Nature: Animal, Moral, Technological
When, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth insisted that an “overbalance of pleasure” entails the “circumstance of meter,” he confirmed a philosophical assumption far older than Kant's theory of the sublime. The pervasive assumption—which, today, can be tracked in an on-going
“affective turn” (necessarily entangled in matters of form and style)—is that the artificial makes possible an understanding of the natural.