That the sublime came to be thus characterized by the experience of transcendence and ineffability is observed by Rudolf Otto in his seminal 1913 study, The Idea of the Holy, in which he makes the perhaps more Romantic107 association between the sublime and the numinous:
While the element of “dread” is gradually overborne, the connexion of “the sublime” and “the holy” becomes firmly established as a legitimate schematization and is carried on into the highest forms of religious consciousness—a proof that there exists a hidden kinship between the numinous and the sublime which is something more than accidental analogy, and to which Kant’s Critique of Judgement bears distant witness.108
Recalling our 16th-century mystics, the “mysterium tremendum” for Otto, that overpowering absolute before which we are sorely aware of our own creatureliness, “may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy . . . It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”109
Burke is of further relevance to our study here in his locating the sublime in states of emptiness and privation, in darkness, solitude and silence: “to make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary . . . Everyone will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread.”110 This echoes the sense of spiritual loss initially described by John of the Cross, who spoke of the “obscurity” of faith and its “dark night,” which seems to do away with all discursive knowledge, acts, ideas and images. Such obscurity of faith for St. John impresses on the mind that the intellect can neither, through its own power, fully acquire the kind of knowledge that faith affords nor fully understand the content of faith once revealed. “To reach union with the wisdom of God, he writes in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, “a person must advance by unknowing rather than by knowing.”111 And again:
Other knowledge is acquired by the light of the intellect, but not the knowledge of faith . . . How wonderful it was. A cloud, dark in itself, could illuminate the night . . . faith, a dark and obscure cloud to souls (also a night in that it blinds and deprives them of their natural light), illumines and pours light into their darkness by means of its own darkness.112
It is tempting here, and not without relevance, to consider Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of the “Dionysian” aspect of art in relation to the sublime as sketched above. Indeed, Kant scholar Paul Guyer argues the case for us: “if we take the Dionysian as Nietzsche’s version of the sublime, then Nietzsche has radically reconceived the experience of the sublime as an intimation of the fundamental nonrationality of existence, rather than its rationality . . .”113 In a remarkable echo of St. John on the redemptive release from suffering in transcendence of the self, Nietzsche writes in the Birth of Tragedy: “. . . with sublime gestures he shows us that the whole world of agony is needed in order to compel the individual to generate the releasing and redemptive vision and then, lost in contemplation of that vision, to sit calmly in his rocking boat in the midst of the sea.”114
Returning here to Kant, in our vain attempt to comprehend infinity, imagination’s inadequacy is first experienced as frustration (disequilibrium, suffering, pain), but then gives way to pleasure arising from our awareness that this inadequacy exemplifies the limits of our perceptual ability. Echoing Burke, Kant writes in the Critique of Judgement:
The feeling of the sublime is . . . at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgement of the inadequacy of the . . . faculty of sense being in accord with reason . . .115
Kant’s division between the phenomenal and noumenal, or the sensible and the supersenible, further extends to the human self. On the one hand, we are embodied creatures of feeling and sensibility, who think and act in time and space. This means that as phenomenal beings we are part of nature and are subject to determination by nature’s causal laws. On the other hand, in so far as it is the human subject that imposes this framework through the categories of the understanding—the forms of intuition (spatio-temporality, causality)—the ultimate self must in some sense be presumed to lie beyond the phenomenal world. It must, in other words, be a noumenal or supersensible self. Thus, as Paul Crowther argues, Kant “gives the supersensible self a negative characterization—namely as that aspect of the self which is not in space and time, and not subject to the categories.”116
Henri Bergson and an Excursus on Time
The early modern philosophy of Henri Bergson offers a possible point of intervention in thinking about the sublime, particularly with respect to Viola’s treatment of extended perception (what Bergson has called “psychological time”117), as time is a crucial element in what initiates the sublime in his work, work that requires patience, attention, and slowing down. Viola speaks of the “preciousness of time,” something that perhaps today more than ever, as “needing our attention.”118
Central to Bergson’s thinking is the primordiality of experiential time in consciousness: conscious states understood, not, in the mathematical, scientific notion of time, as a sequence of successive, atomistic, and discrete moments—the time of clocks—but as a multiplicity continually unfolding in “duration.” The order or organization of conscious states, on this view, does not correspond exactly with the order of things in a material—that is, spatial, system. These units distort rather than reflect our inner (subjective) experience of time; they serve the practical conception of time that regulates society, but are inadequate as symbols of felt experience. Duration of reality, for Bergson, is an indivisible “flow” which the intellect, for practical purposes of manipulation and control, separates into definable and rationally manageable pieces; it does this by translating time into a logical system of stable concepts, into space.
In his 1889 Essai sur les donnés immédiates de la conscience—literally “Essay on what is immediately given in consciousness” (a more accurate description of his main concerns, but translated into English as Time and Free Will)—Bergson defined reality as an indivisible pervasive continuity of time. Here Bergson described the temporal dimension of human consciousness as synonymous with creative freedom; in fact, in seeking an alternative to the limitations of scientific knowledge, he urged artists to free themselves from the spatiality of external objects in order to depict reality. This essay, argues Suzanne Guerlac, launches a powerful critique of Kant: “Bergson will attempt to draw a critical line, not between phenomena and noumena, as Kant had done, but between the living and the inert. Whereas inert things are the appropriate objects of science, Bergson believed that living beings, states of consciousness . . . can only be known through a metaphysical method he will call intuition.”119 A succession of conscious states must not be interpreted, as is the inveterate habit of mind, Bergson insisted, as an order of states in space—the phenomenal order of experience is not itself a spatial order. The enduring reality of changing conscious states—indivisible continuous consciousness—is absolutely different from a reality extended in space (and Bergson saw the artist as one who disentangles definite shapes from within that continuity of consciousness). Whereas entities in space are impenetrable, states of consciousness on Bergson’s view “mutually penetrate each other” and are bound together in a relationship of enduring continuity—a ceaseless flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. The successive and interpenetrative states of consciousness merge into one another, each retaining something of what has just passed and each giving intimation of what is to come—a fusion of the past with the present and the anticipated future. States of consciousness come and go and have their temporal meaning in a “duration” which is always within consciousness itself. In An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), Bergson argued: