Some remarks on Genius

MARTÍNEZ, LUCIANA

Congreso; Kant, Art and Beautiful Art; 2024

In this contribution I will discuss some aspects of the historical development of the notion of genius in the pre-critical period. The sources are not texts written by Kant. They are, instead, annotations of the students who participated in his lectures. The nature of the sources makes certain methodological precautions necessary. In order to verify that the ideas developed are more than mere repetitions of the handbooks, it is necessary to compare the contents of the texts with those of the handbooks. In order to verify that the details correspond to what Kant said in the lectures and are not interpretative mistakes by the students, different sets of manuscripts have to be compared with each other and with the philosopher's handwritten reflections. Because of the constraints of an spoken presentation, I will omit the sections of my paper in which I carry out this task and only comment on the main results.Giorgio Tonelli has studied the development of the doctrine of genius in Kant's annotations and has argued that, although we find some comments on the concept in the earlier sources, it is in the silent decade that this doctrine is established. Relying partly on this position and partly on the available sources, which begin in the 70s, I will study two moments. The first moment corresponds to the first half of the decade and the second is the one following Kant's reception of Gerard. I think that, perhaps as a consequence of the contact with Gerard’s ideas and agreeing with Tonelli’s view, there was a turn after 1776.