Abstract
Where is the sublime? How are we to locate it? What is it to locate something as amorphous and ethereal as the sublime — whose very name connotes vaporization? What does it mean to find a place, a proper place (if there is one), for the sublime?
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Notes
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. W.S. Pluhar ( Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987 ), p. 113.
Ibid., p. 99. The reference to “arousing” (regemachen) occurs at ibid.: the sublime “concerns only ideas of reason, which, though they cannot be exhibited adequately, are aroused and called to mind, by this very inadequacy, which can be exhibited in sensibility.”
Ibiid., p. 112. More completely: “that magnitude of a natural object to which the imagination fruitlessly applies its entire ability to comprehend must lead the concept of nature to a supersensible substratechrw(133) a substrate that is large beyond any standard of sense” (ibid.).
Something we currently experience as sublime “is now attractive to the same degree to which [formerly] it was repulsive to mere sensibility” (ibid., p. 115).
Ibid., p. 144. The idea of “subreption” is first defined in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770: “We may call fallacy of subreption (by analogy with the accepted meaning) the intellect’s trick of slipping in a concept of sense as if it were the concept of an intellectual characteristic” (cited at ibid., n. 22).
The proper unchangeable basic measure of nature [as this is posited by the imagination] is the absolute whole of nature.... This basic measure, however, is a self-contradictory concept (because an absolute totality of an endless progression is impossible).“ (Ibid., p. 112)
Ibid., p. 117. The other incompossible pairing, along with adequacy/inadequacy, constitutes an abyssal logic that is on the agenda in section 24 of the Critique of Judgment. “ Cf. ibid., p. 115: ”If a [thing] is excessive for the imagination (and the imagination is driven to [such excess] as it apprehends [the thing] in intuition), then [the thing] is, as it were, an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself.“
Cf. ibid., p. 100: “For the beautiful in nature we must seek a basis outside ourselves, but for the sublime a basis merely within ourselves and in the way of thinking that introduces sublimity into our presentation of nature.” On the “conflict” as such, see ibid., p. 116.
In dealing with the sublime, one “has the feeling that his imagination is inadequate for exhibiting the idea of a whole, [a feeling] in which imagination reaches its maximum, and as it strives to expand that maximum, it sinks back into, itself, but consequently comes to feeling a liking [that amounts to an] emotion [rührendes Wohlgefallen].” (Ibid., p. 109)
Cf. I. Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, tr. J.T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 48 ff.
Bewilderment and perplexity are discussed at ibid., p. 108. The notion of “taking in” (fassen) is treated at p. 107 and p. 116.
Ibid., p. 108. The Pyramids and St. Peter’s are mentioned on the same page. The discussion of the “colossal” on the next page is clearly pertinent to built as well as wild objects.
Both phrases are from ibid. p. 121. Kant plays on the pair erhaben/erheben as well as on erhaben/erhöhen (for this latter pair, see p. 120).
Ibid., p. 56; his italics. Cf. also p. 54: the judging person “will talk about the beautiful as if beauty were a characteristic of the object.”
Ibid., p. 145. Ultimately, beauty resides somewhere between the object and the beholder: we call something beautiful “only by virtue of that characteristic in which it adapts itself to the way we apprehend it” (ibid.).
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929 ), p. 72.
Ibid., p. 80. A more technical definition is this: “to say that a bit of matter has simple location means that, in expressing its spatio-temporal relations, it is adequate to state that it is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time” (Ibid., p. 72; his italics).
Ibid., p. 114. “My theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.” The source of this position in Leibniz is discussed at ibid., pp. 72–73, 81–87.
The Aroundness of the Environment (Das Umhafte der Umwelt) and Dasein’s Spatiality“ is the title of chapter three of Division One of Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 134 ff.
S. Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1954 ), I, 225.
Allgemeine Teilnehmung“: ibid., p. 158. Kant is here speaking of the universal participation at stake in the sensus communis, but the phrase can be construed to have a broader relevance.
Things are separated by space, and are separated by time: but they are also together in space, and together in time, even if they be not contemporaneous. I will call these characters the “separative’ and the `prehensive’ characters of space-time” (Science and the Modern World, p. 80; his italics).
On the question of being “prepared through culture” (vorbereitet durch Kultur) for the experience of wildscapes — e.g., those reported by Horace Bénédict de Saussure — see Critique of Judgment, section 29, where Kant also makes it clear that “the sublime in nature” is also not a matter of “mere convention” (p. 125).
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 ), p. 54.
Aristotle emphasizes the importance of the “in” (en) in the physics of place: cf. Physics, Book IV, chapter eight.
See Critique of Judgment, see section 28. The “colossal” is explored in section 26, “respect” in section 27, and “humility” in section 29. “Amazement” is treated in the “General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments.”
For this theme, see Irene Klaver, “Silent and Wild,” in D. Rothenberg, ed. Wild Ideas (forthcoming: University of Minnesota Press).
Critique of Judgment, p. 124. “Expand” is also invoked in a discussion of the second maxim of wisdom, i.e., under the heading of “a broadened way of thinking.” (Ibid., p. 161)
For it is precisely nature’s inadequacy to the ideaschrw(133) that constitutes what both repels our sensibility and yet attracts us at the same time.“ (Ibid., p. 124)
It seems, then, that we must not regard a judgment of taste as egoistic rather, we must regard it necessarily as pluralistic by its inner nature, i.e., on account of itself rather than the examples that others give of their taste“ (ibid.,p. 140; his italics).
Ibid,p. 126; his italics. Cf. p. 136: “Simplicity (artless purposiveness) is, as it were, nature’s style in the sublime” (his italics). It is to be noted that judgment for Kant is the epitome of relation: e.g., in its capacity to relate subject and predicate, content and object, etc.
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Casey, E.S. (1997). The Place of the Sublime. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Passion for Place Book II. Analecta Husserliana, vol 51. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2549-1_7
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