"Sublime" nell'uso dei Discorsi popolari di Fichte

Fichte cannot be counted among the great theorists of the sublime. Even in his early summary of Kantian “Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment” he deals with the sublime and its peculiarity only in the section devoted to the beautiful. However, his contribution cannot be overlooked. First of all he shows an original analysis of the sublime in its connection with time, where the singular denotes a “universal concept” included in the repertoire of all speakers of a natural language (without actually indulging in a Platonist conception of meaning, based on the belief in a kingdom of abstract entities, present in mind and expressed in language). In his approach this contribution is characterized by the predicative use of the term in particular contexts of discourse where his formulation seems to assume an existential value. He thus led the Kantian theses to more radical consequences: not only the thesis of the unsuitability of referring the sublime to the natural object, but as well the one introducing a particular “moral sentiment” that, accompanying what is considered “sublime”, represents the “subjective condition” under which the consent by everyone is required. The result is a denaturalization of the sublime, as shown in the second and third lesson of his Bestimmung des Gelehrten and more radically in the third book of his Bestimmung des Menschen, where the use of “sublime” in relationship to the human will rectifies the “replacement (Subreption)” considered by Kant at the bottom of the his predication to the nature.