Kant

The universe that Emerson & Co. and a lot of others seem to imagine themselves reeks of Kant, whom I haven't read in years. So I glanced at Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful. But this doesn't seem to be the best sampling of Kant's work. Critique of Pure Reason does, of course, and anything that goes so far into epistemology must have ramifications for aesthetics and literature, but that's a chunk that I suspect I won't get to reread it this year. So I've started into a section of the Critique of Pure Judgment from Adams, Hazard. Ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. Revised. NYC: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. That's been just right. Here are a couple slices, with comments.

"Taste is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction is called beautiful" (378).

In coming to this conclusion, Kant distinguishes beauty from good by saying beauty is intuitable or sensible, whereas good is intellectual or analytical -- so here's a basis for subjective intuition as the base of aesthetic judgment. But he distinguishes that from more relativistic explanations such as have become popular later:

"That which gratifies a man is called pleasant; that which merely pleases is beautiful; that which is esteemed or approved by him, i.e. that to which he accords an objective worth, is good" Pleasantness concerns irrational animals also, but beaut only concerns men, i.e. animal, but still rational beings -- nto merely qua rational (e.g. spirits) , but qua animal also -- and the good concerns every rational being in general. This is a proposition which can only be completely established and explained in the sequel. We may say that, of all these three kinds of satisfaction, that of taste in the beautiful is alone a disniterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, either of sense or of reason here forces our assent" (377).

So pleasure must be felt directly by the subject for the subject's own sake; the subject must receive attain or confront something that's pleasant. The good may be rationally observed and enjoyed in its way without being subjectively felt at all. But Beauty must be felt and may be independent of any subjective or personal self-interest. So while the artist's judgment is subjective, it remains judgment of something universal -- again a foundation of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.

This also relates to the judgment being subjective in the sense that it is made by the perceiving subject, not the perceived object in itself. Kant allows for considerable interaction and complexity in such relationships. That is, intellect uses aesthetic judgments, and multiple aspects of judging may be used in a single judgment:

"Given representations in a judgment can be empirical (consequently, aesthetical); but the judgment which is formed by means of them is logical, provided they are referred in the judgment to the object. Conversely, if the given representations are rational, but are referred in a judgment simply to the subject (to its feeling), the judgment is so far always aesthetical" (376).

Thus, we can get Kant's conclusion, in which beauty constitutes the intuitive, aesthetic, subjective, personal judgment that an object or condition is beautiful, that is, pleasing in a universal way, not just to oneself.

He goes on to state that "The beautiful is that which pleases universally without requiring a concept" (380). Although Kant himself qualifies this quite sharply later on, one can see the relation to Rousseauvian ideas in the importance given to untrained intuition and native insight.

"To seek for a principle of taste which shall furnish, by means of definite concepts, a universal criterion of the beautiful is fruitless trouble, because what is sought is impossible and self-contradictory" (384).

That is, you can't do beauty by the numbers or by category; it has to be specifically instantiated with reference to context and surroundings. Yet on the other hand it involves universal benefit and universal purposiveness. It's worth comparing this and Kant's description of the sublime with Emerson's passage about the transparent eyeball early in Nature, and also with the nature of Whitman's 1st person narrator who is nominally "I" but palpably everyone and all the universe as well and at the same time.

To my knowledge, Kant supplies the most precise and explicit articulation of a theory of personal direct sensation of something like the infinite, the universe, or spirit. Emerson's Nature -- which requires an individual, personal relationship to the universal -- seems to conflate (rightly or wrongly) the good and the beautiful, whereas Kant distinguishes them. In many ways, though, the logical distinctions are impressively similar.

Kant's interpenitration of universal and instantiation constitutes the center of Kant's doctrines of transcendance. It was interesting to nose into A Critique of Pure Reason after so many years and shortly after reading Emerson to see the word transcendental or some form thereof wedged into nearly every chapter title. I doubt Emerson's use of the term a generation afterward could hardly be coincidental. That moment with the transparent eyeball reads like a classic moment of beauty or even of the sublime. This fractal harmonies described by these men seems to be the basis of Romantic and Transcendental aesthetics in general.

The Romantic writer typically assumes that his or her innermost feelings are those of the readers. Therefore the most universal, most sublime material comes from the expulsion of the artist's innermost angst or desire. For the Romantics, the person who so dips into his or her deepest soul, most unmediated passions is the person who most grasps the Truth, not only of his or her innermost being, but of the principle of movement of the universe.

One might go back to Whitman for the example, and not just Whitman's expansiveness, but the particular and peculiar relation of the speaking subject to the reader and to the text. Whitman most directly assumes that he may speak directly for the reader without the reader's permission and with complete assumption of confidence. We have in this way an assumption of similarity of perceptive mechanisms in all readers, similar possession of a mutual reality, subjective appreciation of the tick-tock movements of the universe. This would seem to operate Kant -> Schiller -> Coleridge and Wordsworth -> Emerson -> Whitman -- with various other branches, mostly across Europe.

Kant's sublime only reinforces this impression:

"The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having definite boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as it it or by occasion of it boundlessness represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought" (386).

The sublime is still something to be experienced directly, as per Emerson or theologial Karl Barth. Talking of the absolute grandeur of the sublime, Kant insists that "It is not a pure concept of understanding that is thus signified; still less is it an intuition of sense; and just as little is it a concept of reason, because it brings with it no principleof cognition. It must therefore be a concept of judgement or derived from one, and a subjective purposiveness of the representation in referene tothe judgement must lie at its basis" (387).

So it is subjectively perceived. It's not, however, sensed per se, because it has no identifiable limits, no specific extension. It's greatness, however many times he says absolute, seems to have some kind of relativism. He will eventually get to saying that it involves the relation between things. The first clue seems to be the relativism of said greatness -- it appears to be not a size (how could it be?) but a hierarchy and the characteristic of being at the perceptible outer reach of a system of hierarchies:

"In a judgment by which anything is designated simply as great, it is not merely meant that the object has a magnitude, but hat this magnitude is superior to that of many other objects of the same kind, without, owever, any exact determination of this superiority" (388).

The sublime is the greater thing which contains and subsumes the lesser -- the greater plan of God, the syntax of the sentence, the syntagma of the larger work. Kant makes an interesting further gesture towards the individual perception, concluding this section so:

" . . . the sublime is that, the mere ability to think which sews a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense (387).

In passing, I should note that this coincides very nearly to Jacques Derrida's conception of God as expressed in The Gift of Death (page 109, if I recall).

A couple of paragraphs of Kant seem worth typing out:

"The feeling of the sublime is therefore a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason. There is at the same time a pleasure thus excited, arising from the correspondence with rational ideas of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest facultyfo sense, insofar as it is a law fo us to strive afte rthese ideas. In fact it is for us a law (of reason) and belongs to our destination to estimate as small, in comparison with ideas of reason, everthing which nature, regarded as an object of sense, contains that is great for us; and that which arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible destination agrees with that law" (389).

"Sublimity . . . does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious that we are superior to nature within, and therefore also to nature witout us (so far as it influences us). Everything that excites this feeling in us, e.g. the mightof nature which calls forth our forces, is called them (although improperly) sublime. Only by supposing this idea in ourselves and in reference to it are we capable of attaining to the idea of the sublimity of that Being which produces respect in us, not merely by the might that it displayes in nature, but rather by means of the faculty which resides in ous of judging it fearlessly and of regarding our destination as sublime in respect of it" (391).

"Spirit, in an aesthetical sense, is the name given to the animating principle of the mind' (391).

There at the end we have the pure Romanticism:

"In a word, the aesthetical idea is a representation of the imagination associated with a given concept, which is bound up with such a multiplicity of partial representaitons in its free employment that for it no expression marking a definite can be found; and such a representaiton, therefore, adds to a concept much ineffable thought, the feeling of which quickens the cognitive faculties, and with langauge, which is the mere letter, minds up spirit also" (392).

And and this point, one feels that the individual has slipped quite solidly into aesthetics and spirit, and may use his own personal judgment as an indicator without reference to prior judgment, social judgment, religion or government.

The bizarre thing is that this straightlaced man who seems to have never confronted anyone has been instrumental in the great revolutions, and perhaps more than anyone who carried a gun or sword. I don't know that I find a "pen is mightier" here, but at least a "to thine own self be true."