(Burke) ‘The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.’ However, the sublime does not describe the moment of the arrival of danger, but to the terror of the annihilation and death, the self is nevertheless able to rejoice in its survival, in having escaped what seemed to be inevitable perdition and being able to reassert its security and integrity. In fact the awaited danger can never actually arrive: to stay within the bounds of the experience of the sublime, it has to be constantly deferred, striking what might seem like a secret pact with the self that participates in the theatre of terror and darkness on the unspoken assumption that its safety is always assured. The element of control and regulation is the organising principle of the Burkean sublime.
(of Burke) This is to say, the self needs to experience great terror in order to be plucked out of the indifference of existence … and to appreciate life, but the sublime is ultimately the experience of overcoming this terror and thus celebrating one’s invincibility in the face of what seemed to be a greater power. The sublime, of which Burke presents himself as an objective and disinterested spectator, is in fact prescribed by him a priori, a move which allows him to eliminate any potential disruption to subjectivity.
While Burke focuses on the removal of danger for the sake of maintaining the self’s security, for Immanuel Kant the sublime does not necessarily need to involve a threat to our physical wellbeing. Rather than emphasise the withdrawal of danger resulting in the selfs survival, Kant points to the control that the human mind can exert over sublimity. The mind’s supremacy manifests itself in its ability to always think the infinity which imagination always fails to grasp. As Kant argues in the Critique of Judgement, pleasure resulting from the correspondence of the sublime felling to the law of reason, clashes with pain caused by the impossibility of balancing the judgement of different faculties. Insisting that ‘[t]he point of capital importance is that the mere ability even to think it as a whole indicates a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense’, he allows reason to triumph over senses, thus claiming the self’s power over the insurmountable and the unlimited.
But the attainment of the Kantian sublime depends on a sacrifice. Kant makes it clear that imagination has to collapse when facing the infinitely great fro the sake of an achievement of a higher goal – i.e. ‘the awakening of a feeling of a supersensible faculty within us.’ When it attempts to overcome ‘principally distracted feelings and desires’, the self realises its rational and autonomous dimension, something which Kant takes as a given. Premised on the sacrifice of imagination, the sublime is ultimately a state of moral consciousness. We have to remember that moral law, according to Kant, is binding on us absolutely.
