Robert R. Clewis

“The sublime is a massive concept,” Emily Brady states in her book’s first sentence. Her lucid study of the sublime should interest scholars from a wide range of disciplines, from environmental philosophy and aesthetics to the history of philosophy, art history, and literary criticism. Although its title refers to modern philosophy, the book examines not only the period typically classified in philosophy as “modern,” but also romanticism and contemporary aesthetics. Brady aims “to reassess, and to some extent reclaim, the meaning of the sublime as developed during its heyday in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory by the likes of Addison, Burke, Kant, and others, and mark out its relevance for contemporary debates...

I emphasize the harmony between the sublime and the underlying concept of the purposiveness of nature, i.e. that the sublime is purposive through its initial contrapurposiveness. One favorable outcome of this reading is that it locates further unity in the Critique of Judgment, e.g. it helps make sense of why, besides historical reasons, Kant may have turned to the sublime in the first place in the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” (Part One of the CJ). I question some prominent readings of Kant’s theory, e.g. that as a mere ‘appendix’ to his theory of nature, Kant’s account of the sublime has little connection to his project’s main aims. The place of the sublime is thus near the middle.