Solitude and the Sublime

The Romantic Aesthetics of Individuation

Frances Ferguson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134977482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they had significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism.

1

An Introduction to the Sublime

This book will proceed, more or less simultaneously, on two fronts. In what may be alternately be regarded as indecision or a studied refusal to separate “theoretical” and “historical” issues from one another, it traces what I take to be the most significant portions of the development of the sublime. In the unequal and not-so-wide survey of this study, these are the Burkean empiricist model and the Kantian formalist (or formalist idealist) account;¹ in the more nearly equal and wider survey, these are the discernible corollaries of the Burkean and Kantian arguments about the sublime which appear in more popular or less argumentatively precise literature (the Gothic novel, the population debate in England from around the end of the eighteenth century, and the travel literature describing picturesque and sublime landscapes).

Yet the historical account has had its urgency for me because of the resurgence of the philosophical issues of the sublime in the work that has come to be identified as “theoretical.” This is not to say, in some crudely idealist fashion that collapses ideas and opinions, objects and ideology, that “my theory” made me see certain things as if they were historically existent. It is, however, to announce my view that the modern historical development of the notion of the sublime encapsulates two basic positions on aesthetics and its importance, and that these positions continue to set the terms for even the most recent and superficially alien arguments on the subject.

In brief, my view is that the advent of aesthetics as a more or less distinct area of philosophical speculation marks an intensification of interest in the mental image and in the difficulties of assimilating it to the problems of ontology and epistemology, on the one hand, and to those of ethics, on the other. Burke's procedure, in discussing the sublime and the beautiful and our thoughts about them, is to treat mental images first as if they were the affective traces of objects and then as if they were objects themselves. At the outset of the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, this makes it possible for him to classify objects as sublime or beautiful, as objects whose distinguishing features can be gauged by human responses. By the end of the Enquiry, the difficulty of making those classifications has come to be very nearly the foremost topic of Burke's discussion. If objects can be known, in Burke's aesthetics, only through experience, the persistence of mental images, the accumulation of previous responses to objects (which he refers to under the general rubric of “habit”) of prior experience continually threatens to make present experience virtually illegible.

Representation for Burke thus revolves around images of affect, of present, past, or future (anticipated) experience. One can represent and give testimony about the existence and value of objects on the basis of sensory experience, what one has actually experienced. Yet that model of empirical testimony has extreme limitations because of its very capaciousness. As soon as an individual's affective response is taken as constitutive of aesthetic objects (i.e., as making them either beautiful or sublime), every occasion for affect becomes equally an object. A memory, provoking response, can on this account look as much like a sensory object as a nonintemalized object, a thing or event in the outside world. By that token, the representation of experience makes affect an extremely unreliable index to the existence of objects, because the representations—in the form of memories and anticipations—themselves become the objects of response.

The problem that arises for Burke's Enquiry is, then, that the mental images of past or future objects of experience clutter the tablet of experience to such an extent that one cannot differentiate the response to objects from the response to one's representations of them. Burke's inability or refusal to make a thorough-going distinction between objects and mental objects makes the testimony of the senses its own skeptical double, and mental representations become their own opposites—the impossibility of sustaining a distinction between objects and representations.

Part of my argument here is that Burke's Enquiry, though employing vastly different terminology and procedures from recent deconstructive and historicist criticism, shares with them an aesthetic empiricism, a commitment to such a conflation (and indeed that deconstruction's interest in differences and distinctions is less important for insisting upon a gap between things and representations, or between signifiers and signifieds, than for making both of these equally objects of consciousness). In my view, Kantian aesthetics not only addresses such a central problem of empiricist aesthetics— the relative standing of objects and representations—but goes a long way toward resolving it by the simple argument of structure. (This is as much as to announce an apologia for Kant's account of aesthetic form as a regulative structure, and to suggest that Kantian aesthetics is especially important for making the argument for the primacy of the regulative, or for the claim that epistemology becomes parasitic on form). Whereas Burke had treated aesthetic experience as if it involved basically the pleasure and pain that one has in responding to objects, Kant assigned a much more distinct area to it. Just as in Burke, the classifications of objects were subject to change, but, differently from Burke, the Kantian aesthetic made clear the need to talk less about the reality of objects and responses than about the place of the mental image. And, though the Kantian separation of the aesthetic has repeatedly been seen as an escapist attempt to make reality less real, it seems to me that the Kantian boundaries achieve precisely the opposite effect. By means of the realm of the aesthetic, Kant is able to avoid the Burkean empiricist competition between objects and the representations through which they are known, and to advance a view of aesthetic objects as the more or less substantial versions of mental images.

Mental images may, in perfect keeping with his account, concern the most real and most urgent problems conceivable. Yet their consequences in action are less than clear. Aesthetic objects, like dreams, memories, anticipations, and so forth, have connections with real and substantial action and suffering, but a chief portion of their interest for Kant lies in their not being—and never being—identical to them.²

The differences between Burke's and Kant's positions become clearest perhaps on the most basic level, as the two are describing the distinguishing features of their subject matter. They both recognize categories of the beautiful and the sublime, and both link the beautiful with society and the sublime with individuals isolated either by the simple fact of their solitude or by an heroic distinction that sets them apart even as they participate in social enterprises. Yet where Burke continually suggests different possible classifications of the same items—horses, for instance, that may be considered as awe inspiring in their might or as reliably domesticated creatures—Kant makes a crucial decision to restrict the sublime: “it must be nature, or be thought of as nature.”³ Burke's account incorporates something like affect (or reception or context) into the terms of his classification, as if to anticipate what the twentieth century would describe as an identity between facts and values (or at least as an inability to sustain a fact-value distinction). Kant's identification of the sublime with nature, by contrast, conspicuously diminishes the place of affect. Affect, the viewer's or auditor's response, may be necessary to constitute the experience as aesthetic—to make it count as experience. Affect does not, however, work to constitute the identity of the object in the way it does for Burke. Rather, the point of a sublime object's being natural lies in its not being conditioned by the human viewer, in the indifference to knowing its ontological status (the “indifference to its existence”), which occurs in the very process of seeing it as an aesthetic object. If Burke argues that aesthetic experience enables one to know things and events through the modifications they effect on one's body, Kant's interest in nature as such registers the peculiarity that persons should see themselves as responding to intentionless and sensationless objects.

The Burkean interpenetration of human and natural types of beauty and sublimity assimilates itself to the kind of anthropomorphism that John Ruskin described in his brilliant discussion of the “pathetic fallacy,” the illusion that inanimate objects can participate in human feelings. Indeed, that version of anthropomorphism makes a dramatistic and interpersonally imitative model look as though it applied even to relations between persons and trees, persons and stones. The ultimate use that Kantian formalism makes of nature, however, is to supplant such a dramatistic model by strictly limiting the number of speaking voices. If Burke locates aesthetic pleasure in the satisfactions that one can have in objects as extensions of one's relations with other human beings, Kant's account of the sublime continually asks what sort of value there might be in taking pleasure in objects that neither possess nor express consciousness.

This is, in my view, the crucial importance of the sublime in Kant's aesthetic theory—that it conspicuously reduces the force of the empiricist argument by making it unclear what the experience of the sublime would mean were it not for what Kant terms transcendental a priori principles of judgment. Thus, although he can, with Burke, include both natural and artificial objects in the category of the beautiful, he restricts the sublime to human pleasure in nature. The experience of sublime pleasure in nature is seen, in other words, as transcendental because of its not needing to be taught, and indeed because of the way in which the construction of the lesson plan for that learning is itself unimaginable. (The use of the sublime as a limit case, I would argue, explains the difficulty that writers from Friedrich Schiller to de Man and Eagleton have had with the notion of the aesthetic education because they correctly see the problems of distinguishing the formalist account of aesthetics from the art treatises—the communication of advice from one artist to another, and from artist to audience—that preceded it.) If education involves the notion of the heritability of intentions, the sublime in Kant's restricted description insists upon sublime aesthetic experience as the communication of intentionlessness.

Now it is on the score of the notion of the transcendent and transcendental that particular difficulties have repeatedly arisen for the Kantian account. For if the empirical account collects testimony from various different people's experience and tries to generalize on that basis, the critiques of Kant's transcendentalism have essentially tried to read the possibility of individual autonomy (not needing to be initiated into aesthetic experience) and the autonomy of the aesthetic from more practical knowledge as if they made excessive claims by propounding an empiricism in reverse. Thus, sublime transcendence has looked to some (most recently Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Eagleton) like a false claim to individual distinction, or like an assertion of property rights in collective, socially induced experience.

With Adorno, they have seen the possibility of usefulness, didactic transmission, and cognition itself as an enduring compromise of the artfulness of any particular example of art. If art is to be art, it must be for its own sake. That formulation of the significance of the aesthetic has been enormously—if sometimes foolishly—productive for both art and criticism. Yet the burden of my argument is that such a version of aestheticism has scant purchase on the main portion of Kant's song in the Third Critique. Instead, it seems to me that Kant's segregation of the aesthetic judgment enables him, somewhat paradoxically, to broach an argument that will make the aesthetic crucial to the most central aspects of inquiry in the phenomenological tradition. This involves more than formulating a definition of the aesthetic that can be defended in the name of culture or in the name of individual freedom. Rather, as is borne out by Martin Heidegger's sustained interest in Kant's account of imagination, the aesthetic becomes the site for an examination of the meaningfulness of the very lack of fit between objects and the individuals that perceive them. The project of analyzing one's pleasure in an object that has no necessary relation to a previously existing object of exchange or use, the project of the Analytic of the Beautiful, accompanies an even more improbable undertaking in the Analytic of the Sublime, the project of justifying one's pleasure in objects that, by virtue of being natural rather than artificial, do not bear any obvious relation to intersubjective experience, and that, by virtue of not having clear and distinct boundaries, make the apparently objective act of cognition involve more than a mere response to objects.

To say that the debate over aesthetics and particularly over the sublime occurs between Burkean empiricism and Kantian formalist idealism in some sense states the obvious. This is a commonplace of the history of aesthetics, as is the usual expansion of it—that the discussion of art becomes less objective and more subjective, less oriented toward things and more oriented toward individual psychology (or what is disparagingly seen as self-absorption). That account is not wrong, or not simply wrong. What it fails to do, however, is to distinguish between the empiricist-formalist debates in aesthetics and those over ontology and epistemology. It fails, in other words, to suggest why Kant bothered to add a third critique to those of pure and practical reason, why the argument supplementing empiricism seemed to need to be led through aesthetic objects as well as “ordinary” objects. The Critique of Judgment seems, from such a perspective, to have been borne out of an unaccountable Kantian commitment to producing analyses in threes. Burke, in trying to establish an objectivity for individual consciousness on the basis of sensation, continually converts empiricism into a skeptical meditation on the vagaries of individual consciousness as it tries to translate between the language of persons and the language of objects. The empiricism and the skepticism are, however, less interesting from my perspective than the interest in psychology as a version of an interest in aesthetic objects. And the aesthetic, in the process of coming to be defined as something potentially distinct from taste as a particularly demanding version of consumption, becomes less important as a social and sociological phenomenon and more important for representing a distinct kind of experience. The aesthetic, as Kant outlines it, prefigures and justifies Heidegger's later suggestion (in Kant and the Future of Metaphysics) that the imagination should be promoted to the standing of a separate faculty, on the order of the reason or the understanding.⁴

The particular emphasis on mental images with which I am concerned is more circumscribed and circumspect than “imagination” in two influential senses of the word. It does not concern itself with visuality per se, as many eighteenth-century accounts of the term have been seen to do. Neither does it automatically entail a valorization of imagination like that proffered by defenses of art—that it brings “us” (whoever that might be) together, that it provides an escape from narrow utilitarianism, and so forth. Rather, the imagination suggests the interconnections between consciousness and matter (the way in which thought continually needs some version of objects in order to be thought—which can be seen as one aspect of Derrida's and de Man's interest in language). In addition, the imagination provides a very particular account of what counts as matter from a phenomenological view. In the strong sense of the word, imagination involves a focus on the impressionai matter of states such as memory insofar as memory is a version of the aes...