On the sublime feeling

Abstract

What does the feeling of the sublime consist of? What is its nature, its status? What
kind of relationships do you weave with the imagination and intellectual intuition of the “ele
ment of the intelligible”? How are affectivity and Gemüt present there? How to understand its
relationship with the affections, the affective, the feeling and the feelings? The answers to these
questions are undertaken by Richir in this short text in which he comments and analyzes in
detail some of the most notable paragraphs of Kant’s Critique of Judgement; Richir masterfully
stops at the “General Observation on the Exposition of Reflective Aesthetic Judgments,” with
which Kant closes the “Analytics of the Sublime,” to conclude with three observations that not
only constitute a general vision of the text but also the general outlines of his own proposal: i)
affections as sensations, temporalized in the present and situated in relation to space, and the
Leib are always received by the Gemüt, not as a physical “sign”, but as something already incor
poreal and capable of constituting, in intentional acts, the phenomenological hylé (otherwise
immaterial); ii) affections are, in the Gemüt, that in which it experiences its movements, in itself
foreign to the present and space, and which unfold without trajectory in an “element” that is
not the element of the intelligible, although not foreign to him; iii) finally, the Gemüt, which has
a relationship with affectivity, with the soul and even with the spirit, is something like the root,
“the source of everything”, one of whose dimensions is affectivity, primordial or archaic, the
heart (thymos) or the intimacy that can resonate with the “element of the intelligible” because
it is radically external (although of a non-spatial exteriority), and this through the mediation
of schematism and its interruption. These three positions will bring Richir very close to the
Kantian definition of the Gemüt: the mood is by itself; It is all life, the very beginning of life