A Metaphysical Analysis of the Kantian Sublime

I. Introduction
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement takes up an ambitious end; the reconciliation and unification of both the method and object of philosophical inquiry. His final critique synthesizes the maxims of his critical system, and through an examination of our sensible relation to the world, Kant revitalizes his transcendental objective. Though a minor element within his narrative on our faculties of judgement, the sublime reconceptualizes the purposive universe which fascinated his predecessors. Originating in the conflagration of competing Empiricist and Rationalist theories, the historical precedent for his thinking ought not be ignored; drawing from the Leibnizian concept of an infinite God, he rejects our connection to an absolute reality through the phenomena-noumena schema, a maneuver which translates impactfully into his Aesthetic system.

In order to forge a better understanding of Kant’s overarching system, and their implications for our apperceptions of the sublime, I intend to evidence the influence of Rationalist ethics through the corpus of Leibniz and his successors, Wolff and Baumgarten. The Leibnizian formulation of the Best of All Possible Worlds and God’s teleological imperative inspired the theories of his followers, whose elucidation of a natural perfection and aesthetic sensibilities and their axiomatized systems serve as the point of departure for Kant’s more immanent moral approach. As such, following an explication of the Rationalist presumption of noumenal knowledge, I will trace Kant’s postulations on Aesthetical judgement in the Third Critique back through the critical system of ethics in his Second, to the metaphysical formulations of a Transcendent Idealism in the First. Ultimately, my aim is to unpack the Kantian relationship between a natural order of the universe, our prerogative to synthesize meaning from the cognitive experience thereof, and the ineffable rules which emerge from our brushes with the sublime.

II. Rationalist Origins
Leibnizian doctrine presents as a pregnant field of inquiry to enrich an understanding of Kant’s Aesthetic theory; the former’s infinite and rational God inspires the latter’s argument for the formative power of a priori truths. The essential premise of Discourse on Metaphysics, after all, is an untotalized God, whose eternal will guides the formation of the universe to the Best of All Possible Worlds (BPW) through the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). In other words, Leibniz ascents to the causal order of the natural world, rationalizing its telos as the “final cause” of a benevolent creator. His metaphysics thus play a crucial role in his ethics; like Spinoza, Leibniz ascertains that the proper engagements of our freedom will reconcile our cognition with the sovereign reason of God. As he concludes the Discourse, “Only minds are made in his image… for only they can serve him freely, and act in imitation of the divine nature, knowing what they are doing. A single mind is worth a whole world, since it not only expresses the world, but also knows it, and governs itself there after the fashion of God”(36). Thus, he supports fully the notion of absolute perfection, and its attainability intrinsic to the cognitive relationship we share with the divine actor. The implications of our ascension to that However, Leibniz’s metaphysical-ethical paradigm, and its emphasis on virtuosity through reason alone, disregard our sensible relationship with the cosmos as an esoteric resource for the cultivation of wisdom.

The Rationalist method impels Leibniz to disregard our sensible judgements as too opaque for any moralistic reflection, in favor of the crystalline potency innate in logical argument. While the sum of the universe is merely an expression of God’s will, and all aspects of that expression are holistically connected and equivalently demonstrative of the BPW, our ‘bodily’ reactions thereof insubstantially lay bare the nature of that overarching plan. His position is derivative of a belief that our sensible understandings may be clear, but they are not distinct. As Leibniz argues, “our confused feelings result from a downright infinite jumble of perceptions… For if several perceptions don’t fit together so as to make one, and no one of them stands out above the rest, and the impressions they make are all just about equally strong and equally capable of catching the soul’s attention, it can perceive them only confusedly”(33). It follows that he considers a logical investigation into the nature of these perceptions the only legitimate means for deducing the essential quality of its cause. His post as the inventor of calculus and overarching polymath evidence such commitments to logical deduction; from the beginning of his career, Leibniz yearned to construct a language for representing the “absolute character” of concepts. Dubbed the Characteristica Universalis, his intention was to catalog an “alphabet of human thought” which mirrors natural laws and purges our thought of any ambiguity. His wholly Rationalistic method implicates an aesthetic sense which struggles to reconcile the intuitive, sensible reaction with the logical imperative fundamental to human experience.

This much is demonstrated by Leibniz’ sporadic writings on the essence of artistic impressions, confounded with that je ne sais quoi of our ineffable relationship with the creative work. Judgement, a cognitive mode which Kant will later establish as the consummate intuitive faculty of conscious minds, is dismissed in the Rationalist oeuvre as merely a confused conception of the ultimate order of things. Leibniz justifies his argument with On The Ultimate Origin of Things along these lines: “we rashly make judgments about the immense and the eternal . . .Look at a picture, then cover it up except for one small part. That part will look like a jumble of colours, showing no skill and giving no delight… [but when you conceive] the whole surface from a suitable distance, you… realize what looked like accidental splotches on the canvas had been made with great skill by the artist”(3). And so, while he concedes that the intuitive relation between a creative mind and the sensible world, as a finite and mercurial representation, Leibniz concludes that these cognitions are inferior aspects of an absolute cognition which could only be realized by an apprehension of the natural laws which dictate them. His aspiration to realize an infinite perfection is precisely the aesthetic sense which develops in his successors’ works.

While the Rationalist aesthetic sense admits a sensible realization of God’s unending beauty, it fails to realize our inherent disconnect from the absolute truths from which that beauty springs. In other words, their sublimation of the aesthetic deny its intelligibility. It was only with Baumgarten’s reprioritization of the ‘lower faculties of cognition’ and our sensuous imperative which could vitalize a connection between Kant’s phenomenal limitations on judgement and the perfect, noumenal realm which perpetually reveals itself to us.

III. Kantian Metaphysics and Morality
In order to adumbrate the correlation between Leibniz’ cosmological aesthetic and Kant’s considerations of sublimity, we must begin with a summary of his metaphysical arrangement. Fundamentally, the position he forges in Critique of Pure Reason serves as the metaphysical groundwork for the moralistic and aesthetical arguments of his later work. Following Humes’ denunciation of inductive reasoning, Kant realizes that the conscious mind cannot deduce a priori truths through reason alone. Instead, our cognitive faculty naturally orders our experience according to those a priori laws, and we are left to interpret their essence from those abstract relationships. As such he establishes the noumenal-phenomenal distinction, wherein our apprehensions of the ideal realm are finite, subjective, and necessarily inadequate. Kant argues that we only become cognizant of the noumenal realm through the lens of our conscious life, as entailed by the twelve categories which delimit our experience. The consideration of these underlying structures in Critique of Pure Reason lead him to formalize a Transcendental Idealist conception, wherein the natural order of experience is derivative of our cognitive capacities: “this unity of consciousness would be impossible if in the cognition of the manifold the mind could not become conscious of the identity of the function by means of which this manifold is synthetically combined into one cognition”(A108). In other words, Kant holds that the natural laws, the moral inclinations, the aesthetic conclusions which are assented to in conscious life are unconditionally products of mental proclivities. The construction of the summum bonum in his second critique and the teleological crucifix of his third are thus predicated upon our inherent drive to confirm the underlying structures of lived experience, and in turn to rationalize our reason for being. Thus it follows that the metaphysics established in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason stands as a necessary building block for his aesthetic philosophy: nonetheless, the two arguments remain disjoint without a middle term.

The insistence in Kant’s aesthetical writings that our judgements of the sensible realm correlate to an innate moral sensibility compels an overview of the Critique of Practical Reason. To understand his ethical system, wholly encapsulated by the Categorical Imperative, requires an account of his conception of freedom. Kant argues that the human experience, arbitrated by the rules of our conscious capacity, entails a will existing outside of the constraints of strict causality. Following a realization of the incongruence of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and empirical data, and the implicatively transcendent element of all a priori truths, Kant supposes that the laws which define conscious action are themselves autonomously established, pursuant of the noumenal essence of the individual. As opposed to the traditional freedom of Rationalist thought, wherein the action and force of the individual is legislated by a higher order, and thus only free in their cognizance of the fate which has been prescribed to them, he argues that our freedom must be self-caused, derivative only from the reason which is implicit to its conscious ideal. Thus our autonomous telos, residing noumenally and unfettered by the chains of external causation, defines itself and its course in the world. It follows that Kant rejects any mundane origin of ethical commitments.

The inherent divide between conscious life and the absolute truths which dictate one’s being in the world necessitates a morality compelled by pragmatic interpretation of the Good to which she ascents. In essence, Critique of Practical Reason attempts to reconcile our finite perspective with the objective worldly harmony by imploring a transcendence of our innate animalistic predilections, in favor of duty to the manifest laws which have revealed themselves through reason. He incarnates this ethical formula within the Categorical Imperative, which he summarizes as to “act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law”(§5, 30). Hence, though perfection is inconceivable, and thus unattainable, for the finite human progeny, to embody the Good which is rationally evident to the individual will justify their action as morally sound. In sum, Kant supposes that acquiescence to the rules of reason, to the attitude that is evidently virtuous, may deliver us to the Summum Bonum, the Kingdom of God, a world where all action is predicated by a duty to the final cause which compels it. Along these lines, Kant rejects the relativist account of the Good as Eudaemonia, as equivalent to pleasure, and instead promotes a deontological duty as definitive of practical reason. These considerations deliver him from the moral skepticism which plague the Empirical school, while avoiding the dogmatism of the Rationalists; as a practical tool for cogitating our moral exigency, the Categorical Imperative obliges a reconciliation of perspective with objective truth. It seems apparent that these philosophical maneuverings are an integral step for the sensible, aesthetic judgements of a critical idealist.

IV. The Kantian Sublime: Unveiling the Cosmic Sublime
The conclusive tome of Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental directive, the Critique of Judgement, reconceptualizes his cognitive moralism within the overarching faculty of Urteilskraft. Whereas the prior two critiques focused on the powers of reason, as the logical guide to proper thinking and the definitive limits of lived experience, judgement is then introduced as the consummate power of rule-making, and thus subsumes both reason and our sensibilities under one system. Kant defines judgement as “the capacity to subsume under rules, that is, to distinguish whether something falls under a given rule”(127) in Critique of Pure Reason, but broadens its scope in Critique of Judgement to “thinking the particular under the universal”(Introduction 5:179), and thus addressing it as a wholly self-sustained a priori principle of cognitive capacity. By cultivating judgement as independent, or somehow superior to, our faculty for reason, he allows for the construction of guiding principles to themselves exist both with and beyond mere logical rationalization. These considerations allow Kant to expand his moral system explicitly into an aesthetic sense; as he argues, our judgements of reflection allow us to understand all of nature as lawlike, and in turn to fathom that beauty as a cosmic expression of virtue. The sublime, though a minute part of Kant’s judgemental tableau, presents an aesthetical judgement which he believes may “bridge the gulf”(IX, 195) of natural laws and freedom, thus compelling our moral sensibilities. In the coming paragraphs, I will lay bare the essence of his judgements of beauty, his conception of the sublime, and the means by which the sphere of Aesthetics impacts the Categorical Imperative.

Contrasting judgements of determination with those of reflection, Kant ascertains the latter to be imperative for the construction of maxims with universal import. Whereas the determinative urteilskraft aligns with his schema within Critique of Pure Reason as “judgements of understanding”(Introduction IV, 5:179) and thus as reasoned attributions to a priori laws, the latter distinguishes itself as the synthesis of a priori laws themselves. What he deems a heautonomical principle, the reflektierende urteilskraft “also possesses an a priori principle for the possibility of nature, but one that holds only for the subject, a principle by which judgment prescribes, not to nature, but to itself, a law for its reflection on nature. This law could be called the law of the specification of nature in terms of its empirical laws... so that the division will have an order that our understanding can cognize”(Introduction V, 25:186). This language hints at further significances for our judgements of reflection, as they point towards aesthetical and teleological predilections fundamental to cognitive experience. Kant makes the case that the drive to ascertain principles of natural relationships and motivations– from geometric equivalences to cause and effect– is a universal conscious impulse that compels moral duty in all that is human. Thus, by taking up the world, either mentally or sensibly, we may align ourselves more closely to a supersensible objectivity.

Kant argues that beauty is a characteristic of objects qua objects. Through empirical investigation, the natural world is revealed to us; by experiencing the alterity, phenomenal ideas will compound to allow for a judgement of its noumenal essence. The influence of Hume thus resonates, as he chalked up the Principle of Sufficient Reason as a product of mere custom and habit. As an aesthetical reaction, conceptions of the beautiful are bound to the senses, a relationship he expounds in the Four Moments of Judgement of Taste. Despite their sensible quality, one feels beautiful objects only disinterestedly, for “we can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful... what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the respect in which I depend on the object's existence”(§§2: 46,205). Thus what resonates beautifully must carry a weight of universality, of baring beauty as primarily as color or mass. Nonetheless, these judgement fails to afford any substance to the object’s aesthetic quality, as it cannot be proven a priori. Beauty, in a Kantian sense, then disavows both Empirical and Rationalist sensible schemas, carrying a “purposiveness without purpose” which eludes noumenal definition yet transcends phenomenal subjectivity.

The sublime itself sustains much of the aesthetic paradigm established by Kant’s sense of the beautiful, but presents some stark antitheses. He defines sublimity as a feeling of pleasure derived from the triumph of reason over a force of nature. An essential similarity between the beautiful and the sublime is their sustenance of an ineffable necessity in the subject of inquiry, though the latter is of a different sort; the mathematical and the dynamical sublime are “contrapurposive” because they defy an absolute comprehension. As is the case with Mt. Everest or a majestic jungle cat, “if something arouses in us... a feeling of the sublime, then it may indeed appear… incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination, and yet we judge it all the more sublime for that”(§23, 99:245). It follows that the sheer ineffability of such a conception arouses a sense of a grandiosity in the reasons and essences which carry a perfection wholly alien to us. Despite a fear inherent to the unknown and unknowable, Kant supposes the sublime still elicits pleasure, for our mind’s capacity to apprehend the magnitude of an object, to present a real idea to itself, seemingly transcends our phenomenal post towards a universal totality. In this regard, brushes with the sublime symbolize an explicitly moral sense, perpetually harmonizing our logical schema with the a priori structures that dictate lived experience.

Sublimity, according to the Kantian account, provides a cognitive font of moral realization, of demonstrating a duty to something beyond our finite commitments. In Critique of Practical Reason, he rebukes moral conceptions which are born out of a relativistic pleasure drive, as they are the illusory product of self-love which ducks any responsibility to a supersensible moral obligation. The Critique of Judgement cements this conception, and prescribes experiences of sublimity as tokens for the realization of that duty: as Kant elucidates, “[the sublime] reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature… This keeps the humanity in our person from being degraded, even though a human being would have to succumb to that dominance of nature”(§28: 121, 262). He thus argues that our conscious response to sublimity cultivates our moral attitude, as it substantiates determinative reasons for being and compels a strengthening of our practical reason. As Dr. Melissa Merritt argues in her article The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime, his aesthetic judgements of the sublime are synthetic realizations of a fundamental human duty. Dr. Merritt expounds, “the Kantian can be distinguished as a logical sublime in the sense that it depends on the subject’s consciousness of rational principles. Moral feeling is a mode of the Kantian sublime: it is an elevated state of mind, registering as the subject’s attraction to an ideal conceived through the moral law”(46-47). Consequently, the sublime, and the whole of Kant’s critical system of aesthetic judgement, can be reinterpreted as an account of our ascendence to the Good via the Good demonstrated by our faculties of cognitive and sensual experience. While the Categorical Imperative undertakes a moral convention bound to phenomenal understanding, it endorses the pruning of a conatus which aims at an absolute noumenal perfection. In this regard, Kant’s transcendental idealism serves the same ethical end as that of his predecessor, Leibniz– albeit perpetually and parabolically.

V. Conclusions: The Revolution Against Rational Dogmatism
Whereas Leibniz, diplomat and polymath, fabricates an absolute conception of divine providence, Kant’s recognition of the inherent limits of conscious experience lead to the formulation of a much more nuanced ethical-aesthetical system. As summarized above, Kant’s Summum Bonum rests intrinsically at the heart of conscious experience, expressed in a rational interpretation of natural laws. By interpreting the essential noumenal character of the external world logically, we in turn subsume its particular nature under a universal, and may elevate our own status relationally by capitulating to that understanding. Thus, the Kantian sublime informs a rational agent cosmologically, furnishing a conception of their role in the untotalized universe and the final cause which beckons from within. Such an experience, in my mind, correlates aptly to a Leibnizian contemplation of the infinite God. While his Aesthetic arguments subdue any substantive moral value in sensible perceptions, Leibniz nonetheless supplants an unfettered admiration of God’s law as the sole source of metaphysical clarity and ethical righteousness. His Best of All Possible Worlds resonates ideally with Kant’s own Kingdom of God, and the Summum Bonum of a dutiful humanity. Only limited by a presumption of an infinitely imaginative rational judgement, Leibniz’ proposition of an all-loving society, autonomously guided by the universal harmony, laid the groundwork for the Transcendentalist tradition of the succeeding century. Transmuted by the likes of Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten, the Leibnizian commitment to a noumenal perfection surely influenced Kant’s own Christian ethic. As we maintain our posts as thinking beings, perpetually thrown into the cascade of sensible and cognitive stimuli, may we hope to take a lesson from these profound moralists, and let the resonance of sublimity sway our conduct, so we may move ever-closer to the asymptote of our supersensible vocation.