A word on the Sublime
EXCERPT
In this short vignette, I attempt to profile the Sublime philosophically.
…Sublime is any internal, infinite presentation, which, by virtue of the immensity of its scope, so exceeds the possibilities of particularisation, that in its external representation it is sensed by a beholder to go far beyond its physical extension, perhaps even endlessly, and thereby yields a feeling of delighted helplessness we call awe. The Sublime is, therefore, more a relational entity between infinite and finite aspects, between form and particular, than necessarily a physical quality, or formula of qualities, like vastness and uniformity. It is, that is, not reducible to any single phenomenological category, neither external nor internal, such as an object or a feeling, but most importantly, nor even to a form, since the form, however necessary as a precondition, and however immense in its transcendental capaciousness, itself remains neutral without the fulfilment of an empirical activator, one suited to realising this dormant potential – albeit, in this case, inadequately. And yet, as critical as we may concede the external object to be in this process of transcendental completion, we understand at the same that it cannot be catalogued as precisely as the likes of Burke, Baillie and even Kant would have it; it would appear to come in far more varied manifestations than these concede, both the large and small, vast and diminutive. Thus one notes that the feeling of the Sublime manifests itself just as readily through a miniature by Schumann as in the choral climax of Beethoven’s 9th, just as meaningfully in a lyric by Yeats as in a Sophoclean tragedy. In the former, we are no less struck than in the latter by the impression of being visited upon by something exceeding our ability to assign a delimited meaning to it, that is, an external trigger not co-extensive with a transcendental substructure, and yet we are all the same assured of its existence. We struggle to consciously retrace upward the steps of its fusion, since, not only has it taken place by an intuitive process, but particularly by one that betrays a certain benign phenomenological flaw; and yet we cannot help sensing, through the blissful agony of this containment, the unmistakable palpitating force it seeks in vain to reduce to just proportion.
At first glance, this relational aspect would appear to be the distinguishing feature of the Sublime from the Beautiful, in which we see no such manifest excession, that is, no overflowing of the transcendental volume beyond the natural capacity of its empirical container. In this case, there would appear to be a harmony, a greater compatibility between form and particular, and thus no resultant ineffable quality to the feeling roused. The Sublime produces awe, not simply – and not even necessarily – when the object exceeds the Self’s powers or perception to behold it – as Addison would have it[1] – but for the exact opposite reason, even: when the transcendental space in the beholder’s depths is so expansive that it cannot be captured in the physical delimitations of the particular, which then must content itself with alluding to it merely. Here the beholder feels the awe, not on account of the object, but of the immensity itself, which announces itself in that moment, roundabout, without fully revealing itself. The intuition of this inferred discrepancy, then – that between declaration and concealment – is the immediate cause of the feeling in question, and is perhaps concomitant with the realisation that one’s own depths contain a terrific vastness hitherto unexplored and unimagined. The feeling of the Sublime one experiences while contemplating the grandeur of nature – as in an starry sky or a rocky mountain – can be said to work in a similar fashion in spite of the vastness of its object; even here the form in question, that of endlessness and infinity, is itself such as cannot be contained in the scope of even this objective vision, and so finds itself wresting and writhing fitfully beyond the confines of its empirical parameters.
That kind of art can be deemed Sublime by means of which this discrepancy precisely is activated: this ‘empirical overflow’, this ‘transcendental overcapaciousness’. One could go as far as to call it Fine Art’s defining phenomenological modus operandi, since an infinite essence is always implicated in an artwork’s external presentation, which can all the same never be reduced to it and read literally by its means. And there is still the question of degree, so that, practically speaking, we tend to apply the term to those instances in which the discrepancy is most dramatic and notiçable. But on close analysis, we find that it characterises the phenomenology of art even in those in which it is less so. For, that Fine Art would attempt to contain the uncontainable, represent the unrepresentable, to imitate the inimitable, appears intuitive to anyone seeking to explain its purposiveness. It is this, no more nor less, that was meant by Batteux when he cautioned that the artist should imitate nature, but not as it is – telle qu’elle est[2]. The exclusion, mimetically, of that which is mundane and superfluous in life, amounts to a concomitant addition to it; it is externally purified of that which is metaphysically irrelevant and, in reducing it thus empirically one necessarily expands it transcendentally. The representation of la belle nature is itself sublime in a very important sense; it is life as it couldbe and perhaps would be, were it aestheticised, or lived out completely in the median aesthetic Lifeworld, which is in any case closer than our own to that pure transcendental realm that grounds it. The Sublime, then, appears to an extent to be built into the very structure of art, since, in its highest form, Fine Art is an aestheticization of the Transcendental, a distillation of that which is inherently larger than may ever be contained by it. We find, thereinsofar, that the much discussed relationship between the Sublime and the Beautiful is a nuanced one. For, according to our definition, even the Beautiful can be conveyed as sublime. That is to say: when a metaphysical quantity, upon its retrieval in an set of aesthetic externalities, is found to possess an extension of beauty such as to exceed the capacity of these to fully capture it, while all the while allowing them perfectly to rouse its transcendental value at least to the point of a clear-if-indirect reference, and to steer the beholder’s awareness unmistakably in its general direction, we can say that we are in the presence, not of the Sublime merely, nor much less merely of the Beautiful, but of the ‘sublimely Beautiful’. The ‘sublimely lyrical’, the ‘sublimely grand’, the ‘sublimely tender’, the ‘sublimely ordered’, and the ‘sublimely terrible’ all function in a similar fashion: adverbially rather than adjectivally or substantively, as modal rather than categorical phenomena. The Sublime is thus a mode of transcendental relation by which any form – that is, one of any quality – is denoted and represented in its referent by excession rather than co-extension.
[1] Issue no. 412 of The Spectator, June 23, 1712
[2] Les Beaux-arts reduits à un même principe, Part I, § 1.
