Aesthetica Preprint

Preface

Robert R. Clewis, Arno Schubbach — Sat, 25 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Kant and the Possibility of the Sublime in the Visual Arts

Uygar Abaci — Sat, 25 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Whether Kant’s critical aesthetics accommodates the possibility of art eliciting the sublime is a lively debate in the literature. Those who defend this possibility have generally based their account on Kant’s theory of “aesthetic ideas” (Pillow 1994, Wicks 1995, Tomasi 2005, Vandenabeele 2015). I argue that this common strategy fails. I propose an alternative positive account. First, if art is to elicit the Kantian sublime through its form, the viewer is required to adopt a particular mental condition such that they perceive the artwork as sheer magnitude or power, abstracting from that it is a human artifact, what its purpose may be, and what it is supposed to represent. Second, if art is to elicit the Kantian sublime through its content, it can do so in a second-order manner, through the representation not of natural objects which would directly elicit the sublime, but the sublime experience itself (of another subject).

Can Painting Evoke the Kantian Sublime?

Robert Clewis — Sat, 25 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Can painting evoke an experience of the sublime, understood in terms adopted by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment? I will present three considerations that imply that painting cannot evoke the Kantian sublime. I then indicate some problems with each consideration. In the process, I explain how some paintings might evoke an experience of the sublime, even when painting is understood in terms of an eighteenth-century European context and conception of painting. In order to illustrate the phenomenology of sublime responses to paintings, I conclude with two examples. I thereby aim to show the real possibility of the Kantian sublime in response to painting.

Why Not Exactly? Revisiting the Alleged Arguments against the Artistic Sublime in Kant’s “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment”

Arno Schubbach — Sat, 25 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The debate about whether, according to Kant, there can be an artistic sublime often fails to clarify the relationship of the “Analytic of the Sublime” to the “Analytic of the Beautiful” and to the short discourse on art of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (KU, § 43 to § 59). Therefore, three types of arguments are often conflated, which I would like to propose to distinguish as precisely as possible: 1. arguments that cast doubt on the possibility of aesthetic judgments with respect to works of art in general; 2. arguments that specifically put into question the experience of the beautiful in the arts; 3. arguments questioning the artistic sublime. Kant addresses the first two types of arguments in his ingenious argumentation of why we can experience works of art as beautiful at all. However, they are often readily understood as arguments against the possibility of an artistic sublime, which Kant, however, hardly discusses as such. By distinguishing these types of arguments, I want to pinpoint what exactly, according to Kant, stood in the way of the possibility of an artistic sublime – and to explore the possibility of artistic strategies to overcome these obstacles.

Duality and Temporality: Evoking the Sublime through Pictures

Johannes Grave — Sat, 25 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Pictures pose a particular problem for the question of the representability of the sublime (in Kant’s sense). Their dependence on a limited and immobile picture carrier seems to prevent any depiction of the sublime from the outset. The present contribution first asks what preconditions must be met in order to be able to speak of a successful evocation of the sublime. On this basis, it is explained why the choice of pictorial motifs that can be experienced as sublime in nature is not an adequate solution to this problem. Instead, the paper proposes that the mobilization of specific properties of pictures, i.e., their duality and their temporality, could render the evocation of sublime sensations conceivable. This approach is finally illustrated by reference to the examples of Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner.

Evoking the Sublime in Landscape Painting: Joseph Anton Koch’s Schmadribachfall and Caspar David Friedrich’s Watzmann

Sonja Scherbaum — Sat, 25 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Kant’s rejection of the possibility of an artistic sublime requires critical revision. By reference to two landscape paintings – Joseph Anton Koch’s Schmadribachfall and Caspar David Friedrich’s Watzmann – it will be shown that paintings can indeed be capable of evoking an experience of the sublime. In this context, it is precisely the painting’s manner of representation that can provoke the failure of apprehension and comprehension that is central to the mathematically sublime and that represents an indispensable element of the experience of the sublime. Although Immanuel Kant cites examples from architecture to illustrate this failure of apprehension and comprehension, a pure judgment of the sublime can only be made regarding “raw nature”. Works of art, however, are always determined in their form and size by a human purpose. On the basis of contemporary sources, it will be shown that works of art can be considered as mere magnitudes. Another reason for Kant’s rejection of the artistic sublime is his restrictive understanding of the work of art. The historical analysis of the paintings in question will show that beyond the level of this normative understanding of the work of art, paintings can be capable of eliciting an experience of the sublime.

Giving Form to the Formless: from the Kantian sublime to the debate between Rosalind Krauss and Georges Didi-Huberman

Serena Feloj — Sat, 25 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this text, I will ask whether an artistic representation of the sublime is possible from one of its essential characteristics: the absence of form. Beginning with the Kantian notion of formlessness and its theoretical implications, I would like to refer to Rosalind Krauss’s (1996) reading and the debate engaged in with Georges Didi-Huberman (1995). In this journey around formlessness I will make mention of the entry “formlessness” that Bataille publishes in Documents (Bataille 1929). The thesis that I would like to argue, taking a position in the debate, is that even in the experience of the sublime, which is entirely subjective and originates in formlessness, there emerges the purely human need to resort to form and representation.