An Iroquois in Paris and a Crusoe on a Desert Island: Kant’s Aesthetics and the Process of Civilization

Abstract

In section 2 of Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) Immanuel Kant refers to the Iroquois sachem declaring that what pleased him in Paris were cook-shops, not palaces. For Kant the sachem seems to be a barbarian ensnared by his appetite and incapable of disinterested pleasure. This essay, however, argues first that Kant, extracting this episode from “The History of New France” (1744) written by French Jesuit missionary Charlevoix, tacitly advocates the idea of the noble savage, thereby giving the Iroquois sachem the function of criticizing a luxurious civilization. Second, the essay shows that in the “General Remark on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments” Kant evaluates positively a castaway Crusoe as a person who withdraws from civilized society, conscious of the fact that society is far from being a moral ideal. The Iroquois sachem and the castaway Crusoe are examples that anticipate section 83 in the second part of his Critique of the Power of Judgment, which focuses on the role of the faculty of taste in the process of civilization, thereby incorporating into his whole system the theory of taste as expounded in the first part.