Why trekkers weep at the top of the Thorong La, and whether Kant would understand
Its coordinates: 5.1 Theories of Beauty · 5.2 Philosophy of Art · 5.2.1 Definition and Boundaries +7 more
Eight months a year I take groups over the Thorong La on the Annapurna circuit. At the top, a little over 5,400 metres, something happens to about one person in five. They cry. Strong people, bankers, soldiers. They are exhausted and the air is thin, so part of it is the body. But they all say the same thing afterwards: they felt very small, and it was not unpleasant.
A client left me a book on Kant, and I have been reading the part about the sublime. Kant says that when nature overwhelms us with size or power, our imagination fails, but we discover in ourselves a power of reason that nature cannot reach, and that discovery is the pleasure. And he says we must be safe for this to work.
Two things trouble me. First, at the pass nobody is fully safe. Altitude sickness is real and I have carried people down. So is the feeling sublime, or just fear plus relief?
Second, in the villages where I grew up, the high peaks are the homes of deities. Machapuchare is closed to climbers for that reason. When my grandmother looked at the mountains she did not feel her own reason rising above them. She felt that something was there, much greater than her, and that it was right to be small. Kant says the sublime is really in the mind, not in the mountain. I think she would find that sentence very strange.
Is Kant describing what my trekkers feel, or something else?