The pleasures of contra-purposiveness: Kant, the sublime, and being human

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

Crowther and the Kantian Sublime in Art

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

Is the city a cultural landscape? An attempt to analyze the city from the perspective of landscape aesthetics

This paper sets out to interpret the phrase ‘the city landscape’. Beginning with landscape aesthetics based on two categories — the picturesque and the sublime — the author attempts todemonstrate that a city can be interpreted in terms of a cultural landscape. This necessitates a re‑interpretation of the category of the sublime, whereby, through references to Edmund Burke, Theodor W. Adorno and Arnold Berleant, the sublime assumes the nature of a category which determines the existential situation of a person in the world. Here, the sublime provides people with an impulse to undertake efforts to fashion their surroundings and forge the essence of the living world. As such, the sublime also becomes a category that promotes social activities aimed at improving the quality of life in a city, such as the activities of ‘urban gardeners’

The Macabre on the Margins: A Study of the Fantastic Terrors of the Fin de Siècle

It demonstrates that in spite of the dominant associations of fantastic literature with horror, terror, as the marginal and marginalized fear of the unknown, with its uncanny, sublime and suspenseful qualities, holds a definitive presence in fin de siècle fantastic texts. Literary analysis of the chosen texts registers significant examples of the importance of terror to fantastic writing, and as such functions to extract an “aesthetics of sublime terror” from the margins of critical studies of this often macabre literary mode

Infinity and the Sublime

In this paper we intend to connect two different strands of research concerning the origin of what I shall loosely call "formal" ideas: firstly, the relation between logic and rhetoric - the theme of the 2006 Cambridge conference to which this paper was a contribution -, and secondly, the impact of religious convictions on the formation of certain twentieth century mathematical concepts, as brought to the attention recently by the work of L. Graham and J.-M. Kantor. In fact, we shall show that the latter question is a special case of the former, and that investigation of the larger question adds to our understanding of the smaller one. Our approach will be primarily historical.Comment: 29 pages and 3 figure

The Metaphysics of the Sublime: Old Wine, New Wineskin?

John Milbank’s and Phillip Blond’s narratives of modernity’s descent to nihilism identify the “metaphysics of the sublime” as a feature of modernity, assimilated from Kant’s critical project, that is particularly problematic for the robust post-modern Christian theology proposed in Radical Orthodoxy. This essay argues that the sublime is not the concept most fundamental to their account of Kant’s role in modernity. Far more important is the “phenomenon/noumenon” distinction, which Milbank and Blond read as a “two-world” distinction—an understanding that, despite a long history in Kant interpretation, is not Kant’s. It is less important, however, that constructive dialogue between Radical Orthodoxy and Catholic theology correct this misreading of Kant. More important will be efforts to understand the metaphor of the “immense depth of things,” which Radical Orthodox offers in contrast to the “metaphysics of the sublime,” particularly in relation to the concepts of participation and the analogy of attribution that emerge from Radical Orthodoxy’s reading of Aquinas

Le sublime et la fiction

Il y a des oeuvres d'art poétiques, et en particulier quelques poèmes modernistes, qui nous offrent des représentations du sublime dans un de ses aspects les plus problématiques. Cet aspect comporte la simultanéité des éléments à la fois subjectifs et objectifs. Mais comment peut-on comprendre le sublime sous ce double masque ? Comment se fait-il que le sublime puis- se être à la/ois objectif et subjectif? Dans cet article je propose d'articuler ces deux aspects du sublime en ayant recours aux réflexions tardives de Kant dans son Opus postumum sur le Selbstsetzungs- lehre, sur ce que j'appellerai « une auto-position fictive ».Some poetic works of art, and in particular some modernist poems, present us literary representa- tions of the sublime in one of its most searching, and still problematic, aspects. This aspect of the sublime, unlike many others, involves the simultaneity of both subjective and objective elements. But how are we to understand the sublime in such a double guise ? How can the sublime be simultaneously both objective and subjective ? My suggestion here is that we can best articulate both the objective and subjective aspects by making use of Kant's late reflections in the Opus Postumum on the Selbstsetzungslehre, that is, on what I will call a fictional self-positing

Sublime in Its Magnitude : The Emancipation Proclamation

Book Summary: Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was a pivotal moment in the history of the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation had officially gone into effect on January 1, 1863, and the proposed Thirteenth Amendment had become a campaign issue. Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment captures these historic times, profiling the individuals, events, and enactments that led to slavery’s abolition. Fifteen leading Lincoln scholars contribute to this collection, covering slavery from its roots in 1619 Jamestown, through the adoption of the Constitution, to Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. [From the Publisher

Kant on Religious Feelings - An Extrapolation

The religious feeling considered in this paper is the feeling of awe that can be construed in the extrapolation of the feeling of respect for the law. The latter itself can be better understood in analogy to the feeling of the sublime. Hence the thesis of my interpretation and extrapolation is: a characterization of the religious feeling in Kant’s critiques of reason and their analyses of feelings is possible. It has to be understood in analogy to the feeling of respect for the law and thus to the feeling of the sublime. The religious feeling would, as certain formulations suggest, refer to awe of the inconceivable size of God. The religious feeling of awe would also be a feeling caused by reason -- an instance of a judgement-based feeling. The respective judgement is a reflexive judgement, an achievement of the reflecting faculty of judgement. The religious feeling would resemble Schleiermacher’s ”plain feeling of dependence’, but given the analogy with the dialectics of the sublime, it would also include the complementary component of self-elevation