Lyotard on the Kantian Sublime :: Sublime Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Lyotard on the Kantian SublimeABSTRACT In this essay I explicate J.F. Lyotards reading of the Kantian sublime as presented in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1994) and in tell the Question What is Postmodernism (1984). Lessons articulates the context in which critical thought situates itself as a zone of virtually infinite creative cognitive content, undetermined by principles but in search of them Answering the Question explores how the virtually infinite creative capacity of thought manifests in the avant-gardes. Essentially, in both works Lyotard understands the Kantian sublime as legitimating deconstructive postmodernism. In the Critique of Judgement Kant defines the sublime as that, the mere world power to think which shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense. (1) Such striving for absolute comprehension beyond what the imagination is capable of representing in a simple perception or image may be occasioned by the rawness of scenes like the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the magnitude or immensity of which alludes to the estimation of absolute greatness. (2) Imaginations failure to contain this Idea understandably results in nuisance. (3) But pain is not the end-point characteristic of sublime feeling is a movement of pain to pleasure the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outflow of them. (4) In other words one is awestruck nature appears as a mere nothing in comparison with the Ideas of Reason. (5) From this we realize our superiority to nature within and without us and our supersensible destination beyond nature. (6) In this paper I wish to explicate J-F. Lyotards reading of the Kantian sublime. There are lessons to be learned here, as the title of his recent work (1994), Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, suggests.Essentially, the heuristic rule function of the sublime is to expose reflective judgment (of which sublime feeling is a species) as the context in which the critical enterprise functions or as the manner in which critical thought situates its own a priori conditions. (7) The Kantian sublime may teach us something else In an earlier work (1984), Answering the Question What is Postmodernism?, Lyotard views the sublime as legitimating the avant-garde as way of extending the critical enterprise to the arts. The method behind the madness of the avant-gardes, Lyotard contends, is incomprehensible unless one is already beaten(prenominal) with the incommensurability of reality to concept which is implied in the Kantian philosophy of the sublime.