Close Reading (Preview) of Kant on the Sublime

0:05 Mark: Hi, this is Mark Linsenmayer. What you're about to hear is a short preview of a new bonus product, a close reading from a section of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Beyond what we just covered in the recent episode, this time covering the sublime. The full file features me and Wes Alwan and runs an hour and 20 minutes. A close reading is just that. We read a particularly difficult text sentence by sentence and discuss what each sentence means. This is a great way to learn the terminology of a very difficult thinker and if you're new to philosophy, a demonstration of strategies for figuring out any difficult text.

We're not presenting this as if we're experts, as if we're Kant scholars. That's not the point. The point is to allow you to share in this experience of discovering the ins and outs of a difficult text. To hear the full discussion, you can go to partiallyexaminedlife.com store and purchase it very cheaply as a one off product.

0:54 Wes: Or.

0:55 Mark: Or you can get it plus all the other bonus content we've ever created by becoming a pel citizen. You can do that for just $5, get a heap of content if you don't unsubscribe immediately and stay a member for another $5 a month or pay $50 for the year and you'll get all of our future offerings like this as well. And we do have more of these close readings planned. You can also do a search for this product on the itunes store. Also, the latter pleasure, that is sublimity, is very different in kind from the former in that the former, the beautiful, directly brings with it a of the promotion of life and hence is compatible with charms and an imagination at play.

While the latter, the feeling of the sublime, is a pleasure that arises only indirectly being generated, namely by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital powers and the immediately following and all the more powerful outpouring of them.

1:49 Wes: Okay, so let's stop there and say what are the charms he's talking about?

1:54 Mark: So if you see something beautiful, he's saying even though really pure beauty is just appreciation of form, it is nothing to do with. So if. If you have a beautiful singing voice, we're not paying attention to the fact that you're pretty, that it has a nice lilt to it, you know, that you smile when you're singing, that there's a lot of trouble.

2:14 Wes: Or even if he's go. So radical, I think is to say that he says that even like the color in a painting is a matter of charm, right? And It's a charm in the sense. It's just. It elicits emotions. But the aesthetic judgment of beauty isn't about the emotional response per se. It's simply about form. It's a relationship maybe between those colored dots, let's say, or those colored brushstrokes, but it's not the emotional response to the color itself.

2:40 Mark: Still, he's. He's making a different point here that the former, the beautiful directly brings with it a feeling of the promotion of life and hence is compatible with charms and an imagination at play. I mean, imagination at play is there by definition. That's how he's just described the enjoying the beautiful. But it's not an accident that so much of beauty comes with charm. Even though he's made a big deal about how charming is not technically what the beautiful is. It directly brings with it a feeling of the promotion of life. I mean, that's very alien to the pure form. So I think this is. This may be the first time that he's saying that the beautiful, even though it is non purposive, it brings with it this purposeful.

3:24 Wes: Well, he says actually he talks about this, the feeling of life, actually in the very first section of the analytic of the beautiful. He connects it to pleasure and pain. And he's talking about it in relation to, again, the beauty. Okay, so this actually is the judgment not being conceptual.

3:40 Mark: That is, yeah, is straight from Burke as well.

3:42 Wes: How is it straight from Burke?

3:44 Mark: Just that a lot of the Burke reading was devoted to laying out how. And I'm not sure that Kant is going to have the same distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, but that in human physiology the beautiful is always related in some way to feelings of pleasure, including the sort of general promotion of life, you know, anticipation of pleasure, whatever. And the sublime is not to feeling pain, but to things associated with the realm of pain, you know, fear of death.

4:12 Wes: And I think the idea here, again, it goes back to. It's not a pleasure in a particular being gratified by some particular object outside of us. It's more a relationship to our own faculty. And the aliveness of that faculty, let's say of the conceptual faculty, it's activity. And that's where it's like an I'm alive feeling.

4:31 Mark: All right, so he said, however. But while the latter, the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that arises only indirectly being generated, namely by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital powers and the immediately following an all the more powerful outpouring of them. Hence, as an emotion it seems to be not play, but something serious in the activity of the imagination.

4:54 Wes: So the inhibition of the vital powers. I guess he'll probably tell us more about what that means.

4:59 Mark: Yeah, I don't. I don't have a clue.

5:01 Wes: Something to do with the fear of, I imagine, of the limitless. Something like that.

5:07 Mark: Hence it is also incompatible with charms. And since the mind is not merely attracted by the object, but is also reciprocally repelled by it, the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much contain positive pleasure as it does admiration or respect. That is, it deserves to be called negative pleasure.

5:27 Wes: So that's interesting because respect is something we normally associate with the good in Kant. So you respect the law, for instance.

5:37 Mark: Well, one of the things that.

5:38 Wes: Right.

5:38 Mark: For Kant, I mean, one of the things for Burke, any show of strength could be the sublime. So if you see a tiger, then just the fact that it could rip you apart, that brings about admiration and respect. What an awesome creature. You know, it's really. Awe is very much tied in with this, right. And so you're attracted by the object, but you're also reciprocally repelled by it, he says. So if something is scary like that, you know, so the. The dark, what is the charm of deep, deep darkness? Well, it's not a charm in the way that something beautiful can have a charm, but it's some. Weird.

6:12 Wes: I think the awe thing, you know, captures that. It's awesome.

6:16 Mark: So we feel a momentary inhibition of the vital powers. In other words, we kind of are scared. We feel a little helpless. And then immediately following the all the more powerful outpouring of them. So we kind of feel this catharsis through having felt helpless a second ago.

6:32 Wes: I have a feeling it's going to be that outpouring will come when we realize we're actually safe in the presence of something, even though it's so powerful and scary.

6:42 Mark: Next paragraph. The most important and intrinsic difference between the sublime and the beautiful, however, is this. That if, as is appropriate, we consider first only the sublime in objects of nature, that in art is, after all, always restricted to the conditions of agreement with nature. Natural beauty, the self sufficient kind, carries with it a purposiveness in its form, through which the object seems, as it were, to be predetermined for our power of judgment and thus constitutes an object of satisfaction in itself. Whereas that which, without any rationalizing, merely an apprehension, excites us in the feeling of the sublime may, to be sure, appear in its form to be contra purposive for our power of judgment Unsuitable for our faculty of presentation and, as it were, doing violence to our imagination. But it is nevertheless judged all the more sublime for that.

7:30 Wes: Okay, so let's back up in there. For the beauty, the seeming purposiveness of the form. In beauty, the purposiveness is. It's not that it serves any particular purpose, but that the beauty of things seems to suggest that they are in a way designed to conform and to arouse our power of judgment, our faculty of judgment in a pleasing way. Right.

7:53 Mark: Yeah. Metaphorically, you could say. Like it fits our eyes or something. You know, the idea of fitness often comes up in the literature.

8:00 Wes: It's like a flower where, you know, all that's necessary for experience is that it be capable of being judged under some concept. The beauty is surplus form, let's say. It's not necessary. And it looks as if it's been put there as a sort of providential, you know, gift to us that does even more for our power of judgment than is required.

8:21 Mark: Whereas the sublime, it appears in its form to be contra purposive for a power of judgment, which, again, if you think about just the fact that we can't. With the deepest darkness or something, or the power of the mighty.

8:34 Wes: And also the contra purposive in the sense that if it's something limitless, it can't be conceptualized.

8:40 Mark: Yeah. But is nevertheless judged all the more sublime for that. But from this, one immediately sees that we express ourselves on the whole incorrectly if we call some object of nature sublime, although we can quite correctly call very many of them beautiful. For how can we designate with an expression of approval that which is apprehended as in itself contra purposive? I think we need to think of some examples here. So a mighty waterfall.

9:05 Wes: Yeah, I was just thinking of Niagara Falls. Yeah.

9:09 Mark: How can we designate it with an expression of approval if it's apprehended as in itself contra purposive?

9:16 Wes: Well, let's see what he. See how he answers the question.

9:18 Mark: We can say no more than that. The object serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind. We can say no more than that. The object serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind. For what is properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason which, though no presentation adequate to them is possible, are provoked and called to mind precisely by this inadequacy which does allow of sensible presentation.

9:45 Wes: All right, so this gets us more into the way in which reason is important here, because we know that substance and God, those are not things we can experience and conceptualize, really. And sublimity falls in the same category.

10:00 Mark: So Burke used as one of his examples of the sublime ideas of God, but he sort of used it as, you know, just like the tiger is scary, the idea of God is scary. And I think Kant is trying to say that it's really. If you really are talking about limitlessness, then merely a scary tiger is not going to be sublime. It's only if you really take the tiger as the tiger God, who is like the scariest fucking thing you've ever seen in your life, then that would.

10:28 Wes: Yeah, the main thing is that we don't experience the sublimity in the tiger. It's one of these things that reason does that doesn't come from experience. The sublimity part is supplied by reason. But I don't think he's explicitly talked about scariness yet, though. Right. Burke may have, but I don't think Kant is still on the limitless thing.

10:45 Mark: Yes.

10:46 Wes: The main idea here is that it's associated with reason in the sense that it's just in the mind, that sublimity is just an idea. It's not something we experience in the object in the way that beauty is experienced in the representation, at least, or the presentation.

10:59 Mark: Right. So you could imagine a tiger actually being quite beautiful, having a beautiful form, being very well constructed. But at the same time, it's the fear, whatever, that it represents, the danger. That is a purely conceptual thing. And if you don't even know what that is, you could say, oh, what a pretty picture, you know, what a pretty animal. But it's only if you have the idea of how dangerous it is that you get that concept. I'll keep running with the scariness thing until we see something that contravenes that. But here's an example. Thus, the wide ocean enraged by storms cannot be called sublime.

Its visage is horrible. And one must have already have filled the mind with all sorts of ideas if by means of such an intuition, it is to be put in the mood for a feeling which is itself sublime, in that the mind is incited to abandon sensibility and to occupy itself with ideas that contain a higher purposiveness.

11:50 Wes: So you have to come to it with certain preconceptions in order for it to be interpretable as sublime.

11:56 Mark: Which is a little different than Burke, because Burke seems to think that it's just the visual sight of the raging storm overwhelms you and you are sort of even out kind of outside yourself. You're not. But Kant seems to be saying far from that. It's only that it connotes in you some ideas that you already have in your mind.

12:15 Wes: Yeah. And it's nothing about the form because the form is the limited thing.

12:18 Mark: Uh huh.

12:19 Wes: The limitlessness has to be a matter of reason because it's. It's not a. So to the extent that it's a. It's an object in the world that you can look at and experience that can't convey sublimity in the same way that it can't convey causality. Like we don't experience causality. It's supplied by. Well, that's getting us into weird territory actually.

12:38 Mark: Right.

12:38 Wes: Because that's.

12:38 Mark: That's a concept of the understanding and not from reason. But we.

12:42 Wes: That's true.

12:42 Mark: It's hard to see the difference between the two in some of these circumstances. If you're saying that, you know, like the example I gave before that somebody who's coming up with genuses and other language of speciation, you know, that's a concept that they're applying. It's a concept of reason. But causality is a concept of the understanding which reason can then try to apply to everything. So there's. They're just different levels. It seems like the experience of. I see this as causal and I see this as a duck where obviously duck was invented by somebody. It's not a natural concept of the understanding. Anyway, they seem similar experiences so it takes some analysis to take them apart.

13:20 Wes: Yeah, I misspoke there because. Yeah. Any. Anything we experience, it's. There's a lot that's supplied by the mind according to Kant So that's not a good distinction. But the main thing, the idea here to get is that it's something that's not in the object. Let's say.

13:33 Mark: All right, we're almost done with our second pa.

13:41 Wes: It.