Kant’s Critique of Judgement on the sublime (3)

Continuing our investigation of Kant’s theory of the sublime. In this post we’ll look at §§27-29, which take us to the end of the Analytic of the Sublime.

Morality

Kant connects our feeling for the sublime in nature with reason and ‘moral feeling’ (p149). This connection needs some explanation, as Kant does not really discuss his philosophy of ethics in the CoJ.

When Kant talks of a ‘supersensible faculty’, the supersensible refers to the noumenal or intelligible realm, the realm of things in themselves. (‘Sensible’ here refers to whether something can be sensed.) The core of Kant’s ethics is that morality gives us a certain access to the noumenal world. Just as our minds interpret the noumenal realm in epistemology to construct reality through time, space and the categories, they also interpret the noumenal realm to construct an ethics, providing representations of moral law. Kant argues that our moral certainties come not from experience but from a priori structures of the mind. In consequence we necessarily feel that we ought to take certain courses of action – then, we must choose to actually do them, which is where free will comes in, otherwise morality would mean nothing. While we are agents aware of moral law, we are also animals, subject to ‘inclination’ such as the desire for food or for sex. Both sides appear good to us, so as rational animals we are in conflict. But the ability to make moral choices is what marks us out as human beings.

There is a nice expression of this in a famous passage from the Critique of Pure Reason:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me... The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature... The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world. (5:161–2)

We don’t find freedom of choice in the phenomenal world, which is a world of causation. We must find it in the noumenal world, where there is a self ‘in itself’ that is free and is responsible for our phenomenal actions.

• There is a sensible world of phenomena that is determined.
• There is a supersensible world of noumena that is free (and superior to sensibility).

The supersensible therefore is the ground of subjective freedom. Because it exists in the noumenal realm, our free moral self is unknowable. We know only that we must have free will (otherwise it would be impossible to hold us morally responsible for our actions); we do not know how or why we have it, or exactly how it relates to our actions.

We cannot cognise the supersensible. We can only think it (CoJ, p151). What we can do is continually strive towards an ideal, and come as close as we can to it. The sublime puts us in mind of ideas that only reason can provide and makes us aware of ourselves as moral, rational creatures. When we are faced by physical danger, we are aware of something in us that is not threatened by any physical danger – something that is not spatial or temporal, i.e. sensible, but super-sensible.

§27: Reason and the link to morality

The sections on the mathematical sublime address the logical aspect of quantity. §27 discusses quality: it is headed ‘On the quality of the satisfaction in the judging of the sublime’. Here one might expect Kant to discuss disinterestedness; in fact, for his comments on the sublime as without interest and universally communicable we need to look elsewhere, e.g. to §25 (5:249) and some further references in the General Remark. Kant thinks judgements of the sublime are independent of any interest in the existence of the object.

We have learned that our failure of sensible representation using the power of imagination leads us to a pleasurable awareness of the power of our reason to represent what the senses cannot. Kant begins:

The feeling of the inadequacy of our capacity for the attainment of an idea that is a law for us is respect. (p140)

Kant is claiming that even when our imagination proves inadequate to comprehending a whole, we are nonetheless able to conceive of the idea of a whole, and to realise that this rational idea of the absolute is a law. The feeling our sensory, finite self has for this ideal rational condition (which is superior to sensibility) is ‘respect’.

What does this mean? Well, in §23, Kant said:

the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much contain positive pleasure as it does admiration or respect, i.e., it deserves to be called negative pleasure. (p129)

Kant is distinguishing between admiration and respect, so firstly let’s establish the difference between them. This has been nicely explained by Melissa McBay Merritt, who specialises in Kant and ethics – the easiest thing is to quote her:

According to Kant, the sublime can be made manifest either through admiration (Bewunderung) or through respect (Achtung) (CJ 5:245). Kant distinguishes these feelings first by their proper objects: the proper object of respect is the moral law, or persons inasmuch as they may figure as ‘examples’ of this law; the proper object of admiration, by contrast, is some thing, ‘for example, lofty mountains, the magnitude, number, and distance of the heavenly bodies, the strength and swiftness of many animals’ (CPrR 5:76). Thus Kant implies that the moral sublime is experienced as respect, or moral feeling, whereas the natural sublime is experienced as admiration.¹

So to get the distinction, we have to know the Critique of Practical Reason.

Both conceive of an absolute standard, but respect is a standard that holds for ourselves. Admiration is slightly different: Merritt likens it to watching athletes who are stronger and faster than us, without expecting ourselves to perform as well as they can. It is therefore contemplative, whereas respect is exhortative, i.e. it demands that we strive toward a certain standard.

• Admiration: for things / nature; contemplative
• Respect: for the moral law, or persons who exemplify it / human beings; exhortative

Of course, attaining a perfect rational condition is not possible because we are also animals with various inclinations and needs and limitations. So respect is perhaps a bit like looking up to the unattainably gifted Leonardo da Vinci for mastering painting as we never could, but striving to improve our painting nonetheless.

Thus the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation. (p141)

What does Kant mean by our ‘vocation’ (Bestimmung)? A vocation normally is a strong sense of suitability, or calling, for a particular position or role in life; in logic, Bestimmung means determination: something that decides what a thing is. For Kant, the sublime reveals something about our nature as rational beings: our capacity for moral ideas. Our vocation as human beings – as ‘rational animals’ in Aristotelian terminology – is to live according to a moral freedom which raises us above nature, as nature is deterministic and doesn’t enjoy this freedom. Since free choice is not found in the phenomenal world, this vocation is supersensible, i.e. it is found in the noumenal world.

Then he reiterates his theory of two steps: that the sublime is a feeling of displeasure at the inadequacy of our imagination, i.e. at our sensory limitations, followed by a pleasure in the realisation that we strive nonetheless to ideas of reason that can conceive what the senses cannot handle, i.e. in our rational capacities, confirming ‘the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive faculty over the greatest faculty of sensibility’. Kant here says the pleasure and displeasure happen ‘at the same time’, and later portrays it as a kind of oscillation between the two. These aren’t quite the same thing. But he conceives it as more or less simultaneous, a kind of ‘negative pleasure’ (p129).

Kant says we discover our vocation by a process of subreption (Subreption). This forbidding word is originally a legal term, and indicates a kind of fallacy where we confuse experience (appearances) for reason (concepts, principles): we feel for an object in nature what we really feel for our vocation.

He goes on:

It is a law (of reason) for us and part of our vocation to estimate everything great that nature contains as an object of the senses for us as small in comparison with ideas of reason; and whatever arouses the feeling of this supersensible vocation in us is in agreement with that law.

The failure of sensible representation leads to a higher satisfaction, as the sublime ‘arouses the feeling of our supersensible vocation’ in us. The subject’s incapacity reveals an unlimited capacity. The displeasurable perception of inadequacy is purposive for this feeling of our supersensible vocation and thus creates pleasure. Kant later underlines this:

The very same violence that is inflicted on the subject by the imagination is judged as purposive for the whole vocation of the mind. (p142)

Kant describes the sublime movement in the mind with a striking image:

This movement (especially in its inception) may be compared to a vibration [Erschütterung], i.e., to a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object. (p141)

The failure of the imagination repels (Abstoßen), but reason’s idea of the supersensible which drives imagination’s efforts attracts (Anziehen) – thus the mind vibrates between the two, between sensible and supersensible, if you like. There is a ‘subjective play’ of the imagination and reason, wherein the two are harmonious even as they are in contrast (p142). This obviously invites a comparison with the ‘free play’ of the beautiful discussed back in §9:

Just as imagination and understanding produce subjective purposiveness of the powers of the mind in the judging of the beautiful through their unison, so do imagination and reason produce subjective purposiveness through their conflict. (p142, my emphasis)

The free play of the beautiful is a unison of imagination and understanding; the free play of the sublime is a conflict of imagination and reason.

The enlargement of the imagination

Kant closes §27 with an interesting point he makes in a few different places, about the ‘enlargement [or expansion, extension] of the imagination’ (die Erweiterung der Einbildungskraft) (p133, p143), or ‘enlargement of the mind’ (p138). It first comes up in §25 when Kant is talking about our universally communicable satisfaction in the sublime, which he describes as a

satisfaction... in the enlargement of the imagination in itself. (p133)

Our satisfaction is not based on the object, but in a kind of expansion of the imagination.

an enlargement of the mind which feels itself empowered to overstep the limits of sensibility from another (practical) point of view. (p138)

The idea seems to be that the imagination makes a special effort to deal with the situation, and when it comes into contact with reason it rises above itself, isn’t equipped to grasp the supersensible, yet ‘feels itself to be unbounded precisely because of this elimination of the limits of sensibility’ (p156). It expands, and is frustrated, yet the uplifted feeling contributes to the complex negative pleasure of the sublime.

The dynamically sublime (§28)

This section discusses the logical aspect of relation (purposiveness) with respect to the sublime.

If the main point about the mathematical sublime is magnitude, the main point about the dynamically sublime is power. Something that is so powerful that it overcomes our ability to resist has ‘dominion’ over us. However:

Nature considered in aesthetic judgement as a power that has no dominion over us is dynamically sublime. (p143)

The object must arouse fear while having ‘no dominion over us’, that is, we are confronted with a fearsome thing but from a position of safety. After all, someone who is genuinely afraid cannot judge the sublime – s/he is too busy with the more pressing matter of running away, and there is no satisfaction in such a feeling.

Powerful things that can prompt the dynamically sublime include:

Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc., make our capacity to resist into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power. But the sight of them only becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety. (p144)

We call these objects sublime because

they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature.

The mathematically sublime makes us feel inadequate because our imagination could not sensuously grasp the infinite. The dynamically sublime makes us feel inadequate because the power of nature makes us ‘recognise our physical powerlessness’ (p145) by comparison.

But at the same time, we can think ourselves as independent of the threat. Although our human body would have to succumb to the power, the ‘humanity in our person remains undemeaned’. As human beings we have to worry about such everyday things as ‘goods, health and life’, which can be affected by natural power, but there is also a moral aspect of us which would not have to bow down to it.

These ‘highest principles’ give us a ‘superiority to nature’. Why are we superior to nature? Remember back in §23 when Kant said that intuitions of the sublime

make palpable in ourselves a purposiveness that is entirely independent of nature.

Nature is deterministic and animal, whereas we are free and rational. The sublime is purposive for practical reason. When we experience our inadequacy before cliffs, thunder, volcanoes and so on, we realise that there is within us a different, moral force that even mighty nature cannot endanger. This again gives us the two-step response of negative /displeasure (at our inadequacy) followed by positive / pleasure (at our superiority to nature).

The mind can make palpable to itself the sublimity of its own vocation even over nature. (p145)

This gives us a feeling of ‘self-esteem’. Kant thinks that we reserve a particular admiration for people of sublime character who do not shrink before danger but go about their business without fear, leading him to ruminate that:

Even war, if it is conducted with order and reverence for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it. (p146)

In war, says Kant, people can assert their courage, whereas long periods of peace lead to selfishness, cowardice and weakness. This is a dreadful opinion, as it makes war look like a good, bracing thing. It also echoes the sort of feminine/beauty and masculine/sublime dichotomy explored by Edmund Burke: by linking the sublime to war, Kant identifies it with the masculine, on the assumption that women didn’t engage in warfare in the 18th century.

Then Kant offers some reflections upon God. To imagine ourselves superior to the fearful thing we are witnessing would seem an ‘outrage’ if the fearful thing is God himself, compared to whom we should feel deflated. But to the disinterested, righteous viewer God is not an object of fear. This is the difference between religion and superstition. Kant reminds us that sublimity is in the mind, ‘insofar as we can become conscious of being superior to nature within us and thus also to nature outside us’; only in light of the existence of the sublime in our minds can we appreciate the sublimity of the being who (in Kant’s view) gives us that capacity, and our powers of reason.

Kant’s preoccupation with morality leaves him open to the claim that he is not greatly interested in the aesthetic side of the sublime. Paul Crowther remarked:

Kant is so keen to stress the moral aspects of the sublime that he fails to offer anything convincing – apart from scattered hints – as to its credentials as an aesthetic concept... Our experience of sublimity in relation to nature is reduced to indirect moral awareness.²

All those starry heavens, stormy seas and so on, impressive as they are, are for Kant just prompts for us to realise something about ourselves.

Summary of the two kinds of sublime

We are now in a position to compare the two kinds of sublime in a handy table:

Mathematical	Dynamical
Quantity and quality	Relation and modality
Referred to faculty of cognition (i.e. theoretical reason = logic, speculation)	Referred to faculty of desire (i.e. practical reason = ideas, ethics)
Huge objects that defy our imagination	Powerful objects that expose our comparative physical vulnerability
Reveals the supersensible via our ability to conceive the absolute through ideas of reason	Reveals the supersensible by prompting respect for our moral vocation
We become aware of a greatness of mind surpassing the senses	We think ourselves independent of and superior to nature

There is a dichotomy between outer nature (the given world) and inner nature (our ideas of reason and our morality) that we bring into connection through the judgement of the sublime. In both kinds there is an imposition from something mighty outside of us that exposes our human limitations yet at the same time affirms our human nature – our ‘idea of humanity’ and moral vocation. The exposure of our inadequacy triggers the feeling of the sublime in our minds, and we feel satisfaction or pleasure as our reason or vocation is revealed to us. There is a movement, a kind of vibration:

a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object. (p141)

Although we can’t represent the totality or our moral vocation objectively (empirically), we can think it subjectively. ‘The sublime is a power of the mind to soar above certain obstacles of sensibility by means of moral principles’ (p154).

§29: The sublime and culture

In §29 Kant addresses the modality of our feeling for the sublime, i.e. its necessity (as Kant says on p149, ‘this modality of aesthetic judgments, namely their presumed necessity’). He has some reservations about this necessity. Compared to beauty,

we cannot promise ourselves that our judgment concerning the sublime in nature will so readily find acceptance by others. For a far greater culture, not merely of the aesthetic power of judgment, but also of the cognitive faculties on which that is based, seems to be requisite in order to be able to make a judgment about this excellence of the objects of nature. (p148)

We established in the Analytic of the Beautiful that beauty has a universal, subjective validity. The sublime is the same, but to make judgements of the sublime requires ‘a far greater culture’. This is because the power of the sublime depends upon our ‘receptivity to ideas’.

Without the development of moral ideas, that which we, prepared by culture, call sublime will appear merely repellent to the unrefined person. He will see in the proofs of the dominion of nature given by its destructiveness and in the enormous measure of its power, against which his own vanishes away to nothing, only the distress, danger, and need that would surround the person who was banished thereto.

Unrefined people don’t have their moral vocation aroused by the sublime – they just see the size, power and fear. Kant gives the example of the Savoyard peasant who had no hesitation in dismissing as fools all ‘devotees of the icy mountains’, i.e. refined people who went walking in the mountains for the pleasure of it. If the wanderer exposed him-/herself to danger simply for a thrill, maybe the peasant is right. But people like the traveller Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, to whom Kant refers, recorded his travels in the Alps for a higher purpose:

His intention was the edification of mankind, and this excellent man experienced the elevating sentiment that he gave to the readers of his travels as part of the bargain.

There is elitism here, of course. The only people with the leisure and education to roam around in search of uplifting experiences, and to even think of seeking such things in the mountains, belong to the privileged classes.

However, the judgement of the sublime does not require culture to exist. It is not created by culture and thus a product of convention. No,

it has its foundation in human nature, and indeed in that which can be required of everyone and demanded of him along with healthy understanding, namely in the predisposition to the feeling for (practical) ideas, i.e., to that which is moral.

Everyone has access to this feeling. The role of culture is to refine this common disposition that Kant appeals to as the ground of the necessity of the judgement of the sublime:

This is the ground for the necessity of the assent of the judgment of other people concerning the sublime to our own... For just as we reproach someone who is indifferent in judging an object in nature that we find beautiful with lack of taste, so we say of someone who remains unmoved by that which we judge to be sublime that he has no feeling. We demand both, however, of every human being.

The cultivation, the ‘development and exercise’, of this disposition towards moral feeling, ‘remains our responsibility’ (p146). What makes the sublime different to beauty? The sublime hangs on a relation of the imagination, not to the understanding (the faculty of concepts) as with beauty, but to reason (the faculty of ideas). We believe ourselves justified in presupposing reason and thus moral feeling in every human being, which gives the judgement of the sublime its necessity. We all share a ground in moral sensitivity, it’s just that we each need to cultivate it, in an active way that beauty does not require.

Kant calls this a ‘principal moment for the critique of the power of judgement’. That judgements of the sublime are necessary confirms that the power of judgement has a priori principles, and raises it above mere subjective psychology to the realm of transcendental philosophy.

On a side note, Kant’s concerns about the need for culture play into a bigger bourgeois concern for education, as explored in Rousseau or the German Bildungsroman. We need to be educated through a kind of civic and spiritual process, in order to learn the customs and sentiments that will bring the self-interested individuals of bourgeois society together into a harmonious whole.³

The ‘General remark’

The CoJ is poorly laid out here, as section §30, the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgements, is clearly not a part of the Analytic of the Sublime. The final section on the sublime is actually the ‘General remark [Allgemeine Anmerkung] on the exposition of aesthetic reflective judgements’ (p149-59). This is a meander through a few of the issues raised by the sublime, some of it repetitive.

Kant opens with a summary of what we’ve learned about pleasure:

In relation to the feeling of pleasure an object is to be counted either among the agreeable or the beautiful or the sublime or the (absolutely) good.

He presents these in terms of the moments and/or aspects of logic:

• agreeable – quantity (only a matter of the number of the charms, and of the mass of the
  agreeable sensation)
• beautiful – quality (requires a purposive quality in the object)
• sublime – relation (the sensible in the representation of nature is judged as suitable for a possible supersensible use of it)
• good – modality (the modality of a necessity resting on a priori concepts, which expects everyone’s assent)

He summarises the beautiful and the sublime:

• ‘That is beautiful which pleases in the mere judging (thus not by means of the sensation of sense nor in accordance with a concept of the understanding). From this it follows of itself that it must please without any interest.’
• ‘That is sublime which pleases immediately through its resistance to the interest of the senses.’

Both are means of aesthetically valid judging, on subjective grounds, and both are purposive for moral feeling: the beautiful shows us how to love something ‘without interest’, the sublime how to ‘esteem’ or respect it.

Enthusiasm

Kant carries on reflecting upon his theory of the sublime, with no little repetition; I won’t go over it again, or pick out every point. One notion I will pause on is that of enthusiasm. This is the only place Kant discusses this notion in the CoJ.

The idea of the good with affect is called enthusiasm. This state of mind seems to be sublime, so much so that it is commonly maintained that without it nothing great can be accomplished. (p154)

In this passage, Kant makes the point that not every apparently elevated state of mind is the sublime. He calls enthusiasm an ‘affect’ (a ‘tumultuous’ mere feeling that can sometimes be sublime) and distinguishes that from a ‘passion’, which is more sustained and is never sublime because it allows no freedom of mind. Enthusiasm is ‘incapable of engaging in free consideration of principles, in order to determine itself in accordance with them’ – it arises when we get carried away, without properly reflecting on what we really want in the situation. Merritt offers a helpful illustration:

Someone might, for example, be overcome during a political speech; this could be ‘uplifting’ if she finds herself longing for certain ideals. But if we do not understand what we seek, and why it is good, then we are not freely aiming at anything at all: it is the sweep of affect that urges us on, and we are chasing an image.⁴

Someone who does not reflect is in danger of being under the sway of others, falling short of Kant’s conviction that Enlightenment was about thinking for oneself.

Kant goes on: a ‘courageous’ affect, which ‘arouses the consciousness of our powers to overcome any resistance’ is aesthetically sublime, whereas a ‘yielding’ affect ‘'has nothing noble in it’. He lists a number of things that have nothing to do with beauty, let alone sublimity: novels, sentimental plays, shallow moral precepts, and bad sermons. Such things

enervate the heart, and make it unreceptive to the rigorous precept of duty and incapable of all respect for the dignity of humanity in our own person and the right of human beings.

Kant thinks the sublime involves duty, respect, nobility and dignity. He begins by saying that enthusiasm only ‘seems’ to be sublime, then says it may achieve the sublime, because it is ‘a stretching of the powers through ideas’ – provided the feeling is of a noble kind, i.e. involves a disposition of the mind that reveals our contact with the supersensible, and avoids the delusions of ‘visionary rapture’ (Schwärmerei)⁵, which Kant considers unenlightened and superstitious. Quite how someone who is not reflecting for themselves upon rational principles can have a meaningful moral experience through the sublime is not clear. By applying the phrase ‘aesthetically sublime’ he is perhaps describing enthusiasm as partially sublime, failing to engage with the more logical and practical faculty of reason as in the proper sublime experience. Enthusiasm leaves us ‘agreeably exhausted’ like after a massage, which doesn’t seem to be as grandiose as the sublime proper, described earlier, that ‘demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.’

Given the superiority of ideas of reason and morality to sensibility, Kant observes that the sublime can seem abstract, but he doesn’t see that as a problem. As the French philosopher Lyotard commented:

We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to ‘make visible’ this absolute greatness of power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are Ideas of which no presentation is possible.⁶

We don’t need to see tangible representations of supersensible things like morality or the absolute. For illustration, Kant refers to the commandment of the Hebrew Bible that the Jews must make no graven images (‘perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Book of the Law,’ p156.) The impossibility of representing the moral law does not mean it has no force: on the contrary, says Kant, the Jews had all the more enthusiasm for their religion. He defends his conception from the charge that denying the moral law any sensible representation leaves it cold and lifeless. Our freedom is ‘inscrutable’ to us because it is supersensible and not available to our cognition, but we don’t need ‘images and childish devices’ – in fact, governments like to supply us with such things because the resulting apathy makes us easier to handle.

Notes

1. Melissa McBay Merritt, ‘The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime’, chapter 3 of The Sublime From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Timothy M. Costelloe (2012).
2. Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (1989), p134-5.
3. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990).
4. Merritt, ibid.
5. Note that Enthusiasm and Schwärmerei, though sometimes both translated ‘enthusiasm’ in English translations (confusingly), are different notions for Kant. The former is ambivalent, the latter is frowned upon.
6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), p78.

Kant’s Critique of Judgement on the sublime (2)

Continuing our investigation of Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime. In this post we’ll look at §§24-26.

§24: Divisions of the sublime

In the very short §24, Kant explains that judgements of the sublime may be divided into the same four moments as judgements of the beautiful:

The satisfaction in the sublime... must be represented as universal in its quantity, as without interest in its quality, as subjective purposiveness in its relation, and the latter, as far as its modality is concerned, as necessary. (p131)

I discussed the Four Moments here. Each of the moments discusses a particular aspect of a judgement. As Paul Guyer puts it:

Kant’s four moments... describe a complex set of relations among feelings of aesthetic response, explanations of such responses, and the status of the judgments which give expression to these responses.¹

Kant is claiming that these two distinct forms of aesthetic judgement, the beautiful and the sublime, arise from the same set of logical criteria. He does not divide out the moments into their own headed sections quite as he did in the Analytic of the Beautiful, which, as Guyer points out in his Editor’s Introduction, ‘may make it hard at first to see how Kant is using the four original categories’ (p. xxx). Guyer goes on:

In fact, his account of the mathematical sublime is organised around the concepts of quantity and quality while the discussion of the dynamical sublime represents the application of the concepts of relation and modality. (p.xxx-xxxi)

For clarity:

• The mathematical sublime concerns quantity and quality:
• Quantity (universality): The discussion of magnitude in §25-26
• Quality (disinterestedness): The discussion of the quality of the satisfaction in the sublime in §27
• The dynamical concerns relation and modality:
• Relation (subjective purposiveness): The discussion of the purposiveness of the sublime for reason in §28
• Modality (necessity): The discussion of culture in §29

Kant adds that a further division of the sublime is necessary which the beautiful did not require: into mathematical (mathematisch) and dynamical (dynamisch). Kant evokes the theme of harmony/relaxation vs tension, calm vs movement:

• Judging the beautiful presupposes ‘calm contemplation’
• Judging the sublime however involves a two-step ‘movement of the mind’, from negative to positive reactions

It is important to know that for Kant, reason has two aspects: theoretical and practical, a.k.a. cognition and desire. The former (which is logical, speculative) was explored in the Critique of Pure Reason, the latter (which addresses how we ought to act) in the Critique of Practical Reason. His view is that the two are different applications of ‘one and the same reason’², a doctrine known as the ‘unity of reason’. It is this division into two aspects that leads to the two kinds of the sublime:

This movement is to be judged as subjectively purposive (because the sublime pleases), thus this movement is related through the imagination either to the faculty of cognition or to the faculty of desire, but in both relations the purposiveness of the given representation is judged only with regard to this faculty (without an end or interest): for then the first is attributed to the object as a mathematical, the second as a dynamical disposition of the imagination, and thus the object is represented as sublime in the twofold manner intended. (p131)

The contra-purposive sublime representation is relayed to the faculty of reason in both cases. The two forms of the sublime flow from whether it is relayed

• either to cognition (theoretical reason) → the mathematical sublime
• or to desire (practical reason) → dynamical sublime. 

This is an either/or: the movement relates to one or the other, depending on the kind of contra-purposiveness involved, and the kind of feeling is different in either case, though both relate to the one overarching faculty of reason. We will look at both kinds, and I will tabulate their attributes presently, but in brief:

• the mathematical concerns what is physically big or infinite
• the dynamical concerns what is powerful

The division between mathematical and dynamical refers back to a distinction of mathematical and dynamical made in the Critique of Pure Reason, which is – you will be unsurprised to hear – rather complicated, and I see no need to get into it.

Kant’s text is potentially a bit confusing because he overlays his discussion of the mathematical and dynamical sublime onto sections that are supposedly divided according to the four moments. Bear in mind that, ideally, the moments concern all judgements of the sublime, of whatever type.

The mathematically sublime (§25-6)

Kant begins §25 with a definition:

We call sublime that which is absolutely great.

That is, infinite – or at least, so big that it makes us think of infinity. These two sections get dense and complicated. What Kant is trying to communicate – in his frustrating, barely readable way – is that the sublime creates a special kind of awareness in us, because it is too big for us to comprehend.

This is why he starts talking about relative sizes and ‘magnitude’. From the quote below I’ve removed the Latin interpolations:

To be great [Groß-sein] and to be a magnitude [eine Größe³ sein] are quite different concepts. Likewise, simply to say that something is great is also something entirely different from saying that it is absolutely great [schlechthin groß]. The latter is that which is great beyond all comparison. (p131-2)

There are three concepts here:

• Great: the object is big in a general sense
• Magnitude: the object has a specific measurement
• Absolutely great: the object beyond all comparison = the sublime

Normally, when we experience an object, we use a mathematical means of quantifying it. A thing can be considered a magnitude, i.e. to have size, simply from itself; but to judge how great it is requires a comparison, i.e. you need another thing with a size, which you can compare it with.

To measure an object’s greatness against that of something else, we use a unit of measurement. But however big a thing is, there could always be something bigger. For bigger things you can keep adding units of measurement until you’ve finished measuring it, but such measurements are comparative and can never match up to a concept of something that is absolutely great.

When we say something is ‘great’ it seems we aren’t making any comparisons, because it’s just a vague term. But in fact, the word itself does imply the thing is bigger than other comparable objects. We’re just not given a specific size or measurement. Here we see the moment of quantity/universality making itself felt: such a judgement, says Kant, ‘lays claim to universal assent’, and is ‘grounded on a standard that one presupposes can be assumed to be the same for everyone’.

But such a judgement is not determinate – it has no specific measurement like ‘100 kilograms’ or ‘10 kilometres’ – and is therefore not a matter of logical cognition. Instead it is an aesthetic, reflecting judgement, ‘since it is a merely subjective standard’. Kant concludes:

Even if we have no interest at all in the object, i.e., its existence is indifferent to us, still its mere magnitude, even if it is considered as formless, can bring with it a satisfaction that is universally communicable, hence it may contain a consciousness of a subjective purposiveness in the use of our cognitive faculties. (p133, my emphasis)

This of course resembles the beautiful. But the sublime object has no form; the pleasure doesn’t lie in cognition in general like the free play of the beautiful; instead it lies in an ‘enlargement of the imagination in itself’.

Kant notes that anything we intuit aesthetically as an appearance is a quantum i.e. has a size, so we can judge anything in terms of large or small, even beauty.

But if we say something is absolutely great, says Kant,

we do not allow a suitable standard for it to be sought outside of it, but merely within it. (p134)

Ordinary measurement is by its nature comparative and thus not suitable for the sublime, which is great beyond all comparison. When we experience a vast or infinite thing, we don’t have meaningful units of measure for it. ‘It is a magnitude that is equal only to itself.’ Compared to the sublime, everything else is small.

Anything can appear huge if compared to something much smaller (e.g. using a microscope), or tiny if compared to something much bigger (e.g. using a telescope). Therefore, nothing that can be an object of the senses can be sublime: the sublime is absolutely great, not comparatively so. E.g. it can’t be made to look smaller by comparing it to something bigger, since nothing can be bigger than infinity. Kant gets a bit ahead of himself here:

Just because there is in our imagination a striving to advance to the infinite, while in our reason there lies a claim to absolute totality, as to a real idea, the very inadequacy of our faculty for estimating the magnitude of the things in the sensible world awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us... It is the disposition of the mind [Geistes-stimmung] resulting from a certain representation occupying the reflective judgement, but not the object, which is to be called sublime. (p134)

We’ll get onto all that shortly, as he elaborates it in §26. But this is why Kant argues that the object itself is not sublime. It is ‘the use that the power of judgment naturally makes in behalf’ of the feeling (of the supersensible) that is absolutely great, compared to which any other use is small. Kant concludes:

That is sublime which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.

Now let’s move on to §26 which explains further how this stuff works.

§26

When we use numbers to make determinate/specific measurements or estimations of magnitude we make a mathematical estimation. ‘Logical estimations of magnitude’, as Kant also calls them, simply keep counting on and on, in a numerical series. There is no limit to how far towards infinity this can keep going.

In the sublime, which is great beyond all comparison and thus out of the reach of ordinary, comparative measurements, we make a general measurement by eye. This is an aesthetic estimation, which attempts to grasp the magnitude ‘in one intuition’ (p135). (As Kant uses the word ‘aesthetic’ here at the start of §26 he seems to mean it in the older sense of aisthesis or sense perception.) In this case, there is a limit, namely the absolute, beyond which no greater measure is possible, which ‘brings with it the idea of the sublime’ (p135). The aesthetic estimation produces an ‘emotion’ that the mathematical one cannot (i.e. our satisfaction in becoming aware of our powers of reason).

We have to try to apprehend and understand the objects of the sublime aesthetically, in one intuition, as a single great whole. But we can only handle objects that are on a finite scale – our senses are limited to representations of bounded objects. Faced with sublime objects (or more correctly, objects that prompt the sublime in our minds), our imagination struggles and fails.

Kant explains how he thinks this works. We take in a measurement in ‘mere intuition’ and therefore sensorily. To try and measure a magnitude is the job of the imagination, which requires two functions:

• Apprehension (Auffassung), associated with mathematical estimation. Here the imagination uses a basic measure to progressively add units in a sequence.
• Comprehension (Zusammenfassung), associated with aesthetic estimation. Here the imagination compiles a number of units, acquired in a temporal sequence, into one big one.

These functions differ in handling the sublime:

There is no difficulty with apprehension, because it can go on to infinity; but comprehension becomes ever more difficult the further apprehension advances, and soon reaches its maximum, namely the aesthetically greatest basic measure for the estimation of magnitude. (p135)

When confronted with the sublime, apprehension can cope because it’s just an ongoing count using the standard mathematical/numerical concepts. But the comprehension can’t as there is a limit to our ability to grasp a size in an intuition:

For when apprehension has gone so far that the partial representations of the intuition of the senses that were apprehended first already begin to fade in the imagination as the latter proceeds on to the apprehension of further ones, then it loses on one side as much as it gains on the other, and there is in the comprehension a greatest point beyond which it cannot go. (p135)

As the eye travels across the sublime object, the bits that we saw earlier start to fade in the imagination before we can complete the intuition. Our apprehension can keep on going, but our comprehension hits a limit. Taking in an absolutely great whole in one go is impossible for us. You can’t do it in a single intuition.

Kant gives the example of the Pyramids and then St Peter’s (p135-6), though he never personally experienced either. You have to get within a certain distance of the building, or you can’t see it clearly; but once you’re near enough to see it, you can’t take it all in. (Note this means there is an optimum distance for experiencing the sublime.)

The eye requires some time to complete its apprehension from the base level to the apex, but during this time the former always partly fades before the imagination has taken in the latter, and the comprehension is never complete. (p136)

Rising from top to bottom, your perception of the base of the building fades in your imagination before you have taken in its apex, and you cannot connect the parts. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but some of the parts are all we can get.

Too big to take in: St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Photo: Nserrano

As Kant puts it, the representation (in this case, the Pyramid, or St Peter’s) is non-purposive for our power of judgement: unlike the beautiful, it does not seem as if it were designed with our faculties in mind. This creates a ‘bewilderment or sort of embarrassment’.

Here there is a feeling of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the ideas of a whole, in which the imagination reaches its maximum and, in the effort to extend it, sinks back into itself. (p136)

Then something special happens. As the imagination ‘sinks back into itself’, it is ‘thereby transported into an emotionally moving satisfaction’. Kant explained this feeling a couple of pages earlier, which we quoted already but should make more sense now:

Just because there is in our imagination a striving to advance to the infinite, while in our reason there lies a claim to absolute totality, as to a real idea, the very inadequacy of our faculty for estimating the magnitude of the things in the sensible world awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us. (p134)

As the spectator’s imagination fails to perceive the whole, we are made aware of an idea of the whole (or the totality, or the absolute). We can’t sense the whole but we can conceive of it; can’t make a sensory representation of it but can make a rational representation of it. This is ‘infinity comprehended’ (p139). This representation can only have come, not from the imagination, but from the faculty that produces such abstract, non-sensory ideas: reason. The idea is not something we have sensed, because we can’t empirically sense abstract concepts of that sort; they are outside our experience. Instead, it is created by a part of ourselves that is supersensible.

Even being able to think of [the infinite] as a whole indicates a faculty of the mind which surpasses every standard of sense. (p138)

The fact that we even attempt to think of things like the infinite reveals in us the power of reason that gives us the idea of an absolutely great whole to start with. Realising we have the capacity to conceive such things in the form of ideas gives us that ‘emotionally moving satisfaction’ – a sort of self-congratulatory feeling. Seeing as we’re becoming aware of a greatness in the mind that outstrips any magnitude and in a way even nature itself, perhaps it’s no wonder we’re pleased with ourselves.

There’s a partition in the text, marked with three asterisks, after which Kant explores all this a little further.

Even to be able to think the given infinite without contradiction requires a faculty in the human mind that is itself supersensible. For it is only by means of this and its idea of a noumenon, which itself admits of no intuition though it is presupposed as the substratum of the intuition of the world as mere appearance, that the infinite of the sensible world is completely comprehended in the pure intellectual estimation of magnitude under a concept, even though it can never be completely thought in the mathematical estimation of magnitude through numerical concepts. (p138)

The noumenon refers to something in the world of things in themselves. This noumenal world, not knowable to us directly, underwrites all the appearances or phenomena that we experience. There is no way that we humans could be able to think the infinite, which we cannot experience directly. We could only be able to think of such things if, again, we are in touch with the supersensible: the realm of the soul, of infinity, of God. This ability is great beyond comparison with the mere mathematical estimation of magnitude, which doesn’t allow us to think of infinity in its entirety.

The pure sublime and art

Kant introduces a new distinction of the ‘pure’ sublime, which he defines as ‘not mixed up with
anything teleological as judgments of reason’ (p136). In other words, it is similar to pure beauty in not being mixed up with a concept or end – except that he is thinking about nature, not art, so he mentions it in terms of teleology instead of human ends/intentions.

A pure judgment on the sublime... must have no end of the object as its determining ground if it is to be aesthetic and not mixed up with any judgment of the understanding or of reason. (p136-7)

He expands on this via a comment on the role of art:

If the aesthetic judgement is to be pure... and if an example of that is to be given which is fully appropriate for the critique of the aesthetic power of judgement, then the sublime must not be shown in products of art (e.g. buildings, columns, etc.), where a human end determines the form as well as the magnitude, nor in natural things whose concept already brings with it a determinate end (e.g., animals of a known natural determination), but rather in raw nature (and even in this only insofar as it by itself brings with it neither charm nor emotion from real danger), merely insofar as it contains magnitude. (p136, my emphases)

Kant is limiting the ‘pure’ sublime (the sublime without an end) to raw nature containing magnitude only: too big for us to grasp, and seen from a position of safety. Works of art or animals can’t count as sublime since we have no difficulty grasping them as wholes using our imagination. He seems to be forgetting – or regretting – that he offered the Pyramids and St Peter’s as examples of the sublime, both of which are ‘buildings’ and ‘products of art’. Perhaps, given the unusual scale of architecture compared to most other works of art, the sheer size of such buildings makes them an exception amongst the arts.

Kant doesn’t claim we cannot represent the sublime in art. He himself mentions the sublime in art in passing in §23, where he comments that it ‘is, after all, always restricted to the conditions of agreement with nature’ (whatever that means), which acknowledges that the sublime in art can exist. However, the sublime in art would not be ‘pure’, which reminds us of his division of beauty into ‘free’ and ‘adherent’.

Kant doesn’t discuss what sublime art would involve, which is rather disappointing, and he seems to regard it as marginal. It does seem difficult to imagine a ‘formless’ work of art, even if we don’t take the demand for formlessness literally; and the insistent attribution of sublimity to the mind rather than the object itself, prompted by our inability to grasp the physical size or power of the object, seems equally problematic when talking about artworks. Perhaps it is less about the art object itself than the sublime subject matter it portrays, which can evoke in us something like what we feel when confronted by the sublime in nature.

The monstrous and the colossal 

Kant goes on, in a very short passage on p136-7, to add a couple of weird terms – the monstrous and the colossal – which are a bit confusing. Kant begins:

...In this sort of representation [by which he seems to mean the mathematical sublime] nature contains nothing that would be monstrous (or magnificent or terrible); the magnitude that is apprehended may grow as large as one wants as long as it can be comprehended in one whole by the imagination.

Clearly he is posing them against the ‘pure’ mathematical sublime, which contains nothing monstrous. But it is confusing to read about the sublime being ‘comprehended in one whole by the imagination’, as this is precisely what Kant has just said we cannot do with the sublime. Anyway, Kant then introduces the two terms:

• Monstrous (ungeheuer): ‘by its magnitude [the object] annihilates the end which its concept constitutes’. The object is so big that it destroys the purpose it is meant to have (whatever that means).
• Colossal (kolossalisch): ‘the presentation of a concept... which is almost too great’ for our faculty of presentation. The ‘almost’ suggests the colossal is a bit less big than the monstrous – not impossible for us to comprehend, just difficult.

Kant does not explain what it means for the sublime to involve a concept, or what it means for magnitude to ‘annihilate’ one, so this passage is rather unclear. The academic Robert Doran states it this way:

What is judged monstrous or colossal are objects of great magnitude that are fused with a concept of their end, as if their magnitude violated (the monstrous) or almost violated (the colossal) the objective purposiveness of the object.⁴

From the context, Kant seems to be making the point that just because an object is big and part of ‘raw nature’ doesn’t necessarily make it pure. There are things in raw nature that can be huge and have a concept of their end, namely monstrous and colossal objects – frustratingly he offers no examples of such objects, so it’s hard to tell what sort of thing he has in mind. Neither allows for a ‘pure’ judgement, as they involve an end/concept, i.e. the object has a purpose or function. That means the monstrous and colossal would involve adherent (or dependent) aesthetic judgements, if we may borrow the language used with regard to beauty, which admittedly Kant doesn’t do here.

There is some further evidence of Kant’s thinking in another later work, the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,⁵ in which he distinguishes the sublime from the monstrous:

• ‘The sublime is awe-inspiring greatness (magnitudo reverenda)’
• ‘The monstrous is greatness that is contrapurposive (magnitudo monstrosa)’

This confirms that in Kant’s mind the sublime and the monstrous are distinct, i.e. the monstrous and colossal are not forms of the sublime. It makes the point that ‘not all contrapurposive representations of magnitudinous nature are sublime’ (Doran). The feeling of satisfaction in reason could not be ‘monstrous’ for Kant.

Then at the end of the passage, before the partition, Kant again underlines that the pure sublime is neither monstrous nor colossal:

A pure judgment on the sublime, however, must have no end of the object as its determining ground if it is to be aesthetic and not mixed up with any judgment of the understanding or of reason.

This passage of some dozen lines is literally the only time he uses the terms ‘monstrous’ and ‘colossal’ in the CoJ. The intellectual labour required to make sense of them, therefore, far outweighs the importance their inventor places on them.

Notes

1. Paul Guyer, ‘Kant’s Distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime’ (1992).
2. Critique of Practical Reason, 5:121.
3. In case you’re wondering, the German word Kant uses for the moment of quantity is Quantität, not Größe.
4. Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (2015), p238.
5. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, p140.

Kant’s Critique of Judgement on the sublime (1)

The section of the CoJ that Kant calls the ‘Analytic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement’ is divided into two books. The first, the Analytic of the Beautiful (§§1-22), discusses the four ‘moments’ and judgements of the beautiful. The second, the Analytic of the Sublime (§§23-29 plus a long General Remark), discusses judgements of the sublime (das Erhabene, from erheben, to raise or lift up), a concept we have so far only encountered in passing mentions in the Introductions and Preface.

Though the idea of the sublime goes back to ancient times, the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime in aesthetics properly began in 18th century Britain and Ireland¹, the most significant text being Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke’s influential book, which you can read online here, is interested in the psychology of aesthetics²: the sublime and the beautiful are not qualities of the object but feelings in the subject. For Burke, the sublime is something overwhelming and frightening:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (Part I, Section 7)

Despite this terror, the observer can find pleasure in the sublime provided he or she encounters it from a place of safety.

Kant took up Burke’s beautiful/sublime distinction in his own 1764 essay, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime: he too views them in terms of subjective feeling. But that essay is more about national and sexual differences rather than a serious contribution to aesthetics. In the Critique of Judgement Kant’s approach is much more focused and theoretical, as he now wants to incorporate the sublime into his critical philosophy.

Introducing the sublime (§23)

Perhaps because the sublime was a well-established aesthetic category, Kant seems to feel no immediate need to define it. But across the Analytic of the Sublime he gives us some powerful examples, describing it in terms of ‘the wide ocean, enraged by storms’ (p129); the Egyptian Pyramids and St Peter’s in Rome (p136); ‘shapeless mountain masses towering above one another in wild disorder with their pyramids of ice’ and the ‘dark and raging sea’ (p139); and threatening cliffs, thunderclouds, lightning, thunder, volcanoes, hurricanes, the boundless ocean, a lofty waterfall, and a mighty river (p144). Almost all of these are natural phenomena³ which we find overwhelming, even frightening.

If this sounds like you are in for a thrill, you are wrong (except perhaps intellectually), as Kant dives straight into his own complex epistemology using a thicket of difficult language.

First he says what the beautiful and sublime have in common, then how they differ. To clarify the opening paragraph of §23, let’s be clear about judgements. According to Kant, if you are walking in a park and see a squirrel, you receive a manifold of sensible representations; then your faculty of understanding provides a concept to explain what the manifold is; and your mind synthesises the two so you can experience the squirrel. You have just exercised your faculty of judgement.

Judgements can be determinative or reflective:

• When you identify the object in the park as a squirrel, you are applying a determinate concept (‘squirrel’). You have a universal category ready to hand that explains what the particular thing is.
• If you have never encountered a squirrel or even heard of such things, you won’t have a concept ‘squirrel’ to apply. You have a particular, but you need to reflect upon it to find a universal.

Kant says judgements of taste and of the sublime are similar in two ways:

1. They are both reflective judgements. In such a judgement we make no use of determining concepts. In the Introduction of the CoJ, Kant explains what we use instead: a general, indeterminate concept of the purposiveness of nature. This principle is not empirical, or ethical, or grounded in experience – it simply serves to unify experience in the absence of a determining concept. Simply put: when I make a determinative judgement, I am aware of the object as something (a squirrel). When I make a reflective judgement, I am aware merely of the object as such, as an object in general.

2. They are also both aesthetic (as opposed to cognitive) judgements – they are accompanied by pleasure (das Wohlgefallen), which is not based on sensation (like the agreeable) or on a determinate concept (like the good). The feeling of pleasure can be assumed to be the same in every subject, so despite being subjective and singular it is also universal. Later, on p136-7, Kant observes that ‘a pure judgement of the sublime... must have no end of the object as its determining ground if it is to be aesthetic’ – just like a judgement of taste.

Kant then discusses how the beautiful and the sublime differ. The packed paragraph below crunches many of his points:

The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in limitation; the sublime, by contrast, is to be found in a formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it, or at its instance, and yet it is also thought as a totality: so that the beautiful seems to be taken as the presentation of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, but the sublime as that of a similar concept of reason. Thus the satisfaction is connected in the first case with the representation of quality, but in this case with that of quantity. Also the latter pleasure is very different in kind from the former, in that the former (the beautiful) directly brings with it a feeling of the promotion of life, and hence is compatible with charms and an imagination at play, while the latter (the feeling of the sublime) is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, being generated, namely, by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital powers and the immediately following and all the more powerful outpouring of them; hence as an emotion it seems to be not play but something serious in the activity of the imagination. Hence it is also incompatible with charms, and, since the mind is not merely attracted by the object, but is also always reciprocally repelled by it, the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much contain a positive pleasure as it does admiration or respect, i.e., it deserves to be called negative pleasure. (§23, p128-9)

For greater ease of comprehension, we can tabulate the several distinctions thus (at the end I’ve included a couple of further points he adds later):

The beautiful	The sublime
The form of the object	A formless object
Limitation	Limitlessness
Indeterminate concept of the understanding	Indeterminate concept of reason
Quality	Quantity
Direct, positive pleasure = the promotion of life	Indirect, negative pleasure = inhibition then outpouring of the vital powers
Compatible with charms	Incompatible with charms
Imagination as play activity	Imagination as serious activity
Purposiveness of nature	Purposiveness of ourselves
Calm contemplation	A movement of the mind

There is a lot for us to unpack here. It isn’t easy, because Kant’s explanation of it is so unnecessarily, torturously difficult. If you find it hard to follow, it’s not you being stupid, it’s Kant being terrible at explaining himself.

The two-step process of the sublime

Kant describes on p129 the difference that is ‘most important and intrinsic’ between the beautiful and the sublime. He begins (my emphases):

Natural beauty... carries with it a purposiveness in its form, through which the object seems as it were to be predetermined for our power of judgement, and thus constitutes an object of satisfaction in itself.

But the sublime is different:

That which, without any rationalising, merely in apprehension, excites in us the feeling of the sublime, may... appear in its form to be contrapurposive⁴ for our power of judgement, unsuitable for our faculty of presentation, and as it were doing violence to our imagination, but is nevertheless judged all the more sublime for that.

Sublime objects have such size and power that we cannot apprehend them in a single intuition: they are ‘unsuitable for our faculty of presentation’, do ‘violence to our imagination’, ‘cannot be contained in any sensible form’ and ‘no presentation adequate to them is possible’. They overwhelm our imagination, and make us painfully aware of our limitations – of the ‘inadequacy’ (Unangemessenheit, a term Kant uses repeatedly) of our faculties to the task of apprehending such phenomena.

This is the ‘inhibition’ Kant referred to. But this unpleasantness cannot be the end of the matter. After all, the sublime is an aesthetic judgement that involves a feeling of pleasure, as he told us in the first paragraph. Our pleasure in the beautiful arises from our perception of the object’s ‘form of purposiveness’ (p106), leading to a harmony of the imagination and understanding. If the form of the sublime object is contra-purposive, our feeling of pleasure must come from somewhere else.

Kant’s answer is that the sublime, unlike the beautiful, has a two-step structure (though he doesn’t call it that). In judgements of the sublime, we move from our sense of inadequacy to ‘ideas of reason’, which are ‘provoked and called to mind precisely by this inadequacy’. The mind then occupies itself with ‘ideas that contain a higher purposiveness’. We discover that the sublime does not actually exist in the object – after all, we can’t comprehend the object. Instead, it exists in our own minds, in our faculty of reason.

We can say no more than that the object serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind; for what is properly sublime... concerns only ideas of reason. (p129)

We will often say that the object – the ocean, the Pyramids, or whatever – is sublime, and I will probably do it too, but what we strictly mean is that the object arouses sublimity in the mind.

Now we understand what Kant means by ‘a momentary inhibition of the vital powers and the immediately following and all the more powerful outpouring of them’. It is this two-step structure:

1. An initial negative reaction: the object is too big and overwhelming for us to grasp as a whole or totality; it is contrapurposive for the faculty whose job it is to do that grasping, namely the imagination.
2. An ensuing positive reaction: although our senses can’t grasp the whole, our reason can grasp the possibility or idea of a whole or totality; this discovery of the sublime in our minds is purposive for our faculty of reason, and is therefore pleasurable.

We might look at this as moving from tension to relaxation; from displeasure to pleasure; from anxiety to affirmation. The two steps are nearly simultaneous but not quite: the process consists of a ‘momentary inhibition of the vital powers and the immediately following and all the more powerful outpouring of them’ (my italics). The second step follows the first, albeit immediately. Later in §27 Kant says the feeling of pleasure and displeasure are aroused ‘at the same time’ (p141) and depicts them as a kind of oscillation between two poles, which suggests the steps are simultaneous. So if we want to be pernickety we might conclude that there is an initial feeling of displeasure, immediately followed by a feeling of pleasure, and then a rapid vibration between the two, so that the whole thing effectively happens at once.

In the beautiful, the object is relayed to the imagination and the understanding. In the sublime, it is relayed to the imagination and reason.

The beautiful seems to be taken as the presentation of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, but the sublime as that of a similar [i.e. indeterminate] concept of reason. (p128)

This is because the beautiful concerns the form of the object, whereas in the sublime no form – or at least no whole form – can be apprehended, so we turn to the idea of a whole instead, and ideas are the domain of reason. More on form below.

This is not the first time Kant has made a link between beauty and reason. In §17, he claimed the highest model or archetype of taste was the ideal of beauty, which is a concept of reason connecting the human figure to morality. As it hangs upon our internal purposiveness and reason (the faculty concerned with morality), the sublime taps into the moral side of our nature. We’ll return to this later.

The ‘technique of nature’

In the next and final paragraph of §23, Kant says that beauty in nature suggests an apparent purposiveness for our faculties: the way nature is made makes it seem as if it is designed so we can apprehend it through our power of judgement. He refers to a ‘technique of nature’ (eine Technik der Natur) that draws an analogy with art, i.e. with the sort of purpose that a human being exercises when s/he makes an artwork. (Kant first introduces this analogy in the First Introduction, p7.) This analogy of the generation of nature with the products of art expands our concept of nature, so we start to think of it not as a ‘purposeless mechanism’ but as similar to art in its seeming employment of purposive form. We can look in nature for ‘objective principles’, and forms that correspond to those principles.

The beautiful shows us we are suited to nature, we fit into it – our minds are disposed to find laws and order in it. It can arouse the free play of imagination and understanding and give us pleasure. As Christian Helmut Wenzel puts it, ‘subjective (aesthetic) as well as objective (teleological) purposiveness reveal to us that we are part of nature’.⁵

Kant says the sublime is different:

It is mostly rather in its chaos or in its wildest and most unruly disorder and devastation... that [nature] excites the ideas of the sublime. (p130)

He concludes that the sublime is much less ‘rich in consequences’ than beauty. It reveals no purposiveness in nature; rather our intuitions of nature can reveal a purposiveness in ourselves (‘in the mind’) that is independent of nature. Because of this, Kant goes on to describe the ‘theory of the sublime’ as ‘a mere appendix’. This seems ironic, since he was writing at a time when the sublime was a fashionable and popular subject, and his own theory of the sublime has been very influential even for (post)modern thinkers. But read him carefully. He is not derogating the sublime. He is saying that it is an appendix ‘to the aesthetic judging of the purposiveness of nature’. In the sublime, instead of revealing our fit to nature, a jolt of contrapurposiveness does violence to our place in nature, making us aware of our inadequacy, and turning us inward to our own faculties. This is interesting and important, but it is secondary to the main focus of the CoJ, which is to find, via the analysis of the judgement of taste, a way to bridge the supposed gulf between nature and freedom (and thus unify theoretical and practical reason). This grounding we find in the beautiful, not the sublime, which is why Kant considers his theory of the latter an ‘appendix’.

Form and formlessness

Kant is saying some interesting things about form.

As explained in the Analytic of the Beautiful: when we make a judgement of taste, a discrete spatial-temporal object is presented to the mind. Since no concept determines the judgement, our pleasure is a completely free satisfaction, involving no interest either of the senses (the agreeable) or reason (the good). In other words, no rule is applied. Since the judgement of taste can’t be based on sensation or an end or a concept, the source of our pleasure is the form of purposiveness of the representation of the object. Neither the imagination nor the understanding predominates, leading to a free play of the faculties (p102) that grounds the beautiful. This free play or harmonious relationship gives us pleasure in:

1. How the world seems as if it were designed for (is purposive for) our faculties of cognition (Introduction V, p71)
2. The free activity or animation of the mind, of the ‘feeling of life’ (p90).

Beauty hangs upon our free contemplation of a limited, self-contained object that has form. Although the object is indeterminate, i.e. not subsumed under a concept, we are still aware of its spatio-temporal structure. Kant calls this an ‘indeterminate concept of the understanding’ (p128), i.e. the general fact of being a self-contained or self-sufficient object.

Judgements of the sublime also arouse aesthetic pleasure. But, as Kant has just told us:

• The beautiful is grounded in ‘the form of the object, which consists in limitation’, i.e. grounded in a finite, self-contained object.
• The sublime is grounded in ‘a formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it’, i.e. grounded in an experience that is limitless, concerning no discrete spatio-temporal form. Hence why it is excited by ‘the wide ocean, enraged by storms’ or nature ‘in its chaos or in its wildest and most unruly disorder and devastation’.

We will understand this a bit better as we read on. For the moment: Kant is noting a distinction here between form and formlessness, order and disorder. The sublime object has no spatio-temporal form, or at least none we can comprehend. It might have form but be incredibly big, and thus effectively formless – Kant is happy to consider as sublime both the Pyramids, which do have form, just very big form, and the ‘starry heavens’ (p152), which are infinite. Thinking Kant could not have literally meant spatio-temporal objects without form, the philosopher Uygar Abaci noted:

What then Kant actually means is that the sublime is found in an object whose form is so difficult or impossible for our power of imagination to render as a perceptual unity that it eventually prompts in us the idea of limitlessness (Unbegrenztheit).⁶

Kant goes on:

What is properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason, which, though no presentation adequate to them is possible, are provoked and called to mind precisely by this inadequacy, which does allow of sensible presentation. (129)

Since the object of the sublime has no spatio-temporal form, it cannot in Kant’s epistemology be unified by our powers of cognition. The sublime ‘appears contrapurposive for our power of judgement, unsuitable for our faculty of presentation’. Our faculties can only think of it through the general idea of a totality or whole. This is an idea of reason – not of the understanding, which concerns objects of experience. When we try and fail to experience a mighty spatio-temporal object, we refer the object not to imagination and understanding but instead to imagination and reason.

Kant makes this point again a bit later:

Just as the aesthetic power of judgment in judging the beautiful relates the imagination in its free play to the understanding, in order to agree with its concepts in general (without determination of them), so in judging a thing to be sublime the same faculty is related to reason, in order to correspond subjectively with its ideas. (p139)

Therefore:

• The beautiful relates the imagination to the understanding. 
• The sublime relates the imagination to reason.

Note how understanding and reason differ for Kant. The understanding deals with sense data and applies concepts to generate empirical knowledge. Reason deals with abstract ideas outside our sensory grasp – such as God, freedom or the soul – which are noble but unknowable.

As we have seen, Kant thinks nature seems to us as if it were purposive for our cognition. This doesn’t work with the sublime: the totality is an a priori concept of reason that operates independently of experience.

[The concept of the sublime in nature] indicates nothing purposive in nature itself, but only in the possible use of its intuitions to make palpable in ourselves a purposiveness that is entirely independent of nature. For the beautiful in nature we must seek a ground outside ourselves, but for the sublime merely one in ourselves and in the way of thinking that introduces sublimity into the representation of the former. (p130)

Our pleasure in the beautiful is grounded in something external to us, i.e. the purposiveness of nature. Our pleasure in the sublime however is grounded in something internal to us, i.e. a purposiveness in ourselves. The object provokes a sublimity that is based upon ideas of reason, and ideas of reason are by definition found in the mind.

Our experience of it prompts us to glory in our ability to entertain big, noble ideas such as the infinite. Even though we are not capable of grasping the totality, the fact that we are able to conceive of such a thing bears witness to the grand capacity of the human mind.

Therefore:

• The pleasure of the beautiful lies in our apprehension that objects of nature seem purposive for our faculties, as if designed for them.
• The pleasure of the sublime lies in the affirmation of the power of human reason in the face of something too big for us to grasp.

Notes

1. Joseph Addison set the ball rolling in the Spectator in 1712 with his discussion of ‘the great’, derived from Longinus.
2. Kant mentions this himself in the First Introduction of the CoJ: p38 of the Guyer/Matthews edition.
3. You may sometimes read that Kant reserves the sublime only for nature and not art, but that is misleading. He includes the Pyramids and St Peter’s in his list of sublime things, and architecture was routinely considered one of the arts by the mid-18th century.
4. Note that non-purposive (unzweckmäßig) and counter- or contra-purposive (zweckwidrig) don’t mean the same thing. The first is not purposive; the second runs actively against being purposive.
5. Christian Helmut Wenzel, An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics (2005), p111.
6. Uygar Abaci, ‘Kant’s Justified Dismissal of Artistic Sublimity’, 2008.

Why does anything exist?

Part of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Why is there a universe? Why are there atoms, people, planets, and 2 trillion galaxies?¹ Why does existence exist? This is one of those questions we used to put to philosophers and nowadays tend to put to scientists instead.

Existence does exist. So there seem to be two possibilities. Either existence has always existed (so far) or there used to be a time when it didn’t.

1. Existence didn’t always exist

To start with the latter: if existence did not always exist, there must once have been nothing.

Since at least the ancient Greeks, philosophy (and science, insofar as the two were indistinguishable until two or three centuries ago) has often been sceptical of existence coming into being ex nihilo (Latin for ‘out of nothing’). It was Parmenides who first argued that ‘nothing comes from nothing’ (usually presented in Latin: ex nihilo nihil fit).

The alternative was to present it in the religious terms of creatio ex nihilo or ‘creation out of nothing’. The Abrahamic tradition ascribes existence to a creator God. Ancient Near Eastern and Classical mythology said the gods created the world out of already-existing primeval materials, which sidesteps the issue. Either way, the supernatural is merely a placeholder for ignorance. The next question of course is, why does God exist? What created Him – or, since gendering an absolute being seems foolish, It? The appeal to divinity merely puts the problem back one step. The ancient Israelites who wrote the Old Testament resorted to a fairy tale because they lacked better ways of accounting for the world.

Modern science offers a theory of how the universe could start ‘from nothing’ called quantum fluctuation.² On this theory, tiny bubbles of space-time can spontaneously pop into existence in a vacuum because space has uneven density and is therefore unstable. However:

A vacuum is not nothing.

• A classical vacuum is completely empty space. But space – even empty space – is not nothing. Things can pass through it and it can be measured. And in fact, interstellar vacuum (a more perfect vacuum than we can create on Earth) contains bits of gas and dust known as the interstellar medium. 
• A quantum vacuum, i.e. the quantum state with the lowest possible energy, is also not nothing, as it contains the fluctuations: electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into existence. 

If quantum laws apply, then it’s not nothing. The presence of quantum laws is something, which has to be accounted for. Where did the quantum laws come from? The ‘laws’ of physics cannot exist separately from the material universe that they apply to.

In short, quantum fluctuation still has to presume that something exists, and therefore the cosmologist’s conception of ‘nothing’ (empty space) is different to the philosophical one (a state of non-existence or non-being). Of course, we struggle to think in the latter terms. As soon as we start to ask if nothing can exist we are caught in a linguistic muddle.

We cannot assume that such a state is possible. Even zero is a number. And how do we think of a time before existence in which, by definition, there was no ‘time’? ‘Nothing’ may be no more than an abstract intellectual construct, impossible for spatial-temporal beings like ourselves to properly conceive, and impossible in practice.

2. Existence has always existed

That leaves us with the other possibility – that existence has always existed, in one form or another. We can’t rule out the possibility that at some point it will stop existing, but that raises the same problem of time: how can there meaningfully be a ‘time’ when existence ceases? And where would all the stuff go? It seems the best thing is to conclude that there has to be something, and that it is eternal.

The Big Bang theory contends, on the basis of a vast amount of evidence, that our universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago. If it had a beginning, the universe – at least in its current form – is not eternal: something must have existed before it. We may never know what, but we have to assume there was something.

Without a creator God or gods, the idea of purpose is redundant, as purpose requires a will. Instead we can look only for causes. We humans find it hard to conceive of things not having a cause. Yet any appeal to causes leaves us in an infinite regress:

What caused the Universe? The Big Bang.
What caused the Big Bang? Whatever condition existed prior to it.
What caused that condition? And so on.

Conclusion

Why does anything exist? We don’t know, and it is hard to give a coherent answer. The question is so far out of our comprehension that we can only speculate, and most of us have better things to do. We must simply take it as a given, a brute fact, that existence exists. As theoretical physicist Sean Carroll has put it, “there is a quantum state that evolves through time according to the laws of physics, and that’s all there ever was.”

Notes

1. SciShow Space have a nice video about the number of galaxies here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOURqm-MB4s
2. See for example Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe From Nothing (2012).

Contrary vs contradictory

In philosophical logic there is a difference between contrary and contradictory statements.

Contradictory

Two statements are contradictory when one must be true and the other must be false. Take these two statements:

The cat is white.
The cat is black.

These are contradictory because they cannot both be true at the same time.

Contrary

Contrary statements are similar to contradictory ones, in that both statements cannot be true at the same time. The difference is that they might both be false. The statements about the cat cannot both be true at the same time – but if the cat is ginger, then neither is true. In that case the statements are contrary rather than contradictory.

Lukács’s theory of reification (1)

In the next few posts I shall continue discussing the chain of philosophical ideas underlying the commodification of art. If you’re new to these ideas, you may find it helpful to read my post on Marx’s theory of the commodity first.

Perhaps the most important theoretical response to that theory was written by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács¹ in the central chapter of his book History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923). This influential and controversial work is a collection of essays; the one that concerns us here is the centrepiece, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. In this essay Lukács extends the theory of commodification into what he calls, using Marx’s term, reification (Verdinglichung). The Latin res means ‘thing’,² thus ‘reification’ means ‘thing-ification’.

Reification as such is not a big theme in Marx or his immediate successors, but it became prominent through Lukács, for whom the commodity form has consequences for every corner of society. While History and Class Consciousness (HCC) makes occasional passing references to art, its only substantive discussion is the short, though significant, section referring to Schiller on pages 137-40. But reification was taken up and applied to art by other thinkers, in particular the Frankfurt School, so anyone interested in art theory should be acquainted with this idea (whether or not one agrees with it). Here I will simply outline Lukács’s theory and we can study its specific implications for art another time.

As Lukács himself explains while reconsidering the book in his 1967 preface, he wrote HCC during a transitional period when he was moving from an early idealism, ultra-leftism and sectarianism towards Leninism. This shift had not yet matured, leaving ‘unresolved conflict between opposed intellectual trends’ (p xvi).

The book’s political philosophy (flawed in my view) received criticism from various directions, in response to which Lukács wrote a defence called Tailism and the Dialectic (written in around 1925-6 and unpublished until 1996); but we’re not concerned with any of that here.

I read the 1971 Merlin Press edition (pictured above), a translation by Rodney Livingstone from the original German. My page numbers refer to this edition; the relevant chapter/essay is on pages 83-222. You can also read HCC online at marxists.org. Gendered language in quotes is the fault of the translator. If you can read German, the original (Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik) can be found online too. As always, I recommend you read the book yourself. Be warned: parts of Lukács’s essay are demanding if you are new to philosophy, and its abstract language makes it more inaccessible than it needs to be. (Yes, I share your exasperation.) 

Context and purpose

Lukács wrote HCC at a time in the late 1910s and early 1920s when, following uprisings in Russia, Germany and Hungary, widespread socialist revolution seemed imminent. The book was partly a critique of fatalism – the determinism fashionable in the Second International³ that the laws of history made revolution inevitable. But as well as trying to lay out a philosophy for revolution, Lukács was commenting on the alienation of human beings in the modern social world.

He divides his essay into three parts.

• I. The Phenomenon of Reification:
  Explains his general theory of reification, as an extension of Marx’s commodity theory.
• II. The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought:
  Analyses the effect of reification on bourgeois philosophy.
• III. The Standpoint of the Proletariat:
  Proposes how the proletariat can overcome reification. 

Across these three sections Lukács extends Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to explain the conditions of social and psychological life in the modern world, and the nature of bourgeois philosophy. His theory is about more than revolutionary practice, as he also asks how reification affects the way we think, and how it might be overcome. 

I. The phenomenon of reification

Lukács begins by making clear how important he thinks the commodity is:

At this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure. (p83)

The ‘problem of commodities’ is the ‘central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects.’ He summarises Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, a problem specific to the capitalist age:

Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people. (p83)

Lukács accepts Marx’s theory as a basis, then poses his main question:

how far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences able to influence the total outer and inner life of society? (p84)

Lukács introduces us to Marx’s account of commodity fetishism. There is a qualitative difference between a society in which commodity exchange appears only episodically, as one form among many (e.g. prehistoric barter economies), and one in which it is dominant, ‘permeating every expression of life’ (i.e. modern capitalist societies). In a society where the commodity is the ‘universal structuring principle’, it can ‘penetrate society in all its aspects’ and ‘remould it in its own image.’ As long as the commodity was not the dominant form of wealth, it was still possible to understand the interpersonal nature of economic relations; but under capitalism,

as the process advanced and forms became more complex and less direct, it became increasingly difficult and rare to find anyone penetrating the veil of reification. (p86)

Marx calls this ‘economic mystification’.⁴ Commodity relations produce a reification that assumes

decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression and for their attempts to comprehend the process or to rebel against its disastrous effects and liberate themselves from servitude to the ‘second nature’⁵ so created. (p86)

The basic concept behind reification is commodity fetishism, whereby a relation between people takes on the appearance of a relation between things. Commodities are made by human beings, but they create the illusion that they have lives and relations of their own. Lukács says this phenomenon has both an objective and a subjective side (p87):

• Objective: Our labour creates a world of seemingly independent objects, and relations between them, whose laws we can discover but cannot modify by our actions.
• Subjective: Our own labour becomes a commodity independent of us that must obey the laws of commodity production; our actions therefore become estranged from us.

When commodity production is universal rather than merely episodic, i.e. under capitalism, both subjectively and objectively human labour becomes abstracted, equal and comparable, measured by socially necessary labour time. This is part of a long-term historical trend towards the rationalisation⁶ of labour (e.g. Taylorism):

• The qualitative, human and individual attributes of the worker are gradually eliminated.
• The labour process is broken down into abstract, rational, specialised operations. The worker loses touch with the finished product, his/her work reduced to a series of mechanically repeated actions that need to be completed in a fixed period of time. 

Lukács is drawing heavily upon the work of the sociologist Max Weber, who explored this notion in his famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Weber associated capitalism with a larger process of labour organisation and bureaucracy based on efficiency and calculation, which he called ‘rationalisation’ (Rationalisierung). For Weber, this was impelled by Protestantism, and the workers submitted to it to prove they were worthy of heaven; but, to Weber’s regret, the process left us in a godless, ‘disenchanted’ world with no concern for human values. He memorably described the phenomenon as a stahlhartes Gehäuse, which could be precisely translated as a ‘casing as hard as steel’ but is better known in English as the ‘iron cage’:

This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilised coal is burnt. In [Richard] Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment’. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (p181, Parsons translation)

This is a grim image. Back to Lukács, who adopts the concept and claims that rationalisation is even applied to the worker’s consciousness:

this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker’s ‘soul’: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialised rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts. (p88)

Modern humans are governed by time-keeping, the rise and fall of stocks and shares, and other processes that seem to have an independent life of their own. This conditions human consciousness and the way we understand ourselves in the world. Lukács draws two main conclusions:

1) The object is fragmented: Rationalisation ‘declares war’ on the organic, irrational, qualitative unity of the products of labour based on ‘the traditional amalgam of empirical experiences of work.’ The object of our work process loses its organic necessity; it is no longer a unified product but the ‘objective synthesis’ of a set of rationalised systems that each have a more limited, immediate end, so that the actual end product seems almost like an arbitrary outcome.

2) The subject is fragmented: The human being becomes ‘a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system’. His/her creativity and idiosyncrasy is unwelcome as it could lead to deviation from the fixed path demanded by the rationalised work-process. He/she is not in command of the process he/she is a part of and must conform to an already existing system, becoming merely contemplative instead of active.

Lukács cites Marx:

Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything.⁷

In the work-process, even those basic categories of humankind’s orientation to the world, space and time, are rethought. Stripped of quality, they are reduced to a common denominator. 

Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space. (p90)

Why does this fragment the human subject?

• Workers are forced to commodify their labour-power (i.e. to sell their labour to a capitalist in return for a wage) in order to live. Our labour is our personal, human, world-transforming activity, and one of the most basic properties of being human, yet it is taken out of our own control. It becomes something external to us, even opposed to us. Not only do we make commodities, in a sense we become commodities ourselves (under slavery this happens literally).
• Instead of enjoying direct, natural, organic relations with one another, we are mediated and imprisoned by abstract laws and our communities become atomised.

Lukács creates his own grim image of dehumanisation:

The personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system. (p90)

Lukács is touching on aspects of the Marxist concept of alienation, which I won’t get into here, but as Marx’s early writings on the subject (the draft 1844 Manuscripts) weren’t published until 1932, Lukács does well to anticipate them. He says the factory becomes a microcosm of capitalist society: exploitation and oppression existed in all ages, but under industrial capitalism, mass production became rationalised and mechanised, and formed the whole structure of society. ‘The fate of the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole’ (p91). A society has to ‘learn to satisfy all its needs in terms of commodity exchange’.

This implies that the principle of rational mechanisation and calculability must embrace every aspect of life... Only when the whole life of society is thus fragmented into the isolated acts of commodity exchange can the ‘free’ worker come into being; at the same time his fate becomes the typical fate of the whole society. (p91)

For the first time, every member of society is subject to a set of unified laws that apply across the board. The laws of capitalist production extend into ‘every manifestation of life in society’, such as law, the state, economics, journalism, etc. Thus Lukács takes the influence of commodity exchange further than Marx: it is all-pervasive.

Lukács points out that this atomisation is ‘only an illusion’, a ‘reflex in consciousness’. Modern society is of course law-governed and ordered. Despite this, atomisation (albeit illusory) is necessary in society built on commodity exchange.

This transformation of a human function into a commodity reveals in all its starkness the dehumanised and dehumanising function of the commodity relation. (p92)

We can’t even understand things as things any more. The authentic, immediate, qualitative character of things is replaced by a reified one. As Marx put it, ‘the ground and the earth have nothing to do with ground-rent.’ Such reified relations become normalised:

The relations between men that lie hidden in the immediate commodity relation, as well as the relations between men and the objects that should really gratify their needs, have faded to the point where they can be neither recognised nor even perceived. (p93)

We start to live through the commodity, and see this as normal. As capitalism spreads, consolidates and develops, ‘the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man’ (p93). Even the bourgeois thinkers who recognise reification have no deep analysis of it and only describe its surface; separating this surface from its historical roots in capitalism lets them claim it is an inevitable, timeless aspect of human life.

The capitalist economy is based upon exact calculation, so the bourgeoisie structures society in this image, with predictable legal rulings, readymade laws, a bureaucracy, and the standardisation of social life. The unity of this rationalised society is in fact illusory, because its formal laws and concrete reality don’t always match up. The details are governed by laws, the totality by chance (p101-2).

Human activity is constrained by having to fit into a fixed system. Lukács quotes Marx’s observation on factory work that the worker is ‘crippled to the point of abnormality’. Capitalism brings into being ‘a unified economic structure, and hence a formally-unified structure of consciousness’ (p100):

The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of ‘ghostly objectivity’... stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of’ like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic ‘qualities’ into play without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process. (p100)

With ever greater division of labour and specialisation, we lose sight of the whole. Lukács takes examples from science and from bourgeois economics, where the failure of formal laws to grasp the whole leads to failure to penetrate to the underlying material reality. The reified world appears

as the only possible world, the only conceptually accessible, comprehensible world vouchsafed to us humans. (p110)

Notes

Penguin Classics edition of Marx’s Capital, 3 vols, translated in 1976 by Ben Fowkes.

1. The Hungarian ‘György’ is sometimes Germanised as ‘Georg’: Lukács published under both names.
2. The German word Verdinglichung (‘making into a thing’) is more immediately understandable to Germans than ‘reification’ is for English speakers.
3. The Second International was a loose international federation of socialist parties, created in 1889, which broke up after most of its forces backed their respective national ruling classes in supporting the First World War. I will discuss its determinism more in part 3.
4. Marx, Capital Vol. 3, ch.48, p970.
5. ‘Second nature’ is the Aristotelian idea, discernible in Kant, that there is a species of animal in nature (human beings) who transform themselves into rational beings capable of reflecting and acting upon the world according to reason. So if first nature is the natural world, ‘second nature’ is the world built by self-aware human beings.
6. Not to be confused with rationalism.
7. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Part 2: Constituted Value of Synthetic Value (1847).