THE SUBLIME ACTION
THE SUBLIME ACTION

Summary/Abstract: In the measure that we become intimate with persons, other animals, ecological systems, artworks, or buildings, we develop perceptual and conceptual sensitivity, logical acumen, breadth and depth of comprehension, and the capacity to distinguish the important from the trivial. The recognition of the importance does not derive from any justificatory procedure. Importance is intrinsic, it is perceived in a perception and feeling of scope, sway, and pathos of distance. Things and events reveal themselves as sublime when they demonstrate that before them man is not the measure of all things. Importance is not ascribed to things. It is given. Importance is descriptive rather than prescriptive category, contrary to some ethical theorists the followers of David Hume. We discover what we want to do only when we discover what we have to do because of the importance of our actions that awakens inclinations and goals that were latent in our character or awakens new desires. Kant is wrong to suppose that there is a pure free will that activates us, that something is not hypothetically but categorically imperative when it does not depend on a freely selected project or goal of the agent but is imposed as an imperative on our thought to formulate the universal and the necessary. We are not just surviving; we are devoted to, sacrifice ourselves to, repair, raise and produce what is important to us and what is important in itself. To have lived our life without ever having stood for something noble consigns us irremediably to a wretched evaluation of the life we have lived.

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