Dec 12, 2018 07:16 PM
https://aeon.co/ideas/at-once-tiny-and-h...ll-sublime
EXCERPT: Responses to the sublime are puzzling. While the 18th century saw ‘the beautiful’ as a wholly pleasurable experience of typically delicate, harmonious, balanced, smooth and polished objects, the sublime was understood largely as its opposite: a mix of pain and pleasure, experienced in the presence of typically vast, formless, threatening, overwhelming natural environments or phenomena. Thus the philosopher Edmund Burke in 1756 describes sublime pleasure in oxymoronic terms as a ‘delightful horror’ and a ‘sort of tranquility tinged with terror’.
[...] It became a problem to explain why the sublime should be experienced overall with positive affect and valued so highly, given that it was seen to also involve an element of pain. Deepening the sense of paradox is the view that the experience of the sublime is actually more profound and satisfying than that of the beautiful. Some believe such sublime aesthetic experiences constitute religious or spiritual experiences of God or a ‘numinous’ reality.
There are two kinds of response to the sublime: what I call the ‘thin’ and the ‘thick’ sublime. Burke’s physiological account understands the sublime as an immediate affective arousal, which is not a highly intellectual aesthetic response. This is the ‘thin sublime’. Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer meanwhile offer transcendental accounts – that is, accounts that involve putatively universal cognitive faculties – and understand the sublime as an emotional response in which intellectual reflection on ideas, especially ideas about humankind’s place in nature, play a significant role. This is the ‘thick sublime’.
Thin sublime, then, is akin to an immediate reaction of awe, and this bare cognitive appraisal that kind of stuns and overwhelms the appreciator might very well be the first moment in all sublime aesthetic responses. But when one lingers in that experience of awe, and the mind starts to reflect on the features of the awe-inspiring landscape or phenomenon, and the way it makes one feel, then this cognitive-affective engagement constitutes thick sublime experience.
Why do these sorts of sublime experiences matter? For Burke, the experience matters insofar as it is the ‘strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’. But for Kant and Schopenhauer, the experience is profounder still. [...] For Kant, this experience of the irresistibility of nature’s power prompts us to realise that we are weak and existentially insignificant in the grand scheme of nature. And yet, it also reveals that we transcend nature as moral agents and systematic knowers. Insofar as we are morally free beings capable of comprehending nature in a systematic way, we are in a sense independent of and superior to nature.
For Schopenhauer too, the objects of aesthetic contemplation in the feeling of the sublime bear ‘a hostile relation to the human will in general (as it presents itself in its objecthood, the human body) and oppose it, threatening it with a superior power that suppresses all resistance, or reducing it to nothing with its immense size’. But sublime pleasure results when a person is able to achieve calm contemplation of an object or environment despite the fact that it appears threatening to the person’s bodily or psychological wellbeing....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/at-once-tiny-and-h...ll-sublime
EXCERPT: Responses to the sublime are puzzling. While the 18th century saw ‘the beautiful’ as a wholly pleasurable experience of typically delicate, harmonious, balanced, smooth and polished objects, the sublime was understood largely as its opposite: a mix of pain and pleasure, experienced in the presence of typically vast, formless, threatening, overwhelming natural environments or phenomena. Thus the philosopher Edmund Burke in 1756 describes sublime pleasure in oxymoronic terms as a ‘delightful horror’ and a ‘sort of tranquility tinged with terror’.
[...] It became a problem to explain why the sublime should be experienced overall with positive affect and valued so highly, given that it was seen to also involve an element of pain. Deepening the sense of paradox is the view that the experience of the sublime is actually more profound and satisfying than that of the beautiful. Some believe such sublime aesthetic experiences constitute religious or spiritual experiences of God or a ‘numinous’ reality.
There are two kinds of response to the sublime: what I call the ‘thin’ and the ‘thick’ sublime. Burke’s physiological account understands the sublime as an immediate affective arousal, which is not a highly intellectual aesthetic response. This is the ‘thin sublime’. Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer meanwhile offer transcendental accounts – that is, accounts that involve putatively universal cognitive faculties – and understand the sublime as an emotional response in which intellectual reflection on ideas, especially ideas about humankind’s place in nature, play a significant role. This is the ‘thick sublime’.
Thin sublime, then, is akin to an immediate reaction of awe, and this bare cognitive appraisal that kind of stuns and overwhelms the appreciator might very well be the first moment in all sublime aesthetic responses. But when one lingers in that experience of awe, and the mind starts to reflect on the features of the awe-inspiring landscape or phenomenon, and the way it makes one feel, then this cognitive-affective engagement constitutes thick sublime experience.
Why do these sorts of sublime experiences matter? For Burke, the experience matters insofar as it is the ‘strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’. But for Kant and Schopenhauer, the experience is profounder still. [...] For Kant, this experience of the irresistibility of nature’s power prompts us to realise that we are weak and existentially insignificant in the grand scheme of nature. And yet, it also reveals that we transcend nature as moral agents and systematic knowers. Insofar as we are morally free beings capable of comprehending nature in a systematic way, we are in a sense independent of and superior to nature.
For Schopenhauer too, the objects of aesthetic contemplation in the feeling of the sublime bear ‘a hostile relation to the human will in general (as it presents itself in its objecthood, the human body) and oppose it, threatening it with a superior power that suppresses all resistance, or reducing it to nothing with its immense size’. But sublime pleasure results when a person is able to achieve calm contemplation of an object or environment despite the fact that it appears threatening to the person’s bodily or psychological wellbeing....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/at-once-tiny-and-h...ll-sublime
