Idealization, sublimation, normativity. A psychoanalytic reading of the 'Critique of Judgement'

Abstract

This present article offers a reading of the Critique of Judgement stemming from the psychoanalytic concepts of idealization and sublimation. Idealization underlies to the Kantian notion of a final end, the supreme good, as the ideal that permits to conceive the possibility of realization of the moral world in the world of nature; equally, the process of sublimation is explained as the reverse of the judgment of taste. Such correspondence between sublimation and judgment, shall permit us to describe a normative function of sublimation, which is analogous in arts and morals. Thus, the psychoanalytic perspective of sublimation explains the ethico-political reading of the Critique of Judgement made in contemporary ethics, based on aesthetic judgment.