Kant and Milton’s “Reciprocal” Expression of Coexistent Being
Embedded Files
Sanford Budick
Sanford Budick
Jerusalem
Professor of English
The Hebrew University
Sanford Budick is Professor of English at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
His publications include:
Dryden and the Abyss of Light: A Study of Religio Laici and
The Hind and the Panther (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1970)
Poetry of Civilization: Mythopoeic Displacement in the Verse
of Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Johnson (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1974)
The Dividing Muse: Images of Sacred Disjunction in Milton’s
Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)
The Western Theory of Tradition: Terms and Paradigms of the
Cultural Sublime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
Kant and Milton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2010)
Hazarding All: Shakespeare and the Drama of Consciousness
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021)
Edited books with Geoffrey Hartman and Wolfgang Iser.
Some awards related to the presentation:
Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2002-
2003
James Holly Hanford Award of the Milton Society of America,
1987, for The Dividing Muse: Images of Sacred Disjunction in
Milton’s Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)
James Holly Hanford Award of the Milton Society of America,
2012, for Kant and Milton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2010)
Some articles related to the presentation:
"Miltonic Mind" Milton's Modernities, ed. Feisal G. Mohamed and Patrick Fadely (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 169-197
"The Function of Kant’s Miltonic Citations on a Page of the Opus postumum", Philosophy and Literature 40 (1) (2016):76-97
"Descarte's Cogito, Kant's Sublime, and Rembrandt's Philosophers: Cultural
Transmission as Occasion for Freedom"; Modern Language Quarterly 58 (1997): 27-61; reprinted in Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 235-268
“Kant's Miltonic Test of Talent: The Presence "When I Consider" in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” Modern Language Quarterly, 61 (2000): 481-518
"Tradition in the Space of Negativity"; in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989; reprinted Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 297-322
“Locating the Early Modern Emergence of the Moral Sublime: Kant’s Engagement with Milton’s Poetry and the Book of Job,” in Tradition, Heterodoxy and Religious Culture: Judaism and Chrisitanity in the Early Modern Period, ed. Chanita Goodblatt and Howard Kreisel (Beersheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 2006), pp. 233-62
“Respect,” in Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook, ed. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Donovan Sherman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 180-187
Kant and Milton’s “Reciprocal” Expression of Coexistent Being
22.07.2024
Rio de Janeiro - 10h
Kaliningrad - 15h
Jerusalem - 16h
Despite the fact that I previously devoted a monograph to Kant’s relation to Milton’s poetry, I then failed to see the profound, far-ranging insights that Kant explicitly brings to a key passage of Paradise Lost in a much-revised page of the Opus postumum. I do not much blame myself for this large oversight. Not only did no other commentator take note of them, but, as I have learned with considerable struggle, following Kant’s extended engagement with Milton on that manuscript page requires sustained delving through layer upon compressed layer of collocated meanings.
Focusing on Raphael’s verses at Paradise Lost. 8.140-52, Kant explained Milton’s achievement of the experience of ethereal light and coexistent being in the performance of “reciprocal” perceptions.
This explanation takes the form of an unfolding of Kant’s terms for experience of ether-light in close parallel with Milton’s terms for expressing “holy light” or “Light Ethereal” or “that light.”
In Milton’s verses and Kant’s corresponding explanations, an immaterial being inserts the preceding idea of the purposiveness of an animated first matter.
This insertion takes the form of a “What if” (Milton) or “hypothesis” (Kant) of the dynamical or animated first matter that Milton calls “Light Ethereal” and that Kant calls “caloric” or “Aether . . . Licht” or “light-material” or “light stuff.”
For both Milton in practice and Kant at very least in theory, inserting and communicating the purposiveness of this dynamical, reciprocal first matter is an “actus of cognition” that is the key to experience of coexistent being.
Handout
Handout
Budick_THE FUNCTION OF KANT'S MILTONIC CITATIONS ON A PAGE OF THE OPUS POSTUMUM.pdfPage updated
Report abuse