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Kant on Sublimity and Morality

Political Philosophy Now

University of Wales Press

Longinus and the Origins of the Sublimity–Morality Connection

Eighteenth-century debates on the sublime tell us much about the origins of Kantian sublimity and its connections to morality, for Kant relies heavily on these debates. But many fail to see that eighteenth-century accounts of the sublime themselves rely on the ancient Greek author Longinus (long confused with the neo-Platonist Cassius Longinus c.220–73 CE, author of a rhetoric text (in Burke: 468)). No figure is more important to the history of sublimity. Longinus dictated the terms of all subsequent writing on sublimity and articulated positions that in some respects are more amenable to Kantian morality than any of the important eighteenth-century empiricist and rationalist accounts known to Kant. For this reason, a reading of Longinus serves the historical function of subverting attempts to derive Kantian sublimity from British empiricist aesthetics or to assert the originality of the latter. Reading Longinus also helps to show the origins of Kant's transformation of traditional associations of sublimity and virtue into a critical account of sublimity's functions in a universalistic morality. Longinus' account of the conditions and moral relevance of sublimity prepares the ground for the Kantian critical account in ways that exhibit the limitations of eighteenth-century empiricist aesthetics. Yet, the Longinian account shares many of the limitations of eighteenth-century aesthetics for Kantian morality. Longinus' acceptance of Aristotelian virtue ethics, his failure to warrant his assertions and his lack of a systematic critique of experience make it impossible for him to show how subjective experience might operate within a universal morality. As a result, his account of sublimity remains a mere collection of loosely associated, unargued claims. Hence, we will see that Kant's revisions of the Longinian tradition provide an explanation for sublimity and assign sublimity specific functions within his critical morality.

The sublimity craze in early modern Europe began with Nicolas Boileau's (1636–1711) phenomenally successful 1674 French translation of Longinus' work, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] The English and German translations of the text, following the French Traité du sublime, were On the Sublime and Vom Erhabenen, respectively, meaning 'on height' or 'on the elevated' (see Wood: 189). Although the tenth-century Parisinus manuscript of Longinus' text, missing about one thousand lines, had already appeared in three editions and been translated into Latin and Italian by the end of the sixteenth century, and into English by John Hall in 1652 (Grube: vii; Wood: 10), Boileau's translation 'produced a spectacular reaction'; for the next 150 years, Longinus was a 'household name' (Russell, introduction to Longinus 1964: xliii), so much so that Russell can claim that 'European literary criticism' owes its second-greatest debt, after Aristotle, to Longinus (Russell: ix). Longinus' influence was particularly strong in England and within a few years the sublime began to appear in the writings of all the great English critics, from John Dryden in 1676 to John Dennis in 1701 and 1704, Alexander Pope in 1709, the third earl of Shaftesbury in 1711, Joseph Addison in 1711–12, Jonathan Swift in 1733 and Sir Joshua Reynolds in the 1760s (Russell: xlii). The sublime also became the focus of British, French and German philosophical work. The most prominent were Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Moses Mendelssohn's 'On the sublime and naive in the fine sciences' (1758) and Immanuel Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) and the 'Analytic of the Sublime' in the Critique of Judgment (1790).

From the perspective of modern aesthetics, which lacks access to any of his own ancient sources, Longinus did much more than merely inspire this torrent of writing. Indeed, he seems to have set forth the entire framework, subject matter, terminology, methods, definitions and examples used by eighteenth-century writers on the sublime, as well as the specific associations between sublimity and morality.

A partial list of ideas derived from Longinus includes:

• the mathematical and dynamical sublime,

• the methodological determination of the sublime (by reference to examples from classical authors),

• the description of sublimity as universal, elevated, noble, pleasing, boundless, heroic, grand, magnificent, formless, overpowering, a hybrid of nature and rule-governed techne and a moral, psychological ('subjective') experience.

(This psychological experience is linked closely to genius, enthusiasm, emotion — but not pity, grief or fear — affects, character, imagination, reason and other mental powers.)

In order to establish the relevance of Longinian sublimity to Kantian morality, it is necessary first to correct conventional accounts that place Longinus within an exclusively rhetorical, rather than psychological or aesthetic, tradition, concerned with identifying the essence of elevation, height or greatness in speech and writing, in words rather than images or vast, grand objects (Russell, introduction to Longinus 1964: x–xi; cf. Monk; Wood; Kirwan; Shaw: 5, 12, 71; etc.). The notion that rhetoric is exclusive of psychological and moral questions depends on a misreading of Aristotle. While Aristotelian rhetoric is indeed a linguistic art of rule-governed persuasion centred on proof, Aristotle argues that rhetoric, as a branch of ethics, may also work on character and emotions, and thus involve psychological and moral elements (Aristotle, Rhetoric: I.1–2). Nor can rhetoric be separated radically from aesthetics, for the persuasive, emotional and psychological elements of rhetoric engage the same mental powers as aesthetics, defined as the study of the images or representations experienced or considered by sensibility (Greek [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], aisthesis), imagination, understanding and reason. Now if one turns away from the Aristotelian text and defines rhetoric differently as a non-psychological, non-aesthetic form of techne, as in Monk and others, then Longinus certainly does not offer a merely rhetorical reading of sublimity, for his account of sublimity as a techne contingent on mental activity recognizes the significance of practical questions of method and use in public speaking and, above all, 'the essentially moral and psychological basis of the problem ... how can we develop our capacities to some degree of greatness?' (Russell: x). For Longinus, the moral and psychological task of self-development is simultaneously aesthetic, since words both originate in and conjure up mental representations or images and emotions. The moral function of aesthetic representation derives in part from the motivating, elevating power of these representations. Because [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] refers to words that evoke images associated with overpowering enthusiasm and passion, it operates by raising the passive reader violently beyond 'himself' through the affects, rather than by free and rational persuasion. By generating this self-transcendence, sublime experience situates the person in the virtuous position of a higher selflessness. Yet, the emotional force motivating this self-transcendence could be appropriated for all manner of actions, virtuous or otherwise. There is no clear control function regulating what actions sublimity may engender. Images or mental representations (eidolopoiias) not only make strong contributions in persuasiveness to 'dignity, elevation and power', but they apply to the mental ideas originative of all speech, and particularly sublime speech, speech 'carried away by enthusiasm [enthousiasmos] and passion' (L 1907: XV, 82–3). These affective, imagistic, ideational, rule-governed and linguistic understandings of the sublime demonstrate that Longinus conceives sublimity in moral, aesthetic and psychological terms transcending traditional 'rhetorical' readings of his work.

As befits its place in this Aristotelian 'rhetorical' tradition, the morality developed in Longinian sublimity is primarily the very same Aristotelian virtue ethics still dominant in virtually all eighteenth-century writings on the sublime, including Kant's early work and older elements of the 'Analytic of the Sublime'. Longinus describes sublimity in implicitly Aristotelian ethical terms, arguing that 'sublimity depends upon where [pou, the place] and how [pos, manner] and the circumstances and that for the sake of which [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] the motive]' (ibid.: XVI, 92–3). This reference to context, manner, circumstances and motive (final cause, that for the sake of which) could be drawn straight from Aristotle's account of right action (e.g. Ethics: II.1106b20, 1109a27, III.1110b33–11a6). Here we have no a priori guide to what context, manner, circumstances and motive are appropriate to sublimity, for the Longinian criteria for judging the sublime exhibit the Aristotelian concern to establish moral standards by reference not solely to reason or universal rules, but to practised moral judgement and the affects of the person as well. This reliance on moral exemplars, developed moral judgement and affects implies either an ideological reference to a foundational standard deemed moral in itself or an infinite regress, where each judgement or moral action is so considered by its reference to a prior, similarly 'justified' judgement. Hence, this reliance on an Aristotelian form of morality is inherently problematic. But if we ask what specific moral virtues sublimity involves, rather than speaking abstractly of moral foundations or virtue in general, we cannot easily associate the excess of Longinian sublimity with many of the moderate Aristotelian virtues. Where there is a clear link, from the very definition of the sublime, is to the Aristotelian virtues of greatness and magnanimity, yet this relationship directly connects the traditional account of sublimity to the transcendent form of Kantian sublimity and morality. Longinus argues that sublimity in literature is akin to the 'high-souled' disdain for 'riches, honours, distinctions, sovereignties and all other' external values to men of good sense (L 1907: VII, 54–5). The sublime collapses into admiration of the mortal, the lawless, the shameless, when softened by greed, as in peacetime, we become ignoble 'slaves of pleasure' (ibid.: XLIV, 156–61). Sublimity requires transcendence of mortal pleasures. This view, anticipating Kant, demonstrates that for Longinus, as for Kant, sublimity's relationship to pleasure and the affects consists in the drive to master them, and thereby to transcend the limits of human existence. In this respect, Longinus provides just the dominating, transcendent relationship to the affects called for by the Kantian critical account.

Indeed, Longinus already sets forth the elements of the moral 'transformation' of sublimity that Paul Guyer attributes first to Kant. In distinguishing two types of pre-Kantian eighteenth-century sublimity, the psychological and the theological-moral, Guyer argues that '[w]hat Kant did was to transmute the psychological account into an alternative moral account in which humanity is elevated rather than humbled' (Guyer 1993: 259). As we shall see, there were, in fact, numerous pre-Kantian readings of sublimity as moral elevation. But at least fifteen hundred years earlier, Longinus provided perhaps the first and most influential example of this particular moral reading in describing sublime height or elevation as transcendence of the merely human or mortal (a characteristic both of the sublime object and the spectator experiencing the sublime) in imagination's passing beyond the universe and all space to human purpose in this world (L 1907: XXXVI, 136–7; XXXV, 132–5), and in giving a moral reading of this form of transcendence.

The similarities to Kant's moral account of sublimity go much farther. In fact, it can be argued that Longinian categories, ranging from the association of sublimity with self-transcendence to the account of the power struggles of the faculties within the sublime, provide the framework for a Kantian moral reading of sublimity. Longinus and Kant agree that the tension between imagination and reason is definitive of sublimity, that reason and imagination are necessary to it (L 1907: XVI, 94–5), that morality depends on a power struggle between these two mental powers and that sublimity is incompatible with an excess or disorder of the passions, which Kant calls fanaticism (Schwärmerei) and Longinus calls [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or false enthusiasm [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], a hollow, untimely 'display of passion', immoderacy (L 1957: III, 6–7), or 'intoxication personal and independent of the subject matter' (L 1907: III, 48–9). Thus, the destruction of a certain unstable, temporary mean or balance between the powers of reason, imagination and the passions destroys the sublime. In allying beauty and sublimity in moral terms (ibid.: XXVII, 96–7), then, Longinus repeatedly describes them both as harmonic phenomena (ibid.: XXVIII, 114–15; XXXIX, 142–3). However, like Kant, he stresses the interplay of tension and release, disorder and order, imagination and reason, rather than simple harmony. If there are not two forms of sublimity at issue here, a simple or naive and a complex style, but only one (and Longinus does not answer this question), the harmony and dissonance described by Longinus might be combined into a single Kantian 'harmony' defined by the unification of contradictions or tensions, as in Sappho's desire to effect 'a concourse of the passions' (ibid.: X, 70–1). But it is certainly the case that for both Longinus and Kant, the tension definitive of sublimity, between sensibility or imagination and reason, is harmonious or morally productive in enabling the spectator's transcendence of sensibility. It might be asked whether the disharmony of sensibility or imagination with reason would always enable moral transcendence. In the Kantian case, the inclinations of sensibility must be negative, and negative inclinations covertly serve reason's moral ends by obstructing sensibility, but in the Longinian case inclinations often serve positively to reinforce rational commands, an effect that for Kant would occasion suspicion of the autonomy, purity or rational control of moral commands.

The most morally significant similarity between Longinus and Kant is the view that sublime height or elevation, both in the experiencing subject and the sublime object (ibid.: XXXVI, 134–7), constitutes an unrestricted transcendence of the merely human or mortal (ibid.: 136–7; cf. Weiskel: 3). Nature implants in humans, as spectators of the vast, mighty universe, 'the unconquerable love of whatever is elevated and more divine than we ... Wherefore not even the entire universe suffices for the thought and contemplation within the reach of the human mind, but our imaginations often pass beyond the bounds of space' to recognize the purpose of our existence in what is great in our life; humans 'reserve their admiration [thaumaston, wonder] for that which is astounding [paradoxon]' (L 1907: XXXV, 132–5). The sublime experience of what is transcendent frees the spectator's thought and imagination, prepared already by nature to admire what is elevated, to think and imagine freely what transcends spatio-temporal existence. Hence, sublimity serves to detach the spectator from earthly inclinations in favour of the universal. Longinus, like Baumgarten, Kant and many others, regards sublimity as a means of achieving virtue through the transcendence of earthly greed; as Philip Shaw argues, the sublime 'elevates man above the tawdry concern with wealth and status' (Shaw: 18). But this view is problematic in that it is unaccompanied in Longinus by a rational, universal system of non-natural morality reliant on transcendence and it fails to distinguish clearly between the capacities and functions of thought and imagination, neglecting the ancient philosophical tradition in which (visual) imagination is linked to finite material representations in the visual sphere.

In Longinus' account, the sublime exhibits for experience transcendent standards by reference to which the insignificance and baseness of all quotidian desires become evident. There is no cognitive judgement dismissing greed as wrong for particular reasons; the accepted rightness of virtue is, rather, given visceral demonstration and the person is motivated to live virtuously. Sublimity's role in preparing the virtuous person is clear. Virtue requires the transcendent greatness and nobility of the magnanimous man or the disengaged, purely theoretical life of the contemplative 'man', not, normally, the practically engaged man acting from the conventional midpoint between extremes of, say, passion and reason. The sublime is its own type of virtuous extreme. This association of virtue with sublime transcendence of nature enables the segregation of evaluative and factual realms, a step crucial to any conventionally successful morality. Yet, transcendence of nature remains dependent on our natural love for the supernatural. This move avoids the circularity of Aristotelian references to moral exemplars, although, as we have seen, Longinus elsewhere looks to the moral exemplar to establish standards for virtuous behaviour and to the exemplary author to exhibit the sublime. But, by conditioning virtue ultimately on natural functions, he undermines its claim to transcendence. The fact that we have some natural function cannot establish that it is morally good to possess that function or that the function is present in us for some transcendent purpose. While mere nature can explain the presence and pragmatic effectiveness of various functions, as in Darwinian natural selection, it cannot establish their transcendent value, and the mere love of transcendence, as a human emotion, is not thereby elevated beyond natural experience to this posited evaluative dimension.

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Excerpted from Kant on Sublimity and Morality by Joshua Rayman. Copyright © 2012 Joshua Rayman. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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