The search for the sublime
Kant’s philosophy inspires the imagination
January 23, 2007
Jolene Hildebrand
It would make life extremely difficult and tedious if we were to question the true, denotative meaning of every word we use. Using language is inescapable, and throughout the many words we use to signify certain meanings, it seems that we rarely pay attention, or even consider, what the words we use actually mean. Yet certain words mean much more than we commonly suppose, and they can have the ability to reveal an entirely profound meaning.
Sublime is such a word. The very connotative nature of it is powerful on its own, but ultimately impotent without the understanding of its history. Commonly, the sublime is something that impresses the mind with its grandeur and elevation. However, the word also appears throughout literary history, and has found the consummation of its meaning in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy.
Kant’s analysis of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment was that it generated a different state of mind other than the aesthetically beautiful. The beautiful is a state of restful contemplation, while the sublime causes a dissonance within us, and elevates us out of the empirical realm and into the realm of ideas.
While the beautiful lifts us into a state of relation and harmony, the sublime surpasses every standard of sense. The sublime results from an extension of the imagination in itself, our very incapability of apprehending anything beyond the limits of our mind is confronted by the sublime, which gives the feeling of a supersensible faculty. There are no experiential standards for the sublime; it imposes its own standards.
For example, pure reason is an aspiration to a totalizing vision, and reinforces our tendency to have absolutes. In apprehending the sublime, we experience a rift between pure reason, striving for totality, and the need for the imagination to complete this totalizing vision.
Ultimately, the sublime relates to our striving for something beyond empirical things for eternal and immutable things. Kant believes that there is some correspondence between our mind and the beyond, and although there is a temporary experience of pain in this disjunction, it is ultimately the gateway to freedom.
Kant also distinguished between understanding and reason, privileging reason as the faculty that could extend beyond material perception. For Kant, ideas of reason guided the understanding. Understanding is the world we experience, but what we experience is actively interpreted by the productive imagination, and cannot be the same for everyone. We cannot know things outside the framework of space and time, and reason goes awry when it seeks to totalize the vision of what we cannot possibly know. But it can enable us to think certain ideas without understanding them, and this is what can point us to the sublime.
As human beings, we cannot articulate every source that inspires us. However, reason and the imagination work together to reveal the sublime, and in turn can only give us intimations of what cannot be understood or conceptualized. The sublime is not revealed to us through scrutiny and observation, but rather through a painful realization of the limitations of our consciousness and the immensity of the space and time that surrounds us.
In turn, the sublime can inspire great works of art that seek to capture some element of its experience. The Romantic thinkers, both European and English, were greatly inspired by Kant’s philosophy, and sought to capture it in some of the greatest poetry ever written.
As an Enlightenment thinker, Kant believed that pure reason could yield a moral order free from the corruption and stagnation of the church, and that it could achieve objective truth. However, in the years since the Enlightenment, such optimistic faith in human reason has proved to be naïve; one cannot retain the values and paradigm of a religious tradition and annex its divine source. Truth becomes relative without an anchor. Later thinkers, who have held far more realistic views, have departed from this tradition.
Yet despite the apparent naïveté of Kant’s philosophy, his work on the sublime has much that we can learn from. Experiencing the sublime is painful; it transcends the normal categories of our understanding and extends our imagination beyond the temporal. Such an experience verges on a spiritual understanding of human comprehension, one that acknowledges the existence of a human striving for eternity, and gives meaning to our frustrations with the temporal boundaries of our world.
Can we become too cynical to believe in the sublime? Does such an archaic notion exist only within the accepted framework of a past age? We cannot abandon the constraints of the cultural climate that we are born into, and ours is certainly infused with skepticism. However, there is something unified and harmonious within Kant’s philosophy; a blending of vision and romanticism that dispels suspicion and anxiety. Despite the inherent cynicism of our times, perhaps we need to believe that there is something that can extend beyond ourselves and connect with eternity. The sublime does not need to be relegated to the past, but can inspire a very disillusioned world.
Now you go...
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