Is the Sublime Sustainable? A Comparative Aesthetics Approach to the Sublime 9004538534, 9789004538535, 9789004538542, 2023932207

Citation preview

Is the Sublime Sustainable? A Comparative Aesthetics Approach to the Sublime

Brill Research Perspectives in Religion and the Arts Editor-in-Chief Aaron Rosen (Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC) Associate Editors Barbara Baert (University of Leuve) Yohana A. Junker (Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley) S. Brent Plate (Hamilton College, New York) Zhange Ni (Virginia Tech) Founding Editor Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (Georgetown University, Washington, DC)

Volumes published in this Brill Research Perspective title are listed at brill.com/rpras

Is the Sublime Sustainable? A Comparative Aesthetics Approach to the Sublime By

Peter L. Doebler

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library Congress Control Number: 2023932207

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2468-886X isbn 978-90-04-53853-5 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-53854-2 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Peter L. Doebler. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

1

2

3

4



Note on Translations vii Acknowledgments viii Abstract 1 Keywords 1 Introduction: Questioning the Sublime and Standing before a Waterfall 1 Locating the Sublime in the Euro-American Context 13 1.1 Establishing a Roadmap for the Sublime 13 1.2 Longinus, the Middle Ages, and Renaissance: Origin and Hibernation 14 1.3 The Eighteenth Century: the Golden Age of the Sublime 16 1.4 The Nineteenth Century: the Eclipse of the Sublime 24 1.5 The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: a Sublime Revival 27 1.6 Summary 31 Sustaining Depth: Critiquing the Sublime with Theological Aesthetics 32 2.1 Question: Sublime vs. Beauty? 33 2.2 Answer: a Peaceful Beautiful-Sublime via the Analogy of Being 37 2.3 Sustaining Depth with Hiroshi Senju 42 Preserving Particularity: Critiquing the Sublime with Environmental Aesthetics 47 3.1 Environmental Aesthetic Perspectives on the Relation of Nature and Art 49 3.2 The Sublime in Nature and/or Art? Kant as a Touchstone 52 3.3 Recovering a Sublime That Links Nature and Art through Engagement 56 3.3.1 Bodily Engagement 56 3.3.2 Imaginative Engagement 57 3.3.3 Affective Engagement 59 3.4 Preserving Particularity with Hiroshi Senju 61 Cultivating Participation: Critiquing the Sublime with Critical Theory 66 4.1 Feminist Critiques 66 4.2 Racial Critiques 72 4.3 Political Critiques 76 4.4 Technological Critiques 83 4.5 Cultivating Participation with Hiroshi Senju 85 Conclusion: toward an Everyday Sublime 90 Bibliography 97

Note on Translations The romanization of Japanese follows the modified Hepburn system as used in the Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary. However, if a quote from a reference uses a different transliteration I have left it unchanged. Regarding the order of Japanese names, I have written Hiroshi Senju’s name throughout in the English order because his personal webpage uses this order. For works cited, if the work was written in English I have used the English order. If a work was translated from the Japanese I have retained the Japanese order. Finally, if a translation is my own this is noted in the footnotes.

Acknowledgments Many people have contributed to the development and completion of this book. First, I thank Ronald Nakasone, who was an ideal advisor throughout my doctoral research at the Graduate Theological Union. Professor Nakasone introduced me to the work of Hiroshi Senju, planting the initial seed that grew into this project. His careful and creative scholarship and gentle mentorship have been invaluable to both my professional and personal development. Next, this book grew out of my dissertation at the Graduate Theological Union and was cultivated in graduate seminars and several conferences with encouraging feedback and helpful criticism from teachers and colleagues. I am especially grateful to the members of my dissertation committee—Ronald Nakasone, Fr. Anselm Ramelow, and Yuriko Saito—for their thoughtful readings and perceptive comments that further clarified and improved the ideas. As the dissertation morphed into a book, I am thankful to Aaron Rosen, Editor-in-Chief for Brill Research Perspectives in Religion and the Arts, for his enthusiastic reception of the book proposal and incisive assessment that helped further hone the book’s focus. Likewise, my editor at Brill, Rashmi Shetty, has made moving the manuscript through each stage of production a joy rather than a chore. Portions of the Introduction and Part 3 appeared in articles published in Contemporary Aesthetics (“Imaginative Intersections: Engaging Aesthetic Experience at the Shofuso Japanese House,” Volume 15, 2017) and Japan Studies Review (“Old, New, Borrowed, and Blue: Hiroshi Senju’s Waterfall Paintings as Intersections of Innovation,” Volume 19, 2015). I appreciate the journal editors allowing that material to be presented here in revised form. Illustrations were generously provided by the Japan American Society of Greater Philadelphia and the National Gallery of Art. Finally, I dedicate this to Yoshie, my partner and joy. She has patiently endured the innumerable rabbit trails, dead ends, and occasional vistas that occur along the path of an extended research project like this. Without her the journey would have been much longer, more confusing, and certainly less fun.

Is the Sublime Sustainable? A Comparative Aesthetics Approach to the Sublime Peter L. Doebler

Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio, USA [email protected]

Abstract Is the Sublime Sustainable? introduces the key points of debate around the sublime while opening new avenues for future inquiry, especially through its comparative aesthetics approach. In this book, you will discover how thinking on the sublime emerged historically and then engage with the recent critical scholarship on the topic, including from the fields of theology, philosophy, and literature. The critiques of the sublime are then expanded in dialogue with perspectives from Japanese aesthetics and art, shaping the argument that what is needed today is a sublime that enriches human lives by cultivating profound, participative relationships.

Keywords theological aesthetics – environmental aesthetics – Japanese aesthetics – comparative aesthetics – critical theory – literature – philosophy – ethics – art theory – Hiroshi Senju – Immanuel Kant – Watsuji Tetsurō – yūgen – analogia entis – beauty



Introduction: Questioning the Sublime and Standing before a Waterfall

What is the sublime and why is it important today? The sublime is an aesthetic concept that maintains an uneasy relationship with religious ideas or sentiments. It is often identified as an overwhelming experience that challenges the limits of one’s own perception, reason, or identity and produces a range of responses from exhilaration and awe to anxiety and fear. This has made the sublime a useful surrogate for religion, preserving a sense of the transcendent but resisting any specific intellectual or material form. While the sublime was most discussed in the eighteenth century, it continues to be an influential

© Peter L. Doebler, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004538542_002

2

Doebler

concept across humanities disciplines such as philosophy, art theory, theology, and literary studies.1 However, despite its influence the sublime faces criticism from several perspectives, including critical theory, theological aesthetics, and environmental aesthetics. These critiques are not united, but they share a common concern: the sublime’s tendency to create or reinforce dualisms. First, critical theory identifies ethical problems in the sublime because it can create a faceless, threatening ‘other’ that can be used to marginalize different social groups through binary relationships. Second, theological approaches identify ontological problems in the sublime, arguing that the modern division between beauty and the sublime expresses a view of reality that is at root, violent. Third, environmental aesthetics identify aesthetic problems in the sublime because it supports a division between nature and art.2 So, while each perspective criticizes the sublime from a different angle—ethical, ontological, aesthetic—together they call the concept into question and highlight the need for an alternative approach if it is to remain a valid and useful means for articulating profound human experiences. This book aims to present an overview of the topic of the sublime on several levels. First, it traces a genealogy of the sublime, introducing the key thinkers and their perspectives. This provides the context to then explore the various critiques in depth. These critiques have emerged from multiple fields, including literary studies, theology, and philosophy, which indicates the pervasive influence of the sublime. However, these fields often remain siloed, risking the chance that their mutual insights are ignored. Drawing these together helps highlight how ontological questions are inseparable from the aesthetic and ethical debates surrounding the sublime. Finally, I expand the critiques of the sublime further by placing them in dialogue with perspectives from Japanese aesthetics and the artwork of the contemporary painter Hiroshi Senju (b. 1958). Due to space limitations these are brief, a sort of coda to each part, but they 1 For examples from each of these fields see, respectively: David B. Johnson, “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and Its Limits,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 118–134; James Elkins, “Against the Sublime,” in Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, ed. Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75–90; Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); and Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 2 For examples of these critiques see, respectively: Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (London: Routledge, 2007); David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2004), 43–93; and Emily Brady, “The Environmental Sublime,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 171–182.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

3

serve an important purpose in two ways. Drawing on Japanese aesthetics introduces a cross-cultural perspective and helps broaden the discussion further, considering how another tradition may help us see the topic in a new light.3 In addition, including the artwork of Senju, especially his waterfall paintings, provides an artistic touchstone exemplifying certain theoretical points, but also aims to show how artworks bring their own contribution—through their own way of ‘thinking’ as it were—to such discussions. That is, artworks do not merely provide visual illustrations for philosophical and religious concepts but are themselves engaging with such concepts through the resources of art—such as color, line, specific materials, or installation site—rather than analytical language. In these ways the book introduces the main players and points of debate around the sublime while opening new avenues for future inquiry, especially via a comparative aesthetics approach. This is further supported by the extensive bibliography at the end. Part 1 provides a survey of the different ways the sublime has been theorized over the last two thousand years, ranging from Longinus in antiquity through the influential theories of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant and up to postmodern philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson. This establishes a general framework in which to place the specific critiques of the sublime that are taken up in Parts 2, 3, and 4. Part 2 considers critiques of the sublime from theological aesthetics. I discuss the work of John Milbank, Graham Ward, and John Betz, among others, and their complementary approaches that argue against the binaries inherent in the modern sublime. Instead, they propose an interrelation of beauty and the sublime rooted in theological notions of trinity, incarnation, and the analogy of being. Then, the theological aesthetic perspectives are placed in dialogue with Senju’s art and the Japanese aesthetic concept of yūgen to develop a perspective that does not place beauty and the sublime in opposition. Part 3 explores critiques from environmental aesthetics. Here I draw on the work of Emily Brady, Ronald Hepburn, Yuriko Saito, and Arnold Berleant and their emphases on bodily and affective engagement in the aesthetic experience of nature. Then, the environmental aesthetic perspectives are placed in dialogue with Senju’s art and the Japanese aesthetics of nature, art, and the everyday to develop a perspective that integrates the sublime into both nature and art.

3 For a deeper discussion of the perspectives from Japanese aesthetics see Peter L. Doebler, “Seeing the Things You Cannot See: (Dis)-solving the Sublime through the Paintings of Hiroshi Senju,” PhD diss. (Graduate Theological Union, 2014).

4

Doebler

Part 4 investigates critiques from critical theory. I review select feminist, racial, political, and technological critiques, in particular Christine Battersby’s work on terror and difference. Then, the critical theory critiques are placed in dialogue with Senju’s art and the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō’s ethics to develop a perspective that avoids either a dualism that pits the ego against a marginal ‘other,’ or a totality that completely erases difference. The Conclusion builds on the critiques of the previous three parts to fashion a constructive proposal for an everyday sublime, a middle position between the various extremes that have marked the history of the sublime, between emphasizing subject or object, nature or art. This avoids the ontological, aesthetic, and ethical pitfalls that the concept sometimes suffers and instead cultivates a sublime that enriches human lives by finding in each particular moment, person, thing, and place, participative encounters that resonate with a profound depth. The remainder of this introduction provides a brief overview of Senju’s waterfall paintings, focusing on his installation at the Shofuso Japanese House in Philadelphia (Figs. 1 and 2). Senju provides a helpful lens through which to view the sublime and critiques of it. On a superficial level, waterfalls have been a perennial natural phenomenon linked to the sublime and Senju’s waterfalls build on this tradition. But on a deeper level, a hallmark of Senju’s work is how it negotiates multiple intersections of difference. As will be seen, the history of the sublime is marked by movements shuttling between the perceived dualisms of object/subject and nature/art, and that what is needed is a way to mediate these differences. The artwork of Senju intimates one way this can be achieved. For those primarily interested in the overview of the sublime, they can jump to Part 1 now and return to this summary of the work of Senju when reaching the comparative sections at the end of Parts 2, 3, and 4. Senju completed all his studies, up through a Ph.D., at the Tokyo National University of the Arts. There he specialized in nihonga (日本画), or traditional Japanese painting. The breakout point in Senju’s career was receiving the Honorable Mention prize at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995, especially since he was the first Asian artist to receive the honor. The prize was for his massive installation work The Fall, one of the earliest iterations of what has become a consistent subject of his work up to the present, indeed the subject Senju is perhaps best known for.4 A feature of Senju’s work is how it negotiates multiple intersections of difference. I will briefly discuss how this is manifest in the subject matter of 4 Examples of this and many of Senju’s other projects may be viewed on Hiroshi Senju’s website at http://www.hiroshisenju.com/exhibitions.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

5

Figure 1

Shofuso Japanese House looking towards the rooms installed with Hiroshi Senju’s paintings © Elizabeth Felicella, courtesy of Japan American Society of Greater Philadelphia

Figure 2

Hiroshi Senju, Imagination of Dynamics, 2007, acrylics on hemp paper. Philadelphia, Shofuso Japanese House © Elizabeth Felicella, courtesy of Japan American Society of Greater Philadelphia

6

Doebler

his paintings, the materials and techniques he uses, the exhibition spaces his works reside in, and his view of creativity. I will conclude by focusing on a particular work, his permanent installation at the Shofuso Japanese House in Philadelphia. First, Senju takes a traditional subject of landscape painting, the waterfall, and develops it in new ways. Rather than painting a waterfall of a particular place, in Senju’s paintings the waterfall becomes the whole painting, and the palette is stripped down to basic black and white or single colors. This abstraction and simplicity, while apparently limiting, provides a framework that has supported seemingly endless variations up to the present, whether in the size of the works, the kinds of spaces where they may be effectively displayed, or the choice of materials—natural pigments, brightly colored acrylics (as used in his Falling Color series), or fluorescent paint that glows blue under black light (as used in his Nightfall series). This contrasts with standard waterfall paintings, such as one by Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). (Fig. 3) Church’s painting contains land and sky that act as foreground and background markers and indicate that this is an image of a geographic place, Niagara Falls. There are also temporal markers through the use of color, suggesting the season and time of day. In Senju’s waterfalls these contextual guides are removed. We do not see them from the outside, as in typical perspective paintings such as Church’s. Instead of observation, Senju’s paintings elicit participation, not erasing nature or the viewer but drawing the two together. What Senju does is guide us to an even more uncharted place,

Figure 3

Fredric Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857, oil on canvas. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund), 2014.79.10 Artwork in the public domain, photograph courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

7

somewhere beyond the purely objective natural world, deeper into the human that perceives this world. Next, Senju’s choice of materials maintains continuity with tradition, but his technique transforms these in new ways. Senju works in the nihonga tradition, employing pigments obtained from natural materials such as azurite, crystals, and crushed shells, which are then mixed with animal glue as a binder and applied to traditional Japanese mulberry paper. Where Senju especially departs from the tradition is in his brushwork, or lack of it. While he does use a brush for the smooth, black background, the rest of the painting consists of pouring white paint down the surface from the top and then airbrushing the surface.5 The combination of dripping and blowing Senju employs for creating his waterfalls mirrors the structure of a natural waterfall, using gravity and air to create an image that blurs the line between mimesis and reality. We see a literal waterfall of paint that changes into the image of a waterfall; the impression before us feels not so much painted as conjured. Third, Senju’s paintings are displayed in places of transition, intersections. On the one hand, there are his paintings on Japanese sliding doors in traditional private settings such as the Shofuso Japanese House in Philadelphia (Fig. 4) and the Daitokuji-Jukoin Betsuin Temple in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. Here the point of transition is the doorway, the meeting between rooms. On the other hand, there are the public works Senju has carried out such as the installations at the Tokyo Grand Hyatt Hotel or the Tokyo Haneda Airport where the works participate in large sites of transition, places meant for the comings and goings of travel. Across this spectrum we see another way that Senju works at the intersection of tradition and the modern, innovating both. The form and the content of his waterfall paintings are flexible enough to work in traditional spaces and sizes, such as the sliding doors, but they fit equally well the modern demand for large artworks, both in the art world of the museum and public spaces. Paradoxically, his waterfalls make traditional settings such as a temple feel strikingly modern and infuse technologically buzzing public spaces with a serene beauty that makes transit through the urban landscape feel at one with the nature it has displaced. 5 While surprising, this technique is not unprecedented in traditional Japanese art where there is a technique called tarashi-komi that is exactly this: paint is dripped onto the still-wet surface, allowing for the unexpected or the accidental; the paint itself finishes the painting. See Fritz van Briessen, The Way of the Brush: Painting Techniques of China and Japan (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1999), 122–123. At the same time, the technique finds echoes in the work of modern and contemporary artists such as Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Pat Steir. Steir has used the technique in her own series of waterfall paintings, which creates an interesting counterpoint to Senju’s.

8

Doebler

Figure 4

Hiroshi Senju, Imagination of Dynamics and Imagination of Silence, 2007, acrylics on hemp paper. Philadelphia, Shofuso Japanese House © Elizabeth Felicella, courtesy of Japan American Society of Greater Philadelphia

Finally, Senju’s view of art and creativity draws on the negotiation of the intersection of the artist’s memory and imagination with those of the viewer. When I think of the definition of art, I find it is a way to communicate our imagination to other people. In other words, conveying our feeling to someone who wouldn’t readily understand us, this is art.6 Working with his own memories of the waterfalls in nature that he has studied,7 Senju uses his imagination to give form to his inner vision and feeling in the hope of truly achieving a work that can embody this and present it to the viewer. When Senju’s vision intersects with the vision of the individual viewer

6 Hiroshi Senju, “Interview: Hiroshi Senju,” J-Collabo.com, accessed November 17, 2021, https:// www.j-collabo.org/single-post/2008/03/20/1-hiroshi-senju. 7 While Senju’s paintings are clearly not of specific, natural waterfalls, he studies first-hand waterfalls across the globe, from Hawai‘i to the Amazon, and makes use of photographs for his paintings. See Michaël Amy, “The Waterfall Paintings in Contemporary Japanese Art Historical Context,” in Hiroshi Senju, Rachel Baum and Michaël Amy (Milan: Skira, 2009), 15 and 20.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

9

through the meeting place of the finished work, the viewer’s imagination is activated and points them back to their own memories, completing a relational circle. It is the fact that Senju’s waterfalls are at the same time figurative and abstract that allows for the fruitful interplay of imagination and memory. Since the paintings are clearly waterfalls there is something for the viewer to ‘hold onto.’ But since they do not aim to depict any precise waterfall in current space and time, say Niagara Falls, the viewer has freedom to make the waterfall more personal. To quote Senju again, I find art very important, but even more important is to enrich your imagination. I do not go out to the waterfall and paint on site. My waterfall paintings are very much figurative, however, at the same time they are very abstract. Personally, I feel that I may have gone beyond the abstract or the figurative. I am indeed painting a waterfall, but which waterfall am I painting?8 We see, then, that for Senju the creative process—from inspiration to composition to reception—is a fundamentally relational process, both between humans and nature and between humans and humans. Art conveys a message directly to people in their deepest being because it is not expressed in words. … In art, completely different things can … exist close together and be in nature at the same time. That is the message from art and it is also a peace making process.9 Senju’s art creates meaningful points of intersection between the perceived aesthetic tensions of objective nature vs. subjective artist, traditional vs. modern styles, public vs. private spaces, the artist’s memory and imagination vs. the audience’s, or even figurative vs. abstract art. In short, it is an experience of peace. However, can we be more specific about what constitutes this peaceful profundity? To consider this further, I will conclude with an examination of one work by Senju, his installation at the Shofuso Japanese House. This will allow for a concrete discussion when referencing Senju at the end of Parts 2, 3, and 4. In particular, I will highlight how Senju’s Shofuso paintings evoke unique experiences of depth, particularity, and participation.

8 Hiroshi Senju, “Hiroshi Senju,” Asian Art Newspaper, January, 2009. 9 Senju, “Interview: Hiroshi Senju.”

10

Doebler

Hiroshi Senju’s installation at the Shofuso Japanese House in Philadelphia’s West Fairmont Park is a series of fusuma-e (襖絵, paintings on Japanese sliding doors) completed in 2007.10 The paintings occupy two main rooms of the house, including a large painting in the tokonoma (床の間, an alcove in the main room where hanging scrolls, flower arrangements, or other valuable objects may be placed). (Fig. 2) Senju named both rooms. The larger room is ‘Imagination of Dynamics’ and the smaller room is ‘Imagination of Silence.’11 These suggestive names are reflected in the ways Senju uses color and line differently in each room. Overall, ‘Imagination of Dynamics’ is much lighter than ‘Imagination of Silence;’ it has fewer dark sections and the succession of horizontal streams all the way across gives the room a lightness and verticality. In contrast, ‘Imagination of Silence’ is much darker and more varied in its lines and patterns. Dark tones are more evident, giving the room a somber feeling. (Fig. 4) Combined, the rooms generate a complexity, a complementary movement and stillness, noise and silence that evoke a profound depth that is both spatial and emotive. This feeling of depth is further compounded through the material support of the paintings, the fact that rather than being on a framed canvas hung in an interior room these paintings are mobile. This puts in motion two kinds of relationships. First, since the doors can be opened to the outside directly, this creates a permeable space between outside/inside. Therefore, changes in the weather and light, depending on the time of day and season, will affect how the waterfalls appear, thus creating new paintings at any moment. This contrasts with a painting in a closed room that would always be seen in the same, artificial light. Second, since the doors slide and are removable, rather than turning on hinges, they have the potential to open a variety of spaces on a smooth continuum. Therefore, you can see the waterfalls in the adjacent room in a variety of ways, so there are really an infinite number of waterfalls/paintings in the rooms. This ability to activate multiple visual planes in a variety of ways accentuates a shifting feeling of depth. When Senju was commissioned to make paintings for Shofuso, the subject matter was left up to him. Rather than imposing his own ideas on the house, he instead decided to consult the surroundings.

10 11

For details on the history of the building see Yuichi Ozawa, Story of Shofuso: A Cultural Bridge between Japan and the United States (Philadelphia: Friends of the Japanese House and Garden, 2010), 7. See Ozawa, Story of Shofuso, 47.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

11

Acknowledging the beauty of the landscape from all sides of Shofuso, I decided to use my senses. By closing my eyes and ‘feeling’ the atmosphere, I heard the waterfall coming out of the pond. I was perhaps not able to create a work referring to the four seasons that was strong enough, but I could paint the waterfall. Maybe I could not capture all the colors, but I could try to capture the sound of it within the painting.12 Senju acknowledging the surrounding garden makes sense when one understands that the rooms have a clear view out onto the garden and pond when the outside sliding doors are opened. This effectively creates a work of art out of nature, framed by the house’s openings, a natural artwork that faces the human artwork inside. Senju’s cooperation with nature in the planning of the paintings is also seen in his choice of materials, the paint and paper. This process is reported in detail by Yuichi Ozawa: In March 2006, Senju visited Shofuso to develop a conceptual design of the murals. Spending hours observing Shofuso from the garden, he decided against painting murals in black ink ([suibokuga], 水墨画) …, as he felt it would not blend well with the patina that had developed over the past fifty years. He also decided to use Swiss-made Lascaux acrylic paint instead of the traditional mineral paint (iwa-enogu, 岩絵具) since he was concerned that the hide glue might crack because of the drier weather in Philadelphia as compared to that of Japan. He created a ‘Shofuso color’ by blending olive green, clay, and red wine (enji, 臙脂) pigments, extracting the elements from the building and garden.13 In this quote we see how Senju was willing to depart from the nihonga tradition of using paint based on mineral pigments and animal glue to account for the difference in climate. Also, he was willing to depart from his own tradition of painting waterfalls on a black-ink background, acknowledging that if he forced the color on the location, it would not work. Instead, he considered the age of the structure and the surrounding nature and drew the colors from it to create what, on a cursory glance, appears to be black, but on closer inspection is a deep color that changes hue depending on the light, weather, or what it is perceived within the larger visual field. In these ways, Senju’s paintings at 12 Quoted in Ozawa, Story of Shofuso, 48. 13 Ozawa, Story of Shofuso, 47.

12

Doebler

Shofuso show a sensitivity to the particularity of space and place, integrating the natural and human environments. Lastly, the paintings at Shofuso invite participation from the visitor by activating multiple senses. First is vision. In both rooms the whole person is enveloped by the paintings, especially because seating is directly on the floor, following the Japanese custom. Next, hearing is activated. Since the whole image is just falling water there is nothing else to distract one’s attention and as a result the auditory sense seems to become more acute. But this imaginative, virtual sound is then made real by the sound of a waterfall bubbling out in the Shofuso garden pond, and in this way nature supports the paintings. Third, this easy commerce between outside nature and the paintings within the building also engages the sense of touch. Since the building allows for the permeable space between inside and outside, the paintings change with the weather and light and the visitor’s body registers these differences, which in turn can generate different moods. Fourth, smell is engaged since the house uses traditional, natural building materials such as aromatic hinoki (檜, Japanese cypress) and the rice straw tatami flooring. But the easy access to the adjacent garden also provides a variety of natural smells that make the paintings less of an object to be gazed at than a constituent part that complements the overall environment. Finally, taste may even be involved through the Japanese tea ceremony that is often held in the large room. Sitting on the tatami mat, smelling the tea that wafts together with the smell of the house and garden, feeling the warmth of the tea bowl in your hands and then the ambient temperature of the room, looking up from the rich green tea to the paintings you might note the subtle shade of green blended there, and then look across to the garden and the green in blossom. In this brief examination of Senju’s installation at the Shofuso Japanese House I have sketched three ways for further understanding the profound effect of his waterfall paintings: distinct experiences of depth, particularity, and participation. Looking back, we can see that these were already anticipated in an earlier comment by Senju: Art conveys a message directly to people in their deepest being because it is not expressed in words. … In art, completely different things can … exist close together and be in nature at the same time. That is the message from art and it is also a peace making process.14 14 Senju, “Interview: Hiroshi Senju.”

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

13

Senju thus weaves together ontological (‘deepest being’), aesthetic (‘art’) and ethical (‘different things can  … exist close together’) concerns. And I would suggest that these undergird the distinct experiences of depth, particularity, and participation evoked by his paintings. Likewise, the various recent critiques of the sublime identified at the beginning—from theological aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, and critical theory—align with these three concerns and advocate for constructive approaches that emphasize ontological depth, aesthetic particularity, and ethical participation. This has been a relatively focused exploration of a single artist and artwork, but as we turn now to explore the topic of the sublime, the hope is that this example will serve to keep the theoretical discussion grounded. 1

Locating the Sublime in the Euro-American Context

1.1 Establishing a Roadmap for the Sublime “Where is the sublime appearing?” Looking at past thinkers who have considered the sublime, this is a perennial question. At the same time, there is also the question, “What is the sublime?” These two questions indicate why the word ‘sublime’ is often grammatically ambiguous, moving between an adjective, such as a sublime mountain, and a noun, the sublime.15 This question, “Where is the sublime appearing?” suggests that the noun-sublime is something that plays hide-and-seek, showing up here and there and these spots where it appears—perhaps a vista of Mont Blanc or Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals—are described with the adjective-sublime. Combined, we can think of the sublime as a liminal border. Conceptualizing the sublime as a liminal border is expressed in the etymology of the word itself. The English word ‘sublime’ comes from the Latin adjective sublimis, which refers to what is elevated or lofty. It refers to natural phenomenon but may also be applied to emotional or moral states. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests the word derives from sub (under) and limen (lintel), which brings out a physical and architectural nuance. The word entered French and English vernacular “in the fourteenth century through the alchemical tradition meaning ‘to purify’ (hence the verb ‘to sublimate’), and

15

For one observation of this ambiguity see Baldine Saint Girons, “The Sublime from Longinus to Montesquieu,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, v.4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 322.

14

Doebler

was associated with fire, violence, and pure essence.”16 The related Greek word is ὕψος (hupsos), a noun that generally means height. So, we can call a thing or experience sublime when it reaches a point of limitation and at this point there is an intersection where the sublime appears. The question, “Where is the sublime appearing?” is both a question asked by different thinkers who have written on the sublime and a question we can ask about the history of thought on the sublime. By following the tracks left by the sublime through the history of thought a more comprehensive picture of the concept emerges. To map these tracks, it is useful to think of two axes on which to plot the diverse interpretations of the sublime. First is a vertical axis with nature and ineffable realities (including the divine) on one end and human communicative expressions such as rhetoric or art on the other end. Second is a horizontal axis between the objective thing and the subjective self. That is, is the appearance of the sublime an attribute of the experienced object or is it in the experiencing subject, or somewhere in between? The following summary, then, is mostly descriptive, aiming to lay a foundation to better understand the problems associated with the sublime that will be investigated in the subsequent parts. Longinus, the Middle Ages, and Renaissance: Origin and Hibernation One of the earliest reflections on the sublime appears in Roman antiquity in an incomplete first-century CE work entitled Peri Hypsos. The author is unknown, although it was long attributed to someone named Longinus. The text presents itself as a practical guide for effective rhetoric. According to Longinus, the sublime style differs from typical rhetorical techniques that aim to persuade the listener; instead it is marked by shock and awe, striking the listener unexpectedly and irresistibly sweeping them away. 1.2

For grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. This is because persuasion is on the

16 Timothy M. Costelloe, “The Sublime: A Short Introduction to a Long History,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3. Here Costelloe draws on Jan Cohn and Thomas H. Miles, “The Sublime: In Alchemy, Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis,” Modern Philology 74/3 (1977): 289–304.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

15

whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer.17 The sublime then, moves the listener to a point of self-transcendence, but apparently through a kind of deceit and verbal violence, bypassing the listener’s reason. This already suggests ethical issues with the sublime, as will be discussed in the following parts.18 Mapping Longinus, the sublime appears in human rhetoric and is largely seen as an objective feature of the speech, which works a mysterious effect on the subjective listener. Most modern historical narratives of the sublime begin with Longinus and then leap to the late seventeenth century, when Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711) published a translation of Longinus in 1674, an event that was to bring the sublime to the forefront of aesthetic discussions in the eighteenth century. The narrative of sublime height-disappearance-recovery is tidy, but its general dismissal of the sublime from the Middle Ages may overreach. Stephen Jaeger attributes the widely held view that the sublime has little presence in the Middle Ages in part due to the influential interpretations of Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) as well as Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), both of whom saw the sublime as effectively suppressed after Longinus.19 For Auerbach, the disappearance of the sublime can be traced to a lack of interest in sublime rhetorical stylistics and a loss of sublime subject matter. The paradox of divine incarnation was extended by early Christian writers—preeminently Augustine—to defend the lowly stylistics of the New Testament writings, creating a kind of alternative sublime, the sermo humilis, “the only medium in which such sublime mysteries can be brought within the reach of men.”20 However, while 17 Longinus, ‘Longinus’ On Sublimity, ed. and trans. D. A. Russell, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 2. Quoted in Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2005), 13. 18 However, Longinus actually suggests the ecstasy and elevation the sublime engenders has the meritorious effect of raising listeners beyond the vices of avarice and the love of pleasure. See Longinus, On Sublimity, 52 and Shaw, The Sublime, 18. 19 According to Jaeger, the influence of these scholars is related to a larger perspective in Medieval academic studies he describes as “the diminutive Middle Ages,” which characterizes the period as one “of small, quaint things and people, of miniatures, humble, little, overshadowed by its big neighbors—antiquity in its past and the Renaissance in its future—a conduit between the two.” C. Stephen Jaeger, “Introduction,” in Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 5. 20 Erich Auerbach, Literary Language in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 51. For an alternative discussion of Augustine and the sublime—and a partial response to Auerbach—see Danuta Shanzer, “‘Incessu humilem, successu excelsam’: Augustine, Sermo humilis, and Scriptural upos,” in

16

Doebler

Longinus was largely unknown throughout the period, this does not mean there was no appearance of the sublime. Indeed, it is possible to trace a refined view that interweaves anthropology, Christian theology, and aesthetics. Such a view sees the human as a magnificent artwork that parallels the magnificence visible in the natural world and which human-made products may further exemplify and participate in.21 Another corrective to the typical view that the sublime suddenly reappeared with Boileau is offered by Debora Shuger who traces the development of a ‘Christian Grand Style’ in the English Renaissance, what she also terms a ‘passionate plain style.’22 Such a rhetoric revived the Augustinian emphasis on the relatedness of emotion and knowledge, using passionate speech as a means to move hearers toward God. The relationship between this Christian rhetoric and the emergence of aesthetics in the eighteenth-century requires more study and is something that cannot be pursued here, but it is mentioned in order to underscore that the sublime had a life between Longinus and the eighteenth century, a life that became entwined with Christian theological concerns. So, where was the sublime in the Middle Ages and Renaissance? It was still closely associated with rhetoric but also made reference to the natural world and divine. Also, the sublime was still considered a feature of the experienced object. 1.3 The Eighteenth Century: the Golden Age of the Sublime While it is not accurate to jump from Longinus to the eighteenth century as many analyses of the sublime do, the revival of Longinus via Boileau’s translation in 1674 is a significant moment, especially since its influence would lead to the explosion of interest in the sublime among British writers during that period. What becomes a particular concern then is identifying the source of the sublime. Longinus had briefly suggested the source of the sublime resides in nature and the divine, despite his primary emphasis on rhetoric.23 The English writers of this period extended these suggestions. First, they focused on nature as a source of the sublime, in particular the extreme elements of Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 51–78. 21 See Martino Rossi Monti, “‘Opus es magnificum’: The Image of God and the Aesthetics of Grace,” and C. Stephen Jaeger, “Richard of St. Victor and the Medieval Sublime,” in Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 17–34 and 157–178. 22 Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 249. 23 See Longinus, On Sublimity, 42.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

17

nature.24 Second, they connected the sublime specifically to the God of the Christian Bible—omnipotent, omnipresent, and beyond comprehension—as the ultimate source of the sublime. Thomas Burnet’s (1635–1715) The Sacred Theory of the Earth (Latin version, 1681–1689; English version 1684–1690) anticipates and vividly expresses this combination of natural and divine sublimity. In Sacred Theory, Burnet attempts to reconcile events in the Bible—such as Noah’s Flood—with the science of his day. What is significant for the discussion of the sublime is the paradoxical response Burnet has towards the irregular portions of nature, notably mountains. On the one hand, There is nothing in Nature more shapeless and ill-figur’d than an old Rock or Mountain, and all that Variety that is among them, is but the many various Modes of Irregularity.25 Such a sentiment, repeated in various ways in the book, expresses Burnet’s vision of a fallen world. At the same time, Burnet could feel something else in the mountains and other extreme aspects of the natural world: The greatest Objects in Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold; and next to the Great Concave of the Heavens, and those boundless Regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon with more Pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things, that inspires the Mind with great Thoughts and Passions; we do naturally, upon such Occasions, think of God and his Greatness: And whatsoever hath but the Shadow and Appearance of INFINITE, as all Things have that are too big for our Comprehension, they fill and overbear the Mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of Stupor and Admiration.26 Burnet’s response to the extreme elements of nature anticipates what will become two significant issues in the emerging field of aesthetics. First is recognizing that beauty or beautiful objects do not cover the full range of aesthetic experience, thus additional aesthetic categories are needed, such as the developing theories of the sublime and picturesque. Second is a shift from viewing 24 25 26

See Shaw, The Sublime, 29. Quoted in Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Develop­ ment of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), 210. Quoted in Nicholson, Mountain Gloom, 214.

18

Doebler

beauty or sublimity as a property of the experienced object towards viewing it as a product of the experiencing subject.27 Where is the sublime for Burnet? In nature and the ineffable and in the objective things, although moving towards the subjective. This nascent intuition of the natural sublime in Burnet prepared the way for a flourishing of discussions on the topic in the eighteenth century.28 One of the early, accessible, and influential treatments was Joseph Addison’s (1672–1719) series of essays in the periodical The Spectator, often referred to together as “On the Pleasures of the Imagination” (1712). These essays anticipate many of the developments in the thought of the sublime. Addison divides the pleasures of the imagination in three groups: things that are great, uncommon, or beautiful.29 His definition of greatness is relevant for emerging conceptions of the sublime. Regarding the great he writes: By greatness I do not only mean the bulk of any single object, but the largeness of a whole view, considered as one entire piece. Such are the prospects of an open champaign country, a vast uncultivated desert, of huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices, or a wide expanse of waters, where we are struck not with the novelty or beauty of the sight, but with that rude kind of magnificence which appears in many of these stupendous works of nature. Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. Such wide and undetermined prospects are as pleasing to the fancy, as the speculations of eternity and infinitude are to the understanding. (397–398) And when he then considers the causes of this pleasure in greatness he ultimately identifies it with the greatness of God. Humans are drawn to expansive views of greatness because they point to the soul’s greatest happiness; God is the greatest greatness, so to speak (see 401).

27

As Marjorie Nicholson notes, “Here … for the first time in England we find a sharp distinction between the emotional effects of the sublime and the beautiful in external Nature and find, too, awareness of a conflict and a growing realization that they are subjective, residing not in the object but in the ‘soul’ of the man perceiving the object.” Nicholson, Mountain Gloom, 222, italics original. 28 A wide variety of readings from this period may be found in Andrew Ashfield and Peter DeBolla, eds., The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 29 Joseph Addison, Addison’s Essays from the Spectator (London: Ward, Lock, 1882), 397. Parenthetical page numbers in the following text are to this work.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

19

While Addison recognizes the value of spatial, visual, and literary arts as secondary forms of the imagination, he is emphatic that regarding greatness nature has no match (see 403). However, architecture occupies a special place in Addison’s schema, because it bridges the divide between primary and secondary imagination. Anticipating Hegel, he identifies greatness in architecture in the products of ancient societies, “especially among the Eastern nations of the world,” such as the pyramids or the Great Wall of China (407). Furthermore, Addison suggests that great buildings persist as worship sites because they provide a space that in some way supports the expanding of the human mind and soul. However, there is a hint of negativity when Addison considers the limits of the imagination. On the one hand the imagination—thanks to discoveries via the advances in optics during Addison’s time—takes great pleasure in “enlarge[ing] itself by degrees” by comparing the human to the earth and stars or, in the other direction, what is microscopic and beyond the grasp of the naked eye.30 At the same time, this shows us the proper limits, as well as the defectiveness, of our imagination; how it is confined to a very small quantity of space, and immediately stopt in its operations, when it endeavours to take in anything that is very great, or very little. (426) This kind of breakdown in the imagination in the face of what challenges normal sense perception anticipates Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the sublime. So, in the end in Addison we find a mediating position, primarily locating the sublime in nature and the divine but also seeing it in art. At the same time, Addison seems to view the sublime as a feature of the object, but is also aware that it to some extent depends on the subject. Finally, we also see in Addison a growing emphasis on the violence and power the sublime implicitly suggests as our senses are pressed to their limits. The Irish born English politician Edmund Burke (1730–97) would take this association of the sublime with violence and power to its furthest point in his youthful treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). In the Enquiry, Burke’s stated aim is to discover the essential principles that undergird human ‘passions,’ which for him seems to include emotional states as well as aesthetic feelings and judgments. From 30

Baldine Saint Girons suggests that the 18th century emphasis on the natural sublime was motivated by changes in science that enabled a new appreciation of nature outside of inhabited spaces. See “The Sublime from Longinus to Montesquieu,” 324.

20

Doebler

the beginning, Burke assumes the basic categories of the beautiful and sublime that were in wide circulation at his time, but he argues that previous writing on these topics has often muddled the two terms and what is need is an empirical investigation such as his. Thus, his treatise is fundamentally an attempt to organize more clearly the relation between the beautiful and the sublime, emphasizing the difference between the two. Burke succinctly defines the sublime as: Whatever is fitted in any sort 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; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeing.31 However, it is a peculiar kind of pain and terror that produces delight, a delight that comes “when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances” (47). Experiencing the sublime depends on a certain distance from real pain or danger. So, for Burke the sublime is primarily a feature of the experienced object while the subject has a quasi-feeling of pain or terror. Compared with earlier interpretations of the sublime we have surveyed, Burke is well within the traditional view of seeing the sublime as a feature of the experienced object. However, one of his innovations is that he focuses on one particular feature, threat or pain, and moves that to the front, making it the defining feature of the sublime. Being more specific, Burke says that the primary passion caused by the sublime is astonishment, “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (53). In this state of astonishment, we are so overwhelmed by the thing that reason is forestalled. The sources of such experiences include things that are obscure and things that are powerful, because in both of these the individual’s will is thwarted. He later goes on to root this empirically in the idea of ‘tension,’ that greatness, infinity, and darkness are conducive to the sublime since they create a strain on normal vision (see 124–135). Another innovation Burke makes in the thinking on the sublime is that he quite consciously separates beauty and the sublime and almost forcibly holds them apart. The contrast between the two is sustained throughout and, 31 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36, italics original. Parenthetical page numbers in the following text are to this work.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

21

significantly, gendered, beauty being feminine, small, smooth, delicate, and bright, while the sublime is masculine, vast, rough, solid, and dark (113–114). Finally, the mention of those “whose business it is to affect the passions” suggests that Burke is writing with artists in mind. He mentions the sublime in architecture briefly (see 69–70 and 74) and employs examples drawn from literature, such as Virgil and Milton. So, while references to nature generally provide the background for his empirical discussion, at the very end Burke concludes, It was not my design to enter into the criticism of the sublime and beautiful in any art, but to attempt to lay down such principles as may tend to ascertain, to distinguish, and to form a sort of standard for them. (160–161) Thus, he seems to see the sublime as equally present in nature and fine art, if not more so in art. While Burke’s discussion of the sublime has become among the most well-known, there were other voices around his time and shortly after, including Alexander Gerard (1728–95), Lord Kames (1696–1782), Archibald Alison (1757–1839), and Dugald Stewart (1753–1828). Rather than emphasizing terror and pain as definitive elements of the sublime, these authors focused on the sublime more as Addison did, as a pleasing sense of elevation, grandeur, and power. As Rachel Zuckert summarizes, In emphasizing elevation and sedateness (or dreamlikeness) these accounts depict a milder, more straightforwardly uplifting response to large objects and take the experience of contemplating the Alps, the calm ocean, or the starry sky as emblematic of the sublime. Such experience strikes one not as markedly painful or frightening, but rather as calm and elevating. Thus (again contra Burke), these thinkers also hold that objects may be both beautiful and sublime.32 Zuckert goes on to argue that these thinkers develop a version of the sublime that attempts to account for the variety of objects and feelings associated with the sublime rather than identifying one essential characteristic as Burke does. So, while they start from the core experience of the magnificent or elevating in nature as paradigmatic, a process of association or transference from 32

Rachel Zuckert, “The Associative Sublime,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 66–67.

22

Doebler

one experience to another links different objects and feelings, which become identified as sublime, even though overall there may be a wide diversity of phenomena, including the arts. But despite their qualitative difference from Burke, if we plot this group of thinkers they would be in a similar position to Burke, seeing the sublime as a primarily objective feature of things but present in both nature and art. A dramatically different approach is taken by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), whose discussion of the sublime in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) has been arguably the most influential work on the topic.33 In his discussion of the analytic of the sublime, Kant opens by highlighting the differences between the beautiful and the sublime, reinforcing the division opened by Burke, whom he had read. The beautiful is clearly delineated while the sublime is limitless; the beautiful is playful and promotes a feeling of life while the sublime is serious and engenders a feeling that vitality is inhibited. Thus, the beautiful is a positive pleasure while the sublime is what Kant terms a negative pleasure, since the pleasure from the experience is only received indirectly. This indirect, negative pleasure is based on the key difference between the beautiful and the sublime: the beautiful indicates a purposiveness which the human power of judgment can grasp whereas the sublime seems to lack any comprehensible purpose and thus thwarts the power of the imagination. The negative pleasure of the sublime comes when this very thwarting of our judgment spurs us on to recognize our unique capabilities of reason. This is why Kant argues that sublimity is not a property of the experienced object but resides in the experiencing subject. As he states, the experience of the object is the occasion “for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind; for what is properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form.”34 With this we already see how Kant marks a paradigm shift in thinking about the sublime. As Paul Guyer notes, “Kant reduced the natural objects … to mere triggers, the proper object of the experience being ourselves.”35 Furthermore, Kant is unique in seeing nature as the only thing capable of generating sublime experience; art is not capable of the sublime. This distinction also turns on the 33

This is the most evolved version of Kant’s work on the sublime. For an earlier iteration, see Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 34 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129. Parenthetical page numbers in the following text are to this work. 35 Paul Guyer, “The German Sublime After Kant,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 102.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

23

difference between purposiveness and nonpurposiveness. For Kant the intentionality visible in beautiful nature suggests an analogy with the intentionality expressed by humans in art, creating a suggestive relation between the two. In contrast, the sublime merely highlights the difference between nature and humans as the nonpurposiveness suggested by extreme experiences of nature serves only “to make palpable in ourselves a purposiveness that is entirely independent of nature” (130). A further elaboration of his view of the sublime will fill out this position. Kant divides the sublime in two, the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime. The mathematical sublime has to do with quantities of large magnitudes, and Kant draws a narrow compass around the kinds of things that can engender it, specifically magnitudes in ‘raw nature’ that, when seen, press vision to its limits (136). What such experiences evoke is the idea of the infinite, an idea that can only be grasped by reason and in this way elevates the mind. This ability of the mind to grasp larger and larger wholes in nature that press our sensory capacities to their limits has the effect of “representing our imagination in all its boundlessness, and with it nature, as paling into insignificance beside the ideas of reason …” (140). The mathematical sublime gives the pleasurable feeling to the mind that nothing is greater than it. The dynamical sublime also has the pleasing effect of elevating reason above nature and our sensory capacities, although this time it is with respect to power. Kant sees those events in nature that instill fear, threatening our very life, as arousing a feeling of the sublime when viewed from a safe distance, because we are able to look within and discover in our reason a power different from, but equal to, nature. The dynamical sublime gives the pleasurable feeling to the mind that nothing is more powerful than it: Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightening and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc., make our capacity to resist into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power. But the sight of them only becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature. (144–145)

24

Doebler

1.4 The Nineteenth Century: the Eclipse of the Sublime In the nineteenth century, Kant’s interpretation of the sublime cast a long shadow, whether eliciting new elaborations or critiques. But what is most noteworthy is that while Kant restricted the sublime to the experience of nature, the inward turn Kant made possible led to a progressive association of the sublime with the experience of art. Following closely on Kant’s heels, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), in his essay “On the Sublime (Toward the Further Development of Some Kantian Ideas)” (1793), focuses even more than Kant on how the subjective nature of the sublime points to the uniqueness and greatness of the human will.36 As Paul Guyer notes, Schiller makes two significant modifications to Kant. First, he expands the dynamical sublime to dealing with not only overcoming nature but also overcoming what is non-rational within ourselves. This leads to his second alteration of Kant: art, rather than nature, becomes the primary impetus for sublime experience since only a human product can challenge the human to overcome restrictions internal to itself. And for Schiller it is tragedy that is the best medium for expressing the ‘pathetic sublime,’ since it can show both human suffering and moral independence in that suffering.37 Schiller marks new territory as he locates the sublime in the subject and sees both art and nature as means to evoke it. At roughly the same time as Schiller, among English Romantic interpreters of the sublime Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) is significant. On one hand, he seems to tow a close line to a Kantian definition of the sublime as an experience located in the subject, although, like Schiller, he views art as a key source of such an experience. I meet, I find the Beautiful—but I give, contribute, or rather attribute the Sublime. No object of Sense is sublime in itself; but only so far as I make it a symbol of some Idea.38 But at other times, Coleridge sounds a different note, blurring the division between subject and object. This can be seen in his understanding of poetry as a symbolic expression that presents the Idea and thing as inseparable. Here a

36

In Friedrich Schiller, Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), 22–44. 37 See Guyer, “The German Sublime After Kant,” 106. 38 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 597. Quoted in Shaw, The Sublime, 95.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

25

symbol is that which “partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity.”39 Such a synthesis is more gnomically expressed in this way: “Where neither whole nor parts, but unity, as boundless or endless allness—the Sublime.”40 This suggests a middle position as the poem, a work of art, is inseparable from what it expresses, especially nature. At the same time, the sublime is primarily located in the subject but closely related to the object, as if the sublime does not belong to one or the other but may appear in their union. G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) takes the artistic turn of Schiller and Coleridge even further while offering a critique of Kant. While Kant views nature to be the best example of the sublime precisely because it brackets out any human maker or social context, Hegel emphasizes the sublime as an essential stage in the unfolding of history, specifically in human art that takes place within particular contexts. In his posthumously published Lectures on Fine Art (1835), Hegel develops a theory of art as the embodiment of Absolute Spirit, or Idea, in sensual, material form. Thus, in sharp contrast to Kant, from the outset he minimizes the aesthetic experience of nature in his considerations, focusing primarily on art. Furthermore, the sublime only appears in Hegel’s theorizing as one moment within the history of art, which is the unfolding of Spirit through the arts, each stage leading to further self-consciousness. In Hegel’s schema of art history there are three roughly chronological stages, the symbolic, classic, and romantic. The sublime appears in the era of symbolic art, which is particularly associated with colossal architecture such as the pyramids.41 The features of obscurity and grandeur mark this art because the Spirit is searching for adequate expression, expression that will not be achieved until the classic unity of Greek sculpture. However, even within his analysis of symbolic art the sublime plays a marginal, but essential role, as human awareness of Spirit moves from unconscious to conscious symbolism. Hegel loosely keeps Kant’s sense of the sublime when he notes that it is “the attempt to express the infinite, without finding in the sphere of phenomena an object which proves adequate for this representation.”42 However, he 39 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 30. Quoted in Shaw, The Sublime, 94. 40 Quoted in Nicola Trott, “The Picturesque, the Beautiful and the Sublime,” in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 85. 41 The periods of art are chronological although Hegel does not deny aspects of each may appear in other periods. It is merely what is the dominant theme during an epoch. 42 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, two vol., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 363.

26

Doebler

clearly departs from Kant by applying this to human made objects that are attempts to articulate Spirit. An art object is sublime when the maker begins to recognize that what is aimed at in the act of making—Spirit—is different from and cannot be contained in the made thing. This marks a move to conscious symbolism. For Hegel, then, the sublime is associated primarily with art and is seen more as an objective feature of human products produced in a particular historical context. The fact that Hegel gives the sublime a marginal place in such a massive work on aesthetics leads Paul Guyer to argue it is “a major factor in the virtual disappearance of the category from aesthetics in the century or more.”43 Certainly interest in the sublime does seem to subside after Hegel until it becomes popular again in the late twentieth century. But an important stepping-stone during this lull that must be mentioned is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). In his early work The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), Nietzsche builds off of Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788–1860) view of reality as irrational, but goes a step further. If, as Paul Guyer suggests, one reads Nietzsche’s contrast between the ordered Apollonian and the chaotic Dionysian as a contrast between beauty and sublime, then he “has radically reconceived the experience of the sublime as an intimation of the fundamental nonrationality of existence, rather than its rationality.”44 One could even suggest Nietzsche is returning the sublime to its roots in Longinus where the sublime bypasses the rational. Yet, at the same time Nietzsche continues the Hegelian emphasis that the sublime appears in art rather than nature. The difference is that art for Nietzsche presents us with a very different vision of reality than Hegel and, significantly, sublime art is a thing of the moment rather than a relic of an obscure past. As Nietzsche says, Here, at this moment of supreme danger for the will, art approaches as a saving sorceress with the power to heal. Art alone can re-direct those repulsive thoughts about the terrible and absurd nature of existence into representations with which man can live; these representations are the sublime, whereby the terrible is tamed by artistic means, and the comical, whereby disgust at absurdity is discharged by artistic means.45

43 Guyer, “The German Sublime After Kant,” 109. 44 Guyer, “The German Sublime After Kant,” 115. 45 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 40, italics original. Quoted in Guyer, “The German Sublime After Kant,” 115.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

27

This emphasis on the terrible echoes Burke and will influence the retrieval of the sublime almost a hundred years later. This is an early view of Nietzsche on the sublime and changes to his thought will be touched on in Part 4, but for now it can be noted that Nietzsche locates the sublime more in the object and views it as generated by works of art, in a similar position to Hegel. 1.5 The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: a Sublime Revival After being ignored for most of the twentieth century, the sublime has experienced a change of fortune since the 1970s, becoming a popular topic within discussions surrounding postmodernism, and amid this revival has undergone further transformations. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) is perhaps the most influential contemporary thinker who has discussed the sublime, writing about it across many books and essays.46 In his analysis of the current cultural context, which he labels as postmodern, Lyotard looks at the contemporary state of the arts both to diagnose problems as well as prescribe solutions. For Lyotard, the modern and postmodern are not different, temporally sequential periods but they work together in a continual, renewing movement.47 The modern calls into question all earlier paradigms of knowledge, morality, or metaphysics: Modernity, whenever it appears, does not occur without a shattering of belief, without a discovery of the lack of reality in reality—a discovery linked to the invention of other realities. (234, ital. orig.) Lyotard sees two possible responses to this apparently liberating event of calling reality into question and these are both marked by different approaches to the image and image-making technologies. One response is reactionary and is exemplified in totalitarian politics and consumer capitalism. Both of these utilize advances in technology, such as photography, to create qualitatively and 46

Some examples include: Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?” in The Postmodern Reader: Foundational Texts, ed. Michael Drolet (London: Routledge, 2004), 230–237; “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime,” trans. Lisa Liebmann, Artforum, 20/8 (April, 1982): 64–69; “The Sublime and the Avant Garde,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 89–107. 47 See Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?” in The Postmodern Reader: Foundational Texts, ed. Michael Drolet (London: Routledge, 2004), 235–36. Parenthetical page numbers in the following text are to this work.

28

Doebler

quantitatively superior representational images of the world, images that reinforce the impulse towards realism, which aims at “protecting consciousness from doubt” (232). The other possible response to the loss of a stable semblance of ‘reality’ in modernity is the path taken by the avant-garde movements in the arts, which continually challenge any attempt at adequately representing reality and constantly showing this impossibility. Lyotard suggests that this mode of response is grounded on the aesthetic of the sublime (see 234). In further contrasting these two kinds of response to the challenge of modernity, Lyotard draws on Kant’s analytic of the beautiful and the sublime. He notes that for Kant the pleasure of the beautiful arises from an accord between the capacity to conceive and the capacity to present an object corresponding to the concept. … The sublime is a different feeling. It occurs when the imagination in fact fails to present any object which could accord with a concept, even if only in principle. (234) So, whereas political and economic powers will aim for stable, beautiful presentations of reality that can produce uniform standards of taste for communal agreement, avant-garde art takes as its challenge “presenting the existence of something unpresentable. Showing that there is something we can conceive of which we can neither see nor show” (235). This is done through techniques of negative presentation, such as formal abstraction and the lack of recognizable, figural content, so that in seeing the viewer will not see and in this way the painting “will give pleasure only by giving pain,” a complex experience that is the hallmark of the sublime for both Burke and Kant, as we have seen. Thus, avant-garde art will “continually expose the artifices of presentation that allow thought to be enslaved by the gaze and diverted from the unpresentable” (235). As a result, such works will often appear—in vocabulary Lyotard draws directly from the Kantian sublime—“‘monstrous,’ ‘formless,’ purely ‘negative’ nonentities.”48 Instead of presenting an illusion of reality such as those manipulated by political and economic powers that claim a “reconciliation of the concept and the sensible” in a tidy totality, the avant-garde artist and thinker49 instead will “invent allusions to what is conceivable but not presentable” and thereby resist any presumably violent, totalizing closure (237).

48 Jean-François Lyotard, “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime,” trans. Lisa Liebmann. Artforum, 20/8 (April, 1982), 67. 49 Lyotard sees the artist and philosopher as close kin in their questioning of reality. See Lyotard, “Presenting the Unpresentable,” 69.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

29

From this brief survey of Lyotard’s approach to the sublime, we can see he draws on Kant, but at the same time makes some significant changes. Most notably is that Lyotard’s theory is completely founded on art whereas for Kant the sublime is always connected with the experience of nature. So, Lyotard locates the sublime in art. However, he is ambivalent about whether the sublime is a feature of the object or the subject. As he hermetically comments, “The sublime feeling, which is also the feeling of the sublime” (234). Indeed, what is perhaps most significant is that Lyotard gestures towards a sublime, as the unpresentable, as a particular thing that is perceived in a fragmentary way through the artwork. The artwork will be sublime to the extent that it adequately captures this mysterious sublime that hovers always beyond.50 While not usually associated with postmodernism, Theodor Adorno’s (1903– 1969) reflections on the sublime in his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970) echo Lyotard’s resistance to political and economic threats of totality. Furthermore, like Lyotard, Adorno also draws on but transforms Kant’s sublime. For Adorno, instead of the Kantian noumenal realm being beyond the finitude of the empirical realm, the human is firmly circumscribed within the empirical as one more creature within nature open to foibles and frailty. The sublime was supposedly the grandeur of human beings who are spiritual and dominate nature. If, however, the experience of the sublime reveals itself as the self-consciousness of human beings’ naturalness, then the composition of the concept changes.51 Adorno suggests that this changed conception of the sublime was supported by a change in the ways art was understood. Since the late eighteenth century, Adorno reads authentic art as progressively becoming autonomous and assuming the role of social critic. By detaching itself from any particular use function, art is able to serve humans in a more subversive way. “It is loyal to humanity only through inhumanity to it” (197). Here Adorno means that art 50 Lyotard’s view of the sublime as the unpresentable is shared by many other contemporary thinkers on the subject, such as Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Slavoj Žižek, although each develop this in different ways. On Deleuze and Kirsteva see David B. Johnson “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and Its Limits,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 118–134. On Nancy see Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Sublime Offering,” in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 25–53. On Žižek see Shaw, The Sublime, 131–147. 51 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 198. Parenthetical page numbers in the following text are to this work.

30

Doebler

must challenge the ‘administered world’ of modern society and break through the ‘reified consciousness’ that it maintains (196). To do this, an artwork will always attempt to communicate ‘the uncommunicable’ and this paradoxical situation will appear as an irreconcilable tension between the form and content of an artwork. Adorno sees this breakdown in representation in the artwork as a transposition of the defeat of the imagination by nature in Kant’s version of the sublime. And the reason why art can, indeed must, take over for nature as the site of sublime experience is because in the evolution of art it was discovered that, “Art’s spirit is the self-recognition of the spirit itself as natural” (196). By recognizing the fact of the natural state of humans is all there is, the positive transcendence of spirit offered by Kant is proved an illusion and it is left to art to work out the contradictory experience of humans without recourse to any transcendental realm. By trying to sustain contradictions, Adorno develops a dialectical version of the sublime that recognizes the ways the sublime has been reified in the past as an instrument of domination in pursuit of some Absolute, anticipating more recent critiques.52 In response to this, “Art must find domination a source of shame and seek to overturn the perdurable, the desideratum of the concept of the sublime” (199). For Adorno, then, the sublime is in an obscure place between the subject and the object, but it is clearly prompted by works of art. Finally, the perspective of Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) should be mentioned as he provides some nuances to what we have seen in Lyotard and Adorno. Jameson, in his Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), draws on Burke and Kant’s conceptions of the sublime in order to articulate the new ‘emotional ground tone’ of the postmodern situation. He suggests that while the sublime traditionally had to do with the limits of human strength and representation in the face of overwhelming nature, “The other of our society is … no longer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist societies, but something else which we must now identify.”53 Jameson summarizes this new thing as technology, but technology as a feature of multinational capitalism. This creates a new space around us that we are still grappling with,

52 Adorno’s analysis of the sublime’s complicity in power and domination may be read, in part, as a response to his experience of the Nazi era in Germany, critiquing the ideology that enabled it in an effort to prevent such atrocities from happening again. 53 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 35, italics original.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

31

a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp. … It is in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodern sublime can alone be adequately theorized.54 Jameson makes explicit the threat of advanced capitalism hinted at by both Lyotard and Adorno, but the difference is that he identifies this as the new sublime for our day, while Lyotard and Adorno locate the sublime in those artistic expressions of resistance against such a monolithic structure. But at the same time, Jameson seems to agree with Lyotard and Adorno that the only adequate form of resistance against this threat is a progressive art that reaches towards a different kind of sublime, the ‘unpresentable’ or the ‘uncommunicable’ Lyotard and Adorno speak of: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.55 So, we can plot Jameson next to Adorno and Lyotard, but note that for him the sublime arises in two different kinds of human products, negatively in technology and global capitalism, positively in art. 1.6 Summary Our survey of the sublime has covered almost two thousand years and we have seen a diversity of opinions regarding whether the sublime is in the object or the subject, and if it is generated by nature or human products such as art. While some maintain a rigid distinction, several suggest a mediating position between the extreme dichotomies of subject/object and art/nature. One common feature among the different positions surveyed here is an emphasis on formlessness, that the sublime is what escapes representation or thwarts our attempts at comprehension. There is also a general consensus that the sublime gives a certain complex pleasure, a state of elevation. Indeed, taken 54 Jameson, Postmodernism, 38. 55 Jameson, Postmodernism, 54.

32

Doebler

together these different views seem to suggest two kinds of sublime, as we saw in Frederic Jameson, a negative sublime that threatens and a positive sublime that liberates. As we explore the different critiques of the sublime in the following parts it may be helpful to keep this distinction in mind as we try to consider where the sublime has gone wrong and why it may be worth keeping, albeit with certain modifications. 2

Sustaining Depth: Critiquing the Sublime with Theological Aesthetics The sublime is any power which is perilous, shattering, ravishing, traumatic, excessive, exhilarating, dwarfing, astonishing, uncontainable, over­ whelming, boundless, obscure, terrifying, enthralling, and uplifting. As such, like so many modern aesthetic concepts, it is among other things a secularized version of God. In modern times, art has been often enough forced to stand in for the Almighty. The sublime is a glimpse of infinity which dissolves our identity and shakes us to our roots, but in an agreeable kind of way. It warps the very inner structure of the mind, tugging us loose from the slackening grasp of reason. Like the divine and the Dionysian, it is enrapturing as well as devastating— which is to say that it is not hard to detect in it the shadowy presence of the death drive.56

This quote by the literary theorist Terry Eagleton points to one issue in current discussions of the sublime, the relation of the concept to ontology, including religious, theological, and spiritual thought.57 In particular, a recent cluster of theological approaches have identified ontological problems in the sublime, arguing that the modern division between beauty and the sublime expresses a view of reality that is at root, violent. In what follows I will specifically discuss the complementary work of John Milbank, Graham Ward, and John Betz that, on one hand, presents a critical genealogy of this modern split between beauty and the sublime and, on the other, offers constructive proposals that advocate for the interrelation of 56 57

Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 44. For one recent overview of the relation between the sublime and religion see Andrew Chignell and Matthew C. Halteman, “Religion and the Sublime,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 183–202.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

33

beauty and the sublime rooted in theological notions of trinity, incarnation, and the analogy of being.58 I will conclude by placing these critiques and suggestions in dialogue with Hiroshi Senju’s art and the Japanese aesthetic concept of yūgen. 2.1 Question: Sublime vs. Beauty? John Milbank argues that in the postmodern sublime—such as we saw in the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson in our survey of the sublime—there is a shift from a conceptualization of the sublime as “a suprahierarchical summit which we may gradually hope to scale” to “a new thinking of the transcendent as the absolutely unknowable void, upon whose brink we finite beings must dizzily hover.”59 What made this shift possible, according to Milbank, was an earlier division between the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful is contained harmony while the sublime is uncontained rupture and shock. Milbank traces this division back to Burke and Kant, which is in keeping with what we saw in our survey. This suggests that the line between the postmodern and modern is not as clear as some would suggest. However, Milbank then goes even further to suggest that behind Burke and Kant are theological influences. One of the theological issues Milbank identifies is the idea in Christian mysticism that God must be loved indifferently with no reference to individual desire or happiness. This indifference is passed on to Kant via German Pietism and becomes the hallmark of Kant’s aesthetic. For Kant the aesthetic is only a steppingstone to the ethical and this is why the sublime is more important than beauty, because its

58 Other recent discussions of the sublime from a theological perspective include David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2004), 43–93; Ben Quash, ‘The De-sublimations of Christian Art’, in The Art of the Sublime, ed. Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding, January 2013, accessed 17 November 2021, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/ben-quash-the-de -sublimations-of-christian-art-r1140522; Grace Jantzen, “On Changing the Imaginary,” in The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 289–293; Frederick C. Bauerschmidt, “Aesthetics: The Theological Sublime,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, et al. (London: Routledge, 1999), 201–219; and Paul S. Fiddes, “The Sublime and the Beautiful: Intersections between Theology and Literature,” in Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces, ed. Heather Walton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 127–152. 59 John Milbank, “Sublimity: The Modern Transcendent,” in Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, ed. Regina Schwartz (London: Routledge, 2004), 211.

34

Doebler

exclusive association with painful shock and rupture … is a sign of the necessary sacrifice of the pleasurable, which is the only possible mode of access to the purely moral domain.60 Milbank goes on to suggest that the whole effort of German Idealism, including Schiller and Hegel, was to find an alternative to Kant’s strict, ethical sublime, one that would recover beauty and desire, but this failed. He argues that while Hegel seems to be attempting to reunite the sublime and beauty, he only ends up establishing “a more radical philosophy of sublimity.”61 This is because for Hegel the self must express its freedom in some concrete action. But such an action never corresponds to the indeterminate essence of freedom. Conse­ quently, only the sublime remains: it is no longer that real beyond to which we gesture, but rather the ultimate emptiness of all our gestures, reducing their ‘beautiful’ content to an empirical residue. Hegel effaces the beautiful in favor of the sublime.62 This logic is then taken up by postmodern thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, et. al., “when they take the absolute to be a sublime void present only when a-voided in difference, and re-voided only in re-differentiation, in ceaseless oscillation.”63 Graham Ward presents a slightly different reading of the contemporary sublime, but with similar conclusions to Milbank. Ward suggests the sublime and kitsch function as two ways to fulfill the need for transcendence in modernity. The sublime is marked by silence and is seen as meaningful while kitsch is superficial and meaningless. Modernity shuttles back and forth between these poles, which are similar in that they de-create by insisting upon the inadequacy of signification in signifying. The sublime and kitsch are mirror reflections of each other, each producing depthlessness, each denigrating the body and materiality, for both require the disintegration (and proclaim the fundamental illusion) of time and space. That which lies beyond can be either theistically or atheistically interpreted; it can either be plenitude or void.64 60 61 62 63 64

Milbank, “Sublimity,” 218–219, italics original. Milbank, “Sublimity,” 226. Milbank, “Sublimity,” 228, italics original. Milbank, “Sublimity,” 228. Graham Ward, “Transcendence and Representation,” in Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, ed. Regina Schwartz (London: Routledge,

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

35

Ward’s sublime/kitsch framework may be a useful way to think of the two kinds of sublime identified by Lyotard. Lyotard considers two kinds of positive response to the current situation, which may be labeled the modern and postmodern sublime. The modern, following Kant, is melancholic and nostalgic, feeling a sense of loss as all grand narratives are called into question and one “despairs of being able to speak on anything, whether human or divine.”65 Modern art, for Lyotard, can communicate this. The postmodern sublime goes beyond this, accepting that there is no ‘real’ that even needs negative representation. The aesthetic of this is pastiche and all attempts to dissolve stable representations. If we use Ward’s categories, the modern and postmodern sublime are not chronological, but they trade back and forth. And as we saw, for Lyotard these sensibilities may coexist in the same work. Milbank and Ward, then, suggest that the modern/postmodern sublime functions as a new transcendent that lacks any ontological depth but contents itself with the transcendent as unknowable void. John Betz traces this out in fine detail in two extended essays.66 There he argues that an “overarching discourse of the sublime” that conceives of the sublime and the beautiful in opposition—and exalts the former—spans both modern and postmodern philosophy, showing that both movements are in reality cut from the same cloth, that the postmodern, for all its contestations, is really just a continuation of the modern. What both share is an aversion to recourse to any transcendent reality.67 The only difference is that modern philosophy tends to construe the sublime in terms of an ultimate presence and identity, following Parmenides, whereas postmodern philosophy construes the sublime in terms of an ultimate absence and difference, following Heraclitus. In either case, however, the beauty of being disappears, because it is ultimately an illusion—either of the One (or Absolute) or of Nothing at all. (371)68 2004), 135. This contrast of the sublime and kitsch is also discussed in Graham Ward, True Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 124–125. 65 Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, “The Invisible and the Sublime: From Participation to Reconciliation.” in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology, ed. James K. A. Smith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 92. 66 John R. Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part One),” Modern Theology 21/3 (2005): 367–411 and “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part Two),” Modern Theology 22/1 (2006): 1–50. 67 See John R. Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part One),” Modern Theology 21/3 (2005), 375. Parenthetical page numbers in the following text are to this work. 68 This echoes Lyotard’s schema of a modern and postmodern sublime.

36

Doebler

We have already seen a sketch of Kant’s analytic of the beautiful and sublime in the previous part and it can serve as background for evaluating Betz’s interpretation. What Betz emphasizes is that for Kant both the beautiful and the sublime are subjective experiences and are not located in the experienced object. With regard to the beautiful, what makes something beautiful is that it allows the imagination to engage in a sort of free play, where the imagination is not required to perform its usual labor of creating concepts that can organize sense experience for the understanding. This ‘disinterested’ activity is useful because it prepares the individual for the more important thing, disinterested ethical action in conformity with the categorical imperative. This subjective focus leads Betz to argue that Kant’s transcendental project is ultimately ‘narcissistic’ and ‘Promethean,’ giving him a close kinship with Nietzsche’s will to power (378). Moving on to the sublime, Betz is careful to distinguish two versions of the sublime, one Kant’s and one postmodern, noting that while the latter draws generously on Kant, it seizes on particular comments that are misinterpreted, specifically Kant’s references to violence (as well as ‘abyss’ and ‘sacrifice’) and finds in this a fissure that destabilizes Kant’s autonomous subject who is rationally in control. Betz recognizes there is some warrant for reading this violence in Kant, and that indeed Kant does separate the beautiful and the sublime and the sublime does portend violence, both from nature to the individual but then from the individual to nature in the feeling of rational superiority. But while for Kant the sublime is an occasion for “a negative presentation of the infinite,” this is actually the occasion for a “higher presentation” which is the brilliance of human reason. According to Betz, Thus, it is here, where aesthetics and ethics coincide, that one arrives at the pinnacle of Kant’s system. For just as nature (through the feeling of the sublime) leads to the moral law, the moral law turns out to be what is truly sublime. (385, ital. orig.) But crucially, while the beautiful may point to the moral law in a vague way, all pleasure and desire is cut off in the sublime which enables reason to force the will into obedience of the law. Turning to the postmodern sublime, Betz identifies two parents of the postmodern version, one the ‘poetic nihilism’ that comes through the legacy of Kant and Nietzsche, showing the arbitrariness of reason and thus the centrality of the will and its aesthetic inventions, and the ‘ontological nihilism’ of Heidegger who attempts to ‘remember’ Being by erasing all representations in

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

37

the face of Nothing. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy draws on both of these, hence Betz’s choice of focusing on him since he effectively shows how aesthetics and ontology work off of each other.69 For Nancy the sublime is the place where presentation emerges and it uncovers the very event of anything coming to being, bearing a resemblance to Heidegger’s Sein. For both Nancy and Heidegger, the experience of Being has no transcendent referent. At the same time, Nancy riffs on Kant’s sense of the imagination slipping in the face of the void, so that rather than exalting reason “the sublime exposes one to the ontological horizon of any presentation whatsoever” (394). But despite the differences between the Kantian and Nancy’s postmodern sublime, both stay at the level of immanence and ultimately leave the self closed in on itself and in this way it is plausible to see the postmodern project as an extension and ‘radicalization’ of the Enlightenment project (see 395). Such, then, is the ultimate similarity between Kant (modernity) and Nancy (post-modernity). Both are transcendental philosophies that play out between a groundless subject and the empty horizon of its own possibilities. (398) Betz’s assessment of this immanent transcendent could also be applied to the postmodern sublime we saw in Lyotard, Adorno, and Jameson, all of whom restrict human aspirations to the material. And while Betz acknowledges positive gestures in postmodern philosophy towards some otherness, he concludes that these are ultimately empty since they always preclude any reality outside the present world. In the end, the postmodern discourse of the sublime “is ruled by a discourse of power” (400). 2.2 Answer: a Peaceful Beautiful-Sublime via the Analogy of Being In contrast to this separation of beauty and the sublime over the last two hundred years, Milbank, Ward, and Betz advocate for a perspective that peacefully interrelates beauty and the sublime. Milbank says we need a perspective that holds the beautiful and sublime in suspension, “allowing merely a relative distinction between the two.”70 Such a perspective would emphasize the relationality and gift-giving nature of any encounter of the subject with an ‘other’ object. 69 See Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Sublime Offering,” in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 25–53. 70 Milbank, “Sublimity,” 228.

38

Doebler

In this mode [of giving] therefore, one could seek to restore the sublime to the beautiful and close the duality. And the mode discloses that the key to such restoration is once more to construe the beautiful as part of a movement towards desire for the other. Where this is denied, and the sublime is sundered from the beautiful—eventually, as in postmodern nihilism to the point of obliterating it—then the passage to the sublime leads not to union with a living other, but to a dispassionate freedom which beckons us beyond encounter, to total fusion.71 Milbank suggests such a constructive view may be found in the biblical idea of kabod, or glory, that the incomprehensible God can be communicated and grasped—but never completely—in concrete form, ultimately in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Such a knowable, visible, incarnational sublime then stands in contrast with the modern quasi-religious sublime of modernity and postmodernity which “tend[s] strictly to substitute sublimity for transcendence. This means that all that persists of transcendence is sheer unknowability or its quality of non-representability and non-depictability.”72 In a similar vein, Graham Ward suggests allegory is a constructive way to rethink the relation of beauty and the sublime and other binaries such as language/silence, transcendence/immanence, etc. A turn to allegory emphasizes that all language is fluid and ambiguous, that it is not only denotative but connotative and participative. And rather than disregarding materiality as with the sublime or kitsch, allegory activates and suspends the material. It dissolves the line between name and thing and any assumption that the world is a static state upon the basis of which knowledge of things through the transparency of words is believable.73 Allegory suggests that we are constantly reading the world at each moment as it changes. Finally, like Milbank, Ward suggests a Christian theological framework based on incarnation and the relational Trinity is ultimately needed to ground his view of allegory and overcome the binaries he discusses.74 Just as in the critique of the sublime, Betz presents the most detailed proposal for how to restore the relation between beauty and the sublime. All 71 72 73 74

Milbank, “Sublimity,” 230. Milbank, “Sublimity,” 212–213, italics original. Ward, “Transcendence and Representation,” 138. See Ward, “Transcendence and Representation,” 145.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

39

of these authors critique the separation of the beautiful and the sublime in modern and postmodern thought, yet none of them see one as reducible to the other; rather, there is always an attempt to hold both in productive tension. Betz, for example, does not deny that beautiful/sublime name different aesthetic experiences; rather, it is how one interprets the difference between them and their relationship, whether it is “one of degree or one of absolute rupture.”75 The crux of the matter, then, is that the postmodern sublime is simply one interpretation and Betz develops an alternative interpretation based on the notion of the analogy of being (analogia entis), particularly as it was developed by the twentieth-century theologian Erich Przywara (1889–1972). Having its genesis in Aristotle’s definition of analogy, the analogy of being is a way of conceiving the relation of creation to God by means of proportion. But rather than being a crude form of natural theology—as alleged by Karl Barth—or onto-theology—as alleged by Martin Heidegger—it asserts that for every similarity between God and creation there is a greater dissimilarity. Thus, it is a method to recognize and preserve difference. In Przywara’s own words, It stands … as a ‘suspended middle’ between the absolute transcendence of the God of Calvin, Kierkegaard, and Barth, and the absolute immanence of the God of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack.—‘Analogy,’ understood as a genuine relation between two X, wipes out at the root every ‘derivation’—whether deductive or inductive.76 Thus, rather than being a principle of identity the analogy of being is an explicit ‘reductio in mysterioum’ (Przywara’s phrase), a ruthless reduction of all principles … to the mystery of their own inconclusiveness (cf. 2 Cor. 10:4–5): to the mystery, which is evident to any honest philosophy, that creaturely being and knowing can in no way ground itself.77 This groundless, suspended position of the creature speaks to Przywara’s basic ontological outlook that positions the creature at the intersection of the two analogies he identifies: the immanent analogy and the theological analogy. 75 Betz, “Beyond the Sublime (Part One),” 373. 76 Quoted in John R. Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part Two),” Modern Theology 22/1 (2006), 10. 77 John R. Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part Two),” Modern Theology 22/1 (2006), 10, italics original. Parenthetical page numbers in the following text are to this work.

40

Doebler

The immanent analogy is the creature’s basic state of being, which is suspended between ‘essence in existence’ and ‘essence beyond existence.’ The theological analogy is this relation between becoming (in the sense of ‘essence in-and-beyond existence’) and Being (in the sense of a divine identity of essence and existence) that constitutes the most basic analogy between God and creatures. (22, ital. orig.) While Przywara ultimately grounds the analogia entis theologically, he also argues that the immanent analogy, the basic ontological state of essence-in-andbeyond existence has historical and phenomenological warrant. Historically, the tension between essence and existence can be seen in the series of philosophical dichotomies between idealist and realist traditions from Plato and Aristotle onward. This historical fact is also borne out in the basic phenomenological reality experienced by people everyday. As Betz notes, Przywara begins his book Analogia Entis “as a phenomenological investigation” and he is writing in response to both Husserl and Heidegger, but where he departs from them is in also being “an explicit metaphysics of transcendence” (25). At the same time, what sets Przywara’s analogia entis apart from theories of transcendence is that it is rooted in phenomenology. This tension of essencein-and-beyond-existence leads Przywara to take St. Thomas Aquinas’s ‘real distinction’ further by specifying that creaturely being not only is one where essence and existence are different—as opposed to God in whom they are united—but that it “is ‘in becoming’ (in fieri), or that it only ‘is’ as becoming, specifically, as a ‘coming to be’ of essence” (26, ital. orig.). But it is this basic phenomenological position that then opens the creature out (in love) towards the theological analogy. As Betz summarizes, Far, then, from compromising the difference between God and creatures (as Barth imagined), the analogy of being forcibly holds it open; and it does so with regard to an ultimate generosity: for the sake of an asymptotic ascent of the creature to the threshold of its origin, where its speculations break off of necessity into the silent adoration of the Giver of being—and not into some form of modern or postmodern auto-affection. (29–30, ital. orig., brackets orig.) This last sentence brings us back to the sublime and leads to the question, “What is the relevance of the analogy of being for interpreting the sublime?”

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

41

Based on Przywara’s analogy of being, Betz offers a basic approach to a theological sublime: a theological, specifically Christian sublime has to do … with the givenness (in the form of ‘in-and-beyond’) of the unrepresentable in what is presented, or, one might say, with the givenness of the sublime in the beautiful—without thereby relaxing the tension between these terms … but precisely maintaining it, inasmuch as their form remains strictly analogical. (32, ital. orig.) Furthermore, what a specifically Christian sublime can offer is a ‘positive infinite’ in contrast to the negative longing seen in Romantic aesthetics and this is precisely because of Christ’s kenotic descent (the infinite coming into the finite) and the human being raised up via the Spirit to be in Christ by which immanence is transcended (33, ital. orig.). Betz goes on to appropriate Kant’s categories of the sublime, the mathematical and dynamic, to capture two aspects of a theological sublime: the mathematical in the infinite that stretches out in Christ to eternity, as the creature is taken into the divine life, while the dynamic is the utter grandeur and incomprehensibility that is run up against in the experience of God. Thus, for theology, the beautiful (understood as a feeling corresponding to God’s proximity, his givenness, his friendliness to his creatures) necessarily goes together with the sublime (understood as a feeling in view of God’s sheer immensity and utter incomprehensibility). (33) Like postmodernism, theology shares a view that ontology and aesthetics merge. But where they differ is on their interpretations of the relation of beauty and the sublime, which in turn rest on divergent ontologies: for postmodernism “the sublime testifies to a chthonic rupture of essence, as if the order of being were an illusory surface continually betrayed by a more profound violence” while for theology “the sublime bears witness to the analogy of being” (35). What is admirable in Betz’s elaboration of the analogy of being is how it holds things in productive tension, both ontologically (essence/existence) and aesthetically (beautiful/sublime), and how this is cradled in the theological analogy “that peaceful sea in which beauty discloses depth and depth gives itself to be seen as beauty” (36). But importantly, the analogy of being does not merely enable an escapist transcendence; rather, it makes it possible to

42

Doebler

genuinely return to and value the here and now, precisely “to an immanence that is now seen as subtended and pervaded by the omnipresent humility of the Logos, who knows no limit” (36). 2.3 Sustaining Depth with Hiroshi Senju In our discussion of perspectives from Christian theological aesthetics, represented by John Milbank, Graham Ward, and John Betz, we have seen how they have critiqued the division of beauty and the sublime in Euro-American philosophy, arguing that the modern and postmodern sublime—from Kant to Lyotard—is ultimately a mistaken, hollow, and possibly destructive, attempt to maintain a sense of immanent transcendence. In response to this they attempt to reintegrate beauty and the sublime. They do this by suggesting a perspective based on core Christian notions of trinity and incarnation. In particular, we looked closely at the analogy of being as a relational way to positively recover a sublime rich with ontological depth. This concern with depth is something that is also central to Hiroshi Senju’s artwork, as well as the Japanese aesthetic concept of yūgen. How do these compare with the theological critiques and their constrictive proposals? One point of contact is the theme of ‘intersections.’ In other words, the intersections identified in the survey of Senju’s artwork can be seen as instantiating the intersections articulated by the analogy of being as discussed by Betz. These intersections were the immanent analogy, being in-and-beyond existence, and the theological analogy, being in-and-beyond creation. These intersections are suggestively present in the moment Senju identifies as the creative impetus for his work, his encounter with a lava field in Hawai‘i around Kilauea volcano. In an instant, I understood that if I could paint this scene I could possibly express time, the universe, earth, as well as white space and ma [an interval]. In fact, ever since then I have constantly pursued my artwork in order to capture that setting.78 Here we see Senju grasping being in its wholeness. On one hand, the immanent analogy is expressed in reference to time, the universe, and the earth, the continuum of time and space that humans occupy. On the other hand, the theological analogy is suggested by Senju when he refers to ‘white space and ma.’ Ma (間) is connected with the notion of the Shintō kami (神, deity) and 78

Hiroshi Senju, “Flatwater,” in 軽井沢千住博美術館/Hiroshi Senju Museum Karuizawa, vol. 1 (Karuizawa, Japan: Hiroshi Senju Museum Karuizawa, 2013), 65, bracket original.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

43

denotes the space in reality that is filled with ki (気), the mysterious life energy that permeates all things.79 Senju identifies this full-emptiness in the way empty space was employed in Asian ink painting, a technique that enabled painters to give form to this formless energy. As Senju comments, “There is a significant meaning in this space where nothing is painted, like the nature of the universe.”80 In this way, spatial depth may open out onto ontological depth. This is exemplified in Senju’s paintings at Shofuso in the way that the position of the paintings on the fusuma (sliding doors) creates the potential for a variety of new spaces. As Senju comments on this unique medium, The fusuma create interior space through a series of complex planes. If you open the fusuma, you can see the fusuma in the adjoining room, but depending on how you open them, a totally different view appears.81 First, there is the relation of the paintings between the adjacent rooms. (Figs. 2 and 4) This exemplifies the immanent analogy, being in-and-beyond existence, since the viewer’s experience of the single room is always in relation to and modified by an awareness of what is ‘beyond’ in the next room. At the same time, the painter should be aware that the fusuma exist as part of a larger work that is co-related. If the shoji [doors to the outside veranda] are entirely open it becomes one with the outside.82 This exemplifies the theological analogy, being in-and-beyond creation, as the experience of the paintings is further modified by the intersection with a different world, as it were, the outside world of nature and the rest of the building that sits beyond the enclosed walls. (Fig. 1) Depending on various factors—such as where one is sitting, how the doors are opened, the time of day or season—each experience will be different. Across both ‘analogies’— the relation of the internal rooms and the relation of the rooms to the outside—there always exists a ‘gradual continuum’ where the experience of 79

See Matsuoka Seigow, “Aspects of Kami,” in MA: Space-Time in Japan, ed. Matsuoka Seigow (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, n.d.), 56–57 and Richard B. Pilgrim, “Intervals (Ma) in Space and Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan,” History of Religions 25/3 (February 1986), 255–277. 80 Hiroshi Senju, 美術の核心, Bijutsu no kakushin, [The Heart of Art] (Tokyo: Bunshun Shinsho, 2008), 73–74. All references to this work are my translation. 81 Senju, Bijutsu no kakushin, 116–117. 82 Senju, Bijutsu no kakushin, 116–117.

44

Doebler

spatial depth may open to an experience of ontological depth. In this way, Senju’s paintings give vivid expression to the analogy of being in a form that enables the viewer to grasp its rich insight in one look. Furthermore, the Japanese aesthetic concept of yūgen (幽玄) may also be a useful ally in the critique of the sublime by theological aesthetics. The problem identified with the sublime is that it is construed as one side of a binary. The solution offered by theological aesthetics is not to completely jettison the sublime, but to attempt to close this dualism, whether it is done in terms of glory (Milbank), allegory (Ward), of the analogy of being (Betz). Each of these attempts to establish a theoretical framework that will create relations rather than divisions, but at the same time will not erase differences. Such a perspective is already anticipated in yūgen, which labels a feeling that arises from an indiscriminate awareness that gives one insight into the fundamental interdependence of all things.83 A key element of this is the contemplative practice of shikan, the goal of which is to acknowledge the impermanence of all things—the perceiving subject included—and dissolve dualistic distinctions. Through this “existence conceived of as a confrontational relationship between the perceiver and perceived” is rejected and the result is a profound peacefulness.84 And, significantly, this peace is not obtained by erasing difference or submitting one side to the other, but by sustaining the two in an interdependent relationship, the exact goal the theological aesthetic perspectives aimed for. More specifically, the Japanese aesthetician Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959) made a direct comparison between yūgen and the sublime in the posthumously published Aesthetics (美学, Bigaku, 1959–1960). Ōnishi attempts to compare Eastern—and particularly Japanese—aesthetic categories with Western 83 Yūgen became a conspicuous aesthetic value in the twelfth century when waka poets employed the term in their criticism, and it later was central to appreciation of Nō drama. Approached etymologically, the word is made up of two components: yū (幽) and gen (玄). Discussing these, Makoto Ueda notes that “yū means deep, dim, or difficult to see, and that gen, originally describing the dark, profound, tranquil color of the universe, refers to the Taoist concept of truth.” Makoto Ueda, “Zeami and the Art of Nō Drama: Imitation, Yūgen, and Sublimity,” Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader, ed. Nancy Hume (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 182. See also Toyo Izutsu, “The Aesthetic Structure of Waka,” in The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan, Toshihiko Izutsu and Toyo Izutsu (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 3–25. The concept has informed the work of artists outside of Japan as well, such as Bosco Sodi. See Bosco Sodi, et al. Yūgen: Bosco Sodi (London: Blain|Southern, 2016). 84 Konishi Jin’ichi, “Shunzei no yūgen-fū to shikan,” Bungaku 20/2 (Feb. 1952): 111–112. Quoted in William LaFleur, The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 100.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

45

ones and then subsume these together under universal categories. For Ōnishi, the sublime (崇高, sūkō) is a universal and it is manifest in the West as the tragic and in the East as yūgen.85 After tracing the term’s historical context in medieval Japan, Ōnishi attempts to identify what yūgen is as an aesthetic concept. He identifies seven distinct elements, which create a semantic field. These are: 1) hiddenness, 2) darkness, 3) silence, 4) profoundness, 5) depth or fullness, 6) mystery, and 7) vagueness or indescribability.86 And when Ōnishi then considers what may hold all these together, he highlights 5, depth, which he also describes as “content-heavy (inhaltsschwer), which is unbounded consolidation and condensation in things.”87 But what is the basis of this depth, or what gives it this weightiness? It is here that Ōnishi connects yūgen and the sublime. However, in terms of aesthetic meaning, the meaning of fullness as we are discussing it should be naturally related to the meaning of grandness, heaviness, and powerfulness, as well as the meaning of magnificence or Erhabenheit—sublime.88 In addition to the mathematical and dynamical sublime that are clearly invoked here, Ōnishi emphasizes the unique darkness this depth portends, another key feature of the sublime: but when we question where this emphasis of the unique depth comes from, it undoubtedly has something in common with darkness [幽暗性, yūansei] (Dunkelheit) … that is already represented in the sublime (das Erhabene), as a basic aesthetic category.89 His final conclusion is that this deep darkness is at its root metaphysical, the experience of 85

86 87 88 89

For a critical overview of Ōnishi’s project as a whole, see Tanehisa Otabe, “Representations of ‘Japaneseness’ in Modern Japanese Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Critique of Comparative Reason,” in Modern Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, ed. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 153–164. See Ōnishi Yoshinori, 美学, Bigaku [Aesthetics], vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1959–60), 225–229. All references to this work are my translation. Ōnishi, Bigaku, 228. Ōnishi will often follow a technical word in Japanese with its German equivalent in parentheses. These have been retained in the translation. Ōnishi, Bigaku, 228. Ōnishi, Bigaku, 234.

46

Doebler

Being (Sein) itself or pure existence.  … When you sublate the creative work of the psyche and put the full self into the given of nature and achieve pure contemplation that allows it to sink into thought and reach the level of Buddhist meditation, nature, psyche, matter, and self become one, and the immediate wholeness of being is recalled in a split second; such a special aspect of pure aesthetic experience is meant [by pure existence].90 On one hand, Ōnishi is clearly drawing on the sublime as it was developed in Western aesthetics to articulate a unique Japanese concept. On the other hand, by proposing the sublime as a basic aesthetic category it seems he is trying to establish something beyond social or historical boundaries, a different sublime that is modified through the unique contribution of yūgen. For Ōnishi, the sublime as a universal category is generally motivated by the greatness of nature, but in the West it tends towards the tragic while in the East it tends towards yūgen. And these differences can to some extent be predicated on different fundamental attitudes towards nature. Makoto Ueda’s comparison of Kant and Ōnishi on the sublime is instructive: whereas the German philosopher stressed the resistance of human reason against nature’s overwhelming force, the Japanese scholar wants to emphasize man’s love for and harmony with nature. He believes that sublime beauty arises when the artist faces nature not as an enemy to conquer but as an object of aesthetic contemplation, an object with which he ultimately entrusts his soul.91 So, in some ways Ōnishi was already aware of the problems with the sublime that Milbank, Ward, Betz, and others have traced through the postmodern and modern philosophy back to Kant. Inasmuch as the theological perspectives aim to ‘correct’ Kant and his postmodern progeny through recourse to pre-modern, Christian theological notions, it is possible to view the Western sublime that has developed over the last two hundred years, especially with its implicit idea of conflict, as an aberration. Therefore, Ōnishi’s broader attempt at finding a universal category of the sublime may not be entirely misguided, but the tragic

90 Ōnishi, Bigaku, 234. 91 Makoto Ueda, “Yūgen and Erhabene: Ōnishi Yoshinori’s Attempt to Synthesize Japanese and Western Aesthetics,” in Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 293.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

47

sublime would need to be replaced by the peaceful sublime—especially as expressed in the analogy of being—as its true counterpart. While the perspectives from theological aesthetics and Japanese aesthetics show points of similarity, it is important not to elide their differences. These are seen in their distinct intellectual concepts discussed, such as yūgen for Japanese aesthetics, and glory, allegory, and the analogy of being for theological aesthetics. These different concepts, in turn, rest of distinct presuppositions. Yūgen has roots in a non-theistic Buddhist perspective that does not posit a unique personality at the basis of the universe. Instead, it stresses the impermanence and interrelatedness of all things in their simultaneous co-arising. By contrast, the theological perspectives are based on the notion of a personal, Triune God that provides a ground for existence as relational, but also, preserving the difference of God from creation, emphasizes the need for analogy. The Trinity also undergirds the doctrines of the Incarnation—the co-existence of divine and human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth—and the Holy Spirit. Together, these provide the means for the human to participate in the divine. Yet, despite the presuppositional differences, the two separate approaches reach a similar conclusion: a peaceful depth that harmoniously crosses borders of difference, a hallmark of Senju’s paintings. Returning to Shofuso, we can see this in the interplay of black and white in the paintings. The challenge, as Senju notes, is to find the harmony in competing forces, such as black and white, and this reveals art’s primary function: “In other words, art is the wisdom of creating peace. It is wisdom for how to get along.”92 Thus, across the paintings in Shofuso we can feel the beautiful surface of the screen of white give way to the sublime depths of the black beneath, showing how it is not only possible, but necessary to maintain a relational continuum across the two, as “beauty discloses depth and depth gives itself to be seen in beauty.”93 3

Preserving Particularity: Critiquing the Sublime with Environmental Aesthetics

In Euro-American aesthetics the fine arts have been a primary area of concern while nature has been largely relegated to the margins. However, over the last thirty years the sub-field of environmental aesthetics has emerged and taken 92

Hiroshi Senju, わたしが芸術について語るなる, Watashi ga geijutsu nitsuite katarunaru, [If I speak about art] (Tokyo: Poplar-sha, 2011), 170. All references to this work are my translation. 93 Betz, “Beyond the Sublime (Part Two),” 36.

48

Doebler

issue with the neglect of nature by aesthetics. Its proponents claim that nature deserves as much aesthetic appreciation as art. Among discussion within environmental aesthetics, a central issue is the relationship of nature and art in aesthetic appreciation and experience. Do they each require a different kind of aesthetic attention and produce a different aesthetic experience? The sublime is particularly relevant because its history in some ways mirrors the tension between nature and art. Discussions of the sublime before the nineteenth century, as seen in Part 1, often viewed the sublime as primarily related to nature and art was merely derivative. Joseph Addison’s view is a good example. If we consider the works of nature and art, as they are qualified to entertain the imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in comparison of the former; for though they may sometimes appear as beautiful or strange, they can have nothing in them of that vastness and immensity, which afford so great an entertainment to the mind of the beholder. The one may be as polite and delicate as the other, but can never show herself so august and magnificent in the design. There is something more bold and masterly in the rough, careless strokes of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art.94 But as the idea of the system of the fine arts developed from the nineteenth century through the twentieth century to the present, this has changed to the point where now art is seen as a primary source of sublimity as seen, for example, in the theories of Lyotard and Adorno. Must this division stand? The following pages will investigate this question. First, I will sketch some of the views from environmental aesthetics on the relation of nature and art. This will lay a groundwork for specifically approaching the issue of the sublime in relation to nature and art, giving particular attention to Kant. Then I will consider constructive proposals from environmental aestheticians for a sublime that can link art and nature based on bodily, imaginative, and affective engagement. I will conclude by placing these critiques and suggestions in dialogue with Senju’s art and the Japanese aesthetics of nature, art, and the everyday.

94

Joseph Addison, Addison’s Essays from the Spectator (London: Ward, Lock, 1882), 403.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

49

Environmental Aesthetic Perspectives on the Relation of Nature and Art In a seminal essay for the field of environmental aesthetics, Ronald Hepburn investigates the neglect of natural beauty by aesthetics. He asks why there has been a shift in aesthetics from focusing on nature to focusing on the fine arts and he identifies a variety of possible answers. First, with changes in technology (and religious belief), humans in the modern world are estranged from nature and often see it as ‘indifferent.’ This distance from nature is further compounded by science, which has expanded the diversity of perspectives by which we can view nature besides aesthetically. At the same time, artists have turned from nature to a preoccupation with expression, formalism, or activism and the aesthetic theories and artistic criticism that aim to explain such art seem inapplicable to appreciating nature.95 For Hepburn, the problem is if we lack an aesthetic vocabulary to articulate the experience of nature then such experiences will be effectively pushed “off-the-map; and, since off the map, seldom visited.”96 In order to reclaim such lost experiences, different writers in environmental aesthetics have attempted to develop a useful vocabulary by distinguishing the ways in which the aesthetic appreciation of nature differs from the appreciation of art. These differences include the kind of involvement between object and subject, space, time, and intentionality. First, the aesthetic appreciation of nature is participatory; the object and observing subject are mutually involved because the viewer as subject is always within the environment. This is due, in part, to the fact that nature, in contrast to much art, is frameless. Nature is frameless both in the straightforward sense that a perception of the natural environment has no physical frame, unlike, say, a John Constable painting of the English countryside, and in the more abstract sense that artworks are often bracketed from our daily environs into special places such as museums. In contrast, the natural environment, as Yuriko Saito notes, is boundless, “surrounding and enveloping us, with indefinite elements and indeterminate boundaries,”97 thus moving us from a position of spectator to member of a larger whole. This move from passive observer to active constituent challenges the typical aesthetic appreciation of art because it both 3.1

95 96 97

See Ronald Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in British Analytical Philosophy, ed. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 288. Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” 288. Yuriko Saito, “Environmental Directions for Aesthetics and the Arts,” in Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics, ed. Arnold Berleant (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 173.

50

Doebler

requires a more flexible perceptivity that can “integrate new things that at first seem outside what we are looking at”98 and highlights our total, bodily engagement, opening aesthetics from a visual and auditory focus to embracing synesthesia, especially the ‘lower’ senses of touch, smell, and taste.99 If the natural environment is spatially unlimited, compared to the fine arts, it is also different in its temporal mode. As Emily Brady comments, if artworks are “on the whole, stable, enduring objects of perception, nature is unplanned and often spontaneous, making our encounters with it unpredictable, and full of surprises.”100 So, instead of having a controlling, objective view of the thing itself, which can be circumscribed by the spectator at selected times, nature manifests itself as different all the time and in this way provides potentially infinite aesthetic experiences. This can also add a distinct aesthetic quality to our experience of nature, for if each moment that passes will never come again in just the same way this “lends a sense of uniqueness, urgency and pathos to our experience.”101 Perhaps the most obvious difference between nature and art is intentionality: with an artwork there is an artist and we may inquire into why the work was made while nature appears to have no obvious personality behind it. Based on this difference, Allen Carlson suggests art and natural objects require different modes of interpretation. When attending to art, interpretive frameworks “are typically metaphysical, mystical, or psychological,” but when we attend to nature “what plays this role, and has increasingly done so in the West since the seventeenth century, is the alternative account given by natural science.”102 For Carlson, then, it is the progressively unfolding story of the sciences that tells us about the various forces of nature that then informs our aesthetic appreciation of nature in the absence of artistic intentionality. In contrast to Carlson’s science-based approach, Emily Brady deals with the question of intentionality differently. She also acknowledges that, unlike art, there is not an art world context that can guide our experience of nature. But instead of scientific explanations, Brady emphasizes the dynamic ways perception and imagination may interact when we experience nature, providing a unique aesthetic experience that, compared to a scientific approach, 98 Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” 290. 99 See Saito, “Environmental Directions for Aesthetics and the Arts,” 174–175. 100 Emily Brady, Aesthetics and the Natural Environment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 66. 101 Saito, “Environmental Directions for Aesthetics and the Arts,” 177. 102 Allen Carlson, “Appreciating Art and Appreciating Nature,” in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 219–220.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

51

is more purely aesthetic and egalitarian since it does not depend on specialized knowledge.103 Combining these different features of our encounter with nature—mutual involvement and framelessness, temporality, and non-intentionality— environmental aesthetics suggests a positive way of aesthetically appreciating nature that is diverse, active, and expansive. However, as we have seen this way of approaching nature is developed by contrasting it with the arts. But is it essential to define one against the other or is there a prospect for continuity? Arnold Berleant provides suggestions for a modified approach by offering what he calls an aesthetics of engagement. This aesthetic contrasts with the classic aesthetic paradigm of disinterest and, rather than grounding itself in the arts, is based on the environment.104 But in order to show this Berleant begins with a borderline case: architecture, a phenomenon that always seems to shift between art and environment. First, he looks at how architecture is kinesthetic and synesthetic. It is impossible to separate a building from its site in the natural environment and it is equally impossible to separate these from the perceiving person. Instead, they work together, each contributing a part. And our engagement with a building is only one specific feature of our broader interaction with the environment as a whole, an engagement that is always drawing on all of our senses.105 Such an aesthetics of engagement, then, challenges thinking of the individual subject as a detached observer that is more reason than body. “The environment is not the object of a subjective act of contemplation: Environment is continuous with us, our very condition of living.”106 This kind of engagement with the environment requires active, integrative perception that involves the whole person and it is this kind of perception— rather than disinterestedly contemplating a distanced object—that provides “the seeds of the aesthetic. How these are cultivated is the story of the art of human culture.”107 The payoff of a new aesthetic model based on the environment is that it cannot only account for more than the fine arts—which other 103 See Emily Brady, “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, ed. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, OT: Broadview Press, 2004), 166. 104 See Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 148. 105 See Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 151–155. 106 Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 156. 107 Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 156. This would seem to undercut a sharp distinction between art as intentional and nature as unintentional, even without any religious presuppositions.

52

Doebler

environmental aesthetic approaches aimed to do—but it can also help us appreciate the fine arts in a more robust and satisfying way. Thus it is possible to see a continuity between nature and the arts and instead of needing a separate theory to account for each, one theory—aesthetic engagement—may cover the whole spectrum.108 But while Berleant roots this aesthetic in the experience of the environment, he also acknowledges that nature is not distinct from human culture; rather, both influence each other symbiotically. Furthermore, “Our very conception of nature has emerged historically and differs widely from one cultural tradition to another.”109 So, it is never possible—nor desirable—to bracket the natural environment from the human life world; instead, we must be aware of the historical and cultural manifestations of these if we are to chart a normative path for a fruitful future of humans living in the land. 3.2 The Sublime in Nature and/or Art? Kant as a Touchstone So far we have observed some of the unique features of the aesthetic experience of nature according to environmental aesthetics and suggested a mediating position via Arnold Berleant. The next question is how these modify our understanding of the sublime, which has a complex relation to both nature and art. A helpful way into this question is to look closer at the question of artistic sublimity in Kant’s aesthetics since his discussion of the sublime has served as a touchstone for debates. Uygar Abaci argues rigorously that there is no artistic sublimity for Kant.110 He acknowledges various factors that leave the possibility open, such as the facts that Kant does not explicitly deny the possibility, he references artworks when discussing the sublime, and he locates the sublime in the experiencing subject.111 Together these suggest that any object may potentially be a source for stimulating the sublime. However, for Abaci there are two key factors that seem to exclude art from the sublime.112 First, both the mathematical and dynamical sublimes are based on an encounter with nature that reveals human cognitive or moral autonomy to itself; art as a human product would 108 See Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 161. 109 Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 167. See also Arto Haapala’s comment that, “The ways humans have seen and experienced nature have changed over time. In this sense, nature is of our making.” Arto Haapala, “Art and Nature: The Interplay of Works of Art and Natural Phenomena,” in Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics, ed. Arnold Berleant (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 57. 110 Uygar Abaci, “Kant’s Justified Dismissal of Artistic Sublimity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66/3 (2008): 237–251. 111 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §23, §26, and §30. 112 See Abaci, “Kant’s Justified Dismissal of Artistic Sublimity,” 240–241.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

53

seem to be insufficient for this. Second, for Kant art cannot elicit a response of pure sublimity because it is ‘impure’ since it is intentionally made and serves some purpose and, most importantly, art must represent things beautifully.113 However, in the discussion of genius Kant comments that it is through this figure that nature gives the rule to art.114 This seems to suggest that just as a judgment of sublimity is made based on an encounter with nature, art, as nature translated by the artist, could also be judged sublime. For example, Paul Crowther contends that an artwork could be sublime through one of three ways: “the overwhelming perceptual scale of a work of art  … a work’s overwhelming personal significance … or … the imaginatively overwhelming character of some general truth embodied in the work.”115 But Abaci objects that for all of these what is revealed is the genius’s creative capability rather than human reason and morality in contrast to nature.116 Another possibility is that an artwork may represent something sublime. This could be depicting the types of objects Kant speaks of as occasions for sublime experience, such as raging oceans or towering mountains. But again, the objection for Abaci is that these are still intentional objects and therefore impure and “judgments on the conceptual contents of works of art are to be understood as part of judgments of taste.”117 So is the sublime permanently excluded from the realm of art for Kant? In a response to Abaci’s essay, Robert Clewis suggests that some art can communicate the sublime and he bases this on Kant’s distinction between presentation (Darstellung) and representation (Vorstellung). Artworks that represent “objects traditionally considered sublime” should be distinguished from artworks that present the sublime.118 Clewis cites “a Friedrich painting of an iceberg” as an example of a painting that represents the sublime but “does not always elicit the sublime in us.”119 To this we could add numerous examples such as Frederic Edwin Church’s Niagara. (Fig. 3) However, Clewis’ reference to Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) is suggestive because if we turn to perhaps the most famous of his works, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Wanderer über

113 See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §48 and §52. 114 See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §46. 115 Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 161. Quoted in Abaci, “Kant’s Justified Dismissal of Artistic Sublimity,” 245. 116 See Abaci, “Kant’s Justified Dismissal of Artistic Sublimity,” 246. 117 Abaci, “Kant’s Justified Dismissal of Artistic Sublimity,” 248. 118 Robert Clewis, “A Case for Kantian Artistic Sublimity: A Response to Abaci,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68/2 (2010), 169. 119 Clewis, “A Case for Kantian Artistic Sublimity,” 169.

54

Doebler

dem Nebelmeer, 1817), we can see a significant shift from typical ‘sublime’ paintings such as Church’s. As Joseph Leo Koerner comments, More programmatically than perhaps any other painting of the period, Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog aspires to invoke the sublime of a thoroughly subjectivized aesthetic, in which the painted world turns inward on the beholder. … The Rükenfigur is so prominent in the composition that the world appears to be an emanation from his gaze, or more precisely, from his heart. … Even without an internal viewer in the picture, Friedrich’s landscapes present themselves as something seen, rather than simply as something there.120 We could say, then, that Friedrich’s Wanderer evokes for us an image of the Kantian subject’s encounter with nature (in this case the mathematical sublime), or better we could say it relates a story of sublime experience that narrates for us human autonomy before nature. What Friedrich’s painting does by presenting the Wanderer’s subjective vision is that it marks a bridge from merely representing the sublime in nature to presenting the sublime in art. The fruition of the internal turn of Friedrich’s Wanderer can be seen in twentieth-century abstract art. One example is Barnett Newman (1905–1970), who is significant for Lyotard’s thinking about the sublime. Newman’s distinct paintings—large fields of color bisected by thin lines of contrasting color he called ‘zips’—are the result of explicit theorizing about the sublime and finding a way to present it, such as his Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–1951). In his essay “The Sublime is Now,” Newman argues, The failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to this blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation (the objective world, whether distorted or pure) and to build an art within a framework of pure plasticity. … I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it. … We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful.121 120 Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 181. 121 Barnett Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, new ed., ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 581–582.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

55

Newman seems to anticipate some of Abaci’s criticisms of artistic sublimity and his art may be seen as an attempt to evoke a pure sublime in contrast to earlier representations of sublimity. The key move is to break away from any representation of nature, as if the greatest way to show the artist’s autonomy from nature is precisely by excluding it from art. Therefore, a turn to pure abstraction, creating paintings of pure color unlike anything nature presents us with, is the only way humankind can “define and express its own rational nature in opposition to the infinite and unknown.”122 By moving beyond nature to a pure unknown or formlessness, what Newman’s art may suggest is engagement with a sort of meta-sublime, the ultimate formlessness that lies behind the mathematical and dynamical sublime in nature. Such an esoteric sublime that bypasses nature provides one limited option for pure artistic sublimity and therefore we can see the roots of contemporary art in part in the sublime, in finding a way that the genius can authentically express the sublime in art. I would not claim that these examples refute Abaci’s arguments completely; indeed he is probably correct that in a strictly Kantian sense there is no pure artistic sublimity.123 But broaching this debate highlights some of the crucial issues when thinking about the sublime in relation to art and nature. On one hand, it can distort our relation to nature, emphasizing autonomy to an excessive extent. On the other hand, it can also denigrate the potentialities of art. What I would suggest is that our discussion of environmental aesthetics points to an alternative that can be efficacious for both nature and art rather than pushing them apart. Indeed, the participative quality of our engagement with nature pointed out by environmental aesthetics should make us ask Kant why we should worry about ‘pure’ judgments of beauty or sublimity. The use of the object and our participation in it seems relevant, even essential to a full aesthetic experience rather than mere contemplation. In the next section, then, I will explore how environmental aesthetics gives us a map for recovering the natural sublime based on bodily, imaginative, and affective engagement and how this sublime stands in continuity with art rather than separation.

122 Paul Crowther, “Barnett Newman on the Sublime,” Oxford Art Journal 7/2 (1984), 56. 123 A similar view is recently expressed by Emily Brady. She argues that works of art cannot be sublime in themselves, largely because they lack “the qualities of scale, formlessness, wildness, or disorder which characterize paradigm cases from nature. … Although the arts can represent, convey, or express the sublime, these modes are not sufficient for sublimity itself, and constitute only derivative forms of it.” Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 146–147. Some possible exceptions she notes are land art and skyscrapers.

56

Doebler

Recovering a Sublime That Links Nature and Art through Engagement 3.3.1 Bodily Engagement First, Arnold Berleant’s aesthetic based on our engagement with the environment as described earlier highlights that the encounter with the sublime in nature requires the whole person in active participation rather than in distanced contemplation. In his analysis of aesthetic engagement, Berleant draws on the sublime because the concept implies nature is something beyond our control.124 He criticizes how Kant reduces the aesthetic satisfaction in the sublime to a process of the mind. In contrast to an interested position, a detached position of total safety is not only impossible but undesirable, for somatic involvement plays an essential role in the excitement of the sublime and can contribute to a closer intimacy with nature as we become aware of our true relation to it as a constituent part. If we are willing to forego rational control in the face of nature a very different kind of aesthetic appreciation can emerge and moments of sublime encounter become 3.3

times of sensory acuteness, of perceptual unity of nature and human, of a congruity of awareness, understanding, and involvement mixed with awe and humility, in which the focus is on the immediacy and directness of the occasion of experience. Perceiving environment from within, as it were, looking not at it but being in it, nature becomes something quite different. It is transformed into a realm in which we live as participants, not observers. … One cannot distance oneself from such events; in fact, part of the aesthetic power of such occasions lies in our very vulnerability.125 However, this vulnerability experienced in overwhelming moments is only one region on a wide, continuous spectrum of experience. Just as significant “are gentler occasions on which we engage the natural world,” and these occasions are equally marked by “total engagement, a sensory immersion in the natural world that reaches the still-uncommon experience of unity.”126 124 See Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 167–171. 125 Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 169–170, italics original. A similar point is made by Yuriko Saito discussing the distance Burke and Kant emphasize in sublime experience. “In short, distancing presents a dilemma: some distancing is necessary for making our aesthetic appreciation of dangerous objects in nature possible, but too much distancing will deprive us of the opportunity to have a fully engaging aesthetic appreciation of them.” Yuriko Saito, “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (Spring 1998), 107. 126 Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 171.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

57

This dynamic aesthetic engagement we can observe in the experience of nature as sublime can in turn help mediate any division between nature and art as sites of sublime opportunity, countering the radical autonomy required by either a Kantian natural sublime or a Newmanesque abstract art sublime since “both [nature and art] can function reciprocally with the appreciator, enticing the participant to join in a unified perceptual situation.”127 And significantly for our overall argument, it is here that Berleant asserts that beauty and the sublime may not be as different as they appear. There may be an easy transition from beauty to the sublime, though I suspect that both ‘beauty’ and ‘sublime’ require radical redefining once one no longer associates the first with objects and the second with transcendence. Perhaps the truth approached by transcendence lies in the quality of unity with nature that aesthetic engagement encourages.128 The experience of the sublime, then, when it is considered via an engaged, synesthetic participation, is not bracketed out as a marginal experience—least of all a solely cognitive and subjective one—rather it portends the potential significance of each moment and each encounter. But before discussing this core issue of transcendence further we should note how such experience depends on the active involvement of imagination. 3.3.2 Imaginative Engagement As mentioned earlier, Emily Brady proposed acute perception and imagination as central to our aesthetic appreciation of nature. More specifically, she identifies four modes of imagination which she calls exploratory, projective, ampliative, and revelatory, and these are helpful for deepening our understanding of how our aesthetic encounters with nature are engaged rather than passive.129 These modes of imagination move from relative simplicity to more complexity. Exploratory imagination is closely linked to direct perception and uses imaginative associations to make an aesthetic judgment about an object. For example, I feel the smooth gloss of a new leaf that has just emerged in springtime and I think of an image of a baby’s smooth skin. Projective imagination goes a step further in actively placing a new image onto the perceived object “such that what is actually there is somehow added to, replaced with, or

127 Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 172. 128 Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 173–174. 129 See Brady, “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” 160–163.

58

Doebler

overlaid by, a projected image.”130 We play with ways of seeing the object differently in order to further enrich our experiences, for example seeing the tiny veins in the leaf and imagining my hand as the leaf, feeling the flow of nutrients from water and soil and the expansion of life beneath the sun. Next, ampliative imagination goes beyond the mere play of imagining one thing as another to imagining the broader context in which the object participates both spatially and temporally, often creating a narrative. Here scientific knowledge may play an important role. In the case of the new leaf I may imagine its relationship to the flower that immediately preceded it, or how the leaf will look in the fall, larger, rougher, and more aged, or even of the future decay of the leaf into the ground which will sustain other trees and new leaves. Such imaginings may then lead into revelatory imagination. In this mode, invention stretches the power of imagination to its limits, and this often gives way to a kind of truth or knowledge about the world—a kind of revelation in a non-religious sense.131 But what is unique about this kind of truth, Brady notes, is that it is distinctly aesthetic because it emerges through close perceptual and imaginative engagement. Two things can be added to Brady’s analysis. First, all of these modes of imaginative engagement, which are based on immediate perception, are to some extent shaped by cultural context and therefore the imaginative experience of nature cannot be sharply cut off from art, which can be viewed as a particularly effective means of imaginatively engaging with nature, both for the person creating art and for the receiver. Rather than art being a separate aesthetic activity from our experience of nature, in art “we can also talk about nature being disclosed to us in a certain way.”132 Second, since the imaginative engagement with nature will include some cultural factors it does not seem essential to say that a deep truth perceived in such an experience is “revelation in a non-religious sense,” since metaphysical beliefs may enter into the experience and provide a further richness of associations. The profound experience Brady speaks of need not include religious or spiritual ideas or commitments, but at the same time these do not need to be excluded as irrelevant. So, Brady’s revelatory imagination returns us again to the topic of affective transcendence and it is important to consider further 130 Brady, “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” 162. 131 Brady, “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” 163. 132 Haapala, “Art and Nature,” 57.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

59

what exactly the nature of this transcendence is since it is a foundational issue when thinking about the sublime. 3.3.3 Affective Engagement A good way to summarize Brady’s four modes of imaginative engagement— which certainly overlap and are of a piece—is Ronald Hepburn’s use of the word ‘realize’ to describe our aesthetic engagement with nature. A moment of realizing nature is an experience accompanying and arising out of perceptions upon which we dwell and linger: I am gazing at the cumulo-nimbus cloud, when I realize its height. We do not discard, or pass beyond, the experience, as if we were judging the height of the cloud in flight-navigation.133 This particular way of patiently engaging nature could mark “a passage … from easy beauty to difficult and more serious beauty”134 or, we could say sublime beauty. Again, this would posit beauty and sublime as continuous rather than stark opposites, as argued by the theological aesthetic perspectives discussed in the previous part. This was also suggested by Arnold Berleant above. And what marks experiences of more serious beauty, according to Hepburn, are experiences of unity or oneness with nature. But importantly, such experiences do not subsume nature to one’s subjective ego, extinguishing nature’s foreignness, but instead allow that otherness free play in the modifying of one’s everyday sense of one’s own being. … Supposing that by this kind of aesthetic experience nature is felt to lose some of its ‘foreignness’, that may be because we have ourselves become foreign to our everyday, unexamined notion of ourselves, and not through any assimilation of nature’s forms to pre-existent notions, images or perceptions.135 In short, we are in relation to nature. But if such an experience of unity intimates some kind of transcendence and sublimity, this would seem to work against a Kantian sublime based on exerting our own autonomy before a foreign nature that exceeds or overpowers us. Rather, it seems to give some of

133 Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” 304. 134 Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” 305. 135 Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” 297.

60

Doebler

one’s autonomy to nature, acknowledging that a richer, deeper self can be discovered through such an accommodation. This returns us to Berleant’s comment that “there may be an easy transition from beauty to the sublime.” Such a transition may be discerned in our experiences of unity with nature. The perceived sense of continuity of our human being with the dynamic forms and processes of the natural world is a central factor in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, and it accounts for a touch of the sublime in the feeling of awe that accompanies the occasion. Transcendent no longer, the quality of numinousness persists in the sense of immanence we sometimes obtain in nature and art, and which is the fulfillment of aesthetic engagement.136 What is especially noteworthy about this quote is how the transcendent moves to the immanent without losing its qualitative aspect; it is still exceptional, but rather than being isolated it is brought into the fabric of the mundane moment, democratizing aesthetic experience.137 At the same time, if such an experience of unity makes the transcendent immanent in perceived nature, it also charges immanent nature with wonder and mystery and this, in turn can have a normative effect on our relationship to nature. Rather than nature being absorbed into the self, this kind of unity is more akin to the marriage of true minds found in any meaningful friendship where there is a closeness in the midst of a radical otherness, for there is always an excess, something else we do not know about our friend but which marks a promise for future discovery. Encountering nature in a similar way, as a mystery that “cannot be fully known or appreciated … supports an attitude of humility.”138 This kind of making strange, of mystery that is perceived in immanent nature destabilizes the self but only for the purpose of producing a greater insight, for the radical otherness of nature should not push the self towards an isolated transcendent ego, but rather holds out an opportunity to sound a purer note, relating opposites without erasing their differences.139 136 Berleant, Aesthetics of Environment, 174. 137 A similar immanent-transcendent is suggested by Christopher Hitt in his discussion of Thoreau’s essay “Ktaadn” in Maine Woods. See Christopher Hitt, “Toward an Ecological Sublime,” New Literary History 30/3 (1999), 616–617. 138 Emily Brady, “The Environmental Sublime,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 180. 139 Ronald Hepburn intriguingly notes that the co-presence of opposites in nature, such as life and stillness, “constitutes a fundamental, and too little recognised, key concept

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

61

3.4 Preserving Particularity with Hiroshi Senju To this point, we have considered the relationship of the sublime to both nature and art, noting how this debate, a legacy of Kant, continues into the present. We bracketed this by exploring perspectives from environmental aesthetics. First, we noted unique features of the aesthetic experience of nature—its participative and temporal qualities—summarized in Arnold Berleant’s idea of aesthetic engagement. Based on this, we sketched a natural sublime based on bodily, imaginative, and affective engagement, and suggested that this sublime stands in continuity with art rather than separation from it. Japanese aesthetics seems to have maintained such a perspective in a relatively continuous tradition, as opposed to Euro-American aesthetics, which has often emphasized what is different about nature and art and, as a result, isolated the sublime with one or the other. Thus, perspectives from Japanese aesthetics anticipate but also can help extend the emphases in environmental aesthetics and these are illustrated in the paintings of Hiroshi Senju. First, regarding bodily engagement, Arnold Berleant argued that the sublime, rather than being a detached experience that is largely a cognitive affair, requires sensory immersion and bodily participation. This is accessible in both unusual, extreme experiences as well as typical, daily ones. A sensitivity to the bodily experience of nature is also expressed in Senju’s paintings at Shofuso. They cooperate with the environment and heighten the visitor’s experience of this environment. The natural environment does not just sit around the built environment, but permeates it throughout in the wood structure, the material of the paints, the tatami flooring, etc. (Fig. 4) Here we see a key creative principle in Japanese aesthetics, to let a thing fully be. A seminal version of this object-directed approach to artistic creation is set out in the earliest manual for garden making in Japan, the Sakuteiki, dating to the eleventh century. One of the core principles of garden design set forth there is kowan ni shitagau, or ‘obeying (or following) the request.’140 Attentiveness to the unique features of a rock should guide its placement within the garden. Likewise, trimming a tree should be done in such a way that the unique shape is accented and developed. As Yuriko Saito notes,

for aesthetic theory.” Ronald Hepburn, “Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination,” Environmental Values 5 (1996), 199. Here I am suggesting that the co-presence of the opposites of human and nature, as well as nature and art, are also part of this concept. 140 Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 112. For an English translation of the Sakuteiki see Jirō Takei and Marc P. Keane, Sakuteiki, Visions of the Japanese Garden: A Modern Translation of Japan’s Gardening Classic (Boston: Tuttle, 2001).

62

Doebler

The gardener is thus required to discern the defining features of the particular material and give them a clear, forceful articulation by eliminating adventitious, inessential, and irrelevant parts. The whole art-making here requires the creator to work closely with, rather than in spite of or irrespective of, the material’s natural endowments.141 Whether it is the garden at Shofuso, the paint employed, or the wood used for the structure, the uniqueness of each thing is accentuated; yet at the same time they are integrated into the greater whole that is the Shofuso complex, a whole Senju was acutely aware of when he planned his paintings. (Fig. 1) This interlacing of natural and built environments is then registered in the visitor’s bodily experience as all the senses are aroused. Senju has described the beauty of eating ramen noodles as not lying in just tasting the noodles, but in having all the senses aroused—the sound of slurping, the warmth of the bowl in one’s hands, etc.—so Shofuso engages all five senses. This is in part due to the context: rather than being placed in a museum where the primary function would be to serve as an object for vision, Senju’s waterfall paintings at Shofuso sit in a house meant for daily living. In this way one may sit and drink tea while looking at the paintings, hearing the waterfall in the garden, feeling the breeze that wafts through the open sliding doors, and smelling the earthy aroma of wood and rice straw that are part of the house. Experienced in such a context, the paintings link art with nature and daily life and remind one that, as Senju says, “what is called ‘beauty’ is concerned largely with the business of living one’s life.”142 Second, regarding imaginative engagement, Japanese aesthetics has a long history of cultivating a sensitivity to time and an appreciation for obscurity that in turn activates the imagination. Emily Brady’s four modes of imagination may help amplify this in an analytic way, in particular the ‘ampliative imagination’ and the ‘revelatory imagination.’ Her notion of ampliative imagination as placing things in a narrative helps account for the preference of such cultural touchstones as Yoshida Kenkō (1283?–1350/52?) or Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591) for the muted moments in nature that are not immediately attractive or interesting. For example, in his Tsurezuregusa, or Essays in Idleness, Kenkō muses, 141 Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, 113, italics original. For more on the Japanese aesthetic of expressing the essence of things, see Yuriko Saito, “Representing the Essence of Objects: Art in the Japanese Aesthetic Tradition,” in Art and Essence, ed. Stephen Davies and Ananta Ch. Sukla (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 125–142. 142 Hiroshi Senju, わたしが芸術について語るなる (Watashi ga geijutsu nitsuite katarunaru [If I speak about art]) (Tokyo: Poplar-sha, 2011), 20.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

63

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? … Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. … In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting.143 Likewise, Rikyū observed, People in the world, in search of a sight of cherry-blossoms, pass their days and nights in anxiety, roaming around, and wondering if the time has come for cherry trees to be in full bloom in this mountain or that forest. … They are merely capable of taking pleasure in the colorful sights which appear to their physical eyes alone.144 This appreciation for cherry trees before they flower or after the blossoms have scattered suggests a richer imagination that is able to place single experiences within a larger time-space narrative, considering the lifecycle of the tree. The benefit of this type of imagination, which Brady does not explicitly state and Japanese aesthetics highlights, is that this makes all moments in the experience of nature potentially meaningful. It cultivates an imagination that is able to see the momentous in the anti-moments. Furthermore, the appreciation of the various states of the cherry tree gives insight into the impermanence of all things. This would mark a change into what Brady calls the revelatory imagination, a grasp of some truth about the world. While Brady is not specific about the content of this revelation, Japanese aesthetics offers one perspective, the impermanence of all things that are co-arising at each moment, which creates a fellow-feeling with nature: mono no aware (もののあはれあはれ), being moved by the pathos of things.145 This sensitivity to things in their materiality as they pass through time is rooted in Shintō and Buddhist presuppositions,146 so again it is worth qualifying Brady’s 143 Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō, trans. Donald Keene, second ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 115. 144 Nanbō Sōkei, “Record of Nanbō,” in Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu, The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 156–157. Quoted in Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, 189. 145 For further discussion of mono no aware see Motoori Norinaga, “On Mono no Aware,” in The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey, trans. and ed. Michael Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 172–194 and Yuriko Saito, “Nature: Japanese Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, v.3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 344–45. 146 For some examples of these see: Yuriko Saito, “The Japanese Aesthetics of Packaging,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57/2 (Spring 1999), 257–265; Yuriko Saito,

64

Doebler

comment that although the revelatory imagination may give “a kind of revelation in a non-religious sense,”147 in the analysis of particular kinds of imagination religious or spiritual senses may be especially relevant. Brady’s analysis of imagination is meant to apply to the experience of nature, but as noted earlier, the imaginative experience of nature cannot be easily separated from the cultural context that shapes one’s imagination. Furthermore, the arts play a significant role in this process. This is also emphasized in Japanese aesthetics, where nature and the human are seen as closely related, if not identical. This in turn has shaped theories of artistic practice and aesthetic experience that integrate nature, art, and the everyday rather than seeing them as discrete spheres. What Japanese aesthetics can contribute to the environmental aesthetic imagination that Brady develops, then, is an appreciation for how art can complement the imaginative encounter with nature. This is evident in Senju’s paintings, such as those at Shofuso where, rather than distracting the visitor from the surrounding nature, Senju aims to enrich the visitor’s experience of that nature. Here it is worth inserting Senju’s own comments on imagination: I find art very important, but even more important is to enrich your imagination. I do not go out to the waterfall and paint on site. My waterfall paintings are very much figurative, however, at the same time they are very abstract. Personally, I feel that I may have gone beyond the abstract or the figurative. I am indeed painting a waterfall, but which waterfall am I painting?148 Senju recognizes the importance the imagination plays in the experience of any work of art, but he also acknowledges how the artwork can enrich the viewer’s experience of nature through the art. In this way, we see how Senju’s waterfall paintings, being both figurative and abstract, avoid both the extreme of a figurative or abstract sublime in art, say between Frederic Edwin Church’s “The Japanese Aesthetics of Imperfection and Insufficiency,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55/4 (Autumn 1997), 377–385; Jennifer Railey McMahon, “Dependent Origination and the Dual-Nature of the Japanese Aesthetic,” Asian Philosophy 7/2 (July 1997), 123–133; Michael Marra, “Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning,” Phi­ losophy East and West 45/3 (July 1995), 367–387; Yanagi Sōetsu, “The Dharma Gate of Beauty,” trans. Bernard Leach, Eastern Buddhist, New Series 13/2 (October 1979), 1–21; and Karaki Junzō, “Metaphysical Impermanence,” trans. Joseph S. O’Leary, in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. James W. Heisig, et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), 227–232. 147 Brady, “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” 163. 148 Hiroshi Senju, “Hiroshi Senju,” Asian Art Newspaper, January, 2009.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

65

Niagara (Fig. 3) and Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, as well as the extreme of a natural vs. artistic sublime, showing that both divisions miss the mark. Rather, if nature and human are seen as inextricably related, this overcomes the distinction between nature and art and places them in symbiotic relation. So, if there is a sublime it may appear in both, or, more precisely, appear in the intersection and interaction of both and the viewer’s imagination plays a central role in this relationship. Third, regarding affective engagement, Ronald Hepburn used the word ‘realize’ to describe an aesthetic experience of nature that focuses on the particular thing in nature, appreciating it for what it is at the moment and not for any use value. Such an attentive focus opens the possibility for experiences of ‘serious beauty’ that are marked by a feeling of unity or oneness with nature; the encounter with nature modifies our sense of our own being. This bears resemblance to the creative process in Japanese aesthetics, in particular the notion of giving up the self through careful attention to the thing. Whether it is as artistic subject matter for a work of art or design material for a daily-use object, the respectful, humble, and somatically thoughtful engagement with the material thing advocated within the Japanese tradition cultivates, in Yuriko Saito’s words, a “moral capacity for relinquishing the power to impose our own ideas and wishes on the other.”149 By giving up the self, the self is regained, as it were, in a new way, as part of a greater whole. As Hepburn says, we “become foreign to our everyday, unexamined notion of ourselves.”150 One contribution of perspectives from Japanese aesthetics is how they show artistic practice can be conceived of in a way that it contributes to a feeling of unity with nature and the everyday, rather than distracting from it, practices such as haiku poetry, the tea ceremony, or even food packaging. The idea is that if humans through art contribute to helping nature fully be, the process of engagement is essential to help humans fully be, and together this is expressed in mono no aware, the fellow-feeling between humans and nature, and Senju’s work vividly shows this union of the human and nature. As he has said, his waterfall paintings may serve as metaphors for what makes terrestrial life possible: gravity, water, and temperature.151 While such scientific facts may not explicitly come to mind when experiencing the paintings, they are felt on a subconscious level. Furthermore, the location of his works in everyday built 149 Yuriko Saito, “The Moral Dimension of Japanese Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65/1 (Winter 2007), 88. See also “The Japanese Aesthetics of Packaging,” 261 and Everyday Aesthetics, 134. 150 Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” 297. 151 See Ryan Bair, “Hiroshi Senju for Fendi,” accessed 17 November 2021, https://vimeo .com/90248203.

66

Doebler

environments, such as airports, hotels, temples, or houses, increases opportunities to ‘realize’ this common bond of human and nature. Indeed, Senju’s paintings are exemplary for a sublime that interlaces nature and art while cultivating bodily, imaginative, and affective engagement. 4

Cultivating Participation: Critiquing the Sublime with Critical Theory Whatever is fitted in any sort 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; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.152

Edmund Burke’s almost hyperbolic statement reveals an ethical tension within the sublime. Recent writers from different critical perspectives have interrogated the sublime for its complicity in fomenting negative ethical attitudes. Grouped broadly under critical theory, these include critiques from the perspectives of gender, race, politics, and technology. What unites these is a concern with the antagonistic and dualistic tendencies the sublime seems to support. Below I will consider each separately, although as will be seen they often overlap. I will conclude by placing them in dialogue with the ethics of the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) and Hiroshi Senju’s art. 4.1 Feminist Critiques Feminist critiques of the sublime argue that the notion is gendered, that is to say the sublime is presented as male.153 Violence, power, and the transcendent are associated with the sublime while beauty is viewed as predictably peaceful, passive, and immanent. As discussed in the earlier survey of the sublime, Burke and Kant are the two theorists of the sublime who have exerted the greatest influence in the history of the idea and, unsurprisingly, they are central to the gendering of the sublime, a gendering that effectively marginalizes females from participation in this august experience. 152 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36, italics original. 153 While I will discuss recent writers here, it is important to acknowledge that contemporaries of Burke and Kant, such as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) “raged against the ways in which the ‘sublime’ was often explicitly, and nearly always implicitly, gendered as male.” Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (London: Routledge, 2007), 8.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

67

Of the two, Burke is more explicit than Kant. Burke identifies pain and pleasure as the two basic experiences of humans that generate feelings, and these match up with the sublime and the beautiful. Pain is associated with the drive to self-preservation while social life is based on an attraction to pleasure. For Burke, the female serves as the prototype for all beauty since it serves as an impetus for procreation.154 But if the female is fundamentally associated with beauty this implies that the sublime is not the domain of women. Furthermore, since Burke is explicit that pain—and the sublime—is more significant than pleasure, the female is ultimately seen as second-class. Burke significantly influenced Kant’s thinking about the sublime in this regard as well. This is seen most clearly in Kant’s early Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Here Kant follows Burke by viewing the female as the prototypical example of beauty. But he also adds something new, arguing that women should not develop a capacity for the sublime.155 So, the female is neither a source for nor perceiver of the sublime. This prohibition has serious implications since, according to Christine Battersby, “Kant will link full personhood and moral autonomy to the sublime in his later writings.”156 By the time of Kant’s mature writing on the sublime in The Critique of the Power of Judgment, the negative view of the female is largely made implicit. For example, the female is no longer the primary example of beauty; instead it is a disinterested response to nature. Again, women are viewed as incapable of appreciating the sublime. This is because the difference between beauty and the sublime in part rests on a difference between what is safe and what is threatening. And if the sublime is marked by what is threatening this requires virile forces that are the domain of men, and not even all men; rather, education is required. For Kant the pleasure of the sublime is closed off to all except the man who has been ‘prepared by culture’ for the receptivity to ‘moral ideas’, and who has been educated into confidence in the power of his own ego to confront nature at its most fearsome. … Kant’s analysis of the sublime is thus intimately connected with his gendered (and Orientalist) notion of personality. A man proves his superior moral excellence by his ability to experience the sublime. (60–61)

154 See Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 38–40. 155 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), see 78–81. 156 Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (London: Routledge, 2007), 9. Parenthetical page numbers in the following text are to this work.

68

Doebler

If this is coupled with Kant’s comments in his Anthropology, where he states that women should maintain the sense of fear given them by nature in order to protect their wombs and propagate the species, it becomes “clear that Kant’s ideal woman is a wife who either cannot or should not be trained to transcend her emotions” to the extent that an experience of the sublime requires (63, ital. orig.). So, Kant effectively barred women from appreciating the sublime. Another way women are marginalized from the sublime is in relation to artistic creativity. Christine Battersby considers how the sublime is connected to the tradition of alchemy and sublimation. Alchemy viewed female as material and base and the goal was to purify it via the male, producing an androgenous product. This pseudo-science was taken up by Romantic writers such as Novalis (1772–1801) and applied to theories of artistic creativity where the male artist would purify base material into a spiritual product. Battersby suggests that Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), in turn, carried on this gendered view of creativity. He viewed sublimation as a key stimulus to creativity, something women were incapable of. Thus, while very different, the alchemical tradition, Kant, and Freud share a common perspective that “femaleness is linked with materiality, immanence and the non-transcendent” (110, ital. orig.). Influential twentieth century literary critics who wrote on the sublime, such as Neil Hertz157 and Thomas Weiskel,158 extended this Freudian perspective. To generalize, they interpret the sublime in terms of a struggle for ego-identity. The sublime is seen as a kind of pre-oedipal, female excess that the ego must form itself against and it is only against the threat of feminine gaps, excess, formlessness and inundation that the boundaries of the male self are constructed. The sublime reveals the author confronting blockages—the difficulties—in exerting his self: producing anxieties that are transformed to guilt as they manifest themselves at the secondary (mature) level of the adult self, locked into oedipal struggles of son against father. (116) The problem is that the subject is always viewed as male, whether first resisting the female excess or fighting with the father. In order to participate in the experience of the sublime a woman would have to in effect think like a man. Recent writers have attempted various strategies of intervention against this masculine sublime. One approach is to recover alternative sublimes during 157 See Neil Hertz, The End of the Line (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 158 See Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

69

the Romantic period. For example, Anne Mellor considers how female writers during the Romantic period responded to or employed the aesthetic of the sublime in their work. She identifies two kinds of response. First was to “explicitly equate this masculine sublime with patriarchal tyranny.”159 This is effectively seen in the novels of Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The novels are often set in rugged landscapes associated with the sublime, but Radcliffe also transposes the natural threat into domestic settings where the ominous power becomes men preying on women. The second, and more positive response to the sublime is viewing the experience of magnificent nature as an expansion of the self, but not in a way that erases the other. Instead, the expanded self is given a new appreciation for the value of others.160 Radcliffe is also exemplary here. Mellor further develops this ethical and sociable sublime by discussing works by Sydney Owenson, later Lady Morgan (1776–1859), Susan Farrier (1782–1854), and Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827). She suggests that for these writers nature is a female friend, a sister, with whom they share their most intimate experiences and with whom they cooperate in the daily business of life, to the mutual advantage of each.161 The encounter with such nature expands self-knowledge, but this is never a solitary affair; rather, it immediately engenders ‘dialogue with others.’162 Patricia Yeager represents another kind of response to the masculine sublime. Rather than looking to the Romantic period, she tries to identify a female sublime based on twentieth-century writers. Yaeger sees the idea of a ‘female sublime’ as paradoxical since the sublime is a questionable category because of its “self-centered imperialism,” but at the same time she believes it is a literary genre “the woman writer needs” since it deals with “empowerment, transport, and the self’s strong sense of authority.”163 So, Yeager manifests an ambivalence between wanting to appropriate the strong male sublime for women writers and critiquing such a sublime.

159 Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 1993), 91. 160 See Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 95. 161 Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 97, italics original. 162 Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 101. Christine Battersby also attempts to recover an alternative, conciliatory voice by examining the German poet Karoline von Günderode (1780–1816). See The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, 124. 163 Patricia Yeager, “Toward a Female Sublime,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues in Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 192.

70

Doebler

What is valuable in Yeager is her suggestion of three alternative sublime ‘modes’ that may be read out of modern female writers. The first mode is the ‘failed sublime’ where “we witness a woman’s dazzling, unexpected empowerment followed by a moment in which this power is snatched away—often by a masculine counter-sublime.”164 Second is the ‘sovereign sublime’ which initially follows the egotistical male sublime but then subverts it; rather than elevating the self it ends with a dispersion of the power.165 Third, and most significant, is the ‘feminine’ or ‘pre-oedipal’ sublime. Here Yeager draws on Neil Hertz’s psychoanalytic sublime mentioned above. This explains the sublime as a two-stage struggle, an oedipal struggle against the father which is based on a masking or repression of a “pre-oedipal desire for closeness or nearness with the other.”166 Yeager argues that the feminine sublime makes this pre-oedipal impulse explicit and, rather than repressing it, uses it as a stimulus for poetic creativity. Such a sublime hums pre-oedipal songs from the ruins of an agonistic and oppositional poetics. … It engenders a zone where self-empowerment and intersubjective bliss entertain one another in an atmosphere free of paranoia.167 Barbara Freeman takes a different approach. She argues for a ‘feminine sublime’ but this is emphatically not female. Instead, the feminine sublime refers to any experience of radical alterity—experiences of what is excessive and unrepresentable. The feminine sublime is not a discursive strategy, technique, or literary style the female writer invents, but rather a crisis in relation to language and representation that a certain subject undergoes.168 Freeman argues that discourse about the sublime in the past has “typically functioned not to explicate but to neutralize excess” and therefore a different approach that makes room for sublime excess is needed.169 So, while she discusses works by female writers, what she calls the feminine sublime is not restricted to specific, embodied female subjectivities. Rather, the ‘feminine’ 164 Yeager, “Toward a Female Sublime,” 201. 165 Yeager, “Toward a Female Sublime,” 202. 166 Yeager, “Toward a Female Sublime,” 204. 167 Yeager, “Toward a Female Sublime,” 204–205. 168 Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2. 169 Freeman, Feminine Sublime, 4.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

71

refers to “that which contests binaries, including a rigid notion of sexual difference that would insist upon separate male and female selves.”170 The reason she still uses the term ‘feminine’ is “to offer a critique of a tradition that has functioned historically to reassert masculine privilege.”171 Christine Battersby is critical of both Yeager and Freeman’s approaches. Yeager avoids the negative violence of oedipal conflict by focusing on the pre-oedipal, but this still confines her to a psychoanalytic framework where the self is always defined “via the negation of the other” (128). On the other hand, Freeman’s ‘feminine sublime’ that emphasizes pure otherness and actually discounts female particularity runs the risk of “erasing the historical, material and political dimensions of the sublime of embodied female and ‘raced’ and ethnically distinct subjects” (87–88 ital. orig.; see also 102). In response to both of these perspectives, Battersby wants to explore a specifically female sublime that is rooted in the female body, particularly the physiological distinction of having a womb which allows a woman to relate to a real other that is within her. This replaces the psychoanalytic model—with its emphasis on the male perspective that always views the female as an object of desire—with an emphatically non-oedipal model, “a mode of subjectivity that remembers natality.” In this model “identity would emerge through a non-agonistic link with the other, rather than through a defensive gesture of refusal” (129). At the same time, this emphasis on embodiment avoids the danger of abstraction that is inherent in an over emphasis on the other as an unknowable absence.172 Battersby finds theoretical support for this female sublime in an unlikely place, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. She argues that Nietzsche wrestled with “the seductions of the sublime, and ended by reconfiguring sublimity in ways that are radical and also profound” (160). Nietzsche’s innovation is to challenge notions of a stable self and truth as understood by earlier philosophers. His response is to push the ‘I’ to the side of “the knowable space-time universe” and pursue 170 Freeman, Feminine Sublime, 9. 171 Freeman, Feminine Sublime, 10. 172 Battersby’s move to natality is echoed by theologian Grace Jantzen, who critiques Western culture as simultaneously necrophilic and necrophobic, a tendency that both secular and religious culture share. In contrast to the sublime aesthetic of death, manifested in various theories of the sublime that emphasize what is unrepresentable, Jantzen suggests the beauty of natality which exhibits “the potential for newness, fresh beginnings, while at the same time requiring its own preservation.” Grace Jantzen, “On Changing the Imaginary,” in The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 290.

72

Doebler

an encounter with an ‘other’ where this other is not simply a construct of the I (as in the Kantian tradition of the sublime) but is so alien that the I ‘lives right past’ it. … This ‘event’ is not simply the ‘other’ of the I but both so distant and also so near that its significance only emerges in what Nietzsche called in Daybreak the ‘inzwischen’ (the ‘in-between-time’).173 (185–186) At the same time, Nietzsche also added a new appreciation for the body in his The Genealogy of Morals (1887). Bodily activity is inseparable from self-identity; rather, “the Nietzschean self becomes itself through expending its bodily energies, and is not a unified ego that simply encounters an infinite or indefinite ‘other’” (183). The problem, Battersby notes, is that Nietzsche has a largely negative and agonistic view of these competing energies within the self, and what is needed is a constructive approach: By contrast, my own emphasis on the female and raced subject position involves treating fractures and irreconcilable tensions within the social unity or self in an altogether more positive way. The interlacing of self with otherness that is characteristic of the pregnant female who is healthy should help us reconfigure the self-other relation in ways that allow us to think of the richness and the potentiality of the ‘others within’. (187, ital. orig.) In sum, then, what is common across these different feminist responses to the masculine sublime of control, power, and ego, is advocating for a sublime that highlights relation, peace, cultivating life, and protecting difference. 4.2 Racial Critiques Turning to the sublime in relation to race, we can identify three possible problems. First is viewing the ability to aesthetically appreciate the sublime as limited to certain racial groups. Second is seeing a different race as a (negative) sublime object, an ‘other’ that does not fit existing categories and thus proves threatening and must be overcome. Third is believing the ability to appreciate the sublime justifies control over another group of people. The first we can see in Kant and the second and third in Burke.

173 Battersby is primarily drawing from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886), the “Preface” and §259, §284, and §285.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

73

Kant seems to argue that certain racial groups are not capable of appreciating the sublime.174 In his early Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime, Laura Doyle notes that in chapter four Kant applies his gendered categories of beautiful and sublime to different nationalities and races. “In short, he gives extended attention to a nationalist sublime in a period when nationality was mingled rhetorically with notions of class, ancestry, and race.”175 The people of the Americas and Africa are especially derided as having no fine feelings. For example, Kant says about Africans: “Not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praise-worthy quality.”176 While Kant’s mature aesthetics in the Critique of the Power of Judgment will not have such an explicit racial framework, Doyle suggests it is “encoded in his emphasis on ‘preparatory culture.’”177 Furthermore, drawing on Kant’s lectures on anthropology from 1772–1789, Christine Battersby identifies an image of the ‘Oriental’ as one who “is trapped in sensuousness and mere detail” rather than rising above to grasp universals by means of concepts (82). Thus, issues of gender and race overlap in Kant’s aesthetic of the sublime. Without general concepts, without universals, and hence without any ‘real’ moral principles, Kant’s Oriental man is as incapable of transcending appearance as Kant’s European woman. There are, however, two important differences. First, the Kantian woman is bound to immediacy via her emotions, especially via her propensity to fear; by contrast, the Kantian Oriental is constrained not by his emotions, but by the fact that he responds to the world in a too-particular fashion, privileging sense images and shapes. Second, whilst Kant makes the avoidance of the sublime a moral duty for women, in the case of the Oriental peoples Kant seems to suggest that they simply lack the ability to either produce or to appreciate the sublime. (83) If one problem with the sublime is that it is seen as limiting the experience to certain races, equally problematic is how it may enable viewing racial others 174 See also Gil Anidjar’s discussion of the European fear of the Semite based on the sublime in Kant and Hegel. Gil Anidjar, “The Jew, the Arab: An Interview with Gil Anidjar conducted by Nermeen Shaik,” Asia Source, February 2004, accessed 17 November 2021, http://asiasociety.org/jew-arab-interview-gil-anidjar. 175 Laura Doyle, “The Racial Sublime,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 27. 176 Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 111. Quoted in Doyle, “The Racial Sublime,” 29. 177 Doyle, “The Racial Sublime,” 29.

74

Doebler

as sublime objects that must be overcome. On this point, Laura Doyle argues that the aesthetics of the sublime helped mediate changes in European identities in the eighteenth century. This took place in two stages. First, there was a turn inward to folk and primitive native traditions as a means to identify racial uniqueness, for example the recovery and celebration of Anglo-Saxon culture in England. This racial heritage was consolidated and then used as reserve for the colonial project.178 Edmund Burke exemplifies this two-stage approach. On one hand, as Doyle notes, Burke does not delimit the sublime racially, as Kant seems to, but rather finds it is universal in ‘savage’ cultures. Burke draws neither national nor racial boundaries around ancestral energy. Innovatively grounding it in human physiology, Burke discovers equal manifestations of sublimity in the ‘ancient heathen temple’ of Stonehenge (Enquiry 77), the sacred forests of the Druids (Enquiry 59), and the ‘barbarous temples of the Americans’ (Enquiry 59). Sublimity is thus evidence of identity among originary cultures rather than a measure of their difference.179 On the other hand, his later Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) reflect the next step, that certain races—notably the British—have effectively harnessed the savage in such a way as to make it productive, something the French in their Revolution failed to do. Pursuing his own sublime alchemy of race and rights … Burke goes on to point out that if the French had difficulty finding their own Magna Charta or ‘discerning the obliterated constitution of your ancestors,’ they might have ‘looked to your neighbors, who had kept alive the ancient principles and models of the old common law of Europe’ (Reflections 123).180 The complex relation of the sublime as overwhelming terror that is simultaneously contained, as explored in Burke’s Enquiry, is something that persists across his career and informs his political thought. Within the Enquiry there are some places that suggest an obvious racial sublime, for example his physiological explanation that black is sublime since it makes the eye painfully contract since no light is reflected off of the object. In an anecdote this is 178 See Doyle, “The Racial Sublime,” 16. 179 Doyle, “The Racial Sublime,” 29–30. 180 Doyle, “The Racial Sublime,” 30.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

75

tied to black bodies. Burke reports a story of a boy being healed of a cataract and, upon seeing a black woman, recoiling in horror.181 However, Sara Suleri presents a more nuanced picture of how Burke’s thinking about the sublime affected his own view of race. Working from a post-colonial perspective, Suleri suggests that Burke’s early thinking about the sublime as an aesthetic category in his Enquiry provided a conceptual field where he could “bury his intuitive understanding of the irrationality that lies at the heart of rationalism.”182 In other words, what Burke was divining in the political arena was the overpowering sublimity of the vast British Empire. In light of this, the superficially racial story of the boy seeing the black woman takes on deeper significance. A simple correlation between sublimity and race is … not the issue, for what Burke is beginning to envisage is a sublime whose proportions bear a disquieting resemblance to a Conradian heart of darkness, in which aesthetic and epistemological questions are inextricably linked to the economy of historical specificity. … From such a perspective, the Enquiry translates into a text that is politically preparatory for Burke’s later writing, providing him with a brooding understanding of the anxieties of empowerment and the difficulty inherent in any attempt to categorize their structures.183 This dark heart of colonialism may be viewed as a negative sublime for Burke. However, there is also a positive sublime. Suleri points to a speech in the British House of Commons concerning the Fox’s East India Bill (1783). In his speech, Burke employs a rhetoric that “insists on the futility of approaching India as though it could be catalogued or would ever be categorizable.”184 This suggests that one way Burke was able to apply the aesthetic of the sublime to politics, which in the case of colonialism also depended on a view of race, was to recognize that the obscurity and astonishment occurring in the sublime are also experienced in the encounter with different peoples and the proper response is respect. But despite this positive aspect, in the end Burke, caught “between the idea of colonialism and its ensuing lie” was unable to face the horror at the center of the colonial system head-on and instead displaced it onto Warren Hastings (1732–1818), a figure who “could simultaneously protect the colonial

181 See Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 131–132. 182 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 36. 183 Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 44. 184 Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 26.

76

Doebler

project from being indicted for the larger ill of which Hastings was simply a herald.”185 The racial problems with the sublime are closely connected to the political. Therefore, we will first consider some of the political problems associated with the sublime, notably terror, before considering some of the constructive responses to these racial and political excesses. 4.3

Political Critiques The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. … Of course, it’s visually stunning and you’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would ever have thought possible.186

This quote by the contemporary British artist Damien Hirst (b. 1965), made on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, highlights a central political problem related to the sublime: taken to its furthest extreme, the logic of the sublime as a mode of overwhelming terror that stuns the senses into astonishment suggests that something like the attacks on the World Trade Center may be a deeply profound expression of the sublime. What is particularly troubling about it is the way the event seems to erase the line between art and reality, dramatic spectacle and mundane daily life. Indeed, Jean-François Lyotard views a politics of the sublime as impossible except as one thing: terror.187 Is terror inseparable from the sublime? How can we account for the powerful attraction that scenes of terrorism seem to demand? Can political questions be separated from aesthetic and moral ones? First, is terror inseparable from the sublime? Again, Burke and Kant are touchstones. Looking at Burke, he clearly links the sublime to terror and power, as the quote at the beginning of this part shows. At the same time, Burke is quite emphatic that the experience of the sublime can only happen if we are in a position of safety. However, he provides examples that seem to blur the line. On one hand, we can admire the sublime in a tragic play on the stage from the safety of our own seat. But on the other hand, Burke suggests witnessing 185 Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 45. 186 Quoted in Emmanouil Aretoulakis, “Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11,” Contem­ porary Aesthetics 6 (March 2008), accessed 17 November 2021, https://digitalcommons .risd.edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol6/iss1/13/. 187 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 204. Quoted in Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2005), 126.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

77

an execution is even more powerful. So, Burke closely associates the sublime and terror. However, when he faced perhaps the greatest terror of his time, the Terror of the French Revolution, Burke seems to have forgotten his earlier rhetoric of shock-and-awe, or realized the real-life impact of aesthetic theorizing. Christine Battersby is hard on Burke here, accusing him of cowardice as he silently abandons his earlier views (27). In contrast to Burke, Kant relates terror to the sublime in a different way. For Kant, as we have seen previously, the dynamics of the sublime involve a double movement. As Battersby notes, The imagination is agitated as reason and the object impact on it—from above and below, as it were. What causes our enjoyment is precisely this tension or vibration.  … Where ‘terror’ and fear are involved, the terror is not so much bound up with the external events, as with the initial incapacity of the mind to bring sensory experience, imagination, understanding and reason together and deal with what we see or otherwise sense. (30) So, while Kant certainly employs violent terminology to speak of the struggle the psyche undergoes in sublime experience, this is all within the subject. It is worth mentioning here, however, that Kant does connect the experience of war to the sublime, albeit if it is conducted in an orderly way, which would seem to rule out acts of terrorism.188 But even if one accepts Kant’s sense of mental terror, following Burke there does seem to be at least a special category of sublime experience engendered by the experience of terror, an experience that is particularly enchanting. How do we account for this? Drawing on both Burke and Kant, Arnold Berleant has recently tried to provide one answer to this question. Berleant first defines terror in the sense we think of it today, the use of violence to instill fear, often through the threat of the unexpected. He goes on to make the important point that terrorism is not restricted to extremist fundamentalist groups but may come from any group that seeks to engender fear through violence; indeed, terror is a standard operating procedure today, including in mass media.189 188 See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 146. 189 “And there is also the increasingly sophisticated propagandistic use of the media— magazines and newspapers, TV talk shows and news broadcasts—to proliferate false information, obscure and distort current events, and instill insecurity. This is no reign of terror; we are living in an age of terror.” Arnold Berleant, “Art, Terrorism, and the Negative

78

Doebler

But what is the relation of aesthetics and terrorism? Berleant notes that central to any terrorist act is the aesthetic impact, an overwhelming of the senses. Such acts are ‘spectacularly theatrical,’ but they cannot be divorced from their political import; rather, the calculated sensory punch is essential to achieving the political end. Furthermore, since terrorist acts are often large in ‘scope and force’ and indeterminate in effect they seem to fit well with theories of the sublime. On one hand, a terrorist act fits Burke’s description of the sublime as terror, a state of astonishment, “a state of mind with an element of horror in which all other thoughts are suspended.” On the other hand, it fits Kant’s mathematical and dynamical sublimes. Applied to a terrorist act, its effects and consequences cannot be fully described or even mentally encompassed and are incommensurable. Its material consequences in the form of physical destruction and social disruption, the scope of the human anguish inflicted, and the protective measures and reciprocal violence wreaked upon society in reaction can never be fully enumerated. Its human consequences are immeasurable because they are incalculable. … In the place of might in Kant’s dynamical sublime, the sublime in terrorism is present in the intensity of physical force, in its engulfing emotional power, in the overwhelming psychological pressure of the situation.190 Berleant suggests that we need a new aesthetic category—the ‘negative sublime’—to express the moral and aesthetic experience of terror that goes beyond our conception. “Because acts of terrorism elude meaningful quantitative determination, we must further acknowledge their moral and aesthetic incommensurability, indeed, their very inconceivability.”191 This category of the negative sublime is a helpful way to think about why we may be attracted to scenes of terror that are not confined to the theater or museum but break into our daily lives. Of course, as Berleant notes, this is not to aestheticize terror or glorify it. However, Berleant’s use of the word ‘incommensurability’ seems to be gesturing towards a deeper issue surrounding terror and the sublime and that is the question of evil.

Sublime,” Contemporary Aesthetics 7 (November 2009), accessed 17 November 2021, https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol7/iss1/4/. 190 Berleant, “Art, Terrorism, and the Negative Sublime.” 191 Berleant, “Art, Terrorism, and the Negative Sublime,” italics original.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

79

In the post-9/11 world, Slavoj Žižek observes that in our resigned postideological era which admits no positive Absolutes, the only legitimate candidate for the Absolute are radically evil acts[.] … And it tells us a lot about today’s constellation that the only Absolute is that of sublime/irrepresentable Evil.192 Žižek’s comment has deeper political references, which we will return to, but for the moment his statement points to how important the sublime—as linked to evil—is in the contemporary consciousness. Radical, dynamic acts of overwhelming, almost gratuitous destruction—the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 9/11—capture the imagination and in place of any other stable belief provide a bedrock for the wandering contemporary world. Richard Kearney has also noticed this connection between evil and the sublime in postmodern thought. Discussing writers such as Julia Kristeva, Lyotard, and Žižek, Kearney observes that the sublime functions as a site for discussing unspeakable evil but in a way that often coincides with the positively transcendent. It becomes impossible—or even unnecessary—to discern if the sublime masks utter malevolence or unbounded goodness. For example, if the sublime for Lyotard is the ‘unnamable’—something that cannot be represented—there is an unsettling irony in his comments that the Holocaust and the Hebrew Lord are both unspeakably sublime.193 Likewise, Žižek emphasizes the ambiguity between good and evil in the law as understood by Kant. In Kant, these postmoderns argue, the sublime Law comes to occupy the place of the noumenal God of Exodus. We know that the Law is but not what it is.194 In a more popular vein, there is the horrible deity described by Joseph Campbell in his The Power of Myth (1988): 192 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002), 138–139. 193 See Richard Kearney, “Evil, Monstrosity, and the Sublime,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 57/3 (2001), 494. 194 Kearney, “Evil, Monstrosity, and the Sublime,” 495, italics original. Literary critic Terry Eagleton also notes the connection between the sublime and law, except this time in Burke. For Burke the law is sublime/masculine and it must use beauty/feminine to attract followers. This is because the law-giver, or nation, is always established on a primal violence of conquest that it must cover up. See Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 49 and 58.

80

Doebler

By monster I mean some horrendous presence or apparition that explodes all your standards for harmony, order, and ethical conduct … That’s God in the role of destroyer. Such experiences go past ethical judgements. Ethics is wiped out … God is horrific.195 Such an invocation brings to mind Robert Oppenheimer’s comment that, when observing the testing of the atomic bomb in 1945, he thought of Vishnu’s words in the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” This suggests that what is at the heart of the sublime is death, the ultimate terror that cannot be represented and overwhelms both sense and mind. Like the divine and the Dionysian, [the sublime] is enrapturing as well as devastating—which is to say that it is not hard to detect in it the shadowy presence of the death drive.196 For Americans, the sublime as death and evil seems to have reached an apex in the events of 9/11 and the public discourse surrounding it. But as Slavoj Žižek notes, the fascination with the events did not come out of nowhere; rather, they seemed to fulfill fantasies that Americans had long cherished in disaster and sci-fi films: The fact that the September 11 attacks were the stuff of popular fantasies long before they actually took place provides yet another case of the twisted logic of dreams: it is easy to account for the fact that poor people around the world dream about becoming Americans—so what do the well-to-do Americans, immobilized by their well-being, dream about? About a global catastrophe that would shatter their lives—why?197 ‘Well-to-do Americans’ seems to bring us back to Laura Doyle and Sara Suleri’s comments about the sublime in relation to colonialism and race. What the sublime as experienced in 9/11 may raise is the question of American power—its sources, its uses, and its validation. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that America emerged as a nation at a time when the sublime became an important aesthetic category. Indeed, writers such as Donald Pease and Barbara Novak have spoken of the ‘American sublime,’ the ways the sublime was used

195 Quoted in Kearney, “Evil, Monstrosity, and the Sublime,” 498. 196 Eagleton, Holy Terror, 44. 197 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, 17.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

81

to simultaneously validate America as a special nation with divine favor and objectify the American wilderness as an object for consumption. In the most fundamental sense, the ideology of the sublime constituted and sustained a community of readers who could contemplate the commodification of nature as an elevation of nature into grand ideas.198 This mirrors Laura Doyle’s comments about the British sublime, which first looked back to a sublime Gothic past in order to establish a national identity and then used this identity as a basis for colonial expansion. What the 9/11 attacks bring to the surface, then, is the ambiguous dialectics of power that Burke’s Enquiry dances around, “a dialectic of powerlessness aimed at addressing its inability to identify the locus of empowerment … between the witnessing psyche and the fall of empire.”199 The attacks show not only the destruction of physical structures but expose the deeper structural weaknesses of the uses of American power. In this way the experience of the sublime event offers a chance for self-examination and change. However, an alternative approach is possible, looking outward and radicalizing the perpetrators of the attack as the embodiment of Absolute Evil, which simultaneously absolves the United States of any evil. The latter is the route Žižek suggests the United States took post-9/11. The result is that the terrorists function as the Jews did in Nazi ideology, as an object on which to displace “the inherent antagonism of the system,” that is the fact that the society is internally falling apart and the authorities look for an external source to blame. This displacement onto a sublime, terrible other masks the real sublime object. As Žižek asks, “What if the ‘terrorist attack’ … is ultimately a metaphoric substitute for this Act, for the shattering of our liberal-democratic consensus?”200 This complex relation of 9/11 to the sublime, both the event as overwhelming terror as well as making the terrorists into an Absolute Evil that must be overcome, highlights the issue of difference and recognizing the dangers of definitive, totalizing explanations (this applies to the problems of race as well). How can we think about what may appear as threatening, overwhelming, or obscure in such a way that we are not controlled—or even consumed—by the 198 Donald Pease, “Sublime Politics,” in The American Sublime, ed. Mary Arensberg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 46–47. See also Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875, third ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14 and 33. 199 Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 41. 200 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, 154.

82

Doebler

event, but at the same time the event is not in turn controlled or its effect rendered mute? Jean-François Lyotard suggests an initial approach. While he sees the politics of the sublime as terror, there is a possible response to this, “an aesthetic of the sublime in politics.”201 Lyotard offers the concept of the differend as a way to think about traumatic events such as the Holocaust, Hiroshima, or 9/11. Precisely by remaining as something that is not knowable or does not fit under some category we may know these events that go beyond conceptualization. In terms of the sublime, the pain of the Holocaust is such that it exceeds our ability to supply a concept. … To do justice to the Holocaust, therefore one must phrase the event in such a way that it remains open to future determination since to do otherwise would be to assume that one has already understood the event and thus consumed it as an object of knowledge.202 However, Lyotard’s account of the sublime as differend is not without problems. As Christine Battersby comments, Lyotard’s silence about empirical differences within the imagined community that founds modernity is symptomatic. … Sex, ‘race’, ethnicity and cultural difference (dis)appear as differends in Lyotard’s abstract analysis of agonistic ‘language games’. They seem to be registered but only in Lyotard’s terms. (42) Here Battersby cites Lyotard’s prototypical example of the politics of the sublime—Auschwitz—as reflecting a Western bias towards what it can conceive as unrepresentable. What gets counted as sublime is that which ‘we’ (Western) subjects find hardest to cover over or ‘screen’ out through fantasy imagery or metaphors that contain the horror within manageable bounds. Not only historical distance but also the geography of Europe, the Americas and the West have helped shape the bounds of what is—and what is not—fundamentally disturbing to a civilisation that conceives of its 201 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans. and ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, 1992), 85. Quoted in Shaw, The Sublime, 126. 202 Shaw, The Sublime, 128.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

83

own modernity in terms of consensual rationality and a communicative ideal.203 (43) Furthermore, Lyotard dissolves the subject in Kant’s sublime, instead preferring to think of the abstract ‘inhuman.’ The consequence is that “difference has been rendered entirely ahistorical and ‘inhuman’; materiality has been deprived of its relation with human embodiment” (193). In contrast, what is needed is an emphasis on bodily, spatial, and temporal particularity, a more specific and rigorous way of engaging with the other. This would acknowledge difference, but simultaneously recognize that something of the other is always within oneself, that, as Battersby describes, the sublime as what is different is never over-and-against the self but is in some way present within, like the gestating child. Ultimately, what such an approach to difference would mean is that the pseudo-sublimity of terror is overwhelmed by the ineffable sublimity of patience, forgiveness, and love. 4.4 Technological Critiques Considering 9/11 points to one final issue related to the sublime: the role of technology. At the beginning of Terror, the Sublime and Human Difference, Christine Battersby makes a brief comment about how some people who experienced the events of 9/11 registered it as if watching a movie or a play (22). This suggests a connection between the sublime and media technologies. These are experienced in two ways. First, the media provide us with unique access to so-called sublime events such as terror, war, or natural disasters and calamities such as Hurricane Katrina. We are given direct and repeated coverage, which both impresses us with—even overwhelms us with—the magnificence of the situation, but also makes us immune to the significance of the events.204 We register them as simply something we should watch with astonishment. To paraphrase Richard Kearney’s comments on the Kantian Law, we know that the news is, but not what it is. Second, the proliferation of media technologies may be experienced as sublime in themselves. They overwhelm in the sheer bulk of content they generate. On the other hand, the ubiquity of these technologies seems to mask the radical unrepresentable nature of especially digital technologies; where 203 A similar criticism of Lyotard is registered by Timothy Engström. See Timothy H. Engström, “The Postmodern Sublime?: Philosophical Rehabilitations and Pragmatic Evasions,” boundary 2, 20/2 (Summer 1993), 204. 204 See also Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, 205.

84

Doebler

exactly is the World Wide Web? Then, when wedded to politics these technologies may grow ever more threatening, such as past revelations of the extent of the NSA’s data collection. Technology also contributes to the sublime in ways beyond media, making possible new kinds of fearful, awesome, and overwhelming experiences such as Hiroshima or large weather events compounded by the effects of industrialization and climate change. Jonathan Bordo points out the ironic situation today that the proposed solution to these ‘bad infinite’ events, brought about by human technology, is more technology.205 The sublime in technology arises, Bordo suggests, due to the technological incommensurability of both means and ends. The sources of the threatening processes are too remote to grasp relevantly in situations of crisis while the repercussions are too calamitous to envisage.206 The atomic bomb is exemplary here; how it is made and what it can do exceeds normal conceptualization. Then, in order to manage the threat of technology further technology, notably media, is used to deny the problems. “The denial is in the assurance that actions are already being taken, including the action of announcing and reporting, to address the latest crisis.”207 Such technology produces a veil that prevents us from imagining or grasping the effect of various human actions on the environment itself and creates a kind of dog-chasing-its-tail effect, “increas[ing] the indeterminacy, rendering our experience even more inchoate and defenceless in face of it.”208 Finally, this technological sublime cannot be separated from economic concerns. As noted in our survey of the sublime, Fredric Jameson discusses the return to the sublime as a symptom of society’s inability to resist late capitalism. We experience a “mixed emotion of exhilaration and terror” in the face of new technologies and the pervasive simulacra of commodity culture. “Thus the postmodern resurrection of the aesthetics of the sublime is ultimately an attempt to represent  … the properly unimaginable complexity of advanced,

205 See Jonathan Bordo, “Ecological Peril, Modern Technology and the Postmodern Sublime,” in Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, ed. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (London: Routledge, 1992), 172. 206 Bordo, “Ecological Peril, Modern Technology and the Postmodern Sublime,” 175. 207 Bordo, “Ecological Peril, Modern Technology and the Postmodern Sublime,” 175. 208 Bordo, “Ecological Peril, Modern Technology and the Postmodern Sublime,” 177.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

85

multinational capitalism.”209 Indeed, it is possible to hear in the economics of global warming ironic echoes of Battersby’s contention that Kant found women, lower classes, or other races incapable of sublime experience. Today wealth and technology make certain nations and regions relatively immune from the awesome effects of global warming, which makes such groups reticent to act against global warming but also places them in a distanced position to look in horror at the calamities befalling others.210 The challenge, of course, is if there is any adequate mode of resistance to such a sublime, a productive, egalitarian counter-sublime. 4.5 Cultivating Participation with Hiroshi Senju This survey of ethical problems with the sublime has been wide-ranging. However, these separate critiques—gender, racial, political, technological— cannot easily be separated, indeed they often work together and support each other. Christine Battersby was particularly helpful in identifying the links between gender, race, and politics, and she summarizes the significance of this nexus post-9/11: At stake is the question about what remains when understanding fails and when we are shocked by ‘terror’, or by an encounter with that which is so strange or shockingly ‘other’ that our conceptual framework is unable to encompass it. (11) Battersby sees some postmodern approaches, such as Lyotard’s, as helpful since they view the sublime as effacing the ego rather than celebrating it, but even these need critique. What needs to be explored is precisely the inability of some ‘postmodern’—as well as ‘modern’—thinkers to register differences that are not merely conceptual, symbolic or discursive, but also inscribed on the flesh (of the woman, the Jew or the Arab). (19) This aspect of embodiment and the sensual is central to all four critiques: the different flesh of genders and races, the very physical and sensory power of 209 David B. Johnson, “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and Its Limits,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 130. 210 For an overview of the current economic situation in relation to global warming see William Nordhaus, The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

86

Doebler

terror, and the simultaneous dematerialization of technology and ecological deteriorations from technology. The sublime in each serves to distort, divide, and destroy human relations with one another and the world they are a part of. What is needed is a sublime that can register difference without objectifying it, a sublime that echoes peace rather than pseudo-power. Such a position is affirmed and elaborated in the philosophy of Watsuji Tetsurō and in the art of Hiroshi Senju. Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku (倫理学, Ethics, 1945) is recognized as one of the defining works on the subject in twentieth-century Japanese philosophy. In it, Watsuji criticizes Western ethical thought for focusing too much on the individual self as a consciousness that looks out on others as objects of that consciousness.211 It is possible to see each of the ethical problems identified with the sublime in light of this. If what is outside the ego-self is always seen first as an object this will inevitably highlight difference, be it gender or racial based, and it will also incite strong reactions to difference, such as we saw with political responses to terror, either withdrawing into defensive isolation or brazenly striking out on offense in an attempt to control and subdue difference. Furthermore, an overemphasis on the individual foments a consumerist culture that drives technological advancement, but often has ecological consequences. In response to the Western emphasis on the individual, Watsuji develops an ethics as human betweenness, drawing on an analysis of the Japanese word for human (人間, ningen). The word is made up of two characters—人 (hito, person) and 間 (aida, between)—and in this way the word contains a flexibility that expresses the dual nature of the human as both an individual person and as a member of multiple social relations. “Individuals are basically different from society and yet dissolve themselves into society. Ningen denotes the unity of these contradictories.”212 Based on this, Watsuji suggests that individual humans must be understood in terms of their interpersonal activities, that a human in isolation is a fiction. One of his examples is the student and teacher relationship. As individuals they depend on one another for their identities, that is to say, they co-constitute one another. Likewise, the teacher and student only exist in the larger social whole of the school, which consequently would not exist without the student and teacher. There is no priority in these relationships, the teacher coming before the student or the school coming before the student and teacher. Viewed like 211 See Watsuji Tetsurō, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, trans. Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 32–34. 212 Watsuji, Rinrigaku, 15.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

87

this, what is different from one’s self is never ‘out there’ as a complete opposite. Rather, the different other is a part of the self, an inseparable piece of what gives the self its variety of social identities.213 In this way, Watsuji provides a model for how to respond to the basic issue with the sublime identified by the different perspectives loosely grouped as critical theory: how to relate to difference without controlling it or being controlled by it. For, if being a human means standing in co-constitutive relationships that co-arise without priority, the need to preserve difference will be a basic matter of fact. But, as the critiques reflect and Watsuji is aware, this is not a static process. Difference is never something that reaches a conclusion or is arrested, for then it would become sameness. Here Watsuji’s notion of the spatio-temporal dialectical structure of existence is helpful, the incessant movement in which one becomes an individual by departing somewhat from the communal and then negating this individuality and bringing to realization the community in one way or another, so as to return to one’s authenticity.214 This movement is never a one-time event; rather, it is constantly being played out within a particular relationship, say student/teacher, and simultaneously across the multiple relationships that humans entertain every day. This can be extended to include our relationships as gendered humans with particular racial identities that are within political, economic, technological, and ecological networks. Another contribution from Watsuji is how his perspective of relational betweenness has an ideological basis, emptiness (空, kū). As Isamu Nagami describes it, emptiness for Watsuji is the essence for the existence of individuality as well as totality. … Since things exist interdependently and relatively to each other, the notion of the appearance of a thing-in-itself is denied. Since there is no such thing as the appearance of a thing-in-itself, a thing does not exist. Through this negating process the absolute interdependent causation, kū, reveals itself.215 213 See Watsuji, Rinrigaku, 52–57. 214 Watsuji, Rinrigaku, 186, see also 223 and 233. 215 Isamu Nagami, “The Ontological Foundation Tetsurō Watsuji’s Philosophy: Kū and Human Existence,” Philosophy East and West 31/3 (July 1981), 290. See also William F. LaFleur, “Buddhist Emptiness in the Ethics and Aesthetics of Watsuji Tetsurō,” Religious Studies 14/2 (June 1978): 237–250.

88

Doebler

By denying the existence of anything in isolation, emptiness provides an ontological ground for rejecting divisive dualisms, such as those identified with the sublime. This can benefit the various ethical critiques of the sublime, for while they all identify problems, they do not always seem to have solid reasons for rejecting a problematic sublime. Of course, one could also appeal to other ontological frameworks of relation, such as the Christian notion of the analogy of being discussed in Part 2. This emphasis on relational betweenness in the midst of difference is also a key element in Senju’s art. In particular is his idea of art as communication, a means of dialogue that creates communion across difference, but significantly does not erase difference. For example, Senju compares art to the appreciation of wine: The better wine is, far removed from its source, at any moment after decades people around the world are able to taste it and know that it is delicious. The place of origin is something very personal, regional, and climactic. However, all people as humans equally know this goodness. Isn’t this what wine is? And this is art.  … Isn’t art what crosses everything, what makes you realize that we are the same humans, what communicates beauty and attractiveness, and what makes understanding possible?216 In this quote we can see Watsuji’s dialectic: a wine’s origin is specific and unique, like an individual person, but humans as a whole can appreciate it. Likewise, art, as Senju notes, can cross differences and make understanding possible. This can be extended to include understanding of gendered, racial, political, or any other kind of difference. Senju’s art aims to communicate his own feelings and sensations in order to enrich the viewer’s imaginative life and create greater awareness of our connections as human beings. Among the critics of the sublime, Christine Battersby provided the most constructive suggestions for overcoming the negative aspects of the sublime. In particular, she emphasized the need to attend to difference as it is registered in bodily difference within historical time and space; in other words, to avoid abstracting from the particular. The purpose of this was to avoid both the modern sublime of difference that must be overcome by the rational self and controlled, such as the Kantain sublime, but also the postmodern tendency to go to the opposite extreme of making difference, and the sublime, a completely unknowable, abstract lacuna, such as Lyotard’s notion of the ‘inhuman.’ 216 Hiroshi Senju, わたしが芸術について語るなる (Watashi ga geijutsu nitsuite katarunaru [If I speak about art]) (Tokyo: Poplar-sha, 2011), 156–158.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

89

Battersby’s suggestion was to think of the self-other relation in terms of the basic human relation of natality. The interlacing of self with otherness that is characteristic of the pregnant female who is healthy should help us reconfigure the self-other relation in ways that allow us to think of the richness and the potentiality of the ‘others within’. (187, ital. orig.) Battersby drew inspiration for this idea from Nietzsche’s thought on the body and event, that the self, rather than being a stable entity that looks out on a knowable object, “becomes itself through expending its bodily energies” (183) in a spatio-temporal context where the other is encountered not as something opposed to and sharply different from the self, but is “both so distant and also so near that its significance only emerges in what Nietzsche called … the ‘inzwischen’ (the ‘in-between-time’)” (186). Yet, as Battersby notes, Nietzsche has a largely negative and agonistic view of these competing energies within the self. Watsuji’s ethics shows similarities with this bodily and spatio-temporal perspective, but views it positively and may therefore be a better support for Battersby’s perspective. It is tempting to read in Nietzsche’s inzwischen a parallel to Watsuji’s notion of betweenness. The strength of Watsuji’s perspective is that he articulates how the other can be “both so distant and also so near,” through his understanding of human relations as co-constitutive and arising simultaneously. These relationships are fundamentally based on human bodies that move through and manipulate space and time to form their network of relations, the goal of which is to realize an existential sense of wholeness.217 Battersby’s example of natality—the gestating child in the womb of the mother—is perhaps the most fundamental expression of Watsuji’s spatio-temporal dialectic of human existence as the whole gives rise to the individual that separates itself but returns back to the whole. Yet, it must be remembered that this is not a dialectic that ends in a higher sublation, but a dialectic that suspends itself in the emptiness of interdependent co-arising.218

217 See Watsuji, Rinrigaku, 188. 218 This section presents a necessarily brief sketch of Watsuji’s ethics, and it is important to acknowledge his theory does have areas that deserve critique, such as the risk that the individual is dissolved into the state, a telos Watsuji himself seems open to. See Naoki Sakai, “Return to the West/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsuro’s Anthropology and Discussions of Authenticity,” boundary 2 18/3 Japan in the World (Autumn 1991), 181–188. For another critique see John C. Maraldo, “Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object, Self and Other: Mediating Watsuji Tetsurō’s Hermeneutics,” in

90

Doebler

Finally, Battersby’s emphasis on natality and the bodily, spatio-temporal participation it entails, is also supported by the ways Senju’s art invites participation. Many of Senju’s installations operate at the intersection of public and private spaces, as some are in airports and hotels while others are in Buddhist temples or traditional homes, such as Shofuso. While these function socially as different spaces, common to all is how Senju invites the viewer to a distinctive bodily experience of space. His careful attention to the unique features of each place means that rather than merely seeing the paintings one will experience the paintings and the surrounding environment in fresh ways. This is exemplified in the ways the waterfall paintings at Shofuso are intended to enrich the building itself—the colors of the wood and walls—while also overflowing into the outside space, connecting with the garden. And there are also temporal elements to Senju’s installations, from the fact that in many the person moves through them into another space—including Shofuso where the sliding doors open into other rooms and passageways—to the way many works are tailored to fit with the shifting seasons and times of day. (Fig. 4) But beyond the bodily experience of merely moving through space, Senju’s paintings, especially at Shofuso, also accentuate the multilayered-ness of bodily experience in the way they activate all five senses. At any moment, a visitor may be gazing at one painting while hearing the waterfall in the garden pond, feeling the cool breeze that passes through the veranda, smelling the fragrant scent of the aging house, and sipping a pungent cup of green tea. Each of these sensual modes may be foregrounded and become an object of focused attention and appreciation, but the strength of Shofuso is how it invites the visitor to experience these at the same time in a holistic way. Yet, this integrative experience of the body within space and time is not merely material; rather, Senju emphasizes that a primary goal of his art is to activate the viewer’s memory and imagination. Thus we see that his art reflects Watsuji’s notion that space and time are expressions of human attempts to relate, communicate, and connect. Likewise, the paintings give vivid expression to the relational sublime Battersby seeks in her turn to natality. In short, all three aim to cultivate a participative encounter between two different parties.

Conclusion: toward an Everyday Sublime

This study has explored the relevance of the sublime for the field of religion and the arts. The Introduction provided a case study of the contemporary artist Modern Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, ed. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 76–88.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

91

Hiroshi Senju to ground the subsequent theoretical investigations. Part 1 traced a historical survey of the sublime, exploring how the sublime is associated with what is formless and overwhelming, resisting representation and comprehension, while providing a sort of difficult, elevated pleasure. Also highlighted was the tendency of views to shift between the extremes of identifying the sublime with the object or the subject and in nature or art. Parts 2, 3, and 4 then discussed recent critiques of the sublime from theological aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, and critical theory and how the sublime has been used to create and reinforce dualisms. After examining the respective critiques and their constructive suggestions for how to respond to the problematic aspects of the sublime, we then extended these by placing them in dialogue with perspectives from Senju’s art and Japanese aesthetics and ethics. First, theological aesthetics argued that the beautiful and sublime should not be radically separated but should be held in a productive relation that gestures towards the peaceful depth of being itself. This was especially elaborated in terms of the notion of the analogy of being. This concern with relating difference and evoking ontological depth was equally evident in both the Japanese aesthetic concept of yūgen and the ways Senju’s paintings use color and the unique support of the sliding fusuma in the installation at Shofuso. Second, environmental aesthetics maintained that nature and art should not be radically separated but should be related through a dynamic experience of bodily, imaginative, and affective engagement. A similar kind of engagement was found in the appreciation of materiality and time in Japanese aesthetics, which emphasizes the close bond of humans and nature, cultivates an appreciation for the particular experience of each thing in each moment, and aims to let each thing fully be in its uniqueness as the human cooperates with nature. This was also seen in the ways Senju’s paintings at Shofuso emphasize the sensory and imaginative engagement of the visitor in the simultaneous experience of nature and art. Third, critical theory contended that the self and a marginal other should not be radically separated but should be related in a way that preserves difference rather than objectifying it or erasing it. Such an approach was effectively seen in Watsuji Tetsurō’s theory of ethics as human betweenness, the self and other related in a co-constitutive relationship that is sustained in a spatio-temporal dialectic that does not resolve in either the one or the many. This was also seen in Senju’s own idea of art as a means of relating difference through effective communication, which is instantiated in the ways he creates a dynamic participatory experience at Shofuso. In addition to providing a survey of the sublime and testing its continued relevance for today, the structure of this study has hopefully provided one model of an interdisciplinary methodology that can be used to support

92

Doebler

the broader field of religion and the arts. What has such a method shown? Drawing all the sections together, it has become clear how ontology, aesthetics, and ethics are inseparable from each other, both in debates related to the sublime in the Euro-American context and in Japanese aesthetics. Critical theory charged the sublime with distorting and destroying relationships with different others—be they gendered, racial, political, or technological and ecological—but this is equally manifest in aesthetics where the sublime reinforces a difference between nature and art, and both of these are predicated on an ontological agon between beauty and the sublime identified by theological aesthetics. At the same time, the intimate connection between ontology, aesthetics and ethics was evident in Japanese aesthetics in the ways that materiality and time are expressed in a variety of arts and daily life that is highly aesthetic, but is also rich in ethical and ontological overtones, such as Watsuji’s notion of betweenness or the mysterious depth of yūgen. A strength of what was seen in Senju and Japanese aesthetics and ethics is how they present a largely coherent view that interweaves the separate concerns manifested by the distinct perspectives of theological aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, and critical theory, showing how the different concerns overlap and ultimately must be interrelated. Overall, this comparative study has been largely positive about the contributions from Japanese aesthetics as these are expressed in the work of Senju. One possible criticism is that this overemphasizes the uniqueness of Japanese culture in contrast to Euro-American culture and thereby falls into the same trap of twentieth century comparative studies in Japanese aesthetics. In this respect, the contemporary aesthetician Tanehisa Otabe sounds an important warning: We may conclude that comparative studies almost always aim at justifying Japanese national identity in contrast to Western modernization. It is necessary for us to pay attention simultaneously to the frame of reference and to its historical relativity. Then comparative studies will finally escape merely fixing common sense and hypostacizing [sic.] national qualities, becoming instead a means of opening our eyes to the reality of difference and diversity.219 219 Tanehisa Otabe, “Representations of ‘Japaneseness’ in Modern Japanese Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Critique of Comparative Reason,” in Modern Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, ed. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: Univer­ sity of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 162.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

93

Rather than suggesting that the Japanese aesthetic tradition has ‘all the answers,’ the goal here has been to show that the tradition has a consistent and insightful perspective that, because it developed for a long time in relative isolation from the aesthetic traditions of Euro-America, can provide new ways of approaching issues within the Euro-American tradition, such as the sublime. Of course, this is based on a presupposition that aesthetic traditions—while naturally developing in different historical contexts, using different vocabularies, and often dealing with different issues—share a common root: the profound sensuous participation in the wondrous depth of our world filled with infinite particulars. What might this comparative study point us towards? One possibility is something that has suggested itself here and there in subtle ways, and that is what we could call the everyday sublime, a profound experience in the midst of the mundane that links art, nature, and the everyday.220 This has already been suggested for us especially in the discussions of Japanese aesthetics and environmental aesthetics. It is formulated nicely by Arnold Berleant: There may be an easy transition from beauty to the sublime, though I suspect that both ‘beauty’ and ‘sublime’ require radical redefining once one no longer associates the first with objects and the second with transcendence. … The experience of the sublime, then, when it is considered via an engaged, synesthetic participation is not bracketed out as a marginal experience and least of all a solely cognitive and subjective one, rather it portends the potential significance of each moment and each encounter.221 This book may be seen as one step in this redefinition of the sublime. The sublime, as our historical survey showed, has often been associated with exceptional experiences and places that are outside of our daily lives. But what this implies is that our daily lives are in some way inferior, something that must be endured until the rare moment may come again. It assumes the profound experience we think of as ‘sublime’ only happens with certain kinds of events

220 This phrase is suggested by Thomas Leddy. See Thomas Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Peterborough, OT: Broadview Press, 2012), 237–258. 221 Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 173–174.

94

Doebler

and ignores the possibility that they may be tokens of a perspective which, if we properly attune our attention, may be encountered at any moment, anywhere. Thomas Leddy also suggests the possibility of an everyday sublime. He considers the Buddhist notion of satori (悟り), or enlightenment, as a possible analog to the experience of the everyday sublime, a moment of pure insight into reality. This echoes some earlier discussions of Japanese aesthetics that draw on Buddhist ideas. However, Leddy seems to decide against this, one reason being that satori seems to leave out “the element of pain and fear, or even that of astonishment, so closely associated with the sublime in Western thought.”222 While certainly the sublime has been associated with pain and fear, how exactly these are experienced may vary, and they need not to be seen as the pinnacle of the sublime or outside the realm of daily life. For what may be more painful and fearful than the lives of silent desperation people live day in and day out? It is not that pain or fear is absent from satori, but changing one’s perspective in how pain and fear are viewed. This would also entail changing how one views one’s daily life. It is telling, then, that at the end of his discussion Leddy suggests Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence as a suggestive place to think about the everyday sublime, and that it arrives at a similar point as satori: The idea that one could will that the same event occur an infinite number of times is the idea that each event in everyday life is infinitely precious. Eternity is in essence found in the moment. This notion of eternity replaces that of an afterlife: it is a non-dualistic eternity.223 Both Berleant and Leddy confine the everyday sublime to the immanent, bracketing out a transcendent referent, but an everyday sublime would not require this. Indeed, our discussion of the analogy of being in Christian theology suggests one way a theistic, everyday sublime could be developed. Steve Odin provides a final suggestion towards an everyday sublime. Comparing the American philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) and Zen Buddhism, Odin notes similarities in their philosophical concern with the threat of skepticism and their methods of resolving this. The solution is to employ a dialogical process of conversation with the ordinary that aims at creating a kind of silence. Rather than being a muting of life, this silence instead leads to the transfiguration of the everyday and expands the self, an experience

222 Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, 242. 223 Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, 256.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

95

of “the wonder of the ordinary as sublime.”224 Odin suggests such an ordinary sublime is embodied in Japanese arts and crafts through the aesthetic value of wabi, which “celebrates the beauty of the ordinary, the simple, the common, the rustic, and the natural” while for Cavell it is the “function of art, literature, cinema, theater, opera, television, and other art forms … to open up the sublimity and poetry of the ordinary.”225 Senju’s paintings at Shofuso vividly embody both perspectives Odin mentions. They are works of ‘fine art’ that fit Cavell’s perspective of art being vehicles to reveal to us ways of being able to be at home in the world. But while they are contemporary paintings by an artist well established in the contemporary art world of galleries and museums, their installation in a traditional Japanese house places them in the wabi tradition. The paintings themselves are not worn or old, but they integrate with the aged wood, rice straw flooring, and surrounding garden in a natural way. They show us how a daily space can be integrated with nature and art and together they can form a singular moment of profound experience that may appear at any time, indeed is always available except for our blindness to it. What would make this sublime is the way it opens up a unique depth in the immanent, but a depth that does not overwhelm or erase the everyday; rather, the immanent somehow becomes deeper because of its everydayness. The response can absolutely be one of astonishment, the kind of surprise that comes with any experience of insight that could be called enlightenment. These suggestive comments from Berleant, Leddy, and Odin echo what this study has identified in its exploration of the sublime, that what is needed is a middle path, developing an ability to hold apparent opposites together in productive tension without subsuming one into the other. This would negotiate the extremes of emphasizing subject or object, nature or art, and thereby avoid the ontological, aesthetic, and ethical pitfalls that the concept sometimes suffers. The practical result of an everyday sublime would be enriched human lives that find in each particular moment, person, thing, and place, participative encounters that resonate with a profound depth. Senju’s art is exemplary of an everyday sublime, but it is not unique. Indeed, as one looks across the landscape of contemporary art there are numerous examples of works that function in a similar way, as guides in discovering 224 Steve Odin, “The Ordinary as Sublime in Cavell, Zen, and Nishida: Cavell’s Philosophy of Education in East-West Perspective,” in Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups, ed. Naoko Saito and Paul Standish (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 200. 225 Odin, “The Ordinary as Sublime in Cavell, Zen, and Nishida,” 200.

96

Doebler

the magic that lies hidden in plain sight in our daily lives. Within the context of the immediate discussion, one could look at the installation projects created around waterfalls by Olafur Eliasson and Mariko Mori. Eliasson’s The New York City Waterfalls (2008) is one permutation of his pump-driven waterfalls, installed at four locations around New York City and transforming familiar sights such as the Brooklyn Bridge. Mori’s Ring: One with Nature (2016), in contrast, is a nearly ten-foot composite ring suspended above a 190-foot-high waterfall in Brazil’s Cunhambebe State Park, the ring changing color depending on the angle of reflected light. Among other examples could be the works of Ai Weiwei, such as his Sunflower Seeds (2010), an installation of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds that evokes a Kantian mathematical sublime in its sheer number while simultaneously playing with notions of real vs. fake,226 or Banksy’s numerous street installations that playfully subvert where one should expect to encounter art. One path for future research could be to explore these connections across artists further and the way they sound further depths in the everyday sublime. We have seen how the notion of difference underlies the various critiques of the sublime. Across all of these we see what is primarily at issue is the question of human relation. How do humans relate to what is different? The problem with many versions of the sublime is that they view difference as something to be fought against, controlled, erased, or, what seems to be more and more the case, simply dumbfounded by. In the most extreme form these can lead to what Žižek spoke of, the sublime as Absolute Evil, something beyond our imagination that, whatever it is, has no beneficial relation to us, forcing us to acknowledge that all attempts at meaningful communion are empty gestures. However, these are simply that: versions of the sublime that pretend division, strife, and self-survival are the most profound and awesome experiences humans are capable of. Our discussion has shown that there are other options, but what is needed is a shift of focus: that the profundity of difference can be seen not as radical division but as difference that is in some way within oneself; that wholeness, rather than fragmentation, is the natural human state; and that the sublime, rather than being an exalted feeling of either self-obsession or self-obliteration, is an encounter where one’s deepest desires—to know what is very different from oneself but also to be known in one’s own uniqueness—are met and exceeded. Such an encounter is made palpable in Senju’s paintings that create points of intersection that cross perceived dualisms—whatever would 226 The installation was originally meant to be interactive, with guests walking among the seeds and handling them, but this was deemed to produce too much ceramic dust with potentially negative health effects.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

97

divide, distort, and destroy relationships, both human and non-human—by engaging us in a participative encounter of peace. They point us toward a sustainable sublime that unites silence and sound, motion and stillness, recalling and generating a longing in us for an embrace we have a vague memory of and an insatiable desire for. Bibliography Abaci, Uygar. “Kant’s Justified Dismissal of Artistic Sublimity.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66/3 (2008): 237–251. Addison, Joseph. Addison’s Essays from the Spectator. London: Ward, Lock, 1882. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Amy, Michaël. “The Waterfall Paintings in Contemporary Japanese Art Historical Context.” In Hiroshi Senju, Rachel Baum and Michaël Amy. Milan: Skira, 2009. 9–13. Anidjar, Gil. “The Jew, the Arab: An Interview with Gil Anidjar conducted by Nermeen Shaik.” Asia Source, February 2004. Accessed 17 November 2021. http://asiasociety .org/jew-arab-interview-gil-anidjar. Aretoulakis, Emmanouil. “Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11.” Contemporary Aesthetics 6 (March 2008). Accessed 17 November 2021. https://digitalcommons .risd.edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol6/iss1/13/. Ashfield, Andrew and Peter DeBolla, eds. The Sublime: A Reader in British EighteenthCentury Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Auerbach, Erich. Literary Language in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965. Bair, Ryan. “Hiroshi Senju for Fendi.” Accessed 17 November 2021. https://vimeo .com/90248203. Battersby, Christine. The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference. London: Routledge, 2007. Bauerschmidt, Frederick C. “Aesthetics: The Theological Sublime.” In Radical Ortho­ doxy: A New Theology, edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward. London: Routledge, 1999. 201–219. Berleant, Arnold. The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Berleant, Arnold. “Art, Terrorism, and the Negative Sublime.” Contemporary Aesthetics 7 (November 2009). Accessed 17 November 2021. https://digitalcommons.risd.edu /liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol7/iss1/4/.

98

Doebler

Betz, John R. “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part One).” Modern Theology 21/3 (July 2005): 367–411. Betz, John R. “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part Two).” Modern Theology 22/1 (January 2006): 1–50. Bordo, Jonathan. “Ecological Peril, Modern Technology and the Postmodern Sublime.” In Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, edited by Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick. London: Routledge, 1992. 165–178. Brady, Emily. Aesthetics and the Natural Environment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Brady, Emily. “The Environmental Sublime.” In The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Timothy M. Costelloe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 171–182. Brady, Emily. “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” In The Aes­ thetics of Natural Environments, edited by Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant. Peterborough, OT: Broadview Press, 2004. 156–169. Brady, Emily. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Briessen, Fritz van. The Way of the Brush: Painting Techniques of China and Japan. Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1999. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited with an Introduction by Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Carlson, Allen. “Appreciating Art and Appreciating Nature.” In Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 199–227. Chaplin, Adrienne Dengerink. “The Invisible and the Sublime: From Participation to Reconciliation.” In Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology, edited by James K. A. Smith. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005. 89–106. Chignell, Andrew and Matthew C. Halteman. “Religion and the Sublime.” In The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Timothy M. Costelloe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 183–202. Clewis, Robert R. “A Case for Kantian Artistic Sublimity: A Response to Abaci.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68/2 (2010): 167–170. Cohn, Jan and Thomas H. Miles. “The Sublime: In Alchemy, Aesthetics, and Psychoanalysis.” Modern Philology 74/3 (1977): 289–304. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lay Sermons. Edited by R. J. White. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Volume 7. Bollingen Series. Princeton: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 1972. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Shorter Works and Fragments. Edited by H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Volume 11. Bollingen Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

99

Costelloe, Timothy M. “The Sublime: A Short Introduction to a Long History.” In The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Timothy M. Costelloe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 1–8. Crockett, Clayton. Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Crowther, Paul. “Barnett Newman on the Sublime.” Oxford Art Journal 7/2 (1984): 52–59. Crowther, Paul. The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Doebler, Peter L. “Seeing the Things You Cannot See: (Dis)-solving the Sublime through the Paintings of Hiroshi Senju.” PhD dissertation. Graduate Theological Union, 2014. Doyle, Laura. “The Racial Sublime.” In Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, edited by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 15–39. Eagleton, Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Elkins, James. “Against the Sublime.” In Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, edited by Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 75–90. Engström, Timothy H. “The Postmodern Sublime?: Philosophical Rehabilitations and Pragmatic Evasions.” boundary 2, 20/2 (Summer 1993): 190–204. Fiddes, Paul S. “The Sublime and the Beautiful: Intersections between Theology and Literature.” In Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces, edited by Heather Walton. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 127–152. Freeman, Barbara Claire. The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Saint Girons, Baldine. “The Sublime from Longinus to Montesquieu.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly. Volume 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 322–326. Guyer, Paul. “The German Sublime After Kant.” In The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Timothy M. Costelloe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 102–117. Haapala, Arto. “Art and Nature: The Interplay of Works of Art and Natural Phenomena.” In Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics, edited by Arnold Berleant. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. 47–60. Hart, David Bentley. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2004. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Two volumes. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hepburn, Ronald. “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty.” In British Analytical Philosophy, edited by Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.

100

Doebler

Hepburn, Ronald. “Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination.” Environmental Values 5 (1996): 191–204. Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Hitt, Christopher. “Toward an Ecological Sublime.” New Literary History 30/3 (1999): 603–623. Izutsu, Toyo. “The Aesthetic Structure of Waka.” In The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan, Toshihiko Izutsu and Toyo Izutsu. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. 3–25. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Jaeger, C. Stephen. “Introduction.” In Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music, edited by C. Stephen Jaeger. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 1–16. Jaeger, C. Stephen. “Richard of St. Victor and the Medieval Sublime.” In Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music, edited by C. Stephen Jaeger. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 157–178. Jantzen, Grace. “On Changing the Imaginary.” In The Blackwell Companion to Post­ modern Theology, edited by Graham Ward. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 280–293. Johnson, David B. “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and Its Limits.” In The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Timothy M. Costelloe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 118–134. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Translated by John Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. Karaki Junzō. “Impermanence.” Translated by Joseph S. O’Leary. In Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, edited by James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, John C. Maraldo. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011. 227–232. Kearney, Richard. “Evil, Monstrosity, and the Sublime.” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 57/3 (2001): 485–502. Koerner, Joseph Leo. Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Konishi Jin’ichi. “Shunzei no yūgen-fū to shikan.” Bungaku 20/2 (Feb. 1952): 108–116. LaFleur, William F. “Buddhist Emptiness in the Ethics and Aesthetics of Watsuji Tetsurō.” Religious Studies 14/2 (June 1978): 237–250. LaFleur, William F. The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Leddy, Thomas. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Peterborough, OT: Broadview Press, 2012. Longinus. ‘Longinus’ On Sublimity. Edited and translated by D. A. Russell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

101

Lyotard, Jean-François. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?” In The Postmodern Reader: Foundational Texts. Edited by Michael Drolet. London: Routledge, 2004. 230–237. Originally in The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1985. Translated by Don Barry, et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 1–16. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Lyotard Reader. Edited by Andrew Benjamin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1985. Translated and edited by Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. London: Turnaround, 1992. Lyotard, Jean-François. “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime.” Translated by Lisa Liebmann. Artforum, 20/8 (April, 1982): 64–69. Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Sublime and the Avant Garde.” In The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. 89–107. Maraldo, John C. “Between Individual and Communal, Subject and Object, Self and Other: Mediating Watsuji Tetsurō’s Hermeneutics.” In Modern Japanese Herme­ neutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, edited by Michael F. Marra. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002. 76–88. Marra, Michael F. “Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning.” Philosophy East and West 45/3 (July 1995): 367–387. Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. London: Routledge, 1993. Milbank, John. “Sublimity: The Modern Transcendent.” In Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, edited by Regina Schwartz. London: Routledge, 2004. 211–234. Monti, Martino Rossi. “‘Opus es magnificum’: The Image of God and the Aesthetics of Grace.” In Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music, edited by C. Stephen Jaeger. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 17–34. Motoori Norinaga. “On Mono no Aware.” In The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Herme­ neutical Journey, translated and edited by Michael Marra. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. 172–194. Nagami, Isamu. “The Ontological Foundation Tetsurō Watsuji’s Philosophy: Kū and Human Existence.” Philosophy East and West 31/3 (July 1981): 279–296. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Sublime Offering.” In Of the Sublime: Presence in Question. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. 25–53. Nanbō Sōkei. “A Record of Nanbō,” in Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu, The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. 135–158.

102

Doebler

Newman, Barnett. “The Sublime is Now.” In Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, new edition, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 581–582. Nicholson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Translated by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Nordhaus, William. The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875. Third edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Odin, Steve. “The Ordinary as Sublime in Cavell, Zen, and Nishida: Cavell’s Philosophy of Education in East-West Perspective.” In Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups, edited by Naoko Saito and Paul Standish. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. 188–201. Ōnishi Yoshinori. 美学. Bigaku. [Aesthetics]. Volume 2. Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1959–1960. Otabe, Tanehisa. “Representations of ‘Japaneseness’ in Modern Japanese Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Critique of Comparative Reason.” In Modern Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, edited by Michael F. Marra. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002. 153–164. Ozawa, Yuichi. Story of Shofuso: A Cultural Bridge between Japan and the United States. Philadelphia: Friends of the Japanese House and Garden, 2010. Pease, Donald. “Sublime Politics.” In The American Sublime, edited by Mary Arensberg. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. 21–50. Pilgrim, Richard B. “Intervals (Ma) in Space and Time: Foundations for a ReligioAesthetic Paradigm in Japan.” History of Religions 25/3 (February 1986): 255–277. Quash, Ben. “The De-sublimations of Christian Art.” In The Art of the Sublime, edited by Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding. January 2013. Accessed 17 November 2021. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/ben-quash-the-de -sublimations-of-christian-art-r1140522. Railey McMahon, Jennifer. “Dependent Origination and the Dual-Nature of the Japanese Aesthetic.” Asian Philosophy 7/2 (July 1997): 123–133. Saito, Yuriko. “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (Spring 1998): 101–111. Saito, Yuriko. “Environmental Directions for Aesthetics and the Arts.” In Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics, edited by Arnold Berleant. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. 171–186. Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Is the Sublime Sustainable?

103

Saito, Yuriko. “The Japanese Aesthetics of Imperfection and Insufficiency.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55/4 (Autumn 1997): 377–385. Saito, Yuriko. “The Japanese Aesthetics of Packaging.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57/2 (Spring 1999): 257–265. Saito, Yuriko. “The Moral Dimension of Japanese Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65/1 (Winter 2007): 85–97. Saito, Yuriko. “Nature: Japanese Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly. Volume 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 343–346. Saito, Yuriko. “Representing the Essence of Objects: Art in the Japanese Aesthetic Tradition.” In Art and Essence, edited by Stephen Davies and Ananta Ch. Sukla. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 125–142. Sakai, Naoki. “Return to the West/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsuro’s Anthropology and Discussions of Authenticity.” Boundary 2 18/3 Japan in the World (Autumn 1991): 157–190. Schiller, Friedrich von. “On the Sublime (Toward the Further Development of Some Kantian Ideas).” In Essays, edited by Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. New York: Continuum, 1993. 22–44. Seigow, Matsuoka. “Aspects of Kami.” In MA: Space-Time in Japan, edited by Matsuoka Seigow. New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, n.d. 56–57. Senju, Hiroshi. 美術の核心. Bijutsu no kakushin. [The Heart of Art]. Tokyo: Bunshun Shinsho, 2008. Senju, Hiroshi. “Flatwater.” In 軽井沢千住博美術館/Hiroshi Senju Museum Karuizawa. Volume 1. Karuizawa, Japan: Hiroshi Senju Museum Karuizawa, 2013. 65–70. Senju, Hiroshi. “Hiroshi Senju.” Asian Art Newspaper, January, 2009. Senju, Hiroshi. “Interview: Hiroshi Senju.” J-Collabo.com. Accessed 17 November 2021. https://www.j-collabo.org/single-post/2008/03/20/1-hiroshi-senju. Senju, Hiroshi. わたしが芸術について語るなる. Watashi ga geijutsu nitsuite katarunaru. [If I speak about art]. Tokyo: Poplar-sha, 2011. Shanzer, Danuta. “‘Incessu humilem, successu excelsam’: Augustine, Sermo humilis, and Scriptural upos.” In Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music, edited by C. Stephen Jaeger. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 51–78. Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London: Routledge, 2005. Shuger, Debora K. Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Sodi, Bosco, et al. Yūgen: Bosco Sodi. London: Blain|Southern, 2016. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Takei, Jirō and Marc P. Keane. Sakuteiki, Visions of the Japanese Garden: A Modern Translation of Japan’s Gardening Classic. Boston: Tuttle, 2001.

104

Doebler

Trott, Nicola. “The Picturesque, the Beautiful and the Sublime.” In A Companion to Romanticism, edited by Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 72–90. Ueda, Makoto. “Yūgen and Erhabene: Ōnishi Yoshinori’s Attempt to Synthesize Japanese and Western Aesthetics.” In Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years, edited by J. Thomas Rimer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 282–299. Ueda, Makoto. “Zeami and the Art of Nō Drama: Imitation, Yūgen, and Sublimity.” In Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader, edited by Nancy G. Hume. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. 177–191. Ward, Graham. “Transcendence and Representation.” In Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, edited by Regina Schwartz. London: Routledge, 2004. 127–145. Ward, Graham. True Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Watsuji Tetsurō. Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan. Translated by Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Yanagi Sōetsu. “The Dharma Gate of Beauty.” Translated by Bernard Leach. Eastern Buddhist New Series 13/2 (October 1979): 1–21. Yeager, Patricia. “Toward a Female Sublime.” In Gender and Theory: Dialogues in Feminist Criticism, edited by Linda Kauffman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 191–212. Yoshida Kenkō. Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō. Translated by Donald Keene. Second paperback edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002. Zuckert, Rachel. “The Associative Sublime.” In The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Timothy M. Costelloe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 64–76.