Enlightened Cosmopolitanism: The Political Perspective of the Kantian “Sublime”
One of the aims of the Enlightenment was to introduce clarity into thought and morality into practice. In so doing, it also called for a novus ordo sœculorum, a “new world order” that would facilitate that aim. Now if enlightenment is the emergence of humankind from its self-incurred immaturity on the basis of the courage to use its own understanding, the implication is that this same humankind should have the courage to call for the political order that makes maturity and understanding possible. Already in Kant's essay on enlightenment one begins to make out a politics proper for the life of the mind. Legislative authority may in no way hinder citizens in the free, public use of their reason. As private persons, employed in particular tasks and professions, they may be kept from propounding views different from that of their employer, be it the state, the church, or any other authority. But that authority would overstep its bounds if it sought to keep them from participation in a larger, worldwide community of discourse and dissent. Kant saw that safeguarding the advent of this community of broadened thought, in which all took themselves as members of a cosmopolitan whole, would require not only rationalizing existing political associations to make room for a public sphere at the state level but also moving toward a universal form of political association. In another essay from 1784, “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent,” he went on to postulate that the achievement of such a well-ordered state was necessarily contingent on the gradual establishment of an international confederation of states. Because rational ability is something that can only be developed in the species as a whole, any standing condition of military activity between states would constitute a barrier to the eventual full growth of that rational ability by occupying human agents in destructive, rather than constructive, enterprises. A further implication would be that as long as any state was threatened from the outside by an opposing force or was itself threatening another state, it would have to take those measures often associated with state security, and in so doing would necessarily have to curtail the free expression of its citizens and limit the scope of civil liberties.
These thoughts found their fullest expression in Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) in which Kant drew up definitive articles setting the parameters of a cosmopolitan politics that would allow for the full development of a human reason unhindered in its various concrete tasks by the debts, misery, and waste of belligerent confrontations. First, the constitution of every state should be republican, allowing the voice of the citizenry to determine what policies will be adopted. War would be less likely, because the citizenry would not be as swift to commit their money and their sons to an unnecessary military action as would a prince or a self-appointed cabinet. Second, Kant maintained that international right should be based on a federation of free states. One state would be less likely to meddle in the internal affairs of a second if the second was itself internally strong and not bound by some colonial tie. Third, all of the earth's inhabitants should enjoy the cosmopolitan right of hospitality in all lands of the planet. Because of the physical limitation imposed by the earth itself, humankind would have to learn to live together in such a way that they could encounter one another without immediately provoking the kind of hostilities colonial acquisition brought with it. Most important, Kant now linked respect for human rights to the ideal of a perpetual peace, speaking of the condition “where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere” as being “a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.” This universal feeling of respect for human rights is the ultimate guarantor of perpetual peace. Without it, the other provisions to be taken in that direction would be superfluous, for, as Kant continues, “only under this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are continually advancing towards a perpetual peace”1 and, with it, toward the fulfillment of the highest purpose of nature,2 and that we are, after all, living in an age of enlightenment.
The discussion surrounding the Kantian political tracts lasted for some twenty years.3 One of the questions that emerged and persisted during the course of this discussion was whether cosmopolitanism was at all a defensible political perspective or whether some form of patriotism was the proper attitude to take. The proposals Kant made for an international confederation of republican states, and the expectation he held that humankind would one day be led—if not by rational choice, then certainly by inclination—to a peaceful coexistence in which human rights were respected, came at a time when lines were being drawn between those who welcomed the new order making its way into Europe and those who were retrenching against it. Between the writing of the essay on enlightenment and Perpetual Peace, the French Revolution had sent a shock wave through the old political order, provoking dissent and minor revolutions throughout Europe.4 And yet the Proclamation of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was never implemented, and the new regime in France showed itself to be less than the bastion of liberty, equality, and fraternity it had claimed to be. It is in some respects quite remarkable that Kant should not only have held to his prerevolutionary political perspective but have deepened it as well, particularly at a time when many, even those who had most advocated popular enlightenment and had been unafraid of its potentially revolutionary consequences, were reconsidering their positions.5
These texts also came at a time when it was not entirely clear that philosophical reflection could stand up to the task of addressing the difficulties that the recent political events posed for a theory of liberating politics, and beyond the immediate practical questions, problems with the theoretical underpinnings of a cosmopolitan perspective quickly came to the fore. The Enlightenment call to the use of reason had been under attack from the beginning, and by 1795 most of the fundamental claims Kant had made in Critique of Pure Reason had been severely criticized.6 That he based this cosmopolitan perspective on certain assumptions about the nature and the power of reason (rather than on principles of empirical human nature) only served to diminish its plausibility in the eyes of some. If reason was necessarily culture-bound, language-dependent, and only locally advanced, as many of Kant's contemporaries were maintaining, then the possibility of basing a cosmopolitan perspective on it was suspect. Still some, otherwise reasonably sympathetic to the Kantian program, found Kant's defense of cosmopolitanism along quasi-“natural” lines to be curious and, ultimately, self-defeating. Friedrich Schlegel made precisely this point in his critique of Perpetual Peace, claiming that Kant's use of such natural prodding as the need for trade could in no way stand as a proof that humankind would reach such a goal, or even as a sufficient indication that one ought to try to work toward it.
It is not enough that the means of the possibility of the external promptings of fate to effect a gradual bringing about of perpetual peace are shown. One expects an answer to the question whether the internal development of humanity would lead in that direction?…[OJnly the (actual) necessary laws of experience can guarantee a future success. The laws of political history and the principles of political formation are the only data out of which it can be shown that perpetual peace is no empty idea but rather a task.7
Of course, Kant had used an external prompting, the spread of commerce, as an indication that humankind would one day reach a state of peace, asserting that “the spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people, and it cannot exist side by side with war.”8 Otherwise bellicose states would eventually have to make some genuine gestures in the direction of respecting human rights and national sovereignty if they were to carry on trade. However, Kant elsewhere decried this same commercial spirit as one that serves to foster “base selfishness, cowardice, and softness, and to debase the way of thinking of [a] people.”9 Clearly, Kant would not have based his whole argument on a contingent fact of human nature.
Indeed, throughout the political tracts it becomes clear that for Kant the highest aim of politics, like the aim of enlightenment, is not to make things better but to make us better. A revolution that resulted only in a net gain in human welfare is not to be praised; praiseworthy is the change in the ways of thinking of the people that would allow them to sense a violation of right.10 An international association of trading partners, like a band of thieves, might be forced into some kind of nonaggression pact with one another for their own mutual survival and thereby inaugurate a perpetual peace, but unless there was a widespread shared feeling among all the earth's inhabitants for one another's human rights, such an alliance would of itself signify no moral gain and, indeed, might actually signal a disastrous frame of mind. For, as Kant notes, “human rights have to do with more than order (and rest). Great order and rest can be brought about through universal oppression.”11 Of course, commercialism is not cosmopolitanism, but what cosmopolitanism was, was itself a nagging question, as the question of enlightenment had been ten years earlier. Following Kant, cosmopolitanism was at least a transnational perspective in which primacy was given to the maintenance and extension of human rights; at most it reflected the highest aspirations of humankind. In an article written by Drost von Müller entitled “Thoughts on Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism,” the difference in the two perspectives was claimed to lie in the fact that while both the cosmopolitan and the patriot acted in political life out of love of humanity, the former understood by humanity the whole of humanity while the latter understood humanity in terms of national or local belonging. This whole of humanity, von Müller claimed,
is an idea of our reason. In this idea all of the millions of rational beings on this earth are one, and this includes the past and the future. […] It is this idea then that underlies the wishes and efforts of the cosmopolitan. In consideration of it, so many of the things held by men to be important disappear before its sublimity. Development and formation of all human powers and abilities, spreading of enlightenment, perfection and ennobling, and consequently advancement of the happiness of the human species: the duties of the cosmopolitan aim at this alone. On the other hand, fame and wealth, power and greatness of individual states lose their often so exalted value in the eyes of the cosmopolitan and disappear as being insignificant in his view. This view is not aimed at the individual, but rather at the whole; and where it is a question of the welfare of humanity, there even his fellow citizens appear to him only as a negligible part in the sublime whole.12
Here cosmopolitanism is cast in a necessary relation to enlightenment, a way of looking at things that issues forth in certain practical actions. The language is openly Kantian; it is the Kant of the third Critique. In effect, the kind of thinking Kant there calls sublime is, in its political application, enlightened cosmopolitanism.
It may at first appear misguided to turn to Kant's analysis of aesthetic judgment—and to the more recondite analysis of the sublime—for a grounding for a political perspective. This is so only if one takes the analysis of aesthetic judgment in the sense of a philosophy of art. But Critique of Judgment is a critique of reflective judgment, and although Kant does address matters pertaining to philosophy of art in it, reflective judgment is a broader power, and the sublime, far from being simply a somewhat curious category in Enlightenment philosophy of art,13 is in many respects judgment's highest moment in Kant's formulation, with applications far beyond the merely artistic. Kant divides the analytic of the sublime in the third Critique into two parts, the first having to do with the mathematically sublime, the second with the dynamically sublime. I hope to show that, taken together, the mathematically and dynamically sublime provide the critical framework for the cosmopolitan political perspective Kant developed in his political tracts. The analytic of the mathematically sublime answers the question of how such a perspective is at all possible; the analytic of the dynamically sublime answers the question of how it emerges as a task rather than as a merely historical postulate.
Critique of Judgment is a critique of reflective judgment. Reflective judgments are those we make concerning particular cases for which there is no universal rule, principle, or law (Ak 179). They concern matters that are neither wholly under the domain of reason (freedom) nor wholly under the domain of the understanding (knowledge). It is the work of the understanding to determine the laws of nature and to order phenomenal appearances accordingly, and the work of reason to determine the laws of freedom (the moral law) and to order the actions of rational agents accordingly. Reflective judgments mediate between the understanding and reason. Since the moral law does not tell us how the world operates, and the laws of science do not give us a morality, reflective judgment bridges the “great gulf” (Ak 195) that lies between the two domains, marking out the degree to which states of affairs or objects reflect either a harmony or a discordance of the two domains on the basis of the feelings of pleasure and displeasure in the judging subject. Because of the mediating role it plays with respect to understanding and reason, reflective judgment provides a point of orientation for the mind.14 Depending on the case, a judgment that a state of affairs does not harmonize with both the understanding and reason may refer the mind either toward the understanding (to carry out more scientific research to find out why nature does not harmonize and what the limits of its alterability might be) or toward reason (to determine which of other possible actions to take that may well harmonize).
According to Kant, only the understanding and reason can legislate, that is, determine laws for any possible natural appearance or moral action. Hence reflective judgments are always particular with respect to their object. This is perhaps most easily shown in the case of beauty. To say that a rose is beautiful (a reflective judgment of beauty) is not to say that every rose ought to be so, nor does it warrant the claim that the given flower is not a rose because it is not beautiful. The assertion “This rose is beautiful” is consistent with “That rose is not.”
Although particular with respect to the object, reflective judgments are necessary and universal with respect to judging subjects. When I judge the rose to be beautiful, I am making a statement that reflects my subjective sensibility with regard to it. My sensibility is the determining factor here, and yet, in claiming that the rose is beautiful to me, I also hold out that everyone else will think so, too. This necessity, Kant writes,
is of a special kind. It is not a theoretical objective necessity, allowing us to cognize a priori that everyone will feel this liking for the object I call beautiful. Nor is it a practical objective necessity where…this liking is a necessary consequence of an objective law and means nothing other than that one absolutely (without further intention) ought to act in a certain way. Rather, as a necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgment, it can only be called exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent of everyone to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that we are unable to state. (Ak 236–237)
Exemplary necessity is the kind of necessity that is reflected in the actual reflective judgments we do make and how we expect them to be received by others. When I point out a beautiful sunset to a friend I do not do so to inform her of my state of pleasure; I do it to offer her the opportunity to look upon it and enjoy its beauty herself. I am disappointed when she does not find it beautiful, too, and more disappointing perhaps is the fact that I cannot convince her to like it. There is nothing particular about the sunset I could mention that would count as conclusive proof that it is beautiful, and she is certainly not morally deficient for not seeing it in this way. As it stands, our divergent judgments reflect that we do not share a common form of sensibility, a common perspective, and have something less than a common life together. The point here is not to turn sunsets (or any other object) into the determining factor of human relationships but to turn human relationships into the determining factor of a common worldview. As Kant writes, “The aesthetic universality we attribute to a judgment must be of a special kind; for although it does not connect the predicate of beauty with the concept of the object, considered in its entire logical sphere, yet it extends that predicate over the entire sphere of judging persons” (Ak 215). The necessity of reflective judgments is provided by a kind of solidarity of sensibility that we always presuppose when we make such judgments. Indeed, as Kant continues, “nothing is postulated in a judgment of taste except such a universal voice about a liking unmediated by concepts” (Ak 216). And this universal voice is what makes reflective judgments possible in the first place (Ak 217).
Two points are worth noting here. First, the “appeal to humanity” made in reflective judgments is not the same thing as an appeal to the majority. The line of reasoning in matters of judgment is not “Because most persons find this painting beautiful, it is beautiful,” but “Because I am like most persons, I can expect most persons to find this beautiful.” We do not vote on matters of taste any more than we vote on matters of truth or morality. That there may be judges who do not find it beautiful does not invalidate the judgment made but sets those judges apart from the rest. Such folk are said to lack taste, and, as experience shows, like tends to associate with like; we do not try to convince these people, we dissociate ourselves from them. This leads to the second point, namely, that reflective judgments have pragmatic import, although they do not determine a determinate practical (moral) course of action. One can say that where there is reflective judgment there is a community of judges and, where such judgment is lacking, no such community emerges. But one cannot say what this community will look like, what particular judgments it would have to find itself in agreement over, or even when this community might come into being. The most one can claim is that no one is in principle excluded from it and that, indeed, the ideal situation is one in which all possible agents are participants with the proviso that none be forced into it (one cannot be forced to find something beautiful, or sublime for that matter).
Up to this point we have been following Kant's account of reflective judgments referring to judgments of beauty as examples. The universality and necessity that accompany these judgments accompany those on the sublime as well. Still there are differences between the two kinds of judgment. One is that judgments concerning the beautiful have to do with the quality of an object or state of affairs as a bounded entity; judgments concerning the sublime reflect something's unbounded quantity (Ak 244). In the beautiful, the liking of the subject that is reflected is one that arises from the sense of life's being furthered, whereas that reflected in a judgment on the sublime arises after a feeling of life's being hindered or threatened in the face of such unboundedness. Finally, and Kant takes this to be the major difference between the two, in judgments on the beautiful there appears to be a confirmation of the subject's powers almost as if the object being judged were made for the subject, whereas in those on the sublime, it appears as though the object were contrapurposive for our powers (Ak 245). All of these characteristics are reflected in Kant's claim that “while taste for the beautiful presupposes and sustains the mind in restful contemplation, the feeling for the sublime carries with it, as its character, a mental agitation” (Ak 247). According to Kant, the mind may be agitated in two ways, either with respect to the cognitive power or with respect to the power of desire. The first is what is called the mathematically sublime, the second the dynamically sublime.
The mathematically sublime is something of a misnomer, at least if one understands by mathematical something having to do with numbers. At issue is the determination of magnitude, and at the beginning of his analysis of this form of the sublime Kant distinguishes between a logical determination of magnitude and an aesthetic one (Ak 249). A logical determination is the ascription of a numerical standard to an object, for example, when I make the judgment that the distance from my home to the office is seventeen miles. An aesthetic determination is the judgment that it is a long distance from my home to the office. In the first case, disputes are settled with whatever device is handy that has mile markings on it, and one need only know how to count to make the correct determination of length. Given that a determinate standard is applied, the distance can be equated with other distances, for example, it is also seventeen miles from the office to the zoo. In the second case, dispute settlement is carried on in a rough way through an appeal to what passes as a long distance from home to office. Much can come into play here: what counts as a reasonable time to get to work, the cost of paying for the transportation relative to the money earned, the ways the time could be otherwise spent, and so forth. The judgment that the distance is indeed long is therefore made with reference to a variety of factors, all of which need to be taken into account and none of which is dispensable with respect to the others. Further, the fact that seventeen miles might be a long way to work does not mean that any seventeen-mile journey is long. Seventeen miles is not a long distance to travel when one goes on vacation, for example.
There are other judgments of magnitude that do not rely on empirical standards. Kant's two examples are “the magnitude [or degree] of a certain virtue, or of the civil liberty and justice in a country” and “the magnitude [or degree] of the correctness or incorrectness of some observation or measurement” (Ak 249). The first, Kant states, relies on an a priori practical standard, the second on an a priori theoretical standard. Both are a priori in that one does not have to wait to compare among empirical givens to make the assessment, in fact “one that is given a priori would be confined, because of the deficiencies of the judging subject, to subjective conditions of an exhibition in concreto” (Ak 249). The standard of estimation is “the infinite as a whole” (Ak 254), a standard that, for that reason, is “not only large, but large absolutely, in every respect (beyond all comparison), i.e., sublime” (Ak 250). Properly speaking, according to Kant, it is the 4'expansion of the mind itself” (Ak 249) that results from its inadequacy to the use of this standard that is most truly sublime. Kant does not develop his analysis of these two a priori standards in any great detail; his major concern in the “A” section of the Analytic of the Sublime is to address the point of the mental agitation that accompanies them. His examples, however, provide clues as to what they are and how they function.
The example of an a priori theoretical standard was the degree or magnitude of the correctness or incorrectness of some observation or measurement. All science aims at assembling a system of true observations on data. Whenever a claim that X is the case is brought forth, a subject is called on to make an assessment of that claim. Any such claim necessarily refers to a particular phenomenon, and yet the estimation of its truth requires the idea of the whole of nature construed as a complete system (a world) in which all phenomena are organized in relation to one another. For example, assessing the truth of a claim in chemistry would require not only that it be accurate with respect to the phenomenon in question but also that it be consistent with all other scientific claims. But it is not possible for any statement to be true given this standard. Our knowledge is based on the appearances of things, not things as they are in themselves. Because of this limitation, we are never in a position of knowing whether our knowledge accurately and completely reflects the world as it is. Thus there is a gap between our knowledge of the world and the world itself. This does not imply a fatalism of knowledge, the position that one should not even begin to find answers, but it does imply fallibility. Further, contemporary science or, better, the natural sciences together in no way present a complete, coherent system of nature. It is not yet known, for example, how to properly relate physics and chemistry and biology into an ordered whole. Thus on two counts, there will always be a remainder left by any knowledge claim, and hence no claim can ever be wholly correct.
The same holds true for practical matters, and the a priori practical standard, the magnitude or degree of a certain virtue or of the civil liberty and justice in a country, functions in much the same way. According to Kant, a moral action is one that an agent could legislate for a systematic unity of agents, a kingdom of universal respect. In everyday action, it is not known how to act with respect to this systematic unity, for it is an idea of the whole of humanity (without spatial and temporal limitation), and no agent can begin mentally to grasp the whole of humanity in a way that would be serviceable for the determination of an action. Further, j/t is not always known how to relate and decide on two courses of action, both of which may be in accordance with the moral law but which cannot be implemented at the same time or in the same respect. Thus there is a gap between the moral law and our ability to act on it. At the individual level, then, any act I have to judge as to its morality is bound to come up short; at the social level, any act or system of practical actions, like respect for human rights, is bound to come up short. And still, in the act of judging a given particular action, the subject finds itself aware of the practical moral law all the same and, in recognizing his own limitation, finds it sublime. For present purposes, we can leave the issue of personal actions aside; at stake in a cosmopolitan perspective are social-political actions and states of affairs.
It might be objected that a comparative analysis is sufficient for political matters. It may be thought that a political policy that aims at human rights can be based on a numerical standard and that the best way to achieve this is to reward reductions in human rights violations in hopes that reductions will continue, eventually leading to a state where they are nil. But if the only basis for an assessment of the extent of human rights in a given state is a comparative, numerical one, certain practical consequences can be expected. First, it effectively states that some standard other than human rights is more important in the determination of policy. The value is placed on the reward or the incentive rather than on the human rights violations proper. One could expect that aims at curtailing such violations would continue only as long as the incentive was there. Further, a government may feel itself warranted to begin meddling in the internal affairs of that state on the ground that this state has a (comparatively) bad human rights record', thereby violating those citizens' right of self-determination.
Second, the use of a comparative standard has negative results at home as well. A government seeking to suppress citizens at home may easily find an “enemy” abroad, thereby focusing the citizens' attention away from possible rights violations at home. Even if there is no direct governmental manipulation, citizens who know their lot to be better than that of others in the world can more easily be lulled into a general complacency about the plight of their immediate neighbors under the (comparative) pretext, “If you think it's bad here, you should be there.” Finally, because a comparative standard is an empirical one, based on observable information, it cannot address the question of the rights of future generations. Because they do not exist empirically, they would be irrelevant to present judgment. It is only on the basis of the kind of a priori standard Kant discovers in judgments concerning the sublime that the issue of future generations can at all emerge as a problem.
To make a judgment concerning the magnitude of respect for human rights in aesthetic rather than numerical terms, then, is (contrary to general intuition) to make a stronger judgment. To begin with, sheer numbers do not make as much difference as do people's sensitivity. Amnesty International may compile statistic upon statistic, and they may even distribute the compilations to every household. But unless the recipients of this information feel something akin to outrage at the data, nothing will get done. The facts themselves will not directly prompt one to carry out any particular course of action, it is the discrepancy between the standard and the facts that does. Aesthetically one can never be satisfied as long as there are human rights violations, whereas one may be numerically satisfied that there are fewer, allowing one to see through the political game of making trading agreements with and giving diplomatic favors to a given state based on the reduction of human rights violations by ? percent. To the cosmopolitan, national prestige, military strength, and domestic well-being (all of which are judged comparatively) are as naught in comparison to the universal rights of humankind, the (sublime) standard “in comparison to which everything else is small” (Ak 250). It is because of this that Kant can write that “the rights of man must be held sacred, however great a sacrifice the ruling power may have to make. There can be no half measures here For all politics must bend the knee before right, although politics may hope in return to arrive, however slowly, at a stage of lasting brilliance.”15
Judgments of the mathematically sublime are aesthetic judgments and like them, admit of universality and necessity; one who holds to the high standard of human rights Kant speaks of should be able to expect others to concur in the judgment that no state can be put in the position of superiority over another on that issue or on any other. This necessity, it will be recalled, was not logical or moral necessity but exemplary necessity. One cannot, therefore, provide a logical proof or a moral command to convince someone of the cosmopolitan perspective or oblige them to share it. The most one can do is provide examples that show that this is how agents such as we actually do judge and what kinds of interaction follow from not judging accordingly. Kant, of course, found his example in the enthusiasm of the onlookers for the effort exerted in the French Revolution in the direction of a constitutional state and the guarantee of human rights. One may easily find others. The Vietnamese government's denunciation of the breakdown of the USSR in 1991 reveals much about those making the judgment. It reveals at best a shortsighted, at worst a self-seeking, attitude, which to the sentiments of humanity at large appears petty and small. Now unless reference is made to humanity at large (rather than to some pet aim of the one judging), the judgment that the Vietnamese government's judgment is petty and small will itself appear petty and small and self-seeking. All Kant needs to do to make cosmopolitanism a defensible perspective is to make appeal to the structures that invariably show themselves in such rounds of judgments. That we make judgments of sublimity in magnitude at all is, on Kant's account, not a contingent fact of human nature but a necessary structure of (aesthetic) experience. At that point the burden of proof is on the adversary to show that there are no such structures or no such experience.
Up to this point we have been considering the cosmopolitan perspective in the Analytic of the Sublime from the standpoint of the mathematically sublime. There, the agitation that accompanied a reflective judgment was a cognitive one based on the inability of the mind to present the whole (of humanity) in a single intuition at the same time that it was relying on this idea for the judgment. In the case of the dynamically sublime, the agitation is one that concerns the power of desire (Ak 247). Dynamically sublime judgments present themselves in cases “when in an aesthetic judgment we consider nature as a might that has no dominance over us” (Ak 260). Human agents are natural agents and, as such, are subject to the demands of natural survival: food, shelter, clothing, companionship. In the best of ordinary circumstances we experience no conflict in the fulfillment of these demands; we are not tormented at the thought of securing the daily bread, and an evening of friendship is not a cause for concern. Even external nature appears to cooperate in our efforts here. The cycle of seasons brings forth the harvest, and others' desire for companionship complements our own. In other circumstances, however, the attempt to fulfill these natural demands is frustrated by nature itself. Drought and famine, earthquakes and hurricanes may threaten the ability to make it from one day to the next, and another's differences may make further interaction impossible. In such cases, according to Kant, we judge nature aesthetically as something that arouses fear.
Now not every natural phenomenon that arouses fear in a subject is one about which the judgment can be made that it is sublime. A natural phenomenon that arouses fear is also sublime, according to Kant, if it provokes in the subject a “magnitude of resistance” that demonstrates the subject's superiority over the phenomenon (Ak 260). The judgment of sublimity, properly speaking, is thus made not with respect to nature but to the second, supersensible, nature of the subject, to a point of reference in which the natural concerns of the subject diminish in importance as motives for action.
If in judging nature aesthetically we call it sublime, we do so not because nature arouses fear, but because it calls forth our strength…to regard as small the [objects] of our [natural] concerns: property, health, and life, and because of this we regard nature's might (to which we are indeed subjected in these [natural] concerns) as yet not having such dominance over us, as persons, that we should have to bow to it if our highest principles were at stake and we had to choose between upholding or abandoning them. (Ak 262)
The kind of mental attunement that the dynamically sublime in nature brings forth in us is paid for in the coin of comfort, stability, and surety, for it occurs “only through sacrifice (which is a deprivation—though one that serves our inner freedom—in return for which it reveals in us an unfathomable depth of this supersensible power, whose consequences extend beyond what we can foresee)” (Ak 271). Effectively, the mind gets better (i.e., more attuned to sublimity) only to the degree that things get worse. It is in this sense that Kant can claim that
even war has something of the sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of citizens' rights. At the same time that it makes the way of thinking of a people that carries it on in this way all the more sublime in proportion to the number of dangers in the face of which it courageously stood its ground. (Ak 263)
This is not high praise for war. It is high praise for the moral resolve that shows itself when challenged with war. Kant appears to think that this is such a widely held feeling that he offers it as something of a justification for the very idea of the sublimity in nature.
For what is it that is an object of the highest admiration even to the savage? It is a person who is not terrified, not afraid, and hence does not yield to danger but promptly sets to work with vigor and full deliberation. Even in a fully civilized society there remains this superior esteem for the warrior, except that we demand more of him: that he also demonstrate all the virtues of peace—gentleness, sympathy, and even appropriate care for his own person—precisely because they reveal to us that his mind cannot be subdued by danger. (Ak 262)
War is not a good. Neither are earthquakes, floods, famines, and all the other natural calamities that plague humanity. Kant is not making the mistake of saying that because such events prompt us to good, they must be good (and hence pursued, as in the case of war). Rather, the point is to note that with the occurrence of such natural events, human agents do in fact rise up and act so as to keep the “humanity in [their] person” and, by extension, humanity in others “from being degraded” (Ak 262). The difference is a subtle, but important, one and may help explain Kant's insistence on keeping to an aesthetic based on the judger rather than on the thing judged.
Again, as with all aesthetic judgments, judgments concerning the sublime in nature carry with them (exemplary) universality and necessity. And yet, in §29 of the Analytic of the Sublime, Kant makes a point of addressing the particularities of this universality and necessity as regards these judgments. Kant writes, “It is a fact that what is called sublime by us, having been prepared through culture, comes across as merely repellent to a person who is uncultured and lacking in the development of moral ideas” (Ak 265). Why should this be, and why should the sublime in nature be singled out? For Kant, culture “make[s] headway against the tyranny of man's propensity to the senses and prepare [s] him for a sovereignty in which reason alone is to dominate” (Ak 434) by challenging common, natural conceptions of what constitutes the height of human existence. Of course, the kind of culture will make a difference. Kant decries “romances and maudlin plays; insipid moral precepts that dally with (falsely) so-called noble attitudes but that in fact make the heart languid and insensitive to the stern precept of duty, and that hence make the heart incapable of any respect for the dignity of humanity in our own person and for human rights” (Ak 273). He also criticizes a certain kind of religion, one that places emphasis on “images and childish devices” rather than the pure command of morality, because it leaves the adherent in a state of effective stupor, and, as Kant notes, governments have no difficulty using this to their advantage (Ak 274–275). By extension, one could add the “images and childish devices” a government may promote among its citizens. What is common to all of these is the feeling of well-being they instill in those who hear or practice them by filling in the voids and gaps that otherwise agitate the mind and press the understanding or reason into service. When a symbol, a song, or a slogan replaces thinking, reflection, and criticism, the receptivity to the kind of challenge the sublime puts forth is likely to diminish.
According to Kant, simplicity, defined as artless purposiveness, is nature's style in the sublime (Ak 275). Could there be a culture of simplicity, and, if so, what would it look like? Regrettably, Kant does not provide much by way of an indication. His account of the sublime is, by his own admission, “abstract […and] wholly negative as regards the sensible” (Ak 274). Indeed, earlier in Cntique of Judgment, Kant claimed that reflective judgment does not give rise to a doctrine (as a determinate set of content-laden propositions or maxims) but only to critique (Ak 170, 194). Still, at this point he mentions the commandment against idolatry.
Perhaps the most sublime passage in the Jewish Law is the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, etc. This commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people in its civilized era felt for its religion when it compared itself with other peoples, or can explain the pride that Islam inspires. (Ak 274)
A culture built along these lines, a culture that places more emphasis on the invisible than on the visible (without seeking to enclose the invisible in the visible), would seem to be the kind required to prepare minds to be receptive to sublimity in nature and, with it, to the moral law. As Kant continues,
It is indeed a mistake to worry that depriving this presentation of whatever could commend it to the senses will result in its carrying with it no more than a cold and lifeless approval without any moving force or emotion. It is exactly the other way round. For once the senses no longer see anything before them, while yet the unmistakable and indelible idea…remains, one should sooner need to temper the momentum of an unbounded imagination so as to keep it from rising to the level of enthusiasm, than to seek to support these ideas with images and childlike devices. (Ak 274)
It is not that a new culture would have to be constructed as much as it is that the current culture (to the extent that it deals in symbolic trappings and images) would have to be destroyed.
The task of the sublime is, therefore, a negating one. But it is precisely in this that cosmopolitanism can be viewed as a sublime perspective, for cosmopolitanism, at least in Kant's version of it, requires the elimination of all political barriers on the free exercise of thought and moral action. Just as personal enlightenment involved dispensing with the book, the spiritual adviser, and the doctor, the conditions for the gradual enlightenment of the species involve dispensing with massive armaments and the superiority of one state over another (in terms of political power) and assuring that all inhabitants of the planet have an equal chance to make a living for themselves. Now Kant holds that there will be no lack of evils, and hence no lack of opportunities for human agents to recognize and demonstrate their freedom from external nature or their own natural inclinations. To this extent, one can make the reflective (teleological) judgment that nature will one day lead humankind to a state of perpetual peace in which human rights are respected. But one is equally warranted in the assertion that humans at present are capable of doing (and have the duty to do) what may take nature millennia to accomplish.
Does the Analytic of the Sublime provide a basis for a cosmopolitan political perspective? The answer is yes and no. No, because cosmopolitanism cannot provide “laws of political history and the principles of political formation” as Schlegel, for one, had requested; as a perspective, it can serve to orient action but not direct it. But if one gives up the desire for something like historical laws, the answer is yes, because the analysis of the sublime can allow one to “see” possibilities in experience that one without such a perspective would miss, without however falling into fanaticism, “which is the delusion of wanting to see something beyond all bounds of sensibility” (Ak 275). It can achieve this because the sublime is, on Kant's account, simply a form of aesthetic experience that all agents in principle share. To this degree it is a “necessary law of experience” that is always operative.
History shows that cosmopolitanism did not fare well. Under Hegel, it became the violent incarnation of Absolute Spirit in history. For Marx, the withering away of the state meant the international dictatorship of the proletariat. According to the practice of capitalism it meant the creation of a world market in which politics could play only a facilitating role. The reactions to these various positions and programs (in Nietzsche, in the anarchist strands of socialism, in certain forms of the ecological movement, for example) reveal something that neither Hegel, nor Marx, nor capital can account for. They reveal attempts to do away with structures of thought and governance that stifle the human spirit by denying the sensible and the profitable. To this extent they may be (and often are) considered to have their sublime elements about them.16 What the kind of cosmopolitan perspective Kant develops suggests, however, is that without a concomitant emphasis on the gradual recognition of human rights, even such movements can quickly fall into new forms of domination. Simple negation is not liberation, and the drive to liberate must itself be tempered by the sober and patient task of establishing a state of respect for human rights. The only new world order worthy of the name would be one in which, as Kant imagined, the violation of rights in one part of the world would be felt everywhere. Might ours be an age of enlightenment?
NOTES
1. Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Kant's Political Writings, 2d ed., ed. Hans Reiss (New York, 1989), 107–108.
2. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant's Political Writings, 51.
3. The present volume reflects much of the earlier discussion until the mid-1790s; for developments after 1795, see Anita and Walter Dietze, eds., Ewiger Friede? Dokumente einer deutschen Diskussion um 1800 (Munich, 1989).
4. For an overview of the Jacobin activities in central and eastern Europe, see Helmut Reinalter, Die Französische Revolution und Mitteleuropa (Frankfurt am Main, 1988).
5. Christoph Martin Wieland is an interesting case in point. Although rather flippant in his early enthusiasm for enlightenment, his writings after the Revolution reflect a more guarded stance.
6. For the details of this critique, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
7. Friedrich Schlegel, “Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus. Veranlaßt durch die Kantische Schrift zum ewigen Frieden,” Deutschland 3.7, no. 2 (1796); reprinted in Zwi Batscha and Richard Saage, eds., Friedensutopien (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), 106.
8. Kant, Perpetual Peace, 114.
9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1987), Ak. 263. Future references to this work will be made according to the Akademie page numbering and included in the text.
10. “An Answer to the Question, ‘What Is Enlightenment?' in Kant's Political Writings, 54–60.
11. Immanuel Kant, cited in Matenalien zu Kants Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Zwi Batscha (Frankfurt am Main, 1976), 38.
12. Drost von Müller, “Gedanken über Kosmopolitismus und Patriotismus,” Der Kosmopolit, eine Monatsshrift zur Beförderung wahrer und allgemeiner Humanität 5 (1797); reprinted in Von der ständischen zur bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, ed. Zwi Batscha and Jörn Garber (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 261–262.
13. See, for example, Paul Crowther's charges against the category of the sublime in The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (New York, 1989).
14. In some respects, Critique of Judgment is a fuller account of the position Kant took in “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” written four years earlier.
15. “Toward Perpetual Peace,” 125.
16. See, for example, Jean-François Lyotard's recent attempts to describe presentations of “the fact that the unpresentable exists” which he takes to be indications of sublimity.