Kant's justified dismissal of artistic sublimity

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 66, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 237-251

  Abaci, Uygar ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049323077     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6245.2008.00306.x     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. Kirk Pillow, Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (MIT Press, 2000)
2. Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
3. Robert Wicks, "Kant on Fine Art: Artistic Sublimity Shaped by Beauty," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 189-193
4. James Kirwan, The Aesthetic in Kant: A Critique (London and New York: Continuum, 2004)
5. Eva Schaper, "Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: The Aesthetics of Nature and Art," in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge University Press, 1992)
6. Donald W. Crawford, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (University of Wisconsin Press, 1974)
7. Henry E. Allison, Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
8. Barrows Dunham, A Study in Kant's Aesthetics, the Universal Validity of Aesthetic Judgments (Lancaster: The Science Press, 1934)
9. See Allan Lazaroff "The Kantian Sublime: Aesthetic Judgment and Religious Feeling," Kant Studien 71 (1980): 202-220, quote from p. 206
10. So Kant must have in mind the phenomenological peculiarity of the experience of the mathematically sublime in which the magnitude of the object makes its form incomprehensible as a unified whole. I discuss this below. For a slightly different but generally similar line of interpretation of the "formlessness" of sublime objects, see Theodore A. Gracyk, "Sublimity, Ugliness, and Formlessness in Kant's Aesthetic Theory," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (1986): 49-56
11. Moving from this extra cautiousness of Kant about the objective subreption in the sublime, Huhn, interestingly, argues that the sublime is more central and constitutive than the beautiful in Kant's aesthetics; see Thomas Huhn, "The Kantian Sublime and the Nostalgia for Violence," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 269-275
12. and Dunham, A Study in Kant's Aesthetics, pp. 88-89
13. Kant gives the same examples also in his precritical aesthetic treatise; see Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (hereafter Observations), trans. John T. Goldwait (University of California Press, 1960), p. 49
14. Wicks, for instance, takes these examples as textual evidence for a Kantian notion of artistic sublimity; see Wicks, "Kant on Fine Art: Artistic Sublimity Shaped by Beauty," p. 192
15. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), §68, 7:243, p. 146
16. Allison follows a similar line of interpretation and concludes that "judgments of the sublime in art are inherently adherent"; see Allison, Kant's Theory of Taste, p. 339
17. Guyer, "Kant's Conception of Fine Art," p. 278
18. See Pillow, Sublime Understanding, especially chapter 3, on "Sublime Reflection." Pillow admittedly drops the dynamical sublime as not applicable to art, and consequently dismisses the essential moral significance of the sublime experience
19. Crowther, The Kantian Sublime, p. 153
20. Guyer makes a similar point; see Kant and the Experience of Freedom, p. 264