Looking for Kant: An Interrail Archive Trip

With a couple hours to spare before getting on my next train to Rotterdam, I decided to say a proper goodbye to Paris, the first stop in my summer research trip. Standing atop Pont Neuf, with the Seine rushing beneath me, the two archives to which I had devoted the last seven days flanked me on either side. I reflected on the essays I had pored over, on the many letters I had yet to decipher, and the countless galleries I had roamed. After years of exploring 19th-century French aesthetic practice and theory miles from its capital city, it was incredible to witness all the artworks and figures come to life in the city of lights. Promising the Seine that our parting was more of a ‘see you later’ than an ultimate ‘farewell’, I stepped into the Parisian Métropolitain, ready to take on my next archive at Leiden University.

Choosing the interrail pass depicted a rather tangible side to the network I aim to develop between different historical figures – Auguste comte de Kératry, a French art-critic and politician, Humbert de Superville, a Dutch artist, professor and philosopher of sorts, and Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, statistician, founder of the Body Mass Index – and their engagement with Kantian aesthetics. At the crux of my dissertation lies a desire to explore the tensions and conversations that existed in post-Napoleonic Europe on the relationship between universality and contingency – that is, on abstract ideals and the everyday experience of a fluctuating political context. More specifically, my project aims to understand the role aesthetics – particularly the reception and engagement with Kantian aesthetics – played at the heart of these debates.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

My goal with this archival research trip was twofold: on the one hand, to gain access to other works by my primary figures to adequately contextualise their essays within a wider opus; on the other, I set out to engage with the more experiential side to my dissertation. To fully comprehend the materiality of their intellectual musings, I made it my mission to engage with the physical artworks they referenced and used in their essays – the aesthetic practice that materialised, realised, and ultimately supported their aesthetic theories. The tension between universality and contingency manifests too, in these debates, through the act of translation – the universal applicability of abstract ideals constantly placed under examination through the necessary act of translation into different linguistic and semantic contexts across the continent. Switching between French, English – and, at times, German – at every destination added yet another layer of materiality to the subject of contingency.

Placing Paris as the first stop in my tour allowed me to determine the degree of centrality I wish to award it in my dissertation. Visiting the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Musée d’Orsay’s archives substantiated my desire to place its aesthetic-intellectual imaginary at the centre of my search for Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics in early 19th-century Europe. There, I was able to come to terms with Auguste comte de Keratry’s writings, gaining a much richer and wider understanding of how far Kant’s influence extended and the ways in which he became quintessential to Kératry’s main concerns: education, religion, and the role of aesthetics in shaping the next generation of French men following Napoleon’s downfall. Specifically, analysing his 1825 ‘Beaux-Arts’ and 1819 ‘Réflexions sur le moment présent’ helped to establish the author’s intellectual and personal context around the publication of his translation of Kant’s Beobachtungen. I came away from this archival stop with a clearer sense of Kératry’s persona and more convinced about my decision to make him torchbearer of my search for Kant. To understand Kératry’s reception in his own period, I ploughed through the most extensive archive Paris had to offer on Honoré Daumier, the creator of the comte’s infamous caricature. Seeing the caricatured bust at the Musée d’Orsay filled me with a great sense of excitement and fascination. Doing so has given me a clearer sense of where aesthetic thought fitted into aesthetic practice amidst a seemingly ever-changing political context.

A last-minute cancellation of my planned accommodation in Leiden took me to The Hague instead. What originally seemed like a nuisance turned out to be a fortuitous turn of events. Not only was I able to journal and decompress on the train rides back from Leiden – where I needed to visit Humbert de Superville’s special collection – but I also had the chance to explore the Dutch artist’s city in the evenings.  This included a short visit to the library, where his personal reading collection remains, and an accidental encounter with The Hague’s modern art museum. While I did not come away fully convinced of de Superville’s ‘primary knowledge’ theory, my fascination with him as an intellectual figure has undoubtedly grown – my understanding of his relationship to Kant’s aesthetics much clearer and pertinent to the dissertation.

From Leiden to Brussels: a simple snapshot of my European interrail adventure.

My final stop, Brussels, focused on Adolphe Quetelet’s archives at the Royal Academy. His work stands at the very end of my period, enlightening the last vestiges of direct engagement with Kantian aesthetic frameworks and providing a rather fascinating and clear insight into the intersection between natural philosophy and aesthetics in early nineteenth century Europe. His essays on proportions – particularly his reflections on Albrecht Dürer, and Greek sculpture in general – allowed me to explore how mathematics and sculpture come together in the study of human proportions. These aesthetic reflections were essential to the establishment of his theories on the development of human faculties and the search for a so-called ‘average man’. Quetelet’s work presents a more indirect yet nonetheless pertinent side to the reception of Kant’s aesthetics in early 19th-century Europe, adding a more empirical side to Kant’s Beobachtungen, so to speak, and further building on the German philosopher’s discussion of a pan-European sense of heritage and identity at the end of his Beobachtungen. In Brussels, capital of the European Union, this abstract sense of pan-European aesthetic identity very much presented itself to me in contingent, tangible terms almost two centuries after Quetelet’s engagement with Kant’s theories.  His correspondence was as interesting as the essays; it allowed me to appreciate the multi-lingual context to which Quetelet belonged, and which shaped his intellectual frameworks as a result. Getting to read his unpublished, unedited youthful poetry was a bonus, and a wonderful opportunity to see a side of the mathematician I would never even have dreamed of searching for.

Whilst I came away from my research trip firmly aware that my search for Kant could extend much further than the scope of any DPhil dissertation, the network I had sketched out in a somewhat abstract form so many miles away from the EU’s capital increasingly formed a solid map in my mind. Each figure’s aesthetic engagement with debates over universality and contingency have fallen tangibly into place, always nothing more than a train ride away. This archival research trip has enabled me to traverse the world of Kant’s post-Napoleonic reception on the 300th anniversary of his birth. It has marked my return to Oxford and the world of abstract ideas as one fully immersed in the tensions that existed between universality and contingency, as one undeniably closer to the multi-lingual, ever fluctuating aesthetic frameworks that shaped my figures’ experiences and their own search for Kant in post-Napoleonic Europe.

Sofía Sanabria de Felipe is a 3rd year DPhil candidate in History at Magdalen College, Oxford, researching the reception of Kant’s aesthetics in post-Napoleonic francophone Europe.