And goes on to say,
"[for Kant] It is man's own knowledge and imagination which creates the conception of the grandiosity in nature that dwarfs him. In the end, the rational faculties of man are of a higher order than the elemental force of nature, and they allow him to see it as sublime, instead of simply terrifying."
Maybe what Chuck is describing can be thought of as an experience that relies on or anticipates the sublime because the raw affect of horror is suspended and leaves space for the aesthetic alongside an intact rationality.
From: Chris Doss Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2009 2:49 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] The Cultural Anthropology of 9/11
I'm not sure this is a correct reading of Kant. The mountain/ocean/night sky/other enormous thing is still organized rationally -- it still exists in space and time, according to the principles of causality. It is just cannot be experienced *all at once*.
(The immediate effect of Kant was to give birth to all kinds of mysticisms and irrationalisms, like Novalis and Fichte. I think of him as more the end of the Enlightenment than one of its architects, personally, since Kant makes hash out of the idea that the world is, ultimately, rationally understandable at all, opening up a big space for religion in so doing.)
--- On Tue, 4/14/09, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote: Lyotard is fascinated by this admission, from one of the philosophical architects of the Enlightenment, that the mind cannot always organise the world rationally.
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