On Kant's Account of the Sublime (original) (raw)
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Oxford Handbook of Kant, 2024
An overview of the historical context, central claims, and a few scholarly debates concerning Kant's account of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment
Kant's Account of the Sublime as Critique
Kant Yearbook, 2019
Kant's account of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment has been extremely influential, prompting extensive discussion of the psychology, affect, moral significance, and relevance to artistic representation of the sublime on his provocative view. I focus instead on Kant's account of the mathematical sublime in connection to his theoretical critical project, namely his attempt to characterize human cognitive powers and to limit human pretensions to knowledge of the supersensible. I argue, first, that his account of the psychology of the sublime is designed to explain not just its affective character (its displeasure-pleasure), but also to address challenges concerning the coherence of an experience of something as transcending one's cognitive abilities. Thereby, I argue moreover , Kant provides an alternative, demystifying account of mystical experiences, in which humans might take themselves to intuit that which is beyond human understanding or reason, and thus to claim that they have special cognitive access to the supersensible, transcending the limits Kant claims to establish for human cognition. Kant's account of the mathematical sublime is not merely so reductive of mystical experience, however; it also, I suggest, describes the aesthetic of Kantian critique itself.
The Place of the Sublime in Kant's Project
Studi Kantiani 28, 2015
I argue that the Kantian sublime can help address a uniquely Kantian problem known as the ‘transition’ problem, or the problem of how to actualize the ‘laws of freedom’ (that is, morality) within the natural order. Like beauty, the sublime has the requisite features of a ‘symbol’ of morality. I characterize three additional ways the sublime can assist the transition. I thus put into question some prominent readings of Kant’s theory, e.g. that as a mere ‘appendix’ to his theory of nature, Kant’s account of the sublime has little connection to his project’s main aims. The place of the sublime is thus near the middle.
Kant's Deduction of the Sublime
Kantian Review , 2018
In the third Critique, Kant collapses his deduction of the universal validity of judgements of sublimity into his exposition of such judgements, a decision called into question by commentators. I defend Kant on this score, explaining how the exposition of judgements of sublimity serves as their deduction. Kant's key move is his claim that natural objects are not, strictly speaking, sublime. I argue that ideas of reason, on Kant's view, are the only truly sublime objects and show how this allows him to establish that the imaginations of all observers operate in the same way in experiences of sublimity.
Turn from Sensibility to Rationality: Kant’s Concept of the Sublime
Kant on Intuition. Western and Asian Perspectives on Transcendental Idealism, 2019
There are various dichotomies in Kant’s philosophy: sensibility vs. rationality, nature vs. freedom, cognition vs. morality, noumenon vs. phenomenon, among others. There are also different ways of mediating these dichotomies, which is the systematic undertaking of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. One of the most important concepts in this work is the sublime, which exemplifies the connections between the different dichotomies; this fact means the concept’s construction is full of tension. On the one hand, as a pure reflection of aesthetic judgment the sublime must be without interest or purpose, but on the other hand it is “based on the concept of reason” (KU AA:292). On the one hand, the sublime “represents merely the subjective play of the powers of the mind (imagination and reason) as harmonious” (KU AA5:258), but on the other hand, reason “exercises dominion over sensibility” and the imagination is “purposively determined in accordance with a law” of reason (KU AA5:268f). Taking into account these problems concerning the essential definition the sublime, this paper will first illustrate how the sublime embodies the a priori principle of aesthetic judgment through contrasting the judgment of the sublime with the judgment of taste in order to establish a basic logical frame for the judgment of the sublime. Second, this paper redefines the boundary between the mathematically and dynamically sublime in order to reveal both the coexistence of contemplation and movement within the sublime and the unrevealed function of reason and imagination. Finally, contrasting the sublime with moral feeling, this paper elaborates the turning-structure (from sensibility to rationality and from object-intuition to idea-exhibition) of the sublime.
The Pleasures of Contra-Purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
When Paul Guyer surveyed the literature on the sublime about twenty years ago, he noted the flourishing of psychoanalytic and deconstructionist interpretations of the sublime by literary theorists and offered his own interpretative essay on Kant’s sublime as a contribution to a sparsely populated field. Today the situation is reversed. In the field of philosophical aesthetics, understood to include analytic aesthetics as well as theoretical approaches to literary and visual culture, serious doubts have been raised about the coherence of theories of the sublime and indeed the usefulness of the concept. By contrast, the sublime is increasingly studied by Kantians who value its role in Kant’s moral psychology and consider it a useful, and in some cases indispensible, element to his ethics. The questions the present paper sets out to answer are: Is a coherent theory of the sublime possible? Is the sublime a useful concept? Is the chief interest in the sublime moral? The answers, briefly, are: yes, yes, and no. Although the argument supporting these conclusions focuses on Kant’s analysis, the aim is to show how a certain conception of human agency permits an aesthetic interpretation of the sublime with broader application and significance.
General Remarks for a Historical and Systematic Reconstruction of Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime
Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics Volume 15,, 2023
This paper presents the main aspects for a systematic and historical reconstruction of Kant's Analytic of the Sublime. First, I argue against general assumptions of the literature on the Kantian sublime. Second, I explain Mendelssohn's reception of Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and his rejection of the philosophical use of the concept of negative magnitudes. Third, I present Kant's concept of "negative pleasure" in the Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy as a response to the problems presented in our explanation of Mendelssohn's reception of Burke. Fourth, I examine how the difficulties encountered by Mendelssohn in Burke's theory of sublime condition Kant's Analytic of the Sublime. This influence is evident in the introduction of the negative pleasure into the Critique of Judgment. However, I argue that Kant cannot adequately address the problem that negative pleasure presents in his aesthetics. In conclusion, I claim that Kant, in the third Critique, encounters the same difficulty as Mendelssohn in his reception of Burke, namely the impossibility of philosophically grounding negative feelings.
The Morality of the Sublime: Kant
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