The Sublime, Revisited

Abstract

Throughout this book we have been trying to make sense of responses to music like the one recounted by the unnamed volunteer in the first epigraph to this chapter. I have described these as “strong emotional” and as “sublime” responses, thereby placing them in a philosophical tradition extending from Longinus to Kant and beyond. In doing so, I have used “sublime” in a way that, while not opposed to traditional usage, does not fully cohere with it either. Steering clear of value judgements and ontological commitments, I have remained neutral as to whether the musical works that seem to arouse such responses were themselves “really” sublime or not. In this chapter we face these more normative issues squarely. What is the relationship between the sublime and beauty, and between the sublime and artistic greatness? How are feelings of the sublime related to other possible types of responses to music? What is gained and what is lost in treating sublime responses as fundamentally emotional in nature?

In certain passages it evokes sobs and I feel totally crushed — my listening is fully concentrated, and the rest of the world disappears in a way, and I become merged in the music or the music in me, it fills me completely. I also get physical reactions…wet eyes, a breathing that gets sobbing in certain passages, a feeling of crying in my throat and chest. Trying to find words for the emotions themselves, I would like to use words as: crushed, shaken, tragedy, maybe death, absorption, but also tenderness, longing, desire (vain), a will to live, prayer. The whole experience also has the character of a total standstill, a kind of meditative rest, a last definite and absolute end, after which nothing else can follow.

Unnamed volunteer, report to the SEM Project

A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself. That which is admirable ever confounds our judgement, and eclipses that which is merely reasonable or agreeable. To believe or not is usually in our own power; but the Sublime, acting with an imperious and irresistible force, sways every reader whether he will or no.

Longinus, On the Sublime (i)

that which excites in us, without any reasoning about it, but in the mere apprehension of it, the feeling of the sublime may appear, as regards its form, to violate purpose in respect of the judgment, to be unsuited to our presentative faculty, and as it were to do violence to the imagination; and yet it is judged to be only the more sublime. (§23)

For just as we charge with want of taste the man who is indifferent when passing judgment upon an object of nature that we regard as beautiful, so we say of him who remains unmoved in the presence of that which we judge to be sublime: He has no feeling. (§29)

Kant, Critique of Judgement