Kant’s Attention Economy and the Fear of Idolatrous Fixation

Immanuel Kant diagnoses both himself and Emanuel Swedenborg with diseases of attention. Kant’s hypochondria led him to attend to his body’s obscure affective forces for signs of lifeforce and longevity, while Swedenborg’s enthusiasm involved attending to his visions as souls or signs of the afterlife. This paper examines Kant’s epistemological account of attention, important, I argue, for his philosophy of religion. I consult Kant’s medical sources on attentional pathologies, which illuminate the role of affective and attentive experience in Kant’s critical philosophy, aligning his thought with earlier diagnoses and therapies of idolatrous fixation. By foregrounding the medicine of attention, this paper also draws connections to earlier scholastic and mystical sources, challenging the common assumption that Kant’s critique of enthusiasm marks an irrevocable break from these traditions. At least on the question of attention, Kant struggled to “look away.”