2015 Special Issue

The article broaches the issue of Kant’s claim of the enlightenment of the philosophizing subject by tracing his criticism of philosophical enthusiasm (“Schwärmerei”). For Kant intellectual intuition (“intellektuelle Anschauung”) serves in case of philosophical enthusiasm as a reason for the justification of philosophical knowledge. This determination is a threat for his project of enlightenment, because it entices the philosophizing subject to contradict the maxim of self-thinking. In order to show the link between Kant’s criticism of the concept of intellectual intuition and his claim of the enlightenment of the philosophizing subject, the article gives an analysis of Kant’s usage of the concepts ‘intellectual intuition’ and ‘enthusiasm’ in his critical works. Subsequently Kant’s criticism of the philosophical enthusiasm is rendered more precisely in the context of his criticism of the philosophers of intuition (“Philosophen der Anschauung”) and his criticism of rationalistic metaphysics. Both positions refer — explicitly or implicitly — to intellectual intuition in order to justify philosophical knowledge. As the concept of intellectual intuition is invalid for Kant but central for enthusiastic philosophical positions, philosophical enthusiasm is not merely a threat for his project of enlightenment — it is the ‘death of all philosophy’ (“Tod aller Philosophie”).

Contrary to the standard view in the Kant literature, I argue that the concept of “existence” is the real focus of Kant’s investigation in the “First Moment” of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. That is, “existence” is not a secondary or subordinate part of a more general discourse concerning the “disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment”. Rather, the whole characterization of the judgment of taste as a “judgment of an object grounded on a delight in it which is without any interest” shall be considered here as a means to constructing a new definition of the modal concept of “existence”. More generally, the four moments of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” contain preliminary work on the modal concepts of existence, possibility, necessity — and, of course, contingency, which is very important because it is required for the definition of the very special modal status of the “maxims of judgment”.