This experience, characterized by Kant as the mathematical sublime—vastness of scale, that which is great in spatial extension—and the dynamical sublime—great power, force and energy in Nature—is such that our perceptual faculties, rendered incapable of taking in the sheer immensity of Nature’s manifold, are overwhelmed, resulting in an estimation of power which de-centers the viewer into an awareness of his own trifling position in the universe—what philosopher Paul Crowther has aptly called “existential vertigo.”97 The view, in our immediate perceptual estimation of it, seems a limitless phenomenal mass, utterly unfathomable, and as such the imagination is launched into vain effort to comprehend its magnitude in such a way that leads to the question of the indeterminate (unrepresentable) idea of the infinite. Thus for Kant the sublime is not something “out there” in the world; it is, rather, “the cast of mind in appreciating it that we have to estimate as sublime.”98 This marking of the limit of the rational mind will be echoed in postmodern rehabilitations of the sublime, as for instance in Jean-François Lyotard for whom the work of art could prompt the breakdown of our conceptual system and who declared, “There are no sublime objects, but only sublime feelings.”99
In short, Kant construes the sublime as occasioned by powers that transcend the phenomenal self and prompt a mode of awe or reverence. The sublime is that which, through the suggestion of perceptually, imaginatively, or emotionally overwhelming properties, succeeds in rendering the scope (and limit) of some human capacity vivid to the senses and opens up a space for encounter with the noumenon. He points here to a break between two dimensions of reality—the phenomenal and the noumenal. The sublime, according to Kant, is in effect our way of experiencing our own limits vis-à-vis the unknown, but an unknown (God) we can relate to.
For Kant the material limit to our perceptual and rational capacity serves as a kind of analogue of total understanding; that is to say, we can never know the infinite, but we can imagine it, think it as an idea, and thus experience the consolation that something transcends the limitations of our phenomenal being—thus for Kant preserving a sense of mind’s superior ability to transcend some vast physicality or infinite power over something so challenging. In his earlier Critique of Practical Reason (1788), he sets this up:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me . . . The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature . . . The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world.100
That initial experience of the disproportion between the mind’s ordering power and an ungraspable complexity, thus, may serve us as an analogue for another situation, one in which we attempt to comprehend something beyond the scope of our understanding—when we find ourselves attempting, for instance, to grasp (to describe and to know) such ideas as God and the Infinite. For Kant, we can never grasp the whole “beyond” this world, limited as we are in the human situation of being in the world; we don’t have access to its ultimate Absoluteness. But, as with the sublime, our self-conscious awareness of perceptual and rational limitations is what allows for the reassuring intimation that something transcends finite being. As St. John of the Cross had put it: “This sublime knowledge” which “transcends what is naturally attainable . . . consists in a certain touch of the divinity produced in the soul, and thus it is God himself who is expressed and tasted there.”101 In encountering our rational and linguistic limits, we may abandon our pretentions to knowledge of God. As Denys Turner eloquently glosses the issue in The Darkness of God:
Is it not better to say, as expressive of the apophatic, simply that God is what is on the other side of anything at all we can be conscious of, whether of its presence or of its absence? . . . [W]e can, in a sense, be aware of God, even be ‘conscious’ of God; but only in that sense in which we can be conscious of the failure of our knowledge, not knowing what it is that our knowledge fails to reach.102
Of course, the sublime as aesthetic category has its own considerable tradition, a tradition not unknown to Viola. Seventeenth-century essayist and poet Joseph Addison, in an essay titled “The Pleasure of the Imagination,” published in The Spectator in 1712, described this freedom from perceptual confinement in our experiences of the sublime as that which resists the mind’s call to order:
Our imagination loves to . . . grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful . . . amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them. The mind of man naturally hates everything that looks like a restraint upon it, and is apt to fancy itself under a sort of confinement . . .103
Our ideas of the sublime, according to Addison, are rooted in sense perceptions; the greatness of the sublime, however, is not an inherent quality of nature (storms, earthquakes, disasters) or in the object of its source; rather, it is an act of reflection or mode of consciousness that surpasses the capacity of imagination to contain.
Similarly, 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, in his 1756 treatise A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, situates the quality of fear and attraction in the sublime, particularly in a psychological calculus of pleasure and pain, both inviting and fearsome, which relies on a more strongly empirical sense of bodily orientation and an experience that “pierces” us to “our inaccessible and inmost parts”:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the Sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.104
And this is not altogether unlike an understanding of the body for John of the Cross, for whom in order to acquire supreme knowledge, God must “begin by touching the low state and the extremes of the senses. And from there he must gradually bring the soul after its own manner to the other end, spiritual wisdom, which is incomprehensible to the senses.”105 For both Burke and St. John, a mode of pleasure derives from the alienating experience of danger or pain. And, in one of his few references to the Divine, Burke goes further to posit that the mind is so “struck with [God’s] power” as to “shrink into the minuteness of [its] own nature and [is], in a manner, annihilated before him.”106
Burke is in agreement with Kant (and Addison before him) that the sublime is a source of pleasure, albeit of a negative sort, and that it is an attribute not of nature but rather of the mind. Kant, however, shifts the emphasis from the realm of the physiological—in Burke’s sense of pleasure derived from self-preservation and security in the face of terror (“Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too closely”)—and onto the grander plane of the transcendental.