Nature
Kant provides a wealth of metaphor for expressive examples of the sublime as it exists in nature. An entire paragraph of examples almost reaches past imagery to become a prose poem.
Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like; these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might.
Transcendence
Transcendence is a concept too complicated to explain in this space. Kant fills entire volumes discussing it. One can something of an idea of the majesty of the concept in the simple metaphor he uses to describe human reaction to it:
The transcendent (towards which the Imagination is impelled in its apprehension of intuition) is for the magination like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself.
Victimhood
Kant warns against playing too hard the victim card. Indulging in the pleasures and gains that can be brought on by servility inevitably leads to unwanted negative consequences:
One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.
Like Batman or Bane
Enlightenment is not for the faint-hearted. Kant makes it clear that enlightenment is essentially the result of not being afraid of knowledge. It is a process that requires moving past immaturity:
Only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.
Man Needs Mastering
Kant writes that man’s full dignity and realization remains unmet. He is merely an animal like any other and like animals requires a master to tend to negative consequences of enjoying freedom. Though an animal, the central metaphor used to describe this circumstance looks not to beasts:
“out of wood so crooked and perverse as that which man is made of, nothing absolutely straight can ever be wrought.”
