THE SUBLIME IN ART AND NATURE

Unpublished lecture by Otto Martin Christensen, dr.art. (Ph.D.) otto.m.christensen@gmail.com www.faidros.no

I

The theories and discussions within the domain of philosophical aesthetics have mainly

focused on artefacts. This is hardly surprising. My initial question is whether the categories

developed within such a context can be applied to nature in a meaningful and fruitful way.

There is a danger that one presses natural objects into conceptual and theoretical schemes that

are made to fit objects that many people – among them a lot of philosophers – would claim

are substantially different, i.e. cultural objects; just like it seems that too many phenomena

after the linguistic turn have been studied from the point of view of what might be termed a

linguistic «imperialism», so that obviously non-verbal phenomena like music have been

equipped with a very language-like syntax, semantics and so forth, and studied semiotically

and semiologically as general systems of «signs», «symbols», «signals» and so on. Such

reflections could easily lead us – and perhaps should lead us – into a discussion of deep

metaphysical topics, like the relation between nature and culture, between the biological and

the psychological, between the extensional and the intensional, within the frames of the good,

old demarcation project that philosophers have been working on for ages. I do not, however,

intend to do dive very deep into metaphysics in this context, and will rather focus on a

specific concept, an aesthetic concept that has been and still is applied attributively both to art

works and nature. I will not, however, reveal the identity of the concept yet, but will as an

introduction sketch some of the challenges one may meet when one tries to apply concepts

and models from aesthetic theory to the domain of nature.

What is, for instance, a cultural landscape? Is it possible to discuss this question in a

manner that equals one of the ways philosophical aesthetics has discussed the question “what

is art?” If we try, we can, in my opinion, deal with the question from at least three angles: We

can discuss the ontological status of the phenomenon, we can try to define the concept, or we

can look for characteristic qualities of the object.

In all ontological discussions we necessarily have to use very general concepts and broad

theories, concepts and theories that are not tied to any particular domain, but still there are

certain themes that are specific for given ontological domains. One of the central themes

within the domain of art works, is the role of intentionality. This is a well-known and

important theme, tied to the more general question of what intentionality is as such. Intuition

tells me that there must be much broader margins for non-intentional properties in cultural

landscapes than in art works: Art works are infused with intentionality to a much higher

degree than cultural landscapes are. This seems almost trivial to say – but when dealing with

ontological issues, one often gets the creepy feeling that the margins between the principal

and the trivial are minimal indeed –, and I am not quite sure what the consequences of this

difference would be. If we stick to theory, a rather likely consequence would be that many of

the aesthetic discussions tied to the concept of intentionality would not be very yielding when

transferred to the domain of cultural landscapes – i.e. discussions on themes like authenticity,

originality, plagiarism, forgery, discussions on interpretation, and many (but certainly not all)

discussions on evaluation. This last theme – when set free from intentional presuppositions –

seems to be one converging point between the two domains.

Now to the problem of definition. Ontological questions are questions of thinghood, while

definitional questions may be questions of both thinghood and wordhood, so to speak –

questions de re and de dicto. Ontology deals with the basic nature of a phenomenon, while

definitions delimit the phenomenon or the term referring to the phenomenon from

neighbouring phenomena or terms. As you know, this was traditionally done by searching for

a set of necessary and sufficient properties, but this has in the wake of Wittgenstein’s analysis

of the concept of play in Philosophical Investigation been regarded as a futile undertaking by

many philosophers – among them Morris Weitz, whose article on “The Role of Theory in

Aesthetics” is basic reading for all students of philosophical aesthetics. Just like it is

impossible to enumerate all necessary and sufficient properties that together identify the

concept of play, and thus gives a shared identity to board-games, ball-games, card-games,

Olympic Games and so on, it is impossible to set forth an exhaustive set of properties

common to all arts. Instead of shared identity, we get “family resemblances”. This is the core

of the anti-essentialist argument we find in the Weitz-article. This line of argument might

equally well be applied to the theory of cultural landscapes, as it may, with its very general

outline, be used within all other domains. This means that vagueness – at least in the opinion

of many post-Wittgensteinian philosophers – is a property that sticks to language as such, and

that all attempts at cutting edge definitions are doomed to failure. This is, however, a rather

negative insight, which hardly enables us to say something very reasonable about the cultural

landscape, apart from stating that it is impossible to say exactly what it is and exactly what the

term “cultural landscape” means. But the insight may still be valuable for cultural landscape

theorists involved in defining the thing and the term, as a comforting therapy when one

gradually becomes aware of the limits of delimiting.

However, if we look at the reactions to Weitz’ article, it is perhaps possible to take a less

defensive and more constructive approach to the problem of definition. Thus, Maurice

Mandelbaum pointed out that Weitz based his critique of the definitional project on the

presupposition that all relevant properties that give identity to words and things must be

manifest features. But according to Mandelbaum, more than “look and listen” is required in

order to map a set of defining properties. When dealing with definitions, one has to take into

account non-exhibited properties, such as relational features, an example of which may be

that works of art have in common the feature of “having been created by someone for some

actual or possible audience”. George Dickie’s famous – or, as some would rather put it,

infamous – institutional theory, which is based on Mandelbaum’s suggestions, is linked with

the art world in such a close way that it hardly seems to be very useful for our purpose.

Mandelbaum’s more general indications, however, may yield interesting results when

followed up by theorists of the cultural landscape, even making it possible to open up for the

intentional to a much greater extent than what seemed to be the case a little while ago. But I

would stress that the consideration of non-exhibited properties not necessarily makes it easier

to enumerate all necessary and sufficient properties, and thus wrap words and things in all-

embracing definition-packets.

When it comes to the third approach mentioned above – determining the identity of

something by analysing specific qualities, properties, features – it represents a narrowing and

deepening of the focus compared to the definitional approach, where one usually takes into

account a set of properties, without analysing every single feature in detail. This third way

represents, in my opinion, a viable alternative in all contexts, if the aim is to determine the

identity of something – if one keeps in mind that single qualities hardly make up the complete

identity, and that the search for complete, clear-cut identities most likely will end up in dead

ends in most cases. The quality-approach does not have to be conducted in a purely analytical

way, and in the following I will try to map certain traits of the historical development of the

sublimity concept, since the term “sublime”, according to many philosophers, denotes a

quality that can be found both in nature and works of art. Through this mapping I hope to say

a few things that may be relevant to our understanding of the relation between art and nature,

and possibly to say something, at last indirectly, about the boarder-crossing domain of the

cultural landscape.

II

Sublimity is perhaps only second to beauty when it comes to qualities and concepts that

aestheticians have been focusing on. The last great wave of sublimity-talk was in the Eighties,

and we still live with its repercussions. At that time the wave was particularly strong in

France, where sublimity-talk was often mixed with postmodernity-talk, not the least in

Lyotard’s writings –, and the whole business was also part of the Kant-revival which they

experienced in France – as in most other countries – from that time onwards, with particular

stress on The Critique of Judgment. After the political Sixties and Seventies came the

aesthetical Eighties and Nineties. However, serious historical studies of the sublimity-concept

has mainly been conducted by Anglo-American researchers, with Samuel Monk’s book – The

Sublime, originally published way back in 1935 –, as an acknowledged classic. He directed

his attention towards 18th-Century thought in England, as the subtitle of his book indicates: A

Study of Critical Theories in XVII-Century England. Today, historical sublimity-talk is still

characterized by a focus on English thought in the 18th-Century and on Kant. I will widen the

focus a little bit, trying to make visible a couple of connections that, hopefully, are not

completely trivial.

But let us start in England, with a much-cited passage from The Spectator (issue 412),

where Addison writes as follows:

By greatness I do not only mean the bulk of any single object but the largeness of a whole view considered as one entire piece. Such are the prospects of an open champaign country, a vast uncultivated desert, of huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices, or a wide expanse of waters, where we are not struck with the novelty or beauty of the sight but with that rude kind of magnificence which appears in many of these stupendous works of nature. Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them.

Addison does not use the term “sublime”, but he clearly lists many of the characteristics that

other theorists mention when they write explicitly on the sublime later in the century. The two

most important traits are closely correlated: magnitude and astonishment, of which the first is

a trait of natural objects, and the second a trait of the human subject, confronted with objects

that exceed the capacity of imagination. Thus we get a double-faced concept of the sublime,

applied to certain kinds of natural objects and to the psychological response to those objects.

This becomes the mainstream concept of the sublime in England, as a sign of a novel view on

nature, implying a higher evaluation of uncultivated nature, and as a sign of a new kind of

sensibility, implying a higher evaluation of emotional intensity. In Burke’s Enquiry, however,

we can see two related shifts in the conceptual content: In the first place, Burke pays attention

to non-natural objects (like poetry) as well as to natural; and in the second place, his point of

departure – in spite of his analyses of sublimity in nature – seems to be that he to some extent

distrusts nature’s potential as a supplier of great emotions. Thus we can read as follows in the

opening section of his intriguing book:

Curiosity from its nature is a very active principle; it quickly runs over the greatest part of its objects, and soon exhausts the variety which is commonly to be met with in nature; (I,1).

This leads Burke to look for uncommon traits of nature, and he then goes through the same

kinds of natural phenomena that most other English 18th-Century theorists of the sublime

typically deal with. But his concept of the sublime is definitely more attached to art and

culture than the mainstream concept in England, and we get a concept where the arts – in

particular poetry – are set forth as more efficient causes of sublime ideas and feelings than

nature, as is indicated in the following passage:

[Words] seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural objects … ; yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as any of those, and sometimes a much greater than any of them; (V,1).

I will draw two lines from Burke: First a line back to Boileau and his French translation from

1674 of the old Greek treaty on the sublime, Peri hypsos, which for a long time was

incorrectly attributed to Longinus. Paradoxically, it was Boileau who made the treaty and the

concept fashionable, even if the first printed edition, based on a translation by Robortello,

dates back to 1554. Boileau’s translation was widely read, and many other translations

followed in its aftermath. What makes up the paradox is, of course, that a translation made by

a sworn classicist like Boileau through its reception helped to undermine the classicist ideals

of harmony and constraint, opening up for the limitless and unconstrained in relation to both

objects and the subject’s emotions. This is one of the many ironic gestures of history. But it

was not my intention to make this point – it just came naturally, so to speak, making my paper

less harmonious, but hardly more sublime for that reason. What I intended to do by drawing

the line back to Boileau, and further back to Peri hypsos, was in fact to point out that Burke in

certain parts of his Enquiry brings sublimity back to its original domain, i.e. language. For, as

you know, Peri hypsos was a treaty on rhetoric, more specifically on how to obtain effects of

astonishment and wonder with words. In a short while, I will go back to Boileau and establish

a line from his translation to certain developments within the German language area. But first

I will sketch the announced second line from Burke:

By making curiosity a primary principle in man, and pointing at how easily curiosity is

exhausted, Burke writes himself into a line of reflection that becomes very visible during the

18th Century, in the wake of Locke’s insistence on uneasiness as a dominant action-provoking

principle in man (Essay, Book 2, Chap. XXI). Not the least in French empiricism we can

observe how this line develops into a reflection on how man constantly chases new sensual

stimulations, in order to escape the threat of ennui and boredom. One of Locke’s French

followers, the abbot Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, well-known among aestheticians, writes as follows

in his famous Reflections on poetry and painting from 1719:

L’ennui qui suit bientôt l’inaction de l’âme, est un mal si douloureux pour l’homme, qu’il entreprend souvent les travaux les plus pénibles ... : ou l’âme se livre aux impressions que les objets extérieurs font sur elle; & c’est ce qu’on appelle sentir: ou bien elle s’entretient elle-même par des spéculations sur des matières, soit utiles, soit curieuses; & c’est ce qu’on appelle réfléchir et méditer. ... La première manière de s’occuper dont nous avons parlé, qui est celle de se livrer aux impressions que les objets étrangers font sur nous, est beaucoup plus facile. C’est l’unique ressource de la plûpart des hommes contre l’ennui. ... Les passions qui leur donnent les joies les plus vives, leur causent aussi des peines durables & duoloureuses; mais les hommes craignent encore plus l’ennui qui suit l’inaction, & ils trouvent dans le mouvement des affaires & dans l’yvresse des passions une émotion qui les tient occupés. (Réflexions critiques..., Tome I, Section I).

That the fear of ennui is man’s primary motivation for action is a theme that in France dates

back to Pascal, and, within another theoretical frame than Pascal’s, it becomes a constant

preoccupation among French 18th-century thinkers in the empiricist and sensualist vein, like

Du Bos, and not less in the writings of Condillac and Helvétius. The palliative the thinkers

following Du Bos usually recommend against l’ennui is the same prescribed by him in the

cited passage, i.e. vivid and continually novel external stimuli.

The focus on uncommon natural objects that we find in so many theories of the

sublime, may in this light primarily be seen as a search for strong mental effects, and the

chase for emotional gratification that is common to theorists of the sublime and theorists of

boredom, may, in the perspective of social history, be seen as an effort of the new, industrious

bourgeoisie in the direction of compensating for the tediousness and austerity of their

everyday working life. This compensation is searched both in nature and culture, and, as we

have seen, Burke tries both alternatives, even if he in the end seems to prefer culture, in

particular poetry.

If we follow this line further, we can see how some thinkers and writers takes an

outspoken hostile attitude to nature, praising human imagination and its workings, primarily

the arts, as the only redeeming force in a world that has become unbearably dull. Thus,

Baudelaire, the primary theorist of the ennui in the 19th Century, and at the same time the first

poet of the modern metropolis, often writes about nature in a very spiteful manner, for

instance in his little “Tribute to make-up”:

…la nature n’enseigne rien,… elle contraint l’homme à dormir, à boire, à manger, … C’est elle aussi que pousse l’homme à tuer son semblable, à le manger, à le séquestrer, à le torturer. … Le vertu, au contraire, est artificielle, surnaturelle, … Tout ce que je dis de la nature comme mauvaise conseillère en matière de morale, … peut être transporté dans l’ordre du beau. Je suis aussi conduit à regarder la parure comme un des signes de la noblesse primitive de l’âme humaine. … La mode doit donc être considérée comme un symptôme du gout de l’idéal surnageant dans le cerveau humain au-dessus de tout ce que la vie naturelle y accumule de grossier, de terrestre et d’immonde, comme une déformation sublime de la nature, … (Le peintre de la vie moderne, XI: ”Éloge du maquillage”).

Fashion as an example of a “sublime deformation of nature”! Here we have a concept of

sublimity that is very far removed from the mainstream concept in the 18th century. This anti-

natural attitude reaches one of its absolute peaks in the writings of one of Burke’s

compatriots, Oscar Wilde, in the very beginning of the 20th century. Many of you have

certainly read his Decay of Lying, where he lets his spokesman Vivian characterize nature in

the following terms:

My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. … When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.

Wilde does not explicitly mention sublimity, but it is obvious that his thoughts on these

matters are closely related to Baudelaire’s: Art in Wilde’s words is an attempt to teach nature

her proper, submissive place in relation to culture, while fashion – and art – in Baudelaire’s

vision represents a sublime deformation of nature. Wilde’s conclusion, put forward through

Vivian’s mouth, may almost be read as an anticipation of modern constructionist approaches:

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the selfconscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy. … It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates Art. The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings.

After having sketched this culturalist heritage of the sublimity concept in England and France,

I would like to go back to Boileau’s translation, as already announced, taking the French title

as my point of departure: Traité du Sublime, ou du Merveilleux dans le discours. My first

point is that this translation was widely read also in German areas, since no German

translation was published until 1737, my second point is that the most obvious equivalent in

German to le merveilleux is das Wunderbare, my third point is that this term became a focal

point in the debates between Gottsched and the two Swiss writers Bodmer and Breitinger in

the seventeen-thirties and early -forties, and my fourth point – as a corollary of the first three

– is that this debate to a large extent was a debate on sublimity, where das Wunderbare is

given a conceptual content that is closely related to the content of das Erhabene in Kant’s

third critique. Here is a brief sketch of my argument:

Both Gottsched – as a follower Wolff’s Leibnizian rationalism – and the Swiss

partners made extensive use of Leibniz’ concept of possible worlds, developed as a

justification of evil and a defense of God in his Theodicée. Thus, in Gottsched’s Critische

Dichtkunst, we can read:

Dem Dichter nun stehen alle mögliche Welten zu diensten. Er schränket seinen Witz also nicht in den Lauf der wirklich vorhandenen Natur ein. Seine Einbildungskraft führet ihn auch in das Reich der übrigen Möglichkeiten, die der itzigen Einrichtung nach für unnatürlich gehalten werden.

By this use of Lebniz’ concept of possible worlds, theological connotations are brought into a

poetological context: The poet uses his creative imagination to actualize some of the potential

worlds that exists in God’s infinite mind. This is a possible way to interpret both Gottsched

and the Swiss partners, even if they disagree upon how far away from actual life and nature

the poet should be allowed to move in his works (thus, Gottsched thinks that Milton moves

too far, while the Swiss are great admirers of the same poet). And this means that they also

have different margins for das Wunderbare, which is a term denoting what exceeds empirical

nature, pointing at the transcendent realm of possible worlds.

This leads us further to Kant, who in his construction of the sublime also points in the

direction of a transcendent realm, thereby building on the heritage from Gottsched, Bodmer

and Breitinger. However, it is obvious that Kant also was very well acquainted with the

English writings on the sublime, and he follows the English example by making nature the

sole domain of the sublime. Through a combination of these two influences, he constructs a

concept of sublimity that lets man – when confronted with overwhelming nature – meet both

the shortcomings of his imagination and the infinity that this shortcoming points towards, just

like the poet’s imagination, according to Gottsched, Bodmer and Breitinger, points towards

the infinity of possible worlds. In this connection, Kant gives the concept of Vernunftideen –

ideas of reason – a central function, as is shown in the following passage:

das eigentliche Erhabene kann in keiner sinnlichen Form enthalten sein, sondern trifft nur Ideen der Vernunft, welche, obgleich keine ihnen angemessene Darstellung möglich ist, eben durch diese Unangemessenheit, welche sich sinnlich Darstellen läßt, rege gemacht und ins Gemüt gerufen werden (KdU, §23).

[the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation.]

From this, we can see that the sublime, according to Kant, exists only at an intelligible,

suprasensible level: Strictly spoken, it consists in “ideas of reason” that cannot be given a

sensuous representation. Still, the subject sometimes catches a glimpse of the fact that there

exists a monstrous disproportion between the level of suprasensible ideas and the level of

sensibility, and it is then overwhelmed by feelings that exceed the intensity of all other kinds

of emotions (such as those harmonious feelings induced by a disinterested contemplation of

beauty): Through the size and extension of objects like mountains and deserts, and through its

sheer power and might, as demonstrated by phenomena like roaring storms and oceans, nature

manifests its sublimity – or better: its ability to induce suprasensible ideas and feelings of

sublimity – in two ways, coined the “mathematically” and the “dynamically” sublime,

respectively. Such objects and incidents bring forth ideas of infinite dimension and limitless

power, at the same time as the subject perceives that these ideas are not completely congruent

with the objects and incidents themselves: The subject feels that it possesses a faculty on a

suprasensible level, and that this faculty is capable of holding ideas that cannot be completely

reflected on an empirical level in nature, nor adequately represented by the subject’s own

imagination, regardless of all mental efforts. Thus, the subject is confronted with its own

limitations as a sensuous creature, but the recognition of the disproportion between the

suprasensible ideas and what is empirically accessible and sensuously representable, makes

the subject acknowledge the existence of a mental faculty that exceeds these limitations: The

subject meets infinity within itself. Many lines of Kant’s argument meet in the following

passage – one of the most fascinating found in his entire opus:

Die Stimmung des Gemüts zum Gefühl des Erhabenen erfordert eine Empfänglichkeit desselben für Ideen; denn eben in der Unangemessenheit der Natur zu den letzteren, mithin nur unter der Voraussetzung derselben, und der Anspannung der Einbildungskraft, die Natur als ein Schema für die letzteren zu behandeln, besteht das Abschreckende für die Sinnlichkeit, welches doch zugleich anziehend ist: weil es eine Gewalt ist, welche die Vernunft auf jene ausübt, nur um sie ihrem eigentlichen Gebiete (dem praktischen) angemessen zu erweitern und sie auf das Unendliche hinaussehen zu lassen, welches für jene ein Abgrund ist. (§29).

[The proper mental mood for a feeling of the sublime postulates the mind’s susceptibility for ideas, since it is precisely in the failure of nature to attain to these – and consequently only under presupposition of this susceptibility and of the straining of the imagination to use nature as a schema for ideas – that there is something forbidding to sensibility, but which, for all that, has an attraction for us, arising from the fact of its being a dominion which reason exercises over sensibility with a view to extending it to the requirements of its own realm (the practical) and letting it look out beyond itself into the infinite, which for it is an abyss].

In many ways, Kant’s third critique is a story of man’s dignity, in the mood of the treaties on

man written in the Renaissance. The following passage makes clear that his theory of

sublimity is not meant as praise to external nature, but to man himself – and, in the last resort

– to that infinite Being which is reflected in man’s interior:

Also ist die Erhabenheit in keinem Dinge der Natur, sondern nur in unserm Gemüthe enthalten, sofern wir der Natur in uns und dadurch auch der Natur (sofern sie auf uns einfließt) außer uns überlegen zu sein und bewußt werden können. Alles, was dieses Gefühl in uns erregt, wozu die Macht der Natur gehört, welche unsere Kräfte auffordert, heißt alsdann (obzwar uneigentlich) erhaben; und nur unter der Voraussetzung dieser Idee in uns und in Beziehung auf sie sind wir fähig, zur Idee der Erhabenheit desjenigen Wesens zu gelangen, welches nicht bloß durch seine Macht, die es in der Natur beweiset, innige Achtung in uns wirkt, sondern noch mehr durch das Vermögen, welches in uns gelegt ist, jene ohne Furcht zu beurtheilen und unsere Bestimmung als über dieselbe erhaben zu denken. (§28).

[Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind, in so far as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus also over nature without us (as exerting influence upon us). Everything that provokes this feeling in us, including the might of nature which challenges our strength, is then, though improperly, called sublime, and it is only under presupposition of this idea within us, and in relation to it, that we are capable of attaining to the idea of the sublimity of that Being which inspires deep respect in us, not by the mere display of its might in nature, but more by the faculty which is planted in us of estimating that might without fear, and of regarding our estate as exalted above it].

This is one of the places in Kant’s critiques where he most explicitly surrenders to the idea of

God’s existence, making Deity something more than a mere postulate of practical reason, as

he does in his second critique; and thus we get a sublimity concept with obvious theological

connotations, in the line of the concept of das Wunderbare we spotted in the German

language area earlier in the century, but with external nature as a point of departure, as in the

English sublimity concept, and not art works, as in the concept of das Wunderbare.

Even if the sublimity term gradually goes out of fashion, the German Romanticists, with

their strong religious longing, continue in the theological direction vaguely suggested by Kant

with his sublimity concept, searching for Divinity and infinity in outer and inner nature. But

at the same time, art is lifted up as a domain where the Divine can be searched and

redemption be found – redemption from modern, utilitarian and pedestrian civilization –, to

such a degree that the Germans often use the term Kunstreligion (“art-religion”) about certain

strains of romantic thought. The reason for the vanishing of the sublimity concept, is that

Kant’s successors criticizes his double aesthetics, i.e. his split between the beautiful and the

sublime, and primarily prefer to use a broader concept of beauty, including the elements of

Kant’s sublimity concept, among them its theological connotations.

And from here the way back and up to Baudelaire is shorter than one easily could imagine.

One thing is that his primary aesthetic concept is the beautiful – le beau –, even if he

sometimes talks about sublimity, as in the quoted passage; but the main point is that even for

Baudelaire, who many look upon as a secularized sex- and drug-addicted dandy, the search

for beauty is a search for the Divine. This has been a very much overlooked trait in

Baudelaire’s writings, probably because he has mainly been read within the frame of theories

of aesthetic modernism and social modernity, and because modernism and modernity often

are represented as secular phenomena as such. In the essay quoted above, Baudelaire thus

praises religion as an essential source in man’s necessary fight against the brute, repulsive and

immoral nature without and within, and he criticizes the 18th century-approach to nature for

having neglected the fact of original sin, and – because of this neglect – having praised nature

as essentially beautiful and virtuous:

La nature fut prise dans ce temps-là comme base, source et type de tout bien et de tout beau possibles. La négation du péché originel ne fut pas pour peu de chose dans l’aveuglément général de cette époque.

When Baudelaire stresses that art is a redemptive force for man, and when he links art with

the Divine, he follows the same thread of thought that the German romantics spun out of

Kant’s concept of the sublime; but as he completely eliminates nature as a source of beauty

and a place to search for Divinity and redemption, the resulting conception still becomes very

different from what we find in German Romanticism.

We could go on following the heritage of the sublimity concept in different contexts,

but the small samples I have presented should have given us sufficient indications of how

complicated the intermingling of different elements have been ever since Boileau brought

serious attention to the concept. I have in particular tried to focus on how the concept and its

heritage not only has to do with great nature and its psychological effects, but also with art, or

more broadly: cultural phenomena, and – not the least – with what doubtlessly is one the most

prominent parts of culture, regardless of what theorists of modernity may say: religion.

To sum up, I think we can make my presentation of the sublime and part of its heritage

help us identify at least four typical approaches to nature and culture, linking back to what I

earlier said about the compensating and redemptive forces of different kinds of natural and

cultural phenomena for modern man, living in a secularized, trivial, bureaucratic, capitalistic,

scientific – or rather: scientistic – and demystified world, deprived of other obvious

transcendental sources of meaning than cyberspace:

(1) Nature can looked upon simply as a refuge from the usual trot, giving bodily restoration

and deep emotional experiences, bringing man in harmony with himself and the magnificent

nature he is part of, a nature, however, which is not seen as a reflection of transcendent

powers. This approach is much in the line of the English mainstream concept of sublimity,

and it is probably the dominating approach among Norwegians. We have lots of small – and

these days: ever bigger – cottages far out in the wilderness, and we love to regard ourselves

not only as the most nature-loving, but also the most natural people in the world, almost as

direct descendants of Rousseau’s noble savage. As true Lutherans, those of us who still care

for religion search for God within, and not in external nature; but still, the worship of nature

seems to have become a substitute for religion among many people, for as true Lutherans,

most of us believe that we do not care much about religion after all, and then we need

something to fill in the vacant place of God and fulfill our secret religious longings. Many of

the ecological movements may probably be seen in this perspective – as protestant sects

acting on behalf of a hidden God, generously handing out intrinsic values here, there and

everywhere, since nature should be preserved as much as possible in what is regarded as its

original state, even when cultivated. Of course, I do not doubt that those who participate in

ecological movements may have good arguments and well-founded reasons for their opinions

and activities – in fact, I am likely to share many of their attitudes when it comes to practical

politics –; my intention is only to interpret the eco-phenomenon as a cultural manifestation,

more or less remotely linked with the theme of sublimity.

(2) Secondly, nature may, more in line with German thought and its preoccupation with

transcendent domains and powers, be looked upon as a Divine manifestation, where one

meets something more than one's own emotions, and where these may be intensified in the

meeting with a perceived infinity, not the least because the idea of infinity points in the

direction of Divinity and eternity, and lets man feel his own dignity. Kant's theory of the

sublime is a representative of this attutide, as indicated earlier. And his attitude may be seen

as a reflection of a dominant trait in Christianity, which – making man a manager of nature –

generally has stressed man’s grand dignity compared to other creatures. Because of the

levelling implied in Spinoza’s holist philosophy, his work was met with hostile reactions by

contemporary Christian authorities – even if he in no way eliminates Divinity as such. As you

know, Arne Naess, the founder of deep ecology, has made Spinoza one of his chief guides,

while speaking of totality rather than Divinity; and thus we once more see that the eco-

movements carry a religious heritage. I think it is an important challenge for the eco-

movement to acknowledge this heritage, and in so doing enabling itself to respect the tradition

that has enabled it to respect all other traditions.

(3) When it comes to art, we can identify the same kind of approaches as those we find in

relation to nature. Works of art were in the Renaissance often theoretically interpreted as

manifestations of a reflection of the Divine mind in the mind of the artistic genius, and this

conception was followed up in different theoretical contexts, also in the post-Leibnizian

debate between Gottsched, Bodmer and Breitinger, as we have seen. Baudelaire may in turn

be seen as a late representative of this kind of attitude, when he makes the artist God's own

partner, a partner who helps to make up for the flaws of a nature drenched in original sin, by

pointing at the beauty manifest in his art works and other artefacts.

(4) On the other hand, when God is removed from this picture, we get an ideology of art for

art's sake, which is represented by writers like Oscar Wilde, and that makes art a substitute for

religion, in the sense that art is thought of as having the potential to give meaning to human

life in much the same way as religion does – or rather: did –, and thus to compensate for the

regretted loss of meaning in modernity. How art often becomes a surrogate for religion can

also be seen in certain debates on post-modernity, in particular in Lyotard's work from the

early eighties, where he makes extensive use of a sublimity concept based on Kant. In an

article published in the French review Critique in 1982 he thus writes :

c'est dans l’esthétique du sublime que l'art moderne (y compris la littérature) trouve son ressort, et la logique des avant-gardes ses axiomes ... [les] avant-gardes picturales ... se consacrent à faire allusion à 1’imprésentable par des présentations visibles. ("Reponse ä la question: Qu'est-ce que le postmoderne?", Critique 38, p. 363f).

Here Lyotard makes an allusion to Kant's "ideas of reason", which, as we have seen, are

characterized by not being sensuously representable: As we remember from the passage cited

earlier, Kant says of such ideas that "keine ihnen angemessene Darstellung möglich ist" - that

it is impossible to give an adequate representation of ideas of reason, i.e. of "sublime" ideas,

since these reside in a faculty which is not attached to the empirical, but which constitites a

transcendent, suprasensible level in man's mind, and which in the last resort points towards a

transcendent, suprasensible being, i.e. towards Divinity. It is in the encounter with nature that

man becomes aware of his sublimity and infinity within, even if the ideas he then perceives

never can be fully represented. Lyotard transfers this theory to aesthetics proper, and lets art

rather than nature be the domain of sublimity, in particular the art of the avantguards, since,

the avantguard artists, according to him, try to hint at the non-representable by constantly

using new materials and inventing new modes of expression. Lyotard does not say anything

about what the non-representable substratum of this art might be, and in that respect, he is

more consequent than Kant, since all talk about the identity of the non-representable

necessarily would have to miss the target. But certainly the religious echos in Lyotard's

sublimity concept should not be too difficult to hear.

In many ways, the turn from politics to aesthetics in the eighties, represented by Lyotard,

implied hidden religious themes from the very beginning, as we can see in Lyotard's

conception of the sublime, and as not only those themes, but religious topics in general

became more explicit throughout the nineties, it is not farfetched to talk about a religious turn

in the nineties. As a result of this development, even intellectuals can nowadays talk about

their own religious longings without being too embarassed – like one of Italy's most

prominent contemporary philosophers, Gianni Vattimo, does in his book from 1996, Credere

de credere ("Believing to believe").

I am not quite sure about what this adds up to when it comes to cultural landscapes, since I

have dived deeper into certain metaphysical issues than I originally intended to do - but at

least I think that my sketch of the sublimity concept and its repercussions shows us that the

exhibited properties of objects for many people often point at realms underneath, and that

these realms are perceived as having the greatest importance.