For Edmund Burke, the sublime in nature, that ―comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness‖ (Part II, §V), is that which causes delight through giving us an experience of pain or terror and a sense of our mortality at a distance. For Burke, it is capable of filling us not with the pleasure we experience at viewing something merely beautiful, but with an astonished, thrilling delight (2007, Part I §VII, XVIII, Part II §1-II) that reveals to us something of eternity and infinity (Part II, §IV). In wilderness, we can experience a power, grandeur, and terrified delight that has a more profound impact on us that the pleasures of the merely beautiful, and shows us possibilities and powers that far transcend our own experience and mortality. Whilst not a proponent of wilderness in its own right, Burke identifies it as a fundamental source of the sublime experience he analyses and celebrates. But the experience of wilderness need not be the experience merely of the tourist on the mountain, gazing off into the distance like Caspar David Friedrich‘s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Nor need it be that of the photographer or the postcard. In fact, what is most valued in the experience of wilderness is far more direct than Burke‘s safe vantage point could allow.
According to Julian Young, the sublime emerged as a significant aesthetic category towards the end of the 17th century, when a French translation of Longinus‘ essay ‗On the Sublime (Peri Hupsous) appeared and there was an increase in travel which came with emotionally charged reports of travellers experiences in nature. According to Young, the Loginus essay ―noted the capacity of certain works of art and nature to generate ‗ekstasis‘, to ‗transport [their audience] …out of themselves‘‖ (2005, pp.131-2). For Young, the first philosophically interesting account of the sublime appears in Kant. Kant‘s crucial insight, according to Young, is that in experiencing something that makes us recognize, in Kant‘s own words, ―‗our physical impotence, considered as beings of nature‘‘‘ ([CJ p. 101] in ibid, p.133), and therefore, as with Burke, our own mortality, we also experience something else:
a kind of ekstasis: we discover, as Kant calls it, a ‗‗supersensible‘‘ (CJ p. 96 et passim) side to our being, something that is ‗‗superior‘‘ to our natural self. In experiencing the sublime we transcend our everyday selves, undergo a kind of ‗‗out-of-body‘‘ experience. We are, says Kant (making use of the fact that the German word for the sublime, das Erhabene, literally means ‗‗the raised up‘‘), ‗‗raised up above fear of [the] … operations of nature‘‘ (CJ p. 103). (ibid, p.134)
There are two different kinds of experience of the sublime, for Kant, the mathematical and the dynamical, which Young explains: ―Examples of the former are the night sky, the
pyramids, the interior of St Peter‘s in Rome; of the latter, overhanging rock masses, hurricanes, waterfalls and black skies shot through with lightning flashes‖ (ibid, p.133). The mathematical sublime is the experience of being overwhelmed by a sense of infinite magnitude, and gives rise to an awareness of what is supersensible in the theoretical sense of the ideas of pure reason, whilst the dynamical sublime is the experience of being overwhelmed by nature‘s power, which gives rise to the thought of God‘s supersensible power to determine how things ought to be. For Kant, these feelings lead us to the thought of the moral ideas of God, Freedom and Immortality that allow us to establish the positive freedom of a moral will spontaneously positing a kingdom of universally rational ends. This allows us to be released from the false freedom of sensual determination, the reacting to and arbitrary choosing between sensory stimuli in an always already causally determined realm.
For Kant, explains Young, ―freedom is just the triumph of the moral will over sense‖ (ibid, p.135). However, argues Young, Kant‘s justification for equating the sublime with moral ideas was that ‗‗‗without development of moral ideas, that which we, prepared by culture, call sublime presents itself to the uneducated man merely as terrible‘‘‘ (in ibid). Young calls this ―both patronizing and absurd‖ (ibid), and then turns to Schopenhauer, who took up Kant‘s idea of the sublime, but rejected its equation with moral ideas. For Schopenhauer, the feeling of the sublime arises when the sensuous will to life is overcome by a contemplative consciousness of the eternal within one‘s own subjectivity in the face of an object that threatens one‘s life. As Young describes it,
The subject experiences a special feeling of ‗‗exaltation (Erhebung) beyond the known hostile relation of the … object‘‘ (WR I pp. 201–2). As in Kant‘s account, therefore, the key to the sublime is ekstasis. The joyful element is the ecstatic transcendence of everydayness, of embodied and mortal individuality. (ibid, p.136)
For Schopenhauer, this has two aspects: the recognition, as with Kant, of the feebleness of one‘s own mortal, natural being, faced with annihilation; and the fact that the subject also ―‗. . . feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing, who as the condition of every object, is the supporter of this whole world … [it] being only his representation‘‘‘ ([WR I p. 205] in ibid, p.136). Schopenhauer, argues Young, is far more explicit in describing the sublime in terms of an experience of being confronted with death, so what becomes clear is that ―Part of the feeling of the sublime is, as Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, a ‗running-forward (Vorlaufen)‘ into death‖ (ibid). The difference with Heidegger, however, is that for
Schopenhauer, the experience of mortality is shifted from one‘s individual sense of mortality to a general, encompassing sense of the mortality of human beings as such. Another crucial point of distinction between Schopenhauer‘s sublime and that of Kant and Burke for the current discussion is that, as Sandra Shapshay has pointed out, ―Schopenhauer disagrees with Kant‘s claim that we must ‗find ourselves in safety‘ and may not actually be in danger in an experience of the sublime‖ (2012, p.490). For Schopenhauer, the removal from danger need not be physical, but could in theory be simply a removal of consciousness from the sense of danger or fear associated with it in a more directly life-threatening situation. The direct experience of wilderness, beyond photographs and scenic lookouts, is a combination of both—the danger of death being at a safe distance, and the danger of death sometimes being all too close.
For Young, both Kant and Schopenhauer essentially make the same error in that instead of recognizing the experience of the sublime as an expansive ekstasis into being itself, beyond one‘s mere self, they reduce this beyond to nothing but the thought of an absolute, ideal, eternal and singular transcendental subject. In Schopenhauer, the joy associated with the sublime is directly associated with a sense of the overcoming of one‘s own death by realizing
the immortal within one‘s own subjectivity and mortality. Young agrees that this overcoming of death in the experience of the sublime is a profound thought in that it realizes that, in Schopenhauer‘s words, ―‗we are one with the world and are therefore not oppressed but exalted by its immensity‘ (WR I p. 205)‖ (ibid, p.140). This, according to Young, is ―the essential character of the epiphany of the sublime‖ (ibid, p.140). Young agrees with Freud that the experience of the sublime is an ―oceanic‖ one of expansion into being. For Young, a philosophy that accounts for such an experience whilst avoiding the solipsistic idealism of Kant and Schopenhauer is that of later Heidegger, for whom
Being, that is to say ‗‗nature‘‘, in a deep sense of the word, is multi-aspected, a ‗‗plenitude‘‘ of ‗‗facets‘‘ (PLT p. 124) nearly all of which are unknown to, indeed inconceivable by, us. So, like an iceberg, Being is, almost entirely concealed, almost entirely, as Heidegger puts it, ‗‗secret‘‘, a ‗‗mystery‘‘. And this makes it magical, awesome. In other words, ‗‗sublime‘‘. (ibid, p.141)
Young explains how the sublime finds its way into Heidegger‘s own terminology: ―Though Heidegger rarely uses the word ‗sublime‘, his most fundamental concern is with what he calls ‗the Ereignis‘, the experience of which he describes – using Longinus‘ word – as one of ekstasis; ‗‗transport and enchantment‘ (GA 65 p. 70)‖ (ibid, p.132). Heidegger‘s work on
concepts of nature, being, time and place and the impact of technology and instrumental reason will be of increasing importance throughout this thesis, and will be addressed in more detail in chapter Six.
According to Iris Murdoch, ―if we consider what may be actual experiences of sublime feelings, these feelings are not at all easy to interpret, and we may suspect them to have to do, in their real complexity, not only with morals but also with sex‖ (1959, p.49). For Murdoch, the sublime is an experience of the absence of self, but in the sense of a selflessness, compassion, and in a word—love. It is this that we find in works that shake us as Loginus suggested—in the works of Shakespeare and Tolstoy—an utter selflessness imaginative
absorption in the possibilities of the particularity of others, and in this is our freedom. For her, art and morals are of the same essence, love:
Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that
something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. What stuns us into a realization of our supersensible destiny is not, as Kant imagined, the formlessness of nature, but rather its unutterable particularity; and most particular and individual is the mind of man. . . . One may fail to see the individual because of Hegel‘s totality, because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or because we see each other exclusively as so determined. Or we may fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and
independence, making them into dream objects of our own. Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination. . . . The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. . . . Freedom is exercised in the
confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness. (ibid, pp.51-2)
For Murdoch, one of the things that gives rise to sublime love is what triggers the imagination in the ―unutterable particularity‖ of nature. We do not simply imaginatively expand oceanically into being, but into the irreducible particularity of each being or thing, as we encounter them, and find ourselves most confronted by the particularity of each other, and our freedom in the capacity to imagine what that is like. It is this encounter with the particular other, not the threat of death, that gives rise to the sublime, for Murdoch, and without this particularity and encounter and all its difficulties, there can be no ekstasis, no going beyond oneself, for we go beyond ourselves precisely into the imagining that is a response to the utter particularity of each other. Murdoch says that these feelings have to do with sex, but this is as much as she says on this matter, and from this we might infer that by this she implies that a significant part of the experience of the particularity of one another that is particularly intense
and involves the love and compassion in imagining how things are for this unutterably particular other is sex. But this is just one of the physical and emotional extremes, a potentially cathartic one, which the encounter with the other and the sublime possibilities of love entail, that ground it in the body and the problematic nature of desire and repulsion. But in this, there is not only freedom in the limitless capacity to imagine the particularity of the other, but also in the particularity of each from being ultimately categorizable. Unless this freedom is imagined, however, by compassionate, loving others, this particularity will not be freed in practice, because it will come up against others who do not allow for its particularity. All that is left is ―the war of all against all‖ when the particularity of how things are for others is not compassionately and continually further imagined. What is different about Murdoch‘s view of the sublime is that it is not merely something that arises as a response to natural or life-threatening phenomena at the geographic and spatial limits of civilized lives as in Burke, Kant and Schopehauer, but which is always already intrinsic to human existence and perception. In this way it is more compatible with the Heideggerian view presented by Julian Young, which is not just about certain kinds of environments or encounters, but being itself.
Already, in the art of the Lascaux cave, we have an expression of the kind of imagining Murdoch associates with the sublime, between humans and nature in the form of other species. Here it is expressed as a sympathetic magic that entails the possibility of such a self- sacrifice to the particular other as an erotic, ecstatic freedom, and in its image confronts us with something continuous, intrinsic and immediate in the ―unutterable particularity‖ expressed, as Benjamin remarked. At the same time, what is in this image comprehends the sense of the sublime in the face of peril and death as posited by Burke, Kant, Schopenhauer and Heidegger. In the ecstatic existential human experience of wildness in wilderness, all of this comes together. It is now time to explore some of the values the inheritors of the romantic tradition of the sublime have found in wilderness.
For Emerson, if we spend enough attentive time in wild nature, a ―wild delight‖ will ―run through us‖ (CPW, p.311). His conception of the beauty of wild nature is that essentially ―It
good‖(p.315)—that is, it is the external reflection of the soul in the divine design of the world, and the harmony perceivable in it is the means to attaining one‘s own natural grace. ―In the woods,‖ he says,
we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. (ibid)
For Emerson, the sensuous aesthetic power of wild nature here awakens a sense of union with its divine source. But what of this thrill of the sublime so attractive to Burke, Kant and Schopenhauer? Emerson never addresses this directly, but argues that ―The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition of nature, namely, Motion‖ (p.138). For Emerson, nature‘s secret is the hidden unity in the duality of rest and motion, of change and the identity, the unity of the universal. ―Even the corpse has its own beauty‖, he says (p.313). For him, the spiritual value of wild nature is ultimately only as a vehicle to be superseded and dominated for men to reach their highest physical and spiritual potential:
‗Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, mould, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. . . . The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation—a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God—he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.‘ (p.328)
This anthropocentric idealism was further articulated by Thoreau. When he says, ―in Wildness is the preservation of the world‖ (in Callicott & Nelson, 1998, p.37), he means, amongst other things, the possibilities for the building of a great civilization through its conquest. Thoreau romanticizes the idea of forging into the heart of the wilderness, and building a splendid new civilization there: ―Westward the star of empire takes its way,‖
(1982, p.308), he writes, and prophesies that the founders of this great new civilization will, like Romulus and Remus, suckled by the wolf, ―draw their nourishment and vigor from the same wild source,‖ as have ―the founders of every State that has risen to eminence‖ (p.309). He also romanticizes aspects of indigenous occupation of wild lands, specifically, how the Hottentots of Southwest Africa and some North American Indians ate the raw marrow of the koodoo antelope and Arctic reindeer respectively, arguing, ―Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,—as if we lived on the marrows of koodoos devoured raw‖ (ibid). The sublime as the thrilling terror of wild beasts and landscapes threatening human mortality now turns into the thrill in the primal power of surviving this wilderness by overcoming them, and thereby partaking in this wildness—in the thrill of the kill and the devouring of raw meat. At the same time, he encourages the encroachment of even farmland
into wilderness areas, writing ―the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural‖ (p.313). In extolling the virtue of wildness, Thoreau certainly does not promote unrestrained behaviour, but on the contrary, the Spartan discipline that grappling with nature and living off the land necessarily entails. In fact, at a certain point he came to a rather different view than the one romanticizing the eating of freshly killed raw marrow. Thoreau, in engaging more directly with wild nature than Emerson, embodied and reflected its contradictory aspects – flux and strife, on the one hand, and the eternal, perfect, ideal unity of all being at the heart of the impermanence of wild nature.
In Thoreau‘s celebration of wild nature and heroic individualism is a deep sense of spirituality. He writes of bathing in Walden Pond early each morning as a ―religious exercise,