PHIL 409, Kant and the twentieth century, Fall 2026
the liking for the sublime contains not so much a positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect. (§23, p. 98)
Just as, when we judge the beautiful, imagination and understanding give rise to a subjective purposiveness of the mental powers by their accordance, so do imagination and reason here give rise to such a purposiveness by their conflict, namely, to a feeling that we have a pure and independent reason, or a power for estimating magnitude, whose superiority cannot be made intuitable by anything other than the inadequacy of that power which in exhibiting magnitudes (of sensible objects) is itself unbounded. (§27, pp. 115–116)
The sublime is not unaware of the sensible interest; it opposes it. This intrinsic opposition is expressed in the affectual . . . differend that constitutes the sublime feeling: of fear and exaltation. A differend, which, in turn, is the subjective state of thought at the mercy of the differend of its powers to present and to conceive.
Lyotard, p. 147:
The most difficult and subtle trait to decipher in sublime feeling is the extreme dissonance between the powers of thought, which is simultaneously felt as the sublime feeling’s supreme consonance with itself.
Kant, ‘General comment’ (p. 127):
Beautiful is what we like when we merely judge it (and hence not through any sensation by means of sense in accordance with some concept of the understanding). From this it follows at once that we must like the beautiful without any interest.
Sublime is what, by its resistance to the interest of the senses, we like directly.
The absolute is never there, never given in a presentation, but it is always “present” as a call to think beyond the “there.” Ungraspable, but unforgettable. Never restored, never abandoned. (p. 150)
Because this gesture cannot succeed, there will remain in the order of presentation only a trace, the trace of a retreat, the sign of a “presence” that will never be a presentation. . . . Thus the absolute remains unpresentable; no given is subsumable under its concept. But the imagination can signal its “presence,” an almost insane mirage, in the emptiness it discovers beyond its capacity to “comprehend.” (p. 152)
This is a temporary and remissible delirium, unlike Schwärmerei [excessive warmth or sentimentality]. In mania the imagination claims “positively to present” the absolute. Although the imagination gets carried away in Wahnsinn [delirium], presentation extends beyond its fundamental measure but remains negative. The obligation to which the imagination is subjected by reason does not only leave the imagination terrified, but gives it the courage to force its barriers and attempt a “presentation of the infinite.” (p. 151)
It is in fact difficult to think of a feeling for the sublime in nature without connecting with it a mental attunement similar to that for moral feeling. It is true that the pleasure we take directly in the beautiful in nature also presupposes, as well as cultivates. a certain liberality in our way of thinking, i.e., an independence of the liking from mere enjoyment of sense; but here the freedom is still presented more as in play than as subject to a law-governed task.
But the latter is what genuinely characterizes man’s morality, where reason must exert its dominance over sensibility, except that in an aesthetic judgment about the sublime we present this dominance as being exerted by the imagination itself, as an instrument of reason. (‘Comment’, p. 128)
The law of practical reason must only be effected by reason. The law of practical reason cannot be effected by what it prescribes, for it does not prescribe anything that is determined or could be determinate as object for the will. It effects, by making itself directly the incentive of the will. Such is respect, the only pure moral feeling (KPV).
This purity transcendentally requires a “holiness” of will (KPV), freed from any interest other than the interest of the law for its realization. This is not the case with enthusiasm. By provoking the extreme tension that is subjectively experienced as terror before the loss of presentation and as “ardor” (Schwung) in the face of what exceeds presentation, that is, absolute causality, enthusiasm relates thought to the law with an affectual “strength” (mutig). (p. 154)