Compare And Contrast Lyotard's Critique Of Judgment

Courtenay Fairhurst

212170484

ASP228 – Philosophy, Art, Film

Essay 2

What is the sublime in postmodernist art, as Lyotard sees it? Compare and contrast Lyotard’s account with the account of the sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

In the English dictionary, the word sublime is defined as “something that is extremely beautiful, or reaches level of spiritual meaningfulness that defies any attempt on our part to describe or understand it” (Cloud Deakin, 2014). Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard was a postmodernist writer who heavily focused on the complexity of the sublime notion. His understandings of the theory derived from Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgment’, where Kant described the sublimity experience as something that leaves us

Things such as a storm, mountains, crashing waves, or an endless night sky would provide us with the sublime experience, as we feel our subjection and helplessness as well as the magnificence of the sight before us. Simple art depicting a beautiful sunset wouldn’t be powerful enough to create such a feeling. Kant explains that while beauty can produce an aesthetic experience, the sublime can evoke a more accurate aesthetic experience. The beauty in nature represents its fittingness to our purposes, but the sublime in nature represents it being beyond our control (Cloud Deakin, 2014). In the sublime, there is nothing we can apprehend or control, it is beyond our concept of understanding or reason. The experience of the sublime strikes more deeply into our souls than does the experience of beauty. In beauty, we experience the way we fit in with nature but in the sublime we experience the way it overwhelms us. Comparably to Kant’s theory on the sublime versus the beautiful, Lyotard believes that the sublime can be experienced when looking at an artwork or a photograph that doesn’t only feature nature. Lyotard explains that the sublime is when we see or hear something that is too large or powerful or forceful for us to take in, no matter what it is. It doesn’t change how many times you see something; there is always more to

What we can see isn’t the same as to what we know is there. For example, we know it's a drawing or a photograph of a mountain but our perception cannot take in everything. Our awareness is unable to cope with those sights, but our reason can emphasise the limits of what we can see. In terms of the dynamically sublime, our understanding of physical danger should create awareness that we are not just physical material beings, but moral and noumenal beings as well. Kant believes, however, as the sublime is a ‘mental movement’. we can overcome these negative effects by being rational human beings. This is where Kant classifies the concept of understanding and the concept of reason. With the concept of understanding, we can acknowledge and comprehend what objects we perceive, and the concept of reason is when we do not rely on our senses but merely from our thinking. This allows us to understand things in the world in a non-sensory way. Lyotard, on the other hand, believes that we can comprehend the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful and every exhibition of an object is destined to 'make visible' this absolute greatness of power (Lyotard, 1991). We cannot organise our minds and how we perceive the word so rationally. Some things are simply incapable of being divided into