Guest Post: “Yoong Bae at the Asian Art Museum” by Jennifer Huynh

For an assignment I went to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and looked at the works of an artist named Yoong Bae (1928–1992).  Bae was a Korean artist who was known for blending Korean artistic traditions with modern Western art while reflecting the calmness and harmony of someone at peace. The two artworks I was most interested by him were a painting called “Perseverance” and a silk screen print named “Meditation.” I thought that both of these works were rather unique and a bit dark. In “Perseverance” you can see that he used a lot of dark colors, mainly black and grey. There is a horse and people in this house. In the top part of the house, you can see a black figure that is supposed to represent a person and he is meditating inside of a box. There are also a variety of colors, kind of like a rainbow, coming out of the right side of the roof of the house.  In the lower part of the house, there are two people sitting on top of a horse. The person sitting in the front is holding a spear while the person behind is holding a huge leaf. Underneath the horse is someone meditating and there is a purple ghost-like figure that is hanging from the stomach of the horse upside down. Its head is facing the meditator who is sitting underneath the horse, looking as if it was going to kiss the meditator or suck their soul out. Finally, on the left side of the house is the word “perseverance” shown vertically. The other work of art, “Meditation,” (1991) is a silk screen print and it is a little more colorful than “Perseverance.” The background is orange with bits of red. In the bottom left corner is a black figure, most likely a person, meditating. Hovering over the person is a massive black bird with its head down and its beak almost touching the top of the person’s head. Interestingly, the bird takes up most of the space while the person is rather small and is put in this corner. Both of these works were part of a series Yoong Bae created called Meditation.   

            While looking at “Perseverance”, the first thing I noticed was the color. Dark colors, mostly black and grey, were used throughout the  painting except in the top right corner where there is a rainbow of colors coming out of the top right side of the home.  I would say that the painting  is more ugly than beautiful. The horse does not look like a regular horse. The body of the horse is very small compared to the front and its legs are really long. The figures representing people are all-black, some having shades of purple in them, and they have blue slits for eyes. To me, they looked like monsters or some kind of demon that was meant to scare or inflict harm. Upon first glance, I had felt a little terrified yet intrigued. As for “Meditation,” I thought this painting was beautiful. Again, the first thing I noticed was the color. It was a bit brighter than “Perseverance” seeing that the background was an orangish-goldish red color. Both the person and the bird are painted black but it does not seem as dark as the last painting. Being that the figures are black and the background is orangish-goldish red, they seem to complement one another.

            While looking at “Perseverance,” I thought that the person meditating in the top half of the home was the same person who was meditating in the lower part of the house, and the rainbow colors that were coming out represented him reaching some sort of enlightenment. I also thought that the purple ghost-like figure represented some sort of temptation or desire that wanted to prevent him from reaching enlightenment. In the description of the painting, it says that “The meditators and the horse riders are about to embark on their own spiritual journey. The iridescent lights and upside-down ghostly figure permeate the geometric house-like frame. On the left, the word “Perseverance” implies enduring hardships and the strenuous path to enlightenment.” This painting suggests that through self-accomplishment and the formation of artistic identity, you can achieve a path to enlightenment. It was a little hard to understand what was going on from the first glance but after looking at it for a couple more minutes; I began to understand what the painting was about or could have been about. As a work of art, I thought it was really good. I thought it was better than any similar works of art that I had experienced because this work  was unique and I actually enjoyed it. For an aesthetic experience, it wasn’t great but the painting had a really good meaning behind it. Emotions also had a somewhat big role in my experience of looking at this work because when I first looked at it, I had felt myself feeling a bit terrified yet awed at this painting that was quite different from what I usually saw such as portraits, landscapes, or things that were kitsch. After that initial feeling, I began to have feelings of curiosity, wanting to know as much as I can of the painting by analyzing it and reading the description.  The work of art taught me that in order to achieve in life, you must persevere through hardships and do what you can to reach your goal.

As I started to look at “Meditation” next, it was a whole lot easier to interpret what the painting was about. I thought that the person in the corner represents us humans and that, with our busy lives, sometimes we just have to relax. The person in the corner is meditating while the big, black bird that takes up most of the space in the painting represents all of the burdens or things in life that we see as important but are actually distractions. The big, black bird could also be something or someone that watches over us to make sure that we are safe. In the description of the work, it is said that “this strikingly powerful image evokes various interpretations and interesting questions such as is it a bird, a guardian figure, a divine being, or a symbolic creature that controls or world? Below the black figure, a man meditates, perhaps balancing resistance and submission.” I thought it was an excellent work of art. It gave me a good aesthetic experience, it was better than similar works I have experienced, and it was a valuable experience. Emotions also played a role for me while looking at this painting with feelings of curiosity, because I wanted to know why there was a big, black bird taking up most of the painting, and being able to relate to the meditator. How I interpreted the work of art was that while the man was meditating, you can see this big, black bird above him. I felt the bird represented our burdens and distractions in life. Since it was hovering over him and not actually touching him, it could not get to him because he was at peace while meditating. This painting taught me that sometimes in life, we have to take things easy and relax. An easy way to accomplish that would be to meditate.

Most of what I had just talked about with these works of art can relate to Edmund Burke’s ideas of the sublime. As I had explained in the beginning, the painting “Perseverance” left me feeling terrified yet awed. For Burke, there are two components of the sublime: delight and terror. I had felt terror from seeing mainly dark colors throughout the painting and the black figures that were represented as humans and yet looked nothing like humans and, to me, looked more like evil creatures. They even had blue slits for eyes. However, the awe I felt as well, which would be the delight aspect, was also from seeing these black figures as representation of humans. I’ve never really seen anyone portray humans in this way so I was fascinated. I found it to be interesting and weird to look at. According to Burke, there are also three aspects to his concept of the sublime. First, he suggests that sublimity evokes the infinite through obscurity, vagueness, and suggestion as opposed to clarity and precision[1]. This is true for both of the paintings because when you look at them, it’s up to you how you want to interpret them. There is not a clear cut answer. Second, he asserts that the sublimity lies not in its imagery but rather the emotions it evokes in the reader.. When looking at these two paintings, I felt myself feeling a variety of emotions and they felt real. Lastly, there is, according to Burke, always an element of pain, difficulty, and fear in the sublime aesthetic reaction.. This is true in this case as I had reacted with fear and difficulty upon seeing “Perseverance” for the first time.

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[1] Lokke, Kari Elise. 1982.” The Role of Sublimity in the Development of Modernist Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40 (4) (Summer): 421-9.

Iris Murdoch's revival of Plato's Aesthetics

An interesting oddity of Carolyn Korsmeyer's textbook Aesthetics: The Big Questions is that Iris Murdoch's "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concept" comes right after a selection from Plato's Republic II, III and X, which, although Murdoch considers herself a follower of Plato, is hardly mentioned in her selection.  However, this does give the Philosophy of Art teacher a chance to talk about views of Plato that are much more art-positive than those found in the above-mentioned selections.  The Murdoch selection is taken from a longer essay which itself is one of three essays in her book The Sovereignty of Good published in 1970.  One sees here why Murdoch decided to stop teaching philosophy even though she was a Fellow at Oxford from 1948-1963, a highly prestigious position. Her essay is very much an attack both on analytic and existentialist styles of philosophy.  I think she convinced herself she could do philosophy better as a novelist.    

Murdoch begins her discussion rather surprisingly with emphasis on the importance of metaphor (and images in general), not simply as decoration, but as contributing to the development of consciousness.  This is surprising because Plato does not mention metaphor positively and is generally negative about imagination, a closely related concept:  imagination exists at the lowest level in his epistemology, and such things as dream and shadows are at the lowest level of his metaphysics.  What interests Murdoch is that Plato uses metaphors, analogies and allegories as key points in his dialogues.   She shares with Stephen Pepper, who defended a similar view in his book World Hypotheses (although she shows no awareness of Pepper's work), the idea that the great philosophical systems play with such metaphors and images.  It is impossible to deal with philosophical concepts without using metaphors.  Indeed, metaphysical concepts themselves are deeply metaphorical.  I think this is essentially right and have argued so in “Metaphor and Metaphysics,” in Metaphor and Symbolic Activity (Special Issue on Metaphor and Philosophy) 10:3 (1995) 205-222, although at the time I wrote that paper I had not known or had forgotten that Murdoch had a similar position.  Of course, if you think that philosophy's business is to come up with science-like definitions of concepts then the idea that philosophical theories are essentially metaphors, often in disguise, is going to look misguided. Murdoch and I agree on this point.

Murdoch goes on to say that metaphors often have a "moral charge" which disappears if the analysis of such concepts reduces them to plainer language.  As mentioned earlier, she herself favors metaphors to be found in the writings of Plato.  However she then asserts two assumptions neither of which would have been shared by Plato, one that humans are naturally selfish and the other that there is no natural end for man (i.e. we humans have no purpose given to us by God or nature).  I do not think that man is any more naturally selfish than not, but I do agree with the second point, that we are, as she puts it "transient mortal creatures subject to necessity and chance"  - except that I wouldn't want that to exclude by that the possibility of our having free will.  So, in general Murdoch rejects the idea that there is a God in the traditional sense of the word. Along similar lines, she says that we are anxiety-ridden animals, which seems basically right, although this too needs qualification: there are certainly lots of days in which we are not particularly anxious, and anxiety seems absent in many children.

What is of particular interest in this essay is the way in which Murdoch posits Plato's idea of Beauty, mainly as presented in the Symposium, as an ideal that is both ethical and aesthetic.  What exactly is the relation between ethics and aesthetics?  Murdoch thinks that the path to morality is through unselfishness and that this, plus what she calls objectivity and realism, are connected with virtue.  Mainly she is interested in showing that something about the experience of beauty is more important than the kind of analysis of vocabulary that was typical of philosophy in her time. 

The idea of beauty comes in in a striking image.  She writes, "I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings...then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel.  In the moment everything is altered.  The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared." An experience of beauty in nature can set things right between a person and the world.  The self dissolves and,  "there is nothing now but kestrel."   We can "give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care."  Here Murdoch is in deliberate opposition to Kant whom she takes to believe that experiences of beauty are occasions "for exalted self-feeling."  This is perhaps unfair to Kant, although it is true that he sees the experience of the sublime in this way.   

Kant aside, the question is whether taking delight in the beauty of flowers and animals has something to do with virtue.  To answer this, Murdoch brings Plato in again, arguing that, for Plato, "beauty is the only spiritual thing which we love by instinct."  Much of her essay involves quite plausible speculation about the great metaphors or images of the cave, the line, the sun and the ladder of love found in Plato's Republic and Symposium.  I too have found these metaphors compelling.  It seems that Plato is saying that only with long philosophical training can we grasp the ineffable Good itself, and that when this happens we will be able to see the Good as it manifests itself in things, its symbol being the presence of beauty.  In addition, the solution to the main problems of philosophy are not going to be, despite all of the Platonic and Aristotelian efforts in this direction, a series of definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.  There would be controversy over this among Plato interpreters, but this is a place where I think Murdoch is perceptive:  the end of a Platonic dialogue is seldom an achieved definition, and the ultimate goal is to grasp the Good, which itself cannot be defined at all.  So grasping the Good is just a matter of being able to see the Good in things, or, to speak in other terms, to see things in their essential nature or in terms of the values they exemplify.  The point of the dialogues in a training in intellectual perception, not the wracking up of true definitions.

Murdoch then moves from beauty in nature to beauty in art.  She thinks of art as more edifying than nature in that it is a human product dealing with human affairs.  Further, the good artist has virtues as well as talents, namely he or she is "brave, truthful, patient, humble."  This is true, she thinks, for both the representational and the nonrepresentational arts.  However, the representational arts (painting and literature) are particularly apt since they "hold the mirror up to nature" and are concerned specifically with morality, showing how "the concept of virtue is tied up with the human condition."   For Murdoch, virtue is "pointless," meaning that it is not for any practical purpose (and human existence is pointless anyway, as mentioned above), but it is also supremely important.  The idea is summed up in the notion that "the enjoyment of art is a training in the love of virtue."  She tells us that "good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form." This, she contrasts with what she calls "fantasy art."  True art, she says "affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent."  So, it is opposed to "selfish obsession" and it "invigorates the soul."  As with nature, the perfection of form offered by art "invites unpossessive contemplation."  I cannot help think here of Freud's 1909 essay on poetry and daydreaming in which he understood all of art in terms of wish-fulfillment and therefore fantasy in exactly the way that Murdoch condemns it. Freud deliberately chose popular fiction as his paradigm of art, but of course Murdoch is not going to make that choice.  Murdoch even describes bad art in terms of selfish day-dreams which leads me to think that she was thinking specifically of that essay.  "Good art," instead, gives us an "objective vision."  One could say that it brings us out of the cave.  

Before moving on, I want to stress the idea that for Murdoch, objective vision is a matter both of noticing minute an random detail and finding unity and form.  One of my favorite quotes from her:  "Art shows us the only sense in which the permanent and incorruptible is compatible with the transient" and it reveals to us aspects of the world that we are ordinarily not able to see, although I think she is too optimistic in thinking that art "exhibits virtue in its true guise."  Thus, objective vision of the artist is going to be something like the vision of the good judge in Hume.  Hume's good judge has delicacy of taste which allows him to perceive minute aspects of a work of art and see how they contribute to its overall unity and form, whereas Murdoch's good artist does the same for what she observes. 

On the face of it, and from our current perspective, the idea that anyone seriously can speak of "objective vision" especially when it comes to moral concepts seems naive.  But what fascinates me is this image of the detail of the world brought together in form, and I want to discuss that a bit further.   Murdoch puts a lot of stress on the fact that Plato asked, in the Parmenides, whether there could be forms of hair and dirt, and "if there are then nature is redeemed into the arms of truthful vision."  Murdoch thinks that there are.  This would indicate more emphasis on particularity and on detail, i.e. on everyday life as opposed to a separate mathematics-like realm of Forms.  Similarly, in Plato, as we climb the ladder of love in the Symposium, we start with the perception of something beautiful and erotic, the shoulders of a boy, and end with awareness that beauty is everywhere, a great sea of beauty. 

Murdoch also thinks that the gap between art and morality can be bridged if we take seriously the Platonic idea of techne as intellectual disciplines that are also moral (and that need, on his view, to take the place of the imitative arts), and she then sees the techne of learning a language, in which there is a structure that commands respect and in which attention is rewarded by knowledge of reality, of something the exists independently of her own consciousness:  honesty and humility are required here to succeed, thus the connection to morality, studying being an "exercise in virtue."  It is doubtful however that any focus on techne is going to guarantee virtue, as the existence of evil scientists, mathematicians and linguists pretty much shows. In the end what I find valuable in Murdoch is the stress she places on metaphor and the way she reads Plato on art starting with the Symposium rather than the Republic, interpreting the sovereignty of the good in terms of beauty, which itself can be found in the details and unities of the world we experience.   

Guest post: "The Importance of Erotic Art" by Laki Nua

The Importance of Erotic Art

            Throughout my school career, I have always been programmed to see art as a higher pleasure; something that is understandable through vigorous education about the techniques and technicians who create such works. Though that might be true for some people, I have always found that artwork that stimulates me sexually is a much more enriching experience than art that only stimulates my rational thought; in other words, erotic art. The thrill of the primal urges, the aesthetic pleasure, and the complexity of the subject-matter all create a unique experience that cannot be mimicked. The importance of erotic art has been undermined throughout history however I still believe that it holds the same value as any other art genre.

            When thinking of erotic art, it is hard to pin down a definition for it. There is the typical definition which is anything with sexual subject matter, however I choose to go off of Hans Maes’ definition that he came up in his Stanford Encyclop­­­­edia of Philosophy article on "Erotic Art" which is, “…erotic art is art that is made with the intention to stimulate its target audience sexually, and that succeeds to some extent in doing so.”[1] This, I find, is a great definition to go off of and from there we go to some of the arguments for erotic art’s importance.

            One common theme among thinkers who disagree with erotic art’s importance is the fact that it entices us to want to own the subject. Let’s say we are looking at Edouard Manet’s Olympia (a painting of a nude woman lying on a bed as the main subject of the piece) and we say to ourselves, “Wow that woman is beautiful, I wish I could have her!” This is typically looked down upon and can be seen as a perverted male gaze. However Hans Maes argues that if 21^st century philosopher, Alexander Nehamas saw Olympia he would say that, “… it does what all great art should do: spark the audience’s desire.”[2] This is an interesting point, because what is the point of going to an art museum, or exhibit, if the art that is there doesn’t spark some type of desire in you? Your desire for the subject matter is what brings you to the museum in the first place.

An argument against this view on Olympia is also in Maes’ essay when he is talking about Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who was before Kant in his idea of disinterestedness. Maes paraphrases Shaftesbury’s tree argument, noting that someone may go from contemplating a tree to fantasizing about its tasty fruits: “Both activities are pleasurable, but the pleasures involved are very different…” Shaftesbury uses this to endorse the view that the lust after the fruit is based on the appetitive side we have in common with animals, or, as he likes to call them, “brutes.” He then goes on to say, “The contemplation of beauty, by contrast, is unique to us rational beings. That’s because beauty is exclusively an object of the mind.”[3] Here he is saying that any “brute” can let his appetitive side take over, but humans have the ability to rise above this and be able to contemplate without desire. Shaftesbury, however, thinks of this ability as more of a responsibility than a freedom, as though we should look down upon it. Just because we share something in common with animals does not mean that it is a bad thing or something to dismiss. Do not forget that if there weren’t that appetitive/sexual desire then procreation would not be possible. Procreation is also something we share with animals, however should we look down upon that as well?

Nietzsche, in response to these attacks on desire, believes that, “To believe… that in matters of beauty and art there is such a thing as ‘immaculate perception’ (an aesthetic regard pure of any desire), is simply do deceive oneself.”[4] This brings us to another interesting question: can you really separate the two (contemplation and desire) when it comes to beauty or art?

Contemplation is, typically, a requirement for art, however desire has always been put off to the side for its simplicity and primitiveness.  Plato believes otherwise, using the ancient Greek tradition of paederasty. “…In…[paederasty], Plato saw an opportunity not only for the boy but for the man as well… Such a man would want to understand what made the boy beautiful and sparked his desire. Desire for the boy, then, leads to a desire for understanding.”[5] In this quote, Plato explores the idea of desire being the catalyst for understanding. Why in the world would we ever want to contemplate something if we did not have some type of desire that sparked it in the first place? In Plato’s example, he uses the desire from the older man as the catalyst for his searching for why he finds the young boy so beautiful. This is the same feeling that I get when I see a beautiful woman in a painting. I seek to further understand what beauty is. Seeing erotic art from centuries of artists has shown me what societies’ definitions of beauty were and can say a lot about that society’s frame of mind, when looked into.

Another thought from Plato is that, “…all beautiful things draw us beyond themselves, leading us to recognize and love other, more precious beauties…”[6] What most philosophers get wrong, when they look at erotic art, is the idea that eroticism is a mindless act of perversion. Just as Shaftesbury stated above, the contemplation of beauty is something unique to humans, however desire is simply the first step to enjoying a painting. Philosophers, such as Kant and Shaftesbury, appear to think that once someone sees a sexually desirable subject in a painting, it automatically turns off any rationality that they might have.  However Peggy Zeglin Brand would have a problem with that. Brand created an efficient method to view paintings that involved both disinterested attention (DA) and interested attention (IA). This was what Brand named “toggling” and is what I believe is the answer to discovering the importance of erotic art.[7] I must agree with the opposition to erotic art when they say that art and beauty cannot be simply understood from the primal urges of sex, however I do think that using beauty as a springboard into contemplation is the best method. This is what separates simple pornography from erotic art. We watch pornography for the simulation of sex without much thought into it, however erotic art forces us to see the subject and figure out what it means or represents

Erotic art, for centuries, has been looked down upon as a lower art form. Because of sex’s controversies over the course of time, erotic art has been forced to be seen as an average man’s painting. The importance of erotic art, however, is much deeper than a simple sexual urge. Desire, self-reflection, contemplation and even social understanding are all outcomes of viewing erotic art, if you do not undermine the experience as Kant and Shaftesbury have. If you can allow yourself to be overcome by a painting instead of suppressing your desires you will awaken the ability to “toggle” between DA and IA in such a way that you can fully understand a painting. This is why I hold erotic art to such a high standard. It IS more than simple pornography: it is art in every sense of the word.

 Laki Nua, Philosophy student at San Jose State

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[1] Hans Maes, "Erotic Art," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007), 6

[6] ibid.

[7] Peggy Zeglin Brand, “Disinterestedness and Political Art” in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998) 168

Nietzsche, nausea and the birth of tragedy, Section 7

Nietzsche writes "For the rapture of the Dionysian stage with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed.  This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such with nausea:  an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states."  What exactly does he mean by Dionysian reality?   There seem to be at least three meanings for this term. First it refers to the extremely pessimistic vision of human reality offered by the demigod, Silenus.  Second, and perhaps more important, it represents the experience of oneness with nature associated with Dionysian ecstasy.  But here it probably means a third thing, the "reality" on stage in the Greek tragedy.  The paragraph begins with a reference to "the rapture of the Dionysian stage with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence."   The annihilation of ordinary bounds of existence would be a fictional one.  As we rapturously experience the events on stage it seems that the bounds of existence are broken down.

Why, however, would this be related to lethargy?  Here I feel the limits of not working with the German, but I will continue with Kaufman for now.  Writers on Nietzsche generally associate the lethargic element with the lethargy of Hamlet in the sense of his inability to act.  And the next paragraph indicates that Nietzsche is indeed thinking of Hamlet.  So somehow Hamlet represents for Nietzsche a recognition of "Dionysian truth," although there is a great distance between religious ecstasy of oneness and Hamlet's inability of act.  And we have the problem of explaining his idea that "all the personal experiences of the past" are somehow immersed in the lethargic element (immersed in the lethargy?).  So we have a rapture that certainly Hamlet is not experiencing at any time in Shakespeare's play and the lethargy which contains personal experiences of the past, as though the personal experiences themselves impede action, although one might think that rapture itself would be enough.  

The next sentence indicates that the world of everyday reality is very unlike the world of Dionysian reality: in fact, there is a chasm between them, and this chasm is doubled since it is a chasm of oblivion.  The chasm must be related closely to the oblivion, must be the oblivion of Dionysian oneness which is experienced, as we saw previously, with ecstasy.  Again, "Dionysian reality" is unclear: surely it means something related to truth of Silenus, but also something related to the rapture of Dionysian oneness, and is perhaps also related to what happens on stage in a Greek tragedy, the reality of that world.  

The next sentence puzzles again:  "But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such with nausea:  an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states."   What would the everyday reality re-enter conscious after, and how? Would it be after an experience of religious ecstasy as had by the Dionysian revelers or would it be after leaving the theater? In connection with the second, think of the theater-goer leaving the theater, no longer under the rapturous spell of the Dionysian.  But why would he or she then experience everyday reality with nausea? Why would he/she be in a pleasure-denying and will-negating mood?  For that matter, why would the person returning from a pre-art Dionysian religious festival experience this?  Well there would be a disappointment in discovering that the world of oneness presented on stage, or experienced in the religious orgy, disappears in the everyday world.  There is no redemption, and hence nausea. But also, clearly this is not a good end-point as far as Nietzsche is concerned.  Isn't art supposed to redeem us? And aren't we supposed to say yes to the will and to sensuous life? The state that follows leaving the theater, if this is it, cannot be considered good by Nietzsche.  In reading the Birth of Tragedy I constantly think of stages.  This appears to be yet another stage, hopefully leading to something higher.  

The next paragraph observes that the Dionysian man is like Hamlet in this respect.  Presumably the Dionysian man is the man who has experienced Dionysian ecstasy, has entered imaginatively the world presented on stage, and is now faced again with dull everyday reality.  I would think also that he is confronted once again with the wisdom of Silenus, the ever-presence of suffering, without the balm either of the Apollonian world of gods or the rapturous oneness associated with the Dionysian.  Now the claim is that both he and Hamlet have seen the essence of things, and that they have "gained knowledge" and that this causes nausea that inhibits action.  The knowledge could be the knowledge that Silenus is right or perhaps that suffering may be redeemed by the combination of the Apollonian and the Dionysian that great art provides.  (This interpretation is defeated below, however.) Nietzsche just does not make clear at this point which knowledge is being discussed.  Of course, if you accepted the wisdom of Silenus then this would kill action.  But then perhaps the knowledge that the only redemption is to be found in the experience of Greek tragedy or something very much like it could also kill action. Action in the world is then radically opposed to action on stage.  Those in the audience are passive spectators, but action is still present, i.e. on stage (except when Hamlet dithers.) 

Aristotle has us leaving the theater with a very different feeling: we have experienced something purgative, a catharsis of pity and fear. We will, he thinks, be able to act even more effectively in the world after seeing a Greek tragedy.  Plato, by yet another contrast, thought that you left the theater with bad habits, for example a tendency to weep when decisive, clear-eyed action is necessary. Plato might well agree that lethargy is a natural response to the theater experience. So is Nietzsche agreeing with Plato and disagreeing with Aristotle here?  This would not be the usual response for Nietzsche, who is mainly against Plato. 

The reason Nietzsche gives that nausea inhibits action is that "action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things." The world, as Hamlet sees, is "out of joint," but it would be ridiculous to try to set it right.  In fact, in order to act one must have "the veils of illusion," which knowledge of the eternal nature of things tears away.  Nietzsche is generally more positive about veils of illusion than most philosophers.  Perhaps the redemption of art is that after the death of God we need new illusions, and these are offered by art. In this view, art makes action possible, as we shall see.

This knowledge that eliminates the veils of illusion (belief in the gods, belief in Christianity, belief in the Forms) is "insight into the horrible truth."  This leads us back to the more simplistic reason for the lethargy, i.e. that the Dionysian man and Hamlet has seen the horrible truth of Silenus.  But the truth of Silenus is not the truth of Nietzsche.  Nietzsche is not telling us that it is best we die soon.  In fact, he seems quite admiring of the Greeks insofar as they invented their Gods to deal with this wisdom in a more cheerful way.  The message of Silenus is not given us either by the Greek invention of the Apollonian gods or by the ecstatic experience of the Dionysian rapture.  

Nietzsche continues:  "Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond."  Our puzzlement is compounded.  Is the problem that the experience of Dionysian ecstasy somehow negates any possibility of living under the gaze of the Apollonian gods?  Why cannot we have comfort in the possibility to return to Dionysian ecstasy, perhaps through going to more plays, perhaps by practicing Zen meditation, perhaps by becoming a genius artist?  Or is it that the passage into and out of the theater entails the death of the Greek gods?   I suspect that Nietzsche is telling us that neither the Apollonian nor the Dionysian will do alone.

To say that existence is negated is to say that our own existence seems meaningless, which would be true with the illumination of the "glittering reflection in the gods" and yet there is a solution, which is Greek tragedy itself.  Isn't it ironic that the nausea that Hamlet experiences is experienced by a figure on stage in our greatest post-Greek tragic drama?  So we see him experience nausea, lethargy, and then action that is itself deeply tragic.  But then also are we supposed to experience nausea when we leave the theater? 

Or is it something closer to catharsis?   "Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence."  Now he understands the wisdom of Silenus and is nauseated.  This is a strange sentence.  The participant becomes conscious of a truth he saw in the past?  When did he see it?  He sees the horror or absurdity of existence everywhere?  Why would this happen after coming out of the theater?  Nietzsche seems to be confusing the disease with the cure. It might be that the philosopher (Greek or modern) would become convinced by the suffering around him and then begin to believe that the gods (or God) does not exist, and then find horror and absurdity all around him, and yet surely he cannot stay there, and surely the Greek tragedy, and great art in general, is the only cure available for that, unless perhaps he can achieve the cure through an atheistic form of meditation.  

"Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as saving sorceress, expert at healing."  The whole story was supposed to be about what happens after leaving the theater.  But perhaps I misunderstood "Dionysian stage" which refers not to the theatrical stage but to a stage in a sequence of being!  Notice that Nietzsche does not even distinguish between Apollonian and Dionysian art here, and in fact Apollo is associated with the art of healing.  "She [art] alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror and absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.."  So it sounds as though we are told about the experience of entering the world of the theater, and this does seem to be something like catharsis:  catharsis transformed pity and fear into something with which we can live, the tragic theater transforms nausea similarly.  We come back out without the oppressive nausea.  

N. writes that "these are the sublime in the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic in the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity."  The sublime for Nietzsche is very unlike the sublime for Kant or for Burke.  It is subjectively oriented, as for Kant, but in this case what happens is that the consciousness of the world as absurd after the death of God is tamed, or made funny.  Where does this happen? In the theatrical experience:  "the satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art"  That chorus provides us with an "intermediary world" a world between the world of on stage and our own world, and it is through this that our feelings of nausea can be exhausted.  

Burke's Sublime as an aesthetic concept useful for radical environmentalism, unlike Kant's

Burke's concept of the sublime is necessarily connected with a certain concept of religion, a certain concept of politics and a certain concept of human flourishing.  What fascinates me first about Burke's conception of the sublime is the close connection he makes between it and the Book of Job as well as certain passages in the Psalms that describe God's power.  But why are the things described by God in his dialogue with Job considered to be sublime by Burke?  This is where things get interesting.  For Burke, only wild animals are sublime. Reading these things from the perspective of our own time, for example a time in which thousands of species are going extinct in the Amazon, we find here a delight in a fiercely independent wild animals.  It is, Burke (mis)quoting from the Bible, the horse who "swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage" that is sublime: it is the "gloomy forest" and the "howling wilderness" and the lions and tigers within that are sublime.  The useful horse is not sublime. Nothing natural employed for our benefit and pleasure are sublime. The things that are subject to our will are not sublime.  The contrast between Burke's concept of the sublime and that of Kant could not be greater here.  Kant believes that what is truly sublime is the recognition of our own power as against that of nature.  Burke is almost the opposite: it is recognition of nature's power as against our effort to control it.  I am reminded here of Stan Godlovitch's approach to the aesthetic of the natural environment.  It is said that Burke is misquoting the Bible, I suppose the King James version. Here are the King James passages Burke misquotes on the wild ass and the unicorn.  God here is speaking to Job and reminding him of what he cannot do, how powerless he is in relation to God.  However, I do not think that the differences between the original and Burke's version is important for our purpose since we are speaking now of Burke's concept of the sublime, not that of early Hebrew writers.  Here is the passage from Burke:

"The description of the wild ass, in Job, is worked up into no small sublimity, merely by insisting on his freedom, and his setting mankind at defiance; otherwise the description of such an animal could have had nothing noble in it. Who hath loosed (says he) the bands of the wild ass? whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the voice of the driver. The range of the mountains is his pasture. The magnificent description of the unicorn and of leviathan, in the same book, is full of the same heightening circumstances: Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee? canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? wilt thou trust him because his strength is great?—Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?—will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? In short, wheresoever we find strength, and in what light soever we look upon power we shall all along observe the sublime the concomitant of terror, and contempt the attendant on a strength that is subservient and innoxious."

The key is not that we have God telling Job how powerful He is but how the wild ass insists on his freedom and is defiant of mankind. The unicorn and the leviathan also are unwilling to serve mankind. (God seems to represent this intense anti-human big for animal freedom.) The point is that the Burkean concept of the sublime, unlike the Kantian one could be an aesthetic idea or ideal useful for the radical environmentalist.  The radical environmentalist could say that they want not merely to preserve the beauties of nature but even more the Burkean sublime qualities of nature.  In a sense Burke gives (by way of his misquotes from the Bible) wild animals a voice against human dominance. 

This may also lead us to a different approach to Burke on God as well. Regardless of what Burke himself may have believed, the 18th century reader of his book could easily have been a deist, someone who believes in God, but not of the Christian sort, but rather a God roughly equivalent to nature itself.  Burke stresses violent natural phenomena in reference to our awe of God, for example by way of a quote from the Psalms:  "The earth shook (says the psalmist) the heavens also dropped at the presence of the Lord."  He thinks it interesting that even when God is using his power for good in turning rock into standing water we still experience awe. This event of turning rock into water is much like the natural event of an erupting volcano, except for it being for our benefit and being miraculous.   If God were nature and nature God then we find that both the natural and the miraculous in nature are sublime.  Is there then an equivalence between the power of the untamed ass and the power of nature itself?  Burke sees our awe in God/Nature as the high point of the sublime, speaking of a ladder of the sublime:  "we have traced power through its several gradations into the highest of all, where our imagination is finally lost; and we find terror quite throughout the progress, its inseparable companion, and growing along with it, as far as we can possibly trace it."  Of course this is also coupled, for Burke, with delight, perhaps also increasing as does the terror, leading to a kind of ecstasy of the sublime. 

A second point is that all of this could be seen as a deception or illusion and nonetheless powerful.  Burke writes of infinity that it is "the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime" and yet "there are scarce any things which can become the objects of our senses that are really, and in their own nature infinite."  He then says, "But the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of many things, they seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if they were really so."  He goes on to discuss how the parts of some large object can continue indefinitely and hence can deceive us since the imagination has no check.  One does not have to be a Theist to benefit from Burke's idea of the sublime.

I also want to make one comment about Stonehenge and its rudeness.  This may in a way be connected to the previous comment.  It is not the disposition or ornament of Stonehenge that impresses us, says Burke.  It is our sense of the immense labor that it took to erect such a monument, and also the very rudeness of the stonework, which he believes to increase the sense of grandeur insofar as it "excludes the idea of art, and contrivance."  One could say that the sublime quality of Stonehenge is based, for Burke, on the very thing we find in the wild ass and the untamed unicorn: power, independence, artlessness.  Writing at roughly the same time as Rousseau, Burke is giving the name of an aesthetic quality, the sublime, itself associated ultimately with God and Nature and with "the infinite," to something totally other than what humanity produces with civilization.  This is not to deny that the creators of Stonehenge created a civilization of their own, but perhaps theirs was more respectful, even in awe of, the fierce independence of nature, than we post-Kantians.        

Kant's Mathematical Sublime

I am working now with the Pluhar translation of the Analytic of the Sublime from Kant's Critique of Judgment, found in Korsmeyer's textbook Aesthetics:  The Big Questions.  This is an extremely difficult bit of material, and it is abridged too!  My focus is on the sentence "If the human mind is nonetheless to be able even to think the given infinite without contradiction, it must have within itself a power that is supersensible, whose idea of a noumenon cannot be intuited but can yet be regarded as the substrate underlying what is mere appearance, namely, our intuition of the world." So, to start off, I do not think that the mathematical sublime has much to do with mathematics and actually has a lot to do with the aesthetics of nature as well as the aesthetic experience of great works of art.  It mainly is concerned with a particular kind of experience, one that is aptly illustrated by the example of the Egyptian pyramid.  Kant makes a distinction between apprehension and comprehension, and by the first he simply means the progressive adding of units or numbers.   Apprehension is associated with mathematics.  It is the second concept, comprehension, that is interesting, and it is illustrated by the example of the pyramid.  There is a sweet spot in our appreciation of an Egyptian pyramid: we cannot be too far away or we will not be able to appreciate the individual units of which it is made, but we cannot be too close as then we will not be able to include all of those units in one intuited whole  I like to think of this in relation to appreciation of another great work of art known for another kind of complexity, The Night Watch by Rembrandt.  The point is to try to hold the entire experience of such a work in one's mind, to contemplate it in such a way as to try to intuit it as a whole.  This might be a matter of how one positions oneself spatially before it, although perhaps more important is the amount of time one spends contemplating it: again, not too much or too little.  Although The Night Watch is not as enormous as an Egyptian pyramid, it is great in its complexity, and the number of its parts or appreciable aspects can be seen as, if not infinite, at least indeterminately large. Absolute magnitude, which, Kant believes, aesthetic experience of the sublime gives us, is just a matter of taking the whole thing with its indefinitely large number of appreciable parts in with one intuition. The problem with being too close to the pyramid is that, as one looks at the stones, the earlier parts of the experience are "extinguished."  So, again, this is a temporal as well as a spatial matter.  

Another factor in the experience of the mathematical sublime for Kant is that the judgment of the sublime only happens when the imagination is unable to exhibit the concept of the magnitude. This idea seems to conflict with the main theme of the preceding paragraph.  Our intuition is supposed to grasp the object as a whole, in comprehension, and yet our imagination is not up to the task.  I suspect that by "imagination" here, Kant is not referring to creative imagination but simply to apprehension (associative imagination), i.e. to the ability to put things together in an associative and relatively mechanical way.  So, when the imagination in this mechanical sense gives out, then we have an intuition that hooks us up to something grander.  I take it that this grander thing is much like Aristotle's notion of an organic whole.  Aristotle brings in his concept of the organic whole in the Poetics when he discusses beauty.  As with Kant, and perhaps Kant was thinking of Aristotle when discussing mathematical sublime, he sees magnitude as something valuable, although he associates it with beauty.  He also associates it with the mind's ability to intuit something as a whole. A play is more beautiful if it has magnitude and is still comprehensible, that is, can be apprehended as an organic whole.  

Kant goes on to argue that, unlike mathematics operating under the relatively mechanical concept of apprehension, when the mind listens to what he calls "reason" (Kant's notion of "reason" seems to bear little relation to what we mean by reason and does not for example have anything to do with logic or giving good reasons or arguing well) it demands "totality" even of magnitudes that we never can apprehend completely.  It "demands comprehension in one intuition" and it requires that we experience the infinite in its entirety.  But since the infinite is so large, everything else in relation to it is incredibly small, and to be able to think such an infinite one must go beyond imagination, which is based ultimately on sensation.  There is, here, no determinate relation between things expressible in terms of numbers.  

Again, this is not about mathematics but about the limits of mathematics, even of the mathematical concept of infinity. Although Kant never mentions the phrase, I find myself thinking of that old saying:  "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts." The experience of the sublime is a matter of experiencing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  Kant speaks of the limitations of ordinary intuitions in terms of following standards of sense.  So what is this mental power that goes beyond the standard of sense? It is the capacity to perceive totality.  Kant explains this in one fascinating sentence quoted above, and quoted again here:  "If the human mind is nonetheless to be able even to think the given infinite without contradiction, it must have within itself a power that is supersensible, whose idea of a noumenon cannot be intuited but can yet be regarded as the substrate underlying what is mere appearance, namely our intuition of the world."   The substrate of our world of appearance is the idea of a noumenon, of a world of things in themselves.  So the substrate that underlies appearance is the intuition of the world, i.e. the background thought that everything that happens happens in the world.  This ability is something that goes beyond mere sensation or imagination or even imagination combined with the understanding to point at the noumenal realm, i.e. the realm of God, immortality and the soul, which is to say the realm referred to by religion. 

Bear in mind that belief in God is not necessary for this all to work. Belief in an indeterminate whole that subsumes experience and that also makes wholes greater than the sums of their parts may be sufficient.

Mathematical estimation of magnitude, using numerical concepts only, would not allow us to think infinity in its entirety.  So transcending mere mathematical estimation is actually the solution to the problem that Kant originally posed at the beginning of the Critique of Judgment, how to find a bridge between the realm of experience and the noumenal  realm.  His answer is that the mind can expand itself beyond the barrier of sensible experience as long as it has a practical, i.e. a moral, aim, as opposed to one that is focused on cognition.  So nature is sublime insofar as the idea of infinity is combined with these its intuition.  The introduction of the idea of morality into this discussion seems gratuitous and must have to do with other projects and worries of Kant.

What we are describing is a view of the aesthetics of nature quite contrary to that of those contemporary aestheticians who believe that the proper appreciation of nature is cognitive in a science-like way. Such cognition is bound by its inability to, as Kant would put it, comprehend the infinite.  John Muir, as I have argued in earlier posts, manages to go beyond this relatively narrow perspective.  If Kant and Muir are right than the cyclical view of nature appreciation I have recently advocated may require an addendum, that although cycles are important, there are also high points in the appreciation of nature, or of anything great, even in art, and these occur when the intuition has within it the idea of totality or something infinite, and the attendant pleasure.

So, the relatively mechanical imagination can't truly judge the magnitude of an object, since a true judgment would be one that would give us the experience of the sublime.  So, when the imagination tries to comprehend in a way that surpasses its own ability to encompass all of this in an holistic intuition then we have the experience of the sublime, since at this point reason takes over, as it were, and with it the idea of something that underlies all of our experience, i.e. the intuition of ourselves as experiencing things within an entire world, i.e. the whole of nature.  Kant writes that the "basic measure of nature is the absolute whole of nature, which in the case of nature as appearance, is infinity comprehended."  

But then it turns out that this basic measure is contradictory, even on Kant's account.  There cannot be absolute totality of a progression that is endless.  Does Kant realize that he is deconstructing or at least undercutting himself here?  He seems to be implying that the experience of the sublime is based on an illusion or an illusory experience.  I have no problem with this Nietzschean idea, although it is surprising to find it in Kant.  So, when the imagination tries fruitlessly to comprehend the magnitude of some natural thing, this contradiction leads us to think of a supersensible substrate underlying both nature and our ability to think, one that we must judge as sublime.  (Why need we think this?) What is sublime in this case, Kant argues anthropocentrically, is not nature itself but the attunement within our minds when we judge such an object, the imagination then being referred to reason in such a way as to harmonize with its ideas, i.e. the indeterminate ideas of the noumenal realm.  Kant naively thinks this will be attuned with moral judgments and the influence of moral demands on feeling.  I can't follow him here.

So he finds true sublimity in the mind of the person who has this mental attunement of imagination and reason, and not in nature at all!  This leads him to the rather counter-intuitive claim that "we would not want to call sublime such things as shapeless mountain masses piled on one another in wild disarray." Rather, in this case, what is happening is that the mind "feels elevated in judgment of itself" because it can contemplate these things without thinking about their form.  Instead it can revel in its own imagination and its harmonious connection with reason in its attempt to arrive at noumenal things, although the imagination is inadequate to such ideas.  Some harmony!  Why would he even think that the experience of shapeless mountains and the sublime pleasure we get from this could be connected with the harmony of the defeated imagination in the face of reason's demand for unity even of the infinite? 

Now one important aspect of reason, on Kant's account, is that it demands unity.  So, as Kant puts it, "the idea of comprehending every appearance that may be given us in the intuition of a whole is an idea enjoined on us by a law of reason," which depends on the absolute whole as its measure, a measure that is valid for everyone. So the imagination, in trying to obey this law, fails.  The feeling for the sublime is respect for our vocation in the sense that what humans can do best is to have the feeling of the sublime that comes from this failure.   In having sublime experience we are respecting the idea of humanity in ourselves and not really the magnitude of the volcano or waterfall that we find sublime.  This is just what Kant calls a "subreption."  We realize then that the "rational vocation of our cognitive powers" is superior to the greatest power of sensibility, i.e. of our imagination even in conjunction with the understanding.  So we feel displeasure because our imagination fails in its estimate of magnitude, i.e. of infinity or absolute totality, which reason poses to it, and yet feel pleasure insofar as we realize that such inadequate power is at least harmonious with reason in trying to do this impossible thing.  (I see no reason why pleasure should win out over pain in this instance.)  So we estimate large objects in nature, for example the galaxy seen through the Milky Way, as small in relation to absolute totality, and more important, in relation to the ideas of reason, for example the idea of God. What arouses in us a feeling of our human vocation is in harmony with this law.      

What is valuable in all of this?  I am not sure.  I feel attracted to certain ideas, the idea that there is a high point in the aesthetics of nature, that this cannot be tied in any simple way with mathematical or scientific forms of cognition, that this also ties to our appreciation of works of art like not only the pyramid but more interestingly The Night Watch, that that background idea of the world as totality is somehow combined with or tied to our experience of things as wholes, and finally that there is something tragic and painful as well as pleasurable about the failure of our mechanical imagination to capture the sublime, which work needs the supplement of the creative imagination or what Kant calls "reason" or the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.