[T]he
most important and vital distinction between the sublime and the
beautiful is certainly this: . . . whereas natural beauty . . . conveys a
finality in its form making the object appear, as it were, preadapted
to our power of judgment . . . that which . . . excites the feeling of
the sublime . . . may appear . . . to contravene the ends of our power
of judgment . . . and to be, as it were, an outrage on the imagination .
. . (Critique of Judgment, I, ii, sec. 23)If Kant’s
analysis of the beautiful depends implicitly on the paradoxical
relationship between representation and its object, in his analysis of
the sublime, the paradox is made explicit. Although the beautiful object
cannot be subsumed under a concept, its contemplation provides a
pleasurable stimulation to our cognitive faculty, which grasps beautiful
form as something meant to be perceived and cognized by it. The
sublime, on the contrary, makes us realize the limitations of this
faculty. The pleasure provided by this initially unpleasant realization
is of a
moral nature; the experienced excess of nature over our
power of judgment makes us aware of the transcendent relationship
between our reason and the everyday world.
The feeling of the sublime is . . . at once a feeling
of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the
aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason,
and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgment
of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with
ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a
law. It is, in other words, for us a law (of reason), which goes to make
us what we are, that we should esteem as small in comparison with ideas
of reason everything which for us is great in nature as an object of
sense; and that which makes us alive to the feeling of this
supersensible side of our being harmonizes with that law. (ibid., sec. 27)Kant’s
“mathematical” sublime is a reaction to purely quantitative greatness
of physical magnitude, which, by showing us the inadequacy of our
“faculty of sense,” reminds us of its “smallness” in comparison with
“ideas of reason.” The conceptual movement from displeasure to pleasure
may be understood from the perspective of originary anthropology as
describing the passage from the conflict occasioned by the excess of
desire for the object to the peace provided by the promotion of this
object to a sign of transcendence. What we experience as too great for
our (collective and individual) desire gives us pleasure as a sign
pointing to the “supersensible” domain of signification that defers our
conflict over desire. Kant’s statement that this experience “makes us
alive to [
rege macht] the feeling of this supersensible side of our being” is tantamount to the claim that this experience
generates this feeling.
Where the mathematical sublime triggered by quantitative magnitude
merely negates our faith in the understanding, the infinity of power
(“quality”) we experience in the “dynamic” sublime provides a
transcendent object of faith. The mathematical sublime is a negative
moment between two forms of order, that of the understanding and that of
reason, between the beautiful, which finds satisfaction in form, and
the dynamic sublime, which substitutes for formal order that of an
all-powerful divine will.
But we may look upon an object as fearful, and yet not
be afraid of it, if, that is, our estimate takes the form of our simply
picturing to ourselves the case of our wishing to offer some resistance
to it, and recognizing that all such resistance would be quite futile.
So the righteous man fears God without being afraid of Him, because he
regards the case of his wishing to resist God and His commandments as
one which need cause him no anxiety. But in every such case, regarded by
him as not intrinsically impossible, he cognizes Him as One to be
feared. (ibid., sec. 28)Kant’s exposition of the
relationship between the fearful and the sublime clearly owes much to
Burke; but where the latter (as Kant points out) remains within the
realm of empirical psychology, for Kant the dynamic sublime defines our
relationship to transcendence.
Kant’s categories of the beautiful and the sublime correspond to the
two relationships between representation and its referent that make up
the paradox of signification. On the side of form, representation is a
(beautifully) adequate substitute for its referent, just as the
originary sign was an adequate substitute for the inaccessible central
object; on the side of content, representation is a (sublimely)
inadequate substitute for its referent. The sign can function to defer
mimetic rivalry for the central object only if it is an acceptable
substitute for it. But the very peace brought about by this substitution
transforms the relation to the central object and makes possible its
appropriation within the framework of culture.
Unlike the beautiful, which inheres in an object whose formal
adequacy to our cognitive faculty is embodied in a universal judgment of
taste, the sublime is a subjective attitude not inherent in the
(natural) object that inspires it. But the preceding passage suggests
that this “subjectivity” defines a relationship to a necessarily
inadequate figuration of an unfigurable divine transcendence. The
experience of the sublime reflects the Judeo-Christian rejection of
idols that cannot incarnate the sacred but at best suggest it by their
very ontological distance from it. The object that provokes the
experience of the sublime is not a “graven image” but something that
resists being experienced as a sign and is for that very reason
experienced as a sign of the limitations of signification.
The concept of the sublime has played an eccentric role in aesthetic
theory since pseudo-Longinus in the first century; yet the opposition
between the sublime and the beautiful is an artificial one. Aesthetic
experience is an oscillation between the sign and its referent caused by
the necessary inability of either representation or imaginary reality
to create a stable plenitude of signification; the experience of
beautiful form includes the sublime within it as the moment of the
representation’s inadequacy. Kant describes this oscillatory movement,
but only with respect to the sublime, which he contrasts to our “restful
contemplation” of the beautiful:
The mind feels itself set in motion in the
representation of the sublime in nature; whereas in the aesthetic
judgment upon what is beautiful therein it is in restful contemplation.
This movement, especially in its inception, may be compared with
vibration, i.e., with a rapidly alternating repulsion and
attraction produced by one and the same object. The point of excess for
the imagination . . . is like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself,
yet again for the rational idea of the supersensible it is not
excessive, but conformable to law, and directed to drawing out such an
effort on the part of the imagination: and so in turn as much a source
of attraction as it was repellent to mere sensibility. But the judgment
itself all the while steadfastly preserves its aesthetic character,
because it represents, without being grounded on any definite concept of
the object, merely the subjective play of the mental powers
(imagination and reason) as harmonious by virtue of their very contrast.
For just as in the estimate of the beautiful imagination and
understanding by their concert generate subjective finality of the
mental faculties, so imagination and reason do so here by their
conflict—that is to say they induce a feeling of our possessing a pure
and self-sufficient reason, or a faculty for the estimation of
magnitude, whose preeminence can only be made intuitively evident by the
inadequacy of that faculty which in the presentation of magnitudes (of
objects of sense) is itself unbounded. (sec. 27)The
beautiful creates “concert” where the sublime generates “conflict.” This
contrast, which effectively trivializes the beautiful with respect to
the sublime, has been revived in the postmodern era. The sublime retains
its prestige in intellectual circles, whereas the beautiful is
considered an outmoded category, a quasi-synonym for
kitsch. What
is at stake is clarified by Burke’s psychological analysis, which
associates the beautiful with the feminine and the sublime with the
masculine: the greater spiritual resonance of the sublime would reflect
the fact that culture privileges the deferral of violence over the
fulfillment of desire, since without the former there would be no
opportunity for the latter. Yet it is desire itself that inspires the
violence; literature celebrates the sublimity of female desirability
from Helen of Troy to Laclos’ Mme de Merteuil. This artificial
segregation of the sexes guarantees the metaphysical firewall between
the “supersensible” world of the arbitrary sign and the world of
sensuous forms, natural or man-made.
As an experience of transcendence cut off from its immanent basis,
the sublime is a psychological effect divorced from any cultural
context; the violence of storms and crags becomes a substitute for the
human violence crystallized in the sacred. This was already the function
of the sublime in antiquity; where Aristotle saw no need to separate
off the experience of transcendence from aesthetic experience in
general, by Longinus’ time, the old gods had lost their credibility, not
least in contrast with the God of Christianity, and could no longer
implicitly guarantee this experience. The Enlightenment’s rediscovery of
the sublime reflects its ambition to put away the Judeo-Christian God
as well and construct a wholly empirical anthropology.
Thus modern aesthetics is born in the conceptual splitting of its
object into two parts, neither of which is complete in itself. In the
place of the sublimely beautiful, we must choose between the pretty and
the monstrous, between the sign that loses itself in mimetic identity
with its worldly object and the sign that bears its inadequacy on its
face; the first provides a pleasure of the understanding, the second,
the transcendent joy of reason. These dichotomies, and those of Kantian
thought in general, situate within the categories of culture the split
that culture is designed to mediate, and, in so doing, display the
limitations of the Enlightenment’s scenic imagination. For Kant, the
aesthetic scene is either charmingly pacific or fearfully agitated. That
the peace of the former is the product of the fearsomeness of the
latter is too radical an idea for even the greatest thinker of an era
that could understand the deferral of human violence as the source of
human institutions, but not of the human itself.
