Liam Egan

Research Project

Genius in the Age of Kant: Aesthetic Ideas, Self-Constitution, and the Autarchy of Reason

My dissertation concerns the account of fine art and genius in Kant’s 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment, as well as the reception and transformation of this account by post-Kantian thinkers in the final decade of the eighteenth century. When Kant posits the non-conceptuality of beauty in the opening sections of the third Critique, he introduces a variety of non-discursive intelligibility into his philosophy whose existence has wide-ranging implications for the critical project. First and foremost, the non-conceptuality of beauty as predicated in the judgment of taste revises the claim put forward in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories that “a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception.” And when Kant goes on to argue that the very non-discursive mental state underlying the judgment of taste likewise underlies the productive activity of the artistic genius, he allows into the critical philosophy a species of self-constituting practical activity that is neither strictly moral nor purely instrumental, but aesthetic. The Kantian account of artistic genius thus stands at the intersection of a variety of issues that would come to occupy the post-Kantian Idealists and German Romantics alike: discursive intelligibility and its limits, practical self-constitution, the disputed philosophical status of fine art, and the autarchy of reason—that is, the capacity of human reason to actualize itself in the material world.