6 - The Romantic Sublime and Kant’s Critical Philosophy

Summary

This chapter examines the ‘Critical sublime’ as developed by Kant in the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ in his Kritik der Urteilskraft. It interprets Kant as adumbrating three features that later become central tropes of the Romantic characterization of sublimity: the sense that its source and ultimate value lie beyond everyday experience; that it involves the subject, rather than any external object, as the immediate and direct object of consciousness; and that the paradigmatically natural phenomena and their qualities that ostensibly excite the experience are less important than the contemplative relationship one takes to them. Consideration of each in turn gives the chapter its narrative structure and divides it into three main sections, ‘Transcendence and the Phenomenal Self’, ‘The Moral Subject Within’, and ‘The “Objects” of Nature and Art’. The discussion concludes with a brief observation on the proto-Romantic sentiment that Kant expresses in his view of poetry and the arts.