The sublime; Kant & Burke
Assignment #3
The Sublime
Part 1
In Neil Hertz’s essay, The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime, Neil uses the work of William Wordsworth to makes a connection to the very distinguished and particular notion of the mathematical sublime by Immanuel Kant. The mathematical sublime is the perception that reason has this superiority over imagination because reason and logic is boundless whereas imagination is limited to what we have personally experienced through our senses. When in the presence of something that embodies the overwhelming magnitude of an idea that we cannot comprehend at first glance (the sublime), Kant believes that reason has the upper hand over the senses. By means of reasoning, we as individuals can determine that there is some claim to final totality. When this reasoning comes face to face with an agent of the sublime, our logic is able to understand the failure of our ability to grasp the enormity of something so thought shattering that it eventually leads to the realization that our reason is more reliable than our senses. The sensory faculty bases its understanding on empirical evidence and in this case would have no influence over our train of thought because we have never experienced anything quite like the sublime. Kant labels this as the blockage and associates it with a negative feeling, this feeling of displeasure stems from the fact that in order to grasp the concept of the sublime the individual must realize that their previous cognitive limits were not developed enough. Hertz has a different idea about the result of experiencing the mathematical sublime, he believes that it brings us pleasure by means of displeasure but the pleasure and power of overcoming our imagination’s shortcomings bring us a greater satisfaction than we could have experienced without this knowledge.
Hertz then applies several excerpts from book 7 of Wordsworth’s The 1805 Prelude. Wordsworth’s literary works reinforce Hertz’s position upon the
The Sublime
Part 1
In Neil Hertz’s essay, The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime, Neil uses the work of William Wordsworth to makes a connection to the very distinguished and particular notion of the mathematical sublime by Immanuel Kant. The mathematical sublime is the perception that reason has this superiority over imagination because reason and logic is boundless whereas imagination is limited to what we have personally experienced through our senses. When in the presence of something that embodies the overwhelming magnitude of an idea that we cannot comprehend at first glance (the sublime), Kant believes that reason has the upper hand over the senses. By means of reasoning, we as individuals can determine that there is some claim to final totality. When this reasoning comes face to face with an agent of the sublime, our logic is able to understand the failure of our ability to grasp the enormity of something so thought shattering that it eventually leads to the realization that our reason is more reliable than our senses. The sensory faculty bases its understanding on empirical evidence and in this case would have no influence over our train of thought because we have never experienced anything quite like the sublime. Kant labels this as the blockage and associates it with a negative feeling, this feeling of displeasure stems from the fact that in order to grasp the concept of the sublime the individual must realize that their previous cognitive limits were not developed enough. Hertz has a different idea about the result of experiencing the mathematical sublime, he believes that it brings us pleasure by means of displeasure but the pleasure and power of overcoming our imagination’s shortcomings bring us a greater satisfaction than we could have experienced without this knowledge.
Hertz then applies several excerpts from book 7 of Wordsworth’s The 1805 Prelude. Wordsworth’s literary works reinforce Hertz’s position upon the