Abstract

This study concerns the role of reflective judgment in both aesthetical appreciation and one’s self-understanding in relation to an unfamiliar other. Pillow’s thesis is that “Sublime reflection can provide … a model for a kind of interpretive response to the uncanny Other ‘outside’ our conceptual grasp. It thereby advances our sense-making pursuits even while eschewing unified, conceptual determination”. His principal focus is on Kant’s development of sublime judgment in the third Critique, where this form of reflective judgment becomes central to Pillow’s greater theme: “I privilege sublime reflection in particular because it best models our interpretative search for meanings in things … furthermore, this reflection acknowledges the constitutive limitations of context-dependent understanding, its incapacity to determine fully the sense-making wholes it reaches to comprehend”. Hegel is drawn into the study ostensibly for two reasons. First, he has a more extensive, and determinate, idea of the content of aesthetical appreciation, whereas Kant adheres to a formalistic notion; second, Hegel is the foil for Pillow’s postmodern approach to the significance of reflective understanding. Since Hegel’s Aesthetics presents “the content of an art work … [in] a single fixed theme wholly available to conceptual analysis,” it stands opposed to Pillow’s view that the relation between the self-understanding subject and the other must remain “open” and foreign. Between and above Kant and Hegel floats Lyotard whose deconstructionist work on practical reason forms the impetus in Pillow’s study.