I'm not sure this is a correct reading of Kant. The mountain/ocean/ night sky/other enormous thing is still organized rationally -- it still exists in space and time, according to the principles of causality. It is just cannot be experienced *all at once*. Chris Doss
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It's something I found on the web on Lyotard. As for Kant, I've been through most of Pure Reason and sketchy parts of Practical Reason. Then here and there for the rest. So, I have no idea if the characterization was accurate. I agree Kant comes at the close of the period, but he forms a kind of summation and therefore a symbol to me to stand for the entire movement. What's interesting about the Enlightenment period is there wasn't one. It was more like a art style, a school of writers very much like the postmodern work.
Dwayne hinted at interrogating the name postmodern and the basis for that is similar to arguing about whether there really was such a thing as the Enlightenment. Cassirer had to re-construct this concept of the enlightenment by going over individual writers like Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc. There are similar arguments about the construction of the Renaissance, Medieval ...
The way I look at these questions is to think of them as a state of mind, a mentality or intellectual milieu, a cultural phenomenon. The way I figure out the mentality is to look at the art, read books in the period, etc, then read the political and social history. The whole cultural assemblage gives me a much more concrete sense of something named as the Enlightenment.
Whether the landscape enormous thing is organized on paper or seen from the pleasant view of a well fenced platform isn't really what I was trying to point to. That's a kind of safe spot view so it can be framed. The `real' sublime is to be `in' one of these places, actively dealing with it on its own terms, and even better by yourself, no people, no trails, no nothing ... just out there in the middle of nowhere. Now in those circumstances the whole basis of a `rational' frame changes, because the empirical and practical context has changed. In some sense, it is a liberation feeling. You can push this condition, mind set, sublimity to the limit and beyond your assumed and rational physical and emotional capacity.
Imagine, out there, no one around, by yourself. Now imagine a steep climb up a gully system to reach a high system of ridges, so you can traverse a series of peaks by web of ridges between them. No rope, nobody around, nothing but mountains as far as you can see. The guys who do this kind of thing are a very different breed. They act different, they talk different ... they are like wilderness mystics. They don't live in the same world as you or me. I've done a limited amount of soloing (no rope) and it is truly among the best feelings I've had outdoors. I was in a different form of what might be called rational, if you count the extraordinary concentration on movement and forces. It is something like dancing. Dancers are almost automatically good at learning to climbing.
The way I think about the more civilized version of the sublime is that it was discovered, and constructed as the sublime, once most of the religious constructions had faded away. This religious construction is still there, when people say, `That's God's Work' and point to the landscape. The interconnections between the secular sublime, the religious construction and the landscape can be seen in great places like Utah. My impression driving through small communities to get to climbing areas is that the people who live there are just as nutty and as potentially fierce as the mountain critters in Afghanistan. The massacre story Mike Yates posted seems to indicate the same thing.
I am certain that Heidegger deals with the sublime, but I don't know the details or how he constructs it. It would be interesting to hear that version.
Thinking just now about the sublime, the Germans and WWI ... Thomas Mann for example in his journals is writing merrily along full the proud, German spirit, the pumped up military and empire uber alles during the war. He publishes this way off the mark book, Notes of a Non-Political Man in November 1918. The very month of the German surrender. This book is full of the intellectual justifications for the war. It is so popular, it goes into second printing in January 1919. It is pro-war and is a scurrilous diatribe against the banality of democracy, the mediocrity of mob rule of French `civilization' and sees the war as a clash of civilizations. Boom. The great and noble German civilization crashes with the ignominious surrender! Surrender? What do you mean surrender?
So Mann had a magic moment, that I think of as a sublimity. A stunning shock. And the shocks kept on coming in Weimar. These sorts of events produce a heighten state of consciousness en mass, well mass hysteria. We are in one of those right now, a low grade version, produced by the media and this constant drone over economic collapse.
The problem with these states is that they over ride the analytical and empirical mind set. Everybody starts thinking with what I think of as the mythological mind---parts of which are much more closely interlocked with the emotive states of the body.
The whole power elite is locked into its mythological mind set in panic that they might lose their money and control. The crap I watch on tv is just amazing. One magic explanation after another, one fabrication after another, special language, special words, special incantation to mysterious forces. The whole thing is just witch doctor bullshit... Sorry to diss the proper witch doctors, but really...
CG