The sublime is, in itself, an ineffable concept, one that is ever elusive, and only escapes complete ineffability – the fate of lying in the belly of our deepest unconscious provoking feelings that would be of unknown origin – because of allusive images that summon up a percentage of its total power and serve as giant arrows pointing outside the realm of language. The closest we can ever get to discovering its true substance and form is in contemplation of the generalizations and categorizations of these allusive images of sublimity that spark a bit of that dread that soaks into our bones, thickens our saliva and tightens our throats, and leaves us wide-eyed and pale. But before one can begin to look at these indicators of the sublime – these images portraying a deeply rooted collectivized archetype in the depths of the unconscious – it is necessary to establish the sublime’s ineffability.
The sublime is at once the sum total of all of its parts (images/indicators) and something beyond, something more and greater. Not only this, but when the collection of images that allude to its existence our considered as a whole, as what the sublime is in essence, then the sublime is given concrete existence; it not only exists conceptually, but exists empirically in the form of physical images that inspire what would improperly be labeled as terror or awe.1 The problem is that even while directly experiencing the sublime via image we are aware that the image itself is not the sum total source of our paroxysm of dread.2 This is best illustrated metaphorically with an example from Karl Jaspers’ essay “On My Philosophy”. Jaspers writes:
“Man, however, is not a self-sufficient separate entity, but is constituted by the things he makes his own. In every form of his being man is related to something other than himself: as a being to his world, as consciousness to objects, as spirit to the idea of whatever constitutes totality, as Existenz to Transcendence. Man always becomes man by devoting himself to this other. Only through his absorption in the world of Being, in the immeasurable space of objects, in ideas, in Transcendence, does he become real to himself. If he makes himself the immediate object of his efforts he is on his last and perilous path; for it is possible that in doing so he will lose the Being of the other and then no longer find anything in himself. If man wants to grasp himself directly, he ceases to understand himself, to know who he is and what he should do. (Jaspers, 168)”
What Jaspers is getting at here is the fact that I can never get at my own core. I can never find that one single thing that I identify as me or my self. All that I can ever establish is these identifiers of my own existence, but never my own existence itself. I am Alexander Monea. I am the person with balding brown hair, a red beard, stocky body and slouched posture. I own 145 vinyl records, 28 toothpicks, 16 pairs of socks, and a Toyota Prius. But is that what I really am? Is that what I identify as myself? Or do I feel as if my self is located somewhere deeper than that? If I am not my body, my manifestation, my performances both active and passive, my thoughts, what am I? When I take away all of these identifiers I come to a loss. I cannot really locate this thing that I call my self. Yet, I know it exists. Each one of these identifiers is further evidence. They point to the self, somewhere off in the distance or in the deep parts of existence. This question of self gets harder to answer the simpler and more direct it gets. Eventually a person is left unable to answer, but ultimately knowing that there is an answer. This is the ineffability of and indication towards self.
The sublime exists in much the same way. Each image that we have previously called sublime is an indicator of the sublime. As we strip each one away and label is as merely an identifier, as we simplify the sublime, we inevitably remove all indication of its existence and it vanishes into complete ineffability. As we add them we flesh out this concept and become more and more aware of its existence, but, at the same time, still at a loss for a precise definition of its core, its substance or essence. In essence all that we can hope to do is trace these indicators of sublimity, categorize them, go to the very limits of language, and then stop, ever falling short of deciphering the cause and only ever succeeding in fleshing out the effects.
Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, does much to aid this cause, specifically in Part II of his work, by examining images that provoke sublime emotional responses and grouping them into the most rudimentary of categories. This is a large, respectable, and ostensively useful project, but is, at the same time, a double failure. Of course Burke fails firstly in the sense that his true topic of enquiry is ineffable, but, to his credit, he realizes this and owns up to it in his preface. Burke also fails in taking his task to the borders of language by linking these categories into the largest possible effable category – the sublime. His ideas about the correlations between these categories of indicative images are shoddy and need closer examination.
The first aspect of these indicative images3 is obscurity. Burke posits that this is because “when we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. (Burke, 102)” Both the concepts of infinity and eternity are also common to the sublime.4 The idea of power, generally of a supra-human variety, is common to the sublime. In this sense, God (or any Deity) is also of the sublime, as his power is infinite and supra-human. The next category includes multiple aspects. Privation, of which Burke lists vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence, are all indicative of the sublime. Both vastness and minuteness, in the very extreme sense, are aspects of the sublime image. Another source is difficulty, which Burke qualifies: “When any work seems to have required immense force and labour to effect it, the idea is grand. (118)” And similarly, Burke includes magnificence as an aspect of the sublime as well. He includes both light and darkness as aspects of the sublime, but light only when it is so strong as to be blinding and create a different sort of darkness.
Burke then moves away from visual aspects of the sublime and notes that a few experiences of the other senses, especially in combination with these above, are also sublime. Sound can be indicative of the sublime at certain times. The most easily recognized would be sounds that are very loud or very sudden. He also includes intermittent sounds that leave us in a state of confusion and haunt the mind. Of smell and taste, stench and bitterness can also be sublime, but in themselves are just painful or annoying. Burke believes them to be more effective when paired with visual experiences, largely in writing. In the sense of touch only pain can be said to be indicative of the sublime, but only so in large degrees.
To this list there must be added one more category of the sublime that Burke did not trace, although it was not a force in the art that he examined and didn’t really become prominent until the modernist movements. The last category are those things indicative of the Unknown5, such as chaos, unintelligibility, incomprehensibility, and randomness. This surfaced in the art world largely in the modernist movement of the early and mid twentieth century in response to modern science becoming largely relative, incoherent and unintelligible itself.
Burke concludes the discussion with his position on the nature of the sublime:
“Having thus run through the causes of the sublime with reference to all the senses, my first observation…will be found very nearly true; that the sublime is an idea belonging to self-preservation. That it is therefore ne of the most affecting we have. That its strongest emotion is an emotion of distress, and that no pleasure from a positive cause belongs to it. (Burke, 127)”
This does not seem to be the boundary at which enquiry must necessarily stop though. It is astute to note that this fear of pain, and above all of death, is a product of self-preservation, but it also does not encompass the experience in its totality. It is more an experience of dread than terror of pain and death. Self-preservation may very well be a larger category into which all of these smaller groups of attributes can be grouped, but in saying the fear is of pain and death we lose the real term, dread. It is rare that the sublime is experiences and one thinks of one’s own death and realizes the cause. Just in having a cause there would seemingly be an escape. The identification of this cause would open up a possible release from it. But there is no such release from the grips of the sublime because it is the grip of dread. We do in fact fear pain and death, but there is something deeper to it, some question mark as to the cause of this terror, which transforms it into dread. The question really becomes: why do we fear death so strongly that we are swept up in sublime experiences?
The answer is that it is actually fear of Nothingness or the Unknown, not death or pain in themselves, that we encounter here. Death is a concrete thing that, in itself, cannot be responsible for dread. To attribute the dread to something concrete would be a misuse of the term, and terror, fear, or horror would have to be substituted. But it is dread. One might argue that Nothingness or the Unknown placed as the source of dread would be a similar misuse of the term, but Nothingness and the Unknown are similar to the sublime in that they have official words that allude to them, but at the same time are outside of the realm of language (in the same way that the self is in the passage from Jaspers). They are inevitably giant question marks, and terror aimed at a question mark is always, rather, dread.
It is thus these fundamental, yet ineffable, concepts like Being-in-totality (Existence, or everything that is), Nothing, and the Unknown that make up the core of the sublime. The gripping dread of an encounter with the sublime is caused by our inability to resolve these things, to even comprehend them, and an experience with the very limits of our being in opposed to Being-in-totality, and our dread of our inevitable encounter with Nothing or the Unknown. Self-preservation is an easy term to use in linking all of these aspects of the time, but in using the term we always beget more questions: Why do we feel so deeply the need to preserve the self? And why is there nothing but dread when faced with the thought of being unable to do so?
1 Please note that if and only if the sublime is the source of the emotions brought about by experiencing these things would these labels be incorrect. It is always possible that they may be the right descriptors of the emotion, but only if the sublime remains uninvolved.
2 Dread, instead, is the correct term for the emotional response to the sublime. The reason for this is that terror and awe are targeted at something, inspired by something; they always have a direct object. You are terrified of something. You are in awe of something. In dread you experience a similar, but more profound, emotion that has at its source something quite beyond definition or enumeration. The source of dread must always be a “?”. Martin Heidegger goes to great lengths to argue this same position in his essay: “What is metaphysics?” This may not persuade one though. For surely these emotions are targeted at something, namely the sublime. But, as will soon be clarified, what we refer to as the sublime escapes the word sublime itself. The word sublime is at best a poor metonym, but even more likely a poor metaphor. The word sublime is just the largest bracketed category that points outside of language towards the actual thing. It is the category that contains all the other images and indicators within it, but not the thing indicated itself.
3 It is important to note here that while these aspects are common to sublime images, they are not common to all sublime images. An image indicative of the sublime needn’t have every aspect in Burke’s list, but is likely to have some of these aspects (as these aspects are the most common of the image indicative of the sublime).
4 When speaking about the infinite Burke makes a note (one that would also be applicable to the eternal): “There are scarce any things which can become the objects of ours senses that are really, and in their own nature infinite. But the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of many things, they may seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if they were really so.” This is the same with the eternal because the mind cannot decipher the boundaries of time, and thus any thing whose age is great enough to baffle the mind may present itself as the eternal and have the same effects as the eternal on the mind. Succession and uniformity also lend themselves to the infinite because they give the eye no place to draw a boundary around an object, just as preservation and perseverance lend themselves to eternity as they give the mind no place to draw a temporal boundary.
5 N.B. Here I am only speaking of those things indicative of the Unknown, and not the Unknown itself.
Works Cited:
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1998.
Heidegger, Martin. ""What is Metaphysics"." Kaufmann, Walter. Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1975. 242-265.
Jaspers, Karl. ""On My Philosophy"." Kaufmann, Walter. Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1975. 158-185.
Posts
