Kant and the Feeling of Life is dedicated to the eminent Kant scholar Rudolf Makkreel, who sadly passed away in 2021. Makkreel’s insight has been the driving force behind the compilation of an anthology on a crucial, yet understudied, topic: the concept of life in Kant’s philosophy, and the Critique of the Power of Judgement in particular. The volume is edited by Jennifer Mensch, with an introduction on the significance of the topic and a presentation of each chapter. Fourteen scholars, including Makkreel, contribute pieces from a variety of perspectives on different aspects of the notion of life in Kant’s thought. The spectrum of themes is noticeably wide, ranging from the feeling of life in aesthetic judgements on the beautiful and the sublime to historical reconstructions of the concept in the pre-Kantian tradition, to overviews of different levels of life in Kant’s corpus, to the relation between health and life, even to the role of the organic model in Kant’s political philosophy. In what follows, I will attempt to provide a succinct outline of each chapter.

In the opening chapter, Dennis Schmidt discusses the link crafted by Kant between the feeling of life and the moral vocation of human beings. Central to Schmidt’s argument is the choice of the term Belebung by Kant, a term which alludes to birth as the incipience of life. Schmidt believes its English translation as ‘quickening’ is very apt, since quickening refers to the first felt movements of a fetus. The felt quickening, therefore, of the mind in the Kantian experience of beauty signifies a sudden motion the mind is set into, a motion indicating the birth of new life. Schmidt claims that the birth in question is that of unnameable thought exceeding the mind’s capacity to conceptualise, which Kant calls an aesthetic idea. The birth of an aesthetic idea enlarges the mind and is felt through a quickening of the mind itself. Since an aesthetic idea symbolically presents moral ideas, however, the feeling felt in such an experience makes human beings sense their ultimate belonging to the world as moral beings.

In chapter two, James Risser, after examining Kant’s two Introductions to the third Critique, reads the notion of life as central to the bridge between nature and freedom in Kant’s critical architectonic. Reflective judgement makes the bridge possible through a supersensible ground that unites all human life. Aesthetic judgement makes human beings aware of transcendental freedom – the highest order of life – in the world of sense through the feeling of the ‘furtherance of life [Beförderung des Lebens]’ (CPJ 5: 244),Footnote ¹ a feeling of the mind as universal life. Teleological judgement, on the other hand, orients human beings towards culture, or ethical life, by determining the meaning of furtherance: in the formative activity of adapting nature to human ends, or in the activity of human intelligent life, life is furthered beyond the realm of feeling to find its ultimate manifestation in the harmonious order of the highest good.

Courtney Fugate historically contextualises the concept of life, both in the pre-Kantian tradition and in pre-critical Kant. Fugate shows how the classical distinction between life as actu primo, a self-active power, and life as actu secondo, the manifestation of that power as liveliness (Lebendigkeit), reaches Kant through Crusius, a key influence among his predecessors. Based on the traditional definition of life as actu primo, Kant defines spiritual life – typical of free self-acting beings who have the ground of their action within themselves – as the highest form of life. However, based on the highest, one can also conceive forms of life demonstrating lower degrees of activity. Kant thinks the lowest form of life is animal life, where a brute faculty of choice can be conceived as an analogue of reason, even if it is subjected to external necessitation. Human life, as an intermediate form, partakes of both animal and spiritual nature. A feeling of furtherance or hindrance of life (actu secondo) accompanies each form, with universal, private, and social or communal (referring to the human species) validity, respectively. That background demonstrates, Fugate believes, how the faculty of taste in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, its judgements, and its accompanying feeling of pleasure refer entirely to the intermediate form of life that is distinctive of human beings as such.

In a different historical reconstruction, Colin McQuillan traces the concept of life in the eighteenth-century aesthetic theories of Baumgarten and Meier. For the former, aesthetics is the science of sensible cognition, pertaining to the lower cognitive faculty, and admitting perfections – the agreement of which with each other in a representation constituting life (vita) or liveliness. The latter introduces the notion of living (lebendig) cognition, which is distinct when moving the higher faculty of desire – the will – and indistinct when arousing the lower faculty of desire – the feeling of pleasure or pain. Kant, in criticising both, rejects the association of beauty with sensible cognition already since his 1770s lectures but maintains at the same time the link between life and the independent (from the faculty of desire) faculty of the feeling of pleasure or pain, to finally arrive at the thesis of the third Critique that the cognitive faculties are enlivened through free play.

In chapter five, Kristi Sweet links the concept of life to a neglected part of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, namely section seventeen on the ideal of beauty. The concept of life – present already in Kant’s early works as the union of force and matter, where the former activates the latter – denotes for critical Kant the causal unity of freedom and nature – or the direct forcefulness of reason in the natural order – which reason itself demands in seeking the unconditioned. Even though such realisation points beyond the confines of the critical system, the ideal of beauty – as the maximally beautiful individual instantiation – is an instance of life. Human figures have life insofar as freedom, the unconceptualisable imperative of the will, animates them, insofar as a human being’s movements, gestures, or comportment are wholly determined through moral ends. In that sense, beauty manifests reason’s demand of a unity of force and matter, of freedom and nature, or simply manifests life.

Chapter six by Rachel Zuckert is the first of three pieces treating the Kantian sublime. In Kant’s exposition of the dynamical sublime, our encounter with the might of nature inhibits our vital powers before they get outpoured even stronger through the evocation of our rational moral nature. Zuckert traces an explanatory gap in Kant’s account: the conjunction between the representation of human vulnerability as a natural being and that of human invulnerability as a moral being is not justified. The justification can be reconstructed, Zuckert claims, if one sees that Kant initially adopts the Burkean associative-stimulative framework of vital power arousal, which he nevertheless couples with an additional implicit assumption: the moral subject reflectively reinterprets such vitally thrilling experience as symbolic of morality and the discontinuity it entails for human nature. The Burkean feeling of vitality, or Lebensgefühl, is then reflectively given a spiritualised meaning as Geistesgefühl, the feeling of a being oriented to rational moral ends.

Robert Clewis’ piece can be seen as a natural continuation of Zuckert’s thoughts on the topic. Clewis singles out two sources of pleasure (among the four he traces) in the case of the dynamical sublime. The first consists in the expansion or stretching of imagination by reason in order to feel nature’s power and might. The second is found in the biophysiological model Kant adopts from Burke, which Clewis calls ‘dam-and-release’ of the vital forces, and which renders the sublime a negative pleasure. Clewis holds that Kant retains the Burkean empirico-psychological account to describe the vitalistic phenomenology of the experience, in which the perceiver is not self-aware of the superiority of reason or self-conscious of aspects such as the subreption committed in the judgement or its normativity. It is rather the job of the transcendental philosopher in their subtle reasoning to introduce the perspective revealing all the above aspects and the concealed (from the perceiver) ground of the experience of the sublime.

In the third contribution on the topic, Dilek Huseyinzadegan challenges Kant’s argumentation supporting the thesis that the sublime is a universal feeling available to all human beings. Culture, or cultivation of the faculties, and receptivity to ideas of reason are required, and that is why uncultured or unrefined people cannot make such judgements, per Kant’s own words. Kant attempts to salvage the transcendental character of the sublime by claiming an a priori ground in human nature, namely the predisposition [Anlage] to moral feeling. However, as Huseyinzadegan shows, that ground is never transcendentally deduced in the text. Quite the contrary, the blueprint for moral culture is provincially reserved for specific types of gendered, racialised, and nationalised subjects, as seen in Kant’s account of the development of the moral feeling through the – white Western European – culture of skill and discipline. Huseyinzadegan names this an empirical or anthropological deduction.

In chapter nine, Rodolphe Gasché sketches the interplay between the concepts of sensus communis and the feeling of life. Kant’s assertions that the judgement of taste lays claim to the agreement (Beitritt), approval (Beifall), or assent (Beistimmung) of each and every individual in the entire sphere of judging subjects reveals, through the use of the prefix Bei-, the sense of a shared community of subjects, or a public sphere. That sense is captured by the Kantian adaptation (against both the Aristotelian and Latin traditions, as well as against its eighteenth-century use) of the term sensus communis, denoting an idea of human spiritual life in common and a faculty that a priori takes into account the standpoint of everyone else by abstracting from one’s own private limitations. As such, sensus communis is the transcendental a priori ground of the universal voice with which the judgement of taste speaks and of the universal communicability of its accompanying and (through the feeling of life) enlivening state of mind.

Rudolf Makkreel surveys, in chapter ten, Kant’s anthropological and aesthetic writings, where three levels of human life can be found: the lowest, the soul, denoting the passive capacity to be modified by sense impressions; higher, the mind, as the reactive capacity to compare and reflect; and the highest, the spirit, as the entirely self-active spontaneity of practical reason. With the free play of the faculties in the beautiful indicating life at the level of the mind, and aesthetic ideas produced by imagination pointing to life at the level of spirit, Makkreel reads the aesthetic feeling of life as a holistic mental feeling mediating between the passivity of sense and the pure spontaneity of intellect. The imagination’s function of comprehending in an instant in the case of the sublime is central in revealing the supersensible ground of the life of the mind. It can also have, Makkreel suggests, an orientational function in the reflective comprehension of the internal reciprocity of organisms.

In chapter eleven, Susan Meld Shell discusses how Kant conceives the political state as an organised or self-organised being. Shell argues that two distinct conceptions of the body politic can be traced in Kant, corresponding to different stages of his emerging understanding of organisms. The first – under the influence of Rousseau’s general will – is the model of the monarchical state united from within, either as an enlightened monarchy (an organic body internally animated) or as a despotic monarchy (a mere machine governed by absolute will). The second is introduced by Kant in the 1790s, in response to the death of Frederick the Great and the French Revolution, and revises the concept of the enlightened monarchy: it is no longer only the state itself that is self-subsistent, with its parts merely inherent in its substance. The parts themselves are now thought of as self-organising members that co-affect the civic whole in reciprocal means-ends relations, in an analogy with the Kantian definition of a natural end at the time. That model yields on the political plane a true republic that unites its citizens through a representative system and a non-coercive federation of republics.

Michael Olson examines, in chapter twelve, the relation between the feeling of health and the feeling of life. Health is defined from the mid-1780s onwards as a state of equilibrium of the bodily vital forces (Lebenskräfte), with illness resulting from its disturbance. While health cannot be felt, its diminution occasions pain, or the feeling of the hindrance of life, and its restoration occasions pleasure, or the feeling of the promotion of life. Olson argues that Kant’s reference to the feeling of health in §54 of the Critique of the Power of Judgement should, therefore, be read as a shorthand for the feeling of the promotion of life that restores the equilibrium of health. The purpose of §54 is to draw a link between the pleasure elicited by beauty and the gratification of the body that restores health. The latter is a corporeal analogue of the former, as both cases result from a free play: the former from the harmonious free play of the faculties, the latter from a free play of sensations.

In chapter thirteen, Joan Steigerwald argues that Kant’s formulation of organic functions – such as generation, growth, maintenance, and reproduction – informed the emerging life sciences of the nineteenth century. Naturalists and physiologists, such as Kielmeyer, as well as philosophers, such as Schelling, employ the key Kantian notion of reciprocity of cause and effect of the Critique of the Power of Judgement in order to explain the self-organising capacity of organisms. However, whereas Kant constructs what Steigerwald calls the ‘amphibious’ concept of natural purpose so as to balance the conception of organisms against his own strict dichotomy between the mechanical laws of nature and the rational concept of purpose, his influence moves beyond that dichotomy after incorporating findings from the new sciences of the time.

Finally, Felicitas Munzel concludes the volume with a contribution on Kant’s vision of moral life, or the life of a finite moral rational being. While mind as Gemüt denotes the principle of life in the power of the soul to become affected, moral feeling – as an effect of the moral law on the mind – constitutes an aesthetic state of the mind’s responsiveness to practical reason. It is a duty, however, to cultivate moral feeling through the cultivation of our aptitude for personality – in the context of the three Kantian levels of human aptitudes (Anlagen), pertaining to animality, humanity, and personality, respectively. Mind constitutes, thus, a middle term for Kant for the faculty of the life of rational animal beings; a life linking the legislation stemming from personality, or from their rational moral intelligible self, to their animal life. The cultivation of moral feeling is the path towards the realisation of the highest form of life, or moral life, and towards the highest good, in the determination of human life by reason and in accord with personality.

Space limitations unfortunately prevent a more thorough and in-depth critical discussion of the arguments and the positions defended in the outlined essays. Nevertheless, it is not far-fetched to say that Kant and the Feeling of Life is set to become a point of scholarly reference in the years to come, and the high-quality essays featured are certain to spur extensive scholarly discussion. I would recommend it, without hesitation, to any Kant scholar or student interested in the vast array of topics covered.