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Beautiful and Sublime in Gothic and Fantastic Literature: A Kantian Perspective

Within Kant’s aesthetic theory, the judgment of sublime is characterized by a certain uneasiness, frustration and even fear or horror that a subject experiences when observing nature. On the other hand, nature can also trigger judgments of beauty and it is precisely this interest for the beauty in the nature that is the sign of our moral agency. But judgment of beauty, unlike judgments of sublime, can also be triggered by beautiful art. Beautiful art is art created by genius and genius is someone who is endowed with the gift of nature, the gift which enables the genius to express aesthetic ideas, mostly through aesthetic attributes. However, there are certain genres of literature, such as fantastic literature and Gothic literature - perhaps even science fiction, which are better explained by appeal to sublime than to beauty, i.e. to aesthetic ideas. In this paper, my aim is to analyze the notion of sublime as developed by Kant and to see whether there is a sense in which we can say that there are ideas of sublime, and if there are, what their relation to aesthetic ideas is. Aesthetic ideas can be seen as giving substance, or expression (through aesthetic attributes) to rational ideas. For example, W. Blake’s Tiger, especially if read in connection to The Lamb can be seen as exploring, even provoking, the nature and origin of good and evil, which can ultimately be connected to (rational idea) of God. Given that Kant in his analysis of sublime claims that “ ... what is properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason, which, though no presentation adequate to them is possible, are provoked and called to mind precisely by this inadequacy, which does allow of sensible presentation”, it is worth wondering what the connection between aesthetic ideas and sublime is. While aesthetic ideas are counterparts to rational ideas, which have important cognitive role, it appears that sublime is more connected to – or is more often brought to connection with - certain feelings and emotions, or state of mind, than to cognition. This raises the question of whether the distinctive feature of aesthetic experience generated by gothic and fantastic literature (such as The Raven by E.A. Poe and Young Goodman Brown by N. Hawthorne) – while arguably also seen as elaboration of aesthetic ideas - is equivalent to the experience that Kant characterizes as sublime.

Aesthetic ideas; beautiful; sublime; rational ideas; Kant; science fiction; Gothil literature

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