Poetic Force

Poetry after Kant

Kevin McLaughlin

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780804791007
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780804792288
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This book argues that the theory of force elaborated in Immanuel Kant's aesthetics (and in particular, his theorization of the dynamic sublime) is of decisive importance to poetry in the nineteenth century and to the connection between poetry and philosophy over the last two centuries. Inspired by his deep engagement with the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, who especially developed this Kantian strain of thinking, Kevin McLaughlin uses this theory of force to illuminate the work of three of the most influential nineteenth-century writers in their respective national traditions: Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold. The result is a fine elucidation of Kantian theory and a fresh account of poetic language and its aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities.

1

Ur-ability

Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin

All ground must at some point have been made arable (urbar) by reason . . .

Walter Benjamin

There are two ways of looking at the sea from the perspective of critical philosophy. One is as a thing to be owned. This is the subject of the discussion of the power of possession in the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). In this context Kant distinguishes between empirical and rational titles of acquisition. The former, he proposes, are based on the physical possession of an “original community of land.” In order for such an empirical title to be brought into accord with a “rational concept of right,” he argues, its legitimacy must be established outside of space and time. This “intellectual possession” of the land, however, must continue to “correspond” (korrespondieren) to the empirical conditions of space and time with which it originated and the medium of this correspondence is a certain “force” (Gewalt): “‘What I bring under my control (in meine Gewalt bringe) in accordance with laws of outer freedom and will to become mine becomes mine’” (AA 6: 264; Practical Philosophy, 416). Notwithstanding its traditional connection to illegitimate force (violentia as distinguished from potestas), the term Gewalt is introduced at this point to designate a kind of control that is more responsible to reason than physical power and that therefore provides the basis for the empirical title of acquisition to become rational. The force in question allows possession to be grounded in “the laws of outer freedom”—under the authority of the “united will” of “the civil condition.” It is only on the foundation of such a civil condition, Kant insists, that the “provisional” character of the original empirical possession can become “conclusive.” But there is a wrinkle: this rational possession cannot do without an original physical acquisition—possession has to start somewhere, and this physical starting point remains, as Kant states, “a true acquisition.” The difficulty being negotiated in this passage is that the possessible dimension of things derives ultimately from their empirical existence, and a rational concept of the right to possess them must be established, from the perspective of critical philosophy, outside of empirical space and time. The problem, in short, is that nothing can be possessed rationally, as Kant defines it, because possession is rooted in the physical power over the empirical world and reason calls for a ground outside of that world. The necessary correspondence between possession and physical force is highlighted when one looks at the sea as an acquisition, as Kant does in the following passage on the empirical limits of property rights:

The question arises, how far does authorization to take possession of a piece of land extend? As far as the capacity for controlling it extends (das Vermögen, ihn in seiner Gewalt zu haben), that is, as far as whoever wants to appropriate it can defend it—as if the land were to say, if you cannot protect me you cannot command me. This is how the dispute over whether the sea is open or closed also has to be decided; for example, as far as a cannon shot can reach no one may fish, haul up amber from the ocean floor, and so forth, along the coast of a territory that already belongs to a certain state. (AA 6: 265; Practical Philosophy, 416–17)

From the perspective of its possessibility the sea is seen as a finite thing extended in space and time that can be used for certain ends. It is a matter of limited resources that can be acquired to the precise extent of the owner’s capacity to control them; or, in the terms of the personification offered by Kant, a question of the kind of protection provided by a lord to a loyal vassal.¹ This figure lays the metaphorical ground for the sea to become an empirical object. According to the terms of this figurative contract, a portion of the sea becomes a property circumscribed by the limits of the ability of the owner (in this case the state) to project the physical force required to protect it. In this way a parcel of sea is transformed into a space containing things usable over time such as food (fish) and precious minerals (amber).

A contrasting ability to see the sea appears in the famous passage from the Critique of the Power of Judgment to which I alluded in the Preface. It comes in the “General Remark” that concludes the analysis of the aesthetic judgment of the sublime. At this point Kant has explained that aesthetic judgments occur when the cognition of things extended in space and time fails: in the case of the beautiful, the lack of a cognitive object produces a subjective agreement of the imagination with the understanding resulting in the feeling of a purposiveness in nature that is not determined definitively by a purpose; in the case of the sublime, as I noted above, the cognitive failure leads to a feeling of the superiority of man’s mental capacity over the physical power of nature. As Kant distinguishes aesthetic judgment from cognition of an empirical object, the sea enters a scene decisively different from the sight of property described in the Metaphysics of Morals:

In just the same way, we must not take the sight of the ocean as we think it, enriched with all sorts of knowledge (which are not, however, contained in the immediate intuition), for example as a wide realm of water creatures, as the great storehouse of water for evaporation which impregnates the air with clouds for the benefit of the land, or as an element that separates parts of the world from one another but at the same time makes possible the greatest community among them, for this would yield teleological judgments; rather, one must consider the ocean merely as the poets do, in accordance with what its appearance shows, for instance, when it is considered in periods of calm, as a clear mirror of water bounded only by the heavens, but also when it is turbulent, an abyss threatening to devour everything, and yet still be able to find it sublime. (AA 5: 270; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 152–53)

In this passage the sea is not viewed as a parcel of finite things offering themselves for use by man in exchange for protection: it is not a matter of food for consumption, of water for the cultivation of the land, or of a continuous empirical space for the communication over time among otherwise discontinuous land masses. These are all end-oriented or “teleological” perspectives on the sea as a substantial thing extended in space and time. An aesthetic judgment of the scene is detached from this vision of the sea as a usable object outside of consciousness. Under the conditions of such judgments, instead of offering itself for use (as food, water, or a medium of communication) the sea merely appears: rather than acquiring meaning metaphorically as an object that is seen, by way of personification, to ask for protection, the sea means itself as an appearance. The beauty and sublimity that are associated with its appearances are what the poets see, according to Kant, when they look at the sea. The poets have the ability, in other words, to apprehend such scenes “merely” (bloß): before they become seen as objects in the cognitive sense, that is, before they become subject to the empiricist claim that makes them into the manifestations of an external thing affecting the mind. The capacity of the sea to mean and to communicate itself as an appearance, rather than being made to stand for an object extended in space and time, is poetic, then, in the sense of a force to which the poets are said to be especially receptive and which they are able to communicate. But this combination of receptivity and communicability, which is disclosed as what Kant calls aesthetic judgment, is not restricted to bards or writers of verse; it must be attributed, he insists, to all reasonable beings. The ability, for example, to see the sea before it has been claimed as a substantial thing affecting the mind and the capacity to communicate this vision are the basis of a rational community that never can be fully secured by the sight of a common possession of a portion of the earth’s surface.

This capacity is what I am calling poetic force. It is not, strictly speaking, a property of poetry as a literary genre, and indeed Kant’s attribution of it to the poets is a fine example of the sort of erroneous attribution that he classifies as “subreption.”² Nevertheless, lyric poetry becomes a privileged site for the exploration and expression of this capacity after Kant. But it is important to stress that the force in question is for Kant a shared and a sharing ability: it is collective in the double sense of the sensus communis outlined in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. It thus bears what Kant calls the “ambiguity” (Zweideutigkeit) of a common sense that is both held and expressed communally by all beings capable of reason (AA 5: 293–94; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 173–74). The place of this complex capacity within the broader outline of Kant’s philosophy is delineated by the comments on the metaphysical ambiguity of community that he added to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787)—around the time of his discovery of the transcendental principle of the power of judgment. The last of the three analogies of experience laid out in the first Critique, community (Gemeinschaft) is, Kant explains, the temporal mode of simultaneity. Along with persistence and succession, the simultaneity of community makes it possible for empirical intuitions to be subsumed under pure concepts of understanding in time. Community is in this sense what Kant calls a “temporal domain” (Zeitumfang) as distinct from a temporal series (causation), on the one hand, and a persistence in time (substance), on the other. We perceive a community when appearances exist in the same time, rather than, for example, occurring one after another. Communities appear when A and B are not sequential but reciprocal, reversible. After explaining this analogy, Kant takes note of the ambiguity in the word community that connects these observations with the account of a similar feature of the sensus communis in the third Critique (which, let me emphasize once again, he began writing around this same time): “The word ‘community’ is ambiguous (zweideutig) in our language,” he notes, “and can mean either communio or commercium” (AA B: 260; Critique of Pure Reason, 318). On this point Kant is unambiguous: when it comes to the cognition of community, what we perceive is a commercium. Temporal simultaneity is a matter of a community of entities interacting on one another at the same time. Empirical community, in other words, is commercial interaction. Kant does not speculate about nonempirical simultaneity in this section of the Critique of Pure Reason. However, he is explicit about not refuting its existence. He only rules out that such a community could ever become “an object for our possible experience” (AA B: 261; Critique of Pure Reason, 319). To adapt a famous phrase from the preface to the second edition of the first Critique, we might say that we can think a nonempirical community—community as communio—even if it cannot be given in our experience, provided that the I thinking this possibility does not “contradict itself.”³ Thinking communio in the sense of a nonempirical simultaneity or of a community that exists “where perceptions do not reach” becomes one of the fundamental imperatives of reason in the wake of critical philosophy. Reason after Kant, in this sense, dictates a vision of community as a matter, not of common possession of a thing like a parcel of land or sea, but of a communicability shared by all rational beings. Being able to see this requires the capacity for envisioning community that Kant attributes to the poets.

This is the ability that Benjamin finds expressed in an exemplary way in the poetry of Hölderlin. The groundwork for this discovery was carried out in the renewal of Kantian thinking to which Benjamin’s early writings were devoted.⁴ Although this intensive engagement with Kant occurs in Benjamin’s early years, he remains faithful throughout his work to the theory of a force exceeding the cognitive determination of what he describes as empiricist “mythology”—of an a priori ability making reason possible and, as suggested by the phrase cited above as an epigraph, clearing the ground for its exercise (GS 2.1: 161; SW 1: 103–4). In this sense Benjamin’s critical project is fundamentally directed toward the thinking of the peculiar temporal simultaneity characteristic of the nonempirical community to which Kant alludes in the Critique of Pure Reason. An illuminating example of the persistence of this effort in Benjamin’s work and of a certain modification of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment is the emergence in Benjamin’s later writings of what he calls “now-time.”⁵ Benjamin’s late historical-philosophical reflections reveal his ongoing participation in the critical project of reinterpreting time along the lines of the nonempirical simultaneity to which Kant alludes in his comments on the “ambiguity” of community in the first Critique. “Now-time” thus points to a manifestation of an a priori ability—a force in principle, to invoke another term qualified as “ambiguous” by Kant.⁶ The influential theory of the “dialectical image” developed in Benjamin’s later writings illustrates the link between the specific force at issue in his reflections on “now-time” and the Kantian principle of reason as involving a sovereign or primal ability prior to cognitive experience. What Benjamin calls the “dialectical image” has proven itself the most arresting example of a virtualizing force ascribed, throughout his writing, to the category of the image.

In a remarkable book outlining the structure and extent of this fundamental stress on virtuality in Benjamin’s thinking, Samuel Weber offers some reflections on the “dialectical image” and on the image as such that highlight the Kantian source. Weber focuses in particular on the structure of the image in Benjamin’s work:

“Image” for Benjamin is something very different from the familiar conception; indeed, it is something unheard-of. Image, as used here, signifies not the illustrative depiction of an external object. Rather, as something to be read rather than merely seen, the image is construed by Benjamin as both disjunctive and medial in its structure—which is to say, as both actual and virtual at the same time. Such images become a point of convergence, which Benjamin here designates as “now.” This now coexists with the “time” from which it simultaneously sets itself apart. Time, on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Poetic Force
• Acknowledgments
• Translations and Abbreviations
• 1. Ur-ability: Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin
• 2. Hölderlin’s Peace
• 3. Poetic Reason of State: Baudelaire and the Multitudes
• 4. Arnold’s Resignation
• Epilogue: Making Room for Reason
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List