Richard L. W.

Clarke LITS2002 Notes 07E

1
BURKE AND KANT ON THE SUBLIME

If Longinus theories gave rise to a preoccupation (some might say an obsession) with the author that is still very much with us, they also stimulated intensive discussion on the nature of the readers response to the literary work or, to turn it around, the latters impact on the reader. Theorists like Pope, Hume, and Burke explored the possibility of arriving at a universal standard of taste or judgement, while Addison, Burke and, perhaps most importantly, Kant strove to understand the precise nature of the particular pleasures afforded by reading literature or viewing art. Noting parallels between the response of the audience to an artwork and that of the perceiving subject to nature (the so-called natural sublime), Burke and Kant in particular were responsible for an extensive discussion of the exact difference between the nature of the beautiful and that of the sublime. Offering a psychological theory of the sublime shaped by Lockes associationist model of the mind, Burke equates sublimity with pain and, specifically, terror which, he argues, is produced by our confrontation of immense and obscure phenomena such as massive and gloomy mountain ranges which, because they dwarf humans, make us realise our puny status by contrast and, because their outlines are murky, breed uncertainty and confusion in our minds. He links beauty, by contrast, to the pleasure provoked by clearly delineated objects of manageable proportions that can be easily apprehended and assimilated by the human psyche: For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small: beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes a strong deviation: beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. (306) These are indeed, he argues, ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure (306). Differentiating between at least two mental faculties, the imagination (that part of the mind that, like Lockes understanding, deals with sense impressions) and the reason (which deals with the supersensible), Kants thesis is that the sublime is a function of the inadequacy of the former for grasping and manipulating reality and its subsequent replacement by the latter. To put this another way, the eclipse of the imagination is the prerequisite of the reasons triumph which gives rise to feelings of sublimity. To this end, Kant differentiates between the mathematically sublime (produced by an apparently infinite series or objects of immense size like mountain ranges that are beyond the capacity of our imagination to assimilate) and the dynamically sublime (produced by natural forces like a hurricane or an earthquake that threaten to obliterate us and in the teeth of which any will to resistance, in the words of the Borg, is futile). In the former, confrontation with endlessness or immensity challenges the imagination to grasp the impossible and results in possible cognitive collapse. In the latter, the encounter with overwhelming might challenges the imagination to envision doing the impossible and leads to possible actional impotence. Overwhelmed in either of these ways, we experience either feelings of discomfort and pain (the mathematic sublime) or terror and awe (the dynamical sublime). However, the sublime is an oxymoronic experience that also involves paradoxical feelings of pleasure which are derived, Kant asserts, from the reassertion of reason which succeeds the collapse of the imagination. In the case of the mathematically sublime, a certain elation accompanies the realisation that, however endless the series or huge the object in question, the very capacity to rationally conceive of infinity or totality,

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2002 Notes 07E

concepts which cannot be derived from the sense-impressions produced by nature per se, represents a triumph of the mind over nature. (Kant gestures here to his Critique of Pure Reason.) In the case of the dynamically sublime, a certain cunning self-satisfaction accompanies the realisation that no matter how forceful the winds may blow or the grounds shake, we can rationally conceive of steps which we might take to circumvent such forces and ensure self-preservation, representing the triumph of the will over nature. (Kant gestures here to his Critique of Practical Reason.) The sublime, in other words, oscillates between pain and fear when faced with overwhelming objects and forces, on the one hand, and the sheer pleasure of seeing these themselves overwhelmed in turn, on the other. It should be noted that, in Kants schema, sublimity may be stimulated by but is not a property of the object per se. It is, rather, a mental state (or rapid succession of states) internal to the observer: the pain and terror elicited initially by a sensory response to some aspect of the external world that precipitates the collapse of the imagination is superseded subsequently by that elation and somewhat smug self-satisfaction that accompany the acknowledgment of the triumphant power of reason as it intervenes to fill the void left thereby. Perhaps most importantly, as many theorists such as Steven Knapp or Barbara Freeman have pointed out, the sublime culminates in the proclamation of a transcendental core within the self that is superior to everything without which would threaten it, a subjectivity that is, as it were, not so much produced by as rediscovered and affirmed in the very throes of the experience of the sublime.