Some thoughts on Kant: Critique of Judgement

To Kant, Sense gets in the way of human understanding in so much that it tries to force people to have a relationship of familiarity with new experiences causing them to be incapable of accepting something that is genuine and/or abstract. While reading Kant’s philosophy, one must put aside their Sense, enough so that they might see the argument as a whole, for seeing only small pieces, as with the Egyptian pyramids (112), the meaning of his argument cannot easily be determined. Alternately, if we completely remove our Sense and take in the whole of The Critique without considering each section of the argument, then the details that are most artistic will also be lost. With either situation in place, the writing will fail to perform its task of inspiring mental growth.

This concept is what, according to Kant, allows people to experience the Sublime. I agree with Kant that the Sublime is not the object itself, but the subjective and psychological “state of mind produced by a certain representation with which the reflective Judgment is occupied, and not the Object” (110). Sense strongly encourages the mind to rationalize all that it sees, and can even discard the unusual for being irrational and irrelevant. The sheer awe created when the mind attempts to comprehend what it has just apprehended is what is painful because we use our Sense during the process of comprehension, creating a state of conflict within the mind.

Kant says that, since we have a difficult time processing the sensation of the Sublime, we conceal some of the truths of it (subreption) because it “finds the whole power of the imagination inadequate to its Ideas” (118) and therefore we label the Sublime as “an Object of Nature” (119). In doing this, we create for ourselves a tangible concept that can be worked through with our Sense, and neatly understood. The Sublime cannot be neatly understood because it is not the object, but the state of mind. It is the pain that the human mind undergoes when it cannot neatly understand the observed, and it stays with us and works through us, just as reading Kant’s philosophy works through our minds while we attempt to understand. When easily we understand, we loose the Sublime feeling and all that we are left with is the object, be it the mountain or a body of writing.