CORRELATING COGITATIONS PT 2

Of all the concepts I correlated in Part 1, I have not previously shown reasons to bring together William James' two forms of knowledge (even when seen purely through the lens of my literary formulations) with Kant's two forms of sublimity, which I altered more extensively to meld with literary considerations. So what if any links can be found between James and Kant?

Everything I wrote about the Kantian sublimities derives from his CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, and in his first chapter, long before he broaches the subject of sublimity, Kant announces that he will discuss two sets of concepts:

Now there are only two kinds of concepts, and these admit as many distinct principles of the possibility of their objects, viz. natural concepts and the concept of freedom... Thus Philosophy is correctly divided into two parts, quite distinct in their principles; the theoretical part or Natural Philosophy, and the practical part or Moral Philosophy (for that is the name given to the practical legislation of Reason in accordance with the concept of freedom). 

When Kant set forth his project in 1790, I assume that he took some influence from previous philosophers in one way or another, and I similarly assume that most of the great philosophers who followed Kant were at least aware of this assertion. I do not know if Schopenhauer, reputed to have been a major interpreter of Kant, had this theme statement from JUDGMENT in mind when he distinguished between "perceptual knowledge" and "conceptual knowledge," or whether James or anyone else who discoursed on "knowledge-by-acquaintance" and "knowledge-about" and their congeners. Those matters of philosophical history don't matter; only the fact that all of Kant's JUDGMENT meditations spring from his division between natural concepts and moral concepts. In my mind the literary aspects of "knowledge-by-acquaintance" translate as the lateral meaning of any text, which is the unmediated, literal account of what happens in the narrative, while the aspects of "knowledge-about" translate as the text's vertical meaning, which is mediated by the interpretations made by the characters in the narrative, the author's observations independent of the characters, and the responses of the audience.

So even though Kant has a specific orientation in his "moral philosophy" toward his particular concept of "freedom"-- which I believe he considers essentially "a priori," as against the "a posteriori" concepts of nature-- his system is roughly in line with the later terms for the two forms of knowledge as advanced by James, Grote and others.

Now, Kant's uses examples taken from nature to explicate his twin concepts of sublimity. Here's Kant on what he terms "the mathematical-sublime:"

Examples of the mathematically Sublime of nature in mere intuition are all the cases in which we are given, not so much a larger numerical concept as a large unit for the measure of the Imagination (for shortening the numerical series). A tree, [the height of] which we estimate with reference to the height of a man, at all events gives a standard for a mountain; and if this were a mile high, it would serve as unit for the number expressive of the earth’s diameter, so that the latter might be made intuitible. The earth’s diameter [would supply a unit] for the known planetary system; this again for the Milky Way; and the immeasurable number of milky way systems called nebulae,—which presumably constitute a system of the same kind among themselves—lets us expect no bounds here. Now the Sublime in the aesthetical judging of an immeasurable whole like this lies not so much in the greatness of the number [of units], as in the fact that in our progress we ever arrive at yet greater units.

And here's some of his examples of "the dynamic-sublime:" 

Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like; these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height, and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.

Probably Kant would consider all of hie examples to be "natural concepts." However, the examples of the dynamic-sublime have to do with discrete physical phenomena, which are things of which we know "by acquaintance." The perception of seemingly infinite phenomena, though, are mediated in MY opinion through the knowledge-faculty termed "knowledge-about," because the infinite-seeming phenomena come into conflict with the human desire to suss out proportions in an analytical manner.

The chances that some Kant scholar will dispute my interpretation of the "mathematical-sublime" are the opposite of infinite-- "infinitesimal." But such objections would not matter, because in this essay I translated Kant's formulation into one dealing exclusively with literary experiences of a different form of "infinity:"

it has occured to me that in literature, there are ways to express "infinity" that are not ineluctably entangled with the idea of might, and which will prove consequential for my attempt to formulate the foundations of the three worlds of artistic phenomenality.  This kind of "infinity" may have some "overwhelming" characteristics, but it is not really related to "might" as such.

It is the charm of mythic narrative that it cannot tell one thing without telling a hundred others. The symbols are an endless inter-marrying family. They give life to what, stated in general terms, appears only a cold truism, by hinting how the apparent simplicity of the statement is due to an artificial isolation of a fragment, which, in its natural place, is connected with all the infinity of truths by living fibres.
 

 The "infinity" of which Yeats speaks here-- like the "richness and profusion of images" I found in Edmund Burke-- suggests another form of the sublime with a different nature than the "dynamically sublime."  It is one that overwhelms in a manner roughly analogous to the "mathematically sublime," but the "magnitude" is one that stems not from physical size, but from the magnitude of how many conceivable connections can be made within a given phenomenality.

Hence the name I coin for this exclusively artistic property--

The COMBINATORY-sublime.

In 2013 I had not extrapolated the four potentialities from Jung's four functions; that took place the next year, in 2014's FOUR BY FOUR. Thus my word "connections" is vague at best. Still, the context, that of Yeats' "infinity of truths," aligns far more with the "knowledge-about" epistemologies characteristic of mythic narrative than with "knowledge-by-acquaintance." 

Or so it seems to me now, eleven years later. If I come across any posts of the combinatory-sublime that seem to contradict this current formulation, I reject them in advance, just for the satisfaction of having a sense of symmetry in my system.