The Sublime's Formal Structure in Kant — Epoche B2
A Demand We Cannot Make: Necessity in Kant's Judgement of the Sublime Where the interesting question is not Readers of the third Critique often set out to show that the beautiful and the sublime are less sharply opposed than they look. It is worth noticing that Kant opens the Analytic of the Sublime by saying so himself [1] . At section 23, before any of the material about magnitude and might, he lists what the two have in common: both please on their own account, neither rests on a determinate concept, both are singular judgements that nonetheless demand the agreement of everyone, and both are reflecting rather than determining judgements. A reading that arrives at continuity has arrived where Kant starts. The interesting question lies in the last of those shared features. Both judgements demand agreement. Kant thinks he can justify the demand in the case of beauty. This essay argues that on his own account he cannot justify it in the case of the sublime, and that what he offers instead is a moral demand wearing aesthetic clothes. The claim is deniable: anyone who shows that the warrant Kant gives at section 29 is as universal as the warrant he gives at section 21 refutes it. Beauty, and why its demand can be defended A judgement of taste, for Kant, is not a report of how something affects me. If I say the rose is beautiful I am not saying that I happen to like it; I am speaking as though everyone ought to agree, while conceding that I cannot produce a proof or a rule. That combination is the puzzle the Analytic of the Beautiful is built to solve. Kant's account of the pleasure runs through the two faculties involved in ordinary cognition. Imagination gathers a manifold; understanding brings it under concepts. In the case of a beautiful object these two fall into an unusual relation: imagination and understanding accord with each other without any concept being applied. Kant calls this the free play of the faculties. The object then strikes us as purposive for our capacity to know, without our being able to say what purpose it serves — hence subjective purposiveness, purposiveness without a purpose. The demand for agreement is justified from there, in the fourth moment. Kant argues that the harmony felt in the free play is the very same subjective condition that must be present whenever anyone knows anything at all, since cognition requires imagination and understanding to work together, and cognitions must be communicable. If the condition is required for cognition in general, then it can be presupposed in anyone capable of sharing a thought. Kant calls this presupposition the common sense, and he is careful about what it licenses: not a proof that others will agree, but an entitlement to demand agreement, on the basis of a condition that any judging being must possess. The necessity is exemplary and conditioned, and its condition is one nobody who thinks at all can lack. Whether that argument can carry as much as Kant asks of it is the question Paul Guyer pursues through Kant and the Claims of Taste [2] ; the present essay grants it, because the difficulty it wants to identify lies elsewhere. The sublime, and why its demand runs differently The sublime, for Kant, is not a property of anything. Confronted with something formless or overwhelming — an ocean without a visible limit, a mountain range whose extent the eye cannot take in at once — imagination is set the task of presenting the whole and fails. In the mathematical sublime the failure is one of magnitude; in the dynamical, of power. That failure is felt as displeasure. But the failure itself makes something evident: reason can demand a totality that no presentation can supply, which shows that we possess a faculty not bounded by anything the senses deliver. Pleasure arises from that recognition, and Kant calls it a negative pleasure, one reached only through a check. Kant is unusually candid about the cost. The object is unsuited to our power of presentation and does violence to the imagination, and it is on that account, not despite it, that we call it sublime. There is nothing purposive in the object; the purposiveness lies wholly in the use the mind makes of the encounter. This is why he says at the end of section 23 that the theory of the sublime is a mere appendix to the aesthetic judging of nature's purposiveness. It tells us nothing about nature. The question is then what entitles me to demand that you feel it too. Kant faces the question at section 29 and gives a different answer from the one he gave for beauty. The judgement upon the sublime, he says, requires culture. He immediately guards the concession: the requirement does not make the judgement conventional, because it is grounded in human nature, in the predisposition to the feeling for practical ideas, which is to say in moral feeling. Paul Crowther's The Kantian Sublime takes that moral grounding to be the organising fact about the judgement [3] , and follows out what it commits Kant to once the sublime is extended from nature to art. And Kant draws the consequence, which is the honest part of the section. To someone in whom moral ideas are undeveloped, what the cultivated person calls sublime will simply appear terrifying and repellent. In the General Remark that follows he borrows an example from Saussure's Alpine travels: the Savoyard peasant who called all admirers of the ice mountains fools. What the peasant shows Take the peasant seriously, because Kant does. He is not failing to perceive the mountain. He sees its size perfectly well; his livelihood depends on it. He is not making an error of the kind a better look would correct, and he is not lacking a concept, since no concept is in play. What he lacks, on Kant's own diagnosis, is the developed moral feeling through which the imagination's defeat becomes the occasion for an awareness of one's rational vocation. Now compare the two warrants. For beauty, the subjective condition presupposed in others is o