Kant's Miltonic Test of Talent: The Presence of "When I Consider" in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

In this essay I propose that Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is extensively related to Milton's sonnet on his talent and blindness, "When I Consider." I am aware that my proposal of a significant relation between Kant's thought in the Groundwork and a passage of seventeenth-century English verse may seem not only incredible or trivial but, much more offending, necessarily (in Kant's terms) heteronomous to the autonomy that is the condition of the categorical imperative. I will try to suggest, however, that Kant's relation to Milton's performance provides Kant's access to autonomy in the exercise of his "special talent" [besonderes Talent] for exemplarity, that is, for his particular "teaching" [Belehrung] of exemplarity in the categorical imperative (4:388-9). ¹ Kant's teaching in and of autonomy thus represents his way of learning from Milton. At the same time, I do not require immediate credibility for this suggestion as a condition for establishing the principal facts of the relation between the Groundwork and Milton's sonnet. Indeed, it is clear to me that further articulations of the significance of this relation may well be in order.

My ultimate aims in adducing the density and extent of correspondence between Kant's Groundwork and Milton's sonnet are (1) to identify the status of exemplarity and commonplaceness in Milton's performance that makes it available to Kant in what, in the Critique of Judgment, he calls a "test" of the "talent to be exemplary" (5:309, 318); (2) to make it impossible, or at least very difficult, to doubt that, in exercising his "special talent" for learning as well as for teaching the categorical imperative, Kant followed Milton's performance in considerable detail; and (3) to use the relation of the Groundwork to the poem (and its line) to understand what the "test" of talent and freedom can mean in a kind of learning that is, in Kant's terms in the Critique of Judgment, "following" [Nachfolge], not "imitation" [Nachahmung] (5:318). But I begin by reframing an old problem with regard to which this newly proposed relation has its significance for Kant.

It would seem that in Western cultures what is meant by teaching is someone's presentation of an example, while by learning is meant grasping that presentation. This limited reach of teaching and learning, bound down by examples, is what Kant has in mind in the Critique of Judgment when he pronounces that "learning is nothing but imitation" [Lernen nichts als Nachahmen ist (5:308)]. Indeed, this statement may well remind us of his remark in the Critique of Pure Reason that "examples are the go-cart" or "walker" [der Gängelwagen] of "those who are lacking in the natural talent" of judgment (A 134; B 173-4). Yet it is not easy to see how, at least in Western cultures, we ever view even the most abstract groundwork of a concept without some empirical specificity (if only a time and place of transmission) that causes it to be learned as someone's example of what is being taught. And if we are always only teaching and learning by, from, or how to imitate someone's example, how do we ever teach and learn intellectual autonomy or mental freedom, assuming that such autonomy or freedom is possible under some conditions?

As one answer to this question, I will identify in Kant's writings about these matters the workings of an idea that he himself describes only in part. I will propose that this idea has a special place in these writings and that it corresponds to a significant paradigm of learning in Western cultures. I will further propose that in the Groundwork Kant encounters the full cogency of this paradigm...