Self-affections of imagination and reason in Kant’s sublime

Abstract

In this article, I provide a detailed reconstruction of the way in which imagination and reason affect the inner sense in Kant’s account of the sublime. My aim is to show how two different forms of self-affection combine with each other. In Section 2, I isolate and follow Kant’s argumentative strategy for the transition from the displeasure due to the representational failure of the imagination to the counterbalancing appeal to reason – and the related pleasure. Drawing on this reconstruction, in Section 3 I frame the transition according to two complementary schemes meant to show the structural differences at each step of the sublime, as well as the way they consistently belong to each other. Section 4 draws some key implications from Section 3 in order to stress the relevance of the distinction and reciprocity between the failure of the imagination and the arousal of reason.