Week 3: I do feel enlightened now, actually

I’d like to begin by admitting that this was the one week I missed class, so I was a little concerned I’d not know exactly what was going on in these readings. On the contrary, I’m happy to say not only did I understand them on the whole, but I found them to be brilliant, inspiring, and often enlightening (who would’ve guessed?). There was such a wide variety of views covered, and although I’d love to touch on everyone, I think I’ll have to stick with Kant and Burke. (Pope was a lot of fun with his theory in verse, and Hegel in Lectures on Fine Art reminded me a lot of the book I mentioned in my introduction post – Art & Fear.)

Kant

To begin, I’d like to thank this brilliant man for giving me faith in creating run-on sentences and not feeling bad about it in the slightest because I mean who doesn’t love a good long, long run-on sentence if it helps to enlighten us just a bit more and helps us understand things a bit better and who says they can’t be fun and who cares if they eventually get a little hard to follow?

Okay, all joking aside, Kant was a little hard to follow at times, but by the end I can say it was well worth it. At first, his definition of the beautiful confused me, even made me uncomfortable, but as I continued to read I started to feel better about it. His concept of the beautiful seemed almost zen to me, for he says it lacks “interest” and “emotion” in contrast to the sublime. It was a bit hard to wrap my mind around that, because there isn’t really any way to easily explain and comprehend what that is – but perhaps that is true of beauty. It reminded me quite a bit of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and his concept of Quality (uppercase Q). Pirsig wonders whether quality is objective or subjective, and finally concludes that the problem is that it should be considered in reverse, and that Quality is a state that determines both the objective and subjective. Kant also uses these terms a lot, and I suppose the beautiful could be seen as the same as Pirsig’s concept of Quality. And then Kant makes things even more interesting by explaining that what we judge as beautiful is something we demand be universally so for everyone. And thereby it is a subjective judgment that we view as objective. Does kind of sound like Quality.

(Kant's beautiful = Pirsig's Quality? I need to re-read this book now.)

I think a lot of what made me feel “uncomfortable” with the concept of the beautiful at first was the whole idea of it having nothing to do with interest or emotion, which wasn’t what I was expecting. But when Kant went on to describe his concept of the sublime I felt better, since I realized this was what I had had in mind. I do see why Kant separates these terms, for there is a real difference between the two and the way they make us feel. Sublime has interest and emotion attached, which is probably why it’s a little more, I guess you could say “special” (or so I’m inclined to think). An interesting idea Kant brought up in regards to the sublime is how things that are fearful create sublimity, which relates a lot to the ideas of…

Burke

I love the psychologist that Burke is. His observations on pleasure and pain seem pretty spot-on. Ultimately, his most interesting concept is probably his definition of the sublime, similar to Kant’s and yet taken one step further. While Kant says “the sight of [powerful and fearful things in nature] only becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level” (Kant 438), he sees this as only one aspect or source of the sublime. Burke, on the other hand, flat out states that “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible…is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Burke 459). It seems this is almost contradictory to what we’d normally assume, or at least how it was previously defined by Longinus, although he did touch on this aspect of it. Actually, this was something I noticed when I wrote my first analysis, how Longinus briefly discusses how the sublime can involve ambivalent emotions and negative emotions, but Burke really takes this further by saying it’s only about negative emotions, because these are the strongest emotions there are. That’s some really interesting psychology. I also think it’s interesting because I’ve noticed the concept of ambivalence come up a lot in my classes, especially from the writer’s perspective in my creative writing classes, as being one of the biggest keys to great art. And I think for me the sublime tends to be ambivalence.

In conclusion, it seems to me that what all the theorists agree on is the sublime is basically whatever is greatest. Ultimately, that can come from tons of different circumstances and emotions.