Kant and Anti-Intellectualism: On Displeasure in Judging and the Failure of the Imagination

Abstract

Anti-intellectualism is both epistemic (against products of the intellect) and social (against an elite). One can find in Kant’s discussion of the displeasure in judgment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment an account of anti-intellectualism that captures both of these aspects of anti-intellectualism. For Kant, the remedy for anti-intellectualism, which, I argue, he considers to be constituted by the inability of the productive imagination to come up with forms of possible intuition, is engagement with aesthetic ideas.