Kant on the cognitive value of poetry

Abstract

It is natural to interpret Kant’s claim that the poet, while playing “with ideas”, provides “nourishment to the understanding” (KU § 51, AA 05: 321) as an attribution of cognitive value to poetry. Given that he ascribes to poetry “the highest rank of all” among the arts (KU § 53, AA 05:326), it is also natural to assume that having that value contributes to the high
artistic value of works of poetry. However, that Kant really endorsed this view would appear to be disputable, on the one hand because he explicitly claims that both in nature and art, “that is beautiful which pleases in the mere judging (neither in sensation nor through a concept)” (KU § 44, AA 05: 306), and this may have prevented him from assigning a role to cognitive values in promoting the overall aesthetic value of works of poetry; on the other hand, because he maintains that “an aesthetic idea cannot become a cognition, because it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate” (KU § 57
Anm. I, AA 05: 342).

In this paper, it will be argued that Kant should have been less decided on this, all the more so because the poetic examples that he discusses seem to be cases where aesthetic value and cognitive value relate to one another. In particular, Kant’s comments on verses by Friedrich II show that poetry can convey a kind of cognition – in the case in question, the cognition that we now call ‘perspectival knowledge’. In the paper, the thesis that poetry has cognitive value is not presented as a general claim but as amounting to the statement that some poetic works can convey knowledge and this contributes to their overall value. As for the
kind of knowledge at issue, what Kant says about poetry is of help for understanding that this knowledge is to be distinguished from scientific or philosophical knowledge in part because the relation between text and knowledge is not that of communication or information, but of Darstellung or presentation. Poetic knowledge – if it is allowed to use this expression – is conveyed less through a propositional saying than through a demonstrative showing.