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The Catastrophic Sublime: Thinking With and Beyond Kant in the Anthropocene

Among the many overwhelming challenges posed by the emergent Anthropocene era, there is one that calls rather loudly for a meaningful philosophical response: to fundamentally reconceive the relation between human and nonhuman life in terms which eschew assumptions of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment may be the most philosophically significant attempt to conceptualize the human/non-human relationship as an affective experience, especially his analysis of the sublime, which is why it demands critical reassessment, today. Why should we be thinking about the sublime now? Because it was the threatening power of wild and unruly nature which prompted Kant to take up the sublime as an urgent philosophical question. The threatening powers of a destabilized climate – wildfires, floods, heat domes, atmospheric rivers, and other terrifying manifestations of extreme weather – are far more urgent and far more threatening than Kant could have ever imagined in the 18th century. We can better make sense of our sublime condition – the catastrophic sublime – if we can learn from Kant’s discussion, especially from his analysis of our aesthetic attunement to nonhuman nature, and why we must go beyond it – well beyond it.

► This event is in-person. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200).

Nikolas Kompridis

University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics

Mon, Mar 31, 2025
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin