Kant and Schiller (sans 'Kant and Schiller'): Measurement and Meaning

Considerations of the sublime, what it is and what it does, start with a big question: how do we experience and understand the world and the human place in it? Our place in it leads to various, oscillating forms of knowing and feeling of what this questions means, and of any answers we might have. This is a matter of relation: for Schiller, our relation to the physical and the sensual world; for Kant, a relation between object and subject, and, importantly, as relation is determined on a scale. “That is sublime,” the latter writes,

“in comparison with which everything else is small. We can easily see here that nothing in nature can be given, however large we may judge it, that could not, when considered in a different relation, be degraded all the way to the infinitely small, nor conversely anything so small that it could not, when compared with still smaller standards, be expanded for our imagination all the way to the magnitude of a world; telescopes have provided us with a wealth of material in support of the first point, microscopes in support of the second"(522).

The minuscule and the grand occur in relation, and sublime, therefore, not only happens on a scale, but determines it. Relation thus becomes not only a measurement, but an epistemological method to answer—and judge—the big (and small) questions of us in and of the world. Such a method also asks: is everything measurable? Whether something is beautiful or sublime belongs to our senses more than our knowledge, or, as Kant puts it, to the subject more than the object. If there is a difference between knowing and sensing, is measurement a means to divide or reconcile both of our desires? A mathematical cosmological approach to understanding might seem to contradict the infinity of our imagination, and that which we grasp and create with our senses (as this dichotomy exists, for example, in a traditional assumption of science being opposite of art; a dichotomy that also underlies speculative science and also phenomenology).

Let’s return to the question of measurement: the above contradiction is to some extent expressed in the difference between quantity and quality; two expressions of measurement that one can imagine on a scale of measurable and immeasurable, intangible and tangible, material and thought. Looking at the world through a microscope gives us a sense (a sense in the sense of both knowledge and sense!) of its atoms and molecules; we can measure these minuscule data and relate them to something larger (an amoeba, the human body, the planet). Similarly, phenomenologist sense-data attempts to organize and measure our experience of that large. Both inquire and make meaning, which is where the seemingly contradiction of scientific knowledge and meaning diverges, but also intersects (and which is also a problem posed to language and communication: we can degrade, in Kant’s terms, a text to its smallest units, but its meaning and interpretation come from elsewhere). How measurement and relation allow us to make judgments and meaning becomes then also a matter of our field, and where the question of what we compare fades in relation to what our comparison tells us about the text and the world.