HeyJ XXXVIII (1997), pp.

125–143

THE SUBLIME AND THE OTHER

RICHARD WHITE
Creighton University, Omaha, NE

The sublime is a concept which has a very ancient history, and to fol-
low the intellectual genealogy of this concept we should have to examine
the classical discussion by Longinus, as well as related philosophical
themes in Plato and elsewhere. Likewise, we know that in anticipation
of the whole Romantic movement, the sublime became a very central
and popular category in eighteenth-century aesthetics; and it is now cus-
tomary to refer to the two major texts of this period, Burke’s A Philo-
sophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful and Kant’s Critique of Judgement, as the empirical and trans-
cendental alternatives which together help to organize the whole theoret-
ical space of the sublime.1 Of course, the history of the sublime is much
more complex than this, for in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
authors as diverse as Addison, Schiller, Schopenhauer and Hegel all
produced theories of the sublime; and the trace of the sublime may also
be found in Nietzsche’s discussion of tragedy or Heidegger’s account of
Being. But it remains true that no discussion of the sublime can afford
to ignore either Burke or Kant: since both writers systematize existing
intuitions concerning the sublime, while they develop their own original
insights which help to evoke the experience of sublimity itself.
The great danger of every critical or historical account of the sublime,
however, is that it will simply remain a historical exegesis of either Burke
or Kant or some other author, and in trying to demonstrate the consist-
ency, or otherwise, of a philosopher’s intellectual system, it will lose
sight of the experience of the sublime which it is supposed to clarify and
explain. And this is especially problematic if, as I suspect, the sublime
is a feature of experience which acts in such a way as to shatter the ordin-
ary categories of thought. In this paper, I want to gauge the philosoph-
ical significance of the sublime, and to ask whether this concept still has
any relevance to contemporary life or whether it is simply outmoded.
And this means that I will first return to the actual experience of the
sublime, to describe it and define it and if possible to offer a coherent
philosophical account which would identify the essential moments of
sublimity. With this experience clarified, and with reference to the most
important critical accounts of the sublime, I will then argue that the

© The Editor/Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.

126 RICHARD WHITE

experience of the sublime is exceptionally important, in so far as it

presents us with a general model for the experience of otherness, the
encounter with transcendence itself, which might reasonably be viewed
as impossible. More particularly, I will also argue that the experience of
the sublime is closely related to the experience of the sacred; and I will
show how even in Burke and Kant, the sublime is grasped as a religious
experience – as opposed to a moral or an aesthetic experience – which
finally opens the individual to that which is greater than herself. After
years of neglect, postmodernist and poststructuralist writers, like Lyotard,
have recently seized upon the traditional category of the sublime as some-
how emblematic of the contemporary experience of art, if not of contemp-
orary experience in general. In one sense, I think that postmodernism
has really appropriated the idea of the sublime in order to use it for its
own ends. But in so far as this new reading of the sublime apparently
celebrates all that is conceptually inappropriable, it correctly marks the
point at which thought or philosophy experiences its own limitations and
must recoil in the face of that which forever exceeds it.

Obviously, the whole theoretical discourse upon the sublime is pre-

dicated upon the belief that there really is such a thing as an experience
of sublimity, and that such an experience remains a continual possibility
of human existence. In recent years, however, philosophers and critics
have become deeply suspicious of this whole notion, and instead of
accepting it on its own terms, they have related it to its conditions of
emergence. Thus on the one hand, the sublime may be viewed as per-
haps the most excessive aspect of modern aesthetics, whose fortunes are
closely linked to the rise of capitalism in the middle of the eighteenth
century; and in so far as the discipline of aesthetics is considered a
specifically bourgeois creation, the ethereal category of the sublime is
apparently just another ‘front’ for an underlying economic shift.2 A sec-
ond approach would link the sublime to all mystical and religious feel-
ings in general; following a more psychoanalytical route, it would refer
this whole variety of experience to the ‘oceanic’ feeling of infinite bound-
lessness, which Freud relates to the child’s original relationship to her
mother.3 In both of these cases, the sublime is viewed as a defective ex-
perience which fails to illuminate the way things are. In fact, it actually
distorts our final understanding of the world by distracting us with a
bogus enthusiasm that is basically self-indulgent.
Given these obvious problems, I will therefore begin this analysis of
the sublime from a phenomenological standpoint, which means that I
will try to describe the most essential and invariant features of the sub-
lime experience as it has been described, while at the same time I will
 THE SUBLIME AND THE OTHER 127

try to avoid any final judgements about the origin or the validity of that
experience. ‘Phenomenology’, in its best and purest sense, is the science
which articulates the basic structures of our experience, while it places
the reality of that experience ‘in brackets’. And this seems the most
obvious way to proceed, for the nature of the experience must first be
explained before it can be effectively affirmed or denied. Even so, it
might still be argued that there really is no invariant experience of the
sublime; and that the so-called ‘sublime experience’ is to a large extent
conditioned by the theory which is meant to explain it. Kant, for
example, describes the sublime as follows:

Bold, overhanging, and as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the

vault of heaven, borne alone with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence
of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean
rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like,
make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might.

But then he adds,

provided our position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fear-
fulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of
the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power
of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure
ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature (CJ pp. 110–11).

Here, Kant emphasizes the triumphant reassertion of the self which

follows the impact of the overwhelming object of the sublime. For in his
theory, the experience of the sublime functions as a bridge to our own
ethical enhancement. Our physical self is threatened, but in the end this
only allows us to recognize how absolutely important we are as moral
agents and as ends-in-ourselves. Burke, on the other hand, regards terror
as the ruling principle of the sublime. And so he writes,

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate
most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of soul, in which
all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is
so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by
consequence reason on that object which employs it (B p. 57).

Here, the experience of self-reassertion is not even mentioned. It seems

that everything is on the part of the object and the final result of the
experience of the sublime may actually be self-denial in so far as the self
is overwhelmed and left with a very deep impression of its own im-
potence and inability to act.4 One could even argue that Burke and Kant
are talking about different things. Accepting all of these problems, in
what follows I will simply have to assume that there is such a thing as
a basic experience of the sublime, however this may be conditioned or
128 RICHARD WHITE

overdetermined by theoretical structures. Perhaps it may be better under-

stood through the notion of family resemblance as a set of overlapping
experiences which share some things, but not everything, in common.
But I think it also makes sense to talk about the ‘essential’ or ‘invariant’
features of this experience, and once I have described these, it may well
be the case that our deepest theorists of the sublime recognize these feat-
ures, even if they choose to emphasize some aspects rather than others.
First of all, then, we may reflect upon the typical opposition that is
usually maintained by Burke and Kant, amongst others, between the
sublime and the beautiful. Perhaps this should not be regarded as a strict
opposition. It is not that the sublime is without beauty; but in opposi-
tion to the beauty which is based on a pleasing kind of harmony, like
the picturesque, the sublime possesses an aesthetic attraction precisely
because it seems to unsettle all of our familiar expectations. And it ac-
complishes this, in an aesthetic context, through the very immensity and
power of its objects. Thus the traditional objects of the sublime are
mountains and oceans and man-made objects like cathedrals which
impress us by their sheer power or size; while in a related and analogous
context, anything which moves us beyond the ordinary level of human
experience may also be considered ‘sublime’: a great friendship, for ex-
ample, or an extraordinary sacrifice or love. But as Kant himself insists,
nothing ‘out there’ is really sublime in itself: ‘Sublimity’, he writes,
‘does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our mind, in so
far as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature within,
and thus also over nature without us …’ And he adds, ‘Everything that
provokes this feeling in us, including the might of nature which chal-
lenges our strength, is then, though improperly, called sublime …’
(CJ p. 114). Hence the sublime is not a property of objects, but a
relationship which exists between the individual and the object con-
cerned. In the wrong mood, for example, the mountain or the ocean will
not evoke the experience of the sublime – only boredom. And this means
that the tremendous object only has the power to trigger the experience
of the sublime in so far as it is taken to represent something beyond
itself – the vastness of the cosmos perhaps, or its power and limitless
extension when this is compared to our own limited existence. And it is
only because mountains and oceans and cathedrals are all suggestive of
such immensity that they are capable of affecting us in similar ways.
Apart from their unity as the different symbols of something which is
invariant they would not be comparable things, and the experience of a
mountain would be radically different from the experience of the sea. In
short, I want to claim that whatever excites the feeling of the sublime
only does so by evoking the immensity or mystery of the cosmos in so
far as it is a tremendous part of the cosmos itself. Perhaps this explains
why Kant is correct to focus on natural objects in his discussion of the
sublime. For even though man-made objects, like Mount Rushmore, can
 THE SUBLIME AND THE OTHER 129

be overwhelming, in so far as we know that these are human products we

are not readily drawn into the reflection upon our own limitation which
is clearly an essential moment of the sublime experience.
The second point to emphasize is that in the experience of the sublime
the individual recognizes that she is basically ‘safe’, for what confronts
her is the image of something overwhelming and not an immediate
danger. Obviously, I cannot experience the sublimity of the ocean if it
threatens me or puts me in fear for my life. And for as long as I am
concerned about my own preservation, or even my comfort, I will never
be able to achieve the calm detachment or distance which allows me
to accept, and simply contemplate, the immensity of the object and my
own insignificance and powerlessness in comparison with it. Another
way of putting this would be to say that one can only have an authentic
experience of the sublime if one has successfully bracketed all of one’s
self-regarding concerns. If I am distracted by the physical danger of the
ocean or the coldness of the mountains, then I will not be able to open
myself up to the experience of their sublimity. As we have already seen,
Burke argues that terror is the ruling principle of the sublime. But his
final position is actually far more nuanced: obviously, it is not true to say
that anything which provokes terror will also produce the experience of
sublimity. And Burke himself recognizes this when he comments:
‘terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press
too close’ (B p. 46). There is clearly a very close parallel between the
experience of terror and the experience of the sublime; but in order for
the latter to take place, it is essential to achieve some real distance from
whatever terror may be evoked. In a related context, philosophers of art
have written about ‘aesthetic distance’ to make the point that we cannot
appreciate a painting or a poem if we remain preoccupied with our own
selfish concerns, or interrogate the art work as if it were just another
physical object in the natural world. Aesthetic experience presupposes
a certain aesthetic distance, in which our everyday concerns are put out
of play; and in so far as the experience of the sublime is itself a variety
of aesthetic experience, a certain kind of aesthetic distance is also a
condition for it.
In this context, then, the individual can relinquish control as the
power of the sublime pulls her away from all her everyday concerns to
reveal the immeasureable otherness which confronts her in a very lucid
and immediate way. Through the sublime, the individual is literally
opened up to that which lies outside of herself. She does not experience
herself as a ‘subject’ who projects her interests, concerns and categories
onto the world, but, paradoxically enough, as an ‘object’ in so far as she
is addressed and even invaded by that which lies beyond the circle of
her own concern. For this reason, I have suggested that the experience
of the sublime enables us to have an experience of ‘otherness’, for in
this experience we are startled and affected by what we encounter, and
130 RICHARD WHITE

forced to endure something which exceeds all of our categories of

assimilation and control. Kant seems to regard this as a defining feature
of the sublime, when he writes: ‘For though the imagination, no doubt,
finds nothing beyond the sensible world to which it can lay hold, still
this thrusting aside of the sensible barriers gives it a feeling of being
unbounded; and that removal is thus a presentation of the infinite’
(CJ p. 127). Let us simply comment that the basic intention of this
passage is to suggest the very incommensurability of the sublime, which
points us towards an otherness that may never be appropriated.
Finally, in my comments above I have stressed the overpowering as-
pect of the sublime. But it must also be said that in a deeper respect the
experience of the sublime is actually an empowering experience, since
it expands the horizon of the self and affirms its significance as an in-
tegral aspect of the cosmos itself. Kant recognized this when he argued
that the experience of the sublime ultimately leads to our own self-
affirmation as moral creatures who possess a value that far surpasses
anything in the natural world; and hence,
the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation, which we
attribute to an Object of nature by a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for
the Object in place of one for the idea of the humanity in our own self – the Subject)
(CJ p. 106).

We may or may not agree with Kant’s specific claim on this point. The
important thing to bring out, however, is that the experience of the sub-
lime is an affirmative one which does not leave the individual crushed
and despairing, but strengthened in so far as she is now more deeply
aware of the meaningfulness of her life, in opposition to that which
appears to overwhelm it. Perhaps the bonds of individuation only act as
so many impediments and forms of constraint; and to have these bonds
momentarily lifted, in the experience of the sublime, is to allow the
individual to be empowered in so far as she is released from the ordinary
limits of her subject-ive life. This is not to say, that the experience of the
sublime is in any respect a Dionysian experience in which the individual
gains access to the mystery through deliberate self-abandonment. For
the experience of the sublime is usually a very lucid and thoughtful
experience. And through it the individual subject is ultimately enlarged
as she becomes more deeply aware of her relationship to everything
‘outside’ of her, to everything that is. Thus the experience of the sublime
has both an overwhelming and an empowering aspect, and these aspects
seem to hinge upon the movements of selfhood that it seems to bring
about.
Taking all these points together, I now propose the following basic
account: In the experience of the sublime, the individual is confronted
by the power and immensity of the cosmos in so far as this is made mani-
fest by an exceptional part of the cosmos itself. With such an experience,
 THE SUBLIME AND THE OTHER 131

however, the individual understands that she is basically ‘safe’, for what
she encounters is the image of something overwhelming and not an
immediate physical threat. In this context, the individual can relinquish
control as the power of the sublime pulls her away from her everyday
concerns and reflections, and reveals the otherness which transcends her
in a very lucid and immediate way. At the same time that the experience
is overpowering, though, the individual is also empowered by it, for it
allows her to apprehend a much deeper sense of her own significance as
a meaningful aspect of the cosmos itself.
In what follows, I want to develop some of the themes begun above;
and in particular, I will focus on the sublime as a threshold where the
individual is directly exposed to the experience of alterity. It has been
argued, by Rudolf Otto for example, that the experience of the sublime
can serve as a basic model for the experience of the sacred, since there
is an isomorphism between the two.5 I will now suggest that the experi-
ence of the sublime is indeed a ‘religious’ experience in the broadest
sense, since it forces us beyond the rational comprehension of being as
thought, and allows us to experience being directly as an ‘other’.

II

In his classic text on The Idea of the Holy, Otto claims that there is an
analogy between the nature of religious experience and the experience
of the sublime. He is very careful to insist that the sublime is only an
‘ideogram’ of the sacred, which possesses a similar structure while it is
absolutely different in kind; but even so, his discussion of religious
experience can help us to understand the final significance of the sub-
lime and the respect in which the latter can be construed as an experience
of the sacred.
In opposition to Kant, and anyone else who offers a purely rational
account of religion, Otto argues that the experience of the divine cannot
be limited to an awareness of God’s rational nature. He claims that every
religious experience is in fact empowered by its relationship to the
mysterium tremendum which is precisely that which goes beyond what-
ever can be articulated through concepts like ‘omnipotence’, ‘omnisci-
ence’ and so forth. Thus, for Otto, the idea of the holy is completely
diminished and even falsified once it is limited to a moral interpretation
as ‘the wholly good’. And in The Idea of the Holy, he directs his atten-
tion towards the ‘numinous’ aspect of religious experience, which is the
remainder that appears once all of the rational and conceptual accretions
have been stripped away: ‘I shall speak, then’, he writes, ‘of a unique
“numinous” category of value and of a definitely “numinous” state of
mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied. This
mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other; and
132 RICHARD WHITE

therefore, like every other absolutely primary and elementary datum,

while it admits of being discussed, it cannot strictly be defined’ (IH p. 7).
Paradoxically enough, in The Idea of the Holy, Otto spends a lot of time
trying to articulate the nature of the mysterium tremendum; but as he
also admits, what he is really trying to do is to recall and evoke an
experience which the reader will recognize, rather than describe that
which cannot be said: ‘It will be our endeavour’, he writes, ‘to suggest
this unnamed Something to the reader as far as we may, so that he may
himself feel it. There is no religion in which it does not live as the real
innermost core, and without it no religion would be worthy of the name’
(IH p. 6).
This brings us, then, to Otto’s comparison of the sublime and the
holy: First, he argues that the concept of the sublime is necessarily
inarticulable. And this means that while we may be able to articulate
some of the necessary conditions of the sublime, ‘the concept itself re-
mains unexplicated; it has in it something mysterious, and in this it is
like that of the numinous’ (IH p. 41). Secondly, Otto points out that like
the experience of the holy, the experience of the sublime is at one and
the same time both attractive and repellent, since it relates us to a
powerful ‘something’ which shatters the ordinary horizons of thought:
‘It humbles and at the same time exalts us’, he writes; ‘[it] circumscribes
and extends us beyond ourselves, on the one hand releasing in us a feel-
ing analogous to fear, and on the other rejoicing us’ (IH p. 42). His con-
clusion is that the sublime must be a later and more refined offshoot of
the most basic religious consciousness. What is more interesting, how-
ever, is that when he struggles to articulate the numinous object of the
experience, he can only describe it negatively in terms of that which is
‘wholly other’. It is a suggestion which he leaves undeveloped, but I will
suggest in what follows that it is this encounter with the ‘wholly other’,
or the otherness of the other, which finally illuminates the true signific-
ance of the sublime: Thus, ‘Taken in the religious sense’, he writes,
that which is ‘mysterious’ is – to give it perhaps the most striking expression – the
‘wholly other’ (Θατερον, anyad, alienum), that which is quite beyond the sphere of
the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the
limits of the ‘canny’, and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder
and astonishment (IH p. 26).

These comments are very suggestive, for regardless of our religious

beliefs, they help to articulate the idea of an encounter with alterity or
otherness, which is not simply an appropriation of the other to that
which is the same. Indeed, for such an experience to take place, the
tension with the other as an other must be maintained; which means
that the other cannot be apprehended or reduced to the categories of the
subject; but neither can the subject simply efface or abandon herself
to that which lies outside. It is in this sense that one can and does
 THE SUBLIME AND THE OTHER 133

have the astonishing experience of that which is ‘wholly other’, and I

would argue that this is at the heart of our experience of the sublime.
This is, in fact, the ‘shock’ of the sublime, in which the individual is
broken and reconstituted by that which exceeds all of her categories of
thought.
Otto’s suggestion of a fundamental linkage between the sacred and
the sublime is a helpful one. But like Durkheim, and other thinkers of
the time, Otto tends to think that the holy and the non-holy, or the sacred
and the profane, are absolutely separate from each other. Durkheim’s
pronouncement is well-known:
there is nothing left with which to characterize the sacred in its relation to the
profane except their heterogeneity. However, this heterogeneity is sufficient to
characterize this classification of things and to distinguish it from all others, because
it is very particular: it is absolute. In all the history of human thought there exists
no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so
radically opposed to one another.6

Upon reflection, however, it could also be urged that the sacred is not
such a distinct realm at all and that sacred rituals, like blessings and
prayers, and sacred places, like churches and temples, are really an
integral part of the everyday world which they help to organize and
structure.7 Is it really the case that the sacred and the profane are radic-
ally discontinuous? Or is it not rather that, for the most part, the one is
deeply embedded within the other? The ritual sacrifice is meant to em-
power and intensify our everyday life, while the prayer brings thought-
ful reflection on everything that we do. And yet, if this is so, it is
precisely in this respect that the experience of the sublime is excep-
tional. For in the sublime there is a very sudden and abrupt movement
from one level of experience to another. In the sublime we encounter a
tremendous object and this suggests an immediate presentation of the
wholly other which our everyday involvement with the sacred does not
always allow. If the experience of the sublime is a version of our experi-
ence of the sacred, we might say, it is also the most perspicuous and im-
mediate version of that experience, because unlike most manifestations
of the sacred it is quite discontinuous with the nature of our everyday
life. If we now turn to the discussion of the sublime in Burke and Kant,
we will see the extent to which Otto’s original suggestion is confirmed
by the leading theorists of the sublime. And this will lead us to a final
consideration of that which is ‘wholly other’.
According to Burke, terror is the ruling principle of the sublime.8 In
fact, Burke argues that terror is the most powerful of all the passions,
since it is the response of our most basic instinct of self-preservation
when it is threatened by something which could destroy us. Likewise,
however, there are some situations in which an image or a representa-
tion that would normally produce terror actually produces ‘delight’ as
134 RICHARD WHITE

we realize that we are not immediately threatened and so we can

contemplate the terrible object with a certain detachment and calm.
This means that for Burke, the experience of the sublime is a strange
mixture of pleasure and pain, and attraction and repulsion, to something
which would directly threaten us in another context. It is a strange and
paradoxical experience, and Burke spends much of his essay trying to
explain it.
Burke points out, for example, that our pleasure in the sublime cannot
simply be a sense of relief that danger is present while at the same time
we know that we cannot be harmed. This is a common explanation of the
power of tragedy, which suggests that our delight arises from the suf-
ferings of others that we are spared. For while Burke accepts that such
an experience is only possible given that we are safe – as he says, ‘it is
absolutely necessary my life should be out of any imminent hazard
before I can take a delight in the sufferings of others, real or imaginary
…’ (B p. 48) – he points out that such a precondition is not the rationale
for this experience. Using another example, then, he argues that even the
best play could not compete with the spectacle of a public execution,
which suggests that what fascinates us is not necessarily the repre-
sentation of suffering but the actual suffering itself. Does it then follow
that the experience of the sublime is somehow associated with our own
delight in pain and destruction? Again Burke denies this, and he pro-
vides another related example which echoes the sublime experience:
‘We delight in seeing things’, he writes,

which so far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be to see redressed. This noble
capital, the pride of England and Europe, I believe no man is so strangely wicked as
to desire to see destroyed by a conflagration or an earthquake, though he should be
removed himself to the greatest distance from the danger. But suppose such a fatal
accident to have happened, what numbers from all parts would croud to behold the
ruins, and amongst them many who would have been content never to have seen
London in its glory? (B p. 47).

Here, the destruction itself is not celebrated or lamented but encountered

as the image of destruction which elicits a countervaling self-affirmation
from the observer in question.
Such examples are very helpful in so far as they seem to specify the
peculiar nature of the sublime response. But in the end, Burke himself
accounts for the pleasure of the sublime experience in purely physio-
logical terms. In Part IV of the Enquiry, ‘On the Efficient Cause of the
Sublime and Beautiful’, he argues that pain and terror cause a contraction
of the finer parts of the mind, in exactly the same way as the muscles of
the body are exercised by labour. Without such activity, the finer parts,
as well as the grosser ones, would lapse into torpor: ‘Now’, he writes,
‘as a due exercise is essential to the coarse muscular parts of the con-
stitution, and that without this rousing they would become languid, and
 THE SUBLIME AND THE OTHER 135

diseased, the very same rule holds with regard to those finer parts we
have mentioned; to have them in proper order, they must be shaken and
worked to a proper degree’ (B p. 135). Hence our delight in the sublime
somehow follows from the vigorous exercise of our finer parts which
approaches ‘near to the nature of what causes pain’, without of course
being pain, for then it would not be a sublime experience.
Burke’s response is highly speculative and deeply unsatisfying since
it is reductive and moves on a completely different register from the
sublime experience itself. Likewise, it is not clear how such an explana-
tion could define or differentiate the experience of sublimity. For even if
Burke is correct, the physiological model does not illuminate the experi-
ence as an experience, but remains upon an indifferent mechanical level.
This is all the more frustrating, since Burke is so thoughtful when he
offers us examples of the sublime, or when he tries to articulate the basic
features of the sublime experience.
In the second part of his Enquiry, for example, Burke offers some-
thing of a catalogue of the essential and inessential features of the sub-
lime. Here, he considers such relevant factors as obscurity, vastness,
privation and infinity, magnificence and suddenness, as well as the
possibility of sublime tastes and smells. The most important section,
however, is the one that considers the role of power in our experience of
the sublime; for if the sublime is related to terror at whatever could
destroy us, it follows that the more powerful something is, the more
threatening it is, and hence its greater proximity to the sublime: ‘Besides
these things which directly suggest the idea of danger’, Burke writes,
‘and those which produce a similar effect from a mechanical cause,
I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power’
(B p. 64). After this initial discussion, Burke turns his attention to God;
and here he makes some observations which really anticipate Otto’s
work, when he argues that the God of our understanding, formed by a
complex idea of power, wisdom, justice and goodness, etc., ‘all stretched
to a degree far exceeding the bounds of our comprehension’, is not
really the God that we encounter if we remain open to the actual being
of God. For one thing, Burke writes, the power of God is his most
overwhelming attribute, and when we are aware of this we feel ourselves
to be absolutely annihilated by it: ‘But whilst we contemplate so vast an
object’, he writes, ‘under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and
invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minute-
ness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him’
(B p. 68). Thus if we rejoice in God, Burke says, we rejoice ‘in trem-
bling’, and even if we recognize that God is a ‘God of love’, our primary
and deepest religious response is still one of dread and fascination which
presupposes our actual awareness of such a power. In short, we can
move from terror as the ruling principle of the sublime, to power as the
basic attribute and index of that which is terrible, and finally to God as
136 RICHARD WHITE

the most powerful being of all, and hence, the hidden principle of the
sublime. Burke’s conclusion is as follows:
Thus we have traced power through its several gradations unto the highest of all,
where our imagination is finally lost; and we find terror quite throughout the
progress, its inseparable companion, and growing along with it, as far as we can
possibly trace them. Now as power is undoubtedly a capital source of the sublime,
this will point out evidently from whence its energy is derived, and to what class of
ideas we ought to unite it (B p. 70).

Burke’s claim here, which Otto would certainly endorse, is that the
sublime is a principle which draws its power from something beyond
itself; the object of the sublime bears the trace of something greater
within itself, and in the experience of the sublime, this points us away
from the occasioning object towards that which can never actually be
given in experience, namely God. Thus Burke relates the sublime to the
general features of religious experience. What is most significant in his
account, however, is that here, in the sublime experience, we are related
to something which does not actually ‘appear’, in the sense of something
which presents itself for appropriation by our conceptual scheme. Here,
in fact, we encounter that which is wholly other, something which
exceeds and overwhelms all our ordinary powers of understanding and
which at the same time enlivens those powers by providing them access
to something which seems to go beyond them. Like Otto, Burke has
given the name ‘God’ to that which presents itself while it cannot be
grasped. But in the end, what he is really describing is the ‘wholly
other’, which both gives and withdraws itself in an astonishing experi-
ence like that of the sublime.
At the beginning of Part Two of his essay, Burke comments that
‘Astonishment … is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the
inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect’ (B p. 57). But
while Burke has a lot to say about astonishment and terror, in the
arguments which follow he really does not say much about reverence
and respect, even though in the passage above he has identified them
as essential moments. In the Critique of Judgement, however, Kant
redresses this balance by focusing upon the recuperative powers of the
sublime. Yes, the sublime overwhelms the imagination, but in the end,
Kant insists, the sublime experience is a very affirmative experience
since it allows us to recognize our own superiority as rational moral
beings over all of the productions of nature. For Kant, perhaps the most
important thing about the sublime is that it leads to reverence and
respect for ourselves as supersensible beings. After a brief account of
his theory, we must consider in what respect this ‘mixed’ experience
must also contain a religious dimension.9
In the Critique of Judgement, Kant distinguishes between the math-
ematical and the dynamical sublime. In the case of the first we are
 THE SUBLIME AND THE OTHER 137

overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of an object, like a mountain

which cannot be taken in all in one glance. In the second we are affected
by the incredible power of an object, like the turbulent sea. Kant offers
a different explanation for each of these forms of the sublime, but in the
end his analysis emphasizes two basic moments of every sublime ex-
perience: First, the ordinary powers of our imagination are overwhelmed
by something which is so excessive that it can only be experienced as a
kind of ‘outrage’ upon the senses. However much we try, for example,
our senses simply cannot grasp the vast mountain which is before us as
a fixed and determinate object, and the raging torrent seems so threat-
ening, and leaves us with a profound sense of the limits of our physical
nature. Secondly, Kant argues that in the experience of the sublime the
individual reasserts herself when she recognizes that she is actually
‘superior’ to all the workings of physical nature: while she cannot im-
agine it she can at least think the infinite as a whole, and while she feels
threatened, she realizes that a mere physical thing cannot destroy her
higher nature. And this is why the experience of the sublime is finally
such an affirmative experience. Kant’s account of entering St Peter’s
Basilica gives a clear illustration of both of these moments:
For here a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his imagination for
presenting the idea of a whole within which that imagination attains its maximum,
and, in its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing
succumbs to an emotional delight (CJ p. 100).

Let us look at the first moment: In the experience of the sublime, the
imagination suffers an ‘outrage’ because it cannot comprehend what is
offered to it, or because our ordinary cognitive powers are overwhelmed.
Strictly speaking, then, what we encounter in the experience of the sub-
lime is the ‘other’ to thought, which is not actually given as an ‘object’
to thought, but as the obstacle against which our ordinary apprehension
of the world is shattered. Elsewhere, Kant talks about our delight in the
sublime as only ‘negative’, for while it does open us up to something
which is truly beyond ourselves, it achieves this only in so far as it forces
the imagination to accept that it is limited and inadequate: ‘As such it
can never be anything more than a negative presentation [of the infinite]’,
he writes, ‘but still it expands the soul’ (CJ p. 127). In this context, our
awareness of ‘the infinite’ and our own higher nature is indirectly occa-
sioned by the absolutely other which the understanding and the ima-
gination cannot grasp. For in so far as it is wholly other, it necessarily
escapes all our conceptual appropriation. And yet it is given to us. And
the shock of the sublime lies in our awareness that we are in a relation
to something that does not come from ourselves.
In Kant’s critical philosophy, the idea of the noumenon is the idea of
the thing-in-itself which stands behind all phenomena as their ultimate
cause and ground. The noumenon, as such, is the negative limit of
138 RICHARD WHITE

thought. Hegel as well as many others saw a problem with this, for if the
noumenon can be given to thought, then presumably it is something
which yields to the categories of the understanding and so exists on this
side of experience; whereas if we insist that it cannot be known in any
way, it has no productive part to play in our understanding of the world
and is a nugatory concept.10 Hegel’s critique is well-taken, and in the
Critique of Judgement Kant himself insists that the sublime does not
give us any kind of cognitive access to the noumenal realm: as he writes,
‘This pure, elevating, merely negative presentation of morality involves
… no fear of fanaticism, which is a delusion that would will some vision
beyond all the bounds of sensibility; i.e. would dream according to prin-
ciples (rational raving)’ (CJ p. 128). On the other hand, when Kant elab-
orates the experience of the sublime, he indicates that the noumenon, or
the alterity, which is outside thought, may nevertheless be given to
thought – certainly not as an object to be known but as a mystery which
manifests itself precisely in so far as it overwhelms the subject and all
the ordinary projections of the understanding. We do not know the other,
but the other is given in the moment of resistance or recalcitrance to
everyday thought which occasions the experience of the sublime.
After the subject is shattered, there is a second recuperative moment,
in which the individual reappropriates herself and in so doing reaffirms
the absolute value of her life. For Kant argues that we experience a pro-
found joy once we realize that we somehow transcend the world of sense
and that the Ideas of reason have no equivalent within the phenomenal
world. In the experience of the mathematical sublime, for example, the
failure of imagination to grasp the absolute magnitude only brings the
power of our reason into sharp relief; for reason can think the idea of
the infinite and so makes us realize that our physical nature is really a
lesser part of our being: ‘For the sublime’, Kant argues, ‘in the strict
sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather
concerns ideas of reason, which although no adequate presentation of
them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very in-
adequacy itself which does admit the sensuous presentation’ (CJ p. 92).
And hence, ‘it follows that where the size of a natural object is such that
the imagination spends its whole faculty of comprehension upon it in vain,
it must carry our concept of nature to a supersensible substrate (under-
lying both nature and our faculty of thought) which is great beyond every
standard of sense’ (CJ p. 103). Likewise in the experience of the dynamic
sublime, the very threat to our physical nature leads us to reassert our
rational and moral nature, as we realize that we really do transcend the
sensible realm. Even if the raging ocean may destroy us, as noumenal or
moral beings we are invincible, and our existence has an infinite signific-
ance and worth. According to Kant, the sublime is thus an inherently
ethical category, since it reminds us that we are moral creatures who are
summoned to a higher law than the law of our physical desire.
 THE SUBLIME AND THE OTHER 139

Once again, however, it is the encounter with otherness that underlies

all of this. The experience of the sublime is ultimately an experience of
exultation, even though it involves the complete overwhelming of the
empirical self. Kant interprets this in terms of the triumphant reassertion
of our supersensible nature; but without accepting or rejecting his par-
ticular metaphysics, I think that what he recognized is the sense of
unboundedness and the strong sense of being in relation with something
other than oneself. The participation we experience here does not,
however, destroy us. It is not that we are engulfed by the otherness that
confronts us. But in our relationship to it we experience a strange ecst-
asy which is nothing other than our intense experience of a relation to
that which is not me. As Kant writes, ‘This thrusting aside of the sens-
ible barriers gives it a feeling of being unbounded; and that removal
is thus a presentation of the infinite’ (CJ p. 127). In this respect, the
experience of otherness and the other is absolutely empowering. And
the Kantian sublime is a ‘religious’ experience which allows us access
to the sacred in so far as the latter may be grasped as the ‘absolutely
other’ to the world that is known. In fact, Kant, like Burke, seems to
argue that the experience of the sublime allows us to apprehend the
reality of God, when attitudes of fear and submission would always end
in failure. For, ‘we are capable of attaining to the idea of the sublimity
of that Being which inspires deep respect in us’, he writes, ‘not by the
mere display of its might in nature, but by the faculty which is planted
in us of estimating that might without fear, and of regarding our estate
as exalted above it’ (CJ p. 114). Perhaps it follows that for Kant an
authentic encounter with ‘God’ is only possible given the intermediary
of the sublime.
In recent times, Emmanuel Levinas has written extensively and with
remarkable perception about our relation to the other person. He also
insists upon the sense of mystery, in so far as the other is given to me as
something which exceeds my understanding; making me realize that
here I am in a relation to something which does not come from myself.
Along these lines, for example, Levinas describes the nature of love:
‘The pathos of love’, he comments,

consists in an insurmountable duality of beings. It is a relation with what always

slips away. It does not neutralize alterity but preserves it. The other as other does
not become ours, but … withdraws into its mystery.11

But while Levinas’s whole discussion of our relation to the other is

profound, I think there is also a sense in which our dealings with the
other person, since they are conducted on so many different levels, both
authentic and inauthentic, are too complex to serve as a model for
the experience of otherness in general. In this respect, perhaps the sub-
lime still has a privileged place: For in these postmodern times, when
140 RICHARD WHITE

the rule of instrumental reason has apparently triumphed, the sublime

allows us to re-experience the absolute otherness of nature; so that we
may finally relate to the latter as something which is not just an exten-
sion of ourselves. Likewise, the experience of the sublime really forces
the individual back upon herself, in an age when the dissolution of the
subject has apparently been ordained. The experience of the sublime is
thus the model for the experience of otherness itself and it can help us
to understand our relationship to nature, our relation to the other person
and our involvement with the sacred, as the dimension beyond under-
standing which empowers our life and our everyday involvement with
the world. And in this way we can understand its continuing relevance
for our time.

III

Writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, Elizabeth Carter ex-

pressed her sense of amazement when she first beheld the cliffs of Dover:
‘The first impression it gave me’, she writes, ‘was a sense of my own
littleness, and I seemed shrinking to nothingness in the midst of the
stupendous objects by which I was surrounded. But I soon grew more
important by the recollection that nothing which my eyes could survey,
was of equal dignity with the human mind, at once the theatre and the
spectator of the wonders of Omnipotence’.12 Perhaps we should re-
main quite sceptical of the whole category of the sublime, which led
eighteenth-century writers into such transports of enthusiasm. For while
Burke and Kant attempted a rather sober reconstruction of the sublime
experience, the sublime was also an intellectual fad and an alluring
theme in popular consciousness which led to the excesses of the Gothic
novel, and to romantics, like Mrs Carter, who seemed to indulge and
cultivate her own sublime experiences. Similarly, one might object that
whenever Burke or Kant offers us a list of objects which are supposed
to stimulate the sublime, they are simply typical of their age. Thus Kant
writes about ‘the prospect of mountains ascending to heaven, deep ravines
and torrents raging there, deep-shadowed solitudes that invite to brood-
ing melancholy, and the like …’ Its interesting to speculate, however,
that such a list is culturally and historically determined. For certainly in
earlier centuries, mountains were often regarded as a blight upon the
landscape or even as evidence of original sin.13 Likewise, it is not at all
clear that the list of things which Kant describes could be equally valid
in every culture; or that people in every culture would or could have an
equivalent experience of the sublime. Let us remember, though, that for
Kant, at least, there are no intrinsically sublime objects (‘Sublimity’, he
writes, ‘does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our
own mind …’) And following Kant, this means that the sublime is
 THE SUBLIME AND THE OTHER 141

constituted by a particular movement of the soul which may be more

or less available in any given person or any given culture.
Now having said all of this, how are we to understand the recent
‘postmodern’ preoccupation with the category of the sublime? For the
latter has become the focus for many critical discussions in art; while
it also appears to speak to the nature of contemporary experience in
general.
In his essay, ‘What is Postmodernism?’, Lyotard has written, ‘I think
in particular that it is in the aesthetic of the sublime that modern art
(and literature) finds its impetus and the logic of its avant-gardes finds
its axioms’.14 Thus Lyotard argues that postmodern art devotes itself to
present the fact that ‘the unpresentable exists’; and he would say that it
is an art which offers a negative presentation of something which does
not appear because it cannot possibly appear: ‘As painting’, he writes,
‘it will of course present something though negatively; it will there-
fore avoid figuration or representation. It will be “white” like one of
Malevitch’s squares; it will enable us to see only by making it impos-
sible to see; it will please only by causing pain’ (L p. 78). The basic point
here is that the idea of the ‘sublime’ expresses the failure of representa-
tion; and according to Lyotard, the contemporary artist is herself drawn
to express the breakdown through the image or text which points beyond
itself. Lyotard’s thesis has much to recommend itself; and especially
when we consider some of the most influential figures, like Samuel
Beckett, John Cage or Francis Bacon, I think we must admit that they
are drawn to express the fact of the inexpressible. The power of Bacon’s
painting, for example, derives a good deal from the images which seem
to acknowledge their own dissolution, like his portraits and self-portraits
which straddle the divide between representation and pure abstraction;
or the series of paintings of Pope Innocent X, which test form to the
limit, and literally overwhelm the viewer and cause her pain.15 A related
feature of postmodern art is the willingness to adopt new forms, and
what Lyotard calls ‘the increase of being and the jubilation which result
from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial, artistic, or
any other’ (L p. 80). Here we are perhaps reminded of the new possibil-
ities of performance art and video and experimental art of every kind.
For in response to that which is inexpressible, the creation of new forms,
and the emphasis upon the artistic event, may represent the recuperative
moment of the sublime.
Following Lyotard, there is now a considerable literature on the post-
modern sublime.16 On the one hand, we could relate all of this to a re-
newed questioning about the role of art; and especially when art is no
longer to be identified exclusively with ‘the beautiful’, the turn to the
sublime makes sense as an attempt to articulate the disturbing power of
art and the eschewal of restful contemplation. More deeply still, how-
ever, the recent turn to the sublime, both as an artistic category and as a
142 RICHARD WHITE

category of experience, can be read as an attempt to recover something

whose absence is deeply felt. For with the triumph of instrumental
reason and the increasing commodification of every aspect of life, there
really is no place for the sacred or for anything which eludes the
absolute dominion of technological control. In this respect, for example,
Jean Baudrillard writes at length about the disappearance of the other in
contemporary Western society, and the homogenization of all experience
which attends the new ‘inter-active’ relationship between the human and
the machine: ‘Our society is entirely dedicated to neutralizing other-
ness’, he writes, ‘to destroying the other as a natural point of reference
in a vast flood of aseptic communication and interaction, of illusory
exchange and contact’.17 Later he adds ironically, ‘Crude otherness, hard
otherness – the otherness of race, of madness, of poverty – are done with.
Otherness, like everything else, has fallen under the law of the market,
the law of supply and demand. It has become a rare item – hence its high
value on the psychological stock exchange …’18 In fact, there is such a
preoccupation with difference, and the other, or with otherness and
alterity in general, because at some level we realize that these things are
slipping away from us. Philosophy, in particular, has been seized by a
‘panic attack’ for the other. And in this respect, it would make sense
for there to be a renewed interest in a category like the sublime, which
points us towards the sacred and the other, without attempting to reduce
them or control them.
Thus, the sublime is to be valued as a way of encountering that which
remains completely other, whether this is the otherness of nature which
resists our environmental control, or the absolute otherness of the other
person which becomes much harder to experience in an age of com-
modification. Clearly, the postmodern preoccupation with the sublime
entails at least an implicit awareness of this theme; so that even if
postmodernism has used the ‘sublime’ for its own ends, it still suggests
the importance of the sublime as an opening onto that which remains
conceptually inappropriable.
In this article, I have argued that the experience of the sublime is im-
portant since it offers us the most perspicuous experience of otherness,
which I have also related to the experience of the sacred. And though
there may be historical reasons why the sublime experience is becoming
much more difficult to attain, there are also some very good reasons why
the experience of the sublime, and new forms of the sublime, should be
described and celebrated, since they offer a provocative challenge to the
closure of modern life.

Notes
1 E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beauti-
ful (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958) (Henceforth: B). Also I. Kant, Critique of Judgement,
trans. L. Meredith (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1982) (Henceforth CJ).
 THE SUBLIME AND THE OTHER 143
2 Along these lines, see T. Eagleton’s history of aesthetic theory, The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). See especially his discussion of Kant, where he argues that the sublime
‘operates as a thoroughly ideological category’ (p. 90).
3 Freud speaks of the ‘oceanic feeling’ in Civilization and its Discontents (New York: Norton,
1961), pp. 11–20; see also S. Levine, ‘Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet and the Oceanic
Feeling’, New Literary History XVI (1985), pp. 377–400.
4 R. Hepburn carefully distinguishes the two distinctive moments of the sublime in his excel-
lent study ‘The Concept of the Sublime: Has it Any Relevance for Philosophy Today?, Dialectics
and Humanism 15 (1988), pp. 137–55.
5 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London: OUP, 1923) (Henceforth: IH).
6 E. Durkheim,The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1915),
p. 54.
7 For an interesting discussion of the ‘everyday’ aspect of the sacred, see R. Cooper, ‘The
Unifying Structures of the Experience of the Holy’, Philosophy Today XX (1988), pp. 54–61.
Cooper quotes John Robinson who argues in Honest to God (London: SCM, 1963), p. 87: ‘The holy
is the “depth” of the common, just as the “secular” is not a (godless) section of life but the world
cut off from its true depth … The function of worship is to make us more sensitive to these depths’.
8 Useful discussions of Burke are offered by J. Boulton in his Introduction to B, and by
Eagleton. Also, P. Crowther, ‘The Existential Sublime: From Burke’s Aesthetics to the Socio-
Political’, XI International Congress in Aesthetics (Nottingham, 1988), pp. 26–31. S. Cresap,
‘Sublime Politics: On the Uses of an Aesthetics of Terror’, Clio 19 (1990), pp. 111–25.
9 See P. Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989);
M. Nahm, ‘Sublimity and the Moral Law in Kant’s Philosophy’, Kantstudien 48 (1956–7),
pp. 502–24; F. Coleman, The Harmony of Reason: A Study of Kant’s Aesthetics (Pittsburgh: Univ.
of Pittsburgh Press, 1974). For a discussion of the Kantian sublime with particular reference to
Kant’s religion, see A. Lazaroff, ‘The Kantian Sublime’, Kantstudien 71 (1980), pp. 202–20; also,
W. Hund, ‘The Sublime and God in Kant’s Critique of Judgement’, New Scholasticism 57 (1983),
pp. 42–70.
10 Hegel criticizes Kant’s doctrine of the noumenon or thing-in-itself in The Encyclopaedia
Logic, trans. T. Geraets et al. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), pp. 87, 194.
11 E. Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh, Duquesne Univ. Press, 1987),
p. 86. Much of Levinas’s work addresses this theme: see, for example, ‘On the Trail of the Other’,
Philosophy Today 10 (1966), pp. 34–46.
12 Quoted by S. Monk in his classic study of the sublime in seventeenth-century England,
The Sublime (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 216.
13 See Monk, Sublime, pp. 206–7; also M. Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory:
The Development of the Ethics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), p. 30 (cited
by Hund, p. 45).
14 J. F. Lyotard, ‘What is Postmodernism?’ in The Postmodernism Condition (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 77. (Henceforth: L).
15 For a more extensive discussion of Bacon along these lines, see E. van Alphen, Francis
Bacon and the Loss of the Self (London: Reaktion Books, 1992).
16 See Lyotard, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’, Artforum, April 1982, pp. 64–9; and
‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, Artforum April 1984, pp. 36–43. Also J.-L. Nancy, Le Discours
de la syncope (Paris: Aubier Flamarion, 1976); P. Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘On the Sublime’, ICA Docu-
ments 4: Postmodernism (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1986); J. Derrida, The Truth in
Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For a reflection on the contemporary con-
cern with the sublime, see H. Silverman and G. Aylesworth (eds.), The Textual Sublime: Deconstruc-
tion and its Differences (Albany: State Univ. of NY Press, 1990); also S. Watson, ‘Levinas, the
Ethics of Deconstruction and the Remainder of the Sublime’, Man and World 21 (1988), pp. 35–64;
and S. Connor, Postmodernist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 211–21.
17 J. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil (London: Verso, 1993), p. 121.
18 Ibid., p. 124.