A short guide to the theory of the sublime

Style, Winter, 2002 by Kenneth Holmqvist, Jaroslaw Pluciennik

Among the most stimulating contemporary pronouncements on the subject of the sublime is an interpretation of the phenomenon of violence in mass culture that refers to the notion of "the aesthetics of the sublime" (Crowther, Critical Aesthetics 129-30). This can help us to realize how much the meaning of that technical term (the sublime), used nowadays by philosophers, aestheticians, and literary theorists, differs from the meaning usually associated with the sublime and sublime phenomena in the ordinary use of language. Listening to people we can observe that the sublime now frequently means noble and morally positive.

In theoretical reflection a totally different notion is fashionable. In 1984, Jean-Luc Nancy opened his article devoted to the subject as follows: "The sublime is in fashion" (25, see also Crowther, The Kantian Sublime 3). But he added immediately that the fashion is very old. Indeed, if we look at the bibliography of the sublime in English, we can even observe a kind of renaissance: there has been an abundance of theoretical and critical, aesthetic, and general philosophical texts dealing with the sublime since the end of the 70s. (The most important texts are written mainly by Lyotard, but there are other sources relevant here: Rachwal and Slawek, the reader Of the Sublime ed. by Courtine, monographic issues of New Literary History and Studies in Romanticism; Weiskel's Romantic Sublime.) This real "eruption" of academic interest in the English speaking world is accompanied by a revival in other countries. Special issues of literary journals are devoted to the sublime in France, Sweden, and Poland. Antholog ies dealing with the subject are published in France, Netherlands, and Denmark. There is a growing interest in the sublime in Germany and Italy.

In contemporary reflection on the subject, the sublime has many dimensions, not only aesthetic but also ethical (Crowther Critical Aesthetics, The Kantian Sublime; Ferguson "The Nuclear Sublime"); general philosophical and psychological (Sussman, Morris, Weiskel); political (Crowther Critical Aesthetics, Ramazani, Shapiro, Ferguson "The Nuclear Sublime"); linguistic and rhetorical (Holmqvist and Pluciennik); and sociological (Balfe). The sublime may also induce us to think specifically about the political motives of action (Kwiek).

A similar explosion of interest in the sublime can be found in eighteenth-century pre-romantic Britain (see the reader edited by Ashfield and de Bolla, Hipple, Monk). It is impossible here to decide whether "the sublime" and "sublimity" used in the eighteenth century have similar meanings as used today. (For complex histories of the terms, see Wood, Cohn and Miles.) That is why we initially treat the sublime as a kind of literary motif. It is certain that the renaissance of the motif in the 1980s does not make it easy to limit "the sublime" as a term of rhetoric or, generally, of reflection on language. In eighteenth-century aesthetic reflections on the sublime, there are astoundingly different accounts of the subject. It may be said that all three theoretical "arche-texts of the sublime" by Pseudo-Longinos, Burke, and Kant constitute incomparable paradigms of talking about it (see Crowther, Critical Aesthetics 115).

For instance, in Pseudo-Longinos' theory, the sublime has distinct moral implications because it is strongly associated with a kind of normative psychology. On the other hand, Burke's theory is, broadly speaking, directed toward the aesthetics of such situations in which some elements are felt either as painful or as threatening. Still, Kant elaborates his theory in such a way that in his aesthetics the most substantial is a response of reason to the overwhelming excess either of greatness or power. Kant focuses on limitations of imagination when confronted with ideas of reason (cf. Crowther, Critical Aesthetics 115). However, there is something Burke and Kant have in common: they both built their aesthetic theories on the dualism of the beautiful and the sublime. This motif reappears in further reflection on the sublime many times.

Contemporary theoreticians usually comment on the three aforementioned arche-texts, Pseudo-Longinos, Burk, and Kant, often ignoring the fact that the texts are theoretically complex. For instance, when commenting on Burke, they fail to see his associationism and physiologism. While discussing Kant, they frequently happen not to notice his metaphysics. The history of the sublime, as the history of many crucial notions for the humanities, may be seen and understood as a history of misreadings of the past (Nycz 3).

There is something ironic and perverse in the contemporary-postmodern--renaissance of the sublime. The almost two-thousand-year-old world history of the sublime is then full of insinuations, ambiguities, and sudden pauses. Its sources are in the lost treatise by Caecilius of Calakte and a defective response to it by an unidentified author, a response which was accompanied through ages by silence. From the time when the Pseudo-Longinian treatise Peri hypsous came into existence in the first century A.D. until the sixteenth century, when the treatise was published in Basel, European intellectuals were not interested in the sublime. (1) It became popular thanks to Nicholas Boileau's translation (published in 1674), which developed the main thoughts of the treatise, often altering the general ideological meaning of the original. Boileau also published commentaries on Pseudo-Longinos entitled Reflexions Critiques sur Quelques Passages du Rheteur Longin (published in 1694 and 1713). The next milestone in the histor y of the sublime is A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful by Edmund Burke (1756/57). The next great event in the history was Kant's Third Critique, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), which contains the crucial Analytic of the Sublime. (Earlier in 1764 Kant published a less influential work devoted to the beautiful and the sublime, Beobachtungen Uber das Gefuhl des Schonen und Erhabenen; cf. Kant Observations, Crowther The Kantian Sublime, Klinger.) in Germany, Kantian ideas were developed by Friedrich Schiller in Ober das Erhabene (first published in 1801) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Vorlesungen uber die A esthetik (1820), while Burke's viewpoint was elaborated in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819) by Artur Schopenhauer. Romantics from all over Europe developed, theoretically and practically, the ideas of the sublime found in the works of their predecessors. On the surface, there was little interest in the sublime in the second half of the nineteent h century. (There is an interpretation of the theories of the French Symbolists, mainly in Malarme, which shows their dependence on the aesthetics of the sublime. Cf. Lokke 427-28.) It seems that in the twentieth century the sublime was incompatible with the spirit of the age, and until the pronouncements of Theodor Adorno (1970) and JeanFrancois Lyotard (1979), who claimed the opposite, there had been no bold and systemic attempts to revive it. Harold Bloom sees the last considerable interpretation of the sublime in Freud's Das Unheimliche (first published in 1919) (Macksey 931).