Essay on the Sublime (excerpt)

EXCERPT

The following is an excerpt from my essay, “Art as Sublime”, in which I attempt to radically reconceptualise a concept that that dates back to at least the 1st century AD. Its revolutionary thesis is this: that, far from an aesthetic incident, the Sublime is art’s very ‘telos', its inescapable final cause; that which distinguishes it from all other modes of human creativity. “Art as Sublime” was published in Dec, 2023, as a chapter in “Sublimism: An introduction”, co-authored with Raphael Chloé.

§7. Infinite vs finite purposiveness

…Beyond art’s capacity to refer mimetically to an object – which, as we have seen, it possesses in at least two degrees – it possesses yet another, more nuanced mode of representation: the symbolic. We have said that it is this second, more slippery property that defines art, and sets it apart from other types of human creativity. For, Art alone is equipped to denote a form or idea indirectly, non-referentially, that is, by using an external, finite means to do so which itself may be only obliquely empirically connected to it, if at all. When Proust’s tea-dunked Madeleine triggers in us a sweeping nostalgia for childhood innocence; when we sense the eternal pain of Chiron’s transcendent traumas in his mother’s purple rage[1]; when are conjured up inside us images of an inexplicable bliss by the opening bars of Nulla in mundo pax sincera[2]; then we understand the full extent of art’s symbolic power. In none of these examples is the referent directly equivalent to its meaning. Nowhere, that is, does Barry Jenkins directly state – by overvoice, subtitle or otherwise – that it is precisely to repeated, abusive episodes such as this that Chiron can trace back the origin of his adult attachment dysfunction. And we can likewise in no way directly assign to any one Vivaldian musical structure, the beatific vision his music all the same undeniably gives rise to in us. The relationship here is totally unreferential, and yet to deny it altogether on this account would be foolish. Art’s unmistakable power lies precisely in this: that it is able to denote and represent its truth symbolically.

To call this representational process mimetic would, to my mind, thus be misleading, since by mimetic representation what is generally intended is ‘referential’, as I have argued. In referential representation, we have a more-or-less one-to-one correspondence between an object and its meaning. Van Gogh’s painted shoes represent boots as they may exist in a nineteenth-century peasant’s home; Proust’s literary description of a Madeleine represents a sweet that any fin-de-siècle bourgeois boy from Normandie may have dunked in his tea; the terror painted on the face of Munch’s screamer depicts a real emotion that any human might facially express thus, etc. All of these finite significations in art are critical, and yet if we were to stop with them, we would, again, be depriving ourselves of a deeper layer of experience, one far more critical to art’s purposiveness. In his Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche said this best: “Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but rather a metaphysical supplement to it”[3]. We have been calling this supplementary layer of signification, ‘infinite’, and this choice of term is now, I would hope, justified for far more than its historical prestige. For, unlike ‘finite’, that is, mimetic representation, in which there is a direct and immediate correspondence between referent and meaning, even when the object in question is intangible, like an emotion, infinite representation presents no such directness; the relationship, here, between an object and its meaning is indirect, mediate, and relatively open-ended. Then there is the rather more obvious, physical legitimation of the term: if that is finite which is external, or at least externalisable, sensorially or experientially immediate, empirically verifiable, like a flower, a sweet, an expression, a scream, a colour, sadness, triumph, terror; then, conversely, that is necessarily infinite which is not so easily definable or capturable thus by art. We are speaking of any aesthetic object which, either on account of its conceptual depth or complexity, its subtlety or ineffability, remains insusceptible to easy referential treatment, and must be represented otherwise – or at the very least, is far more effectively represented otherwise.

But there is one more reason for the use of this term. To justify it, we must take a short historical detour and delve into metaphysical territory.

§8. Art’s infinite purposiveness as the symbolic representation of pure forms

Plato, as we know, divided the universe into the realms of particulars and of forms; Augustine, into the cities of man and of god. Following Plato’s lead, Descartes retreated from the world of particulars, which he disavowed, and founded his epistemic system on the form of forms, the ‘cogito’. Some years later, Locke, a sworn particularist, did the exact opposite, thereby sparking a philosophical war, one between rationalists and empiricists. With his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant then attempted to resolve this conflict by synthesising some forms – that is, his pure concepts of the understanding – with intuitions of particulars. The phenomenologists, noting the solipsistic impasse Kant had thereby generated, sought to surpass it by arguing that forms and particulars were, if not one and the same, enmeshed, symbiotic, and mutually codependent. Thus considered, the history of Western philosophy may with little exaggeration be seen as the story of these two concepts and their ever-evolving relationship. On the one hand, we have the particulars: phenomenal, empirical, conscious, worldly, sensorial, inhabiting the physical world of appearance. On the other, we have the forms that sustain them: transcendental, ‘heavenly’, unconscious, internal, intuitive, inhabiting the metaphysical realm of essences. If particulars are things as the appear to us in the concrete here and now, forms are things as they are in the abstract; the difference between this particular horse I see galloping in the field before me, and the idea ‘horse’ which I can conjure up in my mind independently of any present particularisation of it. Why the former, particulars, may be defined as finite and the latter, infinite, is clear enough and should warrant no lengthy explanation. The more nuanced question is how they are relevant to Art, its phenomenological structure, and its purposiveness. I shall now attempt to give answers to these questions by bringing all threads of the discussion together and, in so doing, finally guide it back to main topic, the Sublime.

I shall begin with a rather bold statement, which shall also serve as the most definitive philosophical definition of art we shall offer: Art is that mode of human creative activity distinguished from all others by its infinite purposiveness, that is, by its nature to disclose Sublime Truth through the symbolic representation of life’s infinite forms by finite means. While this formulation may at first appear overwhelming, consider that we have already unpacked most of its constituent concepts. We know, for instance, that art’s infinite purposiveness is to represent life symbolically; we also understand that to represent symbolically means to represent unreferentially, that is, by means of an inequivalence between referent and meaning; finally, we have learned that any truth is Sublime which involves a transcendent flight beyond the concreteness of finite appearance toward abstract universality or, in our lingo, ‘infinite’ essence. What remains for us to analyse is Art’s phenomenological modalities, without an explication of which everything heretofore stated might remain but conjectural fancy. Such an examination will take the shape of the following, rather finicky question: in what precise way are life’s infinite, formal structures 1) represented phenomenally in the artwork, and given this finite representation, 2) activated in the consciousness in such a way as allows us to describe this process as constitutive of an ‘infinite purposiveness’?

We will do well to begin with an example. Let us suppose we are beholding the work of a great sculptor: a sculpture depicting a rampant lion. The lion’s teeth are borne, his front legs, raised, and his claws, protracted. We see that it is poised to strike an invisible opponent. Thanks to what we’ve learned, we understand that the artwork has set off two more-or-less simultaneous processes inside us: the one, a more phenomenal impulse, allows us to recognise the sculpture as the physical representation of a flesh-and-blood animal. Here, we see the sculpture as appearance, or at least as a collection of appearances. The other, more intuitive impulse leads us to greater metaphysical depths. By its means, we are able to feel the lion’s strength, its resilience and its ferocity. We may also note that it is engaged in a battle and imagine it to be of an existential magnitude. If we are sensitive enough, we may even intuit the nobility and savagery of nature, or even feel a reassuring kinship for the animal, since we understand that we share the survival instinct that compels it.

We comprehend, by now, that these two processes are fundamentally distinct. The one takes an appearance for a direct object and, finding a concept more or less exactly correspondent to it, represents it internally on the basis of this exactitude. The second almost entirely eschews this kind of literal internal representation. Here, the referent is found in no single appearance, but rather ‘in amongst’ all appearances, not as an unconceptualised object so much as a ‘ready-made’ idea, somewhat already represented as itself in its conscious point of departure. Since it has no exact empirical origin, and can thus find no correspondent internal concept to represent it, it escapes all direct conceptualisation, and instead experiences a direct ‘fallback upon forms alone’. The representation, which must thus gain its completion formally, remains on this account a pure, that is, conceptless intuition. Otherwise worded: since it enters the consciousness already as a sort of ideal completion, it requires no concept for its fulfilment, and so receives, not a conceptual, but a merely formal, that is, intuitive internal representation.

It is not for this reason, however, an inferior form of knowledge. Tout au contraire: it is precisely on account of its ‘bypass of the concept’, of its ‘fallback on forms alone’ that intuitive knowledge has its own special brand of power. Unlike conceptual knowledge, which, since it is bound inextricably to appearance, can call upon merely a specific form by no other means than via its concept, an aphenomenal intuition is rather more like a free radical. Unchained to any one empirical particular, it is free to seek out forms which might otherwise be precluded from it by a conceptual delimitation. It is thus that its symbolic operations are more properly understood: as an unboundedness to this form or that via a conceptualised finite particular. The idea, since it is already represented in the object as such from the outset, is compelled to flee from its locus to its infinite source in order to find its formal legitimation. It knows too well that it does not belong there, ‘in amidst appearances’, where, did we not already know it was placed there by the artist’s genius, we may well suppose it landed by accident. When it is freed by the observer from this phenomenal entanglement, its flight upward is set off with an explosive release such that it is experienced by the beholder as a lofty revelation. In this sense, we may well agree with Schopenhauer, for whom the acquisition of Sublime knowledge involves a “conscious and violent tearing away” from the object[4]. This violent and explosive flight from appearance is altogether rendered unnecessary in more referential forms of representation, in which the object already finds its soft landing in a concept, and is forthwith resolved as an empirical synthesis. Here, the infinite form serves at most to ‘round off’ the finite particular, whose representation retains its empirical constitution, that is, its synthetic conformity of an object to its concept. The idea, on the other hand, is at once much farther from its formal origin and yet also far more potently drawn to it, so that their reunion, once set in motion, can fulfil itself in no other way than as an ‘atomic’ fusion. For the beholder, this results in an immediate, overpowering awareness of pure form which, while it may then-and-there remain consciously inarticulable, since it has defied conceptual unitisation, all the same, on account of its intuitive potency, presents itself as an all-enveloping internal expansion. Thus, at once ineffable and undeniable, fathomless and unmissable, art’s intuitive Truth is here all the better justified as ‘hyperpurposive’. The knowledge Art yields via its symbolic representation of infinite forms is a higher, intuitive, purely formal Truth unavailable through conceptual means alone, irreducible to any finite particular, albeit dependent on these for its activation. And this Truth, as has been argued, is none other than the ‘Sublime’…

[1] Barry Jenkins: Moonlight (2016)

[2] 1735 Motet by Antonio Vivaldi

[3] p. 127

[4] WWR: Vol. 1, Book 3, ç 38