The Possibility of the Sublime : Aesthetic Exchanges [1 ed.] 9781527510302, 9781527502963

Citation preview

The Possibility of the Sublime

The Possibility of the Sublime: Aesthetic Exchanges Edited by

Lars Aagaard-Mogensen

The Possibility of the Sublime: Aesthetic Exchanges Edited by Lars Aagaard-Mogensen This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Lars Aagaard-Mogensen and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0296-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0296-3 Jane Forsey “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (2007), is reprinted by courteous permission of John Wiley and Sons.

CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Chapter I ...................................................................................................... 1 Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible? Jane Forsey Chapter II ................................................................................................... 17 An Aside on the Sublime Joseph Margolis Chapter III ................................................................................................. 21 Bouleversement: Some Kantian Reflections on Jane Forsey’s “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” Rachel Zuckert Chapter IV ................................................................................................. 29 Pleasure and Transcendence: Two Paradoxes of Sublimity Tom Hanauer Chapter V .................................................................................................. 45 A Theory of the Sublime is Possible Robert R. Clewis Chapter VI ................................................................................................. 69 Commentary on Jane Forsey’s “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” Sandra Shapshay Chapter VII ................................................................................................ 81 On Jane Forsey’s Critique of the Sublime Jennifer A. McMahon Chapter VIII .............................................................................................. 93 The Sublime, Redux Jane Forsey

vi

Contents

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 107 Contributors ............................................................................................. 113 Index ........................................................................................................ 115

PREFACE

Language is the common, prime mode of human intercourse. Persons are language users (and everyone uses it rather a lot.) It follows, quite naturally, that all expect—a fair expectation —that they know and also can say what it is they talk about—or else they could not know whether they were talking about the same thing(s). This expectation is, now and then, left in the lurch of sometimes modestly tolerable vagueness, sometimes intolerable total vagueness—leading to a situation equal to a load of fertilizer for misunderstandings. In other words, speakers cannot use concepts willy-nilly: no one would ever understand each other, and conversation would dissipate into babble. Aesthetic concepts are no exception. In order to say, state, assert something one must have, possess, command concepts. When someone asserts, e.g., “The sky is blue” or “Aesthetic experience is complete in itself” it’s given that he can only say so, and others can only understand what he says, when he knows what the ‘sky’ (and ‘is blue’) is, or what ‘complete’ is. He must have the concept of sky or of completeness in order to be able to ascertain there are such, and to state that the sky is blue or the experience is complete. Problems obviously arise if speakers have partial or corrupted concepts and it becomes a philosophical task to get such corrected, to minesweep the sea of misconceptions. Problems of the sort surface and are detected by the varied and disparate explications and accounts speakers offer of the concepts they use. Unfortunately, this is frequently the case regarding æsthetic concepts, at times it seems well-nigh all of them. In the case of the concept of the sublime, Prof. Jane Forsey detected that all available accounts of sublimity, duly unpacked, are indeed corrupted to the point that no coherent account is possible. (Is there, could there be, anything more refreshing than the detection of an impossibility? An ice cold philosophical shower. After all, everything is possible—at least, the slogan goes, in theory. It puts it right up there with traditional aesthetics resting on mistakes, roles of theories,1 1

Sibley, although not mentioning sublimity, explained that aesthetic concepts have no criteria for application, yet one might follow a clue from him, namely that many aesthetic concepts are secondary uses, if they are, figurative transfers from other domains in which they might actually be subject to criteria (necessary and

viii

Preface

contestations, and see how that has fanned out in searches for, and proposals of, possibilities, alternatives, prospects, promises, the omen of revolution, even a scientific one, to be just around the corner, a panoply if not a hail storm of recastings setting in.) If Forsey’s detection is correct, the notion of the sublime collapses into a mere useless label or is given over to frivolous use much like a curse, an exclamation like “Cool!” and “Wow!”, or fillers like “you know what I mean,” “you see,” and “OK” (uttered no matter whether there’s anything to OK.) A weed in the conceptual landscape. Sampling actual uses of the term, it´s not immediately apparent that it has cogent general use(s) and it is not least therefore intriguing, nor less difficult a task, to investigate it. Additionally, what is one to do with the following (brief) assortment of statements from students of the sublime: “examination of æsthetic experience reveals that [the sublime] engenders feelings which are akin to pain. Sublime objects are overwhelming, menacing, intractable to understanding and control” (Stolnitz); “grounded as [the sublime] is entirely within the mind of the experiencing subject ...” (Pierce); “the two most important sources of the sublime—the capacity to conceive great thoughts and the compelling treatment of emotions—arise from genius and can never be captured in a set of rules” (Longinus); “to what extent is the sublime ultimately about embracing the death drive?” (Morley); and “Buñuel possesses an inimitable eye for the beauty of banality, the pornography of proprieties, and the sublime madness of civilized life” (Fuentes)? To Forsey and a great many others incoherence, such disparate uses and statements signal conceptual disaster; to the other contributors to this volume, they are a challenge calling for salvage duty, aid—that is, an examination and re-examination of those disastrous explications. Is the correction correct? Some here appeal to historical, traditional sources (such as Kant) and others to contemporary scientific or hermeneutical speculations about this—tolerably?—vague concept and pronounce promisarily that explanation is possible. Granted the analyticity of explanans and explanandum, when an explication is correct, the explanandum should at the very least be informative, such as to clear away partial and corrupted uses of the given concept. But if that is not possible, ‘sublime’ is doomed to the compost heap or the vagaries of mysticism. Then again even these are subjected to examination, all hoping of course that continued analysis will yield—happy ending—an incorrigible flawless explication: the sufficient conditions, call them theories or accounts). If so, certain questions arise: in which domain is this true of “sublime”? why is it transferred? what does it carry over? Could it be from the bizarre, uncanny, (deviant) charm family?

The Possibility of the Sublime: Aesthetic Exchanges

ix

category of sublimity as a cogent aesthetic concept. While on occasion there is, here there’s probably no need for—à la Moore—the reminder: that no discussion about the meaning of a concept is merely about the meaning of a term, and to think of the sublime is not to think merely of ways of thinking about the world; it is to think of how the world actually is. This is not the proper place to anticipate, recount or analyse the contents of the following essays, the contributors are best served by their own words. What is worth emphasising, however, is to alert readers to the philosophical gains, the conceptual clarifications, these exchanges are expected to arouse. This is intercourse, after all.

CHAPTER I IS A THEORY OF THE SUBLIME POSSIBLE? JANE FORSEY

The aesthetic notion of the sublime has had a great deal of attention in the last decade or so, engendering monographs by Paul Crowther, JeanFrançois Lyotard, and Kirk Pillow, critical anthologies from Dabney Townsend and from Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, and numerous journal articles, conference panels, and symposia.1 This renewal of interest is perhaps timely: a notion that conjures up the inexplicable, the overwhelming, and the horrendous may be well suited to the current age. It is perhaps also timely that we take a step back from this respectable and growing body of research to attend to a single voice that once asked a very important question: “How is a theory of the sublime possible?”2 Guy Sircello was concerned that our efforts to capture and explain the sublime have in fact resulted in claims that are either contradictory or incoherent, due to tensions between (often unarticulated) epistemological and ontological commitments. He also sought to remedy the very problem he posed, with suggestions as to how a coherent theory of the sublime should proceed. The present article takes up the problem as Sircello first voiced it, but without his final optimism. What I offer amounts to an error theory: our 1

Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); JeanFrançois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. E. Rottenberg, (Stanford University Press, 1991); Kirk Pillow, Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000); Dabney Townsend, ed. Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics (Amityville: Baywood Publishing, 1999); Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds. The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 2 Guy Sircello, “How is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993), pp. 541–550. References to Sircello’s work are inserted in parentheses in the text in this Ch. and throughout.

Chapter I

2

current theorizing about the sublime rests on a mistake. I will claim that if we accept the problem as Sircello had described it, his own proposed solution is bound to fail. But if we reject his general methodological assumptions, what we will be left with is so limited that a general theory of the sublime will remain out of our reach. Additionally, I will expand on the evidence Sircello garnered for his case by attending in some detail to the most sophisticated treatment of the sublime we have: that of Immanuel Kant’s work in the third Critique.

I. The Problem of the Sublime But first, the problem itself. Sircello took as his starting point the generally accepted notion that sublime experience “professes to ‘see’ beyond human powers of knowledge and description” and that because of this it is inaccessible to rational thought, (p. 541). Further, in the descriptions of the sublime he canvassed, Sircello found the operation of a general assumption that our cognitive powers are revealed, in the moment, to have what he called “radically limited access” to some broadly construed notion of “reality,” (p. 543). There is a great deal of prima facie evidence for this general claim. Sircello mined such sources as the Tao, Zen Buddhism, and the poetry of Wordsworth and the Romantics, but philosophers writing on the sublime provide similar evidence, and it is with philosophical theory that I am most concerned. Consider the following.

3

1.

Joseph Addison wrote in the Spectator of 1812 that “our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity.”3

2.

The Earl of Shaftesbury rhapsodized about the sublimity of nature in this way: “Thy being is boundless, unsearchable; impenetrable. In thy immensity all thought is lost; fancy gives over its flight: and wearied imagination spends itself in vain.”4

3.

Edmund Burke claimed that the passion caused by the sublime is astonishment, “and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which

Joseph Addison, “The Spectator, No. 412, Monday June 23, 1712,” Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader, p. 62. 4 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Characteristicks,” ibid. p. 73.

Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?

3

all its motions are suspended. ... The mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”5 4.

In the twentieth century, Jean-François Lyotard famously wrote of the postmodern as truly sublime, that which “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself ... that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.”6

In each of these cases, as with others, we grasp at and fail to achieve an understanding of some notion of “reality.” This is Sircello’s main premise: that sublime experience embodies a certain kind of cognitive failure. In these moments we become aware of our limitations; whatever we construe this broad notion of reality to be, it remains tantalizingly out of reach. This experience generates, for Sircello, the first of two themes he identified as running through the majority of sublime discourse, the theme of “epistemological transcendence” (p. 542), which he articulated in the following proposition. An experience of the sublime presents the object of the experience, i.e., the sublime, as epistemologically inaccessible, (p. 545).

At first glance, this is not a contentious thesis: much writing about sublime experience seems to suggest that what is unique is just this moment of being overwhelmed by a sense of something incomprehensible, or incommensurable, or more powerful than we are. And, of course, to be made aware of the limitations of our cognitive capacities is at the same time to transcend them, insofar as we reflect on them. This is another powerful motif in writing on the sublime that I will return to below. Sircello’s concern was that this initial theme of epistemological transcendence tends to embody a second theme that leads us into difficulty. The first theme interprets “the experience of the sublime” as denoting an experience of an object, although it leaves open the question of what this object might be, or whether it indeed exists (p. 545), referring instead to “reality” at large. The second theme, what Sircello called “ontological transcendence,” addresses this object directly and suggests that sublime 5

Edmund Burke, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” ibid. p. 132. 6 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81.

4

Chapter I

experience represents something as existing that is inaccessible to our cognitive powers, something “on a level of being ... which transcends that of humankind and all of humankind’s possible environments,” (p. 545). After all, he went on to say, it is implausible to assert that we have an experience, called sublime, that is without any object, or that the sublime is both an object of experience and one that does not exist (loc.cit.) However, to imply that an epistemologically inaccessible object does exist, Sircello claimed, is to end in either incoherence or contradiction, and cause any attempts at a theory to fail. Let me take each of these charges in turn. Regarding the charge of incoherence, we must ask how we can have an experience—and describe that experience—which presents an object that is in no way epistemologically accessible. This would be tantamount, Sircello noted, to having a visual experience of an invisible object: impossible, (p. 546). Consider James Usher, a contemporary of Burke’s, who wrote: Because the philosophers of our days can assign no form, nor size, nor color, to the object of their sublime awe, they conclude it to be vain and superstitious. ... The truth is, the impression of this obscure presence ... is beyond the verge of the philosophy of the ideas of sense. The disciples of this philosophy ... are notable to conceive that an object has been there which was not represented by a sensible idea, and which makes itself felt only by its influence.7

For Usher, we have an experience of an existent object that is inaccessible to our very modes of experiencing, as with Shaftesbury’s earlier allusion to boundlessness and impenetrability. This is the incoherence with which Sircello was concerned. However, sublime discourse that does not make incoherent claims falls into contradiction instead. Let me return to Addison for a moment: he lists among the objects of sublime experience “a vast uncultivated desert,” “huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices, or a wide expanse of waters.”8 Burke widens this list to include “serpents and poisonous animals of all kinds,”9 and many in the Longinian tradition count poetry, architecture, and painting as candidates for the sublime, just as Lyotard included in his scope works of art and literature. For the most part, a long tradition of writing on the sublime has clearly described the objects of our 7

James Usher, “Clio, or a Discourse on Taste,” The Sublime: A Reader, p. 150f. Addison, “The Spectator,” p. 62. 9 Burke, “A Philosophical Enquiry,” p. 133. 8

Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?

5

experiences. Sircello reminds us that to do so, however, is consistently not to treat these objects as if they were epistemologically inaccessible, (p. 546). Rocks and mountains are not things we do not comprehend or cannot comprehend; we would not describe them if we did not have access to them. When we do identify them as sublime objects, we are not treating them as, at the same time, inaccessible to rational thought. So we fall into contradiction: the sublime object is both transcendent and familiar. On Sircello’s diagnosis, we seem forced to concede that sublime discourse, so long as it embodies both these theses, is either incoherent or contradictory. This is a pressing problem if we seek to find in the sublime anything of philosophical interest. Theorists who wish to emphasize the transcendence of the sublime object are faced with the problem of explaining how we can actually have and describe an experience of it, as in the case of Usher. But theorists who wish to emphasize the experience itself as transcendent must somehow tell us what it is an experience of, if it is not to be a mere fantasy or hallucination. Telling us that it is an unusual experience of an usual object—a rock, a cliff, a storm, and so on— contradicts the first thesis with the second. The heart of the problem, then, is this: if we focus on the metaphysical status of the sublime object, our epistemology becomes problematic, but if we address instead the epistemological transcendence of a certain experience, we still seem forced to make some metaphysical claim about the object of that experience. The theme of epistemological transcendence, as Sircello interpreted it, provides indirect evidence for the second theme of ontological transcendence, with which it appears to be inextricably bound, and this seems to imply that, in fact, nothing can be sublime. Can we overcome this problem and speak coherently about sublimity in some way? Sircello left a hint that we perhaps could if we can find a way to reinterpret the first theme so that it does not embody the second. For it is the first—that general notion that sublime experience somehow overwhelms our cognitive faculties—that has generated such interest in the topic. And it is the second—the ontological claim—that has been at the heart of the conceptual problems I have outlined. Sircello proposed that we attempt a weaker reading of the thesis of epistemological transcendence to exclude any metaphysical postulation. He argued that “epistemological transcendence may not presuppose any ontology and may not directly concern ‘the real’ at all, but only the limitations of our attempts to grasp it, whatever it is or is taken to be,” (p. 540). Our mistake lay in assuming we were talking about some kind of object of experience and in attaching the quality of sublimity to that. Sircello concluded his

6

Chapter I

paper with a proposed rearticulation of the thesis of epistemological transcendence, as follows: for any possible given set of routes of epistemological access to reality, that set is insufficient to grasp the real and that in the moment of sublime experience we are perhaps made aware of this, (p. 540).

It is this revised proposition I will turn to now.

II. The Kantian Sublime Kant becomes an interesting thinker in this regard, for he was notoriously coy about making any kind of metaphysical claim about the nature of the real. His most striking innovation on earlier thinkers was to move the locus of the sublime from a property of an object (whether natural or supernatural) to a feeling experienced by the knowing subject. This seems to indicate a focus on the epistemology of the experience, as Sircello had proposed. At first glance, Kant’s work appears most likely to lead us out of the problems as presented, and therefore merits a more thorough consideration. Kant states at the beginning of the “Analytic of the Sublime” that “we express ourselves incorrectly if we call any object of nature sublime ... All that we can say is that the object is fit for the presentation of a sublimity which can be found in the mind, for no sensible form can contain the sublime properly so-called,” (§23, p. 83f).10 And, more strongly, that “Nichts also, was Gegenstand der Sinnen sein kann, ist, auf diesen Fuß betrachtet, erhaben zu nennen; [nothing, therefore, which can be an object of the senses is, considered on this basis, to be called sublime],” (§24, p. 88).11 For all that Kant remains within the tradition in his mention of such familiar natural examples as “shapeless mountains piled in wild despair,” “the gloomy, raging sea,” and “crude nature” in general, he explicitly departs from earlier thinkers in denying that any of these things themselves are sublime objects of our experiences, (§26, pp. 95, 91). Similarly, while in his discussion of the mathematical sublime he refers to 10

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). I rely for English translation of this text on Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (NewYork: Hafner Publishing Co., 1972). References to the English version of the third Critique will appear in the text in parentheses, with section and page number; references to the German text are provided in subsequent footnotes. 11 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 172.

Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?

7

seemingly inaccessible objects that are “boundless,” “formless,” and “absolutely great,” or that bring with them “the idea of infinity,” he again denies that these are sublime, for all that they occasion the feeling of sublimity in us when we confront them, (§23, p. 82; §25, p. 86; §26, p. 94). His starting point thus seems to reject Sircello’s first interpretation of epistemological transcendence in favour of something approaching the second. What is sublime for Kant is not something in the world—some portion of the “real” that we directly experience—but a feeling we have that is occasioned by certain sensory experiences. Let us look at this feeling of sublimity more closely. Kant, in these sections, is not merely providing a phenomenology of certain kinds of experiences and the emotional charge we get from them. His interest is very much in epistemological transcendence: the mechanism by which we realize our cognitive limitations and the positive (moral) implications of this realization. With the mathematical sublime, for instance, which we experience when faced with vast and formless objects, the faculty of imagination cannot apprehend them as a whole in a single intuition as reason demands. This incommensurability of our imagination with the totalizing demands of reason produces at first a displeasure in our experience of failure and then a subsequent pleasure that is aroused by “the feeling of a supersensible faculty”—our awareness of the superiority of our powers of reason. It is this “state of mind [Geistesstimmung],” he notes, “and not the object, that is to be called sublime [nicht aber das Objekt erhaben zu nennen],” (§25, pp. 88–89).12 Kant seems to suggest in these passages that, in the moment, we become aware of a part of us that transcends the natural world. As Malcolm Budd has put it, our ability to think, for example, the infinite as a whole “is possible only because we possess a supersensible faculty ... Accordingly, sublimity attaches only to the supersensible basis of human nature.”13 Kant writes that the failures of imagination in these moments nevertheless “carry our concept of nature to a supersensible substrate” that lies both at its basis and “also at the basis of our faculty of thought,” (§26, p. 94). The sublime, then, is more than a feeling; it is an awareness of a part of ourselves that surpasses understanding: “Erhaben ist, was auch nur denken zu können ein Vermögen des Gemüts beweiset, das jeden Maßstab der Sinne übertrifft [the sublime is that, the mere ability to think which

12

Ibid. Malcolm Budd, “Delight in the Natural World: Kant on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. Part III: The Sublime in Nature,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998), p. 240. 13

8

Chapter I

shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense],” (§25, p. 89).14 This is equally clear in the sections on the dynamical sublime, in which we experience the force of nature without ourselves being in physical danger. The sight of storms, hurricanes, volcanoes, and other natural forces “exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might,” (§28, p. 100). Nevertheless, this sense of powerlessness leads us to discover in ourselves “a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind”: that of our moral superiority, (§28, p. 101). The sublime, Kant notes, “calls up a power in us (which is not nature)” but allows us to see that nature has no dominion over us, for all that it can overwhelm our physical strength, (§28, p. 101). We become aware in that moment that while we may physically perish in a raging sea, there is a part of us that cannot be touched, even by the most violent of natural forces. That part of us—our moral being—is “disclosed,” or “emerges,” or “is found” in our sensory experience of certain natural phenomena. What is truly sublime, then, is not an object of experience: it is an object of thought. In his General Remark at the end of the “Analytic of the Sublime,” Kant recapitulates his position. Ideas of reason, he reminds us, cannot be presented to the senses, and the failure of the imagination in the face of the sublime is due to its efforts to “make the representation of the senses adequate to these [ideas],” (§29, p. 108). But this failure, this effort on the part of the imagination “forces us ... to think nature itself in its totality as a presentation of something supersensible.” We become aware, thereby, of something that surpasses nature and all our attempts at capturing it. “It is by this that we are reminded,” Kant writes, “that we only have to do with nature as a phenomenon and that it must be regarded as the mere presentation of a nature in itself (of which reason has the idea) ... [T]his idea of the supersensible ... is awakened in us” by the experience of the sublime and “this judgment is based upon a feeling of the mind’s destination, which entirely surpasses the realm of [the natural world],” (§29, p. 108f). The dual movement of the mind—from a sense of our cognitive limitations to the transcendence of them—has little direct application, for Kant, to shapeless mountains and violent storms. These phenomena may provide the catalyst for epistemological transcendence but they are not the direct objects of sublime experience. The real point of these experiences is the realization of our own supersensible nature, a realization that occurs, 14

Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 172.

Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?

9

as Malcolm Budd has noted, “only by conceiving of the sensible world of experience as being dependent on its intelligible basis, the world as it is in itself, thus making manifest ... our status as a causa noumenon.”15 These myriad natural phenomena provide the occasions for our experiences but the real object of the sublime is us.16 The innovative aspect of Kant’s discussion has been in moving the locus of the sublime from objects of the natural world to the subject of experience, but in doing so, Kant has not avoided metaphysical postulation, as Sircello had hoped, for he has resituated the transcendent object as well: what unfolds as truly sublime is our moral being, that part of us that is inaccessible to sensory experience but that we nevertheless become aware of in (certain) moments of cognitive failure. In the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant makes this ontological commitment clear: we “ascribe a certain sublimity and dignity to the person who fulfills all his [moral] duties. For though there is no sublimity in him in so far as he is subject to the moral law, yet he is sublime in so far as he is a giver of the law and subject to it for this reason only.”17 Again, in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant refers to the “sublimity of our own supersensuous existence [die Erhabenheit unserer eigenen übersinnlichen Existenz];” it is an awareness of the transcendent self as moral legislator that sublime experience was getting at all along.18 To be sure, Kant’s account does not suffer from the incoherence in Sircello’s first formulation of epistemological transcendence because Kant is not claiming that we have direct sensory experience of a transcendent object. But, while not incoherent, Kant’s account shows us that the theme of ontological transcendence persists through Sircello’s second articulation 15

Budd, “Delight in the Natural World,” p. 241. As Paul Guyer has noted, “it is we ourselves who are sublime”. See his “The Difficulty of the Sublime,” presented to the American Society for Aesthetics Annual General Meeting, Providence, Rhode Island, October 2005, for the panel “Knowing the Sublime,” p. 15. 17 Immanuel Kant “Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,” Kant Selections, trans. Lewis White Beck, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), p. 281, emphasis added. I have chosen this translation for its emphasis on the term ‘sublime.’ And see Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 75. Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), offers a good discussion of the moral implications of the sublime, see pp. 341–344. 18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), p. 92. And see Kant Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 211. 16

10

Chapter I

of the epistemological thesis. This formulation suggested that for any given set of routes of epistemological access to reality, that set is insufficient to grasp the real. We can see that this articulation still embodies an ontological claim: it represents something as existing that is inaccessible to our cognitive faculties but to which our experience of sublimity is directed. For all that Sircello sought to escape the problem by focusing on the epistemology of sublime experience, it seems that we cannot do this without bringing along some notion of the real, however this notion is construed. Kant’s conception of sublimity, for all that it, too, focuses on the epistemological aspects of our experience, still carries with it an ontological claim about (transcendent) reality. With Sircello’s second formulation, we escape incoherence only to find ourselves facing some ineffable or mysterious reality that we do not experience directly, that we cannot know, but that nevertheless we must posit as existing, of which the sublime gives us a glimmer. This revision of the original thesis does not succeed in omitting the theme of ontological transcendence: instead, as we see with the case of Kant, it renders the ontology all the more mysterious and all the more tantalizingly out of reach.

III. The Impossibility of a Theory of the Sublime Where does this discussion leave us regarding the possibility of a theory of the sublime? I will use this final section to canvas our options, and to make the negative argument that a theory of the sublime as it has been historically formulated is simply not possible. There are three immediate directions open before us in light of the forgoing. First, we can simply accept Kant’s account as the only way to generate a coherent theory of the sublime. Sircello, we can say, aptly revised his epistemological thesis to meet earlier problems of contradiction and incoherence, even if he was mistaken in his optimism that this revision would omit any metaphysics (Sircello, curiously, did not mention Kant in his paper.) But to accept Kant’s account is possible only if we accept the entire Kantian system; the particular kind of cognitive failure we see with the mathematical sublime, for instance, rests on the Kantian theory of what constitutes cognitive success: that of the imagination being able to synthesize sensory experience for the purposes of determinant judgment. The true sublime object can only be a Kantian postulate about our moral being. If we go this route, the sublime becomes nothing more than evidence for—or a symptom of—Kant’s whole architectonic. It may be the result of an (aesthetic) reflective judgment, but it is no longer a truly aesthetic concept and has peripheral use in aesthetic theory (although it

Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?

11

may become of interest for ethics.) This means that any account of the sublime we may seek to provide will be part of an interpretation of the Kantian system only; at best, we may be forced to admit that a theory of the sublime will be incoherent without at minimum a commitment to Kantian terminology. This conclusion may not be dire: a focus on judgments of sublimity may help illuminate Kant’s moral theory. But I suggest that such an outcome would be unsatisfying for the many aesthetic theorists who have sought to rejuvenate the notion and claim it as their purview. A second option is to further investigate Sircello’s revised thesis in the hope that a wholly epistemological account of the sublime is possible. Kant, we can say, was wrong to link the requisite cognitive failure to moral transcendence. Instead, we can perhaps retain the notion of sublimity as a pleasure that results from cognitive failure without his moral conclusions. This is the route Malcolm Budd seems to have taken. He is critical of Kant’s formulation of the sublime, claiming that it “appears to be no more than a product of his inveterate tendency to evaluate everything by reference to moral value ... a tendency that led him to moralize, in one way or another, any experience he valued.”19 If we reject the moralizing aspect of the Kantian account, a much more modest picture of the sublime emerges. The initial negative aspect of the experience remains an awareness of the inadequacy of our imagination or physical strength in the face of certain natural phenomena, but the final movement of the mind, rather than reaching toward some transcendent truth about our natures that we feel but cannot know, emerges directly from this experience of inadequacy. Budd has described it this way: With the sudden dropping away ... of our everyday sense of the importance of our self and its numerous concerns and projects, or the normal sense of the security of our body from external natural forces, the heightened awareness of our manifest vulnerability and insignificance ... is, after the initial shock, experienced with pleasure.20

This more modest interpretation of cognitive failure ends with an awareness of our vulnerability and humility; we are humbled in the face of natural phenomena that are either so vast as to preclude measure, or so powerful that we cannot withstand them. We realize our limitations at these times of cognitive failure, and this realization brings with it a certain pleasure (what Burke and Kant have both termed a “negative” pleasure.) 19 20

Budd, “Delight in the Natural World,” p. 246. Ibid., p. 246.

12

Chapter I

Such an account seems more in keeping with the generally accepted notion of the sublime as a moment of being overwhelmed by a sense of things as incomprehensible, or as more powerful than we are, but it stops short of claiming any transcendence attendant upon this moment (or at best a very thin notion of transcendence as the result of our realization of our own limitations.) But we can ask of Budd’s account why these moments of cognitive failure must be restricted to experiences that follow the general outlines of the Kantian mathematical and dynamical sublime. We have already given up the idea that sublimity resides in objects of experience as being contradictory if they are natural objects and incoherent if they are not. If we now reject the moment of moral transcendence that the sublime is meant to engender, as we reject the Kantian conception altogether, is the field not left wide open for any encounters that likewise humble us or draw attention to our vulnerability? Is this not what Lyotard had in mind for powerful works of art, for instance? Or, more prosaically, what of the cognitive failure I have occasionally experienced in the face of the New York Times crossword puzzle, or complex mathematical problems that truly humble me? What of the rush athletes experience from dangerous sports such as ice-climbing or heli-skiing? What of the vulnerability I feel when riding my bicycle in rush-hour traffic and making it—just—home safely? Why are these sorts of experiences not also sublime or, at any rate, equal candidates for the kind of pleasure that a subjective account would properly call sublime? Budd’s rejection of Kant’s moral goals causes us to lose the initial reasons for focusing on the vast, formless, and threatening aspects of nature alone. Indeed, if we seek a purely epistemological account of the sublime, must we not dismiss any reference to Kant’s so-called dynamical experiences altogether? For these were not moments of cognitive failure per se but instead experiences of our physical vulnerability in the face of (natural) forces we can cognize but cannot withstand. On Budd’s reading, it seems that anything at all could engender an experience of the sublime, provided that it overwhelms our cognitive capacities. This is why I have called his account “subjective,” for it seems that the relevant experiences will be unique to the particular cognitive abilities of a given individual (you may have no difficulty with the crossword puzzle, for instance.) But again, even this minimal reading will not work, for there remains an object of experience that causes cognitive failure, and any attempt to describe or delimit this object will lead to by now familiar problems. This second option is also unsatisfying for a further reason. Why, we can ask, does the awareness of our cognitive limitations lead to pleasure in particular, even of a negative kind? Why does it not instead lead to

Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?

13

frustration, humiliation, or determination to overcome our failures? Budd’s revision of Kant does not explain why the realization of our failings should be met with such equanimity, absent the transcendence to an awareness of moral superiority. His account is not alone in this, if we reconsider the theorists I canvassed at the outset. Lyotard, for instance, does not explain why my incomprehension in the face of certain works of art leads me to awe or a deeper respect for them instead of a dismissal that they have “nothing to say to me.” Again, the onus remains on a purely epistemological account to show how cognitive failure brings pleasure— of a certain kind—with it. This is something that Sircello’s revised formulation equally lacks. Let me turn now to our third option. I have rejected a theory of the sublime that attends to the object of experience because of its troubling ontology. I have also cast doubt on a purely epistemological account of cognitive failure because such an account will require some delineation of the object of experience if it seeks to circumscribe the notion of the sublime in any way. Sircello’s attempted revision of the epistemological thesis thus will not succeed: he had hoped we could theorize about the sublime by attending to the experience itself but we cannot, finally, exclude the experiential object from our account if we begin with the methodological assumptions that initially drove Sircello’s paper. I have said nothing so far about an intersubjective account of the sublime because there is almost no mention in the literature of this experience being culturally shared or even communicable. The sublime has been described as a wholly personal, even intimate experience without reference to others. If one wanted to attempt this line of inquiry, it will not be immune to the problems noted above: even an intersubjective epistemology must have reference to an object of (shared) experience, however that is conceived. What we now might consider, then, is a rejection of the delineation of the problem as Sircello first articulated it: the solution does not lie in a strictly epistemological account of the sublime, we may say, and sublime experience is not best construed as a species of cognitive failure. In fact, we may hazard that traditional theorizing about the sublime has been mistaken all along. But what then is sublime experience? Experience as we normally understand the term is largely held to be intentional, with at least a perceived phenomenal content (whatever that content may turn out to be.) If this experience is not conceptual, leading to the above-noted problems with epistemology, then we can suggest that it is perhaps emotional, a kind of feeling that we have when faced with some (or any) phenomena. That is, not only may we say that the sublime is not a species of cognitive

14

Chapter I

failure, but also that it has nothing to do with cognition at all. Consider Budd’s account again: his interest lies in our feelings of humility and vulnerability, in a pleasurable realization of human limitations. What he has offered here, we can claim, is an (incomplete) account of a type of feeling that is a response to the world. But if we seek to describe the sublime as a feeling (of pleasure) of a certain kind, we face a paradox: either feelings are intentional and object-regarding (and so are theorizable in the above problematic ways), or feelings are nonintentional and cannot be theorized at all.21 Let me develop this a little further. On the one hand, feelings can be seen as intentional—like the feelings of love we have for somebody, or the feelings of resentment we have toward particular political decisions, or feelings of fear toward certain things, and so on. If feelings are intentional they can also be theorized, but if they are intentional we also return to the same objections: Why does the sublime capture feelings in response to some objects/situations and not others? Why these feelings (awe, incomprehension, and so forth) and not others? If, however, we interpret feelings as nonconceptual and nonintentional, we are left with something that cannot readily be theorized at all: How do we provide a theory of this sort of thing beyond some kind of literary capturing of the feelings as they occur? They take no object and have naught to do with cognition. With this option we come full circle to the sources Sircello initially mined for his discussion of the sublime in literary and mystical texts. What he called “sublime discourse,” as “language that is or purports to be ... expressive of sublime experience” (and which I take this side of the paradox to intend,) he held in opposition to “talk about the sublime” that is reflective and analytic (and which includes the works of Burke and Kant,) (p. 541). Sircello quoted, as examples of sublime discourse, Wordsworth: For I would walk alone In storm and tempest or in starlight nights Beneath the quiet heavens, and at that time Have felt whate’er there is of power in sound To breathe an elevated mood, by form Or image unprofaned; and I would stand Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth, Or make their dim abode in distant winds.22

21

My thanks to Mark Smith of Queen’s University at Kingston for a discussion on this point. 22 William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, quoted by Sircello, p. 543.

Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?

15

And the Tao te Ching: The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The un-nameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.23

In both cases we have expressions of sublime experience that do not attempt to analyze or theorize that experience, that do not attempt to “talk about” the sublime at all, but instead use poetic language to communicate a feeling the author has or has had. While such descriptions or expressions may be evocative, they do nothing for a purported theory of the sublime. If this is what we are left with, it is so philosophically limited as to amount to nothing in the way of a theory of the sublime. What may be most unsatisfying about this third option—the sublime as a feeling whether intentional or nonintentional—is that it rejects the history of talk about the sublime to date. The fundamental questions of a tradition—What kinds of objects are sublime? What does the sublime tell us about ourselves as subjects? and, centrally, What does sublime experience illuminate about the limitations of our access to the world?— have no purchase in a purely phenomenological or emotional account. This is deeply unsatisfying because if we accept this option, we must conclude that a theory of the sublime such as we have historically striven for is simply out of reach. Let me briefly review my claims in closing. I have argued that if we accept Sircello’s articulation of the problem with theories of the sublime, we are tasked with the difficulties attendant upon the notion of epistemological transcendence, the major theme that runs through historical attempts to theorize the sublime. This theme seems to incorporate a second theme of 23

Lao-tzu Tao te Ching, quoted by Sircello, p. 544.

16

Chapter I

ontological transcendence that binds us to problematic ontological commitments even when these are unarticulated. Even the sophisticated treatment to which Kant subjected the sublime is not immune to this problem. The sublime, we have seen, cannot be an object of experience, but neither can it be a description of the cognitive failure of a given subject. If it is to deal only with some feeling or emotive state, it devolves to no theory whatsoever. In the one interpretation, the sublime can be nothing; in the second, anything; and in the third, it cannot be theorized at all.24

24

An early version of this article was presented at the American Society for Aesthetics Annual General Meeting, Providence, Rhode Island, October 2005, for the panel “Knowing the Sublime.” I greatly benefited from the commentary provided by Jeffrey Wilson, Department of Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University, and from discussion by participants Paul Guyer, Kirk Pillow, and Melissa Zinkin.

CHAPTER II AN ASIDE ON THE SUBLIME JOSEPH MARGOLIS

I’ve just read, belatedly, a very thoughtful account of the fortunes of the theory of the sublime spanning Kant’s treatment and a few contemporary attempts to “go beyond Kant”: Jane Forsey’s “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”1 Her instructive answer is, of course, No! I had actually published—sometime in the last decade, I believe—a rather heterodox piece on the reception of the canonical view of the sublime, with attention to landscape, modern technology, outer space, and related ideas, sparked by an agreeable reading of a very well-informed overview of the treatment of landscape, touching on the landscape of cities, by a dear friend, Raffaele Milani, which I had first presented as an opening address at a conference, in Bologna, of the International Association for Aesthetics.2 What I wanted to emphasize was the historied nature of the very idea of the sublime, in the setting of Kant’s and Burke’s, and other eighteenth-century views. Space travel and the latest telescopes—not to mention our extreme forms of domesticating the designated sites of the sublime—have made the usual examples much too quotidian to be effectively sublime any longer, although I did dwell for a moment on Turner’s paintings, which seem to me to have “succeeded,” by appearing to approach the threshold “experience” without actually capturing it.

1 Jane Forsey, “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (2007). [Reprinted in this volume, pp. 1-16. All subsequent references are (in text parentheses) to the reprint, Ed.]. 2 I’ve temporarily lost the title [“The Art of Landscape Reconceived,” Ed.] and date of publication of my paper (which appeared in an issue of the International Yearbook of Aesthetics, [Vol. 17, (Sassari: Edizione Edes, 2013), Ed.] edited by Raffaele Milani and Jale Erzen). I’ve also lost for the moment the title and publication details of Milani’s own book, though I doubt he’ll mind my scatter, [The Art of the Landscape (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), Ed.].

18

Chapter II

In any event, Forsey’s paper appears to exhaust the Kantian and postKantian options, where the three alternatives she considers are themselves (as she remarks) tethered to the same constraints advanced in Kant’s original account (including accepting the primacy of Kant’s entire undertaking.) I count myself a pragmatist (as accurately as I can determine), which is to say, I’m an anti-Kantian (perhaps an anti-Kantian “Kantian,” as Charles Peirce has taught us to make room for). What I mean very simply is that I have a suggestion of an anti-Kantian proposal of what the “sublime” (or whatever now shares the conceptual space of the sublime, in our own day and way) might be said to have come to mean. Or, to put the point at its argumentative best, I offer an option that would be anti-Kantian in the wake of Kant’s discussion and that of all those who have tried to answer Kant in something close to Kant’s own idiom (but have failed straightforwardly), according to Forsey’s forceful analysis: in our time, chiefly, Guy Sircello, Malcom Budd, and Jean-François Lyotard, apart from eighteenth-century figures, Kant himself and British discussants, whether influenced directly by Kant or not. I mean my comment as a minor note, principally to salute Jane Forsey’s very nice piece (and to remember my pleasure at meeting her again, quite recently, at a conference in Venice). Well, here’s the idea. What Kant attempted to do was to recast the ultimate questions of First Philosophy in terms of his Critical method, so that he could provide synthetic a priori necessary truths in answering questions regarding the “conditions of possibility” of our knowledge of the world and of the nature of a humanly knowable world, which would be open to complete rational confirmation but without claiming reason as itself a distinct cognitive faculty adequate to the task of producing an objective science as well as an objective morality, solely by the exercise of its own resources. According to the strictest critics of the original venture, Kant was unable to demonstrate the legitimacy of his way of confirming the validity of his Critical (or transcendental) claims. My reading of the matter agrees that Kant could not sort, or confirm, convincingly, the differences between bona fide transcendental claims and first-order empirical claims. Alternatively put: Kant failed to demonstrate that would-be transcendental questions regarding knowledge, reality, the meaning of discursive claims, the ultimate norms of rational life and the like could ever escape the conceptual statement of an infinite regress or ineluctable petitio, regardless of how anyone might propose to answer pertinent transcendental questions. Kant was unable to show that human knowledge and understanding could ever escape the deep (second-order) conditionality of human inquiry itself, which (then) signifies an insurmountable limitation on the least pretensions of objective knowledge.

An Aside on the Sublime

19

The whole of human knowledge and understanding is, therefore, put at ineliminable risk at every point of supposed success. My own conviction is that the threat and challenge (skepticism, if you like) is indeed genuine, ineluctable, but also benign. The practical reliability and the ineliminably incomplete epistemological security of knowledge are entirely and tolerably compatible. At least, it would be so regarded in pragmatist terms. But it means that epistemological “security” is forever breached—hence, that the formulation of an adequate theory of the sublime (read in the way Forsey’s specimen views pursue the matter) is impossible to sustain: “epistemological transcendence,” as she rightly notes, cannot be rightly vouchsafed. But that means that what the usual theories regularly champion is already—“always already”—an ineliminable commonplace of the human condition itself! It cannot possibly be an exceptional or rare experience or discovery—which is what the standard advocacy of the sublime is thought to require. There must be another option, if the notion is to survive at all. My answer is to make a virtue of necessity. It’s the utter perilousness (the ineliminable uncertainties, reversibilities, possibilities of immense disaster, risk, unheard-of contingencies, change, and the like) of human belief and commitment and conviction and conditions of survival sustained through life and the whole of human history that is the source of the sense and presence of the sublime—which is indeed close to what Turner seems to have captured in his paintings of the sea. Dare I suggest that the canonical “sublime” is no more than a version of the picturesque—the occasion for a quaint eighteenth—or nineteenth-century frisson. Think rather of someone agreeing to live in an advanced, suitably furnished spaceship traveling through the cosmos, unable ever to return to earth, devoted to the scientific mission of testing and reporting whatever may be thought important enough to transmit back to earth, forever astonished and committed and fearful, faithful and fated. In this sense, what remains of the sublime is, I suggest, the ordinary as extraordinary, the sheer viability of life in all its guises and niches. But, of course, if this much is conceded, then philosophy’s own contingencies are as congenial to the fortunes of the sublime as anything else in the world. If the experience of the sublime is at all close to what is essential to human life, it would make no sense to suppose that seriously engaged philosophies could be instructively sorted as congenial or uncongenial to that sort of sensibility. In Kant’s case, it’s the futility of the Critical vision itself that obliged Kant to treat the sublime as paradoxical. But then, Kant succeeded at the edge of failure. How many have followed him over the cliff?

CHAPTER III BOULEVERSEMENT: SOME KANTIAN REFLECTIONS ON JANE FORSEY’S “IS A THEORY OF THE SUBLIME POSSIBLE?” RACHEL ZUCKERT

I read many scholarly articles, especially on Kant, and learn from most of them. After all, we live in a time of serious scholarship and careful thinking, and of great attention to Kantian philosophy in particular; much of that scholarship is helpful for one’s thinking—informative, clarificatory, suggestive, provocative. But rarely is my view of things radically changed by an article, I must confess; stubbornly, I am more frequently confirmed and strengthened in prior views than persuaded by articles that take opposing positions. My experience of reading Jane Forsey’s article on the sublime was, then, remarkable, unsettling, exciting. This original, intelligent, ambitious article completely transformed, upended, my understanding of Kant’s account of the sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and of its relationship to Guy Sircello’s article, “How is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” (to which Forsey’s own title refers).1 Prior to reading Forsey’s article, I had thought of these two works—of their arguments, concerns, and contexts of discussion—as worlds apart, despite their purportedly (misleadingly, I thought) shared subject matter, namely the sublime. Kant, I thought, was responding to and continuing the discussion of prior, eighteenth-century writers, most prominently Edmund 1

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sircello, “How Is a Theory.” I shall refer to the latter as “Sircello” with page number, and to “Kant” with, as is customary, page numbers in volume 5 of the Akademie edition (Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900-).

22

Chapter III

Burke (but also Moses Mendelssohn and Alexander Gerard, and likely others as well). So, like those other writers, Kant was aiming to provide a phenomenological description of the experience of the sublime (and/or the objects thereof), as well as to address a question akin to the so-called paradox of tragedy: why should we find an experience of fearsome, overwhelming objects at all pleasurable (thrilling, uplifting)? Why seek out such objects, such experiences, rather than, simply, flee? Writing in the 1990s, Sircello, on the other hand, hardly mentions either Burke or Kant—the central reference points of pretty much all other philosophical discussion of the sublime following them, whether in the nineteenth century or in current discussions. Rather, he seems to take his bearing primarily from Wordsworth, with supplementary references to Buddhist and Christian mystical thinkers. (The biographical origins of this article would be interesting to know, for Sircello does not engage with any scholarly discussions in English literature either, where, presumably, Wordsworth does serve as a central reference point for thought on the sublime. Sircello’s arguments seem almost to come from nowhere, and to speak to no existing discussion, and so to have been waiting for Jane Forsey’s acute ear, her conversational finesse, to bring them into the discussion—or perhaps better, to form a discussion that includes them.) Correspondingly, Sircello seems to have no interest either in the phenomenology or in the eighteenth-century paradox of the sublime, formulating rather a paradox of his own. To wit (crudely put): in the experience of the (Wordsworthian) sublime—as expressed in Wordsworth’s poetry—one takes oneself to come into contact with a “transcendent ontological realm” (Sircello, p. 546) and therein or thereby to be aware both of one’s cognitive inadequacy with relation to that realm, and also of some sort of metaphysical truth (concerning it, or its existence) that is normally inaccessible to human beings. Yet, if one formulates a theory concerning this experience—and its metaphysically superior, usually inaccessible objects—one lays claim precisely to have access to (to be able to grasp, in theoretical understanding) those (purportedly inaccessible) beings and truths, (Sircello, p. 545). So, Sircello asks, is a theory of the sublime (so understood) possible? I still think all of this is accurate, up to a point: Kant does aim primarily to respond to Burke (and his ilk), Sircello does (oddly) write largely as if that discussion never happened. Not just their questions, but their central thematic interests and focal objects or exemplars of the sublime are different as well: Kant and Burke are primarily interested in human affective life, in sensibility, in response to natural objects—in what we now call aesthetic experience of nature—while Sircello is prompted to

Bouleversement

23

formulate his more epistemologically (or metaphysically) oriented questions by nineteenth-century English poetry, understood less as an instance of fine art, than as a later instantiation of the impulses of medieval mysticism. Still, ultimately, this neat separation—of texts, issues, objects, discussions—is wrong, as Forsey saw, and as she showed me. Perhaps one could dig out of Sircello’s article a phenomenology and explanation of the ambiguous pleasures of the sublime; certainly he seems moved by the literary work, Palm Latitudes by Kate Braverman, which he discusses as a contemporary exemplar of the sublime, (Sircello, p. 544). And Forsey does raise questions—akin to those Kant and Burke raise and aim to answer—against a (Malcolm-Budd-related) version of Sircello’s own proposed view in response to his paradox, namely that the sublime is just an experience of cognitive failure (without any conjoined, potentially conflicting cognitive success in reaching a superior realm): “Why, we can ask, does the awareness of our cognitive limitations lead to pleasure in particular, even of a negative kind? Why does it not instead lead to frustration, humiliation, or determination to overcome our failures?” (p. 12f). But Forsey focuses on connection and reinterpretation in the opposite direction, as it were: she takes up (in fact reformulates and sharpens, in ways I salute but will not discuss further here) Sircello’s central question, with its attendant metaphysical and epistemological concerns, in order to reinterpret, even interrogate the eighteenth-century discussion, particularly Kant’s. She rightly notes the pervasiveness of references to objects appreciated as sublime as “beyond” us, both epistemically and metaphysically—as hard to understand, overwhelming, and as somehow superior in their being—in eighteenth-century (and later) philosophical aesthetics of the sublime, (p. 1f). (Forsey doesn’t mention a further support for her position: how prevalently God—surely understood as beyond us metaphysically, and, by most thinkers, epistemically also—is mentioned as a paradigmatic sublime object in eighteenth-century discussions.) She amasses similar textual evidence from Kant’s account of the sublime, notably, his references to the “supersensible,” whether the “supersensible substratum” of phenomenal nature, and (more frequently) to our own “supersensible faculty” of reason, (p. 7ff; Kant, Ak 5 p. 255 and p. 250). Kant thus describes the sublime as in fact having something like the structure Sircello describes: a (purported) experience of that which is beyond experience, or, perhaps more accurately, a sensible experience of a sensible object—awareness of a craggy mountain, say—that nonetheless purports to be or reveal some ultimate, underlying or superior metaphysical reality (that is beyond us, .

24

Chapter III

beyond sensibility). Forsey thus along the way (as it were) defends Kant from a common objection: that Kant (wrongly) downplays or ignores the role of the actual sensible object of experience—the mountain, storm, ocean—in favor of our own supersensible faculty of reason, ideas, or supersensible moral capacity. (An objection I had taken quite seriously, prior to reading this article, as well.) For, Forsey argues (in her analysis of Sircello), if the sublime is to be understood as an experience of one’s own cognitive limitations—and so, perhaps, somehow, as an experience of something that is beyond us, beyond experience—its objects cannot be understood to be ordinary, perfectly accessible, experiential objects, (p. 4f). So indeed Kant’s mountains and seas can only be “the catalyst … but … not the direct objects of sublime experience,” (p. 8). Kant’s recourse to reason—to its ideas of the supersensible—is meant to explain, Forsey demonstrates, not only where the pleasure of the sublime comes from, but also the supersensible import or content of that experience, the intentional object of such feeling. And so, though of course Kant did not know of Sircello’s paradox as such, his reference to reason is supposed also to address Sircello’s question (or something like it): we can be aware of our cognitive limitations—the limitations of our sensible capacities, the limits of experience—precisely because we also have a superior capacity, one that can conceive of the supersensible, namely reason (and that faculty, reason, can presumably also formulate a theory of such experience). All of this—I think now, under Forsey’s tutelage—is simply right about Kant. It deepens Kant’s account of the sublime, rendering it far more significant both within his own philosophy and as part of an historical tradition of discussion. It is not just an account of a mechanism to produce certain emotions (to describe my prior way of reading it a little harshly); rather, Kant’s understanding of the sublime is to be connected both to his concerns with traditional metaphysics, the traditional aspiration to knowledge of ultimate reality, and the limits of human cognition, as well as to a long tradition of attempting to understand experiences of selflimitation and self-transcendence (reaching back, as Sircello suggests, to mystical traditions). I did not, and I think I could not have, seen any of this without Forsey’s analysis.2

2

I would like to mention also, though, two essays that read Kant’s account of the sublime in similar, likewise fruitful ways: Julian Young, “Death, and Transfiguration: Kant, Schopenhauer and Heidegger on the Sublime,” Inquiry 48 (2005), and especially Michelle Grier, “Kant and the Feeling of Sublimity,” in Alix Cohen, ed., Kant on Emotion and Value, (London: Palgrave, 2014), (from which I likewise learned a lot, and with which I have great sympathy).

Bouleversement

25

This is not to say that I agree with all of Forsey’s contentions. On the basis of her interpretation of Kant, in light of Sircello’s paradox, she puts forth—extremely ambitiously, provocatively—objections (in the form of several, nested dilemmas) to all theorization of the sublime as previously undertaken. This discussion is too rich to describe, or to take up all (or even many) of its provocations here. But I shall note a disagreement with Forsey’s Kant interpretation, namely with that element in it that leads her to conclude—perhaps somewhat quickly, from a single case, and against Sircello’s own aspiration—that accounts of the sublime cannot be purely epistemological, cannot avoid metaphysical commitments. This move happens in her article before she turns to the—again, very interesting and provocative—concerns about theorization of the sublime in general; at least to some degree, it distracts me and holds me back from getting to those in my thinking—and it will do so here as well. Forsey contends, specifically, that Kant’s account is committed to an ontological claim concerning the supersensible existence of the self (and perhaps of nature, though this is less clear) or, perhaps more accurately, that on Kant’s account, the subject who experiences the sublime must be understood to be aware of, to be valuing or taking pleasure in, and even maybe to be learning truths about, her own supersensible, ultimate being, as specifically exemplified in our faculty of reason. This—our own metaphysical reality—is the true sublime object, on Kant’s view, (p. 10). Some of Kant’s text can be read this way, certainly. Forsey quotes, in particular, a phrase from the Critique of Practical Reason, which seems to have very strong ontological commitments: Kant celebrates there the “sublimity of our own supersensible existence,” (p. 9). But I am inclined nonetheless to take a more orthodox Kantian line (concerning both epistemology and, as I shall discuss in a moment, aesthetics): a Kantian account need not make such a claim, even if Kant sometimes appears to want to. Contra Forsey, I would contend that on Kant’s (best, most consistent) view we are not aware of our own supersensible being in the experience of the sublime—and so not aware of, or coming to be acquainted with a “higher level” of metaphysical reality that secures the value or is the referent of such experience. Rather, reason is a capacity we have and employ in a way we can be aware of within experience. But it can (epistemically) transcend experience, in formulating ideas of such a beyond. In fact, Kant famously argues in the Critique of Pure Reason that we can only formulate ideas—only think, but not know—about the supersensible beyond, including whatever we ourselves may be, in our non-experienced, non-experienceable nature. In the sublime, I propose

26

Chapter III

then, we are taking pleasure just in having such ideas, not in coming to know their objects. (So I would be somewhat nitpicky about a passage Forsey quotes in mounting her case: “the sublime is that, the mere ability to think which shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense,” [p. 7f; Kant, Ak 5 p. 250; I quote Forsey’s, rather than Guyer’s and Matthews’s translation.] This is a convoluted, puzzling passage, and I do not claim to be able to parse it fully. But: it suggests, supporting Forsey, that the intentional object of sublime feeling, even of sublime experience [if paradoxically], is an idea of that which lies beyond experience, beyond the senses. Against Forsey, however, the faculty of reason—responsible for forming that idea, as the “mere ability to think” it—is not itself said to be some supersensible being beyond experience. Rather, it is superior to the senses because it can come up with that idea, while the senses cannot; we cannot sense infinity, but we can think of it.) Why does this interpretive disagreement matter? For the Kant-obsessed, it matters so as to keep Kant’s view consistent (concerning our ignorance of the supersensible.) But it matters too for questions concerning the sublime (and the theory thereof.) One might think that if one takes Forsey’s line, Kant will fall to Sircello’s paradox or at least fail to provide really a theory of the sublime, understood as an experience of one’s own cognitive limitations. For on that view, the Kantian sublime is either an experience of both knowing and not knowing some superior reality (which seems inconsistent in a way Sircello notes.) Or, perhaps, it might be understood as just an experience of cognitive success (namely of being aware of our own supersensible rational capacity,) together with some (distracting?) sensible flutters of incomprehension. Forsey herself seems to conclude, rather, that Kant’s account does manage to be consistent (does not fall prey to Sircello’s paradox) but only at the price of rendering the sublime a mere bit of “evidence for—or a symptom of—Kant’s whole architectonic. … no longer a truly aesthetic concept and [of] peripheral use in aesthetic theory,” (p. 10). These are conclusions I think one can resist—if one resists the idea that we are aware of some metaphysical truth, of our own ultimate being, in the experience of the Kantian sublime. It is of course true that Kant puts his account in his own technical terms (and they are complicated, clunky terms as well.) Also, Forsey is right that if one does not accept a distinction between reason and sensibility of the kind (broadly speaking) that Kant proposes—that reason, not the senses, conceives of that which lies beyond sensible experience (and that reason in fact does manage so to conceive)—then Kant’s way of avoiding (one version of) Sircello’s paradox will fail. For Kant’s account

Bouleversement

27

does turn on the claim that we can be confused and frustrated by the failure of one kind of cognitive capability (sensibility), while at the same time recognizing that failure, going beyond it in some way, with another (reason). But this does not seem to me too much to swallow (though I am a card-carrying Kantian, so perhaps I have a non-representative view here.) If one takes my anti-metaphysical view of Kant’s account, moreover, I would argue that Kantian pleasures in the sublime are, precisely, aesthetic (albeit, again, in the Kantian sense; see previous parenthetical remark.) For such pleasure arises not from recognizing a fact about our being (as supersensible), but rather from exhilarating cognitive activity, from the dizzying ability of reason to break free from—i.e., think of things differently from—what is given to our senses, perhaps to think of things that are different from anything that exists at all. Kantian pleasures in the sublime are, in other words, aesthetic pleasures—like pleasures in the beautiful, on Kant’s view: they are derived not from learning truths, but from feeling the life of the mind, the liveliness of our own cognitive activity. The metaphysical import (or commitment) of such experience is, in turn, minimal. The experience of the sublime does not offer superior knowledge, even of ourselves. After all, we already know that we can formulate ideas of (say) infinity or God; and again, Kant thinks that we will never know whether there are objects corresponding to such ideas. Indeed, such ideas are (nearly, if not quite purposely?) fictional, aiming to present objects different from any existing objects of which we are aware. And so the (quasi-metaphysical) significance of such experience is its suggestion of freedom—in it, we feel our capacity to think in ways that transcend and so also (potentially) to transform what is sensibly given to us. As Forsey emphasizes, for Kant the sublime is therefore important because it has kinship to and promise for morality—there too we need to understand ourselves as free. But the pleasures of the Kantian sublime are still, I think, properly aesthetic; they need not be reduced to some sort of morality-oriented message about ourselves. They are, I would say, the ambiguous pleasures of human risky, tentative, fallible self-transcendence in thought, of venturing out beyond what we can know securely. Such ventures are thrilling, exhilarating; here we do feel our freedom of thought. But such pleasurable experiences are also marks of our limitations, both of our experience (or the knowledge we base on it)—it may not contain all there is—and of our speculations beyond it, which may after all be mere fiction. These seem to be, in other words, experiences that are enlivening, fascinating, affectively charged, and rich in meaning, offering materials for experiential and thinking exploration, for pleasurable/fearful confusion,

28

Chapter III

in themselves, with (potentially) no cognitive or moral or other “upshot.” Offering such experiences seems to me to be the aspiration of some art, and such experiences are also, certainly, akin to the pleasures of having one’s thought unsettled, upended, by such a smart and deep article as Jane Forsey’s “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”

CHAPTER IV PLEASURE AND TRANSCENDENCE: TWO PARADOXES OF SUBLIMITY TOM HANAUER

I. Introduction The sublime has enjoyed a reawakening in the last few decades, especially in the works of postmodernists and in the rejuvenated scholarship on eighteenth and nineteenth century European aesthetics. In her recent article “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” Jane Forsey has raised some very important concerns about these attempts at the resuscitation of the sublime. According to Forsey, these attempts all share a fundamental mistake: they assume that a theory of the sublime is possible. The sublime, she argues, cannot be theorized since there is nothing that such a theory could be a theory of: “sublimity” denotes something that, upon proper reflection, turns out to be either incoherent, contradictory, or “so limited that a general theory of the sublime will remain out of reach,” (p. 1). Forsey’s argument poses a difficult challenge to anyone who takes the sublime seriously, that is, for anyone who views sublimity as more than a quirk in the annals of European aesthetics. Nevertheless, I will argue that the challenge is not insurmountable. The aim of this paper is thus to defend the coherency of the sublime as a viable aesthetic category against Forsey’s challenge. I divide Forsey’s challenge into two paradoxes. The first paradox (P1)—which I call the transcendence paradox—is about the epistemological and ontological commitments that are implicated in sublimity. The second paradox (P2)—which I call the pleasure paradox— is about the affective content of sublimity. As we will see, while the first paradox is dissolvable, the second paradox maintains some traction. But, far from leading us to conclude that a theory of the sublime is impossible, the latter paradox illuminates the avenues that should be explored in future theories and accounts of the sublime.

30

Chapter IV

II, 1. P1: The Transcendence Paradox According to Forsey, who follows Guy Sircello’s 1993 analysis, the sublime involves two essential “themes.” The first theme, which is titled “epistemological transcendence,” posits that a deep kind of cognitive failure resides at the core of the experience of the sublime. In a sublime experience we are confronted with an object that resists our conceptual grasp; the object of sublime experience is completely epistemologically inaccessible to us. The second theme, “ontological transcendence,” posits that the inaccessible object of sublime experience is in some sense ontologically transcendent, i.e., the object exists beyond “all of humankind’s possible environments,” (Sircello, p. 545). Here is the paradox: the two themes are in an irresolvable conflict with one another. How could we ever have an experience of an object that transcends all of our “possible environments”? Such an object could not, in principle, be the intentional object of any experience. And, if we do have an experience of such an object, we could not consistently commit to saying that it is epistemologically transcendent. In any case, it must be knowable or accessible in some sense if we can assert that it exists. The transcendence paradox, then, is this: theories of the sublime are caught in a double bind. If the theory is centered on the experience of cognitive failure—the epistemology of the sublime—it is left bereft of the possibility of telling us what the experience “is an experience of,” as Forsey says, and if the theory is centered on the transcendent object—the ontology of the sublime—it needs to show how any sort of experience of such an object is even possible, let alone how it could be given any sort of description or a positive existential status (p. 5). If we accept these terms, we are forced to conclude, Forsey claims, that the very idea of a sublime experience is incoherent and thus cannot be theorized. It is incoherent since no experience could simultaneously involve “epistemological transcendence” and “ontological transcendence” (the intentional object) that constitute the core of sublimity.1 The paradox cannot be solved, Forsey claims, by noting that the sublime often takes entities from nature as its intentional objects, e.g., ominous mountain precipices, erupting volcanoes, and so on. If natural objects are the intentional objects of sublime experience, we end up with a stark contradiction. This is simply because mountains, oceans, and natural scenery are not epistemologically inaccessible at all. The intentional 1

It should be noted that, as we will see, although Sircello articulates the paradox, he does not think it is decisive. He thinks that a theory of the sublime remains a possibility, whereas Forsey does not.

Pleasure and Transcendence: Two Paradoxes of Sublimity

31

object, in these cases, winds up being “both transcendent and familiar,” (p. 5). In other words, the sublime in nature still remains mired in paradox.

II, 2. Responding to P1: The Procrustean Bed In response to the transcendence paradox I will argue that the ForseySircello analysis forces the sublime into a Procrustean bed. In establishing this, I will advance three claims: (a) the analysis unnecessarily confines the sublime as such to an epistemological mode, that is to say, it disregards the non-epistemological modes of sublimity; (b) moreover, the analysis provides an unnecessarily strong interpretation of the epistemological mode; and (c) even if the strong interpretation is correct, it is unclear whether the conclusion about the incoherency of the sublime follows (although Forsey’s conclusion that a theory cannot accommodate cases where the strong interpretation does apply might still be correct). First, the Forsey-Sircello analysis reduces the sublime entirely to its epistemological mode. This is unwarranted since the sublime is not always, let alone necessarily, taken to involve epistemological transcendence. Contra the Forsey-Sircello analysis—and especially taking into consideration the accounts of Kant and Burke—sublimity has been commonly bifurcated into the “mathematical” and “dynamical” modes.2 Forsey’s attack seems to be geared more towards the former while leaving the latter almost entirely unaddressed. The mathematical sublime, as Kant explains, is principally concerned with the aesthetic estimation of size. The subject is confronted with something that is so immense and so vast such that it cannot fully cognize the object; the imagination cannot comprehend the object in its totality or synthesize it into a single intuition, e.g., as in Schopenhauer’s example, when “the heavens at night actually bring innumerable worlds before our eyes.”3 This experience of cognitive failure comes with an unpleasant feeling of puzzlement, disorientation, incomprehension, or, in other words, an intimation of our epistemic limitations. The dynamical sublime, on the other hand, is concerned with the aesthetic estimation of 2

The distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime comes specifically from Kant, but it is not unrecognizable in earlier accounts. It is true that this taxonomy of the sublime is somewhat arbitrary, but the point is to show that cognitive failure (epistemology) is not central to the sublime, pace Forsey and Sircello. There is admittedly a lingering question about the relation between the different modes of sublimity: in virtue of what are they all modes of the same thing, i.e., the sublime? 3 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne, (Mineola NY: Dover Publications, 1969), I p. 205.

32

Chapter IV

power. The experience of dynamical sublimity does not (necessarily or primarily) involve cognitive failure, but rather a certain kind of physical failure instead. It involves (in part) a sense of fearfulness, terror, powerlessness, “irresistible force,”4 and so on. As Burke explains, Whatever is fitted … to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.5

And there are, of course, plenty of objects both in nature and art that can evoke this deep experience of physical failure. These objects and representations are powerful, fearful, threatening, and terrifying, but they are not (completely) incomprehensible or epistemically inaccessible—they do not resist and humiliate us as knowers but, rather, as embodied actors. The emphasis on terror, we should note, was already becoming a central aspect in (proto) theories of the sublime in the tail end of the seventeenth century, for example, in the writings of John Dennis. Dennis described terror as a Disturbance of Mind, proceeding from an Apprehension of an approaching Evil, threatening Destruction of very great Trouble either to us or to ours … Things that are powerful, and likely to hurt, are the Causes of Common Terror, and the more they are powerful, and likely to hurt, the more they become the cause of Terror; which Terror, the greater it is, the more it is joined with Wonder, and the earlier it comes to Astonishment.6

Indeed, Burke’s theory itself is primarily concerned with the emotion of terror and the qualities that, he claims, tend to evoke it: vastness, obscurity, privations, darkness, power, and so on. Terror is the “ruling principle” of the sublime, he says.7 So if the transcendence paradox renders sublime experience incoherent, then it at best only succeeds to do so in relation to one mode of sublime experience: the epistemological mode. It has no clear grip on the experience of dynamical sublimity, i.e., sublimity in its non-epistemic mode. Forsey has not done enough to show why any possible theory of the dynamical sublime, like that of Burke’s,

4

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990), II.I p. 53. 5 Ibid. I.VII, p. 36. 6 Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVII-Century England [1935], (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 1960), p. 52. 7 Op.cit. II.II, p. 54.

Pleasure and Transcendence: Two Paradoxes of Sublimity

33

must also “rest on a mistake.”8 Burke’s account might be wrong, of course, but that does not mean powerful and threatening objects and our mixed, negative-positive responses to them cannot be theorized at all. Second, and more importantly, Forsey and Sircello, in setting up the paradox, make an unwarranted assumption even in relation to sublime experience in its epistemological mode. They provide an overly strong interpretation according to which sublimity involves the presentation of an intentional object that is wholly epistemologically transcendent, that is, the intentional object is taken to be such that it cannot be cognized at all. If that is truly the intentional object of sublime experience, there is no surprise that theories of the sublime tend to devolve into incoherency and contradiction; they are attempting to describe an impossible experience. But sublimity in its epistemological mode does not require us to posit the intentional object as wholly epistemically transcendent. The cognitive failure in sublime experience can be one of partial epistemic inaccessibility.9 For example, Forsey misunderstands Burke’s claim that the mind “cannot reason on the [sublime] object that employs it.”10 Burke, in this context, does not mean to say that the object cannot be cognitively grasped at all. He means to say that it cannot be grasped clearly. Burke explains that No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear … To make any thing very terrible, obscurity in general seems to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of apprehension vanishes.11

Burke is only claiming that the object is obscure. He is not claiming that it is epistemologically inaccessible. So, while it is true that the imagination is said to be stretched to its limits in many examples of sublimity, that is not to say that the object that is encountered in such an experience is always taken to be absolutely inaccessible to human cognition tout court. Forsey’s attack is therefore misguided because it unjustifiably forces sublime experience to conform to the strong interpretation she provides. A theory of the sublime need not account for the type of 8

Forsey does have more to say about Kant’s account of the sublime, including its dynamical mode. She agrees that it does not fall prey to the paradox and is, therefore, not incoherent or contradictory, but is nevertheless unsatisfactory because it does posit an odd ontological entity (i.e., the noumenal subject) and it requires us to reduce the sublime to the rest of Kant’s architectonic, (p. 10). 9 Sircello hints at this possibility, but does not pursue it, (p. 547). 10 Burke, II.I, p. 53; cf. Forsey, p. 2. 11 Burke, II.II, p. 53f, my emphasis.

34

Chapter IV

“epistemological transcendence” she and Sircello are concerned with since it is not an essential or core component of sublimity.12 Finally, however, a question remains about cases of sublime experience where the strong interpretation does seem to apply. The paradigmatic cases I have in mind are found in religious discourse. Sircello himself uses a number of these in explicating the paradox. He discusses, for instance, Pseudo-Dionysius’ mystical account of the experience of God. PseudoDionysius describes the revelation of God as bringing “a halt to the activities of our minds, and to the extent that is proper, [approaching] the ray that transcends being,” (Sircello, p. 544).13 The religious experience of God, Pseudo-Dionysius continues, “is of a kind that neither intelligence nor speech can lay hold of … since it surpasses everything and is wholly beyond our capacity to know it,” (ibid.). The transcendence paradox seems unavoidable in this case, since it seems rather clear that the two themes of the sublime are united in Pseudo-Dionysius’ account: the experience of God is wholly epistemically transcendent and the object of the experience —namely, God—is wholly ontologically transcendent. But even here, in the religious cases, the paradox can be resisted. Wayne Proudfoot has argued that the term “God” functions in a prescriptive 12

Forsey could respond that even “partial epistemic transcendence” leads into contradiction, since there is nothing epistemically transcendent about mountains and raging oceans at all. These objects do not involve the slightest bit of epistemic transcendence. This is true in at least one sense: we know with certainty the kinds of objects we are encountering, e.g., thunderstorm, oceans, and so on. But, in another sense, once we agree that the sublime object does not have to be completely beyond our grasp we become open to finding ways in which it may transcend our cognitive capacities to some degree after all. Paul Crowther (The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 181-187) suggests that in some cases of mathematical sublimity we cannot fully comprehend the interrelations between all the parts of the object we are confronted with, although we may nevertheless recognize the type of object the parts belong to (e.g., a mountain). This can be a form of partial epistemic transcendence. The sublime, in these cases, is something that falls on a spectrum rather than being a zero-sum game, as Forsey and Sircello make it out to be. 13 The mention of Pseudo-Dionysius might seem odd, especially to those who share the belief that the sublime is confined to a particular historical period, most notably, eighteenth and nineteenth century British and German Romanticism, as Mary Mothersill (Beauty Restored, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1984) and James Elkins (“Against the Sublime,” Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, eds. Roald Hoffman and Iain Boyd Whyte, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) believe. I reject this view. The sublime, I think, denotes an experience that predates the term “sublime.” But I will not argue for this view here.

Pleasure and Transcendence: Two Paradoxes of Sublimity

35

rather than a descriptive way in Pseudo-Dionysius.14 It does not describe or denote an ontologically transcendent being but rather serves as a way of resisting any such denotation or description. The absolute ineffability of God does not describe the phenomenological content of sublime experience in this case, but is rather a grammatical rule that denies its reducibility to any possible symbolic system, label, or determinate description. Ineffability, which Proudfoot (following William James) considers to be a primary marker of mystical experience, is always a relative matter: “X” is ineffable only in relation to some symbolic system or other. For instance, tactile sensations are ineffable relative to color sensations. The color of a jellyfish cannot adequately capture its viscous feel. Claiming that “God is ineffable” is not predicating ineffability to God. That would be a contradiction. It is, instead, prescribing a rule for identifying an experience as a mystical one: God—along with other religious terms, like Tao and Brahman—serves as a “formulae that rule out in advance the appropriateness or adequacy of any description or adequacy of any description that might be proposed.”15 When put in this way, the sublime experience alluded to in mystical discourse seems to come rather close to Sircello’s own proposed solution to the paradox, specifically, his revised interpretation of epistemological transcendence: [F]or any possible given set of routes of epistemological access to “reality,” that is insufficient to provide a complete understanding or grasp of “the real,” (Sircello, p. 549).

The revised interpretation is meant to evade the problems that emerge for a theory of the sublime once an ontologically transcendent object is posited. It redirects attention only to the ways in which the limitation of human understanding is experienced. Is this a successful retort on behalf of these cases? Forsey thinks not. This is partly because, as Forsey explains towards the end of her paper, “While such descriptions or expressions may be evocative, they do nothing for a purported theory of the sublime,” (p. 15). In other words, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must pass over in silence. The “mystical sublime cannot answer the most important questions that a theory of the sublime is called to address, e.g., “What kinds of objects are sublime?” and “What does the sublime tell us about ourselves as subjects?” (p. 15).16 I am inclined to agree with 14

Religious Experience, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 125. Ibid., p. 129. 16 It is worth noting that Forsey never explains what she means by a “theory” of the sublime. This remains an ambiguity in her paper. Sircello does provide an answer 15

36

Chapter IV

Forsey that the mystical sublime cannot be theorized in a satisfactory sense, but this does not rule out the possibility of theorizing the sublime as such, as I hope to have made clear. We need not take “epistemological transcendence” (or ontological transcendence) to be the central or unifying theme of sublimity and, hence, accounting for it should not be taken as an obvious desideratum of a theory of the sublime. Claiming otherwise is forcing the sublime into a Procrustean bed. Nevertheless, Forsey’s questions retain some force. I think that the motivation behind the questions she poses, and hence what I take to be the real thrust of her critique, is to challenge the theorist to adequately explain what is distinctive about sublimity if it is not going to be epistemological or ontological transcendence. The importance of Forsey’s article lies partly in shifting the burden back onto the theorists. In the remainder of this paper I want to explore this issue by addressing Forsey’s critique of Malcolm Budd’s theory. As I will explain, Forsey attempts to saddle Budd’s account of sublimity with two problems. The first problem concerns the object, while the second concerns the affective experience that the subject undergoes. The second problem, what I call the “pleasure paradox,” will take up the bulk of the discussion.

III, 1. P2: The Pleasure Paradox According to Forsey, Budd’s account can be read as a variation of Sircello’s “revised thesis.”17 Budd’s theory, like Sircello’s revised thesis, does not posit any bizarre ontological entities and remains focused on the subject’s experience. Budd’s description of the sublime experience is as follows:

to this question. For him, a theory of the sublime is an account of its object, i.e., the object that is called “sublime,” (p. 545). However, towards the end of his paper, Sircello seems to abandon this view when he says that a theory of the sublime may still be possible if we go with the revised epistemological thesis and stop ourselves from making any ontological commitments whatsoever, that is, if we leave the object out of the theory, (p. 549). 17 I think it is misleading to read Budd this way. It is true that his account avoids “ontological transcendence” and is therefore aligned with Sircello’s revised thesis. But, on the other hand, Budd’s account is not purely epistemological. Like Kant and Burke, he also discusses powerful phenomena in nature that pose an existential threat to human life. Forsey does seem to recognize this but she uses Budd’s account as a target for showing why Sircello’s revised (epistemological) thesis won’t do.

Pleasure and Transcendence: Two Paradoxes of Sublimity

37

With the sudden dropping away … of our everyday sense of the importance of our self and its numerous concerns and projects, or the normal sense of the security of our body from external natural forces, the heightened awareness of our manifest vulnerability and insignificance … is, after the initial shock, experienced with pleasure.18

The focus of this account is on the experience of being overwhelmed by some object in nature and coming to a kind of pleasurable awareness of one’s vulnerability and the limitations of one’s powers as a natural being. Budd’s theory—unlike Kant and the German idealists—does not flee into the comfort of the “supersensible” (whether it is God, moral freedom, or the ideas of reason.) He remains on earth. But this is also what leads his theory into trouble, according to Forsey. The problems that Budd’s theory faces can be usefully formulated through a deeper comparison with Kant’s own theory.19 On Kant’s account, as it is commonly interpreted, judgments of sublimity, i.e., judgments of the form “X is sublime,” are ultimately explained through a connection that Kant sets up between the experience of sensory frustration (cognitive or practical) and the “supersensible side” of our being: our freedom as moral beings or the “ideas of reasons” and our capacity to think them.20 The sublime experience consists of an exhilarating kind of “negative pleasure”21 that is felt upon a (safe) encounter with objects in nature that are overwhelmingly powerful, terrifying, formless, vast, or incomprehensible: the starry heavens, erupting volcanoes, a stormy ocean, and so on. For Kant, these objects are especially well-suited for generating that anxiety-laden elevation of the soul that constitutes the feeling of the sublime. The explanation for this is that these sorts of objects provide us with a kind of intimation or feeling of the rational “vocation” of the mind.22 As natural beings we are dwarfed by nature, but as rational beings we transcend it.23 In the case of the dynamical sublime, for example, Kant writes, 18

Budd, p. 85. Budd himself builds his account through a critical discussion of Kant’s theory of the sublime, (pp. 66-89). 20 Cf. Allison, Ch. 13. 21 Kant, (2000), §23, 5:245. 22 Ibid., §28, 5:262. 23 Kant does not think we are always explicitly aware of this in sublime experience. Instead, Kant is more concerned with providing a transcendental account of the sublime, that is, he is explaining what makes sublime experience (and judgments) possible. For more, see Robert Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially pp. 72-79 and pp. 219-226. 19

38

Chapter IV nature is judged as sublime not insofar as it arouses fear, but rather because it calls forth our power (which is not part of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health, and life) as trivial, and hence to regard its power (to which we are, to be sure, subjected in regard to those things) as not the sort of dominion over ourselves and our authority to which we would have to bow if it came down to our highest principles and their affirmation or abandonment.24

According to Kant’s theory, the distinctive exhilaration of the sublime—the feeling of our “power” being called forth by nature—is explained through this connection with our moral or rational capacities as supersensible beings. One might argue on behalf of Kant that the threatening and incomprehensible objects found in nature are uniquely capable of evoking this kind of pleasure because they (unlike most of the objects of culture) are so clearly and powerfully indifferent and sometimes even contrary to human ends, values, and concerns. The ways in which these objects conjure up our puniness, powerlessness, and fleetingness as natural creatures can only be offset by summoning up, if only implicitly, our infinitely greater powers as supra-natural creatures: as self-determining, autonomous, free, and rational, moral beings. Budd’s theory, like Kant’s, places the locus of the sublime in the self. But, unlike Kant, Budd does not take our rational “vocation” to be the redemptive or pleasurable basis of sublimity. The explanatory buck of his theory of the sublime seems to stop with the feeling of vulnerability itself. According to Forsey, this is what leads Budd’s theory into serious trouble. Forsey singles out two particular problems, but, as I mentioned above, I will devote most of the attention to the one I take to be more decisive: the pleasure paradox.25 The first problem has to do (once again) with the object of the sublime. As Forsey argues, on Budd’s account, any object at all could be the potential object of sublimity so long as it leads us to feel the kind of pleasurable vulnerability he describes, (p. 12). Thus the “sublime” might arise when I am faced with, say, an especially difficult math problem or a crossword puzzle that I am incapable of solving or if I narrowly escape a traffic accident and so on, (loc.cit.) Forsey thinks this is fatal for a theory of the sublime. Her reasoning seems to be motivated, at least in part, by 24

Kant, (2000), §28, 5:262. The pleasure paradox is not a central part of Forsey’s general critique of the sublime, but it is a key reason she employs for rejecting Budd’s account. It is also worth considering given its place in the history of the theoretical discourse on the sublime. 25

Pleasure and Transcendence: Two Paradoxes of Sublimity

39

thinking that a theory of the sublime should strive to preserve the strong historical connection between nature and sublimity, a connection that persists in Budd’s own account for that matter. So, she claims, since “Budd’s rejection of Kant’s moral goals causes us to lose the initial reasons for focusing on the vast, formless, and threatening aspects of nature alone,” his theory cannot be a satisfactory one, (loc.cit.) But, as I see it, there is no real problem here. First, as we already know, sublimity has been attached to many types of objects other than natural ones, including spiritual or divine entities, artworks, architecture, ideas, moral exemplars, and so on.26 And, second, the things that make these objects evocative of the sublime in the first place are certain qualities that they have rather than the types that they belong to. They can be overwhelming in their size, power, or greatness (etc.) such that they evoke the mixed emotional response that is characteristic of the sublime in the subject who experiences them. It is the qualities that are at issue, not the types of objects that these qualities are attached to.27 We should, of course, inquire about and attempt to theorize the qualities that are typically evocative of the sublime, but there is no reason (a) to think that these qualities can only be instantiated by objects in nature, or (b) that a theory of the sublime should only focus on these qualities when they are instantiated by objects in nature.28 And, once we recognize that it is the qualities that matter rather than the types, we can resist the claim that the sublime can be “anything at all” even if it is divorced from the exclusive domain of nature.

26 But see Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Ch. 5, for the contrary view. Brady provides an argument for the view that the “original” sublime is found first and foremost in nature and not in art. 27 It must be said, however, that the sublime depends on context. There are some things that may be sublime for the ordinary human but will not be sublime for particular individuals, depending on their situation, their history, their culture, and so on. But this should not be seen as a serious problem for a theory of the sublime. If I happen to find the Egyptian pyramids more sublime than (say) my Egyptian tour guide, who has seen the pyramids on countless occasions, that does not mean my tour guide cannot recognize or agree with my judgment even if she herself is no longer moved by them in the same way as I am now. 28 For a broader discussion of the place of the object in a theory of the sublime, see Robert Clewis, “A Theory of the Sublime is Possible” in this anthology. I should add, too, that none of this is to say that we can ever come up with strict principles or laws for evoking the sublime or cases where somebody must find some particular object to be sublime.

40

Chapter IV

The second problem—the pleasure paradox—is about the affective content of the sublime. Budd’s theory cannot explain how the initially and typically painful experience of vulnerability could give rise to the pleasurable aspect of the sublime. This paradox, I claim, is also related to Budd’s rejection of the “supersensible” elements in Kant’s account. For Kant, as we saw, the sublime is pleasurable because it involves shoring up our own powers as rational or moral beings vis-à-vis nature. But, once this route is denied, it becomes unclear why becoming aware of our cosmic insignificance or impotence against the forces or magnitudes of nature should be pleasurable in any sense. So, the pleasure paradox is concerned with how it is that incomprehensible, threatening, or overwhelmingly powerful objects can come to be experienced in that peculiarly pleasurable way that characterizes sublimity.

III, 2. Responding to P2: Human Agency The pleasure paradox is old and many solutions (some even already present in Longinus) have been offered in response to it.29 But here I want to critically examine one potential solution—offered in the recent works of Katerina Deligiorgi—that locates the pleasure of the sublime in the experience it affords us of our identity as human agents. I will argue that the solution does not work. But, as I claim in the concluding section, Deligiorgi’s article, along with Forsey’s, usefully points the way forward to future theories. Katerina Deligiorgi’s recent neo-Kantian theory of the sublime posits that the pleasure of the sublime comes from our getting a momentary and rare intimation of the nature of our agency as human beings situated in the world. The vulnerability that we experience at the hands of “contrapurposive” phenomena illuminates the ways in which we are passive beings in relation to the world, but it equally illuminates the ways in which we are active in relation to the world as well—we are limited in some ways but capable in others. It frees us from an all-encompassing sense of responsibility towards the world as a whole, but also rejuvenates our sense of potentiality for successful action in our own lives. As Deligiorgi says, the pleasure is connected to the awareness of the mere “form” of our

29

See James Kirwan, Sublimity: The Non-Rational and Rational in the History of Aesthetics, (Oxford: Routledge, 2005) Ch. 1 for some of the early solutions to the paradox, e.g., those proposed by Addison and Dennis, as well as their relation to Longinus.

Pleasure and Transcendence: Two Paradoxes of Sublimity

41

agency.30 She explains that The sublime affords us a practical release … we cannot do anything when confronted by the immeasurable and the terrifying, but, because we do not need to either, we become receptive to our identity as active beings … We are at one with ourselves insofar as we recognize ourselves as finite subjects of the experience.31

The pleasure of the sublime thus consists of a kind of satisfied contemplation of one’s proper place in the world: we are not gods, but we are not the playthings of nature either. Some things are in our power, while other things are not. Deligiorgi’s account, however, will not suffice for overcoming the pleasure paradox. I have two reasons for suspecting this: (a) it is difficult to see why an awareness of one’s agency (in Deligiorgi’s sense) would be experienced with pleasure at all, especially in paradigmatic cases of the sublime. In these cases, I would argue, the obstacles we confront represent (if only indirectly) a serious threat to the things we care most deeply about. These objects provide us with the sense of our smallness, insignificance, and mortality. Insofar as the objects of the sublime can be linked to death and annihilation, they make us feel like the playthings of nature where we would like most to feel like gods. Or, to put it more mildly and in Deligiorgi’s terms, the sublime emphasizes our passivity where we would like most to feel our activity. True, one may still recognize, as Deligiorgi claims, that there are some things one can accomplish. But it is not satisfying to recognize that I can accomplish some minor ends if I simultaneously recognize I cannot accomplish my highest ends. Contemplating one’s place in the world as an agent is not a pleasurable experience, if the place one occupies is characterized by a lack of practical control or a state of total epistemic darkness in relation to the things that matter to us. This is why the content of our “identity as active beings” matters to a theory of the sublime. We need to recall that the objects of the sublime are contra-purposive, i.e., they pose a resistance to our ends in some sense or other. Some ends and values are, on the whole, more important and central to our lives as human beings than other ends and values. And (b) even if this sort of awareness should lead to some kind of pleasure, it is unclear why it should produce a rapturous exhilaration and not, instead, the quieter pleasures of stoic resolve or resignation or 30

Katerina Deligiorgi, “Finite Agents, Sublime Feelings: Response to Hanauer,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (2016), p. 201. 31 Ibid. p. 202.

42

Chapter IV

even a shrug of the shoulders. Taken together, (a) and (b) demonstrate that if we follow Deligiorgi’s view we do not end up with a satisfactory theory of the sublime since we are left bereft of a clear explanation for how it is possible to experience with pleasurable exhilaration objects that pose or represent a deep threat to the ends that matter to us most—e.g., the achievement of a deep understanding of the world, living up to the demands of morality, leading a happy life, alleviating the suffering of others, and so on.32

III, 3. Conclusion Forsey’s important article raises serious questions about the possibility of generating a theory of the sublime. But, as I hope to have shown, the main paradox that motivates her (and Sircello’s) critique does not present a decisive case against such a possibility. The “transcendence paradox,” as I have called it, forces the sublime into a Procrustean bed by reducing it to an overly-strong epistemological mode.33 But, while the transcendence paradox can be overcome, the pleasure paradox has turned out to pose an ongoing problem. I do not have the space to survey all the solutions that have been proposed to the paradox, but the problems encountered in Deligiorgi’s theory—which is the most recent solution on offer—show that the paradox remains a live one. In any case, none of this should dissuade us from thinking that a theory of the sublime is possible. It simply poses a demand to clarify and explain the affective content of sublimity and its source. The distinctiveness of the sublime, I think, will ultimately rest in clarifying its affective content and the relation it holds to objects in the world. The sublime does tell us something interesting about what it means to be human. We are peculiar animals who can aesthetically appreciate and take pleasure in things (nature and artifacts) that, in virtue of their sheer power or magnitude, seem to contradict our cognitive, 32

For a longer discussion and critique of Deligiorgi’s paper, see my, “Sublimity and the Ends of Reason: Questions for Deligiorgi,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (2016); and Deligiorgi’s reply, op.cit. 33 It is not so clear that Forsey still accepts the conclusions of her 2007 paper. In a more recent work on the still life paintings of Chardin, Forsey writes, “Chardin disconcerts because in a simple pot and two onions, we are faced with the limits of language, the limits of understanding, and the limits of human experience. His work is both puzzling and an “embarrassment” for his contemporaries because, rather than a reflection of the known, it suggests to us a vista that is ultimately unreachable. In this way his work is not only beautiful; it is sublime”, Jane Forsey, “The Puzzle of Chardin,” Evental Aesthetics 3 (2014), pp. 8-15.

Pleasure and Transcendence: Two Paradoxes of Sublimity

43

sensory, and existential aims and capacities. As long as we continue to be moved in this way the sublime will retain its relevance for our selfunderstanding. In concluding this paper, I want to briefly explain how Deligiorgi’s and Forsey’s articles can help us set down some criteria that a theory of the sublime should meet. First, our theory should be able to explain the pleasurable-painful character of the experience without neglecting either side of the affective divide. Some theories unjustly drop the negative emotions in favor of the positive ones, while other theories unjustly focus on the negative emotions and lose track of the positive ones. Deligiorgi’s theory, to its merit, does not fall into this trap. The unpleasant aspect of the sublime is not negated or lost through the pleasurable feeling of our “higher purposiveness” as agents (to borrow Kant’s phrase). Instead, the painful aspect opens us up to something we can take pleasure in, namely, our identity as finite agents, without the displeasure being completely extinguished in the process. Second, Forsey’s article usefully shows us why a theory of the sublime should not lose track of the object. The feeling and judgment of the sublime is responsive to an object in the world. Kant (as he is usually read) and many of his followers take the “true object” of the sublime to be ourselves, as we have seen. The problem is that this does not conform to the way in which we ordinarily think about aesthetic appreciation. When we appreciate something as “sublime,” we take the object to be the proper bearer of the aesthetic predicate rather than ourselves. When I call a storm at sea “sublime,” I am not confusedly referring to myself instead. The object is the bearer of aesthetic value, and a theory of the sublime—assuming that we now agree one is possible— should be able to accommodate this common-sense intuition.

CHAPTER V A THEORY OF THE SUBLIME IS POSSIBLE ROBERT R. CLEWIS

“Our current theorizing about the sublime rests on a mistake,” Jane Forsey claims, (p. 1). Professor Forsey offers an “error theory” of the sublime. Indeed, there is clearly a problem.1 Although Forsey’s diagnosis is convincing, it need not entail that a coherent theory of the sublime is impossible. Theorists of the sublime can come up with more than an error theory. A coherent theory that does not lie on a mistake seems possible. Forsey’s main argument is sound, but, like the thread Ariadne tied to the lintel in order to guide Theseus, her paper provides a way out of the labyrinth.2 I shall address the problems raised in Forsey’s article and sketch a theory of the sublime, drawing from the history of aesthetics. The aim will be to give a theory of aesthetic responses to an object perceived to be aweinducing or sublime, not an account of rhetorical devices or sublime discourse.

1

Chignell and Halteman also note the philosophical challenge: “The underlying concern about untheorizability, dispensability, and mere fabrication (i.e., that there’s really no there there with respect to the sublime) needs to be more directly confronted by aestheticians … who propose to retain the concept,” A. Chignell and M.C. Halteman, “Religion and the Sublime,” The Sublime: From Antiquity to Present, ed. T. Costelloe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 202. 2 The comparison of her paper to the guiding thread is, of course, intended in a positive sense. In a happy coincidence, one possible etymology of the sublime is: “rising up to the lintel”, from sub (“up to”) + limen (“lintel, threshold”).

46

Chapter V

I. Rejecting Sircello’s epistemological Transcendence Thesis The principal error stems from accepting Guy Sircello’s key premise, which he calls the epistemological transcendence thesis (“ET”). Sircello gives two versions of it. The first version reads: [ET] An experience of the sublime presents the object of the experience, i.e., the sublime, as epistemologically inaccessible, (Sircello, p. 545).

Sircello recognizes a difficulty: ET appears to entail an undesirable ontological inaccessibility thesis, the claim that there is an inaccessible sublime object or entity.3 But, how can we have a fruitful, plausible theory about something that is inaccessible? Sircello recognizes that this is problematic. He tries to avoid this entailment. Sircello wants to find a way to reinterpret epistemological transcendence (i.e., one has limited access to a sublime object) in a way that does not entail ontological transcendence (i.e., there is an inaccessible sublime entity.) But Forsey convincingly argues that Sircello cannot avoid it. She identifies the heart of the problem as this: If we focus on the metaphysical status of the sublime object, our epistemology becomes problematic, but if we address instead the epistemological transcendence of a certain experience, we still seem forced to make some metaphysical claim about the object of that experience, (p. 5).

She is right that ET should not be accepted. But thankfully, if one rejects the claim that either epistemological or ontological transcendence is part of the sublime, there is no need for a theory to account for it. ET should be rejected, among other reasons, because it does not accurately describe or capture the sublime experience. It seems phenomenologically implausible. Moreover, the necessary emotional element of the experience—how the sublime feels—is remarkably absent 3 The dilemma arises: The object is either natural (in the broadest sense, including artifacts), or not. If the object is a natural one, then it is accessible. If it is not a natural object (in the broadest sense), it is not possible to comprehend and theorize it (let alone to theorize it in a way that is fruitful for empirical study). The latter parenthesis should not be taken to suggest that amenability to empirical research is the rubric or criterion by which to judge aesthetic theories; but it is hard to deny that such fecundity would be a welcome outcome.

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

47

from the thesis,4 the starting point of Sircello’s (hence Forsey’s) arguments. The sublime should not be conceived of as either inaccessible or as an inaccessible object. How did ET arise? History is partly to blame. Like Sircello, Forsey reviews some theories from the history of aesthetics that defended ET. Forsey cites Addison and Shaftesbury (moderns) as well as a selfdescribed postmodern, Lyotard (p. 1 and 3). In addition to history, surface grammar is also partly to blame. It is easy to be misled, as Sircello may have been, by the grammar of “experience of.” The experience is not of an inaccessible sublime. In other words, fig. 1 is not the best picture:

Figure 1

If one conceives of the sublime as inaccessible in the above way, the noted puzzles and dilemma arise. Instead, one should claim that the experience is of the object: the mountain, volcano, the pyramid. The object may lead perceivers to reflect on themselves, or on their relationships to the object. It may tell them something about themselves as subjects, or about their relations to their natural or cultural environments. This account can be represented by fig. 2:

4

Insufficient attention to the emotional and affective aspects of the experience likewise diminishes some recent theories of the technological sublime (about, e.g., the internet.) In conceiving of the sublime as a matter of understanding or cognition, accounts such as Wilken’s “’Unthinkable Complexity’: The Internet and the Mathematical Sublime,” The Sublime Today: Contemporary Readings in the Aesthetic, ed. G.B. Pierce, (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), tend to overintellectualize the experience of the sublime (the complexity of the internet is unthinkable and unrepresentable), to view it as a matter of cognitive failure (thereby indirectly exposing themselves to Forsey’s criticisms), to downplay or neglect the roles played by feeling and emotion, or to mischaracterize the phenomenology of aesthetic experiences of the object at hand (e.g., the internet.)

48

Chapter V

Figure 2

Since the sublime is an aesthetic response to an (accessible) object, at one point in his analysis Kant describes the aesthetic judgment of the sublime as having the following form: “This mountain (pyramid, etc.) is sublime.”5 One could also say that the mountain evokes the sublime or appears sublime, too, if one has to make a verbal utterance about it.6 Poets offer some thought-provoking variations on this approach. Poets from various traditions write about or describe sublime objects.7 Li Po’s “Looking at the Waterfall of Mount Lu” describes the water-fall: Water spraying in the air, Drenches the cliffs on the side. Torrents scattering like light mist, Foam pounding on the rocks.8

According to Wordsworth’s The Prelude, […] the black storm upon the mountain-top Sets off the sunbeam in the valley […]

yielding a “feeling and contemplative regard.”9 And amidst torrent, rocks, and “black drizzling crags,” sounded 5

I leave aside Kant’s problematic doctrine of “subreption” here. Silence also seems possible. The Prelude’s Conclusion reads: “pensively we sank / Each into commerce with his private thoughts,” W. Wordsworth, The Portable Romantic Poets, eds. W.H. Auden and N.H. Pearson, (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 225. Though silent, Wordsworth’s speaker is not alone, but traveling with peers (“we”). 7 While these examples of sublime discourse are expressions of the sublime experience, they need not necessarily evoke the sublime. In fact, they may not even “thrill” or “move” listeners or readers. 8 K. Wong, “Negative-Positive Dialectic in the Chinese Sublime,” The Chinese Text: Studies in Comparative Literature, (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1986), p. 125. 9 “Residence in London,” Wordsworth, op.cit., p. 215. 6

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

49

The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent at every turn Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn […]10

The storms, mountains, waterfalls, rocks, and crags are, of course, epistemologically accessible. Forsey makes this point, too. “Rocks and mountains are not things we do not comprehend or cannot comprehend,” (p. 5). One crucial advantage of granting this point and taking this route (as suggested here) is that one removes the need to resolve the paradoxes found in phrases such as “painting the unpaintable,” or “presenting the unpresentable.” Such formulas were favored by Lyotard and iterated in various theories of the sublime in the late 1980s and 1990s. But they are also traceable back to certain passages in Kant (from whom Lyotard drew inspiration), Schopenhauer (for whom the sublime reveals the world in itself), Schelling, and Hegel. My account implies—to use Forsey’s terms—that the sublime object is “familiar” while not being “transcendent,” (p. 5). But is it familiar? No and yes. No: the object is experienced as, or perceived in that particular moment of attention, as novel, striking, and/or rare. The point is not to fetishize novelty or newness, but to emphasize that the object or event is not experienced as ordinary or familiar insofar as it is considered sublime. If it were perceived as familiar, it would not likely appear to be sublime, that is, be part of a stirring and moving experience filled with exhilarating pleasure. It would be too mundane. There is historical backing for this position. As Joseph Priestley puts it: “Whenever any object, how great soever, becomes familiar to the mind … the sublime vanishes.”11 Wordsworth’s poetry is again instructive: “No familiar shapes / Remained […] ; / But huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men.”12 Forsey is right that the claim that “it is an unusual experience of a usual object” (loc.cit.) (a rock, cliff, or storm) puts the transcendence claim in conflict with the familiarity claim. Indeed, the object is not actually transcendent. Insofar as it is viewed or perceived as sublime, the object is not experienced in the “familiar” way, either. Hence some theorists have (misleadingly) called it an experience of the “transcendent.” But, such 10

“Cambridge and the Alps,” ibid., p. 214. Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader, p. 119. 12 Wordsworth, op.cit. p. 207. Note that, contrary to widespread interpretations of the sublime (usually commenting on Kant and his alleged notion of “formlessness,”) these unfamiliar shapes are called huge and mighty forms. 11

50

Chapter V

claims about transcendence should not be taken literally, that is, as being about the noumenal, ineffable, or unpresentable. Moreover, many other theorists have taken the sublime to be about a non-transcendent object. What about the “Yes”? The object is familiar in a sense, or to some people—and insofar as that is true, they do not experience it as sublime. The Alps are familiar to people who live in the Alps, going about their business. The film is familiar to the movie house owner who screens it daily; the massive dome or magnificent work of architecture is well known to those who work in or near it. Insofar as the familiarity blocks their perceiving the sublime as novel and rare, they do not experience the object as sublime. Not only does the proposed account appear to be more accurate from a phenomenological and psychological perspective, but it may well resolve the problems Forsey identified. In order to reinterpret epistemological transcendence in a way that did not entail ontological transcendence, Sircello revised ET. He stated this new version as follows: [ET Revised] The theme of epistemological transcendence may simply mean that for any possible given set of routes of epistemological access to “reality,” that set is insufficient to provide a complete understanding or grasp of “the real,” (Sircello, p. 549).13

Forsey gives convincing arguments to show that Sircello’s revised version will not do, however. It is not necessary to repeat those arguments here. Forsey has demonstrated that ET, in either form, leads to unnecessary philosophical puzzles. The upshot is that one should give up the idea of epistemological transcendence as an essential part of a theory of the sublime. This is not an unwelcome result, since ET is arguably based on a category mistake. ET characterizes the sublime as a failed mode of understanding, hence to make it an epistemological issue or a matter of truth (understood by Sircello as adequation to reality) rather than of emotion and the imagination, as theorists such as Joseph Addison, Joseph Priestley, or Thomas Reid would have it. (A conference panel at which Forsey presented an early version of her article in 2005 was tellingly called “Knowing the Sublime.”) My account of the sublime, as an intense, affective response involving the sensory, perceptual, and imaginative

13

Forsey quotes this passage, albeit in a slightly different version, p. 6.

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

51

powers, identifies in the experience more play and emotion than a concern for truth or conformity to “reality” (Sircello’s term) or adequation.14

II. The Object and Aesthetic Responses to It Forsey’s acute diagnosis runs deeper. In a section called “The Impossibility of a Theory15 of the Sublime,” Forsey (p. 10f) suggests that there are three available options remaining. They are: 1) Kant’s metaphysical and moralized account; 2) Malcolm Budd’s non-moralized and subjective account; and 3) an emotion-based or feeling-based account. At least on one reading, the Kantian account is implausible, since it is at once unnecessarily metaphysical16 and too subjectivistic and psychologistic.17 The second kind of account (Budd’s) amounts to a kind of cognitive failure theory, (p. 12). More specifically, the problem with this second approach, Forsey explains, is that it implies that nearly anything (including, e.g., the frustrating failure to complete a crossword puzzle) can be sublime. If we are to avoid cognitive failure accounts of the sublime, we should reject this second option.18 14

The “threefold” synthesis or use of play, emotion, and truth is adopted from Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, Press 2014). 15 Forsey means a “coherent” theory of the sublime; she does offer an error theory of the sublime. 16 Following Sircello and Forsey, Deligiorgi, who offers a Kantian theory, wants to avoid “awkward ontological commitments,” (“The Pleasures,” p. 31.) Such assertions may give the impression that ontological readings of Kant and German idealists are unpopular today. Although this is not the place to engage in a substantial philosophical-interpretive debate, it should be noted that naturalist, antimetaphysical readings of German idealists and similar philosophical orientations remain a matter of controversy. My reasons for rejecting ET and its associated ontological commitments, when formulating a theory of the sublime, are motivated not only by a desire to avoid Forsey’s acute criticisms, but also by a desire to offer a theory that is simple, parsimonious, and perhaps even testable. 17 Cf. also my “What’s the Big Idea? On Emily Brady’s Sublime,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 50,2 (2016). 18 Alan Richardson’s Burkean “neural” or “corporeal” sublime appears to be a quasi-epistemological account, since it is dependent on the notion of exposing perceptual illusions, hence on representing a kind of cognitive failure. Richardson looks at the brain’s “impressive tricks on the conscious mind,” such as the visual blind spot, imaginary occlusion, the Necker cube, or the duck-rabbit. The experiences of perceptual illusion momentarily jolt observers out of the cognitive categorizations by which humans parse the perceived world, in order to intuit the neural mechanisms working beneath them. Richardson thinks it is pleasant but

52

Chapter V

The third option is the most promising. Forsey rejects the third option, but it merits further exploration. She rejects it on the grounds that it gives rise to another dilemma (p. 14), which must be addressed. Here is the dilemma. A coherent theory of feelings either conceives of feelings as intentional or as non-intentional. (“Intentional” here refers to the state of being conscious of an object, representation, etc., not to having motives, desires, or goals.) In other words, a feeling is either intentional or non-intentional (disjunctive premise.) If the feeling is intentional, then a theory of the sublime is incoherent; however, if feeling is non-intentional, then a theory of the sublime is still incoherent (conjunctive premise). Therefore, a theory of the sublime is incoherent. This can be connected to the aforementioned approaches. If the first (Kantian) approach is adopted whereby the feeling is intentional, the feeling is theorizable only in the problematic ways previously mentioned since the object (freedom, the infinite, noumenal, etc.) is inaccessible. If one adopts the second (Budd’s) option according to which feeling is nonintentional, the feeling cannot be theorized since non-intentional feelings are too particular and are not intelligibly generalizable. At best, one could have poetic or rhetorical discourse stemming from such feelings, but not a coherent theory. To demonstrate that the argument (which is logically valid) is unsound, it needs to be shown that at least one of the premises is false. We cannot reject the disjunctive premise: feelings are either A or non-A (a tautology). The conjunctive premise can be shown to be false: the constructive dilemma needs to be grasped by the horns, just as Theseus did with the Minotaur. So, which of the conjuncts is false? Let us grant that Forsey is right that if a feeling is non-intentional, it cannot be theorized coherently. If so, the conjunct, “if the feeling is intentional, then a theory of the sublime is incoherent” should be shown to be false. It needs to be demonstrated that the feeling or experience of the sublime is intentional (or has an intentional object), but that this object is accessible, and thus that a theory of the sublime is not incoherent, but possible. The intentional object is, quite simply, the mountain, the rocks, the starry night (or a representation thereof.) It is not an inaccessible object. (I

accompanied by a disturbing sense of loss and disorientation for the conscious subject, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). However, it is debatable whether these tricks on the mind, or perceptual illusions, produce the intense affective feeling and emotional experience associated with the sublime. Disorientation or vertigo, by itself, is not sufficient for triggering an experience of the sublime.

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

53

will discuss the object in more detail in this section, and examine feeling in the next section.) Forsey appropriately asks: “Why does the sublime capture feelings in response to some objects/situations and not others? Why these feelings… and not others?” (p. 14). Indeed, these are important questions and should be addressed. Forsey further inquires: What kinds of objects are sublime? What does the sublime tell us about ourselves as subjects? And, centrally, What does sublime experience illuminate about the limitations of our access to the world? (p. 15).

The first question (about objects) is the most important question, and seems more significant than the third question about limited access, and even more significant than the second (the Kantian) question, about what the sublime tells us about ourselves as subjects. Nevertheless, it is natural enough to wonder how the sublime affects us, and how it sheds light on perceivers and viewers, so let us consider this for a moment. Perhaps even the experience itself can sometimes give rise to a self-conscious reflection on the relation between the experiencing self and the object: the work of art (e.g, the film), the artifact or technology (e.g., the internet,) the mountain or canyon, the ecosystem or environment, even nature as a whole. That is, it may occasionally be reflexive (i.e., about oneself, self-referential.) This point merits further analysis, so it will be discussed in the next few paragraphs.

Reflexivity Ronald Hepburn claimed that “most versions of the sublime are in a measure reflexive.”19 Hepburn’s generalization may well be true, at least of the Kantian versions of the sublime. Most of the Kant-inspired theories are reflexive. Moreover, the Kantian paradigm (after Burke’s) is perhaps the most influential of all. On Guyer’s reading of Kant’s theory,20 the sublime experience necessarily involves a conscious recognition of the superiority of one’s faculty of reason. Brady builds a modified version of this into her own Kant-inspired theory, since according to her the sublime

19

Ronald Hepburn, “The Concept of the Sublime: Has It Any Relevance for Philosophy Today?” Dialectics and Humanism 15 (1988), p. 146. 20 A History, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 445.

54

Chapter V

involves a reflection on the self.21 In Deligiorgi’s Kantian account, too, the sublime involves reflexive self-awareness.22 But it is dubitable that reflexivity is an intrinsic or essential part of the experience of the sublime. Arguably, aesthetic theory can benefit by looking at empirical and experimental work in this area. Insofar as selfawareness is meant in an empirical-psychological sense, the issue can be partly addressed by psychological and neurobiological studies of experiences of the sublime. Surprisingly, when one turns to the research, one learns that the empirical and experimental studies give reason to doubt that reflexivity is part of the experience of the sublime. It appears that observers do not reflect on the powers of reason in the sublime. Two recent studies suggest this. One (psychological) study suggests that in feelings of awe (i.e., sublimity) there is “some disengagement from awareness of the self” and that “awe tends to direct attention away from the self and toward the environment.”23 The authors of a recent (neurobiological) study were surprised to find diminished self-awareness. “The most prominently deactivated area, unique to the highest levels of the sublime experience, was the superior frontal gyrus, a zone that was previously found to be deactivated during sensorimotor processing, and interpreted to signify a suppression of self-awareness during such processing.”24 “Suppression of self-awareness would not be expected during experience of the sublime,” they observe, since the philosophical tradition has conceived of it as leading to self-awareness. But perhaps the tradition was wrong about this. (These appeals to scientific evidence need not be taken as “reductionist.” Anjan Chatterjee usefully warned of the risks of reductionism.25 Indeed, the sublime can be examined from various perspectives that may be compatible: transcendental-philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, economic, historical, social, literary, cultural.) Are such findings fatal to Kant’s theory? Not necessarily. Even if it turns out that there is much evidence supporting this hypothesis, and even if Kant held the contrary, false view (which is debatable, as he wrote “even

21

The Sublime, op.cit. “The Pleasures,” op.cit. 23 M.N. Shiota et al., “The Nature of Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept,” Cognition and Emotion 21,5 (2007), p. 960, p. 961. 24 T. Ishizu and S. Zeki, “A Neurobiological Enquiry into the Origins of Our Experience of the Sublime and Beautiful,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014), p. 891. 25 Anjan Chatterjee, “Neuroaesthetics: A Coming of Age Story,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23,10 (2010), p. 59. 22

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

55

though one is not always conscious of it,”)26 Kant could still be rescued. He need not be interpreted empirical-psychologically. He could instead be read as giving a transcendental or “regressive” account of the experience of the sublime. Kant could be interpreted as explaining what makes the experience possible. Kant’s method was, after all, “transcendental.” He distinguished his account from Burke’s psychological-physiological account in just such terms. And the transcendental account need not conflict with an empirical approach, either. Despite widespread interpretations to the contrary,27 Kant admired Burke’s psychological account and called Burke an astute author of the empirical method. Interestingly, Hepburn notes that the sublime experience can be reflective (a matter of aesthetic contemplation), without being reflexive (referring to oneself.)28 Whether or not the two occur together in actual experience, it is useful to distinguish the two conceptually. If that is right, an observer can apprehend and contemplate (reflect) aesthetically, without explicitly thinking about herself—whether of her own greatness or rational powers or agency, or even of herself in comparison to the vast object or natural environs. This means a fortiori that the experience could, in principle, be reflective without the ‘self-admiration’ found in parts of Baillie’s and Kant’s [1790] accounts.

Intersubjectivity This leads to the important issue of intersubjectivity. Is the feeling of awe or sublimity a shared experience? Is it felt in response to the same objects and events? Forsey mentions, but chooses not to explore, “an intersubjective account of the sublime because there is almost no mention in the literature of this experience being culturally shared or even communicable, but has rather been described as a wholly personal, even intimate experience without reference to others,” (p. 13). If the sublime were wholly personal and not communicable, this would indeed be a difficulty, since it would lead to the problems of epistemological accessibility and theorizability similar to those noted above. Forsey’s claim about intersubjectivity and communicability is both striking and promising. It is striking since, e.g., Kant claimed that the judgment of sublimity makes a claim to “subjective universality,”29 which 26

Kant, Critique of the Power, §28, 5, p.262. For the typical reading of Kant on Burke, consider Richardson’s claim: “Kant dismissed Burke’s theory of the sublime,” The Neural Sublime, p. 24; p. 26. 28 Hepburn, “The Concept,” p. 137. 29 Kant, Critique of the Power, §24, 5 p. 247. 27

56

Chapter V

many commentators rightly understand as a claim to, or about, intersubjectivity. In her defense, it can be said that Forsey’s statement about the sublime reflects a common view. The widespread replications of Caspar David Friedrich paintings such as Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) on covers of books about the sublime bolster such readings, unfortunately. What is striking, ultimately, is that this common view is the common view, since the Kantian paradigm is so prominent and since Kant claimed that the sublime makes a normative claim to universal validity. The view that the sublime is merely personal is misleading. As I have written elsewhere, the Kantian sublime “makes a claim to a universal and necessary validity that is intersubjective.” 30 Koneþni likewise calls the sublime “pan-cultural.”31 As a feature of the sublime qua aesthetic judgment, the “intersubjectivity” associated with the sublime is not very different from that of beauty; if it is acceptable to claim that beauty can be intersubjective, it is acceptable to do so in the case of the sublime. Eighteenth-century theorists, for instance, discussed beauty and sublimity together as two kinds of intersubjective aesthetic judgments. A crowd’s enthusiastic admiration of an extraordinary athletic or musical performance exemplifies such intersubjective experience. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty examines sports and athletic competitions admired by fans, who are “in communion with other enthusiastic fans.”32 The achievements, plays, or events put on display can evoke aesthetic responses bordering on the sublime. “Following an athletic event and feeling united with athletes and the crowd can yield some of the more addictively uplifting moments of our lives.”33 Gumbrecht characterizes the sublime in response to “breath-taking … events and achievements” as a shared, collective experience, in “people’s memory” as moments “never to be equaled.”34 Consider a live, game-winning shot, cheered on by thousands of fans. The moment is rare, even unique. The crowd rises together as a collective unity, in celebration of the sublime play or event. Such record-breaking or extraordinary athletic moments, like great musical performances, exhibit the novelty, rarity, or greatness characteristic of the sublime and may be, or at least border on, the sublime. One can also think of the “wowing” display of virtuosity by 30

I argued this in The Kantian Sublime, p. 15. V.J. Koneþni, “The Aesthetic Trinity: Awe, Being Moved, Thrills,” Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 5,2 (2005), p. 27. 32 H.U. Gumbrecht, In Praise of Athletic Beauty, (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 206. 33 Ibid., p. 228f. 34 Ibid., p. 48. 31

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

57

musicians and athletes, or monumental, historic upsets by an underdog, in terms of thrills, being-moved, and the sublime. It is as if those involved have a kind of power over nature’s laws, and/or a kind of “greatness” or unique causality (“Do you believe in miracles?” asked the not-exactlyimpartial American television commentator in the closing moments of the 1980 victory of the U.S. Olympic hockey team, made up of assorted university students, over the rival, veteran Soviet team.) Observers of such events or displays may wonder, “Is that even possible?” thereby stretching the imagination, the faculty of possibility. “I didn’t know human beings could do that.” Power, magnitude, and rarity seem relevant in these demonstrations of athletic or musical virtuosity or “once-in-a-lifetime” moments of historic import. Fittingly, the slogan of the U.S. National Football League once was: Feel the power. At the same time, Forsey’s claim is promising. Forsey writes that, if one wanted to pursue this line of inquiry, “it will not be immune to the problems noted above: even an intersubjective epistemology must have a reference to an object of (shared) experience,” (p. 13). Exactly. The noted problems exist only if the object is taken to be epistemologically transcendent. But it is not epistemologically transcendent; nor is the experience transcendent. If one rejects such claims, the familiar problems can be avoided. So, what is the sublime “object” (when there is one)?35 I propose turning to a more “objectivist” aesthetics, according to which objects typically possessing certain properties or attributes, and perceived in the right contexts, will characteristically evoke the aesthetic experience of the sublime.36 (These need not be seen as necessary and sufficient conditions of the experience. This is not an attempt to offer such a definition.) The “sublime” can generally be said to refer to objects that, in intense, mixed, positive-negative emotional experiences (i.e., in which a feeling of being overwhelmed is combined with exhilarating pleasure), are (from a safe, secure position) perceived to be: vast, grand, colossal, or powerful (hence as involving a risk or potential threat); novel or striking; and rare.37 35

Grand ideas and concepts could in principle evoke the sublime; however, in the present discussion I will focus on objects since they are more accessible and intersubjective. 36 This line eventually leads to and raises questions concerning aesthetic properties and qualities, but such complex and difficult ontological issues are beyond the scope of this paper. 37 This is not meant to be an exhaustive or exclusive list of attributes. Moreover, there appear to be some moral constraints to what can be experienced as sublime

58

Chapter V

This account is indebted to Koneþni’s “stimulus-in-context” model.38 Some of the latter predicates deserve further commentary. Novelty, rarity, and being striking are here construed as contextualized responses that are produced by an engagement or encounter between the object (or event) and the perceiver. Even old objects can sometimes appear novel or rare. The term “novelty” can be predicated of the antiquated and of what has “age value” (to use Carolyn Korsmeyer’s phrase), including ancient ruins and objects of “antiquity.”39 Novelty and/or rarity add to the surprise, astonishment, or shock widely recognized as being part of the phenomenology of the sublime. Moreover, even the stronger claim that they are necessary conditions of the experience, seems plausible (though I will not insist on this point): unless the mountain or pyramid is perceived to be novel / striking / rare, it is likely that familiarity with the mountain or pyramid will block the experience of sublimity or awe. Novelty and rarity are clearly response-dependent. As suggested above, if a person lives below Mount Fuji, her experiences of it will not be rare and the mountain will not be experienced as aesthetically interesting and striking, but as mundane. Kant claimed that the good “Savoyard peasant” who lives in the Alps calls “devotees of the icy mountains” fools.40 Even size and power can be perceived in different ways, depending on one’s perspective. A mountain (cliff, storm) is viewed from a certain distance. One can be too close to or too far from the object or event, for the sublime to occur. Citing Savary, Kant made this point when discussing the Egyptian pyramids. Chinese art theoretician Guo Xi (KuoHsi) (c. 1020-1090) made a similar observation while offering instruction to landscape painters. Guo Xi claimed: “A mountain looks this way close by, another way a few miles away, and yet another way from a distance of a

(thereby excluding, e.g., acts of terrorism or displays of fascism), though this point merits further development and study. 38 “The Aesthetic Trinity,” p. 67f. Koneþni plausibly claims that music could evoke “thrills,” involve “being moved,” and perhaps even, in rare cases and in the right setting, full-blown aesthetic sublimity, (“Aesthetic Trinity”, p. 37). Music’s stirring effects has been widely studied; for overviews, see Koneþni, “Aesthetic Trinity” and “The Aesthetic Trinity” and J. Bicknell, Why Music Moves Us, (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2009). Although the experience of linguistic phenomena such as poetry is, like that of music, extraordinarily complex and multi-faceted, John Dennis and Edmund Burke plausibly suggested that, in the appropriate setting, poetry can involve aesthetic responses that lie on the sublime spectrum. 39 Koneþni, “Aesthetic Trinity,” p. 29. 40 Kant, Critique of the Power, §25, 5: 265.

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

59

dozen miles. Its shape changes at every step.”41 Guo Xi noted that one could view the mountains from below, or look from the rim at the mountain interior, or stare out towards the distance; he called these the “lofty,” “deep,” and “level” perspectives, (ibid.). The proposed objectivist account has historical precedents (see also the next section). Although Burke does not call himself an “objectivist” and is not usually characterized that way—since after all he focuses on the physiological (“nerve”) responses of the subject—certain elements of his account are plainly objectivist in the sense used here. While some of the qualities on his list are doubtful, Burke gives features of objects that in general evoke the sublime: being vast, rugged, massive, powerful, and so on.42 A core element for Burke is the object’s potential threat to the selfpreservation of the perceiver, who observes it from a position of safety and thus feels delightful terror. If the proposed account is correct, the sublime feeling can be theorized after all. The feeling is not transcendent, nor is the object. The sublime is not nothing: there is an object. And the sublime is not anything: the vast or powerful object’s features are experienced in a particular and rare context or setting, and with intense, agreeable feeling.43 Not only can the sublime be theorized, but some of this account’s main claims or implications about the sublime as an object with certain general qualities could even be tested, or at least used in experimental settings. The proposed account has the heuristic benefit that hypotheses about the sublime could be formulated and examined. Questions about the following could be explored: the sublime’s intersubjectivity; its relations to other 41

Wong, “Negative-Positive,” p. 143. Some attributes or objects on Burke’s list are untenable. Loudness, brightness, darkness, and obscurity, even in the appropriate setting conducive to the sublime, do not seem likely to stimulate the sublime. (They seem more conducive to fear.) For instance, as Richardson (Neural Sublime) points out, it is hard to see how the dark aftershock of a bright light (e.g., the sun, a camera flash) can be sublime. The bright light would nearly always be annoying if not painful, and would lack the key emotional, affective elements and the pleasant mental expansion or stretching. For similar reasons, sounds that simply overwhelm the senses (“nerves”) would not count at sublime. 43 My account is similar to Emily Brady’s theory (Sublime in Modern) in that she also describes the general features of sublime objects. However, she focuses on nature and excludes the possibility of genuine or pure sublimity evoked by art. But the latter is of obvious import to an aesthetic theory of the sublime. It does not seem necessary, even given her admirable environmental aims, for her to exclude art and artifact in this way. For my reservations and extended discussion, see my “What’s the Big Idea.” 42

60

Chapter V

emotions and feelings such as beauty and fear; its moral constraints; the physiological responses associated with it; the degree of self-awareness in the experience; and the stimulus properties of the objects that incite the experience. Although the point is controversial, Koneþni persuasively argues44 that it is advantageous for the sublime to be conceptualized so as to become (when possible) amenable to experimental manipulation and measurement of its effects.45 Anjan Chatterjee, a neuroscientist, writes: “What do neuroscientists make of notions such as ‘the sublime?’ The sublime is an emotional experience mentioned frequently in aesthetics … but one that has, so far, had little traction in affective neuroscience.”46 This is an exciting time for empirical research on the sublime. Moreover, transcendental philosophers and Kantians need not be scared away from empirical studies; Kant himself was not.

III. Historical Sources Forsey’s paper is like Ariadne’s clew or thread: Forsey leads a way out of the puzzles she identified. In short, a theory of the sublime should emphasize the pleasure-inducing striving and exhilaration of the mind while it is being (metaphorically) stretched and expanded in response to an object (or representation of it) possessing the features described above. The comparison to Ariadne’s thread can be developed by turning to the history of aesthetics. Since Forsey quotes from Joseph Addison, let us begin there. In Spectator paper No. 411, Addison characterized the “pleasures of the imagination,” including present and remembered pleasures and “delights.”47 One need not read this aesthetic “delight” as a kind of 44

Koneþni, “Aesthetic Trinity,” p. 64. Under the names such as “awe,” “aesthetic awe,” “elevation,” and “peak aesthetic experiences,” the sublime has been investigated by several psychological studies, e.g. J. Haidt, “The Positive Emotion of Elevation,” Prevention & Treatment 3 (2000), pp. 1-4; D. Keltner and J. Haidt, “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” Cognition & Emotion 17,2 (2003), pp. 297-314; Koneþni “The Aesthetic Trinity,” “Aesthetic Trinity;” Shiota et al. “Nature of Awe.” According to Koneþni “Aesthetic Trinity,” p. 66, over the last thirty years there has been a considerable amount of empirical work of thrills or chills elicited by art, but nearly most of these studies focused on music rather than visual stimuli or linguistic phenomena (e.g., narratives, poetry.) 46 Chatterjee, “Neuroaesthetics,” p. 59. 47 R. Steele and J. Addison [1712], Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. Robert J. Allen, (NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970), p. 398. 45

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

61

cognitive failure,48 even if some ambiguity remains in the text. Addison’s Spectator paper No. 412 reads: Our imagination loves to be filled with an Object, or to grasp at any thing that is too big for its Capacity. We are flung into a pleasing Astonishment at such unbounded Views, and feel a delightful Stilness and Amazement in the Soul at the Apprehension of them.49

Addison is not precise about what is unbounded, but the term “unbounded” is best taken to refer neither to the object nor to the “views,” but to a certain kind of feeling or experience. The imagination (or mind, person) feels unbounded (or swelled or expanded), in response to an object. The object is a key causal “stimulus” of the experience; it plays a central role in inciting or evoking the latter. The person is not actually unbounded, nor is the object.50 According to the first sentence in the block quote above, the imagination “loves” to view or be filled with the object, yet the object is said to be “too big.” One must not read too much into the latter. The object is apprehended. Using cognitive powers such as perception and imagination, it is apprehended as extraordinarily vast. The object is immense (or powerful) enough to make observers feel physically inadequate or threatened: this is the “negative” element in the mixed (positive-negative) experience. But the object is not epistemologically inaccessible. Striving, attempting, is not the same as failure. Clearly, the apprehension of the viewed51 object evokes pleasure and delight. In No. 413, Addison ultimately gives a divine-based theory of the source of the pleasure (referring to a “supreme author.”) However, it is more plausible to identify this play of pushing, stretching, and expanding as the key psychological52 source of the pleasure in the sublime. The object’s “vastness and immensity … afford so great an entertainment to the mind of the beholder,” and “the sight wanders up and down without confinement,” (No. 414). Such mental movement and exercise is the principal source of the aesthetic pleasure in the sublime. 48 In any case, one could simply reject this part of Addison’s theory. The proposed account is not bound to any particular historical theory. 49 Steele and Addison, Selections, p. 401. 50 One might object that one cannot have a feeling of unboundedness, since all feelings must have intentional objects. Here again, surface grammar appears to be misleading. One does not really have a feeling of being unbounded or infinite. 51 Addison limits his discussion here to sight, but there is no good reason to limit the theory of the sublime to the visual, or even to one sense alone. 52 The proposed account is agnostic about whether the experiencer explicitly and self-consciously reflects on this.

62

Chapter V

There are many more theories one could appeal to in order to develop and flesh out this account of the sublime as a kind of mental (metaphorical) stretching, filling, or swelling in response to a powerful or massive object. Speaking of natural wonders such as the ocean and the “boiling furnaces” of Mount Etna, Longinus’s On the Sublime (section 35) states, “whatever exceeds the common size, is always great, and always amazing.”53 According to John Baillie, when an object is vast yet uniform “there is to the imagination no limits of its vastness, and the mind runs out into infinity, continually creating as it were from the pattern.”54 Upon seeing a “grand object” a person is affected with something that “as it were extends his very being” and “expands it to a kind of immensity.”55 According to David Hume, “the mere view of greatness, whether successive or extended, enlarges the soul.”56 For Burke, “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.”57 According to Kant’s theory of the sublime, too, the imagination runs freely and is expanded. Likewise, for Gerard, the object “stretches” the mind in a similar way. For Henry Home (Lord Kames), when “the sublime is carried to its due height, and circumscribed within proper bounds, it enchants the mind, and raises the most delightful of all emotions: the reader, engrossed by the sublime object, feels himself raised as it were to a higher rank.”58 Note that the sublime is described as being “circumscribed within proper bounds,” not as unbounded or inaccessible. This perceptual-imaginative and cognitive-emotional complex produces that peculiar emotion that many eighteenth-century writers called the sublime. For the sake of brevity, only three more accounts will be mentioned. According to William Duff [1767], the poet who contemplates “these awful and magnificent scenes in his musing mind … labours to express in his compositions the ideas which dilate and swell his Imagination.”59 Speaking of “vast objects,” Thomas Reid [1785] claims: “it requires a stretch of imagination to grasp them in our minds.”60 Finally, in an extremely useful and insightful passage from his Course of Lectures, Joseph Priestley [1777] ties together the aforementioned themes of the object’s novelty and magnitude and of the perceiver’s imaginative activity: 53

Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader, p. 28. Kirwan, Sublimity, p. 9. 55 Ibid., p. 10. 56 Ibid., p. 9. 57 Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime: A reader, p. 132. 58 Kirwan, Sublimity, p. 40. 59 Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader, p. 174f. 60 Ibid., p. 178f. 54

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

63

Great objects please us for the same reason that new objects do, viz., by the exercise they give to our faculties. The mind, as was observed before, conforming and adapting itself to the objects to which its attention is engaged, must, as it were, enlarge itself, to conceive a great object. This requires a considerable effort of the imagination, which is also attended with a pleasing, though perhaps not a distinct and explicit consciousness of the strength and extent of our powers.61

Not only does Priestley explain the ground or source of the pleasure, list properties such as greatness, and emphasize the role of imagination, but he also conjectures that one need not be conscious of this source while feeling it. Just as one does not have to be conscious of an aesthetic experience’s underlying neurobiological and neural mechanisms, which constitute another source,62 this conjecture seems quite plausible. The references to “stretching” should not be taken literally: the activity of imagination is not a spatial object that can be stretched (even if the activity may be localized.)63 If one must take them in a sense that is more than metaphorical, one might take a move from Kant: one can see these claims as part of a “transcendental” or regressive account that explains what makes an experience possible, its necessary “conditions.” “Transcendental” need not mean anything metaphysical (transcendent), but simply that the account characterizes “a condition of the possibility” of the experience. It involves an analysis of a perceiver’s manner of experiencing objects as sublime, and it examines its necessary conditions or prerequisites, or what mental activities or movements are required for the aesthetic experience or judgment. (In similar fashion, Kant’s “transcendental unity of consciousness” is merely formal and has no psychological content). One need not read this language as entailing that the subject is selfconsciously reflecting on its “conditions” (whatever these conditions might be—end-setting, agency, reason, etc.) The experience is not necessarily reflexive in a second-order sense of explicitly being about the self. Joseph Priestley helpfully employed the term “secret retrospect” to account for ideas that were implied by, but not necessarily made explicit 61

Ibid., p. 119. Ishizu and Zeki, “Neurobiological.” 63 Neurobiological studies may offer insights into the neural underpinnings of the proposed theory. E.g., the inferior frontal gyrus, activated in the sublime, “has also been found to be active when subjects imagine future events ([A.]Viard et al. “Mental Time,”) hence emphasizing the importance of the imagination in neural terms, just as it has been emphasized in hypothetical terms in past discussions of the sublime,” Ishizu and Zeki “Neurobiological,” p. 8. 62

64

Chapter V

in, the experience: “in all sublime conceptions, there is a kind of secret retrospect to preceding ideas and states of mind.”64 “Secret retrospect” is a far more delightful phrase than (Kantian) “transcendental, regressive analysis,” but they can both be employed for similar explanatory ends. Although my aim is not exegetical, it must be admitted that there are some parts of past and present aesthetic theories that emphasize epistemological transcendence (Sircello) and cognitive failure. Shaftesbury writes that the “wearied imagination spends itself in vain,” (p. 2). For Kant, the imagination ultimately fails to fulfill the demands of reason to provide a single image for a limitless, unconditioned idea of a whole, that is, to comprehend the totality of a given magnitude in a single image or intuition. Inspired by, but going beyond, Kant, Lyotard celebrated the failure of conceptual understanding to live up to a demand for totality, even calling for us to wage a war on totality. However, these are only elements of their theories. According to other theories of the sublime, or even to other elements of the theories proposed by these writers, there is a more positive role played by the imagination. This aspect merits more emphasis. Given his place in the history of aesthetics, it is worth dwelling for a moment on Kant’s influential theory of the sublime. Although, for Kant, the faculty of reason is one65 referent of what he calls sublime, the imagination is enlivened and exhilarated, according to his account. True, his text sometimes suggests a mentalistic or psychologistic reading: the idea of reason, or reason itself, is sublime. Or a metaphysical one: freedom, the infinite, is sublime. However, at other times, Kant writes that nature can be considered sublime (“Nature is thus sublime …”)66 He does not (given his doctrine of “subreption”) ultimately claim that nature is actually sublime. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that he acknowledges that one can see nature as sublime and that he recognizes that the judgment can take the form, “This mountain is sublime.” In other words, he indicates that the natural object can be said to be sublime, from a certain perspective. Significantly, to claim or think that the natural wonder is sublime is not necessarily to debase experiencers before nature (as Kant’s 64

Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader, p. 119. Kant actually gives a long list of what is sublime: ideas of reason (including infinity,) the faculty of reason, a state of mind, a feeling, humanity in one’s subject, a supersensible substrate, even freedom (superiority to nature). For a related list, see my Kantian Sublime, appendix 3, “Classification of what Elicits Sublimity,” p. 233f. 66 Kant, Critique of the Power, §25, 5: 255; cf. p. 260; cf. my “What’s the Big Idea,” p. 113. 65

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

65

undesirable or “bad” kind of subreption would have it.) For not only does one feel elevated in the experience, but one can also reflect on humanity’s vital role in a larger whole or context, such as a particular natural environment or ecosystem, contemplating how humans contribute to or shape it, (see again fig. 2, above.) According to the less plausible part of Kant’s theory, the sublime is not an object, but the idea of what is “too great” for observers: “We call sublime that which is absolutely great” or that which is great “beyond all comparison.”67 Kant even sets off his definition with emphasis (in bold font in the English translation): “That is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small.”68 The “too great,” the absolutely great, is an idea of reason: infinity (infinite magnitude or power.) By definition, the actual infinite can never be experienced; an idea of reason cannot itself be experienced.69 This move leads to the epistemological problems that Forsey identified.70 However, it is better to conceive of the sublime, neither as the absolutely great nor as an idea or transcendent object that can never be given in experience, but as the vast or powerful object (or representation thereof) that is viewed as novel or rare or striking, in a stirring, elevating aesthetic experience. This entails rejecting some of Kant’s claims. 67

Kant, Critique of the Power, §25, 5: 248. Ibid., §25, 5: 250. 69 Unlike the present account, my paper presented at the General Meeting of the American Society of Aesthetics at Denver in October 2009 (and on which Jane Forsey generously commented, “A Basis in Freedom?” Wassard Elea Rivista II,4 (2016)), was mainly exegetical, as was my book on Kant (Kantian Sublime) and a recent article (“Place of the Sublime.”) For Kant, the class of what is truly sublime includes “ideas” of reason. As noted in the previous footnote, Kant gives a long list of candidates and uses the “sublime” in several distinct senses. Though a Kantian “idea” is certainly one of the candidates, this part of his theory should be rejected. 70 Nevertheless, there is a sense in which Kantian ideas of reason can be known in a way that the transcendent “nothing” of Sircello’s sublime cannot be known. Infinity can be cognized and used even in pre-Cantorian mathematics, even if (on Kant’s terms) it is not an actual infinite that can be experienced. Likewise, Kant thinks that freedom is not only theoretically “thinkable,” but also knowable from a practical point of view, in what he calls practical cognition. Moreover, it is not clear that “reason” (as a faculty) is epistemologically inaccessible in the relevant sense. Indeed, a theory like Deligiorgi’s (“Pleasures of Contra-Purposiveness”), according to which the sublime involves an experience of one’s own faculty for ends, seems more impervious to Forsey’s criticisms of Sircello’s account. One’s agency or power to set ends is not unknowable or “noumenal,” but quite tangible to agents, revealed in and by ordinary practical activities. 68

66

Chapter V

But it does not entail rejecting every one of them. Kant hints that the large or vast object, viewed in a certain way, evokes the sublime. Kant called this the colossal, the almost too great.71 The mere presentation of a concept … which is almost too great for all presentation … is called colossal, because the end of the presentation of a concept is made more difficult if the intuition of the object is almost too great for our faculty of apprehension.72

Although this passage acknowledges that the object is not too great for the faculty of apprehension (the intuition is only “almost” too great), it still only offers the negative side of the picture. Kant should have added that, by virtue of expanded imagination and mental powers, the observer feels pleasant exhilaration as she apprehends the grand, vast, or colossal object. Finally, at least one passage suggests that the sublime experience is not of an unconditioned idea of reason, but of a vast or powerful object perceived in the appropriate setting and under the right circumstances (see again fig. 2.) Following the reports of Savary, Kant writes that one should be neither too close to nor too far from the Egyptian pyramids, so that the object can appear to be appropriately large.73 The aesthetic attribute “large” (vast, etc.) is here a response-dependent and relative term—a large object viewed from an airplane no longer appears large or vast. Priestley made this point: “the ideas of great and little are confessedly relative.”74 Thus, the perceiver must find the right distance and attend properly to the object. Not all “typical” sublime objects will be experienced as sublime: this is one reason why the sublime is an “aesthetic” term, rather than a mathematical or merely physical category. Kant implies that the right vantage point in relation to a vast object, not to an idea of reason, allows the experience to take place. Kant should have stayed with this. He should not have based his theory of the sublime on the ideas of reason or, worse—for a theory of the sublime at any rate—on moral ideas of reason.75 71

Derrida discusses the colossal, although his interests differ significantly from mine; J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McCleod, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987). 72 Kant, Critique of the Power, §26, 5: 253. 73 Ibid., §26, 5: 252. 74 Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader, p. 119. 75 Kant’s analysis of the sublime felt in response to the establishment of the first French Republic, however, has the seeds of a more fruitful objectivist account: it is a rare, novel moment unfolding in history before thousands of enthralled spectators. See Kant, “A Renewed Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race

A Theory of the Sublime is Possible

67

Conclusion The qualities of sublime objects are response-dependent but can be experienced by diverse people in similar ways that are sharable and communicable, that is, intersubjective. The experience of the sublime need not be self-consciously about the self or subject. The sublime, according to the proposed account, is neither a response to Kantian moral ideas, nor to the infinite, unconditioned, unpresentable, or ineffable. The sublime can be culturally shared, as attested by fans’ responses to athletic and musical feats, or collective experiences of sublime objects and events: consider seeing the Grand Canyon with family or friends. In a paradigmatic and exemplary (visual) case, the response is an intense, stirring, mixed emotional response to an object perceived (from a safe distance) to be vast, powerful, and/or potentially threatening, where the object is experienced as novel, striking, or rare, leading to the sublime’s pleasing shock or surprise. The sublime is not a failure to cognize something inaccessible. A person can cognize the sublime object, since it is neither transcendent nor in an epistemologically inaccessible realm. Following Jane Forsey, I reject Guy Sircello’s key premise (ET, or epistemological transcendence), even in its modified version (ET Revised.) Due to its unique emotional, affective qualities and mixed (positive-negative) valence as well as the general features of the object involved in the experience, the sublime is also not an ordinary cognitive failure such as the inability to complete a crossword puzzle. Conceiving of the sublime in this way allows theorists and researchers to sort through, filter out, and/or simplify the innumerable—and often contradictory—theories of the “sublime” (sometimes preceded by an adjective such as “modern,” “postmodern,” “gothic,” or “oedipal.”) Many of these accounts are ultimately not about the sublime, at least not in any agreed upon and serviceable sense. Moreover, the foregoing makes possible not only a coherent theory, but also one that is conducive to empirical and experimental studies. One does not have to be a proponent of positivism (I am not) to recognize this as an additional advantage and welcome benefit. Finally, such an approach is more conducive to the goals of feminism, which has tended to be wary of the sublime. For instance, Lochhead justly warns against letting “such terms as the sublime, the ineffable, the unpresentable … mask sedimented gender binaries that will

Constantly Progressing?” (written c. 1795-96), published as part of The Conflict of the Faculties in 1798.

68

Chapter V

keep the feminine in the ground.”76 If one adopts my approach, where the sublime is not conceived as a response to the ineffable or unpresentable, such criticisms can be avoided. There are further reasons why it is important to develop a plausible account of the sublime (or awe.) If the experience of the sublime is a fundamental experience for human beings, if it is integral to human happiness and flourishing, and perhaps even eventually raises questions about life’s meaning and significance and its most profound and significant ends, developing a fruitful theory of the sublime is no small achievement. In short, a useful theory could have desirable consequences for fields such as positive psychology, and it could put humans in a better position to recognize, preserve, and restore those cultural artifacts and natural objects that induce or evoke experiences of the sublime. Accordingly, there may be a way out of the labyrinth. Without Professor Forsey’s stimulating article, it would have been impossible to find.

76 J. Lochhead, “The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 12,1 (2008), p. 72.

CHAPTER VI COMMENTARY ON JANE FORSEY’S “IS A THEORY OF THE SUBLIME POSSIBLE?” SANDRA SHAPSHAY

Nearly ten years ago, Jane Forsey published a provocative article in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism titled “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” Against the prevailing tide of postmodern and Kantian enthusiasm for the sublime, she offered a negative answer to this question, arguing that historical and contemporary theorizing about the sublime faces a kind of irresolvable dilemma. The dilemma is essentially this: A theory of the sublime can either explain the sense of epistemological transcendence by making use of “problematic ontological commitments,” (p. 16) such as the claim to a transcendent reality or supersensible noumenal self as moral law-giver (Kant); or such a theory can shed these problematic ontological commitments (Sircello, Budd), but then will have tremendous difficulty in explaining the elevated pleasure—as opposed to mere cognitive frustration or existential anxiety—that seems to characterize genuinely sublime experience.1 For the past few years, I have been working on reconstructing historical theories of sublime experience for use in contemporary aesthetics, and I appreciate Forsey’s challenge to aestheticians like myself to become more methodologically self-conscious. In this response I aim to show that such theoretical work in aesthetics can survive the above dilemma.2 1

In fact, Forsey poses the difficulty as a trilemma, with the third unpalatable option as offering mere descriptions of sublime experience, but this pretty obviously does not amount to an actual “theory” of the sublime, so I ignore the option here. 2 For fuller reconstructions of a theory of the sublime for contemporary environmental aesthetics, please see my “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 53,2 (2013). For a theory of the sublime for contemporary philosophy of art please see my “The

70

Chapter VI

Before attempting to resolve the dilemma, one needs to clarify what a “theory of the sublime” is supposed to do. Forsey provides some guidance here: Such a theory should answer fundamental questions to the tradition like “What kinds of objects are sublime? What does the sublime tell us about ourselves as subjects? And, centrally, What does sublime experience illuminate about the limits of our access to the world?” (p. 15). Indeed, a theory of the sublime should answer such questions, but they are actually secondary to the first order of business: To illuminate a certain family of aesthetic responses that many people have proclaimed to have, especially in the European tradition and especially since the 18th century to the present. Further, it is important to be clear on the nature of the object of theorizing. Unlike objects such as H2O, the laws of thermodynamics, or the Grand Canyon, sublime responses are subjective human phenomena. By “subjective” I do not mean to say that there is no objectivity to judgments of the sublime—in fact I think they can be intersubjectively valid3—rather what I mean by “subjective” is that the sublime consists in a subject’s affective and cognitive response to perceptual experience of an object like a work of art or, more paradigmatically, an environment. What is more, these subjective responses have a history. As Marjorie Hope Nicolson has argued in her classic study of discourse on the aesthetic experience of mountains, a profound shift in aesthetic attitudes occurred in the West between 1660 and 1800. In the period from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, while there was a notion of the “rhetorical sublime” dating to a treatise by Longinus, there was no corresponding “natural sublime” response in recorded poetry and literature, at least with respect to mountainous landscapes. When mountains figured in literature they were described as “’Nature’s Shames and Ills’ and ‘Warts, Wens, Blisters, Imposthumes’ upon the otherwise fair face of Nature.” But by the eighteenth-century mountains were regarded as “’temples of Nature built by the Almighty’ and ‘natural cathedrals’.”4 Although Nicolson’s study does not treat recorded attitudes to other paradigmatically sublime phenomena, the shift in attitudes toward mountains provides evidence to suggest that the “natural sublime” may not Problem and the Promise of the Sublime,” Suffering Art Gladly, ed. Jerrold Levinson, (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). I have adapted much of the material from these papers for this commentary on Forsey’s article. 3 See my “Problem and Promise” for full argument. 4 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), p. 2.

Commentary on Jane Forsey’s “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”

71

be a perennial human response to vast or powerful nature, but rather, a category of human aesthetic experience that developed when beliefs and attitudes about nature helped to enable a response of “delightful horror” rather than simply horror or repulsion. Additional support for the notion that there are decided shifts in the dynamics of taste in the history of nature appreciation, e.g. with respect to the aesthetic category of the picturesque, has been provided by the work of American cultural historian and critic, John Conron.5 It is thus important for any theory of the sublime to reckon with its likely historical situatedness. Additionally, there is reason to believe that sublime aesthetic response may not be universal among cultures. In a comparative study of everyday aesthetics in the Western and Japanese traditions, Yuriko Saito has pointed to the conspicuous absence of the category of the sublime in Japanese aesthetics, noting that in depictions and poetic descriptions of what would be paradigmatically sublime phenomena in the West (typhoons, for instance,) Japanese artists tend to appreciate, depict or describe the beautiful calm after the typhoon.6 Given the evidence for the historical and cultural-situatedness of aesthetic responses like the sublime, and the intertwined nature of such responses with ideas about the human place in the cosmos, any theory of the sublime had better acknowledge that such responses may come and go in time and be present in certain cultures and not others. In this way, my treatment of the concept of the sublime is very much in the spirit of Lydia Goehr’s work in offering an historical understanding of the concept of the “musical work.” Rather than seeing the “musical work” as a kind of Platonic essence, as Analytic philosophers of music are wont to do, Goehr has argued that the concept has a distinctive origin and history within the European classical music tradition.7 I believe the concept of “the sublime” also has an origin and a history that is intertwined with the selfunderstanding of human beings especially as concerns their relationship with nature. Given these limitations on a theory of sublime aesthetic response, what productive theoretical work might still be done?

5

John Conron, American Picturesque, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 6 Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Ch. 3. 7 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

72

Chapter VI

I. Is there a Contemporary Sublime Response? Although I do not think the sublime response is a perennial, human response to certain natural environments and works of art, nonetheless, experiences of being both overwhelmed and exalted, terrified and exhilarated, and humbled and elevated in the presence of certain natural environments and works of art seem still to be with us in European and Anglo-American descriptions of encounters with nature and art. Thus, this aesthetic response is worth recognition by and theoretical attention from contemporary aestheticians. Consider, for instance, John Muir’s description of his experience of a windstorm in the forest of the Yuba River Valley: There is always something deeply exciting, not only in the sounds of winds in the woods, which exert more or less influence over every mind, but in their varied waterlike flow as manifested by the movements of the trees, especially those of the conifers … The waving of a forest of the giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and sublime … Most people like to look at mountain rivers, and bear them in mind; but few care to look at the winds, though far more beautiful and sublime, and though they become at times about as visible as flowing water ... We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind [atop a Douglas Spruce], that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much.8

Not only does Muir use the term “sublime” to describe his experience of this forest whipped up by a powerful wind storm, his description includes many of the hallmarks of the aesthetic category as theorized by Burke, Kant, and Schopenhauer: the environment is experienced as “deeply exciting,” “indescribably impressive,” and leads Muir to entertain thoughts, by his report for the first time, concerning the existential similarities between trees and human beings, namely, that the lives of trees also involve journeys, and that human journeys “away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings.” More recently, in an article for National Geographic, nature writer Donovan Webster recounts this experience of exploring a volcanic environment on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu:

8

John Muir, The Mountains of California, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), Ch. 10.

Commentary on Jane Forsey’s “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”

73

I lower myself into the volcano. Acidic gas bites my nose and eyes. … The breathing of Benbow’s pit is deafening … each new breath from the volcano heaves the air so violently my ears pop in the changing pressure— the temperature momentarily soars. Somewhere not too far below, red-hot, pumpkin-size globs of ejected lava are flying through the air. … Yet suspended hundreds of feet above lava up to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit that reaches toward the center of the Earth, I’m also discovering there’s more. It is stupefyingly beautiful. The enormous noise. The deep, orangey redlight from spattering lava … It is like nowhere else on Earth.9

Although the author never uses the term “sublime,” the phrase “stupefyingly beautiful” seems synonymous. Webster experiences the volcanic environment as fearsome and recognizes that one significant slip of the rope would annihilate him, but he is able simultaneously to acknowledge the fearsomeness and to bracket the personal anxiety to appreciate the environment aesthetically. His experience is a mixed painful/pleasurable one, painful from the threatening nature of the lava, the “acidic gas” that irritates his nose and eyes, and from the strain on his ears caused by the “enormous noise” and atmospheric pressure, but also exhilaratingly pleasurable due to the display of “deep, orangey red light,” the play of “pumpkin sized globs of ejected lava,” and the environment’s other-worldly appearance. Arguably, Webster is here describing a sublime response without explicitly utilizing the term. Finally, take a description of being “emotionally moved by nature” given by aesthetician, Noël Carroll: Earlier I conjured up a scene where standing near a towering cascade, our ears reverberating with the roar of falling water, we are overwhelmed and excited by its grandeur. People quite standardly seek out such experiences. They are, pretheoretically, a form of appreciating nature. Moreover, when caught up in such experiences our attention is fixed on certain aspects of the natural expanse rather than others—the palpable force of the cascade, its height, the volume of water, the way it alters the surrounding atmosphere, etc. This does not require any special scientific knowledge. Perhaps it only requires being human, equipped with the senses we have, being small, and able to intuit the immense force, relative to creatures like us, of the roaring tons of water. … That is, we may be aroused emotionally by nature, and our arousal maybe a function of our human nature in response to a natural expanse.10 9

Donovan Webster, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, ed. E.O. Wilson, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), pp. 253f. 10 Noël Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty, eds.

74

Chapter VI

Carroll is making a point here against Allen Carlson’s “scientific cognitivist” theory of proper environmental appreciation, but in the process he characterizes a version of the Burkean sublime response of being emotionally “overwhelmed and excited” by the grandeur of the cascade, while attending to its “palpable force” which makes us feel small and vulnerable, but which we behold excitedly at a safe distance.

II. Two Types of Sublime Response, the ‘Thin’ and the ‘Thick’ Much of the theorizing of sublime experience in the 18th and 19th centuries aimed at explicating the source of the pleasure in these kinds of experiences. Of the three central aesthetic categories of the day—the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime—only the sublime threatened to seem paradoxical. While the “idea of beauty,” for Burke, was “founded on pleasure” that of the sublime was “founded on pain;”11 thus he describes sublime pleasure in oxymoronic terms as a “delightful horror” and a “sort of tranquility tinged with terror.”12 More mildly, Addison characterizes sublime response as “a pleasing astonishment,”13 and Kant describes it as a “negative” rather than a “positive pleasure,” in which “the mind is not merely attracted by the object, but is also always reciprocally repelled by it.”14 Philosophers took up the following questions: Why do people feel pleasure with respect to objects that do not conform to the conditions of beauty (e.g. harmony, proportion, delicacy) and are instead experienced as vast, overwhelming, or terrifying? (Burke); whence the pleasure with objects recognized as contrapurposive for our cognitive faculties, or which make us feel powerless or existentially insignificant? (Kant and Schopenhauer.) Deepening the sense of paradoxicality is the view that the experience of the sublime is actually more profound and satisfying than that of the Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 170. Carroll’s essay was originally published in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, eds. S. Kemal and I. Gaskell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 11 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Harvard Classics, vol. 24 (New York: Bartleby.com, 2001), Part III, section 27. 12 Burke, Part IV, section 7. 13 Joseph Addison, The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, (London: H.G. Bohn, 1854) Vol. IV, p. 7, Spectator No. 489. 14 Kant, Critique of the Power, p. 129; Ak. 5: 245.

Commentary on Jane Forsey’s “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”

75

beautiful, Burke calling it the “strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,”15 though, for its mixture with pain, the sublime seems less promising for aesthetic pleasure. From this tradition we may derive a distinction between two phenomenological descriptions of sublime response that I call the “thin” and the “thick” sublime. Burke’s physiological account understands the sublime as an immediate emotional but not highly intellectual aesthetic response (call this the “thin sublime”,) whereas Kant’s (and later Schopenhauer’s) transcendental accounts understand the sublime as an emotional response in which the cognitive faculties play a significant role (call this the “thick sublime”.) Due to the differences in the phenomenological descriptions of sublime response, these accounts also offer differing explanations of the source of sublime pain and pleasure. While the “thin” sublime accounts for the pain as resulting from a perceived threat to the organism and the pleasure as a physiologically generated sense of relief; the transcendental explanations of sublime response understand the pain as deriving from a more reflective recognition of human existential or cognitive limitation, and the pleasure from an equally reflective sense of human transcendence of those limitations. Thus, “thick” sublime response involves reflection on the complexities of the relationship between human beings and the world in which we find ourselves, whereas “thin” sublime response does not, and consists rather in a bare cognitive appraisal of the object and immediate affective arousal. In Kant and Schopenhauer’s versions of thick sublime response, these reflections involve a felt recognition of human rational and moral freedom that is revealed precisely in the face of vast or powerful natural environments or works of art which threaten the subject either existentially or psychologically, with annihilation or with complete insignificance. Given the transcendental-idealist background for both of these philosophers, one cannot know that one is free because freedom belongs to the “supersensible substrate” of nature or more specifically to the intelligible character. But insofar as sublime experiences afford a felt recognition (albeit not genuine knowledge) of freedom they are very important systemically.

15

Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, Part I, Ch. 7.

76

Chapter VI

III. Addressing Forsey’s Dilemma In order to utilize the Kantian or Burkean theories of the sublime for contemporary aesthetics, however, one should answer a critic like Forsey, who sees both the thick and the thin sublime as problematic from a theoretical standpoint. With respect to the thick sublime (Kant’s theory), she holds that while the theory can account for the source of pleasurable exaltation (i.e. in a felt recognition of the supersensible part of us, either rational-cognitive or rational-moral,) it gets caught on the first horn of the dilemma in being ineluctably and egregiously tied to ungrounded, speculative-metaphysical ideas incompatible with a secular, scientific world view. Thus the Kantian theory of the sublime seems to involve outmoded transcendent-metaphysical notions that should have no place in a contemporary aesthetic theory. The thin sublime experience would seem to fare better by the lights of Forsey’s criticisms, as it sheds such Kantian metaphysical underpinnings, but it gets caught on the second horn of the dilemma, that is, it is unclear without those moral-metaphysical underpinnings how the pleasure from the experience is to be generated at all. The source of pleasure is chalked up to the feeling of relief from cognitive frustration or existential threat, but this seems to open the floodgates to all manner of not-exactly-sublimesounding experiences (giving up on difficult crossword puzzles and iceclimbing) to be classified erroneously as sublime. In particular, Forsey cites the safe arrival home from riding one’s bike in traffic as having all the hallmarks of this kind of non-metaphysically laden sublime response according to Budd’s Burkean theory of the sublime, but she holds that this hardly seems to get at what sublime experience consists in, (p. 12). Let me try to respond to the difficulties Forsey has raised for both thick and thin theories of sublime response in turn. With respect to the thick variety of sublime experience, recall Majorie Hope Nicolson’s account of the change that took place from 1600 to 1800 with respect to European aesthetic attitudes toward mountains. When people were in the grip of a theological view that saw mountains as God’s punishment on humankind, as a result of the Fall, it makes sense that mountains would be viewed as ugly and scary. But when people later came to see mountains not as punishment but rather as evidence of God’s supreme power and providence, mountains could be experienced, with this revised religious background as sublime. Can a sublime response to mountains, the starry night sky, or a raging storm at sea be understood nowadays in modern, secular, non-egregiously metaphysical terms?

Commentary on Jane Forsey’s “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”

77

I believe that the metaphysical commitments in a theory of “thick sublime” experience need not be understood as egregious, for one does not need not follow Kant in the positing of an actual “noumenal self” in order to cash out the sense of elevation felt in these experiences. In fact, the “ontological commitments” of the thick sublime may be understood as modest and reasonable, for instance, as a commitment to an experience of human freedom and moral responsibility that is very unlikely to be satisfactorily explained in naturalistic terms; or the experience of the simultaneous limitations on human knowledge but also the persistent and awe-inspiring desire of human beings to push all cognitive boundaries. Understood in these ways, an explication of the source of the elevating pleasure need only be committed to a modest degree of mysterianism, i.e. the view that there are certain really persistent mysteries of the human condition relating to, for example, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind and brain, the feeling of free-will and moral responsibility. A modern scientific world view might rule out certain “ontological commitments” as extravagantly speculative, but it remains consistent with scientific understanding to hold that certain facets of the human condition are likely to remain forever mysterious, such as the oddness of the human being’s feeling of free will; the apparent ability to act in a non-egoistic fashion, say, even in the face of an existentially threatening storm; or the strangeness of a human being’s desire to fathom nature in its totality, as well as the recognition of the difficulty (and perhaps impossibility) of this goal. In short, such reflection in the course of an aesthetic encounter seems perfectly consistent with what our best science tells us about the relationship between human beings and nature. Science does not explain many of the oddities of the human condition nor does it rule out a train of aesthetic reflection on these and other very old, philosophical questions that tend to be sparked by vast and overwhelming environments or works of art. Take for example the experience of overwhelming finitude but also exalting reflection on the place of humanity in the environment in an encounter with the starry night sky. Such response will likely persist no matter how much scientific, modern understanding one brings to the encounter. Given the vastness of the phenomenon, the long duration of the stars, and the mind-boggling scale of the universe, it seems likely for a subject’s experience of the thick sublime to be only deepened by scientific understanding, by prompting more-informed reflection on how infinitesimally small she is in the universe, how short a human lifespan is, and even how brief the human species has walked this planet, in

Chapter VI

78

comparison with the spatial and temporal vastness of the night sky. In sum, feelings of awe and wonder at various facets of the universe, reflection on human cognitive and existential limitations, as well as reflection on human powers and our strangely exceptional status within nature, have been and can be for many people, awakened through aesthetic experience with vast or threatening natural environments, and similar works of art, and it seems perfectly appropriate—by the lights of our best science—that this should be the case. In short, the “problematic ontological commitments” that Forsey believes are ineluctably linked to such experience are not so ontological and not so problematic after all. With respect to the “thin sublime,” we need to take up Forsey’s challenge for a theory to distinguish between a bona fide sublime response rather than an experience of mere relief. To help think through this, recall Carroll’s description of being immediately emotionally moved by a perceptual encounter with a cascade: [imagine] a scene where standing near a towering cascade, our ears reverberating with the roar of falling water, we are overwhelmed and excited by its grandeur. … when caught up in such experiences our attention is fixed on certain aspects of the natural expanse rather than others—the palpable force of the cascade, its height, the volume of water, the way it alters the surrounding atmosphere, etc. This does not require any special scientific knowledge. Perhaps it only requires being human, equipped with the senses we have, being small, and able to intuit the immense force, relative to creatures like us, of the roaring tons of water. … That is, we may be aroused emotionally by nature, and our arousal may be a function of our human nature in response to a natural expanse.16

In contrast with Carroll’s description, here are some of the experiences Forsey thinks might be erroneously caught in the expansive net of a Burkean “relief” theory of the sublime (Budd): [W]hat of the cognitive failure I have occasionally experienced in the face of the New York Times crossword puzzle, or complex mathematical problems that truly humble me? What of the rush athletes experience from dangerous sports such as ice-climbing or heli-skiing? What of the vulnerability I feel when riding my bicycle in rush-hour traffic and making it—just—home safely? Why are these sorts of experiences not also sublime or, at any rate, equal candidates for the kind of pleasure that a subjective account would properly call sublime? (p. 12).

16

Carroll, loc.cit.

Commentary on Jane Forsey’s “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”

79

It seems the key to responding to Forsey’s worries about a nonmetaphysical theory promiscuously casting too wide a net onto nonsublime experiences is to ensure that the phenomenology laid out by such a theory is genuinely aesthetic (i.e. involves attention to the perceptual features of the object/environment) and includes in addition to some sort of feeling of limitation (cognitive or existential) a feeling of exaltation, not just mere relief. With this additional stipulation on the theory of the thin sublime, the experiences Forsey describes above could be candidates for sublime response but only provided that they involve some genuine aesthetic attention to the object/environment, as well as an emotional response that involves a feeling of being overwhelmed (limitation) and excited (exaltation.) As described in bare form above, the experience of crossword puzzles, ice-climbing and bike-riding through traffic don’t sound sublime, but they could very well be if they involved actual aesthetic attention and excited/exalted emotional arousal with a fearsome, overwhelming work or environment. Thus, to sum up, I think the key to overcoming Forsey’s dilemma for a theory of the thick sublime is to show that the metaphysical commitments really amount to no more than a modest mysterianism about certain aspects of the human condition, and is, accordingly, not egregiously speculative. And the key to resolving the promiscuity problem for a theory of the thin sublime is to spell out to a greater extent in the theory that the phenomenology must involve aesthetic attention and emotional arousal of an exalted nature. In closing this commentary, I should add that Paul Crowther has offered what I believe is an excellent and underappreciated start at articulating a theory of the contemporary, artistic sublime. He gives a three-fold account of an artistic sublime that is loosely based on the framework of Kant’s theory, an elaboration of what I have been calling the thick sublime. Crowther jettisons, however, Kant’s faculty psychology and the pivotal role played by the recognition of one’s rational vocation, proffering the following definition: the sublime is an item or set of items which, through the possession or suggestion of perceptually, imaginatively, or emotionally overwhelming properties, succeeds in rendering the scope of some human capacity vivid to the senses.17

17

Crowther, The Kantian Sublime, p. 162.

Chapter VI

80

He holds that this (thick) artistic sublime response to art may arise in three main ways: 1. “through the overwhelming perceptual scale of a work making vivid the scope of human artifice” 2. “through a work’s overwhelming personal significance making vivid the scope of artistic creation” 3. “through the imaginatively overwhelming character of some general truth embodied in a work, making vivid the scope of artistic expression.”18

Much more needs to be said to put flesh on the bones of this theory, obviously, but I wanted to offer one valuable attempt to theorize the artistic sublime in a manner that does not involve “problematic ontological commitments.” Notwithstanding the looseness with which the term “sublime” is often used in the academy and in the artworld today, I believe that two coherent accounts of sublime response—thin and thick sublime response—have emerged from the tradition of aesthetic theorizing that can withstand Forsey’s criticisms. Such theories of the sublime are not just possible, they’re even quite helpful in contemporary environmental aesthetics and philosophy of art.

18

Ibid., p. 161.

CHAPTER VII ON JANE FORSEY’S CRITIQUE OF THE SUBLIME JENNIFER A. MCMAHON

The sublime is an aspect of experience that has attracted a great deal of scholarship, not only for scholarly reasons but because it connotes aspects of experience not exhausted by what Descartes once called clear distinct perception. That is, the sublime is an experience of the world which involves us in orientating ourselves within it, and this orientation, our human orientation, elevates us in comparison to the non-human world according to traditional accounts of the sublime. The sublime tells us something about our relation to the world rather than anything about the world per se. Nonetheless there is an objective sense of the sublime in that the narratives involved are culturally endorsed rather than invented by an individual. This means that objects can be judged worthy or not of evoking experiences of the sublime. In other words, it is not an idiosyncratic matter. Immanuel Kant’s formulation of this involved explaining how such an experience is possible in terms of his system of the mind. Jane Forsey notes that Kant takes the features of the sublime as given and extrapolates from them certain features of the mind as if any concept of the sublime must implicate the mental architecture of his account, (p. 11). Further to this she argues that in fact the concept of the sublime does implicate a particular system of the mind but neither Kant nor anyone else can successfully formulate it because the concept itself frames certain contradictions. According to Forsey, two consequences follow. First she argues that Kant’s system of the mind does not support the features of the sublime; and secondly that no system could as the very concept is incoherent. If Forsey can show that Kant was mistaken in presenting his account as coherent given his commitments, this would be of interest in its own right. However, her stronger claim is that we cannot separate any concept of the

82

Chapter VII

sublime out from Kant’s theoretical underpinnings. That the way the features of the mind are meant to operate in experiences of the sublime are contradictory simply points to the fatal flaws in the whole concept. Her conclusion is that there is no coherent account of the sublime available to us. I will argue that Forsey bases her reasoning on the assumption that a foundational empiricist or direct perception holds; and she interprets Kant’s notions of imagination, understanding, and reason as though they are grounded in just such an account of perception. This is revealed in her interpretation of Kant’s phrase “beyond cognition.” Once this foundational is replaced with an account of perception more aligned with current research on perception, both philosophical and empirical, then an account of the sublime is available. Further to this however, I argue that what constitutes the narrative of the sublime is historically contingent. Before setting out my arguments, I consider Forsey’s argument in more detail.

Forsey on the Sublime Forsey begins by presenting Guy Sircello’s account of the sublime as involving an experience which goes beyond human powers of knowledge and as such is “inaccessible to human thought.”1 Forsey tells us that Sircello in researching theories of the sublime found that the general idea was that our cognitive powers have limited access to reality and that certain experiences which we call sublime involve going beyond the limitations of our cognitive capacity. Forsey lists a number of 18th century British philosophers as holding this view, such as Joseph Addison, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and Edmund Burke in addition to the twentieth century French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard.2 Sircello argues that the traditional way of understanding our capacity for the sublime is incoherent. I represent Sircello’s version of the argument in the form of a dilemma as follows. An experience of the sublime involves going beyond our cognitive powers and entails acknowledging something in the world. If an experience of the sublime goes beyond cognition, then cognition is not engaged. If it entails acknowledging something in the world then cognition is engaged. Cognition cannot be both not engaged and engaged at the same time. 1

Sircello, “How is a Theory,” discussed by Forsey, pp. 2ff et passim. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-garde” [1984], The Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. Clive Cazeaux, (New York: Routledge, 2nd. ed., 2011), discussed by Forsey, p. 3f.

2

On Jane Forsey’s Critique of the Sublime

83

Hence the traditional view of the sublime is incoherent. Forsey refers to the account of the sublime targeted here as the first formulation of the sublime which she associates with Kant. Sircello wants to salvage an account of the sublime. To this end he points out that people do in fact describe the objects of their sublime experiences (p. 5). He argues that prima facie it would seem that we must drop the idea that experience of the sublime involves going beyond our cognitive capacity or alternatively we must drop the fact that we are able to identify the objects of the sublime. However, he identifies a third alternative, revealing that the dilemma as I state it is indeed a false one. His alternative suggests that the first premise of the apparent dilemma could be revised by explaining that the experience provides us with a sense of our cognitive limitations rather than actually giving us access to some aspect of reality beyond our cognitive capacities. This is what Forsey refers to as the second formulation of the sublime. Forsey assesses Sircello’s revised account of the sublime, the second formulation as she refers to it, by considering whether Sircello’s revision salvages Kant’s account. She finds that Sircello’s account inherits certain fatal flaws from Kant notwithstanding his adaptation. She points out that Kant emphasized that “nothing that can be an object of the senses is to be called sublime”3 but Kant had already written that “what is sublime, in the proper meaning of the term, cannot be contained in any sensible form but concerns only ideas of reason.”4 I must interject at this point that what Kant writes at ‘245 clearly indicates that what he writes at ‘250 does not mean an object of the senses cannot be experienced as sublime but only that it cannot be considered sublime based only on the fact of it being an object of the senses, as I am sure Forsey would acknowledge. But Forsey argues that Kant is suggesting we access some Platonic realm through experiences of the sublime. I would respond that, on the contrary, for Kant the experience of the sublime is due in part to the way we construe the object or in Kant’s words, “all we are entitled to say is that the object is suitable for exhibiting a sublimity that can be found in the mind.”5 To my mind, this would seem to dissolve the tension that according to Sircello exists between the epistemological (beyond knowing) and ontological (that the object exists) issues within Kant’s account rather than support Forsey’s interpretation of Kant.

3

Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. W.S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), Ak 5: 250. 4 Ibid. Ak 5: 245. 5 Ibid. Ak 5: 245.

84

Chapter VII

While Kant did not hold that the sublime refers to information about an object, he explained that the sublime was expressive of what the object means for us. It is in this respect that the experience goes beyond cognition. That is, he did not mean that experiences of the sublime operate without cognition. The relevant point he wants to make is that the experience of the sublime is constituted in large part by the ascription of meaning and significance to the object and that this meaning is drawn from rational ideas. In this way he shows how our orientation to the world can be infused with the ideas of reason and hence generated by us. Forsey’s critique seems to be based on the false dilemma that either experience is given/caused by perception or alternatively its objects exist in some Platonic realm. In contrast, Kant’s view is that the meaning we ascribe to experience is sourced in us; and furthermore, that the meaning we ascribe to experience shapes that experience. Forsey argues that for Kant the sublime refers to the state of mind in which we realise the superiority of reason over the world as presented by the senses, in support of which she quotes “Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.”6 What is truly sublime for Kant, according to Forsey, and surely she is right in this, is not an object of sense but an object of thought—the superiority of our moral selves over the forces of nature. This idea is sublime. Certain objects might provide the catalyst to experiences of the sublimity of this idea but the objects themselves are not sublime. Our capacity for reason might also be considered sublime. Well and good, but Forsey finds this account incoherent because Kant explains reason as based within a supersensible realm to which the sublime gives us access as if there is some part of reality to which we have no cognitive access. Forsey argues that this is repeated in Sircello’s second formulation of the sublime, according to which the experience alerts us to the limitations of our cognitive powers. This interpretation of Kant can be shown to be rather disingenuous. “Going beyond cognition” given Kant’s notions of aesthetic and rational ideas, clearly does not mean gaining access to some Platonic realm as Forsey would have it. We cognize objects in a determinate and functional way as if they were simply given (as if, perception and cognition of objects exercised only bottom-up processing.) This constitutes theoretical knowledge of objects. However, our moral engagement in the world operates top down. “Going beyond cognition” means attributing more to the object than is given. With aesthetic judgment of beauty we go beyond 6

Ibid. Ak 5: 250; p. 7f.

On Jane Forsey’s Critique of the Sublime

85

cognition and we experience much that is stored in association with the concept of the object that is normally left out of that concept; the fragments, associations, nuances, intimations that are not exhausted by the literal concept we have of an object. In experiences of the sublime the rational ideas play this role which are associated with a broader cultural basis (ideas with no intuition, as rational ideas are, are associated with our moral feeling.) As such, Sircello’s formulation does not address a flaw in Kant’s account but rather revises the moral dimension of it; and Forsey’s targeting of Kant is off the mark. Forsey characterises Kant’s notion of cognitive success as the imagination’s synthesis of “sensory experience for the purposes of determinant judgment,” (p. 10). This process is constituted by imagination being in harmony with the understanding. However, Forsey characterises the Kantian sublime as a matter of cognitive failure which entails that we cannot match understanding with imagination; and this is then linked by Kant to our moral transcendence according to Forsey, (p. 10). As such we can only feel ourselves morally superior but not know it. Because of the significance of our capacity for experiences of the sublime for our moral selves, Forsey thinks this makes the sublime “no longer a truly aesthetic concept” for Kant, (p. 10). Forsey turns back to Sircello’s revised theory of the sublime (the second formulation) according to which the experience of the sublime provides us with a sense of our cognitive limitations rather than actually giving us access to some aspect of reality beyond our cognitive capacities (the latter as we have seen is Forsey’s interpretation of Kant which I have argued is mistaken in my view). As if to corroborate this (mis)interpretation of Kant, Forsey presents an outline of Malcolm Budd’s account of the sublime. But Budd disagrees with Kant on a different point than Forsey but perhaps agrees with Sircello given what I have pointed out is the upshot of Sircello’s view. Budd agrees with Kant (and Sircello) that pleasure results from cognitive dissonance of some kind but argues (against Kant) that no morally relevant conclusions can be drawn from this.7 According to Budd, we simply feel that our insignificance in the face of overpowering natural forces or monolithic forms of nature is somehow pleasurable. In discussing Sircello and Budd, Forsey slides into referring to their ideas on the limitations of cognition and cognitive dissonance respectively as cognitive failure. To this point in the argument Forsey believes she has revealed that sublimity cannot reside in objects of experience when they 7

Sircello, p. 246; p. 11.

86

Chapter VII

are natural objects because the whole feeling of the sublime is about cognitive failure and we cannot know the objects of experience apart from cognition of them. In addition, sublimity cannot reside in objects of experience if they are non-natural either and while Forsey does not provide the reasons for this, presumably the reasons for omitting natural objects apply to non-natural objects, (p. 12). Compounding all this, Forsey argues that when the feeling of cognitive failure is no longer given moral significance, there are no grounds for the pleasure in the sublime and instead we are left with an experience both frustrating and distressing. That is, for a concept of the sublime to be coherent, we need to explain why in cases of the sublime, cognitive failure either suggested or actual, evokes pleasure. When, following Budd, we reject the moral significance of the sublime, Forsey concludes that all kinds of cognitive failure ought to arouse an experience of the sublime which of course they do not, and hence the whole notion of the sublime is called into question. However, my rejection of this way of setting up the concept of the sublime is manyfold. In addition to my particular challenge to the way she has interpreted key aspects of Kant’s text, it is arguable that Forsey has assembled caricatures of Sircello, Budd and Kant on the sublime. None of these authors explained the sublime as a matter of cognitive failure simpliciter. Going beyond cognition is the way Kant describes the process but this is not cognitive failure; instead “going beyond cognition” is conditioned on a cognitive capacity. It describes the path to the emergence of new awareness, new concepts. In his first Critique, Kant explains cognition as involving empirically necessary objects of knowledge. Going beyond cognition means that after object recognition one finds a meaning not presently exhausted by current conceptual frameworks. For Budd the sublime involves cognising our vulnerabilities and insignificance; and for Sircello it involves appreciating our cognitive limitations. None of these examples suggest cognitive failure. Forsey also thinks that the pleasure in these accounts is unmotivated; and she adds to these the account of Lyotard arguing that his account of the sublime fails for the same reason. But each of these authors attempt in their particular way to hook our intuitions into the idea that pleasure is felt in having the entrenched and established concepts of cognition affronted by sublime encounters. Whether it be the imaginative possibilities suggested by power or monolithic size, or the idea of something greater than ourselves of which we feel part, they present likely candidates of pleasure. It might simply be the idea that we can escape our puny myopic concerns for a moment of grand release. Forsey, in referring to the mechanism as cognitive failure, and failing to

On Jane Forsey’s Critique of the Sublime

87

consider the various intellectual bases the various authors suggest could ground this pleasure, sets her targets up as strawmen. Forsey’s own account of the sublime rejects that the sublime is a property of the object and rejects that the experience is based on cognitive failure; but arguably so do the other accounts that she canvases. Forsey claims that Sircello excludes the experiential object altogether from his account but this is not correct either. Sircello revises the first formulation in what it means to go beyond cognition. In the first formulation it was said to mean going beyond the human powers of knowledge and accessing what is normally inaccessible to human thought. His new interpretation (the second formulation) as I wrote above was that the sublime simply revealed to us our cognitive limitations. Sircello did not reject the thesis that we know what it is that prompts this experience, which is to say, he included the experienced object in his account. To interpret his second formulation in terms of a mental state devoid of an object is to distort his meaning. Forsey claims that in the accounts canvassed there is no mention of the sublime being shared or communicable, but in Kant’s account the fact that the experience involves an experience of rational ideas is to point to the objectivity of the experience; the fact that it is in the public not private realm. Objects can be judged apt to evoke experiences of the sublime or not. Reasons can be given for this judgment. Characteristics of an object can be pointed out as relevant or not. If Forsey’s way of characterising traditional theorising about the sublime was accurate, the concept would indeed be incoherent. But this is not the case. When Forsey analyses the accounts regarding the feelings involved in the sublime, matters do not improve. She criticises Budd for providing an inconclusive account of the sublime in not acknowledging that the feeling aroused by the sublime is intentional. If he did this, she argues, he would have to explain why feelings of awe and incomprehension were involved rather than other feelings. She criticises Sircello for adopting a notion of feeling which is explicitly non-intentional. Sircello, in his methodology, employs poetic language in an attempt to demonstrate or exemplify the experience of the sublime rather than explain it, and on this basis Forsey argues that Sircello rejected analyses of the sublime as not possible. Forsey concludes that no philosophical account of the sublime is available. The options she sees herself as having canvassed either (i) include contradictory premises (first formulation); or (ii) give us experiential access to something beyond the phenomenal which is at worst implausible and at best unconstrained (second formulation); and in some cases (iii) inadvertently restrict the sublime to the private, idiosyncratic and whimsical

88

Chapter VII

while also removing any basis for pleasure (by omitting moral significance). The problem with Forsey’s overall thought about the structure of the sublime is she assumes a foundationalist account of perception as expressed by the false dilemma: objects of perception and cognition are either given (bottom-up) or they exist in a Platonic realm. In what follows, I will trace certain ideas found in the writing of a selection of philosophers concerned with how culturally endorsed objects acquire their meaning and significance. They do not all mention the sublime explicitly but what they all address is the content of cognition which goes beyond what is given in perception.

Updating the Sublime: a Unity of Nature or a Patchwork of Cultural Difference Emily Brady rewrites the Kantian sublime.8 She claims her account tracks the implications for the narrative involved in the experience of the sublime of Kant’s aesthetic and moral theory better than Kant did himself but I am not going to evaluate Brady’s account on these terms. Instead, I want to consider her view in terms of a plausible contemporary experience of the sublime: plausible both in terms of practice and theoretical commitments. Instead of the sublime involving a sense of awe or terror in the face of nature followed by a pleasurable feeling of our superiority over nature, she argues that it is not a feeling of superiority which we feel, but a sense of our integration into nature. This she suggests is the basis of the pleasure of the sublime experience. Brady positions her view against much Anglo-analytical aesthetics such as Budd’s account of the sublime in that she does not sharply separate the aesthetic from the ethical. Nonetheless she does follow Budd’s naturalisation of the Kantian sublime. Budd explains our initial response to immense magnitudes of size or power as a feeling of our own insignificance which while initially shocking, is experienced as pleasurable.9 One can imagine that primed by awe and then shock, the lack of our own hand in what we experience reduces stress and tension, and is ultimately pleasing. However, Brady further updates the narrative for this feeling. Yet she does not understand her narrative as historically contingent. Had she done so her account would have been in line with the post-modernists from whom she is at pains to explicitly distinguish herself. Unlike Lyotard, for example,

8 9

Brady, The Sublime. Budd, “Delight in the Natural.”

On Jane Forsey’s Critique of the Sublime

89

Brady treats the sublime in art as secondary.10 But this is not the only way she sees her account as distinguished from Lyotard’s post-modernism.11 Brady not only naturalises the sublime by grounding her notion of the sublime on some natural fact about us, she goes further by factoring this natural fact into the experiential object of the sublime. While it is obviously true that everything of which we are capable must have some fact about the human creature at its base, Brady makes this the experienced content of the sublime. Like Kant, Brady understands the experience of the sublime as orientating us in the world. Yet, for Brady, the way we feel in nature is somehow natural, culturally unmediated. She treats the sublime as an aesthetic category and ethical in that it grounds a particular responsible attitude to the natural environment. Brady does not think that how we fill out the narrative of the sublime is historically contingent. She sees herself as advancing and improving the way we understand the implications of the structural aspects of Kant’s sublime. Brady treats the sublime, correctly in my view, as primarily an experience involved in orientating oneself to the world in a way that makes one feel at home in it. The assumption is that an attitude, perspective, or outlook is required in order to want to know the world. The awe and wonder of the sublime arouses a sense of something greater than ourselves but fear turns to pleasure in our sense of feeling part of this greater thing, which in Brady’s account is nature. Of course for Kant the point was the way this opened up a gulf between what could count as power in nature and what could count as power within us. In nature it was dumb force; in us autonomous reason. And this is the aspect of the sublime downplayed in the accounts discussed by Forsey; and in Brady’s update. In contrast, if we treated the sublime as an experience of the world which orientates us in a way which works against feelings of alienation, then we have a much broader structure to deal with. In Kant’s broadest characterisation of such an experience when he was discussing the enthusiasm of religion, he referred to a subjective principle serving an objective one.12 If we consider the sublime in this light, we could acknowledge that the kind of experience which might have that effect would suggest different explanations and prompt different narratives relative to cultural and historical contexts, both in experience and theoretically. For example, whether one understands oneself as partaking in the supersensible or feeling integrated into nature, would depend on whether one shares cultural commitments with Kant or Brady, 10

Brady, The Sublime, Ch. 5. Lyotard, “Sublime and Avant-Garde.” 12 Kant, Ak 8: 137. 11

90

Chapter VII

respectively. It is the contingent nature of the narrative of the sublime that is in evidence when we compare the account of Brady with another contemporary account such as that of Christine Battersby. Christine Battersby has written extensively on the way our concepts are culturally contingent including the sublime. She argues that while the way Kant characterised the sublime might have been apt for his time, it is out of date now. Battersby thinks that the sublime as construed by Kant, is a structure we impose on experience as a way of domesticating what would otherwise terrorise us. This is why, according to Battersby, Kant explains the sublime in terms of the superiority of reason over the imagination because imagination cannot grasp what reason can impose order upon. So far this is a fairly standard interpretation. But Battersby argues further that finding pleasure in domesticating the other is dated and is no longer a normatively valid or effective response to world events. She writes that Kant’s sublime takes as a “norm a particular kind of Westernised (and gendered) psyche that fears the ‘other’ and the infinite power of nature.”13 Battersby argues that for a contemporary western mind, this narrative gains little traction. Instead, diversity, the other, minorities, etc., are part of how we construe ourselves and as such, today the sublime, the capacity to find the world a place in which we want to be, in spite of the worst evidence to the contrary, utilizes very different structures. Worryingly, this may be a resistance to the actual Battersby muses, but the sublime, according to Battersby, has always contained an element of this. If we recognize the sublime as that aspect of experience that prompts a narrative about our place in the world, then we can see how it would manifest differently at different times, in different cultures. This is because the sublime is not merely given. It may be prompted by the encounter between reason and nature. But the meaning given to this encounter will be based on cultural beliefs and commitments which vary over time.14 This is the sense in which the sublime goes beyond cognition. It is not noncognitive but the significance of the object goes beyond what is given in perception.

13

Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, (NewYork: Routledge, 2007), p. 193. 14 Cf. Putnam’s sense of meaning, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

On Jane Forsey’s Critique of the Sublime

91

Conclusion I would like to thank Jane Forsey for raising the issue of the sublime in the way that she has. For me her critique sets up the issue in terms of the perceptual object as opposed to the meaning and significance we ascribe to it. I have argued that the experience of the sublime involves the latter, and that the content of the narrative of the sublime is culturally contingent. Hence, it is in this sense that the perceptual object, considered on this perceptual basis alone, cannot be the basis of an experience of the sublime. This is because the experience of the sublime goes beyond mere cognition in the meaning and significance we ascribe to it.

CHAPTER VIII THE SUBLIME, REDUX JANE FORSEY

I am honoured that such august company has taken the time to consider my paper on the sublime. These six commentaries are most welcome for they provide me with an extraordinary opportunity to revisit and reconsider my work in their light, as well, perhaps, in the light of my more current philosophical preoccupations. Let me begin with Margolis’ “Aside.” Margolis has seen and done much in his life, including fighting in the Second World War. When he writes of the utter perilousness and risks of human existence, he writes from a well-spring of experience so many of us have never had, and can scarcely imagine. What the standard theories of the sublime seek to highlight, Margolis urges us to realize, is in fact an ineliminable commonplace of the human condition. The sublime he considers is what is essential to human life, with its uncertainties, risks, contingencies, reversals and changes, all of which give rise to fear, astonishment, commitment and even faith. Margolis counts himself a pragmatist—what he offers as an approach to the sublime strikes me rather as existentialist. In experiencing these moments of awareness, Margolis seems to suggest that we sublimate our perils and our fears in the sense that we refine or purify or even idealize them, as we recognize them for what they really are: elements of a broader human lived experience. The sublime then is a gestalt moment that reveals a greater whole than any individual instance of our lives: it brings with it an awareness of the precariousness and contingency of human existence itself. In this, Margolis is less far from Malcolm Budd’s formulation of the sublime than he might imagine. He too rejects the moralizing aspect of a Kantian account: there is no prescription or reward in what Margolis offers, unless our heightened awareness brings its own reward. But, like Budd’s suggestion, Margolis’ brief account of the sublime does not resolve the problems as I had posed them. First, in the reference to some greater “meaning” to human life, the Margolisian sublime strives after the

94

Chapter VIII

transcendent, and suggests that our glimpse of it engenders our reactions. Even for the Existentialists, this is a paradox: we realize simultaneously that there is no truth at all but this realization counts as a greater “truth” about the human condition than our mundane lives generally provide. While Margolis has perhaps well-captured a moment in each of our lives, large or small, what he calls to mind are the poetics of Sartre, Camus, and Kafka, what Sircello termed “sublime discourse” that is expressive of the sublime but that does not aid in an analysis of this purported experience, and that in fact resists such analysis. (This may be more of a problem for me than for Margolis). While I respect Margolis’ pragmatist stand regarding the conditionality of human inquiry, still, the heart of the question remains: what makes this kind of experience a particularly aesthetic one? Budd attempted to tie the recognition of our vulnerability and insignificance to a moment of felt pleasure, as though the satisfaction we gain from such negative realizations is sufficient to count these experiences as aesthetic, and as specifically sublime. Indeed the link between the aesthetic and pleasure is almost as old as the notion of the aesthetic itself. But this link is inherently problematic, I suggest, and requires elucidation, which the notion of the sublime serves to highlight. In this case it courts the paradox of negative emotion (if I may add another paradox to the list), that we aestheticians have not yet adequately resolved. That is, why would a purportedly negative experience of contingency and peril give rise to pleasure? And even if we can claim that such an experience is pleasurable, what distinguishes this pleasure or experience from other pleasures and experiences in the spectrum of human life that marks it as specifically aesthetic (and in this case, sublime)? When Camus writes of Sisyphus’ “silent joy”, that one must imagine him happy in his fate, are we to deduce that his joy is a species of aesthetic pleasure? Or that Sisyphus’ experience is aesthetic because it is pleasurable? Budd does not offer an account of why a realization of our insignificance provides a moment of pleasure (indeed, for Camus, acceptance is a form of philosophical suicide.) Moreover, Margolis does not allow that this experience brings with it any pleasure at all, which makes the question of why the Margolisian sublime is an aesthetic experience all the more urgent. In terms of the paradox of negative emotion, it seems that there are three options open to us for its resolution. First, we can maintain the link between the aesthetic and pleasure, and can claim that the sublime is pleasurable, but then seek to distinguish this pleasure as either a phenomenologically different kind from the pleasures of the beautiful, the agreeable, the erotic and so on, or claim that these experiences have a

The Sublime, Redux

95

different source or structure that nevertheless yields pleasure and makes them aesthetic. (Burke’s notion of “delight” is perhaps an instance of the former; one of the sophistications of Kant’s work is that he chose the latter route.) The second option is to divorce the aesthetic from pleasure, and argue that the sublime, and perhaps experiences of the ugly or the horrific, yield no pleasure at all but are nonetheless aesthetic for some other reason (that needs to be determined); and the third option is to claim that as distinctly unpleasurable, the sublime and like negative experiences are therefore not aesthetic at all. Margolis, as I say, does not mention pleasure, which leaves me guessing between options two and three. And both are difficult. If the sublime is negatively pleasurable, the onus is on Margolis (et al.) to explain what makes it an aesthetic experience (and how it differs from other negative aesthetic experiences.) If, however, the sublime is not aesthetic, we can perhaps cast it out of the roster of the discipline’s abiding concerns. But this is not exactly a “fix”: something, Margolis seems to suggest, singles it out as different from other kinds of experiences or realizations. If not aesthetic, then what, precisely, is it? Shifting the onus of analysis to existential angst—clearing our desks, as it were, brings us no closer to a theory of the sublime than when we began. This brings me to Rachel Zuckert’s remarks. She flatters me to suggest that my article should bouleverser her accomplished scholarship, although I think it has been less of an upheaval than she claims. Zuckert is clearly aware of the problems of the paradox of negative emotion (what she calls the paradox of tragedy, and what Hanauer calls the paradox of pleasure) and this provides a running subtext in her kind and thoughtful comments (as indeed it did in my original paper). Of the three options I have briefly canvassed, (and I am certainly open to suggestions for more), Zuckert sticks to the first: the sublime does provide its pleasures, although it is unclear in Zuckert’s remarks whether she sees these as phenomenologically and affectively different from the aesthetic pleasures of beauty, or as having a different structure or source. On the one hand, she suggests the ambiguous pleasures of the sublime are like pleasures in the beautiful (as equally the result of the liveliness of our own cognitive activity in response to natural objects), on the other hand, these pleasures, unlike those of beauty, offer material for fearful confusion and are risky and unsettling, which for Kant the beautiful is assuredly not. While Zuckert abjures her earlier reading of Kant as providing a merely phenomenological description of the sublime, she does seem to distinguish its hedonic tone from the hedonic tone of other aesthetic experiences, while simultaneously defending an epistemological account

96

Chapter VIII

as offering a structurally different experience. So is the sublime to be distinguished by its affect, or by the particular play of the cognitive faculties in this singular experience? If it is only the latter, an epistemological account of the sublime does not answer the question Zuckert quotes me as asking: why an experience of our cognitive limitations and even failures should produce pleasure, rather than frustration, humiliation and the like, because on the first option, if pleasure is not the result, the sublime is not an aesthetic experience. Of course, one can do both: provide an account of the sublime as being a different kind of experience that yields qualitatively distinct pleasures. But the relation between these two factors is important. Frankly, I do not think that the sublime, the beautiful and so on can be distinguished by the kinds of pleasures they bring. Hedonic tone is subjective: it is what it feels like to have a certain pleasure (or pain). And as subjective, this affective response it not going to ground an aesthetic theory, no matter how poetic our descriptions of it may be. This is where Burke’s account fails, for instance, and where Zuckert’s defense of an epistemological account would fail too, were it dependent upon her description of the kinds of pleasures we feel in the face of the sublime. That I feel this—whatever it may be—(never mind that I can accurately state that this is the particular feeling I am having) is not sufficient to determine this feeling as aesthetic, never mind sublime. So an account of the structure of the experience is at least necessary to distinguish the sublime from the beautiful and to mark these experiences as aesthetic rather than as some other sort. It seems we agree that the sublime (at least on a Kantian account) packs a one-two punch, moving from fear, failure, confusion and the like, to thrill, joy or exhilaration. The question is what precisely yields the second punch? Here Zuckert takes me to task on a matter of Kantian interpretation. I had thought I was being careful to avoid epistemological terms like “knowing” a “truth” about our supersensible being when I described the moment of transcendence that the sublime engenders. I was not careful enough: re-reading my paper I do indeed mention “awareness,” “disclosure,” “seeing” and “realization” which can easily be interpreted as my claiming that we come to have knowledge of an ontologically transcendent object: ourselves. Zuckert is absolutely right to correct me on this, for knowledge of the supersensible is precisely what Kant denies us. But her correction is subtler still: the faculty of reason (that can “think” of objects beyond experience) is not itself an object of this thought, and hence we do not have the ontological transcendence that I claimed was implicit even in a revised epistemological formulation. What we exhilarate in, for Zuckert, is the cognitive activity itself, the breaking free from our

The Sublime, Redux

97

senses, and the freedom “perhaps to think of things that are different from anything that exists at all,” (p. 27). When we feel our freedom of thought we transcend our cognitive failure and experience the particular pleasure of the sublime. This is a graceful and intelligent move, but I am not sure that Zuckert’s proposal can be borne out. Thought is intentional: it takes an object. And even if this object is a mere idea of reason—that may be (or even quite purposely be) fictional—it remains at least a possible transcendent object to which our thoughts are directed. So Kant writes that an experience of the sublime “reveals the consciousness of an unlimited capacity” (Ak 5: 259) in us, and that the dynamical sublime will “allow us to discover within ourselves” a certain mental capacity of resistance, (Ak 5: 261). Even if what we strive after is fictional, strive after it we do—it is the object of our rational speculations, that which we discover, or is revealed, when we think beyond the sensible. Whether or not it exists is not the point: that we postulate or speculate about the existence of something beyond what we can know is precisely the ontological yearning that is implicit in even the most careful epistemological account of the sublime, Zuckert’s included. Without this possible, perhaps fictional object, what is it to which our thoughts are directed? Zuckert suggests that the mere activity of thinking is itself what provides the pleasure: that we do feel our freedom of thought and this feeling of freedom is exhilarating. However, to return to the Existentialists for a moment, why would we suppose a sense of freedom be pleasurable? Why would it not be met with angst, dread, or terror? In the face of fear and incomprehension, is the sense that “hey, I can freely think all kinds of things even if they’re not true” really our response? And a joyful one? Without a stronger moral or cognitive upshot as Zuckert calls it, when the warning light indicating “cognitive failure” (or “immanent annihilation”) goes off, it seems equally plausible that we remain mired in feelings of incomprehension and terror that do not yield the pleasure of the second punch. Tom Hanauer concerns himself with the paradox of negative emotion in his commentary as well, and canvasses Katerina Deligiorgi’s attempt to resolve it by suggesting something similar to Zuckert: that the pleasure of the sublime lies in our awareness of our human agency (as merely formal). But Hanauer rejects this attempt: either our “identity as active beings” (in Deligiorgi’s terms) is distinctly unpleasurable in paradigmatic cases of both the mathematical and dynamical sublime, or that awareness and activity are not clearly rapturous but perhaps minimally pleasurable, or even merely resigned (resulting in a Buddhist shrug, or a Stoic chuckle,

98

Chapter VIII

perhaps.) Hanauer reminds us that for Kant we experience the objects of the sublime as contra-purposive, as strongly resisting our ends (of cognition or physical survival), and that a working theory of the sublime can neither neglect the pain these experiences produce, nor fail to explain a transcendent pleasure thereby (and somehow) achieved. The realization of my agency—that I can do some things, or, with Zuckert, think some things—will be insufficient to produce that pleasure if I remain powerless to actually achieve the particular ends (of comprehension or survival) that I have set. His suggestion for a way out—of the paradox of negative emotion, and of the problem of ontological transcendence that I addressed—adds, perhaps, a fourth option to my list, as does Robert Clewis’, so I’ll try to take them together here. Yes, we need to sort out the pleasure of the sublime (he does not say how) but we also must take the sublime object to be the proper bearer of the aesthetic predicate rather than ourselves. In this, Hanauer rejects or completely disregards Kant’s doctrine of subreption and flirts with (if he does not actually endorse) a form of aesthetic realism. For Kant it is contradictory to claim an aesthetic judgement is objective because such a judgement would perforce be cognitive rather than reflective, (Ak 20: 223). In the case of the sublime, a subreption is particularly dangerous in that we would be giving our positive “approval” to an object that is seen as contra-purposive (Ak 5: 245) and thus be debasing ourselves in the face of these objects rather than rising above them. This is why in §29 Kant claims that without “culture” or the development of moral ideas, the sublime will appear to us to be only “repellent” (Ak 5: 265) because our judgements will stop at the first punch: this thing is incomprehensible, or terrifying, and so on. What pleasure can there be in such judgements, other than some cognitive satisfaction that we’ve described the thing correctly? Clewis thinks that a subreption in the matter of the sublime is not so dangerous or debasing, and takes heart in Kant’s noting that “nature is thus sublime...” from Ak 5: 255. But taken in context, Kant’s remark is as follows: that nature is thus sublime “in those of its appearances the intuitions of which bring with them the idea of its infinity” and he concludes that paragraph by noting that the inadequacy of the imagination so involved “must lead the concept of nature to a supersensible substratum ... and hence allows not so much the object as rather the disposition of the mind in estimating it to be judged sublime,” (Ak 5: 256, my italics). Without being elevated by ideas of the infinite or supersensible, we would indeed be debasing ourselves in the face of these experiences. Clewis, too, must account for the second punch.

The Sublime, Redux

99

Hanauer’s excursion into aesthetic realism is intended as a corrective of my concern that Budd’s account allows that anything at all could be sublime, thus surrendering its explanatory force. Hanauer suggests that it is not the types of objects themselves that are sublime, but certain qualities that they possess. Thus anything that is overwhelming in its size, power or greatness will be a sublime object. This is not a straight-up realism such as, for instance, Hogarth’s, for whom anything that has the quality of a certain serpentine line will thereby be beautiful. And I do not mean to dismiss realism out of hand, just to remind us that it has a number of epistemological and ontological challenges that it must also surmount. Clewis, too, turns to a more objectivist aesthetics and claims that objects possessing certain attributes, such as being vast, powerful and/or potentially threatening, novel, striking or rare are those that are at least eligible to be sublime. The sublime object, he notes, is quite simply, the mountains, the rocks, the starry night. For both Hanauer and Clewis, though, it is not the quality itself of size or greatness that is sufficient for an object to be sublime: its power and so on must also overwhelm us. As Clewis puts it, these qualities are clearly response-dependent; not only are the conditions under which we experience them important (such as a particular, and rare, context or setting) but so too are our affective responses (the objects need to be met with an intense, agreeable feeling of some kind). In effect both Hanauer’s and Clewis’ seemingly novel fourth option collapses into the first: what makes an object sublime is that its various qualities engender (cause?) a particular affective response in us (that is somehow pleasurable (under the right conditions),) and this response still needs to be properly conceptualized. The addition of talk about the qualities the sublime object possesses will net us nothing unless we can explain how and why those qualities move us in a particular way. Hanauer and Clewis deny that being so moved need be a moment of transcendence, however. Hanauer argues that an object need not be wholly inaccessible to us, only obscure—i.e., that we can recognize the type of thing it is but fail to comprehend its parts or their interrelations. The sublime thus falls on a spectrum, Hanauer suggests, rather than being subject to the strong epistemological transcendence that I (and Sircello) claim. It is not that a New York Times crossword (to take an example from my original paper) is wholly incomprehensible to me. I know what type of thing it is, and even what I have to do to solve it. But its solution is obscure, or lies beyond my reach. Hanauer’s point here is well-taken: how often do we confront things that are entirely incomprehensible to us? But this does not help in explaining the distinctiveness of the sublime, or the

100

Chapter VIII

source of its affective content. When faced with the obscurity of the puzzle’s solution, it seems my response would either be determination to crack it, or capitulation. In the former case, I continue my attempts at cognition in the face of frustration; in the latter case I give in to the frustration itself. In neither case do I see the necessary uplifting of my negative affective response into something positive like the exhilaration that even Hanauer admits is required. I might be moved to some kind of pleasure if I completed the puzzle, but then neither the puzzle nor the pleasure would be sublime because it had been cracked. (Granted, Hanauer would say that his focus on the qualities of objects would exclude a crossword puzzle from being sublime at all. My point is that once you reduce complete incomprehension to mere obscurity, I’m not sure that the object retains the power to overwhelm us that Hanauer’s theory needs.) What I think I am groping at here is the idea that the affective uplift (the moral or cognitive upshot) on the first option will have to be directed towards something other than the objects of our frustration, fear, incomprehension and the like. If we take pleasure in them, for their qualities or for their own sakes, then we contradictorily are pleased by the unpleasing. But what is supposed to make the sublime distinct is that we can be moved to pleasure by what should not please us in its contrapurposiveness, and it is this that is so difficult to explain. The reason why I find some kind of ontological transcendence implicit in the structure of the sublime is precisely because the second punch moves us away from the object in front of us toward something else that is in some way elevating. Clewis, on the one hand, notes that the thesis of transcendence is phenomenologically implausible, on the other that the object of the experience can lead perceivers to reflect on themselves, although he notes that such reflexivity is not essential to sublime experience. But then what is? He, like Hanauer, wants the experience of the sublime to reward us with some kind of exhilarating pleasure but he fails to explain its source when such reflection (which I call transcendent) is not involved. What leads, these other times, to the intense feelings he too admits are part of the sublime? To add to the mix, Clewis turns to science: psychological and neurobiological studies. I am uncertain as to how such fields aid in resolving our conceptual problems. That a study can show disengagement from awareness of the self in certain situations, or a de-activation of the superior frontal gyrus in others, simply does not help me to understand what aesthetics is, or how the sublime is a species of it. (That certain neurons fire, or that certain hormones are released, does nothing to explain the phenomenology of love, for example, nor its affective character.) And

The Sublime, Redux

101

a diminishment of self-awareness that can be measured no more marks this response as awe than it marks it as sublime—or as anything else for that matter. It does nothing more than measure the de-activation of the frontal gyrus, or so it seems to me. And while Clewis insists that appeals to scientific evidence need not be taken as reductionist, how else is such evidence to be taken, and how much does it advance our conceptual journey? To claim that the frontal gyrus is the most prominently deactivated area, unique to the highest levels of sublime experience, as Clewis quotes Ishizu and Zeki as stating, is to presuppose that we already know what a sublime experience is, and can now simply measure its effects, which is rather putting the cart before the horse, philosophically speaking. The frontal gyrus is deactivated at other times, such as during sensorimotor processing, so a measurement of this effect could point to any number of different kinds of experiences (or stimuli.) More, that these neuroscientists were surprised at their findings because they counter what philosophical tradition has conceived of as sublime experience precisely acknowledges my concern: their experimental hypothesis involved a presupposition about the nature of the sublime which is just what we philosophers are presently debating. For Clewis, such findings provide evidence that, perhaps, the philosophical tradition is wrong—about reflexive selfawareness—and indeed, perhaps it is. But Clewis, it seems to me, has not yet found a replacement that will either explain the structure of sublime experience, or the source of its particular and intense pleasures. When I turned to Sandra Shapshay’s paper, I found that what I have been groping at thus far is articulated so very clearly that I am both relieved and grateful. Shapshay notes that the sublime is subjective insofar as it consists in a subject’s affective (and cognitive) response to some object, and she agrees with the standard line that this response is two-fold in that it involves being both overwhelmed and exalted, humbled and elevated, and the rest. She offers two ways to theorize the sublime, which she calls “thick” and “thin”, both of which, like Zuckert’s and (inevitably) Hanauer’s suggestions embrace what I have called the first option in response to the problem of negative emotion. But where Zuckert, as I have noted, seems to seek a theory that provides both a phenomenology of the pleasure of the sublime as well as one that explains its structure or source, here Shapshay neatly divides these into two. The thick theory (like Kant’s) begins with an experience of an object (that provides the negative response) but the source of our pleasure lies not in the object itself but involves reflection on the complexities of the relationship between human beings and the world. That is, the source of

102

Chapter VIII

the pleasure lies in what she calls a modest degree of mysterianism directed toward ourselves, the modesty of which is meant to relieve us of the commitment to ontological transcendence that I find troubling—a similar relief that Zuckert has tried to offer. The uplift then lies in us— what Shapshay variously describes as the oddness of our feeling of free will [freedom], our apparent ability to act altruistically [morality], and our desire to fathom nature in its totality [comprehension of the supersensible]. These feelings are awakened through our aesthetic experiences, and are what she calls an aesthetic reflection on very old philosophical questions. Shapshay’s thick account serves to sharpen my earlier concerns: (a) why or how are these feelings pleasurable rather than confounding or troubling? (b) How is a feeling (or awareness) of freedom, morality or rationality less transcendent because it (more modestly) falls short of knowledge? And (c) what makes this reflection particularly aesthetic rather than, say, moral, cognitive, or existential? Even a modest mysterianism strives towards the transcendent, so I claim, whatever it achieves or fails to achieve. These mysteries of the human condition that are opened up on the thick account are precisely the objects to which rational philosophical thought is directed. Certainly I don’t deny that we engage in such speculations, or even that certain (perceptual, somatic) experiences can spark these reflections (I doubt any of us would be philosophers if we thought otherwise.) The key terms that give me pause here, as with Margolis, are, once again, “pleasure” and “aesthetic” (as well as their interrelations.) Shapshay’s thin account of the sublime suggests that we experience an immediate affective arousal (à la Burke) when faced with overwhelming or terrifying objects but Shapshay seeks to distinguish a bona fide sublime response from mere Burkean relief. This, however, appears to be an explicit phenomenology of the kind that I hold in doubt: how are we to determine we are feeling the correct emotion? How does a feeling ground an analysis or theory? Why would a terrifying experience bring us pleasure? Does the specific feeling of that terror mark the experience as sublime? What Shapshay adds here is an additional interesting stipulation: our experiences of sublime response require a genuine aesthetic attention to the object prior to, or as a cause of, our emotive reactions. That is, it seems not to be the qualities the objects possess, as Hanauer urged, but the kind of attention itself that marks the experience as aesthetic (and then, ultimately, sublime.) Shapshay does not say much about this kind of attention, other than that it be directed to an object’s perceptual features, but her comments are suggestive, and lead us for the first time, perhaps, towards option number two.

The Sublime, Redux

103

Like Hanauer’s focus on an object’s qualities, Shapshay’s addition of aesthetic attention is meant to allay what she calls the promiscuity problem of a non-metaphysical theory whereby anything at all might then be sublime. If we can ensure that our phenomenology is genuinely aesthetic, we can then delimit which experiences (or objects) are to be included in it. So if I am not attending to the perceptual features of that crossword puzzle, or not attending to them in the right way, my experience is not an aesthetic one, and my subsequent response is then not sublime. Quite apart from the difficulty in explaining how the same kind of aesthetic attention can give rise to (at least) two very different responses and pleasures—of the beautiful and the sublime—this added stipulation at least seeks to articulate what makes certain experiences particularly aesthetic, prior to, or other than, their affective responses. I think we often take for granted that we know what an aesthetic experience is, or amounts to, but if we can elucidate it more clearly, Shapshay seems to suggest, we can resolve a number of theoretical problems. This at least broaches the second option because it gives primacy to the kind of experience itself and what marks it as aesthetic. In this vein, Shapshay’s remarks bring to mind works by Robert Stecker and Mary Wiseman, both of whom tie aesthetic experience to a certain kind of perception rather than a kind of affective response. For Stecker, this requires “attending in a discriminating manner to forms, qualities or meaningful features of things, attending to these for their own sake or for the sake of this very experience.”1 An aesthetic experience need not result in pleasure, for Stecker: it refers to “the expectation of finding value” rather than its achievement. Even a disappointing or perhaps painful experience is, for him, “one found disvaluable in itself” and thus is still aesthetic provided it involves the proper attention.2 So too with Wiseman, who claims that the term “aesthetic” “refers first of all to a manner of attending to an object presented to the senses” that is careful and focused (in the Cartesian sense of clarity and distinction.)3 This allows her to claim broadly that “any clear and penetrating attention paid to what one senses [counts] as aesthetic,” including a painful trip to the dentist.

1

Robert Stecker, “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Value,” Philosophy Compass, 1 (2006), p. 4. 2 Ibid., p. 5. 3 Mary Wiseman, “Damask Napkins and the Train from Sichuan: Aesthetic Experience of Ordinary Things,” Aesthetics of Everyday Life: East and West, eds. Liu Yuedi and Curtis L. Carter, (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), p. 135.

104

Chapter VIII

She notes that “not all aesthetic experiences please. Some cause disgust, others horror.”4 This suggestive route opened up by Shapshay may provide a resolution to the paradox of negative emotion—that we need not take pleasure in sad music, horror movies or overwhelming natural objects to have an aesthetic encounter with them—and may also resolve the paradoxes of transcendence with which my original paper was concerned if it does away with the need for any kind of elevation or exhilaration by concentrating on the experience and attention itself. These are no small gains! But still this route will not yet yield a theory that distinguishes the sublime as a bona fide response from other kinds of aesthetic value or reward, and Shapshay saw this, which is why she maintains the link to pleasure—an immediate affective response—of a particular kind. And any mention of these pleasures as uplifting threatens to return us to the question of what yields the second punch: we can delimit objects by their qualities or our experiences by the forms of attention we pay to them, but we cannot yet rise beyond them, or with them, or because of them. I had said at the outset that I think the second option is difficult: it holds some traction if we speak in very general terms about “aesthetic value” as Stecker does, that ranges across all the objects of our aesthetic experience, pleasurable or not, but once we try to distinguish between values—of, perhaps, beauty and sublimity—we appear forced to explain this difference in the ways already canvassed: in the objects of the experience or their qualities (Hanauer and Clewis), in the unique structure of the experience itself (the thick view), or in the resultant affective response (the thin view). What I have tried to do thus far is more clearly articulate the ways in which the sublime remains problematic, or seems so to me, both in terms of the paradoxes of my original paper, and in terms of the problem of negative emotion that was much more implicit ten years ago. I have left Jennifer McMahon’s comments to the last in part because, intriguingly and provocatively, she doesn’t really acknowledge these problems at all. This is not to say that she doesn’t attend to the original paper—she provides perhaps the most trenchant criticism of all—but that her approach to the sublime that then emerges is so very—and appealingly—different. McMahon critiques my interpretation of Kant on a number of points (as Zuckert gently does too) but what is most striking is her claim that my thought exhibits a kind of foundationalism about direct perception that presents a false dilemma: either experience is given/caused by perception 4

Ibid., p. 141.

The Sublime, Redux

105

or alternatively its objects exist in some Platonic realm. This is most clearly revealed for McMahon in my interpretation of the Kantian sublime as going beyond cognition or as being transcendent. She suggests that rejecting this foundationalism at its core will make an account of the sublime possible. In doing so, she aligns herself with the works of Emily Brady and Christine Battersby, and rejects Anglo-analytical aesthetics and its presumptions. For McMahon, going beyond cognition is not premised upon cognitive failure (which she sees as far too facile an interpretation of Kant and a setting up of my targets as “straw men”.) Instead, it depends on a cognitive capacity that leads to the emergence of new awareness and new concepts whereby we find meaning that has not been exhausted by our current conceptual frameworks. That is, cognition doesn’t fail in the sublime, nor do we reach for a cognition beyond what is possible. Instead, the sublime addresses a cognition that goes beyond what is given in perception which nevertheless does not rise to some Platonic realm. It addresses, in short, meaning and significance—it is an experience that prompts a narrative about our place in the world and it does this in historically and culturally specific ways. (Shapshay also historicizes the sublime in her commentary but I find its force most apparent here.) So, for instance, the Kantian construal of the sublime is out of date, McMahon suggests, in its Enlightenment imposition of order and reason upon what would otherwise terrorize us; the meaning we searched for in the 18th century differs from that which we seek now. (My students this year utterly rejected the Kantian account for precisely these reasons.) But in any era, McMahon claims, the sublime is a way of orienting ourselves in the world, a way of relieving feelings of alienation in order to feel at home—whether that orientation leads to feelings of mastery and superiority, resistance, integration, or an at-one-ness with nature and the world at large. What I had dismissed in Sircello as “sublime discourse” is for McMahon a methodology to demonstrate rather than explain the sublime because, it appears, explanation stems from the foundationalist epistemology and analytic project that she abjures. Thus what McMahon points to is a hermeneutics of the sublime rather than a theory or analysis of it, and in so doing she rejects what she sees as the stark dichotomies that have thus far informed our discussion: experience as aesthetic or cognitive; feelings as pleasurable or unpleasurable, frustrating or exalted; judgements as determinant or reflective; objects as overwhelming or mundane and so on. I say her comments are provocative because they suggest a more holistic form of philosophy than our, perhaps taxonomic, urges have allowed. But I can’t

106

Chapter VIII

help wondering if in this holism aesthetic experience is being subordinated to a larger philosophical project whereby it loses its specific appeal. What has drawn me to aesthetics is the idea that it carves out a particular kind of engagement with the world that differs from other experiences and judgements, and that has a value for our lives that is uniquely its own. To give up that uniqueness is, if I may, both appealing and repellent; it would more closely align aesthetics with philosophy’s abiding concerns, true, but it would simultaneously rob it of what many of us feel is its singular character as a way of experiencing the world that is like no other, and that has a value or significance like no other. Isn’t this why we have spilt so much ink on trying to demarcate what, precisely, is the sublime?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lars Aagaard-Mogensen, “Aesthetic Qualities,” Essays on Aesthetics, ed. John Fisher, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), pp. 21-34. Joseph Addison, The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, (London: H.G. Bohn, 1854), Vol. IV. Joseph Addison, “The Spectator, No. 412, Monday June 23, 1712,” The Sublime: a Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Ashfield and de Bolla, pp. 62–70. Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). John Baillie, “An essay on the sublime” [1747], The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Ashfield and de Bolla, pp. 87-100. Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, (NewYork: Routledge, 2007). J. Bicknell, Why Music Moves Us, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Malcolm Budd, “Delight in the Natural World: Kant on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. Part III: The Sublime in Nature,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998), pp. 233–251 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Harvard Classics, vol. 24 (New York: Bartleby.com, 2001). Edmund Burke, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Ashfield and de Bolla, pp. 131–144. Noël Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty, eds. Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 169–87, originally published in

108

Bibliography

Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, eds. S. Kemal and I. Gaskell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 244–66. Anjan Chatterjee, “Neuroaesthetics: A Coming of Age Story,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23,10 (2010), pp. 53-62. A. Chignell and M.C. Halteman, “Religion and the Sublime,” The Sublime: From Antiquity to Present, ed. T. Costelloe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 183-202. Robert Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Robert Clewis, “The Place of the Sublime in Kant’s Project,” Studi kantiani 28 (2015), pp. 63-82. Robert Clewis, “What’s the Big Idea? On Emily Brady’s Sublime,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 50,2 (2016), pp. 104-118. John Conron, American Picturesque, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Paul Crowther, The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the AvantGarde, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Katerina Deligiorgi, “The Pleasures of Contra-Purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72 (2014), pp. 25-35. Katerina Deligiorgi, “Finite Agents, Sublime Feelings: Response to Hanauer,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (2016), pp. 199-202. J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McCleod, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987). James Elkins, “Against the Sublime,” Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, eds. Roald Hoffman and Iain Boyd Whyte, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Jane Forsey, “The Puzzle of Chardin,” Evental Aesthetics 3 (2014), pp. 815. Jane Forsey, “A Basis in Freedom?”, Wassard Elea Rivista II,4 (2016), pp. 190-193. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). H.U. Gumbrecht, In Praise of Athletic Beauty, (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). Paul Guyer “The Difficulty of the Sublime,” presented to the American Society for Aesthetics Annual General Meeting, Providence, Rhode Island, October 2005, for the panel “Knowing the Sublime.”

The Possibility of the Sublime: Aesthetic Exchanges

109

Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Michelle Grier, “Kant and the Feeling of Sublimity,” Kant on Emotion and Value, ed. Alix Cohen, (London: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 245-62. J. Haidt, “The Positive Emotion of Elevation,” Prevention & Treatment, 3 (2000), pp. 1-4. Tom Hanauer, “Sublimity and the Ends of Reason: Questions for Deligiorgi,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (2016), pp. 195-199. Ronald Hepburn, “The Concept of the Sublime: Has It Any Relevance for Philosophy Today?”, Dialectics and Humanism 15 (1988), pp. 137155. T. Ishizu and S. Zeki, “A Neurobiological Enquiry into the Origins of Our Experience of the Sublime and Beautiful,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8 (2014), p. 891. Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900-). Immanuel Kant, “A Renewed Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?” [c. 1795-96], The Conflict of the Faculties [1798]. Immanuel Kant, “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” [1786], Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, ed. & trans. Allen W. Wood and George DiGiovanni, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 3–18 [Ak 8: 134–146]. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard, (NewYork: Hafner Publishing Co., 1972). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1790], trans. W.S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987 [Ak 5: 167–356]). Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). Immanuel Kant, “Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,” Kant Selections, trans. Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998). Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993).

110

Bibliography

D. Keltner and J. Haidt, “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” Cognition & Emotion 17,2 (2003), pp. 297-314. James Kirwan, Sublimity: The Non-Rational and Rational in the History of Aesthetics, (Oxford: Routledge, 2005). V.J. Koneþni, “The Aesthetic Trinity: Awe, Being Moved, Thrills,” Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 5,2 (2005), pp. 27-44. V.J. Koneþni, “Aesthetic Trinity Theory and the Sublime,” Philosophy Today 55,1 (2011), pp. 64-73. Lao-tzu Tao te Ching, trans. S. Mitchell, (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). J. Lochhead, “The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 12,1 (2008), pp. 63-74. Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. H.L. Havell, (London: Macmillan and Co., 1890). Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. E. Rottenberg, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-garde” [1984], The Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. Clive Cazeaux, (New York: Routledge, 2nd. ed. 2011), pp. 586-595. Joseph Margolis, “The Art of Landscape Reconceived,” International Yearbook of Aesthetics 17 (2013): 21-31. Raffaele Milani, The Art of the Landscape, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009). Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIICentury England, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960). Simon Morley, ed., The Sublime, (Cambridge: MIT Press 2010). Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). John Muir, The Mountains of California, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894). Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963). Gillian B. Pierce, “Introduction,” The Sublime Today: Contemporary Readings in the Aesthetic, ed. G.B. Pierce, (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).

The Possibility of the Sublime: Aesthetic Exchanges

111

Kirk Pillow, Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne, (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1969). Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Characteristicks,” The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Ashfield and de Bolla, pp. 72–80. Sandra Shapshay, “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 53:2 (2013), pp. 181-198. Sandra Shapshay, “The Problem and the Promise of the Sublime,” Suffering Art Gladly, ed. Jerrold Levinson, (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2013). M.N. Shiota, D. Keltner and A. Mossman “The Nature of Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept,” Cognition and Emotion 21,5 (2007), pp. 944-963. Frank N. Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” [1959], Philosophy Looks at the Arts, ed. Joseph Margolis, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), pp. 64-87. Jerome Stolnitz, “Ugliness,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967), Vol. 8, pp. 174-6.

CONTRIBUTORS

Lars Aagaard-Mogensen taught philosophy many years in the USA (including appointments at Washington University in St. Louis and the School of Visual Arts in New York); he is now the co-founder and director of Wassard Elea, a refugium for artists and scholars in Ascea, southern Italy, and editor of the journal Wassard Elea Rivista. His numerous published works include Culture and Art (Humanities Press), Real Art (C&C), Text, Literature and Aesthetics (Rodopi), and circa a couple of hundred articles, reviews, and poetry in a wide variety of journals. Robert R. Clewis is Professor of Philosophy at Gwynedd Mercy University (Pennsylvania, USA) and a visiting scholar at the LudwigMaximilians-Universität Munich and the University of Pennsylvania. A recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship for his work on Kant, he has written numerous articles and chapters on Kant’s philosophy and is the author of The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge, 2009). He is the translator of the 1784/85 Mrongovius lecture in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology (Cambridge, 2012), and editor of Reading Kant’s Lectures (Walter de Gruyter, 2015). Jane Forsey is Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, and the author of The Aesthetics of Design (Oxford, 2013, Misul Munhwa Publ. Co., 2016). She has published extensively in philosophical aesthetics, including articles on the everyday, still life painting, aesthetic value, negative aesthetics, and the sublime, in journals such as The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Philosophy Today, Symposium, and Estetika. Tom Hanauer is a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of California, Riverside (USA). His primary area of research is in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century German philosophy with special focus on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Frankfurt School. Joseph Margolis is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University (Philadelphia, USA). Past-President of the American Society for Aesthetics, Honorary President and Lifetime Member of the International Association of Aesthetics. Author of over 30 monographs

114

Contributors

and editor of dozens of collections, Margolis' philosophical interests lie in the philosophy of the human sciences, the theory of knowledge and interpretation, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, American philosophy, and pragmatism. Jennifer A. McMahon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide (Australia), and the author of Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant’s Pragmatist Legacy (Routledge 2014) and Aesthetics and Material Beauty: Aesthetics Naturalized (Routledge 2007). She is the Guest Editor of the inaugural issue of the Australasian Philosophical Review on the topic “The Pleasure of Art,” (T&F, March 2017); Chief Investigator for the Australian Research Council funded project “ArtSense: taste and community”; and Editor of Social Aesthetics: Pleasure, Reflection and Accountability (Routledge, forthcoming in 2018). Sandra Shapshay is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University-Bloomington (USA). She works primarily on the history of aesthetics and ethics in the 19th c, with particular focus on Schopenhauer and Kant, and aims to bring the insights of this history to bear on contemporary debates. She recently edited The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (2018) and with Steve Cahn and Stephanie Ross, is editing Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology 2nd ed. (Blackwell). Recent papers include, among others, “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime,” (BJA, 2013) and “The Problem with the Problem of Tragedy: Schopenhauer’s Solution Revisited,” (BJA, 2012). Rachel Zuckert is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University (Illinois, USA) specializing in Kantian philosophy and postKantian 19th century thought. She is the author of Kant on Beauty and Biology, co-editor of Hegel on Philosophy in History (Cambridge 2017), articles in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Kant-Studien, Inquiry, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and is currently working on Herder's aesthetic theory and a collection of essays on 18th century Scottish aesthetics.

INDEX Addison, Joseph; 2; 4; 40; 47; 50; 60; 61; 74; 82 Aesthetics purpose of theory; 15; 35; 70; 106 Allison, Henry; 9 Alps; 50; 58 Ariadne; 45; 60 Baillie, John; 55; 62 Battersby, Christine; 90; 105 Brady, Emily; 39; 51; 53; 59; 88; 89; 105; 108 Brahman; 35 Braverman, Kate; 23 Budd, Malcolm; 7; 11; 18; 36; 76; 85; 86; 93 Burke, Edmund; 2; 4; 11; 14; 17; 22; 23; 31; 32; 33; 55; 58; 59; 62; 72; 74; 75; 82; 95; 96; 102; 107 Camus, Albert; 94 Carlson, Allen; 74 Carroll, Noël; 73; 78 Chardin, Jean B.S.; 42; 108 Chatterjee, Anjan; 54; 60 Chignell, A.; 45 Clewis, Robert; 37; 45; 98; 99; 100 Common sense; 43 Conron, John; 71 Crowther, Paul; 1; 34; 79 Deligiorgi, Katerina; 40; 43; 54; 97 Dennis, John; 32; 40; 58 Descartes, René; 81; 103 Duff, William; 62 Elkins, James; 34 Enlightenment; 105 Friedrich, Caspar David; 56 Fuentes, Carlos; viii Gerard, Alexander; 22; 62 God; 23; 27; 34; 37; 41; 61; 76 Goehr, Lydia; 71

Grand Canyon; 67; 70 Grier, Michelle; 24 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich; 56 Guo Xi; 58 Guyer, Paul; 9; 21; 26; 51; 53 Haidt, J.; 60 Halteman, M.C.; 45 Hanauer, Tom; 29; 95; 97; 99; 101 Hegel, G.W.F.; 49 Hepburn, Ronald; 53; 55 Hermeneutics; 105 Hogarth, William; 99 Hume, David; 62 In Praise of Athletic Beauty; 56; 108 Ishizu, T.; 101 James, William; 35 Kafka, Franz; 94 Kames, Lord (Henry Home); 62 Kant, Immanuel; 6 Analytic of the Sublime; 6; 8 causa noumenon; 9; 33 Critique of Judgment; 21; 109 Critique of Practical Reason; 9; 25; 109 Critique of Pure Reason; 25; 86 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals; 9; 109 noumenal subject; 7; 25; 69; 77 practical cognition; 65 subreption; 48; 64; 98 The Conflict of the Faculties; 67 Koneþni, V.J.; 56; 58; 60 Korsmeyer, Carolyn; 58 Lao-tzu; 15 Li Po; 48 Lochhead, J.; 67 Longinus; viii; 4; 40; 62; 70 Looking at the Waterfall of Mount Lu; 48 Lyotard, Jean-François; 1; 3; 4; 12; 13; 18; 47; 49; 64; 82; 86; 88

116 Margolis, Joseph; 17; 93; 102; 114 McMahon, Jennifer; 104 Mendelssohn, Moses; 22 Milani, Raffaele; 17 Minotaur; 52 Moore, G.E.; ix Morley, Simon; viii Mothersill, Mary; 34 Mount Etna; 62 Muir, John; 72 Music; 56; 57; 58; 67; 71 Mysterianism; viii; 77; 102 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope; 70; 76 On the Sublime; 62 Palm Latitudes; 23 Peirce, Charles; 18 Pierce, G.B.; viii; 47; 110 Plato; 71; 83; 84; 88; 105 Pleasure; 94 Priestley, Joseph; 49; 50; 62; 66 Procrustes; 31; 36; 42 Proudfoot, Wayne; 34; 35 Pseudo-Dionysius; 34; 35 Reid, Thomas; 50; 62 Renaissance; 70 Richardson, Alan; 51; 59 Romantics; 2 Saito, Yuriko; 71 Sartre, J-P.; 94 Savary, A.J.M.R.; 58; 66 Schelling, F.W.J. von; 49

Index Schopenhauer, Arthur; 31; 49; 72; 74; 75; 113; 114 Shaftesbury, Earl of; 2; 4; 47; 64; 82; 111 Shapshay, Sandra; 69; 101; 103 Sibley, Frank; vii Sircello, Guy; 2; 11; 18; 22; 46; 50; 82; 85; 86; 99 Sisyphus; 94 Spectator, The; 2; 60 Stecker, Robert; 103 Stolnitz, Jerome; viii Sublime definition; 57; 65; 79; 106 Tao te Ching; 2; 15; 35 The Prelude; 48 Theseus; 45; 52 Turner, Joseph M.; 17; 19 Usher, James; 4; 5 Vanuatu; 72 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog; 56 Webster, Donovan; 72 Wilken, Rowan; 47 Wiseman, Mary; 103 Wordsworth, William; 2; 14; 22; 48; 49 Young, Julian; 24 Yuba River Valley; 72 Zeki, S.; 101 Zen Buddhism; 2 Zuckert, Rachel; 21; 95; 96; 101