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THE LINGUISTIC CONDITION

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Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Also Available from Bloomsbury

Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the

Modern Subject, ed. Claudia Brodsky and Eloy LaBrada
Words’ Worth: What the Poet Does, Claudia Brodsky
Apperception and Self-Consciousness in Kant and German Idealism,
Dennis Schulting
Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Tird Critique,
Michael Wayne
Te Bloomsbury Companion to Kant,
ed. Gary Banham, Dennis Schulting, and Nigel Hems
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
THE LINGUISTIC CONDITION

Kant’s Critique of Judgment

and the Poetics of Action

Claudia Brodsky
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

iii

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Names: Brodsky, Claudia, 1955– author.

Title: The linguistic condition : Kant’s Critique of judgment and the poetics of action /
Claudia Brodsky.
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Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
For Chloe and Rebecca, with love and admiration
Toni Morrison, dearest friend, clearest mind, in Memoriam
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Alles Menschliche ist voll von Urteilen, weswegen es nicht verwunderlich
scheint, wenn einmal ausgesprochen wurde, daß ohne Urteil kein Bewußtsein
möglich sei.
Everything human is replete with acts of judgment, for which reason, once it
has been articulated, the statement that without judgment no consciousness
would be possible does not seem remarkable.
—H. G. Adler, Eine Reise.
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

vii

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

viii

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements xi
Preface: Acting upon Condition xiii

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION: BEFORE JUDGMENT: DOING WITHOUT KNOWING
IN KANT AND DIDEROT 1

Part I
LINGUISTIC CONDITIONS

Chapter 2
THE “CONDITION” OF JUDGMENT: “COMMON SENSE,” OR
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE IN KANT’S THIRD CRITIQUE 23
1. “Common Sense”and Signiﬁcation, or What is Not Tautology 23
2. “Technique” 42
3. “Free” 51
4. “Feeling” 59
5. Speech Act and “Communicability” 64
6. Rousseau’s Nouns 72
7. Diderot’s Adjectives 92
8. Kant’s Predicates: “Synthetic Judgments A Priori” and
“A General Voice” 109
9. “Te Schema,” or Language Inside 121
10. What is Articulation? 130
11. World Without Words: Wordsworth 138
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Part II
MISSING SENSES AND POETICS

Chapter 3
“JUDGMENT” AND THE GENESIS OF WHAT WE LACK: “POETRY,”
“SCHEMA,” AND THE “MONOGRAM OF IMAGINATION” IN KANT 147
1. “Judgment” in the “Age of Critique” 147
2. Judgment and “Indiﬀerence:” the “Common Sense” of
Imagination in Arendt and Kant 157
3. Te Schema and the Language of Poetry 168
4. Poetry and the Judgment of Critique 189

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
x Contents

Chapter 4
KLEIST’S MERE FORMALITIES 193
1. Kant and Kleist: Representation and Irony 193
2. What happened: Misrepresentation and Missed Representation
in “Die Marquise von O . . .” 198
3. Contesting “Judgment” in “Te Duel” 210

Bibliography 227
Primary Bibliography 227
Secondary Bibliography 229
Index 235
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to the Morris Louis Estate for having granted
me permission on an exceptional basis to feature Louis’ “Beta Lambda” (1961) on
the cover of this work. From my ﬁrst conception of this project and all across the
years of its development, as my understanding of its thesis of a “free” “linguistic
condition” of judgment grew, Louis’ unparalleled “Unfurled” series, of which “Beta
Lambda” is a touchstone I have had the fortune to view my life long, appeared
directly before my mind’s eye. More than any other individual work I know, it
concretely represents the centrality of the act of judgment to Kant’s tripartite
Critique, i.e., the absolute necessity of judgment, precisely because lacking “any
proper realm of its own,” to the opposing realms of knowledge and moral action so
forcefully delineated in the First and Second Critiques. “Beta Lambda” enacts the
very condition, of an unprescripted realm of perception actively enabling opposing
forces to hold together, at whose description this book aims. My thanks to the
Morris Louis Estate for enabling me to bring it before the reader’s eye as well.
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

xii

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
P R E FAC E :
A C T I N G U P O N C O N D I T IO N

Talking – as actors in Harold Pinter plays typically do – in repetitive fragments of

“small talk” shorn of contextualization and response, the principal speaker in “Te
Room” lets fall an unobtrusive non sequitur: “At least you stand a chance.”
In a sense, when all is “said and done,” this book explores what such “standing”
means. A semantically flexible noun derived from a present tense gerund denoting
a singular gravitational orientation or physical motion, “standing,” in the abstract
sense of access to a “right” conferred upon it in English, denotes a “condition,”
“position” or “status” independent of existential being of any description, and, at
least in a negative sense, its meaning is not new. A function of positioning rather
than identity, “standing” designates an acknowledged capacity to act within a
representational – social and historical, and thus legal and political, no less than
dramaturgical – context. Like the “subject-position” in syntactic structures
representing actions and situations of every perceptible and imperceptible kind,
“standing” stands for no particular content nor predicts any particular predicate or
outcome. To “have standing” is, thus, by definition, nothing more nor less than “to
stand a chance:” to possess nothing per se but a “standing” relation to possibility.
Like the syntactic production of the subject position within the representational
context of the sentence, and the mediated production of subjects by their shared
means of articulation, “standing” – the common rather than privative status of
subjecthood as inter-subjective access to action – is inextricable from the
unpredictability by which specifically human activity is defined. While its operative
“presence” may be as presumed as that of grammar within language (and of
language itself), absences and deprivations of “standing” have been the stuff of
cultural imaginaries since the inception of poetics. From the inaugural narratives
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of the bases of ancient civilization in epic, tragedy and explanatory myth, through
the sustaining fables and folklore of every community and continent, to the
modern generation of self-reflective cultural traditions and contemporary
transformations of the definition of culture across media, the want or disabling of
the capacity for communicative interaction has haunted the arts of expression
historically. Homer’s enchanting sirens and speechless sailors live on in the
apparently timeless comic genre of blissfully stupefied men (perennially on view at
a theater near “you”), but so does his doubly defeated Trojan princess, Cassandra,
cursed by Apollo, son of Zeus and god of song who desired her, with both prophetic
power and the ineluctable inability to convey what she knows to anyone – central
female figure and subject of tragedy in Aeschylus, Euripides, and Virgil, made
metaphor for the general, negative condition of modern lyric composition by
Hölderlin, Keats, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Mandelstam, Celan, and Wolff, among

xiii

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
xiv Preface:

others. Myths of mimetically dissembling statues and automata fashioned by

Daedalus and Hephaestus, mortal and god alike, and the endless echoes of Ovid’s
Narcissus and Echo, and Pygmalion and Galatée, in fictional and theoretical
accounts of desire stuck mistaking self for other, find their inverted confirmation
in explicitly “alien” models of the subject in which reflexive self-projection is
instead short-circuited: La Méttrie’s simulacrum of man, or homme-machine,
incapable not only of desire but of the “imagination” desire requires; Diderot’s
homme horloge, homme automate, and wished-for “decomposition of a man,”
theoretically imagined, like Condillac’s statue, as artificial aids in isolating present
and absent sensations from our nonsenory ability to represent them. Te dummy
of Hoffman’s Sandman whose fatal allure “lives” on in Offenbach’s gorgeously
scored Olympia and Delibes’ Coppélia, along with the many mail-order
mannequins figuratively and literally embraced in current cinematic iterations of
the medieval romance genre; the singing sea creatures silenced by the same magic
spells that grant them limbs, and the myriad denizens of erotic, mytho-fantastic
and science-fiction scenarios descended from them – in short, all the beautiful
“body doubles” that “people” nightmare narratives of life limited to “going through
the motions,” semblances of subjects doomed to remain – as Dvorák’s Rusulka
perfectly, paradoxically, describes – “a silent echo of the elements,” themselves all
stand for an uncanny absence of “standing,” the invisible yet acknowledged
“condition” that, independent of the merely phenomenal materiality and false
effigies of aesthesis, alone constitutes the capacities for experience and action that
produce a subject as such.
Rendered incapable of self-articulation in exchange for coveted human corporal
form alone, Dvorák’s mythic Rusulka, returned to her watery element, elects to
regain both eros and voice at the cost of the life of the human subject with
whom she most desired to communicate. Te sense of horror with which she
recognizes the state of living death to which her future existence is thus
consigned, is not shared, ironically enough, by the voluble spokesmen for just
such inert animism that have propelled the tide of bizarrely spiritualist –
“post-philosophical” and “post-Marxist” – “materialisms,” which, echoing neo-
Cartesian echoes of neo-Platonic mysticisms, have increasingly submerged
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

all articulated “grounds” for “standing” – for the very possibility of possible action –
over recent years. Overlapping conﬂations of the empirical with the ontological,
ontology with a sensation-based aestheticism, aesthesis as such with the
political, and the political, thus, ultimately, with the nonpolitical, “divine” or
“sacred,” all describe, in one ﬁgurative vocabulary or another, an autotelic status
quo rendering any notion of action, rather than predetermined reaction, per force,
“immaterial.”i Once objects of understanding themselves, critical theories of

i. Among the most widespread of such – now commonplace – ﬁgurations of “life”

mysteriously liberated from articulation, historicity, disparity, relationality and discursive
mediation of any kind are Deleuze’s traceless “nomadic” motions in space and predetermined
monadic entelechies; Rancière’s “politics” of evanescent aesthetic sensations and equations of

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Preface: xv

understanding that, beginning with Kant’s self-“critical”“revolution” in metaphysics,

derive not from positivist presumptions, but rather the critical differences and
distinctions between real and presumed grounds they draw, are dismissed, whether
in traditional noncritical or “postcritical” historicist fashion, for failing both to
mirror a particular, historically predetermined empirical reality and to indicate,
without contradiction, an historically independent (aesthetic and/or political)
means of overcoming or reversing “history” as such.
In short, the quandary created by noncritical confusions of material physis with
material forms and objects of our own making replicates the death by aesthesis of
desiring a lifeless creation represented by Ovid – as well as Homer, Shakespeare,
Dryden, Goya, Bronzino, Boucher, Rameau, Rousseau, Hawthorne, Keats, Kleist,
Schiller, Balzac, Donezetti, Browning, James, Shaw, Borges, Mandelstam, Brodsky,
and innumerable other formative authors and artists of ancient through
contemporary, classical and popular culture. For the narcissistic double bind
represented by Ovid in Pygmalion’s passion for his sculpture dramatizes the
confounding basis of any subject’s wish that the external world both reflect and
remain spatially distinct from – and thus perceptible to – the self that perceives it.
Experiential desire of any kind requires external objects upon which to pose its
affections, but only by maintaining resolutely ambiguous relations to all bodies
“outside” it – by persisting in “viewing” these both as self-contained entities and as
props of a scenario it contrives – can the self-sustaining “theater” (“contemplation,”
or “speculation:” θεωρία) staged by subjective narcissism thrive. It too feeds upon
objects, with the significant difference that the data of its desire are acknowledged
only insofar as they play the mechanical part, which is to say, already fully
prescribed roles, to which their perception has assigned them. Tus, while
perception and eros both require the “objective” resistance of a certain material
opacity, the “otherness” of the material embraced by contemporary Pygmalions is
of their own making.

sensations with “poetics;” the apocalyptic sensationalism and “charismatic” “sacralization” of

the “sovereign” uniting Agamben’s “glory” of a return to preconscious “infancy” in the “bare life”
of a “mute”“bio-politics” with a post-historical, post-philosophical (and post-political) sensory
“utopia” projected to realize and replace all terrestrial “politics” with the “sacred” manifestation
of a cosmic (Catholic) “theology,” and all such purely metaphoric, modern reincarnations of
medieval creeds of “the incarnate” in popular oxymoronic notions of a “politics of sensation”
See in particular Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2009), esp. pp. 19–44: “Aesthetics as Politics” (orig. Malaise dans l’esthétique [Paris: Galilée,
2004]. For one of the most trenchant, deeply informed critiques of Agamben’s evacuation of all
possibility of any, even Heideggerian “ontological” or Benjaminian “historical,” let alone
politically eﬀective, kind, in adopting the “nihilism” of “absolute utilitarianism” espoused by
Carl Schmitt, see Antonio Negri, “Te sacred dilemma of inoperosity. On Giorgio Agamben’s
Opus Dei,” tr. J. F. McGimsey, UniNomade Sep. 9, 2012 (orig. pub. Feb. 2, 2012). See Secondary
Bibliography for source texts for Agamben’s key themes.

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
xvi Preface:

No relations may be more opaque and thus productive of culture, in its ever-
changing, ofen oppositional historical forms – from the “intellectual” forms of
philosophical concepts and inquiry, logic, law, science, and allegory to the “aesthetic,”
sensuous, referential and material forms of artistic fiction and representation, and
ritual and belief of every kind – than those proposed to span the difference in kind
between material existence and conscious life. Tis book and its companion
volume, Words’ Worth: What the Poet Does,ii examine how we act in filling that gap.
Te philosophical and literary works on which they focus attempt to describe
actions that are qualitatively different, both in source and potential outcome, from
“reactions,” i.e., either naturally or historically determined results. Unlike the
leveling waves of “new,” anthropomorphizing “materialisms” leaving an
indiscriminate flotsam of living and dead in their wake, the active formation of
modes of representation and communication described by Diderot on the model
of the stand-ins for sensation performed by the partially sensorily deprived; Kant’s
formulation of a distinctive “power” or “faculty” for translating the “feeling” of a
perceiving subject into the impersonal predications he calls “judgment;” Rousseau’s
account of language itself originating in one’s first encounter with “others” and,
therein, with oneself; the temporal transformation of the “sacred” into the exigency
of judgment in Kleist; and the “material difference” from codified “poetic diction”
that, for Wordsworth, defines the “real language” of “poetry,” all work to differentiate
inert existence from the capacity to act, or “standing,” in both the immediate and
historical sense. “Agency” – the unparalleled capacity designated by Locke to
underlie his central verbal concept of “consent,” and by Rousseau as the basis of any
equalizing social “convention” or “contract” – is another name for “standing” in the
pivotal sense of “standing a chance.” Neither a biological matter nor spiritual power,
agency is the ability to act in differentiation – indeed to constitute difference – from
a given context, and it can do so because, like the grammatical differentiation of the
“subject-position” within a sentence, its own basis, at once “free” in origin and
conventional in operation, is, for these very reasons, communicable, rather than
contextual or innate. Tis book explores the fundamental relation between
“material” shaped by “convention” to carry meaning, and unconventionally
meaningful, and thus historically productive action, which is to say, between
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“standing” and the condition for action that alters the status quo or “state of things,”
both immediately, in their actuality, and with causally undetermined consequences.
To “be” an “agent” “is” to “act” as one (among many), and such representational
activity is irreducible both to sensory experience and the mechanics of physical
action. It constitutes instead a relational position between “material” shaped to

ii. See Brodsky, Words’ Worth. What the Poet Does (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), for an
extended case study of Wordsworth’s theory and practice of the thesis presented in this
study – in the poet’s words, that “the only purpose” of poetics “worthy of the name,” no less
than the development “likewise of society itself,” depends on “the language really used by
men” (Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington
Smyser, eds. Te Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols, I: 121, 124, et passim).

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Preface: xvii

carry meaning, and differently meaningful, and thus historically productive action,
which is to say, between “standing,” as the “positioning” of a “subject” as such, and
as the condition of any subject’s predication, i.e., action that alters the content
of subject-object relations, including conditional – social, political and
epistemological – definitions of the qualities to which subjecthood refers.
For, to “stand a chance” is to occupy an unpredictable position – in a word, the
position to act with actual and future, historical and material results unscripted by
known past and present circumstance – and “standing,” in the necessarily figurative
sense that the conceptual substantivization of any transitive or intransitive verb
conveys, is a condition unconditioned by the physically empirical. Its basis is the
specifically human capacity for self- and material invention through productive
labor, opposing vampiric evacuations of both by capital accumulation, that Locke’s
Second Treatise called “free agency,” the same capacity to act not in fantasized
supernatural or magic defiance of natural mechanics but in independence, or “free”
of both the real and apparent dependencies whose false conflation Rousseau’s
Discourses analyzed in turn. Like the capacity for “fiction” and “hypothetical
reasoning” on which, Rousseau freely acknowledges, his own necessarily
“speculative” counter-“history” of the formative, necessarily materially unlocatable
“foundations of inequality among men,” exposed in the Discourse named for them,
must rely, the “inalienable” capacity for “free agency” theorized in tandem with that
critical history is tied to the ability not to replicate an already artificially instituted
status quo. Tat ability is afforded Rousseau, acting in his capacity to narrate a
logical “fiction” of the “real” history and bases of social relations, by “discourse”
itself, fitting generic title of his conceptually revolutionary, internationally outlawed
text on the joint trajectory of society and inequality, as well as of its internationally
celebrated predecessor, the prize-winning Discourse on whether the Arts and
Sciences Improve Morals. Because discourse, too, “is” only its enactment, rather than
a positive object or historical fact, it has the inalienable ability to enable the kind of
“change” and empirically untethered “exchanges” (of appearance for reality, and
inequality for equality) that the Second Discourse demystifies and so acts, on pain
of exile for its author, against. Just as nothing – including its own entirely differential
materiality – within or about discursive activity is natural, the only “natural”
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

condition of discourse, language, is the condition of history itself.

Te choice, then, is not and can in fact never have been between language
and matter, language and history, language and “diﬀerence,” or language and
politics and political theory, or, in a larger hermeneutic sense, text and context.
Indeed, in that they frame inherently conjoined subject matters as opposed, such
choices are “false” or, at best, “Solomonic” to begin with, the exclusion of one or
the other side of their proposal resulting in the demise of both, which is to say, the
whole.
Te theorists and authors of agency – of “standing a chance” – investigated in
this study and its companion volume not only undermine such dichotomous
understandings but underscore why understanding as such is sidelined by their
pursuit. Chief among these is Kant, who, long relegated to “the dustbin of history”
by most (while, signiﬁcantly, not all) neo-Marxian materialist and post-Marxist

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
xviii Preface:

cultural–social or “anthropomorphic” theory, ﬁrst hypothesized that both historical

agency and the capacity for “judgment” with which it is intertwined depend upon
a self- and empirically alienating “faculty” for speech. Just as no language is purely
ideational, void of externalization or materialization of some kind, so no language
is “individual:” all languages require what Kant calls the “unresearchable”“common”
“ground” of more than one mind. Not only the capacity for, but the actual acts of
speech that, according to Kant, the specifically noncognitive activity we call
“judgment” entails, are described as inherently shared by the subject who articulates
them with all other potential speakers. Kant disingenuously calls this heretofore
untheorized, intersubjective capacity a “faculty” of “common sense” whose own
either experiential or a priori origin he does not pretend to know, and asserts he
“neither can nor want[s] to investigate at present.”iii Yet the capacity for “common
sense” on which, Kant states in the Critique of Judgment, his thoroughly revolutionary
theory of judgment (counter-intuitively) depends, is anything but the familiar
recourse to platitudinous,”commonsensical” prejudice that Kant consistently
derided as anti-philosophical and regressively anti-critical throughout both his
metaphysical (or, in Kant’s terms,“speculative”) and historical and political writings.
Te first, introductory Chapter of this book, “Before Judgment: Doing without
Knowing,” describes Diderot’s and Kant’s necessarily hypothetical accounts of
actions undertaken by subjects forced to constitute a common means of
communication (be it experiential and “nominal,” or “real,” i.e., for Kant,
mathematical or moral, in purport) from epistemologically inadequate sensations.
By contrast, Chapter Two, “Te ‘Condition’ of Judgment: Kant’s ‘Common Sense,’ or
the Origin of Language in the Tird Critique,” analyzes the active interrelation of
noncognitive phenomenal experience with subjective feeling at the origin of what
Kant calls the “power” of aesthetic judgment, the “faculty” within each subject for
producing the particular intersubjective sense communicated uniquely by linguistic
predication. Rather than prescribing rules for aesthetic judgment, Kant instead
describes it as a “free” act of articulation. Te Chapter includes a comparative
analysis of the related role of negative – missing or alienating – phenomenal
experience in the differing accounts of the “origin” of language hypothesized by
Rousseau and Diderot, and concludes with a preliminary discussion of Wordsworth’s
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representations of the alienation of the human power of linguistic articulation

itself, the eclipses of both knowledge and judgment in which Wordsworth’s
purposeful excursions into the phenomenal world repetitively result.
In contrast to the “common,” signifying rather than sensible “sense” theorized as
the “condition” (“Bedingung”) of judgment by Kant, the second Part of this study,
“Missing Sense and Poetics,” analyzes how the absence of immediate, perceptible
“sense” explicitly results in the active engagement with signiﬁcation we call poetics.
In this it follows Kant’s own lead. For, when Kant self-critically acknowledges, at

iii. Kant’s longstanding criticism and thoroughly original repurposing of the well-worn
term, “common sense,” are discussed in detail in Chapter Two below. For his demurral to
investigate the temporal origin of the faculty he calls by that same name, see Chapter Two,
Section One, n. 57.

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Preface: xix

the opening of the Second Book of the Critique of Pure Reason, that his theory of
“representation[al]” knowledge of perceived phenomena lacks an explanation of
how we produce representations capable of “synthesi[zing]” “heterogeneous” –
“sensory” and “intellectual” – capacities for perception in the first place, he
proceeds to posit a new “internal,” non-sensory capacity precisely to fill that lack.
He calls that capacity “the schema,” and his invention and extraordinary
representation of the schema in a purely graphic figure, that of an identifying sign
or “monogram of the imagination a priori” (Kritik der reinen Vernunf B 181), is
not only a practical act of poetic production in its own right. It is one Kant links
explicitly to how all “poets” do what they do.
For “poetry,” Kant states in the Critique of Judgment, occupies “the highest rank
among all the arts” specifically because of the active “use” to which “poets” put the
perceptible world we all regularly represent to ourselves. “Poets,” he remarks,
purpose those sensible givens into a sign or “schema for the supersensible” (Kritik
der Urteilskraf B 215), and thus, by implication, into a sign of just such an
(imagined) “a priori” “imagination” itself. Furthermore, just as the “schema” that
enables our capacity to make cognitions out of perceptions can find no basis in
external objects and contexts outside itself, so the faculty for judgment that, like
poetry, Kant states, lacks a “field of objects of its own” (Kritik der Urteilskraf
BXXII–XXIII), also apprehends any and all objects differently, which is to say, not
cognitively but imaginatively, with experiences of “feeling” a posteriori rather than
schematic “representations” a priori operative at its base. Kant’s description of the
“schema” as the imprint of an a priori power of “pure imagination” acting upon
experience in the Critique of Pure Reason, and of the “schema”-like use of “nature”
by “poetry” in the Critique of Judgment, thus effectively and fundamentally crosses
his theory of cognition with poetics.
In this Kant’s theory of judgment also critically illuminates the otherwise
unfathomable basis of what we may instead call cognitive criminality, too real
consequence of the material negation of agency that the second Part of this book
next explores. Chapter Tree includes an analysis of Arendt’s infamous description
of Adolf Eichmann as someone who, above all, “lacked imagination” – for Arendt,
the basic ability to view those “outside” him as other than external material bodies.
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Obscured in the controversy resulting from Arendt’s unconventional account, the

Chapter argues, is the basis of its formulation, her analysis of the way in which acts
of judgment (and their absence) both manifest themselves, and prove immeasurably
consequential. Arendt attended Eichmann’s trial as a reporter, and she came to her
conclusion based not on the detailed documentation of his deeds that made the
trying of the accused a mere formality in the juridical sense, but on the words in
which Eichmann, speaking, so to speak, “on the stand,” described them and himself.
Arendt listened to the words Eichmann chose, and what she heard in his
representation of himself, as “mere” executor rather than agent of industrial
deportation and mass murder, was someone entirely capable of organizing and
executing the functional logistics of international genocide because he saw no
diﬀerence between genocide and insecticide, between the methodical destruction
of elementary organisms and of living human bodies equally classed as pestilent

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xx Preface:

matter. Eichmann felt no guilt for his actions because he had, in short, no concept
of agency; in the same terms of Kant’s Tird Critique that would later be investigated
by Arendt herself, he lacked the apparently banal faculty for enacting universally
shared or “common sense” required for “think[ing] from the standpoint of
somebody else.” In making her logically paradoxical argument for the “banality” of
Eichmann’s absolute amorality, it is to that “lack of imagination,” of any capacity to
see more than what meets the eye – to regard other persons not merely as the stuff
of disposable objects but as subjects composed of lives undergone and made, with
thoughts, experiences, recognitions, understandings and abilities of their own –
that she attributes Eichmann’s equally absolute inability to “judge his actions in the
very sense that understanding requires imagination for judgment.” Te key to
understanding and judging Eichmann’s actions in turn lies not in replacing the
interaction of understanding and imagination by sensationalism, the same
conceptual leveling of persons with matter that enabled acts of mass murder in the
first place, but in the radically non-sensationalist notion of a capacity for shared or
“common sense, or, in the commonplace terms in which Pinter’s first-person
speaks in non propria persona to an other, the “standing” by which, “at least, you
stand a chance.”
Kant’s and Arendt’s central conceptions of the dependence of judgment upon
imagination bring the “common”“ground” on which both philosophy and literature
“stand” into relief. Rather than reify or naturalize that “ground,” both the second
Part of this study and its companion volume, Words’ Worth, examine literary works
in which internal as well as sensible bases of judgment are directly put to the test.
First among these are Kleist’s unparalleled narratives of unaccountable actions
whose unfolding parameters defy all available evidence, “Te Marquise of O . . .”
and “Te Duel” (“Der Zweikampf ”). Comparing Kant’s critical theory of limited
representational cognition with the critique of just such knowledge effectively
dramatized by all of Kleist’s fictions, Chapter Four proceeds to analyses of how the
actors of the stories manage to get so much wrong for so long. Not only the agent
but actual occurrence of the punctual act from whose “unwitting conception” the
story of “Te Marquise von O—” devolves, remain intractably difficult to identify,
both for the Marquise directly affected and altered by that action and for the reader
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of Kleist’s inimitable prose. By direct contrast, although “Te Duel,” like “Te
Marquise . . .,” owes its narration to a pointedly transgressive event, the empirical
vehicle, occurrence and impact of that event are all graphically represented in its
very first sentence. What the ensuing story instead represents is a highly entailed
history of how the ascription of agency to that event, its “judgment,” eventually,
indeed involuntarily takes place: how the subject of agency is not only mis-taken
and the actions that are the objects of judgment, switched, but the empirical
attention of those judging them is disastrously distracted from one theater of
judgment to the next before recognizing the literally legible marks of agency for
what they are. Named for a ceremonially sanctified (“göttlich”) “contest” or
“conflict” (“Kampf ”) between “two” combatants (“Zwei”), entered so as to
determine the truth or falsity of contradictory testimony in a capital case, Kleist’s
sui generis “Zweikampf ” instead piles uncertainty upon uncertainty, as the outcome

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Preface: xxi

of a duel designed specifically to manifest the verdict of God, too, comes, with
time, into doubt. Even the conflicting first-person accounts of events that spur the
duel are ultimately re-enacted by the duel itself, for this is a physical fight to the
death of which, with every passing day narrated, no certain victor can be sensibly
discerned. Te story of “the duel” thus makes of every reader a “critical” reader of
the actions it represents, presenting in the realist terms of a mimetic or worldly
fiction the precise quandary, of non-communication between knowledge and
action, conceptual understanding and “feeling,” to which Kant’s theory of
“judgment” responds. Rather than delaying, in the mode of a mystery story, the
revelation of the agent responsible for a particular event, both “Die Marquise . . .”
and “Te Duel” compel their confounded subjects and readers alike to question
“where” – in what intellectual or sensory capacity – and “when” (whether “a priori”
or “a posteriori” to experience), the common basis (or, in Kant’s terms, “condition”)
of acts of judgment lies.
Finally, the complementary volume to this study, Words’ Worth: What the Poet
Does, examines the active effects of language upon the capacity for human agency
itself. Te “real” relations between perception, action, “feeling,” and language,
taken full-circle by Wordsworth’s definitions and practice of the production of
poetry, tie the extended discussion of the poet’s explicit poetic theory to analyses
of some of his most dynamic “scenes” of action in Te Prelude, in Part One of that
study, and to individual “Lucy poems” and the invocation of “Imagination” and
subsequent “Gondo Gorge” description at the highpoint of Te Prelude (Bk VI) in
Part Two. In Part Tree, these analyses of poetic texts find their counterpart in
fictive and speculative accounts, by Rousseau, Diderot, Hegel, Wordsworth, and
Proust, of the “real” limit (or, in Proust’s and Wordsworth’s words, “horizon”)
enabling both internal and material experience to occur. As for Wordsworth,
writing as theorist of poetics, so for these ineffaceably effective analysts of the
historical production of meaning, neither given objects nor self-crediting subjects
but actions relating them within the world – the “acting and re-acting” of “man and
the objects that surround him” – define not only the poet’s “subject matter” but the
subject, any otherwise undefined woman or man. While the purposefully “prosaic”
language and settings of his poetry have led to his own construal as complacent
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“nature poet,” Wordsworth emphasizes, with a speciﬁcity perhaps only matched by

Kant, that “poets” can only be identiﬁed by what they “do.” “What then does the
Poet?” he asks directly, in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” and his response, that
poets act to “construct,” for re-enactment in the reader’s mind, “complex scene[s]”
of interaction between subjects and objects, further speciﬁes that the “language” in
which they “do” this must be as integral to the act of representation as objects and
subjects are to experience itself. Rather than reiterate the inert inventory of an
“inherited,” “pre-coded” lexicon, any poet “worth” the name will write in the active,
consequential, and thus “more permanent,” “real” and “philosophical language of
poetry,” which is not only not opposed to the “prosaic,” but indeed indistinguishable
from the “common” language shared by all.
In this, words most resemble not each other, but rather what they are not, name
and describe. Wordsworth’s celebrated defense of the “language really used by

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
xxii Preface:

men,” and rejection, in theory and in practice, of stilted “poetic diction,” reflect his
explicit view that the active “interest” which “the mind attaches to words” owes to
their status “not only as symbols . . ., but as things, active and efficient . . . themselves.”
In reconceiving and employing the everyday “real language of men,” as Kant’s
theory of judgment employs the prosaic predicative language he calls “common
sense,” Wordsworth’s poetic theory indicates that the “inter-acti[ons]” “the Poet
considers” are those in which words are co-participants. His ordinary language
representations not only set the physical, geometrically delineable “scene” for
individual acts staged to conflict with their own scenography – with localization of
any kind – but communicate the “sense” of profound disorientation they enact
both outwardly and inwardly, rendering every imaginative thwarting of
imagination, like “winds thwarting winds” (Prelude VI: 631), the perceptible object
of its own “contemplation” in “thought.”
Like Wordsworth, all the authors discussed in Words’ Worth understand the
representational relation between experience and “communicability” to be as
conflicted (or, as Hegel writes, “essentially ambiguous”) as it is opaque. And, like
Wordsworth’s, the extraordinary power of their individual descriptions of that
relation owes in part to their fundamental recognition that any “sense” of
experience, no matter how banal or particular, depends upon a “common” faculty
or ability which, first made operative by way of “words” or some other equally
common means of potentially unlimited semantic scope, is itself enabled by its
own formative delimitation from other kinds of activity. For, unlike either
traditional ideas of existential “Being” considered “pure” of either embodiment or
effect, or their “new” sensualist replacement by appeals to “energies” of “emotion” or
“affect,” action effected upon “condition” is consequential because defined against
something else, and the non-naïve, or consciously impure understanding of
experience and materiality these authors share keep that conditionality – like
Proust’s “real horizon” – in view.iv

iv. By contrast, for unstintingly naïve conﬂations of poetics and a “utopian” politics
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revealed in “political-poetic transport[s]” of “feeling” and “sensation,” see the breathless

pronouncements of their entirely metaphoric unification in Rancière, Flesh of Words: Te
Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004 [La
chair des mots. Politique de l’écriture (Paris, 1998)]), pp. 14–21, esp., in which “nature, “
“liberty,” “the Revolution,” “revelation,” “humanity” “lyric subjectivity” and “community” are
all rapidly synthesized within an “immediate meaning of the sensory” purportedly
“recognized” by (of all people) Wordsworth. Cf. Rancière,“Aesthetics as Politics,” in Aesthetics
and its Discontents, in which “politics” and “art” are not only both loosely equated with an
entirely undefined “reframing of a material and symbolic space,” but “the ‘politics’ of art,”
wholly figuratively defined as “suspending the normal coordinates of sensory experience,”
similarly distinguishes something called “ ‘politics’ ” from something called “art” only by a
euphemistic use of quotation marks (24–25) – whether to the greater detriment of politics
or of art seems, from their empty emboîtement here, moot.

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Preface: xxiii

When, repeating the popular truism, “truth will out,” we implicitly discount our
ability to effect either conceptual or material difference, we also unwittingly make
ourselves the punchline of an otherwise pointless joke, the sadistic prank played
on his blind father by one of Shakespeare’s more minor fools. In reciting, with all
the gravity of received wisdom, the words of this conspicuously nonheroic
“Launcelot” (surname “Gobbo”), we (unlike Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice [II.
ii.74]) effectively confuse “truth” with nature. For it is nature that “will” always “out,”
of its “own” “accord:” no matter how forcefully compelled to serve other ends,
nature “can” only and so will always remain true to its own causal physical laws.
“Standing,” the non-natural “condition” or “position” on the sole basis of which
“you stand a chance,” directly implies, by contrast, the act of “standing” apart: of
declining or refusing to “sing from the same hymnal,” to “sound” like a string of
natural matter strung upon a supernatural universal lyre of purely sensory accord.
In so declining, in “sounding” differently, agency departs from mere aesthesis. In
place of the sensational, it composes problems of “sense.” But departures of any
kind depend upon the pivotal position represented by “standing” in the first place,
the non-natural “ground” and possibility of action that alone links any, always only
partially material subject – any “you” – to another, fully absent of determination,
that is, “chance.”
Pinter, who knew a thing or two about political as well as dramaturgical
discourse and action, knew that the basis and object of both is “standing a chance:”
that nothing can happen, in the most consequential sense of the possible, without
actors or agents whose words and actions stand apart from their self-replicating
context, whether that context be the mind-numbing “non-sense” of space-filling,
time-killing “small talk,” equally nonsensical conceits bearing the trademark stamp
of “poetic diction” – materiality without meaningful, because lacking actively
“differ[ing],” significance – or the wholly reactive, mechanical mutations of purely
material physis itself.
If, to paraphrase Wordsworth’s “Preface” together with Kant’s, the only “purpose”
of “critique” “worthy of the name” is to bring its own basis and object into relief, so
as to make their own effectivity known, their and others’ pivotal works written
during the “time” of reflection Kant dubbed “our” “age of critique” – which is to say,
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any “time” “we” participate in the unprescripted “realm” of judgment, or in

Wordsworth’s words, that we “communicate” the “material diﬀerence” enacted in
“the language really used by men” – have themselves formed the basis and object
of the present work, producing actions whose ongoing eﬀects this study can only
preface.

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xxiv

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Chapter 1

I N T R O DU C T IO N :
B E F O R E J U D G M E N T : D O I N G W I T HO U T K N OW I N G
IN KANT AND DIDEROT

Te double participial phrase, “doing without knowing,” can be understood in at

least two principal ways. First and most obviously, doing without knowing means
doing something without actively knowing it or without knowing what it is one
is doing. However, when the second of the present participles, “knowing,” is
understood as a substantive rather than an active verb, then “doing without
knowing” means doing without the thing, state or capability we call knowing while
knowing one is doing so, acting, carrying on, in spite of and in the face of this lack.
In proverbial English, “doing without” may, of course, also be used alone, or without
object, to mean “making do without,” in the sense of faire suﬃre, or “getting on with
it,” persevering in whatever one is doing, even while knowing that one is missing a
key ingredient, an otherwise essential part of the process involved.
In the case of “doing without,” then, “getting on with it” means “getting along”
without something. Understood as action undertaken in the face of partial
deprivation and real uncertainty as to its outcome, the expression, “doing without,”
carries with it the implication of something more: the ability to substitute
something else for the elemental something one is missing. To do without is, in
other words, to act eﬀectively but to do so through indirection, to bring something
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about, to accomplish or arrive at, rather than directly cause a result by putting
something to work in the place of something else one does not possess. In short, it
is to act in the presence, and on the basis, of a representation: not a representation
already ready to hand, whose use value, previously determined by past usage, is
part of the practical, cognitive repertoire upon which the mind unreﬂectively
relies, but a representation made to stand for something excluded from –
unavailable or lost to – that repertoire, the knowledge, whether primary and
empirical, or secondary, i.e., symbolic or semiotic, that one is missing.
Tus to do without knowing is not simply to continue on in the same course but
rather to continue on in a course that we ourselves have altered by adding
something extra and previously external to it. In that it causes us to “ﬁgure out” –
determine or shape and bring to bear – the extra means that the act of “doing
without” can do the most with, the mode of indirection whose natural ground is

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2 Te Linguistic Condition

deprivation and whose product is a representation may provide us with our own
grounds for reflection, for arriving at an understanding of the acquisition of
knowledge itself. For what we do when we do without knowing produces
knowledge that, rather than directly reflecting a foregone conclusion, comes about
unforeseeably, without causal or conventional determination, and with the presence
of something that effectively negates the negation or absence of something, a
representation.
Tus, “doing without knowing” may mean living ignorance, pure and simple, an
ongoing practice of accidental hit or miss, or, it may mean, in a purposeful,
constructive sense, acting so as to achieve an aim or bring something about despite
the absence of the direct knowledge, means, or data, that would facilitate, if not
predetermine action in the first place. “Doing without knowing” may be as
commonplace as ignoring what one does – as most of us, unconsciously or
consciously, gracefully or catastrophically, do most of the time – but it may also be
doing something different from the norm, something that, in its precise contours,
cannot have been done before in that it requires, among other things, the real
absence of positive information, whether apprehended by the senses in the present
or passed along by an already mediated tradition (or “prejudice”), an absence that
alone enables the real presence of ignorance, as well as its positively negative
effects. Uncertain not only as to what he or she knows, but as to what one can
know, and in possession of no “fall-back” position or perceptible path forward, the
subject contrives another way of proceeding by putting another sensible form or
object in position: the subject, any subject, in other words, represents.
Such uncertainty should be sharply distinguished from the all-too-handy
refrain of self-exculpation, “Had I known then what I know now.” Tis disclaimer
of disastrous, typically vainglorious action implies that empirical ignorance, rather
than personal interest and duplicity, at once causes our acts and exonerates us
from all future responsibility for their consequences. Yet knowing this – that one
can always plead former ignorance at a later date – is not to know nothing but,
indeed, to know something, something of not only personal and calculable but
historical and incalculable consequences, and to proceed or to continue to act, on
the basis of it, is to shadow, if not eclipse the content of such an alibi with the
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conscious foreknowledge of its future rhetorical, exculpatory eﬀect. Acting on the

knowledge that one can always claim one acted out of ignorance is to clothe one’s
acts in the costume of a Bildungsroman, a ready-to-wear trope of self-serving de-
indemnification passing itself off as innocence afer the fact. Oriented instead, in
their distinctive approaches to knowledge, toward our response to and responsibility
for what we do with experience, as partial or limited as that experience may be,
Kant and Diderot – distinct theorists of doing without knowing in their own
right – refuse equally to confuse ignorance with innocence and the pursuit of self-
interest with uncertainty, to tailor morality to the limits of cognition.
Before Kant theorized judgment as a specifically noncognitive activity directly
dependent (as described in Part One of this study) upon our ability to communicate
and be understood by others, and thus to speak, in effect, not merely for oneself but
for “any” and “everyone” (“jedermann”), both Kant and Diderot related cognitive

impasses to purposeful acts of representation. And while both Kant and Diderot
divide such representations into markedly different kinds, each with its own
referential title and mode, and while the two-sided (or, as Diderot might say,
amphibological) subject matter of this introduction to a study of the internal
relations linking judgment with poetics and action, could likewise bear such
bilateral subtitles as, “the Blind and the Deaf,” “Metaphor and Gesture,” “Hypothesis
and Image,” and “‘Whatever-His-Name-Is’ and ‘Saunderson’” as well, any individual
analysis of doing without knowing must begin with the frankly – because
necessarily – figurative account in Kant’s own prefatory description of all just such
activity, his distinctly non-causal narrative, in the Second Preface to his First
Critique [“Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage,” Kritik der reinen Vernunf, 1787]). of the
impasses and blind “gropings” (“herumtappen”) that, extending over millenia of
scientific and mathematical ignorance, could only be interrupted by being radically
disrupted, all then operative presumptions overturned, in the unforeseeable, because
unprecedented intellectual actions that Kant calls “revolution[s] in mode of
thinking” (“Revolution der Denkart”)1 To do without knowing in any of the senses
that knowing has had before is what Kant repeatedly calls not a blunder or blindspot
but, on the contrary, the necessary condition of each of the irreversible “revolution[s]”
in our most fundamental powers of conception represented by Kant in the, by turns,
retrospective and prospective narration of the history of ignorance and knowledge,
from ancient thought onwards, with which his “Preface” begins. As Kant recounts it,
the initial step undertaken in the first of these “revolution[s],” from recursively self-
reinforcing ignorance into a practically constructive doing without knowing, was
the turning of reason outward from its own internally formulated rules, the “formal,”
autonomous laws of “logic,” or “rules of all thinking” (“die formaln Regeln alles
Denkens.”2) “Validated” as it is “bound” by “its limitation” to “abstract[ing] from all
objects of knowledge and their differences” (“ihrer Eingeschränkung . . ., dadurch
sie berechtigt, ja verbunden ist, von allen Objekten der Erkenntnis und ihrem
Unterschiede zu abstrahieren”), logic is “understanding having to do with nothing
more than itself and its form” (“. . .der Logik, wo der Verstand es mit nichts weiter,
als sich selbst und seiner Form zu tun hat”).3 Te “revolution in mode of thinking”
Kant first describes itself first turns outward, in an act neither logical nor illogical in
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1. Immanuel Kant, Werkausgabe, 12 vols., ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1977); Kritik der reinen Vernunf (hereafer KrV) B vii, xi, xiv, xv, xvi, xxii, xxx,
III: 20, 22–25, 28, 33. See also, within the same 1787 Preface, the synonymous phrases:
“Umänderung der Denkart” (“reversal” or “transformation in mode of thinking”); KrV,
B XVI, III: 25, B XXIII, III: 28n; “Veränderung der Denkart” (“change in mode of
thinking”), KrV, B XX, III: 27, B XXXII, III: 34; “veränderte Methode der Denkungsart”
(“altered mode of thinking”), KrV, B XIX, III: 26; “gänzliche Revolution” (“total,”
“all-embracing revolution”), KrV, B XXIII, II: 28.
All further quotations from Kant in this study are from this edition. All translations
from the German in this study are my own.
2. Kant, KrV, B IX, III: 21.
3. Kant, KrV, B IX, III: 21.

basis, toward precisely those heteronomous, empirical objects with which logically
coherent understanding not only has “nothing to do,” but knows that to be so in a
positively negative (i.e., self-critical) sense. Yet, the orientation of reason toward the
empirical world would have constituted a mere change of direction rather than
“revolution,” if it had not taken the further step of turning its outward trajectory –
inflecting or angling it, so to speak – back toward the mind. Rather than merely
reversing its own autonomous course, reason ,submitted to what Kant calls “critique”
turns back upon itself in conjunction with or relation to something else. What returns
to the purview of logic is not more, but something different from, logic, the content
of which is specifically not the absence of content, or “abstraction from objects,” that
is the binding (negative) condition of logical positivism, but rather something
positive that is also something negative, or positive only in part: something whose
own “limited” relation to that which is outside and otherwise unrelated to the mind
allows it to come under the purview of logic in the first place. Critically limited to
“representations” (of experiential objects) that can be submitted to logic – even as
the absence of any relation between things as such (or “in themselves”) and the
purely “formal rules of logic” remains intact – investigations of the empirical can
begin to produce what Kant specifically calls “scientific” “knowledge,” rather than an
“inevitable” skepticism toward all epistemogical claims: a new “mode of thinking”
according to which “reason,” now “occupied not merely with itself, but also with
objects” (“wenn [die Vernunf] nicht bloss mit sich selbst, sondern auch mit
Objekten zu schaffen hat”), finally “forge[s] for itself the sure path of science” (“den
sicheren Weg der Wissenschaf einzuschlagen”).4
Perhaps most significantly, such “revolution[s] in mode of thinking” are both
concrete and conceptual for Kant. Tey seamlessly join mind and world by laws
both rational and sensuously perceptible, describing an actual revolution (or
upending) of “method,” by moving in two opposing trajectories at once.5 Yet what
is remarkable about the first of the individual “revolution[s]” whose story Kant
tells, is that Kant knows he doesn’t really know, and makes clear he doesn’t really
care to know, whom it is he is writing about: the actual name, historical
circumstances and identity of the single subject (“eines einzigen Mannes”) who
carried this “endlessly extensive” (“in unendliche Weiten”), irreversible or
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“transhistorical” (“für alle Zeiten”) movement out.6 Well known for describing
“genius” in the Critique of Judgment in terms directly reflecting those he reserves
for poets, as the revolutionary ability to change the “rules” by which one’s own and
future work is judged, all Kant has to say about the first individual to “forge the
sure path” of mathematical and scientific knowledge, and so to change forever the
relationship, or lack thereof, between intellect and the world, is that he was (or
turned out to be) a “fortunate fellow” (“Glückliche[r]”) – some lucky guy.7 Tis

4. Kant, KrV B IX, III: 21.

5. Kant, KrV B XXII, III: 28.
6. Kant, KrV B XI, III: 22.
7. Kant, KrV B XI, III: 22. On Kant on “genius,” see Chapter Tree, Section Tree, n. 356;
Section Four, n. 366.

historically speculative passage from the Second Preface to the First Critique is
worth quoting at some length not only for its rare, explicitly narrative account of
the relationships – between ignorance and representation, construction and
knowledge, and forgettable and unforgettable time – involved in our comprehension
of matters, real and abstract, to which judgment does not apply, but also because of
its own unvarnished, widely unrecognized admission of ignorance on Kant’s part.
Te pointed assertion, by its author, himself, arguably, the greatest epistemologist
in history, of neither knowing nor caring to know how and to whom the inaugural
“revolution” in conceptual history he is describing occurred, makes Kant’s narrative
of the ﬁrst imperishable, intellectually and historically transformative “mode of
thinking” one whose reading should also always give pause:

From the earliest times from which the history of human reason reaches forward,
in the admirable people of the Greeks, mathematics has taken the sure path of a
science. Yet one should not think that it was as easy for mathematics as it was for
logic to find, or rather, forge that royal path in which reason has only to do with
itself. I believe rather that – especially under the Egyptians – things long
remained at a [blind] groping about [ein Herumtappen], and that this
transformation is to be ascribed to a revolution which the lucky notion [der
glückliche Einfall] of a single man brought into existence in one attempt [or
‘experiment:’ Versuch], from which, going forward, the path that one had to take
was no longer to be missed, and the sure way of science was struck and marked
for all times and into endless expanses. Te history of this revolution in mode of
thinking, which was far more important than the discovery of the passage
around the Cape of Good Hope, and of the happy [or “the fortunate:” Glücklichen]
one who brought it into being, is not preserved for us. Still the legend, transmitted
to us by Diogenes Laertius, that names the supposed inventor of the smallest
elements of geometrical demonstrations – which, according to common
judgment, did not even necessitate proof – indicates that the memory of the
change effected with the first trace [Spur] of the discovery of this new way must
have seemed so extremely important to mathematicians that it thereby became
unforgettable. A light went on in the one who demonstrated the equilateral
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triangle (whether Tales or whatever one wishes to call him); for he found that
he must not trace afer that which he saw in the ﬁgure, or take away, so to speak,
its characteristics from the mere concept of it, but bring [these] forward, through
that which he, according to concepts that he himself a priori thought into it and
represented (through construction); and that, in order to know something a
priori with certainty, he must not include in the thing anything other than that
which necessarily follows from what he himself has put in it according to his
concept.
[Die Mathematik ist von den frühsten Zeiten her, wohin die Geschichte der
menschlichen Vernunf reicht, in dem bewundernswürdigen Volke der Griechen
den sicheren Weg einer Wissenschaf gegangen. Allein man darf nicht denken,
dass es ihr so leicht geworden, wie der Logik, wo die Vernunf es nur mit sich

selbst zu tun hat, jenen königlichen Weg zu treffen, oder vielmehr sich selbst zu
bahnen; vielmehr glaube ich, dass es lange mit ihr (vornehmlich noch unter
den Ägyptern) beim Herumtappen geblieben ist, und diese Umänderung
einer Revolution zuzuschrieben sei, die der glückliche Einfall eines einzigen
Mannes in einem Versuche zu Stande brachte, von welchem an die Bahn . . .
und der sichere Gang einer Wissenschaf für alle Zeiten und in unendliche
Weiten eingeschlagen und vorgezeichnet war. Die Geschichte dieser Revolution
der Denkart, welche viel wichtiger war als die Entdeckung des Weges um
das berühmte Vorgebirge, und des Glücklichen, der sie zu Stande brachte,
ist uns nicht aufehalten. Doch beweiset die Sage, welche Diogenes der
Laertier uns überliefert, der von den kleinsten, und, nach dem gemeinen Urteil,
gar nicht einmal eines Beweises benötigten, Elementen der geometrischen
Demonstrationen den angeblichen Erfinder nennt, dass das Andenken der
Veränderung, die durch die erste Spur der Entdeckung dieses neuen Weges
bewirkt wurde, den Mathematikern äusserst wichtig geschienen haben müsse,
und dadurch unvergesslich geworden sei. Dem esten, der den gleichseitigen
Triangel demonstrierte (er mag nun Tales oder wie man will geheissen haben),
dem ging ein Licht auf; denn er fand, dass er nicht dem, was er in der Figur sahe,
oder auch dem blossen Begriffe derselben nachspüren und gleichsam davon ihre
Eigenschafen ablernen, sondern durch das, was er nach Begriffen selbst a priori
hineindachte und darstellte (durch Konstruktion), hervorbringen müsse, und
dass, er, um sicher etwas a priori zu wissen, er der Sache nichts beilegen müsse,
als was aus dem notwendig folgte, was er seinem Begriffe gemäss selbst in sie
gelegt hat.8]

“Te ﬁrst one (whether Tales or whatever one wants to call him) in whom a
light went on . . .”: Kant has managed to transmute the founding “legend” of
geometry into a story about some whatever-his-name-is into whose head at some
unknown time, following successive centuries of groping or tapping blindly about
(“Herumtappen”), a lucky notion (“glückliche[r] Einfall”) happened to fall. What
fell, the content of that singular event (“Einfall” literally: “single” or “one fall,” or, in
its anglicized Latin equivalent, “singular case”), was, to be more exact, nothing less
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than the first equilateral triangle, a form born neither of what whatever-his-name-
is “saw in the figure” of such a triangle with his own eyes (“nicht dem, was er in der
Figur sahe”) nor what he derived or took away from the mere concept of such a
form (“oder auch dem blossen Begriffe derselben nachspüren und gleichsam
davon ihre Eigenschafen ablernen . . . müsse”). Rather, the production of this form
joined together, for the first, and at one and the “same” time, two radically
heterogeneous modes of bringing (mathematical) knowledge about: intellectual,
or object-independent conceptualization and linear or physical representation,
“what he himself according to concepts thought into it and represented (through
construction)” (“was er nach Begriffen selbst a priori hineindachte und darstellte
[durch Konstruktion]”). Te term by which the “single man” we “call” “Kant”

8. Kant, KrV B XI–XII, III: 22 (emphasis in text)

designates the heterogeneous action he describes here is itself no less simultaneously

conceptual and representational, which is to say, irreducibly figural. For the
“revolution” (“in mode of thinking”) to which Kant refers repeatedly in the Second
Preface comprises the same double movement definitive of an actual “revolution”
(in space). All revolutions revolve around a fixed countervailing force, a limit
holding its purely dynamic – undelimited and nonfigurative, and thus formally
violent – motion in check. A figure representing a movement outward that is thus
simultaneously oriented inward, Kant’s “revolution in mode of thinking” is a turn
to the empirical constrained by its equal footing in something unmoving, an
equivocal grounding in a subject that both produces that motion, or “change,” in
the first place and is the unequivocal condition for its “memory” thereafer, the
necessary basis for the “extensive” reception, imprinting and transmission of its
“trace” “for all time,” without which it would be lost, among innumerable motions,
to time and mind in space. Te “revolution” called “critique” that Kant introduces
into “thinking,” the “unprecedented notion,” “casus” or case that happened to occur
or “fall” not in space but within him, as thinking subject, produces a conscious
“construction” of something external defined only by what he (or any “what’s-his-
name”) can “th[ink] into it a priori,” that is, to begin with: a “representation,” rather
than merely notional conjecture or misplaced logical projection, made of reason
‘applied” (“angewandt”) to what, by definition, is not homogeneous with reason,
the “temporally extant” (“Dasein in der Zeit”), “external” (“ausser”), rather than
purely ideational, empirical world.9
Now Kant is, of course, well known for declaring the supposedly ‘rationalist’
Enlightenment dictum that reason must somehow take itself in hand, or rather –
in the actual terms of Kant’s non-rationalist, critical view – in both, heterogeneous,
or at least nonidentical hands: that it must go to nature (“an die Natur gehen”) with
“its principles” “in one hand” (“in einer Hand”) and “the experiment” (“mit dem
Experiment”), that it has “thought out” (“ausdachte”) according to these principles,
“in the other” (“in der anderen”).10 Less well known, if indeed even acknowledged,
is the apparently endless Herumtappen that precedes such ventures: the many
centuries (“so viel Jahrhunderte”) – themselves neither strictly rational nor
irrational in character – of feeling one’s way, of tapping blindly about, trying out
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this potential path or that, this or that hypothetical approach to knowing the
external world, before, for no apparent reason, reason appears, to an undetermined
individual at an undetermined moment in time, in the “construction” of a concrete
“representation” of the laws governing it and the external world. Kant oﬀers no
step-by-step, rational-analytic account of a progressive development toward
Enlightenment, to reason revealing, and revealed by, the sensory world in a
representation pertaining to both. Instead, he repeatedly names this abrupt, two-
sided illumination (“dem ging ein Licht auf ”) of our internal capability to cognize
the external world “eine Revolution,” employing that word at least six times in the
ﬁrst few pages of the Second Preface, just as he uses the pointedly prosaic

9. Kant, KrV B XL–XLI, III: 38–9.

10. Kant, KrV B XIV, III: 23.

“Herumtappen” four times, beginning in the first paragraph, and the even more
philosophically heterodox “Einfall,” at least twice.11 Rather than a developmental,
step-by-step process, that sudden “insight” or “fall” into representation and out of
ignorance obviously owes a debt to ignorance, a real absence of knowledge that
cannot be papered-over “unter blossen Begriffen” (“under mere concepts”), merely
conceptualized – or as Kant might say, “erdichtet” (“fictionalized”) – away. It is a
doing without knowing, and, what is the same for Kant, with no known language,
neither Reden (“speeches”) nor Ausreden (“excuses”) ready to hand, that finds itself
compelled outward to the physical world, forced to commit perceptible forms of
representation that remove the problem from the inadequate province of the mind
alone, so that an “Einfall” becomes simultaneously – following Kant’s rotational
model – what one might call a kind of “Ausfall,” something heretofore invisible that
falls instead from the mind outward. An exteriorization as external as a source of
light, this revolutionary combination of conceptual with material form, in the
graphically visible “construction” of a new basis for mathematics and physics alike,
presents the inside of thinking turned out.
Tat centuries of blind missteps precede moments of “enlightenment” is the
shared, barely narrative characteristic of the history not only of mathematics but
of natural science and metaphysics on Kant’s account, centuries of Herumtappen
interrupted by periodic “revolution[s] in mode of thinking” (“Revolution der
Denkart”). And these inexplicable inventions of new and effective modes of
knowledge are expressed by Kant in terms as graphically prosaic as any his or any
language may possess – that of “a light” “going on in whomever-it-is” who
spontaneously realizes and, in so doing, composes that mode. In Kant, knowledge
itself is no incremental transition of a thinking subject out of the ignorance we call
darkness, but the sudden availability to mind, composed by the mind, of a form,
“path” or “mode” for thinking itself.
Precisely when and why the light dawned on whatever-his-name-is, we do not
know; we don’t know the nature of its origin, the “what” that could have caused it,
nor the “who” that perceived it, the certain, historical identity of him in or upon
whom it first shone. Indeed, Kant makes light of the “legendary” account of such
particulars, claiming instead, both in significant agreement with and no less
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signiﬁcant divergence from Husserl 150 years later,12 that “the ﬁrst trace” (“die erste

11. “Revolution”: KrV B XI, III: 22 (twice); B XIII; III: 23 (twice); B XVI, III: 23; B
XXII, III: 28; likewise “Umänderung der Denkart”: KrV B XVI, III: 25; B XXIII, III: 28;
“Herumtappen”: KrV B VII, X: 20; B XI, III: 22; B XXV, III: 24 (twice); “Einfall”: KrV B XI,
III: 22; B XIII, II: 22.
12. See Edmund Husserl, “Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-
historisches Problem,” ed. Eugen Fink, Revue internationale de la philosophie 1, 1939, pp,
203–225 (written 1936); L’origine de la géométrie, trans. Jacques Derrida, Paris, 1962;
reprinted as “Beilage III,” in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschafen und Phänomenologie,
ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana 6 (Te Hague: Martin Nijhoﬀ, 1954), pp. 365–86; Te Crisis
of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 353–78).

Spur”) of the origin of geometry “must have appeared [so] extremely important to
mathematicians” (“den Mathematikern äusserst wichtig geschienen haben müsse)
as to “become unforgettable” (“und dadurch unvergesslich geworden sei”); that is,
the origin of geometry, the “change that . . . was effected” (“d[ie] Veränderung,
die . . . bewirkt wurde’) with the first external “marking” (“vorgezeichnet”) of its
“founding principle” (“Grundsatz”) and principal form, never required, thanks to
that original externalization, either additional reasoning or external recording to
be reborn (Husserl, by contrast, ultimately arguing instead that the origin of
geometry must be repeated – and can only be repeated – in its written form).13.
By contrast, we do know that Kant’s own “revolution in mode of thinking” is
now known as his “Copernican turn” afer the comparative model he provides of
Copernicus’ conceptual turning of the tables between heaven and earth, his
successful mental “experiment” of “turning the spectator outward” and “leaving the
stars in peace” (“Kopernikus . . . der . . . versuchte, ob es nicht besser gelingen
möchte, wenn er den Zuschauer sich drehen, und dagegen die Sterne in Ruhe
liess”).14 Whenever and however “a light came on for” Kant remains as unknown as
ever, but the known name he attaches to its advent “by analogy” (with “the examples
of mathematics and natural science”) provides the manner in which it will be
imagined thence.15 Kant’s references to “Copernicus” and “whatever-his-name-is”
stand for the two different versions – the former, necessarily entirely theoretical or
intellectual (or, as Kant repeatedly states, “hypothetical” in origin16), the latter,
specifically sensuously “represented,” a graphic “construction” – of “revolution[s]
in mode of thinking” that the theoretical hypothesis of Kant’s own Critique
combines. For Kant’s Critique employs hypothetical, philosophical means to
replace not-knowing with knowing by redefining knowledge itself as the
construction of discursive representations. While non-hypothetical and non-
discursive linear constructions of purely logical geometrical figures can be
transmitted discursively only by “legend,” Kant observes, since they are realized in
independence of the impure “logic” of discourse to begin with, so Kant’s own
critical hypothesis, transmitted in this narrative and explanatory “Preface” to his
First Critique, enacts a “revolution” in the history of thinking about thinking, or
philosophy. Te difference between a partly sense-dependent, logically developed
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scientiﬁc or philosophical hypothesis and a non-sense-based, intellectually realized

mathematical construction, then, is the difference between employing the
discursive language at hand – an already codified, signifying and empirically
referential system of representation – and inventing a newly configured language

13. Kant, KrV B XI, III: 22.

14. Kant, KrV B XVI,, III: 25.
15. Ibid.
16. Kant, KrV B XXII, III: 28n: “what Copernicus took only as an hypothesis to begin
with . . . in this Preface I pose the transformation in mode of thinking put forth in the Kritik
also only as an hypothesis analogous to that hypothesis” (“was Kopernikus anfänglich nur
als Hypothese annahm. . .Ich stelle in dieser, die in der Kritik vorgetragene, jener Hypothese
analogische, Umänderung der Denkart auch nur als Hypothese auf ”).

or significant form for which, like the first equilateral triangle, there were no
empirical referents. A language which positively replaces something missing –
whether the indubitable laws governing a mathematical figure, or the “synthetic
judgment[s] a priori” upon which a theory of knowledge impervious to empirical
skepticism must be based – might also be called, in the strictest sense, a language
of poetry. For poetic language, by definition, effects a cognitive “revolution” in that
it replaces not-knowing by a partly conceptual, partly formal, and thus always in
some way analogizing knowledge inseparable from the acts of inaugural
representation that produce it: a language that names the “change” in conception it
itself effects – that, as all “poetic” language by definition does, does what it says.
Before judgment, in Kant’s words,“speaks for everyone” on the basis of noncognitive
sensory experience – the subject of Part One of this book – the dependence of
knowledge upon the formation of language in the absence of any otherwise
available means of cognition, which is to say, by indirected or “reflected” means of
“metaphor” (“réfléchie de la métaphore”17), is explored at the limit of sensory
experience by Diderot.

Dr. Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1737), Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, is

Diderot’s Copernicus, a real historical figure, blind from birth, creator of a tactile
algebraic calculator, author of Te Elements of Algebra (orig. pub. 1740), and imputed
originator of Bayles’ Teorem (of dual factor probability), but perhaps most widely
known posthumously in his largely fictive role as the ventriloquized speaker of
Diderot’s “Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient” (1749) (“Letter on the
blind as used by those who see”). In a fabricated deathbed colloquoy with a similarly
fictional stand-in for another actual historical figure, the Reverend Gervaise Holmes,
Diderot’s “Saunderson” espouses the Lucretian, or Diderotian, view of nature as a
series of accidental combinations devoid of higher purpose or plan (which is to say,
of a beneficent God), a world “rapidly” composed and decomposed of random
beings, monstrous more ofen than not, that destroy each other in successive
“revolutions:” “What is this world, Mr. Holmes? . . . a rapid succession of beings,”
“monsters [that] are successively annihilated,” “a composite subject to revolutions,
all of which indicate a continual tendency to destruction” (“Qu’est-ce que ce monde,
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monsieur Holmes? . . . une succession rapide d’êtres,” “des monstres [qui] se sont
anéantis successivement,” “un composé sujet à des révolutions, qui toutes indiquent
une tendance continuelle à la destruction”18). Entirely scripted by Diderot,
“Saunderson’”s (necessarily) hypothetical description of the inﬁnite and transitory
permutations of life, “revolutions” that destroy as they compose the world we see,
and the myriad, imperfect “worlds” that, produced by those revolutions, are as
invisible to the sighted as they are impalpable to his own sense of touch – “[h]ow
many misshapen, failed worlds have been dissipated, reformed, and dissipate every

17. Denis Diderot, Oeuvres complètes (hereafer OC ), 25 vols, ed. H. Dieckmann, J.

Fabre, J. Proust, with J. Varloot, (Paris: Hermann, 1975– ), IV: 41. All translations from the
French in this study are my own.
18. Diderot, OC , IV: 48–52.

instant in distant spaces which I do not touch and you do not see” (“Combien de
mondes estropiés, manqués, se sont dissipés, se reforment et se dissipent peut-être à
chaque instant dans des espaces eloignés, où je ne touche point, et vous ne voyez
pas”19) – proved so imaginatively and logically convincing as to jump the bar
between reality and fiction and land its real author in the Vincennes prison.
More than the immediately preceding work, Pensées philosophiques (1746), or
the subsequent De l’interprétation de la nature (1753), it is in the “Lettre sur les
aveugles,” in which an historically known blind person is made to speak for
Diderot, articulating the limits – indeed, the anti-empirical “blindness” – of
religious dogma no less than the anti-philosophical “blindness” of reductive
empirical positivisms, that Diderot represents the possibility of worlds to which
direct sensory perception does not pertain. What better speaker than a sensorily
deprived mathematician to hypothesize the logical probability of unknown
“spaces” of living matter’s constant transformation, arguing persuasively, to his
author’s own peril, for knowledge constituted on the basis of experiment or
experience: “expérience” that always knows itself, however, to be inexhaustive,
which is to say, to be, at every moment, historical, situational, limited.
And it is a blind mathematician who, knowing he must do without knowledge
based entirely and directly on sense perception, invents the analogue in language
to Kant’s “happy notions:” “happy expressions” that “proper to one sense . . . are at
the same time metaphorical to another” out of necessity (“des expressions
heureuses . . . propre à un sens . . . et métaphorique en même temps à un autre
sens”), and thus shed a “reflected” “double light” (“la lumière réfléchie;” “une double
lumière”20) – i.e., a light revealing at once both the activity of the subject and
materiality of the object – to the mind of anyone who hears or reads it. It is in this
“double,” hybrid or Kantian cognitive sense that those compelled to fabricate a
mode of substitution for a missing sense most successfully represent the incomplete
nature of all human experience, supplementing, through a combination of logic
and the always partly analogical work of imagination, the absolute knowledge that
we, as human subjects, must lack, not in spite but because of our always incomplete
experience of any sensible object or context.
By contrast with his “Saunderson,” Diderot’s muet de convention, and sourd et
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muet de naissance (“mute by convention” and “deaf and mute from birth”), fictive
subjects of a fictional and real sensory deprivation, respectively, in his “Lettre sur
les sourds et muets, à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent” (1751) (“Letter
on the deaf and mute as used by those who hear and speak”), do not articulate (or
rather, are not “used,” in dramatic deathbed fashion, to articulate) a materialist
theory of the unending, destructive “revolutions” of nature. Lacking a given
language they can, of course, express to others no view of the universe, or of the
mind – any hypothesis of any kind – and, in this second “Letter,” they are also given
no name. Teir discursive treatment, as agents of knowledge, could hardly be more
different than Diderot’s fictionalized first-hand account of the parting words of

19. Ibid.
20. Diderot, OC, IV: 41. Full passage cited in following Chapter, n. 31.

“Saunderson.” While the discourse delivered by Diderot’s “Saunderson” combines

(its real author’s) speculative hypotheses with the (fictive) representation of a real
historical person, the nominal identity of the subjects of the second “Letter” is
implicitly rendered insignificant by their own inability to express themselves
verbally, their self- as well as knowledge-defeating ignorance of discourse itself.
Yet “[i]gnorance,” Diderot states in the “Letter on the Deaf and Mute,” “is less far
removed from truth than prejudice” (“l’ignorance est moins éloignée de la vérité
que le préjugé”21), underscoring, therein, the paradoxical – necessary yet negative –
relation of knowledge to the senses, and the combined relation of both to
representation in Diderot. For the blind, who have immediate access to sound and so
make free use of verbal language, also provide us with no knowledge about it, and
the deaf, who have immediate, visual access to the external world and make free use
of visible movement within it, provide us with no knowledge about it. Each provides
us with knowledge of that of which they can have no knowledge, except by way of
representation. Tus, in the second “Letter,” Diderot uses (fictional) deaf and mute
subjects to speculate not on the visible forms of nature but on the formation of
language or, what we like to call, human nature. Diderot’s word for that nature we
cannot see, peculiarly human nature, is the “soul,” and his own remarkable description
of the “soul” or “spirit” (âme) as infinitely complex seat of experience makes it not
only impossible to see directly and distinctly at once – think of Frenhofer’s continually
changing painting, in Balzac’s aptly entitled, “Chef d’oeuvre inconnu” (“Unknown
Masterpiece” [emphasis added]), minus the single, still discernible detail of the
painted subject’s protruding foot – but makes it, for that very reason, both a name for
the complex ability to combine experience and intellect that is language and the
invisible subject of its own continuing representation by discourse. Much as the
ability to see impedes one’s ability to reason and imagine the possibility of forms and
relationships one cannot see, so one’s ability to hear and to speak impedes one’s
ability to articulate that which does not already take the form of speech (two positives
can indeed result in negatives, or positive absences of positives, in Diderot).
Such, for Diderot, is the “soul,” from which all knowledge, action, and
representation spring, closest to language but never defined by language, whose
“simultaneous movements,” consisting of “sensations” as well as “ideas” experienced
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all at once (“tout[es] à la fois”), must be subjected to their own analytic

“decomposition” in order to be known at all: to the “successive,” rather than
synchronous, structure of discourse that is the given of any linguistic form, the
“distribution” by the “precision of language” of a “total impression” into “parts.”22 It
is in the act of representing the actions of those deprived of a codiﬁed language
that the “soul,” name of the never already fully codiﬁed nor empirically visible seat
of poetry, can be brought, according to Diderot, into view:

Te state of our soul is one thing; another is the account we render of it, whether
to ourselves, or to others; one thing, the total and instantaneous sensation of this

21. Diderot, OC, IV: 142.

22. Diderot, OC , IV: 161.

state; another thing, the successive and detailed attention that we are forced to
give it to analyze it, make it manifest and make ourselves understood. Our soul
is a moving tableau afer which we paint without cease: we employ a great deal
of time to render it with ﬁdelity: but it exists in its entirety, and all at once: spirit
does not proceed, like expression, by counted steps.
[Autre chose est l’état de notre âme; autre chose, le compte que nous en rendons,
soit à nous-même, soit aux autres; autre chose, la sensation totale et instantanée
de cet état; autre chose, l’attention successive et détaillée que nous somme forcés
d’y donner pour l’analyser, la manifester, et nous faire entendre. Notre âme est un
tableau mouvant, d’après lequel nous peignons sans cesse: nous employons bien
du temps à le rendre avec ﬁdélité: mais il existe en entier, et tout à la fois: l’esprit
ne va pas à pas comptés comme l’expression.23]

Articulate knowledge – a “compte rendu” – of the soul requires ignoring the

original composition of what one articulates, substituting for it our analytic
“decomposition” of it, a “decomposition of the simultaneous movements of the
soul” (“décomposition des mouvements simultanés de l’âme”) in accordance with
the “successive development of discourse” (“développement successif du
discours”).24 Tus, any true knowledge of the soul, that indecipherable amalgam of
intellectual and sensory experience, would, on the one hand, require knowledge of
language, the means we use to decipher and express the indecipherable
heterogeneity of a soul inflected by but not reflective of discourse. Yet, on the other
hand, if knowledge of the soul, and of language, is to be obtained, it would have to
be not through language as given but language as it is being made: not through the
linguistic “decomposition” of complex experience, which we commit nearly every
moment of every day, but through the decomposition of everyday decomposition,
that is, of language itself, the necessary negation of an analytic negation – strange
hybrid of syntheses a priori and a posteriori – such as may be made available to the
hearing and speaking by those who must first represent language to themselves.
For, “deprived” of the immediately language-bearing “faculties of understanding
speech and speaking” (“privé de la faculté d’entendre et de parler”25), those who are,
by nature, “decomposed” must actively compose representations everyday.
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Deprived of the sense most conducive to the second nature of verbal

communication, the deaf – as Diderot’s anonymous stories in the Letter represent
them – instead communicate graphically, through gesture. No history-making
revolution in mode of thinking is recounted or indeed possible here; instead the
light goes on as it goes out, as, unapprehended, and without self-defining laws, it
flickers, in situation afer situation, from one empirically given moment to the next.
Tis flickering signal, emitted without external correspondence, could well be
called the first light of language according to Diderot, an origin preceding the

23. Ibid.
24. Diderot, OC, IV: 158.
25. Diderot, OC , IV–142.

institutionalization of language, the birth pangs of which are immediately

apprehensible sensory qualities untethered to specifically identified objects. On
this fictive, experimental account, long preceding Nietzsche’s theoretical genealogy
of language in “Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinn” (“Truth and Lie in
the extramoral sense”) (1872), the substantive, central linguistic unit of analytic
logic, is not the founding unit of language itself. Instead of naming things, language
first spoke sensations, according to Diderot, and, thus, once subordinated in real
time to the communicative exigencies of successive, temporal discursivity, it was
the adjective that syntactically preceded the substantive. We now “imagine,” Diderot
argues (as will Nietzsche), “that the adjective was really subordinated to the
substantive, even though the substantive is not properly anything and the adjective
is everything” (“l’adjectif soit tout”26). In the first, half-light of language, Diderot
argues, the adjective was everything, and the so-called “inversion” of adjective
before substantive that occasionally occurs in spoken French is in fact a reversion
to an earlier, natural order that institutional and scientific French had inverted first,
according to Diderot. Tis is Diderot’s foray into the famous “bonnet blanc” or
“blanc bonnet” controversy of the grammarians, in which a supposed historical
priority was thought to mirror an equally putative precedence of logic within the
development of thought, or not, and that historical and/or logical priority, to
underpin the syntactic precedence of substantive or adjective, respectively. Yet
Diderot enters the fray only to put the grammarians’ distracting dispute, over which
codified part of language exercises priority over the other, to rest (as he does with
most intra-institutional debates), so as better to discover what language in general
can tell us about who and how we are and how and what we know.
And what it tells us about us, according to Diderot, is that it is peculiarly human
nature to know by representing what we don’t know – experience unattainable by
the senses and thus unavailable to abstract conception – by way of another material
medium, just as the simultaneous yet ever “moving tableau” of the “totality of
impressions” that “is” the soul must instead be represented sequentially by
discourse, “painted afer the fact.” Tus the “natural” subjects of Diderot’s account
of knowledge are not naturally “enlightened,” let alone, as – curiously self-blinding –
historicist clichés about “the Enlightenment” would have it, “universal” or
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“transcendent,” but the sensorily deprived for whom the necessity of representation
is not the exception but the rule. It is these subjects, lacking in the direct means of
knowing, that provide Diderot with a supplemental model for representing the
unknown. For even as they are subjected to others’ clichéd assumptions – prejudices
or ‘pre-judgments’ – regarding their own intellectual and moral capacities as
subjects before developing or learning a symbolic mode of action of their own, it is
these subjects that most conclusively indicate every subject’s general capacity to
communicate acts of conception by means that are necessarily internal in origin
and material in medium. It is those, for whom certain sensory experience and its
corresponding, institutionalized medium are unavailable to begin with, whose

26. Diderot, OC , IV–135.

circumvention, by expressive substitution, of the blockage of one means of sensory

reception and sign production or another, shines an occult light upon the mind’s
ability to produce knowledge of which it has, so to speak, no knowledge, for theirs
is a knowledge a priori non-identical with the data that senses deliver directly.
Diderot’s “Letter on the Deaf and Mute” was not only the direct predecessor to
l’Abbé de l’Epée’s formalization of the “sign language” he had witnessed in action
among the deaf in Paris into the instructional “method” (Institution des sourds et
muets, par la voie de signes méthodiques [pub. 1776]) that would then be literally
institutionalized by the Institut des sourds et muets founded by the Abbé in 1760.
In the most universally ‘literal’ sense, unlimited by specific institutional or sensory
capacity, Diderot’s representation (via dramatized actors of his own invention) of
the invention of “signs” or “symbols”27 “uses” the sensorily deprived not as limit
case or exception to the norm but as fitting substitute for us all, for the sense of
things and/or the ability to express such a sense that we all lack, more or less, at
different times.28 Another name Diderot gives such inevitable representers is
“poet,” and his description of “the spirit” that “passes in the discourse of the poet,”
an undefined spirit that makes do by doing what it does with language, without our
ever knowing what it itself is (“what is this spirit? I have sometimes felt its presence
but all I know of it . . . is [its actions]”) is itself well known:

Tere passes then in the discourse of the poet a spirit that moves and animates
all syllables. What is this spirit? I have sometimes felt its presence; but all that I
know of it is that it is it that acts so that things are said and represented at the
same time; that at the same time that understanding understands them, the soul
is moved, the imagination sees them and the ear hears them, and that discourse
is nothing but a concatenation of energetic terms which expose thought with
force and nobility, but that it is also a tissue of hieroglyphs piled one on the other
that paint it. I could say, in this sense, that all poetry is emblematic.
[Il passe alors dans le discours du poète un esprit qui en meut et viviﬁe toutes les
syllables. Qu’est-ce que cet esprit? J’en ai quelquefois senti la présence; mais tout
ce que j’en sais, c’est que c’est lui qui fait que les choses sont dites et représentées
tout à la fois; que dans le même temps que l’entendement les entend, l’âme en est
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27. Diderot, OC , IV: 34.

28. For a compelling investigation of states of physical incapacitation or “dis-ability”
as just that, states to which all bodily subjects are subject in time, see Paul Kelleher’s
excellent “ ‘Te Man Within the Breast’: Sympathy, Deformity, and Moral Subjectivity in
Adam Smith’s Te Teory of Moral Sentiments,” in Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary
and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject, ed. C. Brodsky and E. LaBrada (NY:
Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 173–200 (see esp. 188–94, on the ‘unavoidable [disabling] eﬀects
of . . . our temporal bodily implication in the world” [193–194]). For an overview and
analysis of historically acknowledged states of disability, see Jacques Striker, A History of
Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

émue, l’imagination les voit et l’oreille les entend, et que le discours n’est plus
seulement un enchaînement de termes énergiques qui exposent la pensée avec
force et noblesse, mais que c’est encore un tissu d’hiéroglyphes entassés les uns
sur les autres qui la peignent. Je pourrais dire, en ce sens, que toute poésie est
emblématique.29]

Of what and in what “sense” a stack of hieroglyphs “can be said” to “be emblematic”
is knowledge that the simultaneously internal (“l’imagination les voit”) and
external (“l’oreille les entend”) quality of poetic representation alone can provide,
knowledge that, without the indirection of poetry – of the spirit passing through
the poet – we, even when enjoying the full complement of our senses, are missing.
Diderot’s epistemological poets – revolutionaries out of sensory necessity – are
those whom, for the most part, history is missing. Yet, Kant’s historical series of
Revolutionen is more Diderotian than at first appears, for revolutions in knowledge
occur randomly on his account, their agents acting less like the masterminds than
the mere vehicles of mental Einfälle, notions falling into individual minds from
who-knows-where. In other words, not determinative historical contexts but
history-making events determine the history Kant tells. Unpredictable occurrences,
these Einfälle punctuate periods of blind groping that may last hundreds of years,
centuries of efforts that can offer no adequate external expression – explanation,
‘excuse’ or Ausrede – for an enduring failure or lack of intellectual “vision” that can
only be characterized metaphorically – so Kant’s Herumtappen – as sensorily
deprived. So it is that in Kant, as in Diderot, the sighted can appear blinder than the
blind, precisely by identifying knowledge uniquely with the evidence of their
senses, taking the temporally and spatially proximate – the “momentary” outcomes
and visible identities of ongoing material permutations – either as sufficient proof
of an “eternal” “order” (in the words of Diderot’s “Saunderson”), or as sufficient
disproof of the possibility of knowledge whatsoever (in the presumptively skeptical
view of the sighted, or should we say, near-sighted Hume).
Similarly, the difference in Diderot’s accounts of “Saunderson” and anonymous
deaf subjects illuminates the critical difference between the modes of “revolution”
in mathematics and metaphysics recounted by Kant. For, while the revolution now
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known as geometry ensues from an a priori act of “construction” – the composition,

according to Kant’s Logik, of some “thing” that is “real” in itself30 – Kant’s ‘Copernican
turn’ is instead a discursive hypothesis a priori, a theoretical reconception of human
actions that understands itself as “analogous” to the scientist’s reversal of the long-
standing conception of our relation to the stars. In hypothesizing such a reversal in
how we understand the mind’s relation to all objects, based on an equally
“revolution[ary]” conception of how empirical knowledge itself is composed,
Kant’s “Copernican turn,” like Copernicus’s, is not a ﬁgure of geometrical
construction but an intellectual ﬁgure or theoretically necessary metaphor, one

29. Diderot, OC, IV: 169.

30. Kant, Logik §203, A 219, VI: 573.

doubling, in Kant’s case, as a metaphor for the intellect itself. For, in the “case” of
Kant’s “turn,” the “tenor” or basic sense to be conveyed (knowledge of the world),
and the “vehicle” for its conveyance (knowledge of the subject) are exchanged,
rendering the “real” object of knowledge not what we know but how it is that we
can know (objects in the ﬁrst place) – in which, in short, the basis not of externality
but of knowledge of the external is the cognitive mode the metaphor exposes.
In contrast with theoretical or metaphorical “Copernican turn[s],” the gestures
of Diderot’s deaf and mute are turns in deed, physical movements, actual doings
without knowing in any given discursive sense. Although not synchronous with
the thought they embody, in the unique mode of a geometrical ﬁgure, like
discursive language “painting afer” the ‘moving tableau of the soul,” their
movements aim to imitate sequentially, bodily, graphically, sensorily, the
simultaneous occurrence of sensations and ideas. Te speeches of Diderot’s
“Saunderson,” on the other hand, are, of necessity, verbal through and through: like
their philosophy, their mode is anti-mimetic. Diderot notes that they are reputed
instead for what, akin to Kant’s “happy notions” (as described above), he calls their
“happy expressions,” observing:

Tose who wrote an account of [Saunderson’s] life say that he was fertile in
happy expressions, and that is highly probable. But what do you mean by happy
expressions, you will perhaps ask? I reply . . . that they are those which are proper
to one sense, to touch, for example, and metaphoric at the same time to another
sense, such as the eyes, from which results a double light for him to whom one
speaks; the true and direct light of expression, and the reﬂected light of metaphor.
[Ceux qui ont écrit sa vie dissent qu’il était fecund en expressions heureuses, et
cela est fort vraisemblable. Mais qu’entendez-vous par des expressions heureuses,
me demanderez-vous peut-être? Je vous répondrai . . . que ce sont celles qui sont
propre à un sens, au toucher par example, et qui sont métaphoriques en même
temps à un autre sens, comme aux yeux, d’où il résulte une double lumière pour
celui à qui l’on parle; la lumière vraie et directe de l’expression, et la lumière
réﬂéchie de la métaphore.31]
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Although the “language of gestures” is also called “metaphoric”32 by Diderot,

the strong communicational purpose, mimetic content and successive structure
of such physical substitutions would place them not only at the opposite end of
the spectrum from the language of poetry, described as an illegible stack of
hieroglyphs, but in opposition to the “double light” of Saunderson’s “happy
expressions.” For, deprived of the direct experience and conﬁrmation of external
evidence, Saunderson must shed a second light with the same necessity as
Copernicus and Kant, which is to say, the purely internal necessity of replacing
empirical ignorance with hypothetical knowledge by speculatively – again,

31. Diderot, OC, IV: 41.

32. Diderot, OC, IV: 144.

necessarily metaphorically – “turning things around.” Unlike his own “Copernican

turn” and the overturning of the presumed supremacy of the senses to cognition
enacted by Diderot’s sensorily deprived, whether these be mimetic and a posteriori,
or hypothetical and a priori to experience in mode, the revolution in mathematics
recounted by Kant does not reverse the bases of our understanding of sensible
things but alone constructs that impossible thing, the fully symbolic, entirely
nonexperiential, and so nonmetaphoric, purely graphic “language” of self-identical
geometrical forms in space. As such it requires no explanatory language to become
a permanent foundation of mathematical knowledge, and as such its initial mortal
vehicle may as well remain unnamed.

In Rossellini’s surprisingly sober Cartesius (1974) – non-dramatic depiction of a

studious, itinerant, and publication-shy Descartes sleeping most of the day afer
reading all night, his small quarters a mess – as in Percy Adlon’s necessarily sober
Céleste – huit clos depiction of Proust’s eponymous real-life housekeeper
meticulously carrying out the duties of her kitchen-bound nocturnal routine,
watching the clock for the precise moment to begin pouring boiling water over
coffee painstakingly pressed into a cloth filter – any external view of “revolutions
of mode of thinking” in the making must indeed limit itself to the few things and
people that surround the subjects in which they occur. Any biopic of Kant
courageous enough to “represent” the “life” of the “revolution” his Critique effects
would have to restrict itself to the hour and repeated rounds of his daily walk
(leaving to Herder the “picture” of the teacher and the man). But the “revolution in
mode of thinking” that “constructs” its own external representation in, say, an
equilateral triangle, would have to remain without further, even metonymic
illustration, a subject of material and historical ignorance.
In this, it would most “resemble” the kind of agency, involving neither judgment
nor knowledge, narrated in Kant’s ethics. Te most daring hypothesis of doing
without knowing ever framed, and reversal of the long-held presupposition that
knowing and acting must accompany each other if they are to be morally effective,
Kant’s theory of the “possibility”33 that we can act in independence of the limits of
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given, phenomenal cognition, and so freed of self-interest in a merely phenomenal

sense – that possibility without which his own entire Kritik might appear instead
a mere prison – is one Kant can never deduce logically, illustrate historically, or
communicate conclusively, although it clearly subtends his remarks on that other
Revolution, in France, whose quality, as self-determining act, will remain, Kant
states, an ineﬀaceable, “sign of our times” (“Vorzeichen unserer Tage”34), regardless
of its particular historical outcomes. So the possibility of moral action in Kant
remains, as it must, at once absolutely critical and open to question, a non-cognitive

33. For a fuller discussion of Kant’s own discursive representation of such a “possible”
act, see Chap. One, Section One, this study.
34. Kant, Streit der Fakultâten A 150 (hereafer StF), in Werkausgabe, XI: 361.

act, immediately invisible to its agent, precisely because knowledge of it could

never be fully provided by the senses. Source and outcome of the abilities and
disabilities that compose all of us, both a priori and historically, the freedom to act
in the mode of thinking Kant called moral, to do without knowing and graphic
identity both, is the most remarkable – and unnamed – of Kant’s Einfälle, and not
the subject, in any but a necessarily double or reﬂected “light,” of the poetics of
judgment and action presented here. Yet it is the very rigor of Kant’s separation of
freedom in action from both the representational limits of cognition and discursive
mode of judgment that ensures the critical “possibility” of each.
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L INGUISTIC C ONDITIONS
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T H E “C O N D I T IO N ” O F J U D G M E N T:
“C OM MON S E N SE ,” O R T H E O R IG I N O F L A N G UAG E I N
K A N T ’ S T H I R D C R I T I QU E

1. “Common Sense” and Signiﬁcation,

or What is Not Tautology
No single statement in Kant’s critical philosophy may be met with greater
disappointment or disbelief than the assertion made without further
conceptualization or explanation in the Critique of Judgment (§20), that the “power
of judgment” [Urteilskraf] – and with it, the entire philosophical project whose
coherence and feasibility that power alone ensures – itself relies on the operation
of something that Kant both distinguishes from and continues to call “common
sense” [Gemeinsinn]:

If judgments of taste (like cognitive judgments) had a deﬁnite objective principle,

anyone rendering them according to this principle would claim the unconditional
necessity of his judgment. If they were without any principle, like those of merely
sense-based taste, no one would allow the necessity of them into their thoughts.
Tus they must have a subjective principle that determines, only through feeling
and not through concepts, but nonetheless generally, what pleases or displeases.
Such a principle however can only be seen as a common sense, which is essentially
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diﬀerent from the common understanding that people sometimes also call
common sense (sensus communis): for the latter does not judge according to
feeling but always according to concepts, even if these are commonly only
obscurely represented principles.
[Wenn Geschmacksurteile (gleich den Erkenntnisurteilen) ein bestimmtes
objektives Prinzip hätten, so würde der, welcher sie nach dem letztern fället, auf
unbedingte Notwendigkeit seines Urteils Anspruch machen. Wären sie ohne
alles Prinzip, wie die des blossen Sinnengeschmacks, so würde man sich gar
keine Notwendigkeit derselben in die Gedanken kommen lassen. Also müssen
sie ein subjektives Prinzip haben, welches nur durch Gefühl und nicht durch
Begriﬀe, doch aber allgemeingültig bestimme, was gefalle oder misfalle. Ein
solches Prinzip aber könnte nur als ein Gemeinsinn angesehen werden; welcher

vom gemeinen Verstande, den man bisweilen auch Gemeinsinn (sensus

communis) nennt, wesentlich unterschieden ist: indem letzterer nicht nach
Gefühl, sondern jederzeit nach Begriﬀen, wiewohl gemeiniglich nur als nach
dunkel vorgestellten Prinzipien, urteilt.35]

Limiting knowledge of things to a coordination of concepts and perceptual

representations, and basing his pathbreaking deﬁnition of aesthetic judgment
precisely on the opposite. i.e., on perceptions shorn of conceptual and representational
content, Kant’s critical “revolution”36 in metaphysics makes no concession to and no
mention of the rule of “common sense,”37 the collective term for any and all

35. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraf (hereafer KU ) B 65, §20, in Werkausgabe, X: 157
(emphasis in text).
36. Kant, KrV B XI–XXIII, III: 22–28. On Kant’s use of the term “revolution” to describe
the reversal in ‘mode of thinking’ at which his Critique aims, cf. Chap. One, this study.
37. Kant’s inauguration of the term “common sense” [Gemeinsinn] in German letters, in
distinction from “healthy,” “sound,” or “common human understanding” [gesunder or
gemeiner Menschenverstand] – popular terms more commonly employed (including, on
occasion, by Kant himself) – is underscored in Marina Savi’s excellent monograph, Il
concetto di senso comune in Kant (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1998), to which this analysis will
return (see Savi, pp. 12–13). In addition to the already available German terms it does not
use, Kant’s unprecedented reference to Gemeinsinn should also be distinguished from the
French notion of “good sense” [le bon sens] that, later mentioned in Kant’s Anthropology
from a Pragmatic Point of View (§6, BA 23, XII: XXX), would have been familiar to him
within the context of philosophical writing from the well-known opening of Descartes’
Discours de la méthode: “Le bon sens est la chose la mieux partagée du monde” (“Good sense
is the best shared [or distributed] thing in the world.”) (René Descartes, Oeuvres
philosophiques 3 vol., ed. Ferdinand Alquié [Paris: Garnier, 1963, 1967, 1973] I: 568). While
the intellectual senses to which they appeal are indeed diﬀerent – Descartes’ “good sense”
naming, not without irony, the commonly credited ability to interpret accurately and
conduct ourselves rationally on the basis of what we perceive, and Kant’s “common sense,”
explicitly distinguished from exactly such, in his words, “common understanding” in the
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passage from the Tird Critique just cited, bearing with it no such hermeneutic and
pragmatic thrust – the link between “common” and “good sense” remains the quality of
commonality by which Descartes singly defines the latter as “the best shared [or distributed]
thing in the world.” Furthermore, although “good sense” in Descartes is a self-crediting
practical capacity, its application results from a specifically intellectual act that Descartes,
while in a sense very different from Kant’s, also calls “judgment” (Discours, I: 594), while the
“sense” of what Descartes calls “common sense” (le sens commun] is, instead, a purely
physiological capacity, the name then commonly given a section of the brain credited with
“receiving,” in common, different “ideas” of physical sensations: “light, sound, odor, taste,
heat, and all the other qualities of external objects” (Discours, I: 628; see also Discours, I:
577). On the history of pseudo-scientific references to such a putative, purely physiological
“common sense,” see Pavel Gregoric, Aristotle on the Common Sense (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), pp. 56–58, 180–82, esp.

intellectual and cultural norms of the circularly self-conﬁrming, ultimately

tautological kind (only common sense can deﬁne “common sense”) that his
“Copernican” Critique deﬁed.38 Even as it appears to appeal to the openly
platitudinous beliefs Kant directly criticized in the Scottish School of Common
Sense philosophy,39 Kant’s introduction of “common sense” remains consistent with

38. For Kant’s exclusion of “tautological” statements from logic, and equation of what he
disparagingly calls the “logic of common reason (sensus communis)” (“Logik der gemeinen
Vernunf [sensus communis])” with “actually no logic, but an anthropological science”
(“eigentlich keine Logik, sondern eine anthropologische Wissenchaf”), see Kant, Logik A
223, VI: 576, and A 12, VI: 439, respectively.
39. See Scott Philip Segrest, America and the Philosophy of Common Sense (Columbia,
Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2010), pp. 25–27, on the distinction and relation between
Aristotelian koine aesthesis (or “common sensation”) and phronesis (or “practical wisdom”),
the translation of the former as “sensus communis” by Aquinas, in the non-Aristotelian
sense of a shared capacity for judging among sensations, and the adoption of the latter by
Reid’s Common Sense philosophy. Focusing on the development of the Common Sense
School in Scotland and the U.S., Segrest briefly, somewhat inexplicably suggests that this
“commensensical” (or tautological) notion of “common sense” was also fundamental to
Kant’s critical philosophy, even while linking it to Aristoteles’ koine ennoiai, or “first
principles” (26), and quoting at length from Kant’s well-known condemnation of Scottish
common sense philosophers in the Prolegomena (35–36). For the critique of Common
Sense philosophy in the Prolegomena, see this Chapter, Section Two, n. 68. Far more
instructive is Segrest’s related discussion of Shafesbury’s and Vico’s approximation of
“common sense” to “good sense” – including, in Shafesbury’s view, a good sense of humor,
or “wit,” capable of deflating both popular opinon and philosophical speculation – and of
“natural” “social ‘affections’ ” to “a sense of beauty or fitness” issuing in “a kind of aesthetic
judgment” and shared “moral sentiment.” Segrest’s illuminating account of the implantation
and dissemination of a prophetic Presbyterianism in eighteenth-century America, most
prominently by successive Presidents of Princeton, which based its religious interpretation
of knowledge on the same Scottish Common Sense philosophy that Kant was then critiquing
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as no philosophy at all – i.e., the peddling of that religion’s “deepest intuitions about man,
God, and the world” as nothing other than “plain common sense” (see 28–33; 56–132) – is
both central to his historical account of the propagation of a “belief ”-based, “common
sense” approach to all discursive philosophy in the United States and sheds an important,
contrasting light upon the critical concerns of the current study. On Shafesbury, and the
“diﬃculties of writing a semantic history of common sense” from Aquinas to its “refutation”
by Hegel, see Fritz van Holthoon, “Common Sense and Natural Law: From Tomas Aquinas
to Tomas Reid,’ in Common Sense, ed. Fritz van Holthoon and David R. Olson (Laham,
MD: University Press of America, 1987), pp. 99–114.
In Rediscovery of Common Sense Philosophy (London: Palgrave, 2007), Stephen Boulter
makes use of historical and biological evolutionary models of understanding to buttress his
case for a general renewal in philosophical discourse of the “common sense” tradition of
Aristotle, Reid, and Moore, even while arguing for the nonevolving, conservative juridical

the critical rigor of his own project, or, what is the same, with a supreme lack of
traditionally proffered “common sense”40 on his part. For Kant ends Section 20 of
the Critique of Judgment by admitting there is nothing whatsoever commonsensical,
nothing any one, let alone each of us, can presume to know about the effectivity,
existence or basis of the undefined capacity for “common sense” [Gemeinsinn] on
which his central theory of judgment rests.
Unlike every other “sense,” “common sense” in the Tird Critique is not an
“external” medium through which we experience sensuous objects, but neither is it
a hypothetical medium originating solely within the subject. “Common sense”
functions instead on the shared or general “presupposition” that it is “given,” a
“presupposing” importantly defined by Kant, in Section 22, as “really” rather than
merely theoretically enacted: “only under the presupposition that there ‘is’ [or,
‘would be:’ gebe*] common sense (by which we do not understand an external
sense, but the effect resulting from the free play of our powers of cognition), only,
I say, under the presupposition of such a common sense can judgment of taste be
rendered;” “Tis undetermined norm of a common sense is really presupposed by
us: our presumed ability to make judgments of taste proves it” (“nur unter der
Voraussetzung, dass es einen Gemeinsinn gebe [wodurch wir aber keinen äussern
Sinn, sondern die Wirkung aus dem freien Spiel unserer Erkenntniskräfe,
verstehen], nur unter Voraussetzung, sage ich, eines solchen Gemeinsinns kann
das Geschmacksurteil gefällt werden;” “Diese unbestimmte Norm eines
Gemeinsinns wird von uns wirklich vorausgesetzt: das beweiset unsere Anmassung,
Geschmacksurteile zu fallen”).41

discourse such a commonsensical approach to philosophy would buttress in turn, without

noting any contradiction between the two. Employing the commonsensical argument that
it is harder and less reasonable to endeavor to prove a positive negative than a positive or
negative, Boulter argues that, by their (positive) “default position” of “healthy” “flexibility,”
“common sense beliefs” shif the philosophical “burden of proof ” to their positive – logical –
negation, i.e., the noncommonsensical, purely hypothetical “aporias” that, according to him,
have defined the “essence,” and resulted in the theoretical excesses, of philosophy from its
inception (see pp. 9, 11–12, 18, 25, 36ff., 82, and esp. 100–117 [on “neo-Kantian
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constructivism”]). While Boulter alludes brieﬂy to Kant’s dismissal of Scottish Common

Sense philosophy in his “Introduction” (p. xi), he, tellingly, makes no mention at all of the
novel, distinctly non-Scottish sense of “common sense” (“Gemeinsinn”) introduced by Kant
in the Tird Critique, and, consequently, offers no analysis either of its explicitly positive,
rather than hypothetical, function, as fulcrum of Kant’s entire tripartite project, nor of the
significance of its inauguration in the context of the first explicitly critical philosophy in
history into German letters at large.
40. Albert Einstein memorably analogized the “common sense” “norms” regressively
attributable to tradition to the beliefs held by any individual as follows: “Common sense is
the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
41. Kant, KU , B 65, 68, X: 157, 159. *Kant’s use of the German “first subjective” tense
indicative of reported or indirect, rather than first-person or declarative, speech, in
describing and referring to “common sense,” is also indicative of and consistent with his

As extraordinary as Kant’s introduction of “common sense” into critique is his

direct self-reference in doing so. Interposed between the preceding clauses
concerning, on the one hand, our “presupposition” of an undefined “common
sense” “resulting from the free play of our powers of cognition,” and, on the other,
an ability to judge that both “proves” the “reality” of what we presuppose and
depends upon it, is Kant’s statement of the origin of these propositions, his own
speaking self, “I,” the active subject of his “I say” (“sage ich”). As noted (*) in the
preceding paragraph, when indicating the presupposed existence of “common
sense,” Kant employs the mood of the German subjunctive that serves to indicate
reported speech and alleged facts (“would be” [gebe]), the same verbal tense and
grammatical equivalent of quote marks with which he will refer to “common
sense” thereafer. Yet, nowhere else in the Critique does Kant declare, in direct
confirmation of the grammatical function and specifically verbal sense of that
tense, the actual fact that he is not hypothesizing, or theorizing, but, quite literally,
saying this. As if openly enacting the very act of presupposition on which “common
sense” and “judgment” are based, Kant verbally indicates the indistinguishability of
actually proposing that proposition from the presuppositions enabling one to do so
by speaking of “common sense” in the first person. Kant, in other words, does what
he says as he is saying it, and, in so doing, renders explicit the verbal form his
proposal of “common sense” and the common “presupposition” of it share. Te
logically entailed, temporal or sequential cognitive distinction between proposition
and presupposition is eclipsed here by a statement indicating that, like what it
proposes, such a proposition is “really” taking place, in a particular speaker’s words.
Tus Kant’s proposition of a fundamental “common sense” defies what we assume
common sense to be by declaring itself in fact nothing more nor less than a fact of
speech, one alleged by a subject (“I”) engaged at that moment in the very act of
enacting or presupposing it. Te difference, in short, between proposing in theory
and presupposing in practice the existence and effectivity of what Kant calls
“common sense” is limited by Kant to the verbal equivalent of diacriticals: a
reporting of speech by a subject himself engaged in the act of presupposition
which that speech (“would be” [gebe]) describes.
Now, it is fair to say there is not a lot of talking, whether first-hand or cited, in
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Kant’s Critique, just as no aspect of its “revolution[ary],” founding hypothesis – that

empirical knowledge is not only valid but inevitable when “empirical” is understood
not to be empirical but representational and our actions, as subjects of knowledge,
is understood to depend less on speciﬁc outcomes than our rethinking of how
knowledge is composed to begin with – appears to rely on anything resembling
“common sense.” Tere is indeed so little talking and so little apparent relation
between speech and the theory of how we know and act elaborated throughout the
Critique that we may overlook the fact that the key hypothetical proof of the

analysis of judgment as a necessarily verbal act. For lack of an equivalent verbal tense in
English, it is signaled here and throughout this study by diacritical marks inserted in the
translations from Kant’s text.

“possibility” of – logically undeducible – “freedom” in the Second Critique is based

in and decided by a chain not of physical but specifically verbal actions, and that
these culminate not in an empirical but equally verbal result: the articulation, by a
subject, in a causally determined, empirical situation, of a discontinuity between
external causality and the determination of any subject’s actions. Te subject of
that situation is a hypothetical “man” who, under “threat” of his own “execution,” is
“demanded” by “his sovereign” to “bear false witness against an honest man,” and
its outcome is demonstrated not by way of an “a priori synthetic judgment” of the
kind Kant’s First Critique proposes empirical knowledge is composed, but, instead,
a question: “Ask him however, whether, if his prince demanded, under threat of
punishment of death, that he bear false witness against an honest man, whether he,
no matter how great his love of living may be, would hold the overcoming of [that
love of living] for possible” (“Fragt ihn aber, ob, wenn sein Fürst ihm, unter
Androhung der . . . Todesstrafe, zumutete, ein falsches Zeugnis wider einen
ehrlichen Mann . . . abzulegen, ob er da, so gross auch seine Liebe zum Leben sein
mag, sie wohl zu überwindern für möglich halte . . .”42).
“Frag ihn aber, ob”—“ask him, however, whether . . .” “he holds for possible” that
he may refuse to lie upon demand: Kant’s attempt to deduce the possibility of free,
moral actions turns upon actions that are neither empirical nor categorical but
discursive. “Ask,” “threaten,” “hold for possible,” “refuse,” “bear false witness,”
“demand” – all are acts enabled by speech alone. Verbal of necessity, they lead to a
single decisive act whose particular object (“an honest man”), mode (“to bear
witness”), and content (“false”) depend as much on discourse as does the result
for which they are said to provide evidence: that of “confirm[ing]” (“bestätigt . . .”)
the prevalence of the concept of “freedom” in “the order of concepts within us”
(“. . . diese Ordnung der Begriffe in uns”43).
Even more importantly, however, what the hypothetical subject of Kant’s
narrative inherently demonstrates, in finding and affirming it to be “possible” that
he might “overcome his love of living” rather than condemn another man through
his own lie, is that, as a subject, he identifies his own life – what it is in itself, in
absolute distinction from its empirical conditions – with his relation to the words
he says: with the truth or falsity of the words he employs in relation to any other
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subject of action whatsoever, rather, again, than to any empirical set of conditions.
Te absence or presence of a “gallows” “erected” on the spot may indeed prove
decisive to a subject’s ability to withstand a personal inclination when “object and
opportunity present themselves,” Kant admits.44 Yet neither his personal like or

42. Kant, KprV A 54, VII: 140.

43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.: “Suppose, that someone pretends his pleasurable inclination would be
irresistible if the beloved object and opportunity presented themselves: whether, if a gallows
were constructed before the house in which he encounters this opportunity in order to hang
him immediately from it afer he enjoyed his pleasure, whether he wouldn’t overcome his
inclination” (“Setzt, dass jemand von seiner wollüstigen Neigung vorgibt, sie sei, wenn ihm
der beliebte Gegenstand und die Gelegenheit dazu vorkämen, für ihn ganz unwiderstehlich:

dislike of the “honest man” about whom he is ordered by his sovereign to lie, nor
the threat that noncompliance with this order will issue in his own death, may
prove similarly decisive to Kant’s subject’s actions, when these consist of acts
committed and expressed to others in language rather than internal calculations of
the relative value of any particular pleasure. Te fact that such a hypothetical
subject cannot “ensure” he “would or would not [bear false witness]” against
another “honest” subject, even under sovereign threat, if he does not, of his own
demise, means he “must concede” (by yet another verbal act) such a refusal to lie is
“possible,” and, we, by extension, that he is what Kant calls “free:” “Whether he
would do it or not, he will perhaps not trust himself to ensure; that it is, however,
possible [he might not], he must concede without doubt” (“Ob er es tun würde,
oder nicht, wird er vielleicht sich nicht getrauen zu versichern, dass es ihm aber
möglich sei, muss er ohne Bedenken einräumen”45).
Tat such specific discursive acts, and language in general, do not figure
prominently, if at all, in the recepton and understanding of Kant’s critical project
may owe simply to the fact that, like this hypothetical, narrative “confirmation” of
“the order of concepts within us,” they arise rarely in the interdependent,
architectonic account of our a priori intellectual powers Kant gives. Yet rarity may
itself mean everything in the Critique: if talk is cheap, Kant implies, blame it on the
cheapness, the meretriciousness or lack of real value of what is said by those who
make it appear so, not on the value of language, as a mode of meaning, itself, let
alone on its most common modalities: the logically interconnected network of
conceptual nominal knowledge all subjects of knowledge use (Kant’s own
proverbial “phone company”), as well as our ability to ask questions about what we
don’t know by forming discursive hypotheses, to say nothing of the possibility that
any man may decide at any time not to lie.
As foundational as is the concept of “freedom,” demonstrated solely in acts of
speech, to the Second Critique is the noncognitive act of judgment that, separate
subject of the Tird Critique, is already described in the First Preface to the First
Critique as that action whose exercise, in “the mature power of judgment of the
time” (“der gereifen Ureilskraf des Zeitalters”), defines that time or age as the “Age
of Critique.”46 Indeed, even the pivotal paragraph of the Second Critique just cited
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itself closes with an act of “judging” (rather than knowing, deducing, or concluding),
upon which, ﬁrst, the “recognition” of “freedom” and, second, that of a “moral law”
dependent in turn on the recognition of freedom, depend. Of his hypothetical
subject, Kant states: “Tus he judges that he can do something because he is
conscious that he should, and recognizes in himself the freedom without which

ob, wenn ein Galgen vor dem Hause, da er diese Gelegenheit trif, aufgerichtet ware, um ihn
sogliech nach genossener Wollust daran zu knüpfen, er alsdenn nicht seine Neigung
bezwingen würde”).
45. Ibid.
46. Kant, KrV A XI–XII, III: 13; see also Kant, Logik A 40, VI: 457: “Our age is the Age
of Critique” (“Unser Zeitalter ist das Zeitalter der Kritik”).

the moral law would otherwise remain unknown to him” (“Er urteilet also, dass
er etwas kann, darum, weil er sich bewusst ist, dass er es soll, und erkennt in sich
die Freiheit, di ihm sonst ohne das moralische Gesetz unbekannt geblieben
wäre”47). Yet judgment is also theorized, for the first time in the history of
philosophy, to be not only an activity but an a priori faculty, indeed, the most
critical of all faculties, by Kant. Te Tird Critique bases the proposition of such an
a priori faculty, most unusually and for the first time in Kant’s philosophy, on what
Kant calls, despite his own consistent criticism of anti-philosophical uses of the
term, “common sense.”
Tat the pathbreaking ability to bridge the primary analytic division – between
theoretical and practical uses of reason and their objects, limited knowledge
and free moral action, on which his own Critique depends should itself depend
on the “presupposed,” discursively unanalyzed faculty that Kant, speaking in
uncharacteristic propria persona, calls “common sense,” appears a conspicuous, if
not fatal flaw in the “building” [Gebäude] of Kant’s “system,” an exception, as
evident as it is inexplicable, to the regularity and autonomy of its logical,
“architectonic” exposition.48 Yet, the analytic weakness unambiguously articulated
by Kant’s introduction of “common sense” at the close of the First Analytic of the
Tird Critique, may also be seen to reveal the rigor and integrity of Kant’s analytic
procedure overall, his refusal either to derive an analytic definition of “common
sense” from its commonplace conception or to circumvent the need for analysis

47. Kant, KprV A 54, VII: 140 (emphasis added).

48. On the “purposive building” and “architectonic construction of knowledge”, see
Kant, KU , B 4, X: 115; KrV, B 9, IV: 51; B 503, IV: 449: “Human reason is according to its
nature architectonic, that is, it considers all knowledge as belonging to a possible system”
(“Die menschliche Vernunf ist ihrer Natur nach architektonisch, d. i., sie betrachtet alle
Erkenntnisse als gehörig zu einem möglichen System”); B 860, IV: 695: “Architectonic is the
art of systems” (“Architektonik ist der Kunst der Systeme”); “Te concept of freedom in
us . . . constitutes the keystone of the entire building of a system of pure, even of speculative
reason” (“Der Begriﬀ der Freiheit . . . macht nun den Schlussstein von dem ganzen Gebäude
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eines Systems der reinen, selbst der spekulativen,Vernunf aus”); B 27, IV: 64:“Transcendental
philosophy is the idea of a science, whose whole plan the Critique of Pure Reason should
sketch architectonically . . . from principles . . .with full guarantee of the completeness and
certainty of all the pieces which compose this building” (“Die Transcendental-Philosophie
ist die Idee einer Wissenschaf, wozu die Kritik der reninen Vernunf den ganzen Plan
architektonisch, d. i. aus Pprinzipien.”); Logik, A 143, VI: “In all sciences, but especially in
those of reason, the idea of the sciences is the general sketch or outline of it and thus the
circumference of all knowledge which belongs to it. Such an idea of the whole . . . is
architectonic” (“In allen Wissenschafen, vornehmlich denen der Vernunf, ist die Idee der
Wissenschaf der allgemeine Abriss oder Umriss derselben . . . Eine solche Idee des
Ganzen . . . ist architektonisch”), et al. Cf. Brodsky, “Architecture and Architectonics: Te Art
of Reason in Kant’s Critique,” Canon: Te Princeton Journal. Tematic Studies in Architecture
Vol. 3, 1988, pp. 103–118.

in the name of the commonsensical, the assumed rather than articulated

presupposition of “Gemeinsinn” ﬁrst named in the course of that analysis itself.
For in refusing to deﬁne “common sense” as “just” “common sense,” something
beyond, or before, but, in any case, independent of analysis in that it is, simply,
given, without relation to anything else, Kant distinguishes the “common sense” of
which he speaks from the purely verbal assertion of sense with which it may most
easily be confused, tautology.49 Tautology, verbal truncheon of all pretenders to the
mind’s supposed “throne,”50 compels the surrender of reason not to a power greater

49. On critical vs. “tautological” statements of “deﬁnition,” see Kant, Logik A 223, VI:
57n6. It was to avoid tautology, as well as its inverse, the inﬁnitely regressive, ofen ultimately
tautological results of a purely “analytic” parsing of statements, that G. E. Moore proposed a
philosophy of “Common Sense,” i.e., that philosophy concern itself with the non-
contradictory combination of “sense-data” and “belief ” under which “human beings”
operate, rather than a notion of “truth” regarding sensory and mental phenomena that it
cannot in fact “analyze.” Moore opens his inaugural lecture on common sense: “I wish, for a
particular reason, to begin in a particular way. Tere are, it seems to me, certain views about
the nature of the Universe which are held, now-a-days, by almost everybody. Tey are so
universally held that they may, I think, fairly be called the views of Common Sense . . . And
I wish to begin by describing these views, because it seems to me that what is most amazing
and most interesting about the views of many philosophers, is the way they go beyond or
positively contradict the views of Common Sense.” Te basis of “the views of Common
Sense,” on Moore’s account, is a sense-based ‘belief ’ in the “existence” of “material objects”
and “other human beings” rendering inconsequential the disciplinary distinction between
knowledge and “belief ” itself (“we believe that we really know all these things that I have
mentioned”), and substituting the notion of a contradiction-proof “common sense” for that
of analytic “truth:” “of the truth of these propositions, there seems to be no doubt, but as
to what is the correct analysis of them there seems to me to be the gravest doubt.” See
G. E. Moore, Some Main Problems in Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd.,
1953 [based on lectures delivered 1910–11]), p. 2; Selected Writings, ed. Tomas Baldwin
(London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 118–19, 133. For an excellent analysis of Moore’s reliance
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upon a distinction between “expression” and “analysis,” and linguistic “communication” and
“content” (or “referent”), see L. Susan Stebbing, Logical Positivism and Analysis (London:
Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 7ﬀ, 16–17, esp.; on Wittgenstein’s critique of Moore, see
Avrum Stroll, Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
pp. 53–54, esp.; on the “intentional solipsism” of Wittgenstein’s equation of every individual
language with a “private” symbolic system of “veriﬁable” “meaning,” and the “methodological
solipsism” of Carnap’s theory of content-free, inter-related “propositions” articulated by a
“universal” “physicalistic language in the formal mode,” see Stebbing, 18–25.
50. Cf. Kant, on the “death of philosophy” at the hands of those who, presenting
themselves as “superior” to analytic “discursive” labor, instead incant the words of ancients
they “[en]throne” out of their own “incapacity to think,” in “Of a Newly Elevated, Superior
Tone in Philosophy,” (“Von einem neuerdings erhobenen Ton in der Philosophie”), VI: 383,
389–90n (A 309, 412–13).

or essentially diﬀerent from itself – the unforseeable intellectual event, say, of “a

happy notion” (“ein glücklicher Einfall51) or “feeling” (“Gefühl”52) – but, rather, to
nothing and no power at all but that of stating itself. Equating truth with a willed
act of repetition purposed to usurp analysis, and as exactly opposite to the critical
clarity of Kant’s “discursive thinking”53 as any single predicative utterance can be,
tautology employs the form of predication so as to render any form a redundancy,
pretending to include within its limits, and so preclude, not merely all necessary but
all possible thought. Just as the age-old advertisment for self-asserting brutality,
“might makes right,” seeks to supplant all basis for the analyses of right and might
by dressing the two, disconnected concepts in nearly tautological garb – linking
them on no other basis than the pronouncement of a succinct narrative rhyme – so
positive logical tautology, an identity statement identifying only itself, represents
not self-evidence but the aim to enact, in language, total sovereignty over language,
over difference of any kind: the difference between thoughts and things, as between
thinking and tautology; the verbal assertion of nothing and destruction of
everything but the pure, context-shorn repetition of a word, “itself.” Stated so as to
abrogate every action of perception, along with the temporality all such acts require,
tautological statements are not the result but the reductio ad absurdum of “common
sense,” not its end but its termination. Tautology negates common sense by
presuming at once to be, to speak for, and to surpass it, to pass off its own purposeful
verbal redundancy as the supposed self-evidence and givenness of reality.

51. Kant, KrV, B XI–XII, II: 22. For a full discussion of Kant’s logically unsubordinated
notion of the “happy notion,” see Chap. One, this study.
52. On the origin of acts of judgment in “feeling,” see Section Four of this Chapter.
53. See Kant, “Of a Newly Elevated . . .,” VI: 380 (A 394). Pertinent to the particularity of
Kant’s undisclosed concept of “common sense” is its relation, as the basis of judgment, to our
capability for “discursive thought.” For an opposite view advocating a “non-discursive”
reliance on common sense “belief,” see Nicholas Rescher, Common-Sense: A New Look at an
Old Philosophical Tradition (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2005), p. 32: “A
common-sense belief. . . is a nondiscursive and nonreﬂective belief of which one is certain –
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and as reasonably certain – as one can be of anything.” While, according to Rescher, beliefs
may be based in inarticulate common sense, it is the “fact” of “linguistic communication”
that oﬀers, Rescher also argues, the best evidence of the workings of “common sense:” “Te
fact that everyday linguistic communication is geared to the ordinary course of things as we
generally experience it means that our standard means for verbal communication are
intimately geared to our common-sense view of the world and its ways. Linguistic
standardism and common-sense thinking are opposite sides of one selfsame coin” (118).
While Rescher’s argument thus becomes involved in the kind of circular reasoning,
assuming “common” “standards of judgment,” (93) that Kant’s enigmatic reference to
“common sense” avoids, his insight into the fundamental interrelation of “prosaic”
“communication” and “common sense” also entails one of the most incisive critiques
currently available of the philosophical triviality and “disconnected[ness]” of “possible
world” and “counterfactual” “methodology[ies]” (see pp. 228–235).

Rather than deﬁne “common sense” as itself self-evident, a sense deﬁnable by

and as tautology, Kant instead relates it, without explicating it, to an analytic
definition of judgment, and thus to the very possibility of specifically critical (or
traditionally anti-“commonsensical”) thought. Surprising in that it occurs at all, let
alone in the voice of the first person, and describing “common sense” to be as
central to the Critique as its own demonstration, let alone definition in the terms
delimited by the Critique, must remain inconclusive, what Kant’s reference to
“common sense” demonstrates is that “common sense” could never be sufficiently
defined as something entitled common sense – another dumb redundancy,
dependent, like all tautology, upon its own enforced echo, the appropriation within
it, in the guise of merely being “itself,” of all that is not it, just as every echo
dissembles the Narcissus at its source. For, if stated instead as a tautological “given,”
“common sense” would preclude all it does not already include as “given,” every
statement that differs from or refers to something other than its own formal self-
mirroring, including, most significantly, the fact of its own essential vacuity.
Like every tautology asserted as a statement referring only and sufficiently to
“itself,” – a statement, in short, whose predicate “is” its subject – “common sense”
defined as common sense could do nothing but assert successive assertions of its
own success; like every tautology, its truest – most effective and empty – translation
is the familiar refrain of all faits accomplis, “nothing succeeds like success.” Kant’s
reference to “common sense,” by contrast, succeeds in remaking “common sense” –
most commonly cited “authority” of anti-intellectual tautology – into a singular
object of intellectual inquiry by stating, in unsubordinated addition to it, what that
reference does not contain, i.e., an adequate account of what “common sense” is.54

54. As developed in the present discussion, “common sense” arises in Kant not in
reference to itself but in relation to, and as the very “condition” of linguistic utterances that,
communicable to and articulable by “everyone,” constitute acts of judgment by a subject. Cf.
Lynd Forguson’s very diﬀerent view, espoused in Common Sense (London: Routledge, 1989),
that “common sense realism,” predicated on shared “beliefs” and independent of “information”
and “opinion,” is instead a properly “metaphysical” aspect of mind: “[c]ommon-sense realism
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deserves to be called a metaphysical view in virtue of the fact that it is an attempt to explain
why our conscious experiences are as they are. It deserves to be called a version of realism in
virtue of the specific type of explanation it gives: our experiences are as they are because we
are related through sense perception and thought to a world which is external to and
independent of the experienes we have of it” (15). Following Reid and Moore, Forguson
furthermore takes direct issue with Davidson’s very different view of a necessary reciprocity
between “common-sense beliefs” and “linguistic interpretation” and “concept[s],” one
suggestive of the central role of the commonality of language within “common sense” itself:
“[a]ccording to Davidson, in order to interpret the utterances of others as meaningful
speech, it is necessary to construe those utterances as expressing their beliefs and
intentions . . . To get the interpretative enterprise off the ground . . ., Davidson argues that we
must not only assume that they say what they believe, but that most of what they believe
actually is true by our own lights” (168); “Davidson’s theory of interpretation is essentially a

At the close of the Fourth (and final) Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful
(Critique of Judgment § 22), Kant acknowledges the failure of his analysis of
judgment to account fully for itself, the nonconformity of the formative capability –
or, as he calls it, “faculty” (“Vermögen”) – of “common sense” with the formality of
the analysis that requires it, including the division of our mental abilities into
“faculties” themselves. Unlike reason, imagination, and understanding, the
principle faculties or capabilities of the mind whose changing relations to each
other across the tripartite, architectonic structure of his Critique Kant delineates;
and unlike the different capacities of experience primarily associated with these,
i.e., logic, sensation, and representation, respectively, “common sense” neither has
nor could have any clearly defined status or function, and so can be subordinated
to neither the “real” and “practical” nor “hypothetical” and “theoretical” conditions,
of action and knowledge, respectively, that are analyzed in the Critique.55 Further
questioning “whether” such a “constitutive principle of the possibility of experience”
as “common sense” even “in fact exists,” and “judgments of taste are thus original
and natural,” or “whether” the “possibility” of “common sense,” of a sense ascribed
by each to all, is “the idea” of a faculty whose “artificial” “acqui[sition]” and
“regulation” of experience is “require[d]” by a “higher principle of reason” instead –
in short, whether common sense is “original” or is a posteriori to “experience”
itself – Kant leaves that fundamental question, and with it, the very credibility of
“common sense,” undecided. With the negative assertion that he has neither the
“ability” nor “desire” to answer it “for now,” and positive demurral of any logical
need to do so, the last paragraph of Section 22 and the entire series of deductive
Moments56 comprising Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful ends:

theory of linguistic interpretation, whereas what I have been arguing is that common sense
is (in part) a theory of interpretation of our behavior in general, not just linguistic behavior”
(171). While Forguson’s view, that we may identify “common-sense realism” in such
“languageless creatures” as “prelinguistic infants” and “animals” with whom we share no
linguistically formed “concepts,” begs the question of how such a necessarily unilateral
attribution could be classiﬁed as “common sense,” Davidson’s view of linguistically grounded
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“beliefs” certainly comes closest to Kant’s signal grounding of “judgment,” rather than belief,
in linguistically enacted “common sense” (170–71).
55. See Kant, KrV, B XXII–XXV, Logik, A 222, VI: 576.
56. Tese “moments” employ the four classical analytic “categories” (quality, quantity,
relation, and modality), traditional since Aristotle, to describe the beautiful, pace Aristotle,
as a universally affective dynamic form and event. Kant’s categorical analysis thus constructs
something that cannot be identified apart from its construction, i.e., the definition of an
action whose identity, unlike that of a given object, cannot be separated from the experience-
based “feeling” and “presupposed” “condition” of “common sense,” necessary condition of
the articulate form it takes. Just as the idealist and prescriptive conceptions of neo-Platonic
and neo-classical aesthetic theory before Kant included neither subjective “feeling” nor
inter-subjective “judgment” in their consideration of the beautiful, so Kant’s employment of
the kind of classical logical exposition never before related to aesthetic experience aimed

Whether there ‘is’ [or ‘would be:’ gebe] in fact such a common sense as a
constitutive principle of the possibility of experience, or whether a yet higher
principle of reason only ‘makes’ [mache] producing a common sense with higher
aims into a regulative principle for us; whether taste ‘is’ [sei] an original and
natural faculty or only the idea of an artificial one to be acquired, so that a
judgment of taste, with its presumption of general determination, ‘is’ in fact only
a demand of reason that such a unanimity in the mode of sense be brought forth;
and whether the ought, i.e., the objective necessity of the confluence of the
feeling of any one man with the particular one of every other man only ‘signifies’
the possibility of arriving at this agreement, and judgment of taste only exhibits
an example of the application of this principle: this we here neither want nor are
able to investigate as of yet, but rather propose now only to break down the
faculty of taste into its elements and unite them finally within the idea of a
common sense.
[Ob in der Tat einen solchen Gemeinsinn, als konstitutives Prinzip der
Möglichkeit der Erfahrung gebe, oder ein noch höheres Prinzip der Vernunf es
uns nur zum regulativen Prinzip mache, allerest einen Gemeinsinn zu höhern
Zwecken in uns hervorzubringen; ob also Geschmack ein ursprüngliches und
Natürliches, oder nur die Idee von einem noch zu erwerbenden und künstlichen
Vermögen sei, so dass ein Geschmacksurteil, mit seiner Zumutung einer
allgemeinen Bestimmung, in der Tat nur eine Vernunfforderung sei, eine solch
Einhelligkeit der Sinnesart hervorzubringen, und das Sollen, d. i., die objective
Notwendigkeit des Zusammenfliessens des Gefühls von jedermann mit jedes
Seinem besondern, nur die Möglichkeit, hierin einträchtig zu werden, bedeute,
und das Geschmacksurteil nur von Anwendung diese Prinzips ein Beispiel
aufstelle: das wollen und können wir hier noch nicht untersuchen, sondern
haben vor jetzt nur das Geschmacksvermögen in seine Elemente aufzulösen,
und sie zuletzt in der Idee eines Gemeinsinns zu vereinigen.57]

Te investigation of its own nature signaled as wanting and that lack, as one
that Kant himself does not even wish to attempt to repair as of yet, “common sense”
names whatever it is that makes judgment a general capacity or faculty, rather than
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precisely at excluding non-demonstrable imputations to the workings of what he calls

“common sense.” Immediately disorienting in eﬀect, Kant’s introduction of logical analytic
methods into an investigation of subjective experience may be the single most far-reaching
theoretical innovation eﬀected in general by the Tird Critique. It is fair to say that, without
Kant’s analytic approach to the subjective experience of the beautiful and the sublime, not
only Freud’s analysis of the psyche according to the “principles” of “pleasure” and “pain,” but
the systematic analysis, by Hegel and Marx, of history, society, language, and value – shared
experiences of the subject ungrounded and unreferrable in any particular subject or
object – appear, in retrospect, unthinkable.
57. See Kant, KU , B 68, X: 159–60.

individually contingent operation of taste, disposition or opinion, in Kant. A

universal subjective capacity that renders possible the linking of the “pure”
“practical reason” of free (or moral) action in the Second Critique with the
“practical” and applied nature of “pure (or theoretical] reason” in the First,
judgment is not another mode of reason introduced to supplement those between
which it mediates. Considered in terms of the modalities of reason Kant describes,
judgment neither “legislates” the activity of the mind nor conforms to intellectual
“laws,” whether these are logical, phenomenal-perceptual and causal, or moral,
noumenal and free. Its operation depends instead on an ability whose very
normativity renders it immediately at odds with the project of critique.58 Small
wonder, then, that Kant’s unadumbrated introduction of “common sense,” an
appeal unprecedented and unprepared for in the analytic sequence preceding it,
has attracted relatively little scrutiny in the separate developments of philosophy
and aesthetic theory ever since,59 and, with one important exception, remains

58. In “Kingston, Kant, and Common Sense,” Cambridge Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 3
(1995): 40–55, anthropologist of “cosmopolitanism” Huon Wardle instead takes just such a
critically productive view of Kant’s distinctive identiﬁcation of common sense as a “faculty,”
opposing it to the notion of an underlying if “amorphous and sluggishly moving body of
‘folk knowledge’ ” described by such dissimilar theorists as Geertz and Gramsci, and way out
of the theoretically tautological “process by which anthropology chases its own tail
historiographically” (44, 54). For Wardle, Kant’s “common sense” indicates one of “the
capabilities individuals display in dealing with an unbounded social context, rather than
with an assumed social homogeneity against which individuals are then explained” (42). See
also Wardle, “Cosmopolitics and Common Sense,” Open Anthropology Cooperative,
Working Papers Series No.1, ISSN 2045–57[3 [online] (Oct. 4, 1999), on Kant’s “common
sense” in relation to the opposing – cosmopolitan and “organistic” – anthropologies of
Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour.
59. See, for example, the passing reference to “common sense” in relation to “judgment”
in Susan Meld Shell’s exhaustive analysis of epigenetic, organistic, hypochondriacal and
other bodily themes in Kant, in Te Embodiment of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago
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Press, 1996), p. 208. See also the brief, initial definition of “common sense” as “a kind of
feeling, namely the feeling of a certain or, as it were, instinctively correct choice” and its
tautological restatement as “a feeling of sensus communis” rather than “obscure conceptuality”
in Jan Kulenkampff ’s careful analysis of the relation between aesthetic judgment and
rationality, Kants Logik des aesthetischen Urteils (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1978), p. 99.
Te obscurity of its conception is the main conclusion of Brent Kalar’s discussion of
“common sense,” in his generally excellent analysis, Te Demands of Taste in Kant’s Aesthetics
(London: Continuum, 2006) – “[a]dmittedly, the argument is not as clear and detailed as
one might like” (139) – in which the “ ‘effect arising from the free play of the cognitive
powers’ ” (KU , Section 20) that Kant identifies with “common sense” is redefined as “none
other than pleasure” itself, and Kant’s specifically discursive notion of “universal
communicability” (Kant, KU , B 66, X:158) is replaced by one of “universal validity” (138,
140). Christian Helmut Wenzel’s Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and

overlooked – despite Kant’s own unequivocal statement of its “necessity” –

by efforts to gain further insight into both the internal conditions and the
philosophical ramifications of the Critique itself.60 Nor, has it been invoked to
play any but a negative role in analyses devoted specifically to re-evaluating

Problems (London: Blackwell, 2005) oﬀers a helpful review of philosophical uses of

“common sense” before Kant, attempts to distinguish the term from sensus communis, and,
concludes, like Kalar, by stressing its identity as an “effect of free play,” before going on to
associate that effect, as it is pointedly not associated by Kant, both with the pseudo-scientific
view, inherited from the ancient Greeks (see n. 39, this Section, this Chapter), of “an inner
sense or faculty that unites our five senses,” and the moral “duty to develop a taste for beauty”
(see pp. 80–85 esp.). By contrast, in Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), Paul Guyer begs the question of what, if anything, the mention of
“common sense” is doing in the Tird Critique, let alone at its center, concluding, simply,
that its “basic meaning. . .for Kant is. . .the faculty of taste itself ” (405 n.42). For an excellent
critique of Guyer’s approach to the Tird Critique, and Kant in general, as a case of mistaken
identity, in which the central “revolution in mode of thought” constituted by Kant’s founding
“hypothesis” – of a capacity for logically interrelated, exclusively phenomenal cognition
based in a priori syntheses of empirical experience, and of the newly defined freedoms of
action enabled by that very delimitation (the “pure” or nonphenomenal practice of “moral”
“reason” or “freedom,” and the specifically linguistic practice of an aesthetic “power of
judgment” by subjects who “feel themselves free” in feeling “pleasure” or “displeasure” before
an unknown object) – is instead replaced by the same Humean, empiricist notions of
predictability and agreement against which Kant was writing in the first place, see Kalar,
pp. 19–36; on Kant’s “revolution” in metaphysics see Chapter One, this study.
60. Te salient exception to this history of near neglect is Arendt’s interpretation of
‘common sense’ as the basis of Kant’s theory of political sensus communis, in Lectures on
Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
While Arendt’s recognition of the critical function of “common sense” in Kant speaks to her
distinctive ability to read philosophy meaningfully, i.e., with regard to the conditions,
practices and consequences defining specifically human activity, her expansive translation
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of Kant’s “common sense” to theory of the polis effectively displaces the effectivity of its
situation, status, or “standing” within the Critique itself. A direct attempt to build upon
Arendt by returning Kant’s openly incomplete account of “common sense” to its relation to
the beautiful is offered in Anthony Cascardi’s Consequences of Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999); see esp. pp. 80–86, 161–64. Acknowledging Adorno’s
skirting of the singularity of “common sense” in Kant (77, 83) as well as Arendt’s important
“vacilat[ion]” on the “aporia” or logical circle it presents, i.e., the fact that in order to be
“communicable” aesthetic judgment must rely on the same “enlarged mentality” that
“communicability” is supposed to supply (85), Cascardi refers the unprecedented quality of
Kant’s “common sense” to our very capability for cognizing precedence, or “memory” (85).
Implicitly recalling Plato’s theory of the recollection (anamnesis) of the Beautiful, Cascardi
describes “common sense” as a “lost” “knowledge” that we can “remember,” and concludes:
“Our participation in judgments that refer to this ‘common sense’ incites the memory of a

and resuscitating the purport and philosophy of “common sense.”61 By the same
token, the questioning of Kant’s own judgment, in invoking “common sense” as a
ﬁrst “principle” without demonstrable origin, would demonstrate nothing so much
as a failure to understand the critical signiﬁcance of the act such questions serve to
dismiss.62 Rather than subordinate it to the guiding critical “hypothesis” clearly
stated in the Second Preface to the First Critique,63 Kant raises a series of
incontrovertible questions (“whether . . . or whether . . .” [ob . . . oder 64]) regarding
the nature of this “common” critical capability – a capability and not a content; a
“possibility” (“Möglichkeit”) and not a logical necessity or rule – not only refusing
thereby to comprehend “common sense” under the rule of any prior, logical or
hypothetical “principle” whatsoever, but implying in addition that, whether

knowledge that was itself once conceived as pleasurable” (85–86). While the addition of a
formerly “pleasurable” “knowledge” to Kant’s theory of our immediate capability for
“common sense” effectively mitigates the division between cognition and judgment,
otherwise acknowledged by Cascardi (75–79), at the basis of the Tird Critique, Cascardi’s
commentary effectively brings into relief our sense of what is not discursively presented to
conception in Kant’s positively ungrounded reference to “common sense.”
61. Tis includes the full spectrum of positive and negative evaluations of “common
sense” philosophies. Contrast, for example, the argument for common sense and against
Kant (and “neo-Kantians”) in Boulter, Rediscovery, (esp. pp. xi, 98–117) with the indictment
of both Kant and all appeals to common sense, considered complicit with “disciplinary”
stagings of “humiliation,” in Paul Saurette, Te Kantian Imperative: Humiliation, Common
Sense, Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 12–14 esp. Blurring the strict
delimitation of the discussion of “common sense” within the Tird Critique as well as the
separation underscored within it between the First and Tird Critiques, Saurette conflates
“common sense” with “common sense recognition,” the lattter defined as a “crucial strategy
of philosophical persuasion” aimed at convincing us “we all share certain values or claims
that we all recognize” without submitting these to “reasoned justification” (pp. 46–47). Te
persistence of this “subterranean Kantian logic” in contemporary philosophy is evident,
Saurette argues, in the implicit recourse to “common sense” made by “Rawls, Habermas,
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Taylor, and many others” (p. 11, 47–48).

62. See Saurette, Te Kantian Imperative.
63. Kant, KrV B XVI, III: 25: “Till now we assumed that all our knowledge must orient
itself in accordance with objects; but all attempts to discern something about them a priori
through concepts, came through this presupposition to nothing. Let us then try for once the
experiment of seeing whether we wouldn’t get further in the tasks of metaphysics in
assuming objects must orient themselves according to our knowledge . . .” (“Bisher nahm
man an, alle unsere Erkenntnis müsse sich nach den Gegenständen richten’ aber alle
Versuche, über sie a priori etwas durch Begriﬀe auszumachen, wodurch unsere Erkenntnis
erweitert würde, gingen unter dieser Voraussetzung zu nichte. Man versuche es daher
einmal, ob wir nicht in den Aufgaben der Metaphysik damit besser fortkommen, dass wir
annehmen, die Gegenstände müssen sich nach unserem Erkenntnis richten . . .”).
64. See n. 57, this Chapter.

dismissive, skeptical or simply unquestioning, failures to reﬂect critically on the

significance of “common sense” will obscure the necessity of its effectivity both
within the Critique and, on its analysis, in ourselves. Still, little is more
understandable (if in a distinctly non-Kantian sense) than such acts of distortion
or neglect, for the very term, “common sense,” contradicts any active, uncommon
interest in its regard. It is the very prosaic, unexceptional, indeed, apparently
negligible assumption of a common turn of mind with neither known nor even
knowable content – of some capacity shared, in the undergoing of a certain kind
of experience, by one with all – that has made the capability Kant defined as the
most important to judgment, and thus to the whole “building” of the Critique, also
appear the weakest in his architectonic design: a mere commonplace that, not
submitted, like other social conventions (including “taste” itself) to critique, is
made to do too much with too little basis or reason. An appeal to “common sense” –
verbal last resort and refuge from analysis of epistemological and cultural
chauvinists alike – would indeed appear most out of place in Kant, whose powers
of analytic scrutiny and comprehensive originality made his multi-faceted Critique
self-critical like no other philosophical work before it, a theory which every theory
of knowledge, aesthetics, or moral action has had to consider since.
Taken alone, in the way it is commonly asserted, “common sense” is indeed a
term for what does, or should, “go without saying,” an ability unreflectively enacted
and relied upon by every practically reasonable mind.65 It boasts no particular

65. Tis is the aspect of “common sense” emphasized by Sophia Rosenfeld in her own
“commonsensical,” conspicuously inaccurate summary of Kant’s analytic of judgment, in
Common Sense. A Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 223:
“Tough judgments of taste are perforce subjective, they always presuppose and refer to an
ideal of universal assent, the possibility, if not the fact, of consensus among all. Sensus
communis is ultimately the name that Kant gives to this faculty of judgment that leads us,
without reﬂection, to make this comparison or to think from a universal standpoint” (223).
Presenting “common sense” in general as both a necessity and evil of political life in a
democracy, Rosenfeld’s book typiﬁes the circular structure of the “commonsensical” view of
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“common sense” that it describes (i.e., we agree to agree that we agree . . .), giving short shrif
to the problems raised by less opportunistic engagements with the term, and including
Arendt alongside Ronald Reagan in its brief concluding compilation of recent examples of
its invocation (254–55). Cf. the compelling critique of commonsensical discussions of
“common sense,” of the very kind Kant similarly critiqued in so-called “Common Sense
Philosophy,” in Dean Wolfe Manders, Te Hegemony of Common Sense. Wisdom and
Mystification in Everyday Life (New York: Lang, 2006): “Relying on common sense wisdom
in everyday life does grave injury to a specific and centrally human chatacteristic: the
potentiality for critical thought. Te hegemony of pragmatic common sense praxis is
coextensive with ‘anti-intellectual’ tendencies that exist, in varying degrees, through the
working population. Under the sway of common sense rationality, individuals’ ability to
entertain general political or social ideas in their own right, outside of their immediate,
linear, instrumental context, becomes increasingly difficult, and ofen undesirable. Te

capacities or components but its own, a self-suﬃciency that, “knowing” – like a

practiced physical motion – what it is about, renders any additional effort of critical
analysis or introspection superfluous, if not injurious, to its execution. Tis would
appear true of Kant’s provocatively self-critical invocation of the term as well, his
stated refusal to attempt to answer just such a question, regarding the existence and
origin of this particular “faculty,” as he directly proposes himself, the pronounced
disengagement from further speculation with which his discussion of this
“presupposed” faculty comes to an end: “this we neither can nor want to investigate
here as of yet” (“das wollen und können wir hier noch nicht untersuchen”).66
Yet, unlike conventional gestures toward self-evidence, Kant’s appeal to a
“faculty” he calls “common sense” is part of the final step of a categorical analysis
said to have depended, in its every preceding step, upon it. And unlike most appeals
to “common sense,” Kant’s serves rather than impedes the development of a course
of critical reflection. Here “common sense” – less defined than it is lef undescribed
by its broad identification as “effect of the free play of our powers of cognition” – is
introduced in response to an exacting formal examination of the felt intangibles of
judgment and aesthetic experience in general: acts and experiences that, while
unmistakably specific, have defied definition at least since Plato’s isolation of truth
and beauty, conceived as eternal “Ideas,” from the changing manifestations of
mimesis. Tus, before dismissing its reference to “common sense” as a retreat from
critical reason into banality, it is to the Analytik – out of whose positive steps the
“necessary” but no less negative “condition” (“notwendige Bedingung”) and
“undefined norm” (“unbestimmte Norm”) of “common sense” are shaped – that we
must look if we are to make sense of it rather than read past it, confusing “common
sense” with the “hollow” (“schal”), “confident” (“getrost”) notion of “common
human understanding” Kant criticizes, or mistaking it for the disproof of the entire
preceding analytic procedure which it underpins.67 For if Kant’s invocation of

intellectual possibilities and powers of critical self and historical reﬂection atrophy. . .‘what
you don’t know can’t hurt you’ ” (90–91). Manders also importantly underscores the linguistic
basis of “common sense,” without which any critique of “false consciousness”– of the kind
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Hegel initiated within philosophy and Marx, Lukács, Lefebvre, and Gramsci brought to bear
upon all social forms – would be as unthinkable as judgment would be to Kant (see esp.
pp. 177–81). Rather than simply accept as true or dismiss as false the truisms oﬀered by
“such common sense phrases as. . .‘time is money’,” “ ‘time and tides wait for no man’,”
Manders observes that the “prosaic false consciousness” of “American common sense”
contains within its statements the “slumbering seeds of its own transcendence:” that, any
“sense” that is “common” is not only, necessarily, a linguistic phenomenon but that, as such, it
also provides the basis for its own critical – philosophical, political, and historical – analysis,
of the very kind Rosenfeld’s incongruously ipso facto “political history” does not provide.
66. See n. 57, this Chapter.
67. For Kant’s description of his distinctive use of the phrase “Gemeinsinn” as
“notwendige Bedingung” (“necessary condition”) and “unbestimmte Norm“ (“undetermined
norm”), see Kant, KU B 66, 68, X: 158, 159. For his stark critique in the Prolegomena of

“common sense” highlights a banality, it does so consciously, indicating that, just as

it participates in judgment, the distinctive noncommonsensical faculty he is here
calling “common sense” is an intellectual “eﬀect” in which we all participate, no less
than a “condition” of judgment on which, whether or not analytically inclined, we
all unconditionally, if inexplicably, rely.68

complacent, conventionally “commonsensical” dismissals not of his own Critique but, on

the contrary, of the radical skepticism of Hume that, on his own account in the Prolegomena,
occasioned his Critique, see the following note.
68. For Kant’s explicit distinction between “common sense” and a “common
understanding” based instead not in immediate “feeling” but in cognitively predetermined
“concepts,” see KU , B 65, X: 157. For his refutation of the easy assumption of a “common
human understanding,” in important contrast to his own foundation of judgment on an
undemonstrable “common sense,” see his Prolegomena A 11–12, Werkausgabe, VI: 117–18, in
which he describes the ﬂawed arguments against Hume of his contemporaries’ as follows:
“Te opponents of the famous man would have had to delve deeply into the nature of reason
insofar as it has to do only with pure thinking in order to satisfy their task, which, however,
they were unﬁtted to do. Tus they discovered a more convenient means of doing so without
spiting all insight, namely the invocation of common human understanding” (“Die Gegner
des berühmten Mannes hätten aber, um der Augabe ein Genüge zu tun, sehr tief in die Natur
der Vernunf, so fern sie bloss mit reinem Denken beschäfigt ist, hineindringen müssen,
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welches ihnen ungelegen war. Sie erfanden daher ein bequemeres Mittel, ohne alle Einsicht
trotzig zu tun, nämlich, die Berufung auf den gemeinen Menschenverstand”). Refusing to
take for granted such a “convenient means” of circumventing careful thought, and
representing the recourse to “calling upon common human understanding” as nothing more
than a “subtle invention of modern times,” one deceptively permitting “the hollowest
enthusiasts to affiliate confidently with exacting minds,” Kant cautions that, “while there is
still even a small remainder of insight, one will do well to prevent oneself from grasping at
this emergency assistance,” whose own “appellation,” he concludes, is “nothing other” than a
“calling upon the judgment of the herd” (“sich auf den gemeinen Menschenverstand zu
berufen, das ist eine von den subtilen Erfindungen neuerer Zeiten, dabei es der schalste
Schwätzer mit dem gründlichsten Köpfe getrost aufnehmen. . . So lange aber noch ein
kleiner Rest von Einsicht da ist, wird man sich wohl hüten, diese Nothülfe zu ergreifen. . .diese
Appellation nichts anders, als eine Berufung auf das Urteil der Menge”).

2. “Technique”
Instead of attempting to “investigate” directly – as Kant explicitly refuses to do –
the nature of that ‘faculty’ upon which, he no less expressly states, his theory of
judgment rests, it may be more useful to consider ‘common sense’ indirectly, in
comparison with another moment in the composition of the Critique of Judgment
in which Kant carries out just such an investigation with regard to a notion he
admits he had employed without sufficient definition in a previous work. Kant’s
stated negation of his own ability or desire to define the “real” (“wirklich”),
“unconditional necessity” of “common sense” to judgment – whether such a shared
“sense” is “natural” or “artificial,” i.e., owing to “experience” or to “reason” alone –
stands in direct contrast with a passage from an early draf of the Tird Critique in
which Kant notes his own earlier failure to define another, similarly key concept,
and, with the assistance of a distinction provided by his theory of judgment,
proceeds to remedy that lack. Te logical circle that Kant’s openly stated analytic
reliance upon “common sense” presents – its necessary participation in both the a
priori principles and active formation of judgment – has its precedent in a similarly
difficult logical “ambiguity” (“Zweideutigkeit”69) that Kant now not only
acknowledges but goes on to clarify by way of an important conceptual distinction
extending to his analysis of aesthetic judgment as well.
In the first version of his Introduction to the Tird Critique, Kant points to
what he calls a logical and semantic “mistake” (“Fehler”) committed in his writing
on moral action, the lexical conflation of the “pragmatic” “imperatives” of merely
instrumental acts and those of a “pure” or “really” “practical reason.”70 According to
Kant, the critical distinction he had made, between “really” moral and merely
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instrumentally “skillful” or “clever” [“geschickt”]) practices, brought with it a

semantic “contradiction” in the general use of the word “practical,” one that had
been only inadequately resolved, Kant goes on to reflect, by his earlier qualification
of the “imperatives” of mere “skillfulness” (or “cleverness” [“Geschicklichkeit”]) as
“problematic” (“problematisch”71).
In the course, then, of introducing an analysis not of “free” “moral” action but of
the aesthetic “judgment” of “freely delineated” objects, Kant is first able to
distinguish what he calls “technical imperatives,” those of an artfulness employed

69. Kant, KU , X: 13; the speciﬁc writing concerned is the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik
der Sitten.
70. Kant, KU , X: 14 (emphases in text).
71. See n. 75.

toward achieving personal aims, from those whose rules determine their aims to
begin with, making the cart (reason’s ”real, practical aim”), thereby, not so much
precede as itself be positively unimaginable without the horse (the possibility of
“action” in the “free,” “moral sense”). Much like the double – foundational and
specifically applied – use judgment makes of “common sense,” the distinct
“imperatives” of moral action and “skill” are both “practical.” Yet, since “free,” moral
actions alone define the end they aim to achieve, the critical difference between
them and all other engagements in praxis requires a further division of the general
notion of the “practical” into two, distinct and disambiguated terms, itself and
another that, contrasting with, refines it. Kant observes:

Only those [practical principles] which represent the determination of an action

directly, i.e., merely through the presentation of their form (according to general
laws), without respect to the means through which an object is to be eﬀected, can
and must have their proper principles (in the idea of freedom) . . . In view of the
concern for a certain ambiguity [of terms], all other principles of exercise, to
which science may adhere, can be called technical instead of practical. For they
belong to the art of bringing into being whatever it is one wishes there to be, that
which can only ever be a mere consequence and no self-sustaining part of any
kind of directive in a fully articulated theory. In this way all prescriptions of
skillfulness belong to technique (or “technology:” “die Technik”)* and therewith
to the theoretical knowledge of nature as consequence [rather than basis]
thereof. From now on, however, we will also use the expression, technique, on the
occasions when objects of nature are merely judged solely as if their possibility
were based in art (or “artiﬁce:” “sich auf die Kunst gründe”) . . ..
[Nur die, welche direkt die Bestimmung einer Handlung, bloss durch die
Vorstellung ihrer Form (nach Gesetzen überhaupt), ohne Rücksicht auf die
Mittel des dadurch zu bewirkenden Objekts, als notwendig darstellen, können
und müssen ihre eigentümliche Prinzipien (in der Idee der Freiheit) haben . . .
Alle übrige Sätze der Ausübung, an welche Wissenschaf sie sich auch immer
anschliessen mögen, können, wenn man etwa Zweideutigkeit besorgt, statt
praktischer technische Sätze heissen. Denn sie gehören zur Kunst, das zu stande
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zu bringen, wovon man will, dass es sein soll, die, bei einer vollständigen Teorie,
jederzeit eine blosse Folgerung und kein für sich bestehender Teil irgend einer
Art von Anweisung ist. Auf solche Weisen gehören alle Vorschrifen der
Geschicklichkeit zur Technik* und mithin zur theoretischen Kenntnis der Natur
als Folgerung derselben. Wir werden uns aber künfig des Ausdrucks der Technik
auch bedienen, wo Gegenstände der Natur bisweilen bloss nur so beurteilt
werden, als ob ihre Möglichkeit sich auf Kunst gründe . . .72]

As the appearance of the word “art” (or “artiﬁce:” “Kunst”) in the second
paragraph of this passage indicates, Kant here employs the deﬁnitions of “technique”

72. Kant, KU , X:13–14 (emphasis in text).

and “technical” he now introduces to clarify a formerly “ambiguous” use of the

term, “practical,” thereby distinguishing moral actions and “principles” (“Sätze”)
from those defined only by their application of “skill” to “bring into being whatever
one wants,” in order to make another critical, unambiguous distinction, now in his
theory of the aesthetic. For the Tird Critique will base acts of “judgment” not on
the “technical” “skillfulness” embodied by any particular artistic practice, but on the
“free play” of mental powers, and resulting “pleasure,” occasioned by the perception
of any either man-made or natural object. In terms that have remained essentially
unchanged in the discourses of art history and criticism ever since, Kant extrapolates
from a lexical distinction between “free” and “skillful” “practice” that, by his own
account, he had failed to make in attempting to define the basis of moral action, so
as clearly to distinguish “aesthetic judgment[s]” from considerations of “objects”
“as if their possibility were based on art [or artifice]” alone. Like the skills brought
to bear on the execution of a personal aim, “prescriptions” (“Vorschrife”) of
“skillfulness” (“Geschicklichkeit”) “belong,” Kant specifies, not to the aesthetic but
“to technology” (“gehören . . . zur Technik”), the expedient “means” (“Mittel”) of
“bringing about” (“bewirk[en]”) an “already known” “aim” or goal. Unlike “actions”
whose “determination” “present[s] their form” (“Vorstellung ihrer Form”) as
“hav[ing] its proper principles (in the idea of freedom),” and thus as “necessary”
(“nötig”) in a critical rather than merely expedient sense, technical acts that work
to “bring into being whatever one wishes there should be” find their sole
determination in the satisfaction of a personal desire or will. Most significantly for
Kant’s entire critical system, the failure to distinguish aesthetic from merely
technical practices will affect the central mediating role of judgment itself. For
those who confuse the aesthetic with the technologically perfected will similarly
confuse all aesthetic activities with the achievement of means to an end, “judg[ing]
[such acts] as if their possibility were merely based on art” rather than any more
fundamental or impersonal aim in which their judgment would also take part.
Tus, while aesthetic judgment may arise in response to objects produced by a
skillful application of technology, judgment itself is never based in a recognition of
technical ability alone. Were this not the case, judgment would cease to be
“universally” subjective, which is to say, fully indifferent to the identity of its objects,
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and nature itself would be viewed analogously as the merely technical product of
perfected skill. Just as “technical imperatives” take as their (tautological) aim the
achievement of personally directed, purely technical gains, the equation of the
bases of aesthetic judgment in the subject with successful instantiations of techne
in objects would likewise objectify, and thereby annul, our experience of sublimity,
reducing nature itself to the workings of an omnipotent technician whose own
causal logic we could explicate, replicate, manipulate and deviate, based on
contingent, delimited aims, in turn – with the manifestly disastrous results that the
very contradiction, between self-determining natural processes and techne
developed to abet non-natural, human aims, inevitably entails.
Still, while distinguishing between the aesthetic and the “technical,” as between
the “technical” and the (real and moral) “practical,” Kant concedes that “technical”
activities “may” indeed follow “practical rules,” just as all acts of “reason” need not

be “immediately legislative:” that the elaboration of applied, or “technically

practical” rules requires analytic reason as well.73 Yet, aesthetic judgment judges
neither the effectiveness of such rules, in their ensemble as a “technology”
(“Technik”), nor the specific “technique” required for their skilled application. For,
to base judgment upon technical dexterity would be to disable the bases of
judgment itself, rendering acts of judgment indiscernible from conceptual
cognitions and limiting the objects of judgment to products of perceivable
technical artistry or value while willfully ignoring the arbitrary, individual
purposes technology may be employed to serve.
Yet, even more pernicious than its limitation of the objects of aesthetic
experience would be the expansion of techne to the moral realm, our relationship
to other subjects. Te subordination of the power of judgment to an admiration of
skill alone, Kant observes, would inevitably extend the rule of dexterity from the
production of inanimate objects to the manipulation of “free human beings” as if
they were inanimate objects, just as it would anthropomorphize nonhuman objects
into “skilled” subjects, attributing to nature a “technical” “art,” rather than causality,
of its own.74 Finally, the confusion of technical with either moral or aesthetic
principles would have the further, logically contradictory effect of placing
admiration in contradiction with the moral, or “real.” Eradicating all distinction
between aesthetic and applied perception as between disinterested and self-
interested pleasure, it must, in sum, define freedom and non-freedom to be not in
contradiction but identical: intellectually as well as experientially, subjectively and
objectively, one and the same.
It is in making, then, this fundamental distinction between a fully “practical” (or
moral) use of reason and a merely applied, “technical,” skillful, or artful one, that
Kant interjects the following note in correction of the “error” he had made in an
earlier work:

*Here is the place to improve upon an error that I committed in the Foundation
of the Metaphysic of Morals. For, afer I said that the imperatives of skillfulness
would only command possible, which is to say, problematic, aims, so I called the
same practical prescriptions problematic imperatives, in which expression a
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contradiction clearly lay. I should have called them instead the technical
imperatives of art [or artiﬁce: Kunst]. Te pragmatics, or rules of cleverness, that

73. Kant, KU B XVII–XVIII, X: 82: “where rules are practical, reason is not thus
immediately legislative, because [rules] can also be technically practical” (“wo Reglen
praktisch sind, ist die Vernunf nicht darum sofort gesetzgebend, weil sie auch technisch
praktisch sein können”).
74. On the manipulation of human subjects as objects, see the citation from Kant
immediately following. On the “misconception” of “nature as art” (“Natur als Kunst”) and of a
“technique of nature” (“Technik der Natur”) itself “originally arising from judgment”
(“ursprünglich aus der Urteilskraf entspringend”), see the ﬁrst version of the Introduction,
KU , X: 17.

are subordinate to the conditions of a real and thus fully subjective and necessary
aim, also stand, of course, among the technical (then what else is cleverness, than
the skillful use of free human beings, and even of the natural dispositions and
inclinations in them, to one’s own ends). Te mere fact that the aim, which we
prescribe to ourselves and others, namely, personal happiness, does not belong
among those aims we merely favor, justiﬁes another special designation of these
technical imperatives: for the[ir] task requires not only what is required by
[merely] technical [undertakings], i.e., the determination of the manner in
which one fulﬁlls an aim, but also the determination of that in which this aim
(happiness) consists, which, in the case of general technical imperatives, must
[instead] be set forth as already known.
[*Hier ist der Ort, einen Fehler zu verbessern, den ich in der Grundlagung zur
Metaphysik der Sitten beging. Denn, nachdem ich von den Imperativen der
Geschicklichkeit gesagt hatte, dass sie nur bedingterweise und zwar under der
Bedingung bloss möglicher, d.i. problematischer, Zwecke geböten, so nannte ich
dergleichen praktische Vorschrifen problematische Imperativen, in welchem
Ausdruck freilich ein Widerspruch liegt. Ich hätte sie technisch, d.i. Imperativen der
Kunst nennen sollen. Die pragmatische, oder Regeln der Klugheit, welche unter der
Bedingung eines wirklichen und so gar subjektiv-notwendigen Zweckes gebieten,
stehen nun zwar auch unter den technischen (denn was ist die Klugheit anders, als
Geschicklichkeit, freie Menschen und unter diesen so gar die Natur-Anlagen und
Neigungen in sich selbst, zu seinen Absichten brauchen zu können). Allein dass der
Zweck, den wir uns und andern unterlegen, nämlich eigene Glückseligkeit, nicht
unter die bloss beliebigen Zwecke gehöret, berechtigt zu einer besondern
Benennung dieser technischen Imperativen: weil die Aufgabe nicht bloss, wie bei
technischen, die Art der Ausführung eines Zwecks, sondern auch die Bestimmung
dessen, was diesen Zweck selbst (die Glückseligkeit) ausmacht, fordert, welches bei
allgemeinen technischen Imperativen als bekannt vorausgesetzt werden muss.75]

Kant’s amended deﬁnition of the “imperatives” of “skill” as solely “technical”

(“technische Imperativen”) attempts to resolve “here,” in an Introduction to the Tird
Critique,76 the “contradiction“ in his initial qualiﬁcation of such imperatives as
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75. Kant, KU X: 14.

76. Te distinction drawn in this first draf of the Introduction between a “merely
technical” or “skilled” use of practical reason, and a fully determining, “legislative” or pure
“practical reason,” is returned to and confirmed in both the A and B editions of the
Introduction to the Tird Critique as a distinction between those “technical-practical
rules . . . of art or cleverness in general” (including the “art” of manipulation employed to
“exercise influence over men and their will”) that, “determined by natural drives,” derive
solely from “concepts of nature” and those of a “will” which “stands instead under the
concept of freedom as well” and whose “laws” “make up the second, namely practical part of
[this] philosophy”; see KU, B xiii–iv, A xiii–iv, X: 79–80.

“problematic,” given that their “foundation” (“Grundlegung”) in “artiﬁce,” rather than

the“things of morality,” must contradict the“real”77 imperative of any, even hypothetical
“moral law.” Te self-contradictory notion of a “problematic imperative” was coined in
the Grundlegung to distinguish and protect from contradiction the reality and formal
(i.e.,“pure” rather than applied) notion of an imperative capacity for free, moral action
itself. While the Tird Critique aims to elucidate the bases and function of judgment
rather than of self-legislating moral action, just such an explanatory note as that
appended “here,” to the word, “technique,” is what is conspicuously missing from its
introduction of a problematically imperative – at once self-legislating and purposefully
applied – “common sense.” More than “ambiguous,” the conceptual amalgam
represented by the Latin, “sensus communis,” is, by Kant’s own admission, one upon
which his Critique cannot improve. For, in naming a “common” rather than “universal”
or “general” (i.e., “transcendental”) capability, “common sense” specifically designates
not an a priori form for perceiving but a kind of shared, non-sensory “sense” we either
make of, or attribute to perceptions – one whose own basis Kant states he neither “can”
nor “wishes to” analyze “now.”
Nor will Kant ever commit such an analysis of “common sense” to print. In
direct contrast to this explicit attempt “to ameliorate” (“verbessern”) an earlier
verbal “ambiguity,” Kant does not amend the necessary “condition” of judgment he
calls “common sense” in later editions of the Tird Critique, or elsewhere.78
Choosing neither to revise nor further elucidate its unelaborated assertion, Kant,
one might say, declines to engage in precisely the kind of purely “technical”
objectification he criticized in the passages just cited, refusing to use “artifice” to
produce a concept of “common sense” to fit his aims: “das zu stande zu bringen,
wovon man will, das es sein soll”79 (‘so as to bring into being whatever it is one
wants there to be”). Rather than make something out of nothing or nothing out of
something, thereby displaying nothing so much as personal ambition enabled by a
certain limited, self-interested dexterity, we, too, might do better not to follow in
the continuing Fichtean tradition of replacing terms Kant purposefully leaves
undefined. Like his student’s philosophically regressive identification of an
unknowable “Ding an sich” with the postulate of an omnipotent ego or Ich, and
initiation, thereby, of the reversion from critical thinking to subjective idealism
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that the hypothesis of a speculatively inaccessible “thing in itself ” was precisely

formulated to impede, the identiﬁcation of “common sense” with either a sensory
or formal given would similarly falsify the very dilemma of theoretical knowledge
that it designates. Nor should we dismiss instead as merely nonrigorous Kant’s

77. Kant, Logik, A 223, VI: 576.

78. Te singularity of the status of “common sense” is underscored by the various,
simple and compound uses of the term Sinn throughout the Critique and elsewhere in Kant.
See the excellent comparison of Gemeinsinn in the Tird Critique with the distinct uses of
the term in Kant’s Anthropology, in Savi, Il concetto di senso comune, p. 85 n. (See Kant,
Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, § 6, 28, 52.)
79. Kant, KU , X: 13.

stated reliance upon an ability of which he can say nothing more than that it alone
permits judgment to take place. It may instead prove more fruitful, or at least less
vacuous of “sense” – in either Kant’s or our “common” sense of the term, if these are
not, at first glance, the same – to investigate the constitutive qualities of judgment
Kant must and does expose, with unambiguous precision, in his “Analytic” of
judgment, if we wish to gain some understanding of the “faculty” of “common
sense” on which all enactments of judgment rest.
For, while, unlike the related term, “practical,” the “common sense” of Kant’s
Tird Critique “can” neither (in Kant’s terms) be disambiguated nor made available
to direct analytic definition, it is nonetheless, Kant states, “unconditionally
necessary” – which is to say, in no way in “error.” And that necessity is all the more
“real” in that it derives not from logical analysis, nor from desired objects, but from
the analysis of the actual acts of judgment whose practice it enables. Now, starting
from an analysis of the activity of judging to arrive at an understanding of the
“common sense” upon which that same activity depends may seem as little logical
as deducing a premise from its effect. Yet every logical deduction or syllogism
might be described as departing, at least in part, from such an unstated logical
inversion as well, the assumption of a known quality itself dependent upon some
other, prior knowledge (of that quality), a kernel of circular reasoning whose
development, pressed against the nominal limits of language, might be explicitly
(non-syllogistically) formulated like this: I know that Socrates was a man because
he was mortal and I know that all men are mortal because I call “mortal” those
beings of limited corporeal life I call “men.”
At very least, in considering what, or, indeed, if, “common sense” “may” “really”
(in Kant’s terms) “be,” by way of the qualities in which Kant analyzes acts of
judgment to consist, we are already given considerably more to work with than one
already known quality alone (mortality), let alone one shared, according to its own
logically unsubordinated definition, by every living being imaginable, and so
offering no basis for knowledge at all. Whatever constitutes the fundamental
“faculty” Kant calls “common sense” – and whatever may be the basis for its
founding relationship both to the “power of judgment” and, with judgment, to the
possibility of Kant’s or any critical project – in attempting to arrive at an
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understanding of “common sense” by way of an analysis of the power said to

depend on it, we can look to what is provided by the logical construction of that
analysis: the specific, constitutive and general, rather than circularly defined
nominal, qualities it first gives us to consider.
If we wish to try to “make sense” of a “faculty” Kant at once invokes and states
he “neither can nor wants to” describe, let alone understand the necessity of the
nearly self-contradictory nature of that invocation – one that places ‘common
sense’ squarely at the center of the larger, step-by-step analysis of judgment it
concludes, even while acknowledging it cannot be explicated by that rational
analysis itself – there is no retrospectively clarifying corrective to which we can
refer, no terminological elaboration replacing ‘common sense’ by a different
combination of modifier and noun. Whatever “common sense” is and does, neither
of the two terms it combines can be mistaken for the insensible workings or willful

applications of technology. Nor can the “undefined norm” and “necessary condition”
of “common sense” be equated with the pseudo-imperatives of merely personal
“cleverness:” the “effect of our cognitive abilities,” “common sense” is neither
tautological in principle nor a “skilled” means of achieving a tautological effect, a
“technique” that sets the very rules by which it is declared a “success.” If we are to
deduce the positive “sense” of the analytic lacuna that is “common sense” – deduce
rather than elide the significance of that lacuna and foundation of the Tird
Critique itself – we must instead examine Kant’s use of traditional logical categories
to constitute a new, “critical” definition of judgment.
Like the foundational reference to “common sense” occurring only at its end,
the process of consecutive specification preceding “common sense” serves to define
the very possibility of a mental power never defined before as such, a “power of
judgment” on whose exercise and operation all other intellectual and practical
activities depend. Accepting and understanding the necessity of such an inversion
in interpretive practice – one whose first condition is stated last in that it is not
liable to demonstration itself (or: “mortal” is what I call “men”) – may come to
prove (or, more accurately, to have proven) a necessary part of the (logically)
unprecedented analysis Kant undertakes, one whose own “effect” upon the
“intellectual faculties” is to extend their interplay, and so put the aesthetic “into
play,” with respect to any perceptible object.
Most critically, Kant achieves this irreversible “revolution” in the conception of
the aesthetic not by objectifying that conception but by analyzing it as an experience
and not an object. And the first terms that this first formal analysis of the aesthetic,
as the name of a certain kind of experience in the subject, must criticize, are its
traditional first terms (and misnomers) equating objectifications of “the aesthetic”
with “taste.”80 Replacing the notion of a purely “personal” (in the juridical sense of

80. In a celebrated footnote to the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the First Critique (KrV, B
36, III: 70n), Kant mocks the peculiarly “German” tendency to conﬂate the terms, “aesthetic”
and “taste,” a confusion “grounded,” he writes, on the “misplaced hope,” ﬁrst “formulated” by
“Baumgarten,” that “the critical judgment of the beautiful” can be “br[ought] under the
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principles of reason,” and its “rules” thereby “raise[d]” to the level of a “science.” Given that
even “the most elegant sources” of these “purported rules” remain “merely empirical” in nature,
such “rules or criteria,” Kant notes, “can never serve as laws determined a priori according to
which our judgments of taste must direct themselves.” Kant then goes on to suggest that we
may “come closer to the language and sense of the ancients, whose separation of knowledge
into αιςθητα και νοητα is well known” (“näher treten würde, bei denen die Einteilung der
Erkenntnis in αιςθητα και νοητα ist berühmt”) by “taking” the “aesthetic” sometimes in a
“transcendental, sometimes in a psychological sense” (“teils in transzendentalen Sinne, teils in
psychologischer Bedeutung zu nehmen”). Te preceding portion of the note criticizing the
German use of the term, “aesthetic,” begins: “Germans are the only ones who now use the
word ‘aesthetics’ to designate that which other critique calls taste. Te ground of this is
the failed hope, conceived by the excellent analyst Baumgarten, of bringing the judgment of
the beautiful under the principles of reason and raising the rules of these to the status of a

corporeal) passive experience mistakenly modeled on inarticulate, physiological

sensation, with an active, express “power” of judgment at once subjective and general
in its form and meaning, Kant initiates a series of reversals that redefine not only the
aesthetic but the relation of the aesthetic to moral practice (or “pure reason”) as well.
Just as he ”hypothesize[d]” that the path of metaphysics might cease to circle upon
itself if it “dare[d]” to reverse, and so discover, its own proper starting point and
end – departing from how it is we know things, rather than what “things” are, without
our knowing them, “in themselves”81 – Kant redefines aesthetic theory by reversing
the order of its investigation, starting with how it is we experience objects aesthetically,
rather than speculating on what inherently aesthetic objects or transcendental Ideas
of the Beautiful must be in themselves. By starting from a general experience of the
subject, rather than a theory of Ideas or prescriptive specification of objects, Kant is
instead able to analyze that experience “in itself.” In so doing, he initiates a logical
cascade of reversals and substitutions of investigative objects in turn: the replacement
of individual, culturally specific rules for the appreciation of the aesthetic, with a
general, subjective “feeling” of “freedom;” of freedom from all necessity, with the
necessity of its own “communication;” of communication of a subjective feeling,
with acts of impersonal denomination; and of action, with its own, logically
unfounded “faculty” and “foundation,” “common sense.”82

science. Te effort, however, is in vain. For intellectual rules or criteria, are, according to their
most distinguished sources, not empirical, and thus can never serve toward determined a priori
rules according to which our judgment of taste must direct itself . . .” (“*Die Deutschen sind
die einzigen, welche sich jetzt des Worts Ästhetik bedienen, um dadurch das zu bezeichnen,
was andre Kritik des Geschmacks heissen. Es liegt hier eine verfehlte Hoffnung zum Grunde,
die der vortreffliche Analyst Baumgarten fasste, die kritische Beurteilung des Schönen unter
Vernunfprinzipien zu bringen, und die Regeln derselben zur Wissenschaf zu erheben. Allein
diese Bemühung ist vergeblich. Denn gedachte Regeln, oder Kriterien, sind ihren vornehmsten
Quellen nach bloss empirisch, und können also niemals zu bestimmten Gesetzen a priori
dienen, wornach sich unser Geschmacksurteil richten müsste . . .”).
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81. See Chapter One, n. 6, this study. Again, this – to use Kant’s terms – unprecedented
“happy notion” is the “critical” “revolution” in philosophical thinking and point of departure
of Kant’s entire Critique that Guyer, even while making Kant his subject, either fails to grasp
or chooses to ignore, basing his “measure[ment]” of Kant’s “failures” on Humean-empirical
rather than critical and logical criteria for (inevitably unattainable) success. Were one to
assess the mimetic “success” or “failure” of a fully abstract, non-pictorial language, the
category mistake involved both in procedure and result would be no less severe than
Guyer’s a priori exclusion of the stated hypothetical foundation of the Critique from his own
philosophically anachronistic, revisionist account of a “Kant” before or without Kant.
82. By contrast, see Noah Lemos, Common Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 8, on the opposition of Scottish common sense philosophy to the view “that
there is a ‘faculty of common sense’ or that one’s considered judgments are known via such
a faculty.”

3. “Free”
Te defining “quality” of judgment, on Kant’s analysis, is an absence of “interest” in
the objects it perceives. Tus, the “First Moment” of the “Analytic of the Beautiful”
ascribes to specifically aesthetic judgments the impartiality of mind traditionally
reserved for ethical judgments before (and afer) Kant’s Critique. Effectively
rewriting conventional conceptions of the aesthetic, Kant extends that impartiality
to moral purposes as well: no less than personal appetites and “purposes” (“Zweck”),
the general capacity to “judge” Kant defines is subject to no impersonal moral
interest or stake. Nor is it subject to socially promoted interests or “tastes.” Te
“disinterest” of the “power of judgment” even in the “existence” of the object judged
suspends not only the a priori, representational and causal formation of cognitions,
but the a posteriori – historical-social, whether instrumental or cultural – utilization
of these we call “ideological” as well.83
As if to underscore the universality and impersonality of this first categorical
aspect of judgment, and with it, of the entire Analytic to follow, Kant admonishes
imitators of the contemporary theorist he himself most admires when excluding
potential conflations of political and moral considerations with the experience
and judgment of the aesthetic he describes. Te first proper noun to arise in the
Analytic of the Beautiful is “Rousseau,” the philosopher to whose universal theory
of “human rights” Kant, by his own positive acknowledgement, owed the “righting”
of the selective bias toward “cultivation” of his own pre-critical moral thought (his
stated debt to Hume, Rousseau’s erstwhile host, described by Kant to be, rather, of
the negative, kind.84) It is not the obvious example of a monarchist, who would, in
all likelihood, commend them, but the unlikely example of a “Rousseau-ist”
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83. Kant, KU B 5, X: 116.

84. On Kant’s early and unwavering acknowledgement of Rousseau as the moral
philosopher who first “taught [him]” and “set [him] to rights, that the cultivation of
knowledge does not constitute the honor” and “rights of mankind” (“Roussau hat mich
zurecht gebracht . . . [und] gelehrt, dass die Kultivierung . . . unserer Erkenntnis nicht die
Ehre [und Rechte] der Menschheit ausmacht”), see Klaus Reich’s classic monograph,
Rousseau und Kant (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1936), reprinted in Rousseau und die Folgen,
Hrsg. R. Bubner, K. Cramer, R. Wiehl [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989]), pp. 80–
96. See his Prolegomena, for Kant’s “free admission” (“Ich gestehe frei”) that he was “first”
“awoken” from “many years” of “dogmatic slumber” by Hume’s attack on causality, whose
effectivity Hume deemed, in Kant’s inimitable description, “a mere bastard of imagination
impregnated by experience” “falsely considered by reason to be its own child” (“dass die

populist who would condemn them, that Kant employs to critique accounts of
taste determined by social and cultural “interests,” including personal interest and
pleasure taken in the “existence” of aesthetic objects operating as indices of
accumulated power and wealth. Directly preceding the naming of Rousseau at the
opening of the First Analytic, are the imagined comments of a self-styled rustic
who has attempted to model himself, incongruously, on a (purely hypothetical)
“original,” or literally pre-historical, “homme sauvage,” Rousseau’s stated theoretical
ﬁction of a pre-human human, lacking language, social relations, or relationships
of any kind, made famous by his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité
parmi les hommes.85 Te views of a wholly unacculturated subject, no less than

Vernunf . . . [den Begriff der Kausalität] fälschlich für ihr eigen Kind halte, da er doch nichts
anders als ein Bastard der Einbildungskraf sei”) (Kant, Prolegomena zu jeder künfigen A 13,
Ibid., VI: 116). Te crucial distinction and conflict between Hume’s conception of mere
“habit,” made to “arise” (“entsprungenen”) in the guise of “subjective necessity” by a so-called
or pseudo “law of association” extrapolated from events (in direct contradiction with the
formal basis of all law for Kant) and Kant’s discussion of the intellectual “origin” (“Ursprung”)
of causality as a “concept,” “arisen from pure understanding” rather than “arrived at by way of
experience as apprehended by Hume” (“nicht, wie Hume besorgt hatte, von der Erfahrung
abgeleitet, sondern aus dem reinen Verstande entsprungen”), describe the two sides of the
problem of defining the origin or basis of language that Kant articulates across the tripartite
composition of the Critique (Kant, Prolegomena A 9, 11, 14, ibid., VI: 116–117, 119).
85. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts; Discours sur l’origine,
et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Paris: Flammarion, 1992 [Paris: Plissot,
1751; Geneva, 1755]). For an excellent discussion of Rousseau’s specifically temporal rather
than historical and causal conception of “nature,” “natural man,” and, consequently, of
“revolution” (the latter shared by Kant), see Dick Howard, Te Politics of Critique
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), pp. 162–63 esp.: “Rousseau broke through
the classificatory image of nature as an immediately real presence; the originary state of
nature arises only once society is already constituted . . . Te point is not to integrate a
history into the General Will, promising to complete its quest for dialectical synthesis or
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transparency. Rousseau’s fundamental insight makes evident the originary leap which
institutes temporality. Tis leap, for which no logic or causality can account, institutes at the
same time the state of nature. . . constantly instituted as orginary at the same time that its
originary structure can never be made permanent. Tis deﬁnes its temporal structure. In
this sense, Rousseau formulates a theory of revolution. Te political reﬂection which
institutes nature as temporal is not susceptible to reduction to a theory of history. Revolution
is the rupture with history, the advent of the new, which can never be predicted but only
made.” On Kant’s view of revolution as the necessary moral antithesis to natural or historical
development, see esp. pp. 5–7: “Kant opposed revolution and supported the French
Revolution. He apparently could not think this leap, and yet recognized it as an instance of
the very causality of freedom on which his ethics (and ultimately his entire system) had to
rest [. . .] the causality of freedom which would permit one to think of a revolution as
something not merely necessitated by the phenomenal order of world development.”

those of the cultural elite that made of Rosseau’s “wild man” a fashionable ideal, are
proﬀered by Kant so as to be excluded from the entirely disinterested, wholly
nonconceptual (and thus noncultural) perception of objects at which his account
of judgment aims:

Te pleasure which we combine with the presentation of the existence of an

object is called interest. Such interest is thus always related to the faculty of
desire, either as the determining ground of the same or as necessarily connected
to its grounds of determination. When we ask if something is beautiful, however,
we do not want to know whether we or anyone else is or could be partial to the
existence of a thing, but, rather, how we judge it in the mere act of observation
(perception or reflection). If someone asks me whether I find the palace that I
see before me beautiful, so may I well say, I don’t like the kind of thing that is
made only to be gawked at; or, in the manner of that Iroquois Sachem, that
nothing in Paris is more to his liking than the cooking shops; even more may I
vilify, in good Rousseau-ese, the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the
people on such superfluous things; finally, I can easily persuade myself that, were
I to find myself on an uninhabited island without hope of ever coming upon
other men, and were able to conjure up such a majestic edifice merely by wishing,
I would not even bother to take the trouble to do so if only I already had a hut
that were comfortable enough for me. Tat is all well and good; only it is not what
we are talking about now [nur davon ist jetzt nicht die Rede]. We only wish to
know if the mere perception of an object is accompanied within me by pleasure,
no matter how indifferent86 I may be in view of the existence of the object of this
perception. One can easily see that what is involved in my being able to say [of
an object] that it is beautiful, and that I have taste, is that which I make out of this
external perception within myself, and not that which I depend upon in the
existence of the object . . . We must not be occupied whatsoever with the existence
of things, but, rather, completely indifferent in that regard, in order to play the
judge in things of taste.
[Interesse wird das Wohlgefallen genannt, was wir mit der Vorstellung der
Existenz eines Gegenstandes verbinden. Ein solches hat daher immer zugleich
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Beziehung auf das Begehrungsvermögen, entweder als Bestimmungsgrund

desselben, oder doch als mit dem Bestimmungsgründe desselben notwendig
zusammenhängenden. Nun will man aber, wenn die Frage ist, ob etwas schön sei,
nicht wissen, ob uns, oder irgend jemand, an der Existenz der Sache irgend etwas
gelegen sei, oder auch nur gelegen sein könne; sondern, wie wir sie in der blossen
Betrachtung (Anschauung oder Reﬂexion) beurteilen. Wenn mich jemand fragt,
ob ich den Palast, den ich vor mir sehe, schön ﬁnde: so mag ich zwar sagen: ich

86. Kant interprets the very appearance (or “Phänomen”) of “indiﬀerence”

(“Gleichgültigkeit”) to be the initial, outward manifestation of judgment on which the
possibility of a critical philosophy depends. See Kant, ﬁrst draf of “Vorrede” to the ﬁrst
edition of the First Critique, X: A XI–XII.

liebe dergleichen Dinge nicht, die bloss für das Angaﬀen gemacht sind, oder, wie
jener irokesische Sachem, ihm gefalle in Paris nichts besser als die Garküchen ich
kann noch überdem auf die Eitelkeit der Grossen auf gut Rousseauisch schmälen,
welche den Schweiss des Volks auf so entbehrliche Dinge verwenden; ich kann
mich endlich gar leicht überzeugen, dass, wenn ich mich auf einem unbewohnten
Eilande, ohne Hoﬀnung, jemals wieder zu Menschen zu kommen, befände, und
ich, durch meinen blossen Wunsche, ein solches Prachtgebäude hinzaubern
könnte, ich mir auch nicht einmal diese Mühe darum geben würde, wenn ich
schon eine Hütte hätte, die mir bequem genug wäre. Man kann mir alles dieses
einräumen und gutheissen; nur davon ist jetzt nicht die Rede. Man will nur
wissen, ob die blosse Vorstellung des Gegenstandes in mir mit Wohlgefallen
begleitet sei, so gleichgültig ich auch immer in Ansehung der Existenz des
Gegenstandes dieser Vorstellung sein mag. Man sieht leicht, dass es auf dem, was
ich aus dieser Vorstellung in mir selbst mache, nicht auf dem, worin ich von der
Existenz des Gegenstandes abhänge, ankomme, um zu sagen, es sei schön, und zu
beweisen, ich habe Geschmack . . . Man muss nicht im mindesten für die Existenz
der Sache eingenommen, sondern in diesem Betracht ganz gleichgültig sein, um
in Sachen des Geschmacks den Richter zu spielen.87]

Te ﬁrst condition of the power to judge an object – an absence of “interest in. . .

its existence” – entails the negation of any practical attachment to that object in
either a cognitive or moral sense, the interests of reason described by the First and
the Second Critique respectively.88 In every sense we can imagine, the object of
judgment is neither a recognizable “object” (“Gegenstand”), nor, at one remove
from objective existence, the recognizable indication of such existence, its non-
objective yet meaningfully extant sign. Only by lacking all notion of what a
perceived object either signiﬁes or is “good for” (whether in Kant’s larger moral or
“merely technical” sense), indeed, by lacking any conception of what it is at all, can
the subject of the speciﬁcally aesthetic experience of a sensuous object “judge” it –
or, as Kant puts it, in the passage just cited, “play the judge.”89 Like “the free play of
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87. Kant, KU , B 5–7, X: 116–17 (emphasis added).

88. For Kant’s description of “interest” as either cognitive, i.e., based in a formal
representation of an object of perception; or moral, based in a concept of the good believed
to be promoted by a perceptual object; or “affective,” based in the “excitement” of “desire” for
“the existence of the object,” and the negation of each of these in relation to judgment, see
esp. Kant, KU , B 9–14, X: 118–123.
89. What Kant writes in the Logik of cognitive “errors” in “understanding,” or intellectual
“judgment,” he may as well have written of errors in the “common understanding” of aesthetic
judgment here. In the former case, the “sole basis for the arisal” of “all such error” is “to be
sought,” he states, “in the unremarked influence of the sensory upon the understanding, or more
precisely stated, upon judgment” (“[d]er Entstehungsgrund alles Irrtums wird daher einzig
und allein in dem unvermerkten Einfluss der Sinnlichkeit auf den Verstand, oder, genauer
geredet, auf das Urteil, gesucht werden müssen” [Kant, Logik A 76–77, VI: 480–81]). In the case

understanding and imagination” – the nonconceptual relation that Kant goes on

to define as the sole “communicable” content of judgment90 – the subject who
judges “plays the judge” not because judgment is a frivolous rather than fundamental
activity, but because, in relation to the purposes of the two Critiques it alone can
mediate, the exercise of judgment must be both impartial and without consequence,
which is to say, as disinterested in, as it is unproductive of conceptual, empirical or
moral objectives or aims.
Serving no purpose other than mediating the strictly divided realms of pure
and practical reason hypothesized by the Critique, the act of judgment is, thus,
“free,” in Kant’s terms, in every way an act can be: the absence of any and all
“interest” in an object on the part of its freely perceiving subject itself reflects the
“freedom” of the form delineated in the object so perceived.91 Alternately derided
and admired as either an aesthetic “formalist” or groundbeaking advocate of
abstraction in art, Kant specifies that the forms perceived in aesthetic experiences,
whether of pictures or picture frames, poems, draperies, or pepper plants planted
in rows (to recall just a few of the improbably equivalent “objects” Kant names92),
must not only be perceived to be free of recognizable cognitive content, but must
be indeterminant or “free” in themselves, objects, whether natural or artificial in
basis, that Kant gathers together under their single shared quality of offering to
perception “free[ly]” “delineat[ed]” forms. His first description of that which
pleases in any object we “find” “beautiful” states:

In order to find anything to be good, I must always know what kind of thing this
object is, that is, I must have a concept of it. In order to find beauty in such a
thing, I need have no concept of it at all. Flowers, free delineations, linear tracings
[or traits] intertwined with one another without purpose under the name of
foliage, mean nothing, depend on no determined concept, yet please.
[Um etwas gut zu finden, muss ich jederzeit wissen, was der Gegenstand für ein
Ding sein soll, d.i. einen Begriff von demselben haben. Um Schönheit woran zu
finden, habe ich das nicht nötig. Blumen, freie Zeichnungen, ohne Absicht in
einander geschlungenen Züge, unter dem Namen des Laubwerks, bedeuten
nichts, hängen von keinem bestimmten Begriffe ab, und gefallen doch.93]
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of “judgment” no longer identifiable with “understanding” except insofar as the latter remains
in free play with imagination or conflict with reason, i.e., in specifically aesthetic experience, it
is, by contrast, not the sensory itself but “interest” in the sensory “existence” of an object that
would compel us to mistake distinct objective qualities for the properly subjective bases of
aesthetic judgment, and individual interest for the distinctive power of judgment itself.
90. Kant, KU , B 29, X: 132.
91. KU , B 11–13, X: 120–21; B 49, X: 146.
92. For these and other heterogeneous occasions for the exercise of judgment mentioned
by Kant, see Kant, KU B 209, 43–44, 215, 211, 72, X: 261–62, 142, 265, 262,163.
93. Kant, KU , B 11–12, X: 120.

Whether two-dimensional in origin or in outline, a “delineation” is a sensible

yet nonphenomenal appearance, which is to say, it is the appearance of appearing
“free” from “meaning” or “representing” any “thing.” In this way, the “subject” it
renders perceptible to the senses is nothing other than the internal state of the
subject capable of perceiving it – for Kant, any subject who, suspending practical
knowledge of the identity and use of an object, instead feels pleasure (or displeasure)
in the conceptually unsubordinated appearance of “traits” whose dynamic
“intertwining” the senses actively record and trace. In the act of judging such a
“delineation,” something sensible and yet “free” of objectification, that “represents
nothing, no object determined by a definite concept” (“sie stellen nichts vor, kein
Objekt unter einem bestimmten Begriffe”), the subject of judgment, as if taking the
place of that indeterminable object, similarly “feels him or herself fully free”
(“sich . . . völlig frei fühlt”94).
To be of the sensory world but make no use of it – to derive no knowledge or
practical value but solely a different, impractical sense of one’s own ability to be
engaged by an experience that is “free” of either representational, cognitive or
consumable, or nonrepresentational, inconsumable moral content – is to be a
subject who, shorn of “interest,” instead “makes [something] out of an external
perception inside [himself].”95 Te subject who “makes something out of ”
perception that is not identical with perception, who makes something unknown
“inside [himself]” while attending to something unknown outside himself, thus
“feels,” like the dynamic form of such an object, “free.” Here aesthetic judgment
offers, by way of an unknown perceptual object, a new mode of being in the subject.
Te judging subject “feels,” in the mode of aesthetic experience, what Kant states is
the “real” purpose of his “negative,” critical project: to render not only knowledge
but actual agency, or action “free” of delimited perceptual-phenomenal conditions,
possible.96 Disentangling experience in general from “positive” – idealist or
skeptical – philosophy of experience and moral theory alike, Kant, in the Critique
of Pure Reason, first limits (and thus ensures) its epistemological content.
Separating epistemological and conceptual from aesthetic experience, or cognition
from judgment, he then does precisely the inverse, analyzing judgment as a “power”
based in a freedom from limited application, a “feeling free” arising with a sensory
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delineation of freedom perceived.

Te “freedom” of which we have no “cognition” but which we “can think” takes
the non-cognitive form, in the Second Critique, not of judgment but of a certain
kind of unconditioned law. Unlike cognition and judgment, this is a law in which
empirical experience can play no part, “[f]or,” Kant reasons good humoredly:

everyone’s will does not have one and the same object at every moment; rather
everyone has his own object (his own pleasure), which, even if it could be made

94. Kant, KU , B 49, X: 146; B18, X: 124 (emphasis in text).

95. See this Chapter, this Section, n. 87.
96. Kant, KrV BXXIX, III–32.

to agree with the guiding aims of others, is far from sufficient for the making of
a law, because the exceptions that one will have to make to it from time to time
are endless and could never be determinately included in one general rule. Te
kind of harmony to come out of this resembles that of a certain satirical poem,
in which the soulful agreement of a married couple set on each other’s destruction
is represented: O wonderful harmony, what he wishes, she wishes, too, etc.; or what
is recounted of the pledge King Franz the First made to Emperor Carl the Fifh:
what my brother Carl wants (Milan), I want to have, too. Empirical grounds of
determination do not suffice for any general external legislation, but also just as
little for an internal one; for everyone bases his inclination on one subject, and
everyone else on another, and in every individual subject one inclination exerts
most influence at one moment, and another, at another moment. To make a law
sufficient to rule under the condition of agreement with it on all sides is
completely impossible.
[Denn der Wille aller hat alsdenn nicht ein und dasselbe Objekt, sondern ein
jeder hat das seinige (sein eigenes Wohlbefinden), welches sich zwar,
zufälligerweise, auch mit anderer ihren Absichten, die sie gleichfalls auf sich
selbst richten, vertragen kann, aber lange nicht zum Gesetze hinreichend ist, weil
die Ausnahmen, die man gelegentlich zu machen befugt ist, endlos sind, und gar
nicht bestimmt in eine allgemeneine Regel befasst werden können. Es kommt
auf diese Art eine Harmonie heraus, die derjenigen ähnlich ist, welche ein
gewisses Spottgedicht auf die Seeleneintracht zweier sich zu Grunde richtenden
Eheleute schildert: O wundervolle Harmonie, was er will, will auch sie etc., oder
was von der Anheischigmachung König Franz des Ersten gegen Kaiser Karl den
Fünfen erzählt wird: was mein Brüder Karl haben will (Mailand), das will ich
auch haben. Empirische Bestimmungsgründe taugen zu keiner allgemeinen
äusseren Gesetzgebung, aber auch eben so wenig zur innern; denn jeder legt sein
Subjekt, ein anderer aber ein anderes Subjekt der Neigung zum Grunde, und in
jedem Subjekt selber ist bald die, bald eine andere im Vorzuge des Einflusses. Ein
Gesetz ausfindig zu machen, das sie insgesamt unter dieser Bedingung, nämlich
mit allseitiger Einstimmung, regierte, ist schlechterdings unmöglich.97]
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A “law” that is “legislative” at every moment for all must be independent of all
“empirical grounds of determination.” Its “condition” can be neither an external
object, nor any “agreement,” or metaphorically ascribed, metaphysical “harmony,”
among subjects: neither the “union of souls” wonderfully satirized by Kant in a
married couple mutually desirous of each other’s destruction, nor of siblings, who,
as king and emperor, both covet the same territory. All, even allied subjects are not
only distinct in their positive and negative objects of desire, but are internally at
odds with themselves, subject, as subjects, to changes in desire over time, “now this,
now that inclination takes preferential inﬂuence” (“bald die [Neigung], bald eine

97. Kant, KprV A 51, VII: 137.

andere im Vorzuge des Einflusses”). Te single sufficient, or defining condition of

a law thus lies not in experiential circumstance but in the degree of “freedom” from
circumstance enacted in its own form: “Given, that only the mere legislative form
of maxims is the suﬃcient ground of determination of a will, . . . so must such a
will be thought as entirely independent from the law of nature of phenomena,
namely, the law of causality. . . Such an independence . . . is called freedom in the
strictest, i.e., transcendental understanding . . .” (“Vorausgesetzt, dass die blosse
gesetzgebende Form der Maximen allein der zureichende Bestimmungsgrund
eines Willens sei . . . so muss ein solcher Wille als gänzlich unabhängig von dem
Naturgesetz der Erscheinung, nämlich das Gesetz der Kausalität . . . gedacht
werden. Eine solche Unabhängigkeit aber heisst Freiheit im strengsten, d.i.
transzendentalen Verstande”).98
Te Second Critique names that independent, self-legislating form, and sole
“law” of a “free will,” the “moral law:” the only law one is truly free – from all
particular, positive conditions – to make for one’s self, rather than constrained, by
personal inclinations and phenomenal conditions, either to follow or to break.99
Te Tird Critique calls what we “make out of . . . external perception within
[ourselves],” without interest in “the existence of the object,” judgment. While both
moral action and judgment are “ma[d]e” within the subject, on the basis of
“power[s]” inhering in every subject, they are fundamentally diﬀerent in a critical
aspect. Judging is what we do not when we act as free, or self-legislating, agents, but
when we “feel ourselves free” to exercise the non-legislating “power of judgment,”
“to play the judge.” And judgment of aesthetic experience does not rule or make
law regarding experience of any sort; its “making” depends instead on a “feeling” of
freedom arising within subjects in the absence of a cognitive object. Te condition
of judgment is not that we act in accordance with a law we have given ourselves but
that we “feel” and articulate something “made within [ourselves]” “out of . . .
external perception,” something that was not “there” – neither “inside” nor “outside”
us – before, but comes about with our “feeling free” of our own or any particular
“interest” in the “existence of the object.” To judge in the Tird Critique is, in a new
and profoundly meaningful sense, to act as a subject compelled by the “feeling” of
“freedom” to speak.
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98. Ibid., A 52, VII: 138 (emphasis in text).

99. Ibid., A 53, VII: 139 et passim.

4. “Feeling”
How can an experience of “freedom” in sensory perception be related to a
“faculty” so little admitting of freedom as “common sense”? What experience could
possibly be “free” enough, both from a (hypothetical) cognitive ability to form
heterogeneous, conceptual-experiential representations a priori, and an overriding
ability to act as “free” (moral) agents in disregard of such representations, so as
truly to be able to mediate between them? What does a subject “free” of the forms
of knowledge, of moral action, and even of “constructive” rather than hypothetical
modes of thinking do?100
Kant calls such an experience “feeling,” and little in the First and Second Critique
prepares us for the introduction of the term. Associated before and afer Kant with
the turn from philosophy toward the cultivation of personal “sensibility” elaborated
by, among others, Hutcheson, Shafesbury, Burke, and Hume, accounts of
subjectivity that focus on the role of feeling in experience typically supplant
theoretical inquiry with empiricist, ofen theatrical descriptions of the private
emotions experiences arouse. Te credited ability of “sensibility” to invest
perception with moral content, to be as inviolable in its personally felt “sense” of
things as is the inarticulate, nonmoral and private experience of “feeling” itself,
sustains precisely the kind of intellectual complacency – epistemological no less
than ethical and political – that Kant’s Critique aimed foremost to counteract.
Te precedent for Kant’s inclusion of “feeling” within philosophy, not as aberration
but as basis of the coherence of his own Critique, lies not with either spiritual or
empirical theories of sentiment and sensibility but with the nonpositivist
epistemology of Rousseau, the thinker whose heterodox linkage of feeling with
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cognition rendered him permanently ineligible for election to the ranks of

sentimentalists, aesthetes and “sensible souls” professing the guidance of “feeling”
alone. For, identifying the role of “feeling” in the progress, regress and revolutions of
civil society – from the creation and inevitable increase of social inequality and
brutality to a contracted state of equality constituting by universal convention the
rule of all by all – Rousseau, recalling the ancient stoics, critiqued its active cultivation
as cause and sign of societal decay. Yet, unlike the stoics, Rousseau considered
“feeling” not in antipathy to but as a basis of reason itself. Te ﬁrst modern theorist
to analyze emotion as an inherently social rather than individually subjective
phenomenon, Rousseau performed his own, historically misinterpreted revolution
in philosophical thinking by recognizing in “feeling” a motive force whose occurrence

100. Kant, KrV, B XI, III: 22.

and effects must be considered in distinction from cultural and empirical givens if
the nature and history of human reason and experience are to be understood.
More than any other philosopher, it was the purportedly pure rationalist, Kant,
who grasped the full scope of, and faithfully integrated within his own systematic
thinking, the larger philosophical role of “feeling” in Rousseau. For, rather than
define a supposed “state of nature” to which Rousseau supposedly wished all
mankind to return, the experience of feeling first distinguished from purely
physical urges by his Discours marks the passage and “change”101 from a
retrospectively “hypothesized”102 “natural man” – imagined, for comparative
analytic purposes, to possess the same corporal needs but none of the intellectual
attributes and passions of men – to actual men and women as they know each
other and themselves historically, i.e., on the basis of their social – differential,
comparative and contractual rather than empirical-positive – relation. It is because
“natural man” does not “feel” (or reason, or remember, or imagine, or even desire or
do anything beyond that which will sate his immediate physical needs) that he is
proffered only hypothetically by Rousseau, not as an ideal of nonsocial man but to
oppose the supposed naturalness of unequal and enslaving social relations.
“Rousseau-ists” (to use Kant’s phrase) who instead equate “feeling” with innocence,
present as distorted a caricature of the critical role “feeling” plays in the speculative
epistemology, anti-theological social theory, and anti-naturalist “social contract” of
Rousseau, as histories of the Enlightenment typically offer of the biographical
Rousseau, that of a social “savage” (noble or not) in conflict with the rationalism of
the age, philosopher who decried the intellect and praised the heart.103

101. See J.-J. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine . . ., pp. 177, 227, 256, et passim. On the
signiﬁcance of Rousseau’s ethical and political theory for Kant’s, see Reich, Rousseau und
Kant; Irving Petscher, “Jean Jacques Rousseau. Ethik und Politik,” in Rousseau und die
Folgen, pp. 1–23, and Otto Vossler, Rousseaus Freiheitslehre (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1962).
102. Cf. Chapter One, n. 16, this study, for Kant’s introduction of the scientiﬁc mode of
hypothetical reasoning into discursive philosophy; see n. 104, this Chapter, for the full
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quotation from Rousseau regarding the necessity of “dispensing with the [supposed
historical] facts” that his theory of inequality will prove mere fictions, and of replacing them
with “hypothetical, conditional” reasoning instead.
103. Extending, improbably, from Voltaire to Derrida, a long series of critics have
condemned (or, in the case of Starobinski, commended) the idealization or ideology of
nature Rousseau’s theory supposedly promotes, just as his literary production, along with
that of a host of central eighteenth-century authors – Goethe, Diderot, Goldsmith,
Richardson, Hölderlin, and early Wordsworth, among them – has been viewed to presage
romanticism by making of “feeling” a secular religion. Tat Rousseau, as influential a
novelist as theorist, may have placed “feeling” and “nature” at the center of his work not to
advance anti-intellectual biases, whether reactionary, naïve, or ideological in basis, but to
designate (in advance of Kant) the rational limits of rational analysis, has not figured in his
own typical characterization as anti-enlightenment scourge.

While “feeling” is as central to Kant’s critical “hypothesis” as it is to Rousseau’s,104

the non-narrative, architectonic form of Kant’s Critique, in direct contrast to
Rousseau’s “hypothetical” theoretical fiction, makes the introduction of feeling at
its very center appear less like evidence of a naturalist ideology than an insignificant
misstep or logical weakness: a failed “moment” in the analytic rather than narrative
sense. And, indeed, whether “feeling” of any kind can successfully fulfill the central

A contrasting analysis of Rousseau’s position within a tradition of theoretical and ﬁctional

writing “beyond feeling” is offered in the final chapter of Brodsky, Words’ Worth: What the
Poet Does (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Rei Terada’s Feeling in Teory. Emotion
afer the“Death of the Subject” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) defly renews
and extends Rousseau’s introduction of feeling into theory by identifying its presence within
the analysis of his writing by Derrida and de Man in particular. No less than in the theoretical
writings of Kant, Rousseau and Wordsworth, analyzed here, the intervention of feeling has
played a pivotal critical role in eighteenth-century literary texts in particular, one that
underscores, rather than excludes, the larger theoretical, moral and epistemological import of
their fictions. I have attempted to analyze some of these in, “Narrative Representation and
Criticism: ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ in Clarissa,” in Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed.
James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), pp. 207–219; “Whatever Moves
You: ‘Experimental Philosophy’ and the Literature of Experience in Diderot and Kleist,” in
Te Tradition of Experiment from the Enlightenment to the Present. Essays in Honor of Peter
Demetz. ed. Nancy Kaiser and David E. Wellbery (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1992), pp. 17–43, and “Beyond the Pleasure of the Principle of Death: Goethe’s Werther and
Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield,” in Einsamkeit und Geselligkeit um 1800, ed. S. Schmid and
R. Emig (Hamburg: Carl Winter Verlag, 2008), pp. 29–40.
104. See Rousseau, Discours sur les origine et les fondements . . ., para. 6, p. 169: “Let’s
begin by clearing away all facts, for they don’t touch upon the question. We must not take
the research into which one can enter on this subject for historical truth but only as
hypothetical and conditional reasoning more appropriate to elucidating the nature of things
than to showing their true origin” (“Commençons donc par écarter tous les faits, car ils ne
touchent point à la question. Il ne faut pas prendre les recherches, dans lesquelles on peut
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entrer sur ce sujet, pour des vérités historiques, mais seulement pour des raisonnements
hypothétiques et conditionnels; plus propres à éclaircir la nature des choses qu’à en montrer
la véritable origine”), and Kant, KrV, B XXIII, III: 28n: “So the central laws of the movements
of the heavenly bodies granted conﬁrmed certainty to that which Copernicus only assumed
at ﬁrst as an hypothesis, and proved at the same time the invisible power that connects the
universe (Newtonian attraction), which would have remained forever undiscovered if
Copernicus had not dared, in a counter-sensical but true way, to look for the observed
movements not in the objects of heaven, but in their viewer. In analogy with that hypothesis,
I present in this Preface the transformation in mode of thinking brought forward in this
Critique only as an hypothesis . . .” (“So verschafen die Zentralgesetze der Bewegungen der
Himmelskörper dem, was Kopernikus anfänglich nur als Hypothese annahm, ausgemachte
Gewissheit, und bewiesen zugleich die unsichtbare den Weltbau verbindende Kraf (der
Newtonische Anziehung), welche auf immer unentdeckt geblieben wäre, wenn die erstere es

role Kant accords it in the Critique remains, of necessity, an open question. For, in
order to conform to Kant’s hypothetical division of our powers into “faculties,” the
function of feeling within the mediating faculty of judgment must itself be two-
sided; like any “bridge” or “overpass” (“Übergang”105), this one, so-called by Kant,
must have one foot in each of the two Critiques whose “unoverseeable chasm”
(“unübersehbare Kluf”106) of separation it spans. Tus, unlike Rousseau, for whom
the passions color cognition, and thus moral action in turn,107 Kant logically
divides ‘feeling” and the aesthetic experience it accompanies into two, apparently
contradictory feelings: those of “pleasure” [Lust] in the beautiful and “displeasure”
or “pain” [Unlust] in the sublime.
Te opposition of positive “pleasure” to its negation in “displeasure” that Kant
makes central to the specifically non-narrative, architectonic exposition of his
Critique will provide the nonrational basis for diachronic – dialectical and/or
differential – models of experience articulated in literature, philosophy and theory
of experience afer Kant. For the early and late romantics, Goethe, Schiller,
Hölderlin, Kleist, Keats, Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley, as for the great authors of
“modern life,” Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Kafa, Proust and Celan, no less than
those of modern theoretical reflection, from Hegel and Feuerbach to Marx, Freud,
Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, Lévi-Strauss, and
their ongoing descendants, Kant’s identification and division of the equally
noncognitive experiences of positive and negative “feeling” – experiences of excess
at work within and alongside rationally structured relations – prove productive in
a distinctly “historical” or narrative sense, providing the structure for dynamic
conceptions of individual development, of social, political and cultural formation,
and of history itself. While Kant famously refuses to investigate the structure of
time, hypothesizing it to be an a priori “form” of perceptual experience instead,
it is his introduction of two immediately opposed poles within the single
nonconceptual realm of “feeling” that will offer others a basis for delimiting and
integrating individual oppositional events diachronically. For, considered in its
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nicht gewagt hätte, auf eine widersinnliche, aber doch wahre Art, die beobachteten
Bewegungen nicht in den Gegenständen des Himmels, sondern in ihrem Zuschauer zu
suchen. Ich stelle in dieser Vorrede die in der Kritik vertragene, jener Hypothese analogische,
Umänderung der Denkart auch nur als Hypothese auf . . .”).
On the key role played by “feeling” in the Tird Critique, and by his theory of judgment
in the development both of Kant’s ethics and his Rousseau-inspired, political theory of
self-legislation, see Howard, Te Politics of Critique, pp. 10–12, 184: “Republican law is not
like the causal laws of nature; it is structured like the judgment of beauty’s ‘lawfulness
without law’ which is justiﬁed through a public process of interaction . . . the ‘freedom to
make public use of one’s reason at every point’.”
105. Kant, KU , B XIX, X: 83.
106. Ibid.
107. See Section Six, this Chapter.

necessary internal tension rather than systematic external function, Kant’s “bridge”
allows for the ascription to experience of a certain generative logic, a development
endowing lived time with, if not a coherent, then at least a temporally “extensive,”
articulable and representable, “shape.”
No such configuration of diachrony is laid out in Kant’s Critique. On the one
hand, time, that “schema” distinguished as entirely “internal” in origin and
perceptible only a posteriori, in the comparative perception of physical change, is a
wholly indemonstrable, purely hypothetical “form,” whose “art,” “monogram of the
pure imagination a priori,” remains “hidden in the depths of the human soul.”108
On the other hand, precisely because its “art” enables diachronic experience in the
first place, time appears practically irrelevant to the immediate, nonrepresentational
and nonconceptual “feeling,” of “pleasure” or “displeasure,” produced within us at
any moment we engage, as subjects, in specifically aesthetic perceptions of sensory
objects. Such perceptions issue not in the formation of stories, but of judgments,
and within the “playful” activity of judging, the schematic role played by time in
cognition is neither assumed nor put into question. Its integral formalizing
function is instead experienced – if it can be said to be experienced at all – as
cancelled or suspended. For, if “free play” means anything, it is the absence of all
schematization, whether that of experience by temporal perception or, in Kant’s
terms, of time as an a priori “schema” in itself.
Yet the act of judging, if it is to be recognized as such and so made available
to analysis in the first place, must present itself in some external or expressive,
and not merely hypothetical theoretical form. Tat form and expression of the
“feeling” of “pleasure” or “displeasure” is not temporally predicated in Kant, but
it is, no less for that, articulated. What articulate form, then, does “feeling,” in
Kant, take?
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108. Kant, KrV B 181, X: 190. Cf. the discussion of the schema in Chapter Two, Section
Nine, and Chapter Tree, this study.

5. Speech Act and “Communicability”

Te expression by the power of judgment of the experience of “feeling” – central
mediating activity of the Critique as a whole – consists in the statements, “It is
beautiful,”“It is sublime.”109 In direct contradiction of the commonplace view of Kant
as inattentive to the nonrational properties and potential of language explored by
such contemporary and later “anti-Enlightenment” thinkers as Hamann, Nietzsche,
Heidegger and Wittgenstein (or, earlier, by Pascal, Vico, Hobbes, Condillac, Rousseau
and Diderot), the medium of the power of judging in the Tird Critique, unlike that
of any other purported “faculty” or “capacity,” is not only specifically described but
described specifically to be that of speech. Already in his attribution of the feeling of
freedom to the apperception of a subject who judges (“the person who judges feels
himself fully free”110) and of “generality” (“Allgemeinheit”) to the feeling of pleasure
judged (“he [who judges] must believe he has reason to attribute a similar pleasure
to everyone”111), Kant states that it is only in the act of “speaking” that this combined
experience of freedom and generality of feeling at once articulates and constitutes
itself, makes itself and makes itself known. Judgment speaks and what it says does
not name but qualifies, describing an unknown nominative subject (“it”) by a simple
predicative complement (“is beautiful;” “is sublime”). It is because the “subject” of
judgment can find no “personal,” as “he”112 can find no “objective” basis for the

109. Cascardi comes closest to acknowledging the entirely technical, verbal deﬁnition
of judgment Kant constructs, before noting the formal resemblance of these sole utterances
of judgment to cognitive or constative statements: “Te claims, ‘It is beautiful’ and ‘It is
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sublime’ (which are quite remarkably, the only two examples Kant oﬀers of claims of taste),
may, as we have said, take the same form as assertions of epistemological facts” (Cascardi,
Consequences of Enlightenment, p. 81).
110. See n. 113, this Section, this Chapter, for full citation.
111. Kant, KU , B 18, X: 124–25.
112. Te awkwardness, peculiar to English, of having either to choose between or to
double all pronominal and adjectival references (“he or she;”“his or her”) to a single, implied
general subject, is both exacerbated and eradicated by Kant’s use of the term, “subject,” to
redeﬁne the concerns of philosophy itself. For, in Kant, that common noun serves both to
designate, in traditional logical terms, the placeholder of a purely grammatical function,
and to name the new, central focus of a necessarily “impure,” and thus “critical” philosophy,
the distinctly human “manifold” of mutually complementary and contradictory “faculties”
that it is, or should be, the task of philosophy to analyze.

“feeling” that “he” speaks in the ﬁrst place, and it is as speech, the mode of manifestation
shared by all, that judgment indicates its general, nonprivative nature:

Since [judgment] does not base itself on any inclination of the subject (nor on
any other dominating interest), but rather because the judging subject [der
Ureilender] feels himself fully free in view of the pleasure he attributes to the
object, so can he discover the grounds of this pleasure in no personal conditions
that would depend upon his subject alone, and thus must regard it as grounded
in that which he can presuppose of everyone else; consequently he must believe
he has reason to attribute a similar pleasure to everyone. He will thus so speak of
the beautiful, as if beauty were a quality of the object and judgment, logical
(constituting a cognition of the object through concepts) . . . For [aesthetic
judgment] has this similarity with logical judgments, that we can suppose its
validity for everyone.
[Denn da es sich nicht auf irgend eine Neigung des Subjekts (noch auf irgend ein
anderes überlegtes Interesse) gründet sondern da der Urteiliende sich in
Ansehung des Wohlgefallens, welches er dem Gegenstande widmet, völlig frei
fühlt; so kann er keine Privatbedingungen als Gründe des Wohlgefallens
auﬃnden, an diese sich sein Subjekt allein hinge, und muss es daher als in
demjenigen begründet ansehen, was er auch bei jedem andern voraussetzen
kann; folglich muss er glauben Grund zu haben, jedermann ein ähnliches
Wohlgefallen zuzumuten. Er wird daher vom Schönen so sprechen, als ob
Schönheit eine Beschaﬀenheit des Gegenstandes und das Urteil logisch (durch

Te Tird Critique further complicates this double, technical and philosophical usage by
rendering explicit, and splitting, the single, grammatical and analytic “subject” implied in
the First and Second Critiques. Te “subject” who judges commits a deﬁnitively grammatical
act – an act of speech – but does so not in propria, nor indeed in any, persona, but, rather,
impersonally to begin with: the ﬁrst word and subject of the discourse uttered by the
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“subject” who judges is not “I” but an undeﬁned “it.”

Finally, that personal qualities, including those typically assigned to genders, do not
define Kant’s “subject” – whose hypothesized, limited and unlimited abilities are themselves
the new, philosophically “heterogeneous” subject of his Critique – is underscored by Kant’s
critical doubling of that subject by the qualifier, “transcendental,” to signify not some purely
immaterial subject somehow divorced from all experience but one whose capacities for
both experience and action are not conditioned upon any particular experience. Defined
only by the ability to produce the logical syntax for connecting, and so to understand
formally delimited experience, and to act, both in intellectual and “moral matters,” in
“freedom” from those very forms of perceptual cognition, the “transcendental subject” –
which, for Kant, means any and all subjects – is as undefined by conventional marks of
“identity,” whether personal or cultural, chosen or imposed, as by the empirical givens or
accidens of birth.

Begriﬀe vom Objekte eine Erkenntnis desselben ausmache) wäre . . . darum, weil
es doch mit dem logischen die Ähnlichkeit hat, dass man die Gültigkeit desselben
für jedermann daran vorasussetzen kann.113]

Te assumption of the general validity of judgment is reﬂected in the fact of its

verbal articulation. It is the speciﬁcally verbal mode, and not “mode of thought,”
(“Denkungsart”114) of judgment, its enactment in an utterance understood to be
comprehensible and attributable to all, that lends it the “logical” quality
“constituting” the constative form of “cognition,” even while what it says says
nothing about either that assumption or the subject’s personal “inclination” with
regard to the object that occasions it, but is instead limited to “speak[ing]” merely
“as if ” speaking of a “quality of the object” itself. Te relationship of judgment to
logic implied by its exclusive realization in verbal form, the very form whose
grammatical and syntactic rules of comprehension are similarly required for the
exercise of logic generally, remains one of implication rather than identity, causing
judgment to appear at once universal and immediately particular in origin, its
“real,”115 rather than merely phenomenal meaning both self-evident and covert,
“objective” and “subjective” – a speech act, in short, whose “ground,” like that of
every speech act, is and can be nothing but the “subjective condition” of “the
general capacity for communication,” rather than any “sensation” as such:

If pleasure in a given object preceded, and only general communicability were

acknowledged in judgments of taste, there would be a contradiction. For such
pleasure would be nothing other than the mere pleasantness of a sensation and
thus, by its nature, could have only private validity, because immediately
dependent solely upon the internal presentation by which an object is given.
Tus it is the general capacity to communicate [or general communicability]
of an internal state that must constitute the ground of a judgment of taste as its
subjective condition.
[Ginge die Lust an dem gegebenen Gegenstande vorher, und nur die allgemeine
Mitteilbarkeit desselben sollte im Geschmacksurteile der Vorstellung des
Gegenstandes anerkannt werden, so würde ein solches Verfahren mit sich selbst
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im Widerspruche stehen. Denn dergleichen Lust würde keine andere, als die
blosse Annehmlichkeit in der Sinnenempﬁndung sein, und daher ihrer Natur
nach nur Privatgültigkeit haben können, weil sie von der Vorstellung, wodurch
der Gegenstand geben wird, unmittelbar abhinge.

113. Kant, KU , B 18, X: 124 (emphases in part my own).

114. See next note, for the speciﬁcally “theoretical” and “practical” “modes of thought”
belonging, by contrast, to the realms of cognition and action, respectively.
115. On the “practical,” both “moral” and verbal bases of the “real,” see n. 55, Chapter
Two, Section One, this study.

Also ist es die allgemeine Mitteilungsfähigkeit des Gemütszustandes in der

gegebenen Vorstellung, welche, als subjektive Bedingung des Geschmacksurteils,
demselben zum Grunde liegen. . . .116]

Te expression of a feeling (of pleasure or displeasure) in words that do not

express that feeling, the “immediate” experience of a subject, but something else
instead, a “capacity to communicate” that states of something not itself, “it is
beautiful,” “it is sublime,” and nothing more, appears both sufficiently empty of
particularity to resemble statements that are logical “for everyone,” i.e., statements
constating logical “knowledge” of “objects through concepts” and nothing more,
and “free” of the cognitive content given shape by conceptual, logical statements,
and thus logical – if one can say so much – only in part.117
Te confusion of logic with “feeling” that his analysis of the specifically verbal
mode of judgment describes is one Kant neither advances nor avoids, and if it
seems as unsuited to the rigor of his distinctions among, and definitions of, the
“faculties of reason” as does his undefined (necessarily overtly ungrounded, i.e.,
neither strictly a priori nor a posteriori referential) denomination of the “condition”
upon which judgment depends “common sense,” a less conventional – or, in Kant’s
terms more critical – inspection of them reveals the grounds of that confusion to

116. Kant, KU B 28, X: 131 (some emphases added).

117. See David W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Teory (Madison: University of Winsconsin
Press, 1974), pp. 16–17, for a perceptive analysis of the “discrepancy” between logical and
grammatical form in the verbal articulation of judgment Kant deﬁnes. In criticizing Kant’s
“imprecis[ion],” in this and other aspects of his Analytic (including its failure to conform to
the Aristotelian table of categories presented in the First Critique), Crawford brings to the
fore the distinctions between both judgment and logic-based statements, and judgment and
the grammatical representation of the experience in which judgment is based, when
imprecisely observing himself that while judgment “aﬃrms” “a feeling of pleasure” in the
“person making the judgment” (in fact it does no such thing), “the grammatical subject of
the judgment is,” instead, “the object” in whose perception the pleasure is felt (16). Most
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signiﬁcantly, Crawford emphasizes the critical distinction between the “mere sensation” of
“pleasure” had in “simply sensing an object” and “condition” of “common sense” that Kant
states “underlies the faculty of judgment.” What he does not recognize, and this work argues,
is that what distinguishes “common sense” from any individual “sensation” is its own
necessarily verbal basis and realization: “[i]f the judgment of taste were made simply and
directly on the basis of a pleasure in having a given sensation (simply sensing the object), it
could make no claim to universal validity. Te pleasures of mere sensation (that is smell,
taste, texture, sound, or sight is pleasing to me) are completely subjective, in Kant’s view;
they vary from individual to individual. . . . By relating the pleasure in the beautiful to the
faculty of judgment, however, Kant claims to have shown how it is possible for judgments of
taste to make this claim for universal validity. He maintains that the principle which
underlies the faculty of judgment (sensus communis) is a condition for any experience
whatsoever” (27–28).

be those that determine the rigor of Kant’s analysis itself. For in describing
judgment as a “feeling” in a subject (i.e., an I who feels pleasure or displeasure)
articulated in the “communicable” verbal form of a logical, universally valid
statement about an object (i.e., “It is beautiful;” “It is sublime”), Kant describes –
and must describe – an experience that is neither theoretical nor practical but
expressible: a “feeling” that produces neither knowledge nor action but words, a
statement, uttered by someone who could be anyone, “logically” constating not
that feeling but a quality of something, of any undefined thing, outside ourselves.
Te subject who, in judging, “speaks of the beautiful as if beauty were a quality of
the object and judgment were logical” neither knows anything nor acts in any
physical or moral sense, but says; and, consistent with saying the speech act it
speaks – sole act the “power of judgment” effects – the specifically verbal production
of judgment must owe to an experience neither cognitive nor moral “reason” can
define, one unencompassed by their separate, “object” “realms”118 of sensory objects
and the Good respectively. Rather than representing or enacting any object, any
subject who, in the experience of “feeling,” “feels himself free,” is free to speak of
something in the place of feeling itself. Judgment speaks “as if ” what it says “were
constitutive of a cognition of the object through concepts” even while employing
no such concepts and constituting no such cognition. Rather than expressing a

118. See Kant, KU , B XVIII–XXII, X: 82–85: “Our complete faculties of knowledge have
two realms, that of the concepts of nature and that of the concept of freedom . . . two different
realms which . . . continuously restrict each other in their effects in the sensory world . . .
Tus there must be a ground of the unity of the supersensory, which lies at the ground of
nature, with that, which the concept of freedom practically contains, whose concept, while
neither theoretically or practically attaining to a cognition, thus makes possible the transition
[or bridge] from the mode of thinking according to its principles of the one to that according
to its principles of the other . . . Tis is the power of judgment, about which one has cause to
guess by analogy, that it too may contain its own principle; which, even when no field of
objects stands as its realm, can have some [or any] ground [or floor]” (“Unser gesamtes
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Erkenntnis vermögen hat zwei Gebiete, das der Naturbegriffe, und das des Freiheitsbegriffe . . .
zwei verschieden[e] Gebiete, die sich . . . in ihren Wirkungen in der Sinnenwelt unauförlich
einschränken . . . Also muss es doch einen Grund der Einheit des Übersinnlichen, welches
der Natur zur Grunde liegt, mit dem, was der Freiheitsbegriff praktisch enthält, geben,
wovon der Begriff, wenn er gleich weder theoretisch noch praktisch zu einem Erkenntnisse
desselben gelangt, mithin kein eigentümliches Gebiet hat, dennoch den Übergang von der
Denkungsart nach den Prinzipien der einen, zu der nach Principien der anderen, möglich
macht . . . Dieses ist die Urteilskraf, von welcher man Ursache hat, nach der Analogie zu
vermuten, dass sie eben wohl . . . doch ein ihr eigenes Prinzip . . . in sich enthalten dürfe:
welches, wenn ihm gleich kein Feld der Gegenstände als sein Gebiet zustände, doch irgend
einen Boden haben kann”). On this particular discussion of the lack of a defined “realm” of
the objects of aesthetic judgment, and consequent extension of the grounds, or territory, of
its “power” anywhere at all, cf. Chapter Tree, Section One, this study.

personal sense or feeling of a subject, judgment is spoken as a general statement

about an unnamed but specific object (“it”), and it is in expressing itself in the form
of the definition, rather than subjective judgment, of an object it does not know that
judgment effectively passes for something else, a constative statement that
“possesses this resemblance to the logical, that we can presuppose its validity for
everyone.,”119
Te deductive circle described here by Kant’s identification of judgment with its
pronouncement, the empirical indistinguishability of the subjective experience of
feeling from the general verbal, or “speech” act in which judgment consists, is as
irresolvable as it is plain. For, rather than committing a mere “mis”-translation from
(a) subject to (an) object, the act of “judgment” translates nothing – neither subject
nor object – to begin with; indeed, if ever a verbal action put the fatally conventional
epistemology of concepts of translation into question – their recursive evasion, by
temporary displacement, of the problems and powers each and every language
presents – it is that of “judgment,” the singularly verbal, and single pivotal, critical
“faculty.” Rather than expressing an inevitable conceptual error or conditional,
individual aberrancy, the speech act that is judgment speaks with the universal
“validity” of logic, a disinterested illocution performable by anyone, just as its
constative, logical form, in speaking of an “it” rather than for an “I,” makes judgment
that particular kind of speech act ascribable to everyone else. Part of discourse or
part of action; piece of the language of “merely nominal” conceptual logic or of the
“real being” and “first basis of the possibility” of things: in theorizing the particular
power of judgment Kant renders that very opposition – organizing principle of his
entire critical project and strict methodological division drawn between “nominal”
and “real definitions” in his Logik120 – a distinction itself merely nominal in scope,
dependent only on the end of the reversible definition of judgment, i.e., as enactable
only in speaking and as speech act, at which one chooses to begin.
As in his refusal to speculate on the bases of “common sense,” Kant makes no
attempt here to resolve the rational puzzle of the identity of the mental capability
he proposes, to disentangle the premises from the consequences of its circular
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119. Ibid.
120. See Kant, Logik A 221–22, VI: 576: “Objects of experience allow merely nominal
explanations. – Logical nominal definitions of given concepts of the understanding are
taken from an attribute; real definitions, by contrast, out the being of the thing, out of the
first basis of its possibility. Tese last thus contain that which always pertains to the thing,
the real being of the same” (“Erfahrungsgegenstände erlauben bloss Nominalerklärungen. –
Logische Nominal-Definitionen gegebener Verstandesbegriffe sind von einem Attribut
hergenommen; Real-Definitionen hingegen aus dem Wesen der Sache, dem ersten Grunde
der Möglichkeit. Die letztern enthalten also das, was jederzeit der Sache zukommt, das
Realwesen derselben.”) For an analysis of the centrality of Kant’s redefinition of the
distinction between “real” from “nominal” definitions in his Logik to his Critique, see
Brodsky, Te Imposition of Form, Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 36–52 esp.

deﬁnition, even to decide which is which, premise or consequence, so as to order

them into a logically consecutive, deductive chain. Te “moments” of Kant’s
Analytik – like the organizational categories they employ – are descriptive, not
hypothetical or speculative. Refusing equally to arrive at a single,“real” or “nominal,”
origin of judgment by playing Solomon to his own formulation, he chooses instead
to emphasize that, while judgments “resemble” logical procedures in their
constitutive “validity” for – which is to say, their utterability by – all subjects, that
validity and that resemblance rest on no conceptions of the sensory, and so no
logical constitution and cognition of objects at all.
Te particular descriptive speech act, “it is beautiful,” can and will only be
uttered when understood to be valid of an object in view, as it were, of the “feeling”
of any subject. Yet because judgment consists of no knowledge of an object, either
de facto or de jure (a logical distinction effectively effaced by the activity of
judgment itself), it remains, despite the form of logical, constative language it takes,
an act of speech and nothing more: nothing more, that is, than speech standing for
the feeling common to every subject by designating instead a “quality constitutive
of an object,” a substitution of object for subject, and of a referential copular
statement for the report of an action (“feeling”), spoken without any personal
“interest” in performing that speech act at all.
Kant’s description of an internal power of judgment whose universality stems
from being externally identifiable with speech reminds us that, like speech acts
themselves, language as a whole depends on concepts but not concepts alone. Te
language that enables logical procedures also enables the replacement, in the act of
articulation, of inarticulate “feeling,” and the confusion of the two, logic and the
mere appearance thereof, may prove as critically productive as it is misleading. Te
fact that any single judgment no less than the singular qualities that define all acts
of judgment are both made available to us only through speech, indicates that, just
as a truly “private language” is not a language but an oxymoron – a notion of
“language” invented by a subject who himself could never remember it because,
entirely internal or unexpressed, it cannot be received or recalled as extant by
anyone – so without speech there would be no judgment, insofar as we can
understand and imagine it.
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Te question, however, which the reversible structure of the foundation of

judgment raises as its result, is whether without judgment, there could be speech:
whether language, repository of all discursive concepts, deﬁnitions, logical
conceptual relations, and, thus, of all knowledge in Kant, originates with the
noncognitive faculty of aesthetic judgment itself, an inarticulate “feeling” disguised
in being articulated as a constative statement, the, strictly speaking, illogical birth
of language and of logic that makes the movement or “transition” within the
Critique – as within every subject – between the limits of logical, phenomenal
cognition and the “practical” realization rather than merely “technical” imitation of
“free” action possible.121 Like the a priori forms of time and space, the conceptual

121. See Kant, KU , B XIX-XX, X: 83–84.

content of language appears fully formed within the Critique, just as the linguistic
basis of all possible epistemology is given by its founding “hypothesis.” Yet in the
Tird Critique language is instead the unique modality of a noncognitive ascription
to an object. What is ascribed to that object, to any object, perceived as if for the
first time – which is to say, as a “free” form or even “not-form,”122 something
apparent but without content, severed from any pre-existing knowledge of or
interest in it on our part – is a quality predicative not of its conceptualization but
of its nonconceptual and thus unstated experience: the experience, free even from
the fundamental operations of schematism, of how that perception makes the
subject “feel.”
“It is beautiful” – which is to say, I feel pleasure in the mere perception of it, in
the “free play of imagination and understanding” that it occasions in me – is the
speech act that does not speak for itself, but for “it,” and for “it” as it is perceived,
without constitutive knowledge, not by an “I” but by “everyone” (“jedermann”). Te
perception that occasions feeling and the feeling that occasions judgment first
occur as judgment in a speech act, a specifically noncognitive use of speech. Tus
it is that this particular origin of judgment, in a feeling so impersonal or general
that only language can express it, indicates at the same time the unique generality
attributable to language, any language, itself. Tat power which is “merely
contemplative,” which is “indifferent as regards the existence of an object,” which is
“not directed to concepts,” not “based on concepts, nor has concepts as its purpose,”
may in turn share not only the generality of language with regard to its own formal
expressive mode, but indicate how such an inherently disinterested, general form
of expression could have been formed to begin with.
For, how could language, which includes the possibility of speech acts, i.e.,
inherently “generally communicable” (“allgemein mitteilen lassen”123) acts taken in
independence of the cognitive and persuasive measures of speech that language
provides, ever “free” itself from such limited, “technical” aims so as to act with the
distinterest of a techne? Or, by the same token, we may ask, in what merely
contemplative experience – the experience by a subject of an unknown object,
“it” – can “the general communicability” (“allgemeine Mitteilbarkeit”124) of
language, repository of knowledge, instrument for the formulation and pursuit of
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interests, and expression of merely contemplative experience alike, disengage itself

from the captive language we use and so allow a disinterested power, that of
judgment, to articulate itself in the ﬁrst place? But this is as much as to ask how
language as mode of action, rather than means of appropriation or even known
intention, originates.

122. Ibid., B XLIX, X: 103.

123. Kant, KU , B 66, X:158.
124. Ibid.

6. Rousseau’s Nouns
Te notion that judgment, in being spoken, by any perceiving subject, “as if ”125 of
an object, has something to do with what makes language language – a system of
delimitation of unlimited complexity and effectivity, rather than a limited means
to an end – is comparable with another, very different description of language
similarly enacted in lieu of cognition, the account of the “origin of languages”
hypothesized by Rousseau. If the predicate of Kant’s dictum, “our age is the Age of
Critique,” merely signified a delimited period within a specific historical
chronology, the birthdate of that “age” might be fixed at 1750, the year Rousseau
responded to the public question posed by the Académie de Dijon: “do the arts and
sciences improve morals?” Enacting in word and in deed its own openly allegorical
first sentence, Rousseau’s prize-winning First Discourse appeared on the
international scene of letters as if “from nothing.”126 By one of the most celebrated

125. See this Chapter, Section Five, n. 113.

126. In the first words of Rousseau’s first speculative publication, there may be no
“greater” – more vivid and comprehensive – “spectacle” in Western letters than that staged
in the introductory sentence of the First Discourse itself, in which Rousseau manages to
represent the entire trajectory of mankind’s active development “out of nothingness” in the
simplest of allegorical scenes, first iteration of a life’s work of remarkable sentences
articulating the practical poetics defining all human history: “It is a great and beautiful
spectacle to see man depart in some way from nothing by his own efforts; to dissipate by the
lights of his reason the shadows in which nature had enveloped him. . . .” (“C’est un grand et
beau spectacle de voir l’homme sortir en quelque manière du néant par ses propres efforts;
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dissiper, par les lumières de sa raison les ténèbres dans lesquelles la nature l’avait
enveloppé . . .” [Discours sur les sciences et les arts; Discours sur l’origine . . ., p. 30]). In the
recursive arc of the human “departure from nothing” into subjecthood that the progress of
the complete sentence proceeds to describe, enlightenment, romanticism, and further,
oppositely oriented enlightenment follow alternately upon each other, proceeding past the
(Nietzschean) narrative summit of the subject’s surplus striving “to elevate himself above
himself ” (“s’éléver au-dessus de lui-même”), to the “still greater and more difficult” feat of his
“returning inside himself to study man and come to know his nature” (“ce qui est encore
plus grand et plus difficile, rentrer en soi pour y étudier l’homme et connaître sa nature . . .”
[Ibid.]). For an excellent account of the interdependent political and cultural formations
that the “spectacle” of man’s “departure from nothing” into history narrated in the
(spectacular) first sentence of the First Discourse entails, see Zev Trachtenberg, Making
Citizens: Rousseau’s Political Teory of Culture (NY: Routledge, 1993).

ironies of history, its critique of the inevitable corruption of private and public
morals by artful replacements of the “appearance” of virtue for virtue, and of
deceptively accumulated might for right – artifice used to garner personal
power at the cost of others’ physical and intellectual “enslavement” – won for
its author the very kind of “celebrity” that the Discours so effectively, famously
demystified.127
Unlike Kant’s Analytic, Rousseau’s account of linguistic articulation takes
the quasi-fictional form of a story, in which the emergence, first, of language,
and, secondly, of cognition, are consequences of an immediate experience of
ignorance: of knowing that one does not know what one perceives and thereby
“knowing” – if such a knowledge were possible – negation alone. Where Kant’s
Critique, when describing the ability to communicate a noncognitive perception,
says “judgment” – one of several powers, if the uniquely pivotal one, articulated
within its architectonic organization of our mental capabilities – Rousseau’s
cognitive allegory says “origin of language,” the articulation, as if for the first time,
of a specifically verbal form in response to a perceptual experience itself occurring
as if for the first time, which is to say, without our already “knowing” it as such (or,
in Kant’s formal terms, cognizing it a priori). Still, both Analytic and narrative at
once allow and obligate their authors to consider language in distinction from any
conceptual knowledge or frame: to understand it as a systematic means of
articulating signification, through predication and symbolization, whose defining
norms and rules, or grammar, share the generality of logic even while remaining in
themselves independent, or, in Kant’s terms, “free,” of the cognitive conclusions to
which the exercise of logic leads.128

127. Te irony of the fact that the work which granted Rousseau immediate international
fame took aim at the attainment of precisely just such “celebrity” was far from lost on
Rousseau. Te ﬁrst sentence of the 1751 “advertisement” to the publication of the Discours
states: “Qu’est ce que la célébrité? Voici le malheureux ouvrage à qui je dois la mienne”
[What is celebrity? Here is the unfortunate work to which I owe my own], J.-J. Rousseau,
“Avertissement,” Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 25). See also the ﬁne Introduction to
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the Discours by Jacques Rogier, whose opening echoes Rousseau’s words: “Te celebrity of
Rousseau dates from the Discours sur les sciences et les arts . . .” (pp. 5–22 [5]).
128. Te constitutional diﬀerences and overlappings between logic and language, as
these bear directly upon the verbal acts of judgment enabled by what Kant calls “common
sense,” are discussed in the preceding Section Five; for Kant’s discussion of the overlap
between statements of judgment and logical statements, see esp. n. 113.
A stunning re-evaluation of Rousseau by Fredric Jameson in Valences of the Dialectic
(New York and London: Verso, 2009) goes precisely to this point. Distinguishing Rousseau’s
“reasoning” from received notions of “Enlightenment Reason,” much as this study describes
Kant’s invocation of a verbally operative “common sense” whose unknown derivation Kant
asserts he neither “wants” to nor “can research now,” Jameson deﬁnes the apparently
paradoxical outcomes and lacunae of Rousseau’s “truly . . . historically original” “reasoning”
not as failings but, on the contrary, as “the “reconstruction of history in thought.” Indeed, the

In his Discours sur l’origine, et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes
(1755), Rousseau next describes the very proposition of an “origin” of language as
presenting an inherent analytical problem, since, logically speaking, “there would
have had to have been words to establish the use of words,” i.e., an articulation of
thought of the very kind language alone provides, as well as an agreed means of
being in “common agreement” on the conventional forms of that articulation,
forms whose universal usage define the existence of a “language” in the first place.129
Te complete subject of this Second Discourse, however – the “origin, or
foundations of inequality” – suggests a plurality of sources for distinctions of
status drawn among its users that language specifically does not make. Rather than
presenting the logical paradox of a single origin dependent upon its own earlier
establishment, and so, infinitely receding from view – a one which is not one, but
also not zero or two – the question of the “origin and foundations” of “inequality”
refers by name to a condition of non-universality, a non-linguistic condition
whose causes differ from each other. Whereas language is an integrated, purely
conventional system for symbolic and communicative action that, like all fully
systematic, or “arbitrary,” conventions, must be performed in order to “be” “itself ”
(and vice versa), “inequality,” on Rousseau’s analysis, has two separate sources
qualitatively distinct from each other in mode and effect: the natural, or empirical-
physical, and the social, or man-made.

fact that that “reasoning” leads Rousseau to an “unprecedented” recognition of logical-

historical “contradiction,” as demonstrated in his discussion of the origin of language in the
Second Discourse in particular, makes him, Jameson concludes, “the impossible founder”
“not only . . . of structuralism” but “of the dialectic itself ” (see “Rousseau and Contradiction,”
Valences, pp. 303–314). Jameson helpfully identifies the historical contradictions articulated
by Rousseau’s specifically historical “reasoning” (what this study calls his hypothetical
“narrative”—in contrast to Kant’s “architectonic”—logic) as analogous, both in structure and
significance, to “one of Kant’s great discoveries:” that Kant, “for whom the reading of Jean-
Jacques was fully as decisive,” reformulated Rousseau’s demonstration of the “impossibility
of thinking about origins” in his deduction of the fundamental “antinomy” at work in all
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possible thinking about time. As discussed in this study, it is precisely that antinomy, and the
temporal dependence of “internality” upon “externality” in which it results, that Kant
describes as the basis for “being in time” (“Dasein in der Zeit”), the question of whose
occurrence (“How?” [“Wie?”]), like that of “change” itself, he utterly frankly and logically
concludes, “we cannot answer” (on the Second Preface, see this Chapter, Section Ten, n. 256;
see also Chapter One, n. 9). On Rousseau and Marx, see also Robert Wokler, Rousseau, Te
Age of Enlightenment, and Teir Legacies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), esp.
pp. 214–232; Lucio Colletti, Ideologia e società (Bari: Universale Laterza, 1975).
129. J.-J. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine . . ., pp. 205–209. On the diﬀering, interrelated
theories of the origin of the language presented in the Discours sur l’origine . . ., on the one
hand, and the Essai sur l’origine des langues, on the other, see Mira Morgenstern, Rousseau
and the Politics of Ambiguity (University Park, Pa.: Te Pennsylvania State University, 1996),
pp. 12–13, 17–20.

Te habitual confusion of the two “foundations,” by which social deﬁnitions are

taken to reflect natural givens, requires Rousseau to investigate how social
inequality came about. Rousseau calls this second kind of “inequality” “moral or
political” (rather than “natural or physical”) “because it depends on a sort of
convention” rather than proceeds from empirical givens, and, instead of confirming
distinctions of natural accident and context, institutes arbitrary ones artificially.130
In this, its solely conventional basis, then, the condition of social inequality
resembles that of language, whereas qualities of “natural” inequality – say, of size,
or strength, or shape, or location – resemble neither linguistic nor social distinctions
in that they are based exclusively in empirical, measurable givens.
Te difference, then, between kinds of “foundations” of inequality is not
incremental but categoricaI, and it is in response to the absolute distinction
between them that Rousseau hypothesizes a kind of “man” absolutely distinct from
man as we know him: a “savage” or “natural man” theoretically defined as a being
existing without a concept of men. Not recognizing others or himself as men and
so lacking all basis and desire for forming either social, comparative cognitive-
conceptual, imaginative, or even emotional – indeed, any other than merely
immediate, physical – relations, the “natural man” perceives neither similarity nor
difference between objects or within individual objects over time: a thing is the
thing it is at each moment it appears, and the mental life of “savage man,” had he
one, would be doomed to the mental violence of death by tautology.
Deprived of all knowledge,” such a man “can only feel the passions” “nature”
fleetingly imposes upon him.131 His “heart asks for nothing” since “no imagination

130. J.-J. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine . . ., p. 167. See Sally Howard Campbell,
Rousseau and the Paradox of Alienation (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2012), pp. 13–41
esp., for a clear description of and contrast between the “social isolation of natural man” and
artiﬁcial alienation of man from man by “property” in civil society.
131. “Te passions derive their origin for their part from our needs, and their progress
from our knowledge, for one can only desire or fear things either insofar as one has ideas of
them, or by the simple impulse of nature; and the savage man, deprived of all enlightenment,
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only experiences the passions of this last kind; his desires do not exceed his physical needs; the
only goods that he knows in the universe are food, a mate, and rest; the only evils that he fears
are pain and hunger. I say pain and not death, for no animal will ever know what death is, and
knowledge of death, and of its terrors, is one of the ﬁrst acquisitions man would have made in
distancing himself from the condition of animals” (“Les passions, à leur tour, tirent leur
origine de nos besoins, et leur progrès de nos connaissances; car on ne peut désirer ou craindre
les choses que sur les idées qu’on en peut avoir, ou par la simple impulsion de la nature; et
l’homme sauvage, privé de toute sorte de lumières, n’éprouve que les passions de cette dernière
espèce; ses désirs ne passent pas ses besoins physiques; les seuls biens, qu’il connaisse dans
l’univers sont la nourriture, une femelle et le repos; les seuls maux qu’il craigne sont la douleur
et le faim; je dis la douleur et non la mort; car jamais l’animal ne saura ce que c’est que mourir,
et la connaissance de la mort, et de ses terreurs, est une des premières acquisitions que
l’homme ait faites, en s’éloignant de la condition animale” [Ibid., pp. 195–96]).

speaks to it,” and that figurative, or catachrestic silence – the absence of speech and
all power of reflection within one in whom they had never existed – renders even
the external “spectacle of nature” “indifferent” to his eye.132 A being who need never
imagine or speak, in that he is, “so to speak, always wholly with himself ” (“pour
ainsi dire, toujours tout entier avec soi”133), and, so we might equally and literally
say, does not know what he is missing, is someone who indeed can only be said to
have been in a “hypothetical” sense, in that, existing only and wholly “with himself ”
and “the sole feeling of his present existence,” he has as little “idea” of anything
beyond the immediate reach of his senses as he does “of the future.” Just as the
“natural man” can imagine no present different from this one, he engages in no
activity capable of exceeding perceived identities in the present by producing a
mediating and replicable – inherently historical – sign. A being lacking any “idea”
of himself, as a subject of experience, or of the objects of his or any experience, can
leave no memorializing record of either behind.
Rousseau’s hypothetical “savage” or “natural man,” a being that can solely be
defined speculatively to resemble man in the first place, is, then, no one either
Rousseau or anyone else can have known, let alone can or should aspire to resemble
or become, not because in order to be this not-quite man one would have to “turn
back the clock,” but because, however and wherever this “man” is, there is no clock,
just as there is neither empirical nor internal experience of self or others to speak
of. “Natural man,” Rousseau’s name for the negation of all relations and temporally
extensive identities, is a fiction allowing him in turn to negate or disallow the
supposed naturalness of the unequal social relations and identities of “the men
before our eyes.”134 It is these, social and historical men who, “with the help of
communication,” “invent” “ideas,” “knowledge,” “curiosity,” “foresight,” and, with
them, the possibility of “progress,” along with the accumulations of power that
accompany the invention of conventional “inequality” itself.135
Te one invention upon which all these last depend, Rousseau declares, is
language, and the “immense space” Rousseau states man had to have “traversed,”
and the “infinite time” it must have “cost,” for language to have “first been invented,”
are phenomenal and experiential metaphors for the categorical distinction he has
already hypothetically drawn, between men, “in a pure state of nature,” whose
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corporeal unequalness, given by nature, would be entirely empirical in origin, and

men “in need of languages,” whose “inequality” they themselves author.136
Summoning those who would reﬂect on these second, conventional or “moral”
foundations of social inequality to “consider how many ideas we owe to the use of
words,” Rousseau asks his reader’s “permi[ssion] to consider for a moment the
predicament of the origin of languages” (“l’embarras de l’origine des langues”).137

132. Ibid., pp. 204, 196, 216–217, 181.

133. Ibid., p. 175.
134. Ibid., p.180.
135. Ibid., pp. 198–209.
136. Ibid., pp. 204, 198
137. Ibid., p. 183–85.

Analogous to his notion of a pre-historical, “natural” or “savage man” conceived, by

“hypothetical and conditional reasoning,”138 for the sole purpose of providing a
comparative vantage point139 from which to analyze the socially enacted inequality
we mistake for natural, Rousseau begins his discussion by attributing a similar,
hypothetically natural origin to language, too, equating “the ﬁrst language” with
“cries of nature” and naturally expressive “gestures” before swifly proving the
insuﬃciency of these to do what only a non-natural “language” of “signs”
“substitut[ed]” for immediate, physical “actions” can do:

. . . but since gesture barely indicates objects that are present, or easy to describe,
and visible actions; since it is not of universal usage, because darkness, or the
interposition of a body render it useless, and since gesture demands attention
rather than excites it, one thought to oneself, finally, to substitute for gesture the
articulations of the voice, which, without having the same relationship with
certain ideas, are more appropriate for representing them all, as instituted signs;
substitution which can only be made by common consent, and in a manner
rather difficult to practice for men whose rough organs had not yet had any
exercise, and even more difficult to conceive in itself, since this unanimous
agreement must have been motivated, and the word seems to have been
absolutely necessary in order to establish the use of the word . . .
[. . . mais comme le geste n’indique guère que les objets présents, ou faciles à
décrire, et les actions visibles; qu’il n’est pas d’un usage universel, puisque l’obscurité,

138. Ibid., p. 156.

139. Rousseau repeatedly defines the “savage man” he has hypothesized both as a being
“possessing nothing” (neither “particular” personal properties nor artificially appropriated
property) in that his actions aim only to satisfy immediate, physical needs, and as the being
whose state of “natural” “equality” consists precisely in that of “being nothing.” See Ibid.,
p. 220; the first sentence of First Discourse (see n. 126, this Section, this Chapter); and Second
Discourse, Ibid. p. 254 in which Rousseau describes the “revolution” that inevitably “closes the
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circle” described by our “departure” from the natural state: “Here is the last term of inequality,
and the extreme point which closes the circle and touches the point from which we departed.
Here all particulars become equal again because they are nothing” (“C’est ici le dernier
terme de l’inégalité, et le point extrême qui ferme le cercle et touche au point d’où nous
sommes parties. C’est ici que tous les particuliers redeviennent égaux parce qu’ils ne sont
rien”). See also the admonition to the reader to beware that “founder of civil society” who
claims and stakes out property as his own: “Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost
if you forget that fruits are everyone’s and the land belongs to no one” (“Gardez-vous d’écouter
cet imposteur; vous êtes perdus, si vous oubliez que les fruits sont à tous, et que la terre n’est
à personne”). Kant’s view of the earth’s surface is exactly the same: “Te earthly ground
[Boden] belongs to no one,” Metaphysik der Sitten §12, XIII: 372; cf. C. Brodsky, In the Place
of Language. Literature and the Architecture of the Referent (NY: Fordham University Press,
2009), pp. 13–14.

ou l’interposition d’un corps, le rendent inutile, et qu’il exige l’attention plutôt qu’il
ne l’excite, on s’avisa enfin de lui substituer les articulations de la voix, qui, sans
avoir le même rapport avec certaines idées, sont plus propres à les représenter
toutes, comme signes institués; substitution qui ne peut se faire que d’un commun
consentement, et d’une manière assez difficile à pratiquer pour des hommes dont
les organes grossiers n’aviaent encore aucun exercice, et plus difficile encore à
concevoir en elle-même, puisque cet accord unanime dut être motive, et que la
parole paraît avoir été fort nécessaire, pour établir l’usage de la parole . . .140]

Similar to false genealogies deriving words from supposedly more originary,

natural gestures, is their attribution to a domestic source that begs the very question
of origins it pretends to answer. Neither view, which merely displaces what it does
not know, can describe the ‘origin of language’ without describing a circle as well:

[T]o say that the mother dictates to the child the words that he must use to ask her
for one thing or the other shows well how one teaches languages that are already
formed, but does not teach us how they are formed . . . [Here is a] new difficulty
even worse than the preceding one; for if men needed words in order to learn to
think, they needed to know how to think even more to find the art of the word . . .
[(D)e dire que la mère dicte à l’enfant les mots dont il devra se servir pour lui
demander telle ou telle chose, cela montre bien comment on enseigne des
langues déjà formées, mais cela n’apprend point comment elles se forment . . .
Nouvelle difficulté pire encore que la précédente; car si les hommes ont eu besoin
de la parole pour apprendre à penser, ils ont eu bien plus besoin encore de savoir
penser pour trouver l’art de la parole.141]

Even if we were to “cross for a moment the immense space that must have
existed between the pure state of nature and the need for languages” (“franchissons
pour un moment l’espace immense qui dut se trouver entre le pur état de nature et
le besoin des langues”142), Rousseau reasons further, it would remain impossible to
conceive how “much time and how many circumstances were necessary” for “the
easiest part of language,” “solely physical substantives,” to be “invent[ed],” to say
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nothing of “purely abstract” “general ideas,” such as “number, abstract words,

aorists . . . verbal tenses, verbs, particles, syntax, propositions, and reasonings,” and
the innumerable other grammatical and analytical forms that themselves “form
the logic of discourse.”143 Describing himself as “frightened by these multiplying
difficulties,” Rousseau offers to “leave the discussion of this difficult problem to
whomever else wants to undertake it,” and, explicitly abandoning the question he
cannot answer of “[w]hatever these origins may be” (“[q]uoi qu’il en soit de ces

140. Ibid., p. 205.

141. Ibid., pp. 203–4.
142. Ibid., p. 204.
143. Ibid., pp. 206–208.

origines”144), he returns to those of inequality in society, whose institution, through

acts of appropriation combining verbal designation (“ ‘Tis is mine’ ” [“Ceci est à
moi”]) with physical delineation (the “enclosure of a terrain” [“ayant enclos un
terrain”]), itself depends upon a prior institution of language.145 Tus, even as it
itself proves unavailable to definition, the origin of language defines the passage
in Rousseau’s social theory from “natural,” equally indifferent, or nonsocial “man,”
to the unnatural “institution [of] inequality”146 among social men: from the
necessary fiction of an imaginary man without language, to men, as they know and
interact with each other, with language. Yet, while a story originating with a “savage”
or prelinguistic man may be “hypothesized” for the sake of an account of social
man based on “reasoning,”147 rather than blinkered cultural assumptions or
retroactive justifications, the moment in which those hypothetical, untraceable
beginnings become a future and present state of inequity – how and when a
posited fiction of universal neutrality is negated by a positively negative reality –
cannot be attributed properly to either side of the natural/social-historical divide.
For it is that very division – between unconscious existence and conscious
experience, physical compulsion and comparative, analytic knowledge, and all the
human relations and endeavors that stem from this last – that the formation of
language, the substitution of signs for sensuous immediacy and subsequent social
occlusion of such (hypothetical) immediacy, would have to bridge.
Of note here is Rousseau’s openly figural spatialization, in the preceding passage
and elsewhere,148 of what would conventionally be represented as a temporal
development or course of events. Rather than limiting his speculations to the passage

144. Ibid., p. 209.

145. Discours sur l’origine, p. 222. I have discussed the necessary involvement of language
in the artiﬁcial invention of property adduced in the Second Part of the Second Discourse
in, In the Place of Language, pp. 9–16. For a lucid discussion of the “prerequisite” of “equality”
both for international “peace” and social “stability,” comparing Rousseau’s theory of history
with Marx’s in the Eighteenth Brumaire, see Christine Jane Carter, Rousseau and the Problem
of War (New York: Garland, 1987), pp. 212–13.
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146. Discours sur l’origine . . ., p. 219.

147. Ibid., p. 169.
148. Ibid., p. 197: “Te more one thinks about this subject, the more the distance from
pure sensations to the simplest cognitions increases in our view; and it is impossible to
conceive how a man would have been able, by his own sole strengths, without the assistance
of communication and the spur of necessity, to cross such a great interval” (“Plus on médite
sur ce sujet, plus la distance des pures sensations aux plus simples connaissances s’agrandit
à nos regards; et il est impossible de concevoir comment un homme aurait pu par ses seules
forces, sans le secours de la communication, et sans l’aiguillon de la nécessité, franchir un si
grand intervalle”). Cf. Ibid., pp. 198, 204 and Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 54, for
similar descriptions of the immeasurable – because categorically transformative and
unprecedented – change that “is” the “origin” of language and inequality as an incalculable
“space” or “distance,” or “inﬁnite time.”

of time required for language to emerge, Rousseau refers instead to the “immense
space” that man would have had to “traverse” to proceed from the “pure state of nature
to that of the need for languages.” A similar spatialization marks the origin of
Rousseau’s own entrance into public letters as well. Te opening sentence of his prize-
winning Discours sur les sciences et les arts149 represents all of human progress as a
visual scene – “un grand et beau spectacle”– occurring both in space and by spatial
means: “It is a grand and beautiful spectacle to see man depart, by his own efforts, out
of nothingness . . ., to cross with giant steps the vast expanse of the universe.”150
Such explicitly spatially figural or scenographic language is especially striking in
Rousseau. Keenly aware of the illusion of knowledge that metaphoric speech effects,
Rousseau announces he will compose his theoretical work in the unadorned, direct
language of prose: “my subject concerning man in general, I will strive to use a
language which suits all nations.”151 Consistent with his critical insight into the
logical “conundrum” any attempt to identify the “origin” of language outside of
language presents, Rousseau’s decision to “use a language” of “general” hypothetical,
rather than empirically specific reasoning to present his unconventional theses
indeed “suit[ed]” his writings not only to “all nations” but all times: whatever opinion
one may hold of Rousseau’s argument, and wherever and whenever those opinions
obtain, the prose style in which Rousseau argues against mistaking convention for
nature defies the temporality of social conventions themselves, and so has remained
among the most communicative and authoritative in French prose.
For the same reasons, Rousseau’s use here of a distinctly unsuited, externalizing
metaphor to describe the complete “change”152 within man that the “establishment”
of language entails, is so conspicuous as to indicate no accident but, rather, an equally
conscious choice, that of staging change itself as an unmistakably fictive appearance,
spectacle or scene. In writing about the formation of language in spatial, visual terms,
Rousseau purposefully avoids the greater conceptual error conventionally committed
in its regard: that of misrepresenting the temporality of that formation – whether in
gradual, progressive and developmental, or unmediated and disruptive terms – as a
representable presence, a series of objects co-present with themselves at identifiable
moments in time. Rousseau’s “discourse” figures the origin of language in metaphoric
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149. See n. 126, this Section, this Chapter.

150. Ibid.
151. Discours sur l’origine . . ., p. 169: “Mon sujet intéressant l’homme en général, je
tâcherai de prendre un langage qui convienne à toutes les nations.” Wordsworth describes
the “prosaic” language “really used by men” of his poetic project in nearly identical terms;
see this Chapter, Section Eleven, and Words’ Worth, pp. 3–56 esp.
152. “[T]he use of the word established itself and perfected itself insensibly in the breast
of each family, and one can go on to conjecture how diverse particular causes could expand
language and accelerate its progress by rendering it more necessary . . . Everything begins to
change how it seems” (“l’usage de la parole s’établit ou se perfectionne insensiblement dans
le sein de chaque famille, et l’on peut conjecturer encore comment diverses causes
particulières purent étendre le langage, et en accélérer le progrès en le rendant plus
nécéssaire . . . Tout commence à changer de face” (Discours sur l’origine . . ., p. 227).

spatial terms, as the fictive mise en scène of an enormous space somehow crossed, so
as not to misrepresent it in apparently logical, causal narrative form.
Unlike the story of a “natural man” whose hypothesized, prior existence provides
a critical lever for understanding social man at present, no story of the origin at the
center of that story – that of an origin of language already determined logically to
be unknowable – is committed by Rousseau to print. Te origin of language, unlike
that of social man from “natural man,” cannot be the subject of a story-line in the
Discours exactly because, unlike the openly fictive hypothesis of a “natural” subject,
the natural capability for fiction – for understanding and action engendered by
artifice, by convention – that made (and makes) language “language,” and not a
subject available to diachronic mimesis to begin with, was “then” and remains
“now” real and ongoing, did and does exist.
Te exception to Rousseau’s refusal to narrate language formation is his “Essai
sur l’origine des langues où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitation musicale”
(written 174?; 175?; 176?; posth. pub. 1781 ). Never published by Rousseau, even its
exceptional status remains equivocal, in that this story is one its author did not
want circulated and read.153 Te Essai, one could say, is the exception that Rousseau
himself refused to externalize, to let take its “place” in history by appearing as one
chapter in the author’s bibliographical chronology.154 Its specific date of composition
unknown, the facts surrounding the “origin” of the Essai itself remain, appropriately
enough, uncertain.155 For, while Rousseau does indeed literally “attempt” to describe

153. Te excellent annotations to the ﬁrst publication of the Essai from an unpublished
1761 manuscript edited by Charles Porset (Essai sur l’origine des langues, où il est parlé de la
mélodie et de l’imitation musicale, ed. Charles Porset [Paris: Nizet, 1969]) include an exchange
of letters with Malherbes (also dating from 1761) in which Rousseau states his “resolution to
suppress” the work. While Malherbes, Rousseau’s only correspondent to have written of
having been sent the work, asserts Rousseau would “be wrong” to “deprive the public of it,”
Rousseau deems his “dissertating on languages” “unworthy of public attention” (pp. 9–10).
154. It is no coincidence that, when ﬁnally published in a modern standard edition, the
Essai proved both the original meeting ground and grounds for critical disagreement
(regarding the Essai and Rousseau in general) between otherwise similarly minded critical
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theorists: Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. See Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1967), pp. 235–378; De Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983 [reprint of orig pub. 1971]), pp. 102–41.
155. While noting the strong divergence in the analyses of the origin of language
presented in the Essai and the Discours of 1754, Porset nonetheless concludes “without
equivocation” that the former must have “originated” with the latter (Essai, p. 12). Yet Porset’s
reconstruction of the probable origin of the Essai demonstrates nothing so much as
Rousseau’s success in making the hypothetical dating of that origin co-extensive with
history itself. Citing Lanson’s contrary view, published in 1911, that, while the “Essay is
certainly in contradiction with the Discourse on Inequality,” it could not have been written
later than 1750, he also references Masson’s speculation, “one year later,” that the Essai was
ﬁrst written as a “note” to the 1754 Discours, but then reworked separately by Rousseau, who
called it a “fragment,” until (at least) 1761 (Essai, pp. 16–24).

the origin of language by way of a visualizable scene in his “essai,” that scene is
represented only insofar as it is seen by one of its actors, and “what” that actor sees,
and, subsequently, does, are explicitly attributed, by the narrator of the scene, to an
exclusively internal act, the unknowing production of a mental fiction. In Rousseau’s
narrated scene of the origin of language, what is “seen” is not what is visible but a
metaphoric appearance of what is not visible, and the man who sees and acts upon
that metaphor in fact views “other” men without knowing he is doing so. Instead,
the object he contemplates is a metaphor of his own involuntary making, one that,
moreover, includes him in its purview and operation. While avoiding the problem
of postulating a human community of any kind before the communicative basis for
such a community exists,156 the individual experience this narrative version of the
origin of language recounts is both singular (“a savage man . . .”) and doubled by the
very external circumstance that triggers it (“. . . in meeting others will at first be
afraid”). For, in seeing, for the first time, “other” beings who appear to pose no
immediate relation or resemblance to himself, this individual subject of language
experiences a feeling – in Rousseau’s terms, a “passion” – resulting in a visual
misperception of what he sees. Te experience of an internal “passion” in an act of
external perception produces something unlike either – a linguistic utterance – and
the first word articulated in this doubly experiential origin of language is what
Rousseau calls a “trope.” In Chapter III of Rousseau’s Essai, entitled, “Tat the first
language must have been figural” (“Que le premier langage dût être figuré”), the
particular trope in which the visual scene of a man first seeing other men results is
“giants” (“Géants”), a misnomer indicating more about the non-natural, subjective
basis of language than the given object it names.
Like Descartes and Locke before him, Rousseau sharply distinguishes animal
from human language, arguing in Chapter I of the Essai that, while animals
which “live and work together” “have a natural language to communicate
among themselves,” “the animals that speak them have them at birth,” making
such “natural languages” “everywhere the same.”157 Just as animal language is

156. Tis is the particular circular dilemma to which Condillac’s account of the origin
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of languages, according to Rousseau, falls prey; see the critique of Condillac’s Essai sur
l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746) in the Discours sur l’origine . . ., pp. 199–204.
157. See Essai, p. 39: “beavers, ants, bees have some natural language to communicate
among themselves, I do not doubt. Tere is even grounds to believe that the language of
beavers and that of ants are in gesture and speak only to the eyes. Whatever may be the case,
precisely because all these languages are natural, they are not acquired; the animals that
speak them were born with them, they all have them, and they are everywhere the same:
they do not change, and do not make the least progress. Te language of convention only
belongs to man. Tat is why man makes progress in the good as well as the bad and why
animals do not. Tis single distinction seems to be far-reaching; one can explain it, or so one
says, by the diﬀerence between [human and animal] organs. I would be curious to see that
explanation” (“les castors, les fourmis, les abeilles ont quelque langue naturelle pour s’entre-
communiquer, je n’en fais aucun doute. Il y a même lieu de croire que la langue des castors

predetermined by nature and “cannot change,”158 the language that, based instead
in “convention,”159 is determined solely by men, takes its origin, in the Essai, in
the “speciﬁc distinction of man” deﬁned by Rousseau in the Second Discourse:
“his quality,” unique among sentient beings, “of being” and “act[ing] as” “a free

et celle des fourmis sont dans le geste et parlent seulment aux yeux. Quoiqu’il en soit, par
cela même que les unes et les autres de ces langues sont naturelles, elles ne sont pas acquises;
les animaux qui les parlent les ont en naissant, ils les ont tous, et partout la même: ils n’en
changent point, ils n’y font pas le moindre progrès. La langue de convention n’appartient
qu’à l’homme. Voilà pourquoi l’homme fait des progrès soit en bien soit en mal, et pourquoi
les animaux n’en font point. Cette seule distinction paroit mener loin: on l’explique, dit-on,
par la différence des organes. Je serois curieux de voir cette explication”). See also Discours
sur l’origine . . ., p. 225.
158. Cf. Descartes’ discussion of “automates” and animals, Discours de la méthode, Pt. 5,
in Oeuvres philosophiques, I: 628: “if there were such machines that had the organs and the
appearance of a monkey, or some other animal without reason, we would have no way of
recognizing that they weren’t of just the same nature as animals; whereas, if they had a
resemblance with our bodies and imitated as many of our actions as was morally possible,
we would always have two very certain ways of recognizing that they were not true men.
Te first of these is that they could never use words, nor other signs in composing them as
we do to declare to others our thoughts. For one can well imagine that a machine would be
so made that it proffers words . . . but not that it arrange them diversely to respond to the
meaning of anything that is said in its presence, as even the wildest men can do . . .” (“s’il y
avait de telles machines, qui eussent les organes et la figure d’un singe, ou de quelque autre
animal sans raison, nous n’aurions aucun moyen pour reconnaître qu’elles ne seraient pas
en tout de même nature que ces animaux; au lieu que, s’il y en avait qui eussent la
ressemblance de nos corps et imitassent autant nos actions que moralement il serait
possible, nous aurions toujours deux moyens très certains pour reconnaître qu’elles ne
seraient point pour cela des vrais hommes. Dont le premier est que jamais elles ne pourraient
user de paroles, ni d’autres signes en les composant, comme nous faisons pour déclarer aux
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autres nos pensées. Car on peut bien concevoir qu’une machine soit tellement faite qu’elle
profère des paroles . . . mais non pas qu’elle les arrange diversement, pour répondre au sens
de tout ce qui se dira en sa présence, ainsi que les hommes les plus hébétés le font”). See also
Locke, “Of Words or Language in General,” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(London: Viking Penguin, 2004), p. 361 (emphasis in text): “Man . . . had by nature his
organs so fashioned, as to be ﬁt to frame articulate sounds, which we may call words. But this
was not enough to produce language; for parrots, and several other birds, will be taught to
make articulate sounds distinct enough, which yet, by no means, are capable of language.
Besides articulate sounds therefore, it was further necessary, that he should be able to use
these sounds, as signs of internal conception; and to make them stand as marks for the ideas
within his own mind, whereby they might be made known to others, and the thoughts of
men’s minds be conveyed from one to another.”
159. Rousseau, Essai, p. 39.

agent.”160 Dormancy of the human attribute of “freedom” – the ability, deﬁnitive no

less of human agency than of agency itself as a uniquely human quality, to act in
independence from natural determination – is what deﬁnes the theoretically
posited, pre- or nonhistorical state of Rousseau’s hypothetical “savage man,” just as
its temporary forgetting or full “renunciation” deﬁne for Rousseau the socially
instituted mechanisms of master-slave relations.161 It is this internal quality of
being a “free agent” capable of “resisting” the “commands” of “nature” that
distinguishes man from animals similarly capable of “understanding” but not
resisting those commands, Rousseau observes:

Every animal has ideas because he has senses, he even combines his ideas up to
a certain point, and man only differs to a greater or lesser degree from the animal
in this regard. Some philosophers have even purported that there is more
difference between one man and another than between a man and an animal;
yet it is not so much understanding that specifically distinguishes man among
the animals as his quality of being a free agent. Nature orders every animal
and the beast obeys. Man undergoes the same [natural] impression but
recognizes himself as able to acquiesce to or resist it. And it is above all in the
consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of the soul of man shows
itself: for physical qualities explain in some way the mechanism of the senses
and formation of ideas, but in the power to will, or, rather, to choose, and in the
feeling of this power one only finds purely spiritual acts, about which one can
explain nothing by mechanical laws.
[Tout animal a des idées puisqu’il a des sens, il combine même ses idées jusqu’à
un certain point, et l’homme ne diffère à cet égard de la bête que du plus au
moins. Quelques philosophes ont même avancé qu’il y a plus de différence de
tel homme à tel homme que de tel homme à telle bête; ce n’est donc pas
tant l’entendement qui fait parmi les animaux la distinction spécifique de

160. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine . . ., pp. 182–83, et passim.

161. Beginning with its famously dichotomous ﬁrst sentence, man’s innate capacity for,
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and enslaving “renunciation” of “freedom” form the double subject of Rousseau’s landmark
Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Whoever believes himself
the master of others is no less a slave than they” (“L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans
les fers. Tel se croit le maître des autres, qui ne laisse pas d’être plus esclave qu’eux” [Du
contrat social (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1966 [orig. pub. 1762]), p. 42]; “[For any man]
[t]o renounce his freedom is to renounce his quality of being a man, the rights of humanity,
even his own duties. Tere is no possible compensation for anyone who renounces
everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man, and to remove all
freedom from his will is to remove all morality from his actions” (“Renoncer à sa liberté c’est
renoncer à sa qualité d’homme, aux droits de l’humanité, même à ses devoirs. Il n’y a aucun
dédommagement possible pour quiconque renonce à tout. Une telle renonciation est
incompatible avec la nature de l’homme, et c’est ôter tout moralité à ses actions que d’ôter
toute liberté à sa volonté” [Ibid., p.46]).

l’homme que sa qualité d’agent libre. La nature commande à tout animal, et la

bête obéit. L’homme éprouve la même impression, mais il se reconnaît libre
d’acquiescer, ou de résister; et c’est surtout dans la conscience de cette liberté
que se montre la spiritualité de son âme: car la physique explique en quelque
manière le mécanisme des sens et la formation des idées; mais dans la puissance
de vouloir ou plutôt de choisir, et dans le sentiment de cette puissance on ne
trouve que des actes purement spirituels, dont on n’explique rien par les lois de
la mécanique.162]

Te quality of “free agen[cy]” deﬁned to distinguish man in the Discours is

linked to distinctively human language in the Essai by Rousseau’s conception of
the ‘passions,’ feelings arising as independently of reason as of physical sensations
and sensory needs. In the story of the origin of human language that Chapter III
of the Essai narrates, the origin of man and of the word, “man,” are one, and men
and human language are first enacted in freedom not only from nonhuman nature
but from recognizably human reflection alike. Language, on this account, no more
resembles “natural” sounds or gestures or any other mimetic reduction of language
to an extension of the senses, than it represents memories or associations deriving
from known conceptions. Rather than in any (imagined) dominance of the sensory
or the conceptual, human language originates in the experience of a conflict
between the two: between the immediacy and ignorance of the senses and the
experiential limits of cognition; between seeing something one has never seen and
confusing habit with knowledge and past experience with present. Te inability of
immediate sensation and applied reason to overcome the chasm between them
issues in a violent feeling – a heightened awareness of internal incapacity – whose
most accurate representation must thus also be empirically inaccurate, a “trope.”
Occasioned by an object whose misapprehension it at once extends and belies, the
“first language” must be just as incapable of naming its own mistaken basis, of
recognizing itself as a “figural” purveyor of fiction rather than of “proper” terms
and definitions. For, a “first language” cannot, by definition, judge itself against
norms defined by any other already given, articulate form.
On the one hand, then, as Rousseau’s stories imply and all his writings
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demonstrate, language is our primary and undying means of critiquing such

perceptual-conceptual ﬁctions. On the other hand, as those same stories imply and
his Second Discourse and Essai demonstrate, language must be incapable of

162. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine . . ., p. 183. Todorov’s subscription to the mistaken,
if conventional view of Rousseau “as a partisan of the state of nature . . . contemptuous
of man in society” is belied not only by this passage, positively distinguishing
man’s “consciousness” of his ability (or “moral” “freedom”) “to resist” the “mechanical”
“commands” of “nature” in comparison with every “animal[’s]” “obe[dience]” to them, but
the entirety of the Second Discourse. See Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness, trans. John T.
Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2001 [orig. French pub. 1985]).

critiquing itself if it is to originate at all. A self-critical language could not come

into being. And, yet, it is because language, unlike purely logical or functional
systems, cannot “be” itself before becoming itself, it is also “free,” like human
“agency” and Rousseau’s own hypothetical narratives, to originate, to occur rather
than merely occupy yet another link in a predetermined causal chain: to emerge
from a penumbra of habitual, empirical and internal givens as language, an
involuntary invention independent of all of these. Since there “is” no language (or,
for that matter, “non-language”) in or with which to compare and analyze it, the
“first language” of Rousseau’s account can continue to develop alongside the
“experiences” whose very terms it (mis)names, adjusting itself in view of past
empirical events and shaping expectations of experience to come. Just as
misconceptions extended in time by linguistic expression can only be corrected in
hindsight, so language can only be oriented toward the future by foresight. Neither
forward nor backward looking by definition, however, a “first language,” or language
without language, must instead be blind to itself – to why it names and what it
names – in order to be born.
With the birth of human language, “history”163 – as concept and as content – is
born as well. Like the ungrounded origin of Kant’s critical “revolution” in a “notion”
or “Einfall,”164 and Kant’s declared refusal to “research” the basis of the “ground” of
judgment, in the “condition” he calls “common sense,” in the Tird Critique,
Rousseau’s origin of language can only be “hypothetical” in that, in the absence of
any prior language, such an event cannot have lef any intelligible signs of itself.
Unavailable to historical research of any kind or method, the “first language” is not
a picture, extension, or inscription of something a subject either “knows” or doesn’t
need to know (in that it is already given), but a word attributed by one man to
others before he knows himself or them to be men, a name given to objects whose
first, noncognitive perception he experiences by “feel[ing] fear:”

A savage man, in meeting others, will ﬁrst of all feel fear. His fear will have made
him see these men bigger and stronger than himself; he will have given them the
name ‘Giants.’ Afer much experience he will have recognized that these
pretended Giants, being neither bigger nor stronger than him, do not agree in
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stature with the idea that he had ﬁrst attached to the word “Giant.”

163. Te fact that, like his literary and autobiographical works, Rousseau’s conceptual
writings, too, employ narrative form, reflects neither an analytic deficit nor penchant for
story-telling on Rousseau’s part, but a rigorous adherence to the theoretical insight into
representation undertaken in any sphere of action that he and Kant share, or, in Kant’s
terms, their “common sense”: the recognition that reflection of any kind relies on
representation, and that representation requires language, which, like all speculative and
fictive representation is not empirically but actively constituted, and thus “historical,” i.e.,
narrative, receptive and productive, memorializing and anticipatory, repetitive and
differentiating, mirroring and distortive, and, in all events, temporal in nature.
164. See n. 8, n. 51, Chapter One, this study.

[Un homme sauvage en rencontrant d’autres se sera d’abord eﬀrayé. Sa frayeur

lui aura fait voir ces hommes plus grands et plus forts que lui-même; il leur aura
donné le nom de Géants. Après beaucoup d’expériences il aura reconnu que ces
prétendus Géants n’étant ni plus grands ni plus forts que lui, leur stature ne
convenoit point à l’idée qu’il avoit d’abord attachée au mot de Géant.165]

Rousseau defines the first word as the expression of an error of perception, the
name or trope for that which mistakenly appears bigger, more powerful than me.
Employing a euphemism for what might well be called “all of human history,”
Rousseau blandly states without further commentary that, “afer many experiences”
(“après beacoup d’expériences”) – occurrences of no defined quality, number or
content, whose stated posterity (“afer”) follows the event of naming contiguously,
without any distinct causal link back to that “origin” itself – the subject in whom
language originates comes to see the error of his ways, or, what is the same, of his
language’s names. “Afer many experiences” whose sole precedent – a feeling of “fear”
surpassing and so unconstrained by real evidence – ensures their likewise violent, if
not murderous character, the inventor of language recognizes that the “others” his
“fear” had presented to him as larger and stronger than him are in fact just like him,
and invents the proper term “man” to designate two beings, self and other, in one.
Te delay in the invention of the proper term or common noun, its secondary
status as an afer-thought, or, more accurately, an afer-feeling and first-thought,
appears, in retrospect, to make as good narrative as it does logically indemonstrable
sense. For, before that corrective, general appellation, and before the “many
experiences,” as unentailed as they are undefined, that follow upon his encounter
with a “giant” of his own, perceptual and linguistic making, “man” had neither
name for nor knowledge of himself. Te “man” who learns, only secondarily, that
he is one “man” among many, sets the primary term and trope “giant” aside,
reserving it for the literal designation of all beings he will perceive – either at future
moments of impassioned ignorance or in their revisionist afermath, “afer many
experiences” have taught him to see properly – as “larger and stronger” than
himself. As to whether the former trope, reborn as a proper term, will turn, as if by
magic, into a trope again – misnomer and displacement of an unrecognized
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passion, rather than nominal end term of a dispassionate, comparative analysis –

no one, least of all its originally deluded speaker, can rightly say.
Nor is such clairvoyance available to Rousseau’s reader. For, the “objective”
diﬀerence between impassioned perception and empirically accurate cognition,
no less than the temporal experience required for their proper distinction, prove as

165. Rousseau, Essai, p. 47. Of special note here is Rousseau’s omission from this
narrated “scene,” of language originating at once within and outside of man, of any copular
attachment to “these men” of the qualities (“larger and stronger”) falsely attributed to them.
Rousseau’s faithful recounting of an act of seeing occurring in complete ignorance of its
“object” refuses to represent, as if objectively, the states, mental impressions, and acts it
narrates, recounting, hypothetically and indirectly, instead: “will have made him see them,”
“will have given them,” “will have recognized that . . .”.

elusive to the subject of Rousseau’s story as to its telling, a shadow cast, or “immense
distance crossed,” by the coupling of perception with feelings that Kant calls “the
power of imagination” (Einbildungskraf). Recalling Kant we may say that the same
difference that allows for nonconceptual aesthetic experience and the “disinterested,”
or “free,” speech act of “judgment” in the Tird Critique, issues in figural
conceptualization and its correction – the language of epistemology – in Rousseau.
Like the subject who judges in Kant, the being in whom language originates in
Rousseau does not speak in the first person, for, of, and about himself. Both the
subject whose judgment, originating in a “feeling” brought about by the perception
of an unidentified object, can only be rendered on the basis of a universal, yet
logically ungrounded faculty called “common sense,” and “a natural man” who,
encountering “others” like him for the first time, experiences a powerful feeling or
“passion” in which a (mistaken) designation originates, act at once verbally and in
freedom – from causality, knowledge, or interest – by “speaking” or “saying”
something about something (“it is beautiful”) or someone else (“giant”) in a
general sense. Instead of stating the “passion” he feels, the speaker who first
becomes a subject in the act of speaking speaks impersonally, “as if ” in the third
person. Similarly, rather than present himself as party or partial to what he says, he
who “plays” at judging “speaks” – to recall Kant’s observation on the identity of
judgment with speech (Tird Critique, B 18) –“as if beauty were a quality of the
object” and not a term standing for the “relationship” of that “object to a subject,” a
relationship the subject does not cognize but “feels.”166

166. Consistent with this analysis, the companion “passion” to the “fear” felt before the
unknown other in Rousseau is “love,” whose accompanying, objectifying trope might just as
well be “the beautiful,” another instance of mistaken identity – or, for that matter, mistaken
diﬀerence – occurring in the dynamic, noncognitive perception of an object. See Rousseau,
Discours sur l’origine . . ., p. 200, and Essai, Chapter IX, “La formation des langues
méridionales,” p. 123, on encounters between young women and men at the well: “Young
girls came to look for water for housekeeping, young men came to water their herds. Teir
eyes, accustomed to the same objects from infancy, began to see other sweeter ones. Te
heart moved itself toward these new objects, an unknown attraction rendered it less savage,
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it felt the pleasure of not being alone. Water became insensibly more necessary, the animals
were thirsty more frequently; one arrived in haste and one departed with regret. In this
happy age where nothing marked the hours, nothing obliged one to count them; time had
no other measure than amusement and boredom . . . Tere was the true cradle of peoples,
and from the pure crystal of fountains departed the first fires of love” (“Les jeunes filles
venoient chercher de l’eau pour le ménage, les jeunes hommes venoient abreuver leurs
troupeaux. Là des yeux accoutumés aux mêmes objets dès l’enfance commencèrent d’en voir
de plus doux. Le coeur s’émut à ces nouveaux objets, un attrait inconnu le rendit moins
sauvage, il sentit le plaisir de n’être plus seul. L’eau devint insensiblement plus necessaire, le
bétail eut soif plus souvent; on arrivoit en hâte et l’on partoit à regret. Dans cet âge heureux
où rien ne marquoit les heures, rien n’obligeoit à les compter; les termes n’avoit d’autre
mesure que l’amusement et l’ennui . . . Là fut enfin le vrai berceau des peuples, et du pur
cristal des fontaines sortirent les premiers feux de l’amour”).

Tis occlusion of the self by the judging subject gives its language the character
of language – of general comprehensibility that language alone articulates and
allows – in that what Kant’s speaking subject of judgment says qualifies an object
already understood to be properly described by the language being employed. By
contrast, what appears proper to the speaker turns out to be improper in Rousseau,
a “trope” that hides the disproportionate “passion” behind it, and general language
arises only narratively, “afer many experiences,” as the correction of an initial
perceptual error. Rousseau never reveals whether that passion itself is named,
whether the subject who, subjecting himself to “fear,” ever recognizes that subjection
as such, even “afer” having recognized he had misjudged his object. Rousseau’s
hypothetical narrative names the “fear” at its origin; Rousseau’s hypothetical
“man” – either before or afer recognizing “other men” – does not. Proceeding
systematically rather than narratively, Kant’s analysis of judgment rules out all
personal articulation of “feeling” in the first place, stating no one would be so
“ridiculous” as to “justify” the “pride he takes” in his individual “taste” by articulating,
even to himself alone, the thought, “this object . . . is beautiful for me.”167 For, to
judge an “object”“beautiful” is at once to decouple it from the temporary, contingent
disposition of any personal, speaking subject. Or, as Rousseau might state, without
the sense of universal assent attached to such appellations as “giant” – or “master,”
or “slave,” or “citizen,” for that matter – neither tyranny, nor submission, nor social
contract, could come into existence, let alone prevail.
In Kant’s Analytic as in Rousseau’s story, then, an originary statement about
something or someone else carries with it a sense of generality – the sense that
what is said, while standing in for a “feeling,” is “objective” rather than “subjective”
in quality – but in one case that quality is articulated as an adjective, in the other,
as a noun. Both terms are part of the nomenclature of discursive language systems
yet the epistemologies that stem from them contrast sharply. Extending from
abstract and general concepts to objects, nouns, like “giant” or “man,” name
identities in which qualities of any or no number are assumed to be contained.
Grammatically independent of any specific qualitative conditions, their function is
nominal and logical above all – thus the perfectly grammatical designation, “the
married bachelor,” whose nonsensical combination of qualities has come to name
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the very possibility of logical paradox itself. Conversely, adjectives, like “beautiful,”
designate free-standing, diﬀerential qualities attributable to any number of nouns

167. Kant, KU , B 20, X: 126: “Es wäre . . . lächerlich, wenn jemand, der sich auf seinen
Geschmack etwas einbildete, sich damit zu rechtfertigen gedächte: dieser Gegenstand (das
Gebäude, was wir sehen, das Kleid, was jener trägt, das Konzert, was wir hören, das Gedicht,
welches zur Beurteilung aufgestellt ist), ist für mich schön. Denn er muss es nicht schön
nennen, wenn es bloss ihm gefällt.” [It would be ridiculous if someone who prided himself
on his taste thought to justify himself to himself: this object (the building that we see, the
dress that that one is wearing, the concert that we hear, the poem that is present for our
judgment), is beautiful for me. For he must not name (something) beautiful when it only
pleases him].

and dependent upon none; their meaning unsubordinated to the controlling

grammatical rules of predication, they are of purely descriptive, applied or
comparative, and absolutely no logical use.
In Kant’s and Rousseau’s theoretical derivations of language from “feeling,” the
objects that a speaking subject either qualifies by an adjective or designates by a
noun are both unknown. Te speech act of judgment, in replacing everyday
nominal knowledge with a declaration of “a quality of an object,” frees otherwise
architectonically delimited faculties to “play” or come into conflict, with no
prospect of either (cognitive) conceptual resolution or (aesthetic) transcendental
synthesis in sight. By contrast, nominal cognition, while also originating in a
speech act, replaces an immediate misperception colored by “passion” with its
singularly linguistic objectification in a “trope.” Just as “judgment” arising not from
concepts but from “feeling” must be enacted linguistically, in speech acts grounded
in the a priori sense of “general communicability” that constitutes “common sense,”
so Rousseau’s story of language first formed “when passion fascinates the eyes”
(“lorsque la passion fascine les yeux”168) ensues from a kind of judgment as well,
but one that misjudges both its object and itself, “masquerading,” even to the
consciousness of its speaker, as a constative utterance169 instead.
Te perceptual error of Rousseau’s first speaker mistakes the effects of feeling
for empirical facts. His larger categorical error is to mistake (mis-)judgment for
cognition. True to Rousseau’s theoretical narration of the purely conventional
nature of social relations, that error informs both the origin of language, first
among all conventions, and of all human, or language-based, history, to come: the
mistaking of conventional social relations for natural conditions, and of
grammatical relations for empirical evidence. For, just as the universal applicability
of grammar first makes a social contract among subjects possible, redefining these
as citizens possessing equal powers and rights, so grammar, too, offers the model
for conventional rather than physical subordination, the founding and “civil”
institutionalization of (mis-)appropriation that, mistaking human for natural or
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168. “Tis is how the figural word was born before the proper word, when passion
fascinates the eyes and the first idea that it offers us is not that of the truth” (“Voilà comment
le mot figuré naît avant le mot propre, lorsque la passion nous fascine les yeux et que la
première idée qu’elle nous offre n’est pas celle de la vérité” [Rousseau, Essai, op. cit., p. 47].)
169. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Tings with Words (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1962), pp. 3–6: “Not all true or false statements are descriptions, and for
this reason I prefer to use the word ‘Constative’ . . . Te type of utterance we are to consider
here is not, of course, in general a type of nonsense; though misuse of it can, as we shall see,
engender rather special varieties of ‘nonsense.’ Rather, it is one of our second class – the
masqueraders” that “quite commonly” “masquerade as a statement of fact, descriptive or
constative . . . and that, oddly enough, when it assumes its most explicit form. Grammarians
have not, I believe, seen through this ‘disguise,’ and philosophers at best incidentally . . . I
propose to call it a performative sentence or a performative utterance.”

divine attribution and cause for effect, originated in the ungrounded “first”
predicative trope, “ ‘this is mine’.”170
Acts of judgment, by contrast, prohibit acts of appropriation by expressly
articulating a quality of an object generally or impartially: “it is beautiful,” “it is
sublime” take no part in the institution of inequality to which the origin of language
in acts of misconception lead inexorably in Rousseau. In this way Kant’s articulate
act of judgment already provides the model for contemporary analytic approaches
to language which, stymied by or blind to the general problem of nominalism,
have come to consider the adjective the essential discursive form, or at least have
tentatively concluded as much from the demonstrable incapacity of logic to define
any noun linguistically without definitional regression or recursivity.171 In the
context, however, of hypothetical analyses of the necessarily nonlogical origin of
language – of the mismatch between logic and sensory experience designated by
any noun made to speak for a specific subject rather than a purely grammatical
function – Kant’s predecessor in granting linguistic priority to perceivable qualities,
and, thus, to experiential adjectives rather than originally tropological nominal
concepts, is Rousseau’s personal interlocutor and contemporary origin of language
theorist, Diderot.

170. Like the origin of languages, the origin of property hypothesized by Rousseau in
the Second Discourse takes the form of a general narrative allegory, the only mode capable
of illustrating in retrospect such an empirically and logically inexplicable event. I have
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offered a fuller discussion of the founding acts of predication and spatial demarcation, that,
grounded in nothing but each other, constitute the equally figurative objectification of
referent by reference at the (fictive) origin of “property” and “civil society” according to
Rousseau, in In the Place of Language, pp. 9–16.
171. A turning point in the assessment by analytic philosophy of the capacity of logic to
define and derive implications from language is Saul Kripke’s review of the uncertainty of
the conceptual content of any noun, from “common” nouns through proper names, in
Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972). In this analytic
philosophy has followed Wittgenstein in questioning the association of language with logic
per se, regarding language instead as regulated by context-specific rules and norms, and any
practice as linguistic that conforms to a “private” or, in a larger sense, internal logic based in
rules its own practice defines. See also Kripke, S. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

7. Diderot’s Adjectives
Rather than hypothesize an historic error in the perception of an object arising
whenever a blinding “passion” (“fear”) “fascinates the eye,” Diderot’s theory of the
origin of language starts with the more radical premise that all sensory perception
is and must be unreliable, in that it routinely includes a wide range of blindspots
inhering in the conditional nature of our experience of sensible objects itself. Te
variability of objects and sensation, of the relation of sensation to consciousness,
and of the attentiveness and operations of consciousness itself, all ensure, Diderot
reasons, that perception will tell us both more and less than we can know with
accuracy about anything occurring outside or within us, not exceptionally but as a
matter of course. Not only unprecedented but commonplace perceptions are
limited, extended, heightened, and mitigated by the unpredictable sharpness or
dullness, absence or “presence of mind,” which is to say, by both the conscious and
unconscious effectivity and ineffectivity with which our senses relay them to the
mind. For the very same reason (of their own unavailability to reason), the
changing external stimulation and internal operation of the senses can provide no
basis, a posteriori, for a “general” or “common sense” definition of the “condition”
enabling linguistic action, according to Diderot.
Tus it is that, by a turn of logic rarely dared within the parameters of rational
thought, Diderot proposes we instead follow a radically counter-intuitive method
for determining how language comes about. Te most effective, if not the only way
to investigate language “before” language – to understand how language is formed
before language forms the basis for the understanding required for language –
must rather reverse the supposed causal relation of physical sensation to articulate
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speech, Diderot contends. By impeding, completely or partially, the unspeaking

sensory component of experience, we may first observe how the mind, operating
without the fleeting and variable nature of sensation, invents its own, linguistically
conditioned “experience:” what it “sees” when it cannot see, how it “speaks” when it
can neither hear nor speak, procuring evidence by producing a language designed
to deliver it when sensory and empirical givens don’t obtain. Just as subjects
naturally furnished with a full complement of senses are regularly “blind” and
“deaf ” to language – failing to disassociate the “mute” data of sensations from the
complex construction, sense and source of the necessarily systematically articulated
language that they, as subjects, freely use – so subjects for whom such disassociation
is itself instead given, cannot, for that very reason, mistake a fully fabricated system
of conventions – both symbolic and grammatical – for the effects of natural

sensations. Paradoxically dependent either, on the one hand, on still prior

conventions and thus a descent into logical regression, or, on the other, on a single,
hypothetical individual’s initial, impassioned error of perception, and “later,”
comparatively engendered self-correction – an historic change itself externalized
in the conscious splitting of a single, unconsciously duplicitous “trope” into two
“literal” designations eventually rendered social and conventional, i.e., “common”
rather than “proper nouns” – the rationally elusive nature of the origin of those
conventions makes it indeed logical and not fantastical to suggest that the
only real, rather than circular, retrospective or hypothetical evidence of the
origin of language from experience may be most readily found in the languages
made and practiced by subjects for whom language is in fact necessarily known,
by way of (the a priori absence of) experience, to be an explicitly artiﬁcial producer
of sense. Tese are the languages investigated in Diderot’s extraordinary “Letter(s)
on the “Blind” and “Deaf and Mute,” “as used by those who see” and “hear and
speak.”172
To understand the real origin of language – to conceive what any language (and
only language) both is and does, without basing that conception on (linguistically
enabled) cognitive conventions – Diderot turns to sign systems whose own self-
evident, material immediacy he knows he cannot just as immediately understand.
Explicitly entitled for the “use” they make of their subjects, Diderot’s semi-
speculative “Letter(s)” imitate the necessary pragmatism of the sensorily deprived,
making subjects who cannot either see or hear stand for those who do, just as those
subjects make a present sense stand in for an absent one. Tese invented means of
replacing de facto physical absence with fabricated presence are languages.
Rendered conspicuous – by the sensorily deprived, to the hearing and sighted – as
conveyors of sense by other means, such compensatory languages are primarily,
unmistakably substitutional, “metaphoric” or “symbolic,” in that they are invented
by subjects naturally incapable of mistaking language for nature, those for whom
confusing linguistic sense with sensation, and sensation with symbolization is
impossible per force.
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172. “Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient’ (1749), “Lettre sur les sourds
et muets à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent” (1751), in Diderot, OC , IV:
15–107, 109–228. On both the Letters, see Franco Venturi’s seminal study, Jeunesse
de Diderot (de 1713 à 1753) trans. Juliette Bertrand (Paris: Albert Skira Editeur, 1939),
pp. 142–67, 237–82.

Forced to make do with experience that experience tells them is limited,173

subjects “deprived of one sense”174 are not freed, by a sense-based illusion of
freedom from all experiential and communicative constraint, to speculate at will
about the nature or content of the sensory phenomena they are missing. If they
wish to make themselves, including their sensorily independent thoughts,175
generally communicable in any way, they must instead use the sensations supplied
by one sense to form a language designed to “speak” for another. Detaching
sensation from its immediate sensory context and attaching it to a necessarily
conceptual one, the sensorily deprived naturally doubly denaturalize experience,
replacing its mute immediacy with a coin of significance forged of a fusion of
catachresis with chiasmus – a two-sided currency each of whose “faces” requires
the “blind” backing of the other to appear to mean at all. Crossing present with
absent sensation so as to endow absence itself with a separate sensible presence,
the languages of subjects unblinded by illusions of sensory self-sufficiency expose,
in extremis, the “real,” or fully constructed, nature of all languages, as the former is
critically defined by Kant: their replacement of purely empirical, infinitely varied
and undependable sense perceptions with perceptible and systematically
repeatable symbols. In speaking for and in the place of inexistent perceptions,
languages invented by subjects deprived of a part of sensory experience are thus
definitively linguistic (rather than gestural or otherwise mimetic) to begin with:

173. In this regard, Diderot’s sensorily deprived subjects experience, as a matter of

course, the principle of universal skepticism regarding any sense-based certainty proposed –
necessarily hypothetically – in Hume’s contemporaneous Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding (1739–40): the theoretical proposition that knowledge gained on the basis of
sense perceptions is always partial at best. Similarly, it was to Hume’s demonstration of the
unavailability of an exhaustive sense-based epistemology that Kant attributed his own
“critical” “revolution in the mode of thought” of philosophy, i.e., his practical limitation of
epistemology to the phenomenal ﬁeld of “representations” of “objects” that the a priori
forms and logical structures accompanying our perception provide. To such “phenomenal”
knowledge Kant opposed the “real” – unlimited because nonexperiential – knowledge of
“things” as they may be “in themselves” that he attributed only to the sensorily unlimited:
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subjects engaged in “free,” i.e., phenomenally and causally undetermined, moral action;
cognitions of the “real things” of mathematics; and “God,” or “immortality.” To the degree
that, like Kant’s self-critical subject, they know what they do not know, and are forced to
translate, materially and consciously, from a state of sense-based ignorance to knowledge by
constructing a formal language to represent to them what they do not experience, Diderot’s
sensorily deprived – knowing practitioners of the linguistic condition of their own
phenomenal experience – would stand somewhere between Kant’s “man” and “God.”
174. Diderot, OC , IV: 34.
175. In rendering in palpable sensory form that which they do not and know they cannot
sense in the world, Diderot’s sensorily deprived directly recall Kant’s mysterious ﬁrst geometer
(“Tales, or whatever-his-name”), whose external “representation” of the pathbreaking
“ﬁgure” of the equilateral triangle was not drawn from sensory experience but “constructed a
priori” from “concepts” alone. See Kant, KrV, XI–XII, III: 22 and this study, Chapter One.

inherently symbolic means for signifying a conventional sense unfounded in any

immediately antecedent sensation. Te invention, not of a new, pseudo-natural
mode of sensation, but of a semantic mode that abstracts from specific sensory
givens to represent a general “idea” unhinged from sensation, the origin of language
in Diderot’s “Letter(s)” binds absence to presence symbolically, or in part.
In the first “Letter,” Diderot calls this intellectual act of origination, by which a
part or partial sense of a whole is abstracted and transferred elsewhere,
“metaphorical,” but, unlike the figural distortion to which the passions submit an
unknown perceptual object at the origin of language in Rousseau, this act
compensating for an absent perception represents its object accurately, just in
necessarily non-identical, artificially composed form.176 Writing in response to the
query of an unnamed (and possibly entirely fabricated177) addressee, Diderot uses
the purported interest of his interlocutor in the cognitive abilities of subjects whose
sight has been restored as a pretext for demonstrating the unique ability of the blind
to illuminate the intellectual operations we all perform. Summing up the separation
of “symbol” from sensation on which his entire theory of language, as of dramatic
acting and dramatic and novelistic writing, draws, Diderot asserts categorically:
“Madame, one has to be lacking a sense in order to know the advantages of the
symbols destined for the senses that remain” (“Madame, il faut manquer d’un sens
pour connaître les avantages des symboles destinés à ceux qui restent”178).
Like his friend and intellectual confrère Rousseau, whose later interest in
natural morphology will extend and reflect Diderot’s own early “experimental
philosophy,”179 Diderot recognizes that any investigation into the origin of language
must devolve into a vicious circle unless a subject outside that circle – a necessarily
hypothetical subject in whom reason and language are not yet indistinguishable –
can be imagined to undergo an experience in which the invention of linguistic
“symbols” is compelled. Pointing, for the first time, to a felt cognitive lack, such an
experience would require the absence of phenomenal self-evidence. Its subject
may be, like Diderot’s addressee, a fiction in toto or in part, but not so the
“symbols” – artificial, material, and technical, rather than either feigning
naturalness, or fictive, in nature – that must originate at once inside and outside
the subject’s mind.180 Tis is the invention of a language of “symbols” belonging to
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176. Diderot, OC , IV: 41.

177. See Yvon Belaval, “Introduction,” in Diderot, OC , IV: 3.
178. Diderot, OC , IV: 34.
179. On the theory and practice of what he named “experimental philosophy” in all
Diderot’s works, from the early Pensées philosophiques, scandalous Bijoux indiscrets and
“Lettre[s],” through the Encyclopédie, Salons, Religieuse and Paradoxe sur le comédien, see
Brodsky, “Whatever Moves You”, pp. 17–44.
180. Tis is how Kant (and, later, Husserl) describes the “origin of geometry:” a
“pathbreaking” (“bahnbrechend”) act of simultaneous mental and external construction on
Kant’s account, the founding of geometry originates anew with every written transmission and
internalization of its principles according to Husserl. See: Kant, KrV, XI-XII, III: 22; Husserl,
“Die Frage nach dem Ursprung . . .” (for full citation, see n. 12, Chapter One, this study).

no individual subject, proper to no individual object, and so of ‘use’ and available

to all, and of language itself as the inherently active constitution of meaning-
bearing, or communicative, relations, which is to say, with Diderot, as constitutively
“metaphorical.” “Trope” or “metaphor,” psychical or physical, impassioned or
empirical in origin: language occurs in both Rousseau and Diderot when psyche
and physiology are experienced as split. Just as he “uses” the blind to get a better,
necessarily “metaphoric” view of the whole of nature, whose infinite, constantly
changing forms can never be seen, let alone pictured, whole,181 so Diderot will turn
to the deaf and mute to discover what no speaking subject can say: how “symbols”
designating “doubl[y]” meaning-bearing, “metaphorical” relations themselves
attain relative positions of significance within the regular – grammatical and
syntactic – construction of language chains.
Diderot bases his account of language in the “Letter on the Blind” on the actual
experience and achievements of Nicholas Saunderson, a contemporary professor of
mathematics at Oxford and author of Te Elements of Algebra (Cambridge, 1740).
Forced by the absence of sight to “invent” a language of “symbols” standing for
objects that are not and will never be evident, “Saunderson,” on Diderot’s account, is
at once a real historical person and his author’s symbolic invention. Since the
conventional symbols of mathematics – numbers, letters, lines, operational signs,
and figures – stand for phenomenally independent entities identified in function of
equations and other reciprocal and combinatory relations in much the same way,
Saunderson may have indeed been the perfect subject to invent a symbolic system
which must signify identities in a “double,” “metaphorical” manner, substituting
meaningful relations for inherent sensory limitations.182 Yet, just as his anti-
theological deathbed speech – “translated,” Diderot states, “from the fragments that
remain of it” – is in fact entirely of Diderot’s own making, Diderot’s blind
“Saunderson” must be “seen” in a “double light” as well, as actual inventor of an
extant language and the “Letter”’s ventriloquized vehicle of the theory of language
it describes, a talking symbolization of the necessary origin of language in

181. Diderot, OC , IV: 50–51. Its proto-Darwinian description of the inﬁnite material
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permutations of nature, including such ﬁnite, “malformed” and “monstrous productions” as

its blind speaker, “Saunderson,” himself, landed the author of the “Lettre sur les aveugles” in
jail shortly afer its publication: Diderot was imprisoned at Vincennes from July 29 to
November 3, 1749. On Diderot’s own “concrete” discursive “style” as manifestation of the
interdependence between language and materialism his writings variously theorize and
represent, see J. p. Séguin, Diderot. Le Discours et les choses (Paris: Librarie Klincksieck,
1978): “In an obsession with things, Diderot ﬁnds paradoxically the primacy of language: to
move toward the concrete is ﬁnally to be attentive to the creation of the real which is nothing
other than all linguistic systems, seized in language and in speech” (17). On the
interdependence of the transformation of forms and liberty itself in Diderot’s theory of the
poetics of nature, see Jacques Chouillet’s classic study, Diderot: poète de l’énergie (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1984 [orig. pub. 1964]).
182. Diderot, OC , IV: 34, 41.

symbolization. In that language is, by deﬁnition, discontinuous with immediate

physical experience, every language must originate as Diderot’s “Saunderson’s” does,
articulating what the senses are incapable of conveying, either of experience or its
absence. Even (the historical) Saunderson’s everyday discourse reflected this
independence from sensation, Diderot reports. Just as phenomenal perception can
never be mistaken for linguistically communicated sense in his case, so Saunderson
used his native language in a manner no less essentially “symbolic” than the
mathematical language he invented. As if every quotidian experience brought with
it a renewed occasion to articulate the relational basis of language expressed per
force in its origin, Saunderson’s conversational speech was also unusually “fertile
with happy expressions” (“fécund en expressions heureuses”), Diderot notes,
constructions that, like Kant’s geometer’s “happy notion” (“glückliche[r] Einfall”183)
of the arithmetically translatable triangle, are “proper to one sense, to touch, for
example, . . . and metaphoric at the same time to another sense, such as the eyes,
from which results a double light for him to whom one talks, the true and direct
light of expression and the reflected light of metaphor” (“celles qui sont propres à un
sens, au toucher, par exemple, et qui sont métaphoriques en même temps à un autre
sens, comme aux yeux; d’où il résulte une double lumière pour celui à qui on parle,
la lumière vraie et directe de l’expression, et la lumière réfléchie de la métaphore.”184)
Describing the origin of language as an internally executed transfer of sense,185
the “Letter on the Blind” does not stipulate what kind of word Saunderson’s “doubly
reflected,” “proper” and “metaphoric” language employs to that end. Impeded ferom
immediately perceiving the objects named by words, the historical Saunderson
created a tactile mathematical “language” whose corporal elements – a rectilinear
“table” divided into small squares defined by holes at their corners and center, in
which pins bearing either “large” or “small” heads are situated – allowed him both
to symbolize numerical values by manipulating the variables of the pins’ size and

183. See n. 8, n. 51, Chapter One, this study.

184. Diderot, OC , IV: 41; 34: “It is quicker to use symbols that are fully invented than to
be the inventor of them, as one is forced to be by deprivation” (“il faut manquer d’un sens
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pour connaître les avantages des symboles destinés à ceux qui restent . . . Il est bien plus
court d’user de symboles tout inventés que d’en être inventeur, comme on y est forcé,
lorsqu’on est pris au dépourvu”).
185. Diderot’s theory of the innate capacity of all subjects, demonstrated of necessity by
the sensorily deprived, to transfer the information received by one sense “metaphorically”
to another either empirically impaired or absent, is in fact the actual working basis of such
state-of-the-art “sensory-substitution devices” as those currently enabling blind subjects to
“see” (via body-worn micro-video cameras delivering digital information in the form of
electronic impulses to their tongues) and deaf subjects to “hear” (via worn microphones
attached to speech processors delivering digitally coded impulses to electrodes implanted in
an otherwise sensorially impaired inner ear). (See Nicola Twilley’s descriptive account of
such technologies in, “Sight Unseen,” Te New Yorker, May 15, 2017.) While sensory
deprivation renders the blind cognizant of the transfers they teach themselves to make,

position (each possible combination signifying a diﬀerent single digit), and to

construct geometrical figures by “fix[ing] lines of “strings of silk” around them.186
Providing a physical solution to the problem of combining algebra with geometry
already resolved “on paper” by Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Geometry,
whose historic use of “letters” or chiffres to symbolize unknowns (including the
subject of thinking, “I”) allowed immeasurable quantities, like irrational numbers,
to be integrated into equations for the first time, the “happy expressions” of
Saunderson’s calculating “machine” are the felicitous arrangements of the tactile
system he has devised, combinations of pins sometimes “name[d]” by “letters of the
alphabet,” to symbolize, in their size and configuration, numbers and lines:

In supposing that Saunderson only employed pins with large heads to designate
the limits of his figures, he could dispose of pins with small heads around them in
nine different ways, all of which were familiar to him. Tus he hardly encountered
difficulties except in the cases where the large number of angular points that he
was obliged to name in his demonstration forced him to have recourse to the
letters of the alphabet. We have not been told how he employed them.

subjects endowed with a full complement of senses are more likely to be “blind” to the fully
conventionalized metaphors upon which prosaic and conceptual discourse rests. Landmark
accounts of this tendency, in everyday speech no less than in philosophy, include: Hobbes,
Leviathan (London: Viking Penguin, 1985 [orig. pub. 1651]), Part I: “Of Man,” Chap. 2, “Of
Imagination,” Chap. 3, “Of Words,” Chap. 4 “Of Speech,” esp.; Locke, Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (London: VikingPenguin 2004 [orig. pub. 1689]), Bk III: “Of Words;”
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [orig. pub.
1739–40]), Bk. I: “Of the Understanding,” Pt. III: “Of Knowledge and Probability,” Section
VI, “Of the Inference from the Impression to the Idea,” Bk. III: “Of Morals,” Section I–III,
esp.; Baudelaire, “La fausse monnaie,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968),
pp. 168–69 [orig. pub. 1864]; Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen
Sinne” (“On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense”) (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2015 [orig. pub.
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1896]); Heidegger, Identität und Diﬀerenz (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1957); Derrida, La

mythologie blanche (Paris: Editions du Seuil,1971); Paul de Man, “Te Epistemology of
Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1978), pp. 13–30.
186. Diderot, OC , IV: 39. Consistent with the transfer of sense Saunderson’s symbolizing
“machine” enacts, Diderot supplements his own discursive explanation of its functioning
with illustrations reproducing in two dimensions some examples of the combinations of
size and location that transform physical pins into representations of numbers and figures
(see OC , IV: 37, 40). In so doing he returns Saunderson’s tactile invention to the very visual
field it was created to replace. While Diderot probably accepted this regressive development
as an inevitable, if ironic, aspect of his efforts to educate the sighted, that irony is itself
effectively mitigated by the change his inserted planches wreak upon the visual: having
already been given shape by (Diderot’s descriptions of) Saunderson’s “language,” the visual
now appears a poor derivative, rather than a primary auxiliary, of mathematics.

[En supposant que Saunderson n’employât que des épingles à grosse tête, pour
designer les limites de ses ﬁgures, il pouvait disposer autour d’elles des épingles
à petite tête de neuf façons diﬀérentes, qui toutes lui étaient familières. Ainsi il
n’était guère embarrassé, que dans les cas où le grand nombre de points angulaires
qu’il était obligé de nommer dans sa démonstration le forçait de recourir aux
lettres de l’alphabet. On ne nous apprend point comment il les employait.187]

Now, number is itself a value or quality, independent of objects as such, just as

geometrical figures are not visual but mathematical in basis. Diderot’s ostensible
purpose in the semi-fictional “Letter on the Blind” was to take a position on the
then contentious philosophical and scientific question, first posed of Locke by the
British scientist, William Molyneux, of whether a subject “born blind,” whose “sight”
is “restituted” (by the removal of cataracts), would be able to “distinguish” a “sphere”
from a “cube” “immediately” upon sight.188 Not only in his dismissal of “the
Molyneux problem” as ungrounded in the actual experience of any seeing eye, but
in his account of the “light” shed upon all language formation by the necessarily
“metaphoric” languages of the blind, Diderot describes the origin of language as the

187. Diderot, OC, IV: 39–40. I have investigated Descartes’ algebraization of geometry
in Lines of Tought. Discourse, Architectonics, and the Origin of Modern Philosophy (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996). See also Diderot’s description of the enhanced ability of
someone who cannot see “to make the passage from physics to geometry” by proceeding in
the sense the sighted would consider backwards, that of calculating, based on phenomenal
forms he can feel, geometrical “suppositions” concerning physical phenomena he cannot
otherwise perceive: “Te blind man thus takes suppositions for [or supposes them to be] that
which is given to him: a ray of light is taken for a thin, elastic string, or for a sequence of little
bodies that strike at our eyes with an incredible speed, and he calculates accordingly. Te
passage from physics to geometry is made, and the question becomes purely mathematical”
(“L’aveugle prend donc les suppositions pour ce qu’on les lui donne: un rayon de lumière
pour un ﬁl élastique et mince, ou pour une suite de petits corps qui viennent frapper nos
yeux avec une vitesse incroyable, et il calcule en conséquence. Le passage de la physique à la
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géométrie est franchi, et la question devient purement mathématique”) (OC , IV: 42–43).
188. Diderot, OC , IV: 54ﬀ. Along with Locke, the cataracts surgeon, William Cheselden,
and, surprisingly, Berkeley, while in opposition to Condillac (see OC, IV: 56–61), Diderot’s
response to the larger question underlying the Molyneux problem, of whether nominal
promotes real knowledge, is a decided no: “Here is my opinion on the . . . preceding
questions: I think that the ﬁrst time the eyes of someone blind from birth open to the light,
he won’t perceive anything at all; that some time would be required for his eye to experiment
upon itself (“Voici maintenant mon opinion sur . . . les questions précédentes: Je pense que
la première fois que les yeux de l’aveugle-né s’ouvriront à la lumière, il n’appercevra rien de
tout; qu’il faudra quelque temps à son oeil pour s’expérimenter” [IV: 66–67]; “However I do
not think in any way that the eye cannot teach itself, or, if it is permitted to speak thus,
experiment upon itself ” (“Cependant je ne pense nullement que l’oeil ne puisse s’instruire,
ou, s’il est permis de parler ainsi, s’expérimenter de lui-même” [IV: 62])).

act of abstracting a quality or condition from the innumerable – or, what amounts
to the same, physically imperceptible – qualities of objects as such. Te “separation,”
rather than elimination, of sensory qualities by which Diderot defines “abstraction”
in the “Letter on the Blind” – “abstraction consists only in separating by thought the
sensory qualities of bodies, either from each other, or from the body that serves as
their base” (“l’abstraction ne consiste qu’à séparer par la pensée les qualités sensibles
des corps, ou les unes des autres, ou du corps même qui leur sert de base”) – “results”
in the logical corollary that “someone born blind perceives things in a much more
abstract way than we do, and, in questions of a purely speculative nature, is probably
less subject to making mistakes” (“il s’ensuit que l’aveugle-né aperçoit les choses
d’une manière beaucoup plus abstraite que nous; et que dans les questions de pure
speculation, il est peut-être moins sujet à se tromper”).189
As in his definition of “abstraction” as an act of highlighting or foregrounding
rather than excluding “sensory qualities,” such that perception is made apperception –
an experience of the act of aesthesis, rather than action erased as it transpires – so
Diderot’s own “abstract” consideration of how language originates never “separates”
sensory qualities from each other nor abstraction itself from sensuous experience
except by the experimental speculations of “thought.” For the same reason, Diderot
considers common nouns to be purely artificial abstractions purposefully divorced
from any real, negative or positive, experiential basis or value. An invention of logic
rather than language, common nouns tell us nothing, Diderot contends, about the
things they denote, reflecting them not in a “double light” but no light at all. Just as
“tree,” in designating a general unqualified concept intended to subsume an infinite
number of organic objects, must fail to describe the particular sensory qualities of
any tree we may experience, so common nouns could not have derived directly, in
an at once immediate and comprehensive exercise of “abstraction,” from experience.
It is instead, Diderot reasons, in the “separation” of sensory qualities from the
individual “bodies” that are their “base” that subjects of experience, aided “by
thought,” must have abstracted striking individual qualities from experience to
form their first words. For Diderot, language, originating, as it does for Rousseau,
alongside acts of perception, proceeds not from a singular experience of “passion”
concealed as it is displaced into “trope” – the figural expression for a first, false
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impression whose correction and replacement by common nouns follow only

“afer” ample comparative “experience” – but, rather, with the already inherently
comparative term for a quality common to any number of experiences, the adjective.
Tis is the conclusion of Diderot’s second “Letter” on the partially sensorily
deprived, those compelled by the absence of hearing, the most immediate
language-bearing sense, to identify objects not by repeating the arbitrary name
others have assigned to them and that they cannot hear, but by naming the speciﬁc
sensory qualities they themselves non-auditorily perceive. For Diderot, in other
words, orality and oral mimicry (or onomatopoeia) have nothing to do with either
the formation or sensory and intellectual function of language at all. As “the
Molyneux problem” of the uncertain relation between intellectual conception and

189. Diderot, OC , IV: 32.

sense perception posed the occasion for the “Letter on the Blind,” the “Letter on the
Deaf and Mute as Used by Tose who Hear and Speak” (1751) begins by addressing
another issue regarding the foundation and founding functional purpose of
language of vital importance at the time, namely, the logical problem posed by
those linguistic “inversions” of adjective and noun sequences that reverse a
syntactic order believed to have once had historical – as it now has logical –
priority. At stake was the central thesis of the Port-Royal grammarians that
grammatical form and logical form are entirely homologous, such that the “art of
speaking” reflects the “art of thinking” that itself reflects the power of “reason”
endowed by “nature” in man.190 According to this view, French grammar embodied
the best linguistic model for logical, analytic thought in that it placed nouns – the
conceptual prerequisite of any definitional logic – before verbs, adjectives, and
complements. Te fact that reversals of this purportedly natural order, or
“inversions,” occurred not only in other languages, including and especially ancient
ones, but in contemporary French as well, raised the question of the empirical
validity of the Port-Royal thesis and, with it, the possibility that logic was not the
governing force behind language formation and use to begin with. In a chapter
devoted to “Inversions” in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines,
Condillac had argued against Port-Royal that analytic and inverted orders are
“equally natural,” depending on “the relationship of the ideas” involved; that
French, which generally excludes inversions, is “less lively” than Latin; and that
“preference” for one language or the other is not a logical but a personal matter,
whose determination depends on the “mind” of the “individual.”191
Diderot, on the other hand, approaches the problem of inversions (as one might
guess) by inverting it. First, he inverts the temporal terms of the controversy itself.
Rather than representing irregular, contemporary deviations from traditional
syntactic order, “inversions” were a regular feature of ancient oratory, Diderot asserts.
Even such basic semantic elements as declension “endings,” so his argument goes,
were subject to “transposition” within the full grammatical and syntactic construction
of ancient periodic sentences. Citing Cicero’s Oratio for Marcellus, he comments:

What I have just said about the inversion of the beginning of the Oration for
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Marcellus is applicable to all inversions. In general, in Latin and Greek periodic

sentences, no matter their length, one perceives from the beginning that the
author having had a reason to employ one ending instead of another did not

190. See A. Arnauld and P. Nicole, La Logique ou L’Art de penser, revised edition, ed. p. Clair
and F. Girbal (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1981 [orig. pub. 1662]), pp. 38, 103–4, esp.
191. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines,
ouvrage où l’on réduit à un seul principe tout ce qui concerne l’entendement humain, ed.
C. Porset, intro. J. Derrida (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1973 [orig. pub. 1746]), pp. 247–52.
Torough discussion of Condillac’s Essai and its direct influence on Diderot and others is
offered in Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and
Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 146–224.

have in his ideas the inversion that rules in his terms. In eﬀect, in the preceding
period, what else determined Cicero to write diuturni silentii in the genitive, quo
in the ablative, eram in the imperfect, and so on, but a pre-existing order in his
spirit that was entirely contrary to that of expressions; an order to which he
conformed without knowing it, subjugated by a long habit of transposing? And
why wouldn’t Cicero have transposed without perceiving he was doing so, since
this is what happens to ourselves when we believe we have formed our language
according to the natural sequence of ideas?
[Ce que je viens de dire de l’inversion du commencement de l’oraison pour
Marcellus, est applicable à toute autre inversion. En général, dans une période
grecque ou latine, quelque longue qu’elle soit, on s’aperçoit, dès le commencement,
que, l’auteur ayant eu une raison d’employer telle ou telle terminaison plutôt que
toute autre, il n’a avait point dans ses idées l’inversion qui règne dans ses termes.
En eﬀet, dans la période précédente, qu’est-ce qui déterminait Cicéron à écrire
diuturni silentii au génitive, quo à l’ablatif, eram à l’imparfait, et ainsi du reste,
qu’un ordre d’idées préexistant dans son esprit, tout contraire à celui des
expressions: ordre auquel il se conformait sans s’en apercevoir, subjugué par la
longue habitude de transposer? Et pourquoi Cicéron n’aurait-il pas transposé
sans s’en apercevoir, puisque la chose nous arrive à nous-mêmes, à nous qui
croyons avoir formé notre langue sur la suite naturelle des idées?192]

Pitting modern against traditional usage, the mistaken historicization of

inversions as stemming from an historically determined decline, “rather than the
long habit of transposing” already eﬀective in ancient texts, demonstrates nothing
so much as the irrelevance of the debate it has framed to its object, the signiﬁcance
of linguistic order itself, except insofar as it reveals a profound misunderstanding
of the basis of the rules by which language makes sense. Partly refuting the
moderate position of Condillac, whose combined account of the formation and
availability of varying word orders in any language he, in large measure, follows,
Diderot again overturns rationalist presuppositions regarding the source and
content of linguistic practices, arguing that what his contemporaries consider
“inversions” were once considered straightforward, and that the analytic order is in
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fact the inversion of the order of language of its origin:

I wouldn’t want to assert generally and without distinction that the Latins do not
invert and that we do. I would only say that if, instead of comparing our sentence
to the didactic order of ideas, one compares it to the order of the invention of
words, to the language of gestures for which oratory language was gradually
substituted, it appears that we invert, and that of all the peoples on earth there is
none that has as many inversions as we have.
[Je ne voudrais donc pas avancer généralement et sans distinction que les Latins
ne renversent point, et que c’est nous qui renversons. Je dirais seulement qu’au

192. Diderot, OC , IV: 154–55.

lieu de comparer notre phrase à l’ordre didactique des idées, si on la compare à

l’ordre d’invention des mots, au langage des gestes auquel le langage oratoire a été
substitué par degré, il paraît que nous renversons, et que de tous les peuples de la
terre il n’y en a point qui ait autant d’inversions que nous.193]

Tis ultimate inversion of the grammatical principle of inversions questions

the significance of that principle itself, suggesting that, rather than judging linguistic
usage according to a “didactic order of ideas,” we consider instead the order of
experience reflected in the “order of the invention of words.” Te distinction
Diderot draws here, between schematized and reflective orders of language, re-
introduces the factor of temporality that grammatical-logical rules of language
exclude, considering the use of language as a constitutive part of our intellectual
interaction with sensory experience, rather than a mechanically applied,
experientially independent, grammatical and morphological code for coordinating
and concatenating specific cognitive contents – as Port Royal would have it –
“logically.” Just as the question posed by “the Molyneux problem” excluded time as
a factor in the ability of the eye to “recognize” what it sees, anticipating, instead,
either an immediate or no linkage between “restored” vision and “stored” “ideas,”194
so the “didactic order of ideas” excludes the temporally dependent relation of
sensation and reflection required for “ideas,” or content, to be formed in the first
place. It is these latter that require, in turn, the heterogeneous formation of language
itself, and Diderot’s first question in the second “Letter” concerns not the properly
logical ordering of words, but, how, to begin with, “languages were formed:”

In order to treat the matter of inversions well, I believe it appropriate to examine

how languages were formed. Sensory objects were the first to strike the senses,
and those that reunited several sensory qualities at the same time were the first
named; these are the different individual things that compose the universe.
Sensory qualities were then distinguished from each other and given names;
these account for the majority of adjectives. Finally, having abstracted from
these sensory qualities, one found or believed one found something in common
among these individual things, such as impenetrability, extension, color, figure,
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etc, and one formed metaphysical and general names and almost all substantives.
[Pour bien traiter la matière des inversions, je crois qu’il est à propos d’examiner
comment les langues se sont formées. Les objets sensibles ont les premiers frappé
les sens, et ceux qui réunissent plusieurs qualités sensibles à la fois ont été les
premiers nommés; ce sont les diﬀérents individus qui composent cet univers. On
a ensuite distingué les qualités sensibles, on a trouvé ou cru trouver quelque
chose de commun dans tous ces individus, comme l’impénétrabilité, l’étendue, la
couleur, la ﬁgure etc. et l’on a formé les noms métaphysiques et généraux, et
presque tous les substantifs.195]

193. Diderot, OC , IV: 164.

194. Diderot, OC , IV: 163, on the “storehouse” (“magasin”) of “ideas” kept in our minds.
195. Diderot, OC , IV: 135.

As Diderot’s account of language formation concludes, the conceptualization of

sensory qualities “found or believed to be found” to be “common” to “individual”
objects (qualities such as “impenetrability, extension, . . . etc.”) led to the creation of
the “nouns” of “metaphysics and nearly all substantives,” with the chiastic result that
the objects of actual sensory experience came to be eclipsed by the nouns used to
name them, and,“little by little, one got used to believing that these nouns represented
real beings” (“[p]eu à peu on s’est accoutumé à croire que ces noms représentaient
des êtres réels”), thereby exchanging nominal existences for real.196 Te multiple
“sensory qualities” that originally caused objects to be noticed came to be considered
“simple accidents” (“de simples accidents”) instead, and the “adjectives” that name
them, as less essential to language than “substantives,” even though, in articulating
and representing the continually changing, objective and affective nature of
experience – for Diderot, the only, if always inadequate, uses of language that
matter – “the substantive is properly nothing, and the adjective is everything”
(“quoique le substantif ne soit proprement rien, et que l’adjectif soit tout”197).
Te philosophical controversy regarding inversions inverted “the natural order
of ideas,” according to Diderot, in “imagining that the adjective was really subordinate
to the substantive” (“l’on s’est imaginé que l’adjectif était réellement subordonné au
substantif ”198), and this is the second way in which he uses a controversy he
considers without validity or epistemological interest to introduce an understanding
of the relation between language and experience that, like temporality, had not been
considered before. For “ideas,” Diderot proposes, are not the erasure but the signature
of experience, whose “natural order” reflects discrete acts of perception rather than
the deductive hierarchy of a nominalist logic: “Asked what a body is, you will answer
that it is an extended, impenetrable, shaped, colored and mobile substance. But remove
all the adjectives from this definition and what will remain of this imaginary being
you call substance?”199 For Diderot, the answer to that question is nothing – nothing,
that is, but the insubstantiality of defining one common noun by another.
Te hypothesis, that “different [sensory] qualities” made manifest in parts or
“portions” of material things would have “affected . . . a man see[ing] a body for the
first time,” does not translate, however, into a theory of language conflating words
with sensations for Diderot. On the contrary, it leads him to the opposing “idea”
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that, in order to understand the organization of language, one would have instead
to “decompose, so to speak, a man, and to consider what he has from each of the
senses he possesses” (“[m]on idée serait donc de décomposer pour ainsi dire un
homme, et de considérer ce qu’il tient de chacun des sens qu’il possède”200). Te
many partial sensations we experience at any moment are followed just as instantly
by others, Diderot suggests, such that the very act of their perception requires the

196. Ibid.
197. Ibid. (emphasis in text).
198. Diderot, OC, IV: 135, 137.
199. Diderot, OC , IV: 136.
200. Diderot, OC, IV: 140; see also 158, 162.

exercise of “successive and detailed attention” in time, just as “the state of the “soul,”
“indivisible” in itself, can only be made “manifest” by the countervailing “force” of
“analysis” originating in our intellect:

Te state of the soul in an indivisible instant was represented by a crowd of terms

demanded by the precision of language which distributed a total impression into
parts: and because these terms were pronounced successively, and were only
heard and understood insofar as they were pronounced, one was led to believe
that the affections of the soul that they represented had the same succession,
when nothing could be further from the case. One thing is the state of our soul;
another thing is the account that we give of it, whether to ourselves or to others;
one thing is the total and instantaneous sensation of this state; another thing, the
successive and detailed attention that we are forced to give it in order to analyze it,
to make it manifest, and to make ourselves heard and understood. Our soul is a
moving tableau afer which we paint without cease: we employ a lot of time to
render it with fidelity but it exists in its entirety and at the same time: the spirit
does not proceed step by step like expression.
[L’état de l’âme dans un instant indivisible fut représenté par une foule de termes
que la précision du langage exigea, et qui distribuèrent une impression totale en
parties: et parce que ces termes se pronoçaient successivement, et ne s’entendaient
qu’à mesure qu’ils se prononçaient, on fut porté à croire que les affections de
l’âme qu’il représentaient avaient la même succession; mais il n’en est rien. Autre
chose est l’état de notre âme; autre chose le compte que nous en rendons soit à
nous-mêmes, soit aux autres: autre chose la sensation totale et instantanée de cet
état; autre chose l’attention successive et détaillée que nous sommes forces d’y
donner pour l’analyser, la manifester et nous faire entendre. Notre âme est un
tableau mouvant d’après lequel nous peignons sans cesse: nous employons bien du
temps à le rendre avec fidélité; mais il existe en entier et tout à la fois: l’esprit ne
va pas à pas comptés comme l’expression.201]

It is on the basis of their own empirical condition – of partial, sensory

“decompos[ition]” –– that the modes of “speech” necessarily invented by the
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unhearing and unspeaking put the temporal “transpositions”202 of sensory

experience into articulation into relief. Unable to rely on vision, the naturally
“decomposed” forge a material mode of symbolization that, necessarily “abstracted”
from the “instantaneous” complexity of sensory experience, renders the “metaphoric”
nature of language a tactile reality perceptible to sighted and unseeing alike.203
Furthermore, in basing his understanding of the composition of language on both

201. Diderot, OC, IV: 161 (emphasis added).

202. Diderot, OC, IV: 154–55.
203. For a fuller examination of the ongoing separation of sensation from knowledge in
Diderot’s Letters, see the complementary study to this one, Words’ Worth, Part Tree,
Chapter 11.

observable and hypothetical “states” of “decompos[ition],” Diderot underscores the

absence of any natural correlation between language and actual sensation. Like his
“Saunderson,” the real or contrived basis of that absence makes no difference: it is its
connection to the act of symbolization that matters. And just as apparently natural
conditions cannot explain a posteriori the linguistic condition exposed by the
“decomposed,” so can no ready-made language linking sensory and nonsensory
experience to articulation disguise it, in that what these ongoing acts of articulation
and representation, “our ceaseless paint[ing] afer,” continuously compose, is a
“language” formed because it does not – indeed, cannot – represent something one
otherwise already knows. Language here acts as a kind of counter-spirit both to the
“state” of constant change, “composition” and “destruction” equated by both Diderot
and his “Saunderson” with “nature,”204 and the equally dynamic “total[ity]” that is the
“state of the spirit [or “soul”: “âme”). “Successive,” “step-by-step,” and “analytic,” it
“decomposes” the distinct sensory qualities that transpire in the “spirit” “all at once,”
“transposing” fleeting sensations into articulate forms of communication
“metaphorically” permitting internal experience to be “seen,”“heard and understood”
for the “first” time, rather than “sink,” forever unrepresented (in Keats’ immortal
words), “to nothingness.”
Te ignorance to which language responds in Rousseau, by contrast, is not of
objects of which, for either real or hypothetical physiological reasons, the subject
experiences no direct sensation, nor of the incessantly “moving tableau of the soul”
that, by definition, no subject can directly sense and know. Neither purely objective
nor subjective in basis, language is instead formed in Rousseau in the context of
the unprecedented perception of an other just like him whom the perceiving
subject cannot recognize to resemble himself, not least because his “own” self is
misperceived by him as his alone, and the origin of language resulting from that
experience names not the feeling, “fear,” that such a complex misperception
inspires – a “passion” with the power “to fascinate the eye” in the stead of any visible
object – but rather an object of imagined dimensions rationally commensurate
with that (inherently irrational) feeling, i.e., a terrifyingly oversized, physically
incommensurate other, or “Giant.”
On Diderot’s view, the incommensurability of “simultaneity” and difference at
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work at every moment of perception impedes all subjects from “seeing” without
the uniquely symbolic and successive mode of language. Language allows subjects
to “express” a complex experience not through its impassioned misprision and
projection in “ﬁgural language,” or “trope” (“Giant”), but the direct converse, a
series of grammatically “analytic” acts distinguishing and “attach[ing] many ideas”
to “a single expression”:

I would willingly eat this here are only modes of a single sensation. I marks the
person who feels it; would eat, the desire and the nature of the felt sensation;
willingly, its intensity or its force; this here, the presence of the desired object; but

204. Cf. Chapter One, n.18, this study.

the sensation does not have in the soul this successive development; and if it
could command with twenty mouths, each mouth saying its word, all the
preceding ideas would be rendered simultaneously . . . But, lacking many mouths,
this is what one has done: one attached many ideas to a single expression.
[Je mangerais volontiers celui ne sont que des modes d’une seule sensation. Je
marque la personne qui l’éprouve; mangerais, le désir et la nature de la sensation
éprouvée; volontiers, son intensité ou sa force; celui, la présence de l’objet désiré;
mais la sensation n’a point dans l’âme ce développement successif du discours; et
si elle pouvait commander à vingt bouches, chaque bouche disant son mot, toutes
les idées précédentes seraient rendues à la fois . . . Mais au défaut de plusieurs
bouches, voici ce qu’on a fait: on a attaché plusieurs idées à une seule expression.205]

A “single,” “discurs[ive]ly develop[ed]” “expression” gives single “successive” voice

to the cacophony of “many mouths” by “decomposing” so as to recompose it into the
symbolic diachrony that is language. Perception, judgment, and feeling occur
together within the “state of the soul” – “to see an object, to judge it beautiful, to feel a
pleasurable sensation, to desire possession, is the state of the soul in a single instant”
(“voir un objet, le juger beau, éprouver une sensation agréeable, désirer la possession,
c’est l’état de l’âme dans un même instant”) – but whereas “Greek and Latin,” Diderot
asserts, “render” that “state” semantically, through “a single word” in whose
“pronounce[ment] all is said, all is understood” (“que le grec et le latin rendent par
un seul mot. Ce mot prononcé, tout est dit, tout est entendu”206), modern languages
render it grammatically, through a logical category of word deﬁned to designate a
single property common to multiple “ideas,” as described above, “the adjective.”207 In
the relation of perception, judgment, and feeling related within a “single expression”
just cited, adjectives distinguish an unnamed object (“it”) by naming neither its true
nor tropological identity (“man,” or “Giant”) but its quality (“beautiful,”“pleasurable”),
and the transitive verbs of which those qualities are the complements, “to judge” and
“to feel,” may only be grammatically predicated by adjectives. Here – in the peculiar
cases of judging and (nonsensory) feeling – grammar reveals, rather than rules out,
a semantic oddity: transitive verbs that attach primarily not to objects but to qualities.
Attached to a feeling rather than a cognition, and unattached to any speciﬁc subject,
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object or context that would prevent its being generally “pronounce[able]” and
“underst[andable]”) (or in Kant’s terms generally “communicable”) in the ﬁrst place,
language originates, in Diderot’s second “Letter,” to “decompose” into discrete,
grammatically sequenced, verbal acts a multitude of sensations experienced at once.
In Kant, that simultaneous multiplicity or copresence of “many mouths” does
not occur within a single subject, but among subjects. In addition to the “play” or
“conﬂict” of cotemporaneous feelings of pleasure and pain, judgment, in order to

205. Diderot, OC , IV: 158.

206. Diderot, OC , IV: 162.
207. Cf. Chap. One, n. 26, this Section, this Chapter, n. 199, n. 200, n. 201.

be judgment, i.e., a generally pronounceable act of speech, must originate “as if ” in

all possible speaking subjects at once, on Kant’s account, just as it must join distinct
parts of speech into a single spoken “synthesis” of subject and adjectival predicate,
a sentence. No less than the synthetic judgments a priori composing Kants critical
theory of cognition, aesthetic judgments in Kant’s Critique of Judgment reveal the
active intellectual sense of the sentence to an extent matched in philosophy before
Kant only by Descartes’ cogito.208

208. Refusing to constate an idea of “I” antecedent to its employment in a predicative

action, and basing the “I”’s existence only on its repetitive (self-)constitution as a bridge (ergo)
across actions (cogito, sum), the fundamentally discursive sense of Descartes’ cogito may be
closest to Kant’s (common) sense of judgment. Cf. Béatrice Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine: Back to
Kant, and Back Again (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 81-82, for a similar view of
the shared discursive (“propositional”) basis of Descartes’ “I think” and Kant’s. Tat the cogito
expresses neither “innate ideas” nor an assumed authority of “the subject,” but rather predicates
one statement upon another employing the same grammatical subject, does not figure in
Chomsky’s important assessment of Descartes’ view of language, as unique “instrument for
the free expression of thought and appropriate response to new situations” undetermined by
“stimulus control,” “animal” “passions,” or any other “mechanical explanation” (see Cartesian
Linguistics [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966] pp. 5–13, 87, esp.). Yet it is no coincidence
that the cogito, first modern account of independent intellectual action and first stated
enactment (outside Genesis) of existence through verbal predication, offers the central
philosophical touchstone for Chomsky’s own groundbreaking theory of language as
contextually independent, infinitely productive “system of generative rules” or “deep
grammar” of predication (see also Chomsky, Language and Mind [NY: Harcourt Brace
Javonovich, 1968], pp. 4–23, esp.). In a related discussion in From Locke to Saussure, pp. 107–
112, 170–176 esp.), Aarsleff takes issue with Chomsky for failing to include Condillac in his
consideration of 18th-century language theorists, while, in his own translation of Condillac’s
Essai, he mistakenly condemns Descartes for failing to do what he did best, i.e., understand,
use, and represent language as an instrument of “action” (see Etienne Bonnot de Condillac,
Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. and ed. and with an Introduction by Hans
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Aarsleff [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], esp. pp. xiii–xvii). Rightly praising
the importance of language in Locke’s Essay, Aarsleff thus inaccurately opposes what
he (ironically accurately) calls “the Cartesian discourse of the mind” to Locke’s “open
admission that words ofen have an active role in thought” (Condillac, Essay, tr. Aarsleff, xvi;
“discourse of the mind,” interestingly, is not Descartes’ phrase but Hobbes’; see Leviathan, Bk
I, Chapter 3, p. 96). From the entirely and necessarily discursive statement of the cogito to the
deduction and discussions of the primarily creative capacity of language that directly
precede it in the Discours, nothing is more central to Descartes’ reinvention of philosophy (or
even its retrospectively characterized “rationalism”) than his understanding of the
fundamental, active role of language in thought. (Locke’s rejection of all “syllogistic” reasoning
is likewise misattributed by Aarsleff to the influence of [Cartesian] “rationalism,” while
Descartes’ own rejection of syllogism was in fact explicitly specifically based on the sophistic
use [and abuse] of the form by the Scholastics [xiv]).

8. Kant’s Predicates: “Synthetic Judgments

A Priori” and “A General Voice”
Judgment in Kant entails the feeling of freedom in addition to that of pleasure or
pain, and to “feel oneself fully free” is to free oneself simultaneously from one’s
personal or partial point of view.209 Tis feeling of freedom gives “the judging subject”
“reason to believe” that the “pleasure” he or she210 is experiencing is distinct from any
other that can be felt by a “private individual” in that it is grounded not in a sensorily
determined, corporeally delimited but, rather, an “undetermined” “common sense,”
in Kant’s social and semantic rather than commonplace sensory meaning of the
term: a productive “faculty” – for externally articulating and so communicating any
experience – “attributable” to “everyone” else. Rather than identifying either an object
(noun) or a quality (adjective), the sentences of judgment combine unnamed objects
with the names for fundamentally abstract qualities; speech acts in the first place,
judgments depart from the logical circle described by accounts of language that
attempt to derive its essentially social and conventional basis from the constative
utterances of single individuals. Te analogous logical difficulty involved in
according “the faculty” of “common sense” and fundamental “ground” of “judgment”
either a priori and formal, or a posteriori, experiential status in the Tird Critique – a
dilemma inhering in the necessarily heterogeneous nature of the universal “sense” of
aesthetic experience Kant proposes – finds its resolution in a “free” action of
“communication” committed by an individual subject that redefines subjective
“free[dom]” as independence from “private” conditions, a “feeling free” in “one’s self”
which, unlike traditional, philosophical and cultural oppositions between “self” and
“other,” simultaneously “presupposes” the feeling of such freedom, occasioned by an
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unknown, conceptually undetermined object of perception, in all.211 Te speaker

209. Kant, KU B 18, X: 123.

210. Te use of masculine and/or feminine pronouns and possessive adjectives, here
and elsewhere throughout this book, reﬂects the particular diﬃculty of expressing in
English a general, non-gendered subject (in the singular nominative or any other case) as
well as the impossibility of coordinating the genders of possessive adjectives with those of
things possessed (rather than of their possessors), as German does as a rule. In colloquial
English there is no accurate, grammatically regular mode that, without resorting to
periphrasis, can represent any single subject speaking judgment in the “general voice.”
211. Te only precedent to Kant’s description of the “free” enactment of a simultaneous
communicability of self with alterity occurs, uncoincidentally, in Rousseau’s necessarily
philosophical and political account of human beings acting in their unique capacity as “free

who “feels himself or herself . . . fully free” expresses this not by saying so, or indeed
saying anything regarding him or herself, but in saying of the object whose perception
occasioned that feeling, “it is beautiful.” In so doing the judging subject employs both
the distinct parts of speech described by Rousseau and Diderot to mark the differing
cognitive origins of language, and, in combining these, effectively makes their
referential field, like their individual speaker, general in scope. For, instead of a
“trope” (“Giant”) proffered in the place of a subject’s unstated feeling (“fear”) with
regard to his or her own person, the noun designating an unknown object of
perception in Kant is a fully impersonal pronoun (“it”), itself as “free” from all
specific knowledge, feelings, and interests as the subject “feels himself ” in speaking it.
Similarly, the adjective that Kant’s judging subject employs to qualify that undefined
pronoun describes no particular sensible aspect of it (size, shape, sound, texture, or
color) but rather a general quality (“beautiful,” “sublime”) serving as a placeholder
“abstracted” from all particular qualities, one “it” shares or, more precisely, is
experienced to hold equally in “common” with our “sense” of other particular, while
equally unknown, sensuous objects: the quality not only of appearing, but of moving
us to use the – externally undetermined – word “beautiful” with regard to them.
Most importantly, however, Kant’s aesthetic judgment does not simply add an
abstract adjective to a noun; like any speech act, the specifically verbal nature of
aesthetic as of any “judgment” in Kant requires that it be articulated in a general,

agent[s],” i.e., subjects “free” to form, communicate with and govern each other via
universally binding agreements or conventions. In signing over their own naturally limited
ability to realize “private” “individual” interests, whether capricious, acquisitive, or
compulsive in nature, “free agents” achieve the artificial standing or status, and acquire and
experience the “sovereign” rights of “citizens” first defined by the formal convention of a
“social contract.” See Du contrat social, esp. Chap. VI, “Du pacte social” and Chap. VII, “Du
souverain,” for Rousseau’s accounts of the “act” by which the “particular person of each
contracting subject,” “giving himself to everyone and to no one,” joins the “moral” and
“political body” of a contractual society (pp. 51–52). See also Discours sur l’origine . . . esp.
pp. 182–83, on man as a “free agent.” Te “alienation” of private wishes by a “general will” first
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originating in freely contracting subjects, like the capacity for “free agency” equally deﬁnitive
of, even when still latent in, “natural” and “social man” in Rousseau’s accounts of human
history, are not only clearly critical for Kant’s later historical and political writings on the
centrality of “theory” to “practice” – including the requirement, for the constitution of any
contractual state, of universal literacy and free, social “communication” of thought beyond
any individual mind through its uncensored “publication” – but his own critically pivotal,
pathbreaking “bridge,” among individuals no less than individual human “capacities” or
“faculties,” constituted of a theory of aesthetic judgment as “free” action spoken in a “general
voice.” For a contrary comparison of Rousseau’s concept of the “general will,” not with the
general communicability deﬁnitive of any language but, on the contrary, with the
particularity of an “aesthetic object,” see C. N. Dugan and Tracey B. Strong, “Music, Politics,
Teater and Representation in Rousseau,” in Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick
Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 329–64 [323–33]).

predicative sentence. “Free” aesthetic judgments are “synthetic judgments a priori” of

the very kind Kant defines as the main philosophical “principle” and “revolution in
mode of thinking” enacted by his Critique – an essential formal fact whose
forgetting underlies, to a large extent, the controversy and misconceptions that
continue to trail his Tird Critique. For, the main “question” and “task” the entire
tripartite Critique poses of itself, and on which, Kant states, the entire “building” of
its “architectonic plan” and “system of principles of pure reason” rests, is whether
synthetic predicative statements, or “synthetic judgments a priori, are possible.”212
In Section IV of the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, “On the Difference
between Analytic and Synthetic Judgments,” Kant compares statements whose
predicates can be shown by analysis to be identical to the cognitive concept we
hold of their subjects – statements, in other words, whose predicates are
indistinguishable from the definition of their subjects – with those whose
predicates are instead judged as “necessarily belonging”213 to their subjects
synthetically. Like aesthetic judgments, “synthetic judgments” are based not in
definitional conceptual knowledge but “experience:”

In all judgments, in which the relationship of a subject to a predicate is thought . . .,

this relationship is possible in two ways. Either the predicate B belongs to the
subject A as something that is contained (in a concealed way) in this concept A;
or B lies completely outside concept A, even though it stands in conjunction with
it. In the first case I call this judgment analytic, in the other case, synthetic.
Analytic judgments (that are positive) are thus those in which the conjunction of
the predicate with the subject through identity is thought, while the other kind,
in which the conjunction is thought without identity, should be called synthetic
judgments. . . . For example, when I say: all bodies are extended, so this is an
analytic judgment. For I need not depart from the concept that I join to [the word]
“body” in order to find “extension” conjoined to it, but rather only analyze the
concept, i.e., become conscious of the manifold of qualities which I at any time
think in it, in order to find its predicate within it; it is thus an analytic judgment.
By contrast, if I say: all bodies are heavy, that predicate is something completely
different from that which I think within the mere concept of a body generally.
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Te addition of such a predicate therefore produces a synthetic judgment.

Judgments of experience, as such, are altogether synthetic. For it would make no
sense for an analytic judgment to be grounded upon experience . . .
[In allen Urteilien, worinnen das Verhältnis eines Subjekts zum Prädikat gedacht
wird . . ., ist dieses Verhältnis auf zweierlei Art möglich. Entweder das Prädikat
B gehört zum Subjekt A als etwas was in diesem Begriﬀ A (versteckter Weise)

212. Kant, KrV B 27, B 18, III: 64, 58–59: “Te actual task of pure reason is precisely
contained in the question: “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” (“Die eigentliche
Aufgabe der reinen Vernunf ist nun in der Frage enthalten: Wie sind synthetische Urteile a
priori möglich?”).
213. Kant, KrV B 13, III: 54.

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112 Te Linguistic Condition

enthalten ist; oder B liegt ganz ausser dem Begriff A, ob es zwar mit demselben
in Verknüpfung steht. Im resten Fall nenne ich das Urteil analytisch, in dem
andern synthetisch. Analytische Urteile (die bejahende) sind also diejenige, in
welchen die Verknüpfung des Prädikats mit dem Subjekt durch Identität,
diejenige aber, in denen diese Verknüpfung ohne Identität gedacht wird,
sollen synthetische Urteile heissen . . . Z. B. wenn ich sage: alle Körper sind
ausgedehnt, so ist dies ein analytisch Urteil. Denn ich darf nicht über den Begriff,
den ich mit dem Körper verbinde, hinausgehen, um die Ausdehnung, als mit
demselben verknüpf, zu finden, sondern jenen Begriff nur zergliedern, d.i. des
Mannigfaltigen, welches ich jederzeit in ihm denke, mir nur bewusst werden,
um dieses Prädikat darin anzutreffen; es ist also ein analytisches Urteil. Dagegen,
wenn ich sage: alle Körper sind schwer, so ist das Prädikat etwas ganz anderes,
als das, was ich in dem blossen Begriff eines Körpers überhaupt denke. Die
Hinzufügen eines solchen Prädikats gibt also ein synthetisch Urteil.
Erfahrungsurteile, als solche, sind insgesamt synthetisch. Denn es wäre
ungereimt, ein analytisches Urteil auf Erfahrung zu gründen. . . .214]

Te judgment, “it is beautiful” (or “sublime”), is just such a synthetic predication.

Based on the experience of an unknown sensory object whose material form (or
formlessness) gives rise to feelings of pleasure (or pain) and freedom in the subject
who perceives it, judgments, spoken by subjects, predicate those objects generally,
yet in a way that neither deﬁnes nor relies on conceptual knowledge of them in the
ﬁrst place. In the predicating judgment, “it is beautiful,” the unnamed object turned
subject, “it,” only “is” a subject insofar as “it is” predicated on the quality, “beautiful,”
and “beautiful” is said to be a quality of “it” only insofar as it is experienced and
articulated as such. In order for that synthesis of subject and predicate to be
enacted in speech, the individual experience of the world on which it is based must
be as independent of individual proclivities as its language must be unburdened of
traditional and contextual connotations, freedom of “feeling” and of speech
conjoining an unknown object to a general quality originating together here in the
formation of “synthetic judgment” itself.
No less than in his proposition of its formalization in a universal “moral law” in
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the Second Critique, freedom in the Critique of Judgment is no private matter for
Kant. Following the larger mediating, “communicating” function by which he
introduces aesthetic judgment as the necessary “bridge” between the mutually
exclusive realms of “phenomenal” (conceptual) cognition and “noumenal” (moral)
action, no subject can “feel . . . fully free” without supposing rather than opposing
such feeling in others. Indeed any purely individual “freedom” limited to merely
“private” – changing and contingent – circumstances constitutes not “freedom” for
Kant, but, rather, a contradiction in terms. Tis feeling, whose “presuppos[ition]” in
every other subject is inseparable from its experience by any individual subject, is
described as arising within each subject on the basis of a characteristically Kantian

214. Kant, KrV B 11–12, III: 52–53.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 113

“as if” (“als ob”215). Like Diderot’s notion of language necessarily formed in a
“double” – “direct” and “reflected – light,” the meaning of the “free” expression of
aesthetic pleasure (or pain) via the predication of an object by a speaking subject –
its significance as a judgment rather than a unilateral statement of fact – is itself
predicated upon its correlation with the capacity of other subjects to so judge, to
express themselves (and other selves) as subjects rather than “private” individuals
whose perceptions and judgments, much like those of Diderot’s fully sensing
subjects, are, ironically, impeded by the blindspots of “positive,”“private” circumstance,
the shortsighted view, of putatively “full” presence, mistakenly credited by the sighted.
Yet, in the case of aesthetic judgment, unlike that of any other general “faculty”
analyzed across Kant’s Critique, the speculative hypothesis of an internal
“presuppos[ition]” is the basis of an action undertaken exclusively and materially
in language, a perceptible speech act that, as speech, cannot, by definition, originate
in a single individual alone. And unlike the “concept of freedom” that Kant calls a
“fact of pure reason”216 whose uniquely non-causal, noumenal basis he attempts –
and, by his own critical criteria, must fail – to deduce in the Second Critique (filling
that inevitable logical lacuna with the conditional narrative of “possible” action
discussed at the opening of this study), the “feeling” of “free[dom]” attributed to
judgment in the Tird Critique is not and cannot be the object of a rational
deduction to begin with, in that it is experiential and practical, rather than
conceptual and cognitive, in basis – its occurrence constituting what we might call
a “fact”217 of judgment derived from its linguistic rather than logical identity. An
ability dependent upon no individual agent or enactment, nor upon either logical
or contingent conditions, it is language, the necessary condition and medium of its
enactment, that allows judgment to be “free” in the first place. As described in the
passage from the Tird Critique, § 6, already cited in full,218 the “subject” who

215. See Hans Vahinger’s seminal study of the hypothetical basis of Kant’s representational
epistemology, Die Philosophie des Als Ob (Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1911). Te present
study seeks to underscore the equally important hypothesis of others’ freedom on the part of
any individual who “feels himself fully free,” a deﬁning experience of freedom, issuing in
aesthetic judgment, that contrasts with the “idea” of “freedom,” or “fact of reason,” articulated
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formally in Kant’s hypothetical “moral law.” I have analyzed Kant’s logical inability to deduce,
and resulting narrative production of “freedom” in Te Imposition of Form, pp. 68–86.
216. Kant, KprV, A 57, VII: 142.
217. Initially designated as one of the three noumenal “ideas” of theoretical reason in
the First Critique, then as a “concept” of practical reason in the Second Critique, which, afer
proving undeducible, is ultimately designated a practical “fact of [pure practical] reason”
(Faktum der Vernunf) itself identiﬁable with the very “form” of “the moral law,” “freedom”
must be understood in strict separation from speciﬁc phenomenal manifestations of any
kind across the framework of Kant’s Critique. Similarly, a “fact” of judgment would consist
of nothing more nor less than its linguistic performance, and is therefore neither
“phenomenal” nor “real” in the strict Kantian sense. On the “real” (mathematical and moral)
and “nominal” (phenomenal) see n. 120, Section Five, this Chapter.
218. See n. 113, Section Five, this Chapter.

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114 Te Linguistic Condition

feels himself fully free . . . can discover as grounds for this pleasure no private
conditions that would depend on the subject alone, and thus must view it as
grounded in that which he can also presuppose in everyone else . . . He will thus
speak of the beautiful as if beauty were characteristic of the object and the
judgment were logical . . . because it has this resemblance to the logical, that it
can presuppose its validity for everyone.
[sich . . . völlig frei fühlt; so kann er keine Privatbedingungen als Gründe des
Wohlgefallens auﬃnden, an diese sich sein Subjekt allein hinge, und muss es
daher als in demjenigen begründet ansehen, was er auch bei jedem andern
voraussetzen kann; folglich muss er glauben Grund zu haben, jedermann ein
ähnliches Wohlgefallen zuzumuten. Er wird daher vom Schönen so sprechen, als
ob Schönheit eine Beschaﬀenheit des Gegenstandes und das Urteil logisch . . .
wäre . . . darum, weil es doch mit dem logischen die Ähnlichkeit hat, dass man
die Gültigkeit desselben für jedermann daran vorasussetzen kann.219]

Finding no “grounds” for this feeling that could “depend solely” on “his own
subject” – the “private conditions” impinging upon each of us at any time – he or
she who “judges” what he or she “feels,” experiences an object in a way no conditions
other than those of a disinterested aesthetic experience allows. For the “pleasure”
felt in the purely sensory perception of any object is a personal event, and to “feel”
pleasure on the basis of sensation is not to be “free” but dependent for one’s pleasure
on that sensation – free, indeed, of cognitive or moral aims, but never “in [one’s]
self.” Sensory pleasure as such depends on the sensory experience of the object that
provides it, making a purely sense-based distinction between such states as love
and addiction diﬃcult to draw, in that both signify a subject “bound,” “made over,”
or “sentenced to” (ad-dire) to another corporeal existence, a bondage to, rather
than “free[ing]” of the subject from the sensation on which a privative pleasure
depends.220 Just as any thing of any purpose and content can provide the occasion
for sensory pleasure, pleasure itself is of little interest to Kant except insofar as it is
accompanied by the “feel[ing]” of “freedom” that aesthetic experience occasions
within the “self.” It is that feeling of freedom as a subject that allows the subject to
“judge” rather than require the source of its pleasure, which is to say, to speak of it
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in the impersonal, third person (“It is beautiful”), expressing thereby the abstract,
common and communicable sense of the “presupposed validity” of that judgment
“for everyone.”221

219. Kant, KU , B 18, X:124 (emphasis added in part).

220. Beginning with its literal Latin meaning, the Oxford English Dictionary details the
equally appropriate technical, personally, and literarily descriptive uses of “addict,” from
Roman law through the New Testament to English political history and Shakespeare; see
OED, Two-Volume Edition, 1971, I: 25.
221. Tat presupposition may “resemble logic” but, unlike logic, involves the sensory
manifestation of a form perceived, and the pleasure or pain felt in that perception. Te
always partly perceptual and dependent, partly universal and independent, heterogeneous

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 115

By contrast with pleasure arising from being bound over, subjected to an object
of sensation, the pleasure (or pain) a subject who judges feels depends on the
“dynamic form”222 of the object he perceives, but not on that object alone; and it
depends on the “freedom” he “feels” in himself, but not on himself, as subject, alone.
Only on the double basis of both can feelings of “pleasure” (in the object) and
“freedom” (in the subject) coincide: pleasure in the beautiful (or displeasure in the
sublime) that the mere perception, rather than any motivating “interest” in the
object perceived, provides; and freedom “in [one’s] self ” (rather than from
something external to the self) which that mere perception, in the felt absence of
any interest, telos or purpose within the self, provides. Neither a cognitive nor
a consequential act, aesthetic judgment, defined in the Introduction to the
Critique of Judgment as the “bridge” (“Übergang”) over the “chasm” (“Kluf”)
between them, performs the additional function few if any material bridges do, of
preventing both sides from falling headlong into that abyss.223 What judgment
does cannot alter the categorical difference between the “realms” of the First and
Second Critiques (or of the “concepts of nature” and the “concept of freedom”224),
the “chasm” of kind between limited and unlimited, representational and
nonrepresentational “realms” that no judgment can transform, fill, or transcend.
Employing the phenomenality of the objects of one and the freedom of the mode
of the other, what the heterogeneous faculty of judgment does do is communicate
across the incommunicability that at once divides knowledge and moral action
and enables them, without either “depending” on or constituting a fully independent,
or alternative, “realm” of its own.225 (In Kant’s “architectonics,” unlike either
Heidegger’s “dwelling” or Habermas’ public sphere and square, a “bridge” is a
passage between mutually exclusive realms of action a priori, not a domain or
home for either “Being” or practical, “communicatve action” itself.226)

and thus undeducible basis of that presupposition is what Kant calls, in no less hybrid terms,
the both “grounding” and “undetermined norm of common sense” (Kant, KU, B 68, X: 159).
222. Kant, KU, B XLIX, 49–50, 79–82 X: 103, 146–47, 168–170.
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223. Ibid., B XX, X: 83.

224. Ibid.
225. Ibid., B XVIII, X: 82.
226. Cf. Paul de Man, “Te Temptation of Permanence” (1955), reprinted in de Man,
Critical Essays, 1953–1978, trans. Dan Latimer, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota, 1989 [orig. French pub. Monde Nouveau, Oct. 1955]), esp. pp.30–40, on
Heidegger’s equivocal uses of such architectural terms as “build,” “ground plan,” “dwell,” and
“bridge” to “unite,” rather than maintain the division between incommensurables
represented by “ ‘earth and sky, divine and moral’ ” in Hölderlin’s poetry, and to make
“dwelling” itself thus seem to “indicate two kinds of ” (equally incommensurable) “acts,”
those of residing, as if in a home, and the radical departure from any such home in “poetic
action.” See Jürgen Habermas, Te Teory of Communicative Action, 2 Vol., Trans. Tomas
McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984 [orig. pub, 1981]), esp. Chap. 1 – 5, I: 1–273, II: 1–111.

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116 Te Linguistic Condition

Te combined feeling of freedom and pleasure experienced in view of an object

is communicated in a predicative statement by its subject, but in words that neither
state those feelings nor say anything about the particular subject nor object of
perception at all. Instead, the “synthetic judgment” in which the “free” experience
of “pleasure” in perception results “resembles” statements “sprung from logic” in
that, like logic, it “presupposes” its (a priori) “validity” for “everyone.”227 Te
universal “validity” “presupposed” in and by the speech act of aesthetic judgment
is void of speciﬁc (either nominal or qualitative) content. No “concepts” are
articulated by judgment (not even those of beauty or sublimity themselves), just as
no object is named by it, “for from concepts there is no passage to the feeling of
pleasure or displeasure” (“[d]enn von Begriﬀen gibt es keinen Übergang zum
Gefühle der Lust oder Unlust”228), which is to say, no “passage” and passage alone
of the kind provided by aesthetic judgment alone: a “synthetic judgment” with no
other content than the general predicative quality the judgment itself provides. By
extension, the “claim” of judgment to interpersonal “validity” stems not from any
sense of “generality” (“Allgemenheit”) “placed in objects” themselves, but is instead
“bound to a claim to subjective generality itself ” (“es muss damit ein Anspruch auf
subjektive Allgemeinheit verbunden sein”).229

Albena Azmanova returns the Kantian core of Habermas’s social theory from
“communicative action” to the communicability underlying acts of judgment specifically, in
Te Scandal of Reason. A Critical Teory of Political Judgment (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2012). Seeking to mediate the “paradox” of theories of “judgment” torn between “moral”
or “ideal theory” and “political realism,” Azmanova proposes “a ‘critical consensus model’ of
normative validity” and “preference transformation” achieved by way of “communication that
allows normative consensus and social criticism to coexist” on the basis of “collective reasoning”
(4). Like aesthetic judgment in Kant, such a “model of judgment,” she states, “develops neither
as a stipulation of criteria and conditions of normative justification nor as an empirical account
of political decision making” (5). While Azmanova offers lucid summations of the reliance of
Habermasian social theory, Rawls’ theory of justice, and Arendt’s political theory on Kant’s
Second, First, and Tird Critiques, respectively, and provides thoughtful commentary on the
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limitations of each, her welcome recognition of the “normative force of linguistic forms” in
Kant neither distinguishes between such a specifically “social” “form” and the ungrounded
“norm” of “common sense” on which Kant bases judgment in particular, nor considers the
specifically linguistic basis of the “communicability” on which her own theory of “social
hermeneutics” depends (see pp. 30–42; 65–135). Te “communicability” of speech defining any
act of judgment in Kant is instead oddly equated in her analysis with the absence of language,
a “meaningful silence” or (paradoxically) “tacit articulation of what is critically relevant,” where
“[t]he ‘relevant’” provides the “starting point of judgment as ‘making-sense-in-common’,” i.e.,
the changing, empirical rather than “necessary,” linguistic “condition” of what is in Kant, by
contrast, a foundational “common sense” (128–29).
227. Ibid., B 19, X: 125.
228. Ibid.
229. Ibid.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 117

As if to indicate how far from Kant’s critical sense of a “subjective generality”

“ground[ed]” in “common sense” our own thinking about the aesthetic has come,
we now call such “synthetic” “subjective” “judgments” “objective,” even though they
replace the identity of the object with a single abstract quality (“It is beautiful;” “it
is sublime”). For Kant, they are, instead, “subjective” in a specifically “general” sense
precisely because, while necessarily and explicitly verbal, they leave, along with the
object, the subject of speech out of the picture: “judgments” would not be “general”
but rather “laughable,” Kant states, if they referred their predications to the
individual identity and contingent opinions of the subject who speaks them.
Defining such statements as “self-justifications” based merely on “pleasant”
sensations, whose sole, sophistical “principle” – “everyone has his own taste (of the
senses)” – runs directly contrary to the critical theory of judgment (and thus the
very possibility of judging, rather than opining or reporting) he describes here,
Kant writes:

In the case of the beautiful things are entirely diﬀerent. Indeed, it would, on the
contrary, be laughable, if someone who was somewhat proud of his taste thought
to justify himself in saying: this object (the building, that we see, the dress that
one is wearing, the concert that we are hearing, the poem that is posited for
judging), is beautiful for me. For he must not name it beautiful when it pleases
merely him;. . . but when pronouncing something beautiful so must he attribute
to others just the same pleasure: he judges not only for himself, but for everyone,
and thus speaks of beauty as if it were a quality of things. He says, the thing is
beautiful; and does not thereby more or less count on the agreement of others in
his judgment of this pleasure, because he found them frequently in agreement
with his, but demands it from them.
[Mit dem Schönen ist es ganz anders bewandt. Es wäre (gerade umgekehrt)
lächerlich, wenn jemand, der sich auf seinen Geschmack etwa einbildete, sich
damit zu rechtfertigen gedächte: dieser Gegenstand (das Gebäude, was wir
sehen, das Kleid, was jener trägt, das Konzert, was wir hören, das Gedicht,
welches zur Beurteilung aufgestellt ist) ist für mich schön. Denn er muss es nicht
schön nennen, wenn es bloss ihm gefällt . . .; wenn er aber etwas für schön
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ausgibt, so mutet er andern eben dasselbe Wohlgefallen zu: er urteilt nicht bloss
für sich, sondern für jedermann, und spricht alsdann von der Schönheit, als
wäre sie eine Eigenschaf der Dinge. Er sagt daher, die Sache ist schön; und
rechnet nicht etwa darum auf anderer Einstimmung in sein Urteil des
Wohlgefallens, weil er sie mehrmalen mit dem seinigen einstimmig befunden
hat, sondern fordert es von ihnen.230]

What kind of voice speaks neither of the “feelings” of a subject nor bases what
it says on the spoken “agreement” of “other subjects” (“anderer Einstimmung”)
with its words, no matter how “frequently” (“mehrmalen”) such individually

230. Ibid., B 20, X: 126 (emphases in text).

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118 Te Linguistic Condition

voiced agreements may be “found” (“befunden”)? What kind of voice speaks

so “objectively” as to say nothing about a particular object that could be
subject to disagreement because what it says “depends” neither on the object
spoken of nor on the subjects who speak it? What kind of voice, in short, can
never say “I”?
Tis “voice” (“Stimme”), as Kant calls it, gives voice not to “rules” that can either
override or generate our and others’ experience of “feeling,” nor does it articulate
“reasons and propositions of reason” capable of persuading individuals to a similar
experience, or name the particular “sensations” (“Empfindungen”) on which still
other individuals may believe their “pleasure depends.” Tose voices belong only to
so many individual “I” ’s, whose stated views can never coincide (or, as the German
language would put it – but Kant, importantly, does not – übereinstimmen) because
they misconstrue aesthetic experience as “subjective” (in the noncritical sense), i.e.,
a matter of private proclivity or conviction, and their complement as external
approval and validation, confusing thereby the “general” enactment of “judgment”
with the personal cultivation of “taste.” Such individual “I”s require and legitimize
overriding authorities whose voices serve, at a second remove, to “judge” their
own: arbiters and regulators of “good” taste; rationalists of the pleasure afforded by
“having” taste; and those who conflate “taste” with the physical sensation for which
it is falsely named. Just as judgment in Kant does not rely on, indeed excludes
“concepts” of its object, it speaks with a voice independent of any of the individual
voices from which these various conceptions of it emerge:

When we judge objects merely according to concepts, so all perception of beauty

is lost. Tus there can also be no rule according to which someone can be
compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful. Whether a dress, a house, a
ﬂower would be (“sei”) beautiful: no one lets his judgment be cajoled by reasons
and principles of reason to that conclusion. One wants to submit the object to
one’s own eyes, just as if one’s pleasure depended on the sensation; and
nevertheless, when one names an object beautiful, one believes one has a general
voice, and makes claim to the accession of everyone, since otherwise every
private sensation would decide only for him and his pleasure alone.
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Here we can now see that in the judgment of taste nothing is postulated other
than such a general voice. . . .
[Wenn man Objekte bloss nach Begriffen beurteilt, so geht alle Vorstellung der
Schönheit verloren. Also kann es auch keine Regel geben, nach der jemand
genötigt werden sollte, etwas für schön anzuerkennen. Ob ein Kleid, ein Haus,
eine Blume schön sei: dazu lässt man sich sein Urteil durch keine Gründe
oder Grundsätze beschwatzen. Man will das Objekt seinen eigenen Augen
unterwerfen, gleich als ob sein Wohlgefallen von der Empfindung abhinge; und
dennoch wenn man den Gegenstand alsdann schön nennt, glaubt man eine
allgemeine Stimme für sich zu haben, und macht Anspruch auf den Beitritt von
jedermann, da hingegen jede Privatempfindung nur für ihn allein und sein
Wohlgefallen entscheiden würde.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 119

Hier ist nun zu sehen, dass in dem Urteile des Geschmacks nichts postuliert
wird, als eine solche allgemeine Stimme. . . .231]

In this important initial formulation of “a general voice” of judgment, the later

problem of “common sense” already comes into view. In “naming” an “object”
“beautiful,” “one believes one has a general voice” – that is, one believes the
utterance of that speech act does not speak for one’s self alone – and, in naming
this belief, Kant proceeds to judge or generalize from it, redeﬁning “such a general
voice” as the sole “postulate” of the act of judgment itself. Te (not quite) formal act
of postulating from a “general” instance of language rather than causal logic –
“Here is now to be seen, that in judgment nothing is postulated but such a general
voice” – is echoed in the introduction and reformulations of the notions of
“common sense” already cited at the opening of this analysis:

Such a principle (that determines [or, “would determine:” bestimme], only through
feeling and not through concepts, but nonetheless generally, what pleases and
displeases [or “would please:” “gefalle;” “would displease:” “misfalle”]) can only be
regarded as a common sense, which is essentially different from the common
understanding that one sometimes also names common sense (sensus communis) . . .
Tus only under the presupposition that there “is” [or, “would be:” gebe]
common sense (by which we do not understand an external sense, but the effect
resulting from the free play of our powers of cognition), only, I say, under the
presupposition of such a common sense can judgment of taste be rendered . . .
Tis undetermined norm of a common sense is really presupposed by us: our
presumed ability to make judgments of taste proves it. Whether in fact such a
common sense . . . “exists” [or “would exist:” gebe]. . . .
[Ein solches Prinzip (welches nur durch Gefühl und nicht durch Begriffe, doch
aber allgemeingültig bestimme, was gefalle oder misfalle) aber könnte nur als
ein Gemeinsinn angesehen werden; welcher vom gemeinen Verstande, den man
bisweilen auch Gemeinsinn (sensus communis) nennt, wesentlich unterschieden
ist . . .
Also nur unter der Voraussetzung, dass es einen Gemeinsinn gebe (wodurch
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wir aber keinen äussern Sinn, sondern die Wirkung aus dem freien Spiel unserer
Erkenntniskräfe, verstehen), nur unter Voraussetzung, sage ich, eines solchen
Gemeinsinns kann das Geschmacksurteil gefällt werden . . . Diese unbestimmte
Norm eines Gemeinsinns wird von uns wirklich vorausgesetzt: das beweiset
unsere Anmassung, Geschmacksurteile au fallen. Ob in der Tat einen solchen
Gemeinsinn . . . gebe. . . .232]

231. Ibid., B 26, X: 130 (emphasis in text).

232. Ibid., B 65, 68, X: 157, 159. On Kant’s employment of the “ﬁrst subjunctive” rather
than indicative tense when describing the referent and use of the term, “common sense,”
now redeﬁned in his “Analytic of Judgment” as the “necessary” linguistic “condition” of its
enactment in a “general voice,” see this Chapter, Section One, n. 41.

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120 Te Linguistic Condition

Te “common sense” which may or may not in fact “exist” and on which
the execution of judgment depends, speaks in the “general voice” and single
“postulate” of the theory of judgment itself. “A general voice,” sole voice that
never says “I,” must speak to and for every subject by speaking, instead, of an
unnamed object. Te voice of every subject states, in speech qualifying an object,
something “generally communicable” among subjects. Tat quality has no “objective”
content, nor does it contain or represent in any semiotic sense the experience of a
subject. Contingent, transitory, and formally unpredictable by deﬁnition, “feeling,”
the individual experience of an individual subject in the absence of a sign, is as little
“communicable” in itself to the subject in whom it occurs – whether Rousseau’s ﬁrst
impassioned subject of speech, Diderot’s inventive subjects of sensory deprivation,
or any other, more conventionally conceived linguistic subjects – as it is to other
subjects, other selves. Any subject who feels, and speaks of “his” or “her” feeling, says
“I.” Whether speaking or silent, feeling speaks for a self. Te exact opposite takes
place in Kant (in Rousseau, and in Diderot). Te subject who “feels” “pleasure” on
Kant’s analysis of judgment, also “feels himself,” at the same time, “fully free,” which
is to say, freed from the contingent limits of “private conditions” to translate, in the
“general voice” of judgment, “his” or “her” “feeling” into general language about an
object, to make an object – rather than any individual subject of experience – into
the subject of a “generally communicable” predicate. Every individual subject is
subject to “his” or “her” changing experience and interests, but the subject of
judgment, speaking subject of “a general voice” that says of an object, “it is beautiful,”
“it is sublime,” speaks of something whose particular name and identity, like his or
her own, he or she no longer represents alone.233 In judging, he or she speaks the
principle of speech,“general communicability,” with every (perceptual) transposition
from subject to object, (felt) transposition from object to subject and (spoken)
transposition from subject to subject that he or she makes, without each of which
“communicability” could never be “general,” and what we call “language” would not
be language at all.
Te “general voice” is language spoken in response to a “feeling” by a subject that
simultaneously “feels [it]self free” to speak without identifying its experience with
an empirical “I” or object. “General communicability,” independent of any
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particular experience, is the formal content of the speech the “general voice” of
judgment articulates. Judgment, in others words, speaks the principle of
speakability. In this,“such a general voice” expresses, in external and thus perceptible
linguistic form, the mysterious “internal form” underpinning all perception in
general that Kant calls “the schema.”

233. Tis is why, no matter the particular empirical object or aesthetic form experienced
by Kant’s judging subject, Kant’s will always be a (if not the) “modern” theory of aesthetic
experience and, conversely, of any “modern art.” In that Kant’s theory of aesthetic “judgment”
and “pleasure” excludes no phenomenal object or perceiving subject, it will always include
the future of art – “new” subjects and objects of aesthetic experience, and “old” subjects and
objects renewed – within its purview.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 121

9. “Te Schema,” or Language Inside

For good or for ill, understanding requires a form of communication. Te “schema”
is the invented medium of understanding hypothesized by Kant’s Critique.
Described in the Second Preface to the First Critique as an “experiment” in
metaphysics, that hypothesis takes for its model the “revolution[s]” in “mode of
thinking” that “change[d],” as they ensured the development of mathematics and
the pure sciences,234 an investigation by the mind of its own capabilities resembling
Copernicus’s turn from empirical to rational-theoretical reasoning in the
investigation of the external world. Te theoretical “analogy”235 Kant proposes
between the practices of mathematics and natural science, on the one hand, and
moral action, judgment and epistemology (or science of mind), on the other,
includes within itself, however, this salient difference, that while theoretical science
of the natural world must alternate between formal reasoning and empirical data,
even while refusing to limit the former to the latter, metaphysics must join the two
in order to produce its objects of study in the first place, making the empirical
inseparable from the formally delimited way in which we question and understand
ourselves and the world. While that external world, and not the “world” of the
mind, is the final concern of theoretical science that turns from the sensory
evidence of physical interactions toward the dispositive logic of reason so as to
understand the laws governing external phenomena in the first place, the bases of
such understanding, as of all conceptual, moral, imaginative, and material action,
is the first and last – a priori and a posteriori – theoretical concern of metaphysics.
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234. Kant, KrV B XVI, III: 25: “I should think that the examples of mathematics and
natural science, which became what they are now through a revolution suddenly brought
about, would be remarkable enough to contemplate the essential pieces of the change in the
mode of thinking that has become so advantageous to them and, at least, in so far as their
analogy as rational cognitions with metaphysics allows, to make the experiment of imitating
them. Until now one assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects . . .” (“Ich
sollte meinen, die Beispiele der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaf, die durch eine auf
einmal zu Stande gebrachte Revolution das geworden sind, was sie jetzt sind, ware
mehrwürdig genug, um den wesentlichen Stücke der Umänderung der Denkart, die ihnen
so vorteilhafig geworden ist, nachzusinnen, und ihnen, so viel ihre Analogie, als
Vernunferkenntnisse nachzuahmen. Bisher nahm man an alle unsere Erkenntnis müsse
sich nach den Gegenständen richten . . .”).
235. Ibid.

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122 Te Linguistic Condition

For this reason Kant recognizes that his own formal hypothesis requires a
content specific to itself, a specifically formal content or form for making content
that would not be adaptive but applicable overall, a “technique” or “art” both
originating in and binding upon the mind if it is to apprehend the world at all.236
When the object of the mind is theory “of mind” in every sense, it can rely on no
external information to describe the myriad actions composing the mind “itself,”
i.e., the amalgam of sensation, association, comparison and reflection, knowing or
recognizing, remembering, projecting, imagining and inventing, thinking,
forgetting, positing and negating, each distinguished from and joined to the other
by no determining procedure or method the mind possesses, without thereby
failing to distinguish those actions from effects (of perception), and thus confusing
universally subjective with particular empirical givens.237 Yet neither can any
theoretical reflection on specifically human activity fail to substantiate what it
hypothesizes without risking logical regress. In this respect, the difference between
theories of metaphysics and of mathematics and science resembles the difference
between geometry and mathematics in general: between theory whose hypotheses
can be concretely represented (in figures, objects, and contexts) and theories that
invent specifically nonrepresentational (or “symbolic”) languages to elaborate
autonomous conceptual and computational logics.
Like a critical metaphysics, geometry does not logically deduce or symbolically
calculate but, instead, graphically and physically “constructs” its objects. “Te first
person who demonstrated” the necessity of the equilateral triangle, Kant writes in
the First Critique, “found”

that he must bring forth not that which he either saw in the ﬁgure or deduced
from mere concepts and, so to speak, forgot about its qualities, but through that
which he thought into it himself, according to concepts a priori, and represented
(through construction) . . .
[nicht dem, was er in der Figur sahe, oder auch dem blossen Begriﬀen derselben
nachspüren und gleichsam davon ihre Eigenschafen ablernen, sondern durch
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236. Cf. n.72, Section Two, this Chapter.

237. Such subject-object confusions characterize the brief life of every “new,” “spectral”
or “speculative” “materialism” or “ontology,” historically recurrent projections of subjective
“life” onto objects by subjects that, whether reveling in an infantile regression into Disney-
like fantasiae of object-animation, or adopting an ultra-Humean skeptical stance precluding
any and all mental action to precisely the same eﬀect, seek so to mystify as to render not
only science but any social or historical formation unthinkable. Tey demonstrate nothing
so much as the necessity of Kant’s entire critical project, like Rosseau’s social epistemology,
and Galilean and Copernican natural science to base themselves on predicating
“hypotheses,” and that the singular desire for identity and contempt for the diﬀerence every
act of predication instantiates is tantamount not only to an enforced evacuation of all
conceptual relations, but a hatred of philosophy itself.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 123

das, was er nach Begriﬀen selbst a priori hineindachte und darstellte (durch
Konstruktion) hervorbringen müsse. . . .238]

Te inseparability of an external body from its conceptualization in an act of

representation conjoined to the thinking that goes “into” it (“not what he saw in the
ﬁgure but . . . that which he a priori thought into it and represented [through
construction]”) is the condition upon which, as Kant describes it, his own
demonstration of the experimental hypothesis of synthetic a priori cognitions –
like that of the “pure geometrical concept” of a circle represented, a priori, in a
circular material object – must depend:

In all subsumptions of an object under a conception, the representation of the

object must be homogeneous with the conception; in other words, the conception
must contain that which is represented in the object to be subsumed under it . . .
So the empirical concept of a dish is homogeneous with the pure geometrical
concept of a circle, in that the rounding, which is thought in the first, can be seen
in the second.
Now, pure conceptions of the understanding, when compared with empirical
perceptions, or even with sensuous perceptions in general, are quite dissimilar or
heterogeneous, and never can be found in any perception. How then is the
subsumption of the latter under the former, and consequently the application of
the categories to phenomena, possible?
[In allen Subsumtionen eines Gegenstandes unter einen Begriff muss die
Vorstellung des ersteren mit der letzern gleichartig sein, d. i. der Begriff muss
dasjenige enthalten, was in dem darunter zu subsumierenden Gegenstande
vorgestellt wird . . . So hat der empirische Begriff eines Tellers mit dem reinen
geometrischen eines Zirkels Gleichartigkeit, indem die Rundung, die in dem
erstern gedacht wird, sich eim letzteren anschauen lässt.
Nun sind aber reine Verstandesbriffe, in Vergleichung mit empirischen (ja
überhaupt sinnlichen) Anschauungen, ganz ungleichartig, und können niemals
in irgend einer Anschauung angetroffen werden. Wie ist nun die Subsumption
der letzteren unter die erste mithin die Anwendung der Kategorie auf
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Erscheinungen möglich . . .?239]

In this key passage on the “heterogeneous” orders of concepts and objects, Kant
himself raises and faces the central question of the practical feasibility of his own
Critique. For, as an “experiment” in thinking, Kant’s fundamental hypothesis
requires no logical demonstration. Yet, in that its purview is conceived as precisely
not “pure” of, but rather as applied to the empirical world, such a critical hypothesis,
unlike purely speculative ones, does require an accompanying account of how that
“application” (“Anwendung”) can be carried out. “How,” in short (or, in Kant’s

238. Kant, KrV, B XI–XII, III: 22. See Kant’s account of the simultaneous, external and
internal “construction” of the equilateral triangle, Chapter One, n. 8, this study.
239. Ibid.

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124 Te Linguistic Condition

immediate terms, “How now” [“Wie nun”]) can we “subsume” the a posteriori stuff
of cognition to a priori forms of cognition, given that the latter, by definition, can
only be conceived of hypothetically in the first place? Put in equivalent, perhaps
more readily available terms: we may well hypothesize the analytic necessity of a
singular unity, “one,” but by what means do we apply it, as an a priori “form” or
“category,” to the infinitely divisible things of the world, let alone to itself whenever
we construct a new, inherently synthetic unity, “two” (and so forth)? How, based on
the hypothesis, “one,” are either empirical identification or arithmetic operations
possible?
Te significance of such a question is not “merely” hypothetical, however, but,
commensurate with any critical hypothesis, real and practical for Kant, and in
raising it he addresses the problem of “method” never resolved, at least with regard
to cognition and judgment of the empirical world, by Descartes. Appropriately,
Kant’s answer responds to the question of feasibility essential to any practice: that
of “how” an action is to proceed, rather than “what” is to be done. Instead of simply
deferring the problem by inventing a higher faculty capable of governing and
taking precedence over the heterogeneous faculties of conceptual understanding
and sensory perception whose coordination with each other produces the
“representations” we know, Kant introduces the inherently practical notion of an
“art” inhering in the mind, a (non-reproductive) “technique”240 for rendering the
heterogeneous homogeneous he calls the “schema.”241
A conception without precedent, no single notion in Kant’s Critique may more
sharply distinguish its theory of a priori representational knowledge from the
idealist and empiricist epistemologies preceding it – all of which, since antiquity,
have described empirical knowledge to one degree or another as a necessary
development, whether natural or cultivated, from sense perception – no less than
the many sensualist and aestheticist marginalizations of knowledge, including
false equations of “knowledge” with sensation, that have succeeded it. Locke’s
historic debunking of the notion of “innate ideas” propounded in the place of
experience by idealizing neo-Cartesians repeats a classical, still lively conflict
regarding the “sources” of knowledge to which Kant directly, and distinctively,
responds.242 Arguing against Platonic notions of “innate” “states of knowledge” in
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favor of the mechanical procedural approach to cognition institutionalized by the

Scholastics afer him, Aristotle narrates, in the Posterior Analytics, “animal”

240. Cf. n. 72, Section Two, this Chapter.

241. Te ancient Greek “schema” (σκημα), signifying physical form or ﬁgure, maintained
its meaning in early modern English; Kant’s use of it to mean an internal techne for the
“production” of knowledge is unique in both the German and English philosophical and
linguistic traditions, and is noted as such in the standard English history of the term. See
OED , Oxford University Press (1971 ed.), p. 2,663.
242. On the double “sources” (“Quellen”) of our knowledge, see Kant, KrV B 1, 33, III:
45, 69, et passim.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 125

“development[s]” of the cognitive “capacity” for “sense-perceptions,” through their

“persistence in the soul,” eventual “systematization,” and ﬁnal “stabilization” as
“knowledge,” as follows:

all animals . . . possess a congenital discriminative capacity which is called sense-

perception. But though sense-perception is innate in all animals, in some the
sense-impression comes to persist, in others it does not. So animals in which this
persistence does not come to be have either no knowledge at all outside the act
of perceiving, or no knowledge of objects of which no impression persists;
animals in which it does come into being . . . can continue to retain the sense-
impression in the soul: and when such persistence is frequently repeated a
further distinction . . . arises between those which out of the persistence of such
sense-impressions develop a power of systematizing them . . . So out of sense-
perception comes to be what we call memory, and out of frequently repeated
memories . . . develops experience. From experience again – i.e., from the
universal now stabilized . . . within the soul . . . originate the skill of the crafsman
and the knowledge of the man of science . . .
We conclude that these states of knowledge are neither innate . . . nor
developed from other high states of knowledge, but from sense perception.243

Kant’s “schema” is, precisely, not “animal”-“developmental” and so subject to

neither varying degrees of impressionability nor frequency of repetition, and, with
these, external manipulation over time. Yet no more is it an applied mechanics or
ideational capability of the mind. Whereas Aristotle furnishes analytic logic with
the useful tool of the “category” and Plato’s Socrates creates the logic of speculative
discourse by opposing “representations” to “Ideas” – intellectually rather than
experientially practical conceptions whose utility to thinking Kant’s Critique
maintains – Kant introduces the new notion of a noncontingent or “transcendental,”
“pure” or a priori “schema” on the same basis that, he stipulated, necessitated his
hypothesis of a “transcendental theory of judgment” in the ﬁrst place, that of the
need for a “third” and “mediating” mode of intellectual action, this time within and
enabling cognition itself. Kant answers his own question of “how” perceptions can
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be “subsumed” “under” concepts as follows:

243. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 99b25–100a10, Te Basic Works of Aristotle, Ed.

Richard McKeon, (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 184–85. Te nearly perfect
replication of Aristotle’s naturalist account of the “develop[ment]” of “science” by present-
day behavioral “sciences”—and the opposition of what, by dint of the most primitive binary
logic, they likewise dub “innate” because they can neither physically observe nor control it,
to that which, because, it appears to them something they can externally observe and
control, they conversely dub external “sense perception”—should give pause to anyone
seeking to elevate the mechanics of Aristotle’s so-called “materialist ontology” above the
basest methods of behavioral conditioning.

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126 Te Linguistic Condition

Now it is clear, that there would have to be some kind of third thing, which, on
the one side, is homogeneous with the category, and homogeneous with the
phenomenon, on the other, and so makes the application of the former to the
latter possible. Tis mediating representation must be pure (without anything
empirical about it) and so, on the one side, intellectual, while on the other side,
sensory. Such a representation is the transcendental schema.
[Nun ist klar, dass es ein Drittes geben müsse, was einerseits mit der Kategorie,
andererseits mit der Erscheinung in Gleichartigkeit stehen muss, und die
Anwendung der ersteren auf die letzte möglich macht. Diese vermittelnde
Vorstellung muss rein (ohne alles Empirische) und doch einerseits intellektuell,
andererseits sinnlich sein. Eine solche ist das transzendentale Schema.244]

As the formal “representation” of Kant’s hypothesis that all knowledge of

“sensory” “phenomena” is representational, i.e., already mediated by formative,
intellectual operations of delimitation and coordination, the schema is
“necessitated” but not contained by that hypothesis. It is itself, in other words,
unmediated, and yet not itself its own first cause. Just as “no [single] image of a
triangle could ever be adequate to the concept of a triangle,” so “sensory
conceptions” must have “schemata” rather than “images of objects” “at their
foundation.”245 And just as the hybrid conception – of “an image” for “a concept” –
that Kant “name[s] the schema,” is itself the “representation of a general procedure
of imagination,”246 so the formation of the schema, medium of this hybridity, must
precede the production of specific images in Kant, and it is in this context that
Kant describes an originary power to image unattached to any particular sensory
experience, a “pure imagination a priori,” which is to say, an imagination by
definition unimaginable, whose identifying mark is the “schema,” its own imageless,
“so to speak, monogram:” an at once abstract and concrete insignia, sign, or
initialing script. Of the identity of the origin of the schema, Kant states critically:

We can only say this much: as the image is the product of the empirical faculty
for productive imagination, the schema of sensory concepts . . . [is] the product
and, so to speak, a monogram of the pure imagination a priori, through and
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according to [or afer] which images ﬁrst become possible, and which only
become linked to concepts by way of the schema that designates them.
[So viel können wir nur sagen: das Bild ist ein Produkt des empirischen
Vermögens der produktiven Einbildungskraf, das Schema sinnlicher Begriﬀe . . .

244. Kant, KrV B 177–78, III: 187–88.

245. Ibid., B 179, III: 189.
246. Ibid., B 180, III: 189: “Diese Vorstellung nun von einem allgemeinen Verfahren der
Einbildungskraf, einem Begriff sein Bild zu verschaffen, nenne ich das Schema zu diesem
Begriffe” (“Tis representation of a general procedure of imagination providing a concept
with its image I call the schema to this concept”).

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 127

ein Produkt und gleichsam ein Monogramm der reinen Einbildungskraf a

priori, wodurch und wonach die Bilder allererst möglich werden, wie aber mit
dem Begriﬀe nur immer vermittelst das Schema, welches sie bezeichnen,
verknüpf werden müssen.247]

According to its provocative definition here by Kant, “the schema” not only
“mediates” – it, “so to speak” (“gleichsam”), speaks, “designating” (“bezeichnet”) the
very “concepts” (“Begriffe”) it “links” (“verknüpf”) to “images.” Analogous to the
“images” “produced” by our “empirical faculty of imagination,” the schema, Kant
states, is “produced” by an imagination “pure” of experience, “through and
according to [or afer] which” all “image” production “first” “becomes possible.”
Impure or “empirical” imagination mediates between the logical “categories” of
reason and the contingency of “phenomena[l]” experience to produce the a
posteriori “images” linked to our cognitive representations. In the case of the
imageless schema, however, rather than mediate between the “heterogeneous”
powers of reason and perception, a “pure” power of imagination is “said” both to
“produce” and to leave behind in the mind its own calling card, the signature or
temporally transmissible sign of the “means by which” (“vermittelst”) imagination
is routinely empirically “appli[ed]” (“Anwendung”). Preceding and independent of
sensation and conceptualization alike, the schema mediates not by imaging but by
“join[ing] “concepts” and “images” in an act of “designat[ion],” the signing and
assigning of a specifically linguistic “bond” (“verknüpf”).
What Kant “names” “the schema” “mediates” in that it, too, “names,” and
“language,” intellectual and applicable through and through, may be its other, more
common pseudonym. For, “monogram” of the “pure imagination a priori,” the
schema is both the mode of communication between the intellect and the senses
and the source of the designations that, in its capacity as a single, “homogeneous”
medium, it communicates. Te schema, in other words, allows us to make
“communicable,” or “common” “sense,” on the “inside,” of the “sensory” objects we
experience on the “outside,” to bring into communication the “sense” of a concept it
“designates” with the speechless, unknown, indeed, strictly speaking, un-experienced
sensations of the “senses.” Without this “monogram” of a “pure,” or nonimitative,
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imaging power – “product” (“Produkt”) in the form of an abstract sign or signature,

of a power to signify rather than image – even the images we produce, let alone the
sensory experiences we undergo, would remain fundamentally incommunicable
with concepts, and thus to ourselves as well.
Yet, the same may be said of the nonconceptual sensory experience Kant calls
“aesthetic.” Te “monogram” and “product” of an independent power of imagination,
whose own unique power to “designate” (“bezeichnet”) “joins” (“verknüpf”)
experience with concepts, the schema functions in the perceiving subject as “common
sense” does in the act of aesthetic judgment, speaking for and thus communicating,
across spatial, temporal and individual diﬀerentiation, sensations that, in its

247. Ibid., B 181, III: 190 (emphasis in text).

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128 Te Linguistic Condition

absence, would leave no trace of their individual occurrences, just as the “common,”
inherently “communicable” “sense” grounding and spoken in judgment, rather
than reporting the speaker’s feeling,248 qualifies an unknown object “for everyone”
or not at all. Like the schema – the Critique’s own necessary, a priori “construction”
not of a perfectly rational geometric figure brought into being by “thought,” but of
a “monogram” scripted by imagination alone to “designate” and, in so doing, “join”
external manifestations to our power to form – aesthetic judgment designates an
internal experience articulable by anyone. Te schema, Kant’s “transcendental”
“representation” of the internal power to “designate,” speaks no less powerfully in
the verbal practice of judgment. As the cognizing schema “binds” understanding to
perception in the definitively communicable medium of conceptual designations,
so aesthetic judgment, in “say[ing]” something of an unknown sensory object, “it,”
qualifies that object “for everyone:” regardless of whether spoken in a private or
public context, the “general voice” of judgment abolishes, in the act of its expression,
the distinction between private and public spheres. And like the schema, judgment,
too, “joins” “heterogeneous” orders of experience a priori, binding the discursively
continuous, yet epistemologically discontinuous, qualitative and nominal
components it designates so as to “construct,” like a geometer “think[ing]” without
reference to subjective experience, the predicative statement and “communicable”
judgment it “brings forth:” “it is beautiful,” “it is sublime.”
Te “common sense” in which, Kant states, aesthetic judgment is “ground[ed],”
and whose own basis he asserts he has neither the ability nor wish to “investigate,”
is no more commonsensical a notion than that of a “monogram” “sa[id]” (“so much

248. Te complex relation of language and feeling in the Tird Critique, the former
articulated “in response” to, even while supplanting the latter, substituting speech about an
unknown object for the inarticulate passions of an individual subject, resembles Rousseau’s
account of the origin of language in its suggestion that no feeling can both be experienced
and speak its name at the same time, and diﬀers from it in that, instead of displacing and
occluding a subjective feeling (“fear”) in the objective form of a nominal ﬁgurative utterance
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(“Giant”), Kant’s account of speech qualiﬁes an unidentiﬁed object, using an abstract

adjective (“beautiful”) to forge a kind of middle ground between subject and object. For, no
matter how much they appear to indicate “a part of ” objects themselves, adjectives are the
part of speech most indicative, as Diderot described, of our experience of objects: unlike a
feeling of fear that, occluding an experience of ignorance by “fascinating the eye,” is in turn
occluded by an appellation falsely constating an “objective” state of things based on a
metalepsis (because I feel “fear” of this unknown other [of an unknown me], he must be or
have been objectively bigger than me), the predicative complements, “beautiful” and
“sublime,” are qualities possessing precisely no objectiﬁable, constatable basis in Kant, or
indeed, in any theory of the aesthetic since antiquity. Te, by turns, dependent and mutually
exclusive relation of language to feeling described in theory and literature during and afer
Kant’s “Age of Critique” is discussed in “ ‘Te Real Horizon’,” the concluding Part of Words’
Worth, complementary study to this work.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 129

can we only say . . .” [“so viel können wir nur sagen”249]) to be inscribed, a priori and
indelibly, in the mind, the – at once internal and external250 – identifying mark or
signature of a power of imagination, antecedent to any particular experience,
whose “product” it is. Just as the First Critique demonstrates the practical validity
of a hypothetical theory of universal phenomenal or limited knowledge, and the
Tird Critique analyzes the “transcendental” or universal faculty of judgment it
itself proposes we all possess – a speciﬁcally non-conceptual “power” that “speaks”
impersonally, or “for everyone” – the schema required to make knowledge
“possible” has its a priori counterpart in Kant’s theory of judgment in “common
sense.” One produces the language that the other must employ.

249. Cf. n. 247, this Chapter, this Section.

250. Kant’s description of the “schema” as the “monogram” or marking carried within
the mind of an imagination “pure” of, or previous to, and thus capable of forming experience
relates directly to the interaction between language and external, earth-bound markings
required for the production of history. I have described that interaction in a study of the
heterogeneous composition of referentiality, and reference-based, demarcating history (In
the Place of Language . . . [2009]), which argues that the acts, events and presences of the
past that we understand to constitute history are dependent for their persistence and
perception as such on the mutual supplementation of external, material markings in space
with systematically signiﬁcant, linguistic or other communicative signs. Tis study argues
the complementary view that any (by deﬁnition, nonhistorical) “origin of language” would
have to be, by contrast, simultaneously internal and external to begin with, and that Kant’s
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mysterious “schema” performs the redoubtable discursive task of representing and so

“fulfilling” just such a need. For, a “monogram” or signature of an imagination whose power
remains independent of experiential (external and historical) limitations must be at once
indivisible from the medium in which it is engraved and superficial or external enough to
be externally legible and identifiable as such. As his theory of judgment bases its own
possibility on a “common” rather than individually contingent “sense,” Kant’s theory of
knowledge requires a “schema” in which the distinction between external and internal,
rather than corporeally and spatially defined, is produced as it is traversed by a “pure” power
of “imagination” operative within the mind. As discussed in the complementary study to
this book, on Wordsworth’s directly related theory and practice of “common language”
poetry, such an “imagination” makes its own representational appearance, both as imaged
“power” and purely linguistic referent or name, in Book VI of Wordsworth’s Prelude. See
Words’ Worth, Part II, Chapter Nine, “Imagination,” pp. 79–95 in particular.

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130 Te Linguistic Condition

10. What is Articulation?

Initialing “monogram” of a “pure a priori imagination” capable of “joining”“sensory”
experience with “concepts,” and the Critique’s own “representation” (“Vorstellung”)
of a necessary “third” (“ein Drittes”) “mediat[ing]” capability (“vermittelst”) that,
“intellectual on the one hand’ (“einerseits intellektuel”), and “sensuous on the other”
(“einerseits sinnlich”), is nonetheless “pure” (“rein”), or fully non-“empirical” (“ohne
alles Empirische”) in basis, Kant’s “schema” offers a no less necessary “representation”
of the formation of language at its “origin.” Tat “origin” must remain between
diacriticals, or “so-called,” because, just as it is neither contingent upon nor defined
by any specific moment, cause or content, but, rather, is enactable at any moment in
any context, or a priori, to define it as an “origin a priori” (or without origin) is a
contradiction in terms. For the same reason, its representation is no more image-
able than it is derivable from any empirical thing. For, while it first makes the
“production” of any “image” “possible,” the “schema,” Kant emphatically states, is
anything but an “image” itself.251 Calling card of an “imagination” – and, Kant
underscores, “at all times only of the imagination” – that does not image, but initials,
the “art” or techne of the “schema” cannot be referred back to sensory experience
but rather remains “hidden,” Kant famously figures, “in the depths of the human
soul,” and the only proper content of what Kant calls “this” (his) proposed (critical,
non-Aristotelian) “schematism of understanding” (rather than things) is thus our
own undeducible “internal sense,” not of any sensuous thing but of “time” as we
experience it: “schemata are nothing but a priori determinations of time.”252

251. Kant, KrV, B 181–82, III: 190. In one of the sublimely prosaic moments of the First
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Critique, of a piece with the description of “seeing as the poets see” in the Tird, Kant
describes the critical diﬀerence between his new, “transcendental” use of the term “schema”
and any conception we may hold of an “image,” stating that it matters little whether the
“image” made be of a “triangle” or a “dog,” let alone of such a co-existing “multitude” or “mass”
of individual identities as contained within the numerical designation, “one thousand,” no
single image can “reach,” but rather each must stem from “the generality of the concept”
(“triangle,”“dog,”“one thousand”) to begin with, generality to whose “schematic” combination
with the sensory in general no particular “image” could ever be “adequate” (KrV, B 180, III:
189). Absent the internal “art” of the schema, in other words, one imaged “dog” would either
have to be all dogs, in a kind of day when all cows are black (to upend Hegel’s famous
phrase), or no dog would be a “dog,” nor would there, ﬁnally, be such a thing as “images” (or
“representation,” or memory), only present, and indistinguishable, sensuous masses as such.
252. Kant, KrV, B 184–185, III: 192–193 (emphasis in text).

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 131

Similarly, the “three analogies of experience” Kant introduces into the

“Transcendental Analytic” soon afer the notion of a necessarily “mediating”
“schema,” must be analogical, rather than directly empirical or logical in origin, in
that they conceive experience with regard not to any (a priori temporal) objects
themselves, nor “to time itself ” (“der Zeit sich selbst”), but to the basic modes of
temporal differentiation (“permanence,” “successivity” and “simultaneity”)
(“Beharrlichkeit, Folge, und Zugleichsein”) first made distinguishable (and “time”
thus conceivable) by a means of “interconnection” (“Verknüpfung”) permitting us
to “perceive” “the existence of objects in time” (“Existenz der Objekte in der Zeit”).
Tat interconnected, and thus inherently comparative or “analogical,” temporally
differentiating mode of perception allows Kant to conclude, in radical divergence
from all philosophy before him (and convergence with all literary representation at
any time), that experience “itself ” is a product of syntax: “so is experience only
possible through a notion of the necessary interconnection of perceptions”
(“Erfahrung ist nur durch die Vorstellung einer notwendigen Verknüpfung der
Wahrnehmungen möglich”253). By analogy, we, too, may conclude that, whatever an
unimaginable power of “pure imagination a priori” may be, and whatever, if any,
may be its own identifiable origin and script, the schema that is its “product” is also
its specifically temporal offspring, or text. Te nonfinite capability of the “art” of the
schema, like that of language, to join the radically different orders of conception
and sense perception into representations which the same schematically mediating
“understanding” can in turn “interconnect,” is fundamentally linked, then, if
necessarily by “analogy,” to the experience of “time itself.” Within the operations of
the “schema,” language and temporality are at all times coeval.
For, uniquely comparable to linguistic forms, the so-called “sensory concepts”
(“sinnliche Begriffe”) that Kant’s “schematic” “determinations of time” produce work
both ways: they are sensory (externally sensible) instantiations of (internally
produced) concepts and conceptions of the sensory whose single “pure” – because,
paradoxically, necessarily hybrid – content may be critically called not “time itself ”
(whatever that may be) but its experiential product, temporality. And unlike both
idealist and empirical-materialist conceptions of the sensory, they are thus also
neither internal nor external in basis, but must be both, which is to say, communicable
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or social. In addition to introducing time into perception, Kant’s conception of a

“schema” capable of mediating internality and externality “in time”254 effectively
squares the permanent, analytic circle of how properly social, rather than
mechanically, physically determined, relations come about in the first place: how
what the author of the revolutionary Social Contract dispassionately called the
necessity of “convention” can be produced without relying on prior social
conventions – in short, how social conventions, which is to say conventions and
social formations of any kind, can begin to begin with. Unlike false accounts of the
“natural” basis of the willful imposition and unwilled suffering of creaturely, physical
force whose mythologizing “histories” Rousseau was first to criticize, Part One of his

253. Kant, KrV, B 219–220ﬀ., III: 216–217ﬀ.

254. Kant, KrV, B 183ﬀ, III: 191ﬀ.

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132 Te Linguistic Condition

Second Discourse demonstrates the inalienable operation across time of a physically

undetermined, definitively human capacity for forming society by mutual agreement
or convention, itself demonstrated rather than disproven by the logical impossibility
of identifying a “first,” or non-regressive, “origin” of all conventions, or language. Tat
irresoluble paradox, of a first convention both requiring and preceding the
conventional or agreed upon means for convening or agreeing in the first place,
irrefutably exposed by Rousseau in Part One, is then abruptly replaced by Rousseau
in toto, and without further commentary, with a mechanical etiology of nonsignifying,
purely circumstantial “languages” and “societies” conditioned no less than purely
physical compulsion on mere force of proximity in the Second Discourse, Part Two.
As described in Section Six of this Chapter, that logically recursive, textually occluded
problem of an at once temporally and semantically paradoxical “original convention”
is accounted for in Rousseau’s “Essay on the Origin of Languages” by a hypothetical
narrative relating a disfiguring “fear” of human alterity and equality to ignorance.
Whether represented as a circular logical conundrum or as a linear narrative of
impassioned error and belated correction, social relations and linguistic relations are
and remain equally coterminous in both cases. For the Rousseau of the undateable
“Essay” (that he, or the alter-ego Rousseau himself called the “juge de Jean-Jacques,”255
refused to publish in his lifetime), the problem of constructing a logical chronology
of language is misconstrued to begin with, in that any first word would have had to
have been born of excess, not ratio, in order to depart from an as yet unarticulated
norm. Just as the first word would originate in a blinding passion it occludes by
misconceiving and misnaming an other in its stead, inventing a “trope,” “Giant,” for
what the other is not, so the recognition of an always latent sameness of self and
other that, first acquired “afer much” comparative “experience,” can only be
established rationally through a belated invention of the common noun, “man.” In
tandem with temporality, Rousseau, like Kant, suggests that sociability – whether
viewed as universally “natural” or in the eye of the beholder; as conceptual fiction, or
expendable convention – is as dependent upon linguistic articulation, a signifying
act of some kind, as is any form of human communication and relation, from doubt
to acknowledgement, mistrust to “selfless” (or “moral”) action, confusion regarding
“truth” to “commitment” to a (“moral”) “cause,” and from the designation of bodily
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co-existence in space to nonlocal equality of “rights” “under law.”

255. Rousseau completed the three dialogues comprising Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques
in 1776; one of his final works; like his similarly self-representing, autobiographical-
autofictional Confessions and Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, it was also only published in
1782, afer the death of its authorial subject (1778), making the identification of “which”
Rousseau we are to take at “his” word, whether the representing and reflecting subject or
represented subject-as-object – or as Rousseau famously calls the latter in the opening lines
of the Confessions, the “me” (“moi”) he “will be (“et cet homme, ce sera moi”) once portrayed
“in all the truth of his nature” (“dans toute la verité de sa nature), not as his (unrepresented)
self, but as “a man” (“un homme”). See Rousseau, Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques, ed.
A. C. Fusil (Paris: Plon, 1923).

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 133

But this is as much as to say that, in order for objects to be related to each other
and to us as objects, and for subjects to relate to other subjects as subjects, rather
than objects, the heterogeneous combination of sensory impressions and
conception produced by the schema must also be universally communicable. Teir
internal production must be externalized, made as “common,” or extracted from
personal properties as any abstract, common noun, by articulate forms of which
the simple grapheme of the “monogram” – recognizable yet lacking demonstrable
referent – is an especially fitting, because entirely “imaginati[ve]” “representation.”
Deduced and defined by Kant at the opening of the “Transcendental Doctrine of
Judgment” of the First Critique as “a [necessary] third” capacity for formal
“mediation” between sensation and conception, the operation of the schema
within understanding resembles the “mediating,” “third” “power” of “judgment”
within his critical philosophy, a “power” or capability likewise inseparable from its
“own” external communication in third-person declarative statements (“it is
beautiful . . .”). Just as an object in the world provides its occasion, aesthetic
judgment requires articulation within the world. In this respect, not only the
essential communicating function of the Tird Critique within Kant’s overarching
“architectonic” project,” but the “mediations” individually internal to the First
and Tird Critiques relate to each other as each other’s “inside” and “outside,” or, in
the terms of the Second Preface, within the necessarily reciprocal relation of
“internal” to “external” that is the only possible basis for our experience of
change, and temporal existence or “Dasein” in general.256 In the essentially hybrid,
so-called “sensory concepts” of the schema and speech acts of judgment, a similar,
internal-external, or necessarily translateral temporalization of experience is
effected, with the difference that the source of temporal “determinab[ility]”
(“bestimmbar[keit]”257) occasioned by the schema lies in the temporally hybrid

256. Kant, KrV B xl–xli, III: 38–9 (emphasis in text): “I am solely conscious of my
being in time [Dasein in der Zeit] (and of the determinability of the former in the latter)
through internal experience, and this is more than merely being conscious of my representation
of myself to myself, but is rather is the same as the empirical consciousness of my being in time,
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which is only determinable through a relation to something that, bound to my existence, is

outside me. Tis consciousness of my being in time is thus bound identically with the
consciousness of a relationship to something outside me, and thus it is experience and not an
invention (or fabrication [Edrichtung], sense and not imagination, which inseparably links that
which is external to me with my internal sense” (“Allein ich bin mir meines Daseins in der Zeit
(folglich auch der Bestimmbarkeit desselben in dieser) durch innere Erfahrung bewusst, und
dieses ist mehr, als bloss mich meiner Vorstellung bewusst zu sein, doch aber einerlei mit dem
empirischen Bewusstsein meines Daseins, welches nur durch Beziehung auf etwas, was, mit
meiner Existenz verbunden, ausser mir ist, bestimmbar ist. Dieses Bewusstsein meines Daseins
in der Zeit ist also mit dem Bewusstsein eines Verhältnisse zu etwas ausser mir identisch
verbunden, und es ist also Erfarhrung und nicht Erdichtung, Sinn und nicht Einbildungsdraf,
welches das Aussere mit meinem inneren Sinn unzertrennlich verknüpf . . .”).
257. Ibid.

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134 Te Linguistic Condition

nature of articulation itself. For, necessarily available a priori, the schema makes
knowledge possible, while, just as necessarily acting only a posteriori, i.e., upon
experience, its own temporal hybridity makes it impossible for the “heterogeneous”
cognitions (unlike those of geometric constructions) the schema produces
necessarily to prevail in time.258 In suspending knowledge, by contrast, the
noncognizing power of judgment would have the counter-effect of separating
temporality from any possible chronology, making an a posteriori power of
articulation the “first” moment or “origin” of an experience “free” of just such
schematic cognitions, and the “determinations of time” produced with them.
Like two sides of a single page, the “inside” and “outside” of any dividing
demarcation is not merely formal, but substantive, and the demarcations between
Kant’s individual Critiques are indeed substantive in a specifically critical sense.
For, unlike equally tautological statements of subjective opinion or subjectively
supposed, empirical “givens,” critical analyses understand the substance of
experience to be the product of formal or impersonal relations, whether the
“experience” involved results in knowledge, feeling, a state of being, or condition,
and whether the “substance” in question appears as “real” or “self-determining” as
history, or as “nominal” and apparently unrelated to the “real” as fiction. While any
“system” of knowledge depends on the internal coherence of its formation, in
order for a systematic epistemology to be “critical” (rather than purely symbolic or
self-referential), it cannot be fully autonomous, which is to say, incommunicative
with the other intellectual activities whose rational, representational, and
imaginative means it shares, just as those activities tied by their common means
to knowledge – “moral” and scientific “reasoning,” theoretical hypothesis and
empirical experimentation, historiographic, literary and aesthetic representation
and interpretation – must engage with issues of cognition even while not explicitly
epistemological in aim, contributing to and so altering any viable theory of how we
know. By the same token, while the formation of a philosophical – or indeed of any
non-natural – “system” requires its own defining, operational closure, Kant’s
“critical” “system” includes within it the opening and “passage” (“Übergang”259)
from one intellectual activity to another that, delimited by the partial commonality
of elements and faculties composing these activities, also borders upon disrupting
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258. Graphically put, or “looked at” from the other end, as it were, of the telescope, the
consequences of temporally correlating acts of imagination with knowledge are as enormous
as, or co-extensive with, the external acts and internal consciousness of experience
composing all human (as opposed to natural) history. Wordsworth suggests the same in
stating, in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” that any attempt to “account for the present state
of the public taste” would have not only to “point out the manner in which language and the
human mind act and re-act upon each other” but “retrace the revolutions, not of literature
alone, but likewise of society itself.” See William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in
Te Prose Works, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1974), I: 121, and Words’ Worth, p. 9, n. 5.
259. Kant, KU B XX, X: 83, et passim.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 135

the eﬀective operation of each. Te consideration of relations obtaining before,

within, and in negation of identity, developed into the central modality of
philosophy by Hegel’s temporal delineation of the dialectic and Heidegger’s
unreservedly differential description of “Being,” finds its unlikely precedent in a
synchronic, systematic description of distinct intellectual activities the internal
coherence of which depends in turn upon the differentiation of each from the
other, yet whose asymmetrical overlap ensures that they will remain open and in
relation. Like the “schema” that, as if “join[ing]” individual lines into a single
meaning-bearing “monogram,” relates, a priori and inextricably, the divided,
“intellectual” and “sensory” capabilities of the mind, the “passage” between a priori
cognitive consistency and “free” acts and “feelings,” whose shared field of reference
is the external world, is the articulate activity Kant calls “judgment.”
Te relation between the synthetic speech acts of judgment and the synthesis of
sensory experience and intellect into “sensory concepts” by the schema also points,
by way of and with Kant, to a larger truth about language and what it does, by way
of and with each subject. Language is not only the universal “third” means of
“mediation” “(Vermittelung”) and “communication” (“Mitteilung”) between
subjects – two words sharing the common term for means, mean and middle
(“mit”) in German. It is the means with which we distinguish and define ourselves
in relation to a temporal world, not as either impervious or subordinate but,
precisely, as “subject” to it, inherently capable of being affected rather than
determined by natural forces. Neither “master” nor “slave,” in Goethe’s Faust’s or
Milton’s Satan’s consumingly unilateral understandings of those terms, the subject
instead meets the world, so to speak, halfway, “joining,” however non-synthetically,
one external form – discourse – to another – objects.
For, in basis and in general, the articulation of language binds “internal”
experience – an otherwise nonexistent content – to “external” form. To call such
externalization “fiction” is surely to miss its point, the extraordinary, utterly
ordinary service it performs as “bridge” not only between a subject defined as the
repository of certain common powers and all that is or appears extraneous to such
a subject, but across the chasm, between delimited substance and unlimited
powers, operative within (and only within) every subject. For nature is nature, as
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Spinoza axiomatically describes, because in it the inﬁnite power and necessary

substance of God wholly determine, contain, and derive from each other.260 Te
deﬁning powers of the subject described by Kant, by contrast, determine and
derive from an external form of containment, an extra externality they produce
themselves. As the “pure imagination a priori” “produc[es]” “the schema” – its own
signature, calling card, or “monogram,” whose recognizable form constitutes a kind
of externality, ungrounded in previous experience, within the mind, defying
thereby all vestiges of naturalized “space” in our understanding of the mind’s
productions – so the articulation of language, any language, delimits otherwise

260. See esp. Part One, Propositions 7–16, of the Ethics, in Spinoza, Te Ethics and
Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (New York: Hackett, 1982 [orig. pub. 1677]), pp. 34–62.

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136 Te Linguistic Condition

unmediated and thus unknowable experience by “containing” it in the recognizable

external forms it first composes, representing and defining – speaking of –
experience as if the systematic, logical and nominal limits of language were as
substantial as those of the empirical world.
Within Kant’s “architectonic” “building” of reason, “judgment” is indeed the
“middle realm” between (applied, cognitive) theory and (pure, moral) practice: an
applied practice of speech. Tis is speech that, without moral or cognitive posture,
speaks “for everyone,” not as willed or knowingly designated representative of all
other subjects, but by working definition of “judgment” itself. For, as in every other
constitutive activity of the subject analyzed in Kant’s Critique, here, too, “theory”
analyzes an already active “practice.” In the case of judgment, however, practice
specifically and explicitly requires an intermediary, articulation. Te language in
which it is spoken is itself the “middle realm” of judgment in Kant, the necessary,
articulate form in which both theory and practice of judgment and all subjects of
judgment meet – their “common sense” in the abstract sense that the schema is the
signature conjoining form and sensation, making all “experience,” in Kant’s words,
“cognitive,” which is to say, sensory and conceptual at once. In Kant its “origin” lies in
neither “end” of a circular chain of deduction, nor in any one subject, but in a “power
to judge” that, activated by a feeling arising from the perception of an unknown
object, first articulates and apportions (Ur-teil) in external forms a statement in
which that object is predicated by being identified, not by name, but with a quality.
Just as Kant hypothesizes the necessity of a schema (“so there has to be a third
thing . . .”261) that, in direct contrast to the “image[s]” of “the empirical . . . imagination,”
is instead a legible, external sign or “monogram” of the “pure imagination,”262 so, in
its capacity as articulation, rather than empirical conceptualization, language is
externalization. By this is meant neither the projection nor imaging, displacement
nor transmission or translation, from “inside” to “outside,” or from one subject to
others, of a meaning any subject already knows, but rather the act of articulation
upon which the indirection we call meaning – the necessary nonidentity of any
meaning with its means – depends. Signs, markings, symbols, characters, emblems,
images, icons, words all externalize, make indirectly perceivable, thoughts and
relations of every order, kind and description – from “empirical” observations to
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categorical deﬁnitions, from acts of speech to the analytic discourse we call

“philosophy,” and theoretical speculation to ﬁction – that, without them, would
have no “known” or even imagined, let alone communicable, existence at all.263
Yet language “is” externalization in another, less technical sense as well. In
containing what it includes, each act and instance of articulation excludes what it

261. Kant, KrV B 181, III: 190. See Section Nine, n. 244, this Chapter.
262. See n. 247, Section Nine, this Chapter.
263. Te most familiar, unequivocal realization of this fact is perhaps the least
understood as such. In order to produce, by purposefully faulty employment of syllogistic
means, the new, indirect meaning of “I think” – “therefore I am” – the circular or illogical
sentence we now call Descartes’ “cogito” had ﬁrst to be stated, articulated. Cf. n. 208, Section
Seven, this Chapter.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 137

does not contain, constituting, thereby, an “outside” to its every “inside.” Specifically
verbal articulations, however, endow externality with the additional quality of
commonality: an abstracted, or entirely inorganic “second skin” operating
independently of the spatial and temporal constraints of purely physical
articulations and inarticulate experience alike. Arising like a kind of gloss or scrim
between each subject and the external world, even while they tear the veil of
apparent phenomenal impenetrability between subjects, bringing invisible
“internal” lives into communication with each other in entirely unforeseeable
ways, verbal articulations make the perceptibly “external” or “other” into another,
separate subject brought into “contact” with other subjects by way of the discursive
surfaces they share. Neither tactile nor phenomenal in any sense, these are the
surfaces we ourselves externalize when we partake and join in discourse – surfaces
so definitive of our own existence that it is them alone we mean when pronouncing,
without the slightest hint or consciousness of irony, we’ll “be in touch.”
Verbal articulation, then, makes containment into an externally uncontained
realm of contact, a “third,” middle ground between inside and outside, subject and
other (as well as subject as other). But this is as much as to say, in positive rather
than negative terms, that, in excluding what it does not contain, the act of
articulation also includes the externality – the common, wholly nonphenomenal
“ground” – it creates. Unlike the representational knowledge we make of our
delimited perceptions of a phenomenal, external world, articulation produces the
particular – common rather than empirical – externality in which it itself is based.
In this, it not only comprehends the necessarily mutually exclusive realms, of the
perceptible or phenomenal and ideational or noumenal, that Kant’s “faculty” of
judgment “bridges” or “mediates,” but the generative basis of Hegel’s dialectic. And
in this, the composition of externalization that is articulation contains “within
it” every predictably circular rehearsal (disguised, in un-self-conscious, “post”-
Hegelian fashion, as discovery) of whether externality or consciousness, negation
or sublation, matter or idea, subject or predicate, the resistant particular or form of
thought is bound to emerge the victor of an ongoing process that specifically
requires their opposition. For the discontinuous movement of the dialectic itself
requires its “own” “second skin” of articulation, too.
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138 Te Linguistic Condition

11. World Without Words: Wordsworth

Tere may exist no more effective representation in English of Kant’s articulate
theory of judgment – its realization, in acts of speech, of an otherwise ungrounded,
nonprivative or “common sense” – than the common language poetry and poetic
theory of Wordsworth. As Words’ Worth, the complementary case study to this
investigation of the linguistic condition of judgment and agency in general, lays
out in detail, Wordsworth’s express rejection, in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” of
the cluttered landscape of vacuously extravagant figures then passing for “poetic
diction,” was the theoretical expression, unrestricted to any historical moment, of
the poet’s attempt to represent in “real language” the experience of an external
world not only unadorned of worn tokens of poeticism, but directly at odds with
the framing or delimitation of experience required for its phenomenal
representation. In order to effect that positive, “material”264 and conceptual
change – both in poetic practice and in our understanding of the interrelationship
between language and any “subject” ’s “perception”265 of the empirical – Wordsworth
must first replace the phenomenal externality of the world, within which subjects
move, with a nonphenomenal externality that, like language, is an externality we
construct rather than represent, and what the poet discovers each time he does so
is a world of “things” that, rather than remain external, “enter unawares into [the]
mind” of the subject subjected to them.266

264. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Te Prose Works, ed. W. J. B.

Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), I: 140.
265. In the unﬁnished manuscript posthumously entitled, “Te Sublime and the
Beautiful,” Wordsworth describes any verbal conceptualization (“talk”) of a “sublime”
“object” as dependent upon the interaction of that object with a subject who perceives it in
nonprivative terms identical to Kant’s: “to talk of an object as being sublime or beautiful in
itself, without references to some subject by whom that sublimity or beauty is perceived, is
absurd.” See Wordsworth, Prose Works, Appendix III to A Guide Trough the District of the
Lakes, II: 357. While Wordsworth denied having read Kant’s Tird Critique – the work of
aesthetic theory most admired by his close friend and collaborator, Coleridge – perhaps no
theorist or critic better (or more inherently) demonstrated and explained the active bases of
Wordsworth’s poetics than Kant.
266. William Wordsworth, Te Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W. J. B. Owen. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985 [orig. pub. 1805, 1850], Bk. V: 385.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 139

Like Kant’s theory of an ability to judge based on not knowing the “objects” we
speak of, Wordsworth’s poetics of “real language” suspend all perceptual-conceptual
conflations of language with the world, revealing the “real” of his heterodox concept
of “real language” to be an actively differentiating, nonphenomenal capacity for
perceiving, experiencing and representing the world not as we know, but rather
immediately undergo it. As narrated in his poetry, the resulting experience for the
subject is an immediate loss of external orientation, a sense of nothing – no external
thing – so much as of feeling “lost.”267 Like the “delineations” and “dynamic forms”
that, emptied of the cognitive content of schematic combinations of sensation with
a concept, arouse a “feeling” of “freedom” articulated in the verbal act of judgment
instead, the “regular,” ongoing movement of dynamic syntactic delineation across
evenly measured but ofen enjambed, grammatically regular, yet unpredictably
predicated blank verse lines, and the estrangingly active “objects,” or objects acting
like subjects, whose dynamic, external perception Wordsworth’s “real language”
poetry represents, combine stark graphic simplicity with mimetic contents turned
alien, if not altogether unrecognizable. As the poet describes the “undetermined
sense” and “blank desertion” of “thoughts” that his own experiential transgressions
of cognitive limits put to “work” – specfically, the work of negation – within his
“brain:” “[n]o familiar shapes/Remained, no pleasant images of trees,/Of sea or
sky . . .”.268 More remarkable still, the usurpation of recognizable phenomenality
that his own external actions in the phenomenal world bring about extends to the
most elemental, “familiar” “sense” of the language used to describe common
phenomena themselves, or, as the poet proceeds to state, consecutively articulating
and stripping words of their meaning: “. . . or sky, no colours of green fields.”269
Wordsworth’s articulations of cognition negated sets into relief the experience
of a subject deprived not only of the gravitational and directional orientation in
and delimitation of space we call “place,” but of the signposts for shaping one’s
way in the world provided by referential-conceptual language itself. Each
“familiar” object we either sense directly or internally “envision” we conceive as
something of some extension somewhere, an object in space, and that conceiving
is representational, denominational, linguistic. When objects appear instead as
“things” shorn of names, comparative qualities, and all other formal means of
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determination, the subjects who perceive them lose in turn the ability to conceive
them. Te “undetermined sense” of an autonomous, nonphenomenal world in
which “scenes” of movement, enacted by a subject so as to transgress the very
bounds of their staging, result, is a world of “unknown modes of being” and “huge
and mighty forms, that do not live/Like living men:”270 a world without language,
and thus without subjects as well.

267. Wordsworth, Te Prelude (1850), VI: 596; (1805), VI: 529.

268. Wordsworth, Te Prelude (1850), I: 391–397; (1805), I: 419–424.
269. Wordsworth, Te Prelude (1850), I: 397; (1805), I: 424.
270. Wordsworth, Te Prelude (1850), I: 392–98; (1805) I: 419–25.

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140 Te Linguistic Condition

Language – any language – is the formative, always two-sided boundary that we

make: the architectonic line at once dividing and conjoining “inside” and “outside,”
here and there, this and that, and any subject and a world including other subjects
of which she or he is a no less material part, and it had to be made, externalized, to
be that line. Without language, without its external forms and the fact and experience
of externality delimited by those forms, the virtual line of articulation dividing
external from internal, and external mode of the activity we call thinking, would
vanish, not only in time, but in the present as well. In that they are not objects, not
cognitive phenomena of any sort, the otherwise “meaningless” things of language
are as indivisible from the production of thinking, and of meaning, as they alone
provide the reproducible, and thus materially and temporally resistant interface
between any subject and any other subjects, all otherwise objectively subjected to
the organic corporal limits of space and time. As if in demonstration of that very
real, i.e., nonphenomenal linguistic condition of any subject’s temporal existence,
the dying Keats, even while deeming his own “name” “writ in water,”271 wrote other
“things” to the last, giving nonorganic, transtemporal external form to both his
thought and corporeal experience as long as (indeed, according to his post-mortem,
far longer than) the increasing limitations of his consumptive, not yet quarter-
century “old” body allowed. And it is those articulated, linguistic things that make
their readers not only reference their author’s name, but dispute that referent’s
proleptic prophecy of its own erasure from all external signs of history, the inevitable
intellectual myopia that all consciously transitory, bodily existence may entail.
By contrast, recalling the inarticulate “concourse wild/Of jocund din” provoked
by “mimic hootings” “bl[own],” willfully and incongruously, to “silent owls,”
Wordsworth’s poetry makes the redoubtable attempt to represent, in language rather
than artificially mimicked animal sounds, “echoes” of his efforts to extinguish the line
between inside and outside, and so to experience, by purposefully staged external
means, externality without language. Tis is no dream of a “pure” yet somehow not
purely physical materialism (let alone of a somehow tangible, discoursible, yet
“pure” – neither conceptual nor physical – “space”), whether personified by us as
“mute” and thus pathetically available to our own anthropomorphizing ventriloquism,
or personally provoked into “long halloos” perceived as deafening, non-cognizable
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menace or, for that matter, as “true,” because “animal” merriment occurring
somewhere “beyond” all ethical reﬂection. Nor is it the lie of somehow speaking from
a position of self-appointed omnipotence able to espy all these suppositions from an
“outside” that, according to those suppositions, does not exist, in that their very
conception as such aims precisely to erase the articulate delineation of outside and
inside allowing for their external perception, and any accompanying – deﬁnitively

271. Te memorial stone inscription Keats wrote for himself was, famously paradoxically,
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” His wishes ignored, and a stone covered in
sentimental phrases and symbols (broken lyres, etc.) placed at his grave at the Protestant
Cemetery in Rome instead, a small footstone with the epitaph he did desire was later placed
there by friends. See Robert Gittings’ excellent John Keats, a biography (NY: Little Brown, 1968)
for a clear, understatedly gripping, while never sentimental account of the poet’s short life.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 141

nonomnipotent – experience of “feeling,” in the ﬁrst place. Wordsworth’s is instead

the un-self-deceiving desire to write poetry undefined either by intentionally “poetic”
signatures or any “natural” experience the subject can recognize. Yet, even to
experience oneself become the passage of an “other” as terrifying as Rousseau’s
“Giant” to his unselfnowing subject – to first recognize the self negatively, as “other”
to itself, its senses immediately subjected to a “scene” of “dim and undetermined
sense,” its archival “mind,” expropriated of all “familiar images” and “colours” by
“huge and mighty forms” that “move through”272 it instead – is not to erase but to
undergo delimitation and difference in the profoundest sense.
Such is the basis of the explicit assertion of the necessary conjunction of perceptible
material limits and language made in the opening words of the “Essay on Epitaphs:”
“[i]t needs scarcely be said, that an Epitaph presupposes a Monument, upon which it
is to be engraven.”273 As the material “external sign” serving specifically to “point out
the place where [the] Dead are interred,” the monument replaces the “body” there
“mouldering” with the inorganic marker of a locus presently delimited in space –
referential sign of a past organic life necessarily delimited in time.274 Conversely, the
universally intelligible, verbal “epitaph”“engraven” upon the monument is a “[w]riting”
“exposed to all,” its “conjunction” of our object-independent “faculty of reason” with
specifically interactive, “social feelings,” producing “an intimation or assurance within
us, that some part of our nature is imperishable.”275 Te “co-existent and twin birth of
Reason” with “the sense of Immortality” consisting of “nothing less than infinity”
requires “a receptacle without bounds or dimensions,” and such a receptacle is the
mind through which unknown forms “move” in Te Prelude.276 What the combination
of the epitaphic word and spatially delimiting monument represent is the combination
of the boundless and delimited that defines each individual subject’s nonfinite
experience, i.e., not the flow but, importantly, the “overflow”277 that makes experience
itself an always partial representation of the infinite.

272. Wordsworth, Te Prelude (1850), I; 396–97; (18050, I;423–242

273. “Essay on Epitaphs” (1810), Owen and Smyser, I: 49.
274. “Essay on Epitaphs,” I: 58. I have developed a theory of referentiality conjoining
“place” with the potentially marking materiality (or, in Wordsworth’s terms here, “engraven”
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“external signs”) of language, in In the Place of Language.

275. “Essay on Epitaphs,” II: 50 (emphasis in text).
276. “Essay on Epitaphs,” II: 51. See this Section, this Chapter, n. 274.
277. Wordsworth’s most ofen repeated description of poetry – “All poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” – is itself only the first part of the very extensive
sentence and definitional paragraph in which it appears, whose further development directly
contradicts it: “. . . powerful feeling: but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be
attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who being possessed
of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply. For our continued
influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the
representatives of all our past feelings . . .”, Ibid., I: 126. For a detailed analysis of this
extraordinarily extended, purposefully self-contradictory, explicitly temporally delineated
definition of poetry on Wordsworth’s part, see Words’ Worth, Part One, Section Four.

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142 Te Linguistic Condition

In Kant such delimitation, and the sense of self as agent of otherness that it
enables, is instead invented as it is articulated in verbal acts called “judgment:”
statements predicating an unknown object with a quality undefined by sensory
particulars, its meaning “undetermined” except by the act of stating “it” (“. . . is
beautiful;” “. . . is sublime”) as if one were “any and every other” (“jedermann”). In
the place of a purely internal, and thus necessarily inarticulate sensation, and in
the place of the “I” who speaks only of his or her own pleasure or displeasure,
judgment, in speaking of an undefined “it” outside the speaker, becomes the
linguistic scene of speech sayable by all: medium of the “mighty forms” of material
articulation never identifiable with but underlying all possible phenomenality,
both “familiar images” and their estrangement, or phenomenality dialectically
conceived (as it will be, not by the unknowing, because theoretically and practically
mediating “power to judge” necessarily defined as such within the overarching co-
extant structure of Kant’s “architectonic” system, but by the developmental history
of “consciousness” shaping the equally necessarily temporal “phenomenology of
spirit” in Hegel).
Finally, “judgment” is itself “free,” on Kant’s analysis, of being either phenomenal
and thus necessarily “nominal” or moral or mathematical and thus “real,” precisely
because it is an act of speech: neither a definition of an apparent object nor pure
construction of a thing but a statement doing something in saying something only
manifestable in language – a nonparticular, neither deducible nor demonstrable
predication, “it is beautiful” – instead of constating something else. Tat speech act
takes the form of a noncognitive statement generally qualifying an object on the
basis of the feeling its experience provokes within the subject. It is an act articulating
an outside that, since ungrounded in knowledge, cannot be said to exist without it.
Te language of judgment – language to begin with, before nominal definitions and
substitutions obtain – turns the subject outward, is the subject’s outside, the second
skin of communication we express into the world in order to “have” externality of
mind. At the same time it is the external form not of one but all subjects, the form
of making sense – of making externality perceptible as such – of which language
first avails us, and, by the very definition of language, everyone, regardless of
personal “sensibility” or means of access to sensation, shares: in Kant’s terms, a
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necessary, and necessarily “undetermined norm” or otherwise indeterminable

“common sense.” On the other side of Wordsworth’s ability to “see,” in Kant’s words,
“as the poets do,”278 i.e., to see linguistically, rather than conceptually, a world
without words whose nonphenomenal reality most resembles that of language
itself, is Kant’s world of necessarily verbally externalized aesthetic judgment,
referential acts of predication that deﬁne neither a ﬁnite subject nor object but
articulate, the way poets do, the quality of the relation of subject and object and
dynamic form to perception that any subject can experience between the two.
Judgment requires imagination but what we cannot imagine may be just such an
invention as Kant is compelled to call, in a radically literal sense, common sense, as

278. See Chapter Tree, Section Tree, n. 366, this study.

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Te “Condition” of Judgment 143

indeed it may be the only means by which particularly accessed sensation is entirely
replaced by singularly commonly accessible signification: the internal “revolution”
replacing sensory contingency with thinking, and the unthinkable particularity of
any and all discrete empirical experience with an articulation of the “freedom” to
think in words spoken in a singularly “general voice.” Active, relational and
differential, a priori (rather than “commensensical” by always latterday, which is to
say, a posteriori, tautological consensus,), Kant’s “general voice” designates the mode
of “self ”-expression in which any subject who judges speaks. Te “sense” of its
articulations proper to all who perform it, the purely verbal “forms” (as Saussure
defined the actively constitutive “signs” of any “language”279) of which the speech
acts of judgement are composed all enact the nonparticular differentiations of
meaning that we, in using them in differing a posteriori contexts, already all agree
to convene. No less than “Rerum virusque cano,” “the world lay all before them,”
“Was it for this . . .,” and “I was born . . .,” “it is beautiful” is the matter-of-fact
statement of a verbally indicated world. Te speech act that is judgment, acting so
as to predicate an unknown object in a “general voice,” represents no “thing” but the
internal as well as externally conventional, representational, imagined, and
historical world of words Wordsworth would do without while subjecting himself
to the “other,” unimagined side coincident within it, employing verbal signposts so
as to take them, in the act of doing so, to their “prosaic” limit.
Perhaps less imaginable still, however, Kant’s “power of judgment” is also the
“bridge,” “Übergang” or “passage” from ourselves to a “world” within which we
must be “lost:”280 an externality, no less within us, of which, like Diderot’s
“Saunderson,” we know ourselves blind, in that, permanently unavailable to visible
or imagined spatialization, its temporal existence as materiality (“Dasein in der
Zeit”) can never be perceived schematically, nor, thus, “experience[d]” by “analogy.”
Like a noncommonsensical “common sense,” the content of the unique “inner
sense” of the schema, “pure product of the imagination a priori” whose “form” is
“time,”281 is not sensation but articulation, the inherently social capacity for
marking – and so remarking, delimiting and therein differentiating one from
another, internal from external, then from now – and thus for experiencing any
difference, anything “outside” or “within” ourselves, which is to say, with Kant,
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“change” of any kind at all. Without the faculty for externalization of experience, of
“feeling,” through a “common” or shared “sense” not of any cognitive representation,
let alone thoroughly acculturated or purely schematic “sensory conception”282 of

279. Saussure, Cours, de linguistique générale, ed. C. Bally, A. Sechehaye et A Riedlinger

(Paris : Payot, 1971 [1916]), Pt. II, Chap. IV §4, “Le signe dans sa totalité,” p. 169.
280. William Wordsworth, Te Prelude (1850), VI: 596.
281. Kant, KrV A 182, III: 190: “the schema is a transcendental product of the power of
imagination . . . according to the condition of its form (of time) . . .” (“das Schema . . . ist ein
transzendentales Produkt der Einbildungskraf . . . nach Bedingung [seiner] Form (der
Zeit) . . .”.
282. Cf. n. 247, Sections Nine, this Chapter.

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144 Te Linguistic Condition

an object, but of any object’s formative relation to any subject a priori, or

predication – the “transcendental,” i.e. “general” “capacity” to enact articulation that
Kant calls “judgment” – not only would all our other capacities for action, indeed
action itself, be inconceivable, let alone practicable, but our cognizing, moral, and
“feeling” selves, such as they are or can be, could never even be dreamed of, let
alone experienced, enacted, or thought. And, rather than produce an internal
“form” “of time” codependent upon our ability to experience the external world,
without the power to articulate, to externalize the experience of anything external
to us, we, even while “living,” would simply occupy another piece of space within it,
no more capable, in Wordsworth’s words, of “feel[ing] the touch of earthly years”
or, for that matter, becoming “lost,” than “rocks and stones” “rolled round in earth’s
diurnal course.”283
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283. William Wordsworth, “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal,” ll.3–4, 7–8.

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Part II

M ISSING S ENSES AND P OETICS

145

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146

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Chapter 3

“J U D G M E N T ” A N D T H E G E N E SI S O F
W HAT W E L AC K :
“P O E T RY ,” “S C H E M A ,” A N D T H E “M O N O G R A M
O F I M AG I NAT IO N ” I N K A N T

1. “Judgment” in the “Age of Critique”

Part One of this study identified in Kant’s “Analytic of Judgment” an account of
the enactment of judgment that is at once a description of the “origin of language:”
of speech that, originating in the “feeling” experienced by an individual subject
before an unknown object, both “frees” the speaker (from his or her personal
interests) to “speak for everyone” and requires, as its common “ground,” something
Kant calls the “faculty” of “common sense.” Te content-free commonality or
“communicability” of “sense” hypothesized, for the first and last time, by Kant at
the conclusion of the final “Fourth Moment” of the “Analytic” (in which Kant
defines the “modality” of aesthetic judgments – last analytic category he employs
to describe the capacity for judging – as that of being “necessarily” available to any
subject at any time), in no way resembles the platitudinous “common sense
philosophy” or received ideas of “common human understanding” explicitly
dismissed by Kant in the First Critique, and later Prolegomena, as a tissue of
banalities masking, and so postponing acknowledgement of, the fundamental
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need for a critique of their baseless complacency.284 Rather than general notions
circularly asserted, accepted and perpetuated by unstated reﬂexive convention,
Kant’s “common sense” consists in internal acts of “judgment” necessarily
externalized in being spoken in a “general voice,” verbal articulations whose sense
is not “pre-dict-able” or conventional but produced as inherently “communicable”
to begin with, and whose (hypothetical) a priori or (experiential) a posteriori basis
Kant states he neither “can” nor “wishes to” “research.”285
To a degree unmatched in any philosophical endeavor before or since, the
“power” Kant calls “judgment” is made central to the actual and future development

284. Kant, KrV B XXXIII, III: 34; See also Chapter Two, n. 37, this study.
285. See n. 57, Chapter Two, Section One, this study.

147

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148 Te Linguistic Condition

of theoretical reflection, i.e., the “revolution” in “mode of thinking” that his critical
philosophy performs.286 Both the pivotal analyses of the Second and the Tird
Critiques – the former demonstrating the “possibility” that each subject may
“indeed” act in “freedom” from his or her own (phenomenally limited) “self-
interest,” thereby “confirm[ing]” not the probability but “fact” (or “deed,” Tat) of a
“moral law;” the latter describing an inherently “communicable,” declarative speech
act that, qualifying the unknown object of an experience of “feeling,” “speaks for
every” subject who “feels himself free,” from personal inclination and interest, in so
speaking – result in acts of judgment in which judgment and language coincide.
Tus it is no coincidence that, along with a wave of necessarily hypothetical
speculations on how language could have originated, “judgment” itself emerged as
a way of thinking about the capacities or “power[s]” of human experience in
general during a time of fundamental inquiry that we, designating and delimiting
such activity as an historical period even as history alternately buries and re-enacts
it, call “the Enlightenment,” and Kant, who instead described “enlightenment” as
the “right” and “inclination” of “humanity” at any historical moment “to think,”
called “the Age of Critique.”287 Since to think about the twin activities of
“enlightenment” and “judgment” involved in any “critical” “revolution in mode of
thinking” is, in Kant’s view, neither to arrive at the accurate judgment of any
specific object or experience nor to clarify any subject or answer any question
definitively, but rather to reflect upon what the “fact” of noncontingent thinking
enables us to do, so any examination of the genesis of judgment in Kant’s own
thinking must acknowledge frankly that, analogous to the impossibility of arriving
at an archeological “origin” of language, it can rely on no given, empirical or
contextual conditions to determine what the gratuitous or “free” “power” to speak
called “judgment” in Kant’s Critique is.
As discussed in Part One of this study, the “power of judgment” is the “mediating
link” (“Mittelglied”) connecting the otherwise incommunicable “realms”
(“Gebiete”) of cognitive or theoretical and noncognitive or moral reason in Kant’s
architectonic system.288 Like the undelimited “time” of “enlightenment” itself, it can
never be sufficiently recalled that, by submitting cognition of the world, on the one
hand, and action in the world, on the other, to what he called “critique,” Kant
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reversed the conventional deﬁnitions of these as, respectively, pure and practical.
Pure reason, once submitted to the a priori formal limits of representational
knowledge hypothesized in the First Critique, is, in practice, in Kant, impure – not
independent of experience and so free to speculate at will, but instead exercised, in
an involuntary fashion, only insofar as it is applied to experience, the sensory and

286. See n. 1, Chapter One, this study.

287. See Note 2, A XI, Preface to First Edition, First Critique, Kant, KrV, III: 13; see
“Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Auflärung?” (“Answer to the Question: What is
Enlightenment?”), Kant, XI: 53–61 (58, 61).
288. Kant, KU, B XIX–XXII, X:83–85.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 149

formal “perception” of objects named by concepts and linked by logical categories

(chief among these, causality).289 Teoretical – so-called “pure” – reason is thus not
pure but rather “practical” in the Critique, a “heterogeneous”290 (because both
sense-based and formal) rather than autonomous exercise of the mind. Such a
hybridized formation of knowledge, incapable by deﬁnition of “knowing” things as
they may really be, or “in themselves” (“an sich”), is limited in its purview to the
“phenomenal” objects we perceive, which is to say, the cognitive representations we
form, a priori, of the empirical objects we experience.
An analogous reversal of terms holds reciprocally for so-called “practical” reason.
Once submitted to the analysis of the Second Critique, practical reason – the reason
of moral action – will prove itself to be “pure,” in that it alone acts, by deﬁnition, in
complete freedom from the formal limitations ascribed to phenomenal perception
in the First Critique. “Practical” or “applied” reason, then, turns out to be pure
because, unlike reputedly “pure,” “theoretical” reason, it is truly self-determining,

289. No single lexical translation may be more responsible for the ongoing distortion of
his critical theory than that of Kant’s distinctly perceptual use of the term, “Anschauung”
(similarly used soon afer by Hegel as synonym for sensory perception), by its near semantic
opposite, the spiritual and theological term, “intuition.” (For an early instance of Kant’s use
of “Anschauung” to signify decidedly “sensory perception” (“sinnliche Anschauung”), see
Kant, KU, X: 35; for full quotation, see n. 344, this Chapter, Section Tree.) Still, perhaps
more than that of any other common noun he adopts, Kant’s speciﬁcally nonintuitional use
of “Anschauung” may be seen to stand in nuce for the irreversibility of the impact of his
Critique upon all areas of philosophical inquiry to come, the obstacle rather than invitation
to reprises of idealist or sensationalist metaphysics in every ﬁeld from language and
aesthetic theory, theory of history, and moral philosophy, to philosophy of mathematics,
logic and cognition. In employing the term in its concretely literal sense of “an-schauen” –
“to look at” or “upon” (as in the related term, “Schauspiel,” a drama or “play” staged for the
“looking”) – Kant’s “Anschauung” combines perception with the noncontingent ability to
structure perception formally (in space and time) and “discursively” (“diskursiv’) (by way of
logically related concepts and “a priori” “categories,” including causality). As opposed to the
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conventional use of “intuition” to designate an entirely internal notion or idea, “Anschauung”

in Kant “ is “heterogeneous” (“heterogen”) because applied (“angewandt”) a priori, or to
begin with, its “double” (“zweierlei”), contingent and noncontingent, empirical and
intellectual composition closer to a practicable framework for the enactment of
“representations” of the material world (“Darstellungen” or “Vorstellungen,” similarly used
for theatrical showings and presentations in German) than it can ever be to the notion of a
purely self-emanating “idea.” In this, Kant’s “Anschauung” – a purely formal act of perception,
or “looking at”– enacts upon the notion of an “innate” “intuition” employed by skeptical and
idealist philosophies alike the same “revolution” (“Revolution”) that his Critique’s essentially
hybrid “hypothesis” (“Hypothese”), of “applied” or impure, yet a priori knowledge “dared”
(“gewagt”) “introduce” into metaphysics in their stead (see KrV B XI – 176, III: 22, 23, 25,
26, 28, 28n, 31, 109, 187, et.al.).
290. Kant, KrV B 176–77, III:187.

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free of the causal reasoning and representational knowledge that would limit the
actions of a fully independent, noncontingent will, and deﬁned by no formative, or
a priori, conceptual condition other than the “concept” or “idea” of freedom itself.
Te theater of action of practical reason is the same, delimited sensory world of our
perceptions, but the guiding metteur en scène, both of its origination and ultimate
purpose or orientation, is “the unconditioned” (“das Unbedingte”), supersensory
(“übersinnliche”) “realm” (“Gebiet”) of “ideas” (“Ideen”), and, chief among these,
that of “freedom” itself, the single “idea” we “must be able at least to think” (“wenigstens
müssen denken können”), “without contradicting [ourselves]” (“wenn ich mir nur
nicht selbst widerspreche”), by dividing “thinking” from “cognition” and limiting the
purview of the latter to empirical givens.291 Precisely because “thinking” represents
no particular cognitive content to the mind, it is free to accompany, without
elaboration or contradiction, every delimited action described in Kant’s Critique.
Similarly, in that thinking, as Kant describes it, is an action producing nothing we
can know, Kant can state “freely,” or without contradiction, on behalf of every
subject: “I can think what I want [or what I will]” (“denken kann ich was ich will”),
in which “will” (“want”) names no mere wish but the “freedom” to act in independence
from purely personal wishes, in which what any “I want[s]” is not limited to its
individual, phenomenal self-interest.292
Still, between the fully deﬁned and divided realms of the impure, or applied,
reason of our knowledge of the natural world, and the practically pure or self-
determining reason of “free” or “moral” action in that world, Kant posed, not

291. Kant, KrV, B XXVII, III: 31. Tat the nonreferential notion of “freedom” is (along
with that of God and immortality) one of three “ideas” we “can think” (but not know) makes it,
in structural terms, the “positive” complement to the “negative” or “critical” “hypothesis”
limiting knowledge to the representation of phenomenal objects in the First Critique (see in
particular the Preface to the 2nd Edition [KrV B XXIV–XXIX, III: 29–33]). To prove that
“freedom” follows from the very project of epistemological critique, i.e., that even while outside
the limits Kant sets for “all empirical conditions” (“aller empirischen Bedingungen”), it is
nonetheless demonstrable by strictly logical deduction, is the purpose of the Second Critique,
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in which the attempt to derive and unravel a specific “concept of freedom” (“Freiheitsbegriff ”)
from its inextricable “entanglement in inconceivables” (“in Unbegreiflichkeiten verwickelt”)
inevitably proves infeasible and Kant is instead compelled to acknowledge the “imposition” of
the “form” of that “concept” upon “us,” an illogical act of force to whose “confirmation by
experience” (“auch die Erfahrung bestätigt) he then appeals so as to demonstrate a posteriori –
i.e., in strictly pre- and non-critical fashion – the actual existence of “this ordering of the
concepts in us” (“diese Ordnung der Begriffe in uns”). See KpV A 53–54, VII: 139–40. Its
“imposition” once noted, the “idea” of “freedom” is subsequently referred to as “the concept of
freedom” throughout the Second and Tird Critiques (see, for example, KU , B XX, cited n. 292,
this Chapter). For an early analysis of Kant’s explicit logical impasse here, and extraordinary
interjection of an “imposition” of the “form” of “freedom” upon the unfailing architectonic
logic of the Critique that produces it, see Brodsky, Imposition, Part One, Chapter 2, pp. 21–87).
292. Kant, KrV, B XXVII, III: 31 (emphasis in text).

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 151

another “reason,” but a “power,” that of “judging.” While it is conventional to equate

Kant’s – and, by association, any – rationally elaborated philosophy with a sterile
determinism, it is the thoroughly nonmechanical power of judging, positioned as
the central action of the internally divided Critique, that just as actively and
powerfully disrupts any such equation. For, Kant submits the power to judge to
criticism, too. Te Introduction to the Critique of Judgment states unequivocally
that a “power” uniquely capable of providing the “passageway” between the “modes
of thought,” and “ground of unity” between the “diﬀerent worlds,” of “freedom” and
of “nature” must for the same reason possess no “proper realm” of its “own:”

Now even if an unoverseeable gulf is fixed between the realm of the concept of
nature, as the sensory, and the realm of the concept of freedom, as the
supersensory, so that no transition is possible from the first to the second (that
is by way of the theoretical use of reason), just as if these two were so many
different worlds, the first of which can have no influence on the second; so should
the second of these have an influence on the first, namely, the concept of freedom
should make real in the sensory world the purpose given to it by its laws; and
nature must consequently also be able to be so thought, that the lawfulness or
regularity of its form may at least determine itself together with the possibility of
those purposes to be effected following the laws of freedom. – Tus there must
be a ground of the unity of the supersensory which lies at the basis of nature,
with that which the concept of freedom practically contains; a ground whose
concept, while attaining neither theoretically nor practically to its cognition,
and, by the same token, possesses no proper or particular realm, still makes
possible the transition from the mode of thinking, according to principles, of the
one, to the mode of thinking, according to principles, of the other.
[Ob nun zwar eine unübersehbare Kluf zwischen dem Gebiete des Naturbegriffs,
als dem Sinnlichen, und dem Gebiete des Freiheitsbegriff, als dem Übersinnlichen,
befestigt ist, so dass von dem ersteren zum anderen (also vermittelst des theoretischen
Gebrauchs der Vernunf) kein Übergang möglich ist, gleich als ob es so viel
verschiedene Welten wären, deren erste auf die zweite keinen Einfluss haben kann:
so soll doch diese auf jene einen Einfluss haben, nämlich der Freiheitsbegriff soll den
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durch seine Gesetze aufgegebenen Zweck in der Sinnenwelt wirklich machen; und
die Natur muss folglich auch so gedacht werden können, dass die Gesetzmässigkeit
ihrer Form wenigstens zur Möglichkeit der in ihr zu bewirkenden Zwecke nach
Freiheitsgesetzen zusammenstimme.– Also muss es doch einen Grund der Einheit
des Übersinnlichen, welches der Natur zum Grunde liegt, mit dem, was der
Freiheitsbegriﬀ praktisch enthält, geben, wovon der Begriﬀ, wenn er gleich wieder
theoretisch noch praktisch zu einem Erkenntnisse desselben gelangt, mithin kein
eigentümliches Gebiet hat, dennoch den Übergang von der Denkungsart nach den
Prinzipien der einen, zu der nach Prinzipien der anderen, möglich macht.293]

293. Kant, KU, B XX, XXI: 83–84 (emphasis added in part); cf. Chapter Two, Section
Four, n. 105, this study.

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152 Te Linguistic Condition

Te “ground of the unity” of sensory nature and freedom that Kant is about to
describe is no ground, in the sense of an independent reason or basis, but rather a
conduit operating as a communicative or syntactic medium – “bridge” or “passage”
or “overpass” (“Übergang”) – between two independent intellectual capacities or
“realms,” that of “theoretical” reason applied to phenomena in the hybrid form of
“understanding,” and that of a “pure” “practical reason” itself constitutive of “free”
moral action. Each of these realms is delimited as much by what it excludes as
what it includes – “things in themselves” and “freedom,” on the one hand, and the
a priori limits and “categories” of cognition on the other – and each is formally
defined by the hypothetical rules and laws that govern its constitution: the rule of
representation and causal relations defining the sensory realm of phenomenal
cognition, and the self-legislating law of freedom from phenomenal interest as well
as contingency defining the supersensory realm of moral action. What additionally,
significantly distinguishes the “ground” of a connective “power” that provides a
“bridge” between realms rather than “possesses” a “realm of its own,” is that, in
addition to possessing no particular or proper content, it is ruled and constituted
by no “law.” Kant continues:

Still, in the family of high cognitive faculties, there is yet a middle term between
understanding and reason. Tis is the power of judgment, and one has cause to
suppose by analogy that this power, even when it may not contain its own
legislation, may still well contain its own principle, which may be sought
according to laws, although this principle is merely a priori subjective; a principle
which, even if it presents no ﬁeld of objects as its own realm, still may have some
territory having a certain characteristic for which this principle may be valid.
[Allein in der Familie der oberen Erkenntnisvermögen gibt es doch noch ein
Mittelglied zwischen dem Verstande und der Vernunf. Dieses ist die Urteilskraf,
von welcher man Ursache hat, nach der Analogie zu vermuten, dass sie eben
sowohl, wenn gleich nicht eine eigene Gesetzgebung, doch ein ihr eigenes
Prinzip, nach Gesetzen zu suchen, allenfalls ein bloss subjektives a priori, in
sich enthalten dürfe: welches, wenn ihm gleich kein Feld der Gegenstände
als sein Gebiet zustände, doch irgend einen Boden haben kann, und eine
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gewisse Beschaﬀenheit desselben, wofür gerade nur dieses Prinzip geltend sein
möchte.294]

Te power of judgment mediates between two “realms” of reason, the

phenomenal and nonphenomenal or noumenal, whose distinct laws of operation
and opposing objects delimit the critical, “unoverseeable gulf ” between them. Tat
power may have “its own principle,” Kant states, but is ruled by no inherent laws;
and, instead of “its own realm” or “domain” (“eigentümliches Gebiet”), it has what
he loosely calls “any old territory” (“irgend einen Boden”) or “ﬁeld” at its disposal.

294. Kant, KU , B XXII–XXIII, X: 85 (emphasis in text).

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 153

Kant’s atypical substitution here for “ground” (“Grund”) – the ﬁguratively

conceptual term he had used to designate the unifying function of judgment
within the tripartite structure of the Critique – by the distinctly physical terms,
“field” (“Feld”) and “territory” (literally: “floor” [“Boden”]), to designate the
indefinite bounds of the purview of “judgment” in the world, already indicates the
prosaic nature of the “objects” (“Gegenstände”) to which its “power” may extend.
“Any old” (“irgend einen”) “field” indeed: for, as the wildly disparate occasions for
the exercise of judgment elaborated by Kant make evident, the unpredictable –
undelimited and unregulated – “territory” of aesthetic experience, as Kant now
defines it, may be encountered anywhere and consist in anything, if only that thing
is encountered freely, i.e., without either a priori causal and cognitive conceptions,
or a posteriori conceptual prejudices. Wherever and whenever we experience the
subjective power of judgment – a feeling of pleasure or displeasure, experienced in
the noncognitive perception of an object, “communicated” in being replaced by an
impersonal predicative statement formally reminiscent of logic – “there,” in the
communicable act of the third-person copular that first refers to it, the otherwise
undefined “territory” of “the power of judgment” takes place. In that judgment
requires the particular perceptual experience Kant calls “aesthetic,” even as they are
“free” of both conceptual knowledge and personal psychology, acts of judgment
are not in themselves “self-legislating,” free of any object “outside” them. Linguistic
in its enactment, the “power of judgment” qualifies (rather than logically defines)
an object. On whatever objective basis the subjective faculties of imagination and
understanding engage each other in pleasurable “free play,” or, in perceiving an
objective absence of form, reason and imagination instead conflict “violently,”
“there” another outcropping of the “field” of judgment appears. Inherently
transitional, rather than appropriative or territorial, that “field,” “ground” or “floor”
that is really a “bridge” is the “passage” or “middle ground” we call “the aesthetic.”295
Viewed, then, from the perspective of the power of judging, a way of perceiving
that all sensuous perception carries with it as the arresting of cognition, a kind of
outline or shifing shadow of all cognitive objects, the “unoverseeable gulf ” between
theoretical and practical reason – yawning abyss of potentially unbridgeable
dualism – appears instead as a playground of unlimited dimensions, one whose
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furthest bound similarly cannot be seen. If anything defines this open field of
pleasurable forms or painful “nonform” (“Unform”), it is certainly not a known,
predetermined content: whether terrifying or pleasurable in effect, Kant’s aesthetic
“territory” is definitely not a theme park.296 Exactly “because no definite concept
limits them to a special rule of cognition” (“weil kein bestimmter Begriff sie auf eine
besondere Erkenntnisregel einschränkt”), both the “free play” and violent conflict of
the faculties brought about by the power of judgment occur on the most diverse,
indeed conceptually contrary “ground[s]:” “irregular,” “wasteful nature” no less than
geometric pyramids; pyramids designed and built by man or amassed by nature

295. Kant, KU, B 29, X:132.

296. Kant, KU, B XLIX, X:103.

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154 Te Linguistic Condition

from heaps of ice; the ocean at rest, the ocean roiled in storm, as well as
the individual seashells it turns up; the massive built interior of St. Peter’s, the natural
external shapes of individual birds and flowers no less than the repetitive delineation
of the latter on decorative “wallpaper” (“Papiertapeten”).297 Te undefined “realm” of
judgment that extends to all these equally is and remains genuinely unknown
“territory,” a veritable wilderness in which the singular and the commonplace,
imposing and gratuitous, “purposive” and “formless” all appear to the mind very
much as they do in Kant’s unprecedented analysis: unanticipated, logically and
hierarchically unsubordinated, neither “high,” nor “low,” but side by side.298 When it
comes to the pleasurable “free play” (or painful “conflict”) of judgment, in other
words, you can’t tell the players by the scorecard. Tere are players – understanding,
imagination, and reason – but no scorecard: no rules predetermine the play of the
mind, no concept designates knowledge of an object the mind affords. Instead of
these there is something Kant calls “universal communicability” (“allgemeine
Mitteilbarkeit”), simply, the “communicability” “of a feeling” (“eines Gefühls”) that
one senses is not proper to one’s self alone.299 Personal taste and preferences are well
and good, Kant suggests: chacun à son gôut he would be the first to agree. Yet it is
precisely one’s personal predilection, approbation, or “taste,” what one might “wish”
or not wish for oneself, that is not at issue in judgment as he defines it and which he
distinguishes plainly from such individual views as follows: “If someone asks me
whether I find the palace which I see before me beautiful, so may I very well say: I
don’t like that kind of thing that is made merely for the sake of ostentation . . . One
can grant me all this and endorse it; only it just so happens that this is not what we
are talking about now” (“nur davon ist jetzt nicht die Rede”).300 Independently of
whether one or any one of us “like[s] that kind of thing,” the “universal
communicability” that alone defines the power that is judgment is based on what
Kant calls “common sense” (“Gemeinsinn”), a notion whose prominent, indeed
controversial role in recent reception of the Critique of Judgment belies the
understated, entirely heterodox basis of its self-evidence for Kant.301 For, given the

297. Kant, KU , B 29, X: 132; B 72, X: 163; B 88–89, X: 174; B 95, X: 179, B 119, X: 196; B
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49, X: 146.
298. Kant, KU, B 133, X: 208.
299. Kant, KU , B 66, X: 158.
300. Kant, KU , B 6–7, X:116–117.
301. Along with Schiller’s pivotal translation of Kantian aesthetic “play” into political
life, no other notion is as central to Habermas’s post-Kantian formulation of “communicative
action” in liberal society, which makes the linguistic “communicability” of “sense” in a
commonly shared public sphere (a concept literalized in early modern English-language
communities by the delineation of a central “village, “town” or “city commons”) its guiding
theoretical principle. Nor may any notion be more objectionable to social and aesthetic
theorists whose avowed political aim takes exception to the notion of the unexceptional (as
reﬂective of a status quo that any participation in “communicative activity” is supposed to
reify). As analyzed in Words’ Worth, the complementary study to this exposition of Kant’s

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 155

universality of the only possible mode of cognition theorized in his First Critique,
that of representations of sensory perceptions linked a priori by the formal syntax
of logical categories and delimited by the a priori synthetic forms of time and space,
the “power to judge” defined in the Tird as arising with the perception of a sensory
but nonrepresentational, noncognitive form, or even Unform or nonform, would, by
extension, be no less impersonal, commonplace or general. Indeed, logically rather
than ideologically speaking, the kind of power constituted by a “common sense” not
of sensation but articulation – and with articulation, of its own “communicability” –
would be no less “common,” by necessity, than the very abilities “to imagine and to
understand” whose “free play” compose the act of judging (the “beautiful”) in the
first place.302 For by “judgment” Kant means not the ability to produce a specific
content or meaning capable of subordinating imagination to understanding, but,
precisely, to imagine at the same time one perceives, and so to “feel” something in
view of some unknown thing that brings these two activities into semantic
suspension, whether in violent, cognitively irresolvable conflicts of the kind
experienced in perceiving objects we judge “sublime,” or in the pleasurably
unresolving, noncognitive “free play of intellectual faculties” (“freies Spiel der
Erkenntnisvermögen”303) defining our experience of objects we judge “beautiful.”
It is here, in the context of “common sense,” that Kant’s talk of “wallpaper”304 – in
itself a perfectly apt and perfectly inconsequential example of an occasion for
judgment to come into play – instead appears, when compared with another
sensory form it resembles, especially theoretically telling. For, if it is generally true
that genuinely philosophical inquiry finds no object or circumstance unworthy of
reflection, Kant alone may possess the lack of philosophical prejudice necessary to
make the experience of inherently superfluous wall coverings critically reflective

poetics of judgment, the exclusive “use” of the “common” and “prosaic” “language really used
by men” that Wordsworth identiﬁes with any poetry “worthy of the name,” in also aligning
language with history by identifying it as, rather than opposing it to action, comes closer to
Kant’s inherently modern theory of judgment not as consensus-driven but “grounded” a
priori on a distinctly social “condition” than either its Habermasian or anti-Habermasian
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progeny. See Jürgen Habermas, Teorie des kommunikativen Handelns 2 Bde. (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1981), in which Habermas’s inaugural opposition of a communicative “lifeworld”
to the objectification of life by rational functionalism anticipates his focus, in Der
philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt: Sukrhamp, 1985; see pp. 294–367, esp.), on
“subject-centered reason” over “systems-rationality” and the “possibility of a consensus” in
the “the making of meaning” reached through “processes of mutual understanding” carried
out in “public” and “private” “everyday life.” See also Habermas’s trenchant critique of
Luhmann’s “prelinguistic” definition of “meaning” as “identical significations” made
“present” “autocatalytically,” i.e. without need for verbal communication let alone
interpretation, within both “psychic” and “emergent social systems” (Diskurs, pp. 369–385).
302. Kant, KU, B 29, X: 132
303. Ibid.
304. Ibid., B 49, X: 146.

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156 Te Linguistic Condition

of the pivotal power of a philosophical system. Without implicitly commending a

holistic Bauhaus aesthetic, nor, for that matter, the purposefully capricious
aesthetics of Dada (even if, in historical fact, he may have presaged them both),
Kant indicates by way of this banal example not a human propensity for the
heimlich and all forms of home decoration but the indispensable and undelimitable
bases of a deﬁning and positively unheimlich capacity for moral action. For Kant
considers the free pattern of decorative wallpaper as yet another “territory” to
which judgment extends, but excludes from the “realm” of judgment just such a
pattern when it adorns a covering of another object and kind, one whose very
existence, while just as sensuous and even pleasurable, is not decorative but instead
vitally necessary to the “subject” – in both senses of the word – of the Critique
itself. Kant denies that the free, dynamic forms delineated on wall coverings may
similarly be judged beautiful when rendered inextricable from the merest
phenomenal appearance of the agency whose freedom from phenomenality it is
the central aim of Critique to constate: when engraved, that is, in human skin. Te
curving shapes of “tattoos” could be judged just as beautiful as decorative wallpaper,
Kant goes on to state, if only the canvas used for their delineation “were not a
human being” (“wenn es nur nicht ein Mensch wäre”).305 And it is here that Kant’s
singularly iconoclastic analysis of speciﬁcally aesthetic judgment recalls another
analysis of judgment – not of the aesthetic but of actions – considered immoral in
its day for the very reason that, instead of confusing judgment either with cognition
or with moral prescriptions, it based itself instead in the analytic terms of Kant’s
Tird Critique.
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305. Kant, KU, B 50, X: 147.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 157

2. Judgment and “Indiﬀerence:” the “Common Sense” of

Imagination in Arendt and Kant
In Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (published first in
installments in the Te New Yorker, then in book form in 1963), Hannah Arendt
characterized Adolf Eichmann as a man who lacked all imagination. In her report
on Eichmann’s testimony she termed the “evil” resulting from that lack “banal,”
thus consigning herself along with her subject to a codetermining reputation for
infamy (the more in excess of the imaginable the actions of the one, the more in
default of the morally acceptable, the attribution of these acts to an absence of
imagination, on the part of the other). Yet, while the consequences of Eichmann’s
actions at every level and in every realm of human activity – empirical and
intellectual, individual and social, political and jurisprudential, scientific and
cultural, historical, actual, and potential, to name some of the most obvious –
were and remain ultimately inestimable in their ongoing effects, it is not their
incalculable outcome but their immediate basis that Arendt describes. While
widely rejected in favor of the more reassuring view of Eichmann as an
exceptionally and inexplicably evil individual, and all condemnation of his actions
as unexceptionably good, such views, Arendt’s analysis implies, might themselves
be more, rather than less in agreement with the exceptionally programmatic nature
of those actions, in that such a program relies, in the first place, on the negation
of an unexceptional, or commonsensical, sense of humanity. Rather than a
“ ‘monster’,” Eichmann, she states, is a “clown,” an undistinguished person in every
way whose lack of even basic commonsensical intelligence impeded him from
completing either a secondary or elementary trade school course of education;
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whose combination of baseless, apparently compensatory vanity with a self-

evident sense of personal deficiency exhibited publicly in an insistently “bragging”
“clownishness,” testified above all to his fear of being considered a nobody, and
feeling, not only of no regret for manufacturing the mass death of entire
international populations – according to transnational categories his own self-
appointed group identified or “selected” for extinction within nations – but that he
himself (unself-ironically) could not “live without being a member of something
or other.”306 While boasting of an intelligence he did not possess, Eichmann, for
Arendt, demonstrated most obviously the glaring absence of any at all by lacking
the elementary “common sense” required to recognize the nonsensical nature of

306. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (NY:
Viking, 1963), p. 55.

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158 Te Linguistic Condition

any “objective” policy of genocide, i.e., one whose aim and object, in “peacetime” as
in “wartime,” is the negation by people of “a” people among people – i.e., a policy of
abysmal self-contradiction that must destroy all it touches.
Just as Arendt views Eichmann’s platitudinous testimony as the stuff of banality,
for there to be moral action, rather than universalist platitudes regarding particular
“moral problems” (“the Jewish problem,” the problems of “deviancy” and “Bolshevism”
then; the problems of “the poor,” “‘alien’” and “‘undocumented’” now) we must at
least (in Kant’s terms) “be able to think” and, in thinking, understand that what
Eichmann was unable to imagine was itself in no way extraordinary. For Eichmann,
in order not to be nobody, there had to be nobody that was not Eichmann, or, just the
same, nobody defined as not to belong, by its own definition, to the group to which
he, Eichmann, was only too pleased to belong, and thus genocide was merely the
attainment of a positive object so defined. Te “solution” to a so-called “problem” –
that of non-identity within identity of any kind – objectified, anthropomorphized,
and classified as such, necessitated not only its own purely physical objectification
and thus relentlessly spatial modes of “finalization” (external labeling, first of
garments, then of human bodies themselves; spatial tracking, corporal removal and
public “round-ups” of human beings for the purpose of segregating, ghetto-izing,
shipping and spatially “concentrating” their bodies within spaces created for their
on-site extermination, cremation and ejection into space itself), but an evacuation of
every mental action other than identification itself based on the identification of
identity with space (viz. “Lebensraum”). As much as the achievement of an ad hoc
material or ideological benefit of any practical kind, the annihilation of whatever
was defined as the outside that this identification required aimed equally to
annihilate,through purely physical,corporal means,perhaps the most commonsensical
of all metaphysical principles: that of the impossibility of fully identifying – and so
spatially conflating – the particular and the general.
For the same reason that his “clownish” inflation of identity included “no room”
within it for the most commonsensical conception of the general, Eichmann’s “evil”
was so “banal” as to lack all common sense of violence, of a commonality, in the
literal sense of common to all, not based in the unrelenting production of exclusion
and death. For the realm to which Eichmann’s understanding did not extend was, for
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all beings endowed with understanding and imagination, the most ordinary, indeed,
the most commonsensical: that of the perception by human beings of other human
beings among them. Incapable of imagining another like him who, at the same time,
is not him, which is to say, incapable of “think[ing] from the standpoint of somebody
else,” Eichmann, while fully conscious of his actions, was not only fully unperturbed
by, indeed proud of what he did, conceived, and ordered to have done to others: he
demonstrated himself just as unable to reﬂect on those actions as to understand and
so judge them, and himself, in the very sense that understanding requires imagination
for judgment.307 Arendt never questioned the judging of Eichmann. Indeed, she
issues an unequivocal critique, unequalled among philosophical assessments of
judgment and undiminished in contemporary signiﬁcance, of the failure to judge

307. Ibid., p. 49.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 159

individuals as a failure to judge whatsoever. She criticizes the German Protestant

Church for publicly identifying the basis of its own retrospective admission of “guilt”
as a failure of “mercy” piously granted in exchange for evil, rather than of morally
acknowledging, let alone seeking “justice” for the innocent, and mocks the popular
“public opinion” that only groups and not individuals may be judged, precisely for
the reason that “an indictment of all Christianity” or, for that matter, as so ofen self-
defeatingly asserted, of “‘mankind as a whole’,” can never be “proven” and thus no
judgment ever formed. Responding to the strategic, permanently applicable miscue
of deference to “‘the God of Mercy’” perversely “aver[red]” in the “postwar statement
of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland,” she writes:

It seems to me that a Christian is guilty before the God of Mercy if he repays evil
with evil, hence that the churches would have sinned against mercy if millions of
Jews had been killed as punishment for some evil they committed. But if the
churches shared in the guilt for an outrage pure and simple, as they themselves
attest, then the matter must still be considered to fall within the purview of the
God of Justice.
Tis slip of the tongue [substituting mercy for justice], as it were, is no
accident. Justice, but not mercy, is a matter of judgment, and about nothing does
public opinion everywhere seem to be in happier agreement than that no one has
the right to judge somebody else. What public opinion permits us to judge and
even to condemn are trends, or whole groups of people – the larger the better – in
short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made, names can
no longer be named. Needless to add, this taboo applies doubly when the deeds
or words of famous people or men in high position are being questioned. Tis is
currently expressed in high-ﬂown assertions that it is “superﬁcial” to insist on
details and to mention individuals, whereas it is the sign of sophistication to
speak in generalities according to which all cats are gray and we are all equally
guilty . . . Te charge against Christianity in general, with its two thousand years
of history, cannot be proved, and if it could be proved, it would be horrible. No
one seems to mind this so long as no person is involved. . . .308
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In contrast with public “opinion,” Arendt makes as clear as Kant does that the
exercise of the “power of judging” judges, in each instance, an individual,
nonsubsumable object or event, a singularity in that, by deﬁnition, it is
unsubordinated to general conceptualizations, unknown. Insisting that Eichmann,
the individual, be judged, she also insists, in similarly Kantian mode, that to judge
any object is to apply one’s understanding and imagination to the individual
phenomenon or “case” one perceives before one. In the case of Eichmann this
means precisely to attend to, rather than gloss over or ascribe to any general
conception the “details” of individual actions, and to listen with the attention of the
unpreconceiving to the individual words composing the verbal actions that are his

308. Ibid., pp. 296–97.

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160 Te Linguistic Condition

testimony, the extraordinary convention according to which acts performed in

language are judged alongside matters of fact, with the weight of law.309
Arendt does not hesitate to draw the stark consequence of such an individually
based analytic judgment when it comes to Eichmann in particular. For, to employ
understanding with imagination so as to judge rather than pre-judge him, to relate
the words with which Eichmann describes and accounts for his actions to those
actions themselves, was to judge someone, who, by evidence of those words, was
entirely devoid of the capacity for judgment, someone in whom the linchpin that
is that power is lacking, in whom the abyss between cognition and moral action
thus gaped unfathomably, never to be spanned. Up to and including “the grotesque
silliness of his last words” – “ ‘Afer a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet
again’ ” – Eichmann demonstrated not that the “evil” of his actions was
commonplace, but that his own inability to judge those actions led inexorably to
his own open, ongoing embrace of – and equation of evil with – “banality.”310
It is for this reason that, quite apart from what others may think of his actions,
what Eichmann thought about his actions could never be communicated by him,
not because his views were so heinous as to be unutterable but because, at the time
of those actions and in all the time succeeding them, what he thought – if he
thought – of them remained in the realm of the merely material, void of content,
because incapable of grasping any distinction or other than rote relation between
meaning and verbal form, let alone moral distinction between action and mechanics.
Contrary to the assumptions of the judges at his trial, Eichmann’s apparently “‘empty
talk’,” Arendt suggests, rather than “feigned,” was indeed empty in truth, through and
through; his very real “inability to think” made him “genuinely incapable of uttering
a single sentence that was not a cliché.”311 By speaking about the nearly unimaginable
in “clichés” alone, Eichmann, Arendt argues, is not concealing his own private
thoughts but making manifest, in the public form of sworn testimony, an “inability
to speak” “closely connected with an inability to think” in the ﬁrst place, the same
inability that had made the actions he conceived and served seamlessly feasible for
him, and now made him view himself, insofar as his own person was assigned any
individual responsibility for those actions, as subject not to public judgment but to
his own, merely personal misfortune, that of having “‘had no luck’.”312
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Tat Eichmann could not imagine or understand the extraordinary content of

his acts, found entirely ordinary their equation of humanity with insensate
materiality, remained as unimaginable to those present at his trial as it did to the
many readers whom Arendt’s report from Jerusalem appalled. Yet even this is

309. See Austin’s reference to his own debt to Kant in arguing, in his inaugural theory of
performative speech, for the particular performativity of “ ‘ethical propositions’ ” and that
“Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond,”
in How to Do Tings with Words, pp. 2–3, 12.
310. Arendt, Eichmann, p. 252.
311. Ibid., p. 48–49.
312. Ibid., p. 175.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 161

so because the imagination required of Eichmann was – and herein lies Arendt’s
underlying, and indisputable, point – not exceptional but, rather, itself banal. It
was neither an extraordinary personal disposition, but rather the absence of an
ability of relative banality, which made Eichmann in action, and thus, in fact, “a
monster.”313 For it was not an unknown form of life, the esoteric, unencountered
or extraterrestrial, but the most readily imaginable, commonest quality available
to judgment, the being human of other human beings, that Eichmann could neither
imagine, nor understand, nor feel in life, and so could not communicate in word or
action. Te being human of other human beings was the undefined “object” of
judgment for which this subject of judgment possessed no language, knew or
encountered no words that were not clichéd banalities, which is to say, no words
that communicated anything to anyone, including Eichmann himself. So monstrous,
Arendt argues, is the absence of all commonplace imagination that it eradicates the
understanding conveyed by words as well as deeds in any but a strictly mechanical
sense. So monstrous indeed, we may argue, is the extraordinary lack of the ordinary,
the total inability to see someone not yourself as some one, to imagine, that is, not
the extraordinary but rather the ordinary otherness of others, that it replaces the
“purpose-free” “common sense” perceptions on which imagination depends with
the purposeful coventionalization of the extraordinary, its conversion to a “norm”
by the very words used to speak of it: the invented euphemisms of a so-called
“technical” terminology whose concrete meaning and moral or practical
consequences are inevitably expressed in time-worn cliché. Only in the absence of
the ordinary, Arendt argues, can the total objectification, or dehumanization, of the
human into pure materiality be conceived of as ordinary, as “business” (including
“the business of war”) “as usual,” as if, to all intents and purposes – to quote Kant,
writing of the human body employed as material canvas – “it were not a human
being” (“. . . nicht ein Mensch wäre”) upon whom one acted and of whom one
spoke; “as if only” (“wenn es nur . . .”) a human being were not one.
For, Kant’s (remarkably commonsensical) argument goes, unlike wall coverings
and all purely decorative surfaces whose appearance to the eye can serve no
purpose but to please and engage the mind in free play, the superficies of human
beings is never pure of its telos, the purpose of enabling and sustaining individual
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life. Tus it is that, unlike the decoration of a wall that has never lived, the tattooing
of human beings, in crossing the line between judgment and practice, between an
undefined “field” of aesthetic “objects” and the fully self-defining realm of the “free”
“subject,” may come to serve the opposite purpose of reducing individual life to
mere material givenness, i.e., to the surface of a foreign corporality lacking any
imaginable, and thus conceivable, interiority. Furthermore, such conflations of
subjects with objects to the point of nondistinction can and will mirror themselves,
as mere surfaces, infinitely, so that total objectification (among which, the

313. Ibid., p. 246: “I am not the monster I am made out to be,’ Eichmann said, ‘I am the
victim of a fallacy’;” cf. pp. 276, 288.

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162 Te Linguistic Condition

routinized slaughterhouse tattooing of humans) may be used, in turn, to mark

numerically the otherwise undistinguished living, thereby facilitating their final
conversion into corpses, the ultimately indistinguished dead. And thus it is that
human exteriority used by any subject as if merely another among its possible
objects – another canvas to delineate or mark at will, a truly ineluctable medium of
décor – may find its logical extension in the implementation of the skin of others
for home furnishings, the absolute subversion of the non-subordinating “power”
of judgment into a unilateral expression of totalizing utilitarianism, a monstrous
conflation of cognitive limits with unlimited practices from which no object and
no subject is free. Tis is the monstrousness of viewing and using all superficies as
one, and of reducing all things to superficies as if materiality were everything, or,
rather, things were “everything,” and formative actions of any kind, from perception,
to cognition, to feeling, to judgment, to the active constructions of “real things”
(including unpredetermined events) from “no-thing” – in short, history – never
indeed occur, or, in Kant’s words, as if in sense perception and all the actions
relating to it, there were never “anything that there appeared.”314
Eichmann’s inability to imagine any other is monstrous in that, along with
actual, phenomenal perception, it cuts judgment quite out of the picture, thereby
conflating the very ability to reason with “solution”-driven practicality, perverting
by leaving no gap between Kant’s First and Second Critique. What Arendt
recognized was that while Eichmann’s trial and testimony did not and could never
indicate what “pure” “evil” looked and sounded like in human form, they did
indicate that monstrosity, in the form of the failure to perform the simplest act of
imagination, may indeed take the form (words and persona) of a banal bookkeeper
or file clerk, “information” “processor” or bureaucrat, and that the result of such an
absolute lack of imagination must be the absolute inability to judge any object or
action in a manner neither sanctioned nor prohibited by pre-existing law or
belief – an inability which, before Kant, may have seemed of no real consequence
in itself, a matter either of personal disposition or “aesthetics” alone. In analyzing
Eichmann’s “banality,” the real depth of his self-evident superficiality, Arendt thus
effectively reveals the hidden radicality of judgment in Kant, the way in which the
inability to imagine, and thus to judge, that which it is easiest to imagine and to
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judge, results not in a momentary lapse of mind or manners but in a lack unable
even to conceive of itself as such, a truly unbridgeable chasm dividing delimited
knowledge from moral action and language from that which language alone can

314. “At the same time . . . it will be maintained, that we must at least be able to think, if
not to know, these same objects also as things in themselves. Otherwise there would follow
the principle without rhyme or reason, that an appearance were without something which
there appears” (“Gleichwohl wird . . . doch dabei immer vorbehalten, dass wir eben dieselben
Gegenstände auch als Dinge an sich selbst, wenn gleich nicht erkennen, doch wenigstens
müssen denken können. Denn sonst würde der ungereimte Satz daraus folgen, dass
Erscheinung ohne etwas wäre, was da erscheint”) (Kant, KrV B XXVI–XXVVII, III:30–31).

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 163

communicate, the commonplace combination of sensory imagination and

understanding constituting the unsuspected depths of common sense.
Tese comments may appear to take Kant’s seemingly frivolous reflections on
wallpaper far afield. Yet it was the seeming frivolity, the lack of seriousness attributed
to Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann as a being void of any and all imagination that can
begin to indicate the real extent of the wilderness that is the territory of judgment
in Kant. For even its partial qualification as “aesthetic” proves insufficient to contain
and domesticate – if not, indeed, as further evidence of – that wilderness itself. In a
little-remarked comment in the preliminary version of the Introduction to the
Tird Critique, Kant notes that the “expression of an aesthetic mode of presentation
always remains unavoidably ambiguous” (“Es bleibt also immer eine unvermeidliche
Zweideutigkeit in dem Ausdrucke einer ästhetischen Vorstellungsart”) in that the
term, “aesthetic,” may be used, so to speak, “generically,” to denote any and every
sense perception of an object issuing in a cognition, or, as it is the burden of his
Tird Critique to argue, it may instead be limited in meaning to specific experiences
of feeling (pleasure or displeasure) in the act of perceiving an unknown object,
experiences of a subject rendered “communicable” with and “for every” subject by
their third-person articulation in the “general voice” of the verbal judgment of an
object. In a side commentary later re-enacted nearly verbatim by Saussure with
reference to the enduring ambiguity of the term, “sign,” and preceded by Lessing’s
analogous note to Laokoon regarding the misleading use of the single German
term, “Gemälde” to refer equally to “poetic” and “material paintings,” Kant both
remarks on the practical “ambiguity” of the term, “aesthetic,” and states his Critique
of Judgment will continue to employ it, due to a want not of intellectual clarity
regarding what his Critique means to say but of the verbal means available with
which to say it: “because we lack another expression” (“weil uns ein anderer
Ausdruck mangelt”).315 Rather than invent a neologism, Kant (like Lessing and
Saussure) retains a single common term whose ambiguity in context compels the
encounter with its critical function again and again.
In his “Transcendental Aesthetic,” foundational First Part of the First Critique,
Kant indeed uses “aesthetic” in its pre-modern, exclusively perceptual sense, overtly
criticizes Baumgarten’s modern (in Kant’s words, “German”) confusion of the
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“beautiful” deﬁned in “aesthetic” treatises with the rule-derived, aesthetic (i.e.,

sensory) objects of a cognitive “science,” and, noting the “lack” of “another
expression” for that inherently “ambigu[ous]” term, suggests that the central
operative concept (and its respective “faculty” or “power”) at the basis of his

315. See Kant, KrV B 36, III: 70n, for Kant’s critique of Baumgarten and suggested
division of the term “aesthetic” into separate “transcendental” and “psychological” (or
perceptual-cognitive) “sense[s] or “meaning[s];” on the “ambigu[ity]” of the term see also
Kant, KU, X: 35. See Saussure, Cours, p. 99; see Lessing, Laokoon, Chapter XIV, and Chap.
XIV, note 1, in G. E. Lessing, Werke, 5 vols. (Berlin: Aufau Verlag, 1978), III: 242, 242n.

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164 Te Linguistic Condition

Critique performs a double duty as well.316 For, just as “aesthetic” is shown

immediately in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” to pertain not only to the judgment
of the beautiful and the sublime, so the “power of judgment” is shown from the
very outset of the Critique to pertain not only to the aesthetic. In the Preface to the
first edition of the First Critique, Kant gives a brief outline of the recent history of
“metaphysics,” “queen of all the sciences.” Tat history leads from “despotic”
dogmatists, to “nomadic” “skeptics,” to the “physiology” of Locke, whose fatefully
mistaken ascription to metaphysics of a genesis from physical experience alone (at
least on Kant’s account) “would have had rightfully to become suspect” (“mit Recht
hätte verdächtig werden müssen”), since the very conception of such a “genealogy
was in fact falsely fictionalized onto [metaphysics]” (“weil diese Genealogie ihr in
der Tat fälschlich angedichtet war”).317 Te fall of empiricism gave rise, Kant
continues, to apparent “indifference” toward metaphysics on the whole, and it is
this very moment, when a “falsifying fictionalization” of its “genesis” is said to make
metaphysics seem an object of least intellectual interest, or “indifference,” that Kant
recasts as the intervention of “judgment” into “fictionalization” (or “mere seeming
knowledge”) and basis of the reinvention of metaphysics his Critique is about to
undertake:

Tis indiﬀerence is, however . . . a phenomenon, which deserves attention and

reflection. It is obviously not the effect of frivolity or unseriousness but rather
that of the mature power of judgment* of the age, which no longer lets itself be
taken in by mere seeming knowledge, and it is a challenge to reason to take upon
itself the most difficult of all its occupations anew, namely that of self-knowledge,
and to set up a court of law which would ensure it in its justified claims, just as,
by contrast, it would allow it to dispatch readily with all groundless pretentions
not through pronouncements of power but according to its eternal and
unchangeable laws, and this is none other than the Critique of Pure Reason.
[Indessen ist diese Gleichgültigkeit . . . doch ein Phänomen, das Aufmerksamkeit
und Nachsinnen verdient. Sie ist offenbar die Wirkung nicht des Leichtsinns,
sondern der gereifen Urteilskraf* des Zeitalters, welches sich nicht länger durch
Scheinwissen hinhalten last, und eine Aufforderung an die Vernunf, das
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beschwerlichste aller ihrer Geschäfe, nämlich das der Selbsterkenntnis aufs

316. Kant, KrV, B 36, III: 70n; KU , X: 35: “Tere always remains therefore an unavoidable
ambiguity in the expression of an aesthetic mode of mental presentation, when, on the
hand, one understands it to refer to something that excites a feeling of pleasure or pain, and,
on the other, to refer to our basic cognitive faculty insofar as it is the sensory perception that
allows us to cognize objects as appearances” (“Es bleibt also immer eine unvermeidliche
Zweideutigkeit in dem Ausdrucke einer ästhetischen Vorstellungsart, wenn man darunter
bald diejenige versteht, welche das Gefühl der Lust und Unlust erregt, bald diejenige, welche
bloss as Erkenntnisvermögen angeht, sofern darin sinnliche Anschauung angetroﬀen wird,
die uns die Gegenstände nur als Erscheinungen erkennen lässt.)
317. Kant, KrV, A X, III: 12.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 165

neue zu übernehmen und einen Gerichtshoﬀ einzusetzen, der sie bei ihren
gerechten Ansprüchen sichere, dagegen aber alle grundlose Anmassungen, nicht
durch Machtsprüche, sondern nach ihren ewigen und unwandelbaren Gesetzen,
abfertigen könne, und dieser ist kein anderer als die Kritik der reinen Vernunf
selbst.318]

A footnote denoted by an asterisk follows immediately upon this ﬁrst naming of

the “power of judgment” within the tripartite Critique, a verbal account of judgment
occurring not in the last and Tird Critique named for it but, rather, in the inaugural
Critique of Pure Reason. In the text of that footnote Kant contests contemporary
“complaints” (“Klagen”) about the inadequacy of the “mode of thinking”
(“Denkungsart”) of “our time” (“unser Zeitalter”) by turning them on their head,
stating that “indifference” and “doubt” (“Zweifel”) are “rather proofs” of the exercise
of an “exacting mode of thinking” (“vielmehr Beweise einer gründlichen
Denkungsart”).319 Apparent “indifference” is thus the ambivalent, at once positive
and negative indication of a “mode of thinking” that has no positive mode of
expression of its own, but through which, “and finally” (“und, endlich”) following
from which, “strict critique” (“strenge Kritik”) can first occur.320 Tus it is in the
context of a footnote not to contemporary polemics but to a negatively expressive
“indifference” to these, a “mode of thinking” he has called, for the first time, “the
power of judgment,” that Kant names, also for the first time, the “age” or “time” to
which that “power” properly pertains. Te next sentence in this footnote, relating
“the power of judgment” to an “indifference” to current, falsely premised debates,
categorically states: “Our age [or time] is the actual [or proper] age of Critique”
(“Unser Zeitalter ist das eigentliche Zeitalter der Kritik”321).“Te power of judgment”
that takes the form of “indifference” in the face of “falsifying fictionalization” is
interpreted critically by Kant to indicate the “actual[ity]” at “our” or any apparently
“indifferent” “time” of the activity that is “critique.” Tis “Phänomen” of seeming
“indifference” to “mere seeming knowledge” is not only appropriate to, but indeed
definitive of what Kant calls “our age,” or “time,” which is to say, every “time” in which
the “phenomenon” of “indifference” is neither “frivolous” nor “unserious” but the
expression of the positive discovery of a negative: that which we are missing, or lack.
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For “indifference” may be the mere but no less necessary appearance of an already
critical, intellectual distance, the “doubt” and “challenge to reason” we “must be able”
to pose and undergo when, “indifferent” to the spell of metaphysical or empiricist
fictions alike, we exercise in the present our “power of judgment,” i.e., the power
to critique, rather than merely adopt or discard, accounts of how and what we
can know.

318. Kant, KrV, A X–XI, III: 12–13.

319. Kant, KrV, A X, III: 12.
320. Ibid.
321. Kant, KrV, A XI–XII, III: 13

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166 Te Linguistic Condition

Few accounts of the operation of judgment are more instructive of Arendt’s. For,
at work in her apparent indifference to the “monstrosity” of Eichmann was an
analysis of the monstrousness of the inability underlying his refusal to judge himself,
the absolute lack of “imagination” and “common sense” that rendered commonplace
judgment perhaps the sole action of which he was and remained incapable, or to
which, one might say, he took exception. “Genealogically” speaking, the indefensible
“case” of Eichmann originates in that specifically nonsensorily generated lack. For
the inability to “think from the standpoint of somebody else” that permitted
Eichmann to “defend” himself as the “victim of a fallacy” and accuse his captors of
a logical mistake was the same that allowed him both to act upon numberless other
beings as he did and escape, in mind as in body, any and all sense of the content and
consequences of his actions, even onto the final “cliché,” declaiming the inescapable
brevity of life, to which he sentenced his judges upon hearing himself sentenced to
die for his inestimable crimes. Like Kant’s introductory analysis of judgment
enacted in the guise of apparent “indifference” (to philosophical “schools”), and its
inverse, the seemingly incontrovertible, because apparently purely empirical
evidence of guilt or innocence that works to preclude judgment and relegate
language to the status of a mere formality (the same appearance of certainty
contested in Kleist’s “Duel,” as analyzed in the next Chapter), Arendt’s fundamentally
“critical” account of Eichmann, in the “universal,” specifically “Kantian,” rather than
(in her view, uninstructively) ad hominem sense of the term, renders the centrality
of “imagination” to the capacity for “judgment” and of judgment to all human
understanding and action conspicuous by demonstrating, in the most elemental
terms, the truly unimaginable consequences of its apparently “banal” absence. In so
doing, she more alarmingly reveals “the monstrous” as neither singular nor
unimaginably foreign but as inhering in any state of mind to which the most
common employment of “the power of imagination” – of seeing another neither as
no one but yourself, nor as nothing – remains utterly foreign, and in which, as a
result, “the power of judgment” plays no part.
Unlike a disastrous inability to judge, confused by its inherently delusional
subject with a purely mechanical logical “fallacy,” apparent “indifference” to
falsifying accounts of cognition, whether these be of the “mystifying,” “dogmatic,”
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or “skeptical” “physiological” kind, “is” itself nothing less, Kant proposes, than the
phenomenal appearance of a “power” that makes all the difference: not the power
to know anything per se but to perform upon all knowledge what Kant calls, in the
Second Preface to the First Critique, “a revolution in mode of thinking” (“eine
Revolutions der Denkart”322). “Te power of judgment,” neither cognitive nor
moral in itself, is not only the necessary link between these two distinct, strictly
limited and strictly unlimited capabilities of reason, respectively, that Kant, for the
first time in the history of philosophy, brings to independent expression and so
enables us to think. It is also, as this, its initial appearance as a negative affect

322. Kant, KrV, B XI, III:22. See Chap. One, this study.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 167

requiring interpretation, posits, the necessarily occluded origin of the critique that
produces those distinct practices of reason themselves.
“Judgment,” that “power” without a “realm proper” or “objects of its own,” may be
nothing less than the “phenomenon” constituting the perceptible aspect, or “mode,”
of “thinking” (“Art des Denkens,” “Denkungsart”) for Kant, the appearance of an
ability and activity that themselves know no critical bounds. For, while empirical
knowledge must be mediated by formal limits if it is to be unassailable by doubt,
“I can think what I will” (“aber denken kann ich was ich will”323), Kant asserts, in
the same sense that, in the Second Critique, we “can” “will” ourselves the ability to
act in “freedom” from the limits of self-interest, or morally. Te power of judgment
to articulate a “feeling” arising in the perception of an unknown object as a
predication of that object, rather than a personal feeling – an impersonal, inherently
“communicable” statement “free” of qualification other than the “condition” of
communicability Kant calls “common sense” – may also be the power to perceive as
illusion (“Scheinwissen”) all “metaphysical” equations of knowledge with immaterial
“Forms,” no less than all exclusively sense-based negations of the possibility of
forming any knowledge, or indeed of undergoing any experience, at all. Even before
being submitted to “critique,” the “power,” rather than “reason,” of “judgment”
appears here, at the very outset of Kant’s project, as a “mode of thinking” and therein
articulating not only the “aesthetic” “forms” and “nonforms” of the beautiful and
sublime, but the “forms” and “nonforms” of “thinking” that are the aesthetic
appearance and articulation of “critique” whose defining “mode” and moment are
“our”“own.” For, the mode of professed indifference to falsifying intellectual fictions
proves to be not so much misleading as a refusal to give itself, its own real difference,
away: an impersonally “communicable” appearance of thinking, or critical
“phenomenon,” that Kant “expresses” as judgment in action.
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323. Kant, KrV, B XXVIII, III: 31.

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168 Te Linguistic Condition

3. Te Schema and the Language of Poetry

Subreption: [Hidden snatching]: the suppression of truth or facts with the
view to acquiring a dispensation, a faculty; a false or misleading representation
aimed at the acquisition of a power or faculty; a want of expression.
—OED [1971, II: 3125]

Te activity Kant calls judgment is a power that lacks a proper object. Neither
the phenomenal objects that are the limited representations of things as we perceive,
conceive and know them, nor the noumenal object of the pure reason of moral
action – the Good, “free” of personal interest, that is made rather than known – is
the “objective field” or “realm” (“Feld der Gegenstände als sein Gebiet”) that defines
the exercise of judgment.324 Directed toward no specific object or cognitive or
moral purpose, judgment is at the same time the most “critical” power espoused in
the Critique. Its very lack of an object-appropriate “reason” makes judgment both
the necessary “middle link” (“Mittelglied”) and “bridge” (“Übergang”) between the
First and Second Critiques and the subjective power or mental faculty without
which, according to Kant, there could be no Critique, the “challenge to reason”
whose undefined exercise defines its time as “our time,” “the Age of Critique.”325
Consisting either “in the free play of imagination and understanding” (“in dem
freien Spiele der Einbildungskraf und des Verstandes”326) during the perception

325. Kant, KU , B VI, XXII, X: 85; KU , B XXI, X:84. In the Logic, Kant similarly attributes
the genesis of all cognitive “error” [Irrtum] – as “difficult” in itself “to conceive” [schwer zu
begreifen] as the “shying” of a “power from its own essential laws” (“wie irgend eine Kraf
von ihren eigenen wesentlichen Gesetzen abweichen solle”) – to the failure not to think, or
to perceive, but “to judge:” “the basis for the arisal of all error . . . must be sought, solely and
alone, in the unnoticed influence of sensory perception upon understanding, or to speak
more precisely, upon judgment. Tis influence, namely, brings us . . . to mistakenly exchange
the mere seeming appearance of truth for the truth itself ” (“Der Entstehungsgrund alles
Irrtums wird . . . einzig und allein in dem unvermerkten Einflusse der Sinnlichkeit auf den
Verstand, oder, genauer zu reden, auf das Urteil gesucht werden müssen. Dieser Einfluss
nämlich macht, dass wir im Urteilen . . . den blossen Schein der Wahrheit mit der Wahrheit
selbst verwechseln“) (Logik A 76, VI: 480).
326. Kant, KU , B 29, X: 132,

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 169

of the beautiful, or in the experience of “violence done to the imagination”

(“gewalttätig für die Einbildungskraf”327) by “ideas of reason” exceeding “sensory
form” in the perception of the sublime (“for the sublime proper cannot be
contained in any sensory form but rather touches only upon ideas of reason”
[“denn das eigentliche Erhabene kann in keiner sinnlichen Form entahlten sein,
sondern trif nur Ideen der Vernunf”328], judgment remains “actual,” reaches no
conclusion, nor could it. Te free play of the senses and the mind, and violence
done to the senses by the mind, entail instead “feelings” – of “pleasure and pain”
(“Lust und Unlust”329) – that are, by definition, as unavailable to the architectonic
laws of logic and phenomenal limits of representation that make cognition possible
as to the self-legislating rule of freedom from all ruled cognition that instead
makes possible moral action. Judgment has no “realm of its own” (“kein
eigentümliches Gebiet”) – what it perceives are not conceptual objects but forms
or (in the sublime) their absence, “formlessness” (“Formlosigkeit”) – and judgment,
which is neither the knowing of some thing as it appears to us nor the doing of
something in itself, similarly possesses no proper rules of exercise.330 As such it is
also singularly “indifferent,” Kant writes, to the false claims or false representations
that have ruled metaphysics, an indifference, however, that has the further effect of
freeing the mind to think its own difference from givens. For, in grounding the
power of judgment negatively, in “indifference” to past metaphysical (or anti-
metaphysical, purely physiological) determinist precepts, Kant maintains the
possibility of the subject’s “will” to “think” critically, i.e., in independence from
man-made and natural causality alike. It is to such “free” acts of the will whose
possibility the entire project of the Critique aims at proving irrefutable, at deducing
as no illusion but real, that no subject, in Kant’s self-legislating sense of the term,
can be “indifferent.”
As thinking remains unprescribed by Kant, defined only as a function of
the freedom that defines the will,331 so judgment, that “Phänomen” that appears
as the outer side of thinking, remains lacking in specific content even while
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327. Kant, KU , B 76, X: 166.

328. Kant, KU , B 77, X: 166.
329. Kant, KU, B XXIII, X: 85.
330. Kant, KU , B XXI, X: 84; B 179, X: 168.
331. Kant may have been the first to pronounce the maxim, long both commonplace
and disputed, “[Te]will is free” (“[der] Wille sei frei”). However, unlike his innumerable
successors, he did so while defining “the will” as only one among many, architectonically
interrelated and delimited intellectual faculties, and logical and causal operations and
functions, that are not “free” – self-defining or “pure” – but “applied” to the world, or, in the
case of the “imagination a priori,” as discussed in this Chapter, to the “schema[tic]” “use” of
the world. See Kant, KU , B XXVII, III: 31, KrV B 74–76, III: 97–78; see also KrV B 752–53,
IV: 621; see also Chapter Two, Section Nine, this Study.

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170 Te Linguistic Condition

interacting with the world. Kant’s “Analytic[s] of the Beautiful” and “the
Sublime” break down received notions of aesthetic taste to arrive at a counter-
definition of aesthetic judgment. Teir step-by-step critique of taste affirms
that judgment is what taste is not, i.e., equally independent of the transitory
claims of private subjectivity and personal enjoyment, and supposedly
impersonal and immutable pedagogic or religious goals and doctrines. Yet Kant’s
negative procedure leaves open the question of how, aside from the purely analytic
definition of its constitutive qualities, this particular power can be said, positively,
to work.
For, unlike knowledge constituted of delimited representations conjoined on
the basis of categorical logical rules, and unlike those acts Kant calls the practical
products of pure reason in that they are free to rule themselves, Kant’s negative
definition of judgment – as a faculty that follows no rules and has no proper realm
of objects – directs itself as much against rules of taste as against prescriptions of
aesthetic content. At once a “phenomenon” in itself and undetermined by either
our cognition of, or pure freedom from, phenomenality, judgment is instead a
coordination of faculties: of imagination and understanding in free play, or reason
and imagination in conflict. Te “power” of judgment – “meditating link” or
“bridge” between the First and Second Critique – is thus, in its own internal
composition, also such a bridge. For, understood in its function rather than as a
spatial figure of unification, a “bridge” is a supplement enabling interactions
between truly distinct givens whose outcomes it does not ensure. In Kant’s tripartite
Critique, those givens are the faculties of understanding, applied reason and sense-
related imagination that compose cognitions as described in the Critique of Pure
Reason or First Critique, and those of pure reason and a will “free” of all sensory
self-interest, that, working together, engender moral action in the Critique of
Practical Reason or Second Critique. Likewise, as Kant defines it, the “bridge,”
Critique of Judgment or mediating Tird Critique between these, divides, with an
eye to each side of the “abyss” it spans, into two interconnected halves: the “Analytic
of the Beautiful” in which, rather than composing cognitions, understanding and
imagination (acting in the absence of reason) engage each other in the “pleasurable”
“free play” of “aesthetic” (rather than representational, cognitive) perceptions; and
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the “Analytic of the Sublime” in which sense-related imagination and the faculty of
pure reason (acting in the absence of understanding) come into “painful,” violent
conﬂict. Tere is thus not one kind of aesthetic judgment, but two, just as there are
separate, grounded terminations of every “bridge,” across the countervailing forces
of whose extension away from those groundings and toward one another the
bridge itself is made, holds itself in place.
Similarly, rather than merely restating prescribed views of prescribed objects –
and Kant’s panoply of every such possible object makes clear that, when it comes
to occasioning aesthetic judgment, for Kant (unlike any other theorist of the
aesthetic of his time and well before the surrealists, hyperrealists, pop-artists,
situationalists, conceptualists, installationists and performance artists of our own),
any object or “dynamic” appearance will do – it is instead in allowing the interaction
of the faculties to play out that we compose the statement judging an object to be

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 171

“beautiful” or “sublime.”332 For, if judgment operated according to known rules and

objects, it would constitute, in Kant’s terms, a “grammar,” rather the central
mediating activity of the Critique.333
In its critical ability to coordinate rather than subordinate distinct intellectual
capacities within us no less than to mediate between Kant’s own structurally divided
First and Second Critiques, the “power” of judgment fundamentally resembles the
most essential, and enigmatic, of Kantian linkages or Mittelglieder, the “schema.” As
discussed in the preceding Chapter, the schema is introduced in the Critique of Pure
Reason as the link that “must” necessarily join the two “heterogeneous” “sources” of
cognition and their respective theoretical domains: the a priori or universal bases of
sensory experience described in the “Transcendental Aesthetics” and the conceptual
formalization of these analyzed in the “Transcendental Logic.” But it is in the context
of the analysis of aesthetic judgment in the Tird Critique, and the particular
practical examples Kant gives of imagination acting in freedom from cognition, that
the workings of the “schema” come most clearly, if indirectly, into view.
Kant introduces the “Analytic of Basic Principles” of his “Transcendental Logic”
with a discussion of the most principal among them, namely, that the rules of logic,
while separate from, must be “united” with those governing our ability to perceive
sensory objects:

332. Indeed, the closest proponent to Kant of the necessarily open field of judgment may
be Mallarmé. In an acid denunciation of all official arbiters of taste written a century afer
the publication of the Critique of Judgment, Mallarmé critiqued the false appeal to
“judgment” made by “juries” of the Salons so as to mask their exercise of a purely institutional
power interested solely in censoring “systematically” all painting whose production they
could neither understand nor control. Mallarmé notes that the only “mandate” of “judgment”
free of such “bad faith” derives instead from “the public,” “the multitude that demands to see
with its own eyes,” and who “with rare prescience, dubbed [these painters*] Intransigent,
which in political language means radical and democratic” (*“les refusés” or “impressionist”
artists denied admission to the Salons). Te exercise of judgment, like that of the eye itself,
according to Mallarmé, can never be appropriated and abrogated by officiating “bodies”
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empowered to decide for every other eye what it can and will see, but is rather an activity
reserved for all such others, or the viewing “public” as such, whose right it is “to demand to
see everything there is.” Of the strategy of delaying the inevitable – the viewing, by all who
wish to see it, of what “there is” – Mallarmé states presciently: “To gain a few years on
M. Manet, what a sad [or pathetic] politics! (“Gagner quelques anneés sur M. Manet: triste
politique!”). See Mallarmé, “Te Impressionists and Edouard Manet” (ﬁrst published in
English, translated from the lost French original, in Te Art Monthly Review, Sep. 1876) and
“Le Jury de Peinture pour 1874 et M. Manet” (ﬁrst published in “La Renaissance Artistique
et Littéraire,” 12 April 1874), both reprinted in their entirety in Penny Florence, Mallarmé,
Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 1986, pp. 11–21.
333. Cf. Kant’s comparison of the rule-governed parsing and organization of experience
with a “grammar” in the Prolegomena (Kant, Prolegomena A 118, V: 192).

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172 Te Linguistic Condition

Our knowledge springs from two basic sources in the mind, the first of which is the
faculty of receiving representations (the receptivity of impressions), the second,
that of cognizing an object by way of these representations (the spontaneity of
concepts); through the first, an object is given to us; through the second, it is thought
in its relation to that representation (as mere determination of the mind).
Perception and concepts thus make up the elements of all our knowledge, so that
neither concepts without a perception that corresponds to them in some way, nor
a perception without concepts, can constitute cognition. . . .
Let us name the receptivity of our mind to receiving representations, insofar
as it is in some way affected, sensibility [or sensory ability]; so is the contrary
ability, to produce representations oneself, or the spontaneity of knowledge,
understanding. Our nature is such that perception in us can never be other than
sensory, i.e., it can only contain the mode in which we are affected by objects. By
contrast, the faculty of thinking the object of a sensory perception is understanding.
Neither of these inherent faculties is to be preferred to the other. Without the
sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without understanding
none would be thought. Toughts without content are empty, [sensory]
perceptions without concepts are blind . . . Nor can these faculties, or capabilities,
exchange their functions. Te understanding senses nothing and the senses
cannot think anything. Only in their uniting with each other can cognition arise.
For this very reason we may not confuse their contributions, but rather have
great cause to separate and distinguish the one from the other carefully. Tus we
distinguish the science of the rules of sense perception in general, i.e., the
Aesthetic, from the science of the rules of understanding in general, i.e., Logic.334

334. Kant, KrV B 74–77, III: 97–98: “Unsere Erkenntnis entspringt aus zwei
Grundquellen des Gemüts, deren die erste is, die Vorstellungen zu empfangen (die
Rezeptivität der Eindrücke), die zweite das Vermögen, durch diese Vorstellungen, einen
Gegenstand zu erkennen (Spontaneität der Begriﬀe); durch die erstere wird uns ein
Gegenstand gegeben, durch die zweite wird dieser im Verhältnis und jene Vorstellung (als
blosse Bestimmung des Gemüts) gedacht. Anschauung und Begriﬀe machen also die
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Elemente aller unserer Erkenntnis aus, so dass weder Begriffe, ohne ihnen auf einige Art
korrespondierende Anschauung, noch Anschauung ohne Begriffe, ein Erkenntnis abgeben
können. . . . Wollen wir die Rezeptivität unseres Gemüts, Vorstellungen zu empfangen, so
fern es auf irgend eine Weise affiziert wird, Sinnlichkeit nennen: so ist dagegen das Vermögen,
Vorstellungen selbst hervorzubringen, oder die Spontaneität des Erkenntnisses, der
Verstand. Unsere Natur bringt es so mit sich, dass die Anschauung niemals anders als
sinnlich sein kann, d. i. nur die Art enthält, wie wir von Gegenständen affiziert warden.
Dagegen ist das Vermögen, den Gegenstand sinnlicher Anschauung zu denken, der Verstand.
Keine dieser Eigenschafen ist der anderen vorzuziehen. Ohne Sinnlichkeit würde uns kein
Gegenstand gegeben, und ohne Verstand keiner gedacht warden. Gedanken ohne Inhalt
sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind . . . Beide Vermögen, oder Fähigkeiten,
können auch ihre Funktionen nicht vertauschen. Der Verstand vermag nichts anzuschauen,
und die Sinne nichts zu denken. Nur daraus, dass sie sich vereinigen, kann Erkenntnis

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 173

Te strict “separ[ation]” of our sensory “receptivity” from our “production” of

“representations”“in relation” to “concepts” is both required by Kant’s critical theory of
cognition and requires its own mode of relation if knowledge based in the “function”
of each is to “arise” from it. In the “Analysis of Principles” of the “Transcendental
Analytic” that follows the expositions of the “Transcendental Aesthetic” and “Logic”
(and precedes the analysis of scholastic “dialectics” as a “logic of mere seeming
appearances” [“Logik des Scheins”] in the “Transcendental Dialectic”), Kant lists the
three “higher intellectual faculties” – “Understanding, Power of Judgment and
Reason” – delineated by the architectonic “plan” (“Grundrisse”) upon which the
“logic” of his Critique is “built” (“erbauet”), situating the subject of the Tird Critique
in second, mediating position.335 He suggests the “designation,” “a Doctrine of
Judgment,” serve to name the “canon” of logical “principles” that would “instruct” the
“power of judgment” “to apply the concepts of understanding” “to [phenomenal]
appearances,” and attributes our ability to coordinate logic with perceptible sensuous
objects to a “Transcendental Power of Judgment in General.”336 “Transcendental,”
here, it must be stressed, means not the exceptional but the universal; yet, “judgment,”
alone among the “higher faculties,” is such a “transcendental power” that exceptions to
it are not only evident to us but are themselves evidence of what Kant, most unusually,
deﬁnes in a footnote as “what we call stupidity,” an inability to discern even a single
“case” “in concreto” to which a general rule of logic “in abstracto” applies:

*Te lack of the power of judgment is properly that which we call stupidity, and
such an affliction cannot be helped. A dull or constricted mind only lacking in a
proper level of understanding and concepts may well be outfitted through
instruction, even to the point of learnedness. Yet since it is the wont of such
persons to miss something there, too, so it is not uncommon to meet learned men
who, in the use of their science, ofen betray the lack they will never ameliorate.
[*Der Mangel an Urteilskraf ist eigentlich das, was man Dummheit nennt, und
einen solchen Gebrechen ist gar nicht abzuhelfen. Ein stumpfer oder
eingeschränkter Kopf, dem es an nichts, als an gehörigen Grade des Verstandes
und eigenen Begriffen desselben mangelt, ist durch Erlernung sehr wohl, so gar
bis zur Gelehrsamkeit, auszurüsten. Da es aber gemeiniglich alsdenn auch an
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jenem (der secunda Petri) zu fehlen pﬂegt, so ist es nichts Ungewöhnliches, sehr

entspringen. Deswegen darf man aber doch nicht ihren Anteil vermischen, sondern man
hat grosse Ursache, jedes von dem andern sorgfältig abzusondern, und zu unterscheiden.
Daher unterscheiden wir die Wissenschaf der Regeln der Sinnlichkeit überhaupt, d. i.
Ästhetik, von der Wissenschaf der Verstandesregeln überhaupt, d. i. der Logik.’
335. Ibid., B 170, III: 183.
336. Ibid., B 171, III: 184. See also Kant, Logik A 9, VI: 437: “Logic is thus more than
mere critique: it is a canon which later serves critique, i.e., serves as principle for the judging
of all uses of the understanding as such” (“Die Logik ist also mehr als blosse Kritik; sie ist
ein Kanon, der nachher zur Kritik dient, d. h. zum Prinzip der Beurteilung alles
Verstandesgebrauchs überhaupt”).

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174 Te Linguistic Condition

gelehrte Männer anzutreﬀen, die, im Gebrauche ihrer Wissenschaf, jenen nie zu

bessernden Mangel häuﬁg blicken lassen.’337]

Unlike the other, strictly cognitive “faculties,” “the power of judgment” is at once
“transcendental” and individual, in that it enables us to discern, rather than
constitute, a priori, realizations of the “abstract” in the “concrete.” Unlike the other
“faculties,” too, it is available but not given to every subject, and its absence results,
to borrow Kant’s own structural terms, in an “unbridgeable gulf ” between the
faculties themselves. Given his excursus on the “irremediable” “lack” of judgment
no amount of instruction can conceal, the discussion of the so-called
“Transcendental Doctrine” of judgment that follows his brief “Introduction” to
“Transcendental Judgment in General” appears to represent just such a piece of
“learned” “stupidity” on Kant’s own part: a retreat from the concretely informative
“power of judgment” to an abstract organization of categories and concepts of
experience, which, as described in the preceding Chapter, Kant, repeating a topos
of the mechanics of ancient metaphysics, entitles “schematism.” Te first section of
the “Analytic of the Principles“ of the “Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment”
introduces the notion, adverse to the general critical principles entailed by Kant’s
“revolution” in metaphysics, of a “Schematism of Pure Conceptions of the
Understanding” (“Von dem Schematismus der reinen Verstandesbegriffe”) defined
not by the production of “a priori synthetic judgments” whose “possibility” it is the
central aim of the Critique to demonstrate,338 but by the contrary principle of
conceptual subordination or “subsumption.” Te ground-laying discussion of the
“schematism” particular to “the power of judgment” begins:

In all subsumptions of an object under a conception, the representation of the

object must be homogeneous with the conception; in other words, the conception
must contain that which is represented in the object to be subsumed under it, for
that is precisely what the expression – an object is [or, is said to be: sei] contained
under a concept – means. Tus is the empirical concept of a plate homogeneous
with the pure geometrical concept of a circle, in that the rounding that is thought
in the ﬁrst can be intuited in the second.
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[In allen Subsumtionen eines Gegenstandes unter einen Begriff muss die
Vorstellung des ersteren mit der letztern gleichartig sein, d.i. der Begriff muss
dasjenige enthalten, was in dem darunter zu subsumierenden Gegenstande
vorgestellt wird, den das bedeutet eben der Ausdruck: ein Gegenstand sei unter
einem Begriffe enthalten. So hat der empirische Begriff eines Tellers mit dem
reinen geometrischen eines Zirkels Gleichartigkeit, indem die Rundung, die in
dem ersteren gedacht wird, sich in letzteren lässt.339]

337. Ibid., B 172–175, III: 184–86, “On the Transcendental Power of Judgment in
General” (“Von der transzendentalen Urteilskraf überhaupt”); for the footnote deﬁning
“stupidity” as an “irremediable” “lack” of judgment, see B 173, III: 185n.
338. Ibid, KrV, B 20, III: 59.
339. Ibid., KrV, B 176, III: 187.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 175

Tis introductory deﬁnition of “conceptual subsumption” as dependent

(“muss”) upon the homogeneity (“gleichartig sein”) of the representation and
conception of an object is offered as a self-evident rule of logic without further
comment by Kant. Te logical difficulty that both the principle of “subsumption”
and Kant’s exemplification of it in the “purely geometrical” and “empirical
concept[s]” of “circle” and “plate” raise by implication, however, is that the “nominal,”
“discursive knowledge” defined by Kant as the “negative” product of the Critique
can avail itself of none of the fully formal and thus “homogeneous” “principles”
and “concepts” constitutive of “real” – “mathematical” or “moral” – knowledge
and action, as these are described in Kant’s Logic.340 Whereas the rules of
geometrical “construction”341 determine, a priori, the very objects named by their
“concepts,” “the pure concepts of understanding,” as Kant describes them in his
expository Prolegomena, “serve only, so to speak, to spell out appearances, in order
to render them legible as experience” (“die reine Verstandesbegriffe . . . dienen
gleichsam nur, Erscheinungen zu buchstabieren, um sie als Erfahrung lesen zu
können”).342 Whereas geometers, in other words, need neither “spell” nor “read
experience,” in that the objects they describe are not first given to them, a posteriori,
by the senses, but rather produced and governed, a priori, by the mathematical
rules that define them, anyone aiming to describe “how” we “can read experience”
in such a way as to constitute a coherent epistemology must grapple instead, as
Descartes first made plain, with the necessary discursivity of – or “spelling of
appearances” by – method.
Kant, who fully rejected purely nominal, conceptual syllogisms and all other
scholastic techniques for “proving” foregone conclusions, knows that the
“principle” he has just elaborated, that of the “contain[ment]” of an “object” by its
“concept,” is easier to stipulate than to demonstrate, easier said than done.
Contrary to the principle of an a priori “homogeneity” between concept and
object upon which a circularly constituted “subsumption” of empirical experience
would have to depend, the central question for a specifically critical rather than
syllogistic theory of understanding remains as it was, for Kant, to begin with:
“how” is empirical knowledge, and thus, the “subsumption [of an object by a
concept] possible?” How, that is, can logical conceptions and categories be rendered
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“homogeneous” with, and so “appli[ed]” properly to, sensuous perceptions and

phenomenal representations defined as categorically different – in kind, source
and mode of apprehension – from them in the first place? As quoted in Chapter
Two, Section Nine, with regard to the origin or formation of language in general,
but merits repeating here with regard to the “Analytics” of aesthetic judgment, and,
as we shall see, to poetry in particular, Kant continues:

340. See Kant, Logik, 23, VI: 446, A 221–222, VI: 576; KrV, B XXIV, III: 29; cf. n. 121,
Section Five, Chap. Two, this study
341. Kant, KrV, B XII, III: 22.
342. Kant, Prolegomena, A 101, V: 180–81.

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176 Te Linguistic Condition

Now, pure conceptions of the understanding, in comparison with empirical

(or indeed any sensuous) perceptions343, are entirely dissimilar or heterogeneous,
and never can be found in any intuition [or perception]. How then is
the subsumption of the latter under the first, including the application of the
categories to phenomenal appearances, possible, since no one will say: this
[category], for example, causality, can also be perceived through the senses
and is contained in the appearance. Tis so natural and monumental question is
the real cause that makes a transcendental doctrine of judgment necessary,
namely, so as to show how it is possible that pure concepts of understanding can
be applied to appearances at all. In all other sciences, in which the concepts
through which an object is thought in general are not so different and
heterogeneous from those that represent the object in concreto, as it is given, it is
unnecessary to give a special explanation to account for the application of the
former to the latter.
[Nun sind aber reine Verstandesbegriffe, in Vergleichung mit empirischen
(ja überhaupt sinnlichen) Anschauungen, ganz ungleichartig, und können
niemals in irgend einer Anschauung angetroffen werden. Wie ist nun die
Subsumtion der letztern under die erste, mithin die Anwendung der Kategorie
auf Erscheinungen möglich, da doch niemand sagen wird: diese, z.B., die
Kausalität, könne auch durch Sinne angeschauet werden und sei in der
Erscheinung enthalten? Diese so natürliche und erhebliche Frage ist nun
eigentlich die Ursache, welche eine tranzsendentale Doktrin der Urteilskraf
notwendig macht, um nämlich die Möglichkeit zu zeigen, wie reine
Verstandesbegriffe auf Erscheinungen überhaupt angewandt werden können. In
allen anderen Wissenschafen, wo die Begriffe, durch die der Gegenstand
allgemein gedacht wird, von denen, die diesen in concreto vorstellen, wie
er gegeben wird, nicht so unterschieden und heterogen sind, ist es unnötig,
wegen der Anwendung des ersteren auf den letzten besondere Erörterung zu
geben.344]

Te purely logical operation of “subsumption,” in other words, is introduced

and monumental question” to which it cannot pertain. Te rule of logical

“subsumption,” solely applicable to a homogeneous ﬁeld, makes the introduction

343. On this more accurate rendering of Kant’s use of the word, “Anschauung,” to
designate the ability to “look at” (“anschauen”), or, by any other means, perceive external
phenomena, regardless of the content of the perception, which is to say, to mean the near
opposite of what we understand by its conventional English translation, “intuition,” see
Section One, this Chapter, n. 289.
344. Kant, KrV, B 176–177, III: 187 (emphasis in text). See also Chapter Two, Section
Nine, n. 242.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 177

into reason of a nonlogical or impure mode of agency capable of acting upon the
heterogeneity of object and concept “necessary.” Having demonstrated logically
that the rules of logic cannot apply to such a mode, in order to account for our
critically fundamental capacity to apply the “cognitive faculties” given to us “in
abstracto,” to the sensory objects given us by experience “in concreto,” Kant
introduces the “rule” of a “mediating” “third something” that, neither “experiential”
nor “intellectual” in origin, and neither an “image” (“Bild”) of an object nor
additional “faculty” or “power,” is itself both (formed) “product” and (formative)
“procedure” of the already hybrid – sensing and shaping – power of “imagination”
(“Einbildungskraf”). Kant deduces the necessity for this main element, or
“mediating imagined representation” (“vermittelnde Vorstellung”) of the
“transcendental doctrine of judgment” underlying the very possibility of empirical
knowledge as follows:

Now it is clear, that there would have to be some kind of third thing which on
the one side is homogeneous with the category and homogeneous with the
phenomenon on the other, and so makes the application of the former to
the latter possible. Tis mediating imagined representation must be pure,
without anything empirical about it, and so, on the one side, intellectual,
while on the other side, sensual. Such a representation is the transcendental
schema . . .
Te schema is in itself at all moments a product of the power of imagination;
but in that the synthesis of the latter aims not at a single sense perception
[“Anschauung”] but at unity in the determination of sensibility, so the schema
must be distinguished from the image. Tus, when I set five points one afer
another:. . . . this is the image of the number five. By contrast, if I simply think a
number in general, which can well be five or a hundred, so is this thinking more
the imagined representation of a method for imagining a certain concept
corresponding to an amount (for example, a thousand) in an image, than it is
this image itself, which in this last case could only be seen at a glance and
compared with the concept with difficulty. Tis imagining, then, of a general
procedure of imagination for furnishing a concept with an image, I call the
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schema of this concept.

In fact, it is not images of objects but schemata that lie at the basis of our pure
sensory concepts. No image would ever be adequate to the concept of a triangle
in general . . . Even less does an object of experience or image of the same attain
to the empirical concept, but rather relates itself at every moment immediately
to the schema of the power of imagination as a rule for the determination of our
sensory perception [“Anschauung”] according to a certain general concept. Te
concept of a dog signifies a rule according to which my imagination registers [or
“notes,” “marks,” or “documents:” “verzeichnen”] the figure of a four-footed
animal in general without being limited to a single particular figure provided me
by experience or any possible image that I can represent in concreto. Tis
schematism of our understanding, in view of phenomenal appearances and their
mere form, is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true hand

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178 Te Linguistic Condition

grips [or, levers of operation: “Handgriﬀe”] we will only with diﬃculty ever
divine from nature and expose unveiled before our eyes.345

“Now” whether or not one indeed ﬁnds all this “clear” (“Nun ist klar . . .”),
or whether Kant’s introduction, in the mode of the hypothetical subjunctive
(“there would have to be” [“es . . . geben müsse”]), of a “necessary” notion of
the “schema” unlike any other in the history of philosophy, appears, instead,
inherently self-referential – since, given the conditions of delimitation upon
which his critical epistemology is predicated, “some third thing,” or “schema,” that is
not unilaterally delimited, indeed there “must be” – one thing that will be clear to
any reader of the Critique as a whole is that Kant’s formulation here is directly
echoed in the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, in which Kant explains, in
the indicative, why “there must thus be” (“also muss es doch geben”) this “third,” a

345. Ibid., B 177–81, III: 187–190:

Nun ist klar, dass es ein Drittes geben müsse, was einerseits mit der Kategorie,
andererseits mit der Erscheinung in Gleichartigkeit stehen muss, und die
Answendung der ersteren auf die letzte möglich macht. Diese vermittelende
Vorstellung muss rein (ohne alles Empirische) und doch einerseit intellektuel,
andereseits sinnlich sein. Eine solche ist das transzendentale Schema . . . Das Schema
ist an sich selbst jederzeit nur ein Produkt der Einbildungskraf; aber indem die
Synthesis der letzteren keine einzelne Anschauung, sondern die Einheit in der
Bestimmung der Sinnlichkeit allein zur Absicht hat, so ist das Schema doch vom
Bilde zu unterscheiden. So, wenn ich fünf Punkte hinter einander setzte . . . . . ist
dieses ein Bild von der Zahl fünf. Dagegen, wenn ich eine Zahl überhaupt nur denke,
dre nun fünf oder hundert sein kann, so ist dieses Denken mehr die Vorstellung einer
Methode, einem gewissen Begriffe gemäss eine Menge (z. E. Tausend) in einem Bilde
vorzustellen, als dieses Bild selbst, welches ich im letztern Falle schwerlich würde
übersehen und mit dem Begriff vergleichen können. Diese Vorstellung nun von
einem allgemeinen Verfahren der Einbildungskraf, einem Begriff sein Bild zu
verschaffen, nenne ich das Schema zu diesem Begriff. In der Tat liegen unsern reinen
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sinnlichen Begriffen nicht Bilder der Gegenstände, sondern Schemata zum Grunde.
Dem Begriffe von einem Triangel überhaupt würde gar kein Bild desselben jemals
adäquat sein. . . . Noch viel weniger erreicht ein Gegenstand der Erfahrung oder Bild
desselben jemals den empirischen Begriff, sondern dieser bezieht sich jederzeit
unmittelbar auf das Schema der Einbildungskraf, als eine Regel der Bestimmung
unserer Anschauung, gemäss einem gewissen allgemeinen Begriffe. Der Begriff vom
Hunde bedeutet eine Regel, nach welcher meine Einbildungskraf die Gestalt eines
vierfüssigen Tieres allgemein verzeichnen kann, ohne auf irgend eine einzige
besondere Gestalt, die mir die Erfahrung darbiete, oder auch ein jedes möglich Bild,
was ich in concreto darstellen kann, eingeschränkt zu sein. Dieser Schematismus
unseres Verstandes, in Ansehung der Erscheinungen und ihrer blossen Form, ist eine
verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele, deren wahre Handgriffe wir
der Natur schwerlich jemals abraten, und sie unverdeckt vor Augen legen werden.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 179

Tird Critique. Just as judgment is described in the “Transcendental Analytic” of the

First Critique as a “transcendental” power mediating between the “abstract” and the
“concrete,” so the Critique of Judgment analyzes the “passage” provided by aesthetic
judgment across the otherwise unbridgeable “chasm” separating the “realms” in
which, within a single, empirical world, we operate alternately: on the one hand, the
“supersensory” “realm” of the (practically) pure reason of freedom, and, on the
other, the phenomenal “realm” of sensory objects to which we “apply” the (practically)
impure reason of cognition.346 Like judgment, the schema coordinates otherwise
incommunicable realms, and like judgment it has “no realm of its own” (“kein
eigentümliches Gebiet”);347 its basis is the very Critique which could not cohere
without it – an architectonic structure whose own explicit requirement of mediation
echoes, again, the self-structuring necessity of the schema to cognition.
Yet, rather than view Kant’s own logical procedure here as hopelessly circular –
the hypothesis of something as necessary with regard to something already
hypothesized as possible – we can view it instead as an act of subreption, as
described in the definition of the term cited in the epigraph to this Section: a
representation made, on no other basis than that of necessity, with a view toward
“the acquisition of a power or faculty” one cannot properly identify in that
identifying it would require it, the very power one positively “lacks.” Kant, indeed,
comes as close as the logic and language of the Critique, or, more precisely, as the
reliance of logic upon language that defines the Critique, allows, to defining, as the
nonlogical result of an action, the hybrid form of mediation the very logic of the
Critique requires, proceeding from what may appear a pure product of logic to
another, strictly illogical kind of product, one that, by its own definition, can have
neither “proper” logical status nor “realm” within the “architectonic” structure of
the Critique. In so doing he further suggests that in order for any architectonic,
logically interrelated structure not merely to cohere within itself but to act upon
our understanding critically it must contain, at its core, an illogically produced
principle. Given by neither the senses nor the intellect, and so, like “the concept of
freedom,” unavailable to derivation by the “discursive” logic of the Critique itself,348
the notion of the “schema” Kant’s philosophical system compels him to invent,
itself represents the necessity of that invention. For, rather than a discursive concept,
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a hypothetical a priori “form” (for perceiving phenomena), or a supposed mental

346. Kant, KU B XX–XXI, X: 84.

347. Kant, KU B XXI, X: 84.
348. On the “discursive” nature of the logic employed in the production of phenomenal
knowledge, see Kant, Logik A 23, VI: 446: “herein . . . mathematics has an advantage over
philosophy, in that the cognitions of the former are intuitive, those of the latter, on the
contrary, only discursive” (“hierin hat also . . . die Mathematik einen Vorzug vor der
Philosophie, dass die Erkenntnisse der erstern intuitive, die der letztern hingegen nur
discursive Erkenntnisse sind”). Cf. Béatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge.
Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. 324ﬀ.

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180 Te Linguistic Condition

“faculty,” the “schema,” Kant remarkably submits, is “a product and, as it were, a

monogram of the pure imagination a priori” (“ein Produkt und gleichsam ein
Monogramm der reinen Einbildungskraf a priori”349).
“Now,” given the fact that imagination in Kant’s Critique is never “pure” but
always related to sensory perceptions, and never “a priori” to, but coincident with,
empirical experience, Kant’s “schema” is, “as it were,” so deeply fundamental to the
Critique as to be fundamentally at odds with it, so deeply internal to it as to stand
quite outside it, which is, indeed, nothing less than to say, “a monogram, as it were,
of the pure imagination a priori.” A “monogram” or initializing sign of some thing
or power, “pure” and “a priori,” that stands and acts quite apart from that thing or
power itself, indicating without identifying, without “spelling out:” this unusual if
not unparalleled lexical usage in Kant expresses that for which Kant wants –
indeed, in his own terms, “must” want – expression, the originary imprint, in an
abbreviated signature, of imagination on the mind. Unlike the experiential notion
of sensory “impressions” upon or mimetic “copies” of “sensations” within the
intellect redundantly theorized in earlier empirical philosophy, by which sensation
and knowledge merely circularly reflect each other, the schema – abstractly
identifying delineation, mark, or “monogram” of the imagination upon the mind
itself – first allows the mind to be mind, i.e., to coordinate its faculties or abilities.
At the same time – which is to say, the “a priori” time of a “pure,” or nonexperiential
“imagination” that, unlike the operations of conceptualization or logic, leaves the
sensuous, temporal trace or abbreviated signature of itself behind it within the
mind – the schema, “product and, as it were, monogram of pure imagination,”
exceeds and so is incommensurate with the critical limits of reason, as of
imagination to empirical perception, that Kant himself so consistently applies.
Performing an analogous coordinating function to that of the mediating
schema, “the power of judgment” is the central, mediating, “higher faculty” of
the Critique, and its practice, the defining activity of “the Age of Critique.” Yet,
unlike the schema, judgment is never produced by a “pure imagination” acting
“a priori,” in independence of experience itself. Instead, it must always be
occasioned by the perception of an empirical object, however conventional and
otherwise negligible or unconventionally, even violently striking, the distinct
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matter bearing the form (or absence of form) perceptible in that object may be. All
perceptible objects, natural and made, may be “judged” in an aesthetic sense,
depending on their eﬀect upon us, Kant contends (and his highly unorthodox
sampling of the objects of aesthetic experience amply demonstrates). Yet, not all
objects of aesthetic judgment are made equal, he no less suggests. In analyzing the
distinct “values” (“Werte”) of individual artforms at the close of the “Analytic of the
Sublime,” Kant arrives, almost surreptitiously, at the single artform that, by dint of
its peculiar relationship to its own medium, he judges to be of the “highest rank”
and most sublime.350 In §53 of the Critique of Judgment, he writes:

349. Kant, KU B 860–879, IV: 695–709.

350. Kant, KU, B 215, X: 265.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 181

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and wants
least to be guided by precept or example) maintains the highest rank. It expands
the mind in that it sets the imagination into a state of freedom and presents,
within the limits of a given concept, that form which, among the unbounded
variety of possible forms according with it, links the representation of this
concept with a fullness of thoughts for which no verbal expression is fully
adequate, thus raising itself aesthetically to Ideas.
[Unter allen behauptet die Dichtkunst (die fast gänzlich dem Genie ihren
Urpsrung verdankt, und am wenigsten durch Vorschrif, oder durch Beispiele
geleitet sein will) den obersten Rang. Sie erweitert das Gemüt dadurch, dass sie
die Einbildungskraf in Freiheit setzt und innerhalb den Schranken eines
gegebenen Begriﬀe, unter der unbegrenzten Mannigfaltigkeit möglicher damit
zusammenstimmender Formen, diejenige darbiete, welche die Darstellung
desselben mit einer Gedankenfülle verknüpf, der kein Sprachausdruck völlig
adäquat ist, und sich also ästhetisch zu Ideen erhebt.351]

Poetry is that artform which knows the limits of its medium, “verbal expression,”
and the limits of that medium’s own products, “given concepts” or conceptual
discourse; and poetry is that artform which, “least guided by precept or example,”
“sets the imagination in freedom” from those limits by formally “linking” its
conceptual medium to “a fullness of thoughts” for which “no expression of language
is fully adequate.” Poetry, in other words, is the highest artform because it practices
the art of subreption, of wanting expression, itself as good a deﬁnition as any
imaginable for the “Ideas” to which it “raises itself,” the things in themselves, rather
than things of experience, whose necessary want of commensurate expression is
the very basis, indeed the very reason for being of Kant’s Critique. Poetry cannot
faithfully represent transcendental “ideas” to us, principle among these the critical
idea of “freedom” itself – nothing and no artform can provide a representation
adequate to that idea. Yet the “art of poetry” alone uses conceptual discourse in
such a way as to indicate its relationship to “ideas,’ which is to say, to an ability “to
think” to which any “given concept” and “verbal expression” remain “inadequate.”352
Tat the practical identity of poetry consists in its ability to “link” necessarily
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“inadequate verbal expression” to “a fullness of thoughts” brings poetry closest to

the two central, practically and theoretically necessary capabilities elaborated in
Kant’s tripartite Critique: the ability of judgment “to speak,” “for every person,” a
priori, in a “general voice” articulating “common sense;” and the ability of the
“schema,” calling card or “monogram” lef in the mind by a “pure power of
imagination a priori,” to “link” the heterogeneous givens of sensory experience and
conceptual understanding in a way that mutually exceeds the limits of each.353

351. Kant, KU , B 215–216, X: 265.

352. Kant, KrV, B XXIX, X: 32.
353. See Chapter Two, Sections Eight and Nine, this study.

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182 Te Linguistic Condition

As if in acknowledgement of the structural link among the individual abilities,

as among the individual Critiques, he describes, Kant’s extraordinary focus on
poetry does not end here, but rather includes an analysis of poetic practice directly
linking what poets do to the “Transcendental Analytic” of the First Critique. Te
positive art of indicating a negative, that of the “inadequacy” of any “verbal
expression” to “the fullness of thought” to which it may be “linked,” poetry,
according to Kant, does not present itself as either representing or even interested
in such thoughts: neither the mind nor the “imagination” it “sets into freedom” is
the object of whose “verbal expression” poetry, Kant states, must fall short. Rather
than dream the possibility of a mind untethered to language, a new and no less
mythological Promethean power uncriticized or unbound, or imagine an
“imagination” “free[d]” once and for all from the necessary inadequacy of any
conceptual representation to the “fullness of thoughts,” Kant reverses any such
“idealist” speculative tendencies by suggesting that the relationship of poetry to
judgment may itself compose a monogram of another kind. “True to form,” as the
commonplace “inadequate expression” goes (“inadequate,” since, in the Critique, as
in poetry, to be “true to form” is already, or a priori, to be true to content), Kant
continues his analysis by proceeding in the opposite sense, now considering “the
art of poetry” not as it relates to imagination but, rather, to the given empirical
world, and this is where Kant’s theory of poetry becomes, in the fundamental
terms of his moral theory, “really” (rather than merely phenomenally) “interesting,”
or – to use his own explicitly euphemistic disclaimer for any attempt to describe
that which, by deﬁnition, can never be adequately described – where poetry itself,
as Kant describes it, becomes, “as it were” (“gleichsam”), “really” “Good.” His
analysis of the conceptual limits of the artistic medium that “sets the imagination
in freedom” describes the way in which its practitioners makes us “feel” able to
“judge:”

[Poetry] strengthens the mind in that it allows it to feel its free, self-actuating
capability, independent of determination by nature, for regarding and judging
nature as a phenomenon from viewpoints it does not of itself present, either to
sense or understanding, in experience, and thus of using nature on behalf of,
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and, as it were, as a schema of the supersensible.

[(Die Dichtkunst) stärkt das Gemüt, indem sie es sein freies, selbsttätiges
und von der Naturbestimmung unabhängiges Vermögen fühlen lässt, die
Natur, als Erscheinung, nach Ansichten zu betrachten und zu beurteilen, die
sie nicht von selbst, weder für den Sinn noch den Verstand in der Erfahrung
darbietet und sie also zum Behuf und gleichsam zum Schema des Übersinnlichen
zu gebrauchen.354]

“Te art of poetry” allows the mind “to feel its faculty” – “free, self-actuating,
and independent of determination by nature” – for “regard[ing]” “nature” not as

354. Kant, KU , B 215, X: 265.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 183

the unfree, causally determined and phenomenally delimited “appearance” it

“itself ” “presents” “to our senses and understanding in experience,” but, rather, as it
can be “used” to relate to, or act “on behalf of,” something with which nothing
determined by nature can ever be commensurate, “the supersensible.” Poetry
allows us to “feel” our own capability for “judgment,” which is to say, “to feel” the
“faculty” for “feeling” (pleasure and pain) even while “feeling itself free” (from
cognition and interest).355 Yet this means that, following the very logic of the
Critique from which Kant’s formal establishment of the central intellectual and
sensory interaction he calls “judgment” stems, and on which its own, critically
original definition depends, poetry allows us to “feel” in such a way that only
the application of the general predicates, “is beautiful,” “is sublime,” can properly
designate and, in their abstraction from all particular content, adequately express.
It permits us to “regard” “nature” not as a cognitive object as conducive of personal
emotion, opinion, and employment as of scientific research, but rather as that
impure form most fundamental to cognition, “the schema,” “monogram of the
imagination a priori.” Turning nature, “so to speak,” inside out, freeing our ability
to cognize the sensory world as delimited, logically interrelated phenomena, into
one of “using” it to bring to mind the “supersensible,” poetry “strengthens” the “free
and self-actuating” “ability” of the mind to “judge:” to predicate in undefined words
(“beautiful,” “sublime”) an unknown object made of words, to “feel oneself free” in
an act of speech whose linguistic condition is that it “speaks for everyone.” In so
doing, poetry allows us not merely to “feel” something whose occasion we cannot
identify with a natural object, but to “use”“nature” itself as a “schema” for something
we can neither “feel” nor perceive in itself, something less like any thing than the
“freedom” “to think,” “the supersensible.”
Te relationship between poetry and judgment, then, is symmetrical and
mutual: judgment of poetry as poetry is based in a feeling, and poetry allows “the
mind” to “feel” it possesses the capacity “to judge.” Te interactive nature of that
relationship makes it as difficult to maintain and separate its two agents as to
decide with which of them it begins: whether it is our encounter with poetry that
(first) makes us “feel” able to judge, or our capacity for judgment that allows us to
encounter poetry in the way we do. Just as Kant notes in his discussion of the “free”
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exercise of “imagination” in “genius,” that “poetry” is the only such exercise “actually
capable of showing the full measure of aesthetic ideas,” in that it “ﬁnds no examples”
for its “representations” (whether of “ideas” or “experience”356) “in nature,” so “the
art of poetry” “strengthens” our “ability” to “say” something that does not constate
something else (whether a piece of conceptual knowledge, a moral precept, or an
individual feeling or interest) but rather responds, in the form of an impersonal
statement about an object, to the “feeling” we as subjects experience in perceiving

355. Kant, KU , B 14–18, X: 122–125.

356. Kant, KU , B 194–201, X: 250–55; for Kant on the historic productivity of “genius,”
see. n. 366, Section Four, this Chapter.

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184 Te Linguistic Condition

either a “freely delineated,” “dynamic form,” or “formlessness.”357 Judgment and

poetry, then, interact as acts of language do, and the comparability of their activities
is directly inserted into his “General Remarks” on the First Section of the Analytic
by Kant:

although, in the perception of a given object of the senses, [the imagination in

judgments of taste] is tied to a deﬁnite form of this object and to that extent has
no free play (as it does in the making of poetry), still one can easily conceive that
the object could furnish it with such a form as . . . the imagination, if it were lef
free to itself, would design.
[ob (im Geschmacksurteile die Einbildungskraf) zwar bei der Auﬀassung eines
gegebenen Gegenstandes der Sinne an eine bestimmte Form diese Objekts
gebunden ist und sofern kein freies Spiel [wie im Dichten] hat, so last sich doch
noch wohl begreifen: dass der Gegenstand ihr gerade eine solche Form an die
Hand geben könne, . . . wie sie die Einbildungskraf, wenn sie sich selbst frei
überlassen wäre.358]

“Tied to a deﬁnite form of [an] object,” the “play” of “perception” enacted in

judgment is not as “free” “as in the making of poetry,” Kant states, and, arising in the
context of the section of the Analytic devoted to judgment of the “beautiful,” this
parenthetical, differential comparison of “judging” and “poetry-making” appears as
reasonable as it is easy to overlook. Similarly, on the other end of the affective
spectrum of experience from “play,”“the feeling of the sublime in nature” is compared
to “the mood of the mind” in experiencing the real practice of “the moral,” i.e., the
“exclusively negative satisfaction” we feel in the “violence” inflicted upon our
“sensibility” by an “imagination” put to work “as an instrument” of “reason:”

In fact, a feeling for the sublime in nature cannot well be thought without joining
it to a mood of the mind similar to the moral. And though the immediate
pleasure in the beautiful in nature likewise requires and cultivates a certain
liberality of mode of thought, . . . in aesthetic judgments of the sublime the
violence [done to sensibility by reason] is presented as exercised through the
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imagination, working as an instrument of reason, itself.

Te satisfaction in the sublime in nature is also thus only negative (while that
in the beautiful is positive), namely, a feeling of the deprivation of the freedom of
imagination through [imagination] itself, because purposefully determined
according to another law than that of its empirical use.

357. On judgment as the act of “say[ing],” see Ibid., B 7, X: 117, and Chapter Two, Section
Five, this study. On aesthetic experience as an apprehension of “free” and “dynamic forms”
to the “formless,” see Kant, KU , B XLIX, 49–50, 79–82 X: 103, 146–47, 168–170.
358. Te comparison between “the imagination in judgment” and “in poetry” appears at
the opening of the General Remarks to the First Section of the Analytic; see Kant, KU , B 69,
X: 160.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 185

[In der Tat last sich ein Gefühl für das Erhabene der Natur nicht wohl denken,
ohne eine Stimmung des Gemüts die der zum Moralischen ähnlich ist, damit zu
verbinden; und, obgleich die unmittelbare Lust am Schönen der Natur gleichfalls
eine gewisse Liberalität der Denkungsart . . . voraussetzt und kultiviert . . . im
ästhetischen Urteile über das Erhabene diese Gewalt durch die Einbildungskraf
selbst, als einem Werkzeuge der Vernunf, ausgeübt vorgestellt wird.
Das Wohlgefallens am Erhabenen der Natur ist daher auch nur negativ (statt
dessen das am Schönen positive ist), nämlich ein Gefühl der Beraubung der
Freiheit der Einbildungskraf durch sie selbst, indem sie nach einem andern
Gesetze, als dem des empirischen Gebrauchs, zweckmässig bestimmt wird359].

Tis analytic operation of identifying, so as to compare, otherwise mutually

exclusive – “negative” and “positive” – outcomes is a familiar constituent of the
“architectonic” plan of its “building” “sketched” at the very outset of the Critique.360
Rather than fitting them to a dialectical exposition of givens or an organon-like
design, Kant organizes the interacting operations of the intellectual faculties he
analyzes into a free-standing, self-defining “system” by elaborating and constructing
a kind of equilibrium of forces between them.361 Whether resulting in limited
knowledge of phenomenal objects, a feeling of pleasure or pain in perceiving the
form of an object in the absence of knowledge, or the freedom to act morally, i.e.,
in the absence of both knowledge and affect, the operations that one individual
Critique posits, another one takes away. Te same organizing principle of exchange
maintains the cohesion of the internally divided mediation provided by the Tird
Critique itself. Just as the beautiful affords “positive,” the sublime affords “negative
satisfaction,” and the “free play” (of imagination and understanding) in the former
compares with the “violen[t]” “deprivation” of “imagination” through “imagination
itself ” in the latter – this last operation further subdividing a single faculty,
“imagination,” into the comparable, negative and positive functions of subject and
object of action respectively.
Such an architectonic method of coordinating comparable activites across the
Critique does not obtain, however, in the section of the Analytic describing the
necessarily incomparable, because non-objectifiable perceptual experiences we
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359. Kant, KU., B 117, X: 194–95 (emphasis in text).

360. Kant, KrV, B 27, III: 65; cf. Kant, Logik, A 143, VI: 523.
361. While Kant’s creation of a formal “system” for understanding empirical experience
may seem anachronistic when viewed from the momentary standpoint aﬀorded by
changing historical and cultural – including philosophical – norms, its permanent analogue
remains Saussure’s equally groundbreaking theory of language as “language” (langue), i.e., as
neither an “organic” nor accidental product of physical and “social” history as it “appears . . .
at ﬁrst sight,” but, at any moment of its operation, as it is in its “true nature,” an internally
coherent and self-sustaining “system” allowing its objects, “signs,” to be “exchanged” as
“values” (Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, “Introduction,” pp. 26, 34–5,
et passim.).

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186 Te Linguistic Condition

judge “sublime.” Abandoning any attempt to balance negative with positive, Kant
instead describes the “naming” of the “sublime” by conjoining the acts of judging
and poetry-making into a single mandatory, simultaneously experiential and
moral action. What we read in this wrenching juxtaposition of descriptions is a
word-for-word cancellation of the analogical perspective required for analytic
comparisons in the ﬁrst place: discrete phenomena replaced by dimensionless
surfaces, the position of sensing, knowing subject destroyed by forces perceived
but unknown. Te absolute identiﬁcation of the language describing “how the
poets see” with the detailed relation of the “sight” described –language here
describing not the content of a visual object but rather that of something we might
call “sight” – condenses the acts of poetry-making and judging into a unilateral,
modal assertion predicated by the single most arresting descriptive passage in the
entire tripartite Critique. Having explained that, “when we name the sight of the
starry sky sublime,” “we must” not “lay at the foundation” of that “judgment”
“concepts” of the “worlds” and “suns” the sky contains, “but merely how we see it, as
an extensive vault that touches all,” Kant continues:

Just so, must the sight of the ocean [not be judged sublime] according to the way
that we, enriched with miscellaneous bits of knowledge (which are, however, not
contained within immediate perception), think it . . . but rather merely as the
poets do it, according to that which the appearance in [or appearance on the
surface of] the eye shows – approximately, when it is regarded while quiet, as a
clear mirror of water which is merely bounded by the sky, but when it is unquiet,
as an abyss threatening to devour all – must we still be able to ﬁnd [the ocean]
sublime.
[Eben so den Anblick des Ozeans nicht so, wie wir, mit allerlei Kenntnissen (die
aber nicht in der unmittelbaren Anschauung enthalten sind) bereichert, ihn
denken . . . sondern man muss den Ozean bloss, wie die Dichter es tun, nach dem,
was der Augenschein zeigt, etwa, wenn er in Ruhe betrachtet wird, als einen
klaren Wasserspiegel, der bloss von Himmel begrenzt ist, aber ist er unruhig, wie
einen alles zu verschlingen drohenden Abgrund, dennoch erhaben ﬁnden
können.362]
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To judge an appearance sublime is to “see” it and “name” it as such. In order,

however, to see it as such we “must” regard it as “the poets do,” as an appearance
without recognizable contours, seen as if not with but rather as it appears “in” or
“upon the eye” (“Augenschein”). Similarly, the act of speaking what they see is the
condition of the poets seeing as poets, just as the act of “nam[ing]” it deﬁnes our
judgment of the sublime. Both poetry-making and judgment are acts of language,
in which “nature,” available to us only in experience, is “used” as a “schema,”
available to us only in language; yet the nature represented in this conﬂation of

362. Kant, KU B 118–19, X: 196 (emphasis in text).

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 187

judgment, “seeing,” and poetry-making is linguistic through and through.363 A

“schema for the supersensible,” it is still sensible, like a “monogram;” “a product of
the pure imagination a priori,” it still perceives something external to the viewer, if
in a distinctly nonphenomenal way.
In violently equating, rather than exchanging, the mode and object of “sight”
in poetry and judgment alike, Kant makes clear that judgment, too, never
merely reports on the known. Instead of representing either “nature” or the “feeling”
of the subject “so speaking” (“so sprechen”), it predicates, as if for the first time,
the object that occasions that feeling, making “it” the subject of a verbal equation
with a quality (“beautiful,” “sublime”).364 Neither based on nor aimed at the
acquisition of scientific knowledge, but rather articulating the basis of the
mind’s “power” to “feel” itself “free” of “conceptual constraints,” such acts of speech
are the linguistic condition of the “self-actuating” practice of poetry defined by
Kant, its “independence” from both “the determination of nature” and our “natural”
or phenomenal and causally determined selves. Tis same independence, moreover,
constitutes our ability “to judge,” and poetry in particular “strengthens” it. Poetry,
then, is as much an object of judgment, assigned by Kant’s theory of judgment the
“highest rank” among all the arts, as it is the artform that “allows” the mind “to
judge” to begin with, to “regard” “nature” in a way distinct from either our cognitive
represention or instrumental use of it. Yet poetry does something more than offer
us a different, “aesthetic” view of the natural world. It allows the mind instead to
“use” that world as poetry itself does, “at the behest” of some thing or power
“independent” of perception that Kant calls “the supersensible.”
For both poetry and judgment, that “use” is verbal. What poetry composes,
judgment reads, but this is to say that poetry is the aesthetic object whose particular
“experience,” that of reading or hearing words, rather than intuiting or perceiving
objects, is “use[]d” by the “mind” it “strengthens” in the same way it itself “uses”
“nature” – not as delimited phenomenal representation, or unrepresentable
transcendental Idea, but as “schema,” or delimited and indelible signature, of a
“pure imagination a priori,” independent of any particular sense perception. As put
to verbal “use” by poetry – its composition and its reading – the unfree
“appearance[s]” “present[ed]” to us by “nature” are turned into “schemata” for the
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freedom to so use them, the “free, self-actuating” capacity of the mind to imagine,
and to “judge” them as such.
In the “art of poetry,” in other words, it is not counterbalancing faculties of
experience but language and nature “themselves” that exchange places according to
Kant, the latter put into the service of the former, not for personal or cognitive
representational purposes but “at the behest” of the “supersensible.” Te language
of poetry “uses” “nature” to do for the “inadequate expression” of the “fullness of

363. As discussed in the supplementary work to this study, this loss of perspective, as of
all recognizable figures, defining the activity of seeing it represents, defines the openly
“prosaic” diction and subject matter of Wordsworth’s poetry and poetics. See Words’ Worth.
364. Kant, KU , B 18, X: 124; see Chapter Two, Section Eight, this study.

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188 Te Linguistic Condition

thought” that is conceptual discourse what the “schema” does for cognition of
nature: serve as “monogram” of a power of the mind it cannot itself represent.
Poetry uses “nature” as a “schema” to express that which any representation of
nature can itself only inadequately express and, in that “natural” representation of
its own inadequacy, attains the rank of highest artform, which is to say, that which
shows itself most inadequate to the immeasurable task it alone can perform. Poetry
is the highest artform because it represents its own utilization of nature both as
necessary and as necessarily inadequate; and because poetry is that artform
inherently lacking in adequate “expression” for its real content – the reality,
independence from natural conditions, or “freedom” of “thought” – its “use” of
nature expresses or externalizes the most “internal” medium, the schema. Te
peculiar representational medium that is the language of poetry appears to hold a
mirror not to nature but to the “hidden” “monogram” of “pure imagination, a
priori,” to present to us the signs of that a priori power, now not as abstract
monogram but an undelimitable verbal content, in descriptions of scenes of nature
that “appear” to us not natural but “sublime.”
In representing “the sight of the ocean” not as a function of but in abstraction
from knowledge, as something without phenomenal limitations that we nonetheless
perceive, the language of poetry displays – as if it were, “so to speak,” “the ocean” –
both the “depth” and “extension” of thought informing Kant’s Critique, endowing
the internal cognitive form of the schema with the external identity of visible,
material nature. Yet, it “uses nature, as it were, as a schema” not for the purpose of
representing either schema or nature – of rendering the former concrete and the
latter, verbal, and thereby fulﬁlling or fully “expressing” the reality either of internal
form or external world. Rather, “poetry uses nature, as it were, as a schema” because
it is the only way in which it can be neither schematic nor natural, but “poetry,”
which is to say, the only way it can represent, in the appearance of the very opposite
or negation of the same, the supersensible that is its content, the “fullness of
thoughts.” Representational language that does not represent its content is the
inherently “inadequate” language of poetry, the artform in which “external” and
“internal,” “nature” and “schema,” “appear” to take on each other’s identity. Yet this is
to say that nothing in poetic language – neither the apparently concrete and
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abstract terms it uses, nor its necessary, or grammatical, and conventional, or

stylistic forms – “is” “as” it “appears” to be: like a “schema” that “must” be both active
and imperceptible, buried “in the depths of the soul,” in order to function as such,
the true content of poetry must be “hidden” from view. For, rather than represent
each other, the things Kant calls “schematism” and “nature” – the “art” (“Kunst”)
whose readymade availability to enactment (“Handgriﬀe”) allows for perception,
and the objects that “art” allows us to perceive, respectively – remain categorically
distinct from each other, thus allowing us “to think” the possibility of that which we
cannot perceive, and that Kant calls, for that reason, “the supersensible.” Just as acts
of judgment remain divorced from cognitions of objects, and divide the “feeling” of
the speaking subject from the qualitative predication of objects they perform, so
“the art of poetry” maintains the “art” of the “schema” without which perception
and “feeling,” cognition and its occlusion, could themselves not be thought.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 189

4. Poetry and the Judgment of Critique

Kant may use the notion of the schema to make possible our knowledge of nature,
to make nothing less than science and philosophy themselves possible. Te schema,
he states, is, “so to speak, a monogram of pure imagination a priori” – something,
in other words, that Kant cannot properly express within the limits of his own
conceptual discourse, yet, nonetheless, does not simply dream up. Yet, according to
Kant’s philosophy it is not philosophy but “the art of poetry” that “uses” nature “as
a schema for the supersensible:” as sign of the freedom of thinking to use
representations as representations, a means of articulation unbounded by natural
sensory limitations (itself imagined here as “a monogram”), and of the freedom,
from even the most elemental determinations of nature, of imagination
(theoretically imagined here as “pure”) itself. At once signpost, avenue, and sole
appearance of freedom, hovering between subject and object, as between the
capacities of language and perception, and so strictly identifiable with neither, the
schematic use of nature by poetry recognizes, as Kant recognizes with regard to his
critical project, that any either purely “natural” or fully nonreferential (or, to use
Kant’s terms, not merely “fictional” but “falsely fictional”365) means of expression
must be inadequate to the representation of nonrepresentational activity it wants
to express. When poetry represents natural phenomena not as objects but as the
effect of “seeing as the poets do,” it thus does so in the manner Kant calls “genius,”
not because it has no use for such phenomena but precisely because, in the act of
using them, it can take no “example” found in “nature” as its lead.366 Poetry, on

365. See n. 317, Section Two, this Chapter.

366. See Kant, KU , B 180–182, 201, X: 241–42, 255 for his profoundly complex, because
practical (rather than ideational-ideological) account of “genius” – closely presaging
Wordsworth’s in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads – as the production of, instead of subservience
to “determined rules,” a praxis in which the limited cognitive abilities and unlimited “free”
action of speech analyzed separately in the First and Tird Critiques eﬀectively intersect
(what Kant calls “the exemplary originality of the natural gif of a subject [making] free use
of his cognitive faculty”). Perhaps most importantly, Kant’s conception of “genius” includes
its essential capacity to produce history. For while the particular productivity that Kant
calls”genius” must be “lost” to every attempt to mime or “imitat[e]” it, its singular historical
eﬀectivity is to “awaken” future negations of imitation, the “revolutions,” breaks or
discontinuities in the reproduction of cultural norms that, arising with “the feeling of [their]
own originality,” provide the example of a temporally productive “freedom from rules” in
“another genius in posterity.”

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190 Te Linguistic Condition

Kant’s account, takes nature much as it takes language, the discursive “world” of
expression itself: indeed, from the practical point of view of poetry, natural and
linguistic determinations are equivalent, which is to say, not equally inadequate
but equally useful in their inadequacy – as either merely representable or mere
representation – to that which they are purposed to express.
Te “use” of such inadequacy, the expression of such lack, can give the mind some
idea of its own “purposive” “occupations,” Kant continues.367 Yet it does this in the
only “produc[tive]” way that representational language can: not by proﬀering
grounds for moral actions and consequences but rather their near opposite, “mere
play.” Kant states: “[Poetry] plays with mere [or illusory] appearances, which it
produces at its pleasure, or will, without thereby deceiving, for it declares its activity
[or occupation] to be mere play, one which, however, can be purposively used by the
understanding and its activities [or occupations]” (“[Die Dichtkunst] spielt mit dem
Schein, den sie nach Belieben bewirkt, ohne doch dadurch zu betrügen; denn sie
erklärt ihre Beschäfigung selbst für blosses Spiel, welches gleichwohl vom Verstande
und zu dessen Geschäfe zweckmässig gebraucht werden kann”368). “Play with mere
[or illusory] appearances” that declares itself as such does not “deceive” us unless we
assume “mere play” and its “purposive” use “by understanding” to be opposed, which
is to say, unless we have not read the foregoing Critique. But in that case we would
also be unable to understand either “poetry” or “judgment” themselves, the way in
which and, moreover, why their own identities are both practically and conceptually
interdependent in Kant. For, just as “judgment” alone is capable both of deﬁning
“poetry” and “judging” it “the highest art,” in that, instead of taking its “example[s]”
from nature,” it “uses” “nature” as a “schema” for (rather than truly illusory
representation of) “the supersensible,” so “poetry” alone provides “judgment” with
exemplary descriptions of how and what one must “see” in order to be able to “judge,”
i.e., transcriptions of the sensory world “as it appears to the eye,” unmediated by a
priori cognition, that only the active language of “poetry” can provide.
As the “schema” is not only a necessary form of “linkage” between our capacities
for sense perception and intellection, but one whose usage indicates that
“imagination” acts a priori or “before” them, judgment is the critical, “middle link”
(“Mittelglied”) relating the necessarily distinct yet overlapping activities in which
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we share: those of logical and conceptual “understanding;” of sensory, or a posteriori,

and nonsenory, or a priori, “imagination;” and, ﬁnally, of “feeling” “free” enough not
only to feel but to “speak” not for one’s self but “for every” self. To speak this way is
to speak in the language of a “general voice,” in which “general” means nothing less
nor more than to speak as speech must always be spoken in order to be speech, the
singularly “common,” irreducibly abstract mode of enacting “sense.” In direct
contrast to any sensation, this is a “sense” never limited to any individual moment
or piece of space, just as it is never its temporary speaker’s alone, in that its articulate
production depends a priori on an external social form. And that formal externality

367. Kant, KU , B 216, X: 265–266.

368. Ibid.

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“Judgment” and the Genesis of What We Lack 191

reﬂects no predetermined mode of conformity or empirically derived rule or

“norm,” but rather the inherently social “possibility” of “free” agency itself, i.e., the
only purely other-directed, which is to say,“moral” ability to “think.” And if judgment
is the outer side of the “supersensible” act of thinking, a nonprescriptive, critical
faculty for coordinating, rather than being unilaterally defined by, the limitations of
both applied (or discursive) and pure (or non-discursive) reason, then poetry turns
the Critique, which posits and defines those faculties, outside in, “freely” making
the external side of reason, that of “nature” as we perceive and cognize it, into the
internal “schema” of its own purposes, foremost among these that of allowing the
mind to “feel” its critical “ability” “to judge.” Poetry uses nature as that necessarily
inadequate “schema of the supersensible” which allows the discursive representation
of nature by understanding to serve the purpose of presenting understanding with
that which it can never quite understand. If in aesthetic judgment we see no
particular thing or object but “feel” something defined only by its universal
“communicability,” poetry communicates to us nothing but our universal ability to
“judge” things and so see them differently. For the “nature” of which poetry makes
its own articulate “use” presents to understanding neither a theoretically determined
faculty of mind nor a cognitively determined representation of the world but rather,
and in place of these, our ability to think in such a way that will always want
expression, to think even the possibility of just such a wanting of expression. Tis
expressive lack ensures “the fullness of thoughts” by inscribing articulation into the
very basis of thinking while stripping it of discursive conceptualization, which is as
much as to say, by expressing nothing less nor more than a “monogram of pure
imagination” at work.
Tat is the subreption, the subterfuge of poetry: to “appear” to be “mere play”
while performing – indeed, in order to perform – the most critically consequential
kind of action within the mind. As for the basis or grounds of that subreption, the
very notion is a contradiction in any event, as Kant, just before coining his own
singularly thought-provoking expression for the schema – that of a “monogram”
or stamp of the imagination previous to all experience – deceptively, indeed, nearly
poetically, asserts. While denying that the a priori or a posteriori basis of the
explicitly linguistic “condition” of a uniquely “common sense” could or even should
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be “researched,”369 in describing “the schematism of our understanding in the

viewing of appearances and their mere form” as “an art hidden in the depths of
the human soul,” Kant posits the existence not of a grounding principle or cause
but of a techne concealed within us, “the nature of whose readymade mechanisms
we will only ever with great diﬃculty discover and lay unconcealed before our
eyes.”370 Te a priori “art” of the schema ﬁrst allowing the otherwise incommunicable

369. Cf. n. 57, Section One, Chapter Two, this study.

370. Kant, KU , B 182, III:190: “Dieser Schematismus unseres Verstandes, in Ansehung
der Erscheinungen und ihrer blossen Form, ist eine verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der
menschlichen Seele, deren wahre Handgriﬀe wir der Natur schwerlich jemals abraten, und
sie unverdeckt vor Augen legen werden.”

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192 Te Linguistic Condition

capacities of sense perception and conception to communicate with each other371

is enacted in the a priori “communicability” of the specifically verbal medium of
judgment in Kant, even as its empirical and conceptual operation, in mediating
sensory experience by discursivity, reveals to us, in the “deepest,” i.e., most
immeasurable sense, the world.
Revealing nothing by revealing that one is concealing everything; revealing
everything by concealing nothing, including that which one cannot express, Kant
both offers the “art” of the schema for us to “judge” and buries it “in the hidden
depths” of that for which, no expression being adequate to it, we call, “the human
soul.” Lacking “imagination,” in the conventional, a posteriori sense of sensuous
images for the “hidden art” of which the schema is the a priori imprint or
monogram; and lacking the art of poetry his critical theory of judgment defines as
the “the highest of the arts,” in that, using sensible “nature” as “schema for the
supersensible,” its language can communicate nature “as the poets see it” – as some
unknown thing of infinite extension, duration, or depth – what more effective
expression of the inseparable relation of judgment and poetry at the core of his
Critique than Kant’s own open, verbal burial of the techne or “art” they share. Te
“play[ful],” verbal “use” that the poet makes of “nature,” as “schema” for something
or some power unavailable to our temporally and spatially delimited perceptions
of nature, must be found wanting in a critical philosophy whose theory of
knowledge is based on the limiting presupposition of the schema. Yet, the “art” of
the “schema,” Kant suggests, is also one that, like the poets, every subject must “use”
in order to perceive, “feel,” and judge, rather than “know.”
In relating “judgment,” sole “power” to mediate between the necessarily
noncommunicating “realms” of his Critique that he more or less invents, to its own
central model for conceiving and enacting that power, the verbal “seeing” known
as “poetry,” Kant expresses – exposes and buries – the “art” for which there is “no
example in nature” at the basis of his Critique: not poetry, certainly, but, perhaps, a
stroke of genius, which is to say, a judgment that, based on the “communicability”
of a techne, must lack a proper object – a judgment of critique.
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371. Cf. n. 345, this Chapter, Section Tree.

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Chapter 4

K L E I ST ’ S M E R E F O R M A L I T I E S

1. Kant and Kleist: Representation and Irony

Whether or not Kleist truly grasped the architectonic impasses and structural
limits written into Kant’s hypothesis that all human cognition is necessarily, or a
priori, representational in nature, no other writer, not even Nietzsche, more
accurately represented, a posteriori, the representational limits of objective
knowledge ﬁrst theorized by Kant’s Critique, nor, for that matter, the annihilation
of those limits by the kind of acts that Kant called “free,” and that his Logic deﬁned
as not merely “nominal” or “discursive” objects of knowledge but “real.”372 Kleist’s

372. See Kant, Logik A 221–222, § 106, “Nominal- und Real-Definitionen,” VI: 575–76.
Cf. Chapter Two, Section Five, n. 120, this study, and, for Diderot’s similar view, Chapter
Two, Section Seven, n. 195, n. 201, n. 205, this study. Gauging the degree of Kant’s
direct influence upon Kleist is (to recall Kant’s turn of phrase regarding the “research” of
“common sense”) neither a feasible nor desirable task. More significant, this study argues,
than any purported causal relation between them is that both philosopher and author
understand cognition as a discursive activity requiring representation and subordinated,
as discourse, to critical limitations. In Kant, the central division between delimited,
causally structured cognition and noncognitive, free (moral) action is at once enacted and
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reﬂected in the theoretical and structural division between the First and Second Critique. In
Kleist, the collision of narratively incompatible instances of cognition and freedom
composes the occasion and progress of the narrative itself. Te critical relation of each to its
ostensible subject matter – “history”/“story” (“Geschichte”) in the case of Kleist, and
causality in the case of Kant’s representational epistemology – is brilliantly observed by
Carol Jacobs, in “Te Style of Kleist,” diacritics, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Winter 1979): 47–61: “One
suspects then that no “Geschichte” can escape its own disruptive repetition from history to
story, and perhaps this means that it is impossible to have a text that does not thereby
ultimately become critical in the Kantian sense of the word (reason undertaking the task of
self-knowledge [Smith, p. 9], and critical even beyond the limits of sense” (59; see 55–59).
See also Brodsky, “Kant and Narrative Teory,” Chapter 2 of Te Imposition of Form,
pp. 21–25, esp. An historical account of the relationship is provided in Ludwig Muth, Kleist
und Kant (Köln: Kölner Universitäts-Verlag, 1954).

193

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194 Te Linguistic Condition

distinctive stylistic approach to the problem of representation – unlike, and

unmistakable for, any other in German letters – made him Kant’s literary
Doppelgänger whether Kleist willed that twinship or not. True to the double
philosophical constraints of Kant’s Critique – that of knowledge theorized as
indeed achievable, but only by way of representation, and that of free action
theorized as not only possible but necessary, yet only without the intervention of
representational knowledge – Kleist, like Kant, would have found nothing to be
gained but further mystification of the possible (what Kant called the “mystical
illumination” preached by “monarch[ic]” “mystagogen”373) by attempts to replace
the mutually critical limits of our capabilities with absolute fictions of either
positivist-empiricist or idealist persuasion, whether such fictions are literary or
philosophical in vocabulary. Te spectrum of agents and sufferers of action
narrated and staged by Kleist’s stories, anecdotes, and dramas extends freely from
the spiritual to the prosaic, the regal to the accidental, the whimsical to the literally
earth-shattering, and the mythological to the involuntary and mechanical. Among
all these (and more), however, transcendent figures do not figure, precisely in that
they would “appear” by way of discourse to transcend discourse in the mode of
divinities. Indeed, using the impersonal negative version of a verbal phrase ofen
employed narratively by Kleist in a personally alienating, if grammatically positive
sense – that of persons reduced, marionettenhaf, to “playing roles”374 excluding
freedom of movement along with consciousness from their performance – we may
say that, in Kleist’s own fictions, the fiction of unconditional transcendence, in the
form of any figure, spielt gar keine Rolle.
Unlike Kant’s Critique for the most part,375 however, Kleist’s understanding of the
limits of discourse and discursive logic faced an additional a priori limit: the added
constraint, and complication, of representing experiential knowledge in a medium
that is itself representational and discursive to begin with, that is, of representing the
very limits of cognitive experience in the already inherently representational
discourse of fiction, language always at a self-reflexive remove from the “real” it
represents. Perhaps it was that hall-of-mirrors-effect, of fiction representing the
experience of representational experience, one set of representational limits
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373. See Kant, “Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie”
(“On a newly elevated superior tone in Philosophy”) Werkausgabe, op.cit. VI: 386, 383n, 388.
374. See “Die Marquise von O . . .,” in Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe
2 Bde., Hrsg. Helmut Sembdner (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), II: 106,
112, 139. All further quotations from Kleist are from this edition, and denoted by volume
and page no.
375. Te most signiﬁcant exception to this rule would be Kant’s own introduction of
narration into his deduction of the origin of the “concept of freedom” in the Second Critique.
See Kant, KprV, A 54, VII: 140, and Chapter Two, Section One, n. 45, this study. I have
analyzed the equivocal status and critical necessity of this narrative turn in Kant, in Te
Imposition of Form, pp. 81–86, esp.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 195

mirroring, ad inﬁnitum, the other, that, understandably, drove Kleist to distraction.

Yet just as, at the end of the dialogue narrated in “On the Marionette-Teater,” Kleist
offers the most effective (which is to say, regressive) representation of this effectively
infinite regression, in the image of a “concave mirror” whose own illusory imaging
of unfathomable depths is both the merely mechanical effect of lumens ricocheting
between inter-“facing” surfaces and a canny, visual representation of every –
material or mental – force that, invisibly “hitting” or confronting a surface, effects a
division between immediacy and “reflection,” so Kleist’s stories compel us to traverse
the arc of the mind delineating and holding these two separate realms of experience
in place. And what emerges at the other “end” of that traversal – the result to which
the airtight construction and pointed impenetrability of these stories representing
representational experience tend – are individual, at once externally determined
and self-reflexive “realizations” of the fact that fictions of narrative and dramatic
action are both the only way and, necessarily, the always misleading way to represent
experience in any “real” sense at all.
From and reflecting this condition of fiction – of a knowledge of experience not
hypothetically theorized, as it is by Kant, but rather represented, both lexically and
diegetically, as limited by experience a priori – the peculiar slant of the literary
discourse that Kleist employs extends. For, whether spoken in the first or authorial
third person, the words of Kleist’s works appear to glance off the depth of the
events they represent like light off a theatrical scrim, their illumination angled to
skim the surface of a fabric pulled so taut and thin as to become, at any moment
that angle is altered, translucent, rather than visible as a fabric at all. Kleist’s textual
simulations of a purposefully fabricated, superficial perspective – his training of
discourse so as to conceal, and, at another moment, reveal a pivotal scene already
“there,” already “taking place” behind a central screen, rather than kept waiting, like
an omnipotent deus ex machina or circumstantial dénouement, off in the wings –
could hardly be more in keeping with Kant’s theoretization of all the things of
experience as merely phenomenal, but no less consequential appearances, the
vertiginous, simultaneous sense of the surface and unstated, noumenal depth of
experience that every line of Kant’s own discursive project conveys.
Tus, whatever the real as opposed to theoretical conflict between our cognitive
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mediations of experience, on the one hand, and the reality of the things and events
we experience, on the other, as Kleist himself is said to have experienced during his
“Kant-Krise,” it is fair to say that whenever no such crisis or even critical interest
regarding the formalization required for any actual cognition, let alone all
communicability of experience, to take place – when the representational relation of
knowledge to experience, and suspension of representation in judgment, appear,
instead, eclipsed by their conflation, as if the artifice of representation that we not
only know and reason, but, increasingly, live and die by, could simply be occluded or
theoretically suspended by paradoxical assertions of an entirely passive, “purely”
sensory reception of a phenomenality somehow without phenomenality, or
appearance of any kind – then Kleist, no stranger, in theory or practice, to eclipses of
reason and other natural disasters, may offer the most timely, because untimely,
critique of such nonreflective practices. For, unlike all deadly confusions nonsensically

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196 Te Linguistic Condition

equating “language” with a variety of nonlanguages – pictures, bodies, magically

sensate matter, purely sensory “non-sense” or, for that matter, materially transcendent
“mathematics” (the list does not so much grow as cycle through itself repetitively) –
and identifying words and any formal sign operative within any linguistic system as
such with the realm of purely materially given and thus essentially nonverbal,
Empirie or ‘stuﬀ,’376 Kleist’s writing does not substitute a selective découpage and
assemblage of verbal snippets for thinking. Te conspicuously crafed semantic
ambiguity of the very mechanics of Kleist’s prose, its freighting of the essential
sequentiality of syntax with the full weight of discrete alongside narrative meaning,
reveals both the critical diﬀerence between representation and whatever object,
state, or action is represented, and “succeeds” in relating these in an at once clearly
meaningful and immediately opaque, unrecognizable way. Indeed, Kleist may be
most meaningfully read whenever sterile monisms prevail instead, precisely because,
for its active readers no less than its actor-characters, Kleist’s prose achieves the
contrary: recognizing, in a supremely dialectical fashion, its “success” is “failure,”

376. Te facile use and ﬁgural abuse of the term, “archaeology,” as a kind of passe-partout
replacement for critical historical analysis of the complex bases and content of humanly
composed objects and practices, popularized by Foucault’s depiction of “history” as a series
of static scenographies of domination, has come to stand for such reifying tendencies of
late. Of the many incisive critiques, informing the history of philosophy and theory, that
take aim at such doubly reductive, i.e., not merely thought-free but thought-annihilating
compilations of human products, as if merely empirical extants, under arbitrary “taxonomic”
themes and names, none may surpass Hegel’s early exposé (Phenomenology [1807]) of the
tiresome “trick” of the “method,” passing oﬀ “lifeless determinations” for “wisdom,” of
“labeling” “natural and intellectual forms” alike as one does “boxes or cans in a grocer’s stall”
or “a skeleton with scraps of paper glued to it:”

Te knack of this kind of wisdom is as quickly learned as it is easy to practice; the

repetition of it, once familiar, becomes as insuﬀerable as the repetition of a conjuring
trick already seen through . . . What results from this method of labeling everything in
the heavens and earth, every natural and intellectual form, with a few determinations of
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a general schema so as better to order them . . . is namely a [taxonomic] table resembling

a skeleton with bits of paper glued to it or the rows of sealed boxes or cans with stickers
stuck on them in a grocer’s stall . . . lifeless determinations . . . of an understanding
as dead as such cognition is external. [Der Pﬁﬀ einer solchen Weisheit ist so bald
erlernt, als es leicht ist, ihn auszuüben; seine Wiederholung einer eingesehenen
Taschenspielerkunst. . . . Was diese Methode, allem Himmlischen und Irdischen, allen
natürlichen und geistigen Gestalten die paar Bestimmung . . . aufzukleben und auf
diese Weise alles einzurangieren, hervorbringt, ist . . . nämlich eine Tabelle, die
einem Skelette mit angeklebten Zettelchen oder den Reihen verschlossener Buchsen
mit ihren aufgeheteten Etiketten in einer Gewürzkrämerbude gleicht [. . .]leblosen
Bestimmungen . . . eines gleich toter Verstand . . . und gleich äusserliches Erkennen.
(G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie dies Geistes, in Teorie-Werkausgabe, XX Bde., Hrg. E.
Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969–71], III: 50–51).

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 197

Kleist lucidly represents the relationship of representation and represented as

elusive – as difficult as it is necessary to the very possibility of acting to ascertain.
Te ways in which Kleist enacts that difficulty are legion and deservedly well
known.377 Prosaic, representational and grammatical; narrative, spoken, and
interpolated, rather than overtly speculative: the shifs in meaning, as between
tragedy and comedy, that we experience in reading Kleist’s language convey an
underlying sense of language itself as appearance or “Schein,” just as they convey
experience itself as communicable only through a kind of formalism, the “regular”378
relation of events on which any account of experience depends. Easily and
nonetheless accurately, one speaks of Kleistian “irony” – that all in Kleist is never as
it seems. Yet the variety of formal and lexical ways in which Kleist writes – to quote
Goethe on discursive mediation – “mit Ironie,”379 make evident that no other
medium than discourse could so convincingly state and question its own sense,
enact its own self-evidence and concealment of evidence as richly and apparently
obliviously, as significantly and insouciantly, comedically and disastrously, or with
such lucidity and opacity, at every comprehensible and mysterious turn.
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377. See esp. Lilian Furst, “Double-Dealing in the Marquise von O . . .,” in Echoes and
Inﬂuences of German Romanticism, ed. M. S. Batts, A. W. Riley, and H. Wetzel (New York:
Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 85–95; Bernd Fischer, “Irony Ironized; Heinrich von Kleist’s Narrative
Stance and Friedrich Schlegel’s Teory of Irony,” European Romantic Review, Vol. 1, No. 1
(1990): 59–74; Helmut Schneider, “Standing and Falling in Heinrich von Kleist,” MLN ,
Vol 115, No. 3 (April 2000): 502–18; Bianca Teisen, “Simultaneity: A Narrative Figure in
Kleist,” MLN , Vol. 121, No. 3 (April 2008): 514–21. See also my “Whatever Moves You:
‘Experimental Philosophy’, 17–43 (40–43 esp.).
378. As described in Words’ Worth, this is Wordsworth’s term for the condition, conveyed
equally in poetry and prose by meter, that allows writing and reading to proceed past the
“overbalances” of which experience is composed.
379. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Vorwort zur Farbenlehre,” Werke, Hamburger
Ausgabe, XIV Bde., Hrsg. E. Trunz, et. al. (München: dtv, 1982), XIII: 317.

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198 Te Linguistic Condition

2. What happened: Misrepresentation and Missed

Representation in “Die Marquise von O . . .”
Te best – and least – well “known” example of the transparent obscurity of Kleist’s
prose occurs in the infamous sentence near the opening of the Marquise von O . . .,
that, hiding the story’s pivotal action in plain, narrative sight, at once enacts and
represents the inaccessibility of its buried content to actors and readers of the story
alike. Te single sentence upon which the celebrated suspense of the story will
hinge itself hinges upon a sign so literally self-eﬀacing as to involve no semantic
denotation at all. Standing for a break in representational content – an ostensible
marking of a lack of sense – that sign is the dash or “Gedankenstrich” appearing
just afer the story’s imperceptibly telling sentence begins: “Hier – traf er, da bald
darauf ihre erschrockenen Frauen erschienen, Anstalten, einen Artzt zu rufen;
versicherte, indem er sich den Hut aufsetzte, dass sie sich bald erholen würde; und
kehrte in den Kampf zurück.”380
Like the very event it both does and does not represent, Kleist’s most famously
confounding sentence turns conventions on their head even in the act of complying
with their formal norms. Following syntactic prescriptions and employing
commonplace turns of phrase, the sentence nonetheless renders its own sequential
understanding, and thereby, any translation or paraphrase of it inaccurate per
force. For the sense of Kleist’s utterance bifurcates between the syntactically
deferred and idiomatic, and immediate and literal meaning of a single verb: “traf ”
(“struck,” “hit,” “met”). A rendering of the sentence in English that reproduces the
obligatory syntactic position of the verb in the original would literally translate the
opening of the sentence as follows: “Here – struck he . . .”. Yet the further
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development of the sentence reveals that “traf,” its principal active verb, may mean
something else entirely, as deﬁned by its postponed predicate complement,

380. Kleist, II: 106. See n.386 for a necessarily disjointed, because syntactically and
lexically literal English translation of this sentence, whose regular German syntax cannot be
rendered in regular English syntax except through a series of smoothing transpositions.
Directly re-attaching to the conjugated verb “traf ” (“met,” “struck,” “hit”) its long postponed,
formulaic complement, as composed by Kleist, these literally “trans-lating” transpositions,
moving the contents of one end of Kleist’s sentence to the other, dispense with both the
diacritical “dash” directly preceding that active verb and the deictic “Here” the “dash”
immediately succeeds, thereby destroying by burying all access to the verb’s literal meaning.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 199

“Anstalten” (“preparations,” “measures,”). Read with that complement already in

mind, which is to say, retrospectively rather than sequentially, the main clause of
the sentence would have to be re-translated as follows: “Here – he took . . . measures
to call a doctor . . .”. Like the a priori spatial form of all cognitive phenomenal
perception hypothesized by Kant, the sequencing integral to every syntactic
utterance is determined by a priori grammatical rules. Te subordinate clause
intervening between the main active verb and its complement, itself introduced by
the ambiguous (either co-temporaneous or causal) conjunction, “da” (“while;” “in
that;” “since”) – “da ihre erschrockenen Frauen bald darauf erschienen” (“while [or
“in that;” “since”] her frightened women appeared soon thereafer”) – has the
progressive effect of effacing the immediate, physical meaning(s) of “treffen” (“hit,”
“struck,” “met”) with which the sentence begins, and replacing these recursively
with the contrary, secondary and idiomatically specific meanings, “take,” “make,”
that its delayed predication by “Anstalten” (“preparations;” “measures”) dictates.
Cloaked in conventionality, the first, apparently inconsequential verb of a single
sentence inconspicuously productive of the entire story to come will first be
recognized as such afer and apart from its having been read, when its duplicitous
significance is revealed to the reader externally, either by word of mouth or the
work of philology. In this it puts the reader in the “position” of the Marquise herself,
subjected to an “unwitting conception” on which all subsequent conceptions
depend.381 Like the apparently saving gesture by which the Graf – at first reading –
rescues the Marquise from violation, Kleist’s sentence demonstrates that any single
word, even one of apparently straightforward transitive significance like “treffen”
(“meet,” “strike”), and any even apparently meaningless or gratuitious sign, such as
a “Gedankenstrich,” a “line,” “stroke” or “dash” taking the place of “thought,” can
confound all understanding of the “story” of which it is a part.
Te problems for understanding that Kleist’s sentence reveals relate not only to
secondary problems of “translation.” For, while their syntactic and grammatical
norms distinguish the operations of linguistic systems from one another, their
positive, practical constitution occurs on the level of each sentence and subject of
which a language is capable. Language first produces subjects by linking them
verbally, both to each other and to non-subjects, composing, in so doing, an
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articulated world of action and interaction wholly dependent in its origin and
existence upon those relations. Yet the creation of grammatical subjects requires
acts of predication that, just as systematically, project our attention away from
them, both conceptually and syntactically. Just as the subject of a sentence only “is”
insofar as it “does” (including the doing of being done to, i.e., defined or modified
in some way), every sentence, every act of predication, is, in small, an act of
narration. And while narration, by definition, incorporates that which is different
from the subject it names, its specifically verbal delineation of the constitutive
relations in which any subject is engaged may prove either immediately to be, or
retrospectively to have been, a forking path. Not only the most celebrated

381. Kleist, II: 124.

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200 Te Linguistic Condition

Gedankenstrich in literature,382 but the entire sentence in which it originally occurs

(and appears “originally” to operate only syntactically), enacts the loss of a single
representable sense in the course of predication itself: the inability of a purely
graphic, nonrepresentational symbol or linear “stroke” (“Strich”) – “—” – to coincide,
linguistically and spatially, with the representational meaning of the deictic adverb
that immediately precedes it, “Hier.”383 As its own temporal “encounter” by any
reader demonstrates, no “—” can be “here” at one and the same moment in time: in
order to be intelligible as such, a purely graphic and a verbal deictic indicating a
single location can never coincide in space. Similarly, the conjugated transitive verb
(“traf ’) whose position, abutting a dash succinctly demarcating and separating it
from the directional, “here,” conveys “at ﬁrst blush” (to use another characteristically
Kleistian double-entendre384) the sense of a target directly and purposefully
“struck” – “Hier – traf er” – only to undergo the total alteration in meaning brought
about by its grammatically postponed completion, one, no less semantically
equivocal, subordinate clause later, by the formulaic object, “Anstalten” (“Hier –
traf er. . . . Anstalten:” “Here . . . he took . . . measures”). Any single reading (let alone

382. For a compelling discussion of the critical equivocal status of Kleist’s mischevious,
apparently gratuitously inserted dash, whose “narrative context . . . deliberately misleads the
reader into ignoring [it],” see Dorrit Cohn’s excellent “Kleist’s ‘Marquise von O . . .’: the Problem
of Knowledge,” Monatshef Vol. 67, No. 2, 1975 (129–44): 129. While underscoring the
imperceptible technical role of the dash in leading the reader of the story down the garden
path, Cohn views the Marquise’s failure to make the proper identification of the subject and
transitive action for which it stands in realist, psychological terms, concluding that “Kleist
endowed the Marquise with an unconscious form of knowledge unacknowledged by her
conscious self,” an “erotic knowledge” that, entailing a “frantic shutting out” that “paradoxically
betrays the presence of the knowledge within the self ” (133), echoes the self-deceiving
psychology of all Kleist’s characters: “Kleist so rarely provides insider views of his characters
because their psyches are usually subject to such violent and conflicting emotions that words
are powerless to describe them” (140). Tis study argues, by contrast, that what Cohn views as
the Marquise’s repression of powerful “emotions” may have never been objectifiable to begin
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with. On an epistemological level, then, the event simultaneously represented and buried by
Kleist’s “silent” (129) dash would be as incompatible with its “conscious,” narrative
representation as the appearance of natural “grace” in motion eﬀected by their manipulation
is known to the wooden limbs of Kleist’s “marionettes,” its enactment attributed, as they are
ultimately by the Marquise, to the superhuman powers of “Angel” or “Devil” instead.
383. Kleist, II: 106.
384. In the course of the narration of the “Marquise von O . . .” – story of an immediately
indecipherable physical act as uncontemplated by its subject as its object – the involuntary
physical act of blushing (variously, “becoming red,” “embarrassed,” “heated,” or “glowing”)
seen to transpose an unspoken, internal excitement to the face, accompanies nearly every
conscious meeting and inquiry regarding the relation between that subject and object. See
Kleist, II:106, 107, 110 (2x), 112, 116, 122, 125, 128, 130, 135, 136 (2x), 140. See also II: 110
and 113, in which a related “loss of color” (in the Graf ’s face) is noted instead.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 201

translation) of this most majestically misleading of sentences must indeed mangle

its meaning, and, in so doing, further conceal the content of its effectively
exclamatory, at once semantic and spatial indication (“Here—”) of a specific action,
removing, through their double, graphic and semantic representation, both the
mystery of the story and its “solution” equally undetectably from view.
Including and occluding the answers to the central referential and causal
questions of any narrative – who, what, where, how, and when? – Kleist’s sentence
renders these no more available to the reader than to the “unconscious”
(“bewusstlos”) Marquise herself, unrepresented object of a transitive action (“traf ”
[“met/struck”]) that, while originating in a distinct subject, “he,” (“er”), ends instead
in vaguely designated “measures” (“Anstalten”) whose own purely formal,
periphrastic sense contradicts the literal physical sense of the verb it complements,
effectively shrouding not only our own but that subject’s consciousness of what
“he” has done.385 Still, mangling English syntax instead of German semantics, so as
to reproduce the critical syntactic position of each element in the original and
juxtapose the alternative meanings that the crossing paths of its syntax and
grammar suggest, a literal, grammatical rendering of the sentence, viewed
retrospectively, might be graphically represented like this: “Here – struck/met/hit
he, in that/since/because shortly thereafer her terrified ladies appeared, measures
to call a doctor; assured, in that/while/because he put his hat on, that she would
recover soon; and turned back into the battle.”386
An additional consideration, however, renders the corrective aspirations of
even that ungainly syntactic imitation moot, or, worse, misleading, in that it, too,
remains, strictly speaking, beside the point. For, while a Gedankenstrich is a mark
neither in need of nor available to direct lexical translation, Kleist’s placement of it
(“—”) directly afer the word, “here,” makes “here” mean not, or not only, “here” but
there, where “there” is no word of deixis, no verbal indication of a position in space,
but a purely graphic or nonverbal linear stroke, a marking of somewhere or
something else than “here” that is another here in itself. In the tapestry of double-
entendres that compose this text – threads compiled into scenes whose subjects,
actions, and object, upon closer inspection, can no longer be identified – Kleist’s
“dash” is terrifically easy to read past. Yet, still more troubling than the questions
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ﬁrst raised by its perception afer the fact, is the fact that this particular “dash” is,
in narrative as well as syntactic terms, a mistake, a diacritical marking consistent
with neither the content nor the grammar of the sentence in which it appears.
Unrequired – indeed, rendered erroneous – by its immediate context, this dash (or

385. Ibid., II: 106.

386. Ibid; see n. 380, this Chapter, for German original. Te additional, decorously
obscene double-entendre, of the Graf ’s “assuring” others, while/in that he “put his hat back
on” (afer doing the undeﬁned deed immediately designated by “traf ”), that the Marquise
will recover nicely, is also masked by the syntactic and diacritical (near) disappearing act
this sentence performs on the Graf ’s main reported action (“traf er”), as are the sexual
allusions of later repeated references to the Graf and his either “förmlich” (“polite”) or
practical (prophylactic) repositionings on his head of his hat.

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202 Te Linguistic Condition

“stroke” of a pen) may be judged to be either an irregular, graphic insertion on its

author’s part or to perform a very different, nongrammatical and non-narrative
semantic function: that of rendering irreducibly present its own aberrant intrusion
upon the regular, past-tense recounting of events in which it appears, and thereby
enacting in representing or standing in for, in any present of its encounter, the
mistaken occurrence of aberrancy itself. For, even were we instead to refer the dash
within Kleist’s sentence back to the deictic it succeeds, we would remain just as
unable to say where (or what) “here” is, to know, in short, what we were reading.
Te immediate purpose of any “Gedankenstrich” – the complex German word
for a simple graphic mark whose yoking together of “thought(s)” and “stroke”
renders its own “literal” meaning no less uncertain387 – may be to leap, as it were, to
a subsequent, associated, but unsubordinated thought, spontaneously leaving
another behind, or, equally, to mark the extension of one’s thinking in two different
directions at once. Kleist’s grammatically gratuitous, apparently semantically
vacuous, syntatical dash does both, referring the narrative verb and subject that
follow it (“ – traf er” [ – struck/hit/met/encountered he]) back to the adverbial
deictic (“Hier—”) that immediately precedes it, so as to convey an already
completed, direct transitive action, and directing that same transitive verb away
from the indicated location of its enactment, (“here”) to a formulaic complement
(“measures” or “preparations” [“Anstalten”]) at once delayed and overshadowed by
intervening dependent clauses rife with their own ambiguous conjunctions and
double-entendres: “ladies” who either “appeared terrified” or “appeared terrified;”
“assurances” given either “while” or “because” the Graf, either literally or
euphemistically speaking, “put his hat on his head;” and the “return” of the Graf
“into the battle” (again, literally or euphemistically meant).
Just so, word afer word, treffen afer treffen, each syntactically and semantically
untreffend (“here,” and not “here;” direct and all but direct in their sense), the
equivocal verbal representation and graphically marked occlusion of predication
composing a single, apparently negligible, narrative sentence conceals (“here—”) in
the smallest discursive space, and without the slightest legible ripple, the central act
whose identity and agent generate the entire story of “Die Marquise von O . . .” as a
story.388 Furthermore, even as the ostensible causal mystery of that story, a modern
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387. When spelled out literally, the elided genitive or prepositional construction
connecting “Gedanken” to “Strich” yields all of the following meanings: “a line of,” “a line
(standing) for,” or “a line struck through and cancelling thought(s).”
388. Perhaps the best extensive gloss on the irresoluble, historically productive tension
between agent and action, event and structure, and other incommensurate components of
the “double vision” written into all of Kleist’s stories is Steven Howe’s excellent study of the
political thinking underlying their composition in comparison with that of the theorist and
literary author Kleist most resembled, Rousseau. See Steven Howe, Heinrich von Kleist and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Violence, Identity, Nation (New York: Camden House, 2012): “In
exploring the limitations of knowledge, the relation between agency and structure, and the
necessary expedients of war against imperial tyranny, [Kleist] adopts a ‘Dialektik der
Auflärung’ that was not discovered by Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1940’s but had

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 203

classic of the “whodunit” genre originating in the tragedy of Oedipus, appears

resolved in the manner of a comedy of mistaken identity, the narrative representation
of the titular Marquise’s experience remains true to its entitling ellipses (“von
O . . .”) and foundational Strich. Beginning with a personal advertisement of
ignorance – a published inquiry into the empirical history of one’s most intimate
relations – and ending with the perpetuation of ignorance in future editions of
those same relations, the “ganze Reihe von jungen Russen” (“whole series of young
Russians”389) that follow upon the ﬁrst, every intervening act related by its narrative
appears, on one level, public or common knowledge, and, on another, imperceptible
to its agents and readers alike.390 Indeed, in Kleist’s narrative world no real diﬀerence

rather been uncovered contemporaneously by its leading thinkers of the age and then given
new and dangerous inflections by the experience of the Revolution and its wars” (204); on
the clarity of Kleist’s and Rousseau’s “double vision,” see in particular Chapter 1, “Kleist,
Rousseau and the Paradoxes of Enlightenment,” pp. 12–55.
389. Kleist, II: 143.
390. By direct contrast, leaning heavily on a presumed homology of fiction with
“information,” and systems and data theory, Jake Fraser’s “Kleist’s Secrets. Nachrichtenverkehr
in Die Marquise von O . . .” (Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrif [2017] 91: 254–296) employs the
notion of “intelligence” gathering and concealment (or “secrets”) to relegate even the
possibility of conflict between sensory experience and understanding, of the kind every
subject in Kleist encounters, to a critical past best replaced by a freshly informed awareness
of both the (somehow) autonomous ability of “information” to “locate” “knowledge in non-
knowledge” “ontologically,” and our own continuous “submission” “to the material
constraints” of “the event that exists only and through the medium of information” whose
“conduits” we are (272). Whatever “knowledge in non-knowledge” can mean in a non-
rhetorical sense, and wherever and however the “medium of information” and “the event
that exists . . . through it” are themselves enacted are not questions, on their author’s view,
but rather givens, as is the independent will of “information” to “locate” anything, let alone
an oxymoron in space. While attempted erasures of experience by replacements granting
“ontological” priority to mysteriously autotelic “information” may be viewed merely to
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extend to “secret” surveillance “services” the unselfconsciously transcendental-metaphysical

substantivizations of “media” that have made the resuscitation of a regressive, neo-
Aristotelian focus on “Being” inevitable, Fraser’s chosen literary context (or, in his terms,
that for which he serves as “conduit”) raises the obvious question: what would the pregnant,
not simultaneously non-pregnant Marquise think? For unlike Descartes’ famous use of the
phrase in his early Cogitationes Privatae to describe his mode of entry into the mundi
teatrum, the emblem of “ ‘larvatus prodeo’” that Fraser’s study bears in epigraph is most
accurately considered a mask itself, in that the “secret” of which, it argues, the Marquise’s
story (or, as Renée Girard similarly argued decades ago with regard to all stories) is the
“operational” “effect” is itself neither “open” (to cite Anne-Lise François’ instructive term)
nor the temporally contingent “effect” of “thinking” described by Descartes, but, rather,
“empty” – thus begging the question of what constitutes “information” in the first place. As
the ever-ripening irony of literary history would have it, however, by locating the “proof ” of

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204 Te Linguistic Condition

seems to distinguish the actors represented from the readers of their representation:
both do not so much overlook the “big picture” conveyed by the story told, as forget
that it is composed, of necessity, of innumerable brushstrokes, each apparently
insignificant, each, logically speaking, equally critical.
Tus it is no criticism to state that, like Kant’s epistemology of causally related,
representational phenomena, Kleist’s narratives “appear” at once inevitable and
superficial: indicative not of any “thing in itself ” but of the limited, refractive
nature of our empirical perceptions, compounded in literature by their further
representation. Always intimating that something they are not stating (or rather,
are and are not stating) is actively afoot, steadily if imperceptibly advancing the
unpredictable causality of their plots, the perfect coherence of these fables of
implacable events presents the representations they enact – whether of a father
whose wife joyfully watches through a keyhole as he kisses their daughter “just like
a lover,”391 or of the circulation in “newsprint” by that widowed daughter of her
wish “to make the acquaintance” of her “child’s father”392 – with unwavering,
impersonal equanimity, as if their thoroughly unversimilar, yet no less recognizable
content were itself indistinguishable from the formal discursive rules of its
recounting. Te detached, descriptive idiom of Kleist’s distinctive narrative voice
coolly strings together improbabilities in the manner of a speaker for whom the
commission of the very act of narration is merely to reiterate accepted forms of
expressions, conventional statements as extraneous to the experience they
articulate as the discursive surface they weave is opaque. Even as their mimetic
narrative content retains its wildly unconventional character without ever slipping
into the recognizably absurd, the narrative sentences that convey those thoroughly
unpredictable actions, scenes and events proceed with the kind of formal order
that characterizes the successful performance of norms.
If literary “style” in general consists in a kind of authorial imprint – the
distinctive, individual shaping of a common medium – Kleist’s verbally inimitable
style of narration, conflating the unmistakably individual with general rules of
decorum, and spontaneous actions with their rote enactment, is its own perfect,
prosaic imitation, the polite removal and repositioning of a “hat” capping and
reproducing the “real” actions (in Kant’s sense of the word) they hide in plain sight.
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Conveying with carefully wrought syntactic elegance their own ﬁdelity to freedom,
combining self-constraining discipline with gratuitous motivation, the orderly
style of Kleist’s stories resembles the props or material support of the at once

a Kleistian “information” theory in a single, openly satirical reference by Kleist, in the

hilarious “Lehrbuch der Französischen Journalistik” (1809), to a “secret archive” in which
this mock-Napoleonic manual for world domination through propaganda-“journalism” is
reported hidden, Fraser helpfully re-introduces us to Kleist’s own prescient account of the
all-too actual consequences of granting to exclusively mediatized, imperial ambitions
metaphysical rather than ﬁctional priority.
391. Kleist, II: 138.
392. Kleist, II: 104, 131.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 205

conventional and extraordinary “encounter(s)” they relate, a perfectly sentential

mode that makes order itself appear not orderly but out of place, as displaceable
and indispensable to the narration of action as its punctuation, a kind of verbal
“hat” whose positioning demarcates actions, allowing them to begin and end.393

393. In the exquisitely literal cinematic rendering of the “Marquise von O . . .” by Eric
Rohmer (1976), in which the text of eventful narrative passages is reproduced preceding
changes of scene on the screen, the diacritical function of his hat is placed squarely on view
whenever the enigmatic “Graf,” “performed” with perfectly sincere opacity by the great
Bruno Ganz, enters into respectful proximity with the “unwitting” Marquise. Proof of its
enduring transferability to any context, Kleist’s practical employment of this piece of
masculine haberdashery as “out-fitting,” the punctuating, diacritical mark of disguised
attempts both to “make good on” and mask ill-fitting actions, is perhaps nowhere more
effectively carried forward than in Joel and Ethan Coen’s masterful Miller’s Crossing (1990).
Te densely layered, rapid-fire exchanges of dialogue, bullets and blows that together
compose the “war” between smalltime gangsters comprising the main plotline of the Coens’
film, one whose motivations remain as purposefully diegetically unclear as the causal laws
its characters put into motion and manipulate remain steadfast, make its distinctively
individually mannered (while never wooden) characters appear alternately puppeteers and
marionettes. Te mournful gravity with which the main protagonist, “Tom,” brilliantly
played by Gabriel Byrne, carefully attends from start to finish to his fedora, makes the
Kleistian significance of “mere” props or trappings to this purposefully appointed, stylized
film hard to miss, the choreography of its characters’ casual capacity for violence, by a
reversal on the “Marquise . . .,” placed squarely on the surface, Tom’s of-entreated “heart,”
hidden. Even had the Coens not stated that their conception of the film originated in the
image of a fedora being blown through the woods, nor closed the film with the dark brim of
Tom’s fedora being lowered, like closing brackets or a casket cover, over eyes that, having
first shown sorrow, had looked directly, in a sole and last close-up, at no one but the viewer,
before being veiled in a dirge-like procession of receding frames, the insistence of the hat,
in Byrne’s eloquent hands, speaks volumes within the Coens’ plotting of an irreparable
faultline, the never clarified “misunderstanding” or “mix-up” its bearer always knew to be
permanent. In the hands of the Coen Bros., the fearful prospect of an element of male décor,
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as conventional as “gangsterdom,” blown pell mell across a forest whose named “crossing”
point no winds respect, is represented in a story in which just the opposite transpires, and
its wearer ends up lost because the hat, so to speak, sticks.
With or without the happy coincidence of a punctuating hat, few compositions, including
Frank Stella’s great “Marquise von O” series (1998–2000), enact the crafed density and lucidity
of Kleist’s writing – its polish, pathos, air-tight plotting, violence and humor – as effectively as
the Coens’ film, and, by no coincidence, no other verbal composition comes close. Small
wonder that, like Kleist, the Coens are as ofen admired as criticized for their conspicuous use
of eccentric objects and generic markings rather than recognizable motivation to support the
extra-ordinary stories of the apparently ordinary they tell, or, what comes to the same, the
sense of what does and does not meet the eye that their precisely scripted, verbal and visual
narratives convey: light beaming through bullet holes in a debut “film noir;” tracks of blood
and tires revealed from a God’s eye perspective to snake across “innocent-as-the-driven”

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206 Te Linguistic Condition

And, like any object set into motion, the “merely” formal acts that Kleist’s
particular style of narrative sentence appear to relate prove to be causally effective
as well. Te singular “striking” of a sexual target that, narratively disguised as a
polite “taking of measures,” results in a “marriage contract” denying the “spouse”
conjugal “rights,” and ascribing all wealth and sovereignty to mother and offspring
in “Die Marquise . . .;”394 the war of a “righteous” Michael Kohlhaas against all afer
his arbitrarily disfigured property in not fully restored;395 the divided outcome of a
“duel” stipulated to decide truth “divinely” in “Der Zweikampf ” (“Te Duel”):396 all
are indicepherable actions and events that, unavailable to judgment, take on the
cast of conventionality, even as the causal chain they unleash in reality proves
ironclad. Catalysts of irreversible change, these pivotal Kleistian acts reveal the
dormant active verb, verbinden (“to bind”), at the root of the term for rote social
forms, Verbindlichkeiten (“obligations,” “forms of courtesy”), whose many verbal
variants compose a kind of standing lexicon in Kleist.397 For, in the “world” of
Kleist’s compositions, both actions and their verbal representation rest explicitly
on social and linguistic conventions, “binding” formalities whose following crosses
the very line between form and content they draw. Tis is to say that not only
gestures of polite social intercourse, but obligatory discursive and grammatical
forms become narrative in effect once employed, i.e., as eventful, even physically
consequential, as the metaphorically “binding” power of moral “obligation.”
Such doubly binding terms inform Kleist’s justly celebrated, structural (or, in
Kant’s terms, “architectonic”) “irony” as well. Enforcing “formality” in both the
discursive and social and epistemological and moral sense – that of a socially
constituted “condition” originating in what Kant describes as a necessarily
linguistically enactable “common sense,” and that of a formalism of faculties
entirely “free” from or a priori to any individual network of social conventions and
norms – irony permeates Kleist’s narratives from their syntax to turns of plot.
Undergirding and accompanying them from beginning to end, it at once binds
and divides the “roles” or “parts” played by discourse and action in the stories,
making of narration itself a two-sided form of communication. In this (one might
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Midwestern snow; weird, immobile hairstyles and signature bowling gear; regional and
archaic speech patterns and music; conspicuous classical and biblical ﬁgures; detailed set
design and stylized cinematography; and, yes, a wildly out-of-place pregnancy. In the immortal
words of the proudly do-nothing character and least likely narrative vehicle of all, who insists
on being called by a generic masculine moniker (become au courrant ever since among males
of every occupation and description, indeed, so generically expressive a marker it is now used
by all genders) and whose proper name in fact sets his terriﬁcally mixed-up tale of woe in
motion: each of these decorative elements is the “rug” that “pulls the whole [room] together,”
the “hat” keeping agent and action from falling apart.
394. Kleist, II: 142–143.
395. Kleist, II: 10, 14, 15.
396. Kleist, II: 261.
397. Kleist, II: 105, 110, 112, 117, 118, 130, 143, et passim.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 207

well say, ironically) irony in Kleist most resembles not the falling apart but the
necessary mediating link (“Mittelglied”398) of knowledge and freedom that is for
Kant the “power of judgment.” For, like Kleist’s Janus-faced stories, Kant’s capacity
for judging, unbound by either cognitive or moral forms, provides a “bridge” or
basis of relation between them, generally intelligible or “common” forms of
communication (“Mit-teil-ung”399) that first enable acts of “participation” (“Teil-
nehmen”) – that “taking part” of which, ironically, one becomes the medium or
part taken, part of some thing or activity that, in itself unavailable to conscious
perception, one cannot state in an appropriate way.
Te way Kleist uses irony to “bridge” the division between cognition and action
his stories represent appears especially pronounced in “Die Marquise von O . . .,” a
tale of ignorance and knowledge conspicuously pregnant with the fruits of their
“encounter.” Not only the quandary of visibly “altered circumstances”400 that appear
to dictate the story from beginning to end – from their publication in newsprint to
their involuntary resolution in a second physical act, as the “obligatory forms”
(“Verbindlichkeiten”) that bind Marquise and Graf postfactum find their “release”
in an “Ent-bindung” (“birth” or “delivery;” literally, “unbinding”)401 duly prefaced
by the signing of contractual bonds – but each duplicitously knowing narrative
sentence seems to serve as stand-in for a single, inexplicable402 and, as it turns out,
singularly productive act of “binding,” one literally uniting otherwise isolated
bodies to compose a new body, the non-narrative origin represented within the
story by the graphic sign of its omission. Everything that follows narratively from,
frames and precedes that discretely uninterpretable sign indicates that, no less
than the Marquise, her author cannot decide whether the agent of the action it
stands for is “angel,” or “devil,”403 or, perhaps more disturbingly, a kind of
Gedankenstrich or bridge between the two. Author of the same act of violation
from whose commission he had just defended the Marquise, the Graf seems to
embody the pure viability of any mediating medium, a materiality of formation
unrelated to peception, and, as such, inaccessible to judgment itself.
Just the opposite appears the case in another of Kleist’s narrative fictions, whose
story and plot structure function within his corpus as a kind of bookend to “Die
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398. Kant, KU B V, X: 74.

399. Kant, KU B 65, 67, X: 157–58.
400. Kleist, II: 104.
401. Kleist, II: 143.
402. As if commenting on the contemporary concept of “enlightenment” (“Auflärung”),
Kleist weaves the word (along with its close verbal relations, “Erklärung” and “erklären”
[“explanation,” to explain”]) into the fabric of his story of a subject in search of “enlightenment”
as to her own “inconceivable alteration of form” (“unbegreiﬂiche Veränderung ihrer Gestalt”
[119]) with a frequency approached only by the permutations of “verbinden” he employs,
ofen in tandem with these. See Kleist, II: 105, 111 (3x), 112 (3x), 117 (3x), 118 (4x), 120, 129,
133, 142, et passim.
403. Kleist, II: 143.

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208 Te Linguistic Condition

Marquise von O . . .”. Te founding action of “Der Zweikampf ” (“Te Duel) is also
an act of intimate violation: a striking or hitting literally reported to “pierce”
(“durchbohr[en]”404) its target. Yet that definitive corporal transgression is instead
represented with syntactically heightened directness. Rather than buried in
narrative parts unknown, it emerges suddenly and abruptly out of an intricate web
of subordinate clauses stemming not from its agent but its target, the subject
named in the story’s first words. Te encasing of that subject in layers of syntax
unfurling skeins of contextual information, both within and alongside each other,
in the story’s hyper-hypotactic first sentence, proves no more effective a bulwark
against its breach than a “chestbone” against arrow. Rather than effectively buried
under a diacritical mark, this “hit” hits the reader, too, with the sudden clarity
and force proper to the physical event. Not the identity of that event itself, its
what, how, where, and when, but its who, its doer, alone remains unaccounted for,
and the judgment of what becomes a moving target of culpability, on the basis of
sworn yet equivocal testimony, identifiable but misattributable physical evidence,
and the entailment and displacement of all of these by other disputed events,
compose the entire body of the narrative thereafer. In “Te Duel” (literally, the
“combat of two, or “Zwei-kampf ”), the mediating function of judgment acts not
as a nonrepresentational bridge (or dash) spanning two mutually exclusive
experiential realms and modes (such as the “angel”/“devil” that “is” the “saving” and
target-“striking” “Graf ”), but as the unraveling of experience itself. For, “Te Duel”
tells a story of “encounters” that, in contrast with the unswerving blow that gives
rise to them, only appear, or appear only temporarily to meet their mark, a series
of misleading, mistaken, false, or simply missed signs that follow upon the direct
hit they nearly cast into oblivion, effectively replacing it, by accumulated
misdirection, as central subject of the story itself. For the issue in dispute in the
eponymous “duel” is not, in fact, that of the proper identity of a successful assassin,
agent of the undisputed offense of murder committed against a member of the
landed gentry, but a purported failing or flaw of female virtue – first and most
reliable substitute (as Kleist all too effectively, ironically demonstrates) for the
judgment of men by men. Te duel toward which the story builds sidelines the
graphically described, concrete crime with which it began in favor of a dispute
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over the rectitude of an honored woman, as the object of judgment slides from the
capital crime of murder to a notional lack of chastity and the mode of judgment
slips from human discourse to sacred event, the latter supposedly embodied in the
life or death of dueling combatants.
Yet, like the discursive murder investigation and trial that it first displaces then
replaces, and ensuing narrative development of the story that bears its name, even
the duel-to-the-death itself, supposed to play a post factum evidentiary role in
defending not the “honor” of one of its participants but the veracity of a woman’s
virtue, turns out to be inconclusive in effect, and thus ends up turning, too, on
questions of judgment, its own bases and demonstrable bona fides, rather than any

404. Kleist, II: 229.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 209

decisive blow or “hit.” In short, how one judges the unknown proves just as elusive
in the narrative course of actions and detours from judging those actions
comprising the story, “Te Duel,” as it does in the duel to which those actions,
including the enactments of these detours, “lead.” For, only in Kleist (or, perhaps,
also, in his closest narrative successor, Kafa) would a purely physical action,
institutionalized as substitute for judgment, fail to “do the job” (of killing) as well,
as even the “might makes right” mode of non-reasoning – simple sensory rhyme
nonsensically applicable to any bodily conquest – of this “combat of two” ﬁnds
itself compelled to switch its stated subject and object. Rather than conﬁrm its
viewer’s ability to identify not only who, in the duel, possesses might and who,
right, but on which side of the slogan might and right themselves in fact reside, the
duel’s apparently incontrovertible, because plainly visible dubiety of outcome
brings the need for the act of judgment itself, long consigned to oblivion, “so to
speak,” (as Kant might write) back from the dead.405
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405. On Kleist’s improbable achievement of uncertainty by causal, narrative means, cf.

Achim Aurnhammer, “Im Horizont der Ungewissheit: Unzuverlässigen Erzählen in Kleists
Novellen,” in Heinrich von Kleist: Neue Ansichten eines rebellischen Klassikers, Hrsg. Werner
Frick (Freiburg, i. Br.: Rombach, 2014), 101–128.

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210 Te Linguistic Condition

3. Contesting “Judgment” in “Te Duel”

In the context of a Critique aimed at proceeding beyond the limits of both empiricist
and idealist accounts of them, understanding and action are mediated not by
operations of literary – representational and narrative – “irony,” but by Urteilskraf,
a discursive “power of judgment” whose analogous lack of cognitive and causal
determination produces a singular ability to perceive sensuous objects not through
a priori formal means, as synthetic, conceptual representations, but as unknown
embodiments of dynamic forms whose equally dynamic experience we undergo as
feelings. Subject only to their predication as “beautiful,” these perceptible forms
may be chasms as well as wall coverings, pictures as well as picture frames,
landscapes as well as flowers in a vase, just as, in our apprehension of a sensuous
object so apparently dynamic as to surpass any boundaries we can imagine, the
“sublime” destruction or upending of all formal delineation and dimensionality
that Kant calls “Unform” can be experienced by us anywhere our reason – here, the
kind of “pure reason” whose operation is not delimited by specific objects – comes
into conflict with our sensuously configured imagination (or imagination
operating a posteriori).406 Although Kant attributes to “judging” (“Urteilen”) the
general capacity for renewing philosophy, and with philosophy, science – equating
it, in the First Preface to the First Critique, with the “Age of Critique” defining “our”
and thus any “age” in which it is enacted407 – he distinguishes the ability to judge
(“Urteilskraf”) in the Tird Critique, by contrast, as the “power” to mediate
between the otherwise incommunicable “realms” of limited knowledge and
unlimited action described in the First and Second Critiques respectively, the very
domains of experience and practice whose incommunicability Kleist’s every text
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describes.
While there is nothing we might choose to call “ironic” about the exercise of the
power of judgment Kant describes, like irony, it may operate anywhere at any time,
turning any object, no matter how apparently negligible, into the basis for “feeling”
precisely because it unsettles the content as well as context of an object, its “realm.”
A mere “bridge,” or “Übergang,” between “domains,” or “Gebiete,” of human
endeavor separated in practice, the power of judgment called “aesthetic” is “free”

406. Kant, KU B 49, B XLIX, B 79, X: 146, 103, 168.

407. Kant, KrV, A X–XI, III: 12–13n; cf. Chapter Two, Section One, n. 46; Chapter
Tree, Section One, n. 321.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 211

not to determine, govern, or regulate a demarcated “territory,” or “Boden,” of its

own.408 Grounded instead on the “condition” of the shared or “common sense” first
produced by articulate speech, the power of judgment speaks on the second-hand
or reported basis that is the communal property of articulation itself: to participate
in the “common sense” of judgment, according to Kant, is, specifically, “to say” of
some object, not that “it is,” but that “it is [said to be409] beautiful” [“zu sagen, es sei
schön”] [Analytik des Schönen, §2]), in other words, to constate, in speaking, the
performance not of one’s own but others’ ability to speak.410
Tus, like irony, judgment, too, can be said to speak “in quotation marks,”411 i.e., at
once affirmatively and as if in an impersonal voice, even as it brings different aspects
of language to the fore. “Irony” combines affirmation with negation by proffering
propositions available to equally viable, opposing interpretations, whereas judgment
is defined less by the content of what it says than what it does and does not do, brings
to consciousness and suspends. “Contemplative”412 rather than pragmatic, the power
of judgment enables us to communicate a “feeling” as an adjective qualifying the
object that occasions it, in the form of a statement already “presupposed”413 to be
understandable and constatable by all. Unlike irony, judgment neither says this and
that, nor this and not-this, but, like irony, it says this is what I say “it” is without saying
“I” say this, even while indicating that, in the place of “I,” everyone else does or would:
that what any subject of judgment says in predicating an object speaks for every

408. Kant, KU B XX–XXI, X: 83–85; cf. Chapter Tree, Section One, n. 293, this study
409. Kant’s use of the first subjective, “sei,” to articulate the copular of judgment both
conforms to the grammatical rules regarding reported or second-hand speech and
substantiates his theory that all judgments speak not merely for their speaker but for all
speakers, just as they issue not from an individual but what he calls a “common sense.”
Composed nearly entirely of discordant strings of speech acts committed pursuant to the
sudden act of murder narrated in the indicative preterite in its first paragraph, perhaps
more than any other story by Kleist, the entirety of “Te Duel” afer that first paragraph
might well have been written in the first subjunctive.
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410. Kant, KU B 6, 65–68, X: 117, 157–59; see Chapter Two, Section Tree, n. 113, this study.
411. Cf. young Marcel’s memorable description of the disturbingly “ironic tone” used by
Swann, whenever “speaking of serious things” – “emit[ting] a judgment about a work, about
a way of understanding life”—as a speech spoken “as if . . . in quotation marks,” i.e., already
conscious of others’ use of language to emit judgments not their own, or not their own
alone. It is the story of Swann that he himself narrates – one best deﬁned as related entirely
“between quotation marks” in that it occurred long before his own birth – that, Marcel
“later” recognizes, provided the model not only of his “own” experience of life, but of his
(circularly projected) livre à venir, i.e., the very long story of a life he has already written.
See A la recherche du temps perdu 3 vol (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954), I: 97–98,
210–211.
412. Kant, KU B 15, X: 122.
413. See Chapter Two, Section One, n. 41, Section Eight, n. 219, this study.

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212 Te Linguistic Condition

(“jedermann”414) subject’s experience of that object in precisely the way that language
itself – and perhaps language alone – is a pure (in Kant’s terms, “real” and “concrete”)
construction of commonality. Furthermore, “contemplative” rather than cognitive,
judgment suspends the inﬂuence of conceptual knowledge, personal opinion and all
interest upon experience, including the impersonal interest deﬁnitive of moral
action. Like cognition, judgment is always “related to” some sensory object,
“something outside the self” (“auf etwas ausser mich bezogen”).415 Yet, unlike
cognition and like the pure or moral use of reason, judgment is also “free” to regard
objects without regarding them either as unknowable “things-in-themselves” or as
cognitive “phenomena.” Its own “feeling” of “free[dom]”416 frees imagination to
“play”417 on equal footing with understanding in experiences of “pleasure” in the
beautiful, and frees reason to “do violence”418 to imagination by violating the
boundaries of sense perceptions in the painful experience of the sublime.

414. See Kant, KU B 20, X: 126, cf. Chapter Two, Section Six, n. 167: “Denn er muss es
nicht schön nennen, wenn es bloss ihm gefällt . . .; wenn er aber etwas für schön ausgibt, so
mutet er andern eben dasselbe Wohlgefallen zu: er urteilt nicht bloss für sich, sondern für
jedermann” (“For [a subject] must not name [an object] beautiful when it pleases merely
him; but when [a subject] pronounces something beautiful so he attributes to others just the
same pleasure: he judges not only for himself, but for everyone”); see also Kant, KU B 26, X:
130 (emphasis in text), Chapter Two, Section Eight, n. 233 this study:

Ob ein Kleid, ein Haus, eine Blume schön sei: dazu lässt man sich sein Urteil durch
keine Gründe oder Grundsätze beschwatzen. Man will das Objekt seinen eigenen
Augen unterwerfen, gleich als ob sein Wohlgefallen von der Empﬁndung abhinge;
und dennoch wenn man den Gegenstand alsdann schön nennt, glaubt man eine
allgemeine Stimme für sich zu haben, und macht Anspruch auf den Beitritt von
jedermann, da hingegen jede Privatempﬁndung nur für ihn allein und sein
Wohlgefallen entscheiden würde.
Hier ist nun zu sehen, dass in dem Urteile des Geschmacks nichts postuliert wird,
als eine solche allgemeine Stimme . . .
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[Whether a dress, a house, a ﬂower would be (“sei”) beautiful: no one lets his
judgment be cajoled by reasons and principles of reason to that conclusion. Some
people want to submit the object to their own eyes, just as if their pleasure depended
on the sensation; and nevertheless, when one names an object beautiful, one believes
one has a general voice, and makes claim to the accession of everyone, since otherwise
every private sensation would decide only for him and his pleasure alone.
Here we can now see that in the judgment of taste nothing is postulated other
than such a general voice . . . .]setzt

415. Kant, KrV B 38, III: 72.

416. See Chapter Two, Section Tree, this study.
417. Kant, KU B 29, X: 132.
418. Kant, KU B 77, X: 166.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 213

Now, the conﬂict between representational cognition and noncognitive action –

which is to say, Kant’s conflict – may be the central story of all Kleist’s stories, its
presence imperfectly represented in the prosaisms of his irony, its absence, the
grace presented in the perfectly empirical, sense-able and senseless movements of
marionettes. Yet, just as Kant hypothesizes the ability of the “power” he calls
judgment to mediate the conflict between cognitive limits and unlimited moral
actions, so Kleist attempts, in “Te Duel,” to represent such mediation itself. His
“Zweikampf,” or “Conflict of Two,” narrates, in the representational hypothetical
form of fiction, how the enactment of judgment – as critical for Kant to the
feasibility of his fundamental distinction between “applied” and “pure” operations
of reason as is the suspension (in both senses of the term) of the binding logic and
conflicting, phenomenal and moral grounds of these by the “bridge”-like ability to
“feel oneself free” – manages illogically, indeed, in this story, “willy-nilly,” or despite
both human oversight and contrivance, to span the “chasm” between the two, and,
in so doing, take on its own appearance in the world. Rather than analyze how a
supposed “power” or capacity for judgment within us “communicates” itself
externally through “free” articulate acts of qualitative predication, Kleist’s story
seeks judgment everywhere the eye can look, its explicitly juridical motif serving
to underscore rather than obviate the question: how do we know “judgment” is not
“misjudgment” or mistake?
For, rather than entitling this tale of the social mediation between mere
appearances and moral reality, “Te Judgment,” Kleist, who, consistent with his
own representational narrative mode, preferred referential to conceptual titles
generally, names it for the decisive physical action aimed at rendering all need for
internal judgment and discursive mediation moot: “Te Duel” or combat
(“Kampf ”) of two (“Zwei”). While “Michael Kohlhaas” tells the story of a just war
waged against a casually unjust world to effect nothing less than the reversal of
material cause and effect – the physical rectification of a self-evident wrong or
“Unrecht” to a state of integrity to which questions of justice need not and do not
apply – “Te Duel” tells a story of diverging paths taken to ascertain the right
subject and object of complaint, diversions of focus occurring not in spite of but
on the basis of evidence. Replacing judgment of the person or persons culpable of
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a multiply witnessed capital wrong, first, with an inquiry into the parties to sexual
relations aleatory to the event, followed by questions as to the nature of evidence
capable of “proving” those relations in fact took place and, finally, by which means,
human or “divine,” and, moreover, at what moment, that or any proof should be
considered definitive,419 “Te Duel” represents no universal capacity for judgment,

419. Assumed to be the last story he wrote, shortly before his suicide in Nov. 1811,
at the age of 34, “Te Duel” may be viewed – in the very sense of the inconclusive bases of
judgment it presents – as Kleist’s ﬁctive embodiment and recapitulation of his own literary
corpus, the narrative representation of its author’s uncertainty as to whether the blows
sustained by his “body” of work will prove, at some undetermined point in time, to have been
merely apparently fatal, and the judgment and justice due it – if due it – ultimately make

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214 Te Linguistic Condition

in either the normative or Kant’s critical sense,420 but rather the potential
extermination of such a “power” by assumptions of self-evidence based in either
pure sentience or godly omniscience. In Kleist, as in Kant, judgment requires
critique of perception – a practical fact of which every inevitably mis-taken
representation undertaken in the prosaic proceedings of Kleist’s ﬁctions is Exhibit
A. Whether fortuitously or by design – an opposition the ostensible “plots” of those

themselves known. Unwittingly befitting its title, the posthumous reception of “Te Duel”
has been sharply divided between readers who consider it the weakest – least passionately
compelling – of Kleist’s stories, and those who view it as his strongest and most profound.
Reviewing the story’s reception-history, James G. McGlathery attributes the roughly 50-year
period of its (mostly) positive evaluation to an “existentialist period in literary criticism”
beginning with Gerhard Fricke’s Gefühl und Schicksal bei Heinrich von Kleist. Studien über
des innern Vorgang im Leben und Schaffen des Dichters (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt,
1929) and extending to Denis Dyer’s Stories of Kleist. A Critical Study (New York: Holmes
and Meier, 1977). With the exception of Horn’s 1978 study and Brown’s 1998 assessment of
the complete literary works (see Secondary Bib.), the late twentieth-century renaissance of
interest in and early twenty-first century bicentennial commemorations of Kleist’s narrative
work in particular have neither favored nor disfavored, but, rather, paid relatively scant
attention to the story. See James McGlathery, “Kleist’s ‘Der Zweikampf ’ as Comedy’,” in
Heinrich von Kleist Studies, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (New York: AMS Press, 1980), pp. 87–92.
420. While Kant recognized the irresoluble conflict between public honor and internal
human dignity resulting in the legalized state of nature – or murder – enacted in duels, and
refused to condemn the individual’s attempt to reconcile public and private selves by
making his own being both ethical “means” and “end,” he was also critical of the mere “show”
or appearance of honor duels can be employed to effect, contrasting these, much as Kleist’s
story does, with a duel engaged in for “love of honor[ing]” virtue itself. See his Anthropology
from a Pragmatic Point of View, § 74, “On timidity and bravery” (“Von der Furchtsamkeit
und der Tapferkeit,” Kant, Anthropologie, BA 213, XII: 588. For Kant’s views on dueling see
the section on “punishment and clemency” in, “Teory of Law,” Part One of the Metaphysic
of Morals, AB 1950205, VIII: 452–59. Cf. the contemporary debate regarding those views
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and their larger implications for post-Kantian political theory, in Alex Livingston and Leah
Soroko, “From Honor to Dignity and Back Again. Remarks on LaVaque-Manty’s ‘Dueling
for Equality’,” Political Teory Vol. 35, No. 4 (2007: 494–501), their response to Mika
LaVaque-Manty, “Dueling for Equality: Masculine Honor and the Modern Politics of
Dignity,” Political Teory, Vol. 34, No. 6 (2006: 715–740); see also Michael Vloytinsky’s
compelling deduction of the case for viewing Kant’s well-known endorsement of capital
punishment in cases of murder as a regulative principle regarding the value of human life
rather than an actual law either accountably or universally applicable in the sensory world,
in “Te Kantian Case Against the Death Penalty,” published on-line at academia.
edu/2469736/; and Rudolf A. Makkreel’s expansion upon Vloytinsky’s argument to include
the notion of “reﬂective judgment” articulated in the Tird Critique, in “Relating Kant’s
Teory of Reﬂective Judgment to the Law,” Washington University Jurisprudence Review,
Vol. 6, No. 9 (2013: 147–60.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 215

fictions prove particularly hard to place – in entitling his final story for a “duel”
whose outcome is inconclusive, Kleist encapsulated the experience plotted by all
his fictions: no narratives, not even Kafa’s, challenge our ability to identify the
casual relation of their representations more skillfully. “Judgment” (“Urteil”) – to
quote Kant in his inaugural Preface to the First Critique – of the “real effects”
(“Wirkungen”) of aesthesis, in the perceptual sense, is one, Kleist implies, each
“reader” and “judge” (“Leser” und “Richter”) must make.421
As if to induce in every reader and judge the singular impact from which it
stems, Kleist’s story of judgment opens, as described above, with the most extensive,
densely layered descriptive sentence in all of German-language narrative, a
seamless fiction of seemingly endless contextual subordinations ending in a single
punctual, indeed, in this case, literally puncturing event:

Herzog Wilhelm von Breysach, who had been living in enmity with his half-
brother, Graf Jakob the Redbeard, since his secret marriage with a countess
named Katharina von Heersbruck from the House of the Alt-Hüningen, who
appeared to be under his rank, returned, around the end of the fourteenth
century, as the night of Saint Remigius began to fall, from a meeting held with
the German Kaiser in Worms, in which he, lacking children by marriage, all of
whom had died, had eﬀected the legitimation of Graf Philipp von Hüningen, a
natural son engendered with his wife before their marriage. Looking into the
future with more joy than at any time during the whole run of his government,
he had already reached the park, which lay behind his castle: as suddenly an
arrow broke forth out of the darkness of the bushes, and pierced his body just
below the breastbone.
[Herzog Wilhelm von Breysach, der, seit seiner heimlichen Verbindungmit einer
Gräﬁn, namens Katharina von Heersbruck, aus dem Hause Alt-Hüningen, die
unter seinem Range zu sein schien, mit seinem Halbbruder, dem Grafen Jakob
dem Rotbart, in Feindschaf lebte, kam gegen das Ende des vier-zehnten
Jahrhunderts, da die Nacht des heiligen Remigius zu dämmern began, von einer
in Worms mit dem deutschen Kaiser abgehaltenen Zusammenkunf zurück,
worin er sich von diesem Herrn, in Ermangelung ehelicher Kinder, die ihm
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gestorben waren, die Legitimation eines, mit seiner Gemahlin vor der Ehe
erzeugten, natürlichen Sohnes, des Grafen Philipp von Hüningen, ausgewirkt
hatte. Freudiger, als während des ganzen Laufs seiner Regierung in die Zukunf
blickend, hatte er schon den Park, der hinter seinem Schlosse lag, erreicht: als
plötzlich ein Pfeilschuss aus dem Dunkel der Gebüsche hervorbrach, und ihm,
dicht unter dem Brustknochen, den Leib durchbohrte.422]

What follows not from an apparently gratuitous “dash” (“—”) standing in for an
unperceived act of bodily transgression (as in “Die Marquise von O . . .”), but from

421. Kant, KrV, A xvi, III: 15.

422. Kleist, II: 229.

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216 Te Linguistic Condition

another punctuating diacritical mark, a full colon (“:”) introducing, into the life of
a soon to be defunct, extensively described subject, the “sudden” “outbreak” of a
“shot” out of the “dark,” as unanticipated by its target as by the reader of “the whole,”
hundred-word “run” of more than a dozen grammatically “govern[ed]” descriptive
and subordinate clauses packed into the single, roughly 10-line, overarching clause
that precedes it,423 is an approximately thirty-page story embedded instead with
unveriﬁed assertions and declarations, or “Aussagen:” true, false, and equally false
and true statements, suspicions, oaths, testimonies, verdicts, and sacraments,
including the all-“decisive” “judgment” of God, supposed to be “spoken,” through
the rule of the duel, in the inevitable befalling of “death” to the dueling party that
spoke falsely.424 From a single arrow that meets its mark in the breast of the Herzog,

423. Like the grammatically ordinary, apparently unremarkable sentence within which
the violation of the Marquise is at once hidden and stated, the grammatically extraordinary
compounding of multiply layered dependent clauses into which the report of an apparently
perfectly targeted collision of arrow and vital organ, “under the breastbone,” intrudes into the
opening sentence of “Te Duel” makes its translation into any language less rich in the ability
to accommodate virtually unlimited layers of perfectly regular, syntactic embedding a
particularly ungainly task. While I have tried to maintain the syntax of the original in the
version provided above, standard English translations of the sentence tend to level out the
vertical accumulation of clauses in the original that, bringing different segments of
“background” information forward onto the same narrative “plane,” compel the reader to
store, or “shelve,” its temporally and causally dependent bits of data before reading further.
Attempting to ease the mental effort the sentence requires of its readers to keep the different
pieces of its “back-story” present, even while proceeding to the pointed, contextually “piercing”
narrative event and final transitive verb with which its near mis-en-abîme of information
(within information) abruptly ends (in being violently forced to a final full-stop), such
facilitating renderings take the liberty of dividing Kleist’s elongated first sentence into two,
smoothly legible sentences, the second beginning roughly at the mid-point of the former, afer
the designation of the location of the Kaiser in Worms. See, for example, Te Marquise of
O—and Other Stories, trans. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (London: Viking, 1978), p. 287, for
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one of the most widely circulated simplifying versions of the sentence in English.
424. Kleist, II: 244, 251, 253, 254, 259. In “ ‘Die Stunde der Entscheidung’: Ordeal and
Uncertainty in Kleist’s ‘Der Zweikampf ’ ” (Monatshefe Vol. 101, No. 4 [2009]: 469–82), Brian
Tucker views the story as a whole as a representation of “decisionism” – “the exceptional
decision inherent in every application of the law” (477). Te present study argues, by contrast,
that the validity of any decision – including those universally supposed to speak on “divine”
authority – is instead directly questioned, on an explicitly temporal basis, by Kleist’s story, in
which the voice of decisiveness believed to express itself deﬁnitively in the formal
performance of a “contest” between truth and falsity, or innocence and guilt, proves instead
merely another captive to the inconclusive vagaries of judgment. For, rather than befalling
the judged once and for all, as the assassin’s arrow felled the Herzog, one “exceptional” or
“divine” “decision” replaces another in “Der Zweikampf ” from one hour to the next, just as
the subjects under scrutiny seem to replace each other on a moment’s notice. Finally, the

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 217

punctuating and shattering, in the speed of a single transition from verb to object,
a verbal carapace spun of interdependent familial, legal and intentional
circumstances, an entire narrative mirroring the maddeningly ongoing period of
its opening sentence ensues.425 Just as gradual in its accretion of context and as
kaleidoscopic in rhetorical effect, the interconnected series of declarations, feints,
doubts, suspicions, dissimulations and proofs following from that sentence
effectively extenuates the single decisive act the sentence reports and that the
remainder of the story at first seems motivated to account for. Tese include, in
sequential order, the cautious display of friendship to her brother-in-law and rival
for the realm, Graf Jakob von Rotbart, by the Herzog’s widow; the oath and

formal addition of a fresh amendment to the divine law of the duel necessitated by the
inconclusive results of dueling witnessed in the story now predicates duels’ decisiveness not
upon “God’s will” but on whether God “wishes” to will anything (“Wenn es Gottes Wille
ist . . .”) – to judge any individual action or agent – in the first place. Tat temporal
qualification of the “rendering” of divine, or extra-temporal, verdicts (“wie es der Spruch des
höchsten Gottes . . . entschieden hat”) puts even all apparently conclusive decisions into
question by destroying the alleviating notion of the decision as event that “divides”
(“scheidet”) not only the guilty from the innocent but what was from what is now. Not what
is decided, but whether a decision has been rendered has itself been rendered permanently
inconclusive by Kleist. Te entirely open-ended verbal caveat with whose words the story
ends – “When it is God’s will” – puts all the signs of exceptional “decisionism” precluding the
necessity of judgment into doubt (Kleist, II: 254 [emphasis added]). On Kleist’s narrative
representation of the temporal condition his story amends to “the outcome of any duel”
hereafer, cf. John M. Ellis, “Kleist’s ‘Der Zweikampf ’,” Monatshefe, Vol. 65, No. 1 (1972): 48–
60, esp. 58: “once it is allowed that in some cases we may not know right away what the truth
is, it follows that we cannot know for certain in any case. It will never be possible again to
look at the outcome of any duel and say simply: there is the truth.” Cf. Wolfgang Wittkowski’s
observation, in “ ‘Die heilige Cäcilie’ und ‘Der Zweikampf ’: Kleists Legenden und die
romanitische Ironie,” Colloquia Germanica No. 5 (1972): 17–28, of the simultaneously
motivating and anihilating effect of a statute whose own actual occurrence of application
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remains in doubt (46). It is for just this reason, Wittkowski cannily remarks, that Kleist’s Von
Trotta can continue to maintain the authority of the statute even while questioning the
relation of its “truth” to any temporal demands we may place on its “express[ion]:” “Where
lies the obligation of the highest divine wisdom to indicate and express the truth in the
moment of its summoning by the believing?” (“Wo liegt die Verpﬂichtung der höchsten
göttlichen Weisheit, die Wahrheit im Augenblick der glaubensvollen Anrufung selbst,
anzuzeigen und auszusprechen?”).
425. Te complexly extensive opening sentence of “Te Duel” provides a prime Kleistian,
which is to say, simultaneously mimetic and ironic representation, of the principle of the
“gradual composition [or fabrication] of thinking in speaking” on which Kleist wrote. See
Kleist, II: 319–24. For an excellent analysis of the institutionally and culturally critical
dimension of the essay, see Jill Ann Kowalik, “Kleist’s Essay on Rhetoric,” Monatshefe,
Vol. 81, No. 4 (1989): 434–446.

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218 Te Linguistic Condition

evidentiary defense of his innocence presented in tribunal by Rotbart; the

affirmation of her own innocence of intimacy with Rotbart by the woman he
names as his lover and alibi at the time of the crime, Frau Littergarde von Auerstein;
the defense of Frau Littergarde and public oath taken to prove her innocence “in
God’s judgment before the world” sworn by Herzog Friedrich von Trotta, when, on
the strength of evidence presented as “the most decisive proofs”426 of his purported
tryst with Littergarde, Rotbart is acquitted – “freigesprochen” – of murder by the
Kaiser and Littergarde accused of perjury in his place.427 Tis extensive
concatenation of verbal acts finally appears on the point of culminating in the
performance of the bodily act for which the story is named, when Rotbart,
employing an idiomatic, formulaic (or “förmlich”428) variant of “treffen” reminiscent
of its duplicitous use by the narrator of “Te Marquise . . .” with regard to another
widow of famed virtue (“Hier – traf er . . . Anstalten”), declares he will “prove” the
“truth” of his statements “with regard to Frau Littegarde” (“Frau Littegarden
betreffend”), and therein his own innocence of the crime of murder regarding
which he was summoned to testify to begin with, effectively substituting one object
of “regard,” one target of “treffen[d]” for another, through the “ ‘honest, chivalric
contest of a duel.’ ”429
Te result of the duel, however, proves as inconclusive and equivocal, its true
meaning as “mysterious” or “hidden” (“geheimnisvoll”430) as duels to the death can
only prove in Kleist. Performed to express, once and for all, the “judgment of God,”
this staged “contest of two” yields not neatly opposing but changing results, not one
singular and self-evident but a developing, internally divided “truth.” Even the
most empirically determinable condition – the presence or absence of life –
gradually proves indeterminate afer the duel is completed, as executor and victim
of what had appeared a single mortal blow gradually exchange internal physical
states. Rotbart, author of that wound and declared victor of the duel, finds himself,
no less sensibly than incomprehensibly, dying over time; von Trotta, subjected to
Rotbart’s piercing stroke of the sword, and the agent, for his part, of a mere “skin”
wound to his opponent and ostensible slayer, finds himself, no less incomprehensibly,
progressively healed, fully alive.431 As the “divine judgment” believed to have first
been rendered by the duel remains in force in the minds of all those privy to it (and
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von Trotta and Littegarde, deemed guilty of deception, are imprisoned), the
refutation of its verdict by mounting physical evidence produces considerable
internal, intellectual conﬂict in those it directly aﬀects. In nearly the same breath,
Littegarde passionately exclaims she is as “pure of guilt . . . as the breast of a
newborn child, . . . the body of a nun,” and, in the very act of asserting her innocence,

426. Kleist, II: 241

427. Kleist, II: 242
428. For Kleist’s uses of “förmlich” to describe verbal actions, see Kleist, II: 236, 242.
429. Kleist, II: 242.
430. Kleist, II: 248.
431. Kleist, II: 243.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 219

chides von Trotta for “ ‘believing what my mouth says’,” posing of her defender the
single decisive question she herself considers to have been already answered
definitively, and thus merely a “rhetorical” one: “ ‘Has the divine judgment of God
not decided against me?’ ”432 Te wounded von Trotta asserts in response that he
has been “given . . . life again” by Littegarde’s “words” of innocence and urges the
lady for whom he would have died willingly to “think” the “more comprehensible”
of the “two” – contradictory – “thoughts” produced by that singular judgment, i.e.,
that, given the sensible fact of his living, he should be deemed the duel’s winner:
“Of two thoughts, which confuse the senses, let us think the more comprehensible,
more conceivable, and before you believe yourself guilty, rather believe that, in the
duel I fought for you, I won!” (“Lass uns, von zwei Gedanken, die die Sinne
verwirren, den verständlicheren und begreiflicheren denken, und eher du dich
schuldig glaubt, lieber glauben, dass ich in dem Zweikampf den ich für dich
gefochten, siegte!”)433 As much a “believe[r]” as any in the infallibility of “divine
judgment,” von Trotta reasons it can be no fault of “divine wisdom” itself if the
verdict it “indicates” and “expresses” is not delivered at the same “moment” it is
“summoned” by those in mortal need of it: “ ‘In what lies the obligation of the
highest, divine wisdom to indicate and express the truth in the moment of its
summoning by those who believe in it?’ ” (“Wo liegt die Verpflichtung der höchsten
göttlichen Weisheit, die Wahrheit im Augenblick der glaubensvollen Anrufung
selbst, anzuzeigen und auszusprechen?”434)
Unfortunately for him and his beloved, the imperial tribunal does not share von
Trotta’s enlightened hermeneutical bent. Despite his advancing recovery from his
adversary’s blow, and the latter’s ongoing deterioration, von Trotta remains
officially “condemned,” along with Littergarde, to die.435 Other revelations,
unconnected to the event of the duel, render the “divine” nature of the “judgment”
“expressed” by it more troubling still. Te deception of Littegarde’s chambermaid
is discovered (she impersonated Littegarde), and the fact made evident (the
chambermaid is demonstrably pregnant) that her seduction-in-disguise of Rotbart
calls the content (if not the form) of his alibi, “Frau Littegarde betreffend,” into
question: Rotbart, it seems, was indeed occupied elsewhere as an assassin’s arrow
“pierced” the Herzog’s “breast,” but the body being betroffen by his own at that
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moment was not in fact Littegarde’s. Despite the vindication of Littegarde’s virtue
and, with it, von Trotta, that this new evidence brings, the Kaiser declares himself
ruled immutably by “the holy judgment” ﬁrst spoken through the duel.436 It is the
dying Rotbart, who, upon learning he had mistaken the identity of his sexual
conquest and alibi, orders himself carried to the scene of execution to declare von
Trotta and Littegarde “unschuldig” (“innocent”), announcing, moreover, that, all

432. Kleist, II: 253.

433. Kleist, II: 254.
434. Ibid.
435. Kleist, II: 254.
436. Ibid.

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220 Te Linguistic Condition

appearances to the contrary, this had been “God’s sentence” all along. Even though
it had then been von Trotta who emerged from the duel gravely wounded, and,
thanks to “a special stroke of heavenly good fortune,” was now in the “bloom” of
health; and even though, bringing their mutual reversal of fortunes full circle, it is
now he, Rotbart, who, having been barely wounded in the duel and declared
blameless, lies dying before the healthy man condemned to death, it is not only to
acknowledge the “innocence” of the condemned that he orders himself brought to
the place of their execution. For in addition to confessing his own guilt (“I am the
murderer of my brother, the noble Duke Wilhelm von Breysach”437) and exonerating
von Trotta and Littegarde, Rotbart pronounces that, all evidence to the contrary,
“ ‘the sentence of the highest God’ ” “ ‘spoken before the eyes of all gathered’ ” “ ‘on
that portentous day’ ” remains the same as when it was first “decided” (“ ‘wie es der
Spruch des höchsten Gottes, an jenem verhängnisvollen Tage, vor dem Augen aller
versammelten . . . entschieden hat!’ ”438).
In Rotbart’s dying declaration, the meaning attributed to a divine judgment is
contradicted even as its autonomous formal terms are emphatically maintained,
and, in contrast with the failure of demonstrative empirical evidence to result in
any alteration of the original verdict rendered, the sheer extravagance of Rotbart’s
purely verbal, interpretive fiat works to singular effect. Te previously unmovable
Kaiser, (ironically) described as “frozen like a stone by [Robert’s] words,”439 reverses
rather than confirms his sentence and bids von Trotta and Littegarde no longer be
burned at the stake. Rotbart expires, but not without reminding us of the single
purposeful object “Te Duel” has labored, by a labyrinthine casting of doubt on
every word spoken within it, to make us forget: the arrow that, unlike every other
assertion of will in the story, and most unlike a “contest of two” conducted in public
view, emerged unilaterally, from invisibility, to hit its mark to begin with, the target,
basis and conclusion of the maze-like opening of the narrative itself. Early in the
story it is noted that the distinctive workmanship and “engraved” marks of the
arrow allowed its ownership to be traced.440 “Five months” afer the murder of the
Herzog, an arrowmaker in Strassburg had recognized it as one he had made for
Rotbart and it was his “statement” clarifying that fact, the “Erklärung”441 made by a
thing’s maker who had no particular interest in the purpose to which it was put,
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which led to the summoning of Rotbart before the Kaiser’s court in the ﬁrst place.
It was there that Rotbart testiﬁed, and others freely corroborated his testimony
regarding another collateral matter: that during the night of his brother’s murder
he was otherwise engaged, with no less than the most virtuous widow in the land,
and so, by implication, could not have caused his brother’s death.
Te shock of Rotbart’s salacious revelation overshadows the question
immediately at hand, moving his interlocutors to focus their attention on a

437. Kleist, II: 260.

438. Kleist, II: 259.
439. Ibid (emphasis added).
440. Kleist, II: 231.
441. Ibid.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 221

reputedly virtuous woman’s imputed hypocrisy, and so to take their eyes from the
proverbial “ball” set in motion by the arrow’s fatal course – in this case, the relaying
of undisputed evidence of Rotbart’s proprietary relation to the arrow itself. Yet also
overlooked during Rotbart’s startling confession – not to murder but to a tangential
liaison with Littegarde or, as it turns out, with someone herself bearing only a
tangential relation to Littegarde – was the appositive term and apparently merely
formal disclaimer or testimonial “formality” included in the midst of Rotbart’s
testimony as to “why” his “participation in the murder of [his] brother” was
“improbable,” if not impossible: “ ‘why it is neither probable nor even possible that
I, whether personally or indirectly [or “by any external means,” literally, “through
any form of mediation”: mittellbar] participated in the murder of my brother’ ”
(“ ‘warum es weder wahrscheinlich, noch auch selbst möglich sei, dass ich an dem
Mord meines Bruders, es sei nun persönlich oder mittelbar, Teil genommen . . .’ ”442).
Te ensuing conclusion of this sentence describing his own whereabouts at the
time of the murder – logically speaking, its premise – is, to Rotbart’s knowledge,
true: as far as he knew at the time of his testimony, he had indeed spent that night
in Littegarde’s arms. But the opening of the sentence – logically speaking, its
conclusion – declaring it is neither “probable nor even possible” that he could have
“either personally or indirectly” participated in the murder, is, to Rotbart’s
knowledge, false, a fact that he admits only with his last breath, afer realizing his
own death is imminent and that he himself had been deceived.443 Everything that

442. Kleist, II: 235 (emphasis added).

443. Contrast this with Ellis’s opening observation that Rotbart, the single character in
the story he views in singularly positive terms – “the Count,” Ellis states, is “human, colorful,
attractive, forceful, resourceful, and thoroughly impressive,” in all ways “more credible and
understandable, and more likeable” than the “weak and irresolute simpleton” von Trotta –
“is not in fact guilty of the lie of which Friedrich accuses him” (“Kleist’s ‘Der Zweikampf ’,”
pp. 54, 59, 48). Consistent with his objection to the amendment undermining the
“immediate” quality (“unmittelbar”) of divine law, Ellis ignores the formulaic appositive, “or
by any other means” (“mediately”) (“oder mittlebar”), constituting the lie of Rotbart’s
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testimony. Te general neglect of the phrase within the story and its reception alike suggests
that it may indeed take a “simpleton” – someone whose courage derives from the, for him,
unquestionable honesty of another – rather than a “resourceful,” “likeable” character like
Rotbart, to recognize the words of a lie when he or she hears them. Like Ellis, Peter Horn
fails to recognize the lie at the center of Rotbart’s declaration, focusing his attention instead
on what Rotbart believes to be the truth of his alibi (Horn, Heinrich von Kleists Erzählungen
[Königstein/Ts.: Scriptor Tashenbuch, 1978], pp. 206–7), even while recognizing its logic to
be mere “casuistry” and criticizing what he calls Rotbart’s “literalist” reading of the
prohibition against murder as failing to include the causative: “ ‘You should not have [or,
cause to be] killed’ ” (210). For an opposing view underscoring the decisive eﬀect of von
Trotta’s actions upon the narrative – principally, that of granting it the “necessary time” to
change course – see Hilda Meldrum Brown, Henrich von Kleist. Te Ambiguity of Art and
the Necessity of Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 131. While Meldrum

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222 Te Linguistic Condition

Rotbart had said, and everything that others had said about Rotbart; everything
that Littegarde had said and that von Trotta had said about Littegarde (and that her
mother had said to her about him); and everything that the Kaiser said God had
said in the Zweikampf itself, in a string of Aussagen productive of still others, all
prove to have been mere distractions, no less fatal for being distractions, from the
lie, spoken in the form of a mere formality, that both set the stage for and prefigured
the unreliability of a supposedly dispositive “contest of two.” For, once Rotbart
claims, both in “good faith” and by mistake, to have been intimately occupied
“elsewhere” on the night of the murder, which is to say, in immediate proximity to
the person of the otherwise virtuous Littegarde, and once that inflammatory alibi
is challenged by von Trotta, and Littegarde’s honor, defended in a duel, the
apparently purely conventional technical term, “mittelbar,” uttered within Rotbart’s
sworn iteration of the technical disclaimer, “es sei nun persönlich oder mittelbar”
(“whether personally or indirectly [or mediately]”), is, at first, immediately and
then retrospectively forgotten, if ever it was heard at all – including by the
simultaneously mechanically reciting, openly lying Rotbart himself.
Yet it is that apparently merely förmlich,444 or formal, aside – “oder mittelbar” –
that had already rendered Rotbart’s or any “alibi” indifferent to the matter at hand.
For one can present all the sensory alibis, every alius, “otherwise” or “elsewhere”
engaged, dreamt or demonstrated under heaven, and still the “probability” inherent
in the “possibility” of “mediated” action will remain undeterred, untouched, for any
action enacted not “personally” but through any of innumerable “other” means all
enabled by the purely “formal” forms that are the forms of communication are
always impersonal and personal at once. So, in this story, the positive denial of
such communication – of any and all “participation” via any “means:” “oder
mittelbar” – is at once publicly uttered and uncommunicated, unconsidered and
undiscussed, and the resulting story we read is the wrong story, itself a screen for
another wrong story, itself the screen for a non-story, i.e., the conclusion that was
instead obvious from its first sentence, and that the focus of his listeners (and
readers) on the “personal,” to the exclusion of the “merely” formal content of his
sworn statement made disappear from view as soon as Rotbart’s licentious
declaration, itself as deceived as it was duplicitous, was made. In “Te Duel,” one
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act gets substituted for another act, one object of judgment for another, as soon as
judgment begins.

Brown importantly points to the ease with which an illicit alibi comes to replace a material
arrow in the minds of the tribunal members, stating, “[the case against Rotbart is] readily set
aside when he produces his ailibi – despite the damning ‘Indizenbewis’ or piece of concrete
incriminating evidence . . . to the eﬀect that the murder weapon, namely a specially designed
arrow, actually belonged to [Rotbart]” (129), she, too, fails to note the lie already present in
the apparently “merely” formal terms of Rotbart’s initial declaration: a mere verbal formality
whose blithe utterance in actual contravention of the truth the dying Rotbart recognizes to
have indeed been the basis of the “divine judgment” against him afer all.
444. See n. 428, this Section, this Chapter.

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Kleist’s Mere Formalities 223

No duel can decide this error in judgment, this tendency to miss the obvious in
the course of seeking the truth. Rotbart’s ﬁnal confession returns us to the act
whose mediated authorship we, like all the witnesses to the duel, had forgotten to
remember to seek – the truth of “mediation” hidden behind an initial lie. For, as
Rotbart discovers and, discovering, attributes to a judgment divine, the lie
committed in an apparently merely förmlich articulation of innocence hiding
behind a “personal” truth, itself hides another truth Rotbart himself did not know
was itself both “persönlich” and “mittelbar,” immediately “personal” in the closest,
most physically intimate, “ﬁrst-hand” sense, and mediated through intentionally
misleading signs accepted by him at face value, which is to say, an act of deception
that, unknown to Rotbart, underlay his own deceptive, apparently merely technical
utterance of an alibi, similarly accepted at face value by the tribunal.
Given the contradictory layers of meaningful speech in this story – of truth and
falsity presented, credited or entirely missed – it is little wonder that the conditional
caveat, “when [or: if] it is God’s will” (“Wenn es Gottes Wille ist”), would ultimately
be amended to a statute originally ordering that aesthesis transcend judgment, i.e.,
that immediacy of perception must trump all “mediat[ed]” forms of communication
in judgments deemed “divine,” and divinity seen to make itself evident in a present
in which “guilt comes immediately to light” (“dass die Schuld dadurch unmittelbar
ans Tageslicht komme”445). Te compounding of the irony of the story by the
addition of a supplemental inscription literally enshrining the temporal and causal
uncertainty on which all contests of the very kind it narrates are to be predicated
henceforth – a kind of mitigating footnote to divine will and escape clause from
mundane error serving to codify not the demonstrability of guilt or innocence but
validity of indecision, by anticipating that, at any time, the divine may “wish” to
remain silent, to refuse to make its “judgment” known – is wonderfully, humorously
plain. Like the conclusion of “Te Marquise von O . . .,” with the exception of the
dead Herzog whose initial naming, elaborate historical contextualization, and
targeted murder gets the narrative underway, “Te Duel” ends happily for all who
seem to merit such deserts, and, for all others, with some measure of assurance, in
the form of an amending conditional clause, that some measure of adjustment, if
not of justice, could be applied to all future appearances of “divine will.” Much as
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the marriage and inheritance contracts signed and presented by the Graf to the
present and future mother of his oﬀspring mitigate the contradictory possibility of
his appearing alternately “angel” and “devil” again, the written caveat that divine
knowledge of truth, God’s own judgment, will appear to us in “decisive” form only
if God so wills, ensures that diﬀering presentations and temporal interpretations
of evidence may henceforth be permitted to mitigate possible assassinations of the
innocent by the state.
Less evident, however, is Kleist’s insistence, in closing a narrative entitled “Te
Duel” with the citation of an amendment inscribing into law the uncertain validity
of all such contests, that judgment on earth, like a narrative, is never ruled by divine

445. Kleist, II: 261.

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224 Te Linguistic Condition

signs, even and especially those it represents and cites; that the signs it may fail to
consider, in deciding what constitutes a just conclusion to any action, may also
appear, at any moment, words empty of meaning, formalities without sense –
merely verbal terms “hitting” (treffen) upon nothing “regarding” (betreffend) the
matter at hand. Unlike divine judgment, Kleist’s story of judgment indicates that
blindness, whether willed or involuntary, to the binding nature of “mere” formalities
will issue in mystifications of the “possible” – “das möglich[e]” – of the very kind at
which Rotbart’s many maneuverings aimed, a self-interested disabling of the
common critical capacity for judgment disdainfully dubbed anti-philosophical
“philosophisizing,” or “mystagoge[ry]”446 by Kant. In Kant, such mystification
pretends to transcend the necessity of form to thought, indeed, to replace thinking
itself by an unlimited self-sufficiency and immediacy of sense believed imitative of
divine omniscience. Just as such travesties of thought rely at every step on the
inherently comparable, individual concepts (such as “divine,” “absolute,” “truth,”
“directly,” “revealed,” “senses”447) whose very significance they purport to supersede,
so in Kleist’s story an intended mystification of others’ critical ability to judge,
rather than “transcend” evidence, is accomplished through the deceptive articulation
of a lie as mere form.
By leaving the lie of “mediation” as “mere form” unperceived by those it
immediately misled – the tribunal, before whom it is presented, that neglects or
forgets its actual, “probable or possible” meaning, as well as all present and future
readers of this, Kleist’s final text, who regularly fail to read it, its textual appearance
esembling “only” another Gedankenstrich pregnant with meaning we ignore – and
concluding with an amendment permitting such errors to continue even as, in
retrospect, they remain open to question, the judgment that both the duel and
“Te Duel” are intended to render remains, on Kleist’s account, inconclusive, the
contest between the evident and the non-evident undecided, just as Kant’s critical
conflict, between the modes of cognition and moral action, remains irresolvable by
either of these alone. Yet, that conflict, or “contest,” whose structural – permanently
reciprocal (rather than transformatively dialectical) – instantiation of the pure,
critical utility of negation was the basis of the “power to judge” to begin with: an
impersonal “power” whose “necessary” “possibility” Kant hypothesized, rightly, to
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be undeniable by other means, in that, like the ungrounded, empirically

nonreferential “faculty of common sense” at its foundation, it itself never occurs in

446. Kant, “Von einem neuerdings erhobenen Ton in der Philosophie” (“Of a Newly
Elevated Tone in Philosophy”), Werkasugabe VI: 388 (A 409); cf. Chapter Two, Section One,
n. 50, this study. On the “political aesthetic” of Kleist’s representations of contrived
appearances in its relation to Rousseau’s, see Steven Howe, Heinrich von Kleist., Chapter
One, “Kleist, Rousseau, and the Paradoxes of Enlightenment” (pp. 12–55) and “Conclusion”
(pp. 195–228).
447. Kant, “On a Newly Elevated,” VI: 388 (A 409); cf. n. 50, n. 53, ChapterTwo,
Section One.

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Kleist’s Mere Formalities 225

propria persona, such that the only positive “proof ” of its ability and activity occurs
in the alius of speech. If ever proof could be rendered, in the representational
world to which Kant limits cognition, of the theory of a nonrepresentational power
of judgment based in the inherently mediating medium of discourse that his Tird
Critique describes, such evidence would itself have to be representational, causal
and a posteriori – in short, as conclusive and inconclusive, “probable,” “possible,”
and mistaken as the extenuating, referentially fictional events and really referential,
“merely formal” lies composing Kleist’s story.
For, just as Rotbart’s testimony lies when it “formally” denies its speaker’s
participation in verbal “mediation,” the impersonal mode of action that turns out
to be the content of “his” crime in that it communicates its commission to the
hands of another, so Kant’s theory of judgment provides the answer to the question
that the tribunal “hearing” Rotbart’s case fails to pose, the question whose terms his
own testimony provides. Like a “dash” or Gedankenstrich “bridg[ing]” and so
holding together two separate realms of action never legible at the same time, the
double function of judgment, as critical because discursive form of mediation, in
Kant, is to transpose Rotbart’s appositive declaration of an apparently merely
formal disclaimer – “noch mittelbar” (“nor by any other means [of mediation]”) –
into the diacritically altered form of a question: “noch mittelbar?” (“still [or yet]
available to mediation?”). Lest we, too, like Rotbart’s tribunal, distractedly forget
how full of truly, because practically critical meaning, all “personal” disclaimers
notwithstanding, the merely formal or förmlich may turn out to be, that question,
which is no less than the central question posed by Kant of his own Critique – “can
this yet be mediated?” – enacts for us the very “possibility” (if not mimetic
“probability”) of discursive mediation that is its own double and reply. For the very
posing of Kant’s essential critical question and “revolution in mode of thinking”
that, in defiance of pointless, perennially attractive dualisms and monisms, asks
instead whether mediation as such remains possible, must by definition cross a
posteriori with a priori, just as its answer, already contained in the ability to seek it,
is a “pure” speech act available to all speakers, i.e., every subject “free[d]” from
empirical and fictive conditions to speak – upon the specifically linguistic
condition of “feeling one’s self free” – not only “personally,” but for “every other,”
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

which is to say, on the necessarily heterogeneous, a priori and a posteriori

“condition” deﬁning all use of language as such. As if merely “formally” constating
what must misleadingly appear, a posteriori, “mere” “common sense” and is the
a priori “communicability” of mediation itself, like Kant’s theory of judgment,
Kleist’s story of judgment answers the question whose centrality to judgment –
and thus to the “critical” ability “to think” in “freedom” from determination that
judgment alone has the “power” to articulate – makes both question and answer,
once articulated, appear equally to go without saying: “noch mittelbar”?;
aber doch.448

448. Roughly: “But of course;” “you said it!”

226

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
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Wokler, Robert. Rousseau, Te Age of Enlightenment, and Teir Legacies. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012.
Wolfson, Susan. “Wordsworth’s Craf.” In Te Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth. Ed.
Stephen Gill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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234

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INDEX
Adler, Hans, vi automata and hommes-machines
Adlon, Percy desire for total noncontingency they
Céleste of, 18 embody, xii
Adorno, T. W., 62 as fantasy of a superhuman ability to
Aeschylus fabricate the “animate” absence
tragedy of Cassandra in, x of experience as such, xi–xii
Agamben, Giorgio Azamanova, Albena, 115–16n
“mute” “incarnation” of the “sacred” in,
xi–xiin Balzac, Honoré de
“Opus Dei” of, xi–xiin “Chez d’œuvre inconnu” of, 12
agency death by desire for the lifeless
as ability to alter an apparently represented by, xii
“natural” “state of things,” in Baudelaire, Charles
Locke and Rousseau, xiii negative condition of lyric in, x, 62
as basis for equalizing social Beck, Ulrich, 36n
conventions and contracts in “being in time” (“Dasein in der Zeit“)
Rousseau, xiii ﬁrst conception of, by Kant, 73n
as diﬀerentiation and departure from Benjamin, Walter, xii, 62
aesthesis, xx Borges, Jorge Luis
“free,” in Locke and Rousseau, xiv, 86, and Ovidian theme of death by
109–10n aesthesis, xii
and freedom from phenomenality in Boucher, François, xii
Kant, 156, 190–1 Boulter, Stephen, 25n, 38n
and judgment in Kant, xv, xvii, 56, 84 Brodsky, Joseph
and language in Wordsworth, xviii and Ovidian theme of death by
linguistic condition of, 138 aesthesis, xii
mistaken in Kleist, xvii Bronzino, Agnolo di Cosimo, xii
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relation to structure of, in Steven Browning, Robert, xi

Howe’s analysis of Kleist’s Burke, Edmund, 59
political thought and “standing,” Byrne, Gabriel, 205n
xiii–xiv
and “revolution(s) in thinking,” 18n Carnap, Rudolf, 31n
Arendt, Hannah Carter, Christine Jane, 79n
on Adolf Eichmann speaking “on the Cascardi, Anthony, 37–8n, 65n
stand”, xvi–xvii Celan, Paul, x, 62
Eichmann in Jerusalem by, 157–67 Chomsky, Noam
on Kant’s undeﬁned sensus communis, on Descartes’ account of language,
37n 108n
Aristotle, 25n, 34n, 124–5 Coen, Joel and Ethan (“the Coen Bros.”)
Arnauld A., and P. Nicole, 101n cinematic style of, in comparison with
Austin, J. L., 90n Kleist’s narrative prose, 205–6n

235

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236 Index

ﬁlmic equivalent of diacritical marks in supposed “natural” order of

the works of, 205–6n language, 14, 101–5
Miller’s Crossing, of, 205n comparison of poetic discourse with “a
use of mannered and regional speech stack of hieroglyphs” by, 15–17
patterns, “generic” and De l’interprétation de la nature of, 11
idiosyncratic physical props to “double light of metaphor” in, 11, 17,
represent “character” externally 95, 97, 100
by, 205–6n his “Saunderson,” 3, 10–12, 16–17, 98–9
Cohn, Dorrit, 200n hypothetical conception of an “homme
Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, xi, 64, 82n, horloge,” by, xi
82–3n, 101, 101n, 108n “Lettre sur les aveugles” of, 10–11,
consent 16–17
founding notion of verbal act of, in “Lettre sur les sourds et muets” of
Locke, xiii 10–18
Crawford, David W., 67n literary production of, 60n, 103n
logical and historical precedence of
Daedalus, xi adjective theorized by, 14,
Davidson, Donald, 33–4n 103–4
Deleuze, Gilles, xin logical-hypothetical description of
Delibes, Léo, xi inﬁnite diversity of natural
de Man, Paul, 81n, 98n, 115n formations by, 10–12, 17
Derrida, Jacques “Molyneux Problem” in, 99–100, 103
L’origine de la géometrie, trans. of notion of “decomposition” as
Husserl, by, 8n theoretical method of, xi, 12–13,
on Rousseau, 60–1n, 81n, 98n, 101n 105
Descartes, Renée Pensées philosophiques of, 11
accounts of distinctive capacities of on poetry, 12, 15–17
human language by, 24n, 82, “real” limit of perception in, xviii, 10
82–3n, 83n Donizetti, Domenico, xi
Discours de la méthode of, 24n, 83n, Dryden, John, xii
98 Dugan, C. N., 109–10n
discursive conception of cogito by, 108, Dvorák, Antonin, xi
108n, 136n
Geometry of, 98 Eichmann, Adolf
integration of algebra with geometry Arendt’s account of the absence of all
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by, 98, 99n commonsensical conception of

problem of “method” in, 124, 175 the general, and thus of violence,
“larvatus prodeo” motto, in Cogitationes in, 158
Privatae of, 203n his “clownishness” as symptom of a
portrayal of, in Rosselini’s “Cartesius,” lack of “common sense,” 157–8,
17–18n 166
Diderot, Denis his own equation of “evil” with
account of “origin” of language by, xv “banality,” 160
accounts of forms of representation the relation of his platitudinous speech
and communication invented by to the commission of genocide,
the sensorily deprived of, xiii, xv, 157–61
2–3, 10–18 Einstein, Albert, 26n
on “bonnet blanc” controversy Ellis, John M., 216–7n
regarding “inversions” of a Euripides, tragedy of Cassandra, in, x

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Index 237

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 62 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, xii

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 47 Hegel, G, W, F., 25n
Fischer, Bernd, 197n account of his correlation of the origin
Florence, Penny, 171n of thinking with the
Forguson, Lynd, 33–4n architectural origin of the
François, Anne-Lise, 203n aesthetic in Words‘ Worth, xviii
Fraser, Jake, 203–4n the alternating absence and presence of
Freud, Sigmund specific “faculties” within the
his structural economy of pleasure and intellectual actions analyzed in
pain first formulated in Kant’s Kant’s three Critiques as
Tird Critique, 34–5n, 62 antecedent of his temporal
Fricke, Gerhard, 213–14n delineation of the dialectic,
Furst, Lilian, 197n 134–5
best known adage of, concerning
Ganz, Bruno mental death by indistinction, in
perfect performance of the role of relation to Kant’s combinatory
“role-playing” played by Kleist’s cognitive “art” of the “schema,”
“Graf,” in Rohmer’s Marquise 130n
von O, of, 205n “false consciousness” in, 39–40n
Geertz, Clifford, 36n his and Kant’s use of the term,
Girard, Renée, 203–4n “Anschauung” to signify
Gittings, Robert, 140n “perception” rather than
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 60n “intuition,” 149n
advocacy in his Color Teory his scathing critique of the “lifeless”
(Farbenlehre) of discursive leveling of all mental and
mediation enacted “mit Ironie,” natural “forms” by
197, 197n “compartment[alizing]”
early romanticism of, 62 thematic and taxonomic
master-slave opposition conceived by “method(s),” 196n
his Faust, 135 Kant’s analysis of the positive and
Werther, of, 61n negative experiences of the
Goldsmith, Oliver, 60n beautiful and sublime in relation
Goya, Francesco, xii to his dialectic, 34–5n, 62
Gramsci, Antonio, 36n, 38–9n Heidegger, Martin, 62
Gregoric, Pavel, 24n and “anti-Enlightenment” theory, 64
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Guyer, Paul, 36–7n, 50n his critique of the everyday

conventionalization of
Habermas, Jürgen, 38n, 115–16n metaphor in Identity and
antecedents of his theory of Diﬀerence, 97–8n
“communicative action” in his diﬀerential account of “Being,”
Kant’s and Schiller’s concepts of 135
aesthetic “play,” 154–5n the evacuation and reversal of his
his concept of the “public sphere,” “ontological” critique of
contrasted with the metaphysics by Agamben’s
architectonic function of Kant’s notion of a “coming” “utopia,”
Tird Critique, as necessary xi–iin
“bridge” between his First and his use of architectural terms, 115n
Second, 113, 113n Hephaestus, xi
Hamann, Johann Georg, 64 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 18

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238 Index

Hobbes, Tomas degradation of all causal logic to a

and “anti-Enlightenment” theory, temporary product of custom,
97–8n “habit,” or “association” by,
his attribution in Leviathan of 51–2n
“discourse” to “the mind,” 108n Diderot’s account of the
his recognition of the demonstration, by the sensorily
conventionalization of deprived, of every mind’s
metaphors in both philosophy intellectual productivity, in
and everyday speech, 97–8n relation to his limitation and
Hoﬀmann, E. T. A., xi replacement of all such
Hölderlin, Friedrich productivity by empirical
critique of Heidegger’s commentary impressions, 94n
on, by Paul de Man, 115n emphasis on passive “sensibility” in
negative condition of lyric in, x, 60n, 62 Enquiry of, 59
Homer his equation of “Understanding” with
death by aesthesis in, xii purely habitual inferences from
sirens of stupefaction in, x impressions, 97–8n
Horkheimer, Max, 62, 202–3n skeptical account of all knowledge
Horn, Peter, 213–14n, 221n in favor of “feeling” of, 59,
Howard, Dick 94n
his analysis of Rousseau’s speciﬁcally theory of mind of, compared to the
temporal accounts of a myopia of the sighted, as these
hypothetical “state of nature,” are described by Diderot’s
of “man,” and of “revolution,” “Saunderson,” 16, 94n
52n recognition of the conventionalization
on the key role of “feeling” in Kant’s of metaphor in both
Tird Critique, 61–2n philosophical and everyday
Howe, Steven discourse by, 97–8n
on the political thinking informing stated debt to, by Kant, 51, 51–2n,
Kleist’s stories, in relation to 94n
Rousseau’s, 202–3n, 224n Husserl, Edmund, 62
Hume, David his account of the origin of geometry
adoption by “new” (i.e., old) in comparison with Kant’s, 8, 8n,
“ontological” “materialisms,” of 95n
the radical mental passivity his account of “writing” as the required
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prerequisite to his skepticism, external means of transmitting,

122n repeating and reenacting the
as basis of Paul Guyer’s backwards “original” conception of
rejection, as insuﬃciently geometry, 9
imitative of, of Kant, whose Hutcheson, Frances, 59
“critical” “revolution” arose
explicitly to negate the skeptic’s James, Henry
usurpation of mental action by death by aesthesis portrayed by, xii
sensation, 36–7n, 50n Jameson, Frederic
defense of, by Kant, against his opposition of the logical
“commonsensical” dismissals of “contradictions” exposed by
the challenge to all knowledge Rousseau’s“historical reasoning”
and possibility of moral action to caricatures of “Enlightenment
he raised, 40–1n, 41n Reason,” 73n

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Index 239

his redeﬁnition of Rousseau as “free” action, by, xv, xvii, 28–30,

“impossible founder” of “the 36, 38
dialectic itself,” comparable in its distinction between objects of nominal
“structural” epistemological and real deﬁnition and
scope to Kant’s “transcendental knowledge in his Logik, xv, 69,
antimony” of time, 73n 69n, 90, 142, 175, 193, 193n
employment of the German
Kafa, Franz, 62 Gemeinsinn (“common sense”)
and Kleist, 209, 215 in sharp distinction from
Kalar, Brent, 36–7n Scottish “Common Sense”
Kant, Immanuel Philosophy, commonplace
account of “genius” by, 4, 4n, 181, 183, German notions of “healthy” or
183n, 189, 189n “common human
account of origin of geometry by, 5–6, understanding” (“gesunder” or
8–9, 16, 18, 95n, 122 “gemeiner Menschenverstand”),
acknowledgement of debt to Rousseau and conventional notions of a
by, 51–2, 51n, 73–4n “logic of common reason”
“ambiguity” of term “aesthetic” noted (“Logik der gemeinen
and disambiguated by, 163–4 Vernunf”) that “is actually no
“Answer to the Question, What is logic but an anthropology”
Enlightenment?” ([die] eigentlich keine Logik
(“Beantwortung der Frage . . .”) sondern eine anthropologische
of, 148n Wissenschaf ist”), 23–4, 24n,
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of 25n, 26, 26n, 31, 35, 40n, 45n,
View of, 24n, 214n 47n, 119, 154
“Augenschein” (“appearance upon the exposition of the basis and explanation
eye”) of nature seen “as the poets of the role of “synthetic
do,” distinguished from its judgments a priori” in his
phenomenal appearance, by, Critique by, 110–12
186 “feeling,” in his theory of judgment, xvi,
“being in time” (“Dasein in der Zeit”) xviii, 24, 32, 34n, 35, 37, 50, 56,
ﬁrst conceived and formulated 58–9, 61–3
by, 7, 74, 133, 133n, 143 on “feeling free” in act of aesthetic
“communicability” constituting verbal judgment commensurate with
act of aesthetic judgment, “free delineation” perceived in
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deﬁned by, 36n, 37n, 66–7, 71, its objects, 55–6, 64–5, 68,
90, 109, 115, 116n, 120, 147, 109–10, 113–15, 113n, 120, 148
154–5, 154n, 167, 191–2, 225 “free agency” in, 16, 19, 58–9
contrasted with Habermas’ “general voice” (“allgemeine Stimme”)
“communicative action,” 154–5n of speech required to enact
“Copernican turn” enacted and aesthetic judgment, theorized
described by, 9, 9n, 16, 17, 18, 25, by, 109–10n, 117–21, 128, 143,
61n, 121 147, 163, 181, 190, 212n
critical correction of “ambiguity” of his “grammar” of cognition in, 171, 171n
previous use of the term, grounds for hypothetical reasoning
“practical,” by, 42–6 deduced by, xv, 7, 9, 9n, 10, 16,
demonstration, on the basis of 26–9, 34, 36–7n, 38, 47, 50, 50n,
hypothetical verbal actions, of 55, 50, 61–2n
the “possibility” of (“moral”) Grundlegung der Metaphysik of, 42, 42n

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240 Index

“Herumtappen” (“groping around in “schema” described by, as “art [of

the dark”) defining millennia of cogntion] buried in the soul,” in
pre-Euclidean mathematics, distinction from ancient Greek
described by, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8n, usage, xvi, 63, 120–8, 125, 125n
16 130, 135, 177–9, 188, 191–2
“heterogeneity” of cognition theorized Second Critique (Critique of Practical
by, xvi, 6–7, 59, 65, 123–4, 127–8, Reason) of, 27–9, 36, 54, 56, 58,
133–4, 149, 171, 176, 181 59, 65, 112, 113, 115, 116, 148,
interpretation of “apparent 149, 150n, 162, 167, 168, 170,
indifference” to philosophy by, 171, 193, 194, 210
53n, 164–5, 169 “Second Preface” to First Critique of, 3,
Metaphysik der Sitten of, 77n 5, 7, 38, 74n, 121, 133, 166
“monogram of imagination a priori” in “self-legislation,” concept of, and
First Critique of, xvi, 63, 126–30, Rousseau’s, 58, 62
133, 135–6, 179–83, 187–92 on sonoric illusion of spiritual
on “mystagogery” of antidiscursive “harmony,” 56–7
“sensers of truth” that “pretend Streit der Fakultäten (Conflict of the
to the throne [of philosophy]” Faculties) of, 18n
184, 224 “stupidity” (“Dummheit”) defined as
on “nomadic skeptics,” 164 “lack of any power to judge” by,
notion of the “fortuitous notion” 173
(“glücklicher Einfall”) in, 5, 6, 8, subject of judgment conceived as agent
8n of otherness, by, 142
notion of “free play” (of faculties) in, “subreption” in, 179, 191
26–7, 36n, 40, 44, 54–5, 55n, 63, Technik (“technology”), techne, and
71, 90, 107, 119, 153–5, 161, “technical,” in contradistiction
168–70, 184–5, 212 to “moral” “imperatives,
“On a Newly Elevated Tone in described by, 42–9, 45n, 46n,
Philosophy” (“Von einem 47n, 54, 64n, 65n, 70–1, 95, 114n,
neuerdings . . .”) of, 31n, 32n, 122, 124
194, 194n unconventional critical use of the
on poetry, xvi, 181–92 hybrid notion, sensus communis,
poets’ “use” of “nature” described by, by, 23, 24, 25n, 37n, 47, 67n
xvi, 182–3, 187–92 “Unform” (“nonform”) and
on “the power of judgment” as “Formlosigkeit”
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deﬁnitive of any “Age of (“formlessness”), theorized by,

Critique,” 29, 29n, 164–5 153, 155, 167–9, 184, 210
Prolegomena of, 25n, 40–1n, 41n, 51n, “violent” experience of the“sublime”
52n, 147, 171n, 175, 175n described by, 169–70, 184
relation of agency to speech described “wallpaper” (“Papiertapeten”) opposed
by, xiv to “tattoos” by, 154–6, 161, 163
relation between feeling and language Keats, John, 62
described by, 128n death by aesthesis represented by, xii
“revolution(s) in mode of thinking” negative condition of lyric represented
described by, xii, 3, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7, in, x
8n, 9, 10, 13, 16, 18, 24, 27, 37, opposition between paradoxical
37n, 49, 50, 94, 111, 121, self-memorializing epitaph he
121n, 143, 148, 149, 166, 174, composed and those
225 posthumously composed for

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Index 241

him and erected by others, 140, “Michael Kohlhaas” of, 206, 213
140n prose syntax of his narratives, 196,
material “symbols” of Diderot’s 198n, 201, 206, 208, 216n
sensorily deprived contrasted relation of his causal fictions to Kant’s
with thoughts said feared to epistemology and moral theory,
“sink to nothingness” by, 106 192–3, 193n, 195–7
Kelleher, Paul representational fiction and
analysis of “dis-ability,” as universal representational cognition in,
temporal condition, within the 195–7, 204
context of Smith’s Teory of unfathomably motivated causality
Moral Sentiments, by, 15n and prominent signs of
Kleist, Heinrich von demarcation defining the
“Auflärung” (“enlightenment”), widely differing contents of
ambiguous references to, in his all his stories, compared
fictions, 207n with the individual verbal and
“blushing” and other external visual signatures integral to each
appearances of otherwise similarly divergently themed
invisible emotion named in his film of the Coen Bros., 205–6n
fictions, 200n Kripke, Saul, 91n
causality and freedom combined in the Kulenkampff, Jan, 36n
distinctive discursive “style” of
his works, xviii, 193n, 204 La Méttrie, Julien Offray de, xi
death by desire for the lifeless Latour, Bruno, 36n
represented by, xii LaVaque-Marty, Mika, 214n
dialectical relationship of success and Lefebvre, Henri, 39n
failure in his works, 196, 224 Lemnos, Noah, 50n
“Te Duel” of, xvii–xviii, 206–9, Lessing, G. E.
213–25 Laokoon of, 163
“Erklärung” (“explanation”) of the Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 62
apparently self-evident, in, 220 Livingston, Alex, and Leah Soroko,
“formalities,” merely conventional, or 214n
“polite,” yet “binding,” Locke, John
(“Verbindlichkeiten”), in, 201n account of “framing” of human
“hat(s)” and other diacritical props and language, in distinction to
accoutrements in, 204, 205n animal mimesis, in Essay
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“Kant-Krise” (“Kant-crisis”) of, 195 Concerning Human

“marionette-like” (“marionettenhaf”) Understanding of, 83n, 108n,
“role-playing“ (“Rolle spielen”) 164
ascribed to the actions of agency described in Second Treatise of,
characters in his narratives, xiii–xiv
194 founding concept of “consent” in,
“Te Marquise von O . . .” (“Die xiii
Marquise von O . . .”) of, Longuenesse, Béatrice, 108n
xvii–xviii, 194, 197–207 on Descartes’ cogito as antecedent of
“Gedankenstrich” (“dash”) at its the active, “I think,”
foundation, 198–203 accompanying all judgment in
“the means of mediation” (“mittelbar”) Kant, 136n
stated and ignored in his works, Louis, Morris, ix
221–4 Lukács, Gyorgy, 39n

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242 Index

McGlathery, James G., 213–14n Pascal, Blaise, 64

Makkreel, Rudolf A., 214n Pinter, Harold, xvii, xx
Mallarmé, Stéphane “Te Room,” by, x
differential and dialectical relations speech patterns in the plays of, x
composed in the poetry of, Plato
62 and Aristotelian Scholasticism,
Kantian advocacy of an unprescribed 124–5
“public” realm of aesthetic “Ideas” in aesthetic theory of, 40
judgment by, 171n and Kant’s “schema,” 125
negative lyric condition in, xi theory of anamnesis of, 37–8n
Manders, Dean Wolfe Porset, Charles
on “potentiality for critical thought,” annotation of first standard edition of
39–40n Rousseau’s posthumously
Mandelstam, Osip, xii published “Essai sur l’origine des
Marcuse, Herbert, 62 langues” by, 81n
Marx, Karl, 62 on the probable date of composition of
importance of language to his the “Essai,” 81n
(Hegelian) critique of “false Proust, Marcel
consciousness,” 39–40n account of the “real horizon” of
and “new,” “post-Marxist” and experience by, xviii–xix
“post-historical,” “ontological” and Céleste Albaret, author of
“materialisms,” xi, xiv Monsieur Proust (1972) and
the relation of his structural thought to subject of Percy Adlon’s Céleste,
Kant’s structural economy of 18
pleasure and pain, and negative “ironic tone” of the speech of Swann,
generation of value, 34–5n original “author” of his life, as
and Rousseau, 73–4n, 79n observed by the fictive narrator
Moore, G. E., 25–6n, 31n, 33–4n of his A la recherche du temps
Morgenstern, Mira, 74n perdu, 211n
Muth, Ludwig, 193n Pygmalion and Galatea, xi–xii

Narcissus and Echo, xi Rameau, Jean-Philippe, xii

Negri, Antonio Rancière, Jacques, xin
“On Giorgio Agamben’s Opus Dei” by, Aesthetics and Its Discontents of, xiin
xi–xiin “Aesthetics as Politics” of, xiin
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neo-Platonic Te Flesh of Words of, xixn

aesthetic theory, 34 and Wordsworth, xixn
mysticisms, xi Rawls, John, 116n
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 64 Reagan, Ronald, 39–40n
“On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Reich, Klaus, 51–2n
sense” (“Über Wahrheit und Reid, Tomas, 25–6n, 33–4n
Lüge im aussermoralischen Rescher, Nicholas, 32n
Sinne”) by, 14 Richardson, Samuel
and literature of “feeling,” 60n
Offenbach, Jacques, xi Rilke, Rainer Maria, 62
Ovid Rohmer, Eric
death by desire for the lifeless film, Die Marquise von O . . ., of,
reflection of a self-projection in, 205–6n
xi–xii Rosenfeld, Sophia, 39n

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Index 243

Rossellini, Roberto on origin of language, 72–4, 76–84,

ﬁlm, Cartesius, of, 18 89–91, 91n, 85–6, 100, 106
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques paradoxical historical status as
“agency,” “free,” human capacity for “anti-Enlightenment” founder of
(“en sa qualité d’agent libre”), the Enlightenment, 61n, 64
conception of, by, xiv, 83–5, “real” limit of experience indicated by,
109–10n xviii
Confessions of, 132n Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire of,
Du contrat social of, xiii, 59–60, 84n, 132n
89–90, 109–10n, 131
death by aesthesis represented by, xii Saurette, Paul, 38n
Discourse on whether the Arts and Saussure, Ferdinand de, 143
Sciences Improve the Morals of Savi, Mariana, 24n
Men (“First Discourse”) of, 72–3, schema
72n Kant’s conception of, as “monogram of
account of “man’s departure from imagination a priori, xvi, 63,
nothingness” in its opening 126–8, 129n, 130, 133, 135–6,
sentence 71–2, 72n, 77n, 84n 180–3, 187–9, 191–2
Discourse on the Origin and Schiller, Friedrich
Foundations of Inequality among adoption of Kant’s notion of “free play”
Men (“Second Discourse”) of, by, 154n
xiv, 59–60, 60n, 74–81, 77n, 79n, death by aesthesis in, xvii
83–5, 89–91, 131–2 early romanticism of, 62
account of necessary substitution of Schmitt, Carl
abstract formal signs for “absolute utilitarianism” and “nihilism”
gestures, 76–8 of, critiqued by Negri, xiin
distinction of animal from human Scottish School of Common Sense
language in, 84–5 Philosophy, 25–6, 25n, 31n, 32n,
verbal creation of referent of 33n
spatial demarcation composing Segrest, Scott Philip, 25n
the act of appropriation, Shafesbury, Lord and 7th Earl of
narrated in, 75n, 77n, 78–80, “good sense” in, 25n
79n, 91, 91n “sensibility” in, 59
distinction of human language Shakespeare, William
from the non-“divers[ifying],” death by desire for the lifeless in, xii
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“unchanging” “languages” of Merchant of Venice of, xx

“automata” and “animals” in Shaw, George Bernard
Discours de la méthode of, 82–3, death by desire for a projection of the
82n, 83n self in, xii
“Essay on the Origin of Languages” of, Shell, Susan Meld, 36n
74n, 81–3, 81n, 82n, 83n, 85–90, Shelley, P. B., 62
88n, 91n Socrates, 48
account of “trope” as ﬁrst word in, Spinoza, Baruch, 135n
82–91 “standing” and agency, xiii–xiv, xvii
host of Hume, 51 as social access to “rights,” x
hypothetical reasoning of, xiv, 52, 60–1, as subject-position in relation to
61–2n possibility (“chance”), x
Kant’s acknowledged debt to, 51–2, and verbal action, xx
51n, 73–4n Stebbing, Susan, 31n

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
244 Index

Stella, Frank Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 31n, 64

“Marquise of O” series, 205n Wittowski, Wolfgang, 216n
Striker, Jacques, 15n Wokler, Robert, 73–4n
Stroll, Avrum, 31n Woolf, Virgina
Strong, Tracey B., 109–10n Cassandra ﬁgure in, x
Wordsworth, William
tautology accounts of the “real” limit of
conversion, via redundancy, of verba experience in, xv, xviii
into empirical givens by, 32–3 on “communicability,” xx
Kant’s critique of, 31n on dependance of “the state of public
as usurpation of thinking and “death of taste” on mutual interactions of
philosophy” described in Kant’s language and mind 134n
“On a Newly Elevated Tone in “Essay on Epitaphs” of, 141
Philosophy,” 32, 32n geometrical delineation in, xx, 139
Terada, Rei, 61n “Gondo Gorge” passage in Te Prelude
Teisen, Bianca, 197n of, xviii
Todorov, Tzvetan, 85n “A Guide through the District of the
Trachtenberg, Zev, 72n Lakes” by, 138n
Tucker, Brian, 246n “Lucy Poems” of, xviii, 144
Twilley, Nicola, 97–8n most widely circulated, severely
truncated deﬁnition of poetry
Vahinger, Hans, 113n of, 141n
Vico, Giambattista, 64 “Power” of “Imagination” referenced by,
Virgil 129n, 134n
tragedy of Cassandra in, x “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” of, xx
Vloytinsky, MichaelL 214n on “real language” vs. “poetic diction,”
Von Holthoon, Fritz, 25n xviii–ix, xiiin, 80n, 138–9
Vossler, Otto, 60n “Te Sublime and the Beautiful” of,
138n
Wardle, Huon, 36n viewed as “nature poet,” xviii
Wenzel, Christian Helmut, 36–7n viewed as poet of “feeling,” 60–1n, 62
Copyright © 2021. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

245

246

247

248

Brodsky, Claudia. The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.

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