We see other worlds in the distance, but gravity forces us to remain on
the earth; we can see other perfections in the spirits above us, but our
nature forces us to remain human beings.
INTRODUCTION
A distinctive feature of Kant’s account of the sublime is that the
term “sublime” does not properly apply to any object in
nature: no craggy peak, turbulent sea, or thunderous sky is sublime sensu
stricto. Rather, “true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of
one who judges, not in the object in nature.” Indeed, no
sensible object – be it St. Peter’s or
the 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” (CJ
5:250). Only a state of mind can truly be sublime (CJ
5:245–6, 257, and 264). Any account of the Kantian sublime must
examine and account for this state of mind. Kant likens the sublime state of
mind to a “vibration, i.e., to a rapidly alternating repulsion from,
and attraction to, one and the same object” (CJ 5:258; see also CJ
5:245). But this clue about the phenomenology of the sublime does not
adequately specify this state of mind, because other states of mind, such as
weakness of will, might be described in similar terms.
In order to specify the sublime state of mind appropriately, we need to
appreciate the significance of the sublime in the broader scope of
Kant’s critical project. The received view – which Kant
analyzes and corrects rather than dismisses outright – was that the
sublime refers to something great or mighty in nature or art that arouses a
distinctive pleasure in the subject. The pleasure is distinctive because it
is mixed with a measure of pain or fear. In the Critique of the
Power of Judgment, Kant explicitly acknowledges Edmund
Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke traces our enjoyment of the
sublime in nature to the “passions” related to
self-preservation. Whatever can “excite the ideas of pain, and
danger,” he maintains, “… whatever is in any sort
terrible, … or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source
of the sublime.”