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.
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