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.
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