On The Kantian Sublime

Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime seeks to analyze a certain aesthetic affect which he terms as the sublime. He describes this affect as a, “feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger.” An inhibition of vital forces indicates a displeasure and a stronger outpouring of those vital forces indicates a pleasure. This means that the sublime is both a pleasurable and an unpleasurable affect. Kant seeks to explain both how the sublime is rendered within an individual and why it is both pleasing and displeasing. In order to do this, Kant distinguishes between two different types of sublime experiences: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime.

The mathematically sublime, Kant states, results from two actions of the mind: apprehension and comprehension. Apprehension refers to the mind’s ability to receive sense-experience of an object. Comprehension, however, refers to the mind’s ability to perceive an object as a whole in order to make sense to the mind. Apprehension, the sense-experience of an object, occurs first and then comprehension is added to make sense of what is perceived. Sublimity occurs when, according to Kant, the mind is unable to comprehend what is apprehended, when there is so much to perceive, the mind cannot possibly grasp or understand what is perceived. What produces the painful part of the sublime affect in the mathematically sublime, states Kant, is that it shows the limits of the human mind to be able to comprehend experience. However, what makes this pleasurable is it allows us to recognize humanity’s obedience to the transcendental laws of reason to consistently try to perceive and understand an object as a whole, even when it is impossible to do so.

The dynamically sublime, by contrast, is produced by objects that arouse fear and respect due to how powerful those objects are. Kant states that though the object must arouse fear in us, we cannot be afraid of it to feel the sublimity resulting from our contact with it. For example, in order for us to feel the sublime affect from a thunderstorm, we must not be attempting to flee and fearful for our lives, but it does not reduce the respect for the power of the thunderstorm, just because we are not fearful for our own human lives. Kant states the pain part of this version of the sublime is a result of discovering our limits as human beings by encountering that which is much greater and more powerful than ourselves. The pain lies in the recognizition that humans are not the most powerful beings on Earth. The pleasure, on the other hand, lies in the recognition that in the presence of something greater, our Earthly concerns are small and insignificant. It makes us feel as if the worries and tribulations of the everyday are petty and insignificant in comparison to the greatness we are in the presence of.

I think that Kant gives us two good examples of the sublime and helps to illuminate the sublime by giving a theoretical framework in which to view such an elusive concept as the sublime. That being said, I do not think that Kant gives us a broad enough view of the sublime. It is unclear as to whether he thinks these are the only two varieties of the sublime affect. He does qualify his statements that these are the two types found in nature, and that all human-created sublimity is somehow an instantiation of these natural kinds of sublimity. However, this kind of statement relies upon Kant’s own metaphysical conception of the universe which may be drastically different from other metaphysical conceptions. I agree with Kant as to the affectual characteristics of the sublime (as quoted earlier); however, I believe I have a broader and more inclusive explanation as to how the sublime affect is induced in an individual. The sublime affect is induced only if the individual comes into contact with something which is not human, something which is not within the realm of the day-to-day existence of mankind, something which is not within the normal bounds of an individual’s comprehension of the world around us. Notice how this includes both Kantian types of the sublime, and is rendered from these types, but also recognizes the similarities between the two types: both types deal with things beyond and above human normal existence.

I also think that Kant mistakes, in his attempt to explain why the sublime affect is being aroused, the difference between an experience that is sublime and a revelation that is sublime. For example, I recently visited Rome and I saw the Pantheon, my experience in the Pantheon reflects Kant’s idea of the mathematically sublime. I was not able to comprehend what I was perceiving in the Pantheon due to how enormously vast it was, and the sublime affect was indeed induced within me to a great proportion. However, not once was I to think that I was limited and received pain or I had the power to obey transcendental laws of reason and received pleasure. Indeed, I do not think that the power of the human mind to obey transcendental laws of reason is even desirable, let alone pleasurable. This revelation which Kant talks about when in the presence of the mathematically sublime may in fact be a source of sublime pleasure. I do not deny that; however, what I do deny is that this recognition is the cause of the experience of the mathematically sublime to induce the peculiar pleasure/pain affect of the sublime. And what is really happening in Kant’s explanation, is two instances of the sublime affect: one of the experience and one of reflection upon the experience. It may be objected that these recognitions are actually subconscious recognitions and not ones we are aware of; however, I wish to give an explanation for why certain experiences are sublime which does not rely on speculations of subconscious activity. (For, if we are not aware of the thoughts how can we be so sure they are there?) The explanation is a rather simple one: contact with something that is not familiar is by its very nature pleasurable and unpleasurable. So, previously, I wrote that the condition which is required to produce the sublime affect is that we have contact with something alien, something inhuman, something foreign. Why does this cause displeasure? Well, because we generally like things which we have encountered before, things which are familiar, things which we understand, things that are foreign present a threat to how we learn and understand the world around us and we are likely to feel pain as a result of that. If this is painful, what’s pleasurable about it? Precisely the reason why it is displeasurable, it is not who we are, it is something new, something different, it brings us out of our normal everyday lives. Now something to note is that there are indeed exceptions to this. There are people who despise and find no pleasure in experiences which are foreign to them, and they are only a source of pain. Likewise, there are people who are the opposite, who love experiences foreign to them, and there is no pain involved at all. However the affect described by Kant, “[The] feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger,”still holds in these cases. What does not hold is the idea of the affect being both painful and pleasurable.

I would like to return now to a claim I made earlier: that there is both the sublime induced through experience and the sublime induced through reflection of an experience. This statement, if true, contradicts the Kantian assumption that the sublime exists only in the mind, only in the process of reflection. However, this idea that one way the sublime is instantiated is through the process of reflection has implications as to whether or not post-modern works of art should be considered works of art at all. The provocation of the sublime and the beautiful affects were once attempted to be used for defining art and differentiating what is art from what is not art. However, with the advent of modernism, and more specifically, post-modernism, those criteria have come into serious issues in that it does not seem like any works under the ‘post-modern’ category can induce the sublime or the beautiful affect. This is interesting in that ‘post-modern art’ is also sometimes described as ‘conceptual art’, in that the work provokes questioning of many different things, from metaphysics to politics to even the question of ‘What is Art?’ itself. So, if these works induce these questions, that means the audience must attempt to answer those questions, and if they do answer those questions, I wonder if the audience will achieve a sublime affect with the answer to the question. I wonder if when we discover a certain truth about the world, if we are not also experiencing the sublime affect of ‘[a] feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger.” It certainly seems like the audience will; I know I have definitely felt the sublime from epiphanies in my contact with works of art. It seems like discovering truths about the world meets the prerequisite for the sublime, in that contact with the truth, with some kind of absolute truth is a foreign thing to many human beings, if not all human beings, in that humans live in a world of subjective experience, so the epiphany of objective truth would be an alien concept. The interaction with that alien concept could cause a sublime affect. So maybe it is still possible to differentiate art and non-art in the sense before the advent of post-modernism, in that post-modernism exists in order to inspire inquiry which may lead to a sublime epiphany.