I went to a roundtable the other night on "The Aesthetic" hosted by our English department. As you might expect, much of the discussion was guided by Kant's Critique of Judgment, supplemented with the requisite considerations of Baumgarten and Burke. At one point, the discussion turned to the "sublime" and, of course, to the ready-to-hand example of sublimity, the ocean.
I wasn't as familiar with Edmund Burke's work on the sublime, so I was interested to learn that Burke (who also, naturally, finds the ocean sublime) argues that the feeling of "terror" or "fear" inspired by the sublime involves some speculation about the possibility of one's own death. That is, we find the ocean sublime partly because its vastness exceeds the powers of our understanding, but more so because that vastness prompts us to imagine our own death by drowning in it. This marks an interesting difference between him and Kant. For Kant, judgments about the sublime (qua aesthetic judgments) must be universal and necessary, which would preclude any considerations of the subject's (particular) death. The sublimity of the ocean is an instance of what Kant would call the "dynamical" sublime, that is, a judgment about the magnitude and might of the ocean, which exceeds human understanding, and not about the particular threat that magnitude and might poses to me. I think Kant might also describe the sublimity of the ocean as "terrible"-- inasmuch as he recognizes that the "feeling" inspired by the sublime is the opposite of the feeling inspired by the beautiful-- but that terror cannot be grounded in any particular empirical psychology.
In the past, I have often heard people talk about Kant's sublime, though explain it in a way that is much closer to Burke. The reasons why these two ideas may be potentially confused seem obvious, but since the distinction between the two is so significant, it seems crucial to try to situate Kant's sublime far, far away from Burke's.
This led me to wonder: is there another (perhaps, better) example of the sublime that doesn't allow for this confusion between Kant's description and Burke's description? In other words, can we think of an example of sublimity that would still inspire the negative feelings that Kant associates with the sublime without those negative feelings being potentially associated with our own death, even if only in a latent way?