ABSTRACT
In the judgement of the sublime, as we have seen, the failure of imagination to fulfil reason’s demand arouses in us the feeling, but critically not the sensual exhibition, of our supersensible ‘vocation’ (Kant 1987: 114-15). Ideas of reason are represented, therefore, but only negatively: the mind feels but cannot capture its capacity for transcendence. For Kant’s followers in the Romantic and Idealist traditions, this is a particularly troubling conclusion. For what remains, after the ‘pleasure’ of discovering the non-sensuous, rational foundation of the mind, is the ‘displeasure’ of knowing that one can never give sensual representation to this foundation. Henceforth, in the German Idealist tradition, the emphasis falls not so much on the triumph of reason as on the failure of imagination as it strives to realise the ineffable. This presents a problem for poets and artists striving to defend the primacy of the imagination. In the case of the poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), for instance, whose short essay ‘On The Sublime’ appeared in 1793, the outcome of the sublime is ‘a mixed feeling … a composition of melancholy … and of joyousness’ (1988: 42). As the literary critic Paul Hamilton comments, ‘melancholy arises from the imagination’s loss of its empirical employment’. Consequently, ‘we are no longer at home in the world constituted by our experience when we are enjoying the feeling of being able to think
beyond it. This joyful feeling of self-aggrandizement defines itself in relation to the unhappy consciousness of no longer belonging to the phenomenal world’ (1983: 55).
