The sublime

In plain terms

Some things are too large or too powerful to be taken in, and the failure to take them in is the experience.

A storm at sea, a mountain range, a number so large that no imagining reaches it. The response is not pleasure exactly - it includes something closer to alarm - and it is valued anyway, which is what makes the sublime a distinct category rather than a variety of beauty.

Kant's explanation is the ingenious part. What is overwhelmed is imagination, which cannot present the whole thing at once. What that failure reveals is that we have a capacity - reason - that can form the idea anyway. So the feeling is not really about the mountain. It is the discovery, occasioned by the mountain, that something in us exceeds it.

As a philosopher would put it

Burke grounds the sublime in terror at a distance: the passions concerning self-preservation are the strongest, and when their occasion is not an actual danger they produce delight rather than pleasure. Vastness, obscurity, power and privation are his sources.

Kant's analysis divides it. The mathematically sublime concerns magnitude that imagination cannot comprehend in a single intuition; the dynamically sublime concerns might that we recognise as physically overpowering while judging ourselves not subject to it. In both, the pleasure arises indirectly: imagination fails, and the failure reveals reason's capacity for ideas of totality and for moral independence, so the sublime is finally about the subject rather than the object.

Lyotard revives the category for modernism and the avant-garde, treating the sublime as the presentation of the fact that the unpresentable exists - which makes it the key aesthetic term for art that refuses to be taken in.

What is actually disputed

Whether the sublime is about the object or the subject.

Kant's answer is unambiguous: nothing in nature is sublime, and the term properly applies to a state of mind occasioned by nature. That resolves the puzzle of how something formless and threatening can be aesthetically valuable, and it makes the whole experience a flattering discovery about human reason - which critics from the Romantics onward have found self-serving.

The alternative is that the object really is overwhelming and that the experience is a recognition of our smallness rather than our greatness. That fits the phenomenology better and leaves the pleasure unexplained.

Ecological criticism adds a further objection: an aesthetic that resolves an encounter with an overwhelming nature into a demonstration of human superiority is exactly the attitude that has proved most costly, and reading the sublime as humbling rather than elevating may be the more accurate as well as the more useful reading.