Rachel Zuckert

Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique

Abstract: Kant’s account of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment has been ex-
tremely influential, prompting extensive discussion of the psychology, affect,
moral significance, and relevance to artistic representation of the sublime on
his provocative view. I focus instead on Kant’s account of the mathematical sub-
lime in connection to his theoretical critical project, namely his attempt to char-
acterize human cognitive powers and to limit human pretensions to knowledge
of the supersensible. I argue, first, that his account of the psychology of the sub-
lime is designed to explain not just its affective character (its displeasure-pleas-
ure), but also to address challenges concerning the coherence of an experience
of something as transcending one’s cognitive abilities. Thereby, I argue more-
over, Kant provides an alternative, demystifying account of mystical experiences,
in which humans might take themselves to intuit that which is beyond human
understanding or reason, and thus to claim that they have special cognitive ac-
cess to the supersensible, transcending the limits Kant claims to establish for
human cognition. Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime is not merely so
reductive of mystical experience, however; it also, I suggest, describes the aes-
thetic of Kantian critique itself.

Introduction
On Kant’s account in the Critique of Judgment, the sublime is a painful-pleasur-
able experience of overwhelming natural objects, in which the subject becomes
affectively aware of the limitations of her sensible nature, as well as of the supe-
riority of reason to sensibility, even to the objects of sensible nature themselves.
This account has been extremely influential; together with Edmund Burke’s En-
quiry concerning the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, it has
set the terms of most later discussion of the sublime. Scholars have extensively
discussed Kant’s characterization of the phenomenology and psychological ex-
planatory structure of such experience; its aesthetic character (including distinc-
tion from or similarity to the beautiful); its proper objects (natural objects, as
Kant avers, or an extension of the account to artworks); as well as the relation-

https://doi.org/10.1515/kantyb-2019-0006
100 Rachel Zuckert

ship between it and Kant’s characterization of the dignity of practical reason, its
superiority to sensibility, and the feeling of respect, in his moral philosophy.¹
In this essay, by contrast, I propose to connect Kant’s account of the math-
ematical sublime to the project of critique in his theoretical philosophy.² I shall
argue, first, that his account of the psychology of the sublime is designed to ex-
plain not just the affective character (the pleasurable-painfulness) of this expe-
rience, but also its very possibility: to address challenges concerning the coher-
ence (thus possibility) of an experience of something as transcending one’s
cognitive abilities. Understood so, i. e., as an experience of human cognitive lim-
itations, the sublime would seem pertinent to Kant’s theoretical project of cri-
tique, namely his attempt to delimit the scope of human knowledge, and I
shall argue that it does contribute signally, if indirectly, to that project. For
Kant here redescribes and thereby demystifies a sort of experience – of recogniz-
ing the limits of human sensibility – that might lead some (mystics, Platonists,
and their ilk) to claim that they have special cognitive access to the supersensi-
ble, that they can transcend the limits Kant claims (in the first Critique) to estab-
lish for human cognition. As I shall suggest in conclusion, however, Kant’s ac-
count of the sublime is not merely reductive, but also, positively, characterizes
the aesthetic of Kantian critique itself.

The Problem of Incoherence: Is the Experience of

the Sublime Possible?
I shall proceed in a somewhat anachronistic way: by reading Kant’s account of
the mathematical sublime through an essay by Guy Sircello published in 1993,
entitled “How is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” This title sounds Kantian,
but the essay does not mention Kant. It focuses rather on an understanding of
the sublime drawn from the English Romantics, according to which the sublime
object is beyond human cognitive faculties, or, in Sircello’s terms, is epistemical-
ly “transcendent.” Thus, while Kant conceives of the experience of the sublime

 For recent contributions, see Brady (2013), Deligiorgi (2018), Doran (2015) and Merritt (2012).
 As is well known, Kant distinguishes the sublime into two genres, mathematical and dynamic.
I do not discuss the latter, as it is an experience not of cognitive, but of practical limitation, i. e.,
of a powerful object as (potentially) frustrating action. In pursing the connection between it and
Kant’s theoretical philosophy, my approach builds upon Grier (2014). Hughes (2007) interesting-
ly proposes a different cognitive significance for the sublime, as part of the epistemological proj-
ect of the Critique of Judgment.
 Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique 101

primarily as affectively charged (and expressed in aesthetic judgment based in

feeling), in concert with the general approach of eighteenth-century aesthetics,
Sircello has a more nineteenth-century conception of it as cognitive, as appre-
hension of a truth, indeed here the highest, most hard-to-reach sort of truth. Sir-
cello’s essay is nonetheless enlightening when used to approach Kant, I shall
suggest, because it poses a question concerning the possibility of sublime expe-
rience that Kant’s account can be taken to answer.³ I begin, then, by outlining
Sircello’s argument.
As stated in his title, Sircello asks whether a theory of the sublime is possi-
ble, to which question he responds affirmatively (1993, 541). But the essay is
largely directed to press the question whether such a theory is possible, and to
argue that on a certain interpretation of the sublime, a theory of it is not possi-
ble. This interpretation involves three inconsistent theses:
1) “An experience of the sublime presents the object of the experience, i. e., the
sublime, as [epistemically] inaccessible.”
2) “An experience of the sublime, insofar as it presents the sublime as [epis-
temically] inaccessible, is correct about the sublime.”
3) “Any true theory of the sublime constitutes [epistemic] access to the object of
the experience of the sublime and thus to the sublime.”⁴

The inconsistency is clear: in holding that a theory of the sublime is possible,

one claims both that some object is epistemically inaccessible to human beings
(as sublime) and that it is epistemically accessible (since one can have a theory
about it). Sircello’s conclusion is that if there is to be a theory of the sublime, 1)
must be rejected in favor of a weaker characterization of the epistemic transcen-
dence definitive (on his view) of sublime experience.
This worry concerning claims about epistemic transcendence is central to
the interpretation of Kant that I shall offer, but Sircello adds several points
that will be pertinent as well. Sircello claims that thesis 1) harbors two further
commitments: that sublime experience represents its object not only as epistemi-
cally inaccessible, but also as existing – I shall refer to this commitment as “the

 I follow Forsey (2007) in connecting Kant to Sircello, though (as discussed below) my conclu-
sions differ. For recent responses to Forsey’s excellent essay, see Aagaard-Mogensen (2017).
 All Sircello (1993, 545). I change Sircello’s “epistemological” to “epistemic” throughout (in
brackets in the quoted sentences), as I believe that he means that the sublime is beyond knowl-
edge, not merely theories thereof. Sircello mentions a fourth premise – “A theory of the sublime
is a theory of the object of an experience of the sublime” (ibid) – which I leave aside, as it in-
troduces unnecessary complications for putting his discussion in conversation with Kant’s ac-
count.
102 Rachel Zuckert

existence claim” – and (moreover) as existing on a “higher level” of reality. In

support of the existence claim, Sircello suggests that otherwise the experience
would suffer from “pragmatic contradiction” (1993, 545): it would undermine
its own significance by claiming to be fantasy, i. e., to be about a non-existent
object, to reveal a mere falsity. As Sircello writes (in a somewhat different con-
text), if the experience of the sublime were a mere fantasy – and so also, presum-
ably, if it were to present itself as mere fantasy – it would have no philosophical
interest, and there would be no reason to formulate a theory concerning it (1993,
547).
Sircello refers to the second, stronger claim (that the object exists at a level
of reality beyond the human sphere) as the “thesis of ontological transcen-
dence.” This thesis appears to play two roles in the conception of the sublime
articulated in 1).⁵ First, it indicates the significance of sublime experience: it
gives us a sense of a higher order of reality. Second, it explains the epistemic
transcendence of that experience: if an object is beyond us in its “level of real-
ity,” it would seem also to be beyond our cognitive grasp.
Sircello uses these addenda, in turn, to generate a further problem concern-
ing not a theory of the sublime, but the experience of the sublime, conceived in
accord with 1). Sircello argues that, according to 1), the experience of the sublime
both represents the object as inaccessible, and represents the object as (in some
way) accessible, i. e., as (known to be) existing, at a “higher level,” as accessed
within the experience itself.⁶ It seems to me that Sircello does not need the ad-
denda to make this argument (though they will for other reasons be relevant
here). For 1) appears to be itself incoherent or to render sublime experience
so, insofar as it claims that we both do and do not have some cognitive access
to the object. According to 1), the experience of the sublime represents an object
as unrepresentable, or accesses it as inaccessible to our cognitive powers. Thus,
at the heart of Sircello’s essay is the question: is experience of the sublime co-
herent (not self-contradictory)? Or: how is such experience possible? Sircello’s
announced question concerning a theory of the sublime is a corollary of this
deeper question – to which, I shall argue, Kant’s account of the mathematical
sublime offers an answer.

 I speculate here because Sircello does not spell out why proponents of 1) would endorse this
thesis.
 Sircello also takes the existence claim to be problematic because testimony concerning sub-
lime experience suggests that one is representing not an object, but “nothing,” the absence of
being, in that experience (1993, 547– 8).
 Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique 103

Kant’s Critique of Sublimity I: How is the

Sublime Possible?
As noted above, Kant appears to have what one might call an eighteenth-century,
rather than Romantic conception of the sublime: defined not by cognitive ach-
ievement (or failure) (as for Sircello), but by affective responsiveness. Corre-
spondingly, central among Kant’s tasks in his account are to explain that re-
sponse – here a perhaps puzzling pleasure taken in a challenging,
overwhelming experience – and to justify the claims made in aesthetic judg-
ments on others to share that response.
Yet the theme of epistemic transcendence is present in eighteenth-century
discussion as well. In particular, Moses Mendelssohn’s account of the sublime
raises Sircello’s question relatively directly.⁷ Like Kant, Mendelssohn conceives
of the experience of the sublime primarily in affective terms – as combining
pleasure and pain (and so, in his terms, as a “mixed sentiment”) – and aims
to explain this response. He does so by arguing that all representation has (as
it were) two poles: it is about some object, and it is had by a subject.⁸ Each
pole can ground a pleasurable or a painful response: the object’s good qualities
(perfections) can ground pleasure, or its bad qualities pain, while the fact that
the representation belongs to the subject (thus contributing to the subject’s
[im]perfection) can also ground pleasure or pain. Therefore, he argues, there
can be “mixed sentiments” in response to a single representation. In the case
of the sublime, pleasure is grounded in the object of the representation, while
the pain arises from the subjective side: we feel pleasure because of the object’s
greatness, and pain because the object is so great as to transcend our abilities of
representation.⁹ But then, with Sircello, we must ask: how can the subject’s rep-
resentation be of a great object – sufficiently directed to or “containing” that ob-
ject to ground her pleasure – if the object transcends her powers of representa-
tion? How is such an experience of epistemic transcendence possible? Sircello’s
question is, in short, not so alien to Kant’s intellectual context after all. And I
shall now suggest that Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime is designed
to respond to it, as well as to the more directly aesthetic questions noted above.
In his account of the mathematical sublime, Kant too treats the experience
of a great object as challenging to the subject’s cognitive powers, of finding a

 Forsey (2007) adduces passages from Addison, Shaftesbury, and Burke as well.
 Mendelssohn (1997 [1761], 132– 3).
 Mendelssohn (1997, 145, 196).
104 Rachel Zuckert

large object overwhelming, beyond one, something that one cannot quite “take
in.” He concurs with Mendelssohn that the subject has a “mixed sentiment” –
pleasure and displeasure – in such experience, but unlike Mendelssohn, he ex-
plains both feelings by recourse to the “subjective side” of representations. Be-
cause he holds that the subject’s cognitive activity is complex, combining func-
tioning of different faculties, he can explain how different, even conflicting
feelings can be aroused with respect to a single object, in a single experience,
by referring to the activity of different faculties. In the experience of the mathe-
matical sublime, specifically, we take pleasure in the achievements of reason,
displeasure in recognizing the “inadequacy”¹⁰ of the imagination, its cognitive
inability to grasp the sensible object. Thus Kant concurs with Mendelssohn
that in the sublime, the subject finds the object in some way unrepresentable.
And, as I shall now argue, Kant’s complex account of the psychology of the sub-
lime – the superiority of reason, the inadequacy of the imagination – not only is
meant to explain the affective charge of sublime experience, but also addresses
Sircello’s question (implicitly raised by not answered by Mendelssohn’s ac-
count): it explains the possibility of representing an object as unrepresentable.
We may note first that in his account of the mathematical sublime Kant care-
fully identifies the precise character of the cognitive overwhelmingness of the
large object. Kant notes that we are capable of representing large objects math-
ematically, using a chosen unit and then judging the object to be of a size com-
prising some number of such units (CJ, AA 5:254– 55). Such representation of the
object’s size is intellectual rather than sensible: we do not see the object as hav-
ing that size, but grasp it conceptually. We can, Kant claims, represent a large
object sensibly as well, in that we can sensibly apprehend each of its parts
one by one, progressively (CJ, AA 5:255). But we can also try to “comprehend”
the object sensibly: not just to characterize its size numerically (conceptually),
not just to perceive its parts serially, but rather to see it all at once, intuitively,
as a whole. If concerned with very large objects, this attempt at comprehension
will fail; the imagination will be inadequate to this task (CJ, AA 5:251– 2,
5:255 – 6).¹¹

 CJ, AA 5:257. All citations to Kant are from the Critique of Judgment unless otherwise noted,
and employ Akademie volume followed by page number, as is customary. All quotations are
from the Cambridge University Press translations.
 Kant suggests occasionally that the imagination succeeds, however: the experience pushes
“almost to the point of the inadequacy of the faculty of imagination” (CJ, AA 5:253, my emphasis)
or “a magnitude almost reaches the outermost limit of our faculty of comprehension in one in-
tuition” (CJ, AA 5:259; my emphasis).
 Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique 105

Thus Kant characterizes a very specific way in which we might find an object
unrepresentable, beyond our cognitive powers: the large object is beyond imag-
inative (sensible) comprehension. The subject can represent this object conceptu-
ally – not just mathematically, but also according to concepts that identify its
kind (storm, ocean, etc.). Indeed, though Kant seems tempted to deny this,
one probably does represent the object conceptually even within the experience
of the sublime: one finds this “ocean” (or mountain or starry heaven) over-
whelmingly large.¹² Thus the subject experiencing the sublime can be under-
stood, straightforwardly and coherently, to be representing an object (in one
way) that he is also finding unrepresentable in a different way, i. e., by a single,
specific mode of cognition, not totally inaccessible.
Yet so far Kant’s account has not, I submit, answered Sircello’s question. The
mere failure to take something in, while successfully representing it in some
other way, is not sufficient to characterize an experience of epistemic transcen-
dence. For one must also be able to recognize one’s cognitive failure as failure.
Otherwise one will be merely in a state of blissful ignorance (not recognizing
that one is failing), or confusion (simply failing to represent something, without
being able to interpret that situation).¹³ In the case of the mathematical sublime
as so far characterized, one will be ignorant or confused alongside having some
other, successful cognitive representation of an object. Moreover, if the experi-
ence of the sublime is to be significant, this failure must be recognizable as a
significant (not pointless) failure, a failure at something that is worth doing.
Kant’s account as described so far – namely, that we can represent the object
conceptually, but fail imaginatively to comprehend it – does not satisfy these de-
siderata. One might be able to recognize one’s failure through comparison with
other cases: I can comprehend the size of this foothill, but not of that mountain.
But even if recognized, this failure might seem trivial. Thus, to take a different
example, I can make myself feel dizzy and unable to put together perceptually
a pattern of black and white swirls, by staring at it for a while – by comparison
to other objects, which I can stare at without such incapacity. This cognitive fail-

 This suggestion is, however, consistent with Kant’s denials that determinate concepts
“ground” the judgment of the sublime (CJ, AA 5:258), or that we judge objects according to con-
cepts of ends when finding them sublime (CJ, AA 5:252– 3).
 I am grateful to Katalin Makkai for help with this formulation. Sircello’s own positive propos-
al that in the sublime we may experience of the lack of coherence among our different cognitive
“modes of access” to reality (and thus recognize our epistemic limitations), might suffer from
this problem: it is unclear how one would know that such incoherence is a failure, rather
than just error of one mode in conflict with the success of another (as in the bent stick sort
of cases).
106 Rachel Zuckert

ure seems trivial (and also not pleasing). Why is one’s inability to comprehend
the size of a large object different?¹⁴
Kant invokes reason not only to explain the uplifting pleasure of the sub-
lime, I suggest, but also to address these concerns. “The voice of reason” sets
the goals for the imagination’s activity in the experience of the sublime (CJ,
AA 5:254); it thereby both allows the subject to recognize the imaginative cogni-
tive failure and establishes its significance. Reason sets norms for imaginative
activity in two (related) ways, on Kant’s account: by providing a norm or goal
for cognition of a single object, and for knowledge of the sensible world as a
whole.
First, reason formulates the demand to understand objects (or groups of ob-
jects) as totalities, not just discursively (as through the concepts of the under-
standing) – part by part, or in accord with universal, abstract rules – but rather
as individuals, and completely (ibid.). Moreover, this sort of grasp of an object
would not just be different from cognition of objects by the understanding, but
superior: not grasping objects mediately and partially, via abstract rules, but
all at once and completely. In attempting to comprehend the large object, the
imagination attempts to approximate to this rational ideal, to grasp the object
as a totality.
Second, reason prompts the imagination to attempt a more expansive feat of
comprehension – as it were out from comprehension of this object to the world
as a whole. Kant suggests, that is, that the subject might use its comprehensive
grasp of the large object as a “basic measure” in “aesthetic estimation” of the
magnitude of other objects, indeed of nature as a whole. When we aim to “esti-
mate” the size of an object, on Kant’s view, we employ a measure, a unit that is
not itself measured, but rather “aesthetically” grasped – comprehended. For
mathematical judgment, we can in principle use any such unit (any size will
just be some or other multiple of that unit). But for aesthetic estimation,
where one aims to achieve (as it were) an intuitive sense of the object’s size,
the unit needs to be comparable in size to the object – if one has to imagine
a unit multiplied millions of times, one fails to gain an intuitive sense of the re-

 This problem is my gloss on the second prong of Forsey’s dilemma (her reconstruction of
Sircello’s problem): ordinary objects are representable, but then as such cannot be found to
be “beyond” us (sublime). (The first prong of her dilemma is, I believe, that an extraordinary
object may be beyond us, so potentially sublime, but then we cannot represent it at all.) I
think Forsey moves too quickly in formulating the dilemma: if we have different “modes of cog-
nitive access” (to use Sircello’s term), success in representation is not all or nothing. I therefore
reframe what I take to be her insight: some failures to represent ordinary objects (which we can
represent in other ways) are trivial, not sublime.
 Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique 107

sultant size. Therefore, in attempting aesthetically to estimate larger and larger

objects, one attempts to employ – and so to comprehend – larger and larger
“basic measures.” In such estimation, Kant claims, one experiences the sublime
because the units keep getting larger – and the objects one has already estimated
keep getting (comparatively) smaller – until one comes up against the limits of
the imagination’s comprehending and estimating abilities.¹⁵
Here again the imagination’s activity is driven by reason’s demands, this
time for intuitive grasp not of a single object, but of nature as a whole, in accord
with the rational idea of the world. Just as (Kant had argued in the first Critique)
this idea propels scientific investigation (activity of the understanding) to pro-
ceed ever further, so does it press imaginative comprehension not to rest with
any “basic measure,” but rather to progress outwards, onwards, to an “aesthetic
estimation” of all of nature – which, again, would be a supremely satisfying,
comprehensive grasp of all of nature, a cognitive achievement.
In both cases, then, a rational norm allows the subject to recognize the fail-
ure of the imagination and its significance. The failure is recognized in light of
the standard or goal set by reason. It is significant, first, because imaginative
success would satisfy a cognitive (rationally prescribed) aim. And, more impor-
tantly, it is significant because (factual) imaginative failure can be compared
to, allows the subject to become aware of, rational success at its own form of
comprehension (as it were): its formulation of the ideas of the infinite or of na-
ture as a whole, ideas which encapsulate reason’s cognitive goals, and which far
surpass the imagination’s abilities of comprehension (5:254, 257). The subject’s
recognition of imaginative failure is, at the same time, recognition of the supe-
riority of reason as a cognitive faculty. As noted above, on Kant’s view, this rec-
ognition of reason explains why an experience of failure is nonetheless uplifting:
what we are finding sublime – the true source of our wonder, awe, uplifting
pleasure – is not the challenging sensible object, but rather reason itself (CJ,
AA 5:256). And this recognition also seems, Kant acknowledges, to be a cognitive
achievement somewhat like that to which Sircello calls attention: it seems to pro-
vide access to the ordinarily unrepresentable (again in a specific way, i. e., sen-

 See CJ, AA 5:526 – 7. Though I cannot argue for this claim here, I believe that this (often un-
noticed) second aspect of Kant’s argument is crucial: it can explain the passages noted above
concerning the near failure of imagination (for here it does comprehend the individual object,
but not thereby the whole universe). More importantly, it can explain why the judgment of
the sublime (specifically the moment of felt inadequacy on which it is in part based) might
be universally subjectively valid: individuals may vary concerning how easily they can compre-
hend this or that object, from this or that distance, but no individual can sensibly “estimate” the
size of the world as a whole. See also Moore (2018).
108 Rachel Zuckert

sibly unrepresentable). For through its inadequacy to reason’s demands, the

imagination makes those demands – and their superiority – present in sensibil-
ity, felt, real to us: the experience of the sublime, Kant writes, “as it were makes
intuitable the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive faculty over the
greatest faculty of sensibility” (CJ, AA 5:257, my emphasis; see also CJ, AA
5:258 – 9).
Thus, I contend, Kant’s account addresses Sircello’s question concerning the
incoherence of the experience of the sublime, understood as an experience of
epistemic transcendence. Kant does so by claiming that we represent the object
as unrepresentable by a certain cognitive activity, not as unrepresentable simpli-
citer.¹⁶ This failure is, moreover, both recognizable and recognizably significant
because it is judged according to rational norms – and it is therefore also pleas-
ing in making us sensibly aware of the superiority of reason to sensibility.

Kant’s Critique of Sublimity II: Against Mysticism

So far I have suggested that Kant’s concerns are closer to Sircello’s than one
might initially suspect. Now, however, I shall attend to their differences: as
noted, Sircello conceives of the experience of the sublime primarily in cognitive
terms – in it, we learn of our epistemic limitations (if this can be made out) –
whereas Kant emphasizes its aesthetic (affective) character. As also already
noted, Kant’s emphasis upon the aesthetic means that he aims (as Sircello
does not) to explain why this experience is pleasing. But, I shall now argue,
this difference also establishes the place and significance of the sublime in
Kant’s project of critique: as an aestheticization, and thus demystification, of
the experience of epistemic transcendence.

A. The Sublime as/contrasted to Mysticism

I start here by returning briefly to Sircello. In discussing the thesis of ontological

transcendence – the claim that the sublime object exists on a “higher plane” –
Sircello sketches a conception of sublime experience that could avoid incoher-

 Because it is sensibility (or imagination) that fails to represent the object, for which the ob-
ject is (in a certain way) unrepresentable, Kant’s account also addresses Sircello’s official ques-
tion: there can be a rational theory of the sublime because the experience of the sublime does
not transcend what reason can do – precisely not, since it shows the superiority of reason to
sensibility through the failure of sensibility.
 Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique 109

ence of the kind he diagnoses. On this view, the object of sublime experience is
“inaccessible to ordinary and familiar modes of epistemic access” (1993, 547, my
emphasis), but is accessed here by some special mode of cognitive access. This
special cognitive power thus also presumably makes us aware of the limitations
of our “ordinary and familiar” epistemic powers.
On this proposal, I submit, the experience of the sublime is understood as a
mystical experience; I accordingly call it “the mystical view.” Sircello in fact cites
medieval mystics’ testimony as examples of sublime experiences,¹⁷ and the Eng-
lish Romantics, the chief source for Sircello’s conception of the sublime, would
also endorse this mystical interpretation of the sublime, I think, though they
might identify art rather than religion as its primary locus and expression.
The mystical view explains how the experience of the sublime can coherent-
ly be understood to represent something as unrepresentable in roughly the same
way as does Kant, i. e., by identifying a diversity of cognitive powers. The subject
succeeds in representing the object by a special power, while finding it to be in-
accessible to other (“ordinary”) epistemic powers. One may also thus (easily)
identify the significance of the cognitive limitation revealed in sublime experi-
ence: it is a failure to recognize higher, usually inaccessible truths. (Though Sir-
cello is not interested in doing so, this view could also explain the pleasing char-
acter of the sublime, i. e., as grounded in its signal cognitive achievement.) Thus
the mystical view not only renders sublime experience (understood as an expe-
rience of epistemic transcendence) coherent, but also accommodates the thesis
of ontological transcendence.
Despite the similarities in the structure of this proposal and Kant’s account,
they are nonetheless importantly distinct. For on Kant’s account, the subject
does not access the highest truths in the experience of the sublime. In fact,
she learns nothing. (The judgment of the sublime is an aesthetic, not a cognitive
judgment.) Apart from this experience, “before” it, the subject already can judge
that the natural object is large, and already has the rational ideas of the infinite
and world: no one has the experience of the sublime, Kant claims, until culture
has progressed far enough that the mind is “filled” with ideas that are, then,
available to be prompted by perception of the natural object (CJ, AA 5:246).
Indeed, more strongly, there is a sense in which the experience of the sub-
lime on Kant’s view is a cognitively empty experience, an experience (nearly)
of nothing. The subject does represent the natural object conceptually, as falling
under a kind (ocean, mountain, and so forth), as noted above. But (as it were)

 Sircello adduces these cases to show that the experience of the sublime is not limited to the
eighteenth century, as is sometimes alleged.
110 Rachel Zuckert

she tries to “predicate” a nonsensical predicate of it. For, as noted, the subject
fails to comprehend the object; thus she does not predicate a sensible quality
of it. Such failure instead puts her in mind of the rational norms prompting
this imaginative activity, and the ideas of reason that encapsulate the goals of
such activity. Because she has been prompted to think of those ideas in perceiv-
ing a sensible object, she is tempted to believe that their objects are being pre-
sented to her sensibly: that infinity is found “in” the large natural object, that
she is in sensible contact with nature as a whole or its “supersensible ground.”¹⁸
As Kant puts it: the subject’s “way of thinking… introduces sublimity into” the
natural object.¹⁹ But in fact ideas of reason are mere ideas, with no object that
we can know. Certainly they are not instantiated in, cannot properly be predicat-
ed of, the sensible object. Thus the “predicate” (as it were) that the subject is
tempted to apply to the object judged sublime – something like the-supersensi-
ble-presented-sensibly – is incoherent.²⁰ The purported representation of the
sensible object as itself sublime, as revealing supersensible reality, is, then, a
representation of a non-thing, or nonsense.²¹
By contrast, it is not nonsense on Kant’s view that the imagination fails and
thereby leads the subject to feel the superiority of reason. But this feeling is not a
cognitive achievement: the subject can and indeed must be aware of her rational
capacity prior to the experience of the sublime, through the exercise of reason in
formulating ideas. The experience of reason in the sublime is, rather, novel and

 CJ, AA 5:255, an opaque passage that warrants more detailed attention than I can pay here;
in particular, there are difficulties about how to reconcile this line of thought with Kant’s claims
in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason that space and time are infinite
given magnitudes and belong to sensibility (they are not ideas of reason). In discussing the dy-
namic sublime, Kant notes similarly that one might take powerful natural objects to reveal God’s
wrath (CJ, AA 5:264), i. e., to be a sensible revelation of a supersensible being; it is in fact com-
mon to consider God, perhaps as revealed in nature, a preeminent object of the experience of the
sublime in the eighteenth century (as, e. g., in both Mendelssohn’s and Burke’s accounts).
 CJ, AA 5:246.
 This paragraph is my attempt (briefly) to gloss Kant’s claim that the experience of the sub-
lime involves “subreption” (CJ, AA 5:257); for further discussion, see Grier (2014) and Moore
(2018).
 Kant’s view might, then, accommodate the mystics’ self-descriptions as experiencing noth-
ingness noted by Sircello. To be clear: the experience may have an incoherent object (or the sub-
ject may be inclined to think that it has such an object), as I am now suggesting, but nonetheless
(rightly understood) is a possible experience (as argued above), namely a coherent experience of
one’s own cognitive limitations (i.e., of the failure of the imagination, judged in light of rational
norms, as correlated to separate cognitive contents/objects, i. e., large natural objects and ideas
of reason, respectively).
 Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique 111

significant only and precisely as felt, as aesthetic.²² As I shall now suggest,

Kant’s account of the sublime is therefore not just different from the mystical
view, but it is also important to his critical project precisely as thus different
from the mystical view, as a de-mystifying reinterpretation of sublime experi-
ence.

B. The Kantian Sublime as Critique of Mysticism

Kant is, of course, aware of claims to mystical experience – including, notably,

Swedenborg’s – and vehemently denies that human beings have any such access
to higher truth unreachable by ordinary human cognitive faculties. To purport to
have such cognitive access is, on Kant’s view, “enthusiasm” (Enthusiasmus) or
“fanaticism” (Schwärmerei). It is to attribute to human beings, indeed to claim
for oneself, a capacity beyond the human. For Kant, sublime experience on
the mystical view is – to use Sircello’s expression – a fantasy.
Much as one might sympathize with this position, it must be acknowledged
that Kant does not provide much argument for it, often just heaping scorn on
those who make such claims. Against Kant, one might object that mystics’ (or
Romantics’) experiences are real, and seem to transcend ordinary cognition, to
provide contact with higher reality. Why would such experience not count as evi-
dence against Kant’s claim that human beings are incapable of such cognition?
Kant’s account of the sublime, I suggest, is an indirect response to this ob-
jection.²³ Kant here provides an alternative account of mystical experiences, not
simply dismissing them as mistaken or pretentious, but rather explaining them

 Though I am not treating the connection of the sublime to morality, I note that this includes
the “moral self-knowledge” to which Deligiorgi (2018, 183) among others refers: the experience
of the dynamic sublime on Kant’s account presupposes that we already, rationally understand
ourselves as moral beings (see CJ, AA 5:265). What we gain is (only) the aesthetic feeling of our-
selves as moral beings.
 Kant explicitly, if ambiguously, links the sublime to both fanaticism and enthusiasm, “delu-
sions” (he writes) of believing oneself able to sense the supersensible, at CJ, AA 5:272, 274– 5.
Kant seems (in my opinion mistakenly) to conceive of enthusiasm as an object of appreciation
(in addition to the large or powerful natural objects explicitly identified as occasioning objects
for the experience of the sublime, and to the ideas of reason, the true objects of admiration). For
my purposes, Kant’s comparison of these delusions to the state of experiencing the sublime is
more important: it suggests that this experience is similar to a (purported, erroneous) state of
perceiving supersensible reality.
112 Rachel Zuckert

away.²⁴ His account is, in other words, reductive: it explains the possibility of
such purportedly supernatural experiences in terms of ordinary cognitive facul-
ties, reason and imagination, that are employed in other contexts and may be
assumed to belong to all human beings. In the experience of the sublime,
these faculties operate in an unusual way, but – Kant attempts to show – we
need not think that there is some special cognitive faculty, possessed only by
a very few (mystics, visionaries), to explain such experience. In particular,
Kant’s proposal that ideas of reason function as goals for the “expansion” of
imagination is meant to explain the subject’s sense in such experience of self-
transcendence, of grasping something that also eludes her (as discussed
above). And it can explain the sense that one therein becomes aware of some
higher reality, gains an intimation that the sensible world is not all there is.
Thus, Kant here attempts not to decry, nor to ignore, but to account for the
fact that Sircello’s thesis of ontological transcendence or the related mystical
view seems apt to describe sublime experience – without, of course, allowing
that the appreciating subject is in direct contact with some higher reality.
Moreover, Kant’s account can be read as an error theory concerning the mys-
tical interpretation of such experiences. As we have seen, the experience of the
sublime on Kant’s account involves two forms of sensibility: the imaginative at-
tempted representation of the natural object, and displeasure-pleasure concern-
ing the superiority of reason over the imagination. The fact that sensibility is in-
volved in this experience could explain why the mystic takes himself to be in
direct contact with some ultimate reality. For unlike the mere rational consider-
ation of ideas (such as infinity), the experience of the sublime includes some-
thing felt, immediate, sensibly given, and thus something that (as it were) is pre-
sented to us as existing, not just as thought.
But, Kant’s account suggests, the mystic’s interpretation of this experience is
erroneous with respect to both forms of sensibility. First, the natural object, sen-
sibly perceived and sensibly felt as challenging to the imagination, puts the sub-
ject in mind of reason’s ideas of supersensible objects, also beyond sensibility.
But this does not mean that the subject senses those supersensible objects: a
sensed failure of sensibility, a felt absence (of comprehension) does not amount
to the presentation (evidence for the existence) of something non-sensible.²⁵ Sec-

 This attempt to redescribe purported sensible experiences of the supersensible is different

from (but complementary to) Kant’s arguments that reason cannot provide us knowledge of
the supersensible in the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique.
 Kant does seem to believe that one can know of the existence of something beyond the sen-
sible, on the basis of a sensible representation, for he claims in the Critique of Pure Reason that
we can know that things in themselves exist: otherwise “there [would be] an appearance without
 Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique 113

ond: the subject does have a positive feeling – even a feeling of “presence,” as it
were – in the experience of the sublime on Kant’s account. Namely, she feels the
superiority of reason to sensibility, in the form of pleasure. But feelings – pleas-
ures and displeasures – are, as Kant emphasizes, subjective. They do not tell us
about the nature of the object or world, but only about the states or attitudes of
the subject (CJ, AA 5:204). Feeling is not affection, revealing the existence of an
object, but self-affection. Thus, on Kant’s view, the existence claim (proposed by
Sircello) is an error. The mystic believes that she is in contact with an existing
thing (on a “higher plane”), but this is a mistaken interpretation of the role of
sensibility in the experience of the sublime.
Kant’s account does not, it is true, demonstrate that the mystical view is
false, that the experience of the sublime is (merely) aesthetic experience, not
a revelation of higher truths. But given the indeterminacy of such experience,
the confusion and limitation that subjects feel, the experiences themselves can-
not unequivocally weigh in favor of one interpretation or another. The mystical
interpretation is also hard – or, perhaps, question-beggingly easy – to defend.
For the truths purportedly accessed in such experience are professedly beyond
ordinary human faculties, and thus almost definitionally beyond articulation,
communication, or defense. By contrast, the Kantian interpretation, in explain-
ing such experience precisely in terms of ordinary cognitive faculties, may be dis-
cussed by, and defended to, others; indeed it is presumed to be shareable by all.
From a Kantian point of view, this theoretical advantage is a moral advantage as
well: unlike the mystical view, his account does not attribute to particular
human beings some sort of inexplicable insight beyond others’ comprehension,
or an indefeasible superiority over the “ordinary.”²⁶

Kant’s account of the sublime is, then, a critique in both senses central to his
theoretical philosophy: it aims to show how such experience is possible, not in-

anything that appears” (CPR, B xxvii). Though I cannot discuss this (controversial) passage in
any detail, I suggest that the knowledge it describes may be distinguished from the sort of
knowledge claim that (I am claiming) Kant diagnoses as erroneous: it is an inference (perhaps
a specifically philosophical inference) from ordinary experience of an ordinary object, known to
exist sensibly, to its existence considered as unrelated to sensibility. The mystic claims, by con-
trast, to know of the existence of something distinct from ordinary objects – in Kant’s terms, ob-
jects of rational ideas (infinity, God, world-whole) understood as definitively beyond sensible ex-
perience or nature – through sensible experience.
 If this is right, then it is a great irony that, through the mediation of Lyotard’s reception (in
Lyotard 1984, 71– 82 and other writings), Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime has given
rise to an outbreak of mysticism in art theory, as bemoaned in Elkins (2011).
114 Rachel Zuckert

coherent,²⁷ and to limit the claims that can be made on the basis of it. It is part of
his critical account of the nature and limits of human cognition. In particular, by
addressing a potential counterexample, by de-mystifying purported mystical ex-
periences, it supports Kant’s contention that human beings lack intellectual in-
tuition, in the form of an ability to intuit (even sense) intelligible entities. Thus
the sublime is, for Kant, significant precisely in its insignificance, as mere “ap-
pendix.”²⁸ The experience of the sublime reveals neither ultimate reality nor
(some) human beings’ special access to it; it arises simply from a particular
mode of functioning of ordinary cognitive faculties, which affords a particular
aesthetic experience. But, contra Sircello, for Kant it is philosophically important
to have a theory of the sublime – of mystical experience – as fantasy, as, in large
part, an experience of nothing.

Coda: Aesthetics of Freedom

My interpretation has omitted something, however: the way in which the expe-
rience of the sublime on Kant’s account is not mere fantasy, not merely a cogni-
tively insignificant experience. It also is, positively, an aesthetic experience, one
suffused with painful-pleasurable admiration for the faculty of reason and is, as
such, significant.
Jane Forsey suggests, in fact, that for Kant the faculty of reason is the exis-
tent object of sublime experience. The natural-yet-supersensible purported inten-
tional object of the experience of the sublime (e. g., the mountain presenting the
infinite sensibly) may not be a true object of admiration, nor ontologically tran-
scendent, nor even, I have proposed, a coherent object at all. But, Forsey propos-
es, on Kant’s view the experience of the sublime is about an existing, indeed an
ontologically transcendent object, namely, the faculty of reason.
Kant’s description of reason as a “supersensible faculty” (as at CJ, AA 5:250)
may support such an interpretation. But I think this proposal misses two ele-
ments of Kant’s view: the subjectivity of feeling and the riskiness (as it were)
of reason, a riskiness reflected in the very phenomenology of the sublime.
That is, first: feeling – pleasure and displeasure – is, as mentioned above, sub-
jective on Kant’s view. It reveals nothing about the object but is purely subjective

 As in the first Critique, Kant’s account of the possibility of such experience also has justifi-
catory import: a “deduction” (legitimation) of certain judgments, here of course judgments of the
sublime. I cannot discuss this further element of the account here, however.
 Kant calls his account a “mere appendix” to the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment at CJ, AA
5:246.
 Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique 115

responsiveness to an object or (more precisely) to having the representation of

that object.²⁹ Feeling should not, then, be understood as equivalent to sensible
representation of an object, even representation of something belonging to the
subject (such as the faculty of reason) as an object. Correspondingly, unlike sen-
sible representation, feeling does not ground knowledge of the existence of a
represented object. Rather, feeling is first-personal; it reflects what-it-is-to-be a
subject, to have this point of view, to engage in this kind of representing (direct-
ed towards objects). Our feeling for reason in the sublime is, accordingly, not a
revelation of a fact about ourselves (we already, independently, can and do know
that we have reason), or a grasp of a supersensible object (which we cannot
have, on Kant’s view, even when this object is our own nature). It is a first-per-
sonal sense of what it is to “inhabit” reason – or, more precisely, reason and sen-
sibility at once. It is pleasure in being rationally oriented towards the world, in
being able to transcend ourselves, to set goals that challenge our sensible facul-
ties, that push us to think beyond, to be dissatisfied with, the sensible world in
which we find ourselves. It is a feeling of freedom, of the “enlargement of the
mind which feels itself empowered to overstep the limits of sensibility” (CJ,
AA 5:255).
The feeling of the sublime is also, of course, a pleasure tinged with displeas-
ure. Kant emphasizes, as we have seen, that the subject is pained at the inade-
quacy of human sensibility. But the tinge of displeasure reflects too, I think, the
riskiness of Kantian reason, the fact that human rational transcendence of sen-
sibility is incomplete, human freedom not guaranteed. As we have seen, reason
proposes ideals that transcend sensibility. But precisely because sensibility is the
only way objects are given to us, we cannot be assured that the ideals of reason
have objects, that the demands and promises of reason are something more than
fantasy.³⁰ Thus, I must now modify an earlier formulation: in the experience of

 See again CJ, AA 5:204. I have discussed this Kantian view of feeling in Zuckert (2002) and
(2018).
 In other words, I think Forsey’s metaphysical reading makes things both too hard and too
easy for Kant. On one hand: Kant’s reference to reason as “supersensible” can be read as de-
scribing the fact that reason formulates ideas and norms that transcend what is given in sensi-
bility (i.e., it comes up with distinctive thought-contents), and not (as she proposes, but for Kant
problematically, even self-contradictorily) its status as a purportedly known, non-sensible thing.
Indeed Kant usually refers to “ideas of reason,” and not reason itself, as the object of admiration
in the sublime. On the other hand, pointing to reason as a transcendent “object” of sublime ex-
perience makes it too easy to respond to this worry about its potentially fantastical character: if
reason is a supersensible being (somehow accessed in this experience), the fact that rational
ideas do not convey any knowledge, and so may not legitimate the feeling of elevating pleasure
in the sublime, is not addressed.
116 Rachel Zuckert

the sublime, imagination fails at a task reason sets. But on Kant’s view, reason
does not fully succeed at that task either: though it does formulate such ideas, it
does not succeed in knowing the infinite, nature as a whole, or its supersensible
ground. What is felt in the experience of the mathematical sublime on Kant’s
view, most properly, is the fact that reason succeeds (only) in setting beyond-nat-
ural goals.
For this reason, the sublime is, I suggest, the aesthetic of Kantian theoretical
reason, perhaps of Kantian criticism as such: a painful pleasure in an unassured
transcendence; an exhilarating pleasure at freedom from sensibility, tinged with
fear that it may lead us into empty nothingness; or, more soberly, an admiration
for reason as that which limits sensibility, but also must limit itself.³¹ The riski-
ness of theoretical reason felt in the experience of the sublime may also explain,
I note in closing, why Kant claims that the experience of the sublime, even ap-
parently the mathematical sublime, gains its significance and justification from
its connection to the practical (5:256). The experience of the mathematical sub-
lime does not have moral ideas or practical reason as part of its content; it is
rather, I have suggested, a feeling of the freedom of reason, theoretically em-
ployed. But on Kant’s view such freedom of reason may be ultimately vindicated
by morality alone; for with respect to practical rational demands, it is at least
possible that human beings may both demand of ourselves and achieve rational
transcendence of sensibility.³²

 The centrality of the aesthetic of the sublime to Kant’s philosophical sensibility is attested
most clearly in the famous passage concerning the sublimity of the starry skies and the
moral law at CPrR, AA 5:161– 2 of the Critique of Practical Reason.
 I thank Katalin Makkai, two anonymous referees for this journal, and audiences at the Emory
Universtiy Graduate Student Conference, the North American Kant Society Biennial conference
held at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Grand Valley State University (Grand Rapids, MI), and the
Tübingen Summer School on aesthetics and epistemology for insightful comments on earlier
versions of this essay.
 Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique 117

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