Cosmological Aesthetics through the Kantian Sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian by Erman Kaplama (review)

This two-chapter work brings together Heraclitus, Kant, and Nietzsche in an effort to explore transition (Übergang) and motion, two concepts derived from Kant’s Opus Postumum that the author argues are indications of Kant’s cosmological-aesthetic approach in his late work. At times, the book seems to want to be a work of Kant scholarship, addressing the question of the role of the Opus Postumum in the Kantian corpus. Indeed, the most sustained engagements with secondary literature occur in the sections on Kant. At other times, however, Erman Kaplama extracts the notion of transition from Kant’s work in order to make broader claims about the way in which the human faculty of sense intuition (Anschauung) serves as a bridge or transition between forces of nature and our concepts of them. To this end, Kaplama incorporates the fragments of Heraclitus and Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian, demonstrating an engagement with the idea of transition in all three thinkers.

Chapter 1 opens with a reflection on the Heraclitean logos. Drawing heavily on Heidegger, Kaplama argues that rather than an a priori law of the cosmos, logos constitutes gathering, and is thus the transition between humanity and kosmos. Only through logos does what is given appear as a unified kosmos (3). While this would seem to simply be a Kantian reading of Heraclitus, Kaplama insists that logos must not be understood as merely a rational imposition on phusis, an interpretation he equates with idealism. Nor, it seems, can we say that logos is a product of phusis, which would be physicalism (6). Rather, Kaplama believes that Heraclitus straddles this line because logos is an aesthetic principle mediating between human inner and outer sense. He understands Kant’s later work on aesthetics to be similarly occupied with the transition between the forces of nature and the human understanding of them. To better illustrate the principle of transition, Kaplama analyzes Kant’s idea of the sublime and Nietzsche’s idea of the Dionysian as two ideas that enact a link between natural forces and human understanding. The Dionysian, he suggests, is Nietzsche’s response to Kant’s tendency to moralize the sublime and “to isolate the human mind from external nature” (53). Like the Kantian sublime, Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian links cosmological motion with human ethos, but the Dionysian points to chaos rather than moral purpose. Kaplama uses Nietzsche primarily in order to develop his own point concerning transition, and the brief analyses of The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra in this chapter do not engage the literature in a way that would allow for them to constitute a significant contribution to Nietzsche scholarship.

Chapter 2 addresses the principle of motion as foundational for what Kaplama calls a cosmological aesthetics. This discussion of motion seems to be an effort to think a principle independent of and prior to subjectivity, as one that constitutes the subject’s intuitions of space and time. Such motion, which Kaplama relates to Heraclitean phusis, is embraced by Kant in the Opus Postumum, making the late Kant a natural philosopher (108). However, Kaplama seems most drawn to Nietzsche’s ideas of the eternal return and will to power as ideas most powerfully expressing phusis as motion in a Heraclitean sense. The eternal return is understood cosmologically as a principle of eternal becoming. Following Deleuze, Kaplama suggests that the eternal return has little to do with sameness, but is instead the doctrine of the cosmic child creating and destroying. While the Heraclitean dimensions of the eternal return and will to power are potentially rich territory for thought, Kaplama’s analysis suffers from some flaws. The most significant lies in his use of Heidegger’s interpretation of these concepts, which Kaplama assumes as authoritative without argument, to the point of making Nietzsche and Heidegger’s Nietzsche almost interchangeable. While Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche seems to...