The Heroic, the Pathic, the Barbaric: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Sight of War

This paper begins by briefly outlining Kant’s definition of the dynamic sublime and then discusses the German philosopher’s ambivalent stance toward the relationship between war and the sublime. In doing so, it will develop the notion of the “pathic” as a mode of perceiving violence that contrasts with Kant’s description of the sublime spectacle of war and aligns more coherently with Kant’s “primary” stance toward war, as famously articulated in Toward Perpetual Peace. By linking aesthetic and moral perspectives as Kant does in the analytic of the sublime, the pathic serves as an attempt to conceptualize suffering as a driving motive of the civilizational process that Kant describes in his philosophy of history—a motive that is obscured by his allusions to the workings of nature within human history. The paper concludes by shedding light on the renewed relevance of Kant’s thoughts on war and the sublime, focusing on his (and his disciple Friedrich Schiller’s) remarks on the French Revolution as a “historical sign”, in which Kant maintains that a rational course of history is concealed behind the veil of catastrophic violence and seemingly meaningless destruction.