Kant and Milton

by Sanford Budick

Kant and Milton brings to bear new evidence and long-neglected materials to show the importance of Kant’s encounter with Milton’s poetry to the formation of Kant’s moral and aesthetic thought. Sanford Budick reveals the relation between a poetic vision and a philosophy that theorized what that poetry was doing. As Plato and Aristotle contemplate Homer, so Kant contemplates Milton. In all these cases philosophy and poetry allow us to better understand each other. Milton gave voice to the transformation of human understanding effected by the Protestant Revolt, making poetry of the idea that human reason is created self-sufficient. Kant turned that religiously inflected poetry into the richest modern philosophy. Milton’s bold self-reliance is Kant’s as well. Using lectures of Kant that have been published only in the past decade, Budick develops an account of Kant based on his lifelong absorption in the poetry of Milton, especially Paradise Lost . By bringing to bear the immense power of his reflections on aesthetic and moral form, Kant produced one of the most penetrating interpretations of Milton’s achievement that has ever been offered and, at the same time, reached new peaks in the development of aesthetics and moral reason.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2010

Reviews

[M Pereira · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very good. I think it requires a presumption of the scholarship around Kant's moral and aesthetic philosophy; as well as reading the work of John Milton. It was fulfilling to read Milton before this book. It was not so fun reading Kant!

[Ramzzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Precisely in that moment of loss of power the mind experiences a freedom from all encroaching pressures or needs, so that (Kant believes he has shown) we succeed to the moral feeling that can only be felt in freedom. The temporal duration of the experience of the succession procedure is as uniquely compressed as that of the sublime. In Kant’s mature thought whenever we encounter one of his experiences of Milton’s poetry of the sublime, it is clear that the groundwork that has been laid for the procedure of succession is extensive and deliberated, yet the moment of effectuation is a flight to infinity and a lightning transaction.”

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am hoping I can start getting inspired to write my review of this book. It brings together two unlikely writers/thinkers, a philosopher and a poet, who lived about 100 years apart from each other. Budick claims that Milton significantly inspired Kant's aesthetics and ethics. It is a strong claim, but quite substantiated even though Kant only mentions Milton a few times in his oeuvre.

To take one important claim from the book in the chapter entitled 'Kantian Tragic Form and Kantian "Storytelling"', Budick claims that both 'in the manner of telling and in the form that is represented, storytelling is concerned with the realm of "as if"... the degree of the story's embeddedness in what is for the teller or auditor an infinitely extended repetition, or endless progression, of presupposed, commonplace experience...this storytelling also constitutes the feeling of respect and provides the form of exemplarity in the transfer from the individual to the archetypal or universal' (204-206).

That doesn't really give you a taste of the whole book, but it is a start!