Sur le sentiment du sublime

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 “element 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 incorporeal 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.