Wonder and sublimity: Revisions of a classical topos in the philosophy and aesthetics of the German Enlightenment (Kant, Schiller)

The dissertation considers what is at stake when theoretical wonder ceases to be an originating affect for speculative thought and becomes, instead, a limiting concept for critical philosophy. It attempts to show that: (1) wonder functions for its classical proponents (e.g. Aristotle) in an entirely different context than that presupposed by the aesthetics of the sublime (e.g., Kant, Schiller). This difference can be ascribed to the way in which the feeling of the sublime is operative in the overcoming of modern theodicy (i.e. the conceptual redescription of natural ills as necessary evils), whereas wonder is an intimation of what Edward O. Wilson has recently called, the "consilient perspective" (i.e. the unity of knowledge). (2) Whereas, wonder suggests the beginnings of an overarching conceptual unity linking together mind and nature, the sublime, by contrast, is part of an ontology of freedom, in which our subjective capacity to withstand the blows of natural contingency without resorting to conceptual redescription or aesthetic totalization reveals the workings of an underlying "faculty of resistance." (3) The resultant ambivalence of the sublime feeling is elucidated differently by Kant and Schiller, such that the former regards it as the cognitive lucidity resulting from the self-cancellation of the passions, whereas the latter views it as a function of the will, insofar as it suggests a subjective capacity to attend to things differently. Finally, it is suggested that (4) the true source of sublimity in Kant and Schiller is the force of personality to lend unity and meaning to phenomena which would otherwise lack such (i.e. historical contingencies).