Well, as a strict armchair Kantian and "physicist" (that is, an idiot who reads things he can barely understand) I have no idea what this article is trying to tell us.
This problem constitutes Kant's principle argument that something else must be going on in the sublime experience other than the mere overwhelmingness of some object. As Kant will later claim, objects of sense (oceans, pyramids, etc.) are called 'sublime' only by a kind of covert sleight-of-hand, what he calls a 'subreption' (sect.27). In fact, what is actually sublime, Kant argues, are ideas of our own reason. The overwhelmingness of sensible objects leads the minds to these ideas.
Now, such presentations of reason are necessarily unexhibitable by sense. Moreover, the faculty of reason is not merely an inert source of such ideas, but characteristically demands that its ideas be presented. (This same demand is what creates all the dialectical problems that Kant analyses in, for example, the Antinomies.) Kant claims that the relation of the overwhelming sensible object to our sense is in a kind of 'harmony' (sect.27) or analogy to the relation of the rational idea of absolute totality to any sensible object or faculty. The sublime experience, then, is a two-layer process. First, a contrapurposive layer in which our faculties of sense fail to complete their task of presentation. Second, a strangely purposive layer in which this very failure constitutes a 'negative exhibition' ('General Comment' following sect.29) of the ideas of reason (which could not otherwise be presented). This 'exhibition' thus also provides a purposiveness of the natural object for the fulfillment of the demands of reason. Moreover, and importantly, it also provides a new and 'higher' purposiveness to the faculties of sense themselves which are now understood to be properly positioned with respect to our 'supersensible vocation' (sect.27) - i.e. in the ultimately moral hierarchy of the faculties. Beyond simply comprehending individual sensible things, our faculty of sensibility, we might say, now knows what it is for. We will return to this point shortly. The consequence of this purposiveness is exactly that 'negative pleasure' (sect.23) for which we had be searching. The initial displeasure of the 'violence' against our apparent sensible interests is now matched by a 'higher' pleasure arising from the strange purposiveness Kant has discovered. Interestingly, on Kant's description, neither of these feelings wins out - instead, the sublime feeling consists of a unique 'vibration' or 'rapid alternation' of these feelings (sect.27).
My hunch though, is that, like most of us, this "appeal to Kant" is misplaced, as ensconced in the entire Kantian "trancendental idealism" it's preposterous (to me) to make the claim that "Nature, according to Kant, cannot be art because nature is passive and mechanistic." The very foundation of this claim (which I know not if it is something Kant said or not) but it presupposes that Kant would be saying something of nature as a "thing-in-itself." Which is exactly what Kant wants us to understand as being unknowable.
So, indeed, nature, of course, is not sublime, in and of itself, it is sublime only in our perception of it. "The sublime" in other words, would be phenomena not noumena, as a matter of course. So, nature, as noumena, is not sublime,
a priori, the sublime is
a posteriori as a matter of course. I'd think that is a bit like asking if there could be an
a priori phenomena, which might be like asking if there is a married bachelor though...