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(All parts in English)

KAUFMANN

LACAN

I would like to point out the meaning I attribute to such an exploration. Obviously, this may seem trying to more than one person.
For a long time, I have used the metaphor of the rabbit and the hat regarding a certain way of extracting from the analytical discourse what does not belong there. I could now say that, at times, I subject you to the trial of being fed raw rabbits. Pull yourselves together. Take a lesson from the boa constrictor—sleep a little, and then it will pass. Upon waking, you will notice that you have nonetheless digested something.

This is very important: ANTIGONE. It is precisely through this method—obviously a bit harsh, somewhat tough—which consists of joining me in breaking the stones on the road of the text, that it will eventually sink into your skin.
I mean that you will retrospectively realize that this image of ANTIGONE, even if you had no suspicion of it, is absolutely there—latent, fundamental, essential. It is part of your morality, whether you want it or not.

And this is why it is important to reexamine its meaning—if this meaning is not, ultimately, the diluted meaning through which the lesson is usually conveyed. It is nothing less than a reinterpretation of the entire meaning of the Sophoclean message.
And I believe that having heard certain things, even if you might, let’s say, resist this sharpening of the text’s edges, you cannot help but feel what it is about.

And if you now wish to reread SOPHOCLES, you will realize the distance this discourse creates—even if you can stop me on this or that point. I do not exclude that I might, on occasion, make a misinterpretation myself, but I do not think that it can stop us from unveiling this overall nonsensical view in which SOPHOCLES, through the care of a certain tradition, has been preserved.

Finally, as I discussed this with some of you who opposed me with certain memories of their reading of Oedipus at Colonus—memories obviously influenced by scholastic interpretations—I remembered a small footnote. There are people here who enjoy footnotes. I will read one to you from a work that analysts like you should, at the very least, have full knowledge of from having read it once: Psyché by Erwin ROHDE, for which we have an excellent French translation. Overall, you will learn more—and more certain things—about what Greek civilization bequeaths to us than from any original work in French. The “most spiritual people on earth” do not have all the strings to their bow. We already suffer the misfortune of having a Romanticism that did not rise much higher than a certain level of foolishness, and in the realm of erudition, we do not enjoy all privileges either.

On page 463 of Erwin ROHDE, there is a small footnote about Oedipus at Colonus summarizing what it is about. I have already spoken to you about Oedipus at Colonus in terms exactly aligned with what I am pursuing today.

“It suffices to read the play without prejudice,” he writes, “to see that this wild, irritated, merciless old man, who pronounces horrible curses on his sons—just at the end of the play, twenty minutes earlier, he is still crushing Polynices under his curses—and who relishes in advance, like a man thirsty for vengeance, the misfortunes that will befall his native city, has nothing of this ‘profound peace of God,’ this ‘transfiguration of the pious penitent’ that traditional exegesis likes to detect in him. The poet, who is not accustomed to veiling the realities of life [with insipid and softening phrases], clearly understood that misery and misfortune do not ordinarily ‘transfigure’ man but depress and deprive him of his nobility. His Oedipus is pious (he was so from the beginning, even in Oedipus Rex), but he has become wild, [ἠγρίωσαι just like Philoctetes] in his suffering. (Phil. 1321)”

Here, at least, is the testimony of a reader not specifically oriented towards the problems of tragedy, in this work, which is a history of the concepts Greeks had about the soul.

For us, what I am trying to show you is that above all, the ethical elaboration we inherit from morality—before SOCRATES, ARISTOTLE, and PLATO, before “the Greeks”—portrays man and interrogates him in the pathways of solitude. It situates the hero in this zone of overlap between death and life, which is the field where he engages concerning the area of his true relationship. This relationship pertains to what I have called here the second death: this relationship to being, insofar as it suspends everything related to transformation, to the cycle of generations and corruptions, to the very history that carries us. It takes us to a level more radical than anything and, as such, is suspended in language.

If you will, to express it in the terms of Monsieur LÉVI-STRAUSS—and I am sure I am not mistaken in invoking him here, for, as I have told you, prompted by me to reread ANTIGONE, it is precisely in these terms that he expressed himself while speaking to me:

“ANTIGONE, in facing CRÉON, positions herself as the synchronic opposed to the relation of the diachronic.”

I left unfinished, in the end, all that I could have told you about the text of ANTIGONE. As we cannot exhaust it, if only for reasons of time this year, it is clear that the question arises at the conclusion of what I will call “the divine utilization of ANTIGONE”, and in this regard, one could draw more than one comparison or testimony. ANTIGONE, hanged in her tomb, evokes something other than the act of suicide—namely, the relation to all kinds of hanged heroines, myths of the hanged maiden, or a particular myth of ERIGONE, for example, linked to the advent of the cult of DIONYSOS. Her father, to whom DIONYSOS gave wine, abused it for lack of understanding its proper use. He died, and his daughter went to hang herself on his tomb. This is an explanatory myth of an entire rite where we see images of young girls, more or less simplified and symbolized, hanging from trees. In short, the entire ritual and mythical backdrop is there, reclaiming in its religious harmony what is presented to us here on the stage.

Nonetheless, from the Sophoclean perspective, the hero has nothing to do with this utilization, and ANTIGONE is the one who has already chosen her path toward death. The invocation that winds itself around this kind of stem is something else; it does not engage with the human challenge in the moment.

I will leave it there for today because, at the moment when I have completed what I have to convey to you about κάθαρσις (catharsis), the topic is the “effect of beauty” that arises from this relationship of the hero to this definable boundary, marked in this instance by a certain Ἄτη (Ate).

Here, I ask you to understand why—using the very definitions of the seminar’s structure—I want to yield the floor. I do not wish to be the one who, like a Maître Jacques, alone stirs all the more or less heterogeneous areas of what has been passed down to us through traditional elaboration in these matters.

It is well understood—and I emphasize this—that this is a mode of operation for a certain area among you, meaning each of you who, at a certain point in their thought, might often resist what I am trying to make you understand by sympathetically commenting—albeit in a more or less ambiguous way—on what is conventionally referred to as the breadth of my information or, as they also say, my culture. By the way, I do not like that at all. It has a counterpoint: people wonder where I find the time to gather all this. You must at least admit that I have a slight lead over you in life. I do not quite have two centuries behind me, manicured like an English lawn, but I am getting close. I am closer than you are. I have had time to forget several times over the things I am telling you about.

Thus, today, regarding the beautiful, I would like to yield the floor to someone who has seemed particularly competent to me in this field and at a point of articulation that I consider essential for the continuation of my discourse: the definition of the beautiful and the sublime as posited by KANT.

Indeed, as you will see, there is a mode of categorical analysis here that has great significance for connecting with the topological structuring of discourse that I am pursuing before you. The relation, the reminder, for those of you who have already opened the Critique of Judgment, of the insights provided—or, for those who have not yet done so, an introduction to them—seems to me an essential step, an essential moment, which is why I will now ask Monsieur KAUFMANN to take the floor immediately.

You will then see the use we can make of the work he has brought to your attention today.

Presentation by Pierre KAUFMANN

There are, of course, many ways to approach the Critique of Judgment:

• To approach it in a dogmatic way,
• From the perspective of the history of Kantianism,
• Or from the perspective of the history of art.

The path I have chosen starts with Werther. Specifically, with two passages from Werther that seemed to me to essentially situate the themes of existence in relation to which Kant placed his own conceptualization endeavor. Indeed, these are two passages—I do not know historically if Kant interrogated them in his development of the concept of the beautiful and the sublime—where three essential points emerge regarding the notion Kant formed of these two aesthetic experiences.

These are two passages where we see Goethe’s hero first captivated by the feeling of beauty, then surrendering to the expansion of this feeling, which brings him into contact with a nature brimming with full divinity. Gradually, as this feeling of expansion culminates in an ecstasy of divinization, we see Werther‘s anguish of death emerge. Shortly, I will read these two passages to you in translation. But notice right away why I begin with this text by Goethe: at its core, Kant‘s project was to seek a philosophical solution to the deadlock in which Goethe’s hero found himself. Indeed, through these texts, it will no doubt become apparent to you that Werther‘s suicide stemmed from his inability to achieve a position of equilibrium between life—and the very feeling of life given to us initially through the sense of beauty—and:

• Life,
• The transcendence of the sense of life, which culminates in the ecstasy of divinization,
• And finally, death.

Werther was unable to articulate these three dimensions of experience with one another. Yet Kant offers us an aesthetics of the beautiful and an aesthetics of the sublime.

But undoubtedly, the most important aspect of the Critique of Judgment is the articulation he achieves between:

• The aesthetics of the beautiful,
• And the aesthetics of the sublime.

In other words, there is a progression in the Critique of Judgment, and this progression essentially represents a sublimation of Werther’s experience. Essentially, one could say that the Critique of Judgment is, quite precisely, Werther sublimated.

I will therefore read a few fragments of these two texts rather quickly, emphasizing the different articulations. From Book I, first:

“A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my whole soul, regarding this sweet spring morning, which I enjoy with all my heart. I am alone and delight in living in this land created for souls like mine…
I am, my dear friend, so absorbed in this feeling of existing charm that my artistic production suffers from it. [Werther, May 10]”

Here, then, is the first moment, namely, a contact that can be described as instinctive with nature, although we can already note that Werther here mentions a paralysis of his creative power, a paralysis that will gradually develop as the very demand for creation becomes increasingly acute.

We will then witness the expansion of this feeling of beauty:

“I could not currently draw even a single line, and yet I have never been more of a painter than at these moments,
when the lovely valley around me is veiled in mists, a sanctuary into which only a few furtive rays can penetrate. Then, lying in the grass near the cascading brook, a thousand diverse plants close to the ground draw my attention. When I feel closer to my heart the teeming life of the small world that lives among these blades of grass—the innumerable,
the unfathomable forces of these tiny worms, these gnats…”

Here we witness the boundless expansion of the feeling of beauty, followed by its divinization:

“…and when I feel the presence of the Almighty, who created us in His image, the breath of being, all love, which carries us
and keeps us aloft in eternal delights, then a sort of twilight gathers around my eyes, and the heavens hover in my soul like the image of a lover. I sigh, suffering, and I think, ah, if only one could express all this.”

We see here how the indefinite transforms into a demand for creation:

“Ah, if you could breathe onto paper what lives in you with such fullness and such warmth, the mirror of the infinite god.”

Then suddenly, we encounter this fall:

“My friend, I am lost in these thoughts; I am like one struck down beneath the power of these magnificent visions.”

You see how, beginning from a feeling of harmony with the spectacle of nature—a spectacle in which Werther, moreover, participates—we arrive at an infinite dilation that manifests as a demand for creation, and how suddenly an abyss emerges precisely because of this infinite unfolding.

We could say that the first theme corresponds to Kant‘s critique of the feeling of the beautiful, while the second aligns with the critique of the feeling of the sublime. There is another passage, dated August 18, from which I will only provide a small excerpt to convey that this is indeed a fundamental theme in Werther:

“What fatality decreed that what constitutes man’s happiness becomes the source of his misery? The feeling so full, so warm, that my heart has for living nature—the feeling that flooded me with such delight, that turned the world around me into a paradise—now becomes an unbearable executioner, a tormenting demon that pursues me.”

This is followed by a description similar to the one I just read. We see how the feeling of germination here aligns with the feeling of the infinite. Gradually, we observe this infinity unfolding, followed by this passage:

“Brother, the mere memory of those hours does me good… although afterward, I feel doubly the anguish of the state into which I have fallen. Before my soul, as if a curtain has risen, the scene where I once contemplated infinite life transforms under my eyes into the abyss of the eternally open grave.”

From this initial indication, here are the moments of inquiry I propose:

• First, I would like to offer a very general conceptual outline of the Critique of Judgment, covering the four moments in Kant‘s analysis of the beautiful and then the sublime.
• Next, to provide a backdrop for these initial analyses, we could, if time permits, refer to two sets of problems.

First, the relationship of the Critique of Judgment with Burke‘s Aesthetic Physiology. The English liberal published a Physiology of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 1757, which is one of the sources of the Critique of Judgment. Burke, in conducting his analysis of these sentiments, adopts a physiological perspective.

Secondly, it might be interesting to explore the relationship between Kantian aesthetics and 18th-century history, particularly the historical positioning of the problem of signs.

For we see how, in Lessing and Mendelssohn, a gradual formulation of aesthetic problems emerges, leading Kant, ultimately, to engage with and question what will become the fundamental issue of his aesthetics: the problem of the transcendental constitution of signs. While 18th-century aesthetics, in Mendelssohn and Lessing, remains focused on questions about the meaning of signs, we can say that Kant‘s essential breakthrough lies in questioning the conditions of possibility for signs in their aesthetic sense.

Thus, I will begin—reserving the right to return to this later—by immediately providing some insights into the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime in Kant. Let us first consider the feeling of the beautiful. How does Kant formulate the problem of analyzing the beautiful? Fundamentally, he begins with a description of the aesthetic feeling, but this description revolves around an essential problem: the absolute universal, the universalization of aesthetic pleasure.

Indeed, if we relate Kant‘s endeavor here to what we could call Werther‘s failure, we see that what Kant seeks is to “save” Werther by universalizing both aesthetic pleasure on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the feeling of the sublime. In other words, the goal is to ascribe a positive meaning to Werther‘s experience, and this positive meaning will derive from this experience of universality attributed to pleasure. How can there be universalizable pleasure? This is the problem of the beautiful.

On the other hand, the problem of the sublime is more complex because the fundamental difference between the beautiful and the sublime in Kant lies in the conflictual nature of the sublime.

The experience of the beautiful is a kind of repose in the pleasure of contemplation. In contrast, the experience of the sublime is one of a tearing apart—between our sensitivity on the one hand, and, on the other, our supersensible destiny. In other words, we are torn from the sensible, but, torn as we are, we resist this separation, and it is this very conflict that characterizes the sublime. This is precisely the conflict that Werther testifies to, but it is this conflict that Kant seeks to universalize. The universality of this conflict—constitutive, in a sense, of the human condition, and of human finitude as such—the universalization of this feeling is what constitutes the sublime.

Thus, the aim is to universalize pure pleasure and to universalize the conflict between our attachment to the natural world and the sense of our supra-sensible destiny. To frame the problem of the beautiful, Kant refers to the general analysis he provides of judgment and to the moments in the Critique of Pure Reason that allow for the general determination of any judgment. That is, he situates his analysis from the perspective of, in technical terms, quality, quantity, relation, and modality.
I will set aside this terminology and move directly to the essence of the matter.

The first point from which Kant begins is the problem of the existence of the object we aesthetically enjoy.
In other words, does the judgment of taste, insofar as it is based on aesthetic pleasure, relate to an existing reality?
Kant‘s answer is negative, meaning that the judgment of taste and aesthetic pleasure are of such a nature that they overcome the opposition introduced in the Critique of Pure Reason between appearance and reality.

According to the first moment of aesthetic judgment, aesthetic pleasure is a pleasure we experience because we do not determine any existing reality beyond the mere appearance of the object that would surpass it. In other words, we see that this first moment offers a certain resolution to the opposition between thing and appearance, between the Ding and the Erscheinung (thing and phenomenon). We can say that, within aesthetic pleasure, there is a coincidence between the thing and its appearance.

The thing, as an existing thing, is in some sense resolved into its pure appearance, which Kant expresses by stating that taste is the faculty of judging an object or a mode of representation through the satisfaction of pleasure, in a completely disinterested way. Disinterested, meaning that in aesthetic pleasure, we take no interest in the existence of the thing itself. But how is this possible?

A passage from Kant concerning this disinterested satisfaction suggests that we must distinguish, in the appearance of the object, between the presence of the thing itself and the manner of this presence—that is, the way in which this thing appears to us. If we can experience disinterested aesthetic satisfaction, it is to the extent that the focus of the experience shifts from the thing’s presence to the mode under which this thing appears to us. Here is what Kant says:

“Every relationship of representations and even every relationship between impressions can be objective, but it is only the feeling of pleasure and displeasure through which nothing is determined in the object. Instead, it is the being, the subject, according to how the subject feels the mode in which the ‘how it lives’ is affected by the representation.”

We can give this experience a completely concrete character. If I consider the presence of this carafe before me, I can either relate to the carafe as an existing thing—that is, I would divide within my sense of this existence between pure and simple appearance, between the aspect of the thing on one hand and the thing itself on the other. In this case, beyond the Erscheinung (appearance), there would be the Ding (thing).

But there is another way I can approach this experience, and this second way is precisely the aesthetic attitude. This attitude consists not in relating the state of consciousness to the existing thing outside myself but in simply experiencing the manner, the mode under which I am affected.

Of course, I refrain here from making any analogy. But this undoubtedly stirs certain resonances in your mind. To what extent does Kant‘s analysis of disinterestedness in aesthetic satisfaction prepare us to understand how there can be a universalization of pleasure—how there can be a pleasure valid not only for me but for all humanity?

Well, it is precisely here that we must clarify the “how.” Indeed, the task is to establish the status of this mode through which the object is given to us. Now, we know that from Kant‘s transcendental perspective, the object is constituted within the framework of a priori conditions. In other words, the mode by which the object, the existing thing, is or can be given to us is not empirical but a priori. That is to say, it does not depend on experience but on the very—subjective—conditions of perception.

In other words, there can be disinterested satisfaction because we shift the focus from the experience of the thing itself to the mode of this experience. Furthermore, there can be universalization, as we will see, of the pleasure thus experienced, in the sense that the mode under which we are affected by the thing depends on conditions that are not empirical but a priori—in other words, transcendental.

This brings us to the first moment. This disinterestedness toward the existing thing gives us access to the second moment, namely, universality. What is the issue here for Kant? In other words, why is it difficult to understand how there can be a universal pleasure? The difficulty lies in the very nature of pleasure—namely, the fact that pleasure is a state. Indeed, all knowledge pertains to objects.

The Critique of Pure Reason determined the a priori conditions for the constitution of objects, but it is unclear—if it is true that the universality specific to knowledge pertains to the object—how a certain kind of universality can pertain to a state.
This is precisely the problem that Kant will address in his analysis of the second moment:
How can aesthetic pleasure be universalized?

Let us start with the first moment. We said that the satisfaction derived from the beautiful is a disinterested satisfaction that testifies to a mode in which the object is given. More specifically, Kant tells us that aesthetic pleasure arises from the feeling of a free play between the imagination and the understanding.

This means that, as shown by the analysis of knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason, two faculties must intervene in every determination of an object. These faculties are sensibility and understanding, and imagination serves as an intermediary faculty between sensibility and understanding.

Thus, our concern is not with the relationship between understanding and sensibility, but with the relationship between understanding and imagination.

• What does imagination provide us?
• And what does understanding contribute?

Here, we are not speaking of creative imagination but of our ability to form images of things without questioning the existence that corresponds to those images.

Imagination provides us with multiplicity, and the diversity within it comes from sensibility—from the forms of sensibility. The unity within imagination, however, comes from the judging self. In other words, and from the broad perspective of classical aesthetics, Kant defines beauty as the unity of a diversity. The feeling of beauty, the sense of aesthetic pleasure, will therefore be the feeling of a free harmony between diversity and unity.

We see, then, that within the very constitution of the aesthetic experience, the faculties of object-knowledge intervene. In other words, to the extent that knowledge requires this dual polarity:

• Diversity on the one hand,
• Unity on the other,

…to the extent that there is a division between sensibility and understanding—and therefore between imagination and understanding—to that extent, we can experience aesthetic pleasure. For we take pleasure in the free harmony between these two distinct faculties.

But this structure of knowledge, in which two faculties must necessarily cooperate for our knowledge, is also the framework for universal knowledge. Kant believes that the universality of the conditions of knowledge guarantees the universality of aesthetic pleasure. Let me elaborate.

The Critique of Pure Reason showed us that two faculties collaborate in the constitution of an object, such as this carafe. The collaboration, the interplay of these two faculties, is a condition for the determination of the object. There can be no common object—no object that is an object for all—except under the condition of this cooperation between the faculties of sensibility and understanding.

In other words, this is possible only under the condition of a connection between the diversity and the unity of the thinking self. This is precisely the framework within which we experience aesthetic pleasure. Certainly, in aesthetic pleasure, we do not have a determination of the given sensible multiplicity or the given sensible diversity; we do not have a determination of this sensible diversity through judgment—that is, we do not determine an object.

For Kant, this means that we do not have a concept of the beautiful object; we do not determine the object. However, it is these same faculties that cooperate in knowledge, whose cooperation ensures the universality of knowledge. These are the same two faculties which, in knowledge, are determinative and determining, and which, in the case of aesthetic pleasure, constitute the two poles between which the harmony we experience in aesthetic pleasure is established.

In terms of knowledge:

• We have two cooperating faculties.
• We have a determination of diversity by judgment.
• In the case of aesthetic pleasure, we have these same faculties, but we can no longer say that judgment determines an object.
• We have only a harmony, a free harmony, a free play, as Kant says, between diversity and unity.

The universality of aesthetic pleasure, the possibility of universalizing pleasure—at least in the realm of aesthetic pleasure—rests, according to Kant, on the universality of the framework of knowledge.

In other words, I carry within me the function of objectification. It is precisely in this capacity that the universality of aesthetic pleasure is possible, between the poles constituted by the two functions of knowledge.

Let us take, once again, the example of the carafe. In the knowledge of an object, there is a given diversity, and there is a unification through judgment that allows me to think, this is a carafe. There is diversity in both space and time. This diversity is unified under a concept—the concept of the carafe—which determines the object.

Thus, I have two faculties: sensibility and imagination, more or less interconnected on the one hand, and understanding on the other. Understanding determines sensibility. This is the condition, as I said, that makes it possible for the carafe to be not only a carafe for me but for everyone. There is a constitution of objectivity. It is within this framework of objectification that we find aesthetic pleasure, insofar as the faculties intervene, but only in harmony.

If I consider a Cézanne carafe, instead of having the diversity determined by a concept, there will be a free play between the profusion of spatial impressions coming to me on the one hand and, on the other, the way they coalesce into the unity of a painting. I will thus experience a pleasure that is universalizable. Why?

Because you and I share the same frameworks for constituting objectivity—that is, it is the shared framework of objectivity’s constitution that allows for a pleasure that is non-objective, purely subjective, but which fits within this framework. This, then, concerns the moment of universality.

The third moment, which is technically designated under the category of relation, pertains to the interpretation to be given to purposiveness in the case of aesthetic judgment. Kant tells us that the second moment I just mentioned is:

“That is beautiful which pleases universally without a concept.”

The third moment concerns the purposiveness of the object. Why, then, is it important to introduce here, in the analysis—I am not adopting Kant‘s perspective but a broader one—the notion of purposiveness? Fundamentally, through the problem of aesthetic purposiveness, the relationship between “the beautiful” and “the good” (or “the moral good”) is posed. Just as earlier we could pose the problem of the relationship between the beautiful and objectivity, here, if we assume that the beautiful object is proportionate to its natural destination, we could say that purposiveness in the relation of means to ends would characterize aesthetic judgment.

However, what Kant tells us is that the beautiful and the judgment of taste are characterized by a purposiveness without purpose. We can understand this phrase in light of the earlier discussion of objectivity. What we found earlier in the universality of aesthetic pleasure was the framework of objectification.

What we find here, in some sense, is the framework of finalization. In aesthetic judgment, we do not experience the relation of certain data to a concretely given purpose, but rather a relation of purposiveness that is not itself tied to a determined purpose.

This is easily understood when considering what we discussed earlier about the free harmony of the faculties of knowledge within universalizable pleasure. For this purposiveness without purpose is precisely the harmony between the faculty that provides diversity and the faculty that ensures the connection of our various impressions. Why speak here of purposiveness? Precisely because neither of these faculties can be reduced to or identified with its opposite. In aesthetic pleasure, we thus feel a kind of a priori fact—that is, we experience a harmony, or Stimmung, as Kant puts it.

This harmony does not correspond to any logical necessity; it is, rather, a certain kind of fact, and it is this free harmony that we experience in pleasure. For Kant, we should not distinguish between pleasure on one hand and purposiveness on the other. Pleasure is simply the fact that we strive to remain in this state of harmony between the two faculties of imagination and understanding.

For Kant, the preeminent characteristic of pleasure is that it inclines us to remain in the state we are in, as opposed to pain. Thus, we find ourselves in a state in which we strive to remain, and we tend to remain in this state because it objectively corresponds, even for us, to the constitution of experience.

The fourth moment concerns necessity—that is, the principle of the subjective nature of the feeling of pleasure. Here, Kant poses the question of whether there truly is a necessity to the judgment of taste in the same sense that there is a necessity to knowledge. In other words, is the judgment of taste an apodictic judgment? Kant’s answer delves deeply into the analysis of the feeling of beauty, as he holds that the universality of the judgment of taste, being in no way comparable to the universality of knowledge, rests on a grounded communicability.

In other words, in the feeling of aesthetic pleasure, we experience nothing other than this fact—valid in its own right—that our pleasure is also valid for everyone. However, this cannot be an apodictic necessity, for the simple reason that we do not have a conceptualizable object; we do not have a conceptually determined object on which the judgment is based. It is not the judgment about the object that is universalized. That is, our sense of necessity does not coincide with the notion of logical necessity. Instead, we sense that universality is necessarily grounded in some way.

So, what exactly is this necessity that differs from the necessity of knowledge? It is based on the relationship we considered earlier, between the framework of objectivity and aesthetic pleasure. That is, if universality is grounded according to this fourth moment, it is by virtue of the a priori nature of the relationship between the general conditions of the constitution of experience and the aesthetic pleasure that arises between the two poles of imagination and understanding. In other words, it is in the very structure of subjectivity that the necessity specific to the judgment of taste is grounded. We can immediately highlight the two limits of this Kantian analysis from an aesthetic perspective.

First, it is an aesthetics of form, a so-called classical aesthetics. Kant very explicitly excludes any contribution of sensory impressions to the elaboration of aesthetic pleasure. Furthermore, the judgment of taste concerns a fixed form. In other words, it is essential that the judgment of taste, understood as a judgment of beauty, targets a defined appearance. What precisely allows the transition from the experience of beauty to the experience of the sublime is that the experience of the sublime is first and foremost an experience of the formless.

How, then, can we relate the experience of the sublime to the experience of beauty? There is a passage in the Critique of Judgment that shows us that these two moments in Kant’s critique must, in truth, be brought back to one another. It is a passage where Kant tells us that in the sublime, our imagination is, in some sense, deprived of its power, and that we must—this is the term he uses—sacrifice it.

In the feeling of the sublime, we sacrifice the beautiful harmony that reigns in the feeling of beauty between our subjectivity and experience. We are deprived of the power of our imagination; we sacrifice this power. To this extent, our imagination, he says, aligns itself with a law—the law of reason. In other words, in the feeling of beauty, in aesthetic pleasure derived from the beautiful, we experience harmony between understanding and imagination—that is, a harmonious collaboration between our cognitive faculties.

By contrast, in the feeling of the sublime, we are deprived of this happiness of an imagination harmonized with our subjectivity. Similarly, our subjectivity recognizes its inability to successfully grasp the diversity of sensory impressions. In other words, a conflict arises here between ourselves and the sensible world. In this conflict, we must sacrifice something—our imagination—and abandon its claim to grasp the sensible. For in the feeling of the sublime, we are, characteristically, overwhelmed by the spectacle of the sublime and must acknowledge our impotence.

But what happens here in the feeling of the sublime? There occurs a conversion of the sense of our impotence into a sense of power. That is, we recognize that we are empirically powerless, that our capacity for apprehension is limited, that our power is constrained in relation to the power of external things.

Yet, Kant says, this feeling of impotence awakens in us the sense of another power: the power of the infinite, of which our reason is the faculty. Kant’s analysis of the feeling of the sublime is divided into two domains: the domain he calls the mathematical—that is, the domain of magnitude—and the domain he calls the dynamic, which is the domain of causality.

Let us first consider magnitude in the mathematical sense. He tells us that we experience the sublime before a natural spectacle when we recognize that we possess no measure adequate to determining the magnitudes of nature. That is, we indefinitely relate our measure to what is being measured, and what is thus measured is further related to something else, taken as a measure, which itself must then be measured.

But we recognize that this process will continue indefinitely. In other words, we are stripped of any capacity to determine magnitude. At this point, we find ourselves in a feeling of impotence. But—Kant says—why do we have this feeling of impotence? We have this feeling only insofar as we know we can indefinitely continue the operation.

From where do we derive this sense of indefinite progression, of an endless continuation of operations, if not from reason itself and the law of reason? Thus, the inability to measure or quantitatively determine nature is converted into a sense of the infinite power of our reason, insofar as our reason is the source of the operations we perform in the domain of quantity.

Certainly, Kant may have had infinitesimal calculus in mind here. These texts are not entirely explicit, but the same idea is found in the works of the English critic Hume, who relates infinitesimal calculus to the concepts of magnitude and sublimity. Of course, this feeling can arise both in the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Moreover, you can see how these passages from Kant correspond almost exactly to the texts of Goethe we read earlier.

Lacan

Between a natural teeming and a signifier—or a problem of the signifier not fully elucidated in Kant‘s time—infinitesimal calculus still held a certain mystery, a mystery that has since completely disappeared. You are certainly correct in saying that infinitesimal calculus is what is evoked behind this experience of the sublime.

Pierre Kaufmann

We must also, undoubtedly, consider here the distinction between space and any determination of space. Kant shows us in the Critique of Pure Reason that every determination of space is a limitation of space, such that the particular determinations of space are absorbed into space taken as infinite.

Finally, regarding the dynamic sublime, we do not have a determination of magnitude but rather a determination of power. One can revisit Kant’s texts:

“Boldly overhanging and seemingly threatening rocks, clouds heaped up with flashes of lightning and peals of thunder, hurricanes that leave behind total devastation, the boundless ocean in its fury, the high waterfalls of a powerful river—these are things that reduce to insignificance our strength of resistance compared to their power. Yet the more terrifying the aspect, the more attractive it becomes. If we find ourselves safe, we easily say of these things that they are sublime because they reveal in us a faculty of resistance of an entirely different kind, one that gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent omnipotence of nature.”

This faculty is freedom. Or rather, the autonomy whose power here appears to us as superior to the power of external nature. You can see, then, that to the extent this movement of our imagination within the sublime is driven by reason—that is, by a certain kind of law—the movement Kant describes is precisely as follows: there is an external power that threatens to crush us, but at the very moment we feel this threat, it is converted into the sense of an internal law. We encounter a power that belongs to singular things—clouds, volcanoes, etc.

The feeling of the sublime arises when we oppose this external power with a law, this time a stronger one. In other words, it is not a stretch to say, using Kant‘s terms, that there occurs a sort of depersonalization and internalization of this external power. However, it must be noted that for Kant, this is not an integration of external force into the subject but rather a kind of contestation between external and internal power.

Thus, we can see how, within the framework of these relationships, Kant’s notion of dispossession or sacrifice by our imagination comes into play. We renounce the ability to fix an externally given form; we renounce the ability to delineate it, to apprehend it in the way we did with the pleasure of the beautiful. Our imagination sacrifices this capability. Yet the positive counterpart to this sacrifice is the experience of the law of our freedom in the assumption of the law of reason.

This would constitute the first stage of our inquiry into these Kantian concepts. Naturally, it would need to be revisited. But now, we could attempt to situate them, particularly in relation to earlier texts by Kant.

First, regarding the general spirit of the doctrine and the evidence that the relationship we can establish between Werther‘s themes and these passages of Kant is not purely speculative. We find in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime the following characteristic image. This is a text from 1764:

“The sunrise is no less magnificent than its setting, but the former pertains to the beautiful, and the latter to the tragic and sublime.”

In other words, we see that Kant explicitly relates the feelings of beauty and sublimity to the sense of birth and decline, of birth and death.

This text is drawn from posthumous remarks that Kant wrote on his own Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. It is from these remarks that we can draw insights into the background of Kant’s research.

First and foremost, let us consider Kant’s very intention to establish the universality of aesthetic pleasure. He tells us that the various feelings of pleasure and displeasure, satisfaction and frustration, do not depend on the nature of the things that provoke them. Love is often a mystery to everyone, and what deeply frustrates one person leaves another indifferent.
Kant does not accommodate this diversity, as demonstrated by a remark like this:

“Everything flows within us like the water of a river, and the inconstant flow renders the play itself inconstant and deceptive. Where can we find in nature fixed points of support that man cannot alter, and which could show him upon which shores he should stand?”

Speculatively, it is these shores that Kant sought, and which he sought in what he calls, somewhere, the dignity of humanity:

“By inclination, I am a seeker. I feel the thirst for knowledge, the restless desire to extend my understanding, and the satisfaction of every advancement achieved. There was a time when I believed that all this could constitute the honor of humanity, and I scorned the common people, who are ignorant of it all. It was Rousseau who disillusioned me. I have learned to revere humankind, and I would find myself far more useless than the average person if I did not strive to enhance the value of all others by bringing forth the rights of humanity.”

This Kantian statement can be taken as the epigraph of Kant‘s intention in the realm of pleasure. It is precisely about bringing forth the rights of humanity in the domains of pleasure. In other words, it is about founding, as we have seen he sought to do, the universality of pleasure.

How, then, does this pursuit of unity arise? It is highly characteristic that at the time Kant wrote these Observations in 1764, he was still directly influenced by Rousseau. At times, he seems to seek this universality in nature, as Rousseau did. One could say that Kant‘s entire progress consisted in realizing that universality could not be found in nature but had to be sought in an order of a priori conditions radically opposed to it. Yet from the moment he wrote these Observations, one can see how he began to diverge from Rousseau. He contrasts the idea of nature with the civilized state, saying that returning to nature would not mean rejecting all the achievements of civilization but rather appreciating these achievements in relation to the demands of nature:

“It is necessary to examine how the art and elegance of the civilized state arise and how they are never found in certain regions, in order to learn to distinguish what is artificial and foreign to nature from what truly belongs to it. If we speak of the happiness of the savage man, it is not to suggest returning to the forests but only to observe what man has lost on one side while gaining on the other. This is so that, in the enjoyment and use of social luxury, one does not become wholly engrossed in the tastes derived from it, which are contrary to both nature and our happiness. Rather, one should remain, even with civilization, a man of nature. This consideration serves as a rule for judgment, for nature never creates man for civil life. His inclinations and efforts aim only at life in its simple state.”

Lacan

This is truly a passage to share with Claude Lévi-Strauss, as it remarkably prefigures the ethic of the ethnographer already established at Kant’s level. The entire discourse of Claude Lévi-Strauss in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France is already indicated here—not necessarily predated, but articulated in a way that is nowhere else emphasized as it is here, not even in Rousseau.

Pierre Kaufmann

Here, Kant contrasts nature with civilization—or culture, as we say today. But it is worth noting that in the Critique of Judgment, he strives to go beyond culture itself. This is attested to in texts from the Critique of Judgment where he questions the social interest of beauty.

We have seen that beauty and the sense of beauty, aesthetic pleasure, are universally communicable. But does this mean, as Burke thought, that aesthetic pleasure is related to sociability? In other words, should we consider the society made possible by participation in shared aesthetic pleasure as merely representing sociability?

Kant responds negatively, and it is in this spirit that he analyzes the transmission of beauty through signs. For Kant, we must distinguish between nature and civilization, understood as factual humanity, and finally, the humanity of rights, which is tied to the very constitution of our experience—in other words, the shared conditions for the constitution of human experience. This sense of insecurity we just indicated transforms interestingly in these Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime, by virtue of the application of the pre-critical theme of the concepts of “beautiful” and “sublime” to women and men.

For Kant, woman belongs to the category of the beautiful, and man to the category of the sublime, in the sense that beauty and woman, according to Kant, always risk deceiving us—in other words, in the sense that they are appearances. In Kant’s psychology and in his remarks on women and aesthetic feeling, there is a primacy of appearance. He says, “One only becomes enamored with appearances, but one loves the truth.” He also states, “Truth is more an obligation than a beauty.”

Thus, we see how this initial outline, provided in this text as an empirical and moralistic psychology in the French sense, concerning the feelings of beauty and the sublime, helps explain the notion of appearance that man encounters in the first moment of the Critique of Judgment. We can say that beauty, for Kant, is a well-grounded appearance. Woman, according to the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, is a beautiful appearance without foundation, whereas beauty is a well-founded appearance. The parallel here is entirely fitting, as Kant extends, throughout an entire chapter of the Observations, these oppositions between woman and man, beauty and the sublime.

Virile qualities, by contrast, are aligned, as they are virile, with truth. Having thus introduced this Kantian background, we should move on to Kant’s insertion into the history of the arts in the 16th century. Specifically, we should address the evolution from baroque and rococo to classicism on one hand, and on the other, the analysis of the sentiment of death in classical art.

If you will, the opposition between the vestals as they were unearthed in Pompeii—what Winckelmann or Lessing called “beauty emerging from oblivion”—on one hand, and on the other, antiquity in its mortal sense, represented by the ruins of Piranesi. This would provide the backdrop to Kant and allow for an interpretation of his philosophy of art as a critique of art.

Lacan

Here, you can only open up perspectives for a topic of study that you have presented to us today, which has been to convey to our assembly—diverse and heterogeneous in its formation—the idea of structure around which Kant simultaneously unites and separates the concept of beauty. We could, in essence, have juxtaposed Aristotle’s idea of pleasure and revisited a very lovely text in which he defines pleasure in his Rhetoric.

Finally, this will serve as a pivot point for us, as is natural in any traditional philosophical discussion, to return to the question of the effect of tragedy at the point where we left it. This question—which, despite what we often believe, must refer back to Aristotle—cannot be reduced to any interpretation of the concept of κάθαρσις (catharsis), moral or otherwise.