Kants Account of the Sublime - Essay Example

Certainly every person has at least one time in his or her lifetime experienced the feeling of being overwhelmed. This aesthetic experience may come about from man’s creation or the splendours of the natural world. Regardless, all people have at sometime known what it is like to be overpowered by a breathtaking force. Of course, what a person finds overwhelming about some phenomenon is strongly dependent on its context. For instance, a 16th century merchant would see any obsolete 20th-century piece of technology as an extraordinary achievement of mankind. Nevertheless, although the objects that bear these aesthetic properties change through time and space, the feeling itself remains constant in terms of how it is experienced and when it is experienced. This notion of being overwhelmed by a property of greatness has been floated around in philosophy for millennia, and only really came to widespread attention with the writings of Immanuel Kant on aesthetics. Kant came to identify what he called the sublime (or, in German, Erhabenen) as something quite different from the concept of beautiful. Beautiful, for Kant, can only be found in objects that are bounded insofar as beauty is “connected with the form of the object” (191). Obviously, for some object to have form, it must have some semblance of an edge. The sublime, however, pertains to something quite different: something without bounds and something that is dynamical in nature. The sublime refers, of course, to those experiences that we cannot describe as “beautiful”. For instance, we cannot call a violent storm, or a brilliant mathematical equation, or a complex piece of equipment “beautiful”. These things may overwhelm us, but it would strictly be a categorical error to ascribe the same aesthetic qualities to them that we might ascribe to a beautiful painting or a beautiful sculpture. Storms, equations, and technology serve separate functions besides helping us appreciate beautiful things. It is the extent to which the former items serve their different functions that overwhelms us. A violent storm, for instance, fulfils the “function” (with that word being used loosely) of destroying things far more effective than a weak storm, and thus the violent storm is more sublime than the weaker one. Kant cleverly separated the sublime into dynamical and mathematical. The former of which refers to a situation in which, metaphysically, our wills are resisted by the sheer force of the event, such as in the case of the storm. The latter of which refers to a situation in which, epistemologically, full understanding of the situation is practically impossible, such as in the case of the mathematical equation and its applications to the real world. Epistemologically, the sublime is of such a great magnitude that it requires entirely different concepts, and must be (as a necessary condition) of a great magnitude. Metaphysically, Kant says, “nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us, is dynamically sublime” (260). In other words, the sublime considered dynamically expresses some kind of force over the subject, emergent from the aesthetic object in question. We might thus wonder what it means, based on these dynamical and mathematical interpretations of the sublime, to be “formless” as Kant believes the sublime to be. The mathematical sublime, as has been said, is large beyond all comparison and is thereby absolutely large. Any finite object in the universe capable of being perceived is therefore measurable, such as a storm or a mountain. Nevertheless, for Kant, measurement is not merely a matter of quantitative values assigned according to some standard: it relies more fundamentally on an understanding of what a unit of such a measurement is. Indeed, a number is a necessary but not sufficient condition of measurement. A unit satisfies that sufficient condition. Thus, because a human being’s faculties are limited, the measurement of any object will be finite. We impose limits both on numbers and units for epistemological reasons, and any object that may proceed to exceed these artificial limitations, based on what is inherent to the human mind’s ability to understand, will be thought of in Kant’s terms as large beyond all comparison. What this means in reality, however, remains less than clear. With these considerations of the sublime out of the way, there remains something else troubling the Kantian picture of the aesthetic. The question of where the sublime fits within Kant’s aesthetic teleology remains unanswered. Kant spoke of pleasure teleologically, as the achievement of an end. On the other hand, Kant often refers to the sublime as “contrapurposive”: “We see from this at once that we express ourselves entirely incorrectly when we call this or that object of nature sublime, even though we may quite correctly call a great many natural objects beautiful; for how can we call something by a term of approval if we apprehend it as in itself contrapurposive?” (245). This problem, for Kant, directs toward a reconceptualization of what is actually going on when we describe something as sublime in the sense that it is of a fantastic magnitude. The sublime, instead of just being this mere awesomeness, must lie deeper in the issue of epistemology. Kant then reformulates the concept of the sublime by taking the focus off of the object of our perception: the storms, the mountains, the equations, the technology, and toward our own ideas. The awesomeness of such sensible objects—objects that enter our minds and with such great magnitudes in size or importance—overwhelms us to create the idea of a truly awe-inspiring object. Our faculty of reason, which plays such a crucial role in the whole of Kantianism, insists on being offered such sights and sounds. Although the sublime is at one level contrapurposive, it is at another something that our higher faculties (beyond the mere sensible displeasure of being overwhelmed) demands of us. At this higher level, it is purposive insofar as it is what Kant calls a “negative pleasure” (245). Although the sublime consists of both of these seemingly contradictory aspects, it still remains an “alteration” between these two feelings. Kant’s account of the sublime, as it is traditionally interpreted anyway, raises many questions as to whether the concept is indeed valid or not. We are left with a substantial difficulty actually differentiating the dynamic from the mathematical sublime. Kant gives the account summarized here of how rational beings use the concepts of number and unit in conjunction to approximate the mathematical sublime, but leaves the reader without one on the corollary “force” as it pertains to our concept of the dynamic sublime. It seems as though the criterion he sets down for magnitude in the mathematical sense are supposed to carry over for the dynamic sense and its “force”. However, the supposed difference between magnitude and force does not permit us to do so and thus the distinction seems to be in peril. This occurs because of Kant’s attempts to fit the sublime in the teleological aesthetic, and the extraction of the sublime from a mere matter of being overwhelmed to a rational comparison of two possibilities. The sublime, taken as an alternating between two epistemologies (the lower-level displeasure of being overwhelmed and the higher-level pleasure of being overwhelmed), removes the metaphysical aspect of the sublime and constricts it to how it affects our rational faculties. Kant’s sublime is truly an interesting contribution to the field of aesthetics, and reintroduces a concept that may be useful in describing a very unique phenomenon. Although the division between mathematical and dynamical sublimes is not without its challenges, it provides a distinctive look at how we might integrate other, non-traditional forms of sensation and thinking into aesthetic philosophy. Crowther (1991) says that the sublime also has an integral place not only in Kantian aesthetic philosophy, but in the context of his ethical system, which places an enormous value on human freedom . Kant extracts the sublime from nature by making it a matter of comparison between two possibilities. Being able not to grasp a sublime phenomenon, for Kant, provides a criterion of evaluating the differing sensibilities of human beings, and their potential for moral action. Works Cited Crowther, P. (1991). The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. (1987). Critique of Judgment. New York: Hackett Publishing Company. Read More