Explain and evaluate Kant's account of genius.

Explain and Evaluate Kant's Account of Genius

Introduction

The word genius refers to the sense of “native intellectual power of an exalted type” dates from 1749, and it was during the middle and later years of the eighteenth century that this term began to be used, first in Britain and then in Germany, to denote that combination of original creative power and transcendent or uncommon insight which we particularly associate with Romanticism. From the 1770s onward, indeed, genius is so often used in combination with the idea of an organically shaping imagination that the two qualities or capacities cannot easily be separated. As with so many aspects of Romanticism—including many traditionally attributed to German sources—however, this meaning is clearly anticipated in Mark Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination (1744), which notably calls on “Some heavenly genius, whose unclouded thoughts / Attain that secret harmony which blends / Thaetherial spirit with its mold of clay” to teach the poet how God or nature enables us to discover that the physical world is ultimately an expression of our own imaginative powers.

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of 1775, however, resists connecting genius with imagination (let alone the imagination which, in Akenside, first creates and then reveals the significance of physical nature), going no further than to define genius as “Mental powers or faculties” (albeit the faculties of a man of genius are defined as “superior”). Similarly with regard to imagination, Johnson is distinctly reserved, defining it as “the power of forming ideal pictures” or “the power of representing things absent to oneself or others.” Akenside's use of these terms, however, is echoed in the work of the Scottish philosopher Alexander Gerard, whose Essay on Genius (1774) specifically associates this quality with an organically shaping imagination which imitates the creativity of nature, anticipating the better-known theories of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.

Evaluation of Kant's Account of Genius

In the Edinburgh Review for October 1802, Francis Jeffrey complained of a new 'sect' of poets who had 'reasserted the independence of genius'. Far from being original, he wrote, the poets of this school drew their doctrines from Germany. Jeffrey was alluding to the celebration of genius in the Sturm und Drang of the 1770s and to the Romantic literature of the 1790s. He was also, possibly, referring to the philosophy of Kant, who in his Critique of Judgment (1790) defined Genius as 'the innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art'. In Kant's influential account, genius is aligned with originality and the productive imagination. As such, genius breaks with neoclassical accounts of art based on imitation and convention, for according to Kant it is not possible to create fine art (as opposed to craft) without genius (Jaspers, Arendt, Manheim, 1962, 108-116).

In the first years of the nineteenth century, genius was not as foreign to British sensibilities as Jeffrey seemed to imply. In fact, German interest in genius was strongly influenced by writers such as Richard Hurd (1720 - 1808), Thomas Warton, ...