KEY THEMES AND TOPICS

The latter is properly a deranged person with presumed immediate inspiration and a great familiarity with the
powers of the heavens. Human nature
knows no more dangerous illusion.
(EMH 267)

ENTHUSIASM
In the Kantian philosophical lexicon, the
English term enthusiasm can express
both the German terms Enthusiasmus and
Schwrmerei. However, from the beginning
of the 1760s, Kant differentiates between
the two concepts as Herders annotations
to Kants lectures testify (LE 175177). In a
footnote in Obs Kant writes:
Fanaticism [Schwrmerei] must always
be distinguished from enthusiasm
[Enthusiasmus]. The former believes
itself to feel an immediate and extraordinary communion with a higher nature,
the latter signifies the state of the mind
which is inflamed beyond the appropriate degree by some principle, whether it
be by the maxim of patriotic virtue, or of
friendship, or of religion, without involving the illusion of a supernatural community. (Obs 251n.; cf. DSS 348, 365)
What distinguishes fanaticism from enthusiasm is the belief in the implication of a
supernatural and divine cause in the determination of the activity of the mind. In particular, Kant has in mind the British moral
philosophers such as Shaftesbury and also
Pietism.
In the contemporary essay EMH, Kant
gives concrete examples from morality by
distinguishing enthusiasm from fanaticism
and considering the latter as a negative aspect
of the life of the mind, which is deceived by
false appearances (or chimeras):
This two-sided appearance of fantasy in
moral sensations that are in themselves
good is enthusiasm [Enthusiasmus],
and nothing great has ever been accomplished in the world without it. Things
stand quite differently with the fanatic
(visionary, enthusiast [Schwrmer]).

In CJ, Kant asserts that enthusiasm arises

when the idea of the good is connected
with affect. This state of mind, Kant says,
seems to be sublime, so much so that it is
commonly maintained that without it nothing great can be accomplished. In particular,
enthusiasm is aesthetically sublime, because
it is a stretching of the powers through ideas,
which give the mind a momentum that acts
far more powerfully and persistently than
the impetus given by sensory representations (CJ 272).
Fanaticism, instead, is a delusion of being
able to see something beyond all bounds
of sensibility, i.e., to dream in accordance
with principles (to rave with reason) [. . .]
(CJ 275). In CF, Kant explains the anthropological importance of the concept of
enthusiasm:
[T]he passionate participation in the
good with affect, i.e., enthusiasm
(although not to be wholly esteemed,
since all affect as such deserves censure),
provide[s] through this history the occasion for the following remark which is
important for anthropology: genuine
enthusiasm always moves only toward
what is ideal and, indeed, to what is
purely moral, such as the concept of
right, and it cannot be grafted onto selfinterest. (CF 86; trans. amended)
In this last moral sense enthusiasm is referred
to also in CPrR (cf. CPrR 157) and it is
extremely important for Kants ethics and
philosophy of history. MS

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KEY THEMES AND TOPICS

FURTHER READING
P. Fenves (ed.), Raising the Tone of
Philosophy. Late Essays by Immanuel
Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques
Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999).
G. Johnson, The tree of melancholy: Kant
on philosophy and enthusiasm, in
C. Firestone, S. Palmquist (eds), Kant
and the New Philosophy of Religion
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2006), pp. 4361.
S. Meld Shell, The Embodiment of
Reason. Kant on Spirit, Generation, and
Community (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), pt. 5.

ETHER NATURAL SCIENCE, EULER

ETHICAL COMMONWEALTH
(ETHICAL COMMUNITY) RELIGION
EVIL RADICAL EVIL
EXALTATION ENTHUSIASM,
PIETISM
EXPERIENCE (SENSIBILITY)
Kant uses the notion experience in two
ways. It means either (1) perception and
what is given through it, and that which is
abstracted from perceptions by means of
induction, which is the indispensable basis
and necessary ground of all empirical
knowledge (B1) or, far more frequently, (2)
the correspondence of perceptions (Refl
2741) or connected perceptions (B161)
constituting such knowledge; experience in
the latter sense is a necessary connection or

synthesis of perceptions (A176=B218; P 275

[5]). For Kant, experience and knowledge
are inextricably bound up.
Although he admits that it may not be
immediately obvious, or recognized by some
of his modern predecessors, Kant holds that
experience [. . .] contains two very heterogeneous elements, namely a matter for cognition
from the senses and a certain form for ordering it from the inner source of pure intuiting
and thinking (A86=B118) ( form).
On Kants view, without both these material and formal conditions, an objective unity
of representations and thus experience, in
the second above-mentioned sense, itself is
not possible. Kant often talks about possible
experience (e.g. B73, B127) or the possibility of experience, which indicates that Kants
main concern are the conditions of possibility of both the experience of objects and the
objects of experience (B197=A158) rather
than mere experience.
Kant believes that failure to recognize
this led philosophers such as Locke and
Hume to mistaken positions regarding
the source of our concepts and our cognition. Locke and Hume fail to recognize that
there are formal conditions necessary for the
possibility of experience, as they think that
material conditions alone are sufficient to
produce experience. Kant believes that for
them the senses do not merely afford us
impressions but also put them together, and
produce images of objects [. . .] (A120n.).
On this view, experience is something we
have independently of any subsequent actions
of either the understanding ( judgment,
deduction) or imagination. As a result
of failing to recognize that experience is a
composite of that which we receive through
impressions and that which our own cognitive faculty [. . .] provides out of itself (B1),
Kant believes that the empiricists are led to the

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