Sublime
I came across the word SUBLIME in Mountains of The Mind by Robert Macfarlane and have been mulling it over a little so the time has come to do some research into the word.
"An intellectual doctrine was proposed which revolutionized both the perception of wild landscapes and contemporary attitudes towards fear. It is a doctrine which continues silently to dominate both our conception of bravery and fear. That influential doctrine was known as the Sublime (a word which means 'lofty' or 'elevated'), and it delighted in chaos, intensity, cataclysm, great size, irregularity [...]." (p.74).
Macfarlane picks out that Burke writes, "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling."
I find this very interesting. Macfarlane goes on saying "that these sublime sights caused terror, and terror was a passion which he wrote (Burke), 'always produces delight when it does not press too close'."
sublime
səˈblʌɪm/
adjective
- 1.of very great excellence or beauty.
"Mozart's sublime piano concertos"
synonyms: exalted, elevated, noble, lofty, awe-inspiring, awesome, majestic, magnificent, imposing, glorious, supreme; More
- 2.(of a person's attitude or behaviour) extreme or unparalleled.
"he had the sublime confidence of youth"
synonyms: supreme, total, complete, utter, consummate, extreme;
arrogant"the sublime confidence of youth"
verb
- 1.CHEMISTRY(of a solid substance) change directly into vapour when heated, typically forming a solid deposit again on cooling.
"the ice sublimed away, leaving the books dry and undamaged" - 2.archaicelevate to a high degree of moral or spiritual purity or excellence.
"let your thoughts be sublimed by the spirit of God"
A search of the Uni Library site took me to a book that I will pick up shortly called
Sublime: The Darkness and the Light: works from the Arts Councils Collection. As I can't access this right now I had a look on Amazon to find out a bit more. This collection is from 1999, "Sublime captures one of the most exciting moments in contemporary art with works like Gustav Metzger's disturbing floorpiece, To crawl into, and Lucia Nogueira's black kites and sentry-boxes. Other artists include Mathew Hale, Hannah Collins, Susan Hiller, Mona Hatoum, Anish Kapoor, and Mark Wallinger. Current British art is generally seen to be dominated by sophisticated, media-conscious sensibilities whose play with visual forms is ironic, street-wise and strategic. This book gives expression to human experiences that lie beyond the mundane realities of the everyday [...]."
Gustav Metzger's To Crawl Into from here
A review of this work from the Design Observer, Cambalest writes, "This series, “Historic Photographs,” uses the humble materials of Minimalism as tools to transform familiar images of destruction and terror into a kind of social sculpture, or even participatory art. The press release suggests that this process compels viewers to engage with the “inescapability and inevitability of evil.”
I am going to look into this a little more when I can get a hold of the book. I continued on to Credo to see what results would come up there. On their basic search I found a definition from the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy:
"a feeling brought about by objects that are infinite, vast (such as the heavens or the ocean), or overwhelmingly powerful (such as a raging torrent, huge mountains, or precipices). The infinite is (in Kant's terminology) the mathematically sublime, the others the dynamically sublime. Though the experience of the sublime is to an important extent unpleasant, it is also accompanied by a certain pleasure: we enjoy the feeling of being overwhelmed. On Kant's view, this pleasure results from an awareness that we have powers of reason that are not dependent on sensation, but that legislate over sense. The sublime thus displays both the limitations of sense experience (and hence our feeling of displeasure) and the power of our own mind (and hence the feeling of pleasure). The sublime was an especially important concept in the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reflection on it was stimulated by the appearance of a translation of Longinus's Perihypsous (“On the Sublime”) in 1674. The “postmodern sublime” has in addition emerged in late twentieth-century thought as a basis for raising questions about art. Whereas beauty is associated with that whose form can be apprehended, the sublime is associated with the formless, that which is “unpresentable” in sensation. Thus, it is connected with critiques of “the aesthetic” – understood as that which is sensuously present – as a way of understanding what is important about art. It has also been given a political reading, where the sublime connects with resistance to rule, and beauty connects with conservative acceptance of existing forms or structures of society."
1. Sublime (philosophy)
2. Aesthetics
I think I have stumbled on something with this word. it links to mountains, it links to emotion, it links to art. I chose aesthetics as I was thinking of the visuals of the mountains. Turns out aesthetics: "the branch of philosophy that is concerned with the nature of art and the criteria of artistic judgment. The classical conception of art as the imitation of nature was formulated by Plato and developed by Aristotle in his Poetics, while modern thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, F. W. Schelling, Benedetto Croce, and Ernst Cassirer have emphasized the creative and symbolic aspects of art." I never knew this.
Back to sublime. The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism says, "The sublime is negative pleasure resulting from the mind’s unsuccessful attempt to represent the infinite. [...] The sublime has been reinterpreted by postmodern theorists as representing an aporia, a gap, or an abyss which marks the inability of language to signify objective meaning. The term is particularly relevant to the studies of aesthetics, literary criticism, and philosophy."
Continued (parts of interest to me):
"For Kant, a judgment of beauty involved the free play of imagination and understanding. Such a judgment is necessarily subjective, because it lacks an objective concept or understanding, or content, but it is also universally communicable as a judgment of taste. That is, a judgment of taste or beauty demands that every rational observer recognize the object as beautiful, even if one cannot objectively prove that the object is beautiful in itself. In a judgment of the sublime, however, understanding disappears, and imagination engages in a desperate struggle with reason. The imagination is forced by reason to comprehend or present as a whole an infinite apprehension, which it cannot do, thus opening up “an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself” (Kant 1987:115).
The human mind is prompted by a natural event or phenomenon to reflect upon its own power to proceed to infinity in its apprehension, which exceeds or outstrips the ability of the understanding to comprehend this dizzying insight into infinity. This intuition is a disorienting, or negative insight, but for Kant human reason then enters the scene and demands a presentation of this infinite apprehension, which the imagination cannot do, and which wounds itself in the effort. The judgment of sublimity is thus a pleasure (albeit a negative one) because it evidences the power of reason to contain the awesome power of the imagination and direct it toward moral ends. The human being is ennobled by her or his ability to contemplate the raging force of nature from a safe distance, secure in the knowledge that even though nature can crush one, that person has achieved an intellectual moral sublimity which brute nature can never destroy.
[...]
Lyotard develops a reading of the sublime in his book, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. He claims that the Critique of Judgment represents the situation of reflection or critique in general, and claims that all knowledge is tautegorical (lacks objective content) and heuristic (submits to the pragmatic demand for being universally communicable). For Lyotard, every judgment of beauty, if taken to an extreme, threatens to become sublime. Additionally, the sublime represents a differend*, a conflict between reason and imagination which is not in principle resolvable at a higher level by a universal tribunal or power, but which can only be felt. Lyotard elaborates his concept of the differend in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute.
In his essay “Parergon,” Derrida claims that the Kantian sublime is anthropomorphic because it is framed by the measure of human knowing and thinking. This frame which reason places around the sublime event prevents it from ultimately piercing reason’s equanimity. Derrida contrasts the sublime with the colossal, which in Kant, according to Derrida, in its monstrosity belongs to neither nature nor culture but rather both in a disturbing and terrifying way.
The sublime in a postmodern sense, as monstrous, colossal, or abyss, bursts the bounds of reason which attempted to keep it in check. The sublime refers to the inability of human beings, in their language and thinking, to represent the infinite capacities of their own thinking or powers of reflection. It also refers to the tension which arises when people conceive, apprehend, or try to represent the unrepresentable."
This last part has caught my attention especially, "the inability of human beings, [...] to represent the infinite capacities of their own thinking or powers of reflection."
With that, I've decided to leave this for a moment and see what I can find image wise.
David Tress
As if by magic I have stumbled on some rather relevant work found here. David Tress' Chasing Sublime Light exhibition showcases his experience of travelling the mountainous landscapes of northern Britain.
I mean,it sort of remind me of some of the work I have done for this project so far. It has a use of layering, and they are very much personal responses. This does make me think that maybe I should focus on an area of the mountains that is personal to me such as the french or Italian Alps, something that has already crossed my mind. In doing this perhaps something a little more organic might come from me. I don't mind this series perpendicularly visually pleasing, in fact the image above is only of the only pieces from the series that I think is technically skillful, I do think that they have a very honest feel to them. They are an exploration and a reflection on what the artist discovered.
Image wise there wasn't much else that came up from searching with "sublime". So on a personal level, what has given me this feeling? This delight in chaos and terror. I think I feel attached to this word because I have felt this many times. It is something I look for. I have felt with on the edge of a cliff and I think this is what I must have a sense of before I try something new when I ski such as higher jumps. Then should I link it to my experience when skiing? Or is that adrenaline?
A sublime rush of adrenaline (from here).
*A wrong or injustice that arises because the discourse in which the wrong might be expressed does not exist. To put it another way, it is a wrong or injustice that arises because the prevailing or hegemonic discourse actively precludes the possibility of this wrong being expressed. To put it still another way, it is a wrong or injustice which cannot be proved to have been a wrong or injustice because the means of doing so has (also) been denied the victim. Jean-François Lyotard, who coined this term in his book Le Différend (1983), translated as The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988), took as his key exhibit Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, whose position is that the only person who can legitimately testify to the existence of gas chambers is somebody who actually died in one. One might also point to the situation of the detainees at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay who as suspects or persons of interest in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ are denied the right to a trial on the grounds that they are neither enemy combatants (which would be covered by the Geneva convention) nor on US soil (which would place them under jurisdiction of the US judiciary). The language, the opportunity, and the means to articulate any wrong that may have befallen them is also denied them. (Oxford Reference).
Mind Maps made from the information so far in an attempt to simplify my findings.
Bibliography
Audi, R. (ed.). (2015). Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (3rd). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cambalest, R. (2011). Assuming The Possition: The Art of Gustav Metzger. Retrieved from https://designobserver.com/feature/assuming-the-position-the-art-of-gustav-metzger/27558
Crockett, C., & CROCKETT, C. (2001). Sublime. In V. E. Taylor, & C. E. Winquist (Eds.), Encyclopedia of postmodernism. London, UK: Routledge. Retrieved from https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/routpostm/sublime/0?institutionId=129
Independent. (2010). Chasing Sublime Light- a preview. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/chasing-sublime-light-a-preview-2167830.html#gallery
Macfarlane, R. (2008). Mountains of The Mind (3rd). London: Granta Books.
Independent. (2010). Chasing Sublime Light- a preview. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/chasing-sublime-light-a-preview-2167830.html#gallery
Macfarlane, R. (2008). Mountains of The Mind (3rd). London: Granta Books.
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