2.1 Kant’s Starting Point

Let us begin, as Kant himself does, by noting that the idea of greatness is indeterminate: we speak of greatness in many ways. We speak of great political powers, great winds, and great heights; of great beauty and great character. Kant is interested in the idea of greatness with all the flexibility of the Latin magnitudo – which, in its literal meaning, is greatness of size or number, but in its figurative meanings can pertain to greatness of soul, greatness of rank or dignity, and so on.Footnote ⁵

Kant, however, begins with greatness considered in its most literal sense, as magnitude of size or bulk. Can anything be absolutely great in size? Kant invokes ‘absolute’ in the strict sense, so that what is at issue is a magnitude not comparable to any other (CJ 5:248).Footnote ⁶ Even the immensity of the Milky Way is comparable to, because measurable in terms of, so many widths of the Earth (5:256). And since, for Kant, nature is not a mere order of inert extended things, but a system of forces,Footnote ⁷ it should follow as well that there can be no absolute greatness of power in nature. There are, of course, many forces of nature that ‘we gladly call’ sublime: ‘thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river’ (5:261). But even the greatest destructive force we can think of – say, the Tsar Bomba – has a power that is comparable to, because measurable in terms of, that of some number of horses. Nature, the order of phenomena, consists of relations – and whatever immensity we can encounter in nature can only ever be relatively great.

So we should not be surprised by Kant’s repeated insistence that stormy seas and the like are not, strictly speaking, sublime: ‘sublimity is not contained in nature, but only in our mind’ (CJ 5:264; see also 5:245–6, 250, 256, 280). But surely the human mind has a place in nature, and can accordingly be influenced, and shaped, by nature. So Kant’s move – namely, saying that true sublimity can only lie in our mind – does not by itself make room for a conception of sublimity as absolute greatness. Other philosophical commitments are required. If true sublimity is absolute greatness, and therefore cannot be found in nature, then the absolute greatness at issue must lie in some kind of freedom from the causal order of material nature – a freedom that expresses itself in the self-determination of a rational being. For imperfectly rational beings – for us – such self-determination is won, if at all, through struggle and effort. In full flower, this self-determination is virtue. As a result, the sublime is not an exclusively ‘aesthetic’ topic for Kant. The Analytic of the Sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment is not a closed system: it points outside of itself, to a larger set of concerns about the nature of human reason, and its cultivation in the face of our finitude or embodiment. The central sections of this Element (§§3–4) will make a case for that overarching thesis – that by Kant’s lights what is sublime, strictly speaking, is our disposition to virtue.

Here, though, I want to shed light on the historical background against which he arrives at this view. For quite a lot was written about the sublimity of stormy seas and high peaks before Kant; and so we should be struck that he begins with the idea that ‘we’ take sublimity to consist in absolute greatness, and then proceeds to make such quick work of the idea that anything like a stormy sea is actually sublime. Who is this ‘we’? It turns out that the answer to this question is not entirely straightforward, for relatively few of Kant’s predecessors explicitly conceived of sublimity in terms of absolute greatness.Footnote ⁸ We will thus need to take stock of some of what had been written about the sublime in the decades prior to Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime to understand why it might be justifiable for Kant to begin in this way.

2.2 The Anglophone Tradition and the Reflective Turn

It is widely held that eighteenth-century Anglophone work on the sublime is distinguished by its emphasis on the ‘direct’ experience of sublimity of nature, and that this marks a departure from the ancient Hellenistic text that in some sense set the initial agenda for modern discussions of the sublime, Longinus’s On the Sublime (Peri Hypsous).Footnote ⁹ For Longinus’s treatise – or the part of it that has survived – is basically a work of poetics, broadly construed: it focuses on how different styles and forms of writing can produce sublimity, which he implicitly takes to be a specially elevated state of mind.Footnote ¹⁰ I take the core thesis about eighteenth-century Anglophone tradition on the sublime to be broadly correct, though I suspect it has been somewhat overstated by its proponents.Footnote ¹¹ For the Anglophone writers did direct fresh and sustained attention to the direct experience of nature as a source of a particular elevation of mind deemed ‘sublime’.

We thus hear quite a bit from them about the sublimity of vast, open vistas – and particularly of what is raw, inhospitable, and uncultivated: hostile stretches of desert; deep and dark forests; swelling seas with titanic, crashing waves; sharp, overhanging cliffs; craggy, icy, peaks piled high atop one another – all are said, time and again, to be sublime.Footnote ¹² But while Anglophone writers took particular interest in nature’s ‘rude kind of magnificence’ (to invoke Joseph Addison’s wonderful phraseFootnote ¹³), they also drew attention to the sublimity of works of human ingenuity and architecture: Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids, St Peter’s in Rome, and the Great Wall of China figure just as well in the Anglophone theorist’s stock set of examples.Footnote ¹⁴

But none of these things, from the vastness of deserts to the stupendous Great Wall, obviously offers a presentation of absolute greatness. We should then wonder whether any idea of ‘absolute greatness’ enters into Anglophone writing on the sublime. The beginnings of an answer may lie in another distinguishing feature of the Anglophone tradition: they tended not to treat the sublimity of nature as an end in itself, but rather presented the greatness of nature as a certain stimulus by which the subject’s attention might be thrust back onto herself. Commentators sometimes speak of this as a dawning ‘subjectivism’ about the sublime;Footnote ¹⁵ but this label is potentially misleading, inasmuch as it might suggest something contingent or one-off, when most accounts take the enjoyment of natural sublimity to reveal something universal, and possibly necessary, about us as human beings. Hence, I will refer to this development in theories of the sublime as the reflective turn, i.e. the idea is that the appreciation of natural sublimity allows us to revel in something about our own minds that is ordinarily hidden.

If the reflective turn provides an interpretive frame for the Anglophone tradition, it is nevertheless one that gets filled in a wide range of ways – depending, above all, on what exactly the enjoyment of natural sublimity is supposed to reveal about us. But the reflective turn does not, by itself, underwrite a conception of sublimity as absolute greatness. It conceivably underwrites the thought that what is strictly speaking sublime may not lie in any immensity of nature, but rather in some quality of mind by which such immensity is enjoyed. But a further step would be needed: namely, that the revealed quality of mind is itself absolutely great. Thomas Reid may have come closest to this idea in the Anglophone tradition. For Reid, any sublimity or grandeur ‘discerned in objects of sense’ is itself a kind of reflection of a sublimity or grandeur in our own minds (somewhat as the moon reflects the light of the sun) – where this original sublimity is a quality of mind worthy of the highest, or most ‘enthusiastical admiration’, because it has ‘real and intrinsic excellence’.Footnote ¹⁶ But without further elaboration, this still falls short of the idea that what is truly sublime is absolutely great.

Since, as we will see in §3, Kant does make use of the reflective turn in his account of natural sublimity, we should consider some of the range of ways in which it plays out in the Anglophone tradition. Its origin is plausibly traced to Joseph Addison’s ground-breaking essays on the ‘pleasures of the imagination’ published in the Spectator in 1712. Early on, Addison observes that it is not so much ‘the bulk of any single object’ that we consider sublime, ‘but the largeness of a whole view, considered as one entire piece’.Footnote ¹⁷ Sublimity is thus explained to be not so much a feature of objects, but rather a feature of how we take things in. This is the beginning of the reflective turn that was developed by subsequent theorists of the sublime. Although the reflective turn can be found throughout the Anglophone tradition, we will briefly consider just two examples that contrast on key points relevant to Kant’s later development of the reflective turn: John Baillie’s 1747 Essay on the Sublime, and Edmund Burke’s 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.Footnote ¹⁸

In each case, it will be important to distinguish not only the particular version of the reflective turn, but also the attendant account of why the reflection should be pleasing. Addison’s halting effort to consider why the sublime pleases only serves to bring the problem itself into sharper view. ‘Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity’, he contends; ‘We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them’.Footnote ¹⁹ But why, really, should we be pleased by what is altogether too much for us to handle? Addison has no compelling answer, beyond the assertion that we enjoy the lack of constraint when we take in a vista that, we feel, could occupy us endlessly – ‘a spacious horizon is an image of liberty’ – and that God has made us so that we take this particular pleasure in the apprehension of whatever is, or at least seems, ‘great or unlimited’.Footnote ²⁰ But Ballie’s and Burke’s answers take a different form: both contend that the sublimity of nature exercises the mind in ways that are properly enjoyable – an idea that, in general outline at least, survives in Kant’s later account.

2.3 Early German Rationalism on the Sublime

To find sublimity explicitly conceived as absolute greatness, we need to turn to the German tradition of aesthetic rationalism that developed from Alexander Baumgarten’s 1750 Aesthetica.Footnote ²⁸

German aesthetic rationalism is rooted in the distinction between sensible and intellectual cognition developed by Leibniz and Wolff: sensible cognition grasps in a ‘confused’ manner what can only be grasped ‘distinctly’ through the intellect’s explicit, and principle-based, articulation of the parts of a thing and determination of its place in a systematic whole. But while the rationalists take sensible cognition to be confused in its very nature, they recognise that it can nevertheless be clear – vividly present to mind – and may even possess a perfection proper to its nature. Baumgarten introduces aesthetics as a practical ‘science of sensible cognition’ (Aesthetica §1 [2007:10–11]) that has the ‘perfection of sensible cognition’ as its ‘purpose’ – where this perfection is nothing other than beauty (Aesthetica §14 [2007:20–1]). He lists six aspects of beauty, the second of which is the ‘aesthetic magnitude’ of the cognition – or, effectively, its sublimity (Aesthetica §22 [2007:24–5]).Footnote ²⁹ Hence, sublimity is an aspect of beauty for Baumgarten and his followers, rather than essentially distinct from it.

But what is ‘aesthetic magnitude’? Georg Meier, Baumgarten’s student and self-professed expositor, explains this magnitude as the greatness of what is represented: a cognition with aesthetic magnitude represents ‘great, suitable, important, noble objects’, and does so in a manner suitable to such dignified content.Footnote ³⁰ Although this arguably sums up Baumgarten’s conclusions on the topic, Baumgarten himself begins with the more literal notion of magnitude as greatness in size. He also draws some other distinctions in the neighbourhood, and is not explicit about whether or how they align: aesthetic magnitude may be either ‘relative’ or ‘absolute’, and it can be ‘natural’ or ‘moral’ (Aesthetica §178 and §181 [2007:154–5,156–7]). Relative magnitude is comparative, whereas absolute magnitude is unconditional and complete in itself, so that nothing further can be added to it (Aesthetica §179 and §185 [2007:154–5,160–1]). Natural and moral magnitude, on the other hand, are distinguished in terms of their relation to freedom: natural magnitude is not, whereas moral magnitude is, closely connected to the idea of freedom as it is determined ‘in accordance with moral laws’ (Aesthetica §§181–2 [2007:156–9]).

Where British writers so often found sublimity in the high seas, Baumgarten takes forests as paradigmatic of the mighty deep: ‘Forests possess the greatest relative magnitude. They are worthy of the greatest honour and are in an eminent way GREAT, MEANINGFUL, AND SUBLIME’ (Aesthetica §203 [2007:176–7]). Yet as he remarks on their prodigious, yet relative, greatness, he pauses to quote a passage from the Roman Stoic moral philosopher, Seneca. The interlude is curious: for just as Baumgarten says that forests are sublime, he thereupon remarks that he ‘would not quarrel’ with Seneca, who says that ‘Only virtue is sublime and exalted [sublimis et excelsa]’ (De Ira I.21.4 [Reference SenecaSeneca 2010:34]). How can he say in his own voice that forests are sublime, at the same time as he endorses Seneca’s view that only virtue is sublime?Footnote ³¹ Perhaps he means to suggest that the attested sublimity of forests (and the like) must somehow be ultimately rooted in, and dependent upon, the sublimity of virtue – after all, he does not say that natural magnitude is unconnected with the concept of freedom, but rather that it is less closely connected to it than moral magnitude is. But if this is his view, it remains implicit at best. Fortunately we can turn to Seneca’s text for some guidance.

Seneca had been arguing against a common view of the greatness of anger: namely, that a person enraged can go on to do ‘great’ things – astonishing things that he wouldn’t ordinarily have the drive to do (De Ira I.20–1). He then observes that lust and ambition also impel people in such ways, and that there is, more obviously, nothing great about them. Baumgarten’s quotation picks up Seneca’s point that ‘all vices’ (anger and other such faults) may be ‘great’ in the sense that their influence over human behaviour can be far-reaching and profound, but they are not great in the sense of being valuable, or worthy of choice. Perhaps anger has a kind of relative magnitude, as it impels us in ways that can in principle be overpowered. But whatever has absolute magnitude, on Baumgarten’s own account, must be unconditional and complete within itself – lacking in nothing. And this is how the Stoic conceives of virtue.Footnote ³² Thus, by endorsing this part of Seneca’s conclusion, Baumgarten implies that sublimity as absolute greatness must ultimately be a matter of moral perfection.

Our aim here is not to resolve the tensions and clarify the ambiguities of Baumgarten’s account of the sublime. For present purposes, it is enough to recognise that he draws a distinction between natural and moral magnitude, and that this distinction correlates to some extent with the distinction between relative and absolute magnitude. Presumably any natural magnitude must also be relative. Perhaps not all moral magnitudes are absolute: this might follow if there are other moral magnitudes apart from virtue, or if it is supposed that virtue admits of degree. Here we would do well to remember that Baumgarten’s entire discussion falls under the scope of aesthetic magnitude – so whatever he may be conceiving as moral magnitude in this context can only be what admits of sensible presentation:Footnote ³³ e.g., virtue as it may be suggested in the poetic and plastic arts, or as it may make itself manifest, however uncertainly, in normal human observation of action and character.

2.4 Taking Stock

We have been looking briefly and selectively into Kant’s predecessors in order to understand how he could set out with the claim that ‘we call sublime that which is absolutely great’ (CJ 5:248).Footnote ³⁴ We do not find a widespread invocation of sublimity as absolute greatness in the Anglophone tradition; instead, we characteristically find particular attention to natural immensity, which can only be comparative. To find an idea of sublimity as absolute greatness, we need to turn to the German rationalist tradition – where the possibility of such sublimity is rooted in the moral perfection of virtue. It would be rash to conclude, from this, that Kant takes himself to be having a conversation with his German rationalist predecessors alone. For what Kant is evidently setting out to do is combine the Anglophone tradition’s reflective turn with the German rationalists’ readiness to link true sublimity – or absolute greatness – with the moral perfection of virtue.

Thus, Kant takes our enjoyment of natural sublimity to be reflective along the same general lines set out by the Anglophone tradition, but takes the revealed power, or propensity, of mind to be absolutely great. His invocation of the reflective turn is plain enough, as he says time and again that ‘true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the one who judges’ and not in the natural object that is better conceived as a mere occasioning stimulus (CJ 5:256). What is sublime is something about our own minds, specifically some capacity for self-determination independently of nature. Thus, Kant aims to argue that

Kant says here that something about the mind is ‘superior’ to nature – where this superiority is cashed out as the possibility of its independence from nature’s influence or determination. In §3 we will see how and why this should amount to an idea of sublimity as absolute greatness by Kant’s lights.

We will be better positioned to undertake that work if we consider, by way of conclusion, another line of thought in the Anglophone tradition – one that moves from the bare consideration of natural immensity to this as the work of God. For it is here that a conception of sublimity as absolute greatness makes a halting, and largely implicit, appearance in the Anglophone tradition. We can find it already in Addison, in a later contribution to the Spectator that he passed off as another’s reply to his earlier essays on the ‘pleasures of the imagination’:

Reid makes much the same point more than seventy years later – that the sea and the starry heavens and so forth are vast objects that require ‘a stretch of imagination to grasp them in our minds. But they appear truly grand, and merit the highest admiration, when we consider them as the work of God’.Footnote ³⁶ Such remarks figure as outliers in a view of the Anglophone tradition as characterised by the reflective turn, since what we admire is not our own minds but the divine power of creation.Footnote ³⁷

However, it is worth pointing out that the sea and the starry night sky are linked to quite different conceptions of natural sublimity. The sea is a blank expanse, and, if it is raging, then sheer power. It is vast but not articulated, not complex. It is particularly important to the Anglophone writers. The starry night sky is an example of sublimity that goes all the way back at least to the Roman Stoic, Seneca.Footnote ³⁸ And while it could in principle be handled as a textured expanse of sheer immensity, like the sea,Footnote ³⁹ for the most part it is not treated this way. It is not the relative emptiness of outer space that struck most theorists of its sublimity, but rather its suggestion of rationally ordered perfection. Thus, Moses Mendelssohn, Kant’s German predecessor, invokes the ‘innumerable legions of stars’ as emblematic of ‘the immensity of the structure of the world’, the finely articulated product of ‘the divine perfection’ (Reference Mendelssohn1997:144–5 [Reference Mendelssohn1929:I.398–9]). The two examples thus distinguish crucially different traditions on the sublime in nature: the Anglophone tradition tends to see the immensity of nature as formless and undifferentiated, while the German rationalist tradition (chiefly in its development by Mendelssohn) sees it as infinitely articulated and ordered.

The significance of this difference between the examples of the sea and the starry night sky can be brought out by considering another stock example of sublimity: Genesis 1.3 – ‘And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light’ – which makes a regular appearance in writing on the sublime going back to Longinus (On the Sublime 9.9 [1995:190–1]), and does so full well in the Anglophone tradition, though some were struck that ‘the heathen critic’ would be so moved by these words.Footnote ⁴⁰ Genesis 1.3 presents sublimity as the product of sheer divine power, and thus effectively as an example of the first sort – somewhat akin to Addison’s or Reid’s sea, when taken as God’s work. Henry Home, Lord Kames, concurs in his 1762 Elements of Criticism, that ‘it is scarce possible, in fewer words, to convey so clear an image of the infinite power of the Deity’; yet, he avers that

We cannot have a determinate idea of what it would be to suddenly create light – from the power of one’s own thought or speech – when there had been nothing but darkness. We can only make a form of words that suggests such a power, the image of which produces a shock to our thought, but not sustained admiration. Kames blames the sublimity of Genesis for its failure to set us in some determinate orientation – because it invokes sheer, incomprehensible power – which, since we cannot coherently aspire to it, leaves us cast down and depressed.

Here Kames may have influenced Kant quite profoundly. For although Kant had, in his early work, taken the appreciation of sublimity to be an inherently exhausting affair that could not be sustained for long,Footnote ⁴¹ he later points in a famous passage to a sublimity of mind that gathers strength the more it is sustained: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration [Bewunderung] and reverence [Ehrfurcht] the more often and more steadily one considers them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’ (CPrR 5:161).Footnote ⁴² We will consider this passage briefly in §3.3, and in greater detail in §5.2. Here, I simply want to note that Kant points to the example of natural sublimity that many would say best triggers ideas of divine creation – the starry night sky – and treats it instead as a stimulus to reflection. Perhaps he supposes, with Kames, that ideas of divine creative power are far too notional to grip us for long.Footnote ⁴³ Not so with the moral law, some tacit grasp of which is – in Kant’s view – at least implicit in every use of common practical reason. As we will see, it is with this constellation of ideas that Kant is able to take sublimity to be absolute greatness, while accepting the general outline of the reflective turn in the Anglophone tradition.

3.1 Herder’s Charge

The idea that the Analytic of the Sublime is not a closed system, that it relies on essentially moral commitments about value, is not a new interpretive claim.Footnote ⁴⁴ But its philosophical implications are, and have long been, controversial.

The worry is that Kant’s account of the sublime is ultimately ‘self-regarding’: we seem to be awestruck by the greatness of nature, when in fact we are awestruck by ourselves. The charge can be traced at least as far back as J. G. Herder’s 1800 Kalligone. The Kantian, who sets out with a conception of sublimity as absolute greatness and accepts a division between sensible and supersensible orders of being, infers that nothing sensible can, strictly speaking, be sublime. That much is straightforwardly presented in Kant’s texts, as we saw in §2. However, Herder takes it to have two possible implications. First, if what is sublime is absolutely great and can thus only be something supersensible, then our appreciation of it cannot run through channels of sensible affection: there can be no felt appreciation of sublimity by Kantian lights. Second, Herder contends, if what is sublime must lie in our supersensible personality, and if the principle of personhood is nothing other than the moral law, then any apparent attraction to natural sublimity must be redescribed as a flush of pride in our own moral perfection.Footnote ⁴⁵

On the face of it, Kant’s text offers a ready line of reply on both fronts. First, Kant argues that we enjoy natural sublimity through a special sort of aesthetic – rather than cognitive – judgement: we appreciate sublimity in the register of feeling. He describes the appreciation of natural sublimity as involving a mixed state of mind, one that may be likened to ‘a vibration, i.e., to a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object’ (5:258; see also Anth 7:243).Footnote ⁴⁶ How can this attraction and repulsion be held together in a single experience? The attraction and the repulsion, Kant answers, stem from distinct resources of mind. The repulsion is rooted in our nature as sensible beings: what figures as a threat to our physical existence, or at least to our sense of orientation and readiness to move about in self-perspicuous ways, is unpleasant. But this is comingled with an attraction that is not based in sensible affection at all, but rather in a certain feeling for our own power of reason. Kant’s account of the ‘aesthetic’ status of our appreciation of natural sublimity relies on the idea that there are genuine feelings proper to our rational nature, as we will see in §3.2–3 – although what these feelings are, and how they are possible, will be not be considered until §4.

The second facet of Herder’s charge is more difficult to address. As a basic interpretive point, it is certainly correct that the absolute greatness that Kant contends can only be found in our own minds – not in any object in nature – must ultimately be understood in terms of the absolute, or incomparable, worth we possess as persons (G 4:434). Properly interpreted, however, this underwrites no implications of moralistic self-satisfaction. For Herder misses the distinctive modality of Kant’s version of the reflective turn: Kant does not claim that the apprehension of natural immensity leads us to become aware of powers of mind that are already perfect and require no further cultivation.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rather, he argues that the apprehension of natural immensity puts us in mind of the essential task of being human, which is ultimately and most fundamentally to cultivate moral virtue as the realisation or completion of our rational nature. Kant takes virtue to be an ideal that can only be conceived in pure thought, through the moral law: we can neither presume to meet it in the flesh, nor surmise it in the intimacy of introspection. The result, on Kant’s view, is something on the order of a strengthened commitment to the proper calling of the human being, the rational animal. In §3.4 we will see how this line of thought emerges in the course of the Analytic of the Sublime.

Yet even if Herder’s complaints are readily resolved with careful attention to Kant’s texts, he nevertheless puts his finger on a lingering discomfort with Kant’s version of the reflective turn. Many will be inclined to think of nature as having a value independently of us, and will want an account of our enjoyment of natural sublimity that leaves us looking out at it, and not in at ourselves.Footnote ⁴⁸ And many will be inclined to think that aesthetic and moral value ought not to be confused, and will want to reject the Kantian idea that our appreciation of natural sublimity is underpinned by some underlying interest in morality. To understand why these are not available options for Kant, we will need to consider his logocentrism about value (i.e. the idea that there is no value in the world independently of reason), and his methodological commitment to undertake philosophical inquiry resolutely from the human standpoint. In the final section of the Element (§5), I will show how these commitments shape Kant’s account in deep ways, and bear on his complex relation to Stoic sources on the sublime.

3.2 The Aesthetic Judgement of Reflection

Let’s begin with the idea that we appreciate natural sublimity in the register of feeling. Kant explains this point by saying that we enjoy sublimity through a certain sort of aesthetic judgement. Thus, we will begin by pinpointing what sort of aesthetic judgement this is, by locating it in a wider taxonomy of judgement.

We can understand Kant’s idea of aesthetic judgement by considering it against its contrast class, logical judgement. For the most part, logical judgements determine a given representation under a concept (CJ 5:211); the given representation may be singular (an intuition), or general (another concept). This is a chair expresses a determination of the first sort, and chairs are artefacts expresses a determination of the second sort.Footnote ⁴⁹ Aesthetic judgements, by contrast, do not determine representations under concepts, but rather express the relation of a given representation to feeling – pleasure or pain – in the subject (CJ 5:203). Since feeling plays no role in the determination of objects, aesthetic judgements are essentially non-cognitive.Footnote ⁵⁰

Any aesthetic judgement is an expression of an immediate like or dislike, in relation to some given representation. In finding some tea delightful, a feeling of pleasure is bound up with the sensible presentation of the tea. But this is an ‘aesthetic judgment of sense’, which Kant distinguishes from his genuine quarry: the ‘aesthetic judgment of reflection’ (FI 20:224).Footnote ⁵¹ I like this tea, and others might as well: but the liking is not necessary – it could be otherwise, and there is no robust sense in which anyone else ‘ought’ to like this tea as I do. An aesthetic judgement of reflection, by contrast, carries a claim to ‘universal validity and necessity’ (FI 20:225). The liking that is involved cannot, therefore, be rooted in contingent facts about the subject’s physical constitution. What, then, is the basis of the pleasure that is involved?

As we set about answering this question, let us first note that Kant takes there to be two varieties of aesthetic judgement of reflection: the judgement of taste through which we appreciate beauty, and the judgement concerning the sublime.Footnote ⁵² And while there are important differences between them, a general story holds about the nature and source of the pleasure they involve. To tell this story, we need to elaborate more on their shared features.

Both varieties of aesthetic judgement of reflection are singular, since both express satisfaction in the sensible presentation of a particular – this beautiful shell, this sublime mountain view (CJ 5:244). As aesthetic judgements, they involve no determinate concepts: ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’ are not functioning as predicates, and the judgements make no cognitive claim. Further, our liking for both the beautiful and the sublime is disinterested: the liking is neither based on a gratification of the senses, nor an esteem for what is good or useful for some purpose.Footnote ⁵³ And so both judgements ‘profess to be universally valid in regard to every subject’, inasmuch as they are expressed in a liking of the right sort (5:244). This particular sort of liking cannot be one that is rooted in contingent facts about the subject’s physical constitutionFootnote ⁵⁴ – including facts about it that are normal in the species, such as the desire for society and the drive for self-preservation that Burke invoked to explain our enjoyment of beauty and sublimity.Footnote ⁵⁵ The liking, Kant maintains, can only draw from what is necessarily constitutive of us inasmuch as we possess a cognitive capacity at all.Footnote ⁵⁶

In making this last point, Kant describes the distinctive liking as a satisfaction in the amenability of the singular representation to ‘the faculty of concepts of the understanding or of reason, as promoting’ it (CJ 5:244). To understand this remark, we need to clarify some terminological issues. When Kant draws basic divisions in human cognitive powers, he often sets out with a fundamental distinction between singular and general representation (intuition and concept), which he maps onto a distinction between sensibility and understanding. The ‘understanding’ in this broad sense is the ‘faculty of concepts’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Further, as the above quotation indicates, there are different sorts of concepts. Concepts of understanding are rules for the determination of phenomenal objects in the domain of nature. Concepts of reason are ideas: concepts that ‘go beyond the possibility of experience’ (A320/B377).Footnote ⁵⁸ More will need to be said about ideas of reason as we take a closer look at the judgement concerning the sublime in §3.3. For now, I simply want to note that understanding and reason alike are cognitive capacities. Pure concepts of the understanding – the categories – form the basis of a battery of substantive principles that spell out what it is to be a phenomenal object, an entity in the domain of nature. The story about ideas of reason is more complicated, since the role of ideas in the theoretical employment of reason is simply to regulate inquiry. But reason is a cognitive capacity in its practical exercise: it is itself the source of a principle with substantive, objective purport – the moral law.Footnote ⁵⁹ This is the principle by which the self-determined freedom of a rational being, or supersensible personhood, is made actual.Footnote ⁶⁰ Thus, the liking involved in the aesthetic judgement of reflection is effectively a function of our cognitive constitution, broadly construed.Footnote ⁶¹ The enjoyment we take in the beautiful shell or the sublime mountain view is a satisfaction in its amenability to us as creatures capable of knowing.

But while we enjoy beauty with unadulterated liking, our appreciation of sublimity is bivalent. Although a pleasurable attraction must govern this state of mind as long as we are moved to sustain it (see CJ 5:220), disagreeable aversion is an essential ingredient. To account for this, we need to consider the differences between beauty and sublimity. Kant takes beautiful objects to be – paradigmatically – bounded, articulated, organised wholes: they present themselves as eminently comprehensible, but we do not actually comprehend them (in the judgement of taste) under concepts of the understanding: ‘natural beauty … carries with it a purposiveness in its form, through which the object seems as it were to be predetermined for our power of judgement’ (5:245). Natural sublimity, however, does not announce itself as comprehensible – quite the contrary. Sublimity requires ‘a formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it’ (5:244), which assaults, and overwhelms, our capacity to comprehend it. Hence, Kant contends that pleasure in the sublime is ‘very different in kind’ from pleasure in the beautiful. For the beautiful

Kant identifies the pleasure we take in beauty with ‘a feeling of the promotion of life’ – that is, with a direct, or concomitant, delight in its enlivening of our cognitive capacities.Footnote ⁶² His second point, however, is not that our enjoyment of the sublime has nothing to do with the enlivening of our cognitive capacities. Rather, it is that this pleasure arises indirectly, so that an assault on cognitive powers of one sort invigorates cognitive powers of another sort.Footnote ⁶³ To fill in this sketch, we must now consider the aesthetic judgement concerning the sublime in greater detail.

3.3 Sublimity of Size and of Power

Kant’s introduction to the Analytic of the Sublime (CJ §23) moves from what is generally true about the aesthetic judgement of reflection to what is specifically true of those judgements which concern the sublime. Thus, the liking involved in judgements concerning the sublime is a satisfaction in the amenability of a sensible representation to the ‘faculty of concepts’ – where this is specified as the faculty of concepts of reason, or ideas of the supersensible. Kant then divides his exposition of judgements concerning the sublime into those that express satisfaction in greatness of size, and those that express satisfaction in greatness of power, calling them the ‘mathematical’ and ‘dynamical’ sublime respectively. This division, as we will see, aligns with the different roles that ideas of reason play in theoretical and practical cognition, respectively (CJ 5:247).

The standard way to read the Analytic of the Sublime is to take the division between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime to be sharp and deep, on the grounds that the one involves a satisfaction of reason in its theoretical capacity, and the other a satisfaction of reason in its practical capacity. However, it is surely possible to recognise that mathematical and dynamical sublimity are distinguished in this way, and still reject any conclusion that mathematical and dynamical sublimity must be mutually exclusive by Kant’s lights. For one thing, sublimity of size and power are not, in their concrete manifestations, often neatly separable from one another. A swelling surf is both massive and crushing; a desert threatens death with its vastness; a lintel at Stonehenge looms overhead and suggests, with that, the prodigious strength that laid it there. Almost any example of natural sublimity works on us in both registers at once. Consider Kant’s catalogue of dynamical sublimity: ‘Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightening and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc.’ (CJ 5:261) – these all appear to be candidates for dynamical-cum-mathematical sublimity. Even Kant’s famous ‘starry heavens’ example is not handled as a case of straight-up mathematical sublimity. It certainly underscores the vastness, and so the mathematical sublimity, of the heavens: ‘an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration’ (CPrR 5:162). But Kant then suggests that the view of this vastness ‘annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force (one knows not how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came’ (5:162).Footnote ⁶⁴ Nature figures as a force that ultimately overwhelms the form of any living species, reclaiming the matter in which it had realised itself.

Of course, while any particular experience of natural sublimity is liable to tap into both mathematical and dynamical modes at once, there could still be no deeper, or more systematic, account of their unity. But Kant’s texts suggest otherwise. As we will see, the fact that a person is able to revel in such manifestations – whether greatness of size, of power, or both at once – depends, on Kant’s view, upon the development of her capacity for moral feeling, and commitment to essentially moral ends (CJ 5:265). Although this point becomes gradually more explicit as Kant’s account proceeds from the mathematical to the dynamical sublime, it should hold across the board. One way to see that is to recall that we enjoy natural sublimity in an aesthetic judgement, and thus cannot put into play any morally determinate idea of the good. If so, then (contra the standard reading) the dynamical sublime should in principle be no ‘closer’ to ethical concerns than the mathematical. They may then be equally dependent on the subject’s background commitment to moral ends. I will make my case for that claim in §3.4, once we have considered the mathematical and dynamical sublime each in turn.

3.4 The Sublime Human Bestimmung

As we have seen, Kant’s account belongs to a ‘reflective’ tradition on the sublime, whereby natural immensity provides an occasioning stimulus that allows us to revel in some prodigious power of our own minds. Earlier proponents of the reflective turn in the Anglophone tradition did not, for the most part, subscribe to a dualism distinguishing sensible and supersensible orders of being. Thus, there is no natural place in such a tradition for a conception of sublimity as absolute greatness, since whatever can figure in the phenomenal order can only ever be relatively great. In such a tradition, ‘sublime’ refers to the arousal of a certain psychological phenomenon with comingled impulses of repulsion and attraction. But Kant supposes that his own account of the sublime rises above empirical psychology, since the pleasurable aspect of the judgement is a function of a certain attraction to one’s own essential purposes, or calling, as a rational being (CJ 5:277–8).Footnote ⁷⁶ What I dislike for its lack of amenability to my physical existence, I enjoy for its amenability to the complete picture of what I called to be as a rational animal.

The crucial term here – Bestimmung – which most basically means ‘determination’, functions in a special way in this context. Kant alludes to a longstanding eighteenth-century debate about the Bestimmung des Menschen, the ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’ of the human being.Footnote ⁷⁷ The ancient formula of our kind takes rational to be our essence or form, distinguishing us from the rest of the animal kingdom; but Kant stresses that this rational nature presents itself as a practical problem, rather than a given endowment – a task, not a fact. A human being is ‘an animal endowed with rational capability (animal rationabile)’ and is called to ‘make out of himself a rational animal (animal rationale)’ (Anth 7:321–2). The given endowment needs to be cultivated, and made complete: thus, Kant takes the Bestimmung of our species to consist in ‘perfection’ (Anth 7:322). Although Kant emphasises, in his anthropological writings, that no individual can fulfil this calling – it is a task for the species as a whole – he nevertheless accords a central place to the perfection of the individual in his later ethical writings. In the Doctrine of Virtue in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant divides duties of virtue into what one owes oneself, and what one owes others; these follow, respectively, from the free adoption of the two morally obligatory ends of self-perfection and the happiness of others (MM-DV 6:385). Self-perfection calls for the cultivation of one’s capacities, ‘the highest of which is the understanding as the faculty of concepts’ – where this is, once again, construed broadly to include ‘concepts having to do with duty’ (6:386–7). To make oneself fit for one’s own essential rationality is itself a moral obligation, a duty of virtue; and while this is originally, or most basically, a matter of cultivating one’s cognitive capacities, it is ultimately a matter of cultivating one’s will or ‘moral way of thinking’ (6:387) according to the standard of virtue that is thought through the moral law.

In Kant’s account, we appreciate (what we in shorthand call) natural sublimity because it resonates with this vocation in some cognitively indeterminate register of feeling:

Repeatedly, Kant deems this calling sublime: he speaks of the ‘sublimity of our moral vocation’ (6:50) and the ‘feeling of the sublimity of our own vocation’ (6:23 n) in the Religion; and of the ‘sublimity of our nature (in its vocation)’ (5:87) in the second Critique. Therefore, what is truly sublime cannot be any given fact of a perfected faculty of reason by Kant’s lights, for no such fact can be given to us. Virtue itself is the perfection of our rational nature; and it is an ideal that, for all we know, may never yet have been attained; its manifestation can neither be directly perceived in others, nor introspected in ourselves (MM-DV 6:383, 396, 409; CPrR 5:83). Contra Herder, Kant’s reflective turn cannot be a matter of a so-called sublimity of nature leading us to admire an actual perfection within us. At the same time, the governing attraction of the sublime is a commitment to one’s own supersensible personality – a commitment we must undertake gladly, if this is to be expressed in some kind of sustained pleasurable feeling. So there must be some kind of confidence in one’s in-principle capacity to answer this calling (CJ 5:262), but without any arrogant presumption that one has, or ever will, answer it once and for all.

With this in mind, let us return to the contested question of whether or not Kant means to draw a sharp and deep division between mathematical and dynamical modes of natural sublimity. The standard view is that he does. However, a closer look at how the sublime human Bestimmung figures in the Analytic of the Sublime, and particularly in a section that belongs to the exposition of the mathematical sublime (CJ §27), tells against the standard view.

In CJ §27 Kant begins with an account of the feeling of respect: ‘The feeling of the inadequacy of our capacity for the attainment of an idea that is a law for us is respect’ (5:257). The ‘law’ that Kant has in mind right here is evidently not the moral law, but rather the regulative principle to seek completeness in the determination of the ‘sum total of appearances’. The possibility of scientific cognition of material nature requires that we regulate inquiry according to this idea (recall §3.3.1); and yet we can never attain the completeness that it calls for. In the case of the mathematically sublime, a massive object arouses efforts of imagination whereby it ‘demonstrates its limits and inadequacy, but at the same time its vocation [Bestimmung] for adequately realising that idea as a law’ (5:257). The immense object is emblematic of this calling, an imperative over cognitive conduct: comprehend the whole! For it suggests a bounded infinity, as if it were the totality of everything that is, the sum total of appearances. And since, in the mathematically sublime, one fails to comprehend the whole in a sensible representation, one recognises both the imperative (the ‘law’) and the inadequacy of one’s capacity to attain it. Hence, there is a sense in which respect is the appropriate attitude to take (or feeling to have) towards it.Footnote ⁷⁸ From here, Kant draws a conclusion that he indicates should hold for natural sublimity tout court:

Kant does not expressly limit the scope of this claim to the mathematically sublime. The proper object of respect, he indicates here, is ‘humanity’ (in this case, that in one’s own subject). But what is ‘humanity’? For Kant, it is the capacity to freely set ends and act on them: ‘The capacity to set oneself an end – any end whatsoever – is what characterises humanity (as distinguished from animality)’ (MM-DV 6:392). Now consider that both mathematical and dynamical sublimity make an assault on our normal sense of agency. Mathematical sublimity disorients: the difficulty of taking in the immensity in a single presentation leaves one without a clear sense of one’s place in the world, and seizes one’s readiness to carry on in the normal ways. The point is even stronger in the case dynamical sublimity, which Kant suggests challenges our normal concerns with worldly goods, health, and life (recall CJ 5:262). We are inclined to pursue these things, but they could all be wiped out when nature’s force bursts forth. But our humanity is not assaulted, if this capacity is realised in the self-determination of the will through the moral law. Thus, Kant says in the above passage that it is appropriate to show something like respect to the large or mighty object in nature, since it provides the occasion to appreciate, through feeling, that we are not subject to its ‘dominion’ in being what we properly are, as rational animals.

Indeed, it is a thought like this that Kant draws upon when he extols the ‘sublime and mighty name’ of ‘Duty!’ in the second Critique: the origin of its nobility that ‘rejects all kinship with the inclinations … can be nothing less than what elevates a human being above himself (as part of the sensible world), what connects him with an order of things that only the understanding can think’ – connects him, that is, with the supersensible order of ‘personality, that is, freedom and independence from the mechanism of the whole of nature, regarded nevertheless as also a capacity of a being subject to … pure practical laws given by his own reason’ (CPrR 5:86–7). With this we can see that Kant’s repeated talk of the sublimity of the human vocation is rather literal, at least in a rhetorical framework that places the supersensible order of being ‘above’ the sensible. We are called up to make ourselves fit for our own essential rationality, to claim our status as persons rather than things.Footnote ⁸⁰ Moreover, Kant concludes this rather florid passage with reference to the ‘second and highest vocation’ of the human being (5:87). The remark is a bit puzzling, since in that passage he never says what the first, and presumably ‘lower’, vocation might be. But his discussion of the morally obligatory end of self-perfection from the Doctrine of Virtue (6:386–7), which I have already sketched above, provides a clue. The perfection proper to ‘humanity’ in the strict sense must consist first in cultivating the resources of body and mind that will better enable one to freely pursue ends and act on them; Kant says that the ‘highest’ of these resources (Vermögen) is the understanding in the broad sense as ‘the faculty of concepts’. Since the understanding so conceived includes concepts of duty, the human vocation must ultimately consist in (and its fulfilment be determined by) the cultivation of the will according to the standard of virtue that can only be thought through the moral law. Thus, the fulfilment of the duty of self-perfection consists of cultivating both natural and moral perfections: the first are developed with the setting of discretionary ends, the second with the adoption of the morally obligatory end to care about humanity in one’s own person and in others. For this very reason, the natural perfections are dependent upon the moral perfection of virtue, for only through our active, practical commitment to the latter can the former be part of the good, or the true calling, of a human being.Footnote ⁸¹

Such considerations tell against the standard view that mathematical sublimity is fully independent of dynamical sublimity. The two seem to need one another, and perhaps in somewhat different ways. For why, really, do we enjoy the assault on imagination in the mathematical sublime? Is it really enough to suppose that we are pleased to register the capacity of reason to conceive in pure thought what can never be met with in the senses? If what I have argued in this section is correct, then by Kant’s lights this enjoyment is possible through a background commitment to distinctly moral ends. And if that is right, then what we appreciatively feel about our own rational capacity is that its own principle of freedom is the source of our own supersensible personhood: and we care to be persons, rather than mere things. All of this is simply more immediate, and in a sense thematic, in the dynamical sublime. Working from the other direction, the dynamical aspect of natural sublimity seems to need the mathematical in concreto: there is little reason to think that Kant is convinced that small poisonous beasts are sublime, à la Burke.Footnote ⁸² Kant seems nearer the mark when he suggests, through his litany of examples, that nature’s might will impress us better when it also strikes us as immense.

With all this in mind, let me draw attention to two further details in CJ §27. Kant says that it ‘belongs to our vocation to estimate everything great that nature contains as an object of the senses for us as small in comparison with ideas of reason’ (5:257).Footnote ⁸³ It is part of our vocation to cultivate our cognitive capacities through exercise that accords with the regulative law of the theoretical reason; and we enjoy immense objects of nature as mathematically sublime inasmuch as they resonate with this calling. And later in CJ §27, Kant recapitulates how the immense object defeats the imagination in its efforts to comprehend the whole, inflicting a kind of ‘violence’ on it; he then adds that this ‘very same violence … is judged as purposive for the whole vocation of the mind’ (5:259). The immediate point of this remark is that the immense object figures as ‘contrapurposive’ for the imagination (as unamenable to its ends), but as ‘purposive’ for the human rational mind in its entirety. What might now strike us about this remark, however, is that Kant pointedly does not speak of what belongs to this vocation in this or that aspect of it. This ‘whole vocation’ must be understood as its cultivation according to its own rational principle, which ultimately calls for the cultivation of the will through the moral law. Therefore, while Kant does indeed distinguish mathematical and dynamical registers of our appreciation of natural sublimity, the whole package is underwritten by a background interest in essentially moral ends.

3.5 Conclusion

Kant undoubtedly walks a fine line. Moral cultivation can only figure as a background condition of the aesthetic judgement concerning natural sublimity: for this judgement cannot involve any determinate idea of the good if it is to be an aesthetic judgement in Kant’s terms. But Kant also suggests that the enjoyment of nature’s vastness and might does something to us: it produces a certain ‘attunement of the mind [Geistesstimmung]’ that is ‘to be called sublime’, rather than the natural object itself (CJ 5:250). What is this ‘attunement’? It certainly cannot be virtue, or its distinctive temperament, since the judgement – once again – cannot directly involve any determinate idea of the good. And yet Kant insists this attunement is ‘compatible with that which the influence of determinate (practical) ideas on feeling would produce’ (5:256, emphasis added). Indeed, this is how Kant explains our enjoyment of natural immensity in the first place: while the presentation of this immensity challenges our resources as sensible beings, it resonates with – indeed, even ‘promotes’ (recall 5:244) – our calling as essentially rational beings. These ideas are not precise; the picture is not sharp. But they can be reinforced if viewed from other angles as well. Any aesthetic judgement of reflection is disinterested, and contemplative: it does not rouse us to action, whether to pluck the beautiful flower, or to run from the mounting surf. Presumably it shouldn’t rouse us to perform a noble deed – or do anything else besides. Natural beauty and sublimity alike seize us, hold us rapt. And yet in the case of the sublime, Kant contends, we only stand to be moved in the right way if we have prepared ourselves through the practice of practical judgement and the concomitant arousal of moral feeling. Only if we are ready to be moved by certain sorts of considerations are we in any condition to stand still, and enjoy the rude magnificence.Footnote ⁸⁴

4.1 Respect

In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant provides an extended account of the moral-psychological phenomenon of respect – the feeling concomitant with our appreciation of moral requirement, or grasp of the moral law.Footnote ⁸⁵ Respect is not itself a cognitive state: it is not the means by which we grasp the good, or understand what we objectively ought to do. Rather, Kant presents respect as the effect that the recognition of moral requirement has on us – specifically, on the feeling of embodied, imperfectly rational beings. This feeling is bivalent: repulsing in one aspect, attracting in another. This bivalence can be traced to our nature as both animal and rational, sensible and intelligible, beings. To understand Kant’s account of respect, we will first need to elaborate his view of our moral condition as rational animals.

Kant takes the rational mind to be essentially reflective – a claim perhaps brought out best in his well-known version of the cogito: ‘The I think must be able to accompany all of my representations’ (CPR B131). Its implication, for specifically practical thought, is that we commit ourselves to maxims – i.e. principles expressing what we take as a reason for doing what – whenever we act intentionally at all: we so commit ourselves regardless of whether we deliberately reflect upon what those principles are, and whether they are well-founded. The significance of this point is that it shows Kant to be committed to the idea that we are rational through and through, even when we act in the interest of sensible desire and ‘inclination’. What is ‘inclination’ (Neigung)? Kant consistently defines it as ‘habitual desire’ (Anth 7:251, 265; MM 6:212; Rel 6:28). Patterns of pleasure and pain work themselves up into habitual desiderative dispositions, or inclinations. This is a given psychological fact about us, and not anything that we could coherently strive to free ourselves from. What this means, though, is that we are not immediately impelled towards the objects of our inclinations, but take them to be good and determine ourselves to attain them on that idea (CPrR 5:59–60). Moreover, if good is ‘a necessary object of the faculty of desire … in accordance with a principle of reason’ (CPrR 5:58), then we are liable to comprehensively misvalue. The object of my inclination appeals to me given contingent facts about my physical constitution, including how it has been shaped by habit (which shaping is itself, most often, an expression and effect of intentional action). The object of my inclination is not a necessary object of desire for any rational being – it simply so happens to be an object of desire for me. We are liable to confuse what is properly a matter of preference for what is objectively good.

With this in mind, let us consider Kant’s view of our moral condition. The second Critique’s Analytic sets out to argue that the constitutive principle of practical reason is the moral law (CPrR 5:19–57). The implication of this (quite controversial) claim is that anyone who has come into the use of her reason – and thus can think about what she ought to do – must have some tacit grasp of this principle, no matter how dim.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet as embodied rational beings with physical needs, it is a proper part of our nature – of our being what we properly ought to be – that we act to address these needs. In the Religion, Kant calls this the ‘predisposition to animality in the human being’, which he describes as a ‘physical or merely mechanical self-love, i.e. a love for which reason is not required’, and includes it within the ‘original predisposition to the good in human nature’ (6:26). Thus, he explicitly rejects the idea that the source of evil can coherently ‘be placed, as is commonly done, in the sensuous nature of the human being, and in the natural inclinations originating from it’ (Rel 6:34–5). This is an important, and easily misunderstood, point. The source of human badness (‘radical evil’) does not lie in our animal nature. In Kant’s view it lies, rather, in the comprehensive misvaluing that is endemic to the imperfect practical rationality of the human being. Given the reflective nature of the rational mind, by default we take the object of inclination to be good, and endorse the claims of self-love as giving us reasons before all else (CPrR 5:74). When this commitment about value (the goodness of the objects of one’s inclinations) is followed through to its natural conclusion, we come to take the claims of self-love to give us reasons above all else. The result is the ‘self-conceit’ by which one arrogates one’s own happiness as the necessary object of choice for any rational being (5:74).

Kant’s account of respect starts with our propensity to validate the claims of self-love: ‘we find our pathologically determinable self’ – what we are as embodied rational beings – ‘striving antecedently to make its claims primary and originally valid, just as if it constituted our entire self’ (CPrR 5:74). But by setting ends freely and acting on them, we take ourselves to be persons rather than mere things; and in so doing, we tacitly grasp the principle of our personality, the moral law. When a person has an active thought about moral requirement, or recognises its standard manifest in another’s conduct or character, the result ‘strikes down self-conceit, that is humiliates it’ (5:73; also 5:74). This involves a comparison – and thus, by Kant’s lights, a reflective rational activity (Rel 6:27) – between two claims about value. But the determination of value issued by the principle of self-love can only be annihilated by the good grasped through the moral law: ‘Hence the moral law unavoidably humiliates every human being when he compares it with the sensible propensity of his nature’ (CPrR 5:74). Yet we are talking about a single human being who, at least tacitly, grasps that the annihilating principle issues from his own rational nature. And thus ‘the effect which on the one side is merely negative’ – and is experienced as painful repulsion – ‘on the other side … is positive’ (5:75), at least inasmuch as one recognises that one is properly a person, not a thing, and thus ought to be governed by the moral law, this principle of personality.

That final qualification is important for appreciating the phenomenological range of the feeling of respect.Footnote ⁸⁷ Although Kant takes the absence of any capacity for moral feeling to be something like monstrous (MM-DV 6:399–400),Footnote ⁸⁸ so that by his lights the feeling of respect is concomitant with the appreciation of moral requirement in any normal human being, it is nevertheless possible not to feel respect with any appreciable duration. For the humiliation of the claims of self-love is unpleasant, and we naturally move to avoid pain: we might find ways of redirecting our attention, or redescribing the situation we find ourselves in, so that we are no longer struck in this way.Footnote ⁸⁹ But if one does have some commitment to one’s moral personality, then one cannot help but to feel respect with one’s recognition of moral requirement (or its exemplar), and feel it with some (however minimal) duration.

4.2 Admiration and Respect As Feelings of the Sublime

Having considered Kant’s account of respect in the second Critique, we now need to examine its bearing on the third Critique’s Analytic of the Sublime. Recall Kant’s account of how our enjoyment of sublimity differs from our enjoyment of beauty: the pleasure involved ‘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’ (CJ 5:245). An inhibiting stress upon powers of one sort invigorates the expression of powers of another sort. Since the object that occasions this response is both repulsive and attractive, ‘the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much contain positive pleasure as it does admiration or respect [Bewunderung oder Achtung], i.e., it deserves to be called negative pleasure’ (5:245; my emphasis). This might be read as an appositive disjunction,Footnote ⁹⁰ were it not for the clear distinction that Kant draws between admiration and respect in the second Critique:

Here Kant points to many of the stock examples of natural sublimity, and explicitly denies that the appropriate feeling could be respect. Instead, he names admiration and amazement as the feelings that takes such things as their proper objects. On the basis of the above we should rule out the idea that respect could be the feeling by which we appreciate natural sublimity.

My aim in this subsection is to explain Kant’s view of the difference between admiration and respect, while accounting for his view of each as feelings for the sublime. They must be deeply enough alike – or closely enough ‘analogous’ to one another (see CPrR 5:78) – to underwrite Kant’s own way of developing the received idea that sublimity is absolute greatness. At the same time, we need to see whether Kant’s account of their relation leaves him with a satisfying reply to Herder-style objections:Footnote ⁹² how can our moral appreciation of absolute value inform the aesthetic appreciation of natural sublimity without taking it over?

We might be puzzled by Kant’s remark that respect can only be directed to persons, not things – since, after all, his account first concerns respect for the moral law: while the moral law is not a ‘thing’, it is not obviously a person, either. But the moral law is the principle of personality, and so Kant treats respect for the moral law as the genus under which distinct species of respect for particular persons – recognition respect and esteem respect – can be determined. (Of these, we will concern ourselves only with esteem respect.Footnote ⁹³) Kant presents esteem respect through a memorable vignette of finding himself moved by the example that a ‘common humble man’ sets for him. We are invited to imagine a person of extremely modest means who (say) gives generously to others – he gives more, and more gladly, than Kant himself ever does. Respect is wrung from him: ‘my spirit bows, whether I want it or whether I do not and hold my head ever so high, that he may not overlook my superior position’ (CPrR 5:77).

In the wake of this vignette, Kant points out that a display of remarkable talent and skill is often an occasion to feel admiration – but not, at least in most instances, respect (CPrR 5:78). This discussion is complicated, because he first denies that a person’s talents are properly an occasion even for admiration at all, at least if they are given endowments. I have a friend who has 360-degree turnout in his feet: i.e. he can stand with his feet facing the opposite direction as the front of his body. I find this astonishing, but not admirable.Footnote ⁹⁴ But a person’s cultivated talents, or skills, can properly be admired – at least if they strike one as something great, and at least somewhat out of the ordinary. Is the good character of the ‘common humble man’ from the earlier vignette properly admired then? Kant denies this:

Kant’s example of the layperson’s admiration for a public intellectual such as Voltaire is similar to my admiration for an Olympic gymnast such as Simone Biles: it is her skill I admire. I do not have any remotely determinate practical understanding of what it would be to run through such a tumbling sequence, or to turn a backflip on a balance beam. All of that is entirely off the radar of my agential possibilities, or interests. I do not, at least as far as sport goes, share her ends. As a result, her shining example does not compel me to do anything. Admiration is not exhortative. But respect is. For the scholar who has somehow learned, along with everyone else, that Voltaire is a bad human being (full stop) may still respect him as a good scholar: Voltaire’s example (as a scholar) provides a model for his efforts (as a scholar).Footnote ⁹⁵ Thus, Kant suggests that I can respect another for her skills if I share the discretionary end that governs the skill. If I do not share this end, then I can only admire her skill, and only then if it strikes me as something great – worth having, and at least somewhat outside of the ordinary run of things. But I stand to respect another human being as a good person only inasmuch as I share the non-discretionary, morally obligatory, end of cultivating good character in myself.Footnote ⁹⁶

From this we can see why admiration might suitably figure as the feeling for natural sublimity. For we enjoy natural sublimity through an aesthetic judgement of reflection, and such judgements are contemplative:Footnote ⁹⁷ they do not directly exhort us to action. As Reference BradyBrady (2013:81) suggests, this allows us to enjoy nature for its own sake, independently of our own ends.Footnote ⁹⁸ Moreover, Kant points to the pedagogical dangers of arousing mere admiration for ostensible figures of virtue; a moral education needs, rather, to arouse genuine respect in order to help someone develop good character.Footnote ⁹⁹ Thus, the non-exhortative character of admiration shows it to be a more suitable candidate for the feeling for natural sublimity than respect.

Finally, one further difference between the moral feeling of respect and the feeling for natural sublimity should be noted. At the outset of this section, I quoted Kant’s presentation of the latter as a ‘negative pleasure’ that arises ‘indirectly’ from some initial assault on our cognitive powers. We might read this simply as a gloss of its bivalence, that some painful aversion is part of the story about how we come to enjoy sublimity. But it reveals, I think, somewhat more than this. For Kant presents respect for the moral law as similarly indirect, and bivalent. However, he also says that ‘respect for the moral law must be regarded as also a positive though indirect effect of the moral law on feeling insofar as the law weakens the hindering influence of the inclinations by humiliating self-conceit’ (CPrR 5:79; my emphasis). We stand to take a kind of pleasure in this humiliation because, but only inasmuch as, we care to make ourselves genuinely good; and we do so on the grounds that ‘whatever diminishes the hindrances to an activity is a furthering of the activity itself’ (5:79). We take an interested pleasure in this, through a determinate practical commitment to a conception of the good. Kant needs to avoid all of this in his account of our appreciation of natural sublimity. He must accordingly avoid any suggestion that we enjoy natural sublimity for any contribution it might make to the formation of good character. So he presents this enjoyment as indirect and negative pleasure.

But this seems stipulative, a mere form of words designed to block any implication of an interested liking. Kant wants to avoid the Burkean implications of a ‘merely negative pleasure’: a liking that is simply to be understood as a release from stress or pain. Intuitively, the richness of our experiences of natural sublimity – that we linger, and are held rapt – requires that we are actively pulled towards something. Otherwise we just enjoy it for the thrill. Kant wants to suggest that our interest in morality accounts for the richness, and direction, of our enjoyment of natural sublimity; but he also wants to keep any determinate moral commitments running in the background, making the aesthetic judgement possible, but not taking part in it as such.

How does Kant presume to pull this off? If there is an answer, it lies in understanding how admiration is like respect in having the expression of rational agency as its proper object. But this very point strains its anointed role as the feeling of natural sublimity. Indeed, there are two reasons why admiration should seem a poor candidate for the feeling for natural sublimity. First, in the context where Kant explains what admiration is, he takes its proper object to be skills and other expressions of rational agency. What does it then mean to speak of admiring a swelling surf and so on? Second, admiration does not seem to have the characteristic bivalence that Kant’s account of natural sublimity requires. What exactly is the repelling side of my admiration for Simone Biles’s gymnastic skill? Since I do not care to be a gymnast myself, we can hardly chalk it up to envy. To answer these questions, it will help to consider how Kant’s contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, distinguished admiration (Bewunderung) from astonishment (Verwunderung), and developed an account of the former as a proper feeling of the sublime. As we will see, Kant endorses Mendelssohn’s view that admiration, not astonishment, should be admitted as a proper feeling for the sublime. But he cannot endorse Mendelssohn’s resulting account – and seeing why will bring into sharper relief the philosophical pressures giving shape to Kant’s own account of the sublime.

4.3 Lessons from Mendelssohn

Why does Kant suggest that admiration is the feeling paradigmatically involved in our appreciation of natural sublimity? The answer, at least in part, lies in Kant’s endorsement of a critical move that Moses Mendelssohn makes against the idea that the proper feeling of the sublime could be anything like astonishment, terror, or pity. Reference BeiserBeiser (2009:208, 219) traces the source of this move to a series of letters that Mendelssohn wrote to G. E. Lessing, contesting that admiration (not pity) is the proper emotion of tragedy – a point that Mendelssohn eventually extends to the sublime more generally in the 1761 Philosophical Writings, where he has Abbé Dubos and Edmund Burke in his sights as well.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ There Mendelssohn takes aim against theories that understand our enjoyment of the sublime as a kind of thrill, an exercise that relieves boredom, or a respite from strain. For all such theories trace our enjoyment of sublimity to a weakness or incapacity of mind; but sublimity must arouse positive powers ‘of knowing and desiring’ in a way that stands to elevate or perfect them.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Mendelssohn eventually names admiration (Bewunderung) as the feeling that fits the bill,Footnote ¹⁰² and says that the paradigmatic object of admiration is not any bodily or physical perfection, but rather ‘perfections of spirit … and generally all great qualities of a spirit that take us by surprise and sweep up our soul with them, elevating it, as it were, above itself’ (Reference Mendelssohn1997:198 [Reference Mendelssohn1929: I.461]).

In this context, Mendelssohn distinguishes admiration (Bewunderung) from astonishment (Verwunderung): both have a sense of shock at what is unexpected, or stands out from the normal run of things; but admiration has an evaluative component – its object is something exceptionally and ‘unexpectedly good’ (Reference Mendelssohn1997:198n [Reference Mendelssohn1929:I.461n]). Mendelssohn thus distinguishes astonishment and admiration as genus and species, which yields an account of admiration’s bivalence. The negative aspect of admiration can be attributed to the ‘pain’ of incomprehension that belongs to it as a species of astonishment; the positive aspect stems from the appreciation of the extraordinary thing as good. Simone Biles’s skill assaults my sense of what is possible in the order of things – this is the disagreeable aspect – but what I admire is a cultivated human excellence that itself stretches my view of the possibilities of human action – and that is agreeable. Admiration is thus shown to be suitably bivalent, and in such a way that indicates how it might be informed by practical reason, but without directly engaging it: it is, once again, a contemplative, not an exhortative, appreciation of her skill.

In many respects, Kant follows suit. In his Anthropology, he explains astonishment (Verwunderung)Footnote ¹⁰³ as a ‘confusion’ occasioned by something unexpected, something that ‘at first impedes the natural play of thought’ – which makes it partly unpleasant, except that the surprise ‘later … promotes the influx of thought to the unexpected representation all the more and thus becomes an agreeable excitement of feeling’ (Anth 7:261). Thus, astonishment appears to have a mixed nature, which prima facie might qualify it as a feeling of the sublime. The painful aspect of astonishment stems from an assault on our cognitive capacities – we encounter something so surprising that we cannot quite fit it into our sense of the normal order of things – and the pleasurable aspect stems from the stimulation this puzzlement gives to those same cognitive capacities.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ And while Kant does seem to allow that ‘an astonishment bordering on terror’ can help involve a person’s imagination in a ‘sublime’ landscape (CJ 5:269), he otherwise suggests that the overall feeling for this sublimity must be some kind of admiration if one is to be compelled in any sustained way (CJ 5:272). Thus, he rejects pure astonishment as a feeling of the sublime, inasmuch as the incomprehension can be a deterrent to ‘feeling our own greatness and power’; and again suggests that admiration better fits the bill of sublime feeling, as a kind of ‘judgment in which we do not grow weary of being astonished’ (Anth 7:243; see also CJ 5:365) – we do not grow weary, presumably, because it offers some positive satisfaction of our rational capacity.

Yet while Kant accepts the broad outlines of Mendelssohn’s distinction between admiration and astonishment, and while he endorses Mendelssohn’s critical point against theorists such as Dubos and Burke, he cannot endorse Mendelssohn’s positive account of admiration as the feeling of the sublime. To see why, we will need to take a closer look at the distinct ways in which Mendelssohn and Kant draw from Stoic sources in their respective theories of the sublime, which is our topic for the next section.

5.1 Apathy and Enthusiasm

In §3.3.2, we identified a turning point in Kant’s account of the dynamical sublime: the sensible presentation of nature’s might is fearful, since it suggests a power that could obliterate one’s existence and any measure of wellbeing; and yet we stand to enjoy it inasmuch as we recognise some other standard of value, and thus that something in us is unthreatened by such power (5:263; quoted in §3.3.2). Here Kant invokes a familiar Stoic idea of facing one’s material circumstances with calm equanimity, imbued with a standing readiness to regard worldly goods – and even health and life itself – as ‘small’ or ‘trivial’ (klein) when their attainment or preservation comes into contest with what morality requires (CJ 5:262). It is worth pointing out that the same characteristically Stoic idea is invoked by Longinus in a prominent place in his essay on the sublime – though not, as we will see, with any thoroughgoing commitment to Stoicism.

Longinus’s treatise on the sublime is pragmatic: it is largely concerned with how literary technique can arouse sublimity of mind, and allow us to ‘develop our natures to some degree of grandeur’ (On the Sublime 1.1 [1995:160–1]). He points to five main ‘sources’ of the sublime – productive sources (πηγαί, literally ‘springs’), not sources in the sense of the governing principles of a theory or system (ἀρχαί). Right before he does so, he invokes, as a piece of common wisdom, the characteristically Stoic idea at issue:

Longinus’s local point is that a writer of truly ‘sublime’ poetry and prose eschews the dazzling literary moves that she might perfectly well know how to execute; and this is something like the sage who slights the wealth and power that may be in his power to claim from a principled concern to cultivate what is truly good. Virtue is indeed the sole good for the Stoic.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ So, this at first looks like a mere analogy, with limited implications for Longinus’s substantive view. However, he immediately thereafter claims that sublime writing should be universally uplifting, pleasing ‘all people at all times’ (7.4 [180–1]), implying that such writing should draw us towards what is objectively good – like the Stoic’s idea of virtue. Longinus next turns to the ‘first and most powerful’ source of the sublime, which he names as ‘the power to form grand conceptions’ (8.1 [180–1]). Sublimity comes chiefly from the capacity to have thoughts of the right sort, about suitably great things. But it also, Longinus contends, comes from ‘violent and enthusiastic emotion [τὸ σφοδρὸν καὶ ἐνθουσιαστικὸν πάθος]’ (8.1 [180–1]). These are the two natural or congenital sources of the sublime, which Longinus distinguishes from the remaining three that lie in technical aspects of writing.

Kant rejects the Longinian idea of ‘violent and enthusiastic emotion’ as a proper source of the sublime in the third Critique.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ To be precise, Kant does not deny that the spirit can soar through the power of emotion: he calls this ‘enthusiasm [Enthusiasmus]’, which he defines as ‘the idea of the good with affect’ (CJ 5:272; my italics). Now, it is generally true that through the force of violent emotion we might find ourselves doing things we wouldn’t ordinarily have it in ourselves to do;Footnote ¹⁰⁸ enthusiasm is the species of this phenomenon where the driving emotion is positively charged or uplifting (as anger, say, is not) and thereby arouses us to what appears to be good. So Kant acknowledges, in a backhanded way, that enthusiasm ‘seems to be sublime [scheint erhaben]’ (5:272), because through it one’s spirit seems to soar. And maybe, in some sense, it does – but not in any salutary way. For affect, Kant explains, is overwhelming feeling that momentarily suspends one’s capacity for self-conscious thought.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Affect seizes a person’s (typically tacit) grip on herself as the source of a point of view on how things are and what is worth doing. But how then can someone aroused by affect so much as entertain an idea of an action as good? The uplifted state of mind can only be a result of something’s working on you, driving you in ways that you are not (for the duration of affect) in any position to understand, or reflectively assess. Any idea of the good involved can only be vague and indistinct, and something that figures inasmuch as we are subject to external influence and manipulation – politically, pedagogically, religiously, and so on. So when Kant concludes that ‘enthusiasm is aesthetically sublime’ (5:272), he marks it off from any sublimity that could be the expression of self-determined human reason.Footnote ¹¹⁰

This point has not been well understood by commentators, presumably because Kant analyses our appreciation of natural sublimity under the heading of the ‘aesthetic judgment of reflection’, which might give the impression that he has been talking about the ‘aesthetically sublime’ all along. But (as we saw in §3.2) the aesthetic judgement of reflection is grounded in a certain satisfaction of our cognitive powers – and, in the case of the sublime, a satisfaction of reason with regard to its practical capacity. So the type of ‘uplifted’ frame of mind that Kant analyses at length in the Analytic of the Sublime cannot be one that is made possible through affect, or ‘aesthetically’. Moreover, Kant underscores his rejection of enthusiasm with his immediately ensuing endorsement of the Stoic duty of apathy: we ought to make ourselves less susceptible to such overwhelming feeling. Indeed, in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant presents apathy as a necessary condition of virtue (6:408–9): it is required to overcome the endemic human liability to misvalue.Footnote ¹¹¹ It ‘seems strange’, Kant acknowledges, but ‘even affectlessness (apatheia …) in a mind that emphatically pursues its own inalterable principles is sublime, and indeed in a far superior way, because it also has the satisfaction of pure reason on its side’ (CJ 5:272). It seems strange because sublimity is inescapably, for Kant and many others, an expression of feeling and temperament. But the source and nature of the feeling makes all the difference; and for Kant, as I’ve argued, sublimity is essentially connected to the rationally grounded feeling of respect.

The immediate target of Kant’s discussion of enthusiasm and apathy appears to be Moses Mendelssohn’s discussion of humility and human nature in his Philosophical Writings. Mendelssohn argues that moral humility is properly directed at oneself, not the whole human race: one must, in other words, regard one’s own moral cultivation in a sceptical light, while remaining firmly committed to the essential goodness of human beings – that is, our in-principle capacity to make ourselves genuinely virtuous. Should we adopt a view of human nature that invites us to suppose that genuine goodness lies beyond our ken, then moral depravity will inevitably result. Thus, Mendelssohn contends, we ‘must become acquainted with the true dignity of the human being and consider the sublimity of the human being’s ethical nature in the proper light’ (Reference Mendelssohn1997:165 [Reference Mendelssohn1929:I.420]). The proper light is with humility: looking up to this standard, and measuring oneself against it. One is not measuring oneself against anything other than one’s own essential nature as a human being, a rational animal. So far, so good. Kant, at any rate, makes much the same point about humility in the third Critique: ‘Even humility … is a sublime state of mind, that of voluntarily subjecting oneself to the pain of self-reproach in order gradually to eliminate the causes of it’ (5:264). Humility is a glad commitment to an ideal from which one should always appear to fall short. The bivalence of this, and thus its sublimity, should be familiar to us by now. But Mendelssohn develops this idea in ways that Kant cannot endorse:

While Kant agrees with Mendelssohn that we should not consider our own individual failings as the inevitable expression of endemic human weakness, he lodges a pointed critique of Mendelssohn’s view of what it is to cultivate ourselves, as rational beings, into a state of moral health. Mendelssohn suggests here that we ought to consider our every action in relation to a divine lawgiver. But on what epistemic grounds do we take this comparison to be intelligible? On what basis can we take ourselves to be so much as able to have a determinate thought of the place of any human action ‘in relation to eternity’? Though we can look up to an ideal of character, to the perfection of virtue, its goodness must in principle be fully appreciable from where we stand. For Kant, in other words, a ‘wholesome enthusiasm for virtue’ is a contradiction in terms.Footnote ¹¹²

5.2 Starry Heavens

Kant’s argument against enthusiasm is closely connected to his famous ‘starry heavens’ passage that concludes the second Critique – a passage that, as I will suggest, is best understood as a tussle with Mendelssohn over what to accept and reject from the Stoic philosophical legacy, at least as regards a modern theory of the sublime. Since the sublimity of the starry night sky was a particular speciality of the Roman Stoic, Seneca, I will begin with the evidence that gives us reason to suppose that Seneca is indeed their shared and particular point of reference.Footnote ¹¹³

Seneca compares the mind of the virtuous person – the Stoic sage – with the starry night sky several times in his letters to his younger friend, Lucilius, on the therapeutic power of Stoic philosophy. The mind of the sage and the starry heavens are alike ‘eternally serene’ (Letters 59.16 [2015:175]). What is the basis of this serenity? The sage is no longer subject to the chronic misvaluing that afflicts the ordinary human being. Here a brief note on the Stoic duty of apathy, and the ‘eupathic’ ideal of the virtuous person, is necessary. The Stoics call the basic elements of mental content ‘impressions’, which they distinguish as rational or non-rational, depending on whether they are had by rational or non-rational animals. Rational impressions are correlated with proposition-like items that the Stoics call axiōmata. Human adults have rational impressions, which means that the propositional content bound up in the impression is subject to assent or rejection. A rational impression is then a suggestion about how things are; and the propositional content may be evaluative, and thus involve ideas of what it is fitting to do. Impressions of this sort are ‘impulsive’Footnote ¹¹⁴ – a way of being struck by how things are that impels one to act. Typically, this assent is a matter of acquiescence – tacit reliance on the proposition for thought and action. Emotions (pathē) are a species of rational impulse, and thus involve opinion or judgement about good and bad. But on the Stoic view, these judgements are all false. A person who is subject to pathē – more or less everyone – regularly and comprehensively misvalues, takes what is at best to be valued for its positive planning value for what is genuinely good, and takes what is at best to be avoided for its negative planning value for what is genuinely bad.Footnote ¹¹⁵ A sage is apathēs – no longer subject to pathē – and therefore no longer makes false judgements about value. Yet there is nevertheless a felt quality of consciousness – a temperament – concomitant with correct valuing, one constituted by the eupatheiai, centrally joy. And Seneca recommends the Stoic path on this basis: ‘Thus you have reason to desire wisdom if wisdom is always accompanied by joy. But this joy has only one source: a consciousness of the virtues’ (Letters 59.16 [2015:175]) – it is the concomitant expression, in feeling, of one’s recognition of the one true good: virtue. Such joy, in one who has attained virtue, can only be an abiding temperament: it ‘has no intermission and no end’ (59.18 [2015:176]).Footnote ¹¹⁶

The heavens are a natural wonder that we cannot touch: we see them from some unfathomable remove. What follows, then, for the attainability of virtue? Seneca mentions with approval an earlier Roman philosopher who was not an avowed Stoic,Footnote ¹¹⁷ for demonstrating ‘the magnitude of true happiness’ without robbing you of ‘your hope of achieving it’ (64.5 [2005:184]):

Gazing at the heavens is a physical model of the proper orientation of a human mind to a perfection that lies at an unfathomable – but not, for that, uncrossable – remove. ‘Just as our bodily posture is erect, with its gaze towards the heavens, so our mind can stretch forth as far as it wishes, having been formed by the very nature of the world to want things on the divine scale’ (92.30 [2015:347]). We do not, apparently, require divine assistance to make the crossing: the human mind’s only route there is distinctly ‘its own’ (92.30 [2015:347]). Although Seneca does not elaborate here, his point can only be that we make this progress solely by exercising distinctively human resources of judgement to correct, and ultimately overcome, our endemic liability to misvalue.

Kant, we should now be able to see, endorses much of this. And with Seneca, he recognises that virtue can only be acquired from a default starting point of error, faultiness, or sin: ‘All of us have been taken over already, and to learn virtue is to unlearn one’s faults’ (Letters 50.7 [2015:146]). The crucial difference is that, for Kant, virtue cannot be conceived as a kind of security against the endemic human tendency to misvalue. Indeed, his main complaint against the Stoic tradition is chiefly the assumption that the sage has transcended human nature (CPrR 5:127 n). But Seneca, at least, is somewhat ambivalent on this very point. For he says in Consolation to Helvia 8.5 that ‘there is always the same distance between all things divine and all things human’ (Reference SenecaSeneca 2014:56) – perhaps suggesting that no matter how wise any human being may be, she is for that no closer to godhood. Yet in Constantia 15.2, Seneca’s remark on the sage invites Kant’s complaint: ‘his virtue locates him in another part of the universe: he has nothing in common with you’ (Reference SenecaSeneca 2014:164) – he is out there in some ‘beyond’, with the gods. Incidentally, Vogt reports that the early Stoics, at least, took some of the gods to be planets (2008:13) – which, if true,Footnote ¹¹⁹ might cast Seneca’s ‘starry heavens’ passages in a new light. To look out at the starry night sky is, then, quite literally to behold perfectly rational beings. Kant may have had this in mind when he wrote, in the margin of his own published copy of his 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime: ‘We can see other worlds in the distance, but gravity forces us to remain on the earth; we can see other perfections in spirits above us, but our nature forces us to remain human beings’ (20:153).Footnote ¹²⁰ It’s an elegant riposte to the Senecan trope of the starry heavens.

That said, Seneca’s striking way of holding, in one and the same breath, the loftiness of the heavens alongside the loftiness of the sage left its mark on both Mendelssohn and Kant.Footnote ¹²¹ The starry night sky figures prominently in Mendelssohn’s rejoinder to the Burkean theorist who challenges him to show how the sublime can be accommodated within the perfectionist aesthetics of the German rationalist tradition: if natural sublimity is a matter of disorienting vastness and terrifying power, why be pleased by it?Footnote ¹²² In making his reply, Mendelssohn wants to hold on to the bivalence of our appreciation of sublimity: the sentiment involved has to be ‘mixed’ – it must gratify and overwhelm us at the same time, leaving us ‘dizzy’ and in some way unsettled. He begins with a relatively familiar list that spans both magnitudes of nature and spirit: ‘[t]he great world of the sea, a far-reaching plain, the innumerable legions of stars, the eternity of time, every height and depth that exhausts us, a great genius, great virtues that we admire but cannot attain: who can look upon these things without trembling?’ (Reference Mendelssohn1997:144 [Reference Mendelssohn1929:I.398]). To respond to the Burkean theorist, he edits the list, removing undifferentiated, monotonous magnitudes, since with these ‘discontent gains the upper hand’: they are tedious, and even repulsive, because they offer no positive direction to thought. That leaves him with the starry night sky paired with greatnesses of spirit:

Mendelssohn presents these remaining items on his list as differentiated, or articulated: the cosmos figures not as a random scatter of stars, but as the product of rational, and divine, creation. Our discontent in regarding the starry heavens, or considering the magnitude of genius or virtue, is a measure of our inchoate recognition of their greatness as rationally ordered perfections, paired with an awareness of our own ‘weakness’, or inability ever to replace that inchoate recognition with anything approaching full comprehension. Hence Mendelssohn’s striking conclusion: although the discontent is grounded in our weakness, we remain compelled presumably because we recognise that the exalted rationality of the object, its ordered perfection, is a standard or law for us. ‘No sense of tedium or revulsion, no discontent with this or that side of the object intermingles with our sentiment here, and we would be happy if our entire life could be an uninterrupted attempt to grasp the divine perfection’ (Reference Mendelssohn1997:145 [Reference Mendelssohn1929:I.398–9]).Footnote ¹²³ Does Mendelssohn manage, with this, to retain the bivalence proper to judgements of the sublime? The negative side of the experience is absorbed into the whole, as a tempered humility over our inability to comprehend fully the perfection that we are drawn to peer at, and admire.

Kant is closer to Mendelssohn in his famous ‘starry heavens’ passage that concludes the Critique of Practical Reason than he ever is in the Analytic of the Sublime two years later. In the famous passage, the starry heavens figure as an immeasurably structured system – not as a sheer vastness, or a disordered spray of stars.Footnote ¹²⁴ But the passage also underscores aspects of Kant’s account of the sublime that partly draw from Mendelssohn’s insights and remain fully accommodated within the Analytic of the Sublime as well: above all, the idea that our enjoyment of natural sublime must involve a positive satisfaction of our rational capacity. For this is the basis on which Kant, like Mendelssohn before him, explains true sublimity not as a thrill that ultimately exhausts us, but as an enjoyment that draws from the satisfaction of reason and thereby stands to gather strength the more that it is sustained. However, whereas Mendelssohn takes this satisfaction to consist in some indistinct grasp of a rational order that is given to behold, and to be driven by admiration of the perfection of divine agency, Kant takes this satisfaction to lie in the arousal of practical reason, and to be driven by a commitment to one’s own agency.

The starry night sky and the moral law within are not simply juxtaposed to one another, as models for looking up to something on high, or exalted, that share a basic shape. Rather, the recognition of one’s real insignificance as an animal being in the order of cosmos moves one to the expression of a certain moral confidence, through a commitment to one’s supersensible personality:

Thus, for Kant a person’s enjoyment of the sublime turns upon her governing self-conception. Although considering my nothingness in relation to the vastness of the cosmos is unsettling, there must be something in me that remains untroubled by it, that accepts this calmly, if I am to enjoy a feeling of the sublime. The enjoyment requires a background commitment to make myself fit for my own essential rationality, i.e. to ‘the purposive determination of my existence’ as a person through the moral law.Footnote ¹²⁶

For Mendelssohn, the immeasurable perfection of divine creation, made manifest in the starry night sky, is paradigmatically sublime. One looks out and loses oneself, admiring the great goodness of divine creation. There is no sense in which one is implicitly admiring oneself, or even the highest possibility of human agency as such. Thus, whatever Mendelssohn might say, his invocations of the sublimity of human genius and virtue can only be, by his own lights, derivatives of this first and more paradigmatic case. But Kant cannot follow Mendelssohn on this path. He is blocked both by the epistemic principles of his critical philosophy, and by its metaphysics of value. Since Kant takes it that the divine intellect is incomprehensible to us, nothing we might say about the rational order of divine creation can be anything but a reflection of our finite cognitive power. For Kant, Mendelssohn’s approach flirts with enthusiasm of another, more pernicious, sort: Schwärmerei, the presumption to have insight into what lies outside of the bounds of possible experience. Kant follows his ‘starry heavens’ passage with the caveat that while sublime feeling may appropriately inspire inquiry, it should never replace it (CPrR 5:162). Mendelssohn’s aesthetic rationalism appeals to our (putative) power to appreciate the perfection of the cosmic order ‘indistinctly’, through feeling alone; Kant retorts that this may incite us to seek to understand what is not there to be understood. So he ends with the caveat that our awestruck admiration for the starry firmament, ‘the noblest spectacle that can ever be present to the human senses’, may well end ‘in astrology’ – if we presume that this noble spectacle expresses an interest in human affairs, and means to send us messages; and that even our respect for virtue, ‘the noblest property of human nature’, may well end ‘in enthusiasm [Schwärmerei]’ – if we presume to mingle in things divine, or to think we receive impressions of the effects of divine grace on our souls (CPrR 5:162).Footnote ¹²⁷

It follows from Kant’s dualism of nature and freedom that there is no value in the world independently of reason, and nature is indifferent to us. Of course, the sublimity of ashes to ashes, dust to dust rests on this thought – and Kant makes apt use of it in the ‘starry heavens’ passage. Recognising our vanishing nothingness, as animal beings, we are pushed to consider our place in another order, the supersensible domain of freedom, the kingdom of ends. But this is not a consolation for our loss; it is not a promise of happiness. It points us towards every difficulty of the rational animal.

By contrast, some of the most powerful therapeutic arguments of Stoicism take the form of a consolation: this may seem bad – illness, exile, poverty, torture – but it isn’t really. It was some such consolation that Seneca offered his mother from his exile in Corsica, when he wrote about his entranced study of the order and movements of the stars at night (‘so long as my eyes are not directed away from that spectacle, which they can never look on enough … what difference does it make to me what ground I tread?’).Footnote ¹²⁸ This is meant to contrast the self-seeking and calculating exercise of reason that is so common in human affairs – and particularly in the cut-throat political circles of Rome. The petty striving of normal human affairs involves taking things to be good that are not in fact good, and becoming mad with frustration in one’s failure to attain these spurious goods. So he has turned away from those small-minded agitations of thought, and loses himself in rationality on another order: one that embraces all there is. And this is good, because the tranquillity it affords is the basis of true happiness. However, such consolations are not available within Kantian thought.