[책]The sublime: groundwork towards a theory

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제목 The sublime: groundwork towards a theory

저자 Lap-Chuen Tsang

발행인 University Rochester Press, 1998

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This introductory chapter serves a twofold purpose: one, to broach the notion of the sublime for the ensuing discussions; the other, to make room for a theory of the sublime against some challenges to its property and significance. We shall begin with an example of the sublime.

Mountaineering begain as a sport about 250 years ago. Since then mountain climbing has been a human endeavor. In 1852 Everest was discovered to be the highest mountain in the world but it remained unclimbed until 1953 despite numerous heroic attempts, which not rarely ended in death. Then in 1979 Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler managed to climb it without oxygen. In 1980, Messner climbed it again without oxygen, this time all alone. The world was startled by the terrific feat which "marks the outer boundaries of the possible for the mountaineer." Let us recall what another mountaineer Tom Hornbein, who reached the mountaintop in 1963, said about his experience on the summit:

We felt the lonely beauty of the evening, the immense roaring silence of the wind, the tenuousness of our tie to all below. There was a hint of fear, not for our lives, but a vast unknown which pressed in upon us. A fleeting feeling of disappointment--that after all those dreams and questions this was only a mountain top--gave way to the suspicion that maybe there was something more, something beyond the three-dimensional form of the moment. If only it could be perceived.

I would suggest that he is describing the feeling of the sublime in a realistic human context. He is experiencing a sense of realizing himself on the boundary between the possible and the impossible. Some of the reactive feelings and attitudes towards a high mountain, and Mount Everest in particular, which have been expressed in the past, are as follows.

1. The mountain is so high that it is pleasant to look at from a suitable vantage-point.
2. As a tract of vast and uninhabited nature, the mountain "would automatically suggest the hostility of the place to human life, and so evoke fear."(Archibald Alison) Our imagination may labor to travel over it and think of a superior world further behind it.
3. With the fear and the hostility removed, we experience a self-preservative sense of inward greatness(Burke).
4. Though our senses cannot cope with the grandeur of the mountain, our reason can. This confirms our supersensible existence, giving us a sense of self-transcendence (Kant).
5. We identify with the mountain summit reaching out to the beyond, which gives us a 'transfinite' sense of existence (Wordsworth).
6. We feel great ourselves in seeing something great in the mountain, for our co-existence with the mountain is suggestive of a superior origin about it and about ourselves (Apostle Paul).
7. We may even imagine further that we somehow participate in the creation of the greatness of the mountain(Longinus).
8. The mountain is sublime, because it reaches to the beyond. The climb to the summit is sublime, because it is "the limit of what [is] presumed to be physically, physiologically or psychologically possible"(Doug Scott). Man is sublime, because he is the only creature that can think of some feat hardly possible and endeavors to achieve it(Richard Nixon).
9. Mountain Everest is Mountain Analog(Rene Daumal). "The high mountan is an awe-inspiring limit to vision and action, though unreachable, albeit ultimately desirable(Confucius; also Wittgenstein). We feel enchanted by the mountain which reminds us of our great and noble mission as humans.
10. On the summit the mountaineer is undergoing a peak experience of living at the height of his existence(Abraham Maslow); which is transcendent ecstasy(Marghanita Laski), being supraliminally aware of the limit of his ontological vitality(Adam Curle), elated by a sense of glory of being truly himself(Herbert Read)

Mountain Everest is used here as an example of the sublime because it is comprehensible even without a personal encounter with this highest summit on earth, because it appeals basically to our physical capacity. A sublime object of this kind may be characterized as that which evokes our awareness of our being on the threshold from the human to that which transcends the human; which borders on the possible and the impossible; the knowable and the unknowable; the meaningful and the fortuitous; the finite and the infinite. The sublime as thus characterized is well reflected by the entry of the 'sublime' in ^The Oxford English Dictionary^(1989), which defines its primary meaning, based on its usages dating largely from the beginning of the 17th century to the end of the 19th century, as descriptive of that which is truly great in conception and in reality.

There are other kinds of sublime objects, as we shall see, and people may react differently towards objects sublime to them and attribute different significances to them or to their experiences. Our example is intended only to establish some common ground on which our ensuing discussions can be based, also indicating that we shall be concerned with experiences which have been considered important by many people.

The earliest extant determination of the sublime as a distinct quality of mind and of experience is contained in Peri Hupsous, a rhetorical treatise on style, ascribed to an unidentified Greek writer of the first century, commonly referred to by the name of Longinus. Longinus discusses the form and content of great writing, an idea not unfamiliar to the ancient literary world, but he further relates it to that which is truly great in conception and in reality. He suggests that great writing, which springs from the natural endowment of its writer, represents in proper diction and composition that which is truly great, and transports the writer and the reader alike onto the plane of great thoughts and passions. Longinus extends this point to objects of grandeur in nature and our response to them. The following passage is of crucial relevance to the later discussions of the sublime:

[Nature] has implanted in our souls an unconquerable passion for all that is great and for all that is more divine than ourselves. For this reason the entire universe does not satisfy the contemplation and thought that lie within the scope of human endeavor; our ideas often go beyond the boundaries by which we are circumscribed, and if we look at life from all sides, observing how in everything that concerns us the extraordinary, the great, and the beautiful play the leading part, we shall soon realize the purpose of our creation. ... The little fire that we have kindled ourselves, clear and steady as its flame may be, does not strike us with as much awe as the heavenly fires, in spite of their often being shrouded in darkness; ... men hold cheap what is useful and necessary, and always reserve their admiration for what is out of the ordinary.

In the literary world of art and techne, a great writer instantiates a manner in which man endeavors to transcend himself, to assert himself to the limit of his existence, which Longinus construes as belonging in the natural order of grandeur. As a rhetorical treatise primarily concerned with the form and content of great writing, the title Peri Hupsous was rendered, in its early Enlish translations in the 17th century, in terms of loftiness, elegance, elevation, dignity, grandeur, or eloquence. It was not unitl 1698 that an anonymous translator first rendered hupsos as sublime, which has its Latin roots meaning "up to the threshold or lintel or verge". By that time in England, around the turn of the 18th century, the word 'sublime' was already established in critical usage as referring also to a distinct quality of mind and of experience. The title On the Sublime is an appropriate rendering of Longnus' original, for it takes into account not only its rhetorical concern with great writing but also its aesthetical concern with that which is truly great in thought and in reality.

Following Nicolas Boileau's French translation of Longinus' Peri Hupsous in 1674, interest in the sublime as a modern aesthetic category began. In the early decades of the 18th century, discussions on the sublime greatly increased in quantity and intensity. The two most famous writers on the sublime in the century were Edmund Burke and Kant. Burke proposed a unified theory of the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful(1757), which attempts to consolidate all previous discussions in one single idea.--"Terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime."

"The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; ... Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime."

He divides sublime experience into clear-cut categories--obscurity, privation, vastness, succession, uniformity, magnificence, loudness, suddenness, and so on, which were then becoming part of the common language of appreciation of the sublime in art and in nature. Although his theory is based on a narrow mechanical analysis of bodily processes, Burke's emphasis on self-preservation as a necessary condition of our experience of the sublime allows him to recognize a great variety of sublime objects, including the horrible and the uncanny, besides the grand and the noble.

Kant developed a philosophical theory of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment(1790). The theory is a construal of the sublime in terms of his transcendental idealism, taking sublime objects as occasions for realization of our vocation as supersensible beings. He distinguishes two categories of the sublime i.e. the mathematically sublime which appears unsurpassably great and the dynamically sublime which appears irresistibly powerful: the former defying our capacity of mental comprehension(i.e. sensuousness co-ordinated by concepts of cognition and imagination), while the latter our capacity of practical action. An example of the mathematically sublime is the starry heaven and of the latter the stormy sea. The subject who confronts the inestimably great or irresistibly powerful as a unity affirms himself as a unity with a vocation transcendent of the sensible. The sublime in ourselves hovers above or beyond the object which evokes it. Man's vocation, in which is grounded his feeling for the sublime, best manifests itself in his responsiveness to the One transcendent of all that is conceptually intelligible.

Kant's theory highlights Longinus' view of the sublime as that which surrounds our existence. It takes a sublime object as an object which evokes an awareness of our being on the outer fringe of our existence, the fringe being construed as the limit to the knowable, the possible, and the meaningful. Like Burke, Kant also considers the intense emotion of awe and elation to be essential to the experience. He agrees with Burke that the emotion of fear without being afraid--though fearful the object is, the subject is not afraid since it consititutes no real danger--is an essential condition of the experience, but restricts the sublime to our endeavor of self-transcendence, taking natural grandeur as the primary occasion for it, although his regard for the moral law inclines him also to include noble objects in the human dimension as sublime. Accordingly, the theory excludes the horrible and the uncanny, which Burke's theory accomodates.

In the experience of the sublime, Longinus emphasizes our contemplation and thought reaching the limit of the natural order of grandeur; Burke our self-preservation in situations which defy our existing capacities; and Kant our transcendence of the natural order as supersensible beings. Each of them is concerned with an aspect of the sublime which I shall characterize, in general terms, as that which transports man to a realization of himself at the limit of his existence, each giving the sublime an explication based on his own life and experience. All of them exemplify this general idea, which I shall develop as the true and fruitful one about the sublime in the ensuing chapters.

Kant's theory of the sublime is an important document in the history of the concept. It not only attempts to account for the many discussions of the sublime in his time, but also contributes to the prolonged survival of those ideas about the sublime which are congenial to his theory in later generations. If we regard sublime objects of the Kantian kind as standard instances, then sublime objects of the horrid and the uncanny kind will be deemed 'paronymous'. Later discussions on the sublime have been variations on the nature of the transcendent and the manner of its attainment; or simply rejections of such experience or its significance.

In any case, the Kantian sublime, given its predominant position in the last two centuries, has precipitated the impression that the sublime is primarily concerned with man's endeavor to transcend the natural and, contrary to what Kant thinks, also the human. In the secularized world of today, the sublimities of Nature, God and Morality are no longer commonplace. Our century has witnessed the "most spectacular failures: the civilized [sic] butchery of the World War I; the outrage of fascism; the grief of Auschwitz; the destruction of Hiroshima and Dresden; the reign of Stalin ...," and so on. It is at least true to many of us that the sublime, of the Kantian kind, "was finally buried [together with the gods] once and for all beneath an enormous heap of human achievements, discoveries, adventures, tragedies, and hype." So, if the sublime refers to what lies beyond the human, and if we are no longer under the illusion of the possibility of trascendence to the beyond, we might well treat the sublime as a moribund aesthetic.

While the sublime of the Kantian kind has been in decline, whatever is sublime appears also to be in decline, at least in the world of philosophy. As evidence for this observation one could quote the fact that ^The Encyclopedia of Philosophy^, which appeared in 1967, followed by its supplementary volume in 1996, does not a separate entry on the sublime.

With the decline of the Kantian sublime, the world 'sublime' is also deprived of its important associations about life and the conditions of human existence. As Andrew Wilton points out, "nowadays it is usually literary historians who talk about the sublime; and they do so very much in an archaeological spirit." It would seem out of order to propose a theory as if it were explanatory of the sublime in manifold instatiation. One suggestion is that the 'sublime;, which is not a 'standing' concept, does not admit of a general theory. Another related suggestion is that ideas and discussions about the sublime share only family resemblances. In what follows I shall give an account of these challenges and argue for the contrary view that the proposal of a theory of the sublime is proper and significant.

In an introductory lecture on an exhibition on the historical and landscape paintings of J.M.W. Tuerner(1775-1851) to the public in 1980, Andrew Wilton employed the single idea of the sublime to highlight some of Turner's most impressive works. But, as he recalled five years later, "what emerged in response to the exhibition, however, was that even the most basic of eighteenth-century categories are misunderstood today," though his masterly commentary for the occasion had taken pains to explain the 18th-century concept. Apparently, since the turn of the 20th century, the term 'sublime' has changed its sense remarkably. As he observes in his commentary(18980), "in the early 19th century, and for at least two centuries before that, the term was often used to express a whole range of important ideas [about life and the conditions of human existence], and was endlessly debated and redefined by scholars and critics." Such a sense of the term is "very distant from its modern colloquial one, as in phrases like "sublimely unconscious of danger' or 'sublime indeferrence to the feelings of others': though these applications of the word do carry a suggestion of superiority, even if only a blissful superiority of ignorance, which retains some vestigial hint of the full meaning of the term. Not that the expression in its full sense(or senses) is entirely obsolete now; but it has probably lost much of the force that it used to possess, if only because many of its applications assume an attitude to the world, and to its creator, which is now moribund or at least dormant.

This change in the sense of the term 'sublime' has beem attributed to its very nature. In her discussions of Kant's theory of the sublime in ^Beauty Restored^(1984), Mary Mothersill remarks in a footnote that the 'sublime' is not a 'standing' concept, saying that "the concept of beauty, like the concept of knowledge or right, is a 'standing' concept. ... The 'sublime', by contrast, picks out a collection of ideas which is basically local; the components hang together for a while ... and are then dispersed. A philosophical theory that places any weight on such a collection will come, sooner or later, to look ^dated^ and to resist interpretation."

Motherstill suggests in effect that Kant's theory can at most account for the ideas and discussions of the sublime during his times beginning the last quarter of the 17th century. In this she would support the view that the sublime of the Kantian kind is no longer alove and well in our times. As Francis X. Coleman, a commentator on Kant's aesthetics(1974), remarks:

"A twentieth century reader might ask, with a certain smile, whether the sublime really needs an analysis. ... as an aesthetic category with its roots in our culture, the sublime seems largely irrelevant."

Indeed, the diversified instantiation of the sublime in the course of its history is baffling. Longinus is interested in external objects and internal speculations of nobility and grandeur. Kant's concern is primarily with natural grandeur. Burke and some of his contemporarries are moved to experience the sublime also in the presence of natural disasters, graveyards and ghosts, and whatever is grotesquely out of the ordinary; not only by the great and noble but also by "the humble, the low, or the purple" Indeed, the experience seems essentially subjective, sublime objects being of kinds as diverse and dissimilar as personalities. In view of this, an attractive opinion is that it is out of order to explain all instances of the sublime as if they belong to a single category.

In his study of the Gothic sublime(1985), David B. Morris sums up the general opinion thus: "We should begin by accepting an uncomfortable fact: the sublime, like the Gothic novel, embraces such a variety of historical practices and of theoretical accounts that the quest for a single, unchanging feature or essence is futile. There is no essence of the sublime. Instead, what we encounter is (in Wittgenstein's phrase) shared 'family resemblances' which link countless, related discussions of sublimity beginning with Longinus, who first described the irresistible power of great writing to seize control of the reader, to take us outside of ourselves with the sudden, startling intensity of a thunderbolt."

Of course, there are other voices. Donald W. Crawford, for example, is at least sympathetic to the view that there is an essential feature in any instantiation of the sublime. In an essay (1985) on "The Place of the Sublime in Kant's Aesthetic Theory," Crawford traces briefly the history of the concept from Longinus' ^Peri Hupsous^ to Kant's theory of the sublime, which he believes is the tap-root of contemporary environmental aesthetics. With the help of some standard instances of the sublime in nature, he summarizes Kant's theory and proceeds to discuss briefly three of "the numerous difficulties with Kant's analysis of the sublime". First, Kant is inconsistent and unclear in the place he assigns to fear, that the subkect must be fearful but not afraid; secondly, to ground the experience in a universal capacity for moral feeling, as Kant did, is arbirary; and thirdly, Kant is unjustified in restricting the sublime to nature and disregarding the specific properties of sublime objects by taking only their formlessness as efficacious to 'trigger' our experience of the sublime.

Whether or not this account of Kant's theory is tenable, Crawford appears to know so much about the sublime that he thinks there are "numersous difficulties with Kant's analysis of the sublime". But what exactly does he himself think the sublime is? No explicit answer is made available. He declares openly that his study of the sublime in Kant is, in an important sense, continuous with Longinus, pointing out that some "aspects of Longinus' brief discussion of the sublime in nature are important for the development of theories leading to Kant's treatment of the sublime," in which is grounded contemporary environmental aesthetics. But Crawford does not go on to state any one feature common to all instances of the sublime, apart from giving the concept superficial historical continuity in some of the ideas of the thinkers dealt with in his article.

Crawford's article on the sublime in Kant is typical of other treatises on the sublime: He seems to ^presume^ that, with or without a theory of the sublime, writers and readers can understand what the sublime is and how it is treated in their content of discussion and even whether it is properly treated.

Indeed, with or without a theory of the sublime, important treatises on the sublime continue to appear on the scene as something relevant to the contemporary mind. One such volume is the special issue on the sublime and the beautiful in ^New Literary History^ in 1985. In the final review, Ronald Paulson begins with a half-page overview of the studies of the sublime from Burke to Monk and Hipple, then to Harold Bloom and Thomas Weiskel, and continues by discussing the contributions to the special issue, throwing into relief the humanization of the sublime in our times. An overall impression of Paulson's review essay is that all important treatises on the sublime are about a similar kind of human experience in human history.

As we have seen, David B. Morris thinks that "the quest for a single, unchanging feature or essence of the sublime is futile." Let us see if his account of the Gothic sublime in the novels of Horace Walpole(1717-1797), which is of a Burkean kind,shows that the Gothic sublime shares no common feature with, for example, the Kantian sublime, the two kinds which appear to be dissimilar in the objects confronted as sublime. His Freudian analysis of Gothic sublimity in Walpole delineates the instantiation of the sublime in repressed fears and desires "which lie just beyond or below or hidden within consciousness." Gothic sublimity is "a version of the sublime utterly without transcendence, ... which takes us deep within rather than far beyond the human sphere." When confronted with sublime objects of a Gothic kind at a safe psychic distance, the subject is enthralled with intense fear and awe in self-preservative delight. This Gothic version of the Burkean sublime differs radically from the Kantian kind in the form in which the sublime is manifested, but it resembles the Kantian in that it also evokes an intensified emotional state suggestive of some vital concern to human existence. This may be considered ^prima facie^ evidence of some common feature among two apparently dissimilar kinds of the sublime.