Kant's "An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind" and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and...

Kant’s “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime1

MONIQUE DAVID-MENARD

Translated by Alison Ross, revised by the editor

David-Mknard examines the problem of the genesis of Kant’s moral philosophy. The separation between Kantian practical reuson and the inclinations of sense which it regulates is shown by the author to originate in Kant’s attempt to regulate his own tendency to hypochondria. Her argument links the themes from two of Kant’s pre- critical works which attest to this tendency-“An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime-to the final form of the critical philosophy.

Immanuel Kant’s “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” and Observa- tions on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime appeared one after the other in 1764. They have had quite different careers among Kant’s philosophical readers and among those who translated his work into the French language. It is generally agreed that the second piece already contains the themes which organize Kant’s moral philosophy and his philosophy of aesthetic judgment. Certainly, in this work, the faculty of desire is not clearly distinguished from the faculty of feeling pleasure or pain, since the author examines the moral virtues from the perspective of their aesthetic aspect, their character of beauty or sublimity. But this piece is “on the road to the discovery of practical reason,” as Ferdinand AlquiC wrote, because it already distinguishes the “moral virtues, which are simply pleasurable and beautiful, from true virtue which, based on general principles, stems from the sublime or from a nobility which has nothing to do with feeling” (AlquiC 1980,44). Correlatively, Observations

Hypatia vol. 15, no. 4 (Fall 2000) 0 by Alison Ross

Monique David-Menard 83

on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime was translated into French very early, from the moment Kantian thought passed over the Rhine-that is to say, in 1797. The following year, the Magasin encyclopidique published the Ground- in& the Metaphysics ofMorats and presented it as the development, more than twenty years later, of the Observations. Thus this study certainly belongs to the story of Kantian thought as it is commonly understood.

The case is entirely different for “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind.” It was a very minor text that Kant published in a local journal, the Konigsberg- schen gelehrten und politiken Zeitungen and which was not available in French until 1977-and then only in a psychiatry review. Even then this essay remained neglected by translators of Kant. This is the case, for example, among those who, following Ferdinand Alquie’s initiative, published Kant’s collected works in the Bibliotheque de la Pkiade. The editors declared they had included “all of the important writings and genuine elaborations” of Kant’s thought with the exception of most of the scientific and juridical texts. I t so happens that although a first serious French translation was provided for certain works, the editors give no more than a brief mention of the 1764 “Essay.” The essay also goes unmentioned in the bibliography of Kant’s works provided in the re- cent republication of Jules Barni and Paul Archambault’s translation of the Critique of Pure Reason (1976) in the Gamier Flammarion collection (introduction by Bernard Rousset).

Must one conclude that this text bears no relationship to Kant’s critical and transcendental philosophy? Or does this omission bespeak the blindness of Kant specialists with regard to a constant dimension of Kant’s philosophical reflection: the proximity between thought and madness?

To respond to this ambitious and mildly provocative question, we will proceed in stages. First, we must let ourselves be astonished as we examine this strange text, in which a scientific (or, more exactly, semiological) intent can be found mixed up with Kant’s violent polemic against doctors (but also against himself). Second, we need to reflect on the connection between these two contemporary texts, “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” and the Observa- tions on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. What do we thereby learn about formalism in morality from an examination of the empirical material on which it is based? The Kantian reflection on the ambiguity of human char. acteristics always threatens to degenerate into madness (and all the more so since these characteristics are deployed in the order of thought). So, finally, we should ask if this is no more than a marginal, pragmatic, anthropological2 chapter. Or is it not one of the decisive sources of Kant’s theoretical philosophy as this is formulated in the Critique of Pure Reason?

“An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” is strange in its scholarly style and curious in its intent. The biographer who risks referring to this text does so in order to present it as a reflection on the interconnected development of the state of society and the troubles of the mind (see Goulyga 1987,51-52). Kant

84 Hypatia

drafted this text in the wake of an event that had touched the town of KO-

nigsberg. In 1760 a fifty-year-old man, the adventurer Komarnicki, was dis- covered in a forest close to the town. He had returned to the state of nature accompanied by an eight year old child, leading a nomadic existence as a man divinely inspired. Following a serious stomach illness, Komarnicki had had a vision of God that led to his discovery of the path to truth. Kant wrote about this man and his effective reversion to a state of nature in a journal article entitled “Reasoning on the adventurer Jean Komarnicki.” His interest in this case, combined with his reading of Jean Jacques Rousseau (Em& and The So- cial Contract appeared in 1762) led to Kant’s decision to expand on his remarks. So it was that “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” appeared in the same journal.

The only French translation of this essay available until now, which, thanks to Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, was addressed to the specialized public of L‘Eprolution psychiatrique, placed the emphasis elsewhere. Michele ]alley, who introduces the text, notes Kant’s constant interest in madness, but underlines the classificatory and onomastic enterprise which marks the essay. Kant’s aim was to produce, in the wake of Carl von Linnaeus, a natural history of the maladies of the mind, to describe and name mental disorders in such a way that the classificatory ordering could provide a key for the interpretation of this object of knowledge. This attempt was not to meet with success because psychiatry in Germany, which would develop in the following century, was not acquainted with Kant’s systematic classification of madness. On this point, the editor and the translator of the essay agree: Kant is not the precursor to psychiatry. This is presented as a fact, . . . a linguistic fact by the translator, who offers no interpretation of the observation that the terms chosen by Kant belonged more ta popular or literary usage than medical usages of the eighteenth century. They were not to be taken up by later scholars. The editor interprets this fact from the perspective of the history of science^.^

Why not take note of the fact that Kant is not a precursor to modern psychiatry? Perhaps the stakes of his project do not lie here. For, as I suggested, the thesis of the “Essay” is curious, as is its literary style. Kant does not restrict himself to the few remarks on the social causes of mental disorders which in- troduce and conclude his onomastic. No more does he restrict himself, properly speaking, to an onomastic with a systematic and classificatory aim. He assigns an unequal weight to his descriptions; he privileges certain mental disorders, in particular, hallucinations and hypochondria. The interest he brings to these symptoms is similar to what fascinates him about mental disorders: “their ambiguity,” he explains-in other words, the fact that these maladies are almost normal!

The interesting aspect of all these fantasists, these daydreamers who let their dreams markedly color their grasp on reality, is to make us understand


that madness is the inversion, of relative weight, of our perceptions and dreams. For we all have imaginary and slightly delirious worlds. Kant himself says one would have to search the moon to find a being who was not constituted by the tendency to unfurl an absorbing imaginary world and add to it from the ground of sensible impressions. If the non-mad exist, they do so only on the moon. Those amongst us who are designated not-mad do have phantasms. They are sufficiently limited by effective perception that these phantasms do not appear to us during the waking state. The mad are those whose phantasms flow over, either because they hallucinate directly what they per- ceive-and these are, properly speaking, phantasms which invert the relation between what is imaginary and what is perceived in normal waking l i fe-or because they interpret their sensations (which may well correspond to what is present in actual experience) through judgments which are slightly inappro- priate and sustained by their fantastic world. These latter are the delirious.

One finds here the first version of the assertion that Kant will develop regarding Emanuel Swedenborg two years later: “A coherent illusion of the senses in general is a much more remarkable phenomenon than the impostures of reason, the causes of which are well enough known. These impostures one could for the most part protect oneself from by an effort to guide the powers of the mind and restrain a bit better vain curiosity. The illusions of the senses, in contrast, touch the very foundations of our judgments; and when these are false, the rules of logic can not do mucP4 (Kant 1992b, 347).

The term translated here as “illusion” is ‘‘Bkndeuerk,” whose strongest meaning is hallucination. This is sufficient to demonstrate that Kant privileges as an elementary phenomena of madness this internal upheaval to the act of sensation. Certainly it differentiates the mad from the normal person. But it does so in the manner of an inversion of the relative weight of fantasy and perception. This inversion among the mad highlights that in normal phenomena there is a habitual limitation of our phantasmagoria by what we call real impressions. The extreme ambiguity of many of the forms of mental disorder described by Kant relates to the fact that variations in their relative value determine whether a man is wise or a fool. Correlatively, learned distinctions between the faculty of sensation, the faculty of judging closest to the facts of sensation, and the faculty of forming more universal judgments (presented by Kant in the “Essay” as if forms of madness were made for the analysis of the faculties of cognition) have another function in the Kantian text under consideration. They focus the analyst’s attention on this inversion of what is perceived and what is imagined which imperceptibly governs the follies of normal people, such as the hypochondriac who is at ease in the salon, or the person who is in love but tolerably so. This inversion, which colonizes intellectual functions in delirium, is always at work.

The importance of the distinction between the problems of sensibility and

86 Hypatia

those which affect intellectual function is not relative here. It remains sub- ordinate to Kant’s analysis of the ambiguity of wakefulness itself. This ambiguity reveals, in a mild form, the inversion that hallucination consists in. Inevitably, if one is a young romantic girl, marks on a wall appear as the shad- ow of two lovers. Inevitably, a priest will see two church tower^.^ This is the gradient slope of the imaginary, at work in all perception. But something blocks the pull of the imaginary during the waking state of a normal person. In hallucination, by contrast, what is perceived no longer extinguishes the vivacity of our phantasms.

What is the decisive point for understanding the relation of madness to the normal state? It is not that mental disorders collude with or simply add themselves to the hierarchy of our faculties of knowledge. I t is the ambiguity, and so the possible inversion, of the relation between the imaginary and what is perceived in our experiences. This is also verified by the fact that the same disturbances are referred to doubly. Some, such as melancholy or amorous passion, are defined as disturbances of the Empjindung, the sensible reception of events. But they are also categories of the delirium that Kant names Wuhn- sinne6 and which takes the form of an entirely organized interior world, well described in German as Phnrasrerei and in French as fantasmagorie. Without ruling out that the distinctions internal to the order of knowledge organize madness, one could still distinguish disturbances of feeling, disturbances of empirical judgments, and disturbances which affect abstract and universal judgments. Ultimately, however, it would be better to say, so as to make explicit the other criteria of Kantian analyses, that madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity (and hence the possible sub- version) of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas.

Kant (who was not Freudian. . . ) is not that explicit. However, this is the very problem he encounters when he promotes “the coherent illusion” of the senses to the rank of the key phenomenon of madness. The same problem is encountered when he describes with a certain tenderness the milder forms of hallucination, such as hypochondria and mild forms of delirium, as in the evocation of Rousseau among the doctors of the Sorbonne, considered by all to be a fantasist. Indeed, the ambiguity in “An Essay” has a double meaning that we can make explicit, although Kant does not do so himself. The ambiguity always concerns the fact that madness reveals, through the disturbance it occasions even among sane people, that the sanest of our ideas are infiltrated by an imaginary world.

The other form of ambiguity concerns the relation between mild and severe madness. There is only one step between Rousseau, whom the world will judge mad because his sensibility and thought are inflamed for noble causes, and a dangerous, fanatical visionary, but this step makes all the difference. A po-


litical, visionary fanatic in the political world is a dangerous leader, whose relation to reality is itself unstable. The extreme to which his extravagance leads might be the throne, or the scaffold, or both. By means of these states that waver between enthusiasm for principles and madness, Kant presents two modalities that correspond, respectively, to what he will later term theoretical and practical reason.

There is the hypochondriac, this melancholic who develops a whole phantasmagoria out of the illnesses that afflict his body, out of facts in the order of medical knowledge. The delirium of this hypochondriac is constructed in the theoretical order. And there is the state of someone enthusiastic for moral sentiment, who finds himself ridiculed by the doctors of the Sorbonne because his desire or his will seem amiss. Kant does not make these differences explicit. But in his descriptions he has the moralist-fantasizer and the melancholic- fantasizer-theoretician succeed one another. Each time, he first evokes the mild form of madness, which can stem from a simple intolerance to the milieu, then the severe form of the same madness which one can no longer reduce to an intolerance to learned or genteel society-which leaves open the possibil- ity that the mild form can not be reduced to the intolerance it provokes.

It is remarkable that when Kant evokes the theoretical side of hallucinations and the hypochondriac delirium, he puts himself in the foreground, in his production of the act of writing. We are presented with the ambiguity of the man of thought in the very act of writing this “miserable and sinister”’ treatise on the maladies of the mind. It is a cure which the hypochondriac philosopher has prescribed for himself. Writing the last page of his treatise, he declares with vehemence what he hopes to gain from the scientific investigation with re- gards to his own hypochondria: to learn how to avoid blatant extravagance. I t is this extravagance which already fascinated and repulsed him in Swedenborg. Kant indicates the form of ambiguity of madness which particularly interests him: the form which brings metaphysics into proximity with the extrava- gances of inspired deliriums, organized into world systems.

The scientific interest in the “Essay” is not pure--or rather, its purity is not assimilable to the objectivity and the systematicity of a rational classification of mental illnesses. Thus Kant is not the precursor of psychiatry. Let us say (since it is better to avoid the retrospective illusion that the notion of the precursor brings in) that the psychiatric discipline, when it emerges, will attempt to erase what appears explicitly in Kant’s text in its mordant humor, its polemic against medicine, and its final inclusion of the act of writing an onomastic among the therapeutics of mental disturbance. In Kant’s “Essay” the epistemology of the classification of mental maladies is conveyed with a violence which can sometimes be fruitful for the order of knowledge. But it can be fruitful only on the condition that it not misrecognize its own “tendency” to want to eliminate the noxious sweats which would ameliorate the situation of the philosopher.

88 Hypatia

In conclusion, we should note the importance of the “Essay” for the future of Kantian thought. The philosopher’s hypochondria is violent. In writing this essay Kant expresses his hope of cleansing himself of his hypochondria. But, as a good hypochondriac, he moves from his condition to a consideration of “nature.” Finally, the sole therapeutic that he envisages in the event that the writing proves not to be sufficient, is itself ambiguous: “to get rid of the illness radically and in silence.” Is this killing oneself, or merely abandoning the community of human beings while sustaining oneself with the sublimity of humanity? The spectacles of a nature in which man finally finds the idea of his freedom in solitude tempt us to prefer the latter scenario.

None of this removes the ambiguity of the text. It would continue to in- spire the later works. The vanquishing by practical reason of the temptation of suicide will be one of Kant’s favorite examples for distinguishing duty from desire in the Groundingfor the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. In the Critique of Judgment, the melancholy of a philosopher weary of the world will be the privileged empirical occasion for acceding to the rational experience of the sublime.

If this is indeed Kant’s complex intention, one can appreciate the strange- ness of his style which arises from his decision to define alone the maladies of the mind and to invent appropriate names independently of the scholarly terms used by the doctors. Kant draws on common, sometimes idiomatic terms in order to remain faithful to the ambiguity of the maladies of the mind. These include common cases that can imperceptibly turn into that true madness in which humans neither can nor want to recognize themselves as mad. The second reason which explains Kant’s constant recourse to terms of common usage is his polemic against doctors whom he formally respects, but whose knowledge he ultimately refuses, in the interests of his own theoretical phantasmagoria. Note that the irony with which he describes his rivalry with medical knowledge is in every respect less mordant than the violence which permeates his theoretical enterprise, since it is a question of cleansing himself of these thoughts in attaining knowledge of them.

The reflection on the ambiguity of human characteristics and the privilege accorded to the melancholic, that cold but noble man who regulates his desires according to principles, constitutes the thread that links the “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” to the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. Here one finds again the principled man, but now in a climate mod- erated by the aesthetic perspective. The text is charming and less austere than its precursor. Kant undertakes the description of human reality by taking as a guide the diverse forms of feeling or, more exactly, of the art of feeling. It is not merely a question of describing feelings (Gefiihk) “all made from” pleasure and pain. One must understand how they are formed by the culture of certain impressions or sensations (Empfindungen) which color our experiences. In the

Monique David-MCnard 89

description of existence considered from the aesthetic viewpoint this genetic perspective is present from the first sentence of the text: “the different sensations of contentment or of annoyance do not rest so much upon the nature of the external things that elicit them as upon the disposition proper to each man to experience through their means the feelings of pleasure or of pain” (Kant 1960,l).

Kant does not say here merely that one cannot dispute tastes or colors because there is nothing objective about them. He claims that pleasure (Lust) and displeasure (Unjust) result from the development of these elementary data, the impressions of contentment (Vergniigen) and annoyance (Verdruss). This development is diverse amongst individuals. The genetic viewpoint govd erns the description here and gives the charming allure of social concreteness to this writing, that sense of taking a stroll among the diversity of human characters, virtues, sexes, and ethnic and natural specificities. The relative con, stancy of these characteristics can only be understood in terms of their genesis out of elementary affective impressions. This is the basis from which people can then be differentiated.

Let us complicate the problematic somewhat in order to do justice to the Kantian discourse in this work. Kant is not content to describe human characters and differences from the viewpoint of their affective quality. He seeks to distinguish two particular modes among these qualities of pleasure and displeasure: the feelings of the beautiful and of the sublime. Feeling in general is an art. It is hidden in the depths of the formation of human experiences appre- hended in their diversity. But in this art of feeling there is a properly aesthetic aspect, an exponential art,* that shares in and concerns all-or almost all- human experiences. This is the specificity of the feeling of the beautiful and that of the sublime.

It is true that, in the frame of this complex problematic, Kant is highly descriptive. He does not define the double viewpoint of the beautiful and the sublime as he will later. He merely distinguishes the aspect of beauty or that of sublimity in the characters that he describes. For example, he does not say why the phlegmatic character is at odds with both the beautiful and the sublime. He simply notes it and excludes i t from his description. He concerns himself with those characters, such as the choleric and the sanguine, whose very difference does fall within this distinction between beauty and sublimity. His rapid remarks on the rudeness of phlegmatic tendencies which make them unable to be aestheticized will be thought through again, almost thirty years later, in the Critique ofJudpent. What is capable of aestheticization in our sensations and feelings, Kant will say, are the pleasures which we take in the form of objects and in the moment of the formless in nature’s spectacles. The beautiful and the sublime presuppose these disinterested pleasures which certain sensations (those which are entrenched in a monopolizing materiality

90 Hypatia

which renders impossible the play of form, or the fecund event of the route of form in the apprehension of the sublime) do not permit.

In comparing the Observations to the third Critique, it is true that in the first of these texts, Kant is, as he affirms, more an observer than a philosopher. And yet, the material he holds back in 1764 is the same material on which his thought will linger, when he knows how to justify the choice of his material with concepts.

What is true about the examples from which the conceptualization of pure aesthetic experience becomes thinkable is also true of morality. In this regard also, the consideration of moral virtues seems to insinuate itself into the Kantian discourse. “Let us then consider the feelings of the sublime and the beautiful in their conventional classification, but particularly in as much as they are moral,” he writes in the second section of Observations (Kant 1960, 64). But this simple statement introduces the ardent, refined, and detailed analysis of the melancholy of the moral man in whom motives take on the character of principles. The sublime feeling of human dignity that inhabits the moral man is allied, almost naturally, with his weariness at the world, the changing small things of worldly, everyday life. Certainly, the melancholy character does not provide sufficient reason for the moral formalism that Kant will define in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and in the Critique of Practical Reason. However, the weariness of human things in their futile variability is like the path of obligation by which a man can accede to a life supported by constant principles.

Later on, Kant will distinguish in our acts the particular pathological interest attached to their contents and consequences from the conversion of that perspective for which the act is nothing more than a simple pretext for the universalization of its maxim. The interest in the form of our acts will then be defined as being of a completely different order from its pathologically determined motivation. In 1764 this fundamental difference is not posed between the feeling of world-weariness and the life lived according to principles. This latter does not truly break with the order of feeling, though the philosopher underlines that the moral man is spontaneously neither good nor well inten- tioned. Such qualities leave the individual tributary to circumstances. One could say that the relatively cold character of the moral man, posited in the Observations, is the empirical image of what will become the heterogeneity of moral interest with regard to sensible interest, and the negative character of the feeling of respect, in the second Critique.

And yet, one must acknowledge that in 1764 the relation between morality and melancholy is still thinkable in terms of proximity. In 1787 this is no longer possible. No relation of proximity can describe the difference between the empirical and the transcendental, that is to say, here, between the pathological and the moral.9


Nonetheless, the transcendental philosophy of 1787 remains supported by the empirical description in a precise manner. One comprehends no better from Kant’s youthful than from his mature work how life according to principles can, by affixing the moral subject to its principles, take over from what has unraveled in the feeling of world-weariness: the adherence of the subject to its own existence.

In 1764, the classificatory and descriptive intention of the works skirts around this delicate question of knowing why the man whose feeling for existence has been undone manages to live for principles. And, in 1787, this question will be rejected as too empirical. Because the basic difference between the pathological and the moral is axiomatic, the problem of the genesis of the transcendental cannot be posed. Thus Kant defines the pathological by its supposed incapacity to take on an a pion’ determination, “As it is impossible to see a priori which determination will be accompanied with pleasure, and which representation will be on the contrary accompanied by pain” (Kant 1993,83).

What ultimately is the conceptual value of this axiom? For twentieth- century readers of Freud, this Kantian principle is more than obvious. Doesn’t Kant confuse the impossibility of mastery which characterizes the relation between the subject and the subject’s pleasure (jouissance) with the impossibility of knowing a pion‘ the relation of a subject to pleasure or displeasure? Ultimately, this is what Freud demonstrated. The specificity of a human being is constituted by a certain art of feeling. Under the conditions of transference, another subject can know this specificity and establish its apn’on‘ modalities. If this is true, this account is quite compatible with the idea that the subject of this art of feeling does not possess alone the a pion’ reason of that of which this subject is constituted.

I t is only by taking this confusion established between self-consciousness and knowledge as one’s starting point that it becomes evident that no one can know a priori what representation will be accompanied by pleasure and which by pain. What we see here is not simply another moment in the history of knowledge excluding an earlier problematic concerning pleasure and displeasure.

What makes evident this principle according to which the pathological is not susceptible to any a piori determination? It is the double sense taken on by the expression of the inconstancy of sensible life. The lack of constancy designates both the melancholic feeling that worldly things are uncertain and vain, and their ontological incapacity to give a hold to an a priori rational determination. Isn’t it the fecundity of the image or model of melancholy in Kant’s work which prevents him from distinguishing these two significations of the inconstancy of the pathological life?

If this is the case, one must acknowledge that the material provided by the

92 Hypatia

Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime is more than a simple empirical preparation for the elaboration of the transcendental philosophy which is independent of it. For the empirical description and the transcendental elaboration suffer from the same blindspot. Kant does not tell us why the melancholic feeling in conformity with which there is a fragmentation of life can be resolved by the respect for the constancy of principles. He merely affirms that this is the case. It is this inexplicable fact which is later transformed into the principle of the inconstancy of the pathological from the perspective of the a pn’ori. The Observations is not a simple empirical preparation with no more than an illustrative role in the completed system. It constitutes the material of Kant’s conceptual thought. In their elucidating function and resid- ual obscurity these concepts could not have been articulated with just any examples.

The relation established between aesthetics and morality allows us to understand that the liaison of intricate questions occurs as early as 1764. Mel- ancholy is the interval term which brings together morality and the aesthetic of the sublime. The problematic which permits the elucidation of this liaison will only be formulated in 1790, in the Critique of the Faculty o f J u d p n t . But the elements in question are present in 1764. Despite the transformations that the critical philosophy will bring, Kant’s thought on this point has a remarkable constancy.

If one rereads the “General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Re- flective Judgment’’ (Kant 1987,12640) in the Critique ofJudgment, one sees that every analysis of enthusiasm, in its proximity with and distinction from the pure respect for the moral law (which never realizes the infinite in the sensible order) highlights this negative moment in which the apparent consis- tency of sensible life is undone. This negative moment works to the benefit either of respect for the moral law or of the routing of sensibility in the aesthetic order that is at the same time a sublime, admirable, and dangerous ap- peal for a presentation of the infinite: “once the senses no longer see anything before them, while yet the unmistakable and indelible idea of morality remains, one would sooner need to temper the momentum of an unbounded imagination so as to keep it from rising to the level of enthusiasm” (Kant 1987, 135). Enthusiasm is like the right side of a medal whose reverse is melancholy. The Observations already signal their proximity. Having rigorously distinguished the faculty of desire from that which experiences pleasure or pain, Kant was fully aware that he was returning to this entanglement of melancholy, the sense of the sublime, and morality. The importance of this entanglement had already been posed, but in a purely descriptive fashion, in 1764.

What if this truly is the constant and decisive point? Before or after the critical and transcendental philosophy, a unity is constituted of the anthropology of melancholy, moral formalism supported by the notion of respect, and


the aesthetics of the sublime. We are obliged to reconsider a number of the most celebrated interpretations of Kantian morality. One might make particular mention of the Nietzschean verdict and the Lacanian interpretation.

Let’s recall that Nietzsche converts the negative moment of the moral law’s deviation from the sensible into the basis of the categorical imperative: “And shouldn’t we add that the world has never lost completely a certain order of blood and torture (even in old Kant: the categorical imperative has a stench of cruelty)” (Nietzsche 1967,651. Neither the description, nor the later conceptualization of the relation of melancholy to morality on the one hand and to the feeling of the sublime on the other, suffices to establish the validity of what Nietzsche says. For Nietzsche supposes that the stench of cruelty-whose target needs to be determined here-is a forgotten origin of culpability, of duty. Now if it is true that Kant accords importance to the pain inflicted on our sensible being by the imperative of the law which “overwhelms presumption,” the relegation of the pathological is not done in secret when it is a question of defining a criterion for morality. The proof of this lies precisely in the explicit articulation of practical reason and an aesthetics of sublime melancholy.

Yet what again remains obscure in Kant is the reason for the success of his therapeutic method. How does it happen that the dereliction of existence, tied to the violence which is exercised against the self and others, can be transformed into the hinge between the subject and its principles? Kant does not answer. Although he poses the question again in the last section of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals he presents it as resolved, and, in the Critique of Practical Reason, as redundant. But this is not the same as stating that cruelty is the raison d’ttre of the categorical imperative, unless one says much more on the fate of this violence. This is the violence internal to melancholy, which is transformed into the constancy of moral principles and into the exclusive consideration for the pure form of our acts. Kant does not abstain from ex- plaining what becomes of sensibility stripped of the criteria ofmorality. I t is not hindered or killed off. It nourishes the aesthetic of sublime nobility.

The pain inflicted by the moral law on sensibility is not the “repressed” of Kant’s thought. He did not transport away the problem it refers to. But no more did he render it manifest in a politics and erotics of perversion, as is claimed by Lacan in the context of the systematic connection that he sets up between Kant and the Marquis de Sade. Nietzsche supposed that the cruelty which was the source of moral rationalism could not have remained hidden. The very elaboration of a morality of debt and law only serves to bury this violence, of which there remains nothing but the stench. Lacan, by contrast, proposed thinking “Kant with Sade.” Although he never affirmed that there was a per- fect identity between their thought, he converted the categorical imperative into a masochistic theory and practice, an imperative exposed and offered up to the moral law and its representatives.

94 Hypatia

What is assumed here again is that the pain provoked by the moral law would be the raison d'Ctre of this law:

Let us note that this good is only supposed as the Good, by proposing itself, as has just been said, over and against any object which would set a condition to it, by opposing itself to whatever uncertain good these objects might provide, in an a priori equivalence, in order to impose itself as superior by virtue of its universal value. Thus its weight only appears by excluding anything-drive or feeling-which the subject might suffer in his interest for an object, what Kant therefore qualifies as pathological.'O (Lacan 1989,56)

Effectively, Kant privileges this moment where the subject no longer is confronted with any particular object-this is the moment of encounter with a law. Is it necessarily that moment of a masochist subject offering himself to the violence of an Other? Is it the moment of a subject who takes the place of this Other, taking pleasure (jouissance) in obliging his partner to recognize the pain out of which he is constituted? This is the sense of the rapprochement attempted by Lacan between Kant and Sade. It takes the form of a homage addressed to Kant, as indeed to Sade, on the grounds that both had brought to light a necessary perversity in the structure of desire.

To assess the significance of this reading, one would have to linger longer than is possible here. Yet, the Observations on the Feeling ofthe Beautiful and the Sublime allow some decisive points to be established. This is because of the material precision they bring to understanding the relation between the description of moral and aesthetic life and the philosophy of pure will and judg ments of taste. Melancholy is more neurotic than perverse. I t privileges pain tested before the law, or connected to the route of the sensible in the apprehension of the infinite. Kant freely articulates perverse fantasies to us, but the perverse fantasies are not simply perversions. One perceives the sublime character of his praise of friendship. He foregrounds the loss of a friend in order to disclose the dimension of fidelity of the man of principles (Kant 1960,66). But a true Sadian would organize this loss as a real event, which makes all the difference.

In another example used to discuss true love, Kant represents the work of destruction on the face of a loved woman, a face conquered by ugliness. He mocks-or reassures himself with?-the idea that a woman's intelligence is a mere appearance which swiftly reveals itself as such. A noble love could be offered unproblematically to a woman whom in the order of thought one would assume to be ruined (Kant 1960,65).

True, Kant did not reflect on the meaning of these examples that he de- veloped at length. The end of the noble melancholic is to be transformed into


sublime life and moral experience. But this end assumes an exercise of violence. The subject represents this violence to itself as being alternately di- rected against the self and against the other. But this has no conceptual status. The violence represented is not exactly the violence enacted. The counter- posing established between the beautiful feminine qualities, all devoted to play and unstable appearances, and the noble masculine severity which escapes after having been seduced by them (not without having injured them along the way), evokes a conception of the difference between the sexes that one might call banal and neurotic, not Sadian.

Taking everything into consideration, moreover, one can only be astonished at the extreme liberty with which Kant delivers up his formula on what Lacan will call, much later, the sexual misunderstanding: “If all comes to the extreme, the man, confident in his merits, will be able to say: ‘Even if you do not love me, I will constrain you to esteem me’, and the woman, secure in the might of her charms, will answer: ‘Even if you do not inwardly admire me, I will still constrain you to love me”’ (See, for example, Kant 1960,95). Is there not as much accuracy and subtlety here, and on the same terrain, as one finds in the psychoanalytic theoretician, one of whose most famous adages was: “There is no sexual relation.”“ The author “tells” us, ultimately, why he is not married. In any case, one cannot find the object of his desire. One might say that violent, coarse drives are addressed to all women, to such an extent as to inhibit the choice of one particular woman. Or one might say that noble love is always preoccupied with an object forged in thought, whose qualities are rarely combined in one single person.’*

Let us conclude: these two texts belong to a similar period in Kant’s thought. On decisive points they share the same theme. They allow us to in- terrogate the relation between the empirical materials out of which a thought is constituted and the final state of that transcendental philosophy which, in principle, would found and master its sources. These two texts also manifest a disparity of style to which one can appropriately attribute a philosophical status. The Observations is an easy, charming, well-written piece. Its final role in Kant’s completed philosophical works testifies to the philosopher’s great fidelity to his initial intuitions-which are also just so many reflections on his own phantasms. But ultimately, it is hard to understand from reading this text what prompted Kant to redefine philosophy, as radically as he did, in its principles and aims. On the contrary, it is by going back to that austere, polemical text, “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind,” written with a violence scarcely concealed by its classificatory concerns, that one will better grasp the reasons behind the radical reversal which led Kant to become the profoundly innova- tive author of the Critique ofpure Reason. The indications at the end of the text will serve as our guide. The theoretical concern manifests something irrecon- cilable: to write this miserable treatise is to hope for a better remedy than

96 Hypatia

doctors can offer, to purge noxious vapors which had overwhelmed the mind of the man of thought, who is also a hypochondriac and a melancholic, and a man on the brink of becoming a crank and delirious ~isionary.’~ More precisely still, suicide or retreat from the world (which is presented in the Obserua- tiom as the very element of a sublime reconciliation with existence) is given as much weight here as the requirements of thought. This direction of Kant’s thought will become prominent in another austere text, the Dreams ofa Spirit- Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. Kant will state there his fascina- tion for [Swedenborg’s] thought. As a n intellectual construction which is both metaphysical and delirious, it has crossed the threshold. His horror at it repeats and develops the horror of the philosopher profoundly disturbed by ceaseless thoughts, who hopes to be purged of them, as the “Essay” demonstrates. The paradox is that the ultimate name of this purging will be critical philosophy: science within the limits of human reason. This is what will allow Kant to avoid falling into the conjoined phantasmagoria of delirium and metaphysics. The problem posed by Kant in 1764 would result in two ends: aesthetic reconciliation, and a philosophical invention which makes fecund the violence of a reversal. Between these two ends, don’t we have to choose?

NOTES

We thank the Flammarion publishing house for their authorization to publish a translation of this essay. Minor amendments have been made to the text and endnotes for the sake of the piece’s autonomy and in conformance with Hypatia’s referencing style.

1. Translation by Alison Ross of Monique David-Menard, “Presentation,” in Kant, Immanuel. 1990. Essais sur les maladies de la @re; Observations sur k sentiment du beau et du sublime. Trans. Monique David-Menard. Paris: Gamier Flammarion, pp. 7-44.

2 . In French, “anthropology” refers to the human sciences. Trans. 3. In French, the history of science refers, at least after Gaston Bachelard, to the

work of rational “purification of concepts” which does not assign to “non-scientific” discursive formations of “scientific ideologies” only a negative value, i.e., falsehoods pure and simple. Thus its focus on specific scientific disciplines, in this case psychiatry, is mindful of technological, social, institutional, and conceptual formations which in many ways, whether positively or negatively, determine the historically situated scientific work. Most importantly, it does not treat its point of departure, namely the present state of science and norms of scientificity, as a completed doctrine and does not carry out an “epistemological inquisition” on the past science: why it failed to achieve what is considered to be “logically” possible for it (Canguilhem 1988,105). In English, on the other hand, “science” designates primarily the natural sciences whose “history” traditionally consists in a rational reconstruction which displays how one scientific


theory leads to another by virtue of the internal logic of scientific theories themselves. Trans.

4. I have modified the translation to be consistent with the use of the word “illusion” throughout this piece. Meld Shell also translates Blendwerk as illusion. The editions of Dreams ofa Spirit-Seer cited here translate Bkndwerk as “delusion.” See, for example, Kant (1992a, 102-3). Trans.

5. The reference is to Kant (1992a, 101). Trans. 6. The term Wuhn refers to “the illusion of reason” in Kant’s transcendental dia-

lecric in the Critique of Pure Reuson and to madness. Trans. 7. The author quotes from the last page of Kant’s “Essay” (forthcoming). Trans. 8. Reading exponential art for art au carre‘. Trans. 9. That is, by the time of the publication of the second edition of the first Critique.

Trans. 10. I have relied here on James B. Swenson J.’s 1989 translation. 1 have substituted

his translation of sentiment for “feeling.” In Swenson’s translation and Lacan’s orig- inal, “pathological” is in quotation marks. Trans.

11. See Lacan (1982, 138, 56), and, for a discussion of Lacan on this point, Jacqueline Rose (1982,46-48). Ed.

12. The reference is to Kant (1960, 91). Tram. 13. The reference is to Kant (1960, 67). Trans.

REFERENCES

AlquiC, Ferdinand. 1980. Emmanuel Kant: Euvres philosophiques: Introduction aux oeuvres de 1764 d 1766. Paris: Gallimard.

Canguilhem, G. 1988. Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Goulyga, Arsenyi. 1987. Immanuel Kant: His life and thought. Trans. Marijan Despa- latovie. Boston: Birkhauser.

Jalley, Michele. 1977. Introduction to Essai sur les maladies de la tCte. Trans. Jean-Pierre Lefebvre with Andre Feline et al. L‘eoolution psychiatrique 42 (2): 203-12.

Kant, Immanuel. 1960. Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime. Trans. John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press.

. 1976. Critique de la raison pure. Trans. Jules Bami, rev. Paul Archambault. Paris: Garnier Flammarion.

. 1987. Critique ofjudgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett.

. 1990. Essais sur les maladies de la dte: Obserwations sur le sentiment du beau et du sublime. Trans. Monique David-Menard. Paris: Garnier Flammarion.

. 1992a. Dreams of a spirit-seer. Trans. E. E Goerwitz. 1900. Reprint, Bristol: Thoemmes Press.

. 1992b. Dreams of a spirit-seer. Trans. D. Walford and R. Meerbote. The Cam- bridge edition of the works of lmmanuel Kant, vol. 1 : Theoretical philosophy J 755- 1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

98 Hypatia

. 1993. Critique of practical reason. Trans. Lewis White Beck. New York: Mac-, millan.

. Forthcoming. An essay on the maladies of the mind. In Cambridge edition of Kant’s works, uol. 7: Anthropology, philosophy of history and education, ed. Guenter Zoeller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lacan, Jacques. 1989. Kant with Sade. Trans. James B. Swanson, Jr. October 51 (Win- ter): 55-75.

Lacan, Jacques, and the Ecole Freudienne. 1982. Feminine sexuality. Ed. Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell. London: Macrnillan.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. On the genealogy of morals. In On the genealogy of morals and ecce homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books.

Rose, Jacqueline. 1982. Introduction 11. In Feminine sexuality, ed. Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell. London: Macmillan.

Kant's "An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind" and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and...

Documents

Transcript of Kant's "An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind" and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and...