This was a summary that I made during my PhD studies, in an attempt to try to understand French theory. “Kant and Schiller” is an essay by Paul de Man that appears in his Aesthetic Ideology.
“Kant and Schiller” began life as the fifth Messenger Lecture, which de Man gave at Cornell in March 1983. Following the talk, there were several questions from at least four participants: M.H. Abrams, Dominick la Capra, David Martyn, and Christopher Fynsk. De Man’s basic point in this essay is that readers of Kant have tended to domesticate him, particularly his text on the Critique of Judgment. He pinpoints the source of this domestication as a conflation of Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters with Kant’s thought. Schiller valorizes art in a way that Kant does not, and this valorization gets taken up in post-Kantian writers such as, especially, Schopenhauer and also the early Nietzsche. De Man uses Schiller and Kant as figures describing a particular relation: thus, for instance, Heidegger stands in an analogous relation to Derrida as Schiller does to Kant. The central difference in the model relates to what each writer (Schiller and Kant) think to be possible for art. Where Schiller believes in art’s autonomy and power, Kant subjects this power to his critical gaze (especially in the third critique). De Man tries to do something similar with English critics, positing Arnold as the Schiller and then asking who might be the Kant (“Ruskin?” — he doesn’t say for sure).
De Man suggests that he is raising this distinction in order to address a problem that has come up in the course of the lectures: the problem of the question of reversibility. This question seems to relate to the “irreversibility” de Man posits for the movement between language as an exclusively tropological system to language as performative. The first kind of language seems connected to what Lacan or Kristeva might call the Symbolic order; the second kind of language seems akin to the semiotic. What de Man is interested in exploring is the passage between these languages, between trope and performative. He says that this passage is always an “epistemological critique of trope” (133). This critique occurs through an amplification of tropes, an attempt to “saturate your whole field of language” (133). When this fails, other possibilities for language emerge, such as the performative. These other possibilities do not escape the “cognitive system” entirely; they are picked up anew and set to work within it. While De Man does not call this a dialectic, he is also careful to distinguish it from a reversal. He calls it a “relapse” or a “recuperation.” He emphasizes that this passage is an emergence, not the result of a negation. That is, the tropological and the performative are distinct: they are not mediated by either a negation or anything else.
He offers as an example the difference in history between the event as it happened and its reception. When the event is recuperated into the cognitive-tropological system, it becomes something difference its event-ness is resisted by such a recuperation, which is to underscore its absolute distinction. In the case of Kant and Schiller, something similar occurs, so that Kant gets taken up within Schiller’s “tropological system of aesthetics” (134) against the non-tropological character of Kant’s understanding of aesthetics. De Man refers back here to his own earlier lectures, published in Aesthetic Ideology, “Kant’s Materialism” and “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” (the latter was originally titled, “Kant on the Sublime”), where he suggests that Kant’s third Critique undermines (“interrupted, disrupted, disarticulated” [134]) the aesthetic even as his system depends upon it.
Schiller’s style, de Man suggests, is tropological throughout, with a particular emphasis on the trope of chiasmus. Thus he strings his ideas along through a series of polarities. This pattern is, unlike the one de Man envisions for language, reversible and symmetrical. In Schiller’s sense of the sublime, Nature can work on Terror, but so can Reason. Tranquility, likewise, can be operate alongside Nature or Reason.
For Kant, the sublime appears in two asymmetrical modes, which are not polarities, but simply different: the mathematical and dynamic sublime. The mathematical sublime (if I remember correctly) has to do with magnitude. Nature is sublime when it is immense in relation to our smallness. If the mathematical is quantitative, the dynamic sublime is qualitative; however, de Man (in the earlier talk at greater length) asks why this qualitative dimension is necessary at all. He suggests (following his linguistic model) that Kant discovers in the saturation of the tropological field with the mathematical sublime an ongoing lack, which makes room for something like the dynamic sublime, although this is not to posit it as an antithesis or a dialectic.
So, Schiller depends upon polarities and antitheses and for this reason his manner of taking up Kant involves reading his asymmetrical sublime through a polarizing lens: instead of mathematical and dynamic, Schiller offers theoretical and practical. His issue with Kant’s terms is that they cannot guarantee a complete coverage of what might be included in the sublime. By eliminating this area of uncertainty, Schiller advances a totalizing image of the sublime. The theoretical sublime (i.e., “the mathematical”) corresponds to a “failure of representation” (139). The practical sublime, by contrast, appears as the body’s limitations in the face of danger. The theoretical corresponds to a threat to knowledge; the practical, a threat to existence. Schiller’s recuperation goes on to valorize the practical over the theoretical. Our sensibility is connected to the practical in a way it never can be to the theoretical.
De Man raises Schiller’s career as a playwright as a way of underscoring the reasonableness of Schiller’s argument — as well as its relevance to his life. Yet this pragmatic dimension also highlights the absence of any transcendental or philosophical aspect in his reading of the sublime. (He is, after all, operating within an exclusively tropological system). If Kant has legitimate concerns about the philosophical nature of terror (terror-in-itself or at least terror-for-us), Schiller’s concerns are of a psychological character (like Burke’s). While I find de Man’s commentary here problematic because of what seems to be its unavoidable elitism, his critique of Schiller and the more general ideology of the practical Schiller implies is very informative: “The important thing is that this apparent realism [valorized by Schiller], this apparent practicality, this concern with the practical, will result in a total loss of contact with reality, in a total idealism” (142). This seems to form the basis of De Man’s ethical orientation. A total tropological system, which is the system of “the world,” is a total idealism distinct from the reality that is only accessible (if it is accessible at all) through the passage of critique. From de Man’s perspective, we are none of us beyond Schiller. (The shift in teaching philosophies from a valorization of “Literature” to an emphasis on teaching critical thinking reflects a shift that does not seem to have occurred — at least from de Man’s perspective — in the time he is writing. What does it mean, though, for us to be shifting back towards the humanism that former perspective implies? Moreover, is it possible to levy a tropological critique — i.e., to deconstruct — of this aesthetic ideology that might lead not simply into the nihilistic maelstrom of critique, but into a similarly suspended posture of worship? If tropological critique is predicated upon a metaphysics of violence, what form of critique arises from a metaphysics of peace?)
Schiller’s use of the imagination in his account of the sublime resembles Kant’s in so far as the imagination serves to represent the danger that exceeds our rational capacity. Yet Schiller is approaching the sublime empirically, where Kant approaches it epistemologically. By extension, the imagination in Schiller is a mere mechanism — a trope, in fact — that works to link (again, through chiasmus) knowledge with reality. Our desire for self-preservation, which is preoccupied with the real world, tends to oppose our desire for knowledge, which is theoretical or abstract. In a sublime experience, the imagination puts our desire for self-preservation to work. We feel as though we are engaged in a real-life violence that threatens to destroy us, yet at another level, we know what the reality is: namely, that we are not in danger. In Kant, the imagination is not the mechanism by which our inability to encounter the sublime event is overcome, but rather it is “the very symptom of this incapacity” (146). The sublime experience occurs in the wake of the failure of the imagination.
So — to introduce a brief pause before diving in to the remaining 10 pages of the essay — Schiller is the representative of aesthetic ideology for de Man, while Kant (wittingly or otherwise) raises the question of its limits. That question takes the form, de Man confusingly tells us, of “return to the materiality of the inscription, to the letter” (146). Hopefully this will become clearer, but, if not, de Man explores it at greater length in the “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” essay.
These final pages have de Man accounting for developments in Schiller’s thought, particularly in his later Letters on Aesthetic Education. Schiller’s polarities have become much richer — now he offers us the sensory drive, on the one hand, and the drive or desire for form, on the other. These are incompatible with each other, he says, because the scope for each overlap in contradictory ways. The sensory drive wishes to dwell on the moment of sensation, an instance; the desire for form wishes to see an extended manifestation of its absoluteness. To suggest that these desires are symmetrical (i.e., they reside on two poles), is to maintain their reversibility and therefore to ensure that they do not enter into conflict with each other. Unless we maintain the status of both, we will be forced to submit the sensory drive to the drive for form.