Sublimity

The Non-Rational and the Rational in the History of Aesthetics

James Kirwan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415966863
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135455750
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Sublimity addresses the nature of the sublime experience itself, and the function that experience has played, and continues to play, within aesthetic discourse. The book both updates and revises existing treatments of the sublime in the eighteenth century, examines its neglected role in the nineteenth century aesthetics, and analyzes the significance of the modifications the concept has undergone in order to serve the interests of contemporary aesthetics. The book thus offers the most comprehensive coverage of the history of the sublime available.

1

Mountains, Tigers, and Magnanimity:
A Passion and Its Objects

1 Sublime Objects

In 1704 John Dennis laid before his readers the following list of ideas capable of producing the pleasurable passion of “enthusiastic terror”: “gods, daemons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies, enchantments, witchcrafts, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, war, pestilence, famine, &C.”¹ Addison's influential discussion of 1712 of the pleasures of the imagination put far less emphasis on the supernatural. In treating that pleasure which arises from “great” objects he singled out, as exemplary, “huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices, or a wide expanse of water,” this last even more so if stormy.² Shaftesbury included in his enumeration of what is sublime whatever expresses “the amazing depths … the abyss of Deity”: the very thought of the extent of matter and of space, the mysteries of motion, time, sense and thought, the “perfection of the universe,” the “noble ruin” of the world itself, mountains, precipices, darkness, silence.³ Jacob is similarly inclusive:

dreadful precipices; great ruins; subterraneous caverns, and the operations of nature in those dark recesses … the magnificence of architecture; the sight of numerous armies, and assemblies of people … the fall of water in cataracts, or heavy showers; the roaring of the sea; the noise of tempests among lofty trees; thunder; the clash of arms, and voice of war … the consideration of the heroic deeds, and great sentiments of illustrious men; reflections on the various revolutions that have happened in different ages to the nations of the earth; the contemplation of death itself, and on the formation and dissolution of all things.⁴

By midcentury, Baillie no longer found it necessary, as did Dennis, to provide a comprehensive list, but confined himself, in analyzing the causes of sublimity, to those objects that “we know by experience” produce this “elevation”: mountains, the heavens, immense oceans and rivers, love of one's country, universal benevolence, heroism, the desire of conquest (“such as in an Alexander or a Caesar”), fame, or immortality, the contempt of death, power, or honours.⁵ Burke's list of sources of the sublimity is so extensive that it must necessarily be reduced here to its main heads, though he grounds all sublimity in the terrific: whatever is dangerous (from serpents to the ocean), obscurity (darkness, uncertainty, confusion), power (from that of the bull to God's), privation (vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence), vastness, infinity, evidence of immense force or labor, profusion (as in the starry sky), strong light, excessive loudness, the cries of animals, excessively bitter tastes, intolerable stenches, the idea of bodily pain.⁶ Gerard's Essay on Taste, appearing in the same year as the second edition of Burke's more celebrated work, rather than relating discrete qualities to the production of terror, as did Burke, presented them in terms of the conjunction of “quantity” with “simplicity”: magnitude where simple (mountains, great rivers, the expanse of heaven), length of duration (eternity), prodigious numbers of similar things (armies), universal principles and general theorems in science, certain passions and affections (heroism, magnanimity, contempt of honours, riches, or power, “a noble superiority to things external,” patriotism, universal benevolence), and also whatever “astonishes” after the manner of these things, such as the fearful (storms at sea, thunder), or what “stretches” the mind in a similar way, such as evidence of superior strength, power, or genius.⁷

Despite the subsequent relative fame of Burke and Gerard, it is the latter's approach that is more representative of the discourse on the sublime in the eighteenth century, and we find Priestley, in the last quarter of the century, ignoring Burke's more idiosyncratic inclusions—tastes and smells, for example—to produce a list more closely resembling that of Gerard: on the “corporeal” plane, “large rivers, high mountains, and extensive plains; the ocean, the clouds, the heavens, and infinite space; also storms, thunder, lightning, volcanoes, and earthquakes, in nature; and palaces, temples, pyramids, cities, &c. in the works of men;” in the realm of “sentiments” and “passions,” “fortitude, magnanimity, generosity, patriotism, and universal benevolence;” in the realm of science, “general and comprehensive theorems, which, by means of very great and extensive consequences, present the idea of vastness to the mind.”⁸ Priestley also includes the ideas of wealth, honour, and power, grandeur in buildings, ruins, darkness, and silence, while averring that they “borrow their sublime” from associated ideas.⁹ Beattie, toward the century's end, is relatively methodical in his categorization of what may strike the beholder with “agreeable astonishment”: “relative” magnitude (spacious buildings, great cities, large rivers, vast mountains, the ocean, the heavens), great number (an army or navy, a long succession of years, eternity), passions that “discover a high degree of moral excellence” (benevolence and piety), great virtue (fortitude and generosity), great intellectual abilities (such as those of Homer or Newton), bodily strength, strength of mind (intrepidity, boldness, self-command, coolness), and horror (vast caverns, dark woods, overhanging precipices, storms, conflagrations, battles, executions, shipwrecks).¹⁰

The sublime of the eighteenth century, then, was a matter of a certain fairly clearly delimited class of objects or notions. It was a class that could include any object that was observed to arouse a “passion,” “sentiment,” or “emotion,” variously characterized as “elevation,” “transport,” “enthusiasm,” “exaltedness,” “astonishment,” “ecstasy,” “enthusiastic terror,” “delightful horror,” “pleasing astonishment,” “enthusiastic awe,” “indescribable awe,” “ineffable complacency,” “sacred enthusiasm,” “madness of rapture,” “divine transport of admiration and amazement,” “thrilling and delightful wonder,” or “the emotion of grandeur.” While the cause of the feeling might require explanation, there was no question as to what was felt: to be the sublime this sense must, as Richardson said, “strike vehemently upon the mind, and fill, and captivate it irresistibly.”¹¹ It is, indeed, the peculiar emotion that is the common factor—leading both Gerard and Priestley, for example, to include in their lists objects whose qualities do not easily conform to the demands of their respective theories, but that, nevertheless, are generally acknowledged to elicit “the same emotion or a like disposition.”¹²

As this using of affective response as a principle of classification indicates, that area of inquiry now known as aesthetics fell quite naturally in the eighteenth century within “moral philosophy,” into inquiries and treatises on the passions and sentiments: that area that now seems most nearly related to the modern discipline of psychology. Burke, for example, in the preface to his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, writes that his object is “a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts … a careful survey of the properties of things which we find by experience to influence those passions … a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature, by which these properties are capable of exciting our passions.”¹³ Johnson, though he might have been no more impressed with Burke's theory (as distinct from his style) than anyone else, nevertheless considered Burke's work to be “an example of true criticism” insofar as it was funda-mentally concerned with “the workings of the human heart.”¹⁴ Moreover, for all the fundamental piety of the era, this was a psychology to be pursued autonomously.

The desire for happiness is the spring that puts us all in motion … we are touched by this magnet upon our very entrance into being, and ever after tend thitherwards with all the powers of our souls. … Pleasure is our summum bonum; and whatsoever some men may pretend, or fancy, God himself is considered by us as such no otherwise than as it is conceived he is the fountain of good for us. In our deliberations, and determinations concerning actions to be done it is the single principle of pleasure on which all turns ultimately; whatever other principle seems to govern us; whether duty, love of virtue, interest, ambition, sensuality, etc. All terminates in this one great principle self-love; that first motive to all our actions, pleasure. Though as a river being divided into several streams loses its name, and each rivulet has one of its own, this principle being turned into various channels we seem to act by different motives, when it is only the same differently turned.¹⁵

Thus Richardson in his discourse on the “science of a connoisseur.”

It is, indeed, this emphasis on the psychological element that most readily explains the extraordinary attention given to the sublime during this period.¹⁶ Taste per se, insofar as it concerned “beauty” (a term that then covered almost every aesthetic effect, including, at times, sublimity) had proved intractable. Partly, of course, this was a matter of the very broadness of the category. The great majority of those who wrote on the sublime did so within the context of works on taste in general, yet there are no lists of “beautiful objects” to correspond to those catalogues of sublime objects with which we began. Thus Blair, writing on taste, chooses to begin with the sublime since it “has a character more precise and distinctly marked than any other of the pleasures of the imagination.”¹⁷ Later he writes that while the emotion of sublimity is “very distinguishable” from that of beauty, the latter cannot, indeed, be considered so homogeneous as the former.¹⁸ Beauty extends “to a much greater variety of objects than sublimity; to a variety indeed so great, that the feelings which beautiful objects produce, differ considerably, not in degree only but also in kind, from one another.”¹⁹ (Priestley was wide of the mark when he prefaced his own discussion of sublimity with that hoary intellectual gambit of claiming that his term “hath been used in a more vague sense than almost any other term in criticism.”)²⁰ More important, however, was the very paradoxical nature of the “emotion of grandeur” itself. The very fact that the sublime, as a pleasure, was constituted by an element, or moment, of displeasure, that it was, as it were, a compound (fear and admiration), made it more rather than less amenable to analysis than those more purely “positive” pleasures of taste traditionally attributed to the presence of some je ne sais quoi. Even Kant, who very deliberately excludes the possibility of a psychological explanation for taste in general, nevertheless, asserts that, by contrast, “the feeling of emotion” is necessarily combined with sublimity.²¹

A diversity of motives, of varying plausibility, have been proposed to account for the sublime looming so large in the aesthetic discourse of the eighteenth century. While such accounts have usually sought for an explanation in terms of social change, or changes in fundamental sensibility, the phenomenon does not, in fact, stand in need of an explanation that looks beyond the stated aims of that discourse itself: to understand the workings of the mind. As Usher says, in embarking on his analysis of the sublime, what is required is “a cause that accounts sufficiently for all the symptoms.”²² That certain of the conclusions of this discourse—particularly in relation to taste in general—were ideologically led, is self-evident; though the eighteenth century was arguably far less culpable in this respect than either of the two centuries of aesthetic theorizing that have elapsed since. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the aesthetic, for reasons that will be examined in later chapters, lost its autonomy: independently established “truths” about the human heart were now to be brought to aesthetics for confirmation. Who would now go to aesthetics to find out about the workings of the mind? For the intervening centuries have seen what is, in effect, a gradual reification of the “aesthetic object;” a process that has proceeded in step with the abandonment of the concept of taste in aesthetics. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, Baillie could speak of how the mind “sublimes” objects, and writers as diverse as Baillie, Priestley, Rousseau, and Moore could accept as a matter of course that even this most profound experience of admiration should be subject to obsolescence, as the object inspiring it becomes familiar.²³

By contrast, Reid, in his treatment of grandeur in 1785, provides a taste of what was to come in later aesthetic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Mountains, Tigers, and Magnanimity: A Passion and Its Objects
• 2 A Pleasing Rape? Boswell versus Johnson in the History of the Sublime
• 3 Proud Creatures: The Fascination of Greatness
• 4 The Claim to a Nobler Motive: Kant
• 5 The Triumph of the Will: Schiller
• 6 The Philosophy of Belief: German Idealism
• 7 Common Senses: Eighteenth-Century Survivals
• 8 The Literature of Power: The Nineteenth Century
• 9 Epiphany and Therapy: The Twentieth Century
• 10 Sublimity
• Notes
• References
• Index