Kantian Sublime

This essay reconsiders the role of subjectivity and spectatorial remove in the experience of the sublime:

'Like a figure on the shore gazing out to sea, the sublime is, to the subject, an incredible spectacle so far removed as to be safe. In that removal is the tendency to confuse the source of sublimity, attributing it to the spectacle, as in William Falconer’s The Shipwreck (1762), rather than to the viewing subject whose terror stems from the forced comprehension of the frailty and inconsequentiality of its existence. Considering the coexistence of pleasure and terror in the experience of the sublime, the subject’s terror must be reconciled with corresponding pleasure, which is evident in the redemption structure of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) where truly sublime experience is not found in the whirling waters of the ocean, but in the meeting of the humbled soul with the divine.'

Para Gilles Deleuze, o pensamento é indissociável de uma experimentação ou experiência que o force a pensar; de um aprendizado através da constituição de problemas; e de um ato de criação que atualize as Ideias em obras de arte ou conceitos. A filosofia e a arte são disciplinas de pensamento distintas, mas que tem em comum a remissão a modos de sentir. Queremos problematizar neste artigo o quanto a sensibilidade, entendida no sentido de uma matriz do pensamento – tal como propõe Deleuze – remete a uma apropriação de certos aspectos da terceira Crítica de Immanuel Kant. Em primeiro, uma apropriação do conceito de sublime enquanto violência que força aos limites das faculdades; em segundo, uma crítica do senso comum e da concórdia das faculdades; em terceiro, o caráter estético das ideias, tal como aparece no momento do gênio kantiano, pensado por Deleuze como ato de criação. Sob esses três eixos, poderemos discutir a fecundidade de um intercâmbio entre filosofia e arte no que diz res...

Kant on sex gives most philosophers the following associations: a lifelong celibate philosopher; a natural teleological view of sexuality; a strange incorporation of this natural teleological account within his freedom-based moral theory; and a stark ethical condemnation of most sexual activity. Although this paper provides an interpretation of Kant’s view on sexuality, it neither defends nor offers an apology for everything Kant says about sexuality. Rather, it aims to show that a reconsidered Kant-based account can utilize his many worthwhile insights and that by making Kant’s account of sexuality more consistent with his own basic philosophical commitments, the result is a compelling approach to the complex and complicated phenomena of sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation.

Open access link here:
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The main aim of the article is to explore the conceptual genesis of Barnett Newman’s artistic  «sublime». To do this, ample attention is paid to a 1947 critical text in which Newman articulates in philosophical terms a polarity that will rest fundamental in his pictorial practice: that between the “transcendence of objects” and the “reality of transcendental experience”. Generated in Newman’s reflection in order to detach his own painting from the great abstract European tradition, the idea behind that dichotomy served as a laboratory for the well-known essay Sublime is Now (1948). The article attempts to make explicit the fundamental convergence of metaphysical and physical
instances in the artist’s personal notion of the sublime, which links to a radical rethinking of the relationship between subject and object in painting.

Recipient of the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit, Society of Classical Studies, 2017. Citation:

"James Porter's The Sublime in Antiquity is a critical tour-de-force and at the same time a rich and open-ended source-book that will delight readers interested in how the Greeks and Romans described and analyzed the experience of being struck, captivated, even overwhelmed by an act of hearing, viewing, or reading – an experience surely familiar to all lovers of Classical literature and art.

The notion of “the sublime” and of a special category of awe-inspiring, transcendent and almost inexpressible greatness, whether encountered in the natural world (mountains, oceans, storms, a divine presence…) or in various forms of artistic production, has been a key element in Western aesthetics at least since the 18th century.  Critics such as Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel have been followed by innumerable philosophers and historians of aesthetics, almost all of whom have traced the origin of this notion back to the unknown author (traditionally referred to as “Longinus”) who composed a remarkable rhetorical treatise entitled Peri Hypsous (or in Latin, De Sublimitate), some time between ca. 50 and 300 CE.  Longinus’ treatise is thus almost universally regarded as constituting a major break-through in aesthetic thought that really stands alone in Classical antiquity.  (M. H. Abrams, for example, in The Mirror and the Lamp, famously zeroed-in on the contrast between “Classical” poetics, as represented by Aristotle and the mainstream, and “Romantic” sensibilities, as adumbrated by Longinus.)  James Porter, in his immensely erudite and wide-ranging new book, overturns this standardized history of criticism and offers a new and fascinating account of the multiple ways in which “sublime, wonderful, stupendous” experiences and compositions were recognized and described by a wide range of authors before and after Longinus – from Homer and Pindar, to Empedocles and Lucretius, and even such drily analytical critics as Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.  Porter’s extensively documented study, exploring numerous poetical and philosophical passages in close detail, makes it clear that Longinus’ treatise in fact comes in the middle, not at the beginning, of such discussions, distinguished more by its style and choice of particular examples than by its conceptual originality.  As Porter observes, “The sublime pervades much of antiquity; it has simply been hiding in the light.”

Porter’s book is not simply a negative achievement, however, in its re-positioning of Longinus within literary and aesthetic history. Along with its stimulating and important argument about the “tradition of the sublime” as a concept and an affective experience, the book provides a wonderful assemblage of particular close readings and analyses of individual texts, making new connections both within antiquity itself and between ancient and modern authors.  Porter explores such stylistic strategies and dichotomies as simplicity vs variety, the power of the kairos and of ekplêxis, and the “logic of excess,” showing how all of these techniques involve an “art of the emotions” in which, as both rhetoricians and philosophers implicitly agreed, artistic skill and organizational power, whether human or divine, lie at the heart of the sublime effect. This book will immediately become required reading for anyone seriously studying ancient stylistics, rhetorical theory, and the history of aesthetics."

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held values, this process must become reflective. These values have an inescapably ethical dimension, because as we necessarily poetize our surrounding world, we contribute to our personal and communal ethos the character that arises from the culturally shaping power of guiding ideals. Even the immoralist cultivates life within an ethos where obscure feelings connect with some thing or other, whereby certain aims will then appear more valuable than others.

To understand how we cannot help but shape our lives according to dimly or clearly intuited values, I compare Coleridge’s primary imagination, the ‘shaping spirit’ ‘necessary for all human perception’ with Kant’s ‘blind though indispensible function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, yet of which we are scarcely ever conscious’. With Coleridge, we find in imagination an impulse to connect profound but obscure presentiments and ideas with our surroundings. This impulse propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. Whether we pursue merely what attracts us, or seek value beyond this, all lives are freely shaped, without excuses, as the existentialists say, but not always in the most pellucid consciousness. Our choices inevitably engage us in the poetic art of life-writing. Cast in medias res, we necessarily improvise. But this is no argument against lives being moral-aesthetic works, spontaneous compositions in value.

This article explores the surprisingly decisive role that Kant's "incongruity theory" of laughter plays in his aesthetic and broader critical philosophy. First, laughter constitutes a highly specific form of aesthetic judgment in Kant. Laughter involves a discordant relation between the cognitive faculties characteristic of the sublime, but this relation obtains between the understanding and the imagination, the two faculties at play in judgments of taste on the beautiful. Second, laughter is the transcendental condition of possibility for both the beautiful and the sublime. While most commentators dismiss laughter as an afterthought of Kant's aesthetics, laughter in fact constitutes the most basic aesthetic judgment in Kant. Third, an account of aesthetic judgment that begins with laughter transforms how we understand Kant's argument that judgment unites nature and freedom. Namely, it reveals how an empirical world at odds with the subject's purposes can nevertheless advance the subject's rational vocation to think and act beyond the empirical. I conclude by arguing that Kantian critical philosophy is itself a philosophy of laughter.

Alluding to the sources of Wordsworth's sonnet in the 'Book of Job' and Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals', I establish how the so-called 'Wordsworthian sublime' can be deduced. In the former, the sublime comes into play in private retrospections at an individual level, incurred after the ramifications of a tragedy sets in. In the latter, Wordsworth is interpreted as subserving Dorothy's observations on London. Her identifications with the city as 'beautiful' is carefully abstracted and idealized under the banner of his sublime, creating the possibility of interaction, subjugation and hierarchical creation.

Resumen:
Danto sostiene que el fin del arte ha llegado, pero también afirma que el arte sigue siendo importante para nuestras vidas. Las obras de arte pueden encarnar significados que nos conmueven, nos motivan a actuar y nos transforman de alguna manera. El efecto que tiene el arte sobre nosotros depende, en gran medida, de las cualidades estéticas que revisten y modulan el significado de las obras. En el presente trabajo analizaré, puntualmente, el rol que Danto le atribuye a lo bello y lo sublime en ese sentido. Mi objetivo es contrastar la importancia que le confiere a la belleza, como la única
cualidad estética que a la vez es un valor -equiparable a la verdad o la bondad-, con el lugar al que relega a lo sublime. Me propongo reivindicar el rol de lo sublime como un valor significativo para la experiencia del arte y la vida en general.

On September 11, 2001, human bodies fell from some of the tallest buildings in the world and shattered on the pavement below. People jumped from the windows of the World Trade Center to escape fire, and this fire was sustained by the artefacts of early 21st-century technological progress: jet fuel, paper, people, and photocopiers. 9/11 was a symbolic act engaged with politics and aesthetics, but which also placed the base suffering of the human body and mind at its heart. The horror of the terrorist attacks was broadcast on television, another piece of technology deeply woven into Western consciousness. Footage of 9/11 played over and over again on multiple screens, and this footage is now easily accessible on the internet. 9/11’s images are repeated like the pop art of Andy Warhol, whose work Hal Foster describes as ‘a warding away of traumatic significance and an opening out to it’ (1996: 132). This is what occurred during 9/11, and it is what makes it an example of the sublime. Responses to 9/11 attempt to escape its traumatic consequences; but, to do so, one must accept the bodily experience of trauma. In the pages that follow, I will argue that post-9/11 intellectual discourse is informed by the “games” of ludic postmodernism, but in the non-ludic languages of trauma, the uncanny, and the sublime. Trauma theory bases itself in the human body, and I will be exploring how the sublime and the uncanny are understood as embodied in 9/11.

Kant's geographical theory, which was informed by contemporary travel reports, diaries, and journals, developed before his so-called " critical turn. " There are several reasons to study Kant's lectures and material on geography. For instance, the geography provided Kant with terms, concepts, and metaphors which he employed in order to present or elucidate the critical philosophy. Some of the germs of what would become Kant's critical philosophy can already be detected in the geography course. Finally, Kant's geography is also one (though not the only) source of some of the empirical claims in his philosophical works, including the Critique of the Power of Judgment. To give an example of this, I examine his account of the sublime.

Is it trivial, or perhaps even irresponsible, to explore aesthetic themes at a time when the world is engulfed by war, genocide, terrorism, poverty, climate change and financial turmoil? Why indulge in painting, poetry or music when lives and livelihoods are at stake? Can we really afford to entertain questions of taste while concrete political action is urgently required?

This book offers a passionate but systematically sustained defence of an aesthetic engagement with world politics. It argues that aesthetic sources can offer alternative insight: a type of reflective understanding that emerges not from applying the analytical skills that are central the social sciences, but from cultivating a more open-ended level of creativity and sensibility about the political. We then might be able to appreciate what we otherwise cannot even see: perspectives or people excluded from prevailing purviews, for instance, or the emotional nature and consequences of political events. Drawing on detailed case studies that range from Stalinist Russia to Cold War Germany and contemporary Korea, the author compellingly demonstrates how the poetic imagination can help us understand – and perhaps even shape - some of the most difficult political challenges.

'Fine art' is a living phenomenon determined by the purposiveness of nature. 'Fine art' [schöne Kunst] contains a determination that arranges itself in accordance with the purposiveness of nature in Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) philosophy. This implies that 'fine art' is a living phenomenon, having a life of its own beyond its initial creation. In the Critique of Judgement 1790, Kant states that our aesthetic appreciation lies in the faculty of reflective judgment. What Kant incorporates into the third critique is that reflective judgment allows for the creation of new meaning in the face of the beautiful, the sublime, and 'fine art'. This paper will start by examining how Kant had previously set up the regulative ideal in his architectonic system which runs throughout his late philosophy. The purpose of this paper will be to show how Kant brings about a genuine unity between freedom and nature. This unity allows for the requisites for 'fine art' to synthesis with the purposiveness of nature. Kant extends this regulative in the third critique to show how judgment allows for new concepts that were previously unconceived by the understanding. In analysis of the requisites for 'fine art', we will discover how rules of reason harmonise and evolve through genius to originality.

Kantian notions of sublimity abound in his fiction: phenomena whose principal characteristics are their formlessness, infinite expanse, or superhuman might; a subject's encounter with the negative or, put another way, symbolic presentation of what would be described in the fiction of a humanist as its noumenal self; and the limits of language 1 to represent adequately both the awe-inspiring spectacle and the subject's experience of the violation of the limits of being. Lovecraft's pronouncements on "cosmic horror," the effect he aimed to convey in his stories, seem to encourage a sublime reading of his work. Cosmic horror-that fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance-compels the expansion of the experiencing subject's imagination. Two recent studies, moreover, elaborate on the relevance of the Burkean and Kantian sublimes, respectively, in Lovecraft's myth cycle. In "Lovecraft and the Burkean Sublime" (1991), Dale J. Nelson defends the idea that cosmic horror is coeval with religious feeling in Burke. In "Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime" (2002), Bradley A. Will argues that the force of cosmic horror is based upon Lovecraft's presentation of the unknowable rather than merely the unknown in his fiction.

Mary Wollestonecraft was a leftist English philosopher and writer best known for her essay on women's rights entitled The Vindication of the Rights of Women. After a series of personal and financial events around the year 1795, Wollstonecraft decided to embark on business negotiations across Europe. It was on this trip she endeavored to write her travel account Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796. These journals are not just the personal and intimate accounts of her adventures with her young child and nursemaid, but also an attempt to support herself and her daughter financially. Due to the intimate and personal narrative style of the letters, which she herself notes in its first few pages, Wollstonecraft's personal beliefs are ubiquitous among her letters here. The intimacy of these letters also serves to enhance her leftist statements and beliefs, presenting lived experience as an authoritative rhetorical tool.

This essay explores the symbolic expression of the sublime experience and the position of God as the symbol of the sublime object. According to Paul Ricoeur, it is ‘fundamental experiences’ which lead us to produce symbols. Ricoeur’s distinction between the literal and non-literal meanings of the symbol is crucial to the argument of this essay.Following Kant’s description, the sublime experience is an encounter with something which exceeds our power, either to understand it or to resist it. That we survive or overcome the experience gives us a sense of pleasure and excitement. In symbolizing the sublime, the experience has been absorbed by religious expression. In analysing Otto’s account of the religious feeling, the text will show that at a phenomenological level the sublime and the religious experience are the same, with the sublime object symbolized by God.That the sublime object has been personified with the symbol of God is due to the animism within which the experience was first understood. Winwood Reade’s anthropology throws light upon how natural mechanisms and objects, such as the sun, were understood as if they had the will and personality of a fellow human. The passage from this ‘personal order’ to the ‘impersonal order’, as Charles Taylor articulates it, I will argue allows the sublime to be understood without this personification.

Abstract: Kant’s theory of the sublime enables the aesthetic aspects of physics to be addressed in a new light. Usually associated with the visual arts, the sublime offers a context for the consideration of a variety of metaphysical themes in art, philosophy and science. Descriptions of the quantum spacetime field, in particular, in occasioning imaginative representations which strive after something which lies beyond the bounds of experience, disclose an aesthetic appraisal of the sublimity of nature which revives the Romanticist link between nature and aesthetics first established by Kant. Expressed in terms of a confrontation with a transcendental ‘other’, quantum theory’s encounter with the descriptive limits of reality entails a ‘presentation of the unpresentable’, effecting a shift to the poetic at the literary margins of the discourse which reflects the transition from representation to poiesis in Romantic aesthetics. Hence, physics enters the field opened up by the aesthetics of the sublime.

This article considers "Kubla Khan" and the the Arab dream section from the fifth book The Prelude as precursors to the recently theorized concept of saturated phenomenality. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth insist on the limitedness of their dream subjects even as they magnify their dreamt of landscapes to heights of sublimity. Falke describes the implications that this insistence on smallness has for relating experiences of sublime landscapes to experiences of reading or writing poetry.

"Paul Crowther, in his book, The Kantian Sublime (1989), works to reconstruct Kant's aesthetics in order to make its continued relevance to contemporary aesthetic concerns more visible. The present article remains within the area of Crowther's 'cognitive' sublime, to show that there is much space for expanding upon Kantian varieties of the sublime, particularly in art."
Published in Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants: Akten des X. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses [Right and Peace in Kant's Philosophy: Proceedings of the 10th International Kant Congress] 5 vols., ed. Valerio Rohden, Ricardo R. Terra, and Guido A. de Almeida (Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), Vol. 3, pp. 565-576."

FROM THE BACK COVER: What is the essential nature of meaning? . . . . . This book answers by examining interpretive theories from the past and present. It finds that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation, a struggle that reaches crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand, this crisis is mollified by Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology, which argues that we are always already in a meaningful relationship to the objects of the world. On the other hand, this crisis is exacerbated when phenomenology, structuralism, and aesthetic theory directly make meaning into an object of study. . . . . . . . . These historical developments culminate with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose non-hermeneutical phenomenology delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity. Intriguingly, Lacan's work reveals meaning to be sexual in nature. By integrating his notion of sexual difference with his work in discourse theory and topology, this book demonstrates how the subject's struggle with meaning can be suspended.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GENERAL DESCRIPTION: Broadly speaking, the majority of books on Jacques Lacan focus on the earlier periods of his career. They also tend to target the psychoanalytic clinical community, or else discuss his work in various political, social, and cultural contexts. But in almost all cases these books refrain from a detailed exegesis of his actual texts. They instead prefer to comment on his theoretical apparatus as a whole before turning to its practical implications. . . . . . This book positions itself against this grain. Firstly, it closely analyzes some half-dozen key Lacanian texts. This analysis is organized under a single thematic – the question of meaning – in order to advance the reader's understanding of the trajectory of Lacan's thought across his entire career, as well as to promote the book's thesis that the field of meaning can be suspended. Accordingly, an initial chapter takes up the hermeneutical tradition from Flacius onward. This is then supplemented by a chapter which surveys phenomenological, structuralist and aesthetic theories of meaning and their differing methods of textual analysis. Together these two chapters provide a unique context for the sustained analysis of Lacan's texts which begins in the third chapter, an analysis that forms the bulk of the book's content. This contextualization potentially widens the book's appeal to any scholar wishing to explore his relationship to those textual objects he interacts with on a daily basis. And because this book assumes the reader has little to no familiarity with Lacan, the reader will find patient explanations of the basics of his theories before slowly being led up to the more difficult theories of his late years. Again the argument is that Lacan has something to offer all scholars. His work is not just reserved for psychoanalysts. . . . . . It is with his late theories that the serious student of Lacan will find the book's most original contribution. For in the fourth chapter a detailed account is provided of how Lacan derived his infamous formulae of sexuation from Aristotelian logic. These formulae are then extensively discussed against the backdrop of interpretive theory and textual analysis, showing how these formulae capture much more than just the difference between the sexes. Strikingly, this difference is also found to run through meaning itself, something the final chapter aims to demonstrate. It does this by amalgamating three key components of late-Lacan: sexuation, discourse theory and his use of topological spaces. This amalgamation is a first in the literature. But this amalgamation is not just useful in demonstrating the book's thesis. It further suggests how seemingly divergent aspects of late-Lacanian theory can be made to work together.

This article has a double aim: it contributes to a new theorisation of posthumanism and it revisits standard accounts of the relations between posthumanism and deconstruction. Departing from the observation that the distinction between (semantic, subjective) emotions and (asignifying, nonsubjective) affects is critical for posthumanism, the article shows how posthumanism can be described as a minimal emotive scenario. In this scenario, the cancellation of humanism and its strictly codified emotions generates intractable and nonsubjective second-order affects. Both pleasurable and terrifying, these 'posthuman affects' resemble traditional notions of the sublime, without the latter's recuperative and reterritorialising connotations. The article mobilises this broad emotive understanding of posthumanism to question the traditional account of the rise of posthumanism as a reaction to the excessively textualist and literary interests of deconstruction. Focusing on Paul de Man's readings of Kant, Schiller and Hegel, it shows how de Man's use of the notion of 'materiality'another key term in the discourse of posthumanismis already part of an emotive scenario that, like later posthumanist practices, revises the traditional structure of the sublime in order to map a shift from human emotion to posthuman affect.

Abstract: A central tenet of quantum theory is the idea that the physical world is one interconnected, dynamic whole. The discovery that the underlying structure of the universe is field-like rather than particle-like eludes traditional conceptions of representation. The realisation that the whole cannot be represented as a sum of its parts discloses an unexpected limit to scientific knowledge which sees ontological and metaphysical speculation interacting with other areas of thought in physicists’ writing.
Expressed in terms of a confrontation with a transcendental ‘other’, physicists’ encounter with the descriptive limits of reality entails a ‘presentation of the unpresentable’, effecting a shift to the poetic at the margins of its discourse that reflects the transition from representation to poiesis in Romantic aesthetics.
These issues are particularly prominent in David Bohm’s description of the ‘holomovement’. In this paper I argue that the quantum field replaces the Romantic aesthetic of the infinite as a symbol of the mind’s relation to a transcendent order. Hence, physics enters the field opened up by the aesthetics of the sublime.

This article reviews the notion of the sublime as it is regarded in a few of the most influential texts in Western philosophy. Modern sublime that is elaborated in the works of Edmund Burke and Kant is influenced by the ancient text Peri Hypsous. Later, Lyotard takes up the sublime to interpret Modern and Postmodern visual art. The sublime is necessarily linked to art. It is the notion that presents existential (spiritual) questions such as existence of God and meaning of human life. Art has been the realm where such questions are tackled. Sublime is the artistic way to spirituality, and works of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko display that.

Abstract: While recent art theoretical discourse has revived the question of how to locate the aesthetic within contemporary visual culture, the post-Kantian trajectory of aesthetics has also colonised discussions of physics and cosmology. In particular, maverick physicist David Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics posits a rapprochement of art and science which is underpinned by a holistic world-view based on his belief in the interconnectedness of all phenomena.
This paper argues that such tendencies are driven by a romantic impulse rooted in a conception of the sublime that revives the link between nature and aesthetics first established by Kant. Characterised by a combination of science and metaphysics, of explanation and speculation, of the rational and the mystical, Bohm’s views establish a useful framework in which to explore a cluster of issues relating to the tradition of the sublime and which may enable an understanding of the transcendent impulses that sometimes accompany discussions of quantum mechanics, a framework which sees physics intersecting with spirituality via the aesthetic perception of the infinite in the finite. These tendencies I refer to as 'Quantum Romanticism'.