Paul Franks says of Sanford Budick’s new book, Kant and Milton: “Many readers will share my first response to the title: how much is there to say about Kant and Milton? Such readers will also share my subsequent astonishment: I am now convinced that Milton was of central importance to Kant’s philosophy, and that Kant offers significant insight into Milton’s poetry.”
We asked Budick, Professor of English at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, how he came to write on these two thinkers who might seem at first glance to have few concerns in common. Here’s his reconstruction of his process of discovery.
Can we be aware of the moment when the plying of a familiar route turns into a voyage of discovery? If nothing else, I think we can be conscious of the elements of mystery that beckon toward uncharted expanses.
When I began writing this book, I had already spent a good part of my intellectual life thinking and writing about Milton, especially the Milton who is the great modern poet of the sublime. For a long time, too, I had been brooding over the moral philosophy of Kant, especially the Kant who is the great philosopher of the sublime. But I had not thought it possible to put Kant and Milton directly together.
Nonetheless, it was clear that Kant early achieved a working familiarity with Milton's poetry of the sublime. For example, in his first treatise on the sublime (1764), he gave Milton pride of exemplifying place. Twenty-six years later, in the "Analytic of the Sublime" of the third Critique, Kant described how, in the mind's experience of the sublime, "the element of genius" in one genius is "followed by another genius—one whom it arouses to a sense of his own originality."
It now seemed necessary to wonder: Could it be that a formative encounter between Kant and Milton, the two modern geniuses of the sublime, had aroused Kant to his own originality? Could it be that Kant's continuing, detailed contemplation of Milton's poetry altered his way of engaging in moral philosophy?
Understanding Milton’s influence on Kant meant, first, understanding the astonishing eighteenth-century German preoccupation with Milton's poetry— a preoccupation that reached its highest plateau in the decades of Kant's intellectual maturation. Thinking about philosophy and poetry together was as natural as breathing for many German thinkers in Kant’s time. It may seem incredible that Kant reflected philosophically on the structure and content of, for example, a sonnet, until we understand that hardly a generation later, a philosopher such as Fichte would achieve what many consider his most profound formulation of his most original insight in his sonnet on the "the eye of Urania."* And scholars now discern the frontiers of German Idealist philosophy, immediately after Kant, in the poetic breakthroughs of Hölderlin and Novalis.
When we begin to imagine doing philosophy-poetry in the manner of Kant and his contemporaries, we are embarking on the reflective journey that Kant projected as early as the first Critique. There "the mind is affected through its own activity (namely, through... positing... its representation), and so is affected by itself." In Kant and Milton I have tried to show that for Kant that journey is isomorphically enabled (that is, in both heteronomous and autonomous realms) by poetry of the sublime, which is also for him the poetry of the a priori.
What I have learned of the Kant-Milton relation is by no means the end of the story. In fact I can already glimpse a further reach to Kant’s philosophy-poetry. In the ethereal world of blog-posting, I’d like to broach, for the first time, yet another mystery, which also takes the form of a manifold question: With new perspectives on Kant's Miltonic ways of seeing, can we explain why in the Opus postumum, in the margins of Kant’s final effort to trace the mind's self-positing representation, he three times turns his eyes, explicitly, to Milton's poetry? (We have this, unforgettably, in Kant's own handwriting.) Were these Kant’s final memoranda for doing philosophy-poetry, for resuming this voyage of discovery, with Milton in his mind to the last? How, in short, might the poetry of Milton have aroused Kant's final self-positing?
*See Dieter Henrich, "Fichte's Original Insight," trans. David R. Lachterman, Contemporary German Philosophy, 1 (1982): 15-53, especially 39-40.
