irEnE BrEuEr

THE AFFECTIVE INTERTWINING OF BODY AND SPACE

Towards a Phenomenological Sublime in Contemporary
Architecture
Abstract
My paper addresses the founding body emotions of architecture, and in particular it aims at redefining the
sublime into phenomenological terms. Starting from Kant, it argues that the phenomenological sublime is
a bodily-felt emotion aroused by the excess of sensuousness over conceptuality. But at present, the body
metaphor does no longer guarantee order and symbolic meaning. This disruption was brought about by
Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of compossibility and representation, which led, paradoxically
enough, to a sublime bodily experience of space. As contemporary architectural space shows, body and
space are affectively intertwined, but this co-belonging is characterized by conflicts, tensions, and the
suspension of meaning.

Keywords: Architecture; Body; Husserl; Merleau-Ponty; Sublime

1. Introduction

My paper aims at redefining the sublime in phenomenological terms. Departing from

Kant, it claims that the phenomenological sublime is an emotion no longer aroused by
an overwhelming feeling of self-transcendence, but by the arousal of the bodily sensu-
ousness, as expressed by our most primary drives and impulses. The moving powers
of architecture, which presently enhance dissonance over harmony and difference over
identity, call forth a tension between our traditional bodily habits and our bodily lived
experiences and force us into a self-reflection insofar as they compel us to question and
suspend the institutionalised sense architecture has to convey. Thus, the disruption of the
bodily metaphor leads paradoxically enough to a sublime bodily experience of space,
and thus, to a phenomenological feeling of the sublime. The phenomenological sublime
is an emotion aroused neither by the power of our reason transcending the inadequacy of
imagination as it concerns nature, nor by the overwhelming powers of imagination as it
concern an artwork, but by the excess of sensuousness engendering a negative pleasure,
which echoes the bodily state of dispersion amid spatial sensuous forms that resist to be
harnessed into concepts and lead to an endless process of sense formation. I will attempt
to show that this shift, though advanced by empirical psychologists in the nineteenth cen-
tury, took place in the twentieth century resulting from Merleau-Ponty’s reformulation of
Husserl’s phenomenology. Indeed, Husserl focused his transcendental-phenomenologi-
cal position on the modes of appearance of the perceptually given to the experiencing
subject. Everything is perceived from a certain perspective and centred in the moving
bodily ‘I’. Thus, the visibility and invisibility as limited or possible visibility build up the

39
 Il tema di B@bel

world as a picture or representation, so that the true origin of space is found in the body
as a source of the entire perceptual field. This anthropocentric, organic and harmonious
conception of the visible characterizes an architecture based on the bodily metaphoric
order. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, claims that the possibility of creation lies in
the tension between the coherent distortion of and the compliance with natural forms. In
this equivocal field ruled by ambiguity there is sense, but in a state of suspension. As the
experience of contemporary architectural space shows, body and space are affectively
intertwined, but this co-belonging is characterized by conflicts, tensions, and the suspen-
sion of meaning. Hence, the phenomenological sublime is a bodily-felt emotion.
In what follows I’ll deal with Kant’s theory of the sublime as well as with Husserl’s
and Merleau-Ponty’s bodily space theories and work out a redefinition of the sublime
into phenomenological terms. These considerations will be finally applied to and verified
in contemporary architecture.

2. Husserl: The Body as the Turning Point between a Lived Experience (Erlebnis) and
an Experience-of (Erfahrung). Harmony and Representation

The seat of our most primitive sensuous feelings like pleasure or displeasure, wellbe-
ing or discontent is the lived-body, which is not a phenomenon among others: It not only
senses the outer world but feels itself; we experience our lived-body as experiencing. It
has two types of interrelated specific sensations: the ‘kinaesthetic sensations’ – a system
of subjective feelings of movement motivating the visual appearances of things – and a
specific kind of sensorial, tactile events called ‘sensings’ (Empfindnisse). These sensings
are neither an experience of something (Erfahrung), nor a perception (Wahrnehmung):
sensings not only allow the lived-body to sense itself but to constitute itself as a living
object, a body. Both, kinaesthetic sensations and sensings, constitute the outer world, but
the tactile constitution underlies the visual one. These distinctions split the constitutional
process into two spheres: the bodily sensings, which are mostly unconsciously lived
or erlebt on the one hand, and on the other, the kinaesthetic sensations, which are con-
sciously experienced or erfahren. Later on, Husserl reviews this static and stratified con-
stitution based on a clearly drawn differentiation between intentional experiences in the
sense of Erfahrung and non-intentional lived experiences as Erlebnisse as published in
the Logical Investigations. Their continuity is ensured by a bodily intentionality, which
localizes hyletic and tactual sensings and feelings, anchoring them on the body itself.
This process is not driven by an active intentionality correlating conscious experience to
the appearing world, but by a passive intentionality ruled by sensuous drives or impuls-
es. In my view, these impulses are the driving force, which ensures the continuity and
dynamics of the constitutional process of the body.
The body not only constitutes itself by the localization of its sensings but it is the
source of space and higher objectivities too. It is no other than our body as a «medium

40
 irEnE BrEuEr
Il Towards a Phenomenological Sublime

of all perception; […] the organ of perception»1, who ensures the relationship between
things and their surrounding space. Its role is therefore essentially productive or con-
stitutive. The starting point of the constitutional process of objectivities and space is
the reduction of the surrounding world to the pure primordial space, which is localized
perspectively around the living body as the «bearer of the zero-point of orientation»2.
The body is not simply the centre in terms of which all perceived things are situated, but
also the lived-body of free movement, of approaching and distancing, of grasping and
repelling. These movements or kinaesthetic sensations «are here free courses and this
freedom in our consciousness of their unfolding is an essential part of the constitution
of spatiality»3. This means that the constitution of perceived things requires that they be
spatially oriented around the body, while the constitution of space is achieved by a body
insofar as a centre of motility and of action. Notice that it is not a matter of a simple
effectuation of a movement that addresses something, rather it is a question of sensing
a living movement that the I ascribes to himself – a «moving sensing and a movement
through which we sense ourselves»4, as Bernhard Waldenfels puts it.
At this point we may ask how all these processes relate to the one and the same body.
How is that unity guaranteed? The kinaesthetic freedom of our body provides us with
a valuable clue: As a moving body and as «a field of localization of its sensations», the
body is «an organ of the will» insofar as «only bodies are immediately spontaneously
(“freely”) movable»5. The subject has the ‘faculty’ (the ‘I can’) to «freely move this
Body», in Husserl words6. Thus, the subjective capacity of my body to move freely
belongs to the horizon of my kinaesthetic freedom.7 Significantly enough, the subject is
conscious about his possibilities and views himself as the subject who is able to freely
command his kinaesthesias8. Furthermore, as each place in its surrounding space is de-
fined by my body’s ability to reach an unmoving thing, place can be understood as an
embodied place (Leibort). Thus, place and body are essentially intertwined: The body is

1 E. HussErl, Ideas II. Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philo-
sophy. Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. by R. Rojcewicz and A.
Schuwer, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 5th ed. 2000, p. 61. Originally published as Hua IV, Ideen zu einer reinen
Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch. Phänomenologische Unter-
suchung zur Konstitution, hrsg. von M. Biemel, Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag 1952, p. 56. Hereafter
quoted as Hua IV and Ideas II.
2 Hua IV, p. 56; Ideas II, p. 61.
3 Hua IV, p. 58; Ideas II, p. 63.
4 B. waldEnFEls, Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden 3., Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2013, p. 69.
5 Hua IV, p. 152, Ideas II, p. 159.
6 Hua IV, p. 154, Ideas II, p.159 f.
7 See B. rang, Kausalität und Motivation, Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag 1973, pp. 159-163.
8 HussErl, Hua XI. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten
1918-1926, hrsg. von M. FlEiscHEr, Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag 1966, p. 24: «Sie [die Kinästhese]
verläuft als mir frei verfügbar, als frei zu inhibieren, frei wieder zu inszenieren, als ursprünglich sub-
jektive Realisation ab». See HussErl, Volume LX. Analyses concerning Passive and Active Synthesis.
Lectures on Transcendental Logic, ed. by r. Bernet, trans. by a. Steinbock, Kluwer, Dordrecht 2001,
p. 60: «(E)very appearance belongs systematically to some type of series of appearances to be realized
in kinaesthetic freedom».

41
 Il tema di B@bel

therefore spatialized, as it exercises its constitutional functions in space and is itself

spatially extended, while space i.e. place is in turn embodied, as place is defined by my
‘being here’ i.e. my being the zero-point of orientation.
But in my view the body is something more than the centre of the whole perceptual
field and space is more than an absolute location, an objective or representative space
relying on an active act of thought or intentionality: in passive intentionality they are
intertwined, as space already belongs to my bodily structure, which is defined by its
kinaesthetic feelings and its motility. These, in turn, are affectively motivated, so that
it is the role of our affective kinaesthetic freedom to bestow our surrounding world
with sense. The freedom of this affective-motor process – as we may call it – is by no
means absolute, as it is conditioned by our motility habits. The consciousness of kin-
aesthetic feelings and of motility in general is the primary sphere in which all sense is
engendered, this consciousness being essentially a bodily one.
Thus, we may conclude that first, feelings and sensations, not only allow us to rec-
ognize and experience ourselves as experiencing lived-bodies, but they allow us to
know and recognize ourselves as the bodies who are able – at least insofar as kinaes-
thetic sensations are concerned – to freely command them. Second, my being aware
of my self-perception, my self-experience and my kinaesthetic freedom is provided by
a consciousness that not only ‘knows’ about his bodily capacities, but knows itself as
the body originating them. Third, it is the role of the bodily consciousness to endow
the surrounding world with sense. In conclusion, passive experience is grasped by an
affective bodily self-consciousness, which in its turn, allows for a bodily self-knowl-
edge, an experiential self-knowledge that expresses itself in bodily drives and affec-
tions and deploys itself in habitual actions within the surrounding world.
Even though Husserl stressed the role of sensings and kinaesthetic movements in
the constitution of the body and of the outer world, he still conceived the body as sep-
arate from the space surrounding him, i.e. the body remains for him what we might call
an objective body immersed ‘in’ a place in an Aristotelian way, while consciousness
remains knowledge. This understanding of space as organic and organized around an
objective body fits into Husserl’s conception of a lifeworld subjectively lived which
is characterised by a «harmonious unity of perspective and a perspectively organized
experiential style»9. But Husserlian phenomenology has shown that our relationship
to the world is not limited to an immediate presence of the subject amid things. Even
though our world might be organized perspectively around us, our presence is not
limited to a relation of representation: world and things are always more than what is
offered to our gaze insofar as intentionality opens up horizons, internal and external,
of infinite possibilities of determination of things which allow for a potential enrich-
ment of sense. Therefore, insofar as consciousness exceeds the immediate givenness
9 HussErl, Die Welt der lebendigen Gegenwart und die Konstitution der ausserleiblichen Umwelt, in
«Philosophy and Phenomenological Research», VI, 3 (Mar. 1946, reprint 1963, pp. 323-343). Here,
p. 324 f: «[D]as ganze dingliche Wahrnehmungsfeld als konstituierte Mannigfaltigkeit von perspekti-
visch erscheinenden Dingen ist eine harmonische Einheit der Perspektivität; ein perspektivischer Stil
waltet».

42
 irEnE BrEuEr
Il Towards a Phenomenological Sublime

or actuality of the intended object it breaks with the «sovereignty of representation»10,

in Lévinas’ words. We may add that it breaks with representation in terms of the full
determination of objectivity, but not in terms of our presence among things and in
space. Given that on the one hand, my body is a stable zero point of orientation, and
on the other, the constitution of space, objectivity and body are correlative, we may
conclude that the organisation of space mirrors the organisation of our bodily parts, as
Aristotle too claims. This anthropological and organic conception of space is paired
by a normative system of relations, i.e. the principle of the concordance among parts
and the whole, so that the body lays the grounds for the aesthetic conception of space.

3. Merleau-Ponty: The Flesh of the World

Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body is no continuation of Husserl’s. His new

interpretation of Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ opens up into a non-dialectical in-
tertwining of body and existence, i.e. a pre-objective reference to the world grounded
on bodily experience. In his later writings, Merleau-Ponty formulates the concept of
‘être au monde’, i.e. of ‘being towards the world’11, by which he means the state of be-
ing devoted to the world. The self and its surroundings are the two sides of a reflexive
relationship, which makes up the unity of the flesh of the world. By means of the con-
cept of «flesh»12, Merleau-Ponty overcomes Husserl’s constitutional phenomenology
and thus the split between the body as the organ of perception and the world as the field
of perception: The flesh accounts for a sensuous principle, whose ‘cardinal point’ is the
own body. The body is ‘towards space’ in the sense of an embodied attuned ‘being-in’.
Merleau-Ponty breaks with Husserl’s theory of constitution: In his view there has
always been sense and world insofar as being «caught as up in the tissue of things»,
my body «draws it entirely to it, incorporates it». The world is embodied13 so that
«there is a reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other»14. The flesh is
thereby a «means of communication»15, a general location, between the visibility of
things and the bodiliness of the subject who sees. We may therefore define the term
‘experience’ as the place, where this embodied self opens up to the visible and invis-
ible of the world. Here, the experience-of (Erfahrung) and a lived experience (Erleb-
nis) unite into a «situated, incarnated»16 self. The decisive point here is the body does

10 E. léVinas, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, Vrin, Paris 2010, p. 181.
11 See M. MErlEau-Ponty, Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung, [Phénomenologie de la Perception, Pa-
ris, 1945], trans. by r. Boehm, de Gruyter, Berlin 1966, p. 7 Fn.4. R. Boehm remarks on the modifica-
tion of this concept.
12 id., The Visible and the Invisible [Le visible et l’invisible], ed. by c. Lefort, trans. by A. Lingis, Nor-
thwestern University Press, Evanston 1968, p. 136.
13 Ivi, p. 135.
14 Ivi, p. 138.
15 Ibid.
16 Ivi, p. 76.

43
 Il tema di B@bel

not constitute space but is «organic[ally]»17 intertwined with it, i.e. space is already
built into the bodily structure. Such a body inhabits space not in a conceptual but an
affective «understand[ing]»18, provided that he is able to unfold his motility abilities
in life. This is why space is given to the body not in terms of an intentional search for
knowledge but in terms of «an intention to take hold»19. What Merleau-Ponty has in
mind is rather an embodied space ruled by «motility as basic intentionality»20. In his
words, «[…] consciousness is being towards the thing through the intermediary of the
body […]. Motility […] is not […] a handmaid of consciousness»21.
Although Husserl’s intentionality breaks with representation in terms of an accurate re-
production of the world, it grounds on its undisputed essential trait, namely, Leibniz’ claim
that the qualitative difference among things and place might be overcome in a harmonious
way through the unification of space and things in perspective. Merleau-Ponty stresses
instead the rivalry among things, which are simultaneously extended in space and time
within the field of presence and which fight for our attention. This space of bodily local-
isation and motility is not organised perspectively around the body, but it organises itself
in depth as a simultaneity of heterogeneously given things and bodies and is affectively
coloured. Space is bodily lived and the gaze expands to a reinvention of space. There is
therefore no coincidence between the gaze and the visible, but manifold «chiasms»22 unit-
ed in an «intentional “encroachment”»23 that makes up the incompossibility of the world:
«The chiasm truth of the pre-established harmony – – Much more exact than it: for it is
between local-individuated facts, and the chiasm binds as obverse and reverse ensembles
unified in advance in process of differentiation»24. What is at stake here is not the accurate
representation of space for a perceiving bodily subject, but the bodily affective experience
of space.
This bodily, affectively lived experience which was made possible by the break with
both the perspectivity of our Dasein and the compossibility of the beings’ realm, triggers
in my view an emotion of the sublime, a phenomenological emotion of the sublime which
is engendered by the excess of sensitivity over conceptuality, an excess that was already
suggested by Kant. In order to sustain this thesis, I’ll shortly consider the sublime in Kant’s
terms in order to put forward a phenomenological emotion of the sublime as the expression
of a bodily affective experience. This bodily experience of space involves a sense of being
liberated from the perceptual rules of representation.

17 MErlEau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [Phénoménologie de la perception], trans. by c. Smi-

th, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1958, p. 293.
18 Ibid.
19 Ivi, p. 119.
20 Ivi, pp. 158 f.
21 Ivi, p. 161.
22 MErlEau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, cit., pp. 160, 199, 214 f, 239, 259.
23 Ivi, pp. 239, 259.
24 Ivi, p. 262.

44
 irEnE BrEuEr
Il Towards a Phenomenological Sublime

4. Kant: The Emotion of the Sublime

Kant’s first attempt to articulate a theory of the sublime is found in his pre-critical
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, published in 1764. Kant
remarks that we experience various feelings of enjoyment or of displeasure, which de-
pend on our subjective disposition, which in its turn enables us to find things pleasurable
or displeasurable. In case of the sublime, Kant suggests that our disposition towards it
may occur in three characteristic ways: The feeling of the sublime is sometimes accom-
panied by dread or melancholy – «the terrifying sublime» – sometimes with quiet won-
der – «the noble» – and in still other cases with an extraordinary beauty – «the splendid».
As examples of these Kant cites, amongst others, great buildings (such as the Pyramids)
as splendid. Our responses to it can embody ‘quiet wonder’ as well as delightful horror.
Kant uses works of architecture to illustrate the phenomenological workings of the sub-
lime, for example, when he describes the feelings of a visitor of St. Peter’s in Rome. On
such terms, a work of architecture can be so perceptually overwhelming as to transcend
the scope of our capacity for rational cognition25.
While in the Observations sublimity is constructed dispositionally, as a feeling, the An-
alytic of the Sublime, the second book of Part I of the Critique of Judgement concerns in
my view the phenomenological structures grounding the beautiful and the sublime. The
limit of the universal claim for beauty lies there, where our capacity to build up forms,
i.e. the power of imagination or the faculty of presentation, becomes overwhelmed by
what Kant calls the «formlessness»26 of a sense impression. This excessive demand as
results of the sheer immensity of a peak suggesting the idea of limitlessness or infinity to
us, has itself the character of an aesthetic emotion. The sublime, «may appear, indeed, in
point of form to contravene the ends of our power of judgment, to be ill-adapted to our
faculty of presentation, and to do violence, as it were, to the imagination»27. The con-
sciousness of imagination’s inadequacy to cope with the formless phenomenon arouses
a contradictory and ambiguous feeling of a pleasure arising from displeasure, a «neg-
ative pleasure»28 which involves not only alternations of attraction and repulsion but a
sense of pain – «a check to the vital forces»29 as resulting from the imagination’s failure

25 Crowther has reconstructed Kant’s theory of the sublime in terms of four varieties: First, the «cognitive
variety», which divides into the mathematical and dynamical modes; second, «the artefactual sublime»
which arises when some man-made product makes vivid the scope of human artifice; third, «the per-
sonalized sublime», which involves an overwhelming personal significance; fourth, «the expressive
sublime», which evokes a sense of universal significance. Crowther offers a general definition of the
sublime: «The sublime is an item or set of items which, through the possession or suggestion of per-
ceptually, imaginatively, or emotionally overwhelming properties, succeeds in rendering the scope of
some human capacity vivid to the senses». P. crowtHEr, The Kantian Sublime. From Morality to Art,
Clarendon Press, Oxford 1989, p. 162.
26 i. kant, The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment [Kritik der ästhetischen Urtheilskraft], trans. by J.c. Me-
redith, ed. by N. Walker, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007, § 24, p. 78.
27 Ivi, § 23, p. 76.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.

45
 Il tema di B@bel

to build up the unity of a perception. Hence, imagination is induced by this very fail-
ure to «recoil upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight [rührendes
Wohlgefallen]»30. Such agitation is emotional, it involves being moved from ‘within’:
Whereas in the case of beauty we seek a basis in the formal purposiveness of the work
of art, in the case of the sublime, however, we look for this basis «in our own ideas», i.e.
«within us»31, because we fail to estimate the determinate form or magnitude. Hence,
the formless natural object is «counter-purposive (zweckwidrig)»32 insofar as, defying
purposiveness, it seems to defeat the very end of cognition.
As Kant claims in § 80 of his Critique of Teleological Judgment, the ontological con-
cept of a substance requires reference to a purpose (casualty of nature), while conversely,
nature and its laws are themselves subordinated to a cause or idea that binds nature to a
particular form. The purposiveness of nature for our faculties of cognition is subjective;
the principle must be regarded as «if an understanding (though it be not ours) had sup-
plied them for the benefit of our cognitive faculties, so as to render possible a system of
experience according to particular natural laws»33. We have «to admit this distinction as
one subjectively necessary for our cognitive faculty, constituted as it is, and as valid for
reflective, and not for objectively determining judgement»34. It is a transcendental prin-
ciple, under which Kant understands a principle «through which we represent a priori
the universal condition under which alone things can become objects of our cognition
generally»35. As Manfred Baum remarks, this is an «ontological principle» that «ad-
dresses the conditions of possible cognition of things through our human faculties of
cognition»36.
Kant then proceeds first to the «association of the feeling of pleasure with the concept
of the purposiveness of nature»37 and thereafter to «the aesthetic representation of the
purposiveness of nature»38. Both underline the subjectivity of this principle by relating it
to the sensible intuition and the faculty of feeling of the human being39. It is a contingent
principle and its necessity is hypothetical: «For, were it not for this presupposition, we
should have no order of nature in accordance with empirical laws, and, consequently,
no guiding-thread for an experience»40. For Kant, «it is quite conceivable» that mate-
rial comes «to hand in such a confusion (properly speaking only infinitely multiform
and ill-adapted to our power of apprehension)» that «it makes impossible for our un-
derstanding to discover in nature an intelligible order» so as make out of this material

30 Ivi, § 26, p. 83.

31 Ivi, § 25, p. 80.
32 Ivi., § 27, p. 89.
33 Ivi, Introduction, IV, p. 16.
34 Ivi, § 88, p. 286.
35 Ivi, Introduction, V, 16.
36 M. BauM, Kant on Teleological Thinking and its Failures, in id., Kleine Schriften 1. Arbeiten zur theo-
retischen Philosophie Kants, ed. by M. Heinz, W. de Gruyter, Berlin 2019, pp. 305-321. Here, p. 311.
37 kant, Critique of Judgement, cit., Introduction, VI, p. 21.
38 Ivi, Introduction, VII, p. 23.
39 BauM, Kant on Teleological Thinking, cit., p. 313.
40 kant, Critique of Judgement, cit., Introduction, V, p. 20.

46
 irEnE BrEuEr
Il Towards a Phenomenological Sublime

«a consistent context of experience»41. Hence, an object that defies purposiveness as

its ontological principle also defies the very possibility of experiencing it, which, in
Kant’s terms, implies cognoscibility. A formless object shows therefore an ‘ontological
indeterminacy’ that results on the one hand, from Imagination’s failure to link it to an
adequate concept and on the other, from its counter-purposiveness. As Henry Allison
remarks, «the purposiveness of the beautiful is always that of the form» understood as
the «suitability» of the apprehended object to the interplay of the imagination and the
understanding. In contrast, the «sublime presents itself as counter purposive» in view of
its lack of form.42 Paradoxically enough, however, the object is liked, so that even though
it is counterpurposive to our mind, it is purposive to our sensitivity.
Imagination would seem to fall into an abyss if it had not been rescued by the work
or reason. The sublime, indeed, «concerns ideas of reason»43, so that the ground of our
pleasure lies in the way in which objects of nature engage our cognitive faculties. Kant
thus claims that «(t)he sublime is the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty
of mind transcending every standard of the senses»44. While what is beautiful implies
«restful contemplation»45 of «what pleases in the mere judging of it» (i.e. apart from all
interest) and involves no «concept of the understanding», the sublime «is what pleases
immediately through its resistance to the interest of the senses»46. Herein lies for Kant
the difference between a feeling and an emotion: While feeling involves a mere sensuous
and disinterested pleasure arising from the concordance between our faculties, an emo-
tion arises out of their conflict: The sublime requires us to esteem something in spite of
the «hindrances on the part of sensibility»47. Harmony is here achieved by virtue of the
«dominion» which «reason imposes […] upon sensibility»48. It is important to remark
that for Kant, which is sublime is not the formless object itself, but rather the «unfath-
omable depth of this supersensible faculty»49, which, through the ideas of reason, can
grasp the totality. This negative feeling of the inadequacy of imagination is overcome by
a positive feeling of «respect»50 aroused by our becoming conscious of possessing an in-
dependent, «pure reason»51. Sublime is therefore the «attunement of the spirit evoked by

41 Ivi, p. 20 f.
42 H.E. allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste. A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge 2001, p. 309 f. Unlike Allison, who claims that the paradox underlying
the sublime is the «paradoxical conception of a counter-purposive purposiveness» (Ivi, p. 310), I’d
suggest that purposiveness may be considered under two points of view, namely, from our sensitivity
related to our capacity of being affected, and from our understanding related to our capacity for con-
ceptual thinking.
43 kant, Critique of Judgement, cit., § 23, p. 76.
44 Ivi, § 25, p. 81.
45 Ivi, § 27, p. 88.
46 Ivi, General Remark upon the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgements, p. 97.
47 Ibid.
48 Ivi, p. 99.
49 Ivi, p. 101.
50 Ivi, p. 102.
51 Ibid.

47
 Il tema di B@bel

a particular representation engaging the attention of reflective judgment»52 of the subject

of reason and not the mere sensuous object. Kant supplies us here with a phenomenolog-
ical description of the emotion of the sublime, an emotion that encompasses, as Birgit
Recki summarizes, rejection as well as admiration, pleasure and displeasure, anguish
and redemption, irritation and confident pacification, fright and enthusiasm.53 Herein lies
the first step towards the autonomy of aesthetics.
It is also important to note that for Kant, the experience of sublimity focuses on na-
ture, whereas the idea of nature as the major object of aesthetic sensibility was a view
closely related with the rise of Romanticism. As regards to nature, harmony is re-estab-
lished by the work of reason. Even when Kant comes to define the sublime in terms of
representational art, their signifying elements must be ordered in agreement with nature.
Harmony is here attained by the correspondence between a representation and a sub-
ject-matter. But Kant also offers examples where the subject-matter in itself is sublime:
In the well-known case of the inscription upon the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature): «I
am al that is, and that was, and that ever shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil from
my face», as Paul Crowther remarks, we may be dealing with ideas whose intellectual
content cannot be grasped in a perceptual sense, or which evoke extremes of terror and
fantasy.54 Here, Kant uses the term ‘sublime’ in relation both to the work of art and to
the way the revelation is expressed. This suggests the possibility of approaching a spe-
cifically artistic sublime. Kant himself takes a step towards this notion when he comes
to define the aesthetic idea as

that representation of the imagination which evokes much thought, yet without the
possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e., concept, being adequate to it, and which
language, consequently, can never get quite fully capture or render completely intelligible55.

In the aesthetic idea, concept is inadequate to intuition. The sublime witnesses the
idea’s failure to meet the form as also the case of an object of nature that is «monstrous
[…] by its size» shows. Such an object ‘defeats the end that forms its concept’. As Kant
adds,

(t)he colossal is the mere presentation of a concept which is almost too great for
presentation, i.e. borders on the relatively monstrous; for the end to be attained by the
presentation of a concept is made harder to realize by the intuition of the object being
almost too great for our faculty of apprehension56.

The imagination is able to create ‘a second nature’, i.e. an artwork, out of the material

52 Ivi, § 25, p. 81.

53 B. recki, Ästhetik der Sitten. Die Affinität von ästhetischem Gefühl und praktischer Vernunft bei Kant,
Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 2001, p. 201.
54 crowtHEr, The Kantian Sublime, cit., p. 154.
55 kant, Critique of Judgement, cit., § 49, p. 142.
56 Ivi, § 26, p. 83.

48
 irEnE BrEuEr
Il Towards a Phenomenological Sublime

supplied by nature. In doing so, it ‘surpasses nature’, a surpassing that does not consist in
representing the supernatural but things ‘transgressing the limits of experience’ through
the creation of an original image of sensuous configuration. To experience such artworks
as sublime «involves their perceptually, imaginatively or emotionally overwhelming
properties, making vivid the scope of human artifice or expression itself»57.
In my view, this surpassing of nature or «the confines of experience»58 entails the im-
possibility of attaining harmony, insofar as reason is unable to provide a concept for the
excesses of imagination. Here, we are clearly faced with an inversion: While in things of
nature, the inadequacy of imagination is overcome by adequate concepts – conceptuality
here exceeds sensuousness – in works of art, no concept can be wholly adequate to the
representations of imagination – here, sensuousness clearly exceeds conceptuality.

5. The Sublime as Expression of an Affective Bodily Lived Experience

Reason’s insight, that what is perceived exceeds the concept thereof, goes hand in
hand with the phenomenological insight of our faculty of perception, that the thing is
always more than what is given in its actual perception. Actually, the phenomenon can-
not on principle be synthesized as a totality, because each new perception opens up cor-
responding new horizons. This fact not only leads to the bursting of representation and
consequently, to a revision of the feeling of the sublime in Kant’s terms but to a phenom-
enological mode of the sublime as the accurate expression of a bodily lived experience.
In this connection, we have seen that in Kant’s conception of the aesthetic idea, the emo-
tion of the sublime arises from the excess of sensibility over conceptuality. We fail not only
to find an adequate concept of the object of experience, but to ascertain its purpose. This
failure triggers an overwhelming lived experience (Erlebnis) that befalls the passive sub-
ject. The signification content of this lived experience initially evades the subject because of
its immediacy, so that the lived experience of the sublime encompasses something ‘more’
than what ontological concepts can grasp. While the emotion of the sublime involves the
final overcoming of fear or danger by the work or reason, in its beginnings, the feeling of
sensuous overwhelming leads to a pause; a pause wherein reality seems to be beyond the
subject’s grasp, a fold of time wherein it «recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an
emotional delight»59 in Kant’s terms. In this fold of time the subject becomes momentarily
detached from or even alien to every contextual reality. It is an indeterminate lapse of time
wherein the subject is ecstatically drawn back to itself: an experience of ‘ecstatic eternity’,
where the intentional correlation between our consciousness and the perceived object rests
in suspension or is, in the worst case, interrupted: When an intention toward homogeneity
is disappointed, «complete conflict takes place»: Our perception in Husserl’s terms or our
imagination in Kant’s is no longer able to recognize i.e. to synthesize the object, so that what

57 crowtHEr, The Kantian Sublime, cit., p. 168.

58 kant, Critique of Judgement, cit., § 49, p. 143.
59 Ivi, § 23, p. 83.

49
 Il tema di B@bel

is given in experience shows, as Husserl puts it, a «complete heterogeneity», «a dissimilarity

in a pregnant sense»60. The object of experience remains a riddle and the subject is left in a
state of utmost bewilderment.
This experience leads not only to a break of the spontaneous formation of sense but
to a self-reflection insofar as the subject is thrown back to «the whole of his life», as
Hans-Georg Gadamer claims61. In these rare moments, we encounter the «supersensible
side of our being»62, in Kant’s terms. The aesthetic lived experience of the sublime,
as every aesthetic experience, suspends all hitherto existing orders and institutions of
sense only in order to engage in new formations of sense. A time lapse opens up, out
of which a primary affect, the irritability as such, grows up. These affects, which are
bodily lived and sensed, are only apparently exogenous; actually, they originate in the
emotional impulses of the «originary sensuousness», which encompasses, in Husserl’s
words, «activities driven by drives and “sensuous” tendencies»63. We are faced with
something ‘other’, something indeterminate that waits to be endowed with sense. Out of
this call there grows step by step a new sense, which, owing to both the horizonedness
of our experience and the excess of sensibility, will never be thoroughly grasped by con-
ceptuality, thus being doomed to an endless process of sense formation. At this point we
may ask where this emotion of the sublime arises from, considering that its underlying
pre-condition, i.e. the overcoming of our faculties’ conflict thanks to the work of reason
is put into question by the break with representation.
We have already seen through Merleau-Ponty’s writings that this break allowed for
the emergence of a new perceptual ground (Wahrnehmungsboden), wherein body, things
and world exist simultaneously in an ambiguous and dissonant correlation, which as such
equates to the current plurality of particular worlds of experience in permanent tension
with one another. After this turn, the emotion of the sublime as a negative pleasure is no
longer engendered by an overwhelming feeling of self-transcendence but is aroused by a
bodily lived experience, which is motivated by the spatial experience of a dispersed self
amid a world submitted to overwhelming tensions and conflicts. This lived experience
neither allows for transcendence of reason nor for the re-establishment of harmony. On the
contrary, it implies a negative pleasure emerging from the consciousness of the irrepress-
ible power of sensibility, which attests to the world’s incompossibility and contradictori-
ness. It is a bodily pleasure engendered by the disjunction and transgression of sensuous
forms and motivated by the experience of contemporary architectonic space conceptions.

60 HussErl, Experience and Judgment [Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Lo-
gik], ed. by l. Landgrebe, trans. by J. s. Churchill and k. Ameriks, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London
1973, p. 191 f.
61 See H.-g. gadaMEr, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, J.C.B.
Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen 1990, p. 75.
62 kant, Critique of Judgement, cit., § 27, p. 88.
63 HussErl, Hua XXXIII, Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917-1937), ed. by r.
Bernet and D. Lohmar, Kluwer, Dordrecht 2001, p. 276.

50
 irEnE BrEuEr
Il Towards a Phenomenological Sublime

6. The Architectonical Sublime

Even if the sublime can encompass the domain of built environment, it has tradition-
ally done so by assuming the rules of representation, i.e. of a harmonious relationship
between subject and object, wherein the original ordering device mustered for tradi-
tional architecture was that of the body itself, as the original paradigm of order. From
Francesco di Giorgio’s64 explicit analogies to Le Corbusier’s direct ‘imitation’ of Vit-
ruvian65 bodily perfection (the «Modulor» system of proportions66) in the layout of the
Ville Radieuse, the body has provided a guiding metaphor. But the modern phenomenon
of plurality of simultaneous coexisting worlds and the concomitant reformulation of our
cognitive habits resulted in the arousal of other sensibilities, such as the fragmentary, the
chance, and the marginal. The body is therefore no longer the warrant of harmony but
becomes the expression of the dispersion of the modern subject. This disruption of the
bodily metaphor leads to the conception of architectural forms endowed with an excess
of sensibility, allowing for an experience of both bodily implacement and displacement.
Thus, the representational constraints give place to a new aesthetic dimension: the
a.m. bodily experience of space. Anthropocentric forms are disrupted allowing for a neg-
ative pleasure in transgressing, resulting in excessive forms. An ‘improper’ aesthetics
that celebrates the dynamic assemblage of forms over utopian harmony and that declines
a clear ‘visibility’ of a univocal sense in favour of a grey or ‘turbid visibility’ of multiple
senses – a wild gaze. A ‘wild gaze’ that implies a «wild meaning», i.e. «an expression of
experience by experience»67: Far from being reassembled into synthesis, it is experience
itself which conveys meaning as Merleau-Ponty points out in the follow of Husserl. In
the case of the sublime, however, words fall short in view of the excess of sensuous
experience at work, insofar as our conscience tends to ignore the senses which she is
unable to ‘domesticate’: There is always a remaining sense, a ‘core’ of wild meaning that
resists being reassembled into synthesis or being: It marks the very birth of experience.
This disruption of the corporeal paradigm and the resulting excess of sensibility can-
not but lead to a reassertion of the sublime: Summarizing, the phenomenological sublime
is an emotion aroused neither by the power of our reason transcending the inadequacy
of imagination as it concerns nature, nor by the overwhelming powers of imagination as
it concern an artwork, but by the excess of sensibility engendering a negative pleasure,
which echoes the bodily state of dispersion amid spatial sensuous forms that resist to be
harnessed into concepts and lead to an endless process of sense formation. Paradoxically
enough, this exhaustion of corporeality itself involves the arousal of the bodily sensu-
ousness, as expressed by our most primary drives and impulses. The moving powers of

64 See https://www.google.de/search?q=francesco+di+giorgio+martini+vitruvio&sa=X&hl=de&tbm=i-
sch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=R4Sq6ODK1O_YSM%252CUFb9JQwESmbqEM%252C_&vet=1&u-
sg=AI4_-kTqG1NIKb8vDmT6FKS1ZRakzO8JTg&ved=2ahUKEwik_b2xiOjqAhXQsKQKHfKfD-
DwQ9QEwAHoECAoQHA&biw=1290&bih=742#imgrc=R4Sq6ODK1O_YSM
65 See https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man
66 See https://www.lescouleurs.ch/journal/posts/der-modulor-menschennaehe-als-grundwert/
67 MErlEau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, cit., p. 155.

51
 Il tema di B@bel

architecture, which enhance dissonance over harmony and difference over identity, call
forth a tension between our traditional bodily habits and our bodily lived experiences
and force us into a self-reflection insofar as they compel us to question and suspend the
institutionalized sense architecture has to convey.
Let us exemplify these considerations through the built work of architects as diverse
as Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry, among others. As to Bernard
Tschumi, the design strategy at work in his Parc de la Villette68, inaugurated in 1983,
can be related to Merleau-Ponty’s questioning of the structural relationship between
body, space and perception. The whole architectonic program is here decomposed and
recombined into three autonomous structural systems – the points or ‘folies’, the lines
of movement, the surfaces or ‘prairies’. The arbitrary overlapping of these structures
engenders no compossibility but their literal collision. The points or ‘folies’ express no
function whatsoever, in spite of having been designed for a particular purpose: they are
characterized by an ambiguity between sense and non-sense insofar as not serving to
any purpose of denotation but of connotation, they suggest a multiplicity of meanings.
These ‘folies’ question the possibility of inhabiting insofar as they ignore the distinction
‘outside-inside’ on the one hand and on the other, they offer the potentially inhabiting
body «no comforting organic referent». Far from engendering an «embodied space» that
bodies can inhabit and interact with, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, this arbitrary assemblage
of singular elements, may it be stairs, ramps, etc., engenders, as Anthony Vidler remarks,
«antibodily states, such as vertigo, sudden vertical and sideways movements», as if ar-
chitecture would «aspire to the exhaustion of corporeality itself»69.
Here, the leitmotiv of the design strategy is the bodily movement, a movement which
has neither origin nor aim, but calls forth an experience of nomadism: Paths that do not
take us to any destination but induce as to linger in them by addressing our senses, as for
example the so called Way of Fragances does; ramps and stairs, which end up in inaccessi-
ble places, they all induce us to a revision of our traditional concepts and to a redefinition
of their function. The resulting space can be understood as ‘topological’ in Merleau-Pon-
ty’s terms, insofar as it reaches unity only through the superposition of incompossibilities.
There arises a feeling of bodily fragmentation due to the lack of any reference to habitual
places or architectonical types already anchored in our body schema. This strategy triggers
a perverse or negative pleasure that Tschumi explicitly aims at producing and that Adorno
defines as the characteristic of the modern work of art. For Adorno, the picture gathers all
the stigmata of the repulsive and the detestable of the new art70.
Another example of this tension between pleasure and displeasure is the Memorial for
the Jews killed in Europa71, built by Peter Eisenman in Berlin between 2003 and 2005. It

68 See URL:http://www.tschumi.com
69 a. VidlEr, The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern Unhomely, MIT Press, Cambridge 1992,
p. 111 f.
70 tH.w. adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. by G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M.
1995, p. 55.
71 See https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/denkmaeler/denkmal-fuer-die-ermordeten-juden-europas-mit-
ausstellung-im-ort-der-information

52
 irEnE BrEuEr
Il Towards a Phenomenological Sublime

consists of 2711 steles, which remind us of gravestones. No stele resembles the others,
digital design methods enabled a plurality of different steles, almost unnoticeably inclined
and standing on an apparently wavering floor. Upon entering the site there arises a feeling
of uncertainty, unsettledness and even disorientation, as the visitor feels it sinks in the
landscape. It is submitted to a deception: although the steles seem to be of the same
height it is the floor which is inclined, so that the visitor is suddenly and unexpectedly
surrounded by stones that tower over it and seem to bury it under their weight. This effect
is even enforced by the lack of orientation insofar as the design avoided every point of
reference. The abstract conceived steles remit to no meaning, to no message, they have
no inscriptions at all, they stand simply mute: Eisenman defined the memorial as a «place
of no meaning»72, their meaning remains a riddle. It is all about the silentness of the
place, which should encourage to think about and to feel with the absent victims. This
place awakens many feelings of despair – no way leads out of the site –, of solitude, of
lifelessness – there is no comforting vegetation, only flat concrete with sharp angles. These
steles offer neither an organic bodily reference nor a clear meaning: the show an openness
which entails neither the possibility nor the impossibility of a reconciliation, so that their
sense remains floating. Thus, there arises a field of tensions between the abstract forms and
the multiple associations suggested: This place offers an immediate bodily experience the
visitor is passively subjected to: It is overwhelmed by the massiveness of the stones, by the
feeling of being entombed under their massive weight: a sublime experience.
This field of tensions can also be exemplified through the biomorphic architecture.
Organic design is normally associated with smooth, flowing forms, insofar as designers
take inspiration from natural forms. Glen Howard Small73 is one of the oldest represent-
atives of this aesthetics. Influenced by the futuristic aesthetics of the 70ies, he focuses on
the way nature develops structures and employs these as models. Flowing, smooth, fluid
forms are created, they look like tissues, skin, dried liquids or even parasites which seem
to snuggle against the city. These forms motivate a profound feeling of estrangement,
fascination as well as bodily sickness in face of reason’s failure to find adequate concepts
for these forms. Here it becomes evident that the excess of sensibility inevitably triggers
a bodily sublime emotion, which accounts for the pathos inherent to the conflict between
positive and negative emotions74.
One of the pioneers of these design strategies is without doubt Frank Gehry and his
Vitra Museum of 1989. The exterior form is in continuous transformation, so that no
unity can be synthesized here, forms rather engage in a dynamic-forceful play. The same
applies to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a building that exacerbates the play with
forms in their disjunction and seemingly hazardous montage. Once again, disjunction
breaks with representation, a bodily sublime emotion arises.

72 N. Maak, Peter Eisenman im Stelengang, in «Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung», 16.08.83. See https://
www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/thema/peter-eisenman. (accessed 10.03.2020).
73 See https://archinect.com/features/article/87160008/review-glen-small-father-of-green-architecture
74 See on the ‘Tragedy and the Sublime’, E. Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge 2013, pp. 148-165.

53
 Il tema di B@bel

7. Conclusion

By avoiding any pre-established signification as far as conceptuality is concerned, the

a. m. projects impose upon the body affections that belong to the sphere of sensuousness:
An ‘experiential narrative’ of bodily affections, of pathos, that can hardly be accounted
for in adequate concepts. The sublime is thus engendered by sensibility’s excess over
conceptuality, leading to a break with representation. This break and the consequent
questioning of the bodily metaphor as warrant of order and symbolic sense imply par-
adoxically enough the arousal of a bodily affective experience, which is profoundly
sublime in phenomenological terms.

54