regarding the idea of the Sublime

First of all, let me say that my attitude toward Philsophy is rather, um, skewed because of a certain Doctor of Philosophy whom I dated for over a year and who first 1) personified the discipline of Philosophy for me and then proceeded to 2) totally destroy any interest I had in the field through his obtuse and pretentious babblings. I won’t get into a full-out character assassination, but suffice to say the dude ruined philosophical meanderings for me for quite a while. At the dinner table. In half hour lectures in which I was never able to get a word in….. gah. Anyway. Recently (re: today) I’ve been thinking about the notion of the Sublime, and what it has meant to different philosophers over different periods. Here’s a bit from Wikipedia:

The experience of the sublime involves a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might, and is similar to the experience of the tragic. The “tragic consciousness” is the capacity to gain an exalted state of consciousness from the realization of the unavoidable suffering destined for all men and that there are oppositions in life that can never be resolved, most notably that of the “forgiving generosity of deity” subsumed to “inexorable fate”.^[13]

The sublime, as a theme in aesthetics, was the founding move of the Modernist period. Attempting to replace the beautiful with the release of the perceiver from the constraints of the human condition, these ideas were amplified in critical theory through the work of Jean-François Lyotard^[14]. For Lyotard, the sublime’s significance is in the way it points to an aporia in human reason; it expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world.

 I studied some Lyotard in grad school in Critical Theory class and I remember being intrigued. Unfortunately that’s about all I remember. Thanks, booze, for offing that platoon of brain cells. I did write a paper on Kant’s theory of the Sublime for a class at UNO. It’s around somewhere unless it died on that hard drive that literally essploded. I like to refer to it as the Crash of 2004.

I’m much more of a Modernist than a Post Modernist, though I like both and don’t see a conflict in that.  There are aspects of both that I find distasteful, but the PoMos tend to annoy me more than the Moderns with their “nothing is sacred; everything is subjective”-ness. I think that there are some absolutes in this world. I don’t know what they are, and I think as mortals we by nature cannot understand immortality except perhaps through meditation (more on this in another post later on), and I think that unquantifiable things can still be real. Whatever “real” means… won’t go there. Anyway, so I’ve been thinking on the notion of the Sublime, and about Kant, and about that paper that may or may not have survived the Crash of ‘04. In it I remember this: Kant defined the Sublime, the aesthetic sort, as a transcendence of both the beautiful and the ugly, the grotesque and the gorgeous… mating the two, sort of like the feeling of catharsis…. but that’s another post in itself. Anyway, the best way I know to describe it is by quoting Bukowski:

“The note made me feel terrible and good at the same time, which was the way I felt most of the time anyhow.” -CB

And that’s exactly how I feel today. Terrible (physically), emotionally hamstrung and fragile and wobbly, but great, so great also at once. All I can do is sit back and laugh, and watch. Laugh at what life does, how it moves and contorts and surprises constantly. So happy to be alive and on this ride.