A Spur to Activity: Kant, Reflection and the Siren's Song

Christopher Wallace ()

A Spur to Activity: Kant, Reflection and the Siren's Song

In this paper Kant's third Critique is approached as a 'way-out' of the timely life of the spectator.  Kant invokes here the notion of a 'beautiful voice' as a means of expanding the given, and thus experience, beyond the timely image that appears before the subject from within the confines of the 'dwelling' erected in the first Critique.  In attending to phenomena that remained 'nothing for us' when measured discursively, the Kant of the third is concerned with a life not reducible to the schematic measure in which what can be named the untimely, or incommensurate, does not figure.  The argument to be pursued is that the 'beautiful voice' gives both a different measure and a different life by interrupting the continuity of successive time.  Under the conditions of Neuzeit however, it is 'too late' to hear the sounding of the siren's song such that the reflective subject remains unmoved by the affect of an untimely past.  Nevertheless, there is yet another Kant, a 'late Kant', that gestures towards a life that via the recognition of the 'nameless pains of boredom', opens up the possibility of the transformation of the spectator via the reinscription of affect into the life of the subject.  This 'late Kant', it will be argued, allows of a future that demands neither the disavowal nor continuing of the past.