Death and transfiguration: Kant, Schopenhauer and Heidegger on the sublime

Inquiry

Volumn 48, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 131-144

  Young, Julian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

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EID: 33748536076     PISSN: 0020174X     EISSN: 15023923     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00201750510022736     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. This essay was delivered as the keynote address to the 2004 meeting of the International Society for Phenomenological Studies in Asilomar, California. It has been much improved as a result of the searching questions raised by the audience, in particular by Stephan Käufer, John Richardson and Christina Lafont. The essay uses the following abbreviations: BT - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R. Geuss and R. Speirs, trans. R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
2. CJ - Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1968).
3. Though the page references are to Bernard, I have sometimes preferred my own translations. CPR - Critique of Pure Reason trans, N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1964).
4. GA - Martin Heidegger: Gesamtausgabe, ed. F. W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1977-).
5. Numerals refer to volume numbers. GS - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974).
6. PLT - Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Row, 1971).
7. WP - Friedrich Nietzsche. The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Press, 1968).
8. WR I and WR II - The World as Will and Representation vols. I and II, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966).
9. Dionysius or Longinus on the Sublime, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939) p. 125.
10. Quoted in Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 30.
11. Entrückung und Berückung - "transport and enchantment" or "removal-unto and charming-moving-unto" in the more baroque translation provided by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (Blomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) p. 48. The phrase also occurs at GA 4 p. 54.
12. It is unclear how closely Heidegger read Schopenhauer, whom he purported to despise. But he was, of course, a close reader of Nietzsche, and Nietzsche was a close reader of Schopenhauer. So one way or another, it makes sense to think of Schopenhauer and Heidegger taking part in the same conversation.
13. Though not exclusive - Kant's example of "the wide ocean disturbed by the storm" (CJ p. 84) seems designed to combine both species of sublimity - Kant (and Schopenhauer after him) thinks of the two categories as exhaustive. But since the moon, for instance, is a traditional example of the sublime yet overwhelms neither in terms of size (unimpressive) nor power (zero), I think this is a mistake. What actually overwhelms in this case, I would suggest, is the object's indifference to us, the sense of our utter insignificance from the point of view of nature's "concerns". I discuss this interesting third species of the sublime in chapter 5 of my Schopenhauer (London: Routledge, 2005). Here, however, I shall set this aside and proceed within the exhaustiveness assumption common to both Kant and Schopenhauer.
14. It may have crossed the reader's mind that whereas in the previous paragraph I applied "sublime" to the object of experience I am now applying it to the experience itself. The ambivalence is deliberate, and mirrors Kant, who argues that since for any "object of the senses" there is another in relation to which it appears "small", the fundamental bearer of sublimity is the "state of mind" which the object produces (CJ pp. 88-9). Though Kant continues to refer to the object as "sublime", he does so, quite clearly, only in the derivative way in which one calls food which promotes healthy states of the body itself "healthy". Effectively, Kant makes the feeling of the sublime primary, and reduces the sublime object to that which occasions, "triggers", the feeling. As will become clear, both Schopenhauer and Heidegger follow Kant in taking the fundamental bearer of sublimity to be an experience. This enables them, as we will see, to acknowledge a range of possible occasions of the experience, which extends far beyond the pyramids and tempests of eighteenth-century aesthetics.
15. "Painful" and "pleasurable" are the terms Kant uses and they are, of course, woefully inadequate. Indeed, since he is going to argue that the joy of the sublime consists in a rising above our sensory natures, there is something virtually self-contradictory is saying that we take pleasure in rising about the sensory. For simplicity, however, I shall generally stay with Kant's terms.
16. This is encouraged by the German language in which "sinnlich" means both "sensuous" and "sensual".
17. The idea seems to be that the peasant God approximates the Yahweh of the Old Testament. Unlike the "moral" God of, as Kant would see it, enlightened Christianity, he is powerful yet arbitrary, and so "merely terrifying".
18. Rather disastrously, Barnard fails to translate the occurrence of "zugleich" in the second of these passages.
19. Awareness of this difficulty is no doubt the reason why Kant sometimes wavers, and describes there as being, not simultaneity, but rather a "vibration" between the two feelings, "a quickly alternating attraction toward, and repulsion from, the object" (CJ p. 97). But this is a cop-out, a denial of the phenomenon Kant set out to explain. Instead of the paradoxically unitary "negative pleasure" (CJ p. 83), there are, according to this line of thinking, two different feelings; a "negative" feeling and a pleasurable one. This denial of the paradox is, of course, a theoretical option. But, quite apart from the fact that most of the time Kant believes in simultaneity rather than alternation, it will shortly become clear, I think, that Schopenhauer's approach to the paradox is, on several grounds, far superior.
20. Since for Schopenhauer, as for Hume, empathy is the basis of virtue, this implies his own - very unKantian - way of connecting the sublime to the moral.
21. Note that here, as anticipated in footnote 7 above, Schopenhauer extends the possible occasions of the feeling of the sublime way beyond the pyramids and tempests of eighteenth-century aesthetics.
22. In at least one place, Kant himself appears explicitly to endorse the conclusion that some kind of immortality (though not, perhaps, the kind for which "we" hope) is implied by transcendental idealism. The "danger of materialism", i.e. "the fear that on the removal of matter all thought, and even the very existence of thinking beings, would be destroyed", is, he says, completely removed by transcendental idealism, since, according to that doctrine, "the whole corporeal world ... is nothing but an appearance in the sensibility of our [thinking] subject and a mode of its representation" (CPR A 383).
23. At least as expressed in the "A" edition of the Critique of Pure Reason where Kant says, in the passage quoted in the previous footnote, that "if I remove the thinking subject the whole corporeal world must at once vanish: it is nothing save an appearance in the sensibility of our subject and a mode of its representations". Schopenhauer regards this as the "real" Kant. The "B" edition, where transcendental idealism has a less clearly Berkeleyan cast, he regards as an obfuscatory response to the "A" edition's being ridiculed as the work of a "Prussian Berkeley" (WR I p. 434). The "true" nature of Kant's idealism is disputed. It might be, for example, that the best reading of the "B" edition version brings it close to the position I am about to attribute to Heidegger. If so, well and good. My interest is in getting the metaphysics of the sublime right, not in who got it right first.
24. In his own way, Nietzsche sees this in section 374 of the Gay Science, which is entitled "Our New 'Infinite'". Realizing our world-interpretation to be just one of a potential infinity of interpretations, he says, "the world again becomes infinite for us", with the consequence that "once more we are seized by the great shudder". (Section 124 of the same work observes that "there is nothing more awesome than infinity".) Nietzsche follows this remark with a somewhat ambivalent discussion of the significance of the "shudder". It tempts us, he says, to "deify in the old manner" this unknown infinity, to worship it as "the Unknown One". "Alas", however, he continues, "too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are included in the unknown, too much devilry ...". This could be read as instructing us to resist the temptation to deify. Nietzsche might be arguing that since the divine is the good, and since the unknown cannot be known to be good, we have no reason to treat it as divine. A more plausible reading, however, is to see the passage as pointing to the need for a post- (or pre-) Christian conception of the divine, one that places it "beyond good and evil" and abandons the attempt to regulate God according to our human, all too human, standards of good and evil. What we need, I think Nietzsche is saying, is something like a return to the ancient Greek understanding of the holy as the "uncanny".
25. See the first chapter of my Heidegger's Later Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).