At the beginning of this enterprise I acknowledge a singular precedent to the agon I stage between Kant and Shelley . In an essay of manifold suggestiveness, Northrop Frye has proposed that we see literature as a “critique of pure reason.” My overall indebtedness to Frye’s work extends well beyond the bounds of this pregnant essay, and in particular to his seminal volume on Blake . In his brief essay, although I find Frye’s paraphrase of Kant’s critical project less than inspiring, the project he outlines so envelops my own that I feel under some obligation to declare that I only stumbled upon his essay after this book was well underway. Yet with little violence Frye’s overall project may be characterized as monadological (Frye 1957, 121; see also Frye 1982, 209, 224), each part enveloping all, and so the fact that this piece entered my horizon late in the game means little, nor should the inadequacy of Frye’s rather journalistic portrait of Kant encourage us to belittle his all-too-ambitious proposal. To a first approximation, we might understand it as a revisioning of Cassirer’s “philosophy of symbolic forms,” with an eye not to literature as a repository of symbols , but rather as a source of that archetypal design which underpins all, and so even the most purely rational, of categorical structures. As such, it would engulf that tradition which since the Renaissance has come to be known as “philosophia perennis ,” reintegrating philosophy within the larger literary fold of which it was originally an aberrant generic eclosion.

Although I do not intend this project as one in which I use literature to provide a critique of pure reason, Frye’s proposal sets a first model for the encounter between Kant and Shelley . It is too one-sided in its suggestion that literature reveals the imaginative nude retreating beneath philosophical clothing – what Frye declares the elusive object of his ongoing quest (Frye 1990a, 169). Frye’s terms are the romantic ones of imagination bounding reason, securing and circumscribing a limited domain of rationality in a sea of imaginative tradition, buffering reason from its own tendency to extend itself irrationally. Representative of his orientation is his concluding remark that “[i]n Canada today, for example [1982], with its demoralized government and chaotic economy, it seems to me only its lively and articulate culture that holds the country together ” (Frye 1990a, 182). (1982 is the year of appearance of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, set in Northrop Frye’s own Toronto.)

Much as I agree with Frye about the power of culture and ideas, his vision of culture’s role risks, as most romanticisms do, the psychological function of self-congratulation. More saliently, it massively simplifies the very rift between literature and philosophy (not to mention the much larger rift between culture and society) it would seek to repair. In this regard it shares many features with the otherwise admirable ambitions of Kenneth Burke , whose A Grammar of Motives serves as another precedent for this enterprise limited only by its appreciation of the philosophical tradition, which is not as powerful as its attuned sense of literary effect. In this volume I seek, instead, a fully deployed agon between Kant and Shelley , involuting and undoing them to expose their encounter at its utmost.

It goes almost without saying that I exclusively invoke the literary precedents of Burke and Frye and their limitations not at all to demean them, but because there are no equally forward-looking antecedents to mention on the philosophical side of the equation. Philosophically, our age has largely devolved into a fetishistic preoccupation for the precision of the well-tooled cog in the machine, with insufficient appreciation for the monolithic status of the apparatus “underway.” I have not turned to literature for literary so much as for philosophical reasons: the massive default of the contemporary philosophical enterprise to deliver any extended, coherent reflection on its larger purport. The best we could hope for in recent times has been the honesty of Richard Rorty , making a virtue out of necessity by declaring in another 1982 essay that “[a] nation can count itself lucky to have several thousand relatively leisured and relatively unspecialized intellectuals who are exceptionally good at putting together arguments and pulling them apart. Such a group is a precious cultural resource. As we keep saying on our grant applications, the nation would do well to have analytic philosophers advise on public projects. We shall kibbitz at least as well as any other professional group, and perhaps rather better than most” (Rorty 1982, 220–221). (The pedigree of Rorty’s essay is indicated by its first presentation in 1981 at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association and its first appearance in print in The American Scholar). It is true that such argument parsers generally make good intellectual bureaucrats and more especially good professional advisors, but one wonders how much – then, and even more so now – they are accurately characterized as “relatively unspecialized,” and what, if anything, their skills have to do with philosophy. Such is the unlucky situation in which we philosophers find ourselves. Fortunately, there are exceptions: I speak above all of contemporary conditions of philosophical culture and not of the agendas (publicly disclosed or privately withheld) of individual philosophers.

Philosophical romanticisms, from the German varieties through post-Comtean versions of positivism, are as much the root of this problem as any resource for solution, and I mean to explode them here, along with their literary counterparts. These philosophical romanticisms – of which contemporary Hegelianism and analytic philosophy would both count as vestiges – would have us believe that something can be philosophically got from nothing, as if concepts would by themselves engender positive or negative elucidations of reality. Kant’s recognition is that concepts are in themselves philosophically inert, and this points to an entirely different conception of philosophical work which still remains largely unrecognized in the philosophical community at large. Nothing is got from nothing, and the work I promote in this book requires thinking about the programs of Kant and Shelley , not just the concepts they (purportedly) “invoke.” This is only one path to paraphysics , not a singular, royal road.

There is a story told of both philosophical and literary “romanticism” which inspires Frye’s vision. As the story goes, it is the power of the productive imagination, the palpitating heart of the retreating nude, which comes to redeem our world from the cold heart of modern rationality. Versions of this story are well-known in the case of Kant, even better known in the case of Shelley . I want to begin to show how the imagination, whose operation has been highlighted legitimately enough, serves, however, as a shadow for a more basic actor, the parafinite.

In Kant, we meet the parafinite first in the twofold form of the indefinite manifold , space and time .¹ In Shelley , the identification is all the more powerful, coming in the form of Power itself, which “dwells apart in its tranquillity/Remote, serene and inaccessible ” (Shelley 1977, 92). In Kant’s case, the relative status of the manifold , which is indicated in its need to be conditioned by unity, indicates that we are dealing with a form of what I call the relative parafinite . In contrast, Shelley’s invocation of Power in Mont Blanc appeals to what I call the absolute parafinite , at least as a poetic figure , and perhaps as more. One of the questions running throughout this enterprise is whether there is a philosophically defensible conception of the absolute parafinite . In some sense the answer is yes, with antecedence in such a notion as Blake’s “total form ” and, as we will see in more detail, the Kantian sublime. However, it will eventually turn out that the terms of the question are also in need of revision. We are making our way, step by step, into a new landscape. One of the things we should see along the way is that our “new way” is not as new, nor “old things” as old, as we might at first suspect.

In previous work, I have approached the parafinite through the mathematical domain (Bassler 2015). Here my approach will be largely through the more immediate channels of poetry and philosophy, hence leaving the discussion of the mathematical parafinite mostly to one side. Yet we may still see the enterprise of paraphysics as an attempt to develop a philosophical vision which is independent of the commitments philosophy has traditionally (if often implicitly) had to a determinate distinction between the finite and the infinite. The concept of the parafinite, by implication, calls this determinate distinction between the finite and the infinite into question. Even at its best, philosophically “shored up” against the ruins of a largely undefended and conceptually opaque foundation for mathematics, the distinction between the finite and the infinite is not what it has traditionally been taken to be. Rather than viewing philosophy as grounded in an appeal to the mathematical, I take as focus the more basic relation between philosophy and poetry. Because the Western philosophical tradition emerges out of and in vocal opposition to the tradition of Greek literature and especially Homeric epic, I begin with poetry in our modern age as a cultural context for the reconsideration of philosophy.²

I turn first to Mont Blanc – to which I will return again and again , an...