THE GREAT SUBLIMITY SHIFT

 The PRELUDE to this essay should explain why the concept of "the sublime" is so important to the history of metaphenomenal literature. What now follows is more in the nature of my reworking some of the categories in my personal literary theory.  

Following some of the concepts laid forth by both Carl Jung and Northrop Frye, it's become a rock-solid assertion of my theory that all literary works are comprised of a lateral meaning (this concerns what things happen in the text) and a virtual meaning (this concerns how things happen in the text). Both can be as simple, or as complex, as the author of a work desires these meanings to be. Over the years I have sought to bring the lateral/vertical concepts into a perceived harmony with other categories, particularly in the 2023 essay MIGHT AND MYTH and in the 2025 essay CORRELATING COGITATIONS.  Both essays are largely still valid, but there are some problems with my coordinations between the two modes of sublimity that I deduced from my reading of Kant's CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. I no longer believe this passage from MIGHT AND MYTH:

the quanta I now call "excitations" align well with what I've called "the dynamic-sublime," while the quanta I call "correlations" align well with the "the combinatory-sublime."

Nor these two from CORRELATING COGITATIONS:

That the ontocosm of a literary work includes "All modalities of THE DYNAMIC-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MIGHT."

That the epicosm of a literary work includes "All modalities of THE COMBINATORY-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MYTH."

The respective terms ontocosm and epicosm still incorporate all lateral meanings and all vertical meanings, respectively. But I was incorrect to correlate the ontocosm with the dynamic-sublime, and the epicosm only with the combinatory-sublime. 

I might not have made this error, had I more fully concentrated upon another duality of equal relevance, one I did mention in the 2023 essay but not in the 2025 one. Here's the mention from 2023, which immediately follows the 2023 quote from above:

Both potentialities are also more strongly associated with the non-utile activities of "play," while the "secunda" potentialities are primarily about helping the subject survive and prosper through the hard work of discrimination. 

What I failed to do was to re-assess was the extent to which the four potentialities as a whole aligned with the two very different modes of the sublime. I've now decided that, whatever Kant meant with his modes of the sublime, mine apply to the different ways in which human beings approach the "non-directed thinking" of play and the "directed thinking" of work.

The combinatory-sublime is first and foremost applies to the subject's experience of plenitude of forms, which in my system takes the place of Kant's "mathematical-sublime." Thus I now find that this form of the sublime takes in the least "directed" modes of play, which would be (1) the excitations of the kinetic potentiality, and (2) the correlations of the mythopoeic potentiality. Conversely, the most directed modes of play apply to (3) the emotions of the dramatic potentiality, and (4) the cogitations of the didactic potentiality.

I may explore these matters more thoroughly later, but my new categorical alignments go as follows:

KINETIC-- aligned with the ontocosmic combinatory mode

DRAMATIC-- aligned with the ontocosmic dynamicity mode

MYTHOPOEIC-- aligned with the epicosmic combinatory mode

DIDACTIC-- aligned with the epicosmic dynamicity mode