Encounters With The (Post) Sublime

[Philosophy Now]

Siobhan Lyons asks where we can find the sublime in the modern world.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/132/Encounters_With_The_Post_Sublime

[Nick_A]

There’s an old, well known story of a chicken farmer who found an eagle’s egg. He put it with his chickens and soon the egg hatched.

The young eagle grew up with all the other chickens and whatever they did, the eagle did too. He thought he was a chicken, just like them.
Since the chickens could only fly for a short distance, the eagle also learnt to fly a short distance.

He thought that was what he was supposed to do. So that was all that he thought he could do. As a consequence, that was all he was able to do.

One day the eagle saw a bird flying high above him. He was very impressed. “Who is that?” he asked the hens around him.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” the hens told him. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth, we are just chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died as a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

She begins with:

Imagine watching a storm at sea. Imagine standing on a towering, vertiginous mountain peak. ‘The sublime’ refers to an experience of magnificence that nearly, but not quite, invokes fear. Does the sublime still exist in the twenty-first century? Or have we become desensitised to the very concept in a post-nature, mediated world?

A concept widely discussed by philosophers from Burke to Kant, Schopenhauer to Hegel, in recent years its linguistic potency seems to have become diluted through misuse of the term, as ‘sublime’ has been used increasingly to refer to something that is simply beautiful. But the sublime, distinguished from beauty, carries with it more negative connotations of awe, terror, even the threat of death, often at the hands of a savage natural world. As the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, “compared to the pleasure of the beautiful, the pleasure of the sublime is (so to speak) negative… It involves a recoil, as if thinking came up against what precisely attracts it” (The Postmodern Condition, 1994, p.68). But as we continue to endlessly colonise the natural world, becoming more comfortable with the image and the spectacle, the sublime experience itself appears fragile.

She goes on to refer to Kant

Kant argues that the source of the sublime is never an object or a painting, say, but is our mental representation of what he calls the thing-in-itself (ding an sich, which is his name for the world as it exists beyond experience). So this experience can be known only in the intellect – that is, beyond pure sensation. “We express ourselves on the whole incorrectly if we call some object of nature sublime…” he writes: “We can say no more than that the object serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind; for what is properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of [abstract] reason” (p.129).

Then she refers to Slavoj Žižek

“In principle, the gap separating the phenomenal, empirical objects of experience from the Thing-in-itself is insurmountable – that is, no empirical object, no representation of it, can adequately present the Thing; but the Sublime is an object in which we can experience this very impossibility, this permanent failure of the representation to reach after the Thing. Thus, by means of the very failure of representation, we can have a presentiment of the true dimension of the Thing… This is also why an object evoking in us the feeling of Sublimity gives us simultaneous pleasure and displeasure: its gives us displeasure because of its inadequacy to the Thing-Idea, but precisely through this inadequacy it gives us pleasure by indicating the true, incomparable greatness of the Thing, surpassing every possible phenomenal, empirical experience… [It is] nature in its most chaotic, boundless, terrifying dimension which is best qualified to awaken in us the feeling of the Sublime: here, where the aesthetic imagination is strained to its utmost, where all finite determinations dissolve themselves, the failure appears at its purest”
(The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989, p.203).

She has introduced a concept that must be hated in the modern world requiring self serving imagination to support it. It insinuates the dreaded G word which cannot be tolerated as the world loses its capacity to open to the sublime. It has been my experience that only a few are drawn to experience the sublime or this thing in itself - the truth behind appearance which our attachments to appearance masks. Is it any wonder why we are eagles conditioned to become as chickens? Denying the natural attraction to the above must result in diminished human being oblivious of our connection to higher consciousness.

So the question for those still feeling that we are more than chickens, how do we keep the awakening ideas alive in the world regardless of how they are hated in which a person can experience the sublime and profit by the experience? She offers some suggestions. Do you have any.