RE
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Just some notes. Thanks for the reading. The above sparked more thoughts. What I quoted was from wiki and was what Lyotard thought Kant was talking about. I haven't studied any of this. The way I approached the concept of the sublime was from two perspectives, first in the way the sublime is understood in art history and then second from my own experience.
I haven't studied this or thought much about it in any analytic detail. The idea that the sublime and the rational co-exist is true for me, but only looking back in remembering. All experience takes place in time as a lived sequence. So what that means is that some aspect of mind is occurring at a moment. It may be called rational or not. Some activities are so intensely engaging that there is no rational... Climbing, doing art, doing some kinds of work, heavy manual labor, in a very happy or very angry moment, in these moments there is no rational mind for me. I exist in another kind of world.
So then the anthropologist in me, says these are part of what Levi- Strauss wrote about in many of his works. He tried to find structure and order in this mind set and characterized some of it in Triste Tropique and The Savage mind. Freud tried to divide up the same world of mind, differently, and I am not well enough read in Freud to say with any accuracy ... but it sounds like the superego more or less corresponds to some of Kant's rational mind, the ego is somewhere further down the list, then we get into the non-verbal realms of id and libido.
The thing is however we wish to divide up and analyze the mind, all these divisions and components co-exist more or less like instrumental sections in an orchestra playing sometimes more noticeably or less so at any given moment. Since I like to do a lot of things that have few verbal correlatives, I've always been struck by the fact that philosophy seems to have trouble illuminating these non-verbal realms. Painting, poetry, dance, ... well many of the arts illuminate these realms... It's this non-verbal realm that I suspect fascinated Lyotard and many other philosophers who have reacted to the general outline of the mind that emerged from the Enlightenment ... a lot of which spawned a whole sequence of movements and art styles under the general name of Romanticism. Chris referred to mysticism, while Jacobi and others reacted with various religious speculations etc.. There is an intuitive link in some of Goethe between the sublime, the secular world, and the medieval say in his play Faust. The play attempts to blend the mythological world, the legend with the real symbolized as an academic professor Dr Faust where all these elements are mingled together.
So in art history for example we talk about the opposition between Classicism and Romanticism. The sublime appears most explicitly in early 19thC in Gericault, Raft of the Medusa... It's a large painting of people struggling on a raft during a storm at sea, to symbolize the gripping drama of survival against the elements... In the US the sublime appeared in the mid century in landscape painters.
The deeper linkage of the sublime with concepts of divinity shows up much earlier in the 16th Century in ceilings frescos where the sky and clouds stand for a combination of heaven, God and the sublime more or less mixed all together.
I think what's going on in the changing nature of painting is the differentiation and construction of the sublime independent of its embedding in religious experience and visual symbolism. I am pretty sure Malraux's Metamorphosis of the Gods follows these changes, but I can't remember at the moment any detail. One of the reasons I like Malraux is he obviously lived in a boundary region between the world of non-verbal experiences and verbal experience, and wrote about it.
So then the concept of the sublime seemed to suddenly capture a word that corresponded to a non-verbal world in witnessing 9/11. I couldn't give that experience a name at the time. Then suddenly yesterday, I could give it a name. For me the sublime is not just a concept, but a world of experiences many of which have no name because they exist in a non-verbal world, a boundary realm between our common divisions of the mind. So then writing about IT sounds weird, doesn't make sense and so forth.
Taking the idea of the non-verbal and not well differentiated mind as a general sort of terrain to think about ... you can see why Levi- Strauss, Piaget, Deleuze, Lyotard might be attracted to ideas from mathematics as a way to talk about the mind, try to create some systematic approach to analyzing the mind and the human world of society and culture. Then along come scientists who spend their entire day working with their own highly differentiated mind set where every thought and experience takes place in its own cubical, well they go to a talk by someone in the humanities, social sciences or the arts, and flip, i.e Sokal.
I'd like to do a much deeper analysis of Sokal, but not here. The basic approach I take to Sokal is intimately related to this post, but in a much different way... requires a different mind set, something from the history of analytic philosophy, mathematics and physics.
CG
The mention of Leo Lowenthal reminded me of Strauss, since they knew each other or at least met during Weimar...