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KANT, SHELLEY
AND THE VISIONARY
CRITIQUE OF
METAPHYSICS
O. BRADLEY BASSLER
Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique
of Metaphysics
O. Bradley Bassler
Kant, Shelley and the

Visionary Critique of
Metaphysics
O. Bradley Bassler
University of Georgia
Athens, GA, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-77290-5 ISBN 978-3-319-77291-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77291-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936911
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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for Elizabeth, again and again
Preface and Acknowledgments
In a current philosophical climate of scientific scholasticism, divided

between commentaries (mostly on the “great” philosophers) and minute
investigations of “contemporary issues,” the two sides of the division have
much more in common than they differ. In this volume, I seek a way to
exit from both sides of this purported dichotomy.
On the one hand, we need to step out from behind “commentary,” and
I will instead attempt to enlist Shelley and Kant as “guides.” But the cen-
tripetal tendency toward “interpretation,” and so commentary, is difficult
to resist.
On the other hand, many attempts to “do philosophical work on con-
temporary issues” strike me as failing to recognize the ineliminably meta-
phorical dimensions of this work, which is always perceived as somehow
ultimately “literal.” To draw upon two examples almost at random, what
are we to understand literally by the idea that “mind reaches all the way
out to the world”? Even more focally, what is conceptual content, exactly?
On reflection, even the idea of semantic content seems difficult to grasp
literally.
Perhaps, as in the story of the bull of Phalaris, these “ideas” are only as
good as the pain that has gone into them. Nietzsche has said that the
greatest ideas are the greatest events, but also that what we remember is
what impresses us with the most pain. Where would this pain come from,
if not from the “content” of “work”?
vii
viii Preface and Acknowledgments
In another way, the problem is quintessentially one of knowing what

to do with the heritage of Kant, for every attempt to “return” to “straight-
forward” philosophical work is bound to look “metaphysical” in a pejora-
tive sense to the Kantian. Can the program I have called paraphysics
(Bassler 2017), which I will develop in more detail in this volume, supply
an alternative form of “philosophical work”? To do so, it would need to
respect the historical sedimentation of metaphorical content, broadly
construed in Blumenberg’s sense, but offer an alternative to the philo-
sophical numbing of Kantian prophylaxis, the definite separation of
“critical” from “metaphysical” intent, which ultimately becomes as dog-
matic as the dogmatism it would seek to supplant. Husserl’s phenome-
nology provides a first model. Paraphysics would seek, with the help of
Blumenberg and others, to go farther.
There is an indefiniteness at the center of our existence which this
manual for paraphysics seeks to explore. Sartre famously asserted that
“nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being–like a worm” (Sartre 1956,
56). This is one attempt to articulate a sense of such indefiniteness, and
one that exercised its spell over me from my earliest encounter with phi-
losophy as a teenager. Sartre’s formulation is more traditionally ontologi-
cal than the one I will attempt, his “dialectic” of being and nothingness
too reliant on a Hegelian legacy in which the mysteries of “determinate
negation” themselves displace (rather than negating) the indefiniteness
for which an all-too-definite sense of “the Nothing” serves as replace-
ment. If nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm, then
indefiniteness would rather be spread over the skin of our existence like a
film. But the literal falsehood of the antecedent implies the only figura-
tive value of the consequent.
In this venture, I have chosen two primary companions. On the prin-
ciple of Heidegger’s reversion to Hölderlin as the earliest expression of an
insight he would cultivate, I move back over more recent candidate com-
panions to Shelley and Kant. My choice is less principled than Heidegger’s,
more pragmatic: I do not intend, for example, that the historical locus
limned by Shelley and Kant in their different ways makes them either
earliest or most powerful, though there is something about their proxim-
ity to the French Revolution that is historically specific. Also, Shelley and
Kant are both committed to the centrality of the human: Shelley in his
ix
version of “agnostic humanism” and Kant in the ultimate role which he

assigns to the question, “what is the human?”
Shelley’s poetry exemplifies his humanism in a tragic mode which I
find essential to it. In contrast, Kant’s humanism is less aggressive and
more durable. But both ultimately bode extremely ill for traditional con-
ceptions of the human and open the way to an identification of features
associated with the indefinite. I am much less interested in their respec-
tive humanist visions than in the problems of indefiniteness which they
uncover, and in this sense it would be misleading at best to say that para-
physics is (as Sartre said of existentialism) a humanism. As I see it – with
Kant and Shelley’s help (both positive and negative) – the human opens
out onto the indefinite. It is for this reason that I have invited them – as
they have invited me – along for the ride.
The stakes are sufficiently high. Shelley’s effective suicide (poetically if
not literally) is neither a romantic prank nor an extricable biographical
circumstance. Kant’s critical unraveling of philosophy, like Husserl’s later
phenomenological unwinding, occurs at a less apparently visceral, more
overtly intellectual, level, but the philosophical consequences are as great
as the poetic ones in Shelley’s case. It will take time and work to articulate
my sense of what these are. In any case, these will serve as two main
stocks of illustration as my enterprise unfolds. There is more here, too: I
want to use Kant to unwind Shelley, Shelley to unravel Kant. What I
propose may at first look like a Shelleyan reading of Kant, since the
emphasis will be on vision, and Shelley insisted that any poem was the
already inert track of an antecedent visionary design. Kant’s critical pro-
gram, particularly as exemplified in the first of his three Critiques, is mod-
eled on a logical architectonic which also reflects a visionary basis of sorts,
and Shelley helps to probe further into this vision. What Kant has to offer
Shelley beyond durability is a more difficult problem, but it has to do
with the radical revaluation of the notion of a philosophical category, a
vision beyond the traditionally metaphysical one. Both perspectives –
Shelley’s on Kant and Kant’s on Shelley – encourage a vision of paraphys-
ics, and melding the notions of vision and critique I refer to this casting
of paraphysics as visionary critique.
Paraphysics is intended broadly as a philosophical, not a poetic, enter-
prise, but it is more inclusive of philosophical enthusiasm than Kant’s
x Preface and Acknowledgments
strictures against an “elevated tone” would itself permit. In this regard

(though not in all others), Emerson or Blake (both originally clothed in
Swedenborg) would yield more immediate positive antecedence than
either of my companions. Positive affiliation is not the issue, but rather
the aggravation of a still largely unrecognized, though felt condition. In
this regard, Emerson is of little help, profound as my growing sense of
indebtedness to him remains, and the confrontation with Blake is per-
haps best staged in poetry itself. For now, the hope of this introduction to
paraphysics, indicated only in bare outline, is to provide an approach to
those indefinitenesses Shelley experienced as radically as any, but with the
greater robustness a philosophical fortification such as Kant’s may pro-
vide. I remind myself, along with the reader, of my skepticism: hopes are
something different, and less, than promises or even plans. There is noth-
ing to guarantee that paraphysics as an enterprise will prove any more
shielded than Shelleyan poetry, and with unshielded roots in Blake and
Emerson there is perhaps much to prove it less. It would, indeed could,
matter little to me either way. There are mysterious fortitudes to which
we may point in the later tradition of English and American lyric – one
thinks of the disparate examples of Yeats and Stevens – and the respective
bulwarkings of poetry and philosophy may prove comparable or even
ultimately in favor of the longstandingness of the poetic, as opposed to
any philosophical, tradition. In a “middle modern” context, as repre-
sented by the figures of Kant and Shelley, it is the philosopher (always of
frail health) who manifests surprising longevity and the also frail poet
who exemplifies the self-immolation of a furious fuse. Harold Bloom has
trenchantly observed that reading poetry sustains while living poetry kills
all but a very few. In contrast, Bloom contends that reading philosophy is
stultifying (i.e. burn this book), but the philosophical life is a life well
lived. Keeping Bloom’s anti-philosophical wisdom in mind, I militantly
oppose the inertial pull in the direction of merely “reading” Kant and
Shelley. I view this project, in proper American fashion, as a sort of opera-
tor’s manual and/as report from the (mine)field of paraphysics, an enter-
prise of visionary engagement (and more!). Despite the potential
perils – incrementally induced – I do recommend: try this at home.
* * *
xi
Too many people have contributed directly and indirectly to this work to
list them all, but several former students from whom I have learned
deserve special mention and must stand in acknowledgment for all the
many others. Isadora Mosch labored mightily on earlier versions of this
project as a research assistant during her time at the University of Georgia,
and John Paetsch has helped with editorial suggestions and much else.
Conversations with David Hart are at the center of this work, particularly
in the consideration of Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom, and conversa-
tions with Angus Fletcher were a privilege I hope never to forget. As
always Ricardo Abend Van Dalen has been a constant source of support.
I am grateful to April James at Palgrave Macmillan for her work, and to
an anonymous reader for the press. Last, not least but quite the opposite,
I acknowledge the continuing supportive environment my family pro-
vides. In a line of three generations spanning from my mother, Shirley
Anne Gipson Bassler, to my daughter, Zoe Lalene Brient, my wife,
Elizabeth Brient, is the center to whom this work is dedicated.
Athens, GA, USA O. Bradley Bassler

December 2017
Bibliography
Bassler, O. Bradley. Diagnosing Contemporary Philosophy with the Matrix Movies
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology,
trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1956).
Contents
1 From Imagination to the Parafinite 1

1.1 From Imagination to the Parafinite (A First Pass) 1
1.2 Vision and Vision: A Framework for Conversation? 9
1.3 Philosophical Vision, and the Anomalous Vision of Kant 14
1.4 Pure Synthesis as Egological Self-Positioning 18
1.5 Kantian Prophylaxis and Husserlian “Platonism”: A First
Comparison of Two Transcendentalisms 34
Bibliography 44
2 The Parafinite and Self-Positioning 47

2.1 Versions and Aversions of the Parafinite: Galileo, Leibniz
and Kant (and More on Self-Positioning) 47
2.2 Second-Order Self-Positioning as Intimated
in the Second Critique 59
2.3 Theoretical and Practical Self-Positioning in the Opus
Postumum 63
2.4 Symbolism as Higher-Order Schematization
and Blumenberg’s Metaphorology 68
Bibliography 84
xiii
xiv Contents
3 Principles and Categories from Leibniz to Peirce in Five

Easy Steps 87
3.1 Leibniz on the Principle of Sufficient Reason 87
3.2 Kant’s New Elucidation 91
3.3 False Subtleties (Kant) and Four Incapacities (Peirce) 100
3.4 A New List of Categories (Peirce) 106
3.5 The Pragmatic Maxim and Higher-Order
Empiriocriticism: Exponentiation of Self-Positioning 117
Bibliography 134
4 Spotlight on Mathematics: Dislocations of Kant

and Husserl 137
4.1 Brouwer: Dislocation of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic 138
4.2 Hilbert: Relocation of Kant’s Regulative Rationality 141
4.3 Tarskian Semantics: Dislocation of Kant’s Truth
Criterion145
4.4 Analytic Philosophy (and a Comment on Hermeneutics) 148
4.5 Frege as Partial Husserl (Lothar Eley) 149
4.6 Marion’s “Brouwerian” Reading of Wittgenstein 154
4.7 Van Atten’s “Husserlian” Reading of Brouwer 158
Bibliography 160
5 Adjunction and Relocation 163

5.1 Adjunction as Global Dislocation: Introducing a Second
Level of Paraphysics by Kantian Example 163
5.2 Distribution as Relocation: A Third Level, and Kant’s
Transcendental Deduction of the Categories 170
5.3 Blumenberg’s Modernity: A Relocative Appreciation 176
Bibliography 181
6 Shelley’s Vision 183
6.1 Spirit Vision: Shelley’s Poetic Modernism 183
6.2 Beginning and Beyond: Notes to Queen Mab193
6.3 Triumphal Cars 202
6.4 Hesperus and Prosperus: An Exemplary Excursion 210
Contents
xv
6.5 Proof Text for Locative Poetics: Shelley’s Triumph

(Part One) 214
6.6 Reading, Response; Criticism, Vision: A Goethean
Digression218
6.7 Proof Text for Locative Poetics: Shelley’s Triumph
(Part Two) 220
6.8 At Eton and Mont Blanc 227
Bibliography 236
7 Conclusion 239
7.1 The Parafinite and the Imagination 239
7.2 Intimations of the Parafinite 245
Bibliography 251
Index 253
1
From Imagination to the Parafinite
1.1 F rom Imagination to the Parafinite

(A First Pass)
At the beginning of this enterprise I acknowledge a singular precedent to
the agon I stage between Kant and Shelley. In an essay of manifold sug-
gestiveness, Northrop Frye has proposed that we see literature as a “cri-
tique of pure reason.” My overall indebtedness to Frye’s work extends well
beyond the bounds of this pregnant essay, and in particular to his seminal
volume on Blake. In his brief essay, although I find Frye’s paraphrase of
Kant’s critical project less than inspiring, the project he outlines so envel-
ops my own that I feel under some obligation to declare that I only stum-
bled upon his essay after this book was well underway. Yet with little
violence Frye’s overall project may be characterized as monadological
(Frye 1957, 121; see also Frye 1982, 209, 224), each part enveloping all,
and so the fact that this piece entered my horizon late in the game means
little, nor should the inadequacy of Frye’s rather journalistic portrait of
Kant encourage us to belittle his all-too-ambitious proposal. To a first
approximation, we might understand it as a revisioning of Cassirer’s “phi-
losophy of symbolic forms,” with an eye not to literature as a repository of
symbols, but rather as a source of that archetypal design which underpins
© The Author(s) 2018 1

O. B. Bassler, Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77291-2_1
2 O. B. Bassler
all, and so even the most purely rational, of categorical structures. As such,
it would engulf that tradition which since the Renaissance has come to be
known as “philosophia perennis,” reintegrating philosophy within the
larger literary fold of which it was originally an aberrant generic eclosion.
Although I do not intend this project as one in which I use literature
to provide a critique of pure reason, Frye’s proposal sets a first model for
the encounter between Kant and Shelley. It is too one-sided in its sugges-
tion that literature reveals the imaginative nude retreating beneath philo-
sophical clothing – what Frye declares the elusive object of his ongoing
quest (Frye 1990a, 169). Frye’s terms are the romantic ones of imagina-
tion bounding reason, securing and circumscribing a limited domain of
rationality in a sea of imaginative tradition, buffering reason from its own
tendency to extend itself irrationally. Representative of his orientation is
his concluding remark that “[i]n Canada today, for example [1982], with
its demoralized government and chaotic economy, it seems to me only its
lively and articulate culture that holds the country together” (Frye
1990a, 182). (1982 is the year of appearance of David Cronenberg’s
Videodrome, set in Northrop Frye’s own Toronto.)
Much as I agree with Frye about the power of culture and ideas, his
vision of culture’s role risks, as most romanticisms do, the psychological
function of self-congratulation. More saliently, it massively simplifies the
very rift between literature and philosophy (not to mention the much
larger rift between culture and society) it would seek to repair. In this
regard it shares many features with the otherwise admirable ambitions of
Kenneth Burke, whose A Grammar of Motives serves as another precedent
for this enterprise limited only by its appreciation of the philosophical
tradition, which is not as powerful as its attuned sense of literary effect. In
this volume I seek, instead, a fully deployed agon between Kant and Shelley,
involuting and undoing them to expose their encounter at its utmost.
It goes almost without saying that I exclusively invoke the literary prece-
dents of Burke and Frye and their limitations not at all to demean them, but
because there are no equally forward-looking antecedents to mention on the
philosophical side of the equation. Philosophically, our age has largely
devolved into a fetishistic preoccupation for the precision of the well-tooled
cog in the machine, with insufficient appreciation for the monolithic status
of the apparatus “underway.” I have not turned to literature for literary so
From Imagination to the Parafinite 3
much as for philosophical reasons: the massive default of the contemporary

philosophical enterprise to deliver any extended, coherent reflection on its
larger purport. The best we could hope for in recent times has been the
honesty of Richard Rorty, making a virtue out of necessity by declaring in
another 1982 essay that “[a] nation can count itself lucky to have several
thousand relatively leisured and relatively unspecialized intellectuals who are
exceptionally good at putting together arguments and pulling them apart.
Such a group is a precious cultural resource. As we keep saying on our grant
applications, the nation would do well to have analytic philosophers advise
on public projects. We shall kibbitz at least as well as any other professional
group, and perhaps rather better than most” (Rorty 1982, 220–221). (The
pedigree of Rorty’s essay is indicated by its first presentation in 1981 at a
meeting of the American Philosophical Association and its first appearance
in print in The American Scholar). It is true that such argument parsers gen-
erally make good intellectual bureaucrats and more especially good profes-
sional advisors, but one wonders how much – then, and even more so
now – they are accurately characterized as “relatively unspecialized,” and
what, if anything, their skills have to do with philosophy. Such is the unlucky
situation in which we philosophers find ourselves. Fortunately, there are
exceptions: I speak above all of contemporary conditions of philosophical
culture and not of the agendas (publicly disclosed or privately withheld) of
individual philosophers.
Philosophical romanticisms, from the German varieties through post-
Comtean versions of positivism, are as much the root of this problem as
any resource for solution, and I mean to explode them here, along with
their literary counterparts. These philosophical romanticisms – of which
contemporary Hegelianism and analytic philosophy would both count as
vestiges – would have us believe that something can be philosophically
got from nothing, as if concepts would by themselves engender positive
or negative elucidations of reality. Kant’s recognition is that concepts are
in themselves philosophically inert, and this points to an entirely differ-
ent conception of philosophical work which still remains largely unrecog-
nized in the philosophical community at large. Nothing is got from
nothing, and the work I promote in this book requires thinking about the
programs of Kant and Shelley, not just the concepts they (purportedly)
“invoke.” This is only one path to paraphysics, not a singular, royal road.
4 O. B. Bassler
There is a story told of both philosophical and literary “romanticism”

which inspires Frye’s vision. As the story goes, it is the power of the pro-
ductive imagination, the palpitating heart of the retreating nude, which
comes to redeem our world from the cold heart of modern rationality.
Versions of this story are well-known in the case of Kant, even better
known in the case of Shelley. I want to begin to show how the imagina-
tion, whose operation has been highlighted legitimately enough, serves,
however, as a shadow for a more basic actor, the parafinite.
In Kant, we meet the parafinite first in the twofold form of the indefi-
nite manifold, space and time.1 In Shelley, the identification is all the
more powerful, coming in the form of Power itself, which “dwells apart
in its tranquillity/Remote, serene and inaccessible” (Shelley 1977, 92). In
Kant’s case, the relative status of the manifold, which is indicated in its
need to be conditioned by unity, indicates that we are dealing with a form
of what I call the relative parafinite. In contrast, Shelley’s invocation of
Power in Mont Blanc appeals to what I call the absolute parafinite, at least
as a poetic figure, and perhaps as more. One of the questions running
throughout this enterprise is whether there is a philosophically defensible
conception of the absolute parafinite. In some sense the answer is yes,
with antecedence in such a notion as Blake’s “total form” and, as we will
see in more detail, the Kantian sublime. However, it will eventually turn
out that the terms of the question are also in need of revision. We are
making our way, step by step, into a new landscape. One of the things we
should see along the way is that our “new way” is not as new, nor “old
things” as old, as we might at first suspect.
In previous work, I have approached the parafinite through the math-
ematical domain (Bassler 2015). Here my approach will be largely
through the more immediate channels of poetry and philosophy, hence
leaving the discussion of the mathematical parafinite mostly to one side.
Yet we may still see the enterprise of paraphysics as an attempt to develop
a philosophical vision which is independent of the commitments philoso-
phy has traditionally (if often implicitly) had to a determinate distinction
between the finite and the infinite. The concept of the parafinite, by
implication, calls this determinate distinction between the finite and the
infinite into question. Even at its best, philosophically “shored up” against
the ruins of a largely undefended and conceptually opaque foundation
for mathematics, the distinction between the finite and the infinite is not
what it has traditionally been taken to be. Rather than viewing philoso-
phy as grounded in an appeal to the mathematical, I take as focus the
more basic relation between philosophy and poetry. Because the Western
philosophical tradition emerges out of and in vocal opposition to the
tradition of Greek literature and especially Homeric epic, I begin with
poetry in our modern age as a cultural context for the reconsideration of
philosophy.2
I turn first to Mont Blanc – to which I will return again and again, and
particularly to the lines in which Shelley describes Power.
Power dwells apart in its tranquillity

Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primæval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. (Shelley 1977, 92)
Is it Power itself, or the “tranquillity” of power that Shelley characterizes

as “remote, serene, and inaccessible?” This question will be held open; for
now the fine tuning need not detain us. Let us assume, since it collapses
fewer distinctions, that it is the tranquillity of power which is so
characterized.
Shelley was well versed in the Greek and Latin classics, and his notion
of Power is indebted, in particular, to the atomist tradition. In Greek, the
term apeiron is usually translated “infinite.” It is generally taken to be
formed from the privative prefix a- and the root peras, which means
bound, limit or end. Consequently, the term means more literally,
unbounded, unlimited, or unending. In each case, what is negated by the
privative prefix is something definite, and so the unbounded is indefinite.
Peras is associated with the verbal root peraino, which means to end, fin-
ish or accomplish. So we might add to our list of proposed translations
above that apeiron means unaccomplished. Here the indefinite is mani-
fest as something unfinished, hence ongoing – perhaps broken off.
Charles Kahn, however, has proposed an alternative derivation for the
term apeiron. Instead of the root peras, he associates apeiron with the root
peran, which used as an adverb means “on the other side, across, or
beyond,” and is associated with the verbal root perao, which means “to
6 O. B. Bassler
pass across or through a space, to penetrate, pierce or extend” (Kahn

1985, 232).3 On Kahn’s reading, the root meaning of apeiron would
hence be: the untraversable. Kahn’s proposal is interesting because the
notion of the untraversable is not indefinite in the same sense that the
unbounded, the unlimited or the unending are. And if there is something
on the “far side” of the untraversable, it would properly be called “the
inaccessible.”
Whether Kahn’s proposed derivation of the meaning of the term
apeiron is right or not, it indicates a more concrete notion. If you do not
have access to a rocket ship, the moon is inaccessible; and if you do not
have access to a boat or an airplane, another continent is inaccessible.
This makes neither the moon nor the other continent, nor the space that
separates us from them, indefinite. In either case we are dealing with a defi-
nite extent, simply one that is untraversable. The untraversability we
speak of here is, of course, a relative untraversability: relative, in particu-
lar, to our means of transport. Correlatively, the moon or another conti-
nent is only relatively inaccessible. Is there a sense in which something
could be absolutely inaccessible? Shelley’s characterization of the tran-
quillity of Power may suggest that we are dealing with something rela-
tively inaccessible. Indeed, what would it mean for the tranquillity of
Power to be absolutely inaccessible? And even more importantly: would
this absolutely inaccessible be definite, like the moon or the European
continent, or in some way indefinite? We have as yet no means for answer-
ing these questions.
Shelley continues: “And this, the naked countenance of earth, /On
which I gaze, even these primæval mountains/Teach the adverting mind”
(Shelley 1977, 92). What ‘this’ refers to includes, but is not limited to, the
wisdom teaching concerning Power, given in the previous two lines. A
rapid reading of these next lines in the context of the poem at large would
seem to recommend a reading of ‘these primæval mountains’ in terms of
something like the Kantian doctrine of the sublime. But if we attenuate our
pace, peculiar questions emerge from these lines. (We start slowly and
build.) Why does Shelley list first the “naked countenance of the earth” and
only then “these primæval mountains”? And why does he speak of “even
these primæval mountains”? The ‘even’ registers a qualification, but why?
All is not here what it would sublimely seem.
Perhaps it is most natural to suggest the following: “even” the primæval

mountains teach the poet that power, or its tranquillity, is inaccessible
because in this of all cases a sublime power has been revealed, and so
made accessible. In contrast, the inaccessibility is revealed (accessible?!) in
the naked countenance of earth. So far as it goes, this seems plausible.
But how, exactly, does the naked earth reveal this inaccessibility, and if it
reveals it so directly why isn’t that the focus of the poem? And further: if
the effect of the primæval mountains is concessive, why is it the focus?
The dynamics of accession and concession are intricate, and this leads us
into the difficult heart of a major poem.4
As a point of comparison, let us turn equally briefly to Kant’s charac-
terization of the sublime. In the Critique of Judgment Kant tells us: “That
is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small” (Kant
1987, 105). Kant’s characterization of the sublime comes at the end of a
section called “Explication of the Term Sublime,” which is the first sec-
tion in the larger division on the mathematically – as opposed to dynami-
cally – sublime. Since Kant discusses the mathematical sublime before
the dynamical sublime (the difference between the two need not concern
us just yet), here he first lays out that use of the term ‘sublime’ in the
Critique of Judgment. What Kant describes is seemingly a characterization
of the absolutely, rather than the relatively, parafinite: the sublime is large
not relative to some thing, but in comparison with all things. Yet there is
still some comparison at issue here. In this passage, Kant does not say,
“the sublime is the large as such.” How can some thing be large in com-
parison with every other thing? The answer, it seems, must be that the
sublime is not a thing in the same way as all the other things; but how
then can they be compared? A mountain is not, in the most straightfor-
ward sense, larger than everything else. Nor, for that matter, is a galaxy or
a nebula. But perhaps the Power which a mountain discloses is even larger
than the mountain which discloses it, or even a galaxy or nebula.
Terminologically, at least, the concern about comparison is settled by the
way that Kant begins this section. Pluhar translates this beginning: “We call
sublime what is absolutely [schlechthin] large” (Kant 1987, 103). This trans-
lation is warranted by passages which follow, but a more literal translation
than ‘absolutely large’ would in fact be ‘large as such’. The matter is some-
what delicate, for Kant immediately goes on to distinguish that which is
8 O. B. Bassler
“simply” (schlechtweg) large and that which is large “as such” (schlechthin).
More basically, we could distinguish between these as the large “straight-
away” and the large “straight-on” – a subtle linguistic distinction worth
some meditation. To the former, Kant appends the Latin term simpliciter,
and to the latter the Latin phrase absolute, non comparative. It is this which
warrants translating ‘schlecthin’ as ‘absolutely’. Because I want to carry the
more literal parlance along, I prefer to speak of the large straight-away (sim-
pliciter) and the large straight-on (absolute). The large straight-away is the
largeness we come straight (directly) to; the large straight-on is the large as
such – like hitting the nail straight on the head.
When I speak of the large straight-away, Kant says I don’t have an
objective comparison in mind, but only at most a subjective one. As a
judgment, “Magnolia blossoms are large” doesn’t intend that I’m explic-
itly comparing magnolia blossoms to cherry blossoms or to roses. It
means something more like, “I find magnolia blossoms to be large,” even
though, as Kant says, such judgments “demand everyone’s assent, even as
theoretical judgments do” (Kant 1987, 104). (You don’t find magnolia
blossoms to be large? Where are you from?) In contrast, when we say an
object is large straight-on, “we do not permit a standard adequate to it to
be sought outside it, but only within it” (Kant 1987, 105). In terms of
such a characterization of the large straight-on, it is immediately apparent
that the appearance of a physical thing can’t be large straight-on, but only
large straight-away, large “in its genre.” It is just here in the text that Kant
gives the characterization of the sublime as “that in comparison with
which everything else is small,” so we know that precisely what Kant
doesn’t mean by this is that the sublime is the largest in some collection.
The standard is internal, so speaking of the sublime as that in comparison
to which everything else is small means in a way that it is what makes
everything else small. What that means, Kant tells us: “our power of esti-
mating the magnitude of things in the world of sense is inadequate to the
idea [of the sublime],” and so “this inadequacy itself is the arousal in us of
the feeling that we have within us a supersensible power.”5 Consequently,
“what is large straight-on is not an object of sense, but is the use that
judgment makes naturally of certain objects so as to [arouse] this (feel-
ing), and in contrast with that use any other use is small” (Kant 1987,
106, translation modified). What Kant calls the feeling of a supersensible
power leads us back to Power in Shelley’s Mont Blanc.
Kant’s account of the sublime suggests a way to understand Shelley’s

reference to “even the primæval mountain” in Mont Blanc. Although the
mountain is “straight-away” large, it is not large “straight-on.” Yet its
largeness straight-away frustrates our (imaginative) powers of estimation
and intimates a power which lies behind it which is sublime, absolutely
parafinite. “Our imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while our
reason demands absolute totality as a real idea.” The sublime emerges as
“the attunement that the intellect [gets] through a certain presentation
that occupies reflective judgment” (Kant 1987, 106), namely, the judg-
ment of the sublime. This Kantian interpretation of Shelley’s Power is as
the power of a cognitive attunement. It makes Shelley’s Power not just a
poetic figure of the absolutely parafinite but a bona fide instantiation of it.
This, we could say, is the “standard” way of understanding the Kantian
passage from the imagination to the parafinite. As we progress, I will
want to assess its merits and its limitations. Some of these limitations can
be seen by digging deeper into Shelley’s poem, though it will require us
to read Shelley antithetically: against his declaration in A Defense of Poetry,
in particular, that “the great instrument of moral good is the imagina-
tion” (Shelley 1977, 488).
1.2 ision and Vision: A Framework

V
for Conversation?
I follow two predominant lines of visionary design, which I find domi-
nant for any construal of the American reception of the European cul-
tural tradition. First, following Harold Bloom’s lead, I will speak of a
“visionary company” running from Shakespeare through Milton to the
British Romantic poets; Shelley will serve us as a terminus ad quem.
Second, I suggest a visionary company on the continent stretching from
Bruno, Descartes and Spinoza through a latter reception in the German
philosophers Leibniz, Kant and Husserl. The first company is obviously
more “literary” in its orientation, but with philosophical strains burgeon-
ing in such a figure as Coleridge. The latter company is even more
obviously philosophical than the former is literary, to such an extent even
that a defense of them as visionary is called for.
10 O. B. Bassler
Perhaps it is in the case of the inaugurating figure in the continental

line I identify, Descartes, that the visionary component is least difficult to
discern. (In our reception, Bruno continues to remain strange, hence
“precursive.” Bacon inaugurates a distinct line of philosophical vision
that I wish to bracket here; his strongest successors in this line are not
Locke, nor Berkeley, nor Hume, but Vico and Emerson). On the one
hand, there is the tradition, which Descartes himself promotes, of seeing
his philosophical program as contained in germ in the three famous
dreams he reports having had during the night of 10 November 1619
(Hart 2007). On the other hand, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy pres-
ents a physical cosmology which it is not so difficult to accept as vision-
ary. Leibniz’s monadology seems equally visionary, if not more so, and
has even been derided by some famous literary-philosophical personali-
ties as a poem manqué. Rather caustically, George Santayana wrote of
Leibniz’s pre-established harmony,
That many spirits should breed corresponding dreams, and being in con-
tact only with primal fertility, should falsely conceive themselves to inhabit
and undergo life in a society of prisoners running about knocking against
one another in a non-existent cage, is the most childish of fancies: childish
in its groundlessness on the given hypothesis, and childish in feigning not
to credit the obvious natural facts on which it is modeled. (Santayana
1969, 306)
Wallace Stevens called Leibniz “the philosopher afraid of ornament,” and

in a sotto voce register more penetrating than Santayana’s found that
Leibniz
was a man who thought like a poet but did not write like one, although
that seems strangely impossible; and in consequence, his Monadology
instead of standing as one of the world’s revelations looks like a curious
machine, several centuries old. (Stevens 1957, 186)6
This is one strand of modern vision speaking of another, and so both the
criticism and the implied rivalry should be looked upon with distancing
irony. But it is, in any case, a first example of the framework for conversation
I want to sketch out.
The extent of the abuse to which philosophers have been subjected at

the hands of the literati has sometimes reached bracing proportions. The
pistol-whipping which Kant, a. k. a. Kien, receives in Elias Canetti’s Auto-
da-Fé (Canetti 1974) makes the book almost unbearable and hence unread-
able, either before or after the true target of Canetti’s grotesque irony is
identified. Philosophers may have been less intent on abusing the poets,
but if so only out of a misplaced sense of distance from them, gained when
Plato did the job so summarily at the fountainhead of the philosophical
tradition. For my part, I find the aggressive disrespect of the literati often
not only bracing but illuminating. No better recent example of this can be
found than the anti-philosophical animus of Harold Bloom. It reaches
twin peaks in his mid-career Agon (Bloom 1982) as he is determined to
extract the gnosticism he would promote from the false clutches of neo-
Platonic competitors, and in the later Where Shall Wisdom Be Found
(Bloom 2004), in which Bloom begrudgingly locates a major strand of
Western wisdom in the “fascinating bad news” of a Platonic tradition that
would find its chief fictional exponent in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (the char-
acter, if not the play). To begin, but only to begin, such an anti-philosoph-
ical stance always encourages us to ask: why this animus? And in the case
of such a longstanding exponent of the visionary tradition as Harold
Bloom, we must go further and ask whether the threat to literature lies in
philosophy’s co-option of the visionary stance itself, either to its own ends
or, even more damagingly, to the destruction of vision itself.
On the face of it, a “school philosopher” of Kant’s credentials would
seem, on this point, simply to be engaged in the deflation of visionary
“enthusiasm.” So, a first indication is needed of the way in which I see
Kant as a major visionary philosopher. Simply put, Kant’s entire critical
philosophy is spun architectonically out of an underpinning logical scaf-
folding, given in the famous four figures of the table of the syllogism. This
architectonic structure has typically been taken less than seriously, even by
those exponents of Kant who would be so bold as to test the depths of the
transcendental deduction or the schematism of the pure categories of the
understanding. It will require much more of a commitment to Kant than
this to see our way into the visionary structure of Kant’s critical program –
which is to say, to see Kant’s program as visionary critique. Yet if we are to
take him at his own word, this architectonic scaffolding is corroborated by
12 O. B. Bassler
Kant’s own productivity, for it is this logical template which provides a

conjectural thread leading to the discovery of the critical system. Not only
that: it also lies behind Kant’s insistence on our grasping the movement of
the critical project itself (this was, Kant insisted, why he wished not to
distract the reader with “unnecessary” illustrative examples). In fact,
everything in Kant’s writing style is directed toward an appreciation of
this architectonic structure (the penultimate chapter of the 800 plus page
First Critique is on “The Architectonic of Pure Reason,” a suitable termi-
nus for this first of three installments). If we take it sufficiently seriously,
Kant has made his presentation no more difficult than was necessary –
difficult as it may be – and the right way to master the North Face of
modern philosophy is to become sufficiently familiar with the three
Critiques that they can be read straight through as a dramatic trilogy, from
start to finish. That Kant articulated this philosophical behemoth in terms
of the most traditional of logical architectonics and then adapted this
structure to his post-Copernican, non-traditional ends constitutes the
major dramatic tension of Kant’s philosophical work.
Kant’s visionary design is, then, logical in nature: Kant’s vision is a
vision of “logical space,” or as latter day Kantians such as Sellars and
McDowell would call it, a “space of reasons.” That this is more than sim-
ply metaphorical though less than constitutive for Kant’s project is indi-
cated by Kant himself when he says,
All manifoldness of things is only a way, as multifarious as this manifold-

ness, of limiting the concept of the supreme reality – the concept which is
their common substratum – just as all [geometric] figures are possible only
as various ways of limiting infinite space. (Kant 1996, 568–9; see also 599)
This passage occurs in the context of Kant’s discussion of the “Ideal of

Reason,” and Kant calls the more than metaphorical but less than consti-
tutive role of this ideal regulative. Kant’s appeal to the “manifoldness of
things” is a radicalizing of the indefinite manifold of intuition as his start-
ing point in the Transcendental Aesthetic at the beginning of the critical
project. Retrospectively, borrowing Husserlian terminology, we may view
it as a transcendental completion of the preliminary notion of the mani-
fold of intuition. The indefiniteness associated with this preliminary
manifold finds its conceptual expression in the notion of the Kantian

sublime, and this may be viewed as the completion of Kant’s initial appeal
to the indefinite along transcendental lines, on analogy to the way that we
may view Blake’s commitment to total form as a completion of his pur-
suit of Biblical allegory (Frye 1990a, b, 243–50, esp. 245–6). Kant’s logi-
cal space is as governed by a continuity of extension as the geometrical
space to which it stands in analogy: “Datur continuum formarum” – a
continuum of forms is given (Kant 1996, 631). “Pure reason is in fact
occupied with nothing but itself ” (Kant 1996, 645). This, at least, identi-
fies a philosophical target when we wish to establish a conversation
between visionary form in philosophy and literature. And in Kant’s case,
the sense in which this visionary design is constitutive of the visionary
critique of metaphysics can be read directly off of Kant’s own description
of his critical program. How, then, does such a sense of visionary design
compare to that, say, Shelley depicts in Prometheus Unbound?
Before we may address this question we must establish some basic
methodological dicta. First and foremost: the emphasis in the reception
of Kant’s project has been overwhelmingly in terms of the First Critique,
and, with respect to the First Critique, more recently on the Transcendental
Aesthetic and Analytic. By way of contrast, I insist on the centrality of the
Transcendental Dialectic and the Transcendental Doctrine of Method as
the terminus ad quem in the First Critique, and in the architectonic link-
age of the three Critiques more broadly. It is only in such terms – terms
that Kant himself stressed – that the visionary design of the critical phi-
losophy begins to come into focus.7 It is at this point that Religion Within
the Bounds of Reason Alone and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science can be “layered in,” providing further levels in the conceptual
architectonic Kant envisions, and this in turn leads to the dilemmas of
the Opus Postumum. So far from these looking like the senile ravings of
Kien, they seem rather the culmination of Kant’s visionary design, here
achieving its supreme pathos in a faltering that we may anomalously
compare to Shelley’s fragmentary The Triumph of Life.
For all that this may seem to be a neat, even too clever, way to analo-
gize poetic and philosophical vision, the negative limits of this enter-
prise should also be made clear up front. In the case of both Kant and
Shelley, the limits of vision are the limits of certain verbal figures. Kant
14 O. B. Bassler
is constrained by a faculty psychology associated with the logical table of

judgments; and in Shelley’s development, as Harold Bloom puts it, there
is “a continuous effort to subvert the poetic image, so as to arrive at a
more radical kind of verbal figure, which Shelley never altogether
achieved” (Bloom 1971, 109). Bloom’s remark in his 1965 essay looks
ahead to the analysis he will give of life’s chariot in The Triumph of Life
some decade later in terms of a second-order transumption, or “metalep-
sis” (Bloom 1976, 96). I will return later to Bloom’s point, which relies
on a development of the theme of second-order figuration. For now, the
issue is to indicate attempts to identify limits associated with the respec-
tive projects. These limits do not argue for a failure in the correlation of
their visions, but they will lead to a need to recognize historical incoher-
ences associated with the forward promotion of visionary programs.
This, in turn, will necessitate the development of a historical “visionol-
ogy” on analogous lines to Blumenberg’s “paradigms for a metaphorol-
ogy.” Vision is not itself a trope in the way that metaphor is, nor is it a
genre in the sense of epic, drama, allegory or lyric, but it is a category or
locus which itself becomes historical in its multifarious instances. In this
sense, it ultimately moves beyond the provisions of rhetoric.8 The tension
between logic and vision, between figure and design, is productive of
drama in the broadest sense. It is no surprise, though still ironic, that
Kant’s First Critique ends with a chapter on “The History of Pure Reason.”
1.3 hilosophical Vision, and the Anomalous

P
Vision of Kant
To speak of a “Kantian vision” is anomalous, if not downright perverse.
Yet if we bracket the demonstrative claims of Kant’s critical project, what
precisely do we have left, if not a vision of philosophy? This is different
from the sense in which we would typically speak of a poetic vision, in
that a poetic vision is not typically a vision of poetry (or even if it is,
perhaps less obviously). Philosophical visions need not (obviously) be
visions of philosophy either: one might think, for example of the chariot
in Plato’s Phaedrus (253c). Yet as a figure which may be argued a figure
of vision itself, this latter case is also not a simple one, either: again we
verge on the difficult issue of second-order figuration. In the realm of

vision, all is not what it seems. The Kantian distinction between phenom-
enon and noumenon reflects a larger dynamic within the field of philo-
sophical vision.
Near the beginning of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method – the
last major subdivision of the First Critique – Kant identifies the dichot-
omy which lies at the basis of the distinct statuses of two sorts of
concepts:
Now an a priori concept (a nonempirical concept) either already contains

within itself a pure intuition; and in that case it can be constructed. Or it
contains nothing but the synthesis of possible intuitions that are not given
a priori; and in that case we can indeed judge through it synthetically and
a priori, but only discursively according to concepts, never intuitively by
constructing the concept. (Kant 1996, 673–4)
In the first case we are dealing with mathematical concepts, such as

space, time, or number; in the second case we are dealing with the (pure)
categories listed in Kant’s notorious table. We know that the former con-
cepts are synthetic, yet a priori, because they are constructions in intu-
ition. However, since the latter are fundamentally discursive, in what
sense are they also synthetic a priori concepts? Kant answers that they are
synthetic precisely because of their reference to the notion of a synthesis
of possible experience. Possible experience, unlike any given empirical
experience, is a pure notion. So on analogy with the way in which math-
ematical judgments become synthetic a priori by virtue of their joining
concepts by way of a “third thing,” namely an appeal to intuition, tran-
scendental judgments become synthetic a priori by virtue of the way
they join concepts together by way of a “third thing,” namely an appeal
to the synthesis of possible experience. (Controversially, this may be
understood as an appeal to the continuum of forms.) Keeping one’s eye
trained on this issue makes the transcendental deduction a lot less
mysterious.
Kant’s philosophical vision is, first of all, a vision of how experience is
structured so that we can know it. At the end of the dialectic he says of
(pure) reason that
16 O. B. Bassler
. . . the critique convinces us that the proper vocation of this highest cogni-
tive power is to employ all the methods and principles of reason solely for
tracing nature to its innermost core according to all possible principles of
unity . . . (Kant 1996, 661)
This Kantian enterprise is systematic in character, yet genetically, this

enterprise is not one which was itself reached by a systematic method.
Instead, as Kant laments,
It is terrible that only after we have, in accordance with the instruction of an

idea lying hidden in us, for a long time collected rhapsodically as building
material many cognitions referring to this idea, and indeed only after we
have over long periods of time assembled these cognitions technically, we
are first able to discern the idea in a clearer light and to sketch a whole archi-
tectonically in accordance with the purposes of reason. (Kant 1996, 757)
Kant delayed the architectonic presentation of his philosophy well into

his fifties – which would today be somewhat like publishing one’s philo-
sophical system only upon retirement. This fact is dutifully mentioned
but perhaps still insufficiently considered. To begin with the obvious:
there is a dogged insistence and honesty in the way Kant piles up his so-
called “pre-critical” essays on a wide variety of topics seemingly strewn
over a wide philosophical terrain. Retrospectively, their contributions to
the critical enterprise are, in a purely psychological sense, almost too
good to be true. In fact, they are too good to be true: their synthesis in
the critical philosophy should warn us not so much that there is some-
thing contrived in the jointure of this system as that it is a system which
responds even more to previous philosophical work than it does to the
conditions for the possibility of our knowledge of experience. Of the five-
page section on the “history of reason” with which Kant ends his massive
First Critique, Kant tell us he inserts it “only to mark a place in the system
that still remains and that must be filled in the future” (Kant 1996, 771).
He describes the current state of what we would now call history of phi-
losophy as a “ruins,” echoing the eighteenth century tourist ideal pro-
moted most famously by Volney. Johann Jakob Brucker’s history of
philosophy, arguably the first in any modern sense, was still less than fifty
years old.
At the heart of the final major subdivision of the First Critique is Kant’s
insistence that philosophy cannot be learned, but only philosophizing
(Kant 1996, 758–9). This latter is what is required as a basis in order to
philosophize. Yet instead, as Kant notes in the context of Wolffian “school
philosophy,” philosophical instruction labors under the pedagogical illu-
sion of “learning philosophy” (the terms are mine though the idea is
Kant’s). Here we have an analogue – how strictly remains to be consid-
ered – to the dialectical illusions which Kant unmasks in the Transcendental
Dialectic. The sense of the situation Kant conveys, to me at any rate, is
that philosophizing is rarely done and that little is known in any orga-
nized way about the history of this practice. For my own part, an insis-
tence on vision as opposed, say, to historical scholarship or puzzle solving,
is an insistence on returning to the recalcitrant difficulties of philosophiz-
ing. It is such an eye which we must train (in two convergent senses) on
the Kantian architectonic.
I am trying to make two points in tandem: there is a stage of philo-
sophical groping which antecedes the systematic presentation of philoso-
phy (both, shall we say, phylogenetically and ontogenetically), and there
is a persistent tendency to remain a slave to the calcified antecedent pre-
sentations of this activity. Still, as Kant puts it, the presentation of a phil-
osophical system requires a schema (Kant 1996, 756), just as the pure
concepts of the understanding must be schematized in order for them to
be applied to experience. What the schema houses in its presentation of
philosophizing is what Kant calls “an underlying idea” (extricating it
from the verbal phrase: eine grundliegende Idee). In the early stages of
philosophizing, “as one elaborates the idea, the schema – indeed, even the
definition – that at the very outset he gives of his science corresponds very
seldom to his idea” (Kant 1996, 756).
Kant’s schema in the First Critique is the logical schema provided by
the table of the logical functions of judgment. Does his underlying idea
correspond to this schema? What is Kant’s underlying idea?
Kant’s underlying idea is most fully embodied in what will become the
notion of egological self-positing (or, as I prefer, self-positioning) in the
Opus Postumum. In the context of the First Critique, this idea lies at such a
depth that the architectonic schematization makes it difficult to bring out,
but it is reflected in the threefold description of the analytic, synthetic and
18 O. B. Bassler
transcendental unity of apperception in the Transcendental Analytic. (My

perspective generally dovetails with Eckhart Förster’s reading of the doc-
trine of self-positioning, but I find more continuity between the impulses
behind the First Critique and the Opus Postumum than he does. More on
this in Sect. 1.4 below.) If we are to gain a sense of Kant’s anomalous
vision, we must seriously entertain his claim that the right role of theoreti-
cal philosophy is restricted to the domain of possible experience. But to
learn what makes Kant tick, philosophically speaking, we must identify his
underlying idea. If there is a conflict between these two requirements, it
will be the first that must bend at the behest of the second, at least if our
concern is with Kant’s anomalous vision. For by philosophical vision I
roughly mean the primary articulation of the underlying idea.
In the next section I turn to a passage in the First Critique that espe-
cially helps to open this idea out, but before that let me end this section
simply by citing a passage for which the enterprise of this book attempts
to prepare. As should be clear even on a first perusal, the remarks of this
section have attempted a first gloss for it:
Now the system of all philosophical cognition is philosophy. Philosophy

must here be taken objectively, if we mean by it the archetype for judging
all attempts at philosophizing – the archetype that is to serve for judging
any subjective philosophy, whose edifice is often quite diverse and change-
able. Considered in this way, philosophy is a mere idea of a possible science
that is given nowhere in concreto but that by various roads we try to
approach. We try this until we discover the single path, which is heavily
overgrown by sensibility, and until we succeed in making the ectype – failed
thus far – equal to the archetype insofar as doing this is granted to human
beings. Until then philosophy cannot be learned; for where is philosophy,
who possesses it, and by what can it be recognized? (Kant 1996, 759–60)
1.4 ure Synthesis as Egological

P
Self-Positioning
It is insufficiently recalled that Kant originally intended the critical project
to be fully accomplished in the First Critique alone. I suggest that we view
the train of linkage among the three Critiques according to the following
scheme. As Eckhart Förster has pointed out, the need for a Second Critique
arose when Kant replaced the discussion of our “worthiness to be happy”
by “a morality from ‘respect for the moral law’ which requires no external
‘incentive’ but follows directly from the autonomy of the subject” (Förster
2000, 126). This avoids the petitio principii implied by the conception of
practical rationality Kant proposed in the First Critique, where after “Kant
had just robbed his readers of their conviction that such a being [God]
exists,” he goes on to insist that it is precisely the obligatory force of the
moral law which “inevitably leads to the idea of God.” But in this way,
Kant “already presupposed the very bindingness which the idea of God
was supposed to explain” (Förster 2000, 125; compare Husserl 1978, 282).
In the First Critique there is no moral law (because there is no demand
for such), and so there is no need to provide an independent critique for
(pure) practical reason: the telos of the First Critique had been precisely to
“limit knowledge to make room for faith,” and hence, also morality.
According to Förster there is ultimately a coincidence of faith and moral-
ity in the Opus Postumum, but that is the end of quite another story
(Förster 2000, 147; here compare also Kant 1996, 746). Yet, a different
way of seeing the transition from the First Critique to the Second Critique
will be needed in order to maximize the surveyability of the overall struc-
ture of Kant’s critical philosophy as it developed in its manifold parts
(including the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and the Opus
Postumum). To motivate this shift in perspective, I turn to another issue
in understanding the structure of Kant’s critical philosophy, one which
will help us to attain a preliminary sense in which Kant’s appeal to pure
synthesis in the First Critique may be seen to provide the rudiments, in
this context, of his later doctrine of self-positioning.
Béatrice Longuenesse has insisted on a way in which the transcenden-
tal deduction of the forms of space and time which Kant gives in the
Transcendental Aesthetic must be “revisited” and in a sense “rewritten”
once the distinction between intellectual and figurative synthesis is drawn
in the Transcendental Analytic (Longuenesse 1998, esp. 212ff.). There is
something very valuable about her point (and Förster also recognizes
these issues from another vantage),9 but I disagree with the general scheme
of her interpretation in one basic regard that will have dramatic implica-
tions for Förster’s interpretation of Kant as well. We need to recognize
20 O. B. Bassler
that there is a “layering” of the Kantian enterprise, and what Longuenesse

identifies is one instance of it. It is, then, not so much that the transcen-
dental deduction of the forms of intuition doesn’t need to be revisited as it
is that the way Longuenesse stresses this particular point threatens to lose
sight of the way the phenomenon of such “revisitation” is pervasive,
indeed global, in Kant’s architectonic. Everything in the Analytic requires
a revisiting of the Aesthetic, just as everything in the dialectic requires a
revisiting of the Analytic. The first revisitation flies under the general ban-
ner of the imagination, since this is the application of understanding to
intuition, and the second revisitation flies under the banner of judgment,
since judgment is the application of reason to understanding. The second
“revisitation” is ultimately so extensive and important that it requires its
own Critique, the Critique of Judgment.
How does the Second Critique fit into this perspective on the unfolding
of the critical project? The rough answer to this question is that we should
see the unfolding of the critical project in terms of an ongoing need to
avoid vicious (as opposed to trivial, therefore permissible) circularity in
the critical project so far as it is conceived of as transcendental. Unlike
Förster’s intimation at the end of his book, I do not see the limits of
Kant’s project in his transcendental idealism, but rather in the threat of
transcendental circularity.10 Indeed, I think the extent to which Kant
insists on empirical realism as a form of externalism has been repeatedly
underestimated, though part of this is the fault of Kant himself: his exter-
nalism is the part of his philosophy that requires the most development,
and is the most tortuous. Ultimately I think it is also the most produc-
tive, but it requires us to recognize that Kant must embrace an indefinite
externalism, as is already reflected in the fact that we have no knowledge
of the noumenal object. (One might ask what the point of such an indefi-
nite externalism is. The answer to that question would fully indicate the
sense in which I view Kant as a precursor for paraphysics; this point
should become clearer as I proceed.) Though Kant will attempt to “re-
define” this externalism by appealing to practical rationality, the limita-
tions of the re-definition (i.e. making definite once again) are already
abundantly clear in the Second and Third Critiques. As far as Förster’s
specific interpretation of the transition from the First to the Second
Critique goes, I think it matters less than Förster thinks whether we speak
of a “circularity” in the treatment of morality in the First Critique or sim-

ply of a “layering” of the Second Critique onto the First. Both roads arrive
at much the same place, and there are advantages associated with both
ways of looking at things. In the Third Critique, the treatment of teleo-
logical judgment serves as a “supplement” to the First Critique, and also
to the suite of all three Critiques, internalizing the way in which the Third
Critique stands to the First within the Third Critique itself (i.e. First is to
Third as Third minus teleological judgment is to the critique of teleologi-
cal judgment). Then the “Doctrine of Teleological Judgment” itself mer-
its the status of appendix to the Third Critique: in principle the layers of
layering are indefinite. Finally, there is the “gap” which the Opus Postumum
must close, perhaps the supreme instance of relayering in the Kantian
system, which refigures the way in which the Third Critique was itself
previously figured as a “transition” closing a “gap” in the system. There is
no reason to suspect that the layering ends here: a thorough respect for
the place of the indefinite requires us to recognize philosophy as an
unending task.11
It will seem quizzical to maintain that a philosophy which drives
toward a transcendental doctrine of ideas and a doctrine of egological
self-posit(ion)ing leads to a radical form of externalism, but such is what
I claim, insisting always that this is an externalism which recognizes the
radically indefinite nature of the external. There are strong similarities
here between Kant and Husserl, who in this regard is Kant’s direct succes-
sor. Husserl’s externalism will, however, go beyond the empirical to the
domain of the formal ontological.
At the beginning of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method, in the
first chapter, on the Discipline of Pure Reason, Kant considers the two-
fold use of reason in mathematics and philosophy. In each case, reason is
capable of generating synthetic a priori truths. In the former case, the
manner in which this is accomplished is already announced as early as the
Transcendental Aesthetic: our cognitive faculty constructs concepts by
appeal to intuition. Such a constructive capacity is not available in phi-
losophy, however, and the manner in which we are able to arrive at syn-
thetic a priori truths in this domain has generally garnered much less
attention, though the tools for doing so are available in the First Critique,
and I have begun to discuss them above. It is in the Discipline of Pure
22 O. B. Bassler
Reason that Kant gives us perhaps his most overt characterization of how
this is to be accomplished. “All our cognition still refers ultimately to pos-
sible intuitions; for through these alone is an object given.” Kant then
divides a priori concepts into those which contain a pure intuition within
themselves, such as, for example, the concepts of space and time, and
those concepts which contain “nothing but the synthesis of possible intu-
itions that are not given a priori” (Kant 1996, 674). In this latter case we
cannot judge through the concept intuitively, by way of construction in
intuition, but only discursively. This discursive judgment is indetermi-
nate because it does not appeal to intuition and so cannot make determi-
nate reference to an object – which object, as Kant insisted above, can
only be given in possible intuition. As such, the judgment involved must
remain regulative rather than constitutive: we are not judging directly of
an object, but only regarding the concepts which have possible applica-
tion to the domain of experience. (Kant’s focus here is on this domain
and its regulation; only later will we be concerned with practical
judgments.)
The “synthesis of possible intuitions that are not given a priori” refers
to the synthetic unity of apperception, which is the root of egological
self-positioning in the First Critique. This synthesis of intuitions may
itself refer either to a priori (pure) or a posteriori (empirical) intuition in
the construction of concepts, or, as here, merely to the possibility of intu-
ition. This latter reference, too, could be broken down into the reference
of the synthesis to the possibility of pure intuition, or merely to the pos-
sibility of intuition as such. The former Kant calls figurative synthesis
(synthesis speciosa) and the latter, which concerns us here, intellectual syn-
thesis (synthesis intellectualis). (It is at just this point that my reading
begins to depart from those of Longuenesse and Förster.) Intellectual
synthesis acknowledges ultimate recourse to intuition, but brackets all
appeal to intuition beyond the recognition of this ultimate fact. This is
the manner of philosophical a priori truth. It is this factual appeal to
(possible) intuition that makes intellectual synthesis ampliative; since it is
a priori, this regulation is synthetic a priori.
There are a number of powerful philosophical illusions here that
must be dispelled. For example, doesn’t Kant say that the transcenden-
tal schematism involves a figurative synthesis? And wasn’t it just this
synthesis which needed to be “supplied” to complete (i.e. “re-layer”) the

transcendental deductions of the pure forms of space and time in the
Transcendental Aesthetic?
In fact, it is simply a matter (though no simple matter!) of keeping
track of levels. When I perform a figurative synthesis, and so use the
imaginative faculty in order to “apply understanding to intuition,” I am
in fact making appeal to (pure) intuition. But when I describe the figura-
tive synthesis, I am not performing a figurative synthesis at all, but rather
dealing discursively with concepts: concepts such as “imagination,”
“intuition,” “understanding,” etc. To the extent that in such philosophi-
cal work I am not merely analyzing concepts, but rather making amplia-
tive, i.e. synthetic, judgments, I do so discursively in considering the
synthetic unity of apperception with respect to the field of possible expe-
rience as such.
It is with this in mind that I would suggest a change in the tone of
Longuenesse’s “revisionist” reading of the Transcendental Aesthetic. To be
sure, in the presentation of the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant has not
yet invoked the work involved in figurative synthesis, and as such he is as
yet strictly in no position to talk about space and time as (pure, formal)
intuitions but only as forms of intuition. Ultimately, we must provide a
transcendental justification, hence deduction, for the concepts of space
and time, and in doing so we want to be able to recognize not just their
functional capacity – as formal conditions of intuition – but also their
“objectual” capacity – as themselves (pure, formal) intuitions. It is this
second “layer” that is supplied at B160–161 (Kant 1996, 198), in the
Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding. This
is in fact precisely the appropriate place for this addition because at this
point we treat space and time not as pure forms of intuition but as pure
concepts of understanding. As such, they require a synthetic unity just as
the (other) categories do.
To suggest that there is any further sense in which a “revision” of the
treatment in the Transcendental Aesthetic is required is tantamount to
the charge of a vicious circularity in the Kantian enterprise. We have seen
one potential example of such a circularity above in the case of practical
rationality, and I will remain agnostic whether there is such a vicious
circularity at the earlier point in the enterprise of the First Critique under
24 O. B. Bassler
consideration here (as I will remain agnostic here about just what
Longuenesse is claiming, since the evaluation of her important interpre-
tation is, however, secondary for my particular enterprise). My point is
only that there is one regard in which Kant is in a position to deal with
charges of potential circularity, which is in terms of the strategy I have
outlined. Ultimately, the point will have to be pressed in the context of
the doctrine of self-positioning in the Opus Postumum.
What we see in the passage from the Discipline of Pure Reason is a
sense in which important issues involved in the doctrine of self-
positioning, here described in terms of the egological power of synthesis,
are already at work in the First Critique. The span from the one to the
other is not as great as Förster would imply. The other suggestive vista
which consideration of this passage has already begun to open is a possi-
bly very productive comparison and contrast with Husserl’s transcenden-
tal phenomenology, and at the end of this section, I will make some
preparation for considering this more fully later on.
Before turning to that, however, there is still a bit of work to be done,
perhaps best opened by the question: if there is a “relayering” of the
Transcendental Aesthetic, then what does the purported work of the
Transcendental Aesthetic itself accomplish? To be in the best position to
answer this question, it will help to look back to Kant’s presentation of
his conception of his “Copernican” enterprise in the B Preface.
It has sometimes been charged against Kant, among others, by Bertrand
Russell (Meillassoux 2008, 112–128), that so far from initiating a
Copernican revolution in philosophy, Kant in fact “re-Ptolomaizes” the
philosophical project by turning away from the external world to a con-
fabulation of the subject-centered conditions of experience “within.” On
this reading, Kant returns to the subject-centered perspective which
fueled Ptolemaic astronomy’s saving of the appearances.
Though I was myself once sympathetic to this criticism – which is to
say that I was perplexed by the claims Kant made for his philosophical
venture – I have now come to feel that although this point is not entirely
without merit, the challenge it seeks to pose for Kant’s philosophy is a
shallow one (Blumenberg 1987, 611–2). That Kant did not think of his
revolution in anything like these terms is made abundantly, but also iron-
ically, clear by a passage from the Transcendental Doctrine of Method in
which Kant discusses “The Impossibility of a Skeptical Satisfaction of

Pure Reason as Disunified With Itself.” Here Kant asks to conceive of the
distinction between dogmatic and critical rationality on analogy with the
difference between one who conceives of the earth as a plate (Teller)
“according to its sensible semblance” versus someone who knows that the
earth is spherical (compare Pierobon 1990, 61ff.). From the former per-
spective “I cognize the limits of what is in each case my actual geography,
but I do not cognize the bounds of all possible geography,” whereas from
the latter orientation “I can also from a small part of it – e.g., the magni-
tude of a degree – cognize determinately and according to a priori prin-
ciples the diameter, and through it the complete boundary of the earth,
i.e. its surface area” (Kant 1996, 702). The irony of this passage is that it
motivates the Copernican revolution inherent in Kant’s critical reorienta-
tion by appealing to an analogy which is itself pre-Copernican. Two
points are worth stressing. First, though in one regard the change in ori-
entation revolutionizes our knowledge, there is an equally important
sense in which it simply extends it, as the ‘also’ from the second part of the
quotation makes clear. Second, what is at issue in the reorientation is the
possibility of drawing global knowledge (the complete boundary of the
earth) from local information (the magnitude of a degree), which is
impossible from the former vantage. It is this aspect of the analogy which
makes it particularly illuminating with respect to the stated goal of Kant’s
critical project: to draw the boundaries of knowledge in order to make
room for faith. If there is any guiding key for understanding the con-
struction of Kant’s enterprise (Kant 1996, 31), this is it.
With this passage from the Doctrine of Method in hand, let us return
to the famous discussion of the Copernican revolution in Kant’s B
Preface. Here I want in particular to tease out the strands of Kant’s
description of the revolution in terms of the methodological distinction
he makes between analytic and synthetic modes of proceeding. As a dis-
tinction of method, the roots of the analytic/synthetic pair lie in the
mathematical tradition, and although the distinction goes back to the
roots of classical Greek mathematics, it was still in use in Kant’s time in
ways of which he would have been abundantly aware. There is a second-
ary context for the distinction in chemistry, which Kant mentions in a
footnote to the B Preface to which I will return. At the same time that we
26 O. B. Bassler
must keep them straight, it will also be important to pay attention to the
way in which the methodological distinction bears on the cognitive dis-
tinction between analytic and synthetic truths.
What is the fact which we must recognize which will “launch” us from
the dogmatic to the critical perspective, the fact which parallels the rec-
ognition of the spherical nature of the earth in Kant’s analogy? To answer
this question, we may begin with another: what is it that requires us to
extend our knowledge, i.e. what is it that we are missing globally from a
non-critical cognitive orientation? It is precisely the incapacity to
acknowledge the existence of synthetic a priori truth, in which Kant finds
the otherwise so noble Hume at fault:
David Hume at least came closer to this problem than any other philoso-
pher. Yet he did not think of it nearly determinately enough and in its
universality, but merely remained with the synthetic proposition about the
connection of an effect with its causes (principium causalitatis). He believed
he had discovered that such a proposition is quite impossible a priori. Thus,
according to his conclusions, everything that we call metaphysics would
amount to no more than the delusion of a supposed rational insight into
what in fact is merely borrowed from experience and has, through habit,
acquired a seeming necessity. This assertion, which destroys all philosophy,
would never have entered Hume’s mind if he had envisaged our problem in
its universality. For he would then have seen that by his argument there
could be no pure mathematics either, since it certainly does contain syn-
thetic a priori propositions; and from such an assertion his good sense
would surely have saved him. (Kant 1996, 60)
David Hume is a hyper-intelligent flat-earther, who sees that the “locals”

typically make claims they cannot justify, and so becomes a skeptic.
Kant’s solution is to universalize the dilemma, and out of the recognition
of its extent to diagnose what is required for its resolution: nothing less
than a revolution.
Much comes clear, or at least clearer, if we recognize Kant’s strategy of
beginning with a universalization of Hume’s problem. There is an entire
set of problems which Hume identifies, and their common feature is that
they point to a special kind of knowledge, what Kant will come to call
synthetic a priori knowledge. If we follow the narrative thread of the
B Preface carefully, we see that Kant’s strategy is one of using our recogni-
tion of this synthetic a priori knowledge as a motivation for an even fur-
ther extension of it: the goal, indeed, will be to acquire such synthetic a
priori knowledge in the domain of philosophy itself. Kant’s goal is neither
to provide a metaphysical defense of mathematical knowledge, nor of cau-
sality: this is precisely what Hume sees to be impossible, according to
Kant. But a rejection of this knowledge is equally incoherent, and Kant
doesn’t think even Hume would have maintained his skeptical position if
he had recognized the extent of the problem. The goal, then, which Kant
proposes is to find a universalizing extension of the problem which
becomes its own philosophical resolution. To pursue the analogy with the
spherical earth: once we recognize local curvature, we have to extend this
curvature all the way to its global consequences. This forces a revolution
in orientation, from which vantage the local quandary is resolved.12
With this strategy in mind, we are now in a position to address some
otherwise intransigent remarks Kant makes, which I will attempt to elu-
cidate in terms of the methodological analytic/synthetic distinction.
Famously, Kant proposes that we resolve “Hume’s dilemma” by way of an
“experiment”: we “assume that objects conform to our cognition” rather
than the other way around (Kant 1996, 21). Kant has already motivated
this “reversal” by finding it at work in the case of the “origin of geometry”
(“He may have been called Thales, or by some other name”) and the ori-
gin of natural science (Galileo, Torricelli), and so his proposal is along the
lines of his “universalization” strategy. But then, by Kant’s own descrip-
tion, the strategy seems to be hypothetical in nature: if we assume that
objects conform to our cognition, then we (hope to) see that a coherent
account of a priori knowledge is possible.
In one regard, there is some cause for concern, but in another I think
this attitude of concern – invited by the rhetoric of Kant’s own presenta-
tion – is seriously misdirected. The regard in which there is cause for
concern has to do with the fact that the proposal of this experiment is
made only from a methodologically analytic perspective, and it requires a
synthetic completion, which will ultimately prove even (much) more
philosophically controversial – more on this below. The regard in which
the attitude which this objection expresses is seriously misdirected has to
do with an expectation that Kant should provide something which his
28 O. B. Bassler
enterprise indeed expressly rules out. There is no sense, I believe, in which

Kant either intends, (or given his philosophical commitments could pos-
sibly be in a position to intend), to provide a legitimation of our a priori
knowledge from some sort of external vantage, and it is precisely this
which the (spirit of ) the objection requires. To do so would indeed
amount to just the sort of metaphysical defense of a priori knowledge
which Kant acknowledges Hume has ruled out. The goal is not to con-
vince the hardened skeptic of the legitimacy of a priori knowledge (and
we should bear in mind the analogy with medieval disputes about the
status of the hardened atheist). Rather the goal is to find an internally
coherent account of our knowledge which includes a priori knowledge. A
particularly bracing example, illustrating just how bold (and potentially
foreign) Kant’s way of proceeding is, is supplied by Kant’s claim that we
know a priori that space has three dimensions (Kant 1996, 78 and 80).
(An anticipating proof can be found in Leibniz’s Theodicy. At least Kant
is in good company.)
That being said, it is still not clear what would count as achieving this
goal, and there is cause for complaint that the experiment Kant proposes
is not sufficient: not because it “assumes” that objects conform to our
knowledge, but because it has not yet shown us that this orientation is
ultimately philosophically acceptable. Even assuming that we show its
consistency, i.e. that it does not give rise to the incoherence to which the
opposite assumption leads, we would still need to show its adequacy. The
problem with the “experiment” Kant proposes is simply that on the basis
of the description Kant gives it is not (yet) clear how we would even go
about assessing this adequacy – beyond, that is, carrying it along like a
scientific hypothesis and seeing how much we can explain with it. And
that is clearly insufficient for the claims Kant makes, for it is a purely
pragmatic criterion.
It is here that the methodological analytic/synthetic distinction helps
out. If the above-described experiment is the analytic requirement – the
need to find an orientation which is itself a requisite for the solution of
the problem concerning a priori knowledge – then the synthetic require-
ment is stated in the footnote at Bxviii:
This method, then, which imitates that of the investigator of nature, consists
in searching for the elements of pure reason in what can be confirmed or
refuted by an experiment. Now the propositions of pure reason, especially if
they venture beyond all bounds of possible experience, cannot be tested by
doing (as we do in natural science) an experiment with their objects. Hence
testing such propositions will be feasible only by doing an experiment with
concepts and principles that we assume a priori In that experiment we must
arrange [to use] these concepts and principles in such a way that the same
objects can be contemplated from two different standpoints: on the one hand,
for the sake of experience, as objects of the senses and of the understanding;
yet on the other hand, for the sake of isolated reason that strives to transcend
all bounds of experience, as objects that we merely think. Now if it turns out
that contemplating things from that twofold point of view results in har-
mony with the principle of reason, but that doing so from one and the same
point of view puts reason into an unavoidable conflict with itself, then the
experiment decides in favor of the correctness of distinguishing the two
points of view. (Kant 1996, 23)
It would be easy enough to see the sense of “experiment” here as coincid-

ing with the “experiment” described above, but in fact what it proposes
extends the earlier distinction, complementing the analytic requirement
with what I identify as the synthetic: the conformity now of the principle
of reason with the twofold contemplation of things according to sense/
understanding on the one hand and reason on the other which the assump-
tion that objects conform to our cognition makes possible.
We may see what this second, synthetic requirement involves by com-
paring this passage with Kant’s next two footnotes. Passing over for now
Kant’s references to chemistry, we move directly to his assertion that
The analysis of the metaphysician has divided pure a priori cognition into
two very heterogeneous elements, viz., such cognition of things as appear-
ances, and of things in themselves. The dialectic combines the two so as to
yield agreement with reason’s necessary idea of the unconditioned, and finds
that this agreement can never be obtained except through that distinction,
which is therefore [a] true one. (Kant 1996, 25)
I have emended Pluhar’s translation by removing an interpolation: he

takes the dialectic referred to here as the dialectic of the metaphysician.
30 O. B. Bassler
This is either wrong or seriously misleading on two separate counts. First,

we should note that the distinction Kant draws between things as appear-
ances and things in themselves had already been drawn by “the metaphy-
sicians,” in particular Leibniz. But there was no sense in which Leibniz’s,
or any other metaphysician’s, manipulation of the distinction, could be
taken to satisfy the conditions of the second phrase: this, indeed, is pre-
cisely Kant’s point. We might say that Kant follows the metaphysicians in
adopting the distinction, and so it is in some sense only in Kant’s Dialectic
that we see the depth of the abyss which separates the critical philosopher
from the metaphysician. But this leads to my second point: there is a
sense in which the Dialectic completes the experiment (in the sense in
which I have been speaking of “layering” above) and so it is only when
this final task of the critical argument has been discharged that the tran-
scendental “deductions” of the Analytic assume their full force. Indeed,
once one becomes used to looking at Kant’s project this way, I find it hard
to imagine that anyone could have ever seen it any differently. The differ-
ence between the two parts of the process is nicely brought out in terms
of a passage at Bxx (with my interpolations):
Suppose, now, we find that the unconditional cannot be thought at all with-
out contradiction if we assume that our experiential cognition conforms to
objects as things in themselves, yet that the contradiction vanishes if we
assume that our presentation of things as these are given to us, does not
conform to them as things in themselves [analytic], but that these objects
are, rather, appearances that conform to our way of presenting [synthetic].
(Kant 1996, 24)
In the next footnote, Kant helps us along with this analytic/synthetic

distinction in terms of an analogy from natural science, which at once
concretizes the two sides of the “experiment” and also points ahead to
future problems Kant would need to address in the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science and the Opus Postumum:
In the same way, the central laws governing the motions of the celestial
bodies provided with established certainty what Copernicus had initially
assumed only as a hypothesis, and at the same time provided proof of the
invisible force (Newtonian attraction) that links together the world edifice.
(Kant 1996, 25)
Copernicus made a hypothesis which allowed him (in principle, if not

historical fact) to save the phenomena better than the Ptolemaics, but it
was only with Kepler, Galileo and Newton that this hypothesis was shown
to be in conformity with the universal law of gravitational attraction. It is
on analogy with this conformity that the agreement with the principle of
reason in the Critique should be understood. Just as Newton derives the
laws of motion of celestial bodies as the supreme exemplification of uni-
versal attraction, Kant will (claim to) derive the categories of the under-
standing as the exemplification of the principle of reason.
This points to the necessity, in particular, of the transcendental
deduction for the synthetic completion of Kant’s experiment, and on
my reading this completion is not “completely complete” until the end
of the dialectic, where we see the full conformity of these categories
with the principle of reason. But we still, it may be objected, have very
little sense of what this synthetic supplement actually involves. Barring
a full interpretation of the Critique (and ultimately, in addition, the rest
of the critical project), I don’t think a full answer to this question can be
given – the Critique, we might say, just is an answer to this question.
But that should not deter us from attempting to gain all the preliminary
intuition (in the heuristic sense) for this enterprise we can, and specifi-
cally for its synthetic nature. It is here that we may begin to turn to the
Transcendental Aesthetic for a first stage of exemplification.
In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant tells us that a transcendental
exposition is “the explication of a concept as a principle that permits
insight into the possibility of other synthetic a priori cognitions.” It
requires
(1) that cognitions of that sort do actually flow from the given concept,
and (2) that these cognitions are possible only on the presupposition of a
given way of explicating that concept. (Kant 1996, 80)
Yet in both the transcendental exposition of space (“our explication of the

concept of space is, therefore, the only one that makes comprehensible the
possibility of geometry as a [kind of ] synthetic a priori cognition” (Kant 1996,
80)) and that of time (“these principles hold as rules under which alone
experiences are possible at all; and they instruct us prior to experience, not
32 O. B. Bassler
through it” (Kant 1996, 86)) we are only given accounts which accomplish
(2), not (1). It is for this reason, I believe, that Longuenesse and other com-
mentators have correctly discerned that the transcendental “deductions”
provided in the Transcendental Aesthetic are lacking.
What is appended in the B edition to the end of §8, “General
Comments on Transcendental Aesthetic,” is more discerning. Here Kant
discusses the status of the form of intuition in terms of self-affection in
ways that anticipate the later, more general description of self-positioning.
In these terms Kant is able to trace back the possibility of cognition in
space and time to that synthetic activity of the ego (or in Kantian terms
apperception) from which these cognitions “do actually flow.” Thus in
the discussion of “presentation that can precede all acts of thinking,” i.e.
intuition, Kant begins with the remark that the form of intuition “does
not present anything except insofar as something is being placed within
the mind. Therefore this form can be nothing but the way in which the
mind is affected by its own activity” (Kant 1996, 100). This establishes
the form of intuition as the condition for the possibility of our knowl-
edge of objects. Only after this characterization of the form of intuition
as the locus for the placement of any possible object in terms of the mind’s
own activity of self-affection is Kant in a position to characterize the plac-
ing of the manifold, or what we might call the “self-locating of mind” in
terms of the power of consciousness itself:
If the power to become conscious of oneself is to locate (apprehend) what

lies in the mind, then it must affect the mind; and only in that way can it
produce an intuition of itself. But the form of this intuition lies at the basis
beforehand in the mind; and this form determines, in the presentation of
time, the way in which the manifold is [placed] together in the mind.
(Kant 1996, 100–1)
It is in this latter activity of “collocating in mind” that we find the flowing

of cognitions from the given concept of a “form of intuition,” and we
should view Kant’s characterization of the power of consciousness here as
the “motor” in his philosophy running parallel to Husserl’s appeal to
intentionality. Both are philosophical accounts which proceed in terms of
egological self-activity.
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I'm sure you don't. That isn't all. There are dictionaries and lexicons,
not only German, English, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish, but
also Hebrew, Persian, Magyar, Chinese, Zend, Sanscrit, Hindustani,
Negro dialects, French argot, Portuguese, American slang, and
Pennsylvania Dutch.
And what are those curious pamphlets?
He lifted a few and read off the titles:
A study of the brain of the late Major J.W. Powell.
A study of the anatomic relations of the optic nerve to the accessory
cavities of the nose.
On regeneration in the pigmented skin of the frog and on the
character of the chromatophores.
The chondrocranium of an embryo pig.
Morphology of the parthogenetic development of amphitrite.
Note on the influence of castration on the weight of the brain and
spinal cord in the albino rat.
There are, he added solemnly, many strange words in these
pamphlets, not readily to be found elsewhere.
Now Peter pointed to the pile of note-books on the table.
These are my note-books. I have ranged Paris for my material. For
days I have walked in the Passage des Panoramas and the Rue St.
Honoré, making lists of every object in the windows. In the case of
books I have described the bindings. I have stopped before the
shops of fruit vendors, antique dealers, undertakers, jewellers, and
fashioners of artificial flowers. I have spent so much time in the
Galeries Lafayette and the Bon Marché that I have probably been
mistaken for a shoplifter. These books are full of results. What do
you think of it?
But what is all this for?
For my work, of course. For my work.
I can't imagine, I began almost in a whisper, I was so astonished,
what you do, what you are going to do. Are you writing an
encyclopedia?
No, my intention is not to define or describe, but to enumerate. Life is
made up of a collection of objects, and the mere citation of them is
sufficient to give the reader a sense of form and colour, atmosphere
and style. And form, style, manner in literature are everything;
subject is nothing. Nothing whatever, he added impressively, after a
pause. Do you know what Buffon wrote: Style is the only passport to
posterity. It is not range of information, nor mastery of some little
known branch of science, nor yet novelty of matter, that will insure
immortality. Recall the great writers, Théophile Gautier, Jules Barbey
d'Aurevilly, Joris Huysmans, Oscar Wilde: they all used this method,
catalogues, catalogues, catalogues! All great art is a matter of
cataloguing life, summing it up in a list of objects. This is so true that
the commercial catalogues themselves are almost works of art. Their
only flaw is that they pause to describe. If it only listed objects,
without defining them, a dealer's catalogue would be as precious as
a book by Gautier.
During this discourse, George Moore, the orange cat, had been
wandering around, rather restlessly, occasionally gazing at Peter
with a semi-quizzical expression and an absurd cock of the ears. At
some point or other, however, he had evidently arrived at the
conclusion that this extra display of emotion on the part of his human
companion boded him no evil and, having satisfied himself in this
regard, he leaped lightly to the mantelshelf, circled his enormous
bulk miraculously around three or four times on the limited space at
his disposal, and sank into a profound slumber when, probably, with
dreams of garrets full of lazy mice, his ears and his tail, which
depended a foot below the shelf, began to twitch.
Peter continued to talk: d'Aurevilly wrote his books in different
coloured inks. It was a wonderful idea. Black ink would never do to
describe certain scenes, certain objects. I can imagine an entire
book written in purple, or green, or blood-red, but the best book
would be written in many colours. Consider, for a moment, the
distinction between purple and violet, shades which are cousins: the
one suggests the most violent passions or something royal or papal,
the other a nunnery or a widow, or a being bereft of any capacity for
passion.
Henry James should write his books in white ink on white paper and,
by a system of analogy, you can very well see that Rider Haggard
should write his books in white ink on black paper. Pale ideas,
obviously expressed. Gold! Think what you could do with gold! If
silence is golden, surely the periods, the commas, the semicolons,
and dashes should be of gold. But not only the stops could gleam
and shine; whole silent pages might glitter. And blue, bright blue;
what more suggestive colour for the writer than bright blue?
Not only should manuscripts be written in multi-coloured inks, but
they should be written on multi-coloured papers, and then they
should be printed in multi-coloured inks on multi-coloured papers.
The art of book-making, in the sense that the making of a book is
part of its authorship, part of its creation, is not even begun.
The sculptor is not satisfied with moulding his idea in clay; he gives it
final form in marble or malachite or jade or bronze. Many an author,
however, having completed work on his manuscript, is content to
allow his publisher to choose the paper, the ink, the binding, the
typography: all, obviously, part of the author's task. It is the
publisher's wish, no doubt, to issue the book as cheaply as possible,
and to this end he will make as many books after the same model as
he practicably can. But every book should have a different
appearance from every other book. Every book should have the
aspect to which its ideas give birth. The form of the material should
dictate the form of the binding. Who but a fool, for example, would
print and bind Lavengro and Roderick Hudson in a similar manner?
And yet that is just what publishers will do if they are let alone.
Peter had become so excited that he had awakened George Moore,
who now descended from the mantelpiece and sought the seclusion
of a couch in the corner where, after a few abortive licks at his left
hind-leg, and a pretence of scrubbing his ears, he again settled into
sleep. As for me, I listened, entranced, and as the night before I had
discovered Paris, it seemed to me now that I was discovering the
secrets of the writer's craft and I determined to go forth in the
morning with a note-book, jotting down the names of every object I
encountered.
I must have been somewhat bewildered for I repeated a question I
had asked before:
Have you written anything yet?
Not yet.... I am collecting my materials. It may take me considerably
longer to collect what I shall require for a very short book.
What is the book to be about?
Van Vechten, Van Vechten, you are not following me! he cried, and
he again began to walk up and down the little room. What is the
book to be about? Why, it is to be about the names of the things I
have collected. It is to be about three hundred pages, he added
triumphantly. That is what it is to be about, about three hundred
pages, three hundred pages of colour and style and lists, lists of
objects, all jumbled artfully. There isn't a moral, or an idea, or a plot,
or even a character. There's to be no propaganda or preaching, or
violence, or emotion, or even humour. I am not trying to imitate
Dickens or Dostoevsky. They did not write books; they wrote
newspapers. Art eliminates all such rubbish. Art has nothing to do
with ideas. Art is abstract. When art becomes concrete it is no longer
art. Thank God, I know what I want to do! Thank God, I haven't
wasted my time admiring hack work! Thank God, I can start in at
once constructing a masterpiece! Why a list of passengers sailing on
the Kronprinz Wilhelm is more nearly a work of art than a novel by
Thomas Hardy! What is there in that? Anybody can do it. Where is
the arrangement, the colour, the form? Hardy merely photographs
life!
But aren't you trying to photograph still life?
Peter's face was almost purple; I thought he would burst a blood-
vessel.
Don't you understand that perfumes and reaping-machines are
never to be found together in real life? That is art, making a pattern,
dragging unfamiliar words and colours and sounds together until
they form a pattern, a beautiful pattern. An Aubusson carpet is art,
and it is assuredly not a photograph of still life.... Art....
I don't know how much more of this there was but, when Peter finally
stopped talking, the sunlight was streaming in through the window.
Chapter IV
It was many days before I saw Peter again. I met other men and
women. I visited the Louvre and at first stood humbly in the Salon
Carré before the Monna Lisa and in the long corridor of the Venus de
Milo; a little later, I became thuriferous before Sandro Botticelli's
frescoes from the Villa Lemmi and Watteau's Pierrot. I made a
pilgrimage to the Luxembourg Gallery and read Huysmans's
evocation of the picture before Moreau's Salome. I sat in the tiny old
Roman arena, Lutetia's amphitheatre, constructed in the second or
third century, and conjured up visions of lions and Christian virgins. I
drank tea at the Pavilion d'Armenonville in the Bois and I bought silk
handkerchiefs of many colours at the Galeries Lafayette. I began to
carry my small change in a pig-skin purse and I learned to look out
for bad money. Every morning I called for mail at the American
Express Company in the Rue Scribe. I ate little wild strawberries with
Crème d'Isigny. I bought old copies of l'Assiette au Beurre on the
quais and new copies of Le Sourire at kiosques. I heard Werther at
the Opéra-Comique and I saw Lina Cavalieri in Thaïs at the Opéra. I
made journeys to Versailles, Saint Cloud, and Fontainebleau. I
inspected the little hotel in the Rue des Beaux-Arts where Oscar
Wilde died and I paid my respects to his tomb in Père-Lachaise. The
fig-leaf was missing from the heroic figure on the monument. It had
been stolen, the cemetery-guard informed me, par une jeune miss
anglaise, who desired a souvenir. I drank champagne cocktails,
sitting on a stool, at the American bar in the Grand Hotel. I drank
whisky and soda, ate salted nuts, and talked with English racing men
at Henry's bar, under the delightful brown and yellow mural
decorations, exploiting ladies of the 1880 period with bangs, and
dresses with bustles, and over-drapings, and buttons down the front.
I enjoyed long bus rides and I purchased plays in the arcades of the
Odéon. I went to the races at Chantilly. I drank cocktails at Louis's
bar in the Rue Racine. Louis Doerr, the patron, had worked as a bar-
man in Chicago and understood the secrets of American mixed
drinks. Doubtless, he could have made a Fireman's Shirt. He divided
his time between his little bar and his atelier, where he gave boxing
lessons to the students of the quarter. When he was teaching the
manly art, Madame Doerr manipulated the shaker. I attended
services at Les Hannetons and Maurice's Bar and I strolled through
the Musée de Cluny, where I bought postcards of chastity belts and
instruments of torture. I read Maupassant in the Parc Monceau. I
took in the naughty revues at Parisiana, the Ba-ta-clan, and the
Folies-Bergère. I purchased many English and American novels in
the Tauchnitz edition and I discovered a miniature shop in the Rue
de Furstenberg, where elegant reprints of bawdy eighteenth century
French romances might be procured. I climbed to the top of the
towers of Notre-Dame, particularly to observe a chimère which was
said to resemble me, and I ascended the Tour Eiffel in an elevator. I
consumed hors d'œuvres at the Brasserie Universelle. I attended a
band concert in the Tuileries Gardens. I dined with Olive Fremstad at
the Mercedes and Olive Fremstad dined with me at the Café
d'Harcourt. I heard Salome at the Châtelet, Richard Strauss
conducting, with Emmy Destinn as the protagonist in a modest
costume, trimmed with fur, which had been designed, it was
announced, by the Emperor of Germany. I discovered the
Restaurant Cou-Cou, which I have described in The Merry-Go-
Round, and I made pilgrimages to the Rat Mort, the Nouvelle
Athènes, and the Elysée Montmartre, sacred to the memory of
George Moore. They appeared to have altered since he confessed
as a young man. I stood on a table at the Bal Tabarin and watched
the quadrille, the pas de quatre, concluding with the grand écart,
which was once sinister and wicked but which has come, through the
portentous solemnity with which tradition has invested it, to have
almost a religious significance. I learned to drink Amer Picon,
grenadine, and white absinthe. I waited three hours in the street
before Liane de Pougy's hotel in the Rue de la Néva to see that
famous beauty emerge to take her drive, and I waited nearly as long
at the stage-door of the Opéra-Comique for a glimpse of the
exquisite Regina Badet. I embarked on one of the joyous little Seine
boats and I went slumming in the Place d'Italie, La Villette, a suburb
associated in the memory with the name of Yvette Guilbert, and
Belleville. I saw that very funny farce, Vous n'avez rien à declarer at
the Nouveautés. In the Place des Vosges, I admired the old brick
houses, among the few that Napoleon and the Baron Haussmann
spared in their deracination of Paris. On days when I felt poor, I
dined with the cochers at some marchand de vins. On days when I
felt rich, I dined with the cocottes at the Café de Paris. I examined
the collection of impressionist paintings at the house of Monsieur
Durand-Ruel, No. 37, Rue de Rome, and the vast accumulation of
unfinished sketches for a museum of teratology at the house of
Gustave Moreau, No. 14, Rue de La Rochefoucauld, room after
room of unicorns, Messalinas, muses, magi, Salomes, sphinxes,
argonauts, centaurs, mystic flowers, chimerae, Semeles, hydras,
Magdalens, griffins, Circes, ticpolongas, and crusaders. I drank tea
in the Ceylonese tea-room in the Rue Caumartin, where coffee-hued
Orientals with combs in their hair waited on the tables. I gazed
longingly into the show-windows of the shops where Toledo
cigarette-cases, Bohemian garnets, and Venetian glass goblets were
offered for sale. I bought a pair of blue velvet workman's trousers, a
béret, and a pair of canvas shoes at Au Pays, 162 Faubourg St.
Martin. I often enjoyed my chocolate and omelet at the Café de la
Régence, where everybody plays chess or checkers and has played
chess or checkers for a century or two, and where the actors of the
Comédie Française, which is just across the Place, frequently, during
a rehearsal, come in their make-up for lunch. I learned the meaning
of flic, gigolette, maquereau, tapette, and rigolo. I purchased a dirty
silk scarf and a pair of Louis XV brass candlesticks, which I still
possess, in the Marché du Temple. I tasted babas au rhum,
napoléons, and palmiers. I ordered a suit, which I never wore, from a
French tailor for 150 francs. I bought some Brittany ware in an old
shop back of Notre-Dame. I admired the fifteenth century apocalyptic
glass in the Sainte-Chapelle and the thirteenth century glass in the
Cathedral at Chartres. I learned that demi-tasse is an American
word, that Sparkling Burgundy is an American drink, and that I did
not like French beer. I stayed away from the receptions at the
American embassy. I was devout in Saint Sulpice, the Russian
Church in the Rue Daru, Saint Germain-des-Prés, Saint Eustache,
Sacré-Cœur, and Saint Jacques, and I attended a wedding at the
Madeleine, which reminded me that Bel Ami had been married there.
I passed pleasant evenings at the Boîte à Fursy, on the Rue Pigalle,
and Les Noctambules, on the Rue Champollion. I learned to speak
easily of Mayol, Eve Lavallière, Dranem, Ernest la Jeunesse, Colette
Willy, Max Dearly, Charles-Henry Hirsch, Lantelme, André Gide, and
Jeanne Bloch. I saw Clemenceau, Edward VII, and the King of
Greece. I nibbled toasted scones at a tea-shop on the Rue de Rivoli.
I met the Steins. In short, you will observe that I did everything that
young Americans do when they go to Paris.
On a certain afternoon, early in June, I found myself sitting at a table
in the Café de la Paix with Englewood Jennings and Frederic
Richards, two of my new friends. Richards is a famous person today
and even then he was somebody. He had a habit of sketching,
wherever he might be, on a sheet of paper at a desk at the Hotel
Continental or on a program at the theatre. He drew quick and telling
likenesses in a few lines of figures or objects that pleased him,
absent-mindedly signed them, and then tossed them aside. This
habit of his was so well-known that he was almost invariably followed
by admirers of his work, who snapped up his sketches as soon as he
had disappeared. I saw a good collection of them, drawn on the
stationery of hotels from Hamburg to Taormina, and even on meat
paper, go at auction in London a year or so ago for £1,000. When I
knew him, Richards was a blond giant, careless of everything except
his appearance. Jennings was an American socialist from Harvard
who was ranging Europe to interview Jean Jaurès, Giovanni Papini,
and Karl Liebknecht. He was exceedingly eccentric in his dress, had
steel-grey eyes, the longest, sharpest nose I have ever seen, and
wore glasses framed in tortoise-shell.
It had become my custom to pass two hours of every afternoon on
this busy corner, first ordering tea with two brioches, and later a
succession of absinthes, which I drank with sugar and water. In time
I learned to do without the sugar, just as eventually I might have
learned, in all probability, to do without the water, had I not been
compelled to do without the absinthe[1]. I was enjoying my third
pernod while my companions were dallying with whisky and soda.
We were gossiping, and where in the world can one gossip to better
advantage than on this busy corner, where every passerby offers a
new opportunity? But, occasionally, the conversation slipped into
alien channels.
How can the artist, Jennings, for instance, was asking, know that he
is inspired, when neither the public nor the critics recognize
inspiration? The question is equally interesting asked backwards. As
a matter of fact, the artist is sometimes conscious that he is doing
one thing, while he is acclaimed and appreciated for doing another.
Columbus did not set out to discover America. Yes, there is often an
accidental quality in great art and oftener still there is an accidental
appreciation of it. In one sense art is curiously bound up with its own
epoch, but appreciation or depreciation of its relation to that epoch
may come in another generation. The judgment of posterity may be
cruel to contemporary genius. In a few years we may decide that
Richard Strauss is only another Liszt and Stravinsky, another
Rubinstein.
Inspiration! Richards shrugged his broad shepherd's plaid shoulders.
Inspiration! Artists, critics, public, clever men, and philistines
monotonously employ that word, but it seems to me that art is
created through memory out of experience, combined with a
capacity for feeling and expressing experience, and depending on
the artist's physical condition at the time when he is at work.
Are you, I asked, one of those who believes that a novelist must be
unfaithful to his wife before he can write a fine novel, that a girl
should have an amour with a prize-fighter before she can play Juliet,
and that a musician must be a pederast before he can construct a
great symphony?
Richards laughed.
No, he replied, I am not, but that theory is very popular. How many
times I have heard it thundered forth! As a matter of fact, there is a
certain amount of truth in it, the germ, indeed, of a great truth, for
some emotional experience is essential to the artist, but why
particularize? Each as he may!
I know a man, I went on, who doesn't believe that experience has
anything to do with art at all. He thinks art is a matter of arrangement
and order and form.
His art then, broke in Jennings, is epistemological rather than
inspirational.
But what does he arrange? queried Richards. Surely incidents and
emotions.
Not at all. He arranges objects, abstractions: colours and reaping-
machines, perfumes and toys.
Long ago I read a book like that, Jennings went on. It was called
Imperial Purple and it purported to be a history of the Roman Empire
or the Roman Emperors. It was a strangely amusing book, rather like
a clot of blood on a daisy or a faded pomegranate flower in a glass
of buttermilk.
At this period, I avidly collected labels. Who wrote it? I asked.
I don't remember, but your description of your friend recalls the book.
What is the name of your friend's book?
He hasn't written a book yet.
I see.
He is about to write it. He knows what he wants to do and he is
collecting the materials. He is arranging the form.
What's it about? Jennings appeared to be interested.
Oh, it's about things. Whiffle told me, I suppose he was joking, that it
would be about three hundred pages.
Richards set down his glass and in his face I recognized the
portentous expression of a man about to be delivered of an epigram.
It came: I dislike pine-apples, women with steatopygous figures, and
men with a gift for paronomasia.
Jennings ignored this ignoble interruption. George Moore has written
somewhere, he said, that if an author talks about what he is going to
write, usually he writes it, but when he talks about how he is going to
write it, that is the end of the matter. I wonder if this is true? I have
never thought much about it before but I think perhaps it is. I think
your friend will never write his book.
Richards interrupted again: Look at that maquereau. That's the
celebrated French actor who went to America after a brilliant career
in France in the more lucrative of his two professions, which ended
in a woman's suicide. His history was well-known to the leading
woman of the company with which he was to play in America, but
she had never met him. At the first rehearsal, when they were
introduced, she remarked, Monsieur, la connaissance est déjà faite!
Turning aside, he boasted to his male companions, La gueuse!
Avant dix jours je l'aurai enfilée! In a week he had made good his
threat and in two weeks the poor woman was without a pearl.
He should meet Arabella Munson, said Jennings. She is always
willing to pay her way. She fell in love with an Italian sculptor, or at
any rate selected him as a suitable father for a prospective child.
When she became pregnant, the young man actually fell ill with fear
at the thought that he might be compelled to support both Arabella
and the baby. He took to his bed and sent his mother as an
ambassadress for Arabella's mercy. Choking with sobs, the old
woman demanded what would be required of her son. My good
woman, replied Arabella, dry your tears. I make it a point of honour
never to take a penny from the fathers of my children. Not only do I
support the children, often I support their fathers as well!
It was sufficiently warm. I lazily sipped my absinthe. The terrasse
was crowded and there was constant movement; as soon as a table
was relinquished, another group sat down in the empty chairs. Ephra
Vogelsang, a pretty American singer, had just arrived with a pale
young blond boy, whom I identified as Marcel Moszkowski, the son
of the Polish composer. Presently, another table was taken by Vance
Thompson and Ernest la Jeunesse, whose fat face was sprinkled
with pimples and whose fat fingers were encased to the knuckles in
heavy oriental rings. I bowed to Ephra and to Vance Thompson. On
the sidewalk marched the eternal procession of newsboys, calling La
Pa—trie! La Pa—trie! so like a phrase at the beginning of the second
act of Carmen, old gentlemen, nursemaids, painted boys, bankers,
Americans, Germans, Italians, South Americans, Roumanians, and
Neo-Kaffirs. The carriages, the motors, the buses, formed a perfect
maze on the boulevard. In one of the vehicles I caught a glimpse of
another acquaintance.
That's Lily Hampton, I noted. She is the only woman who ever made
Toscanini smile. You must understand, to appreciate the story, that
she is highly respectable, the Mrs. Kendal of the opera stage, and
the mother of eight or nine children. She never was good at
languages, speaks them all with a rotten accent and a complete
ignorance of their idioms. On this occasion, she was singing in Italian
but she was unable to converse with the director in his native tongue
and, consequently, he was giving her directions in French. He could
not, however, make her understand what he wanted her to do. Again
and again he repeated his request. At last she seemed to gather his
meaning, that she was to turn her back to the footlights. What she
asked him, however, ran like this: Est-ce que vous voulez mon
derrière, maestro?
Now there was a diversion, an altercation at the further end of the
terrasse, and a fluttering of feathered, flowered, and smooth-haired
and bald heads turned in that direction. In the midst of this
turbulence, I heard my name being called and, looking up, beheld
Peter Whiffle waving from the impériale of a bus. I beckoned him to
descend and join us and this he contrived to do after the bus had
travelled several hundred yards on its way towards the Madeleine
and I had abandoned the idea of seeing him return. But the interval
gave me time to inform Richards and Jennings that this was the
young author of whom I had spoken. Presently he came along,
strolling languidly down the walk. He looked a bit tired, but he was
very smartly dressed, with a gardenia as a boutonnière, and he
seemed to vibrate with a feverish kind of jauntiness.
I am glad to see you, he cried. I've been meaning to look you up. In
fact if I hadn't met you I should have looked you up tonight. I'm
burning for adventures. What are you doing?
I explained that I was doing nothing at all and introduced him to my
friends. Jennings had an engagement. He explained that he had to
talk at some socialist meeting, called our waiter, paid for his pile of
saucers, and took his departure. Richards confessed that he was
burning too.
What shall we do? asked the artist.
There's plenty to do, announced Peter, confidently; almost too much
for one night. But let's hurry over to Serapi's, before he closes his
shop.
We asked no questions. We paid our saucers, rose, and strolled
along with Peter across the Place in front of the Opéra and down the
Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin until we stood before a tiny shop, the
window of which was filled with bottles of perfume and photographs
of actresses and other great ladies of various worlds and countries,
all inscribed with flamboyant encomiums, relating to the superior
merits of Serapi's wares and testifying to the superlative esteem in
which Serapi himself was held.
Led by Peter, in the highest exuberance of nervous excitement but
still, I thought, looking curiously tired, we passed within the portal.
We found ourselves in a long narrow room, surrounded on two sides
by glass cases, in which, on glass shelves, were arranged the
products of the perfumer's art. At the back, there was a cashier's
desk without an attendant; at the front, the show-window. In the
centre of the room, the focus of a group of admiring women, stood a
tawny-skinned Oriental—perhaps concretely an Arabian—with
straight black hair and soft black eyes. His physique was magnificent
and he wore a morning coat. Obviously, this was Serapi himself.
Peter, who had now arrived at a state in which he could with difficulty
contain his highly wrought emotion—and it was at this very moment
that I began to suspect him of collecting amusements along with his
other objects—, in a whisper confirmed my conjecture. The ladies,
delicately fashioned Tanagra statuettes in tulle and taffeta and
chiffon artifices from the smartest shops, in hats on which bloomed
all the posies of the season and posies which went beyond any
which had ever bloomed, were much too attractive to be duchesses,
although right here I must pause to protest that even duchesses
sometimes have their good points: the Duchess of Talleyrand has an
ankle and the Duchess of Marlborough, a throat. The picture, to be
recalled later when Mina Loy gave me her lovely drawing of Eros
being spoiled by women, was so pleasant, withal slightly ridiculous,
that Richards and I soon caught the infection of Peter's scarcely
masked laughter and our eyes, too, danced. We made some small
pretence of examining the jars and bottles of Scheherazade, Ambre,
and Chypre in the cases, but only a small pretence was necessary,
as the ladies and their Arab paid not the slightest attention to us.
At length, following a brief apology, Serapi broke through the ranks
and disappeared through a doorway behind the desk at the back of
the room. As the curtains lifted, I caught a glimpse of a plain,
business-like woman, too dignified to be a mere clerk, obviously the
essential wife of the man of genius. He was gone only a few seconds
but during those seconds the chatter ceased abruptly. It was
apparent that the ladies had come singly. They were not acquainted
with one another. As Serapi reentered, they chirped again, peeped
and twittered their twiddling tune, the words of which were Ah! and
Oh! In one hand, he carried a small crystal phial to which a blower
was attached. He explained that the perfume was his latest creation,
an hermetic confusion of the dangers and ardours of Eastern life and
death, the concentrated essence of the unperfumed flowers of
Africa, the odour of their colours, he elaborated, wild desert
existence, the mouldering tombs of the kings of Egypt, the decaying
laces of a dozen Byzantine odalisques, a fragrant breath or two from
the hanging gardens of Babylon, and a faint suggestion of the
perspiration of Istar. It is my reconstruction, the artist concluded, of
the perfume which Ruth employed to attract Boaz! The recipe is an
invention based on a few half-illegible lines which I discovered in the
beauty-table book of an ancient queen of Georgia, perhaps that very
Thamar whose portrait has been painted in seductive music by the
Slav composer, Balakireff.
The ladies gasped. The fascinating Arab pressed the rubber bulb
and blew the cloying vapours into their faces, adjuring them, at the
same time, to think of Thebes or Haroun-Al-Raschid or the pre-
Adamite sultans. The room was soon redolent with a heavy vicious
odour which seemed to reach the brain through the olfactory nerves
and to affect the will like ether.
He is the only man alive today, whispered Peter, not without
reverence, who has taken Flaubert's phrase seriously. He passes his
nights dreaming of larger flowers and stranger perfumes. I believe
that he could invent a new vice!
Serapi went the round of the circle with his mystic spray, and the
twitterings of the ladies softened to ecstatic coos, like the little coos
of dismay and delight of female cats who feel the call of pleasure,
when suddenly the phial fell from the Arab's unclasped hand, the
hand itself dropped to his side, the brown skin became a vivid green,
all tension left his body, and he crumbled into a heap on the floor.
The ladies shrieked; there was a delicious, susurrous, rainbow swirl
and billow of tulle and taffeta and chiffon; there was a frantic nodding
and waving of sweet-peas, red roses, dandelions, and magenta bell-
flowers; and eight pairs of white-gloved arms circled rhythmically in
the air. The effect was worthy of the Russian Ballet and, had Fokine
been present, it would doubtless have been perpetuated to the
subsequent enjoyment of audiences at Covent Garden and the Paris
Opéra.
Now, an assured and measured step was heard. From a room in the
rear, the calm, practical presence entered, bearing a glass of water.
The ladies moved a little to one side as she knelt before the
recumbent figure and sprinkled the green face. Serapi almost
immediately began to manifest signs of recovery; his muscles began
to contract and his face regained its natural colour. We made our
way into the open air and the warm western sunlight of the late
afternoon. Peter was choking with laughter. I was chuckling.
Richards was too astonished to express himself.
Life is sometimes artistic, Peter was saying. Sometimes, if you give it
a chance and look for them, it makes patterns, beautiful patterns. But
Serapi excelled himself today. He has never done anything like this
before. I shall never go back there again. It would be an anticlimax.
We dined somewhere, where I have forgotten. It is practically the
only detail of that evening which has escaped my memory. I
remember clearly how Richards sat listening in silent amazement to
Peter's arguments and decisions on dreams and circumstances,
erected on bewilderingly slender hypotheses. He built up, one after
another, the most gorgeous and fantastic temples of theory; five
minutes later he demolished them with a sledge-hammer or a
feather. It was gay talk, fancy wafted from nowhere, unimportant,
and vastly entertaining. Indeed, who has ever talked like Peter?
We seemed to be in his hands. At any rate neither Richards nor I
offered any suggestions. We waited to hear him tell us what we were
to do. About 9 o'clock, while we were sipping our cognac, he
informed us that our next destination would be La Cigale, a music
hall on the outer circle of the boulevards in Montmartre, where there
was to be seen a revue called, Nue Cocotte, of which I still preserve
the poster, drawn by Maës Laïa, depicting a fat duenna, fully
dressed, wearing a red wig and adorned with pearls, and carrying a
lorgnette, a more plausible female, nude, but for a hat, veil, feather
boa, and a pair of high boots with yellow tops over which protrude an
inch or two of blue sock, and an English comic, in a round hat, a
yellow checked suit, bearing binoculars, all three astride a
remarkably vivid red hobby horse whose feet are planted in the
attitude of bucking. The comic grasps the bobbed black tail of the
nag in one hand and the long yellow braid of the female in the other.
The cocottes of the period were wont to wear very large bell-shaped
hats. Lily Elsie, who was appearing in The Merry Widow in London,
followed this fashion and, as a natural consequence, these head-
decorations were soon dubbed, probably by an American, Merry
Widow hats. Each succeeding day, some girl would appear on the
boulevards surmounted by a greater monstrosity than had been
seen before. Discussion in regard to the subject, editorial and
epistolary, raged at the moment in the Paris journals.
Once we were seated in our stalls on the night in question, it became
evident that the hat of the cocotte in front of Peter completely
obscured his view of the stage. He bent forward and politely
requested her to remove it. She turned and explained with equal
politeness and a most entrancing smile that she could not remove
her hat without removing her hair, surely an impossibility, Monsieur
would understand. Monsieur understood perfectly but, under the
circumstances, would Madame have any objection if Monsieur
created a disturbance? Madame, her eyes shining with mirth, replied
that she would not have the tiniest objection, that above all else in
life she adored fracases. They were of a delight to her. At this
juncture in the interchange of compliments the curtain rose
disclosing a row of females in mauve dresses, bearing baskets of
pink roses. Presently the compère appeared.
Chapeau! cried Peter, in the most stentorian voice I have ever heard
him assume. Chapeau!
The spectators turned to look at the valiant American. Several heads
nodded sympathy and approval.
Chapeau! Peter called again, pointing to the adorable little lady in
front of him, who was enjoying the attention she had created. Her
escort, on the other hand, squirmed a little.
The cry was now taken up by other unfortunate gentlemen in the
stalls, who were placed in like situations but who had not had the
courage to begin the battle. The din, indeed, soon gained such a
degree of dynamic force that not one word of what was being said on
the stage, not one note of the music, could be distinguished.
Gesticulating figures stood up in every part of the theatre, shrieking
and frantically waving canes. The compère advanced to the
footlights and appeared to be addressing us, much in the manner of
an actor attempting to stem a fire stampede in a playhouse, but, of
course, he was inaudible. As he stepped back, a sudden lull
succeeded to the tumult. Peter took advantage of this happy quiet to
interject: Comme Mélisande, je ne suis pas heureux ici!
The spectators roared and screamed; the house rocked with their
mirth. Even the mimes were amused. Now, escorted by two of his
secretaries in elaborate coats decorated with much gold braid, the
manager of the theatre appeared, paraded solemnly down the aisle
to our seats and, with a bow, offered us a box, which we accepted at
once and in which we received homage for the remainder of the
evening. At last we could see the stage and enjoy the blond Idette
Bremonval, the brunette Jane Merville, the comic pranks of Vilbert
and Prince, and the Festival of the Déesse Raison.
The performance concluded, the pretty lady who had not removed
her hat, commissioned her reluctant escort to inquire if we would not
step out for a drink with them. The escort was not ungracious but,
obviously, he lacked enthusiasm. The lady, just as obviously, had
taken a great fancy to Peter. We went to the Rat Mort, where we sat
on the terrasse, the lady gazing steadily at her new hero and
laughing immoderately at his every sally. Peter, however, quickly
showed that he was restless and presently he rose, eager to seek
new diversions. We hailed a passing fiacre and jumped in, while the
lady waved us pathetic adieux. Her companion seemed distinctly
relieved by our departure. Peter was now in the highest animal
spirits. All traces of fatigue had fled from his face. The horse which
drew our fiacre was a poor, worn-out brute, like so many others in
Paris, and the cocher, unlike so many others in Paris, was kind-
hearted and made no effort to hasten his pace. We were crawling
down the hill.
I will race you! cried Peter, leaping out (he told me afterwards that he
had once undertaken a similar exploit with a Bavarian railway train).
Meet me at the Olympia Bar! he cried, dashing on ahead.
The cocher grunted, shook his head, mumbled a few unintelligible
words to the horse, and we drove on more slowly than before. Peter,
indeed, was soon out of sight.
Ten minutes later, as we entered the café under the Olympia Music
Hall, we noted with some surprise that the stools in front of the bar,
on which the cocottes usually sat with their feet on the rungs, their
trains dragging the floor, were empty. The crowd had gathered at the
other end of the long hall and the centre of the crowd was Peter. He
was holding a reception, a reception of cocottes!
Ah! Good evening, Mademoiselle Rolandine de Maupreaux, he was
saying as he extended his hand, I am delighted to greet you here
tonight. And if this isn't dear little Mademoiselle Célestine Sainte-
Résistance and her charming friend, Mademoiselle Edmée Donnez-
Moi! And Camille! Camille la Grande! Quelle chance de vous voir! Et
Madame, votre mère, elle va bien? Et Gisèle la Belle! Mais vous
avez oublié de m'écrire! Do not, I pray you, neglect me again. And
the charming Hortense des Halles et de chez Maxim, and the
particularly adorable Abélardine de Belleville et de la Place d'Italie.
Votre sœur va mieux, j'espère. Then, drawing us in, Permettez-moi,
mesdemoiselles, de vous presenter mes amis, le Duc de Rochester
et le Comte de Cedar Rapids. Spécialement, mesdemoiselles,
permettez-moi de vous recommander le Comte de Cedar Rapids.
He had never, of course, seen any of them before, but they liked it.
Richards grumbled, It's bloody silly, but he was laughing harder than
I was.
I heard one of the girls say, Le jeune Américain est fou!
And the antiphony followed, Mais il est charmant.
Later, another remarked, Je crois que je vais lui demander de me
faire une politesse!
Overhearing which, Peter rejoined, Avec plaisir, Mademoiselle. Quel
genre?
It was all gay, irresponsible and meaningless, perhaps, but gay. We
sat at tables and drank and smoked and spun more fantasies and
quaint conceits until a late hour, and that night I learned that even
French cocottes will occasionally waste their time, provided they are
sufficiently diverted. Towards four o'clock in the morning, however, I
began to note a change in Peter's deportment and demeanour.
There were moments when he sat silent, a little aloof, seemingly the
prey of a melancholy regret, too well aware, perhaps, that the
atmosphere he had himself created would suck him into its merry
hurricane. I caught the lengthening shadows under his eyes and the
premonitory hollows in his cheeks. And this time, therefore, it was I
who suggested departure. Peter acceded, but with an air of
wistfulness as if even the effort of moving from an uncomfortable
situation were painful to him. Rising, we kissed our hands to the
band of sirens, who all pressed forward like the flower maidens of
Parsifal and with equal success. Three of the pretty ladies

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Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique

of Metaphysics O. Bradley Bassler

For the Love of Metaphysics: Nihilism and the Conflict

Kant and the Law of War Arthur Ripstein

Kant and the Transformation of Natural History Andrew

KANT and the Transformation of Natural History Andrew

Keats and Shelley: Winds of Light Kelvin Everest

Causation, Explanation, and the Metaphysics of Aspect

What Is Critique? and "The Culture of the Self" Michel

Kant, Shelley and the

ISBN 978-3-319-77290-5 ISBN 978-3-319-77291-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936911

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Printed on acid-free paper

In a current philosophical climate of scientific scholasticism, divided

In another way, the problem is quintessentially one of knowing what

version of “agnostic humanism” and Kant in the ultimate role which he

strictures against an “elevated tone” would itself permit. In this regard

Athens, GA, USA O. Bradley Bassler

1 From Imagination to the Parafinite 1

2 The Parafinite and Self-Positioning 47

3 Principles and Categories from Leibniz to Peirce in Five

4 Spotlight on Mathematics: Dislocations of Kant

5 Adjunction and Relocation 163

6.5 Proof Text for Locative Poetics: Shelley’s Triumph

1.1 F rom Imagination to the Parafinite

© The Author(s) 2018 1

much as for philosophical reasons: the massive default of the contemporary

There is a story told of both philosophical and literary “romanticism”

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity

Is it Power itself, or the “tranquillity” of power that Shelley characterizes

pass across or through a space, to penetrate, pierce or extend” (Kahn

Perhaps it is most natural to suggest the following: “even” the primæval

Kant’s account of the sublime suggests a way to understand Shelley’s

1.2  ision and Vision: A Framework

Perhaps it is in the case of the inaugurating figure in the continental

Wallace Stevens called Leibniz “the philosopher afraid of ornament,” and

The extent of the abuse to which philosophers have been subjected at

Kant’s own productivity, for it is this logical template which provides a

All manifoldness of things is only a way, as multifarious as this manifold-

This passage occurs in the context of Kant’s discussion of the “Ideal of

manifold finds its conceptual expression in the notion of the Kantian

is constrained by a faculty psychology associated with the logical table of

1.3  hilosophical Vision, and the Anomalous

verge on the difficult issue of second-order figuration. In the realm of

Now an a priori concept (a nonempirical concept) either already contains

In the first case we are dealing with mathematical concepts, such as

This Kantian enterprise is systematic in character, yet genetically, this

It is terrible that only after we have, in accordance with the instruction of an

Kant delayed the architectonic presentation of his philosophy well into

transcendental unity of apperception in the Transcendental Analytic. (My

Now the system of all philosophical cognition is philosophy. Philosophy

1.4  ure Synthesis as Egological

that there is a “layering” of the Kantian enterprise, and what Longuenesse

of a “circularity” in the treatment of morality in the First Critique or sim-

synthesis which needed to be “supplied” to complete (i.e. “re-layer”) the

which Kant discusses “The Impossibility of a Skeptical Satisfaction of

David Hume is a hyper-intelligent flat-earther, who sees that the “locals”

enterprise indeed expressly rules out. There is no sense, I believe, in which

It would be easy enough to see the sense of “experiment” here as coincid-

I have emended Pluhar’s translation by removing an interpolation: he

This is either wrong or seriously misleading on two separate counts. First,

In the next footnote, Kant helps us along with this analytic/synthetic

Athens, GA, USA O. Bradley Bassler

1 From Imagination to the Parafinite 1

2 The Parafinite and Self-Positioning 47

3 Principles and Categories from Leibniz to Peirce in Five

4 Spotlight on Mathematics: Dislocations of Kant

5 Adjunction and Relocation 163

6.5 Proof Text for Locative Poetics: Shelley’s Triumph

1.1 F rom Imagination to the Parafinite

1.2 ision and Vision: A Framework

1.3 hilosophical Vision, and the Anomalous

1.4 ure Synthesis as Egological