In my second book, I intend to reformulate the thinking that lead to my dissertation's work on Shelley as a study of  the subjective or aesthetic possibilities of the political in his poetry and drama: Tyrannies, Tragedy and Utopia: Kant, Nietzsche and the Sensus Communis of Shelley's Aesthetic Polity. I will, as before, develop my understanding of the mutual implication of aesthetics and ethics within the construction of Shelley's lyric and tragic sensibilities. But in this case, I will go beyond my previous investigation of the affects of tragedy and the limited possibilities of action presented in the tragic drama and utilize Kantian and Nietzschean aesthetics to explain how the tragic sensibility generates a sense of community even as it produces an aesthetics of pity, fear, violation and monstrosity.

     For Kant, the aesthetic is a state of mind distinguished by what he describes as its subjective universal communicability. Under the conditions of this communicability, Kant claims, a sensus communis, or "common sense," arises. He describes this "common sense" as "a subjective principle, which determines [our cognitive state] only by feeling rather than by concepts, though nonetheless with universal validity what is liked and disliked" (CJ 20). The sensus communis is, thus, a subjective principle by which a community of subjects can be defined, in the absence of the objective judgments of rational discourse, merely on the basis of a commonly held feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Thus, if we define passion as "any mental or emotion state that exceeds the boundaries of rational discourse," this sensus communis is a passion for community. For Kant, the aesthetic is also a cognitive state that differs from the cognitive states of discursive reason in that it is characterized by a freer play of the imagination and a sensation of life's quickening that is at the same time a feeling of pleasure. Thus this description of the aesthetic complements Kant's observation that the communicability of the mental state is itself bound up with the feeling of pleasure.

     Kantian theory can offer to this study of the Shelley's aesthetics insight into the affective status of lyric and drama both in terms of the sensus communis and the freer play of the imagination and affective states as well as the pleasure common to both. My claim is that Shelley is a poet whose appeal to the imagination under such conditions elicits a subjective awareness of hopes, affects and purposes specific to a sense of community. In this manner, his poetry is able to generate representations that are purposive for and, thus, capable of awakening such a sense of community, or sensus communis. Poetry is, in this sense, the poiesis or production of specific cognitive states that have specific values and inclinations and whose lyrical expression as such is marked by a freer play of the imagination and a heightened feeling of life under an increased awareness of affect and sensation.

     Yet, whatever value the Kantian aesthetics may have for showing the subjective or affective bases of community in presentations disseminated by lyrists or tragedians, these aesthetics are not in themselves sufficient to explain lyric and tragedy. To the extent that definitions of the Aesthetic remain Kantian, they are very rational. The Kantian aesthetics suppose a certain parity of the formal and material powers of cognition. And even in the absence of concepts, this parity remains a rational parity, that is a parity compatible with the possibilities if not the applied concepts of Kant's definitions of nature and freedom. Such aesthetics must cease to apply to Shelley to the extent that Shelley, like Sophocles, is a dramatist whose aesthetics present monstrosities such as rape, incest, patricide, tyranny and excessive cruelty. For such matters, we must look the aesthetics of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy which celebrate the affects and sensations of fear, terror, amazement, absurdity, nausea and revulsion. And Nietzsche's lyrist must articulate extremes of feeling, aversion and desire similar to those found in tragedy .

     Here we must further distinguish between Kant and Nietzsche. Kant can only sanction Apollinian aesthetics that either affirm the individuation possible in an intuition of nature, as in the case of beauty, or supplant the subjective application of one principle of individuation (nature's) with another (reason's), as in the case of sublimity. Kant cannot let go of the possibility of individuation even when finally suspends his concepts; his sublimity is, after all, an aesthetic of the individual; and beauty is the judgment of an individual who, even beyond the standards of discursive reason, demands universal assent. On the other hand, Nietzsche finds in his Dionysian abolition of individuation, conceptual, aesthetic or otherwise, an event more on the order of a collective intoxication: a primordial unity of "man with man" and "man with nature." (Nature here is that of animism or mythology rather than that of the Enlightenment science.)

     In his claim that the aesthetic of tragedy speaks to such a "primordial unity," Nietzsche, like Kant, postulates the subjective grounds of a sensus communis. Thus both Kantian and Nietzschean aesthetics reach out toward a sensus communis that emerges beyond the conceptual individuation of rational discourse. But while the Kantian aesthetics maintain the possibility of such individuation, the aesthetics of Nietzsche's tragedy celebrate their destruction. Thus, for Nietzsche, the aesthetic of tragedy heralds the immanence of a collective, even utopian experiences that can only be expressed under the subjective and participatory venues of song, dance, lyric, tragedy, mythology and other folk-forms. --But this tragic aesthetic can do so only under the terror and abjection that mark the condition of the individual before the onset of the Dionysian abolition of individuation, nature and morality. Consequently, the trauma that Kant, in the "Introduction" to the Critique of Judgment , finds at the core of nature's intelligibility becomes, for Nietzsche, a prelude to the discovery of the grounds of a unity of man with man and man with nature more fundamental than the rational bases of the subject of Kantian morality considered as an individual .

     With this discussion of comparative aesthetics in mind, we might describe Shelley as a poet of tragedy and lyric who moves too much in the moral orbit of a Kantian sublimity to be considered Nietzschean. Yet, it is profitable to utilize the discoveries of Nietzschean aesthetics to elucidate the ways that Shelleyan lyric and tragedy offer subjective and affective venues in which communities can be constituted or, better, called together or invoked. For instance, in his "Preface" to The Cenci Shelley explains how, in tragedy, accounts of exceeding tyranny, cruelty and excess, such as incest, rape and patricide, can, in the context of their discussion, generate a spontaneous sense of community. Beatrice Cenci was raped by her father, contracted for his assassination, and, when caught, executed for her part in the conspiracy. Yet, according to Shelley, any mention of her name among the citizenry of Rome, even 200 years later, excites a discourse of passionate exculpation which demands that Beatrice's actions be justified.

     There is in this something reminiscent of the sensus communis of the Kantian judgment of taste, but there is also a Nietzschean sense of the Dionysian unity that is achieved only through irreparable loss, violence and the destruction of the individual. Yet where Nietzschean aesthetics celebrate such acts as excesses necessary to the shattering of individuation by nature and morality, Shelleyan tragedy finds in such violations of nature and morality opportunities for his "Imagination" to teach by example the superior value of love and forgiveness over revenge and retaliation. Thus if there is something traumatic about the presence of Beatrice in the collective imagination of the people who are bound eternally to keep alive in their community both her legend and her legacy, there is, additionally, this "highest moral purpose" of the tragic drama. Shelley's tragic aesthetic finds in acts of cruelty and tyranny the opportunity to teach a better way to the communities spontaneously generated in their narration.