Ethically Speaking, or “Freedom” in Context: Poetics, Critical Economy, and Kant’s Invention of the “Category” of the “Possible”

This chapter explores the basis of the unique status and effectivity that Kant accords literary representation in the Third Critique in comparison to the basis of those actions he defines as “moral” in the Second Critique. Whereas Kant’s descriptions of the singular power of literature focus on the poet’s ability not merely to represent the natural world but to “use nature as schema[ta]” for the representation the “supersensible,” his account of moral action rests on the apparently mundane “ground” of what he calls the “the possible.” Yet the content of that account demonstrates its own remarkable condition: That any subject’s “recognition” of the “capacity” to act in “freedom” from the purely mechanical causality of the natural world can itself only be made apparent in words, a series of specifically verbal actions, all resulting in the expressed “acknowledgement” that such “free,” “moral” action is indeed “possible.” Kant’s new critical economy of our intellectual capacities thus makes of “the possible” a new, radically counterintuitive category dependent not upon a theoretical division between noumenon and phenomenon but upon the real, practical distinction between the verbal and the phenomenal. Finally, the chapter compares Kant’s description of “what the poets do” and his own specifically verbal realization of the critical moral category of the possible with Schleiermacher’s understanding of the “unity” of language with thinking and resulting equation of “critique” with “literary interpretation.”