Kant’s Attention Economy and the Fear of Idolatrous Fixation

In his Anthropology lectures, Kant distinguishes two ways in which we become conscious of our sensory perceptions: attentio and abstractio (7:131). Attention strengthens impressions, whereas abstraction extracts a determination (Bestimmung). Here, Kant is reworking the epistemological foundations of scholastic logic. In that tradition, perception transitions from attention to abstraction: we first attend to sensory perceptions to form phantasms (mental images), from which we then abstract species (species sensibilis; generalized objects of the intellect). However, Kant disrupts this classical and medieval model of perceptual processing by dividing the sensory and intellectual faculties, attentio and abstractio, as mutually exclusive operations. One can either attend to a “blind” sensation or abstract an “empty” form, but not both sequentially.

This distinction between the sensory and intellectual faculties is not only foundational to Kant’s critical philosophy but also central to his critique of religious enthusiasm. Enthusiasts, Kant argues, mistakenly believe they can access suprasensible (intelligible) reality by attending to sensory experience. Claiming that enthusiasm is impossible, Kant’s critique has even broader implications for scholars of religion, as it seems to undermine all traditional attentive and affective religious practices, reducing religious experience to empty abstractions. Indeed, such experiences are typically taken to be antithetical to Kantian philosophy of religion, with Kant’s critique of enthusiasm marking an irreversible break with past scholastic and mystical writings (Largier, 2022; Simpson, 2011).

This paper reevaluates Kant’s critique of enthusiasm in light of his medical sources on diseased attention. Although Kant was an avid reader of medical literature, these sources are often dismissed as of merely autobiographical interest, the distractions of a self-diagnosed hypochondriac. However, I argue that Kant’s engagement with these medical texts informs his diagnosis of Swedenborg’s enthusiasm in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and influences his peripheral and epistemological discussions of attention. Kant’s hypochondria is also relevant, given that he identifies it as a disease of attention. Attention, Kant writes after the Anthropology citation, makes you “unhappy,” whereas abstraction frees the mind.

The medical anxieties surrounding pathological attention are particularly pronounced in the eighteenth century but have roots in Galenic and humoral medicine, and intersect with religious concerns about idolatrous fixation. Kant could draw on a long medical tradition, which typically grouped hypochondria under melancholia and alongside love melancholy (amor heroes) and religious melancholy or enthusiasm, which were all understood in terms of fixated attention and corresponding global distraction. Briefly reviewing the early modern sources, I focus on the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), whose widely disseminated views reflect common medical opinion of the time and whom Kant consulted. Also an obligatory reference for the medical mechanism Kant employs in Dreams, Boerhaave’s diagnoses and treatments of attention, however, remain consistent with earlier medical traditions, incorporating humoral elements.

Boerhaave situates attention within a trilogy of retentive faculties—alongside imagination and memory—that we possess insofar as the mind is embodied. These faculties process sensory impressions through an economy of external and internal senses: initial sensations swirl obscurely in the sensus communis, from which attention selects and draws sensations into the imagination, where they are synthesized into phantasms and may be stored as lasting impressions in memory. Pathological fixation, the defining feature of melancholic conditions, disrupts this process—whether in Kant’s hypochondria or, more acutely, in Swedenborg’s enthusiasm.

Boerhaave’s model recalls an account from Galen, who likens the sensus communis to a pool of water. Sensation, like a signet ring, briefly reflects on the water’s surface without making a lasting impression. However, if excesses of attention transfer it to the neighboring retentive faculty, which has the composition of wax, it can imprint a lasting image. The phantasm becomes a “graven image” in the mind.

Kant presents a strikingly similar account in “Maladies of the Head,” emphasizing the dangers of excessive attention in reinforcing impressions and potentially damaging the retentive organ. The hypochondriac’s obsessive attention risks this by intensifying sensory force at the initial stage of perception. “Maladies” was occasioned by the encounter with a religious enthusiast, Jan Komarnicki, and Kant here broaches a medical diagnosis he will develop in his work on Swedenborg, albeit somewhat satirically. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, published two years later, diagnoses Swedenborg’s visions to be precisely these excessively forceful impressions or ideæ materiales, which the spiritualist mistakes for suprasensible realities.

Ironically, Swedenborg himself—a proto-neuroscientist and, at the time, a mechanist who cites Boerhaave—provides nearly the same model in his anatomical writings. The key difference is that Swedenborg claims a highly refined mind can still abstract intelligible forms from these sensory impressions, healing by transitioning from sensory attention to intellectual comprehension. Kant, aligning with Boerhaave, rejects this possibility. For him, there is no seamless transition from attentio to abstractio, from phantasm to concept, only a radical discontinuity.

Kant here diverges from earlier scholastic and medieval sources, breaking with what Pollok terms the tradition of the phantasm (2017). Yet this break also situates Kant’s epistemology in dialogue with these sources, revealing unexpected affinities with the mystical traditions that Largier and Simpson deem entirely foreign to Kant. Kant may introduce a gap between sensing attention and abstracting reason, but this allows the former to serve as a symbol for the latter; connected by the very relationship of difference. And this leads Kant to reevaluate enthusiasm as the capacity to form sensory symbols needed to supplement abstraction and attract its attention. 

This paper invites a reconsideration of Kant’s critique of enthusiasm, then, which would incorporate his apophatic use of abstraction and positive remarks about Swedenborg in later Metaphysics lectures.

In The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant reflects on his lifelong struggle with hypochondriacal attention, noting its paradoxical tendency to sharpen focus precisely on what one tries to ignore. Kant describes an attention economy in which abstraction enlivens attention to consider what it seeks to exclude. Engaging with medical discourses on diseased attention, this paper reveals how such an economy operates within Kant’s critique of enthusiasm. Kant must invoke what he would exclude—affective and attentive experience; his critique of enthusiasm is conditioned by the very phenomena it aims to dispel.