English 610 —British Romanticism

Professor
J. Jennifer Jones

Immanuel Kant: From the Beautiful to the Sublime

What is the sublime? In his two part Critique of Judgement — Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and Critique of Teleological Judgement — Immanuel Kant takes on the task of answering and analyzing this question. According to Kant, the sublime and the beautiful are aesthetic judgements, which are in continuous opposition to other judgements that are “determinate” in nature, and in turn fall within the realm of reflective judgement, in so far as not projecting any concepts to identify or classify an experience whether negative or positive, good or bad, etc. Kant calls on numerous faculties of the senses — the faculty of taste, etc. — to show the inability to fit the sublime and the beautiful into a concrete idea. To say that something is sublime is to put upon it ideas of reason and of absolute totality. In other words, Kant’s view of the sublime is connected to the idea that reason can recognize its own limits and also test these limits.

In order to understand the sublime it is important to understand the transition that occurs from the beautiful to the sublime. Kant divides the beautiful into four moments. The first moment discusses “the agreeable” and “the good." The second moment claims that the beautiful behaves universally due to the fact that it holds the expectation that everyone will be in agreement and that any form of disagreement is viewed as wrong. It is also in this moment that the foundation of “free-play” is introduced. The third moment introduces the problem of purpose (end) and purposiveness (finality). It is in the fourth moment that we transgress from the beautiful to the sublime. According to Kant for “the necessary” to exist in aesthetic judgment there has to be a foundation for it to stand on, and this is “common sense," which is different from a common understanding. Imagination becomes a follower of definite law and in being so is restricted to the concept of judgement which is not due to taste.

The similarities and differences of the beautiful and the sublime are essential to understanding Kant’s shift to reason, the mind, as the basic foundation of the sublime. Where the beautiful in nature is based upon form, the sublime can be found in objects that are formless as long as there is a representation of limitlessness while maintaining thoughts of the totality of the object. The beautiful is based on the representation of an indeterminate concept of understanding, but the sublime deals with the presentation of the indeterminate concept of reason. Most importantly, in “respect of the beautiful [taste] presupposes that the mind is in restful contemplation, and preserves it in that state” (94) whereas “the feeling of the sublime involves as its characteristic feature a mental movement combined with the estimate of the object …” (94).

The Kantian definition of the sublime is “a name given to what is absolutely great” (94). But there is a distinction between the great as a magnitude and absolutely great, the latter attributed to something that is beyond comparison to anything else. This in itself must be based on a concept or arise from a source of judgement and introduces a subjective finality of the representation while adhering to the power of judgement (95). The sublime many times takes on a relationship or design that our judgment cannot rationalize or fit into its understanding, and then the imagination that often times works with judgement undergoes an extremely violent disruption. It is this disruption, the inability of the imagination to work, that makes an object or moment more sublime:“For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns idea of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy which does admit a sensuous presentation” (93). But the fact that culture is requisite for the judgement upon the sublime in nature (more than for that upon the beautiful) does not involve its being an original product of culture and something introduced in a more or less conventional way into society. Rather it is in human nature that the foundations are laid, and in fact, in that which, at once with common understanding, we may expect every one to possess and may require of him, namely, a native capacity for the feeling for (practical) ideas, i.e. for moral feeling” (116). According to Kant there are two modes in which an object or experience can be recognized as sublime: Mathematically or Dynamically.

One of the best ways to understand the mathematical sublime is to think of a concept such as infinity, which shows us our limited role and position within time and place. For example the years that we live are irrelevant to the infinity of years to come. In other words, we, the human, are confronted with a large unit of measure, but our power to think about this measurement goes beyond all human standard concepts of senses:“The sublime is that, the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense” (98). In the mathematical sublime the magnitude of a natural thing is essential to the idea of the sublime, because the former attributes to the interpretation and the classification that is placed on the natural thing. Kant uses the example of the Egyptian pyramid. To understand the magnitude of this object is to call upon it not only the materials used, the history of the object, or how other people view it, but most importantly the size of the object in its totality. First, “it takes the eye some time to complete the apprehension from the base to the summit; but in this interval the first tiers always in part disappear before the imagination has taken in the last and so the comprehension is never complete” (99-100). The imagination is what limits us in fully grasping the absolute totality of an object and when the imagination fails the mind must come forward to take its place.

The Dynamical Sublime in nature brings about this notion of might, a power that is superior to great hindrances, especially when attributed to nature.

Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might. But, provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature. (110-111)

In the dynamically sublime the powerlessness that comes with being human is shown through the fear that humans have of nature, a nature that is not calm or tranquil but threatening. However, this feeling does not last long and is immediately followed by a feeling of transcendence or superiority over and beyond nature. Kant makes it clear, however, that within this moment of powerlessness to nature there is a potential of fear, not that the person at that point is gripped or overwhelmed with a moment of fear. What is the importance of this differentiation between being in a moment of fear or a moment with the potential for fear? Just because an object is fearful does not mean that it is feared. Kant uses God as an example of this “un-feared fearfulness”: “So the righteous man fears God without being afraid of him, because he regards the case of his wishing to resist God and His commandments as one which causes him no anxiety” (110).

The fact that our judgement of the sublime in nature is based on our ability to reason, power of the mind, gives rise to the role of modality in judgement. Kant states that “without the development of moral ideas, that which, thanks to preparatory culture, we call sublime, merely strikes the untutored man as terrifying” (115). In other words, our culture — teachings, practices, traditions — enable us to have the mental capacity to see the sublime as something grand, a grand understanding of our place within nature.

But the fact that culture is requisite for the judgement upon the sublime in nature (more than for that upon the beautiful) does not involve its being an original product of culture and something introduced in a more or less conventional way into society. Rather it is in human nature that the foundations are laid, and in fact, in that which, at once with common understanding, we may expect every one to possess and may require of him, namely, a native capacity for the feeling for (practical) ideas, i.e. for moral feeling. (116)

Kereen M. Welch
University of Rhode Island
November 15, 2005

Flagg Road 124
TH 11-noon; 2-3pm

Required Texts
John Milton. Paradise Lost (Norton)

Marilyn Butler, ed. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge)

William Godwin. Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (Penguin)

Stephen Gill, ed. William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)

William Wordsworth. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton)

H. J. Jackson, ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford)

Donald H. Reiman, ed. Shelley's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton)

Jerome McGann, ed. Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford)

Edward Hirsch, ed. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (Random House)

Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (Norton)

Course Packet (Rhode Island Book Company)

NOTE: With the exceptions of Caleb Williams and the Course Packet, all materials are available through Reserve at the URI library.

Class Participation (15%)
Seminar Paper (70%)
Class Opening (15%