Kant on the Mathematical and Dynamic Sublime

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a pioneering German Romantic landscape painter who pioneered the use of landscape as a self-contained emotive subject, using isolated figures seen from behind to invite viewers to experience the sublime—a concept defined by Edmund Burke as powerful natural phenomena that evoke awe, dread, and transcendence through their threat to human existence, while remaining safely observed from a distance.

Caspar David Friedrich, a German Romantic artist, used landscape painting to evoke transcendental spiritual experiences, as seen in 'Abbey in the Oak Forest' (1810) where symbols like dusk, winter, and ruins convey themes of death and cycles, and in 'Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist' (1817-1818) which exemplifies the Romantic concept of the sublime—experiences that inspire awe and remind viewers of humanity's smallness in the vast universe.

Caspar David Friedrich, a German Romantic painter of the early 1800s, revolutionized landscape painting by using nature to evoke the sublime—a concept from Kantian philosophy where humans experience awe and terror before something vast and incomprehensible; Friedrich achieved this through techniques like tiny human figures against vast landscapes, ominous nebulous environments with rolling mists and contorted trees, and the röken figure (viewed from behind), which invited viewers to feel their own insignificance before nature's immensity, making him particularly resonant for winter's humbling season.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a German Romantic painter whose landscapes embodied the philosophical concept of the sublime—a state of awe mixed with terror in response to nature's vastness. Influenced by personal tragedy (losing his mother, brother, and sisters by age 18) and the Enlightenment-era philosophical writings of Edmund Burke, Friedrich created hauntingly solitary figures contemplating nature's overwhelming power, such as 'The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.' His innovative approach of using natural elements as divine symbols and prioritizing emotional truth over idealized representation made him a foundational figure in Romanticism, though he fell out of favor during his lifetime and was later controversially associated with Nazi ideology before receiving renewed scholarly appreciation in the 1970s.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic painter whose work featured landscapes in an entirely new way than his predecessors and contemporaries. Friedrich made landscapes the main character—the environment was the story, not the people in them. His work made landscapes romantic, powerful, and awe-inspiring. This was a game changer for its time, and artists from all over the world would flock to Germany to study his art. Additionally, he'd add symbolism to his work, and this was the spark that birthed the Symbolist movement. Times changed and Romanticism fell out of style, and Friedrich fell into a depression, isolating himself from his family and friends. Friedrich was a romantic, and you can see it in his work, but he wasn't much of a people person either. He wrote, 'You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You are right. I love society, yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company.'

This segment presents Jean-François Lyotard's 'The Inhumane,' using the sublime to analyze 20th-century art. Lyotard argues Burke and Kant's sublime aesthetics opened possibilities for avant-garde experimentation. The sublime involves 'lo inhumano' - something of our humanity that abysmalizes. The artwork presents what is 'impresentable' (unpresentable), treating it as an artifact rather than imitating nature. Society initially rejects sublime art as incomprehensible, then intellectual communities preserve it as traces of the spirit's power. The sublime provides 'un goce ambivalente' (ambivalent enjoyment) - intensifying emotional and conceptual capacities rather than providing simple pleasure.

Jean-François Lyotard traces postmodernism's emergence from late 20th-century cultural exhaustion—a widespread demand for order and stability in an increasingly chaotic world. This craving for simplicity represents a rejection of modernist experimentation. Lyotard connects this to a fundamental crisis: the failure of modernity's grand promise of inevitable progress. The Holocaust shattered confidence in the belief that science, art, and politics would inevitably create a better world. In response, Lyotard turns to Kant's concept of the sublime—the feeling of awe when confronted with something immense that overwhelms our capacity to represent it. This leads him to conclude that modern art's new mission is to witness the 'unpresentable'—vast ideas that cannot be fully represented—by showing the precise moment where representation breaks down.

Jean-François Lyotard, a French philosopher contemporary to and in dialogue with other Continental philosophers like Habermas, defines postmodernism through his work 'The Postmodern Explained.' The modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime but is nostalgic. It allows the unpresentable to be evoked only as absent content, while form thanks to its recognizable consistency continues to offer the reader or spectator material for consolation and pleasure. Such feelings do not amount to the true Sublime feeling, which is intrinsically a combination of Pleasure and Pain - pleasure in reason exceeding all presentation, pain in the imagination or sensibility proving inadequate to the concept. The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself.

Lyotard develops an 'ethics for thought' through the sublime, attempting to curb Western philosophy's totalizing pretensions. He distinguishes modern from postmodern art: modern art maintains hope for joining reason with material presentation, offering pleasure through recognizable forms; postmodern art denies solace and nostalgia, asserting the unpresentable's existence without adequate presentation. Art must renounce representation and reveal that every representation forgets the other. However, this approach faces critique for overdetermining aesthetic experience with ethical significance, thereby destroying what was unique about it—its independence from moral and cognitive evaluation. The indeterminacy of aesthetic experience has been seized upon to assign art the task of cultivating indeterminacy for determinate ends, raising questions about whether this betrays the very freedom that made aesthetic experience valuable in the first place.

Jean-François Lyotard's seminal work 'The Postmodern Condition' argues that modern grand narratives—such as Hegelianism, Marxism, and Enlightenment rationalism—are no longer intellectually credible, and proposes instead a politics of 'paralogy' that celebrates infinite diversity and difference through 'little narratives,' rejecting totalizing meta-discourses in favor of local language games and perspectival pluralism.

The anthropocene crisis (climate change, fossil fuels) presents a paradox for the sublime: on one hand, civilization holds its feet to the fire (greater power than ever before); on the other hand, we face unprecedented disaster. This situation may qualify as sublime experience—either as Burkean overwhelm by external reality or as recognition of something within ourselves responding to what we see. The question is whether this relationship remains sublime or becomes something else. The sublime shakes us out of habitual sense of self and stable individual identity, potentially enabling new kinds of connections—community bonds formed through shared transcendent experiences. Standing on a mountain with someone creates a connection that persists even after loss, transforming the experience into something painful yet meaningful. Discontinuity is central to sublime experience—something unexpected bursts through the fabric of ordinary experience. Walter Benjamin argued distraction is necessary for genuinely modern art. Using Saul on the road to Damascus as analogy: he couldn't have had his transformative experience without the disruptive moment of falling off his horse. The sublime requires rupture from habitual states of being.

The Sublime is an aesthetic response possible to the scientific and technological mediations that allow comprehension of terrestrial dimensions, deep time, and environmental factors. This response attunes to the power that shines in these mediations rather than to the precision of processes that help us understand. Some view the Sublime in images of the Earth and landscape as a positive alternative to recover the indomitable nature and signal the ruin of human power. Others, like Jameson and Bordo, redirect the classical category to indicate that in the ecological crisis, what is truly Sublime is the technical and actual power of its capacity for destruction.

The technological sublime describes encounters with technology evoking powerful emotional responses similar to nature. As the US modernized, people experienced awe with railroads, telegraphs, and engineering projects like the Hoover Dam. David Nye argues this created social cohesion as a civil religion. However, the technological sublime is ephemeral with a half-life, requiring new technologies to sustain feelings. By the late 19th century, industrialization and secularization led many to believe universe powers were humanity's rightful possessions. Awe fell out of fashion, regarded as primitive and naive. This suggests we may suffer from 'awe deficit disorder' caused by secularization, light pollution, smog, and smartphone mediation of life's grandeur.

The trick to enduring an indifferent universe required recognition and respect for nature's power, not Rooseveltian will. John Muir pioneered an ecological aesthetic questioning human centrality without descending into nihilism. He redefined the sublime without losing awe before wilderness silence, finding that when we try to isolate anything, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. George Santayana critiqued transcendentalist nature as merely a mirror reflecting human genius, proposing instead that we feel ourselves as offshoots of nature's life—one brave little force among immense forces. By the early 20th century, the traditional sublime was in eclipse. Photographers replaced painters in portraying wilderness as discrete moments in time and space. The technological sublime emerged as nature gave way to human-made power. Andrew Melrose's painting 'Westward the Star of Empire Makes Its Way' (1867) showed locomotives as sources of light, not divine origin. The Eads Bridge (1874) and Brooklyn Bridge (1883) embodied romance and human daring. Henry Adams became obsessed with the dynamo—the embodiment of modern hubris, evoking profound helplessness and dependence on incomprehensible, omnipotent forces.

The technological sublime refers to the incorporation of infrastructure into the landscape as a new form of sublime experience imposed on human experience starting in the 19th and 20th centuries. Historian David Nye identified this as a transformation where industrial and technological achievements began to evoke the same feelings of awe and terror traditionally associated with natural sublime experiences. This concept addresses how humans relate to transformed environments, especially as conservation becomes significant in contemporary culture within the context of understanding the Anthropocene.