Kantian Sublime Research Articles

Klasična arhitektura u okviru kantovske estetike - između Liotara i Ransijera

Classical architecture's inherent potentiality to constitute the principal architectural expression of western culture since Greek antiquity is due to its dual character: although it comes out from the primordial unity of things expressed by myth and religion in archaic times, it acquires its form of completion in the fifth c. BC, as a symbol of democracy and a harmonic articulation of the world on the ground of philosophical thinking. By placing the avant-guard art in the sphere of the Kantian sublime, Jean-Francois Lyotard focuses on the impossibility of an absolute relation between reason and perception or between thinking and image, in modernity. He considers that in cases where this happens, it gives birth to political monsters. He connects postmodern expressions of classicism in architecture with Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" and the Kantian beautiful. Jacques Ranciere's approach to a Kantian in basis aesthetic consideration of modernity is opposite to that proposed by Lyotard. Instead of the sublime, Ranciere relates the beautiful with the rupture between thinking and perception . In this respect, fragments of the past can stimulate a creative procedure in the present. This investigation aims to contribute to the dialogue for a renovated approach to the role of classicism in architecture today.

Cannon-fever: Beethoven, Waterloo and the Noise of War

Originally written to commemorate the Duke of Wellington's victory over Joseph Bonaparte at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain on 21 June 1813, Wellington's Victory, or, the Battle of Vitoria (Wellington's Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria), Op. 91 became, in the months following the Battle of Waterloo, ‘a national stock-piece’ (Literary Gazette, 1817, 91). Based around a simple, not to say simplistic, opposition between French and English musical motifs – ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’ for the British, and ‘Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre’ (a tune better known in English as ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow’) – the symphony moves towards a carefully notated clash of arms, involving rapid bursts of musketry and cannon fire from opposing orchestral ‘sides’, and rhythmic simulations of galloping cavalry. However, as contemporary accounts of performances of the symphony reveal, the excessive frequency of the loud cracks, bangs and crashes, often deployed by live artillery, made for uncomfortable listening, evoking Goethe's description of the disorientating effects of ‘cannon-fever’ (kanonenfieber). In its activation of the ‘noise’ of war, a mimetic dissonance at odds with the formal unities of the heroic style, Beethoven's symphony thus subverts its assumed status as a pièce d'occasion while also emphasising the sense in which the sounds of battle exceed the regulatory parameters of the Kantian sublime. This article argues that although the Wellington symphony was denounced by critics as a ‘minor’ piece, it highlights an emergent note of discontent in Beethoven's music with the appropriation of music for triumphalist ends.

The body, the garment and the Kantian sublime in fashion

Abstract This article concerns the ways in which Kant’s account of the sublime may be used to explain fashion. It uses examples from designer Rei Kawakubo and theorist Elizabeth Wilson to introduce the argument that our everyday experiences of the body, the garment and fashion are actually experiences of the sublime. In order to make this argument, the article places these experiences in a western philosophical tradition by considering Hegel’s early-nineteenth-century account of the relation between the garment and the body. The article then argues that Roland Barthes’s account of Erté’s alphabet-drawings is a critique of Hegel and Wilson, and that it presupposes Kant’s idea of the sublime. The article provides an account of Kant’s sublime in the Critique of Judgement, written in 1790, relating it back to his account of the schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason (written in 1781). The conclusion is that the experience of the sublime, of the inadequacy that is necessarily involved in the application of concepts to intuitions or in the subsumption of intuitions under concepts, is found in all experience and thus that fashion is always constituted by the experience of the sublime.

Spirituality in Religion and Literature: Buddhism, Levinas, the Sublime, and Jekyll and Hyde

Both religions and literature/the arts have the same purpose--to liberate our mind from the limited ontological domain of the ego and reach infinity, the dimension of genuine love, and thus to attain true wisdom beyond the binary opposition of will, intention, and concepts that cause conflicts and struggle. The goal of religions and literature is to make us to deeply experience the real Self, which is the ultimate reality or universal Truth. This paper first discusses the Buddhist notion of Emptiness and Levinas, whose theory embraces Judaism and Christianity. Then the Kantian sublime is discussed as the most profound aesthetic impetus on the reader’s mind. The last part presents my reading of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. By showing the disappearance of the polar opposites, Jecyll and Hyde, the novella leads the reader to the sphere of the sublime where the reader experiences the spiritual feeling that detaches her/him from ontological perception and conceptualization.

Cosmological Aesthetics through the Kantian Sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian

Cosmological Aesthetics through the Kantian Sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian

Oltre l’antropocentrismo: il sublime ecologico nel contesto anglo-americano

By opposing the dualistic paradigm implicated in the Kantian sublime and eventually resulting in man’s mastering of the material world, this essay upholds Christopher Hitt’s notion of “ecological sublime” as a more respectful mode to relate with the natural environment. Hitt’s revision of the sublime is significant to overcome the false separation of nature and culture (the concept of “internaturality” is here offered in substitution), while fostering the abrogation of the anthropocentric stance that deeply marked the first phases of American history. Despite the multiple contradictions emerging from both their writing experiments, John Muir’s essays and Emily Dickinson’s poetry are here proposed to articulate a more biocentric view of the interlacings of the human and non human.

Sublime Subjects: On the Impossibility of an Objective Theory of the Sublime

Starting from 20th-century theories of the sublime, this essay shows that an objectivist interpretation of such concept cannot fit in with a return to Kantian aesthetics. My argument is based on four points: imagination’s failure, as it is described in “the Analitics of Sublime”; the non-conceptual nature of Kantian sublime; its incompatibility with the ttheory of the symbol; finally, Schiller’s interpretation, which, while trying to read Kant’s aesthetics in objective terms, ends up superimposing two contrasting patterns

Of Fear and Exaltation

This essay considers the political economic ideology in recent popular cinematic depictions of finance in terms of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime. Think, for instance, of the contingent and risky peaks and valleys of the stock market’s price paths as the jagged mountains that inspire the fear and terror necessary for sublime feeling. I give a sustained reading of how the Kantian sublime operates in Neil Burger’s 2011 film Limitless. By subordinating both the technics of neuro-augmentation and the contingency of the economy to an innate human reason, the protagonist shows audiences what it might mean today to experience sublimity – but not without hinting at a latent anti-Kantian fissure that would reorient us against this bourgeois discourse.

Riding the Wind With Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony: The Kantian and Daoist Sublimes in Chinese Musical Modernity

The sublime was at the aesthetic core of Chinese musical modernity from the first half of the twentieth century onwards. Not only was it an important subject for modern thinkers who introduced key ideas from Western philosophy, but the concept of the sublime was also translated into various Chinese terms. Notions of the Kantian beautiful and sublime were central to an ongoing discourse, but the Kantian sublime was never formally addressed with respect to music. What do survive are aesthetic remarks by critics eulogizing music in terms of its manly vigour and monumental grandeur, and it is these that prompt investigation into the philosophical context for the vigorous sound ideal promoted by reformers. The composer Huang Zi (1904–38) is a central figure since he not only referred to the final movement of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony in terms corresponding to the Kantian sublime, but also characterized the second movement using language drawn from classical Chinese poetics that invoked the immortals’ wind-riding aspiration. His attribution of ‘hun’ echoed Daoist transcendence as found in classical lyric criticism and provides a starting point for theorization of the Daoist sublime as a component of modern Chinese aesthetics that continue classical poetics. Huang’s works embrace a sense of loss that places them apart from Chinese modernists’ emphasis on strength and virility in accordance with Western theories of the sublime.

Sublimity, Negativity, and Architecture. An Essay on Negative Architecture through Kant to Adorno

Architecture defines and consumes people. It exposes them to a multitude of varieties of different aesthetic engagements. Architecture becomes a lived experience. However, this lived experience is always caught in the inner workings of the social and more specifically within cultural ideology. In modern capitalism, culture pervades every aspect of our lives. It shows its presence everywhere from our own homes to the public streets. Culture is everywhere, and architecture is a tool used for both the benefit and detriment of the “culture industry”. Kant speaks of the sublime as a profound moment of reason realizing its ability to overcome its own limits. In this experience is it possible to be completely ravaged and descend into hades and melancholy? Is there a beauty in this descent? More specifically, can architecture become banal or pedestrian, uplifting or depressing? According to Theodor Adorno, our subjectivity is defined by the constant dialectical struggle between freedom and unfreedom (among other things). It is realizing our freedom in the face of our unfreedom that makes us truly able to attain some form of resistance. The sublime experience can be transformed into a spirit of revelation and beautifully allow us to in a way resist the one-dimensional tendencies of modern capitalism. Architecture, which is immersed in our societal being and contributes to many of our own subjective unfreedoms, comes to define our lives as inhabited space. When does architecture produce a sublime experience? Can architecture’s authentic “aura” stand out amongst the reproduced city and produce a sublime feeling that can be a form of resistance against the culture industry? Does Grand Central Terminal provide the key to an architecturally sublime experience? Using dialectical experience and examining the sublime feeling (in a critique of the Kantian sublime) as the key to breaking through the culture industry’s banal architectural hold on our subjectivity, this essay will examine the experience of the sublime as a key to unfolding resistance in the face of the banality of modern architecture in the city and opening our minds to the Great Refusal through the exploration of Grand Central Terminal.

O começo do terrível – o legado de von Martius entre a ciência e a ficção na representação da natureza brasileira

As the harbors were opened to foreign nations, scientistsartists went through Brazilian lands and initiated a new kind of visuality connected to scientific paradigms of the nineteenth century, which rejected approaches with the fanciful speculation. This article is about the botanical legacy of the Bavarian Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius. It matters to us to expatiate on how his representation of nature approaches the Kantian sublime and blends into science and fiction. Keywords: Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, sublime, art-science

Inscripción, prescripción, ex-cripción. Nancy ante la ley

this article confronts the readings of Kafka’s story In the Penal Colony by philosophers Jean-luc Nancy and Jean-francois lyotard. the latter has analyzed it carefully due to that story illustrates his idea of “the untreatable”, that is, the preresscription that resists law and which has to do with the body of aisthesis. the prescription would be the sacrifice suffered by aesthetics when it is subordinated to Ethics or Politics, and hence the task that art has in lyotard's work: to bear witness to the unrepresentable. Nancy opposes another aesthetics, based like lyotard’s one on a heritage of the Kantian sublime. the difference between both ideas is that for Nancy bodies –that is, aesthetics– are not prescribed by law: they are primarily excribed. Ex-cription compared to prescription, or what is the same, two different ways of thinking about the relationship between Ethics and aesthetics.

Metamorphosis, Personhood, and Power in Karoline von Günderrode

This paper argues that the neglected writer Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806) develops a model of personhood and a related conception of agency that add to post-Kantian Idealist and German Romantic attempts to understand the relations between self and world and between freedom and determinism. In this paper, I locate the outline of this model in Günderrode's conception of death as metamorphosis. The paper begins from the claim that Günderrode rethinks the Kantian sublime to construct a non-dualistic cosmology and a unique model of personhood. I suggest that Günderrode's account of the self and its world informs a conception of agency that is grounded in the basic vulnerability and finitude of human beings and that denies that autonomy is a condition of freedom. I argue that Günderrode's notion of death as metamorphosis allows her to avoid overemphasizing consciousness and autonomy on the one hand and, on the other, affirming self-annihilation or accepting determinism. The result is a conception of individuality and freedom that reflects the dependency and vulnerability of human existence. The last part of the paper uses Günderrode's play “Hildgund” as an example of how this model of agency emerges in her work.

Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music ed. by C. Stephen Jaeger (review)

Reviewed by: Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music ed. by C. Stephen Jaeger Tara Williams C. Stephen Jaeger, ed., Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. pp. 320; 40 illustrations. ISBN: 978–0–230–61898–5. $90 This collection, which includes an introduction and eleven essays, developed from a 2008 conference on the medieval aesthetics of grandeur. It explores how and where concepts of the magnificent and sublime operated in the Middle Ages, and puts them into conversation with more widely known treatments by writers like Longinus, Immanuel Kant, and Theodor Adorno. In doing so, the volume challenges earlier assessments of the medieval sublime, particularly those by E.R. Curtius and Erich Auerbach, as well as an ‘overarching conception of medieval culture’ that C. Stephen Jaeger calls ‘the diminutive Middle Ages (DMA).’ Although the DMA may be a bit of a straw man—or at least may be a stronger paradigm in some disciplines than others—the contributors effectively undercut any idea that ‘the Middle Ages is a period of small, quaint things and people’ (p. 5). The arrangement of the essays highlights their variety, but several clusters also emerge. Readers who are most interested in the ontological categories at stake might begin with Jaeger’s introduction and ‘Richard of St. Victor and the Medieval Sublime,’ which argues for defining the sublime through its effects rather than any specific [End Page 116] qualities and takes Richard of St. Victor’s description of ‘ecstatic contemplative experience’ as the central case study (p. 163). In ‘How Magnificent Was Medieval Art?,’ Beth Williamson suggests that medieval and modern ideas of the magnificent and sublime have some general similarities but that medieval art encouraged the reader to connect with God rather than to remain disinterested, as required by the Kantian sublime. Architecture and art lend themselves perhaps most naturally to considerations of grandeur, and several essays explore those connections from different angles. Areli Marina’s ‘Magnificent Architecture in Late Medieval Italy’ examines both buildings and texts to demonstrate that ‘the sophisticated visual architectural language of magnificence was well-defined and clearly understood’ much earlier than previously recognized (p. 194). In ‘Reflections on the “Wonderful Height and Size” of Gothic Great Churches and the Medieval Sublime,’ Paul Binski considers how structures might inspire wonder at their colossal size or complex variety. Adam S. Cohen’s ‘Magnificence in Miniature: The Case of Early Medieval Manuscripts’ persuasively demonstrates that books, despite their smaller size, could evoke similar responses; they depicted their patrons as magnificent in addition to functioning as magnificent objects in their own right. Whereas Cohen approaches manuscripts from a visual culture perspective, other writers focus on textual representations of the magnificent and sublime. Martino Rossi Monti’s ‘“Opus es magnificum”: The Image of God and the Aesthetics of Grace’ shows how philosophers and theologians constructed grace as ‘something sublime and grandiose’ (p. 28). Danuta Shanzer considers the problems posed by biblical style’s apparent lack of magnificence in ‘“Incessu humilem, successu excelsam”: Augustine, Sermo humilis, and Scriptural ὕψος.’ In ‘“Error Left Me and Fear Came in Its Place”: The Arrested Sublime of the Giants in Divine Comedy, Canto XXXI,’ Eleanora Stoppino confirms that the sublime was a literary as well as a theological concern; she recognizes ‘disoriented perception’ as ‘a key element for the analysis of the gigantic Sublime’ in Dante p. (181). Proving that the sublime and magnificent were not restricted to what one could see or read, a subset of essays explores how sound also participated in those discourses. Christopher Page studies the writings of and about liturgical singer Mamertus Claudianus in ‘The Magnificence of a Singer in Fifth-Century Gaul.’ Margot E. Fassler’s ‘Helgaud of Fleury and the Liturgical Arts: The Magnification of Robert the Pious’ reflects on ‘the ways that music and musicians helped to make events and persons—both living and dead—worthy of praise’ (p. 103). Emma Dillon’s marvelous essay, ‘Listening to Magnificence in Medieval Paris,’ contends that civic sound, with its unpredictable, unruly, and ephemeral nature, ‘connot[es] the magnificence’ of that city (p. 216). The strengths of this...

O sublime e o cosmopolitismo de Kant no século XXI

In today’s political conjuncture, Kant’s cosmopolitan thinking stands in some unique relation to his notion of the sublime. The present paper aims to articulate (i) how the Kantian sublime is re-appropriated in analyses of the mediated images of social disasters in this century, (ii) how a cosmopolitan thinking can be registered as an aesthetic experience which restores the lost moral dimension of the classical sublime and lastly (iii) what constitutes the nature of this new cosmopolitan structure that is temporary and different in its occurrence from what is suggested by many forms of new cosmopolitanism(s) in the discourse of social and political sciences. Key words: cosmopolitanism, Kant, sublime, distant suffering.

THE RHETORICS OF THE eXtreme

This paper traces the relation between bungee jumping as eXtreme sport and the experience culture that we live in. It is argued that the sublime has been commodified to suit consumers’ preferences and choices. The higher the bridge or drop, the more enticing and challenging the jump. The sublime experience of bungee jumping has been reduced to a “drug” that can be induced whenever a quick fix of adrenaline is needed. The difference between the Kantian sublime and the eXtreme sublime, as figured in bungee jumping and other extreme sports, is also considered. Some comparative notes are made between the Romantic sublime as figured in the landscapes of Friedrich and bungee jumping. Where the Romantic sublime still worked with a necessary distance between object and subject the contemporary extreme sublime attempts to momentously disrupt the distance and become one with the eventfulness of the sublime.

“Like a pillar of fire above the Alps”: William Blake and the Prospect of Revolution

The Alps are not part of a sublime prospect in William Blake's poetry simply because they provoke Burkean terror or occasion a Kantian sensation of the unrepresentable. Rather, in both The Song of Los (1795) and Jerusalem (1804–c. 1820), the Alps are sublime in so far as they present the prospect of revolution. The earlier poem flirts simultaneously with a vision of revolution as eschatological finality and as the political realization of the ideas of “Rousseau and Voltaire.” By contrast, Jerusalem conveys revolution as an experience that potentiates the emergence of a radical ontological condition that frees the subject from both political and religious subjectivation. This paper traces the ways Jerusalem harnesses the Kantian sublime to Deleuzian concepts of difference and repetition. Jerusalem embraces the contra-finality of the sublime that Kant disparages and exploits the aesthetic as a Deleuzian site for the emergence of ontological difference. When Los sings his “watch song,” “the Alps and the Appenines / Listen.” This becoming-human of geography that Los's lyric occasions also gives “Time & Revolution to the Space of Six Thousand Years.” Rather than figuring revolution as an eschatological finality, Jerusalem's revolution involves a radical reconception of the body and the geo-political situation that frame its subjectivation.

Embers of the Sublime

ABSTRACTIn The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (2007), Daniel Heller-Roazen traces the history of what one might call a feeling of being alive, before drawing attention to twentieth-century philosophers' fascination with an apparent dimming of vitality. The work of Jean-Luc Nancy offers something of an exception to this, since what Nancy has called the “withdrawal of the gods” exposes us to an end of sensation that also renews it, by revealing “sense” to consist in our “sublime” and joyful exposure to nothing. In his reworking of the Kantian sublime, Nancy diagnoses sacrifice, in particular, as a disenchanting relic of metaphysics, which contaminates and attenuates any prospective encounter with our sublime finitude. But there is a crucial ambiguity over what this reworking entails. Nancy seems to imply the prospect of increasingly coming into contact with a sublime “évanouissement du sensible,” a fading away of the sensible encountered at the limits of experience. In saying this, he comes into contact with what Bernard Stiegler has described as a “catastrophe du sensible”—a vitiation of affect that is anything but sublime, and which, following the mass-murderer Richard Durn, he identifies with “the loss of the feeling of existing [la perte du sentiment d'exister].”

“A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM”: AESTHETICS OF SUBLIME AND EDGAR ALLEN POE

This paper aims to interpret Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “A Descent into the Maelstrom” in terms of the virtues of the 18th century sublime aesthetic theoretically informed by the works of two prominent philosophers, namely Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. “A Descent into the Maelstrom” is a landscape story about a fisherman’s escape from a deadly whirlpool called Moskoe-strom off the Norwegian coast in the North Sea. The aesthetics of sublime refers to a soul elevating experience of a piece of nature that is massive or mighty enough to cause human imagination to fail. Hence, it is possible to interpret this story in terms of the notion of sublime. The paper shall claim that Poe’s short story exemplifies both a Kantian and Burkean understandings of the concept in a fashion that is peculiar to Poe’s literary style. In the tale, the fisherman’s and the narrator’s experiences correspond to two kinds of sublime. Thus, in Poe’s peculiar writing, Burkean sublime shall be traced back in the fisherman’s experience of the whirlpool, whereas Kantian sublime in that of narrator’s. Following these two philosophers and their descriptions of the sublime, the paper shall trace this notion in Poe’s tale.

Wonder-full geomorphology

Though not yet readily apparent in articles and book chapters, there is a burgeoning series of ‘in the field’ collaborations between geomorphologists and artists focused around the mutual exploration of ‘inspirational landscapes’, and the harnessing of the emotive dimensions of such body/world encounters in the production and communication of geomorphological knowledge. Seemingly at odds with the discipline’s emphasis upon the production of fieldwork data (as opposed to sensed phenomena), as well as its disavowal of the subjective, this work nevertheless resonates with a complex and fascinating aesthetic tradition within geomorphology. Here, we ‘place’ these contemporary collaborations via: reference to Humboldtian science, and the crucial link between sensibility and precision; a reading of the Kantian sublime in the work of G.K. Gilbert; a sketching out of the evisceration of both the aesthetic and art in the second half of the 20th century; and, finally, a review of the current scope of art/geomorphology collaborations, and possible futures.