1 - ‘Contempt for the world’ – Kant's Aesthetics and the Sublime

Summary

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B1, 41/45)

A book on sublime art must begin with Kant's theory of the sublime. First, because it is the focus of our central authors (Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière and Derrida), whether they affirm, deny or deconstruct it. Second, because Kant's description of ‘aesthetic’ experience is foundational for ‘aesthetics’ as a philosophical discipline and has been central to the theorisation of art from Romanticism until today. Third, because of the not always simple pleasure of exploring Kant's amazing system. And finally, fourth, because the sublime provides irresistible drama as it emerges in all its monstrous ambiguity, the paradoxical– but no less necessary– collapse and fulfilment of Kant's system in an experience of the supersensible rising from the ashes of human experience.

But any consideration of Kant's concept of the sublime that wants to apply it to art immediately confronts a problem: Kant categorically denied that art can supply a sublime experience. Obviously this is not our problem alone, as it challenges all theories of sublime art and has inspired a variety strategies to deal with it. A common response is to offer a reading of sublime art that ‘solves’ the problem in Kantian terms, making it more or less consistent with Kant's system as a whole (see Crowther 1989 and 1995). While I will discuss some of these attempts, this approach will not be followed here. This book is not one of Kantian scholarship in the strict sense, and consequently it will not be overly burdened with esoteric questions regarding the consistency, or otherwise, of Kant's critical philosophy. Instead, our question is how the concept of the sublime might be useful in constructing a theory of contemporary artistic practice that draws from Kant but does not entirely play by his rules. In a broad sense, all of the thinkers considered here take this approach. As a result, while this chapter attempts to give an explanatory overview of the place of the sublime within Kant's aesthetics, it focuses on those elements that are directly utilised by the thinkers appearing in subsequent chapters to construct a theory of contemporary sublime art.