Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian — Kant — John Shaqi
Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian
Kant · en
must separate what is united in the feeling. The others fear to
suppress beauty logically, that is, as a conception, when they have
to hold together what in the understanding is separate. The former
wish to think of beauty as it works; the latter wish it to work as
it is thought. Both therefore must miss the truth; the former
because they try to follow infinite nature with their limited
thinking power; the others, because they wish to limit unlimited
nature according to their laws of thought The first fear to rob
beauty of its freedom by a too strict dissection, the others fear to
destroy the distinctness of the conception by a too violent union.
But the former do not reflect that the freedom in which they very
properly place the essence of beauty is not lawlessness, but harmony
of laws; not caprice, but the highest internal necessity. The others
do not remember that distinctness, which they with equal right
demand from beauty, does not consist in the exclusion of certain
realities, but the absolute including of all; that is not therefore
limitation, but infinitude. We shall avoid the quicksands on which
both have made shipwreck if we begin from the two elements in which
beauty divides itself before the understanding, but then afterwards
rise to a pure aesthetic unity by which it works on feeling, and in
which both those conditions completely disappear.
LETTER XIX
Two principal and different states of passive and active capacity of
being determined [Footnote: Bestimmbarkeit] can be distinguished in
man; in like manner two states of passive and active determination.
[Footnote: Bestimmung.] The explanation of this proposition leads us
most readily to our end.
The condition of the state of man before destination or direction is
given him by the impressions of the senses is an unlimited capacity
of being determined. The infinite of time and space is given to his
imagination for its free use; and, because nothing is settled in
this kingdom of the possible, and therefore nothing is excluded from
it, this state of absence of determination can be named an empty
infiniteness, which must not by any means be confounded with an
infinite void.