Kant’s theory of genius and its faculty of the “aesthetic idea” renders the role of
art problematic in the Critique of the Power Judgment. Rodolphe Gasché, among
others, has pointed out that the passages about the aesthetic idea are the central
lines in the third Critiquewhich foster the question of art.1 At the same time, it has
been argued that the sections concerning “On Art in General”2 that deal with ge-
nius and the “aesthetic idea” strangely differ from the rest of the book, as the
passages on the sublime do, too.3 The “aesthetic idea” as well as the work of art
seem conspicuously alien elements in the third Critique. In these – seemingly –
an objective moment occurs which seems to impede the main focus of subjec-
tivity in the Critique of Judgment. “Art” is, as such, quite an ambivalent concept
for Kant. The section “On Art in General” begins with a definition:
Art is distinguished from nature as doing (facere) is from acting or producing in gen-
eral (agere), and the product or consequence of the former is distinguished as work
(opus) from the latter as an effect (effectus).4
It is evident that this distinction mirrors a fundamental difference between a
causa finalis and a causa efficiens. While nature forms a connection of effects, art
is to be understood as a connection of purposes. It is one of the main efforts of
the Critique to show that reflective judgment is able to look upon nature as art,
which means that nature “is thought of as specifying itself in accordance with
such a principle”5. In this case art is a technique, “[t]hus the power of judgment
Filozofski vestnik |   Volume XXX   |   Number 2   |   2009   |   61-80
61
Jan Völker*
Kant and the “Spirit as an Enlivening Principle”
1 Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form. Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2003), p. 106.
2 This is the title of section 43. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, transl. Paul
Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 182. [In the follow-
ing quoted as CPJ.]
3 E.g. Françoise Proust, “Les idées esthétiques”, in: Kants Ästhetik. Kant’s Aesthetics, L’esthétique
de Kant, ed. Hermann Parret (Berlin et al.: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 513–529, here p. 519.
4 CPJ, p. 182.
5 CPJ, p. 19.
* Freie Universität, Berlin
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  1.3.10  23:37  Page 61
62
is properly technical; nature is represented technically”6, as Kant puts it in the
first Introduction. The difference between “an aesthetic judgment of reflection”
and a “cognitive judgment”7 will then depend upon the distinction of this tech-
nical purposiveness, if it is to be regarded objectively (concerning objects of na-
ture) or subjectively.
Art as a technique is determined “through freedom, i.e. through a capacity for
choice”8 and is distinguished from “science”9 and from “handicraft”10. But art is
not only an “act of will” (or Willkür, as the German reads). Kant stresses in section
43 that “something compulsory [is required], or, as it is called, a mechanism, with-
out which the spirit, which must be free in art, and which alone animates the
work, would have no body at all and would entirely evaporate [...].”11 This remark
points to the central relevance of the spirit and its special compulsory condition,
which, in turn, provides the spirit with the necessary body. It is through the spirit
that “mechanical” art can be distinguished from “aesthetical”, the latter having
“the feeling of pleasure as its immediate aim” as Kant explains.12 This means: to
talk about art makes it indispensable to first take a closer look at the spirit. The
internal configuration of the spirit might give us better insight into Kant’s think-
ing of art, since art has to combine the compulsory and the free spirit. 
In what follows, I would like to look at this constellation which marks a decisive
structure in Kant’s approach to art, showing a working apparatus inside it that
injects the aesthetic into thought as its other. In order to do this, one has to fol-
low the thread that sets up the constellation of spirit, mind, and aesthetic ideas
in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. The spirit, as I will try to argue, is an
enlivening principle in the mind insofar as it is the power which makes the aes-
thetic a determined-undetermined other of the rational. Thus, the spirit is de-
termined, on the one hand, by a constellation of mind, aesthetic ideas, and a
certain liveliness, and, on the other, by a constellation of the rational and the
aesthetic that relates to the infinite judgment. To arrive at this point, I will try to
JAN VÖLKER
6 CPJ, p. 22. 
7 CPJ, p. 23.
8 CPJ, p.182.
9 CPJ, p.183.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 CPJ, p.184.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  1.3.10  23:37  Page 62
closely follow Kant’s entwined path of spirit, Gemüt [mind], and the notion of
life. As will be seen, the concept of the Gemüt plays a decisive role.
Gemüt
Kant’s famous definition of the spirit leads directly to the question of the Gemüt:
Spirit, in its aesthetic significance, means the animating [belebendes, J.V.] principle
in the mind [Gemüt, J.V.]. That, however, by which this principle animates the soul
[Seele, J.V.], the material which it uses for this purpose, is that which purposively sets
the mental powers into motion, i.e., into a play that is self-maintaining and even
strengthens the powers to that end.13
One of the vaguest concepts in this definition, which can be easily overlooked,
is that of the “mind” (Gemüt). It seems somehow imprecise, moving in a grey
zone between transcendental philosophy and anthropology or psychology. It is
not easy to grasp, whether one is dealing with a principle of the body or, in this
case, of the spirit. The Gemüt14 relies on this indeterminateness throughout the
first and the third Critique, appearing in both cases as an underlying structure,
yet hard to grasp.15 It remains unclear if it belongs more to a transcendental or to
an empirical register. This holds also for the Critique of the Power of Judgment: It
is not completely clear just how to describe the Gemüt. Kant speaks of a “dispo-
sition of the mind” or a “mental state”16, a “mentality” and the “freedom of the
mind”17, “mental powers”18 or “the faculties of the mind which constitute ge-
nius”, as the headline of the section reads, from which the given quotation on the
spirit is derived.19
63
KANT AND THE “SPIRIT AS AN ENLIVENING PRINCIPLE”
13 CPJ, p. 192. In the following, I will rather speak of an “enlivening principle”, because “en-
livening” renders more closely the connection to the notion of life in belebend. The translation
as “animation” reduces this connection.
14 I will continue here to speak of Gemüt, instead of mind, because of the bodily connotations
this word has in German.
15 Regarding the function of the Gemüt in the Critique of Pure Reason, see Robert B. Pippin, “Kant
on the Spontaneity of Mind”, in: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17:2 (1987), pp. 449–476.
16 CPJ, p. 194f.
17 CPJ, p.154.
18 CPJ, p.192.
19 CPJ, p.191.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  11.3.10  13:35  Page 63
64
The Gemüt concerns the inner sense “by means of which the mind intuits itself,
or its inner state”, it is a “form under which the intuition of its inner state is alone
possible”, as Kant phrased it in the Critique of Pure Reason.20 The Gemüt does
not give an intuition of the soul, but it makes it possible to conceptualize the to-
tality of the inner representations. So in this way the Gemüt is not always already
there, but it can be conceived of as a time-creating functioning of the inner sense,
as Werner Hamacher has underlined. “The Gemüt is in itself self-affection, inso-
far as it, as the act of representation in intuition, never has a different effect than
an affect on itself.”21 Hamacher continues that “this self” never opens anything
other “than the transcendental, a priori time; it has to be the one, irreducible
bringing about of time [zeitigen]”22. It is the bringing about of time because its
first relation is self-affection. In the concept of the Gemüt itself, a difficult dis-
tinction between “nature” and “reason” is already implicated. This makes an un-
derstanding of the relation between “spirit” and “Gemüt” even more difficult,
because now it is no longer possible to conceive of the spirit as of the other of
the Gemüt. The spirit cannot simply be the other, which would enliven the Gemüt
through alterity, because the Gemüt is always already relation. Already in his ear-
lier text on the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (from 1766), Kant developed the notion of
the spirit as completely negative. In this text Kant tried to maintain a distance
from the concept of the spirit, which he saw in a realm beyond experience, to-
gether with the “pseudo sensations” of phantasms and “pseudo-reasons” of
metaphysics. Of spirits, as Kant put it at that time, there is perhaps a great deal
to think, but nothing to know. The reason is evident: no empirical data of spirits
could be found.23
However, how does spirit in an aesthetical sense then come to be an enlivening
principle in this kind of Gemüt? This, at first, leads to the question, what kind of
“life” is at stake at this point.
JAN VÖLKER
20 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, transl. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 157.
21 Werner Hamacher, “EX TEMPORE. Zeit als Vorstellung bei Kant”, in: Politik der Vorstellung.
Theater und Theorie, ed. Joachim Gerstmaier and Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (Berlin: Theater der
Zeit Verlag, 2006), pp. 68–94, here p. 71f. My translation.
22 Ibid., p. 72.
23 In this regard, see, above all, Monique David-Ménard, La folie dans la raison pure. Kant lec-
teur de Swedenborg (Paris: Vrin, 1990).
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  11.3.10  20:05  Page 64
Life
In the context of his pre-critical writings, Kant conceived of life as a “principle”
that is not explicable through relations of nature alone, but one that also differ-
entiates man as a part of nature in nature. In the Critique of the Power of Judg-
ment, Kant directly connects this thought to his pre-critical writings, insofar as
the latter were clearly influenced by British empiricism. In an appendix to the An-
alytics of the Sublime, Kant writes:
The transcendental exposition of aesthetic judgments […] can be compared with the
physiological exposition, as it has been elaborated by Burke and many acute men
among us, in order to see whither a merely empirical exposition of the sublime and the
beautiful would lead.24
Kant refers to Burke’s understanding of the sublime as a drive, on the one hand,
and his inducement of the beautiful from love, on the other hand – similar to
Kant’s argumentation in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sub-
lime (1764), in which Kant conceives of the sublime as a split drive of nature and
searches to find the overcoming of this split in the strange form of marriage,
where sublime and beautiful, man and woman, come together and surpass na-
ture. In the Critique Kant clearly states the universality of the judgment of taste
as opposed to an empirical determination. He demarcates a rejection of a psy-
chology of the beautiful, a passage worth quoting at length, because it offers an
insight into a very complex relation between life and aesthetics.
As psychological remarks, these analyses of the phenomena of our mind are extremely
fine [schön, J.V.], and provide rich materials for the favourite researches of empirical
anthropology. Moreover, it cannot be denied that all representations in us, whether
they are objectively merely sensible or else entirely intellectual, can nevertheless sub-
jectively be associated with gratification or pain, however unnoticeable either might
be (because they all affect the feeling of life, and none of them, insofar as it is a mod-
ification of the subject, can be indifferent), or even that, as Epicurus maintained, grat-
ification and pain are always ultimately corporeal, whether they originate from the
imagination or even from representations of the understanding: because life without
the feeling of the corporeal organs is merely consciousness of one’s existence, but not
65
KANT AND THE “SPIRIT AS AN ENLIVENING PRINCIPLE”
24 CPJ, p. 158.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  1.3.10  23:37  Page 65
66
a feeling of well- or ill-being, i.e. the promotion or inhibition of the powers of life; be-
cause the mind for itself is entirely life (the principle of life itself), and hindrances or
promotions must be sought outside it, though in the human being himself, hence in
combination with his body.25
On first view one could say: “extremely fine”, but unhelpful for further tran-
scendental investigation. But then it becomes clear that the argument proceeds
via nearly imperceptible restrictions and withdrawals. At first, Kant admits that
surely “all representations” – even if only “imperceptible” – can subjectively be
associated with “gratification and pain”. From this concession the phrase de-
velops into a slightly unwilling decline. The following thought goes even fur-
ther: bodily effects are always connected with representations. Kant does not
speak of pleasure and displeasure, but of gratitude and pain. On first interpre-
tation, the transcendental exposition of pleasure and displeasure could be un-
derstood as the meta-structure of the relation between gratitude and pain,
although having in mind that this meta-structure cannot indicate a direct link
from one to the other: In the Critique of the Power of Judgment there is no direct
passage from the affect to the effect of pleasure. Nevertheless, the representa-
tions localize a place where the relation between gratitude/pain and pleas-
ure/displeasure comes into question. Up to this point, the distinction between
the empirical and the transcendental is still possible. However, with the next
sentence the situation changes. If one only stayed on the level of this meta-struc-
ture, one would miss a central point: life. “Life” requires the bodily sensation of
the hindrance or promotion of the vital forces. But these are at the same time the
connotations that Kant introduces of the sublime and the beautiful. Thus, in the
larger context of the Critique, it can be said that life requires the beautiful and the
sublime through their expression of feeling. The beautiful, as Kant had defined
it previously, “directly brings with it a feeling of the promotion of life”,26 while
the sublime is “being generated, namely, by the feeling of a momentary inhibi-
tion of the vital powers”.27 As such, life means, on the one hand, a feeling of well-
being and nausea, the promotion and hindrance of the vital powers. On the other
hand, Kant defines the Gemüt as such that it is by itself “all life” and thereby
JAN VÖLKER
25 CPJ, p. 158f.
26 CPJ, p. 128.
27 CPJ, p. 128f. See also Gasché, Idea of Form, who stresses that life in the organs is felt through
the affectation through representations. Gasché also underlines that this life cannot be bio-
logical life, because the enlivened subject is already a living subject.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  20.3.10  15:23  Page 66
these promotions and hindrances cannot be ascribed to the Gemüt. Hindrances
and promotions are outside of the Gemüt and at the same time corporeal: The
human body lives only in this constellation. Life is the expression of the princi-
ple of life via the promotions and hindrances of the body.28
But what kind of life is this? If empirical anthropology examines bodily relations
of gratitude and pain, then the Critique of the Power of Judgment clarifies the pre-
conditions of the promotions and hindrances of the relations of life. This also
means that with the analytic of the beautiful and the sublime, the Critique aims in
a specific manner at the question of life. On which “territory”29 – nature or freedom
– is the claim based, such that the Gemüt is for itself “all life”, the “life principle”?
In a reflection from the late 1760s Kant defined life as a purely spiritual principle:
“Complete spiritual life starts from the death of the animal.”30 The “immaterial […]
principium of life” was to be distinguished from the “material” like “automaton”
from “spirit”.31 It was not possible to establish life as a general concept, for the
spirit was subjected to a permanent animal limitation. With the notion of “com-
plete life”32 organic life in nature could not be explained, if Kant did not want to as-
sign souls to dogs and plants as well. If he had done that, a great part of nature
would have fallen out of the field of science: for he had also admitted that it had
nothing to say about spirits and souls. The Critique of the Power of Judgment, on the
one hand, opens up the way to think of organic life as a specific difference in na-
ture, which is to be explained teleologically. So, in the frame of the third Critique,
which relevance would then have to be given to the notion of “complete life”? The
teleologically defined life of organic beings is different from life in its aesthetic
perspective, because it exceeds the realm of science. It is remarkable that Kant
mentions that “hindrances or promotions must be sought outside it [the Gemüt,
67
KANT AND THE “SPIRIT AS AN ENLIVENING PRINCIPLE”
28 Concerning this passage in Kant, see also Ross Wilson, Subjective Universality in Kant’s Aes-
thetics (Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 124ff.
29 CPJ, p. 61.
30 “[D]as Vollständige Geistige Leben hebt nach dem Tode des Thieres an.” My translation. The
German original is in: Immanuel Kant, Handschriftlicher Nachlaß Metaphysik, Teil I, Kant’s
gesammelte Schriften, Herausgegeben von der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wis-
senschaften, Band XVII, Handschriftlicher Nachlaß Metaphysik (Berlin und Leipzig: de Gruyter,
1926), p. 474, R 4240. (l (?) 1769–1770).
31 Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, transl. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick
Rauscher, ed. Paul Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 88 [Reflection 3855,
1764–68].
32 Ibid.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  20.3.10  15:23  Page 67
68
J.V.], though in the human being himself, hence in combination with his body”33.
It becomes clear that Kant conceives of life as an occurrence of effects that is gras-
pable only on the site of the body, but at the same time exceeds bodily limitations.34
The Gemüt can neither be understood as an empirical nor as a purely transcen-
dental life. The position of the Gemüt is rendered more and more complex, and im-
portant in Kant’s architecture by the same token. Thus Kant writes in his first
Introduction to the Third Critique: “We can trace all faculties of the human mind
without exception back to these three: the faculty of cognition, the feeling of pleas-
ure and displeasure, and the faculty of desire.”35 The Gemüt, lying at the foundation
of these faculties, could thus be understood as an anthropological structure of
man. But it should already be clear that for Kant anthropology then takes on a com-
pletely different meaning. Michel Foucault has written about the notions of Gemüt
and spirit in this regard, in taking a closer look at their relation in Kant’s Anthro-
pology. Foucault’s analysis gives central hints that help take the specific aesthetic
constellation of Gemüt, spirit, and life into account.
Gemüt, spirit, life
Foucault considers (in one of his first texts) the Gemüt to be one of the central con-
cepts in the Anthropology.36 He differentiates the Gemüt in contrast to “soul” or
“spirit”, a difference that leads him to an initial approximate understanding of the
“spirit” as a principle. Starting from the definition also used by Kant in the An-
thropology – “The principle of the mind that animates by means of ideas is called
spirit.”37 – Foucault emphasises that this principle must not be understood as de-
terminate nor reflective, but exactly as enlivening or animating.38 As Kant speaks
JAN VÖLKER
33 CPJ, p. 158.
34 Regarding this, see also: Howard Caygill, “Life and Aesthetic Pleasure”, in: The Matter of Cri-
tique, Readings in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Andrea Rehberg and Rachel Jones (Manchester: Cli-
namen, 2000), pp. 79–92, here p. 81.
35 CPJ, p. 11. 
36 Michel Foucault, “Introduction à l’anthropologie”, in: Emmanuel Kant, Anthropologie d’un
point de vue pragmatique. Précédé de: Michel Foucault, Introduction à l’anthropologie, ed. Da-
niel Denfert, François Ewald, Frédéric Gros (Paris: Vrin, 2008). This text together with the trans-
lation of Kant’s Anthropology is the first part of Foucault’s dissertation, which remains
unpublished. The edition from 2008 is the first complete edition.
37 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of View, transl. and ed. Robert B.
Louden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 143.
38 See, Foucault, “Introduction”, p. 37.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  11.3.10  20:06  Page 68
of an “animating principle”, neither a regulative nor a constitutive principle can
be meant. Further on, one has to avoid the assumption that the Gemütwould exist
in a dependence on the spirit’s totality. If this were the case, Foucault states, then
the complete Anthropologywould have to be in search of a figure of the spirit (as
a regulative principle), which is obviously not the case. It is rather the idea, freed
of the constraints of transcendental use, which opens itself up to new possibilities
within empirically given things, by means of the schema. Its own realm is given
through experience and it gives the movement of the infinite, in other words a
movement of infinite convergence. Consequently, it is a specific aspect of the ideas
marking the spirit that appears in the schema and enables them to get in touch
with the empirical. Empirical reason is enlivened by the infinite.
Like this, empirical reason never drifts off into the given; in linking it to the infinite
that it rejects, the idea makes it live in the element of the possible. Such is the func-
tion of the Geist: not to organize the Gemüt in such a way as to make a living being out
of it or the analogon of organic life, or even the life of the Absolute itself; but to enliven
it, give birth, in the passivity of the Gemüt, which is the passivity of empirical deter-
mination, to the swarming movement of the ideas– those multiple structures of a be-
coming totality which make and unmake themselves like many other partial lives who
live and die in the spirit. Like this the Gemüt is not simply “what it is”, but “what it
makes out of itself”.39
The Gemüt has to be understood as the passive site of empirical determination
and at the same time as the site where the enlivening through ideas takes place.
It is not the ideas of the spirit, but the spirit is the principle, according to which
the Gemüt can enter the movement between the empirical and the idea. Once
again Foucault:
The spirit would then be the principle in the Gemüt of a de-dialectized dialectics, not
transcendental, dedicated to the domain of experience and forming a body with the
game of phenomena. It is the spirit that opens up the freedom of the possible for the
Gemüt, pulls it out of its determinations, and gives a future to it, which it does not
have due to itself.40
69
KANT AND THE “SPIRIT AS AN ENLIVENING PRINCIPLE”
39 Ibid., p. 39. My translation.
40 Ibid. My translation.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  1.3.10  23:37  Page 69
70
Foucault concludes that the spirit is that moment which testifies transcendentally
to the absence of the infinite, but which empirically supports the force of the infi-
nite for the movement towards truth. Absent and present at the same time, the
spirit denotes not only the place of the truth, but also links the necessity of a Cri-
tique, in transcendental terms, with a sovereign structure  and with the possibility
of an Anthropology as a determination of the possible in the empirical.41 Foucault
leads this analysis on the background of a possible determination of the Anthro-
pology from a Pragmatic Point of Viewwithin the framework of a transcendental ar-
chitecture, and for this reason he only briefly touches upon the Critique of the
Power of Judgement. The determination of the relation of spirit, Gemüt, and the en-
livening principle hide an obvious parallel to the relations in the Critique of the
Power Judgment42, although with a meaningful difference. Foucault relates the def-
inition of the spirit to the ideas of reason, freed of their transcendental use. Yet in
the Critique of the Power of JudgmentKant introduces a new type of idea: aesthetic
ideas. Aesthetic ideas form the central means by which the spirit as an enlivening
principle is able to work on the Gemüt in an aesthetical regard.
Aesthetic ideas
In the passage which the quoted definition of the spirit is from, the spirit is kept
in a conspicuous, Pauline contrast to the letter; a contrast which is at first al-
luded to through the opposition of spirit and mechanism. Spirit, Kant says, needs
a mechanism for its survival, because otherwise it would “evaporate”. As an ex-
ample Kant mentions “the art of poetry”, which needs “correctness and richness
of diction as well as prosody and meter”.43 Even if the spirit has an enlivening ef-
fect, it cannot survive on its own. Every time one tries to catch the spirit in a man-
ifest form, one loses it again. Kant then scrutinizes the notion of the “principle”
that is said to enliven the Gemüt:
Now I maintain that this principle is nothing other than the faculty for the presenta-
tion of aesthetic ideas; by an aesthetic idea, however, I mean that representation of the
imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any
determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no lan-
JAN VÖLKER
41 Ibid., p. 40f.
42 Foucault seems to think that this is not the case, as he refers only to the definition of the
Gemüt in the first introduction, quoted above. See Foucault, “Introduction”, p. 38.
43 CPJ, p. 183.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  1.3.10  23:37  Page 70
guage fully attains or can make intelligible. – One readily sees that it is the counter-
part (pendant) of an idea of reason, which is, conversely, a concept, to which no in-
tuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate.44
Here the distinction between letter and spirit is already alluded to: the aesthetic
idea cannot be reached by any language. “Language” is not to be understood
metaphorically, but means that there is no possible human expression to reach
the spirit. The spirit enlivens by means of ideas and subtracts itself from the
body, to which it is connected, at the same time. The aesthetic idea as the
“medium” of the spirit finds a pendant in the idea of reason. They relate like left
hand and right hand, not in a contradictory opposition, but as equal others. Both
are to be established and described only in interrelation and mutual depend-
ence.45 The aesthetic idea introduces the connection of letter and spirit:
In a word, the aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination, associated with a
given concept, which is combined with such a manifold of partial representations in
the free use of the imagination that no expression designating a determinate concept
can be found for it, which therefore allows the addition to a concept of much that is
unnameable, the feeling of which animates the cognitive faculties and combines spirit
with the mere letter of language.46
The aesthetic idea is without a concept, but in the moment in which it is associ-
ated (“beigesellt”) to language, the idea connects “pure letter” with spirit. With
the reference to association (“Beigesellung”, which relates to the two meanings
of “Gesellschaft”: society and sociability), the distance or proximity to cognition
comes into play. It becomes clear that at the heart of the concept of the spirit lies
a difficult relation between the aesthetic and the rational that has to be clarified.
The aesthetic idea as the means by which the spirit enlivens not only explains
how the spirit proceeds, but also tells us about what the spirit is, because the
71
KANT AND THE “SPIRIT AS AN ENLIVENING PRINCIPLE”
44 CPJ, p. 192.
45 Even if Kant remarks that aesthetic ideas “seek to approximate a presentation of concepts of
reason (of intellectual ideas)” (CPJ, p.192), this should not be understood to mean that aes-
thetic ideas are simply called ideas because they are incomplete ideas of reason, as Karin A.
Fray alludes to: “Kant and the Problem of Genius”, in: Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung, Akten
des IX. internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Vol. 3, ed. Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and
Ralph Schumacher (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2001), pp. 546–552, here p. 548.
46 CPJ, p. 194.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  11.3.10  13:41  Page 71
72
spirit in aesthetical terms is nothing other than this taking place of the aesthet-
ical in the rational, as we will now see.
So, if the aesthetic idea is associated with a concept, how then is the relation be-
tween the aesthetic idea and concept to be thought of? The aesthetic seems to
stand in a specific proximity to the concept. Nevertheless, the aesthetic idea pro-
vides something different than cognition: The “material” delivered via the aes-
thetic idea to reason, in extension beyond the concept, is not important
“objectively, for cognition”, but “subjectively, for the animation [Belebung, J.V.]
of the cognitive powers” and thereby “indirectly to cognitions”.47 Also, the “pen-
dant”, the idea of reason, serves, in the Critique of Pure Reason, not cognition,
but the final understanding of the indeterminate by the means of a concept, to
which no intuition can correspond; the idea of reason loses its intuition to the
benefit of a concept. What is the aesthetic idea missing?
Some pages later, Kant comes back to the relation between the idea of reason
and the aesthetic idea. Ideas in their general sense relate subjectively or objec-
tively to an object, but without enabling cognition of it. Aesthetic ideas are “re-
lated to an intuition in accordance with a merely subjective principle of the
correspondence of the faculties of cognition (of imagination and of understand-
ing)”48, ideas of reason are related to a transcendental concept. While a rational
idea aims at a concept without intuition, the aesthetic idea misses the concept,
but not in the same measure as the rational idea misses the intuition, for the aes-
thetic idea supplements the use of the concepts with “much that is undefinable
in words” [viel Unnennbares, J.V.]. It does not conjure un-conceptional relations
beyond the concepts, but agitates in these constellations, it opens up, in other
words, the sphere of the conceptual, not by realizing this opening through a con-
cept aiming at totality, but by producing an open collection of representations of
the imagination. The aesthetic idea is actually not a counter-part or “pendant”
to the rational idea, but its guest, its gift or, stated differently, its opening.
When Kant talks of “ideas” under the heading “On Taste in Art”49 in the Anthro-
pology, then it seems to be aesthetic ideas that are meant, as introduced in the
JAN VÖLKER
47 CPJ, p. 194.
48 CPJ, p. 217.
49 Kant, Anthropology, p. 143.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  1.3.10  23:37  Page 72
third Critique. But the quoted passage in the Anthropology continues to specify
the spirit as “the productive faculty of reason which provides a model for that a
priori form of the power of imagination”50. The spirit “creates” ideas, in order to
give them as a sample to the imagination. This seems ambivalent, as the spirit is
determined as the faculty of reason, and in the following the accent shifts to the
aspect of representation. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment the spirit then
is defined explicitly as the faculty of the representation of aesthetic ideas and
therewith the spirit in aesthetical terms as a faculty of the productive imagina-
tion, which does not produce ideas of reason, but aesthetic ideas.51 One side of
the imagination, which is a “blind though indispensable function of the soul,
without which we would have no cognition at all”52, as Kant puts it in the Critique
of Pure Reason, comes to the foreground here: its blind, productive faculty, its
forming power obtains an undefined independence in representation.
The imagination (as a productive cognitive faculty) is, namely, very powerful in cre-
ating, as it were, another nature, out of the material which the real one gives it. We en-
tertain ourselves with it when experience seems too mundane to us; we transform the
latter, no doubt always in accordance with analogous laws, but also in accordance
with principles that lie higher in reason (and which are every bit as natural to us as
those in accordance with which the understanding apprehends empirical nature); in
this we feel our freedom from the law of associations (which applies to the empirical
use of that faculty), in accordance with which material can certainly be lent to us by
nature, but the latter can be transformed by us into something entirely different,
namely into that which steps beyond nature.53
Nature is surpassed by following “principles”. These principles are rooted in the
higher reason, but they enable the imagination to work up nature into some-
thing else. In this way productive imagination creates aesthetic ideas, as Kant
continues:
One can call such representations of the imagination ideas: on the one hand because
they at least strive toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus
73
KANT AND THE “SPIRIT AS AN ENLIVENING PRINCIPLE”
50 Kant, Anthropology, p. 143f.
51 See also: Gasché, Idea of Form, p. 110f.
52 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 211.
53 CPJ, p. 192.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  1.3.10  23:37  Page 73
74
seek to approximate a presentation of concepts of reason (of intellectual ideas), which
gives them the appearance of an objective reality; on the other hand, and indeed prin-
cipally, because no concept can be fully adequate to them, as inner intuitions.54
Gasché, who underlines the aesthetic idea differently than Foucault, proposes to
understand Kant’s renaming of the productive imagination as spirit in such a
way that imagination, in its productive efficiency, has become analogous to rea-
son.55 “Aesthetic ideas, consequently, are indefinite, undetermined ideas; they
are, on the level of the sensible, analoga of reason, that is, of the faculty of
ideas”56. And really, following Gasché’s allusion, in the aesthetic ideas Baum-
garten’s analogon rationis seem to reappear in a different manner. One could un-
derstand this as a reconsideration of Baumgarten’s basic intention, to parallelize
the sensible and the rational. On the other hand, it is no longer the metaphysi-
cal order of ontology that demands a totality, in which the logic of the sensible
collides as an independent logic. Baumgarten’s logic of the sensible now be-
comes possible as an indeterminate analogy, because now something undeter-
mined is set in relation to ideas. Aesthetic ideas intensify concepts by means of
intuitions, while ideas of reason deliver concepts without intuitions. But aes-
thetic ideas are not in the same measure independent, but rather an other in the
world of concepts, they are given reality as representations.
The readings of Gasché and Foucault can be crossed in such a way that the spirit
enlivens the Gemüt twice: through aesthetic ideas as well as through rational ideas.
The aesthetic idea is the product of the spirit in the imagination, which shows it-
self as a representation. In opposition to the rational idea, the aesthetic idea de-
velops productive representations, while the “rational” spirit enlivens the Gemüt
with regard to the opening up of the empirical material at the border of the infinite.
This would mean that spirit in aesthetical terms would combine with the repre-
sentation of the possible in the concept with the necessity of Critique, while the
spirit in rational terms, as Foucault puts it, combines the necessity of Critiquewith
the possibility of an anthropology. The spirit, which Foucault claimed to be the
principle of a de-dialectized dialectics, would have to be understood twice: It opens
up the Gemüt to the possible as well as to the representation. In this sense, the
JAN VÖLKER
54 CPJ, p. 192.
55 See Gasché, Idea of Form, p. 111.
56 Ibid., p. 109.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  1.3.10  23:37  Page 74
spirit is the double absent presence of what Kant had dismissed in his earlier writ-
ings as beyond experience, and had barred from thought together with delirium
and mania. The spirit marks the absent presence of the infinite and the present
absence of the representations of the productive imagination, with the spirit not
only the path to an anthropology, but also to what aesthetics opens up.
From this perspective, another view is possible regarding the triad of spirit,
Gemüt, and the enlivening. It was shown that all three are to be understood in a
double way and that they oscillate between the realms of anthropology, aes-
thetics, understanding, and reason. But how does the spirit enliven the Gemüt?
By ideas, on the one hand, but on the other hand it is at the same time the “ma-
terial” by which the spirit enlivens the Gemüt. A play, – to again quote – i.e. of
“that which purposively sets the mental powers into motion, i.e. into a play
which is self-maintaining and even strengthens the powers to that end”57. The
ideas are inseparably connected with the play, which maintains itself and is the
play of the Gemüt, as could be seen with Foucault. In the aesthetic sign the spirit
opens up an enlivening play with regard to representation, which cannot be un-
derstood as “formant corps” with the phenomena, but which becomes in a way
a body itself, combining the force of the idea and the force of the representation.
The consideration mentioned above, that the Critique of the Power of Judgment
aims at life with the examination of the beautiful and sublime, can now be spec-
ified more clearly. “Enlivening” is the result of the connection of spirit and
Gemüt, and therewith, by way of many complications, also, as cannot be shown
here, the result of the combination of the beautiful form with the aesthetic idea.
In this regard, too, the transcendental explication of the beautiful and the sub-
lime would be more directly aiming at the enlivening of the Gemüt by the spirit,
rather than being orientated towards the question of organic life.58 Organic life
is the starting point to which life as spirit can associate itself.
75
KANT AND THE “SPIRIT AS AN ENLIVENING PRINCIPLE”
57 CPJ, p. 192.
58 The idea of the spirit as an animating principle is not new in late Kant. It can be found in
many of the early fragments and notes, even in pre-critical times. An extensive list of passages
related to the animation of the spirit can be found in: Giorgio Tonelli, “Kant’s Early Theory of
Genius (1770–1779) Part I” in: Journal of the History of Philosophy, 4:2 (1966), pp. 109–131 (see
p. 115 for animation). Regarding early theories of organism and spirit, see also Giorgio Tonelli,
“Kant’s Early Theory of Genius (1770–1779) Part II”, in: Journal of the History of Philosophy 4:3
(1966), pp. 209–224. Tonelli points out that Kant replaces the relation of identity between 
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  11.3.10  14:30  Page 75
76
One can go one step further to see not only how aesthetic ideas relate to the spirit,
but also to a conception of art works. The distinction between an idea of reason and
an aesthetic idea is reconsidered by Kant on the side of the object, especially in
the comparison of “aesthetic attributes” and “logical attributes”. “Jupiter’s eagle,
with lightning in its claws”, does not represent what “lies in our concepts of the
sublimity and majesty of creation”, but it is a representation, that gives “the imag-
ination cause to spread itself over a multitude of related representations.”59 The
distinction of the attributes allows Kant to transfer the determination of the aes-
thetic idea onto aesthetic works. They make it possible to analyze the aesthetic at-
tributes in relation to the logical ones in a given work of art. Kant gives only two
examples for “the sake of brevity”60, both from poems, more or less doomed to fall
into oblivion. In the first example, the aesthetical attribute enlivens the “idea of
reason of a cosmopolitan disposition”61, in the second an intellectual concept en-
livens a sensible intuition, but only insofar as the intellectual concept itself, in its
aesthetic regard, is used this way. The examples show the enlivening in the con-
cept or in the relation of one concept to another. What is relevant here is less the
quality of the examples (lines of poems from Frederick the Great), than the
sketched possibility to begin an analysis of works of art. At this point one can take
a look at the formal structure in which the aesthetic and the rational relate, which
then can be called the formal structure of the spirit from an aesthetical perspective.
Infinite judgments
Each time the aesthetic enlivening is a relational enlivening. The aesthetic at-
tributes go “alongside the logical ones” and the arts take “the spirit which ani-
mates [belebt, J.V.] their works solely from the aesthetic attributes of the
objects”.62 They mark “a manifold of partial representations” in “the free use of
the imagination”, as a representation, “associated with a given concept”.63 The
aesthetic attribute as such does not stand in direct opposition to the logical; the
aesthetic idea does not oppose the rational, but it is associated. The aesthetic
JAN VÖLKER
organism and beauty later by a relation of analogy, wherein the “originality and even the mean-
ing of Kant’s mature solution” lies. (p. 216).
59 CPJ, p. 193.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 CPJ, p. 194.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  1.3.10  23:37  Page 76
idea “allows the addition to a concept of much that is unnameable”.64 It is not
unsayable but unnameable; it is not: not conceptional, but non-conceptional.
In representation this becomes an aesthetic expression, an expression of non-
conceptionality. At the same time the aesthetic attribute seems, like the aesthetic
idea, strangely irreducible in relation to the logical-conceptional structure.
Strangely because the relation of irreducibility is in itself not firmly grounded.
What can be said about the aesthetic idea and about the aesthetic attribute can
only be said via negative differentiations. As such, the aesthetic structure can-
not be put down to the conceptional-logical. In other words, it is “bound up”
with it, standing in an un-relation with it. There is no third in itself, in front of
which the aesthetic structure could be established in relation to the order of the
logical. Rather, the aesthetic is distilled as a distinction out of the logical, with-
out there being the possibility to say what would be the guarantor, which would
guarantee the possibility of this distinction. As such, the aesthetic and the log-
ical come together in a relation which is not one. That the aesthetic idea and the
aesthetic attribute allow “much thought” does not yet mean that this relation
would have to be understood as a special relation of cognition. One would
have to think of the aesthetic always already as an extension, a deepening, a
making particular in a concrete case. The other way round, from the starting
point of thought, there can be grasped a realm of the un-conceptional via the in-
finite judgment. This is decisive for the relation between the aesthetic and the
logical and one has take a brief look at the function of the infinite judgment in
Kant to clarify and underline this point, because the sphere that is opened up
in the rational through the aesthetic can be understood as the sphere of the in-
finite judgment.
In his Logics, Kant distinguishes, for example, between affirmative, negating,
and infinite judgments. An affirmative judgment subsumes a subject under the
“sphere” of a predicate, a negating judgment places the subject outside of that
“sphere”.65 Phrases such as “the dog is green” are affirmative, phrases such as
“the dog is not green” are negative. Of relevance here is that the negation of the
assignment of the colour does not say anything about the existence of the dog.
77
KANT AND THE “SPIRIT AS AN ENLIVENING PRINCIPLE”
64 Ibid.
65 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, transl. and ed. J. Michael Young (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), p. 80.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  11.3.10  14:34  Page 77
78
An infinite judgment exhibits exactly the transition from pure logics to tran-
scendental logics: It has a strange form which allows it to be, in pure logical
terms, an affirmative judgment, but a negation in transcendental terms. It is a
double or a split judgment. If one says “a is non-b”, as the general form of this
judgment runs, the assignment is positive in logical terms, it is not a negative
judgment. This is why Kant can say that this distinction does not belong to the
science of logics, because logically it is affirmative.66 However, it will not be ex-
cluded by Kant, rather he understands it as a completion of transcendental logic.
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant develops the infinite judgment as a neces-
sary distinction from the affirmative judgment, because it also asks about the
“value or content of the logical affirmation”.67 More exactly, he defines it as lim-
itative. In the first Critique Kant used a remarkable example to exemplify the
forms of judgment: the soul.68 The phrase “anima est non-mortalis” defines a
specific relation:
Now, since that which is mortal contains one part of the whole domain of possible be-
ings, but that which is undying the other, nothing is said by my proposition but that
the soul is one of the infinite multitude of things that remain if I take away everything
that is mortal. But the infinite sphere of the possible is thereby limited only to the ex-
tent that that which is mortal is separated from it, and the soul is placed in the re-
maining space of its domain.69
The infinite judgment makes a determination in the indeterminate: it determines
a subject (through assigning a predicate) and leaves it at the same time indeter-
minate in its extension.70 Thus the soul is neither alive nor dead, it is undead.71
The infinite judgment forms limitative concepts by marking infinity as a border.
But also it touches upon existence. A negative judgment tells nothing about the
existence of the subject, an infinite does: That the soul is undead means that it
JAN VÖLKER
66 Kant, Logic, p. 80.
67 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 207.
68 Kant follows Meier with this example. See Kristina Engelhard, Das Einfache und die Materie,
Untersuchungen zu Kants Antinomie der Teilungen (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2005), p. 325ff.
69 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 207f.
70 See also: Kristina Engelhard, Das Einfache und die Materie, Untersuchungen zu Kants Antin-
omie der Teilungen, p. 325ff.
71 Slavoj Žižek pointed this out several times, see, e.g., Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 21f.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  11.3.10  14:34  Page 78
is something insofar as it is not something different. Through the assignment of
a non-predicate, the negation is moved from the copula to the predicate and the
subject is determined through this limitative, finite-infinite sphere.72 In a broader
sense, Kant’s discussion of the infinite judgment has to be related to his discus-
sion of the principle of contradiction, which marks a very important path from
his pre-critical to his critical writings. In a specific sense, the infinite judgment
opens up the sphere of the excluded middle.73 One can even observe the infinite
judgment playing a decisive role in the definition of the antinomies.74 Central to
the argument in this case, concerning aesthetic ideas, is that the infinite judg-
ment marks a determined-undetermined sphere.75
The un-conceptional, formed after the model of the infinite judgment, is the cen-
tral relation between the aesthetic and the rational. The aesthetic is not not con-
ceptional, but it is non-conceptional. It does not lie at the roots of the concep-
tional, it is not its substrate, but an opening that surpasses the “nature” of the
conceptionalized itself. It is so only insofar as the roots of the undetermined “na-
ture” can be ascertained: It cannot be cognized, but rather only be worked out;
thought of as a negative interruption of knowledge, of conceptional order, of the
ideas of reason. The powerful imagination somehow produces in the nature of the
concept a different nature: It enriches the concept from the inside with the par-
ticular and rewrites it in a way that it gets another face, another nature. The aes-
thetic idea is the prosopopoeia of the concept, always creating another face for
it. An inner becoming-other, which is, as the enlivening, at the same time, only
possible in the inert, the dead. “Models of taste with regard to the arts of discourse
must be composed in a dead and learned language.”76 If concepts are the frame-
work of thought, then these becoming-other bring life into the concept. This again
79
KANT AND THE “SPIRIT AS AN ENLIVENING PRINCIPLE”
72 See Slavoj Žižek, “Kant as a Theoretician of Vampirism”, in: Lacanian Ink, 8 (1994), pp. 19–33,
here p. 28.
73 E.g. Peter McLaughlin, Kants Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft (Bonn: Bouvier, 1989), 
p. 67f.
74 Ibid., p. 49.
75 From the point of view of the history of logics, the “infinite judgment” stems from a grey area
between the translation of the Aristotelian aóristos, which becomes the propositio infinita af-
terwards and then the “infinite judgment”, which could have also been called the “undeter-
mined judgment”. See Albert Menne, “Die Kantische Urteilstafel im Lichte der Logikgeschichte
und der modernen Logik”, in: Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 20:2 (1989), pp. 317–
324, here p. 318f.
76 CPJ, p. 116.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  11.3.10  14:34  Page 79
80
relates the aesthetic life to the organic life: “The life of creatures”, Kant notes, “is
a series of becoming-other out of an inner principle.”77
If one understands this process as analogous to the discovery of the particular,
then it becomes clear that in the play of the indeterminate aesthetic determina-
tion – which is the play of the spirit – thought does not come to help cognition
and try to specify the concept in the undetermined (as in the question of organic
life), but the aesthetic idea produces intuitions and brings the openings of the
conceptionalized into a representation. This procedure may serve cognition, be-
cause it brings about “much thought”, but only if one is prepared for cognition
to change from one nature to another.78 Cognition runs after the lively concept.
Jupiter’s eagle still represents something different. This determined-indetermi-
nate other is what the spirit enables as an opening in the rational, by means of
aesthetic ideas, and what Kant calls animating the Gemüt. Spirit, in its aesthetic
significance, thus allows man to surpass nature toward aesthetical life.
JAN VÖLKER
77 “Das Leben der Geschopfe ist die Reihe der Veranderungen aus innerem principio”, in: Kant,
Nachlass Metaphysik, p. 728, [R.4786]. My translation.
78 Gilles Deleuze saw in the free play of the faculties a figure that lies beneath all other forms
of judgment and by which the third Critique grounds all other Critiques. But already here the
question arises if the third Critique is not rather an abyss than a ground, an Abgrundmore than
a Grund. See Gilles Deleuze, “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics”, in: Angelaki. Journal of
Theoretical Humanities, 5: 3 (2000) , pp. 57–70, here p. 60.
FV_02_2009_prelom_NOVO.qxp:FV  1.3.10  23:37  Page 80