ABSTRACT
Under the impact of globalization, today’s cultural production tends to provoke human desires and pretends to satisfy them with various mixtures of sensible contents and artistic “bricolage”. Yet, on its deeper layer, we see also a sense of sublime in today’s artistic creation. We will analyze the idea of sublime first by a critical review of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s post-modern reading of Kant’s Analytics of the Sublime, which shows the unconquerable distance between sensibility and concept, presentation and the un-presentable. Unfortunately Lyotard’s idea of sublime could be at its best seen only as a horizontal sublime. By contrast, in Kant, we find a vertical sublime in his analysis of the “dynamic sublime” in human awesome feeling when facing the dimension of infinity. Both Lyotard’s horizontal sublime and Kant’s vertical sublime put their emphasis on the limit of representations, all in neglecting representations’ revealing and creative functions. This paper is based on its author’s interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis and the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas, all in drawing resources from the Aristotelian and Mediaeval philosophy before the arrival of modernity. The main idea is to show the inevitable use of representations and their revealing and creative functions, exemplifying thereby the dynamism of human mind towards enlightenment by realizing itself in finite and definite forms of existence. The sense of sublime is seen here as a dynamic human response to the invitation of Reality Itself and, moreover, the Ultimate Other, though hidden and unfathomable, to go beyond all representations and all forms of realization. We will try to lay out very schematically the journey of meaningfulness starting from the primitive meaning-dynamism on the level of body, which is to be mediated by meaning co-construction on the social level, till its fuller unfolding in an intimate relation with the unfathomable Ultimate Other.
Key words: Sensibility, Representations, Body, Sublime, Meaningfulness, Ultimate Other