In 1797, approximately seven years after Kant published the Critique of the Power of Judgment, the Grand Prix de Rome in history painting was awarded to Louis-André-Gabriel Bouchet for illustrating the death of Cato of Utica (95–46 bce). Cato the Younger, or Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, was renowned in the eighteenth century for having stabbed and killed himself upon learning that the Republic was lost to Caesar. As inspection of the painting reveals, Bouchet presents us with a defiant Cato, full of scorn and unafraid of death. He looks like a man who is free, and who knows it.

In 1764, Kant describes Cato as an exemplar of enthusiasm. Like Bouchet, Kant characterizes Cato as a symbol of freedom. Enthusiasm (Enthusiasm or Enthusiasmus, not Schwärmerei), the pre-Critical theory maintains, is the passion of the sublime. Enthusiasm takes principles that are good in themselves, such as freedom, to an excessive degree. Kant even goes so far as to say that without enthusiasm nothing great can be achieved. At the same time, Kant condemns Cato's suicide as taking a good principle, freedom, and applying it in the wrong way. Of course, it is precisely the features of Cato's suicide itself that so forcefully demonstrate Cato's freedom. Cato defiantly shows that he is free even to take his own life and thus to rise above his sensible interests, above all the interest in self-preservation. His demonstration of freedom is partially what, for Kant, makes Cato's act a demonstration of sublime enthusiasm.