Thought, critique, and novelty in Kant’s critical philosophy

Abstract

The main concern of the thesis is to expose the specifically critical thrust of Kant’s conception of genius. The guiding thread of our investigation is Kant’s conceptualization of taste as the discipline of genius. We argue that this conception arises against the background of a larger context of themes and problematics that concern critical philosophy in general. To this aim we will first provide a preliminary account of Kant’s theory of genius in Critique of Judgment with a view to investigating the implications of this theory for the relationship between art and thought. In that part of the investigation we will try to identify a crucial moment in Kant’s account of artistic creativity, a moment at which we come across a complex relationship between the expansion and the gathering of thought in the presentation of aesthetic ideas. With this identification at hand, we pass on to the contribution of taste to genial creation in order to show how genius, within the dynamics of the critical text, becomes a figure which registers the question of creativity and novelty within the basic parameters of critical philosophy. We do this by showing that disciplining genius becomes necessary due to the contribution of the power of imagination in genial creation, which contribution, while constituting the properly genial element of such creation, jeopardizes it, since imagination, not only in artistic creativity but also in the traditional metaphysics which is a target of Kantian critique, is susceptible to becoming excessively productive and therefore to lending itself to illegitimate uses. The offences of such an excessive imagination, we will try to demonstrate, are correlated in Kant’s view with fanaticism and madness, and this raises the stakes of the disciplining of genius beyond the immediate context of the discussion on fine arts and artistic creativity, relating it to critical philosophy in general.