The Sublime

Eighteenth-century travelers paid to be terrified: they climbed to see the Alps, sailed for the storm, queued for the precipice. Immanuel Kant's century called the feeling the sublime, and by 1757 it had a famous theory. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant inherits this stock experience and asks the question underneath it: when nature frightens us and we enjoy it, what exactly are we enjoying? Paul Guyer traces Kant's answer through mountains and waterfalls, past an old acquaintance from the ethics, to a claim about what nature can and cannot do to a human being. It is worth the climb.