ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century developments, in particular, granted human omnipotence over nature the status of a Faculty. In this chapter the author borrowing the word 'Faculty' from Kant because it is in Kant's theory of the sublime that he encounter a specific bridge between sensations of omnipotence, aesthetic experience, and claims for modern rationality. Its aptitude for omnipotence, in Kant's terms, depends on the varied meanings of this distance, and its periodic collapse and recovery. This faculty of omnipotence arises more purposefully, as an aesthetic/ experiential theory, in Kant's age the Enlightenment, the age of humanism because humanism itself creates a separate nature for humans that sets it at a distance from some other nature, the nature of everything else. Omnipotence over a multitudinous and scale less nature might belong, accordingly, to the same 'psychic mechanism' that presents one as illusory totalities to ourselves. Speculative realism introduces one of the aspects of a very diverse post-humanist movement referred to briefly in the chapter.
