The Sublime as a Challenge to Aesthetic Autonomy — Epoche C1
Kant's most surprising claim about the sublime is that no object is sublime. In the twenty-seventh section of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant 1790) he says that the feeling directed at a mountain or a storm is in truth respect for a vocation of our own, which we then transfer to the object by what he calls a subreption — a substitution in which one thing is credited with what belongs to another. If that is right, the sublime cannot be beauty intensified, because beauty on Kant's account does involve the form of the object, and the sublime by his own argument does not. This essay reconstructs the machinery that produces that conclusion, and in doing so corrects two things in the earlier version of this argument: its appeal to the sensus communis as the ground of the sublime, which reverses what Kant says, and its treatment of Jean-François Lyotard as having overlooked a Kantian move that Lyotard in fact examined at length and deliberately refused. What Kant's Account of Beauty Commits Him To The sublime is defined by contrast, so the terms of the contrast must be exact. Kant analyses the judgement of beauty — the judgement of taste — under four headings. It is disinterested : the pleasure does not depend on the object's existing or on our wanting anything from it, which distinguishes beauty both from the merely agreeable and from the good. It claims universality without a concept : I do not merely report that I like this; I speak as though everyone ought to agree, yet I cannot produce a rule that would prove me right. It exhibits purposiveness without a purpose : the object looks as though it were designed to suit our faculties, without our attributing any actual design to it. And it is judged necessary in a peculiar way, the necessity resting on the presupposition of a sensus communis . What produces the pleasure is the free play of imagination and understanding. The imagination, which gathers a manifold of sensations into a single presentation, and the understanding, which supplies concepts, ordinarily co-operate under a determinate concept: this is a cathedral, and my imagination organises what I see accordingly. In the judgement of taste no determinate concept governs, and the two faculties nevertheless fall into an unforced accord. That accord, felt rather than known, is the pleasure (Guyer 1997). The Baroque church interior of the earlier version illustrates this well, provided the description is precise. The gilded woodwork of the eighteenth-century churches of Salvador da Bahia is dense and elaborate, and it takes time to work through; but it is bounded, articulated, and organised by axes and repetitions that the eye can follow (Bailey 2005). The imagination succeeds. There is strain, but the strain resolves. This is the domain of the beautiful, and the earlier version placed it correctly. Burke's Sublime, and Why Kant Rebuilt It Kant's account is a response to an existing one, and seeing what he changed shows what his own theory has to deliver. Burke (1757) had derived the sublime from terror. Whatever excites ideas of pain or danger, he argued, is a source of the sublime, provided the danger is not immediate: vastness, obscurity, darkness and loudness operate by producing a modification of terror that is not actually distressing, and Burke offered a physiological account in terms of the tension and relaxation of the nerves. Beauty, on his account, arises from opposite qualities — smallness, smoothness, gradual variation. Kant knew this account and rejected its foundations while keeping many of its examples. His objection, stated in the General Remark that follows his own analysis, is that a merely physiological or empirical explanation can tell us how a feeling arises in us but cannot license the demand that others share it. A judgement of taste or of sublimity claims more than a report of one's constitution: it claims that others ought to feel likewise. Only a transcendental account — one that identifies conditions belonging to any judging subject as such — can support that claim. So the task Kant sets himself is to locate the sublime in the structure of the mind's faculties rather than in the physiology of the nerves. The Two Sublimes, and a Correction Kant's answer divides in two, and the earlier version ran the halves together in a way that misassigns its own example. The mathematically sublime concerns magnitude. Its mechanism turns on a distinction Kant draws in the twenty-sixth section between two operations of the imagination. Apprehension is the successive taking-in of parts, and it can proceed indefinitely: one may always take in more. Comprehension is the gathering of what has been apprehended into a single intuition, and it has a maximum. Push past that maximum and the imagination loses at one end what it gains at the other — the earlier parts fade as the later ones are taken up — so the whole is never held together. Kant illustrates this with a traveller's report on the pyramids of Egypt: to feel their magnitude one must stand neither too far away, where the courses of stone blur into an outline, nor too close, where the eye cannot compass the whole; and he adds the interior of St Peter's in Rome, where the visitor is seized by a bewilderment arising from the same inadequacy. The mind, unable to present the magnitude, is nonetheless able to think a totality, because reason demands one; and in registering that its rational demand outruns any possible sensory presentation, it becomes aware of a capacity in itself that is not sensible at all. The dynamically sublime concerns might rather than size. Nature considered as a power against which our physical resistance counts for nothing is fearful; but if we judge it while ourselves in safety, we find in ourselves a capacity to regard our physical vulnerability as not the whole of what we are. Kant's examples are thunderclouds, volcanoes, hurricanes, the boundless ocean, a lofty waterfall. The correction follow