Kant and the Feeling of Sublimity

Abstract

As with a number of theorists in the modern period, Kant takes the sublime to center on a unique and complex aesthetic experience, one in which our delight in an object is complicated by attendant, and contrary, feelings of pain, and repulsion. Although Kant does sometimes suggest that some works of fine art can depict the sublime (a Romantic painting of a sublime landscape), or present ideas in a manner that is sublime (especially the arts of speech), his considered view is that the sublime is best sought in ‘crude nature’, such as the ‘wide ocean, enraged by storms’, where our feelings of sublimity are occasioned immediately.¹ Thus, confining ourselves to Kant’s claims about the sublime in nature, we might say that the sublime is loosely associated with those aesthetic cases in which we feel ourselves overwhelmed or awed by natural phenomena that present as magnificent or mighty: ‘it is rather in its chaos’ that nature most arouses our ideas of the sublime, or in its ‘wildest and most unruly disarray and devastation, provided it displays ‘magnitude and might’ (KU 5:246–7). The formlessness in objects often associated with the sublime in nature highlights what is for Kant one significant difference between the sublime and the beautiful.² For whereas natural beauty allows us to present nature as a system ‘in terms of laws whose principle we do not find anywhere in our understanding’, experiences of the sublime in nature yield no particular ‘objective principle’ to which the forms of nature conform (KU 5:246). Whereas natural beauty leads us (rightly) to judge appearances as belonging not merely to nature as a mechanism without purpose, but also to belong to nature considered by analogy with art (i.e., as purposive for our judgment), the sublime leads us to judge appearances as, as it were, ‘contrapurposive’ for our aesthetic power of judgment (KU 5:246).