Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?

>The aesthetic notion of the sublime has had a great deal of attention in the last decade or so, engendering monographs by Paul Crowther, Jean‐François Lyotard, and Kirk Pillow, critical anthologies from Dabney Townsend and from Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, and numerous journal articles, conference panels, and symposia.1 This renewal of interest is perhaps timely: a notion that conjures up the inexplicable, the overwhelming, and the horrendous may be well suited to the current age. It is perhaps also timely that we take a step back from this respectable and growing body of research to attend to a single voice that once asked a very important question: “How is a theory of the sublime possible?”2 Guy Sircello was concerned that our efforts to capture and explain the sublime have in fact resulted in claims that are either contradictory or incoherent, due to tensions between (often unarticulated) epistemological and ontological commitments. He also sought to remedy the very problem he posed, with suggestions as to how a coherent theory of the sublime should proceed. The present article takes up the problem as Sircello first voiced it, but without his final optimism. What I offer amounts to an error theory: our current theorizing about the sublime rests on a mistake. I will claim that if we accept the problem as Sircello had described it, his own proposed solution is bound to fail. But if we reject his general methodological assumptions, what we will be left with is so limited that a general theory of the sublime will remain out of our reach. Additionally, I will expand on the evidence Sircello garnered for his case by attending in some detail to the most sophisticated treatment of the sublime we have: that of Immanuel Kant's work in the third Critique. But first, the problem itself. Sircello took as his starting point the generally accepted notion that sublime experience “professes to ‘see’ beyond human powers of knowledge and description” and that because of this it is inaccessible to rational thought (p. 541). Further, in the descriptions of the sublime he canvassed, Sircello found the operation of a general assumption that our cognitive powers are revealed, in the moment, to have what he called “radically limited access” to some broadly construed notion of “reality” (p. 543). There is a great deal of prima facie evidence for this general claim. Sircello mined such sources as the Tao, Zen Buddhism, and the poetry of Wordsworth and the Romantics, but philosophers writing on the sublime provide similar evidence, and it is with philosophical theory that I am most concerned. Consider the following. Joseph Addison wrote in the Spectator of 1812 that “our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity.”3 The Earl of Shaftsbury rhapsodized about the sublimity of nature in this way: “Thy being is boundless, unsearchable; impenetrable. In thy immensity all thought is lost; fancy gives over its flight: and wearied imagination spends itself in vain.”4 Edmund Burke claimed that the passion caused by the sublime is astonishment, “and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended. … The mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”5 In the twentieth century, Jean‐François Lyotard famously wrote of the postmodern as truly sublime, that which “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself … that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.”6 In each of these cases, as with others, we grasp at and fail to achieve an understanding of some notion of “reality.” This is Sircello's main premise: that sublime experience embodies a certain kind of cognitive failure. In these moments we become aware of our limitations; whatever we construe this broad notion of reality to be, it remains tantalizingly out of reach. This experience generates, for Sircello, the first of two themes he identified as running through the majority of sublime discourse, the theme of “epistemological transcendence” (p. 542), which he articulated in the following proposition. An experience of the sublime presents the object of the experience, i.e., the sublime, as epistemologically inaccessible. (p. 545) At first glance, this is not a contentious thesis: much writing about sublime experience seems to suggest that what is unique is just this moment of being overwhelmed by a sense of something incomprehensible, or incommensurable, or more powerful than we are. And, of course, to be made aware of the limitations of our cognitive capacities is at the same time to transcend them, insofar as we reflect on them. This is another powerful motif in writing on the sublime that I will return to below. Sircello's concern was that this initial theme of epistemological transcendence tends to embody a second theme that leads us into difficulty. The first theme interprets “the experience of the sublime” as denoting an experience of an object, although it leaves open the question of what this object might be, or whether it indeed exists (p. 545), referring instead to “reality” at large. The second theme, what Sircello called “ontological transcendence,” addresses this object directly and suggests that sublime experience represents something as existing that is inaccessible to our cognitive powers, something “on a level of being … which transcends that of humankind and all of humankind's possible environments” (p. 545). After all, he went on to say, it is implausible to assert that we have an experience, called sublime, that is without any object, or that the sublime is both an object of experience and one that does not exist (p. 545). However, to imply that an epistemologically inaccessible object does exist, Sircello claimed, is to end in either incoherence or contradiction, and cause any attempts at a theory to fail. Let me take each of these charges in turn. Regarding the charge of incoherence, we must ask how we can have an experience—and describe that experience—which presents an object that is in no way epistemologically accessible. This would be tantamount, Sircello noted, to having a visual experience of an invisible object: impossible (p. 546). Consider James Usher, a contemporary of Burke's, who wrote: Because the philosophers of our days can assign no form, nor size, nor color, to the object of their sublime awe, they conclude it to be vain and superstitious. … The truth is, the impression of this obscure presence … is beyond the verge of the philosophy of the ideas of sense. The disciples of this philosophy … are not able to conceive that an object has been there which was not represented by a sensible idea, and which makes itself felt only by its influence.7 For Usher, we have an experience of an existent object that is inaccessible to our very modes of experiencing, as with Shaftsbury's earlier allusion to boundlessness and impenetrability. This is the incoherence with which Sircello was concerned. However, sublime discourse that does not make incoherent claims falls into contradiction instead. Let me return to Addison for a moment: he lists among the objects of sublime experience “a vast uncultivated desert,”“huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices, or a wide expanse of waters.”8 Burke widens this list to include “serpents and poisonous animals of all kinds,”9 and many in the Longinian tradition count poetry, architecture, and painting as candidates for the sublime, just as Lyotard included in his scope works of art and literature. For the most part, a long tradition of writing on the sublime has clearly described the objects of our experiences. Sircello reminds us that to do so, however, is consistently not to treat these objects as if they were epistemologically inaccessible (p. 546). Rocks and mountains are not things we do not comprehend or cannot comprehend; we would not describe them if we did not have access to them. When we do identify them as sublime objects, we are not treating them as, at the same time, inaccessible to rational thought. So we fall into contradiction: the sublime object is both transcendent and familiar. On Sircello's diagnosis, we seem forced to concede that sublime discourse, so long as it embodies both these theses, is either incoherent or contradictory. This is a pressing problem if we seek to find in the sublime anything of philosophical who to the transcendence of the sublime object are with the problem of how we can have and describe an experience of it, as in the case of But who to the experience itself as transcendent must us what it is an experience if it is not to be a or us that it is an experience of a a a and so the first with the The of the is if we on the of the sublime object, our but if we instead the epistemological transcendence of a certain experience, we seem forced to make some claim about the object of that The theme of epistemological as Sircello it, evidence for the second theme of ontological with which it to be and this seems to imply in can be we this problem and about sublimity in some Sircello left a that we perhaps if we can find a way to the first theme so that it does not embody the For it is the general notion that sublime experience our cognitive has such interest in the it is the ontological has been at the of the I have Sircello proposed that we a of the of epistemological transcendence to any He that “epistemological transcendence may not any and may not directly concern at all, but only the limitations of our attempts to grasp it, whatever it is or is to (p. in we were about some kind of object of experience and in the of sublimity to Sircello his with a proposed of the of epistemological as any possible of of epistemological access to that is to grasp the and that in the moment of sublime experience we are perhaps made aware of (p. It is this I will to an in this for he was about any kind of claim about the nature of the most on earlier was to the of the sublime from a of an object or to a by the This seems to a on the of the experience, as Sircello had At first glance, Kant's work most to us out of the as and a more at the of the of the that if we any object of nature sublime … that we can is that the object is for the presentation of a sublimity which can be found in the for no sensible can the sublime And, more that was is, which can be an object of the is, on this to be called For all that remains the tradition in his of such as mountains in and in he from earlier in that any of these things are sublime objects of our in his of the sublime he to inaccessible objects that are and or that with them “the of he that these are sublime, for all that they the of sublimity in us we them starting point seems to reject Sircello's first of epistemological transcendence in of something the What is sublime for is not something in the of the that we directly a we have that is by certain experiences. Let us at this of sublimity more in these is not a of certain of and the charge we from them. interest is very much in epistemological the by which we our cognitive limitations and the of this the sublime, for which we experience with vast and objects, the of imagination cannot them as a in a single as reason This of our imagination with the of reason at first a in our experience of and a that is by “the of a of the of our powers of It is this of mind he “and not the object, that is to be called sublime seems to suggest in these in the moment, we become aware of a of us that transcends the has it, our to for the as a possible only because we a … sublimity only to the of human that the of imagination in these moments our of nature to a that both at its and at the of our of The sublime, is more than a it is an of a of that was sublime is the to which a of the mind of This is in the on the sublime, in which we experience the of nature without being in The of and our of as in with their this sense of leads us to in “a of of a that of our The sublime, up a in us is not but us to that nature has no over for all that it can our become aware in that moment that we may in a there is a of us that cannot be by the most of of or or in our experience of certain What is truly sublime, is not an object of it is an object of thought. In his at the end of the of the his of he reminds cannot be to the and the of the imagination in the of the sublime is due to its efforts to the of the to these But this this on the of the imagination us … to nature itself in its as a presentation of something become of something that nature and all our attempts at is by this that we are we only have to do with nature as a and that it must be as the presentation of a nature in itself which reason has the of the … is in by the experience of the sublime and is a of the which entirely the of The of the a sense of our cognitive limitations to the transcendence of for to mountains and may provide the for epistemological transcendence but they are not the objects of sublime The point of these is the of our own a that as has noted, by of the sensible of experience as being on its the as it is in … our as a provide the for our but the object of the sublime is The of Kant's has been in the of the sublime from objects of the to the of experience, but in so, has not as Sircello had for he has the transcendent object as what as truly sublime is our that of us that is inaccessible to experience but that we become aware of in moments of cognitive failure. In the of the of makes this ontological we a certain sublimity and to the who all his For there is no sublimity in in so as he is to the he is sublime in so as he is a of the and to it for this reason in the of to the of our own it is an of the transcendent as that sublime experience was at all be Kant's does not from the incoherence in Sircello's first of epistemological transcendence because is not that we have experience of a transcendent not incoherent, Kant's us that the theme of ontological transcendence through Sircello's second of the epistemological This that for any of of epistemological access to that is to grasp the can that this embodies an ontological it represents something as existing that is inaccessible to our cognitive but to which our experience of sublimity is For all that Sircello sought to the problem by on the of sublime experience, it seems that we cannot do this without some notion of the this notion is Kant's of for all that it, on the epistemological of our experience, with it an ontological claim about Sircello's second we incoherence only to find some or reality that we do not experience that we cannot but that we must as of which the sublime gives us a This of the does not in the theme of ontological as we with the case of it the all the more and all the more tantalizingly out of reach. does this us the of a theory of the I will this final to our and to make the that a theory of the sublime as it has been is not There are open us in of the we can accept Kant's as the only way to a coherent theory of the Sircello, we can say, his epistemological to earlier of contradiction and incoherence, if he was in his that this would any did not in his But to accept Kant's is possible only if we accept the the kind of cognitive we with the sublime, for rests on the theory of what cognitive that of the imagination being able to experience for the of The sublime object can only be a about our we this the sublime more than evidence a It may be the of an but it is no a truly aesthetic and has in aesthetic theory it may become of interest for This that any of the sublime we may seek to provide will be of an of the at we may be forced to that a theory of the sublime will be incoherent without at a to This may not be a on of sublimity may Kant's But I suggest that such an would be for the many aesthetic who have sought to the notion and claim it as their second is to Sircello's in the that a epistemological of the sublime is we can say, was to the cognitive to we can perhaps the notion of sublimity as a that from cognitive without his This is the seems to have He is critical of Kant's of the sublime, that it to be no more than a of his to by to … a that to in one way or any experience he we reject the of the a much more of the sublime The initial of the experience remains an of the of our imagination or in the of certain but the final of the than some transcendent truth about our that we but cannot directly from this experience of has described it this way: the … of our sense of the of our and its numerous and or the sense of the of our body from the of our and … is, the initial with This more of cognitive with an of our and we are in the of that are either so vast as to or so powerful that we cannot them. our limitations at these of cognitive and this with it a certain Burke and have both a an seems more in with the generally accepted notion of the sublime as a moment of being overwhelmed by a sense of things as incomprehensible, or more powerful than we but it of any transcendence this moment at a very notion of transcendence as the of our of our own But we can ask of these moments of cognitive must be to that the general of the and have up the that sublimity in objects of experience as being contradictory if they are objects and incoherent if they are we reject the moment of transcendence that the sublime is to as we reject the is the not left wide open for any that us or attention to our this not what Lyotard had in mind for powerful works of for more what of the cognitive I have in the of the or that truly What of the experience from such as or What of the I in and are these of not also sublime at any candidates for the kind of that a would of Kant's us to the initial for on the and of nature if we seek a epistemological of the sublime, must we not any to Kant's For these were not moments of cognitive but instead of our in the of we can but cannot On it seems that anything at all an experience of the sublime, that it our cognitive This is I have called his for it seems that the will be unique to the cognitive of a may have no with the for But this will not for there remains an object of experience that cognitive and any to describe or this object will to by This second is also for a we can does the of our cognitive limitations to in of a does it not instead to or to our of does not explain the of our should be with such the transcendence to an of is not in if we the I at the Lyotard, for does not explain in the of certain works of art leads me to or a for them instead of a that they have to to the remains on a epistemological to how cognitive a certain This is something that Sircello's Let me to our third I have a theory of the sublime that to the object of experience because of its I have also on a epistemological of cognitive because such an will some of the object of experience if it to the notion of the sublime in any Sircello's of the epistemological will not he had we about the sublime by attending to the experience itself but we the object from our if we with the methodological that Sircello's I have so about an of the sublime because there is no in the of this experience being or The sublime has been described as a experience without to one to this of it will not be to the an must have to an object of experience, that is What we might is a of the of the problem as Sircello first articulated the solution does not in a epistemological of the sublime, we may say, and sublime experience is not construed as a of cognitive failure. In we may that theorizing about the sublime has been all But what is sublime as we the is to be with at a that may out to this experience is not to the with we can suggest that it is perhaps a kind of that we have with some is, not only may we that the sublime is not a of cognitive but also that it has to do with at Consider his interest in our of and in a of human What he has we can is an of a of that is a to the But if we seek to describe the sublime as a of a certain we a either are and so are in the or are and cannot be at Let me this a On the one can be as the of we have for or the of we have or of certain and so are they can also be but if they are we also return to the same does the sublime capture in to some and not these and so and not however, we as and we are left with something that cannot be at do we provide a theory of this of beyond some kind of of the as they take no object and have to do with this we to the sources Sircello mined for his of the sublime in and What he called as that is or to be … of sublime which I take this of the to he in to about the sublime” that is and which the works of Burke and (p. 541). Sircello as of sublime discourse, For I would and or in the and at that felt there is of in an by and I would some to that of the make their in the The that can be is not the The is the is the of all from the in only the and from the same This is called The to all In both we have of sublime experience that do not to or that experience, that do not to the sublime at all, but instead to a the has or has such descriptions or may be they do for a theory of the this is what we are left it is so limited as to to in the way of a theory of the What may be most about this third sublime as a whether or that it the of about the sublime to The of a of objects are What does the sublime us about as What does sublime experience about the limitations of our access to the no in a or This is because if we accept this we must conclude that a theory of the sublime such as we have for is out of reach. Let me claims in I have that if we accept Sircello's of the problem with of the sublime, we are with the the notion of epistemological the theme that through attempts to the This theme seems to a second theme of ontological transcendence that us to ontological these are the sophisticated treatment to which the sublime is not to this The sublime, we have cannot be an object of experience, but can it be a of the cognitive of a it is to deal only with some or it to no theory In the one the sublime can be in the and in the it cannot be at

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