Were the German philosophers really [wirklich] – philosophical Germans? Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science, section 357

Kant's Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime (hereafter referred to as the Observations) has a curious place in the history of his writings, not only in terms of its popularity among the public when it first appeared, but because of the so-called belletristic style it adopts. Ernst Cassirer describes this in his essay ‘Kant and Rousseau’, when he states that Kant became

We will see later in this chapter that ‘style’ and ‘presentation’ (Darstellung) will itself become the scene of a national dispute in philosophy, that ‘style’ will be one of the ways of differentiating national philosophies for Kant, but let us note for now that if Cassirer highlights Kant's preoccupation with ‘style’, he does not indicate that it is the kind that has led scholars of Kant to ignore the Observations as a ‘serious’ piece of work. Indeed, we might heed Paul de Man's warning that if this text sometimes reads ‘like a collection of eighteenthcentury provincial platitudes, [it] is not to be dismissed [so] lightly’ (de Man 1996: 123).

The importance of the text for de Man derives partly from the fact that it bears similarities to Kant's last Critique, published some twenty-six years later, namely, the Critique of Judgement from 1790. For de Man the correspondence is close enough to ‘make any clear discrepancy between the two texts remarkable’ (ibid. 125). Michel Foucault echoes this proximity between the Observations and Kant's later texts in his doctoral thesis, ‘Introduction to Kant's Anthropology’. He even declares that however different the Observations and the Anthropology may be in terms of perspective, they are also ‘surprisingly similar, even when it comes down to the expressions and the choice of words [… as for example, when Kant describes] the distinctive traits that characterise the different nationalities’ (Foucault 2008: 29).