Since the middle of the 18th century, a perception of nature emerged for which Hamilton’s view of volcanoes is exemplary. The British philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797) developed a theory of the “sublime” in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke 1757), which the Ger-man philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) continued in his Kritik der Urteilskraft(Kant 2009 [1790]: 105–110 and 127–133). Nature appears to us not only as beau-tiful, but at times as overwhelming. But our power of imagination can rise above what we cannot grasp sensually: a stormy sea, an inaccessible glacier, or a burn-ing volcano. We feel the impression of the sublime when confronted with natural phenomena that appear uncontrollable and threatening, but which we can enjoy from a safe distance. In the aesthetic perception of such objects, we feel, as Kant explains, a sense of “superiority over nature itself in its immensity.” Although the individual human beings would not be able to resist the forces of nature, as rational, intellectual beings they are superior to them. The perceiving subjects thus feel the sublime as their “own sublimity,” as the “sublimity of our mental faculty.” In the most devastating scenes of eruption, Hamilton’s depictions show the inhabitants of the region at a distance from the volcano, often separated by a bay, as impressed but not endangered observers. With them, in Kant’s sense, we can feel a sublimity that lies not in the objects, but “in us.”
The literary and cultural history of volcanoes ranges from Pliny’s account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 CE, which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, to Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano (1947) about a British consul in Mexico. Werner Herzog’s documentaries bear witness to their aesthetic of the sublime, which continues to captivate scholars today: La Soufrière (1977) is about the imminent eruption of the eponymous volcano in Guadeloupe, in antic-ipation of which an entire region was evacuated, while Into the Inferno (2016) is about journeys with volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer to active mountains of fire in Vanuatu, Indonesia, Iceland, Ethiopia, and North Korea, where people encoun-ter the force of nature religiously and ritually, poetically and ideologically. The history of volcanoes is not only the story of their exploration, but also the story of their fascination.