One, Two

I published one post here last year. This post will make two for this year.

Sometimes when there is one of something it makes that thing seem precious. Sometimes it makes it seem lonely. I am not sure which of those that post is.

"To call the ocean sublime we must regard it as poets do."

"Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck."Kant so often talks about the ocean. It is his most common example of that in nature which inspires a feeling of the sublime; something great and formless, beside which our own physical power fails, but which causes us to experience the supersensible via our reason. It is also his metaphor for the work of his life, metaphysics.


But Kant was born, died, and spent almost his entire life in the same city, Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad). He never traveled more than 70 miles from home in the course of this life, and he rarely traveled even that far. And so I keep wondering, while I read about the sublime and the beautiful:

Did Kant ever see the ocean?

It would have been the Baltic...

Wikimedia Commons

Steven J. Wilson

Wikimedia Commons