Condemning Kant: racist Legacies of the Sublime
The arresting nature of the sublime–the experience of the event of sublimity–should be an ethical injunction towards pluralism, negotiation, and respect, rather than Kant’s universalising sensus communis of rigid morality. It is also ethically incumbent on us to be vigorously critical of the tradition of the sublime as a concept. Emerging initially with the work of Longinus in the first century, it was in the eighteenth century that the sublime really gained velocity through conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. As a political energy, it is utterly crucial to acknowledge the twisted intellectual history from which the philosophical sublime emerged to ensure that it is not merely an abstract theorisation. The popularity and everyday usage of the term came to dictate an entire generation of European aesthetic taste; but a pleasure in terror had serious ramifications on the legacy of the world. A turn towards mountainous landscapes, ruins, storms, and the supernatural meant a further revolution in an appetite for the untrammelled, the monstrous, and the wild over order and harmony. Among slavery, colonialism, and war, perhaps a new Enlightenment proclivity for the sublime explains much of the violence and Terror of the eighteenth century.
Traditionally, then, the sublime involves some kind of relationship between a sublime object and an experiential response in the subject–usually a kind of cognitive dissonance. At its zenith in the late eighteenth century, theoretical discussions abounded and pushed the sublime into the centre of aesthetic conversations about its value in both art and nature. An aspect common to the majority of these formulations is that the perfect sublime object is natural, that is, of Nature: oceans, thunder, volcanoes, the expanse of the firmament. Vast in scope and dimension, colossal in power and intensity, it induces an acute emotional response which overwhelms the subject in a paradoxical wave: at once anxious with vulnerability and awe-inspiringly pleasurable. In the minds of the Enlightenment, the sublime experience was one of natural imagery, envisioned predominantly as a disorienting confrontation with an object of Nature and the dialectic between self and nature.
The notion of otherness inherent to classic figurations of the sublime presupposes a discourse whereby the sublime operates as a mechanism to reinforce the authority and power of the subject over a hostile other. Read in its historical context, it is not difficult to read Enlightenment discourses of the sublime as an open endorsement for British imperialism and ideologies of Western dominance. The sublime, rooted in a chauvinistic discourse of male dominion, implicates its values of power, greatness, and scale and opens itself up to a valid charge of being a sexist, patriarchal hierarchising. When it is anthropocentric, it is also male-focused and guilty of serving hegemonic culture. When those values are installed and seen within Nature itself, machismo masquerading as ancestral mother ‘Gaia’ makes for an ironic gambit. This is particularly the case in Burke and in Kant.
Burke’s 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful set out the roster of traditional notions of sublimity and the natural world. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment,” he wrote, “and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror”.16 This sublime object is formless, disruptive and wild, and educes a specific type of nameless horror. At least in the Burkean sense, this speaks counter to the delicate order, delight, smooth grandeur, and small-framed form of what he calls ‘beauty’. However formative Burkean notions of a systematic sublime were to the Romantic conception of the sublime they were disempowering. His gendered binaries of masculine and feminine, sublime and beautiful, were elsewhere met with critical condemnation by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Men. In this sense, it is easy to see how a conservative topography of the sublime mapped the tradition of a heteropatriarchal canonical discourse.
To turn to Kant, his philosophy of the sublime is traced heavily by a sense of mastery and superiority–the supposed victory of reason over incalculably large alterity. The supposedly pure high priest of regularity and detachment has been conveniently exonerated for being one of the Enlightenment’s more vocal proponents of racism. As Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze powerfully brought to Western scholarly attention in the 1990s, a moral conviction in the supremacy of the white European race formed a central tenet of Kant’s thinking.3 Indeed, Kant is seen as one of the founding figures of modern “scientific” racism.
An ersatz hierophant of morality, Kant used the same pen of ‘moral philosophy’ to write that, “[Whites] contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection.”4 Elsewhere, in his lesser-known anthropological work, such as the reprehensible 1775 essay, “On the Different Races of Man”, Kant outlined a systemised racist hierarchy replete with disgraceful language and further white supremacy. Even a well-known philosophical, as opposed to anthropological, work like The Critique of Judgment is freighted with sexism and racial essentialism to the point of white supremacy.
The racism and sexism of The Critique of Judgement is not an aberration or personal quirk that could be removed without affecting the wider argument, the text is saturated with and determined by it. Kant exalts human reason to the extent that rationality is elevated to the level of transcendence. In a movement of arrogant apotheosis, ultimately, for Kant, what is sublime is our moral selfhood and faculties of reason: we are not just part of nature, we’re better than it. In this sense, an anti-Kantian ecological response would counter this sublimation of human reason by acknowledging that a mastery of nature is not just impossible, but unethical to attempt (and the impossibility of this mastery is in part what determines the increasing violence of the attempts). In his theory of aesthetic judgment, there are essentially two types of the sublime: the mathematical and the dynamical sublime–one, a question of quantitative scale and physical magnitude, the other concerned with the pure power of a natural object. In both a kind of distance is implied to allow the sense of fear to be translated into Kant’s problematic victory of moral reason and mastery over nature. Crucially, however, this age-old understanding of the sublime concerns itself with an oscillation between an object of nature’s formless grandeur, one that is “received as sublime with a pleasure that is only possible through the mediation of a displeasure.”5 The sublime is both a positive and negative transactional experience.
The mathematical sublime represents a crisis of the mind, of a cognitive inability to process something so incommensurably overbearing that it overwhelms our faculties of both reason and imagination. This sublime experience can also be understood as a struggle between finitude and infinity. It is also a revelation that the mind is inconsistent in always perceiving the world around us in a purely rational way. For Lyotard, the idea that an object can be recognised as a thing while simultaneously being incomprehensible or only partly perceived is a profoundly compelling conceit. In Kant, reason always triumphs and neatly applies the borders and limits; whereas, for Lyotard, the notion that some things are incapable of tidy taxonomies and domestication is a boon for resisting generalising totalities. Here, the sublime points to the positive deficiencies of both reason and the imagination, and, in that dark night of the mind, this crisis moment provides the tipping point for new forms of radical thinking.
For some, however, the sublime can only represent a political conservatism following Donald Pease’s pronouncement that, “Despite all the revolutionary rhetoric invested in the term, the sublime has, in what we could call the politics of historical formation, always served conservative purposes.” A conservative sublime is essentially a philosophy of authority and one dubious about change. Change, of course, is inevitable, particularly in Nature. But the ways in which changes can be made to the social structure of the nation are subject to political whim. If change allows conservative and/or institutional interests to flourish it will be welcomed. The very historical drama of the sublime dictates the ideological stories of progress that the establishment tells itself: of ‘Man’ triumphing over ‘Nature’. The politically conservative sublime is therefore also a weaponised ideology: a defender of the realm. Is it any wonder that conservative figures are so often on the wrong side of history? A politically conservative sublime would be one which seeks to establish ingrained ideas of pure morality and to implant the bourgeois narrative of the striving individual. It is the sublime of traditional creed, of ersatz struggle and modesty aping real instability, and one which holds in contempt the idea of revolution. In Burke–as the longed-for father figure or figurehead of modern Conservatism–for instance, there are shades and shouts of all these ideas, least of all his vocal opposition to the French Revolution.
In the hope of rescuing certain parts of its misused potential I still maintain that the sublime has real transformative power in its sewing and severing of the fabric of radical politics. Instead, it feels more appropriate to agree with Michael J. Shapiro, who suggests in The Political Sublime that, “the crucial political initiatives that challenge authoritative and institutionalized modes of power and authority are precipitated by disruptive events that provoke the formation of oppositional communities of sense, which register the existence of multiple experiential and thought worlds.”6 The sublime event is a disruptive moment of self-consciousness. We are overwhelmed by nature, but, in the same breath, subsumed by humility. The sublime event is therefore also an awareness of being alive in a very radical sense, that is, the organic awareness of oneself ‘being’ a (just one) living organism like so many uncountable others: human, animal, and non-human. Therefore, this experience of the sublime–rather than an elitist, aesthetic experience–is a thorough democratisation: a relationship based on assimilation and respect.
The Future is green: the Ethics of sublime Environmentalism
In the sublime, Nature is the engine which drives the process of individuation. We know who we are through our relationship with the environment and its ecological contexts. This sense of moral determinism in the sublime drives an ethics of conservationism and of sustainable practices in our politics. Christopher Hitt, in repudiating critics of the sublime, believes that, “the concept of the sublime offers a unique opportunity for the realization of a new, more responsible perspective on our relationship with the natural environment.” In the field of literary eco-criticism, Hitt’s “Toward an Ecological Sublime” tries to clarify the nuances of the sublime legacy and to properly understand why, if the criticism is valid, “the sublime encounter with the wild otherness of nature has functioned to reinforce or ratify our estrangement from it.”7
William Cronon, in his essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” sets the stage for a rebuttal of a sublime nature. He claims that the aesthetic of the sublime is a Romantic beautiful savagery, but ultimately an unrealistic one and which undermines itself by association with a dependence on the othered distance between us and the non-human wilderness of nature. However, as Hitt also notices, there is a key moment where Cronon seems to allow himself a vulnerable moment of sublime advocacy:
On the one hand, one of my own most important environmental ethics is that people should always be conscious that they are part of the natural world, inextricably tied to the ecological systems that sustain their lives. Any way of looking at nature that encourages us to believe we are separate from nature—as wilderness tends to do—is likely to reinforce environmentally irresponsible behavior.
On the other hand, I also think it no less crucial for us to recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we did not create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for being as it is. The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable corrective to human arrogance. Any way of looking at nature that helps us remember—as wilderness also tends to do—that the interests of people are not necessarily identical to those of every other creature or of the earth itself is likely to foster responsible behavior. To the extent that wilderness has served as an important vehicle for articulating deep moral values regarding our obligations and responsibilities to the nonhuman world, I would not want to jettison the contributions it has made to our culture’s ways of thinking about nature.
As a critic of the sublime, it seems strange that Cronon surrenders an unequivocal position, and yet, in this almost sublime moment of breaking the faith, he illuminates the contradictory mechanism that powers it. Indeed, in its very nature, there is something jarring about the sublime. Perhaps something of its incompatibility with itself is what informs his ambivalence. Both chastening and empowering as a force of nature, it is far more productive, in an ecological sense, to break from the false authority of Enlightenment and contemporary capitalist logic and focus on the former rather than the latter. As Hitt rounds off, “Part of the sublime experience, in other words, is the realisation that we are mortal creatures, “beings of nature” whose lives are entirely dependent on forces greater than we are.”8
Citing humility–which he suggests we could call the “cornerstone of any environmental ethic”–together with both Kantian and Burkean mentions of wonder, awe, admiration, and respect, Hitt suggests that there remains something salvageable in a retooled version of “an ecological sublime”. This, he says, is “the recognition that the traditional natural sublime, for all its problems, involves what look to us like ecocentric principles. In imagining an ecological sublime, we would need to preserve these (and any other) positive aspects of the conventional sublime while identifying and critiquing its negative aspects.”9 Must we, then, stop seeing ourselves as the wardens of the natural world and rather as tourists to the physical dominion of the environment? The pandemic has shown us that any pretensions humankind has to controlling influence is always limited by the sublime force of Nature and, crucially, microbiological nature. This is not necessarily a deep ecology standpoint, nor one that actively supports a green anarchism that would springboard a pandemic-reactive biophilia, but simply a sad litany of fact. The coronavirus has so far failed to teach state leaders and governments that it is counter-intuitive to ratify human sovereignty over a world we have no claim to hegemonise.
Writing in 1999, Christopher Hitt presciently stated that the “rapidly increasing impact of technology on the world has only heightened the urgency of the need to reconsider the sublime. In an age in which humankind, in its moments of hubris, imagines that it can ensure its own survival through technological means–that it will ultimately win its war with nature–the sublime is more relevant than ever before.”10 While, of course, recent advances in technology and scientific innovation have provided a level of ascendent influence over the natural world and its processes, this represents a repositioning rather than a complete undermining of the laws of the sublime.
Some critics of the sublime denigrate it as an obsolete hangover from the Enlightenment, outdated and irrelevant in the contemporary world. Perhaps the eighteenth-century sublime–of “uncharted territory” and unscalable mountains–is somewhat passé in a universe of accelerated development and eco-modernist digital extortion. Yet the overhanging colonial consequences of this are anything but: what is “uncharted” if not an elision of the people who live there? The coercive violence and layers of accountability within globalisation and European colonising travelled in a terminal direction both metaphorically and literally. The arrogant sublime of an unexplored world also failed to consider the totalisation of capital and the unification of the world through its effects. The world was unified through capital’s consequences, but also microbiologically. The “unification of the globe through disease”11 perversely played out via plague epidemics, syphilis, and the various diseases that played their role in the genocide in America.
Perhaps still, this makes a reformatted version of the sublime all the more vital in conversations about ecology and political environmentalism. Maybe an argument could be made that we are less over-awed by Nature’s phenomena empowered as we are by machine-mastered technological development. However, the moralising hubris of the 1700s has not abated with any possible latent advents of the Anthropocene.
Those very technocratic advancements are energising the pervasiveness of capitalist exploitation, which continue to ravage the environment and split the atom of biological apocalypticism. A natural sublime now speaks not to an oceanic fascination with feral scenery but to the disembodying violence of natural phenomena: the climate emergency’s threat of environmental disaster and Holocene extinction. An appropriate sense of dread pervades the worlds of art, society, politics, and environmentalism; and, undimmed by fear, destructive human interference has disturbed the fine balance of the planet’s climate and ecosystems.
Bad faith actors, whose eyes have been incomprehensibly and voluntarily shut, are realising with unsettling haste that they are perhaps not at the centre of the universe. Indeed, any claim of a putative anthropocentrism needs to be alive to the precept of multiple forms supremacy which underpin it; a claim that humans are at the centre of the universe is also a statement that particular groups deserve to be there and that others do not. It is always imperative to resist totalising formulations about a universal ‘humanity’.
What makes this moment sublime, crucially, is that it paves the way for increased understanding and drives a process of new knowledge about the environment we live in. There is a major spanner in the works, however; namely the consistent narrative of conventional sublime nature. In a traditional sense, it is one where an individual or community transcendentally achieves dominion over the natural world, and, in the erasure of the alienating otherness of nature, is validated by conquering or negating the reality of what the sublime really represents.
Centuries of history teem with ideologies that desperately try to deny the innate vulnerability of a humanity exposed to the elements. In this sense, then, we cannot simply expect that a phenomenon such as COVID-19 will suddenly lead to an acquiescence before Nature. Yet, the exponentially growing threats of environmental cataclysm–some of which are already here–might yet prove to erode the obstinacy of climate deniers, corporate polluters, and the tyrants of deforestation.
In asking “Must a Concern for the Environment Be Centred on Human Beings?”, Bernard Williams responds to his own reflections on the natural sublime by asserting that “our sense of restraint in the face of nature, a sense very basic to conservation concerns, will be grounded in a form of fear: a fear not just of the power of nature itself, but what might be called Promethean fear, a fear of taking too lightly or inconsiderably our relations to nature.”12 This idea of a Promethean fear, then, is one which honours the boundary between ourselves and Nature. It is a sublime respect for the sheer treacherous potency that Nature can unleash, understood here as an indifferent viral power. While ecological interests and conservationism will not always be predicated on neutralising natural dangers, Williams’ invocation of Prometheus obviously signals a human culpability for the increased frequency of sublime disasters such as COVID-19. This fear is both a primeval survival instinct that warns against folly, but also a key to understand our values and priorities which are endangered by imminent jeopardy.
Our admiration and daunted respect for nature can enact a shift in perspective, a shift which forms the foundation for an ethical response to our ecological policies. “The environmental ethic that the sublime underpins is thus relational and non-anthropocentric, but not in a way that excludes the human perspective,” suggests Emily Brady in a discussion of her book The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature. “You can’t exclude that when you’re discussing aesthetic judgment and experience, but you can dehumanize that perspective to some extent,” she adds.
If we balance humility and humanity in the sublime, we can also find a great deal of room for admiration and respect for nature.
When we are ‘in’ nature, our sense of self changes. Confronted with the sublime otherness of the environment, egotism is dissolved by the awareness that, subsumed by Nature, we are simply one of many other biological organisms. In these contexts, we are demoted from special occupations or roles in society. Non-human otherness teaches us respect; respect for the natural world and respect for difference itself (particularly an anxious respect for the viral hazards of ecological destruction). In Kant, this displeasing pleasure takes the form of moral reason and a surmounting of nature; here, however, we are more concerned with a decentring of the human and a respect for nonhuman actors. Explicitly resisting a realm where pathogens have ‘real’ agency, there is still validity to undermining human superiority over non-human nature. That ecological demand is what motivates this version of the sublime.
This is also a matter of sympathy and understanding, of–radically–allowing Nature to run its course in its own way. Part of this is speaks to an impulse towards ‘rewilding’ practices, but this is also a conceptual demand. A respect for nature as-it-is, irrespective of human, or capitalist, desire. To impose on nature something counter to its benefit is a form a desublimation, that is, an act of ecological vandalism. In its very non-humanity, what is sublime about nature is its radical difference; it opens up a non-linguistic space that decentres us, but which also makes us keenly aware that we still have our own humble place in the world. In an ideal world, the natural world should impel us into an appreciative self-critical mode and strike in us the ethical awe of sublimity.
The sublime is a lesson in ethical compassion. It represents a system of networks and shared imbrications that remind us of our ineluctable, sometimes painful, connections with the natural world. In this sense, the feeling of sublimity is also very much a political demand for ethical and environmental responses. In this ecological sense, the sublime is a moment of self-effacement: a drive towards common identity and an understanding that the symbiotic relationships between human behaviour, pathogenic development, and natural processes are entwined in a colossal knot. This eco-political sublime shows us that we are inclusive of nature and that the environment is an extension of the self. The sublime should teach us that a kinship with a wholly other nature can be extended to an ethical compassion for others, that is, to contract the distance between those around us in a move towards a kind of eco-socialism.
The crisis of sublime nature compels us to make political decisions and judgments; to choose what we want to preserve and which path we want to follow. Up to now, governments have seen fit to maintain industrial capitalism and systems of oppressive hierarchy rather than empowering grassroots organisation and sustainable community-led initiatives. What we need, however, is a radical alternative that would sublimate and prioritise an emancipatory politics of ethical ecology.
Enis Yucekoralp is a freelance writer currently based in London. He holds an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge.
Notes:
- ↩ Andreas Malm. 2018. The Progress of this Storm. London: Verso. p. 163.
- ↩ Jean-François Lyotard. 1994. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, edited by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp. 238-39.
- ↩ Emanuel Chukwudi Eze. 1997. “The Colour of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology”, in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader. Edited by Emanuel Chukwudi Eze. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 103-131.
- ↩ Immanuel Kant cited in Charles W. Mills. 2017. Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 95. And see the analysis and other quotes, pp. 95-7. “Now if the only Kant one knows is the Kant sanitized for public consumption, these views will obviously come as a great shock. Kant believed in a natural racial hierarchy, with whites at the top, and blacks and Native Americans (“savages”) at the bottom. He saw the last two races as natural slaves incapable of cultural achievement, and accordingly (like an old-time southern segregationist) he opposed intermarriage as leading to the degradation of whites. Ultimately, he thought, the planet would become all white.” (p. 97).
- ↩ Immanuel Kant. [1790]. 2017. The Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 95.
- ↩ Michael J. Shapiro. 2018. The Political Sublime. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 4.
- ↩ Christopher Hitt. 1999. “Toward an Ecological Sublime” New Literary History. Vol. 30, No. 3, Ecocriticism. p. 605.
- ↩ Hitt. “Towards an Ecological Sublime”. p. 618.
- ↩ Hitt. “Towards an Ecological Sublime”. p. 607.
- ↩ Hitt. “Towards an Ecological Sublime”. p. 607.
- ↩ Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. “A Concept: The Unification of the Globe by Disease (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries) in The Mind and Method of the Historian. Chicago: Chicago University Press. pp. 28-83.
- ↩ Bernard Williams. 1995. “Must a Concern for the Environment Be Centred on Human Beings?” in Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 240.