|
||
 |
 |
The Concept of the Sublime in Eighteenth Century Philosophy
The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the eighteenth century in the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper (third earl of Shaftesbury) and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of Cooper's and Dennis' concepts of the sublime in his Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination,. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities. John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies, in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair." Shaftesbury had made the journey two years prior to Dennis but did not publish his comments until 1709 in the Moralists. His comments on the experience also reflected pleasure and repulsion, citing a "wasted mountain" that showed itself to the world as a "noble ruin", but his concept of the sublime in relation to beauty was one of degree rather than the sharp contradistinction that Dennis developed into a new form of literary criticism. Shaftesbury's writings reflect more of a regard for the awe of the infinity of space, where the sublime was not an aesthetic quality in opposition to beauty, but a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty. Joseph Addison made the "Grand Tour" in 1699 and commented in the Spectator , (1712) that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror". The significance of Addison's concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified; greatness, uncommonness, and beauty, "arise from visible objects" (sight rather than rhetoric). It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime", but uses terms that would be considered as absolutive superlatives, e.g."unbounded", "unlimited",as wellas "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess. Addison's notion of greatness was integral to the concept of the sublime. An art object could be beautiful but it could not rise to greatness. His work Pleasures of the Imagination,, as well as Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, (1744), and Edward Young's Night Thoughts, (1745), are generally considered as the starting points for Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime in Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, (1756). The significance of Burke's writings is that he was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, but antithetical to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction. Burke's concept of the sublime was a stark contrast to the classical notion of aesthetic quality in Plato's Philebus,, Ion,, and Symposium, , and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality. The eighteenth century was an active period for investigation of the sublime as an aesthetic quality with many writers making contributions, but Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher to incorporate aesthetic theory into a philosophic system in the Critique of Judgment,. In accordance with his critical method of the first two Critiques, Kant poses the question "How are judgments of taste possible?" In other words, how can we be certain that a judgment concerning aesthetic quality can be known to be universally true? For Kant, judgments of taste, or beauty, corresponded to the four primary divisions of his categories of the understanding, with the essential element for universalization as the "moment" of "relation" that presupposed a disinterested state where the satisfaction derived was independent of desire and interest. The application of the synthetic a priori, of the judgment of taste, requiring a transcendental deduction, validated the judgment as universal. This treatment of judgments of beauty is analogous to the arguments made in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason,. In those arguments, for example, the intuition of space is presupposed by the mind and not a result of its perceptions. If space is universally presupposed in perception, then the axioms of geometry must be true for everyone. Like space, time, and the categories, beauty belongs to the understanding. The sublime, on the other hand, was for Kant a feeling of satisfaction celebrating reason itself and our capacity as moral beings. The feeling is experienced when our imagination fails to comprehend the vastness of the infinite and we become aware of the ideas of reason and their representation of the totality of the universe, as well as those powers that operate in the universe which we do not grasp and are beyond our control. The feeling is at once existential in that we realize our own finitude, or smallness, but is universal in the realization of our own moral worth as an autonomous being belonging to the fraternity of mankind which shares a moral destiny through its capacity to apply the moral laws of practical reason. The judgments of the sublime arise from two principles of reason, the mathematical and the dynamic, which are both elements that have a common thread throughout Kant's writings on pure and practical reason. The sublime reflects the exaltation of reason and the nobility of the human spirit, whereas judgments of beauty belong to the "mere" understanding. In his discussion of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment,, Kant distinguishes between the sensible concept of measuring things by comparison, and an absolute which as a concept of reason defies comparison and is "great beyond every standard of the senses". It is the same concept of reason that Kant refers to in the Critique of Practical Reason, as a source of free, uncaused activity, and in the Critique of Pure Reason, as the Unconditioned which unifies and completes the conditioned knowledge of the understanding. The sublime is the satisfaction derived from the realization of this concept of reason and its aim at infinite totality. In all three Critiques, Kant had warned that these concepts of unity and the unconditioned are only ideas that regulate the search for empirical knowledge. Towards the end of the eighteenth century other philosophers would utilize Kant's aesthetic theory and his notion of the unconditioned to try and reconcile the knower and the known, re-integrating the sublime and beauty in an Absolute which embodied the idealism which Kant had spent his career intent on refuting. References Addison, Joseph. The Spectator,. Ed. Donald E. Bond. Oxford, 1965. Chet Staley
MORE RESOURCES:
Philosophy - Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
The Cosmic Eggs One of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World is reported (many years after all but the Great Pyramid had vanished) to be the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. This great goddess has what many archaeologists and historians have interpreted to be nearly a thousand breasts on her body. Viewing from Anothers Perspective Sets Humans Apart? Recently I discussed what sets humans apart from other animals and species. The basic question, which has been kicked around for centuries is what makes man so unique? So, different than the other species we see? Many immediately take their religious doctrine and use it to answer the question; they say things like "God made us in his image. Crop Circles and Critical Mass CROP CIRCLES:The Learning Channel (August 7, 2003) just had a show about crop circles. Here are two major points that no debunker will be able to explain in addition to the designs themselves. Darius and the US Postal Service DARIUS: - Coins bearing his visage are found in the Americas but we would never expect to see normal academic overviews mention this for public consideration. And I was not surprised when I read many other things about Aryans and supposed first Empires, as I read the following part of a far larger presentation. Slavers Claim To be Slaves - Taxation The United States of America was planned by elite members of secret societies. One of those elites was Francis Bacon whose utopian book actually used what was being done in Peru as a model. Nature of Visual Representation Nature is often called "red in tooth and claw", this means covered in blood, and comes from a fairy tale called Wolfking; it is a story of times past repute with epic adventures, this quote is very much like "survival of the fittest"!Okay, maybe that was a bit too oblique, however, there was a point to it, perhaps if I add that, an artist named Foucault once created a painting where he wrote the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" which is French for "This is not a pipe" under a very conformist graphic of a smoker's pipe.It was not a pipe, it was a picture of a pipe. DNA, Fiction and Society; How it Affects Thought A book called the Seven Daughters of Eve by Richard Sykes is worthy of a read and talks about what we have learned about the flow of human beings populations through DNA research. Thus it is safe to say that certain members of our species have developed differently and in different ways, meaning the brain also learns differently. Common Psi-sense Up until the start of the 20th Century there was a strong cadre of scientists like Michael Faraday and Sir William Crookes who knew integrating the humanities with hard sciences provided the greater insight or wisdom.The quantum physicists have taken it further in many ways but they were ridiculed by the 'know-nothing scientists' (Kaku) who had only a targeted or single disciplinary approach to knowledge. Future Shock Futurists like Alvin Toffler and his wife are important parts of any informed citizens reading. Naisbitt's forward to Marilyn Ferguson's The Aquarian Conspiracy was part of my introduction to other futurists. Some Ponderable Questions I am nothing if not inquisitive. Ask any person who knows me well. All That We Are... Are Labels Within the confines of the known universe, a madness is present that taints all of the knowledge which every human being has aquired within their life, and within the lives of others.Nothing is as it seems, and it only seems that way because the human being has labeled it as such. Conspiracy Theorist Rudyard Kipling on Masonry: "the closest thing to a religion that I shall ever know"."The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. Star-Fire Ceremony The Templar flag Columbus and da Gama traveled under was the dominant economic (and therefore if for no other reason) force in the three centuries before they set sail. Not just in Europe as we have shown, but in the entire world, these progeny of the Phoenician Brotherhood ended feudal socio-political strangleholds and opened the way for new possibilities. The Concept of the Sublime in Eighteenth Century Philosophy The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the eighteenth century in the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper (third earl of Shaftesbury) and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of Cooper's and Dennis' concepts of the sublime in his Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination,. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities. The Esoteric Mandate (Rothschilds too) The monopoly called usury given to a specific group of Jews has a long history including Templars with Papal Passports. You might think the Jews have been horrifically pursued with prejudice and there certainly are some Jews (That the Halakah or law of the elite Jews also is willing to abuse. Understanding Of I-Ching And Tai Chi In Relation To Our Lives Tai Chi, The Great Ultimate, was found earliest in the Book of Change, or otherwise known as I-Ching. Legend said that this scripture has written by the first emperor of the Zhou Dynasty - Zhou Wen Wang. Evolution and Exorcisms EVOLUTION: More surprising to me as I consider where my intellectual head-space has been on this issue, which is central to theological ideal; is the fact that I have become more of a creationist. Skeptics may say that God doesn't exist and I am inclined to agree he/she isn't within our purview to limit and say we know; HIM, or even what it is that really goes on, in the world about us. Guerrilla Mythbusting: 5 Snappy Rules For Spotting and Exposing Popular Nonsense College students tend to wax enthusiastic about the lessons they pick up in class. Curiously, this very admirable trait, a thirst for knowledge, has a downside to it. The Animal and the Human Recent DNA analyses have revealed that humans share a majority of our genetic makeup with other animals. Physically speaking, our similarities with our fellow beings far outweigh our differences. Einstein and Eirugena ALBERT EINSTEIN: - "I am satisfied with the Mysteries of life.""A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space.
|
| GZZT.org | philosophy home | site map | ||||||||||||
 |