Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

By Kirk Pillow

The topic of the sublime is making a return to contemporary discourse on aestheticsand cognition. In Sublime Understanding, Kirk Pillow makes sublimity the center of an alternativeconception of aesthetic response and interpretation. He draws an aesthetics of sublimity from Kant'sCritique of Judgment, bolsters it with help from Hegel, and establishes its place in a broadenedconception of human understanding (thus differing from the many scholars who use Hegel to dismissKant or vice versa). He argues that sublime reflection provides a model for an interpretive responseto the uncanny Other outside our conceptual grasp; it advances our sense-making pursuits but eschewsunified, conceptual determination. Thus "sublime understanding" is the always partial, indeterminategrasping of contextual wholes through which we make sense of the uncanny particular in both art andthe lived world.The book is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, Pillow presentsinsightful reinterpretations of Kant's and Hegel's aesthetics. In the third part he develops his ownmodel of an aestheticized understanding, which illuminates contemporary discussions of metaphor andinterpretation, while bridging Anglo-American and continental treatments of these issues. Thepresentation is a model of clear and well-crafted exposition, exemplifying the practice ofaesthetically reflective sublime understanding that it articulates.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262161923
• ISBN13: 9780262161923
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 385 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.3"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Aestheticians and Kant scholars: buy this book now!

Pillow provides a fascinating account of Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics that will prove of great interest to both Kant scholars and to those with a more general interest in aesthetics. The references are particularly useful, such that the book is required reading. This is true despite some serious flaws in the book: E.g, its central thesis on the sublime character of artistic meaning is not credible as a reading of Kant. Guyer's account the role of form in judgments of beauty, which Pillow attacks, still does a much better job of explaining our experience of art. However, Pillow's account can be read as a supplement to accounts focused on the importance of beauty, rather than in the way Pillow's own account is presented (as a full-blown critique of Guyer's use of form to explain artistic experience).

Sublime Understandings

One of the best, most insightful works on the subject to date.