mundane to us; we [also] transform [merely given] nature...in accordance
with principles that lie higher in reason...in this we feel our freedom from
the law of association (which applies to the empirical use of [imagination]),
[so that]...material...lent to us by nature...can be transformed by us into
something entirely different, namely into that which steps beyond nature.^19In artistic making, that is to say, a new cultural world is imagined and antici-
pated. The making of art serves as an exemplary gesture that demonstrates the
possibility of free, coherent, and satisfying meaning-making as such.
Partly by way of Kant’s influence, and partly by way of developing independ-
ently the streams of thought that Kant crystallized, these ideas about genius as
exemplary, free, and original imaginative making have been widely taken up.
Coleridge’s conception of imagination as an esemplastic power (molding,
shaping, and unifying power of making) as opposed to merely associative fancy
derives from Kant and Schelling.^20 Michael Baxandall describes influence–the
activeand liberative taking up by a successor of motifs, subject matter, mater-
ials, and so forth from the work of a predecessor: for example, Picasso’sactive
taking up of Cézanne’swayof“registering...two separate planes...as one
superplane”–in similar terms.^21 Harold Bloom’s well-known theory of the
anxiety of influence describes a similar play of active response and Oedipal
contestation in the relation between successor and precursor, as successors are
firstthreatened bythesublime energyofa predecessor geniusand theninactive
response to this threat are liberated to the exercise of their own creativity.^22 A
generally Kantian theory of imagination, creativity, and influence captures the
importance of“direct experience”of original works, as opposed to copies,
descriptions, or paraphrases.^23 It enables us to understand the possibility of
(^19) Ibid., §49, p. 192; my interpolations. For more on Kant’s thought concerning culture as
second nature, see Eldridge,Persistence of Romanticism, pp. 38–39, 62–63.
(^20) Samuel Taylor Coleridge,Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent,
1965), especially chapter 12,“On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power,”pp. 161–67.
(^21) Baxandall,“Excursus Against Influence,”inPatterns of Intention, pp. 58–62. The quoted
phrases come from p. 61. Baxandall’s point in writingagainstinfluence is to emphasize
that influence is active, agentive, taking up of strategies from a predecessor,nota passive,
merely conditioned response–exactly along the lines of Kant’s account of a successor
actively using the work of a predecessor as a model.
(^22) Harold Bloom,The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry(Oxford University Press, 1973).
(^23) See Kant,Critique, trans. Guyer and Matthews, §47, p. 188, where Kant observes that only
“models”and not“mere descriptions”can serve to transmit freely formed, genuinely
artistic ideas“to posterity.”
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