Aesthetic feeling, moral judgement and poetic language: Kant's and Wordsworth's responses to Rousseau

My dissertation examines the ways in which the moral thought of Rousseau can serve as a background for us to understand certain fundamental affinities between Kant and Wordsworth. I examine first how aesthetic feeling provides the locus to reconcile the differences between the moral roles of reason and sensibility; and second, how the ethical function of feeling enables us to account for certain changes in the conception of language in the latter half of the eighteenth century and, in particular, for the attribution of ethical significance to linguistic articulation. I set up the historical and conceptual framework of the project, by arguing that in Rousseau's Emile and the Discours sur l'origine de l'inegalite, reason and sensibility have an intimate mutual involvement. The reminder of the project explores how Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft and Wordsworth's The Prelude develop two issues implicit in Rousseau. First, I argue that, in both Kant and Wordsworth, aesthetic feeling shaped human agents' capacity to make moral judgements, for it provided them with a mode of awareness of their relation to the world, and incorporated a judgment about that relation. Second, I argue that linguistic arts, in particular poetry, constituted aesthetic feeling in both authors, because they provided human beings with the medium to articulate what was not conceptualizable and completely expressible in language.;This project aims at filling two lacunae in previous research. Critical interest in the similarities between Kant and Wordsworth has mostly been limited to these authors' conception of the sublime; their conception of the structure of the beautiful and its ethical significance is relatively unexplored. Moreover, it is often said that while Kant followed Rousseau in locating the moral dimension in human beings' ability to abide by a preexisting universal rule in virtue of their rational nature, the Romantics further developed the centrality of sentiment in Rousseau and defined the good life in terms of certain sentiments. This restrictive construal misses other aspects of Rousseau's importance to Kant and the Romantics, namely, his conceptions of the relation between reason and sensibility, as well as of the ethical value of language.