Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature by Emily Brady (review)

This book divides into two nearly equal halves, and the division neatly encapsulates Emily Brady’s ambitions. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy is, first of all, a finely detailed examination of a distinctive moment in the history of Western aesthetic experience (as we might, with forgivable anachronism, call it): that period in the eighteenth and (early) nineteenth centuries when “the sublime” became a category of keen interest on the part of spectators drawn—newly drawn—to the appreciation of the vastness and power of nature. This focus marked a change in spectators’ tastes. The Alps, for instance, which had once been a burdensome distraction for travelers to Italy, now became an object of increasingly rich imaginative contemplation. As Brady observes, Archibald Alison supposed them to “become more sublime through associations with Hannibal’s march over them” (33); and although it is doubtful whether recent travelers call Hannibal to mind as readily as Alison did, Brady’s explication of Alison’s view helps us to recover the meaning that the sublime had, or could have had, for similarly situated historical spectators.

In the first half of the book Brady meticulously surveys the plentiful variety of mainly British and German writers who theorized the sublime. Familiar names such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant receive due notice here, but also, as with Alison, those that are much less familiar. Yet even for philosophers still widely followed, Brady notes aspects of their accounts that tend to recede from view, such as Burke’s observations on the possibility of sublimity in tastes and smells, including the more problematic class of “stenches” (27). Owing to the quality of its scholarship, Brady’s book is sure to be a standard reference. Those looking for a trustworthy one-stop shop on the sublime as historically conceived need look no farther.

Two chapters are devoted to Kant. This is hardly surprising, because of Kant’s stature, but Brady has another reason for the attention. Kant’s treatment of the sublime is arguably in need of some sympathetic interpretation and reconstruction, since it is easy to have the impression that the Kantian spectator of a natural scene congratulates himself too much on his own nature-defying rational capacities when his admiration is more sensibly aimed at the stars he cannot count in the sky above. Brady does offer us a Kant who is more sensible than he seems, her interpretation of his account serving to show “how our distinctive positioning with respect to nature reveals a deep connection to it—or to something understood as metaphysically greater than ourselves” (88). This move is important for her purposes because Brady wants to use Kant, minus “the full metaphysical baggage of his transcendental philosophy,” to establish the contemporary relevance of the sublime for a proper understanding of the human relationship to non-human nature. It is this rather more polemical agenda that occupies Brady in the second half of the book, especially the last chapter, and it is the Kantian motivation that chiefly, but credibly, ties the two halves together.

The four chapters in the second part are concerned with whether art can be sublime (Brady generally thinks not), the apparently paradoxical character of our appreciation of the sublime and the tragic, the positioning of the sublime vis-à-vis other aesthetic categories (such as ugliness), and the obstacles that require removal if we are to take the experience of the sublime seriously.

The subject of this last chapter is especially important for the overall narrative, inasmuch as Brady wants to neutralize a trio of objections that would effectively relegate the sublime to merely historical significance: that our experience of nature has changed, that the old transcendental trappings are unbelievable, and that the sublime is too anthropocentric to ground a proper orientation to nature. One prominent strand in her subtle discussion (which draws on ideas from the late Ronald Hepburn as well as from Kant) is that we are able, and presumably...