Kant on the Sublime: Critique, Anthropology and the Aesthetic | Prof. Udaya Kumar

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Welcome you all to the second session titled ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy of this Kant conference. We are honored to have Professor Nirmalangshu Mukherji as chair for this session, as well as our distinguished speakers, Professor Uday Kumar, Professor Andrew Shignell, Professor Arindam Chakrabarti, and Professor Günter Zöller, who will be joining us online. I respectfully invite the esteemed panel onto the dais to share their valuable insights.

[00:00:22]Professor Nirmalangshu Mukherji is a former professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Delhi, and former national professor at the Indian Council of Philosophical Research. His issues include vast valuable work on the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, along with their intersection with linguistics, linguistic, specifically biolinguistics.

[00:00:40]His work includes important books titled The Primacy of Grammar and The Human Mind Through the Lens of Language.

[00:00:45]Professor Uday Kumar is a former professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, as well as former professor at the Department of English at the University of Delhi.

[00:00:54]His publications include two books entitled Writing the First Person, Literature Literature History and Autobiography in Modern Kerala, and The Joycean Labyrinth, Repetition, Time, and Tradition in the Ulysses.

[00:01:04]His recent research has focused on death in contemporary culture, forms of life writing, cultural histories of the body, and idioms of vernacular social thought.

[00:01:11]Please, sir.

[00:01:14]Oh, is it? Sorry.

[00:01:15]Um Professor Andrew Shignell is a Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University with appointments in the religion and philosophy departments. He served as the president of the North American Kant Society between 2020 and 2023. He has written extensively on hitherto unexplored dimension of Kant's philosophy with special focus on theorizing hope and despair in their connection with Kantian morality.

[00:01:38]Professor Arindam Chakrabarti is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Ashoka University. His work has tried to blend analytic, continental, and classical Indian philosophies, particularly Nyāya and Buddhist philosophy. His His recent book, Realisms Interlinked: Objects, Subjects, and Other Subjects, continues in this vein and provides a valuable exposition of metaphysical realism and drawing from both Nyāya and analytic from both from the Nyaya and analytic tradition in an exemplary example of what commentators have called cross-cultural philosophy.

[00:02:05]Professor Gunter Zoller is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Munich. His research focuses on German idealism and political philosophy extending across the German tradition including work on Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.

[00:02:17]Thank you all for joining us today.

[00:02:19]We would like to begin by felicitating our guests.

[00:03:12]I now hand over to our chairperson Professor Mukherjee to begin the session.

[00:03:33]Thank you very much.

[00:03:36]Wow.

[00:03:45]Good.

[00:03:51]Hello.

[00:03:55]>> [snorts] >> I would now like to invite our chairperson Professor Mukerji to begin the session.

[00:04:03]Um welcome everyone. Um >> [clears throat] >> Uh we have a session titled I can't what successful title.

[00:04:12]Uh because uh Professor Mitra has come up with interesting titles for each session. I want to announce that title.

[00:04:21]Where is that title?

[00:04:25]Ethics and Politics.

[00:04:27]Okay. Okay. That that's interesting.

[00:04:29]Ethics, aesthetics, and politics. The the other Kant.

[00:04:33]So, that's the idea. And we have four very distinguished speakers here, three uh here, right here, and one online.

[00:04:44]So, that's a very busy session and we don't have much time.

[00:04:48]Because I think we should finish exactly in time so that uh there are still some people left to listen to our research students.

[00:04:56]Okay, which follows that that session of research students follows after this session, after these four lectures. So, there should be some audience for that.

[00:05:05]So, I will be very very strict about time.

[00:05:09]All right?

[00:05:12]Okay, we will break for lunch after the first talk.

[00:05:15]And then uh I will be very strict about time and >> [laughter] >> may not may not allow questions if the speakers go over time.

[00:05:24]Uh because because I want to keep the time for the students >> [snorts] >> uh at the end. Very much. Thank you very much. So, we begin with the first talk.

[00:05:32]I think that's Professor Udaya Kumar.

[00:05:34]He's the first first speaker. Yeah.

[00:05:36]Okay. So, please Udaya Kumar, your topic is uh Kant the on the sublime, critique, anthropology, and the aesthetics. Just like with a comma.

[00:05:47]>> [laughter] >> I think you have half an hour. 30 minutes? 30 minutes, okay?

[00:06:03]25 minutes, will you give me a shout?

[00:06:06]I will try.

[00:06:08]>> [laughter] [snorts] >> Yeah, I'm first of all my apologies for keeping you away from lunch.

[00:06:15]And let me begin by thanking Inakshi Mitra and colleagues at the philosophy department of Delhi University for inviting me for this important conference. It's a pleasure to be back to speak in this building after more than 10 years.

[00:06:32]And to see several friends here, but I must also confess my sense of nervousness, which I shared with Inakshi when she first invited me and then persuaded me to be part of it.

[00:06:45]As you know, I'm not really a philosopher. I'm an interloper here really. And my my own reading of Kant is very sketchy and partial. It's it's not at all comprehensive or it's not at all rigorous.

[00:07:00]Like many literature students or students of literary and cultural studies, I have been interested in some writings of Kant and some discussion ideas in Kant which became very important for literary studies at certain points in time. And this writing on the question of the sublime really came out of that and my initial kind of engagement with it was many years ago. And now when I read these texts again, I'm not sure I understand them better.

[00:07:33]Often I find that I I find them even more complex and even more difficult.

[00:07:38]So, I just wanted to say these things by way of a caveat about the limitations of my paper. I think I'll take a second to get my bottle of water.

[00:07:50]Yeah.

[00:07:52]Thank you.

[00:07:58]Yeah, as you know, for students of literature, especially, the the key text of Kant which people tend to read is the critique of aesthetic judgment.

[00:08:10]Uh which, as you know, is only one part of the critique of the power of judgment. And the second part is often not really read in literary studies context, which is unfortunate because to understand what Kant is trying to do in the critique of aesthetic judgment, we also need to see what happens in the critique of teleological judgment.

[00:08:31]And the the sublime the discussion of the sublime is a peculiar kind of moment in the critique of aesthetic judgment because you could say that, as my friend Jacob was pointing out a few moments ago, on the one hand it looks like a shorter discussion compared to the beautiful, you know, after having set up the beautiful. But on the other hand, it seems to be the pivot on which the the the critique and the arguments in the critique actually turn.

[00:09:04]And something goes away from the plans, you know, it begins as something about natural beauty, about the idea of the beautiful, and then after the sublime, things change, and you get the notion of the aesthetic idea, you begin to get talk about art, a whole range of things begin to happen there.

[00:09:24]Now, Kant, as we know, when he was writing the critique of judgment power, he was engaging very closely with two different traditions of thinking about judgment.

[00:09:35]One was the German tradition, uh Christian Wolff's name has been invoked many times already. And the second was the kind of British tradition, which is uh the Scottish Enlightenment, you know, uh and also people like uh Hume. And in relation to the sublime, of course, the the key predecessor of uh uh Kant, the most famous text, so to say, was Edmund Burke's old 1757 text called A Philosophical Inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful.

[00:10:10]Now, Kant's engagement with the sublime uh goes back a long way.

[00:10:16]Uh you will see that it actually comes up very early in uh this early text called Universal Natural History and the Theory of the Heavens, which is very early. And the concluding uh section, concluding paragraph of that text, I'll just read it out because I'm also trying to follow one particular motive, which comes up repeatedly in Kant's writing on the sublime.

[00:10:41]So, this concluding para of uh the Universal Natural History and the Theory of the Heavens goes, "Indeed, when one has filled one's mind with such observations and with the preceding ones, the view of the starry sky on a clear night gives one a kind of pleasure that only noble souls feel.

[00:11:05]In the universal stillness of nature and the calmness of the senses, the immortal spirit's hidden faculty of cognition speaks an ineffable language and provides undeveloped concepts that can certainly be felt, but not described."

[00:11:24]Question of speakability, you know, that uh and what he was speaking about, yeah.

[00:11:29]>> [snorts] >> If among the thinking creatures of this planet, there are any despicable beings who, in spite of all the delights with which so great an object can attract them, are yet in a position to tie themselves firmly to the service of vanity.

[00:11:47]How unfortunate is his fear that has been able to bring up such miserable creatures?

[00:11:54]But how fortunate is it, on the other hand, because under the most acceptable conditions, a way has been opened for it to attain bliss and sublimity that is exalted infinitely far above the benefits that the most advantageous arrangement of nature can attain in all celestial bodies.

[00:12:20]The The image of the starry sky, uh we are all familiar with that, of course, from the conclusion of the Critique of Practical There Kant says, "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence the more often and more steadily one reflects on them.

[00:12:45]The starry sky above me and the moral law within me."

[00:12:51]But it's also interesting that Kant very quickly moves on in this concluding paragraph of the first book, The Universal Natural History, uh from invoking this feeling of sublimity uh uh while contemplating uh the starry sky, to a criticism of people who cannot feel it.

[00:13:15]Very quickly he moves on from this to differentiate between two different kinds of people.

[00:13:21]One set who are responsive to it, who are moved by this noble feeling, and another who I take to vanity and who cannot etc. etc. Now, uh the distinction between people who are sensitive to this experience and who are not becomes important here.

[00:13:41]Now, this differentiation is what you may call an empirical differentiation.

[00:13:45]Yeah?

[00:13:47]This is a matter for anthropology.

[00:13:53]Anthropology is a site where the sublime and the beautiful were explored before Kant addressed them in critical philosophy.

[00:14:03]In 1764, Kant wrote a text called Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime.

[00:14:10]And his preoccupation with anthropology predated the critical project and also survived the critical project.

[00:14:20]Lectures on physical geography and anthropology, which he regularly delivered, apparently apart from the lectures in logic, those were the most numerous lectures that he gave.

[00:14:30]The former from 1756 for a period of 40 years.

[00:14:35]Anthropology for 25 years from 1772 to 1796.

[00:14:41]And the publication from anthropology from a pragmatic point of view is in 1798, as late as that.

[00:14:49]Now, in his lectures on logic there is one note, one passage which comes up in 1800. He says, "The field of philosophy in this sense may be reduced to the following questions. What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?

[00:15:08]What is man?

[00:15:09]The first question is answered by metaphysics, the second by morals, the third by religion, and the fourth by anthropology.

[00:15:19]In reality, Here, all these might be reckoned under anthropology, since the first three questions refer to the last.

[00:15:28]Now, bringing anthropology into the discussion of the sublime raises indirectly the question of the relationship between the anthropological project and the critical project in Kant. I won't have time to go into that, but making a quick remark that it has been pointed out by some scholars that the anthropological self-observation has the characteristic of reaching neither the subject in itself nor the pure eye of synthesis, but a self which is object and present only in its phenomenal truth.

[00:16:08]Yet, this object I, which is given to the sense in the form of time, is nevertheless not alien to the determining subject. Since, in the end, it is nothing but the subject as it is affected by itself. So, just to connect it with some of the discussions we had in the in the earlier in the morning session, the anthropological figure of the I in that sense, you could say that there is a place it's what Foucault in order of things would call a empirical transcendental conjunction doublet where both these things actually come into play there.

[00:16:47]Now, about sublime, we all know that sublime was a major theme in 18th century British thought, and it goes back to and, interestingly, the idea of the sublime really becomes active after Longinus's text on the lofty style gets translated into English, and it moves from the idea of rhetoric to the idea of sentiment, inner experience, etc. And it goes back to people like uh, uh, uh, Addison, some of the earlier writings on the sublime. And then of course Burke's major text coming which comes out in 1757.

[00:17:25]And in Burke Burke actually begins by speaking about two distinct kinds of pleasure which we experience. One is of course, uh, uh, what he calls beautiful, which is an unproblematic idea of pleasure.

[00:17:39]And the other is the sublime where where it is mixed with some kind of pain uh, which is also related to the idea of fear.

[00:17:47]And still it is something which you enjoy. So a kind of classification between two different experiences of pleasure.

[00:18:00]After having established these two different experiences, which he also connects with connects with another distinction which is between the egotistical emotion of fear and the altruistic emotion of love.

[00:18:16]After this, Burke's text is actually an attempt to enumerate or detail instances of the sublime and the beautiful. You could say that he's concerned with the question of what are the appropriate objects which can provoke these experiences.

[00:18:33]So there are a large number of things we don't have the time to go into that.

[00:18:36]And sometimes Burke's explanations have a kind of what you may call a kind of psychophysiological kind of texture about it. Like obscurity is sublime and it is related to the dilation of the pupil, etc., etc. And also the relaxation of the muscles, uh, the smoothness of the neck, a number of things which are related to, uh, bodily experience becomes important there.

[00:19:02]Now, Kant's, uh, uh, treatment of the sublime in both texts is different, but by the time he comes to the critique of judgment, he would actually directly comment on Burke and just saying that this is actually like the raw materials for a system. You have accumulated all kinds of instances, but you are not actually critically examining them to find out what what the sublime is. What are the conditions of the possibility of the judgment of the sublime?

[00:19:30]But even when he does observations in 1764, Kant's interest is not so much in the objects that provoke the sublime.

[00:19:40]It is rather in the kind of people, the kind of individuals or subjects, who would experience sublimity and who would experience beauty.

[00:19:54]Now, this is it's interesting to notice that this is a taxonomy of different kinds of people, different kinds of classifying the humankind into different types and based on different criteria to explain the preference for the sublime or the openness to the sublime and the openness to the beautiful. There are two ideas which come up as very important. One is the notion of temperament. Now, you know that temperament is a very important idea in Kant's anthropology.

[00:20:27]And the second is the idea of disposition.

[00:20:30]Disposition again is something which is not really a rational kind of feature. It is something which orients you, disposes you to certain kinds of experiences.

[00:20:41]So, he tries to classify or distinguish between different dispositions and temperaments which determine if somebody is open to the idea of the sublime or prefers the beautiful.

[00:20:56]Now, this of course is preceded by a uh synoptic description like in Burke between some examples of objects of the sublime and subject objects of the beautiful. I'll read just two sentences to show you how quickly and seamlessly it moves from speaking about the objects of the experience of the sublime to the kind of people who are actually experiencing them.

[00:21:22]Tall oaks and lonely shadows on a sacred grow a sublime. Flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures of beautiful.

[00:21:31]Night is sublime, day is beautiful.

[00:21:34]The sublime moves, the beautiful charms.

[00:21:38]The mean of a man undergoing the full feeling of sublime is earnest, sometimes rigid and astonished.

[00:21:46]On the other hand, the lively sensation of the beautiful proclaims itself through shining cheerfulness in the eyes, through smiling features and often through audible mirth.

[00:21:59]He also classifies different experiences of the sublime, different kinds of sublime, as terrifying, noble and splendid.

[00:22:09]From this you will see that in the observations he derives a number of uh Now, concepts is too strong a word. A set of phrases and words through which we ordinarily understand people's responses. Like for example, grotesquery, visionary behavior, adventure, and then words like the fob, the crank, the pedant, etc. And as you can see this is part of a what can be broadly called an anthropological approach.

[00:22:42]Now, if from this initial discussion Kant moves on to speak about humors and trying to understand them in relationship to uh temperaments, you know, in relationship to beautiful and the sublime. Like the melancholic is seen as more open to sublime.

[00:23:00]Uh and then he moves on to gender. Here, he in some sense rehearses something which you already find in Burke, that is man is sublime and the woman is actually beautiful.

[00:23:12]And in Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft had written a very powerful criticism of this distinction.

[00:23:19]Now, uh but Kant does not stop with the question of gender. He moves on to nations. Here, arguments like, you know, arguments, statements like Italians and French are beautiful, open to the experience of the beautiful. The Germans, the English, and Spanish are more open to the experience of the sublime.

[00:23:40]And then he expands beyond Europe, but using Europe as a kind of template. He would say that the Arabs are the noblest men in the Orient. They are a bit like, you know, uh the Italians, etc., etc. So, uh a series of, you know, as you know, maybe Kant was already at this young age, he was reading a lot of Travel Writing, Travel Writing here is his major source for the lectures in Anthropology.

[00:24:10]Now, the culmination of this tendency of taxonomy is found in Kant's use use of a kind of racial distinc- distinction. The last part of the observations is really about the different races.

[00:24:24]So, there he takes the distinction between the white and the black races as a fundamental opposition.

[00:24:30]So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man and it appears as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.

[00:24:39]Now, uh there are some more recent thinkers like Robert Bernasconi, probably writing in the '90s or early 2000s, who uh wrote this essay called Who Invented the Concept of Race.

[00:24:53]And he makes this argument that Kant was very central to the invention of a philosophical concept of race, which underlies a modern racialist thinking.

[00:25:04]Like the crucial point he makes in that essay is that the connection established between physical features and physiognomic features on the one hand and mental capacities, attitudes, dispositions, talents, this comes up in the observations to begin with, but it also comes up in other essays like on the diversity of human races, which is written in the 1770s.

[00:25:29]And now we have part of the anthropology lectures available in English, so we have numerous examples of remarks of this kind coming up there.

[00:25:38]So for Kant, the blacks of Africa have no feelings that rise above the trifling.

[00:25:43]Moreover, they are very vain and so talkative, I'm quoting, okay, talkative, that they must be driven apart from each other with thrashings.

[00:25:51]Uh after citing an observation by a black man on the relationship between the sexes among the whites, Kant observes, "And it might be that there was there was something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered. But in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof uh that what he said was quite stupid."

[00:26:10]Now this idea of stupidity becomes important in in discussions of races.

[00:26:15]Now my my uh interest in citing these passages is not to score a political point against Kant, but to see this anthropological impulse in his thinking and how it shapes the thinking about the aesthetic, thinking about the sublime, etc., etc. Now the an- uh anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, the the probably the last published text, and 1798, uh in that there is a second part called anthropological characterization, which aims to specify how to discern man's inner self from his exterior.

[00:26:55]Their argument is developed in four moments here, expanding, you could say, centrifugally. They address, respectively, the character of the person, sexes, nations, races, and species. There are marked similarities between this and the arguments on dispositions that we encountered in observations.

[00:27:14]However, Kant's discussion of racial character in this text is striking in its brevity.

[00:27:20]In the two paragraphs devoted to this section, Kant merely points out that within each race, nature's law aims not to let the characters of its people constantly approach one another in likeness. This is the main point he tries to make there.

[00:27:36]Now, we know that the discussion we find in the third critique is very different from the the kind of things which I outlined so far.

[00:27:44]Uh it's universal in scope, and as we know, the third critique, in some sense, is actually bringing together what Kant tried to do in the first critique and what he did in the second critique.

[00:27:58]And and the question it implicitly responds to is, how can human beings inhabit the world of nature as free subjects, as moral beings?

[00:28:08]So, there, the idea of purposiveness, as all of us know, becomes absolutely important.

[00:28:15]Recently, there has been some work on how how far does this thinking about the teleological orientation for thinking about the sublime go back in time?

[00:28:26]There are some people who have argued that it actually comes quite late. It really is the third critique which does it. But, recently, there have been scholars who have argued that you can find traces of this quite early.

[00:28:40]In terms of sentiments, in terms of the idea of the orientation to your moral feeling, it has certainly a very long history in Kant.

[00:28:51]>> [snorts] >> Now, uh so then like what I said earlier, uh the third critique begins by talking about uh natural beauty.

[00:29:03]Unlike Hegel, you don't get much discussion of works of art in Kant.

[00:29:08]Uh not only that, natural beauty is seen as superior in the beginning of uh the third critique uh uh in comparison to artistic beauty or man-made beauty, so to say.

[00:29:21]Uh this probably changes in the course of the third critique, uh although it's not directly asserted.

[00:29:27]Uh and purposiveness, the the sense of purposiveness that you feel when you look at uh nature, that is seen as already indicating a moral inclination. Gilles Deleuze uh correctly pointed out that the man who goes out for a walk in the forest for Kant is shows signs of a moral inclination more clearly than the one who goes to visit museums. Yeah.

[00:29:55]>> [laughter] >> Yeah. Now, uh I want to know we don't have much time, so I >> I I I will let you know. I will let you know.

[00:30:04]Yeah. Carry on. Carry on. So any anyway, I don't I won't have too much to say. Um uh So we know that the key argument about the sublime that the third critique makes is that the sublime is actually contrafinal. Like it actually there is a kind of conflict which happens in the experience of the sublime.

[00:30:27]Like on the one hand, you're confronted with an image, a representation, which seems to uh which which is difficult to comprehend.

[00:30:41]Uh like in the mathematical sublime, it really becomes one of comprehending.

[00:30:46]And in the dynamic sublime, something which is difficult to come to terms with. It seems to be too big, too powerful, etc. So, the imagination in trying to produce an image of this at some point is interrupted by reason which supplies a pure idea of reason such as infinity.

[00:31:10]And once reason supplies this idea, imagination tries to match it with a representation. Yeah.

[00:31:18]So, imagination Yeah. pulls itself out of its limits and tries to reach it, and it keeps failing. So, it is in this failure, in this falling back, that you get the experience of the sublime.

[00:31:32]So, this is a typical gesture in Kant.

[00:31:34]On the one hand, this sense of humility, it actually shows you how small you are in front of this vast universe. But on the other hand, it also shows you your superiority in relation to nature, because you have the rational idea of infinity, to which nothing in nature can match it. Yeah.

[00:31:54]So, so this this is actually the the key element in the sublime. Now, since I have only about you know, 4 minutes, I I will I will just focus on one moment in the third critique. And uh uh a comment interesting set of comments made by uh an eminent uh literary thinker, Paul de Man, on that. This is a famous passage about uh again, the starry sky. Yeah. Uh which we spoke about earlier. This is from the third critique.

[00:32:23]I quote from Kant. So, if you call the sight of the starry heaven sublime, we must not found our estimate of it upon any concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings with bright spots which we see filling the space above us as their sons moving on orbits prescribed for them with the wisest regard to ends. But we must take it just as it strikes the eye as a broad and all-embracing canopy.

[00:32:53]And it is merely under such a representation that we may posit the sublimity which the pure aesthetic judgment attributes to this object.

[00:33:03]One more short uh paragraph follows on.

[00:33:06]Similarly, as to the prospect of the ocean, the ocean is the other example.

[00:33:10]We are to regard it as we with our minds stored with knowledge on a variety of matters are wont to represent it in thought as let us say a spacious realm of aquatic creatures or as the mighty reservoirs from which are drawn the vapors that fill the air or the clouds of moisture, etc. etc. If we do this, we get nothing beyond teleological judgments.

[00:33:34]Instead of this, we must be able to see sublimity in the ocean regarding it as the poets do according to what the impression on the eye reveals as let us say in its calm a clear mirror of water bounded by the heavens or be it disturbed as threatening to overwhelm and engulf everything. Now, these are interesting for two reasons. One is you don't get that image of fear here. Now, the fear is not it's stillness, the kind of stillness which we invoked in the the universal history essay earlier. And the second thing is that here there is a evacuation of concepts, a denudation of representation of all concepts in order for this experience of the sublime to arise. Now, Paul de Man now I'll just summarize. Paul de Man wrote a very interesting set of essays on Kant, one of which is called for phenomenality and materiality in Kant's third critique, right? And in that he makes his point that this fascinating uh passages these fascinating passages may be juxtaposed to a passage from uh the lectures on logic where Kant speaks about the man in the wild uh who is unaware of houses.

[00:34:56]If he sees a house he will not really uh see it the way in which a person who is familiar with houses would see it.

[00:35:07]Kant says there that in the case of the man in the wild there is only intuition.

[00:35:12]In the other case there is intuition and concept.

[00:35:15]So, but what the man is trying to tell us is that the perception of the man in the wild which is devoid of concepts seems to be strangely like have some kind of kinship. It seems to resonate with what the poet does when he looks at the ocean uh or how the starry sky strikes the eye without striking the mind.

[00:35:42]Now, this is a problematic thing because we know that the figure of the savage appears in the third critique as somebody who cannot have an experience of the sublime.

[00:35:52]Because a savage who looks at a turbulent ocean would only be frightened of it. He will not be able to have the experience of the sublime.

[00:36:02]So, there is an interesting complication in the figure of the figure who is outside the ambit of culture. The human being who is outside the ambit of culture which comes up here. Now, it's it's a it's a question it's an open question as to how to think further with this.

[00:36:25]One of the ways in which one may think about it is that in Kant thinking, Kant's thinking, Kant stands at a kind of very important point where two things are happening, you know, which we associate with the Enlightenment.

[00:36:38]On the one hand, we have the claim claims about the universal idea of the human subject as a free subject, etc. On the other hand, you also have the differentiation of the human race into people who are more cultured and less cultured, more human, less human, etc. etc. These give rise to two different aspects of the Enlightenment, as we know.

[00:37:02]One leading to modern forms of governance and state on the one hand, and the other to the entire history of thinking universality.

[00:37:10]But there is also one more issue there.

[00:37:13]Is it at all possible to think about the savage as not below the threshold of this encounter with the sublime? Time to stop. Yeah. In In Kant's third critique, yeah, I'm just writing it. In Kant's third critique, there are some moments which have a kind of possibility there.

[00:37:31]This happens this is really undeveloped, not only in the third critique, but even in the early lectures. This comes up in the discussion of sensations and effects. Like for example, Kant speaks about the savage as capable of admiration of courage. Yeah, I'm stopping. And also similarly, the savage as somebody who has intensities of sensations. And some sensations are associated more with the experience of the sublime, like shudder as different from tremor. So, there might be a possibility where the question is a question. I'm not suggesting that there is a possibility, but is there a possibility of thinking about this orientation to the sublime at a threshold which is below the level of ideas of reason, you know?

[00:38:23]And to a more elementary threshold of the human being inhabiting a large universe, uh uh with in which it finds itself uh in in a state of stillness, you know?

[00:38:39]So, I'll stop there. Thank you Thank you. Thank you.

[00:38:42]Very good.

[00:38:45]>> [applause] >> Uh it's a very elegant and very well thought out paper.

[00:38:52]Provocative, I would say.

[00:38:54]He claims that it's not political, but I think it's very political. So, but we have don't have much time. So, very few questions. Uh So, maybe if someone is interested. I myself have many many questions. Please go ahead.

[00:39:07]Uh please come come to the mic. You go ahead.

[00:39:10]Last book, Conflict of the Faculties. Uh Conflict of the Faculties. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:39:15]Yeah. Yeah.

[00:39:16]Is that Am I audible? Yes. Yeah. So, um you talked about um the sensitivities of, you know, somehow discerning the sublime, discerning the beautiful in different people.

[00:39:30]And that made me think about how do we cultivate this discernment or this uh quality in us?

[00:39:37]And therein I find a certain paradox because at least in the third critique, these things are a result of a failure, result of a failure of faculties. This is and even in sublime, there is a failure which invites reason to intervene.

[00:39:54]If that happens, how do we learn anything? Because, let's say I see an ocean and I'm in awe of the ocean.

[00:40:04]Nevertheless, if I learn more about the ocean, how oceans are created, what are the geological processes in the history of geology that has created the ocean, you know, my my understanding is becoming better and better.

[00:40:17]Nevertheless, I am less and less prone to feeling that awe, right? So, is the cultivation even possible because cultivation to me then becomes unlearning what you have learned, and there is no pedagogy to it, right?

[00:40:41]Yeah, thank thank you for that. You see, there is an interesting question about the the ability to appreciate beauty of the sublime as belonging to culture.

[00:40:54]Kant, there is a concept of culture.

[00:40:55]There could be a say discussion of culture. But, it's not as if these are these originate in culture. Kant is clear about that. These will not originate in culture and are taught to you in some kind of conventional way. You know, if I remember the sentence, it's something like that.

[00:41:13]It is a natural capacity that being human involves.

[00:41:18]The the different faculties, the possibility of this tension, and the opening, the failure that for Kant is really the success of the human subject.

[00:41:28]The ability to open the door to infinity. Let the reason come in.

[00:41:33]Now, learning a lot about if you become a marine engineer, for example, it is only by suspending the view that uh the sea is full of aquatic creatures, etc., that you will be able to see it like the poet sees it. And that is the gateway to open, so the window which opens to the the moral dimension.

[00:41:53]It is not that knowledge of facts and cognitive knowledge which would actually give you that.

[00:42:03]Well, you know, in Kant, see, he has maybe I do not know if if is a single answer to that. One is there is a certain relationship to nature becomes important. A certain relationship to form becomes important. A sensibility to form.

[00:42:22]After all, what is the what is it to see an ocean like a mirror, you know?

[00:42:28]The mirror is mentioned there because there is a complete lack of depth. It's a pure surface. That that is what he is trying to get at. So, in that sense, a an ability to perform it is only by familiarizing you with It is not something which can be taught in the way in which you can be taught information.

[00:42:51]I would But just one more. Just one. Go ahead.

[00:42:54]Please give her the mic.

[00:42:56]You want to take it?

[00:42:58]We shall She used to be. Uh thank you so much, sir. It was really a thought-provoking lecture. So, my question is as you mentioned about Edmund Burke's the work on beautiful and sublime that he talks about the instantiations, the examples of beautiful and the examples of sublime.

[00:43:20]So, it is more object-oriented, but in the case of Kant, he is more subject-oriented. So, can we say that and you also mentioned about how imagination fails in the case of sublime experiences and the reason have to come in.

[00:43:35]But if the subject, because it is subject-oriented, if the subject uh synthesizes the manifold of the experiences in such a way that the same event can be sublime to one person and can be beautiful to the other person.

[00:43:53]I think that Yes. Yes.

[00:43:55]Yeah, thank you. You know, the the important thing as we are dealing with what is called reflective judgment in these cases, isn't it? Like we are not actually speaking about substantive judgment in a way a actually can be given. And but it's entirely possible to imagine somebody looking at a storm tossed ocean and saying that this is beautiful rather than sublime. But that person would actually be seeing this as in harmony with you know there is a harmony of the faculties which are brought in. Reason is not coming into play there. In the case of the beautiful we know that the harmony is really between understanding, imagination, and sensibility.

[00:44:36]So it is hypothetically it is possible.

[00:44:39]You know.

[00:44:42]Yeah, but Kant's point is that there are like imagine that the stillness of the starry sky, you know. That probably is more amenable to something like this.

[00:44:58]Yeah, but I must give her the first choice.

[00:45:06]Very Small question and quick answers to what >> Thank you so much, sir. Actually this aligns so much with my presentation later today. So on sublime and the critique of judgement. So I wanted to ask because it has laid out the bigger picture of something that I'm going to zoom in on. And the idea is that why is that because of the mora moral the moral sublime and finally like like going to that category of of the sublime and the interpretations interpretations now. Why is it that we go towards the political? Is it the reason that we give more importance to moral sublime as a subcategory of the single unified? I mean why don't we leave or why don't we not depart from that conceptualization and also the the that you later mentioned that why don't we actually take up not reason first but something more fundamental that is uh hinted uh by Burke of course because I also discuss Burke and then uh Kant taking up uh this German biologist Blumenbach's uh Bildungstrieb. So, uh why is that really not taken into consideration or maybe that can be taken into consideration to save us from this this reading of the aesthetic yeah, the sublime yeah.

[00:46:34]Thank you. Thank you.

[00:46:36]Yeah, in a the the reason why you know the critique of judgment has been was uh primarily read I I do not know in philosophy a context but certainly in literature and culture studies context it was read for a long time as really establishing the uh the initial grounds of modern aesthetics.

[00:46:58]So, and one of the assumptions at least what was seen as one of the assumptions of that formation was its detachment from questions of politics. You know, like you you are thinking about a form which is not made by force. So, force is somehow uh harmony itself is a word for you know you could say thinking about that. And but the more recent thinking about Kant has restored that because people read this alongside uh not only the other two critiques but also in relation to the anthropology work, the work on race etc. etc. But that does not resolve the problem. It poses us a bigger challenge. How do you relate how do we relate these two kinds of dimensions of Kant? That is really the the question I was trying to approach and I do not have an answer to that. Thank you. Very good. Very good.

[00:47:49]Anaksha Last last question please.

[00:47:56]No, but there's Okay.

[00:47:57]>> you come. Than- thanks a lot. We have to stop Thank thanks a lot. We have to soon break up for lunch. But I just a very quick question because I could not, you know, kind of resist my temptation. I was thinking that we had been talking about the I mean, rather going on with infinity totality with respect to sublime. And of course, the question of, you know, using unschematized categories like totality infinity you cannot do when, you know, these are all unschematized categories which, you know, the engager with the sublime is trying to put into. But what about infinite decimal and then suddenly I thought about that an analytic philosopher like logical logical atomist like, you know, like Russell and Tractarian Wittgenstein are they, you know, kind of you know, inherently compellingly deprived from engaging with the sublime when they think that I cannot really bring up an elementary proposition?

[00:48:54]I mean, really a genuine referer, a logical a proper name. But it will go on go on down to the infinitesimal towards the ultimate to the atomic facts. Yeah, I mean, could we Actually, it's it's a really Yeah, it's a really good point because even in Burke the infinitesimally small is a potential object of the sublime.

[00:49:21]The it it's actually the same thing. You know, it's two different ends of a spectrum which go beyond the human ability to deal with. The infinitesimal is too minute and the infinite is actually too large.

[00:49:35]Yeah, exactly.

[00:49:38]Yeah.

[00:49:40]No. Kant's, I think Anax is point is very sharp that Kant's mathematical sublime seems to be ignoring the that which is, you know, thousandth of a hair edge like in the open is Bala Krishna so that's the description of it's always means subtle and subtle and subtle and that's at least in the Indian tradition that's the notion of the sublimely deep rather than the past right and of course ultimately there is a unification of the fastest and the smallest but before going that what about in the mathematical Sublime itself the place of the infinitesimal in Kant I think it's a very very good omission that you have pointed out Thank you frankly I don't remember the infinitesimally small in the in the third category but very much but it's actually an important point for him it's it's actually very similar it's not like it's symmetrical you could say in other way like but I did not think about this the other question which one may want to think about is in the dynamically Sublime you have the idea of might but then you have this idea of a stillness which is actually not might so that again the the ocean he says if it is disturbed it can overpower anything but the whole point is that it's like a mirror it's actually so these moments are very very interesting I find yeah Thank you very much and very interesting session so far so we break for lunch thank you very much >> [applause] >> it's a critique of anything Hello. Uh please note that we have uh lunch being served in two different venues. Uh speakers, uh faculty, and presenters are requested to go for lunch in the research gallery. We have our volunteers on standby to help you in the process.

[00:52:04]All others, uh guests and every all other attendees, you can please go for lunch in room number 12, where initially uh tea was served in the morning. Thank you.

[00:52:14]And please queue up, and please uh uh try to maintain a queue. It'll be served. And we come back for the next sessions in the same panel at 3:00 p.m.

[00:52:25]sharp. Thank you.