Kant ABQ Chapter 31  Key Selections

 

300

Genius is the talent… that gives the rule to art.

 

Fine art cannot itself devise the rule by which it is to bring about its product.

 

Every art presupposes rules….

 

…in other words, fine art is possible only as the product of genius

 

Genius is a talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given…

 

Genius itself cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products…

 

 

301

…the word genius is derived from [Latin] genius, [which means]the guardian and guiding spirit that each person is given as his own at birth…

 

…one can indeed learn everything that Newton set forth…on the principles of natural philosophy…; but one cannot learn how to write inspired poetry…

 

…he himself [the genius] does not know [how his ideas arise in his mind], and hence also cannot teach it to anyone else.

 

[Rules of art} cannot be couched in a formula…

 

302

Rather, the rule must be abstracted from what the artist has done, i.e., from the product…

…shallow minds believe that the best way to show that they are geniuses … is by renouncing all rules of academic constraint, believing that they will cut a better figure on the back of an ill-tempered than that of a training-horse.

 

Spirit in an aesthetic sense is the animating principle of the mind…

 

303

[Spirit] is nothing but the ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas; and by aesthetic idea I mean a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever…can be adequate…

 

{Compare Kant’s idea of ‘purposiveness without a purpose’)

 

[In poetry, an aesthetic idea]  is a presentation that makes us add to a concept the thoughts of much that is ineffable, but the feeling of which quickens our cognitive powers and connects language, which would otherwise be mere letters, with spirit.

 

304

…when the aim is aesthetic, then the imagination is free…

(Kant often speaks about the ‘free play of imagination’

 

…genius is the exemplary originality of a subject’s natural endowment in the free use of his cognitive powers.

 

305

But since a genius is nature’s favorite and so must be regarded as a rare phenomenon, his example gives rise to a school for other minds, i.e., a methodical instruction by means of whatever rules could be extracted from those products of spirit…; and for these [the genius’s followers] fine art is to that extent imitation, for which nature, through a genius, gave the rule.