Abstract

There is a strange analogy between Kant´s and Deleuze’s accounts of aesthetic contemplation. In both cases we are dealing with a dynamical interpretation of aesthetic feeling as an augmentation of the spectator’s vital feeling, of what Kant calls our Lebensgefühl. Kant calls the principle that increases life force Geist, which the most recent English translation of the third Critique translates as “spirit,” since its function is to animate. Within Kant’s subject-oriented paradigm, this enlivening principle frees our state of mind from its “pathological” subordination to desires and other empirical interests and directs it to the super-sensible, which Kant determines as the idea that transcends all sensibility. Like Kant, Deleuze’s account of contemplation invokes an enlivening principle which animates our faculties by directing them at an idea that pushes our sensibility (the faculty of being affected) toward a transcending and transcendental transgression of its lower empirical exercise. However, there is an important difference between a mood which, in Kant’s view, speaks in the name of human reason and a vital sensation which, in Deleuze’s eyes, is the manifestation of the animalistic roots of reason. While for Kant, despite the sensory origin of the aesthetic idea, one must conceive all ideas (both aesthetic and intellectual) as spiritual entities that act in the mind without existing materially, for Deleuze the exact opposite must be considered, even if for an idealist philosophy it means total heresy of the spirit: in their primitive birthing ideas originate as spatio-temporal dynamisms that coexist with matter and that receive its movements from within.