It could be thought that the experience of the sublime (especially in nature, if not in art as well) seems to be something of the past. When one pays attention to the range of aesthetic experiences nature could prompt nowadays, the conditions that have traditionally made the experience of sublime nature possible seem to have waned. Firstly, the great impact of technological development over the management and control of natural environments and phenomena, often leading to pollution and destruction, has made it more and more difficult to find environments that retain their wild, undomesticated character. In fact, except for only a few examples, most natural environments have been either considerably transformed or preserved in a controlled manner. Secondly, a cluster of aesthetic categories has taken over the most traditional pair of beauty-sublime concepts, permeating aesthetic interactions and foregrounding aspects that only tangentially relate to the sublime experience. To these reasons, Brady adds a third one: the very development of aesthetics as a discipline seems to have promoted, especially since the 19th century, an art-centred approach, which, consequently, has paid insufficient attention to those categories which have traditionally constituted the aesthetic appreciation of nature.
Against these detrimental aspects, Brady defends in her book The Sublime in Modern Philosophy. Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature a revitalization of the notion of the sublime and a reconsideration of its centrality within contemporary aesthetics. In order to do so, she develops a twofold strategy, which broadly corresponds to the two parts of the book. In the first part, she provides an exhaustive overview of the history of philosophical reflection on the sublime in order to put forward her particular approach to this issue. In the second part, she compares the notion of the sublime with other similar notions and aesthetic problems – such as the paradox of tragedy, painful art, or ugliness – in order to clarify the specific character of the sublime experience, and to foreground its unique value as a particular aesthetic mode through which we relate to natural environments. The book concludes with a chapter on the value of the experience of sublime nature showing both its significance for contemporary aesthetics and its worth from an environmental perspective. In this regard, it could be said that an underlying concern permeating the book is to offer a view of sublime experience where its specific character and value become salient.
Although Brady does not completely dismiss the possibility of an artistic sublime – which she concedes in some forms of architecture and Land Art – she certainly thinks this aesthetic category has its home realm of application in the aesthetic engagement with nature. As we shall see, this intimate connection between sublime experience and nature will lend support to one of the main aims of the book: to show the importance of this aesthetic category for contemporary aesthetics of nature and environmental thought.
The historical revision accomplished in part I of the book provides a solid background for Brady's own proposal and a critical tool to test what features should be located at the core of the sublime experience. In this respect, the author emphasizes the aesthetic character of the notion of the sublime – against some views which tend to foreground its moral aspect – in the sense that it constitutes a sort of relationship towards natural environments that is unmediated by concepts and grounded in an emotional response towards certain perceptual qualities, such as a great scale (mathematical sublime) or overwhelming power (dynamic sublime). Brady also pays great attention to the character of the sublime response. In this regard, she adopts the traditional idea that sublime experience requires a certain distance or level of safety in order to be produced. Sublime experiences, in contrast with pure terror or fear, have a pleasurable component. If someone was too close to the potentially harmful, uncontrolled, natural forces, she could hardly experience pleasure at all. Nevertheless, sublime experience should be understood as a complex one, where negative and positive feelings come together and stimulate the subject's mind – more specifically, her imaginative and rational faculties. Brady notices the difficult issue of explaining the relationship between these two contrary emotional responses, but she thinks it is crucial to give them their due weight. While a feeling of being overwhelmed and humiliated by nature's overpowering forces and magnitude may be experienced in a negative way, a more positive experience can be found by overcoming this negative feeling through the awareness of the power of reason to cope with them. The complex relationship between negative and positive feelings within sublime experience becomes essential in order to explain the pleasure experienced at the expansion of imagination (that feels threatened but also agitated) and at our own indirect capacity to take in what seems beyond sensible apprehension.
Brady's critical rendering of the philosophical history of this concept covers a wide range of authors and traditions, beginning with the Empiricists and ending with the characterization of the sublime experience by the Transcedentalists in North America during the 19th century. Although this revision helps Brady to articulate the essential aspects of her own view on the sublime experience, she notices that the philosophical renderings of this notion have typically tended to overemphasize only one of two essential aspects of sublime experience. Thus, while some approaches have underlined the qualities of the sublime nature – its wild, formless, vast, overwhelming character – as constituting the core aspect of the sublime experience, others have focused on the mental state and the self-regarding aspect that the sublime experience seems to afford. Brady places great emphasis on the idea that a cogent account of the sublime experience should provide a proper place to each of these aspects. In this sense, Kant's view on the sublime receives especial attention and becomes pivotal for Brady's own view. Although the Kantian account of the sublime has been frequently understood as underlining the subjective, self-regarding, character of the sublime experience, Brady tries to favour a reading of Kant's work where the role of the qualities – and, especially, the lack of a delimited form – that typically ground the experience of the sublime receive due attention.
Similarly, Brady's analysis of the moral significance of the sublime experience in Kant's thought favours a reading where the experience of the sublime retains its core aesthetic character and autonomy. Although she pays great attention to the moral significance of the sublime experience and to the way in which it arouses the experience of our own rational abilities to overcome our sensitive limits – that is, of our freedom as a specific moral capacity – she nevertheless emphasizes the aesthetic character of the overall experience. For, as she makes clear, the awareness of our own freedom achieved through the experience of the sublime is not a conceptual or cognitive awareness. In this sense, although there are aspects of the sublime experience that certainly endow this notion with a moral outlook, the experience remains aesthetic throughout. Brady's proposal can thus be summarized as a view of the sublime experience: i) mostly located in the aesthetic relationship with natural environments; ii) where typically qualities such as vastness and overwhelming character feature as the perceptual content of the experience; iii) whose phenomenology is constituted by a complex relationship between pleasure and displeasure; iv) where fear, respect, and a humble attitude derived from the inability of our sensible faculties to take in the vastness of nature is balanced by a pleasurable expansive movement of the imagination and a self-regarding attitude; and v) where an aesthetic awareness of our moral faculties, and especially our capacity to exercise moral freedom, comes to the foreground.
It follows from this characterization that the sublime experience, although importantly linked to morality, sustains itself both from a concern with the qualities of nature that ground this experience and from a realization of our own relationship towards nature (both sensibly and morally).
The second part of the book explores issues related to the relevance of the sublime experience for contemporary aesthetics. Brady begins this part by addressing the possibility of an artistic sublime and offers a number of reasons supporting the idea that art is hardly ever able to provide this kind of experience. First, she thinks art usually lacks the scale or power that typically triggers the experience of the sublime. Secondly, she points to the fact that artworks seldom possess the unbounded character or the formless appearance that grounds the sublime experience. Thirdly, artworks cannot usually be experienced as wild or uncontrolled and they certainly lack the unexpected dynamism of natural phenomena. Fourthly, it seems quite unlikely that the spectator of a work of art experiences it as threatening in the sense in which natural environments can be, partly due to its fictional character. And, finally, given that artworks are intentionally produced objects, they cannot properly trigger the sort of metaphysical matters that are grounded in our relationship towards nature. We cannot, for example, contemplate art as something that is challenging and distinct from us in the same way sublime nature is. As mentioned earlier, Brady leaves some room for the artistic sublime in some cases of architecture and Land Art, but she claims it would be more appropriate to keep in mind that the sublime is a category whose main domain is the aesthetic experience of nature. Thus, although there has been some attempt in contemporary philosophy to revitalize the notion of sublime as an artistic category, she thinks most attempts do so at the cost of distorting the original and central sense of this notion. In this sense, terms like ‘profound’ or ‘grandiosity’ can be more appropriate for describing the experience afforded by music or abstract art; for, however profound and deep the experience provided by these types of art forms may be, they certainly fail to establish the metaphysical concerns that the experience of sublime nature provides.
In chapters 6 and 7 Brady deals with the problem of explaining the value of sublime experience given that it contains displeasure as one of its essential ingredients. In order to approach this issue, she will draw a comparison between the so-called paradox of tragedy (or painful art in general) and the sublime experience. Since much work has focussed on the former topic, Brady aims at throwing some light on the puzzling fact the sublime experience gains part of its specific value in virtue of the displeasure it produces by looking at some of the accounts of the paradox of tragedy. Briefly put, she thinks no account that sticks to a hedonistic view of value can fully account for either paradox. Some unpleasant experiences may possess value as such because they afford experiences that reveal some truth about us or about our relationship to others or to nature, however unpleasant. Nevertheless, and although there might be some similarities between the paradox of tragedy and the paradox of the sublime, Brady thinks sublime experience cannot simply be put under the more generic label of painful art. Similarly, when the value of ugliness is addressed in comparison to the sublime in virtue of its negative aspect, Brady is careful not to lose sight of the specific character of the sublime experience. The point of the comparison rests, though, in the way it illuminates how deep and meaningful relationships toward the environment can be forged through these experiences.
It is this very last idea that Brady expands in the concluding chapter of her book. Once the relevance and character of the sublime experience has been established, Brady defends the view – which has been criticized from different angles – that the experience of sublime nature possesses a specific kind of value. This is grounded precisely in the way it makes us aware, through the feelings proper to the sublime, of a particular relationship between us, as human and moral beings, and nature. She does not defend the strong view that experiences of sublime nature radically transform us from a moral point of view. But she certainly thinks that the specific sort of awareness of our relationship to nature that we gain through the experience of sublime nature possesses both moral and cognitive value: it expands our perceptual abilities as well as our moral awareness. And by doing so it may prompt respectful attitudes towards nature both as a particular appreciated environment and as a whole.
