BDSL-Klassifikation: 03.00.00 Literaturwissenschaft > 03.07.00 Ästhetik
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This paper deals with Kant’s differentiation between artistic beauty and the sublime in nature. In this latter, Kant subsumes everything wild, uncultivated, inanimate and makes it – apparently – available to Aesthetics. As the quintessence of resistence, the "stone" stands for everything that remains the most estranged from the human sphere. In texts of Romantic authors such as Novalis, it can be seen how the "stone" in its turn takes possession of human beings and move them away from human nature. From Romanticism up to contemporary art, the sublime establishes thus a dominion of total alterity, which evades control and keeps consciousness alert to the fact that also in human beings there is an uncontrollable element demanding its rights.
This paper is an "interested" reading of "The Critique of Judgement" – "interested", because, unlike what has become usual in recent decades, it strives to disassociate the Kantian concept of "free beauty" from any interpretation of it as an early defense of abstract art. It is also "interested" because, instead of exposing (once more) the framework of the "Kritik der Urteilskraft", it tries to show how the Third Kantian Critique can be taken as a basis for something that was not part of its original purpose: reviewing the idea of mimesis itself. For that, the understanding of the Kantian sublime (das Erhabene) will be decisive: understood initially as one of the modalities of aesthetic experience, the other being beauty, the sublime progressively distances itself from the latter. If beauty and the sublime are to be thematized independently of "determining judgement", in which the properties of the object impose themselves upon the subject, the modalities of aesthetic experience suppose, on the contrary, the primacy of the subject. This implies gradations: from the experience of harmony propitiated by beauty up through the "negative pleasure" of the sublime, both poles through which reality is reworked by the subject. At the pole of beauty, "representation" of reality still plays a prominent role. At the pole of the "negative pleasure" of the sublime, "representation" is subordinated to the power of "presentation". However, both kinds of experience, the one of beauty and the other of the sublime, belong to the same field of aesthetic experience, because in both of them the subject reworks – does not discard – what comes to him from the outside: it will be necessary to understand "Vorstellung" always as an experience in which the exterior will be transformed by the subject. That is, the representation of the Third Critic will always be an effectual representation. In the sublime as much as in "free beauty", the metamophosis of the exterior by the subject achieves its maximum level without meaning that the external pole – that we usually call "world" or "reality" – disappears. It will thus be necessary to rethink the concept of mimesis in order to understand the metamorphosis of the world performed by radicalization of the aesthetic experience through "free beauty".
This article analyses the influence of Kant on conceptions and definitions of modern literature and art in publications by Lyotard, Kothe, Weber and Luhmann. It is argued that central issues in these publications, such as artistic autonomy, the sublime and the concept of L’art pour l’art, are adopted directly from Kant’s philosophical work and still serve as paradigms in the discussion of origin and status of modern social structure and its art production.