scholarly journals Cartographic Sublime

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Hsu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Philosopher ◽  
Rational Side

Kant distinguishes two notions of the sublime: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. In the case of both notions, the experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a super sensible faculty, over nature. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) The concept of the sublime was associated with nature in late 18th and early 19th century aesthetics. Political philosopher and states-man Edmund Burke evoked human mortality in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, defining the sublime as experience of the overwhelming magnitude of phenomena in the natural world which causes “a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions.” Kant, in contrast to Burke, defines rationality is an important component of the experience of the sublime: “The sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality.” That is, reason--super-added thought--allows us to comprehend and challenge the entirety of that which is beyond comprehension. He writes that “the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation . . . this feeling renders as it were intuitable the supremacy of our cognitive faculties on the rational side over the greatest faculty of sensibility.” For Kant, in other words, the experience of the sublime was the oscillation between sensation and rationality in the face of the overwhelming-ness of phenomena in the world.

scholarly journals Der nordische Naturraum und das Erhabene: Eine Fallstudie // Northern Nature and the Sublime: A case study // El paisaje del Norte y lo sublime: Un caso de estudio

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-22
Author(s):  
Sophie Dietrich
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Artistic Representation ◽  
Caspar David Friedrich ◽  
Siglo Xix

Zusammenfassung   Im vorliegenden Artikel wird die künstlerische Darstellung der für den Norden Europas charakteristischen, ausgedehnten Nadelwälder anhand eines Fallbeispiels aus der Kunstgeschichte untersucht. Bei dem ausgewählten Kunstobjekt handelt es sich um Caspar David Friedrichs (1774 – 1840) Gemälde Der Chausseur im Walde aus dem Jahre 1814. Zunächst erfolgt eine Bildanalyse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Darstellung des Waldes. In diesem Kontext wird erörtert, wie der Künstler dieses Landschaftselement dargestellt hat und inwiefern jene Darstellungsweise mit der symbolischen Bedeutung korrespondiert. Ferner wird dargelegt, inwiefern das Fallbeispiel als Darstellung einer nordischen Landschaft aufgefasst werden kann. In einem weiteren Schritt wird untersucht, ob das Gemälde den Eindruck der Erhabenheit, der sich angesichts von Naturschauspielen einstellt, verbildlicht. Dies geschieht unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Friedrich Schillers Aufsatz Vom Erhabenen. Zur weiteren Ausführung einiger Kantischer Ideen aus dem Jahre 1793 und von Edmund Burkes Philosophischer Untersuchung über den Ursprung unserer Ideen vom Erhabenen und Schönen, die in einer ersten Fassung 1756 und dann 1759 erschien. Dabei liegt der Fokus auf der Frage, ob der im Bild dargestellte Nadelwald im 18. Jahrhundert für die Erweckung der Idee des Erhabenen als geeignet erachtet wurde. Obgleich sich von den entsprechenden philosophischen Traktaten keine Präferenz für eine geographische Region ableiten lässt, bediente man sich in der europäischen Malerei des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts häufig nordischer Landschaften, um die Idee des Erhabenen bildlich darzustellen. Da der Vorzug nordischer Landschaften in diesem Kontext bisher nicht restlos geklärt ist, wird abschließend diskutiert, inwiefern das behandelte Fallbeispiel zum Verständnis dieses Phänomens beitragen kann.   Abstract   This article focuses on the artistic representation of dense conifer forests as a feature characteristic of the landscape of Northern Europe. Caspar David Friedrich´s (1774 – 1840) Chasseur in the Forest, painted in 1813-14, serves as the case study for this article. In the context of the analysis of this painting, particular attention will be paid to the depiction of the forest. It will be investigated if the manner of representation corresponds to any symbolic meaning perceived in the depicted landscape. Furthermore it shall be examined, if the depicted landscape is of its nature a characteristically northern landscape. The analysis will take into account Friedrich Schiller´s essay Vom Erhabenen. Zur weiteren Ausführung einiger Kantischer Ideen on the question of the sublime, which appeared in 1793, as well as Edmund Burke’s work A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the first version of which appeared in 1756, in order to discern if, during the early 19th century, the forest depicted in the case study was considered to be expressive of the idea of the sublime. During the 18th and 19th century, especially Northern landscapes were often considered to be suitable to visualize the idea of the sublime. So far this phenomenon remained unexplained to some degree. Hence the article deals carefully with the relevance of the case study to this question.   Resumen   Este artículo se centra en la representación artística de los densos bosques de coníferas como particularidad del paisaje del Norte. El cuadro de Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840) pintado en 1813-14, Chausseur in the Forest, sirve como caso de estudio en el que la imagen se analiza prestando especial atención a la representación del bosque. Este trabajo investiga si la forma de representar el paisaje se corresponde con su significado simbólico. Además, se investiga si el paisaje reproducido es, por su naturaleza, un paisaje del Norte. El análisis tendrá en cuenta el trabajo de Friedrich Schiller Vom Erhabenen. Zur weiteren Ausführung einiger Kantischer Ideen (1793) acerca de la cuestión de lo sublime y el ensayo de Edmund Burke Indagación filosófica sobre el origen de las ideas acerca de lo sublime y lo bello, publicado en 1756, para descubrir si el bosque representado en este caso de estudio hubiera sido considerado adecuado como representación de la idea de lo sublime a comienzos del siglo XIX. Los paisajes del Norte se consideraban especialmente apropiados como forma de visualización de la idea de lo sublime durante los siglos XVIII y XIX. Este artículo concluye analizando la relevancia de este caso de estudio en lo que respecta a un fenómeno que a día de hoy permanece inexplicado.

Montaigne on Monsters and Monstrosity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Long
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face

Monsters take on many roles in Montaigne’s Essays, almost always in novel ways. They do not take on their usual roles as markers of other races, genders, or bodies, as threats or objects of repulsion. Rather, the authorial self and his work are seen as monstrous; Europeans and their culture are seen as monstrous; the knowledge systems that create monsters are themselves monstrous; man’s vanity is monstrous. But most of all, the monster is the provocation to meditation on man’s presumption, and on the limitations of human knowledge and power in the face of the world and the divine. As the sign of the diversity and mutability of the natural world and thus of divine omnipotence, the monstrous and unusual is valued by Montaigne over the normal or usual. It is also the mark of human creativity, dependent as it is on the vagaries of the imagination, new and radically different from the rhetorical, literary, and artistic norms. This is why the Essays themselves can be considered a monstrous work.

scholarly journals The Logos between psychology, ontology, and Divinity: Fundamental aspects of the concept of Logos in the early thought of Slavoj Žižek

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Corneliu C. Simuț
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Psychological Aspects ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Fundamental Feature ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Thought

Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy spans over more than three decades, which is confirmed by the numerous books he published since the late 1980s. Since his thinking about the idea of logos is no exception, this article focuses on what can be termed Žižek’s early philosophy, and especially that depicted in his The sublime object of ideology (1989) and The metastases of enjoyment (1994). Whilst the former underlines the psychological aspects of the logos, the latter focuses more on theories about being, as well as on theological considerations. This is why, three uses of the logos were identified in Žižek’s thought: psychological, ontological and theological, all three with a clear focus on the human being as conceived in modern thought, which for Žižek seems to be utterly opposed to traditional thinking about man and his relationship with God. It is clear from Žižek that whilst the notion of God does appear in this thought, it only refers to the human being which encapsulates the essence of Žižek’s philosophy to the point that the logos itself is a fundamental feature of the human being’s material existence in the natural world. Regardless of whether the logos points to psychology, ontology or divinity (theology), it always emerges as an idea which centres on the human being, with a special interest in how it exists as well as how it works in the world.

Coleridge on Science, Philosophy, and Poetry: Their Relation to Religion

1959 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucyle Werkmeister
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Mathematical Problem ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Science Philosophy ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The French Revolution

In 1791, when he was eighteen years of age, Coleridge came across Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Although he was sufficiently interested to read the essay, he was not impressed by it. In fact, if one is to judge his reaction by the jeu d'esprit, “Mathematical Problem,” it was chiefly one of amusement. Although he went on to read Burke's other essays, he was attracted by the character of the author and the style of his writing rather than by his point of view; for, certainly a young man who was an avowed disciple of David Hartley, a champion of the French Revolution, and the originator of Pantisocracy could find little comfort in the works of Edmund Burke. But the zeal for Hartley, the French Revolution, and Pantisocracy was short-lived; and by 1796 Coleridge had turned, a “thought-bewilder'd man,” to a reading of Bishop Berkeley.The influence of Berkeley, especially of the later Platonic Berkeley, began to show in his work almost at once; the influence of Burke continued to lag. Out of his reflections on Berkeley, however, came a new admiration for Burke, particularly for his Philosophical Inquiry; and, from the combined teachings of the two, Coleridge ultimately derived suggestions for a theology broad enough to account for and to give meaning and purpose to all human activities. I should like here to indicate briefly the use he made of these suggestions with respect to science, philosophy, and poetry. I do not mean to imply that there were no other influences at work in the formulation of his views; but I do submit that these two influences are basic and that Coleridge's position can be adequately understood only in terms of them.

Can the Sublime Be Postcolonial? Aesthetics, Politics, and Environment in Amitav Ghosh’sThe Hungry Tide

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana María Giles
Keyword(s):  
Mangrove Forest ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Postcolonial State ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Sundarban Mangrove ◽  
Ethics And Politics

AbstractSet in the vast Sundarban mangrove forest of Bangladesh in the shadow of the colonial past and the 1979 Morichjhapi massacre,The Hungry Tidetraces the transformation of three metropolitan characters from disengaged spectators to invested insiders. The novel may be read as elaborating the theories of Jean-François Lyotard, whose revision of the sublime as the “differend” in both aesthetics and politics provides a compelling context for exploring the postcolonial sublime. Suggesting ecocentric ways of engaging the world that loosen the bonds of the colonial past and critiquing the failure of the postcolonial state and the new cosmopolitanism, Ghosh rewrites aesthetics as interconnected with ethics and politics. In his novel, the postcolonial sublime no longer reifies metaphysical or anthropocentric pure reason, but instead enables discovery of our interpenetration with the natural world, spurring us to witnessing and activism in partnership with those who have been rendered silent and invisible.

Romanticism as Modern Re-Enchantment: Burke, Kant, and Emerson on Religious Taste

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Dumler-Winckler
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Critique Of Judgment ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Divinity School ◽  
Moral Taste

AbstractThis essay traces the contours of a trans-Atlantic Romantic legacy of aesthetic, moral and religious taste from its inception in Edmund Burke, through its modifications by Immanuel Kant, to its culmination in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful Burke suggests that religious experience is an aspect of aesthetic and moral taste. Immanuel Kant follows suit in the Critique of Judgment, offering a distinct account of religious taste. Emerson alludes to yet significantly refines aspects of both accounts in his Divinity School Address. Whereas Kant and Burke’s variously stoic accounts depict good religious taste as an experience of alienation from God and from the world, Emerson’s religious agent cultivates a modern spirituality quite at home in the world. Adapting Burke’s re-enchanted moral psychology of taste, Emerson offers a distinctively religious, indeed Christian, form of this modern re-enchantment. Yet for Emerson, refined religious taste allows agents to recognize the full spectrum of normative demands in nature and thus to make a home of such a world.

Epilogue: Ad Astra Per Aspera

2020 ◽  
pp. 188-200
Author(s):  
Adam Pryor
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Imago Dei ◽  
World Today ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Existential Concerns

What happens when the Anthropocene and the imago Dei become corroborative symbols in the astrobiological contexts that shape our engagement with the world today? My argument has been that, in the face of various instances of ecological crises, the Anthropocene symbolizes the existential concerns at stake in this devastation so that we better understand that our way of meaningfully orienting our existence toward the natural world is askew. To remember that we are the imago Dei can give us courage to stay with the trouble of this disorientation a moment longer and imaginatively play out new realities that confront the inevitable ecological devastations that have been wrought upon the earth.

Drastik und Erhabenheit

2015 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Moldenhauer
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Film Reception ◽  
Empathetic Response

AbstractThe essay defines two different modes of filmic violence: sublime and drastic pictures of violence. Based on the definitions of the sublime by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, I argue that the sublime has the tendency to detach the viewer from possible affective end empathetic response to pictures of bodies in pain on the screen. By contrast, the drastic mode has potential to evoke empathetic reactions. Both modes are grounded in specific ways of showing violence: the sublime mode diminishes the bodies on the screen, the drastic mode shows us the faces in close-up and tries to immerse the viewer in the violence.Both definitions are informed by phenomenological film theory (especially the works of Vivian Sobchack), which positions the body of the viewer at the centre of film reception. Nevertheless, the somatic experience is not the only scope of film reception. Films not only show us a filmic world but also suggest a more or less specific way of seeing the world outside the cinema.To this effect, both ways of staging violence have ideological implications. The sublime violence allows the viewer to experience himself as strong and invulnerable, while drastic pictures of violence tend to victimize the viewer.These assumptions are tested on two exemplary instances: the helicopter scene in Francis Ford Coppolas war movie Apocalypse Now and the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Mind, Knowledge and Reality: Themes from Kant

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 321-348
Author(s):  
Quassim Cassam
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Cognitive Faculties

According to what might be described as ‘humanist’ approaches to epistemology, the fundamental task of epistemology is to investigate the nature, scope and origins of human knowledge. Evidently, what we can know depends upon the nature of our cognitive faculties, including our senses and our understanding. Since there may be significant differences between human cognitive faculties and those of other beings, it would seem that an investigation of the nature, scope and origins of human knowledge must therefore concern itself, in the first instance, with uncovering the structure and operations of the human cognitive apparatus. The most influential versions of humanism in epistemology have also been inclined to insist both that it is contingent that our cognitive faculties are as they are, and that an investigation of these faculties must be largely empirical. An empirical investigation is to be understood, very roughly, as one which relies upon observation and experiment, and to describe such an investigation as naturalistic is to draw attention to the fact that it is presupposed by humanism that the faculties being investigated are a part of the natural world, the world of space, time and causal law.

A Māori Girl Watches, Listens, and Learns – Coming of Age from an Indigenous Viewpoint: Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.

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