Historical Background of the Sublime
GETTING TO KNOW THE UNKNOWABLE AS BOTH WONDERFUL AND TERRIBLE
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE SUBLIME
The core of my artistic research is the sublime.1 To illuminate my artistic engagement, I will elaborate on the history and theory of the sublime. While the term has had a long life full of passionate relationships with philosophers and artists who have attempted to reveal its essence, that has not led to a unified definition of its meaning.
What is the sublime? It does not appear to have been defined. Is it a figure of speech? Does it spring from figures, or at least from some figures of speech? Does the sublime enter into all kinds of writings, or are grand subjects only fit for it?
The Characters
Jean de La Bruyère, 16882
The first mention of the sublime is found in writings of Longinus, the Greek rhetorician and philosopher of the Neoplatonic school. In On the Sublime3, which is thought to have been written between the third and first century AD, Longinus discussed the sublime as something great, elevated, or lofty that manifests itself in what is beautiful. In the seventeenth century, British philosophers such as Joseph Addison, Anthony Ashley Cooper, and John Dennis expanded Longinus’ definition by introducing horror as an additional aesthetic quality that can create the sublime. After embarking on a journey across the Alps to Italy John Dennis described the term as “delight that is consistent with reason,“ and “pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear,” but also “mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair.”4
Several years later, British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke proclaimed that horror is not only another potential source of the sublime, but the most potent one. In 1756 he published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.5 In Part I, Section VII, Burke wrote: “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.” In Part II, Section II: “Terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.”
Prominent German philosopher Immanuel Kant followed Burke’s enquiry in 1790 by writing a theory of aesthetics that was published in Critique of Judgment.6 In the chapter Analytic of the Beautiful, Kant disassociated the beautiful from the sublime. While the beautiful is concrete, he explained “it is connected with the form of the object.” And, the sublime is intangible, “it is to be found in a formless object.” Beauty can be reasoned, but to experience the sublime it is necessary to go beyond reason and employ sensibility and imagination. The ability to transcend reason by fusing it with the nature of senses is the vehicle of the sublime that Kant called a “supersensible substrate.” He associated this ability with individuals who pose both superior mindfulness and superior sensibility of the body.
The magnitude of a natural object on which the imagination fruitlessly spends its whole faculty of comprehension must carry our concept of nature to a supersensible substrate (übersinnliche Substrat) (which lies at its basis and also at the basis of our faculty of thought). As this, however, is great beyond all standards of sense, it makes us judge as sublime, not so much the object, as our own state of mind in the estimation of it.
Critique of Judgment
Immanuel Kant, 1790
For Kant sublime is not an object—it is a state of mind we must enter that enables us the experience. We experience the sublime when our imagination fails to conceive the greatness of events solely by means of reason but compensates for this failure with pleasurable sensations that can be manifested through synthesis of senses with virtue of reason. Sublime as an experience is independent of any conceptualization or perception by the human mind. It is a thing-in-itself that Kant called the noumenon, postulated by practical reason but existing in a condition which is in principle unknowable. Gilles Deleuze paraphrases Kant: “It is not the body that realizes, but it is in the body that something is realized, through which the body itself becomes real and substantial.”7
Kant’s theory prompted even more vivid discussion about the nature of the sublime, which created new possible frameworks for the subject. None of these were accepted as a unique model of the concept through which they demonstrated the impossibility to frame the sublime. This only confirmed Kant’s definition of it as the unknowable. So essentially if what we experience is unknowable, the question is how do we experience the unknowable. All the previous theories depicted it as a dichotomic experience that is both wonderful and terrible.
The feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling. It is a composition of melancholy, which at its utmost is manifested in a shudder, and of joyousness which can mount to rapture and, even if it is not actually pleasure, is far preferred by refined souls to all pleasure. This combination of two contradictory perceptions in a single feeling demonstrates our moral independence in an irrefutable manner. For since it is absolutely impossible for the very same object to be related to us in two different ways, it therefore follows that we ourselves are related to the object in two different ways; furthermore, two opposed natures must be united in us, each of which is interested in diametrically opposed ways in the perception of the object. By means of the feeling for the sublime, therefore, we discover that the state of our minds is not necessarily determined by the state of our sensations, that the laws of nature are not necessarily our own, and that we possess a principle proper to ourselves that is independent of all sensuous affects.
On the Sublime
Friedrich Schiller, 18018
Multiplicity of that experience, the dichotomy between bliss and horror, beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, comfort and torment, divine and hell as distinct instances of the single sublime that can be experienced through integration of cognitive and sensory ability is the most persistent in religious mythology. Religions that promote transcendence through light and darkness have illustrated the sublime as the crossing point towards the numinous, the presence of a divinity.
I know some people are of opinion, that no awe, no degree of terror, accompanies the idea of power; and have hazarded to affirm, that we can contemplate the idea of God himself without any such emotion. I purposely avoided, when I first considered this subject, to introduce the idea of that great and tremendous Being, as an example in an argument so light as this; though it frequently occurred to me, not as an objection to, but as a strong confirmation of, my notions in this matter.
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Edmund Burke, 1756
According to the German theologian Rudolf Otto9, crossing the bridge of the sublime is encouraged both by mysterium tremendum et fascinans (“fearful and fascinating mystery”), the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have arrived affront of God, and “nostalgia for paradise,” aching desire to reach the abode of perfection. In Christianity, the God is light, but the God is also darkness.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
John 1:5
King James Version of the Bible, 161110
Myths of heaven and hell have functioned to interpret the world and its counterparts, but also to entice the audience into experiencing its parts. The enticement into the fearful and blissful mystery is where the art comes in. Postmodern French philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard recognized avant-garde art as a novel opportunity for accessing the sublime. He argued that the nature of avant-garde modern art has the unique potential to manipulate the balance of senses, reason, and emotion in a manner that results in a sensation of pleasurable pain. My further investigation is in practice of art that carefully entices senses, reason, and emotion in a way that results in an experience of the unknowable.
Thought must ‘linger,’ must suspend its adherence to what it thinks it knows. It must remain open to what will orientate its critical examination: a feeling.
Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Jean-François Lyotard, 198411
1 From Middle French sublime, from Latin sublīmis (“‘high’”), from sub- (“‘up to”, “upwards’”) + uncertain, often identified with Latin līmis, ablative singular of līmus (“‘oblique’”) or līmen (“‘threshold”, “entrance”, “lintel’”)
2 La Bruyère, Jean de, and Henri Van Laun. Characters. The Oxford library of French classics. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.
3 Longinus, and William Smith. Dionysius Longinus On the sublime. London: Printed for William Sandby, 1742.
4 Pack, Richardson, and John Dennis. The whole works of Major Richardson Pack late of Bury St. Edmonds in the county of Suffolk; in prose and verse. London: Printed for E. Curll, 1729.
5 Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Routledge and Paul, 1958.
6 Kant, Immanuel, and J. H. Bernard. Critique of judgment. New York: Hafner Pub. Co,1951.
7 Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
8 Schiller, Friedrich, and Julius A. Elias. Naive and Sentimental Poetry; and, On the Sublime: Two Essays. Milestones of thought. New York: Ungar, 1966.
9 Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923.
10 Bible. The Holy Bible ; containing the Old and New Testaments. Translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations diligently compared and revised. Authorized King James verson. Cleveland: World Pub. Co, 1970s.
11 Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Theory and history of literature, v. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
