In his First Critique, Kant calls “determinative judgements” those in which both the particular (“these two points and the distance between them”) and the universal (“the notion that the shorter distance between two points is a straight line”) are given, the former in the form of the sensible multiplicity we experience (“this something,” “that something, etc.”), the latter in the form of an a priori idea, be it analytic (“a triangle has three angles”) or synthetic (“the sky is blue”), from which new analytic judgments may be inferred (the full set of which constitutes what we call science).
Conversely, in his Third Critique Kant seems to dream with judgements which may not only inform us about the world (partly, for we ultimately ignore how things are: we know them as they appear to us) or help us to map it conceptually (accordingly), but which may help us to reflect on it instead. For there are things given to us through our experience that do not have attached to them, or easily allow the formation of, a concept.
In this sense, Kant seems to realise that what we find agreeable in sensual terms and what proves good for us in practical terms fall under this category, as we cannot know it beforehand. Nonetheless, we identify it out of our own interest, says Kant.
Instead, beautiful things please us, but not out of utility, since they are useless. And this means that before them we are compelled to open ourselves, it would seem, to something that proves irreducible to concept.
Yet Kant sees that beauty is confined to form, and that, insofar as it is, our experience of it is both formal and, furthermore, limited: this beautiful statue, that beautiful face, etc.
Is there anything, then, that we may come across without being it possible for us to grasp it conceptually, to use it, and to enclose it within our limits? Yes, says Kant. Following inter alios Burke and Mendelssohn, he calls it the “sublime”: das Erhabene (literally “that which rises high,” cf. the Greek notion of φύσις [physis], which means “that which rises” and is thus poorly translated as “nature”). The “sublime,” adds Kant, can be of two different kinds, mathematic (the infinitely big) or dynamical (the infinitely powerful): the sky or a volcano in eruption; or it can combine both characteristics: a stormy sea.
By definition, however, the sublime (unlike the beautiful) cannot be anything produced by us, as it is what opens the door behind to that which lies beyond ourselves, that is to say, beyond our limits – to bring us back to and make ourselves acknowledge these, Schiller will later add.
For this reason, we find untenable the view that the sublime can be found today among such and such modernly-produced “hyper-objects,” as Timothy Morton calls them: from the accumulation of plutonium on the ocean’s floor to climate change. We are willing to call this a “false sublime.”
Living with it may be already inevitable, and one must certainly learn to “live with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway has it. Yet to live with it is one thing, and to flirt with it an altogether different thing: a mixture of Buddhist resignation, Neronian self-indulgency, and Lovecraftian horror before what should actually make us realise how far we have gone in unworlding the earth, which we need to in order to re-imagine it otherwise.
Note. What we have written here contrasts with today’s habitual presentation of Kant as a “correlationist” philosopher. Was Kant anti-correlationist instead? Read in light of his own concerns, Kant is simply all about freedom – and, thereby, against mechanicist causality. Things, he argues, are more than what we get to know about them. We, ourselves, are radically free in practical terms despite the limited knowledge we have of world. And there is something in the latter which we can perceive that transcends any determinism, as well. Therefore, presenting Kant as a correlationist (things are how we represent them) or as an anti-correlationist (we never get to know how things are in themselves) amounts to interpret him in light of our own problems instead of his. At the very least, one should be aware of it. This said, it is obvious that Kant is both things: a correlationist and an anti-correlationist, or, better correlationist in one sense and anti-correlationist in another sense. But there is no contradiction in this: one can say that only in the measure that we know them things become things to us, and at the same time affirm that things are something else (whatever they may be, as we cannot know it) beyond the knowledge we have of them.
One of the many nuclear tests conducted by the US in the Bikini Atoll (Marshall Islands) between 1946 and 1958. An example of “false sublime.”