Alexander Baumgarten began Aesthetica Acromatica, the first esthetics, in 1750. Kant briefly said of this work that it was based on an error. Baumgarten confused judgement, as it is exercised and understood when there is a governing consensus that classifies phenomena categorically, and judgement that, exercised intellectually or emotionally, has to do with an indeterminate relationship among the properties of the subject. Baumgarten’s esthetics depend upon a conceptually determined relationship to the work of art. The sense of beauty is for Kant a pleasure kindled by a free harmony between the function of images and the function of concepts whether the subject is a work of art or nature. Esthetics of the sublime are still more indeterminate: a pleasure mixed with pain, pleasure that comes from pain. In the event of an absolutely immense object––a desert, a mountain, a pyramid––or one that is absolutely powerful––a storm at sea, an erupting volcano––which like all absolutes can only be considered without reason, the imagination and the ability to present fail to provide appropriate representations. This frustration of expression kindles a pain, a kind of cleavage within the subject between what can be conceived and what can be imagined. But this pain in turn engenders a pleasure, in fact a double pleasure: the recognition of the impotence of the imagination contrarily attests to an imagination striving to illuminate even that which cannot be illuminated, and the imagination thus means to harmonize its objects to reason––and furthermore the inadequacy of images, as negative signs, attests to the immense power of Ideas. These unruly powers give rise to an extreme tension (Kant’s agitation) which sets the pathos of the sublime apart from the calm sense of beauty. From any vantage point around this cleavage, infinity, or the absoluteness of Idea, is revealed in what Kant calls a negative presentation, or even a nonpresentation. He cites the Jewish law banning images as an eminent example of negative presentation: optical pleasure reduced to nearly nothing promotes an endless contemplation of infinity. Even before romantic art was unleashed from classical and baroque figuration, the door had thus been opened to inquiries pointing toward abstract and Minimal art. Avant-gardism is thus present in germ stage in the Kantian esthetic of the sublime. The art, however, whose effects are analyzed therein, is of course essentially made up of attempts at representing sublime subjects. And the question Is it happening? does not pertain––at least not explicitly––to Kant’s problematic.

I do, however, believe that question to be at the very center of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. Kant may well have rejected Burke’s thesis in favor of empiricism and physiologism, he may also have borrowed from Burke’s analysis of the characterizing contradiction of the sublime, but he clearly ransacked Burke’s esthetic for what I consider to be its major gambit––to show that the sublime is kindled by the threat that nothing further might happen. Beauty gives positive pleasure, but there is another kind of pleasure that is bound to a passion far stronger than satisfaction, and that is suffering and impending death. In suffering the body affects the soul, but the soul can also affect the body just as though it were experiencing some externally induced pain, and it can do this solely by means of representations that are consciously linked to painful situations. This entirely spiritual passion, for Burke, is synonymous with terror. Terrors are linked to privations: privation of light, terror of darkness; privation of others, terror of solitude; privation of language, terror of silence; privation of objects, terror of emptiness; privation of life, terror of death. What is terrifying is that the It happens that will not happen, that it will stop happening.

Burke wrote that for this terror to mingle with pleasure and with it produce a sublime sensation, it is also necessary that the terror-causing threat be suspended, kept at bay, held back. This suspense, this lessening of threat or danger, provokes a kind of pleasure which is hardly positive satisfaction, but is rather more like relief. This still qualifies as privation, but it is privation in the second degree: the spirit is deprived of the threat of being deprived of light, language, life. Burke distinguished this pleasure in privation from the positive pleasure, and he baptized it with the word “delight.”

Here then is a breakdown of the sublime sensation: a very big, very powerful object threatens to deprive the soul of any and all “happenings,” stuns it (at lower intensities, the soul is at this point seized with admiration, veneration, respect). The soul is dumb, immobilized, as good as dead. Art, by distancing this menace, procures a pleasure of relief, of delight. Thanks to art, the soul is returned to the agitated zone between life and death, and this agitation is its health and its life. For Burke, the sublime was not a matter of elevation (the category within which Aristotle defined tragedy), but a matter of intensification.