INTRODUCTION

In addition to the associationism of Henry Home (Lord Kames), Alexander Gerard, Archibald Alison, and Dugald Stewart (considered by Rachel Zuckert in Chapter 5 of the current volume), the two other decipherable theoretical traditions in eighteenth-century aesthetics comprise thinkers who emphasize either internal sense or the faculty of imagination. The first approach is based on the premise that aesthetic value presupposes some foundation in human nature without which one could not speak of beauty or sublimity at all, and that this should be conceived as an internal counterpart to the external senses of sight, hearing, touch, and gustatory taste. The second, by contrast, although it does not necessarily exclude the idea of internal sense, focuses on the imagination to explain the active and passive features of artistic creativity and aesthetic receptivity. Various writers in the tradition as a whole might be ranged under these two headings, but with respect to the sublime, four figures stand out as having made significant contributions: on the side of internal sense stand Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Thomas Reid (1719–1796), and on the side of imagination, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792).

THE SUBLIME AND INTERNAL SENSE

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury

Shaftesbury’s contribution to aesthetic theory is found primarily in “The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody,” one of a series of lengthy essays composed 1705–1710 and brought together in three volumes as Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times in 1711. Shaftesbury was educated under the direction of John Locke (whose patron was the first earl, Shaftesbury’s grandfather), but although Lockean language pervades the Characteristicks, it is a gloss on a philosophical canvas indebted fundamentally to the rationalist lineage of neo-Platonism and reminiscent, in particular, of Ennead I.6 “On Beauty,” in which Plotinus (himself echoing Plato’s Symposium) argues that the beauty of physical objects is but a “trace” of some higher reality to which the philosophical mind ascends. This school of thought was alive and well in Shaftesbury’s own time through the influence of the late seventeenth-century group of philosophers known as the Cambridge Platonists, and Shaftesbury himself was responsible for publishing the posthumous edition of the Select Sermons of Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), generally considered the founding father of the movement.

INTRODUCTION

In Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764),Kant comments disparagingly on the taste of the Dutch nation. “Amongthe types of people of our part of the world,” he writes, “inmy opinion the Italians and the French are those who distinguish themselvesmost from all the rest by the feeling for the beautiful, but the Germans,English, and Spanish by the feeling for the sublime. Holland can beconsidered as the land where this finer taste becomes ratherunnoticeable.” Given the worldwide renown Dutch art enjoys today,this judgment from the sage of Königsberg rings hollow tocontemporary ears. In that respect, ironically enough, a current Englishedition of the Observations bears an image by theseventeenth-century Dutch Gouden Eeuw (Golden Age) artist Aelbert Cuyp, apainter known primarily for his portraits of cows. Whether Kant would haveappreciated such barnyard pastorals, his observation on the lack of“finer taste” in Holland raises an interesting questionregarding what the Dutch themselves considered sublime. Namely, with regardto the more prevalent (French, English, or German) definitions of theconcept found in the present collection, how might developments in Dutchaesthetics cast a different light on the sublime in the face of those moredominant artistic or cultural developments?

This question regarding what we might call the “Dutch sublime”has only recently been taken up by scholars, and even then almostexclusively by literary historians in the Low Countries. Among thesestudies, the research undertaken by Christophe Madelein stands out. In hisdissertation, “Juigchen in den adel der menschlijke natuur: Hetverhevene in de Nederlanden (1770–1830)” (“Jubilance inthe Nobility of Human Nature: The Sublime in the Low Countries[1770–1830]”), Madelein pursues philosophical debates over theconcept of the sublime written in Dutch and framed within the classiccontexts of Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Kant, and Schiller. According toMadelein, between 1770 and 1830 these contributions consisted, first, oftranslations into Dutch from German and English (of Mendelssohn, Riedel,Beattie, and Blair); second, in subsequent attempts at popularizingKant’s philosophy in the Netherlands (by P. van Hemert, T. vanSwinderen, and J. F. L. Schröder); and, finally, in specifictreatments of the beautiful and the sublime (by Johannes Kinker and WillemBilderdijk).

INTRODUCTION

A distinctive feature of Kant’s account of the sublime is that theterm “sublime” does not properly apply to any object innature: no craggy peak, turbulent sea, or thunderous sky is sublime sensustricto. Rather, “true sublimity must be sought only in the mind ofone who judges, not in the object in nature.” Indeed, nosensible object – be it St. Peter’s orthe Matterhorn – is truly sublime. Such a thing may be dubbed“sublime” only by courtesy, just inasmuch as it“awakens a feeling of a supersensible faculty in us” (CJ5:250). Only a state of mind can truly be sublime (CJ5:245–6, 257, and 264). Any account of the Kantian sublime mustexamine and account for this state of mind. Kant likens the sublime state ofmind to a “vibration, i.e., to a rapidly alternating repulsion from,and attraction to, one and the same object” (CJ 5:258; see also CJ5:245). But this clue about the phenomenology of the sublime does notadequately specify this state of mind, because other states of mind, such asweakness of will, might be described in similar terms.

In order to specify the sublime state of mind appropriately, we need toappreciate the significance of the sublime in the broader scope ofKant’s critical project. The received view – which Kantanalyzes and corrects rather than dismisses outright – was that thesublime refers to something great or mighty in nature or art that arouses adistinctive pleasure in the subject. The pleasure is distinctive because itis mixed with a measure of pain or fear. In the Critique of thePower of Judgment, Kant explicitly acknowledges EdmundBurke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideasof the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke traces our enjoyment of thesublime in nature to the “passions” related toself-preservation. Whatever can “excite the ideas of pain, anddanger,” he maintains, “… whatever is in any sortterrible, … or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a sourceof the sublime.”