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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
EVEN AT ITS CONCEPTION AND ITS VERY FIRST ARTICULATION IN THE critique of Judgment, Kant's aesthetic theory may be seen as problematic. The undeniable and unyielding contrast between the beautiful and the sublime, in particular, not only turns the second half of the analytic of the aesthetic judgment into what Paul de Man calls "one of the most difficult and unresolved passages in the entire corpus of [his] works" (1) but also compels Kant to dismiss the notion of the sublime right inside his own discussion as "not nearly so important or rich in consequences as the concept of the beautiful" or as "a mere appendix to the aesthetical judging of that purposiveness." (2) Yet the urge to exclude the sublime from Kant's aesthetic theory and to malign it as "of [not] much interest to modern sensibilities" (3) is surely as unimaginative as the attempt to promote the sublime unilaterally and to vilify the beautiful as "outmoded--passe even." (4) In order to salvage Kant's insights and rebuild them into what Paul Crowther terms "a more general theory of aesthetic judgment" (139), what is so necessary and important to see and appreciate is not only how there is a complex relationship of both similarities and differences between the beautiful and the sublime but also how such a relationship between them makes it possible for them to work out as Kant's paradise lost and paradise regained.
No matter how the sublime may differ from the beautiful, the two of them nevertheless resemble each other at the same time. Even though Kant touches upon the former only after he completes the analysis of the latter, not only is he not therefore launching into something that is fundamentally different from what he has till then called a judgment of taste but he is also in a very real sense talking about the same thing. "The beautiful and the sublime," as he says, "agree in this that both please in themselves" (Critique of Judgment #23, 82). Taking place only during a cognitive interaction between a subject and an object but setting itself apart from both a judgment of sense and a judgment of logical determination, the sublime is as much a judgment of reflection as the beautiful. As such, it is analogously both similar to and different from the pleasant and the good. Like the pleasant, for instance, the sublime is a singular experience, but unlike the pleasant, it does not derive its satisfaction from any current and therefore transient need for any particular object. Like the good, on the other hand, the sublime makes a universal claim for its judgment, but unlike the good, at the same time it separates the validation of such a collective contention from any ideas of either utility or ultimate purpose. Totally disinterested and centrally concerned only with what Kant terms "the mere presentation [of the object]" or "the faculty of presentation" (#23, 82), the sublime is as much about the internal relationship of man's cognitive capabilities as the beautiful.
In spite of all their similarities, however, the beautiful and the sublime are nevertheless set apart from one another by their concurrent differences. "The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object," as Kant points out, "which consists in having [definite] boundaries" (#23, 82). "The sublime, on the other hand," as he goes on to say, "is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought" (#23, 82). Connected with "the representation of quality" and "the presentation of an indefinite concept of understanding," the pleasure of the beautiful "directly brings with it a feeling of the furtherance of life, and thus is compatible with charms and with the play of the imagination" (#23, 82, 83). Bound up with the representation of quantity and the presentation of an indefinite concept of reason, the satisfaction of the sublime is instead "a pleasure that arises only indirectly; viz. it is produced by the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outflow of them, so that it seems to be regarded as emotion--not play, but earnest in the exercise of the imagination" (#23, 83). While the notion of beauty is linked with the idea of purposiveness in the form of an object so that the latter may be considered almost teleologically as "preadapted to our judgment," the definition of sublimity always involves the violation of purpose with regard to the judgment so that the more violence an object does to the imagination or the more it proves "unsuited to our presentative faculty" the more it will be judged to be sublime (#23, 83).
Even though the intricate relationship between the beautiful and the sublime holds the key to the inner logic of Kant's aesthetic theory, the very way Kant characterizes it in the third critique makes it impossible for his best ideas to work out. For the purpose of differentiating the sublime from the beautiful, to be specific, Kant at times not only depicts it in terms of a certain crisis-and-recovery mechanism but also presents the operation of such a mechanism as sequential rather than simultaneous. Thus, while delineating the mathematical sublime, he talks about how the apprehension of a certain external object may exceed the comprehension of it and thereby short-circuit the process of cognition and how the subsequent need to deal with what cannot be comprehended may bring forth what he calls "the idea of the absolute whole" or what he terms the sublimity of "our own state of mind in the estimation of [the object]" (#27, 99; #26, 94). Thus, while describing the dynamical sublime, he analogously explains how certain natural phenomena as objects of fear can expose "our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might" and how they may then "raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature" (#28, 100-101). In both of these two situations, Kant's conceptualization of a certain two-consecutive-step crisis-and-recovery mechanism makes it inevitable that the experience of the sublime should become indistinguishable from the terrible.
On the one hand, the normally well-coordinated apprehension and comprehension of a person may get out of step with each other in the event of an encounter with something that is enormously large. Even though the incremental or progressive operation of the imagination can theoretically work forever to take in the object, the totality-minded maneuver of the understanding in practice soon reaches its breaking point. As the aesthetical estimation of magnitude fails to keep up with the mathematical measurement, the involved individual inevitably experiences an acute sense of his or her own intellectual impotence. On the other hand, the usually well-fortified capacity of a person to withstand the encroaching powers of any external object may also collapse altogether in the face of something...
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