Welcome to the Bernard X. Bovasso bernx@aol.com
Art and the Sublime
by Bernard X. Bovasso
What the artist projects is an image. Whether non-representational or familiar is beside the point. The 'what' may be subjected to analysis, an attempt at introjection or however the intellect provides itself the psychological task of amplification. But this may serve to bar the experiencial aspects involved insofar as some distinction must be made between an imaginal creative content and the numinous experience encountered during the creative act. The viability of such distinctions was perhaps demonstrated long before modern psychology and art by Edmund Burke in his treatise on The Sublime and The Beautiful. The idea of the sublime in art was later pursued further by Schiller and then Kant in his Critque of Judgement. Burke notes "WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling..." (Edmund Burke (1729-1797).p; On the Sublime and Beautiful). Again, the distinction is drawn between imagic content which is invested in the object nature of the painting and the experiencial aspect that Burke associates with "...the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling...". Burkes "beauty" aspect would indicate in these terms the more object-seeking artist who projects into, or finds beauty in the natural object. This would refer to the empathic or "feeling into" projection as opposed to the experiencial sublime and which Jung also distinquishes in his interpretation of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfuhlung (Abstraction and empathy). Worringer, for example, notes:
"What psychic suppositions are there for the impulse to abstraction? Among those peoples where it exists we must look for them in their feeling for the world, in their psychic behavior vis-a-vis the cosmos. Whereas the feeling into impulse is conditioned by a happy, pantheistic, trustful relationship between man and the phenomena of the outer world, the impuls to abstraction is a result of a great inner uneasiness or fear of these phenomena , and in the religious connection corresponds with a strong transcendental colouring of every idea. Such a state might be called an immense spiritual agoraphobia. When Tibullus says primum in mundo fecit deus timorem (the first thing God made in the world was fear'), this very feeling of dread is admitted as the primal root of artistic energy."10
This corresponds precisely with Burke's Sublime (as opposed to beauty and the empathic projection into nature). Worringer takes it a step further by inidcating it as the urge to abstraction. Jung follows this through to Spittler's Epimetheus; who represents the empathic attitudinal intention and Prometheus who bears the abstracting and sublime intention of the introvert.11
The polarity of beauty and the sublime go back, however, to Plato and the dialogue between Socrates and the poet Ion. Socrates is distinguishing for the poet the difference: "...because they are inspired and possessed... not in their right mind...they are under the influence of Dionysius...in a state of unconsciousness...
Again, the sublime is indicated and quite in accord with what both Burke and Worringer developed in the distinction between beauty (as empathic art) and the sublime: "the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling..." Neitzche picks up on this in his distinction between Apollo and Dionysius. Meanwhile it evolved through the American Hudson River School of Painters who embraced the term "sublime" in their awesome landscapes of the Hudson River valley and on until the post-war NY School of Abstract Expressionist or "Non-Objective" painters emerged in a fury as the NY "Action Painter." Harold Rosenberg, the American art critic and champion of Abstraction Expressionism then reintroduced the term "sublime" in his assessment of the non-objective painter Barnett Newman's idea of the Abstract Sublime. Rosenberg expands the notion of the sublime: "Modern man is a creature whose metaphysical longings today bring him face to face with emptiness. It is in its continuing attempts, perhaps foredoomed, to attain to the absolute, without resort to inherited signs, credos, superstitions that art embodies the present as a spiritual reality. It is significant that Newman, in a speech in 1968 at a meeting in Paris paying homage to Baudelaire as art critic, praised the poet for `his ability to understand the most fundamental of all the problems of a painter, the problem every painter has, no matter what his style, namely-- What to paint.'"12 Or I would prefer to ask, "what does the creative experience demand of the artist?" This brings us full circle back to the older and more ancient Platonic relation to mania (inspiration) and ekstasis both of which indicate a paranous state as an encounter with the mysterium tremendum as an awesome internal experience of not simply a plethora of personatyped imaginal "gods" but the imago dei as demiurgos or Creator. Is this what Burke originally inferred in his notion of the sublime and which would account for the fear and trembling in such experience?
Unfortunately, the American abstract and non-objective art movement was short lived and never really amplified in terms of what Rosenberg observed. During the `sixties such art was displaced by the empathic, object fixed public images of Pop art and conceptual art, much of which was college bred, and more recently in the neo-naturalism of the post-modern painters. Following this it may be said that the semiotics of Hillman's
Archetypal Psychology accommodated a polytheistic identification with persona, the better to occlude the singular, but nameless, experience of the numinous immanence of the archetype. This much is excluded when the term "archetype" is limited to mean its appearance nature in personatypal or imagotypal form and by which Hillman qualifies his Archetypal Psychology: "By `archetype I can only refer to the phenomenal archetype which manifests itself in images. The noumenal archetype cannot by definition be presented so that nothing whatsoever can be posited of it."13 In this way experience is allowed occluded by appearance so that eidolon is used to subvert it or render it suppressed and withdrawn from memory. In short, if the archetype is rendered all typos and no arché it is banned as the agency of original or numinous expereience.
* * * *
Ekstasis and the Eidos
The notion of numen as immanence, or predisposition to form, is not unique to Plato. He merely expressed it very well and with the conviction of his philosophical understanding. The ancient Hebrews, for example, also took image-making very seriously, enough so to ban the graven image, or what Plato may have referred to as the imitation of the imitation; the profanation of the image for diversionary and simulational purposes. Such judgmental distinctions stem from the even more ancient idea that all images wrought were absolutely sacred, animated, as it were, by supernatural or divine presence. In more abstract logic, and without such religious moralization, Kant explicates as much with regard to the imitation of the imitation: "As no representation, except the intuitional, refers immediately to an object, no concept is ever referred to as object immediately, but to some other representation of it, whether it be an intuition, or itself a concept. A judgement is therefore a mediate knowledge of an object, or a representation of a representation of it."14
In other words, a concept, a piece of ideation, or by whatever other simulation a judgement is expressed, is never in direct but mediated relation to the object. Only the perceptual means, the intuition, does not require "some other representation of it." The intuition, as such, is incapable of making a judgement, nor does it discriminate in its range of perceptions among the plurality of items perceived. Indeed, all is perceived and all at once, except the judgement selects what is meaningful according to what is already simulated in mind. And the same would be true of images--since Kant is talking about ideas--in the manifold of a myth consciousness. Yet, beyond judgement and the imaginal range of simulations, the intuition may see all and all at once, over-riding all particulars in a pluralistic field of its perception, by instantly compressing them as something singular. It is then euphemistically said that the "all" (of things) is seen as "essence." The universal essence is cognate with the idea of the eidos and the numen. Since it is ontologically monistic it perdures as a singularity indicating the substance of the Western idea of God.
Here, I cannot refrain from quoting Melville on the subject of the "All:"
"--in reading some of Goethe's sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, 'Live in the all.' That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one,--good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tingling of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the fixed stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. 'My dear boy,' Goethe says to him, 'you are sorely affected with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!'As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me."15
So much for American Transcendentalism, and a mark for its pragmatism! Most important here is how intuition, in direct and unmediated relation to the object or image, evokes experience unmitigated by judgement, or an instituted range of images or ideas. Then the "all (particulars) at once" overwhelms consciousness, as if in and by itself and without reference to anything. Something supernatural, surreal, or other worldly, momentarily invades it. It may thus be understandable that a drastic abbaissment du niveau mental is achieved, allowing this awesome pure experience to rise up.
Short of that, and for purposes of the reasoning mind and a rational format of fixed ideas, the "representation of a representation" is absolutely required, just as it is in a fixed format of gods. What is then denied or misrepresented for both Plato and the Hebrews is the direct object of intuition-- Theos; as essence in experience of all that may be known to perception; as the ultimate unity of all things and simulations. It is the function of intuition, embodied as the eidos, that is a Divine "seeing;" or a seeing with God. The Greek syneidesis (or conscience, seeing with knowledge) incorporates this meaning. Keeping this in mind, Plato's understanding of art and creativity is instructive. With some elegance, this is reiterated in his Ion Dialogue. He has Socrates say to the rhapsode Ion:
For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not as works of art but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revelers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers, when they are under the influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves tell us; for they tell us that they gather their strains from honied fountains out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; thither, like the bees, they wing their way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his is out of his senses, and the mind no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets speak of actions like your own words about Homer; but they do not speak of them by any rules of art: only when they make that to which the muse impels them are their inventions inspired...Had he learned by the rules of art, he would have known how to speak not only of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.16
Socrates makes his point of instruction to Ion in the distinction between imaginal imitation of the epic poems and the intuitional mania or inspiration required to restore their divine arché quality. But the analogy drawn in this case is more dromena, an experiential acting out, than conceptual, as it would be in the case of the eidos. The presence or activity of the eidos is, however, presupposed by Plato, or he would not have been able in hindsight to draw the analogy of the orgiastic ekstasis (separation from being or mind).
Equally may the difference be drawn (in reflected hindsight, of course) between formal archetypal ideas and images (collective representations as gods and heroes) constituting the traditional epics, and the "irrepresentable archetype" which is hardly a "type" but evoked as arché in experience and expression. The former may be come by the "rules of art," whereas the latter through momentary possession (the "passing state"); or what amounts to a critical religious experience. The distinction is simple enough if a personal ideological bias is surrendered for a moment. It is something incorporated throughout Christian art forms.
***
10.Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, p.15, Meridian Books, first published 1908.
11.C. G. Jung, Psychological Types.
12. Harold Rosenberg,
13.ONAP, p. 33, nte,6
14. Emanuel Kant; Critique of Pure Reason, p.63.
15. (Letter to Hawthorne, June 1(?) 1851).
16. Ion, translated by B. Jowett.
Bernard X. Bovasso bernx@aol.com