Book contents
- Kant on Language
- Kant on Language
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Linguistic Implications of Kant’s Thought
- Chapter 1 Kant on Language
- Chapter 2 The Rise of Empirical Meaning
- Chapter 3 Kant and the Idea of a Language in ‘the Senses’
- Chapter 4 Grammar, Categories, and the Structure of Experience
- Chapter 5 A Liberated Language
- Chapter 6 Expressing the Unnamable
- Chapter 7 Kant’s Metaphors and Analogies
- Part II Historical and Philosophical Implications
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 6 - Expressing the Unnamable
Poetic Language, Humanity, and Sociability in Kant’s Third Critique
from Part I - Linguistic Implications of Kant’s Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2025
Book contents
- Kant on Language
- Kant on Language
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Linguistic Implications of Kant’s Thought
- Chapter 1 Kant on Language
- Chapter 2 The Rise of Empirical Meaning
- Chapter 3 Kant and the Idea of a Language in ‘the Senses’
- Chapter 4 Grammar, Categories, and the Structure of Experience
- Chapter 5 A Liberated Language
- Chapter 6 Expressing the Unnamable
- Chapter 7 Kant’s Metaphors and Analogies
- Part II Historical and Philosophical Implications
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Throughout the third Critique Kant repeatedly stresses the importance of communication for human sociability, but he does not link communication to any particular view of language, making it uncertain how he thought of it and its importance for our cognition, rationality, and ethical sensibility. Against such uncertainty, my aim here is to show that there is at least one important form of linguistic expression – the poetic one – that is of paramount importance for Kant’s overall view of humanity’s progress towards the kingdom of ends. In developing my account, I start by explicating the importance of communication in Kant’s overall system, and I then focus on poetic expression, understood as a particular kind of communication. The emerging view of the centrality of the particular poetic expression generated by genius grounds Kant’s aesthetic cognitivism and brings to the fore the two main functions of poetic expression: the one related to development of human cognitive and moral capacities, and the one related to the role of poetry, and aesthetic judgments regarding poetry, in promoting our humanity.
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- Kant on Language , pp. 102 - 119Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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