Serious doubts have been raised about the coherence of theories of the sublime and the usefulness of the concept. By contrast, the sublime is increasingly studied as a key function in Kant's moral ...psychology and in his ethics. This article combines methodological conservatism, approaching the topic from within Kant's discussion of aesthetic judgment, with reconstruction of a conception of human agency that is tenable on Kantian grounds. I argue that a coherent theory of the sublime is possible and useful, and the experience of the sublime is significant for our self-conception as agents. However, the chief interest in the sublime is not moral.
Using the example of William Cecil Slingsby (1849–1929), one of the leading British alpinists active before 1914, this article reassesses late-Victorian and Edwardian mountaineering. It is ...particularly concerned with the motivations of mountaineers: what drew individuals such as Slingsby to the heights of Norway and elsewhere? Engaging with recent trends in scholarship, the article argues that interpretations which assign priority to aggressively masculine and imperialistic factors can be problematic. As Slingsby’s example shows, climbing was closely associated with a particular form of manliness throughout the period between the 1870s and the Great War, but the performance of this manliness involved embracing a cheerful domesticity as well as valorising robustly male derring-do and toughness in adversity. As for imperialist motivations, by the late nineteenth century these mattered less than might be thought, even to mountaineers who—like Slingsby—were ardent imperialists. A second and important aim of this article is to shed light on British cultural interactions with Norway. In his day, Slingsby was perhaps the best-known Englishman in Norway, and he was certainly one of the leading promoters of Anglo-Norwegian exchange in Britain. His mountaineering was importantly connected to the ethnic and philological ties he and other contemporaries (such as W.G. Collingwood) discerned between the two countries. Finally, the article also seeks to draw attention to Slingsby himself, a figure about whom almost nothing has been written by professional historians, despite his significance as a mountaineer and the existence of a considerable body of archival evidence relating to his life.
Working from Crèvecoeur's two accounts of visits to the Niagara peninsula, together with the two maps accompanying those narratives, this essay argues that Crèvecoeur never visited the area during ...the years he claims, 1785 and 1789. Although the narratives thus reflect the centuries-old convention of the traveler/explorer as liar, more significantly they reveal Crèvecoeur's substantial reworking of the received eighteenth-century response to the natural sublime. Both the 1785 Letter to his son and the longer retelling of his supposed 1789 visit inA Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New Yorkpredictably record an initial, expected reaction to the Falls as involving astonishment, horror, and fear of annihilation, but each subsequently carries the experiencing subject beyond this to a rather different conclusion. Anticipating the Romantic period's transformation of the terrifying sublime into a transcendent experience of the beautiful, both the Letter and the Journey transport the subject to a higher state of perception wherein “our feelings are harmonized into placid contemplation.”
Time and space are integral conditions of Poe's transcendent sublime. This article traces the way disparate temporal registers and uncanny enclosed spaces create dislocations that are also ...invitations—experiences of escape and liberation for the artist. Using “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I analyze a clash of spatiotemporal orders, showing these to be salient features of the tale and the Romantic experience. In its brevity and unity, “The Fall of the House of Usher” provides a concentrated example of the capacity of mutually exclusive registers to coexist—one linear, chronological, and rational; the other repetitive, recursive, and uncanny. The effect is “ecstatic” and formal, a matter of artistic stricture that is unique to the properties of the brief tale. This essay combines a formalist and Bakhtinian analyses of “Usher” against the broader subject of Poe's modern and Romantic sensibility. Poe utilized his period's changing experience of time as well as Romantic notions of captive and isolating space to produce a uniquely morbid yet liberating aesthetic. Stricture, tightness, and spiral—the unification of disparate, irreconcilable registers—are shown to be the formal mechanisms of conversion that produce transcendence for Roderick Usher and the shape of Poe's sublime.
ABSTRACT
The sublime has come under severe criticism in recent years. Jane Forsey, for instance, has argued that all theories of the sublime “rest on a mistake” (2007, 381). In her article, “The ...Pleasures of Contra‐purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human,” Katerina Deligiorgi () provides a rejoinder to Forsey. Deligiorgi argues—with the help of Kant—that a coherent theory of the sublime is possible, and she provides a sketch for such a theory. Deligiorgi makes good progress in the debate over the sublime. But here I raise two questions in relation to her account. The aim of these questions is to help clarify and augment her theory and thus extend the discussion about the tenability and relevance of the sublime. The first question is about the pleasure of the sublime. The pleasure, she claims, comes from our catching a glimpse of ourselves as agents in the world. But, I argue, Deligiorgi's conception of agency is insufficient for explaining the pleasure of sublimity, and this is because she does not take into account what I call (echoing Kant) the “ends of reason,” those ends that matter most to us as agents. The second question pertains to the phenomenology of the sublime. The worry here is that Deligiorgi overcomplicates the subject's experience and, in doing so, greatly restricts the scope of the sublime.
The literature on the venerable aesthetic category of the sublime often provides us with lists of sublime phenomena — mountains, storms, deserts, volcanoes, oceans, the starry sky, and so on. But it ...has long been recognized that what matters is the experience of such objects. We then find that one of the most consistent claims about this experience is that it involves an element of fear. Meanwhile, the recognition of the sublime as a category of aesthetic appreciation implies that attraction, admiration or pleasure is also present.
However, there is also a sense of fear and attraction when we watch car chases or fights. Neither of these is an occasion for the sublime so much as a visceral sort of excitement. As such, I will argue that it is not quite fear, but something that often manifests itself as fear that can be located in our experiences of the sublime.
Kant offers the most detailed and convincing account of the mathematical sublime in the history of aesthetics and justly takes into account the deep grounding of aesthetic appraisal and creativity in ...experience and cognition. Still, as it stands, his theory cannot adequately explain the aesthetic value of the majority of modern and contemporary artworks. I argue, then, that a critically upgraded version of Kant’s theory of the mathematical sublime ought to be developed to (i) reveal the aesthetic value of so-called anti-aesthetic art; (ii) substantiate the claim that the aesthetic value of a work of art does not exclusively depend on sensory properties of the work; (iii) explore the topical relevance of the (mathematical) sublime as a viable aesthetic concept in art theory; and (iv) assess more accurately the crucial relation between form and content, which is essential to art. To enable us to assess the value of modern and contemporary artworks adequately, I develop two new varieties of the sublime–namely, the mannerist sublime and the matterist sublime–and connect these with Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas. Furthermore, I show how these two varieties can be successfully employed to account for the aesthetic value of modern and contemporary artworks.
ABSTRACT
Tom Hanauer's thoughtful discussion of my article “The Pleasures of Contra‐purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human” (2014) puts pressure on two important issues concerning the ...affective phenomenology of the sublime. My aim in that article was to present an analysis of the sublime that does not suffer from the problems identified by Jane Forsey in “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” (2007). I argued that Kant's notion of reflective judgment can help with this task, because it allows us to capture the experience of failure that characterizes the sublime without committing us to ontologically transcendent items. In a significant departure from Kant, however, my account does not require references to our moral vocation to explain the pleasure we take in the sublime; the pleasure comes from getting the right measure of our agency. For Hanauer, trouble for my analysis comes both from the discursive presentation of the sublime, its focus on judgment, and from the removal of references to our moral vocation.
Empirical research indicates that beauty is in part a matter of prototype approximation. Some research suggests that unanticipated pattern recognition is important as well. This essay begins by ...briefly outlining an account of beauty based on these factors. It goes on to consider complications. Minor complications include the partial incompatibility of these accounts and the importance of differentiating judgments of beauty from aesthetic response. More serious issues include the relative neglect of literature in neurologically-based discussions of beauty, which tend to focus on music or visual art. There is also a relative neglect of emotion, beyond the reward system. Finally, there is the almost complete absence of the sublime. After considering these problems broadly, the essay turns to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, examining its treatment of beauty and sublimity. The aim of this section is not merely to illuminate Woolf's novel by reference to neuroscientific research. It is equally, perhaps more fully, to expand our neuroscientifically grounded account of aesthetic response by drawing on Woolf's novel. In Mrs. Dalloway, there are gestures toward prototypes and patterns in beauty. But the key features are clearly emotional. Specifically, the emotions at issue in feelings of beauty and sublimity appear to be primarily attachment, on the one hand, and a profound sense of isolation, on the other. Woolf's novel also points us toward other features of aesthetic experience, crucially including the emotion-sharing that is a key function of the production and circulation of art.
PDF
