Douglas Moggach
A related theoretical current proposes other Kantian means to overcome
the persistent dualisms of modern life, which the French Revolution proved
inadequate to resolve. Here Kant’s idea of the intuitive intellect, a conceptual
understanding that produces its own corresponding objectivity, suggests an
image of the new subjectivity, and of a shared realm of freedom. Among
the early German idealists, Friedrich H
¨
olderlin (1770–1843), companion
of Hegel and Schelling, finds a model for this productivity of the mind
in artistic practice, as defined by G. E. Lessing (1729–81), for whom not
objects, but actions, or subjectivity at work in the world, provide the proper
contents of art (Lessing 2003,pp.25–129). For H
¨
olderlin, the supersensible
refers to the possibility of community among all finite spirits, and their claim
of absolute freedom against powers that claim an underivative, transcendent
status (Lypp 1972,p.22 n.24). The noumenal realm of freedom is accessible
in an intellectual intuition, which reveals the unity of subject and subject,
and of subject and external form. The recognition of a common g round
where being and freedom meet checks the dangers implicit in a boundless
subjectivity. The intuition of a preconceptual identity of thinking and being,
attested in art, especially poetry (Harris 1993,p.32; Henrich 2003,pp.279–
95), brings to rest the infinite regress of subjective reflection: the constant
retreat of subjectivity before its own products is a problem detected in
Fichte’s reformulation of Kant (Hegel 1971,pp.415–16;Pinkard2002,
pp. 139–44). H
¨
olderlin resists this romantic turn. In evoking a harmony
of reflection and objective form, aesthetic insight can prefigure and guide
more concrete political transformations.
These developments receive brief but pointed political interpretation
in the anonymous, fragmentary text known as ‘The Earliest System
Programme of German Idealism’,
17
of 1796 or 1797, which illustrates
H
¨
olderlin’s influence, if not his authorship. This text attributes to Kant’s
aesthetics the intention of placing free goal-determination within a natu-
ral order that we can conceive, regulatively, as purposive, in accord with
our own ends. The contemporary world, however, is shaped by the dull
and mechanical interaction of parts (Lypp 1972,p.20). Kant could not
completely free himself from this perspective. Almost simultaneously with
the ‘System Prog ramme’, he would describe and endorse this mechanism
explicitly in his Doctrine of Right, the first part of his Metaphysics of Morals
of 1797, basing juridical relations upon constraint or unilateral exclusions
17 On the disputed authorship of this text, in Hegel’s hand, see Gammon 2000,pp.145–70;Mathy
1994,pp.9–10.
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