Kant and Milton by Sanford Budick (review)

In the introduction to Kant and Milton, Sanford Budick offers an alternative title — Milton and Miltonism in Immanuel Kant, 1764–95, with Special Emphasis on 1785–90. The alternative points to his larger topic — the extent to which Kant’s reading of Milton and his engagement with German Miltonists enabled him to formulate his moral and aesthetic philosophy, culminating in the publication in 1790 of the Critique of Judgment. Although Milton is widely assumed to be the fountainhead of English Romanticism and Kant to be bedrock in Romantic poetry and modern criticism, their relationship has hitherto been a mere footnote in scholarly studies. In this sophisticated and grounded book, Budick reveals that over the decades in which Kant was writing his three Critiques, he read and re-read Milton, referring to him as a “genius” of “exemplary originality,” i.e., worthy of imitation though impossible to imitate (35). In the course of his study, Budick shows that Milton’s poetry was formative in the development of Kant’s philosophy, much as the epics of Homer were formative for Plato and the plays of Sophocles for Aristotle.

Budick maintains that the significance of Milton’s poetry for Kant was not, as one might expect, its focus on the topics of freedom and morality but its power for liberating the mind and initiating a progression that leads to an experience of the moral sublime. He begins by collecting Kant’s fugitive comments on Milton from letters and lectures (some only recently published) and by identifying passages in the philosophical works that draw on Milton without naming him. Correlating Kant’s readings of Milton with the analysis of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment and other works, Budick concludes that the philosopher’s “deepest discoveries of the mind’s access to freedom and moral feeling” occurred through a “crystallization” of his engagement with Milton (7, 253). This crystallization, Budick argues in the final chapter, occurred during the composition of §49 of the Critique, a conclusion he supports with a close reading of §49 and passages from Paradise Lost. In the chapters leading up to this conclusion, Budick not only rescues penetrating interpretations of Milton by Kant and German critics but also offers his own commentary on three monumental works — the sonnet on his blindness (XVIII), Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes.

Kant’s aesthetic and its grounding in his epistemology is at the center of Budick’s study. The epistemology, in a nutshell, is that there are two sources of knowledge — the sensibility (what is given through the senses) and the understanding (what is constructed in the mind). The sensibility refers the raw data of the senses to the a priori forms of space and time, and the understanding schematizes this sense experience into categories such as quality, quantity, etc., in the process effecting a move from perception to thought. This movement from sight to insight is crucial in the Critique of Judgment, Part One of which analyzes aesthetic judgments and Part Two common sense judgments. The first have their meaning in themselves, and the second in relation to a purpose outside of themselves.

In his discussion of aesthetic objects, Kant distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime, with Milton’s poetry as the premier example of the latter. The distinction is detailed in Part One of the third Critique. The beautiful “is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally” (CJ §9).¹ But, as Kant explains, objects can be beautiful without being sublime. The beautiful is related to form and definite boundaries whereas the sublime is related to formlessness and the representation of boundlessness. The beautiful is associated with objects and with stasis, whereas the sublime is associated with the mind and with dynamism. The beautiful is related to the perception of at least a shadowy model in nature or human nature; the sublime to a recognition of the inadequacy of all models. The satisfaction associated with the beautiful involves disinterested contemplation; that associated with the sublime involves deep personal feeling and the...