paul de Man 101–2, 107, 109 Mee, Jon 42, 97, 123, 125, 142, 168n. 4 Meld Shell, Susan 1, 4, 11, 28, 46, 71–2, 77, 135, 138–9, 169–170 n. 22 Milnes, Tim 1, 11, 99 modesty 121, 130–1, 134–141

Lacan, Jacques 99, 108, 117–118 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude 24

new criticism 4, 5–6, 98, 101 new historicism 2, 12, 14 Nietzsche, Friedrich 27, 30 O’Neill, Onora 4–5, 9, 11 orientation 71, 121, 146 Pippin, Robert 55, 57, 59 Piper, Adrian, 11 Poovey, Mary 42, 132–3 Reiss, Timothy 132 Rose, Gillian 8 romantic criticism 1–5, 10–16, 98–9, 146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3, 14, 15, 16, 17–18, 23–41, 149 Discourse on Inequality 27–34 Discourse on Political Economy 33, 34, 38 Essay on the Origin of Languages 37 Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloı¨se 24, 32–3, 38, 127–128 Social Contract 33-37, 57–8 and enlightenment, 23–30 modesty 134–5 see also modesty on the family, 33–6 and Romanticism 31 sovereignty 36–8 Schiller, Friedrich 109 Schwartz, Joel 134 self-consciousness 53–5, 98, 112 see also Kant on moral selfconsciousness Shklar, Judith 30–1, 36–7, 39, 43 Siskin, Clifford, 104 Smith, Adam 29 Spivak, Gayatri 4, 7–8, 17, and Kant 77–97

Index and and and and

Benjamin 100 Foucault and Deleuze 100–1 Herder 79 Paul de Man 73, 107–8, 118, 164–165n. 9 on reflective judgement 72–3, 78, 88 subaltern 100–1 on teleological judgement 84–5 and new historicism 98–9 Starobinski, Jean 24, 28, 140 Tauchert, Ashley 169n. 19 Taylor, Barbara 13, 16, 42–3, 125, 142, 159n. 39 Taylor, Charles, 16–17 Terada, Rei 107 Todd, Janet 42, 133, 153n. 30 Whale, John 13, 125, 158n. 28 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 17 Wokler, Robert, 24, 57 Wollstonecraft, Mary 3, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, 15, 126 Vindication of the Rights of Man 30,

181

41–51 Vindication of the Rights of Woman 121–122, 141–4 reserve,126, 141–143 and Burke 41, 44–5, 48–50, 124, 138, 140 expressivism 17–18 feminist criticism 13-14, 131–133 and Kant 19, 30, 44, 46, 143 modesty, 130–131, 140–144, 148–9 ‘mistakes of conduct’, 15-16, 126, 136 neo-Platonism 48–9, 125 passion 45–7, 137–8 reason 29, 41–3, 45, 47–51, 123–144 and Rousseau 29, 43–5, 49-50, 131, 138, 140 sensibility 51 and Wordsworth 123, 127 Wood, Allen 4, 11, 27, 33, 40, 58–9, 60–1, 77, 84, 135–6 Zammito, John 3–4, 28, 70, 73, 77, 95, 145–7