This essay develops an account of the link between Kant's aesthetics and his ethics. It does so by articulating a Kantian account of moral psychology by way of aesthetic reflective judgements of sublimity. Since judgements of sublimity enrich the picture of a Kantian subject by forcefully revealing the unbounded power of the faculty of reason, I investigate the possibility that judgements of this kind could serve as a basis for moral motivation. The paper first shows how judgements of sublimity help (...) a subject recognize reason's unbounded nature, and proceeds to analyse the practical effects of a subject judging itself sublime. When judgements of sublimity have as their object the unbounded and unsythesizable power of reason, they may thereby serve as the basis for both the recognition of our moral vocation, and the grounds for determining the will to act from respect for it. Since a judgement of sublimity produces for Kant the experience of an enlivening emotion and an outflowing of vital forces, the paper then develops Kant's concept of “life” motivated by a recognition of its practical orientation. In this way sublimity rather than beauty can be interpreted as symbolic hypotyposis of morality. The paper then takes up less favourable interpretations of the practical effects of self-predicated judgements of sublimity, and constructs critical responses to such positions. I conclude, following Adorno, by stressing the historical and social dimension of the capacities for both making sublime judgements, and being morally enlivened by them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to construct a distinct formulation of the sublime via an inspection of some of Jacques Derrida's principal works. Through a reading of his assessment of Kantian sublimity and a development of the dialectical from deconstruction, two patterns of the sublime can be formulated. These two constructed patterns of the sublime, which I shall name “sublime of différance” and “aporetic sublime,” are predicated on the notions of infinity and dialecticism. The aporetic sublime includes in its constitutive structure the (...) element of an orientation to an irreducible other. It is argued in the article that these constructions are open to an incorporation of the sublime as located beyond subjectivity and discourse. (shrink)

Are we really sure to correctly know what do we feel in front ofan artwork and to correctly verbalize it? How do we know what weappreciate and why we appreciate it? This paper deals with the problem ofintrospective opacity in aesthetics (that is, the unreliability of self-knowledge) in the light of traditional philosophical issues, but also of recentpsychological insights, according to which there are many instances ofmisleading intuition about one’s own mental processes, affective states orpreferences. Usually, it is assumed that (...) aesthetic statements are intuitivelyclear and self-evident. However, a long tradition in psychological researchhas called the idea of introspective transparency and the infallibility of self-knowledge into question (Wilson 2002). This topic has only recently beenrecognized as an interesting problem in aesthetics (Melchionne 2011, Irvin2014). In this paper I will discuss the main shortcomings in introspective self-knowledge, mostly referring to psychological findings. As a consequence, thedevelopment of a folk psychological account of aesthetic experience could beneeded, investigating how people develop intuitive and naïve theories abouttheir aesthetic reactions, taste, and feelings, distinct from a more objectiveand empirically grounded account of how judgment and preferences areactually formed in ourselves, even on a neurobiological level. However, itwill also be argued that bypassing the individual judgment and his expressedchoices in favor of allegedly more objective levels of description would notbe an innocent step to take. (shrink)

Despite the possibility for “meta-programming,” the relationship that the photographer maintains to the apparatus in Flusser’s theory is one in which the latter not only conditions the processes of image making and viewing, but perpetuates the larger cultural framework of the technical image. Acting as a materialization of a larger discursive regime, the camera oversees and manages micro- and macro- distributions of the program of which it is a part. This essay attempts to draw out the larger implications of this (...) model by engaging with disaster photography, specifically, the seeming ubiquitous impulse to take pictures in the context of 9/11. Rather than the ineffable of the sublime or unassimilable of trauma studies, Flusser’s ideas allow us to approach this scenario from a materialist framework, suggesting a unique camera consciousness of disaster which functions as a specific category within its larger program rather than its compromise or negation. (shrink)

Kant needs to deduction in order to provide for universal and necessary validity of aesthetic judgment in the critique of judgment. In the deduction sections, He wants a reply to this question: how can a singular judgment be universally valid for everyone? In other words, how can the aesthetic judgment which basically is subjective, claim universal validity? Some of the Kant’s commentators believe that Kant’s deduction which expresses in the formal sections is unsuccessful and then they by the connecting of (...) the beauty with morality want to provide an objective base for the aesthetic judgment. They aimed to explain the universal validity of the judgments. This essay first express deduction, then crisis the moral interpretation of Kant’s deduction. It seems that believe in a moral point of view in the deduction’s topic neglect the autonomy of aesthetic judgments and arises hetoronoum judgments. (shrink)