Denying The Sublime

I am at a rock concert. The music is bad, but the whole spectacle is overwhelming. The speakers’ volume is extremely loud; lights drift all around; a huge crowd is very excited—many dance; many more take pictures with their phones, and all those other flares add to the sensory overstimulation. I find refuge from the violent assault, and from the terrible music, as I often do, in analyzing the situation.

Analysis divides a complex entity into some of its components. And here one component is that each spectator is faced by something of a much larger scale than herself: it takes place, with respect to her, in a gargantuan space and throws out enormous power. I called it “overwhelming”; the term of art, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for something of the sort was “sublime.” That was the time of the Grand Tours, and of a nature that could be majestic and forbidding, that could elicit fright but also, in a combination that was found puzzling, provide at the same time pleasure. Italy’s Orridi (horrific gorges and precipices) were especially popular; the one at Bellano on Lake Como is mentioned in Stendhal’s Voyages en Italie.1placeholder

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment,2placeholder Kant provides an explanation for the occurrence of such an ambiguous sentiment. In both the aspects cited above—size and power—(both mathematically and dynamically, in his terminology) a sublime experience makes us aware of how limited our capacities are:

“Nature is […] sublime in those of its appearances the intuition of which brings with them the idea of its infinity. Now the latter cannot happen except through the inadequacy of even the greatest effort of our imagination in the estimation of the magnitude of an object.” (138)

“Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc., make our capacity to resist into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power.” (144)

But, ultimately, according to him it is not nature doing it. Our empirical nature is humiliated by this kind of experience; what humiliates us, however, is our own rational nature, as it is reason within us that demands the very completeness our imagination cannot attain.

“Now the idea of the comprehension of every appearance that may be given to us into the intuition of a whole is one enjoined on us by a law of reason, which recognizes no other determinate measure, valid for everyone and inalterable, than the absolute whole. But our imagination, even in its greatest effort with regard to the comprehension of a given object in a whole of intuition (hence for the presentation of the idea of reason) that is demanded of it, demonstrates its limits and inadequacy, but at the same time its vocation for adequately realizing that idea as a law.” (140-141)

“[L]ikewise the irresistibility of […] [Nature’s] power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of it and a superiority over nature on which is grounded a self-preservation of quite another kind than that which can be threatened and endangered by nature outside us, whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion.” (145)

And that is where the mixture of opposite feelings comes from:

“The feeling of the sublime is thus a feeling of displeasure from the inadequacy of the imagination […] and a pleasure that is thereby aroused at the same time from the correspondence of this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest sensible faculty in comparison with ideas of reason, insofar as striving for them is nevertheless a law for us.” (141)

Seen in this light, the concert would be confronting the spectators with a sublime experience, as it indeed overwhelms them with a scale and a power that humiliates theirs (and the quality of the music is irrelevant). Some of them might be rising to the challenge, and feel their rational selves vindicated, but the great majority would be escaping it, denying the sublime, reducing the whole thing to their scale—by letting the energy it unleashes agitate their bodies in a dance, hence dissipating as much as possible of it, or, worse still, by taking pictures that could not possibly do justice to it but are midsize objects as they themselves are, hence can provide no threat nor arouse any fear.

The bit about taking pictures can be generalized. Say that you are alone, on a silent afternoon, facing the Orrido of Bellano. There are no crowds; there is no music; all there is is the horrific gorge. You can still deny the experience it offers by shooting away, and thus in effect exchanging the current possible sublime with the later, perfectly ordinary experience of reviewing your output, and also with the current, ordinary busyness of looking for good angles and good compositions—usefully forgetting in the process that the gadget you have in your hands makes taking good pictures a task for dummies.

But now let’s get the crowds back and, in pure analytical spirit, consider a case in which a crowd is responsible for the near-totality of the experience. I saw the Palio di Siena twice. Once I was conveniently arranged at a balcony overlooking the piazza and could follow in full comfort for hours all the different parades until the time came for the frantic race. The second time I was in the piazza itself, one of fifty thousand pressing on each other, and I was ten to twelve people deep from seeing anything at all. What I felt, when finally the race started and the partial, confused images I got did not permit to make any sense of it, was the power of all those people holding their breath for the ninety seconds it lasted, and then releasing it all at once. I am not sure it was sublime: Kant says that happens “as long as we find ourselves in safety” (144), contemplating what could annihilate us but this time will not—and I wouldn’t say that I felt safe where I was. It gave me a sense, however, of how social realities, not just mountains or waterfalls, can have that kind of effect on us. One that, of course, if we are safe, preferably at a safe distance, we could colonize, and deny, by taking pictures of them.

But here things get complicated, as my analysis comes to suggest that what Kant is describing might be a species of a genus, and that not all the other species are as edifying as the one he has chosen to focus on.

I am not sure that what I am thinking of applies to purely natural environments; but, within social ones, the duality between my individual, empirical being and a larger reality that could easily obliterate me but with respect to which I could also adopt a superior perspective, deriving a higher nobility from it—that duality is a fairly common affair. Say that I am at the stadium, among eighty thousand fans yelling their support for a team as well as insults and threats to the supporters of the opposite team. I am aware of how small I am, and of how easily I could get crushed if the confrontation I witness got real and heated. But I can also (as long as I feel safe enough) rise from the ashes of my smallness to identify with the totemic figure of my team, and from that high seat find that it is the me-who-is-part-of-the-team who is humiliating the me-who-still-worries-about-lowly-matters, and derive great pleasure from that, to go together with whatever anxiety the empirical me felt.

In soccer-crazy countries like my native Italy, the threats I alluded to are often carried out; and that is enough to give one pause when considering the kind of identification I just depicted. But there are much worse species to the genus. Take a social display of power like the rallies carefully engineered and recorded, courtesy of Leni Riefenstahl, by the Nazis, and work out their details. Any individual spectator, or even participant, can, in the relative safety of a triumphant, unopposed regime, feel his empirical nature reduced to nothing in the face of this gigantic machine, his capacities inadequate to capture its extension and force, and yet… he can also feel his social identity, his nature as a German and as a Nazi, exalted precisely by the ease with which it could quash little things like his own empirical self.

In these politically correct days, I am sure many would object to applying the word “sublime” to Nazi rallies or other similarly squalid performances. But using different words does not change matters, and does not resolve the problem. What Kant says is well meant. That I am mortified by the perception of the Milky Way can definitely be redeemed when I think that, other than for that reason which I share, the Milky Way would just be a bunch of photons wandering and aggregating in the void; and, if I take it that reason is what I am, then in recognizing the sublimity of the Milky Way I am in fact recognizing the sublimity of (my) reason. Fine and good. But there are controversial, even evil, analogous structures of identification; and I must be careful that, in licensing and even extolling the best one, I don’t open the gates to those others. Together with analysis, I must exercise judgment and be sure that the higher identifications I promote do not involve me in evil. That it is indeed reason I am identifying with.

My awareness returns to the concert. I realize now that there is competition going on, between the production attempting to drown the audience in a sea of sound and light on the one hand, and the audience on the other, or some of it, attempting to bring the production down to a manageable size or to use it for its own personal relief of tension. And it looks as if that kind of competition is just right: we cannot just fall in with every totem. If only the music were not so bad.