INTRODUCTION

Intellectuals on the far side of the world looked eagerly to English andcontinental savants to help them make sense of their place, even as theyinhabited a landscape that few across the Atlantic could imagine. The provincialinhabitants of the British colonies in North America confronted nature in itsmost primal setting, and perhaps the great cultural work of the Anglophonicmigration was to render terra incognita into vernacular terms.For two centuries this was largely an empirical undertaking, but the AmericanRevolution and the subsequent invention of the American state compelledAmericans to expand their imagined geography to encompass both a physicalenvironment – North America – and an emergent community conceivedin revolution – the United States. Place and ideology commanded a uniformexplanation, and the Enlightenment authorized a totalizing narrative thatintimately conjoined what Samuel Stanhope Smith, president of the College of NewJersey, loosely referred to as “climate” with the character ofsociety, and, indeed, with the individual as well. The varieties of complexionsamong the American Indians, Smith observes, are “nothing more than theknown effects of climate, of food, of culture, or of other natural causes,operating on animal bodies … here they are seen in lower stature, andthere of taller and more noble port.” His emphasis on the somatic ischaracteristic of a society obsessed with racial difference, and this firmbelief that the peculiar “climate” of North America literallystamps its impression on the “animal bodies” of its inhabitants isa powerful cultural trope. The kindred conviction that nature thus animatedmight in turn shape thought informed a multitude of intellectual, social, andpolitical dialogues during the era of revolution and the formation of the earlyAmerican republic.

INTRODUCTION

Immanuel Kant’s account of the sublime used the framework of earlier eighteenth-century theories, but it radically interiorized or, to use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s term, subjectivized them: whereas most theorists, whether German or British, characterized the experience of the sublime as our emotional response to the magnitude and power of nature and to exemplary cases of human morality, Kant explained the complex feeling of this experience as a response to the limits of our own imagination, and the power of our own theoretical and practical reason. Kant reduced the natural objects other theorists took as the proper object of the experience to mere triggers, the proper object of the experience being ourselves.

Friedrich von Schiller’s influential essays on the sublime from the middle of the 1790s largely followed Kant, but after him the “absolute idealists” Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel reverted to an objectivist approach that interpreted sublimity as the response to the magnitude or infinitude of realities beyond our own mental faculties. These philosophers interpreted both beauty and sublimity as sensible manifestations of reality and thus effaced the sharp line Kant had drawn between the beautiful and the sublime and, particularly in the case of Hegel, treated the sublime as an early stage in the two categories. They still considered reality to be inherently rational, however, and so maintained the general connection between sublimity and rationality that Kant had pioneered. Arthur Schopenhauer, by contrast, was convinced that reality was nonrational and, consequently, turned the sublime into an experience of natural beauty achieved in the face of nature’s hostility to individual existence. Schopenhauer’s reinterpretation of the sublime along these lines was subsequently turned back into a category of art by the young Friedrich Nietzsche, even though he based his conception of the relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy on Schopenhauer’s view that individual rationality is a veneer placed over the underlying nonrationality of existence. In Nietzsche’s hands the sublime becomes an experience of the transcendence of rationality rather than of transcendent rationality but remains, as it had for Kant, an affirmative experience: in what he would later call the “transvaluation of values,” Nietzsche sees human redemption in transcending the limits of individual reason and identifying with the absurd and contradictory character of existence. Nietzsche, in effect, returns the sublime to the position of importance that it had enjoyed under Kant and Schiller but gradually lost in the work of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.

RETHINKING THE ROMANTIC SUBLIME

How did the Romantics conceive of the sublime? This question, to which I will return, is less easily answered than a related one: how have critics conceived of the Romantic sublime? In the critical literature, “the Romantic sublime” refers to the mind’s transcendence of a natural and/or social world that finally cannot fulfill its desire. Revealed in the moment of the sublime is that the mind is not wholly of the world, but this revelation may be triggered by a particular setting in the world. The lonely grandeur of lakes and mountains, or the solemn interior of a cathedral, invite sublime musings. And these musings are typically conveyed in a heightened style that may itself be described as sublime or awe inspiring. Often cited as the epitome of the Romantic sublime is a passage from book 6 of William Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude:

At this point in his narrative, Wordsworth has just crossed the Alps unwittingly, failing en route to achieve the grand prospect view he earlier imagined. He turns from his disappointment to praise the imagination as a power superior to any actual experience and to celebrate, in these lines, the soul as fundamentally alien to the world of the senses. Wordsworth expresses a yearning for the infinite, the unbounded, the supersensible; he expresses, as though it were a natural or intuitive aspect of our being, the desire to transcend the limitations imposed on us as finite, historically situated beings. Although this yearning evidently has religious roots (particularly neo-Platonic and Augustinian ones), its quasi-secular or at least nonsectarian expression comprises what we now think of as the Romantic sublime. Whether or not this yearning aptly or sufficiently characterizes what authors of the Romantic era actually took to be sublime is a question I shall address in this chapter.

INTRODUCTION

The relationship between the religious and aesthetic domains in human life isdeep, complicated, and hard to describe in philosophical prose. Characterizingit is all the more challenging when the proposed point of intersection is thesublime, which by its very definition runs up to (“sub”) the limit(“limen”) of conceptual analysis and phenomenological description.As a result of the elusiveness of the topic – as well as the vastness ofthe historical territory here – scholarly work on the relationshipbetween religion and the sublime has tended to focus on a specific period or setof figures, with few attempts to provide a theoretical template for the whole.Our goal here, however, is to do precisely that. We begin with some conceptualground clearing before briefly highlighting some undernoticed connectionsbetween religion and the sublime in two central eighteenth-century authors,Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. We then devote the bulk of the chapter to afourfold taxonomy of what we call the theistic sublime, thespiritualistic sublime, thedymythologistic sublime, and thenontheistic sublime.

Needless to say, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry intothe Sublime and Beautiful (1757, 2nd ed. 1759) – thesole contribution to aesthetics by this writer, whose work is primarilydevoted to questions of political history, political theory, and thefoundations of the commonwealth – is profoundly indebted to all thoseBritish thinkers before him who in the first half of the eighteenth centuryundertook a critical review of the aesthetic norms of classicism, and of theclassicist ideal of the education of a gentleman. Although Burke relied onmany ideas found in Francis Hutcheson and Joseph Addison, to name onlythese, his Enquiry, by declaring, as has been noted, an“open revolt against neo-classical principles,” alsothoroughly distinguishes itself from his predecessors. It is true, ofcourse, that all of eighteenth-century British aesthetics is inseparablefrom the thought of John Locke and David Hume. But Burke was the first topropose an uncompromising empiricist – that is, sensualistic –account of aesthetic experience, and to have radically uncoupled thisexperience from extrinsic considerations (particularly, moral andreligious), which still dominate Hutcheson’s An Inquiry intothe Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725).

In seeking to account for aesthetic experience on the basis of soberempirical observation alone, Burke stresses the sensualistic nature ofaesthetic impressions by conceiving of the beautiful and the sublimeprimarily in terms of ideas and passions. By the same stroke, the sensualqualities of the particular objects that affect the senses and theimagination in such a way as to provoke these ideas, or passions, acquiremajor importance. It is on these premises that Burke, in the spirit of IsaacNewton, seeks to establish “an exact theory of our passions.”It is a theory that inquires into their efficient – that is,physiological – causes, and that rigorously coordinates the feelingsof the sublime and beautiful with the affections caused by the objects fromwhich they spring. It is precisely the utmost consistency with which Burkeapplies Locke’s empiricism to aesthetics, as well as his Newtonianmethodology for discovering fixed laws regulating the domain of thepassions, that allowed him to approach aesthetic experience as a realm ofits own.

INTRODUCTION

Plato’s Timaeus opens with an unexpected absence. The previous day, Socrates had led the discussion; his four companions were due to make their contributions today: “One, two, three … and yet our fourth, my dear Timaeus, is – where? (The fourth) of those who yesterday were guests at the feast, but are now the banquet’s hosts?” (Timaeus 17a1–3). The first clause is a bare enumeration: it could not be simpler in construction, or plainer in diction. The shift from cardinal numbers to ordinal adjective signals a change at the start of the second clause: the diction is less plain, the syntax more elaborate; the displacement of the interrogative, as striking in Greek as in English, enacts Socrates’ surprise. The third clause, with its refined vocabulary and striking metaphor, rises to another level altogether. From a dull beginning, the sentence has blossomed by stages into a display that confers sublimity on the whole.

We owe that analysis to Cassius Longinus, a rhetorician, literary scholar, and philosopher of the third century AD, in a fragment preserved by the fifth-century neo-Platonist Proclus. Proclus’s source was probably a lost commentary by Porphyry, the most distinguished of Longinus’s pupils. Porphyry described Longinus as the greatest critic of the age; he was still renowned in the following century for his scholarship and authoritative literary judgment. It was once taken for granted that this Longinus was the author of the treatise On Sublimity. That attribution came under attack early in the nineteenth century and is now generally discounted. But before we consider this and other philological problems, it may be helpful to begin by undertaking a preliminary survey of what I shall, without prejudice, call Longinus’s conception of the sublime.

It is almost as fashionable in the history of philosophy to declare certainconcepts dead and buried as it is, periodically at least, to announce thediscipline itself to be at an “end.” “The sublime”seems to have undergone a similar fate in recent years, and one writer on thesubject has even penned a “Farewell to the Sublime,” placinghimself proudly in the company of other savants to declare, in their collectiveterminology, the sublime anemic, bourgeois, elitist, feeble, ideological,ineffective, irrelevant, irresponsible, nostalgic, poor, and weak – in aword, dead. Drawing on the concept, moreover, does not “do muchphilosophic work or result in much understanding,” readers are informed,and because the sublime is so clearly “damaged goods,” they mightbe willing to accept a “moratorium on the word” and replace itwith others that are “fresh and exact.” This is bad news indeedand, one has to admit, comes as something of a surprise.

To what, however, is one here saying farewell? What could it mean to declare thesublime dead or, at best, as the preceding litany of adjectives suggests,enervated and decadent? Fortunately, declarations of demise have a poor trackrecord in philosophy, even when they come from the likes of Kant, Hegel, andWittgenstein, and moratoriums imposed on the free spirit of philosophicalthought tend to have the same traction as King Canute commanding the tide tostop. Hyperbole aside, such declarations can refer only to some inadequacy inthe philosophical concept of the sublime, rather than signalingthe disappearance of the human experience to which the conceptrefers or in some way delineates. These are two distinct spheres, but they areeffectively elided when “sublime” is treated, as its naysayersapparently do, generically: “What could it mean to define the sublime,once and for all, when it has changed so much since the first appearance of theword – later taken to be the same as the eighteenth-century sublime– in a classical text by Longinus?”

WHY THE SUBLIME, NOW?

Academic study of the sublime has been broad, crossing disciplines such as philosophy, literary theory, critical and cultural theory, art theory, landscape studies, and architecture. However, sublimity has been neglected in contemporary aesthetics, where one might expect it to be discussed; any attention it has received is mainly confined to Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory or to discussions in the history of philosophy. More generally, analytic philosophy has largely ignored the topic, and although continental philosophy has shown an interest, the focus tends to be on the artistic sublime, rather than the natural sublime, despite the legacy of the natural sublime bequeathed by the eighteenth century. This collection will certainly help to fill these gaps in the literature, and a key aim of this essay is to carve out a contemporary home for the sublime.

Why is discussion of the sublime neglected in these ways? It could be that the concept is considered of little relevance to current debates. Mary Mothersill’s Beauty Restored is usually credited with reviving discussions of another concept, beauty, which, historically, was central to aesthetic theory and was usually set in contrast to the sublime. Beauty is now very much back on the philosophical agenda – and on other agendas too. Is such a future possible for the sublime? Here I shall argue that the sublime is indeed relevant and that its relevance is tied to environmental thought and, in particular, to debates in environmental aesthetics. Making progress toward an environmental sublime begins by trying to understand various arguments for why the concept has been neglected. To this end, I examine and reply to three different arguments for its neglect, which I describe as follows: (1) the historical argument; (2) the metaphysical argument; and (3) the anthropocentric argument.

According to the two best-known accounts of the sublime in the eighteenthcentury – those of Burke and Kant – the sublime is anaesthetic experience markedly distinct from that of the beautiful: insteadof pure pleasure in response to orderly, proportioned objects, the sublimeis a mixed response involving fear and frustration as well as heightenedenergy and delight. The objects that arouse this response – in thefirst instance, large or powerful objects – inspire negative feelingsbecause cognitively or (in imagination at least) physically they challengethe aesthetic spectator. Thus a chief philosophical problem concerning thesublime is to explain how the painful experience of such objects couldnonetheless be a source of pleasure, a question similar to the“paradox of tragedy” (the question why we are attracted totragic works, given that they arouse painful feelings), which also occupiedmany eighteenth-century thinkers.

This conception of the sublime as mixed and challenging is often assumed incurrent discussions, as, for example, in those concerning the“postmodern” sublime. It is, however, by and large not sharedby the Scottish philosophers and contemporaries of Burke, whose accounts ofthe sublime are the subject of the present chapter: Alexander Gerard, LordKames (Henry Home), Archibald Alison, and Dugald Stewart. Although they doidentify large objects as paradigmatic objects of the sublime, thesethinkers often describe our response to such objects as serene, pleasurableelevation. Thus their accounts tend not to raise, nor indeed do they attemptto solve, such a “problem” of the sublime. They are concernedinstead with a logically prior question, namely, whether (or how) thesublime can be understood as a single, unified aesthetic category, adefinite type of response to a specifiable class of objects. In answeringthis question, they attempt to be true to the plurality, richness, andcomplexity of the sublime as human beings experience it and to the way it ispresented in the literary and philosophical tradition. They do so, in largepart, by claiming that appreciation of the sublime is characterized byimaginative association. As a result of the centralityof association to the sublime in their accounts, I shall argue, DugaldStewart’s suggestion that the sublime is something like afamily-resemblance concept represents the ultimate purport of theiraccounts.

INTRODUCTION

According to the story told until recently, the sublime first burst onto the French scene in 1674. This was the date that Nicholas Boileau Despréaux (1636–1711), “Lawmaker of the poets,” published the Traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours, his French translation of the Peri hupsous περι ϋψονς. Boileau claimed that, without it, the author he called Longinus would “only be known to a very few scholars.” Scholars since have treated at length the preeminence of Boileau’s work in late seventeenth-century France, from its importance in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns to the parallels with the je ne sais quoi of Dominique Bouhours (1671) and from the Réflexions of René Rapin (1674) to the interpretations of Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721).

Outside French studies, however, we are apt to find this assessment: Boileau led early modernity to identify “sublimity simply with excellence.” The Traité du sublime thus offered a merely technical and rhetorical starting point for the sublime, which was not yet associated with aesthetics and the visual arts. Many critics have suggested that the truly fascinating sublime – the sublime of “overwhelming or transporting” – emerged later and elsewhere. Jean-François Lyotard’s thesis is well known: the sublime understood as a “mode of sensibility” is specific to modernity.

INTRODUCTION

Concluding a recent visit to the Tate Britain to view Mark Rothko’s later paintings, the Seagram Murals, I found that my path of departure sent me through one of the museum’s shops. Walking through racks of merchandise on my way to the street entrance at the shop’s far end, I could not help but notice a display of postcards, for one of them struck me as a travesty. It reproduced one of the paintings I had just visited, Rothko’s Black on Maroon (1959). The postcard reduced Rothko’s complex wash of maroon shades to a blotchy yet otherwise uniform dark red as background to a central, black rectangle. Rothko’s subtlety was lost, replaced by an image more akin to Kasimir Malevich’s geometric suprematism than Rothko’s true antecedent, J. M. W. Turner’s nuanced studies of clouds and light. Moments before, I’d been impressed by the museum’s display of Turner’s Three Seascapes (c. 1827) in close proximity to the Seagram Murals. Now, faced with crude color reproduction and with Rothko’s 15 feet reduced to 6 inches, the Rothko-Turner comparison was visually inexplicable. As Robert Motherwell observed when eulogizing Rothko, his “cooler or darker pictures (those with … earth colors and blacks)” feature “a luminescent glow from within … on a sublime scale.” Motherwell was the not the first to remark on Rothko’s combination of luminosity and sublime scale; he likely knew that his description of Rothko echoes a celebrated 1961 essay by art critic Robert Rosenblum – which, incidentally, includes an illustration of the Rothko-Turner parallel. Rothko had himself praised Rosenblum’s analysis, particularly its astute reliance on Edmund Burke’s observation, “Greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime.”

Consistent with Burke’s remark, the postcard’s problem goes beyond the loss of physical scale. The drastic reduction strips the image of visual nuance and so, too, of luminescence. As a representational vehicle, a postcard cannot provide the perceptual base that supports these aesthetic effects. Together, these alterations conspire to rob the representation of any hint of the sublimity of Rothko’s painting. The process of representation drains the experience of its central rationale in providing visual access to the particular work of art.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the philosophical conceptof the sublime underwent a renaissance among a number of“continental” philosophers, after having fallen largely out offavor around the end of the preceding century. Many thinkers who turned tothe concept of the sublime at this time were associated in one way oranother with the then-nascent and fiercely debated categories of“postmodern theory” and “postmodernism” ingeneral; accordingly, this trend in continental thought quickly becameidentified by the name “postmodern sublime.” In this chapter,we examine the work of four influential thinkers of this postmodernincarnation of the sublime: Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva,Gilles Deleuze, and Fredric Jameson. Other writers also contributed to thisdiscourse, but the work of these four encapsulates effectively its centralthemes and issues, while at the same time illustrating the wide range of itselaboration and use.

Common to these thinkers’ work is a more or less explicit butfundamental engagement with Kant’s “Analytic of theSublime”. For each of them, the contemporary importanceof the experience of sublimity, as well as the central problematic of itsconcept, concerns the issue of what Kant in the Critique of thePower of Judgment calls Darstellung: theprocess through which the imagination presents sensible intuition torational thought. In the aesthetic experience of the sublime, on theirinterpretation, the imagination tries to present an intuition of some objectthat is strictly and intrinsically unpresentable, thereby running up againstits own limit. This means, in these thinkers’ view, that theexperience of the sublime involves a crisis for the faculty of presentationin the form of an irresolvable conflict between it and a set of objects thatremain fundamentally inaccessible to it, but that it strives to presentnonetheless. This issue of irresolvability, which is central to the waythese thinkers conceptualize the sublime, was first and most rigorouslyanalyzed by Kant in the third Critique. For this reason,the thinkers of the postmodern sublime focus almost exclusively onKant’s interpretation and reject both pre-Kantian and German Idealistand Romantic discourses of the sublime; the latter tend to resolve theconflict between presentation and what cannot be presented, whereas theformer ignore the issue altogether.

When Immanuel Kant observed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) that the view of the starry heavens provoked the sentiment of the sublime, he was gazing into the epicenter of the potential relationship of architecture to the sublime. Indeed, several years before, in 1784, the French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée had sought to honor Sir Isaac Newton for having discovered the single principle that regulated the workings of the universe – gravity – by burying him, or more properly speaking, his manes (spirit) “within his discovery,” that is, within an architectural rendition of the cosmos (Figure 15.1). Boullée wanted to place Newton’s sarcophagus at the bottom of a vast spherical cavity whose dome was to have been punctured with small holes so as to allow the sun to shine through in the guise of twinkling stars, such that the viewer would experience an artificial rendition of the most quintessential of sublime scenes in the presence of Newton’s manes.

Both Kant’s observation and Boullée’s project anticipate Charles Blanc’s later insight that would relate the sublime to infinity and the absolute: “Issuing from the depths of nature, emanating from the divine, the sublime is absolute, imperishable…. The sublime is like a sudden glimpse of infinity.” Blanc, in turn, was paraphrasing Longinus, who, in similar words, conveys another aspect of the sublime: the immediate and intense feeling that it produces or that characterizes it. The sublime, he writes, is a feeling in response to some stimulus: “That … is grand and lofty, which the more we consider, the greater Ideas we conceive of it; whose Force we cannot possibly withstand; which immediately sinks deep, and makes such Impressions on the Mind as cannot be easily worn out or effaced.” In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant repeatedly emphasizes that the sublime involves a feeling rather than an idea and that it resides not in the object but in a “disposition of the mind” (CJ 5:265).