The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art

as three new unities; rather, the highest Idea (God) at the same time has to express the absolute unity of the conditions of all objects of thought in general and the unity of the Ideas as such. (In the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and his Opus Postumum Kant argues that the existence of God needs to be postulated because there is the law (the categorical imperative).) As we saw, since we are dealing with an Idea, we should realize that when Kant speaks about God in this context, this Idea does not designate an object beyond experience that can be known with our faculties of cognition. There is no direct representation of this Idea. (This means that the limit designated by this Idea is a border that one cannot pass, a limit that one cannot transgress because there is no presentation (delimitation or imagination) possible beyond the limits of experience. As we will see more generally when discussing the sublime, it presupposes an Unvermögen of the imagination to present when the impossibility of comprehending marks the end of form or of the image.23 However, this end is not simply a negation (death) of the image, but also its final end,24 the Sein-zum-Tode of the image (as Derrida stated), to which it has been directing itself; or as Kant said, an Idea is a focus imaginarius (KRV, A644/B672). To speak of the end of the image (perhaps also in the sense of the focus imaginarius), then, means that the limit presented in the image withdraws the imagining from the presented image of which Kant seemed aware when he formulated that the schematism is a “hidden art” of which we are only seldom aware.) The (subjective) deduction of the Ideas starts off with human knowledge from the paralogisms of pure reason, and proceeds by way of the antinomies of pure reason to the ideals of pure reason (cf. KRV, B396n). We will focus here on the paralogisms, for our concern is rational psychology. The term ‘paralogism’ designates a certain type of formally fallacious syllogism. The syllogism is a paralogism when one deceives oneself by it. And a transcendental paralogism involves a transcendental ground, which results in a formally invalid conclusion. Instead of deceiving others, the transcendental paralogism is self-deception grounded in reason itself. It is reason itself that causes this deception concerning itself. Subsequently, Kant turns to the transcendental concept of the subject: I think, the transcendental apperception, which constitutes all transcendental concepts. According to Kant, the ‘I think’ is “the sole text of the rational psychology, from which it [i.e., rational psychology, JvG] will develop its entire wisdom” (KRV, A343/B401). Hence, rational psychology is first of all concerned with the ‘I think’. This concept is the vehicle of all concepts, without which any thought could not be my thought. Because of the transcendental apperception, all thoughts are introduced as belonging to one consciousness. Kant knew the difficulty and complexity of this matter, witness the fact that he rewrote a large part of the chapter on the paralogisms in the Transcendental Dialectic. We will return to this in Chapter 3 (§3.1). However, the problem of the transcendental apperception is introduced earlier in the text – and this part has also been changed in the second version – when Kant deals with the a priori synthesis by the imagination of the manifold of intuition into the unity of thought: “Now no cognitions can occur in us, no 23 Crockett underscores that Kant’s rewritten transcendental deduction reduces the number of syntheses to two: the figurative and the intellectual synthesis. Because of this, the role of the imagination is, according to Crockett (in which he seems to follow Heidegger), reduced to mere sensibility, and understanding can carry out the intellectual synthesis alone “without any imagination” (KRV, B152). According to Crockett, this gives Kant the possibility to use the distance between the imagination and the understanding for a free play of