Abstract
This chapter explores what Kant means by “life”, the “feeling of life”, the “feeling of the promotion (or inhibition) of life”, and related notions, such as the idea of a “vital power”, through the contrast between Kant’s account of the beautiful and his account of the sublime. We argue that it is significant that Kant characterizes the feeling of the beautiful as a feeling of the promotion of life but the feeling of the sublime in terms of vital powers. We account for this difference by showing that in experiences of beauty, we are aware of ourselves as rational but embodied human beings, as part of nature. In the feeling of the sublime, by contrast, we are aware of ourselves as pure rational beings. This entails that in the beautiful, we experience nature as deeply life-promoting, while in the sublime, we experience the independence of our supersensible vocation from nature.
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Notes
- 1.
One difficulty with working out Kant’s views on this and related points is that, although there is a large amount of relevant textual evidence, most of it comes in the form of student lecture notes. Moreover, these notes indicate that Kant’s views on these matters were continuously evolving. We have tried to mitigate these difficulties when possible by quoting from texts that were either published or written to be published and by citing several supporting sources. For a helpful survey of the shifts in Kant’s views, see Caygill (2000). For a detailed examination of the historical roots of Kant’s concept of life, see Fugate (2018).
- 2.
We thus take something to be alive if it “has a faculty to alter its own state as a consequence of its own representations” (LM-Volckmann 295 [28:448–449]). It remains a matter of debate, however, whether we are licensed to say that organisms really are alive. We bracket this issue, focusing only on life and the feeling of life as it obtains in human beings. For discussion, see McLaughlin (1990), Ginsborg (2001), Breitenbach (2013b, 2014).
- 3.
See also CPR 438 [A393], LM-Volckmann 354 [28:594]; LM-L2 354 [28:594] and LM-K2 396 [28:755] and 405 [28:675]. Cf. MFNS 251–252 [4:544].
- 4.
As we mentioned earlier, Kant sometimes appears to identify life with the faculty of desire. (See Deimling (2018) for a careful defense of these claims.) We suggest, however, that desire is a sufficient condition or “mark” of life.
- 5.
See also the references to the “entire power of mind” (LM-L1 63 [28:247]) and our “entire faculty” (LM-Mrongovius 258–259 [29:890–891]), as well as the reference to life as unity in an interesting Reflexion (R6862) that Adickes dates between 1776 and 1789 (NF 443 [19:183]).
- 6.
- 7.
For example, Kant regularly uses “vital power” in discussing temperament but not character. See PA 384 ff. [7:285 ff.], LA-Mrongovius 467 [25:1370], and LA-Busolt 523–524 [25:1531], for example. See Cohen (2017b) for discussion.
- 8.
- 9.
By “cognitive judgments”, we mean the range of judgments ultimately aiming at determinate concept-application: determining judgments but also reflecting judgments that aim at generating a systematic unity of empirical concepts and laws.
- 10.
Though we cannot give a full defense of this reading of aesthetic and cognitive judgments here, the claims to follow do not depend on adopting this reading. For an alternative interpretation that identifies a “common core” between aesthetic and cognitive judgments, see Breitenbach (2013a, 2015, 2020, Forthcoming). The view we adopt has, on the face of it, a harder time accounting for the universality of aesthetic judgments (though see Cohen 2017a, 146–147), whereas a view such as Breitenbach’s must deal with the prima facie counterintuitive implication that all cognizable objects are (or could be) beautiful.
- 11.
Although in this passage, Kant is talking about works of art, rather than natural beauty, the specific kind of cognitive enhancement characterized here seems to be secured just by the nature of the harmonious free play and thus seems generalizable to all beautiful experiences. The same is not true with respect to the kind of cognitive enhancement Kant attributes to the experience of beautiful poetry, which, according to Kant, “expands the mind by setting the imagination free and presenting, within the limits of a given concept and among the unbounded manifold of forms possibly agreeing with it, the one that connects its presentation with a fullness of thought to which no linguistic expression is fully adequate” (CJ 203–204 [5:326]). Though the freedom of imagination’s activity remains central to this cognitive enhancement, the involvement of specific concepts raises the possibility that the sort of cognitive enhancement described here might be unique to the case of poetry.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
Though the passage quoted earlier focuses on the mathematical sublime, the same point is made explicitly with reference to both the mathematical and the dynamical sublime in the following passage: “Reason inevitably comes in as a faculty of the independence of the absolute totality, and produces the efforts of the mind, though it is in vain, to make the representation of the senses adequate to that. This effort, and the feeling of the unattainability of the idea by means of the imagination, is itself a presentation of the subjective purposiveness of our mind in the use of the imagination for its supersensible vocation” (CJ 151 [5:268]).
- 15.
It is unable, however, to grasp and comprehend everything it can apprehend (CJ 135 [5:251–252] and 138 [5:255–256]).
- 16.
Though this passage is about the dynamical sublime, Kant also characterizes experiences of the mathematical sublime as producing a “disposition of the mind” useful for our practical pursuits; see CJ 139 [5:256].
- 17.
A complete answer must further reckon with the murky claims about the “supersensible substratum” that unifies theoretical reason and practical reason and enables the transition from nature to freedom. See CJ 227 [5:353] and 216–217 [5:340–341].
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the editors, Manja Kisner and Jörg Noller, for their patience and ongoing support, as well as all the participants of the Munich conference for their helpful feedback, with special thanks to John Zammito for his insightful comments. We are also grateful to Angela Breitenbach, Robert Clewis, and Ido Geiger for the time they so generously spent discussing some of the ideas developed in the paper.
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Choi, Y.H., Cohen, A. (2022). Feeling and Life in Kant’s Account of the Beautiful and the Sublime. In: Kisner, M., Noller, J. (eds) The Concept of Drive in Classical German Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84160-7_9
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