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51 Toward a Cultural Idealism: Negativity and Freedom in Hegel and Kant  Tilottama Rajan I German Idealism is often seen as transcendentally indifferent to history. When it is recognized that these theorists are not “pure” philosophers, their cultural and historical concerns are seen as emerging within a totalizing imperialism of philosophy. Yet it is the very idealism of post-Kantian philosophy, intersected as it is by a certain Romanticism, which has made possible our appreciation of aesthetic alterity. For whatever its local prejudices, philosophy after Immanuel Kant introduces new values and forms of judgment seminal for the reception of otherness. Within this context I focus on the opening created by the transposition of the Kantian sublime into the historical framework of G. W. F. Hegel’s Aesthetics. More specifically, I focus on the excessive place of the symbolic and romantic within an art history whose classical totalization is torn open by its displacement from the end to the middle of Hegel’s project. Kant and Hegel are often opposed, the work of Slavoj Žižek being an exception.1 But the Aesthetics shares certain cultural and philosophical topoi with Kant, while performing them differently. It transfers his distinction between the sublime and the beautiful from a philosophical context that elides their conflict to the historicized scene of their cultural competition. It is studded with references to the Idea and freedom—terms with a prehistory in Idealism and also in Kant’s Critiques. As important, Hegel’s work assumes 52 Tilottama Rajan Kant’s analytic apparatus: his distinctions between ideas and concepts, reflective and determinant judgment, and pure and practical reason. Not only is Kant more post-Kantian than we think (“reason” being not unlike Hegel’s Spirit); Hegel is more Kantian than he appears. To read Hegel with Kant rather than J. G. Fichte is to recover a (self-)critical Hegel. More specifically, it restores the context of the Aesthetics in “judgment,” an activity that reconstitutes thought as critique. “Judgment” for Kant involves assessing how and whether concepts apply to experience. Determinant judgments interpret an object in terms of an a priori concept. But the aesthetic is, rather, the object of reflective judgments that are relative, not absolute.2 While such judgments are less certain, they are also more innovative. For by generating a rule from a case for which there is no rule, they open knowledge to new epistemic material. Aesthetic, unlike logical, judgment does not “subsume [its object] under any concept,” thus responding to the autonomy of imagination, whose “freedom . . . consists in the fact that it schematizes without any concept” (CJ 128–29). Kant’s bipartite construction of judgment thus creates a space for the questioning as well as the description of what we might call “Aesthetic Reason.” Ostensibly he limits the subversiveness of judgment by discussing it in a treatise confined to the aesthetic. But as David Carroll points out, judgment in the third Critique is not specifically aesthetic. This vagueness in its reference allows the judgment specified as aesthetic to become a revisionary paradigm for judgment in general—aesthetic, legal, or social.3 The most radical test of judgment occurs in the reflective process that Kant names the sublime, which confronts the mind with an excess it cannot grasp synthetically. The sublime causes a crisis in judgment, not only because it resists accepted canons of beauty, but also because it concedes that judgments are really “sensations considered to be judgments.” In letting this judgment be nonsynthetic, moreover, Kant sees that there are cognitions that cannot yet be reduced to concepts because there are no concepts to convey them. He creates a philosophical space for material that had previously fallen outside the sphere of judgment: forms that lack form, and more recently, moods such as hysteria or melancholy. This material has not been “domiciled” within discourse, thus functioning—albeit negatively—on the side of “freedom.”4 Kant’s linked concerns with art, freedom, and judgment form a background for reading the Aesthetics. For not only is Hegel too concerned with the role of judgment in the formation of culture, he also extends Kant’s discussion of the aesthetic as the “unformed” rather than the adequate embodiment of the Idea. Among Hegel’s many contexts is Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in which the aesthetic is conceived as the beautiful, as Western culture. If the Letters convinces Kant to provide an education in which...

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