The California Sublime

Well, I have returned from my outing to the West Coast. The first days were spent in Oakland at the German Studies Association conference. There were a number of panels on Goethe's lyric production, from which I profited enormously. Most of the folks attending these panels were fellow members of the Goethe Society of North America, and it was great fun to be among them again, too, and to hear some really good and even some really incomprehensible approaches to Goethe. The application of philosophical perspectives to Goethe -- Hegel, Stanley Cavell (!), even Spinoza -- generally leaves me cold (though Nietzsche is an important exception), but such views are what makes the field of Goethe studies vibrant.

And, then, there was the panel I was on, "The Pre-Kantian Sublime," with fellow panelists Bethany Wiggin and Kay Goodman. What I found especially beneficial about the panels I attended was the high quality of the "Comment" after the presentations. Our panel's commentator was Birgit Tautz. Again, really excellent, and I learned a lot. Kay Goodman's presentation, on Luise Gottsched, the wife of Johann Christoph (lovely portrait of her here), formed a really insightful contrast to my own presentation on Bodmer. Luise Gottsched and Bodmer represent two aspects of the reception of the sublime style in German letters.

The German Studies Association is not restricted to literary scholars. Indeed, the members are to a great extent from history. The president of GSA this year is Celia Applegate, a historian at the University of Rochester. I am looking forward to getting a copy of her book Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St. Matthew Passion. I had it in my hands for a few minutes at the conference's book exhibits and noticed that Goethe has a long entry in the index.

Professor Applegate gave the presidential address, entitled "The Importance of Culture." Abandoning any political correctness, she addressed the perilous state of the profession of German history and letters, in particular the effects of catering to students with "popular" subjects. It was a very good talk; she was very impassioned. The entire time, however, I kept thinking that she was at least ten years too late. The professoriate has got itself in this pickle, making the humanities irrelevant and, indeed, contemptible to many. I have always been surprised at the pusillanimity of the tenured. For decades they have witnessed the rise of mediocre scholarship and have kept their mouths shut. Well, like the federal government, spending the inheritance of future generations now, they have enjoyed their perks without caring about nurturing real scholarship and the future of the "liberal arts."

Let me not dwell on this topic, since there is nothing I can do, except pursue my own work.

After Oakland I traveled over to San Francisco, where I spent a few days with friends. It was the first time I enjoyed decent weather in SF. Indeed, it was so warm that there was practically no haze by early afternoon, not to mention fog.

The day after the conference I visited the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. From an architectural point of view, the de Young is really a lovely museum. Moreover, the first thing I encountered in their American section was the above painting on a sublime subject, a diptych of Niagara Falls from 1832 by the Moravian-American painter Gustav Grunewald (1805-1878). (Here is a link to Grunewald, with some biography as well as another Niagara image.) I particularly like the detail from Grunewald's painting at the top of this post, showing viewers above the Falls. Indeed the museum has quite a number of 19th-century American paintings with the sublime as their subject.

My own experience with the sublime, however, was my bike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge and then down (and down and down) to Sausalito. It was a gorgeous day, and, what was more, I discovered a kayak site at a small public beach in Sausalito. Afterward, there was the bike ride back up (and up and up) to the bridge. I peddle around Manhattan all the time, on a one-speed bike, and can even manage the hills in Central Park just fine. But the hills of San Francisco and environs are a different matter. I had to get off the bike a couple of times and push it up the hill. Much to my delight, when I got to the San Francisco side of the bridge, I discovered a bus that would take me to Golden Gate Park. I was able to attach my bike to the front of the bus. Hurray! All in all, a splendid experience.

The Sublime Style versus the Sublime of Nature

Longinus, back in the first century A.D., wrote that the sublime "is a certain eminence or perfection of language." It was in this sense that Boileau made a case for the importance of Longinus in his 1674 translation of the treatise On the Sublime. According to Edmund Burke, writing in 1757, however, the sublime is the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling. I have been doing research on this transition, from the sublime style to a psychological category, especially as it affects German philosophy. Bodmer and Breitinger certainly understood the sublime in terms of poetic effects, but ideas they introduced in their writings contributed to this turn toward aesthetic effect. These ideas principally came from England and Italy.

For instance, already in their Discourses of the Painters of the early 1720s, they emphasized the importance of imagination. They seem to have taken their ideas on imagination from Joseph Addison's Pleasures of the Imagination, which they read (along with John Locke) in French translation. Bodmer, in Discourse 19, wrote that the good poet is distinguished from the ordinary one by a well-cultivated imagination. He uses the word "Imagination" here, not the German term that he would later apply, Einbildungs-Kraft. If he is gifted with a rich imagination, as was Homer (or Bodmer and Breitinger's favorite, Martin Opitz), a poet can extract a subject from his imagination at will. He will be able to describe a battle, a storm at sea, or a quiet scene of love, as if he were actually there.

Everything Bodmer writes about Opitz's superiority in this respect can be found (almost literally) in Addison. Addison, for instance, says of imagination in Spectator 417:

It would be in vain to enquire, whether the Power of imagining Things strongly proceeds from any greater Perfection in the Soul, or from any nicer Texture in the Brain of one Man than of another. But this is certain, that a noble Writer should be born with this Faculty in its full Strength and Vigour, so as to be able to receive lively Ideas from Outward Objects, to retain them long, and to range them together, upon occasion, in such Figures and Representations as are most likely to hit the Fancy of the Reader. A Poet should take as much Pains in forming his Imagination, as a Philosopher in cultivating the Understanding. He must gain a due Relish of the Works of Nature, and be thoroughly conversant in the various Scenary of a Country Life.

I think the part of the above quote that struck Bodmer was "Figures and Representations as are most likely to hit the Fancy of the Reader." And, for Bodmer, a poet's expression of emotion or feeling is more natural when we feel the emotion than when we pretend to. On its face, Discourse 19 seems to suggest that a poet must have experienced the feelings that are represented in a poem. This is not, however, the poetry of experience of Herder or Goethe. If one reads closely, one sees that Bodmer, like Addison, recommends the reading of great works of literature as a method of enriching the poetic imagination. For instance, Addison, writing on "the Faculty of Taste" (Spectator 409), said that it "must in some degree be born with us," but that there were "several Methods for Cultivating and Improving it," the "most natural Method for this Purpose is to be conversant among the Writings of the most Polite Authors."

Despite this introduction into German letters of an "empirical" element, there is an almost total absence in the writings of Bodmer and Breitinger of real nature or even real, lived life. This absence comes out strongly if one compares Addison. It may be an English trait, the result of a long tradition of thinking about nature, but Addison is not being conventional when he writes about the beauties of the natural world that the poet appropriates. Addison also seems to have seriously considered the way the senses appropriate the world around us. For instance, in discussing the difference between the effect of round pillars and square ones in architecture, he writes (Spectator 415) that "the Fancy is infinitely more struck with the view of the open Air, and Skies, that passes through an Arch, than what comes through a square, or any other Figure." This tradition of "empirical observation" is really lacking in Bodmer and Breitinger and goes a long way to explaining the absence of any consideration in their writings of the Alps or other Swiss natural wonders, which the English had been writing about for at least half a century.

Photos: Arches National Park Utah; Allen Zumach Photo Art; U.K. Daily Mail

The Sublime, Again

Ernst Cassirer, in his book The Philosophy of Enlightenment, devotes a chapter to "Fundamental Problems of Aesthetics." Cassirer points out the uninterrupted exchange of ideas in aesthetics in the 18th century, with the thread of ideas becoming so "intertwined that they can scarcely be distinguished in the finished fabric and traced back to their various origins." French, Germans, Italians, the English -- all seemed to echo and parallel each other. In German letters, however, the problem of aesthetics took on a decidedly philosophic cast, indeed, was "placed under the guidance and care of systematic philosophy." The initial systematic spirit was Leibnizian, which received its doctrinal codification under Christian Wolff, and culminated in the Kantian sublime.

I am tracing the reception of the sublime in German letters. The point of entry seems to have been the writings of Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, whom I have already discussed in earlier posts. On the one hand, Bodmer and Breitinger are, like their antagonist Gottsched, advocates of "neoclassicism" in poetry. They accept the rationalist poetics of Boileau as set down down in his L'art poétique. Two important aspects of that poetics. The first concerns form: genres are a given, not something invented by the writer. Thus, you don't add merry songs to a funeral ode. The second concerns subject matter, based on the conviction that some things are simply contrary to nature and that a poet violates the truth of nature by choosing subjects that venture beyond certain boundaries. I would add here that the subject matter of most contemporary fiction, theater, film, etc. violates this 18th-century conception of nature, which is understood as an orderly, and ordered, system. We are talking about the Enlightenment, remember. "Dysfunction," especially if rewarded, would not be acceptable.

Gottsched was perfectly in accord with these restrictions, but Bodmer and Breitinger found a way to expand neoclassical practice. Expression, including the use of figures and metaphors and such other rhetorical conventions, became the place for an artist to do something new and at the same time reveal his mastery. Bodmer and Breitinger found the justification for their advocacy of the "new" and the "marvelous" in poetry in the treatise of Longinus on the sublime.

Ironically, it was Boileau, the strict neoclassicist, who also introduced Longinus into European aesthetics, with his translation of the Greek's treatise in 1674. Basically this treatise -- On the Sublime -- discusses how ancient poets, great ones and not so great ones, moved their readers by the power of poetic expression. Thus, most of it is a discussion of "figures." It is not that Bodmer and Breitinger's "critical" works on poetics, from the early 1740s, foreground Longinus so much as that their treatments are totally informed by Longinus' treatment of figures. Interestingly, the German word for "sublime" -- erhaben -- is not mentioned often in these works. It is only in 1746, in his Critische Briefe, that Bodmer devotes a chapter to a definition of the sublime: "Lehrsätze von dem Wesen der erhabenen Schreibart" or "Theorems concerning the Essence of the Sublime Style." In other words, as Boileau had written, the sublime is "a certain power of discourse the aim of which is to elevate the soul."

Bodmer and Breitinger were men of the early 18th century, when art had not yet been divorced from ethics, and were not interested in the violent emotions that came to be associated with the sublime by mid-18th century. Thus, neither pays much attention to natural grandeur, which forms the starting point of discussions of the "psychological" sublime. This would be articulated by Edmund Burke and culminated in the writings of Mendelssohn, Kant, and Schiller. Bodmer and Breitinger did play a role in this transformation, however, but I will save that for the next post.

Picture credit: Karol Mack

Manhattan Circumnavigation

Okay, this is not about Goethe, but about a Goethe scholar. However, no one back in Louisville, where I come from would have ever imagined I would become a scholar of Goethe. Even less would they have imagined that I would become a kayaker and go paddling in the Hudson River. Yesterday, I joined a group of 55 for a circumnavigation of the island. The top picture is from a rest stop in Astoria, Queens; the other shows the rough waters of the East River.

Tomorrow I hope to get back to the sublime. I have come across something interesting. Though Bodmer was the person who introduced this term into German literary discourse, he was writing about sublime poetry, or the sublime style in writing. He was not writing about what people came to associate with the sublime in the 18th century, namely, grand mountains, the vast ocean depths, and other splendid natural phenomena. This absence would not be worth noting, except for the fact that Bodmer lived his entire life in Zurich, surrounded by the Alps.

My friend Felicitas Hoppe, in a recent small book, Der beste Platz der Welt, describing her stay in a small village in Switzerland, compares the sight of the Alps to the ocean.

Ancients and Moderns

I keep wanting to articulate my thoughts concerning the sublime, as I work on my paper for the German Studies Association conference, but "sublime" is a multivalent term to put it mildly. Benedetto Croce was being ironic when he wrote that "the sublime is anything that has been or shall be called sublime by those who have used or shall use this word." In order to talk about the pre-Kantian sublime (the subject of the GSA panel), I have had to excavate the term from the long history of its use since the late 17th century.

The term emerges in the context of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, on which I recently posted. Here is some background on that "quarrel."

Back in 1649 Descartes wrote (in his treatise concerning "the passions of the soul") that "what the ancients have taught us is so scanty and for the most part so lacking in credibility that I may not hope for any kind of approach toward truth except by rejecting all the paths which they have followed." Talk about doubt! The ancient authorities he was speaking of included, e.g., Aristotle's physics. Already in the 16th century, Copernicus had overturned the most ancient conceptions about our privileged place in the universe.

(And it has gone downhill from there for us humans!)

The application of the discoveries of science and technological innovation in the course of the 18th century would confirm that the world of nature was an ordered one that could be rationally understood and manipulated in ways that would result in not just change but in the transformation of the earth. It was the birth era of the doctrine of progress in knowledge.

This emancipation from inherited knowledge would not stop with the natural sciences. In the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, at the end of the 17th century in France, the disdain for the past extended to the past itself. Expressing a triumphalism concerning the achievements of his own glorious age (that of Louis XIV), Charles Perrault wrote that "the princes of Homer's age resemble modern peasants." Moreover, he asserted, Homer would have been a better poet had he lived in the age of the Sun King.

Not everyone was sure that progress could be made in the arts as it could in the sciences. Another Modern, Fontenelle, the proselytizer of Newton in France, thought that only certain fields allowed of progress: "physics, medicine, mathematics, which are composed of numberless ideas and depend upon precision of thought which improves with extreme slowness, yet is always improving."

Throughout the 18th century, thinkers and artists struggled with the relevance of the past to the present. Indeed, what was at stake was the entire Western intellectual inheritance -- not only the legacy of the classical world but also, as would be apparent, the Christian heritage. Some writers, such as Winckelmann, praising the supposed "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the Greeks, sought to make antiquity relevant for the present. He in turn would have much influence on Goethe and on Weimar classicism. The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns would be replayed in Germany in the last years of the 18th century in two important treatises: Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry and Friedrich Schlegel's On the Study of Greek Poetry.

And then there occurred a turn against the triumphalism of the school of progress, against the notion that the rationalism that powered scientific and technological advance could be applied to the workings of the human psyche. Among the German Romantic writers there was something like a wave of conversions to Roman Catholicism, for instance, Dorothea Schlegel, wife of Friedrich, née Brendel Mendelssohn, oldest daughter of the Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

Longinus's treatise on the sublime, beginning with Boileau's translation in 1674, had a powerful influence on the emergence of "aesthetics" in the 18th century, which finalized the separation of the arts from the sciences. With this "pre-history" I think I may be ready to start writing about the sublime.

Picture credit: The Virtual Philosophy Club; The Technium

The Sublime

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that I was working on the "pre-Kantian sublime" and hoped to write more as my research proceeds. I have to say that the subject is so immense (that fits, I suppose, with the notion of the sublime itself) and the amount of reading I have been doing so varied and also immense that I am having trouble reducing my thoughts to blog-sized posts. My most recent post, on Goethe and translation, was an offshoot of my reading on the sublime, which has its point of entry into European literary discourse in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. It was the translation of Boileau, of the party of the Ancients, of Longinus's treatise on the sublime, that initiated the 18th-century discussion of the sublime.

My focus is, of course, German letters, specifically Johann Jakob Bodmer, the Swiss man of letters and translator of Milton's Paradise Lost into German. Bodmer was a strongly religious man, and his enthusiasm for Milton had much to do with his delight at the appearance of an ancient literary form, the epic, in a modern re-creation and, moreover, on a Christian subject. Bodmer's advocacy of Milton was challenged by the other important German man of letters of the early 18th century, namely, the Leipzig critic Johann Christoph Gottsched, a follower of Wolffian rationalist philosophy, who rejected what he considered the strange products of Milton's poetic imagination.

I am trying to trace the source of Bodmer's defense of imagination, and I suspect it was Addison, though perhaps not in Addison's own essays on the "Pleasures of the Imagination," but perhaps as Addison was transmitted in the writings of the French critic DuBos, in particular Réflexions critiques sur la poësie et sur la peinture (1719). I said this was immense, right?

What might have appealed to Bodmer was Addison's first category of natural objects that please the imagination, namely, "the great." Addison does not use the term sublime, but the objects he mentions -- "a vast uncultivated Desart ... high Rocks and Precipices, or a wide Expanse of Waters," which cause us to be struck by a "rude kind of Magnificence" -- clearly refer to that phenomenon. Though Addison did not explain the cause of this mental effect, he found that its cause lay in God's having framed us in order to act on us through our imagination. Thus, Addison writes that our souls experience a "just Relish" in contemplating the immensity of God's works. As the century progressed -- long before Kant's treatise on the sublime -- the concept of the sublime became secularized. But more on that later.

Picture credits: Big Picture; Cabinet Magazine

Goethe and the Sublime

What do we mean when we say that something is "sublime"? For instance, a slice of cheesecake or chocolate mousse? Or a hairdo or a dress? I suspect in both cases there is an intense feeling of something very delicious to our sense of taste and also very much out of the ordinary run of things. This contemporary use of the word is an attenuated descendent of a rather important aesthetic category in the 18th century, when the measure of the sublime was not food or dress but something much larger, say, mountain massifs or the the extent of the oceans. At the same time, there was a correspondence between the outsized, out-of-the-ordinary object of admiration and the feeling it evoked in us. Thus, the object was sublime, but a person had to feel it to be so. As Kant wrote, in The Critique of Pure Reason (1788), "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within" (tr. Paul Guyer).

Not too be overly immodest, but just about everything Goethe wrote about the sublime can be found in my article in the Goethe Yearbook. By the time he occupied himself with the subject, in the early 1770s, he was the beneficiary of almost a century of European discussions on the role of the sublime in aesthetic theory. Kant in turn made the aesthetic sense the basis of his moral philosophy.

It all began with the translation of the treatise On the Sublime into French by the critic and poet Nicolas Boileau, which appeared in 1674 and introduced the ancient rhetorician Longinus to the European literary world. Europe was ready for a change in its way of thinking about art. Before the 18th century theorists on art agreed with Aristotle that art was a particularly good way of transmitting universal and objective truths in graspable form. And since there were objective truths, it was also agreed that there were objective criteria for producing works of art.

By the 18th century in western Europe, however, there was a move toward more subjective criteria for judging art. This is where Longinus and his treatise on the sublime come in. Longinus, who had lived in the time of Marcus Aurelius (indeed, according to Boileau it was Marcus who ordered Longinus' execution), went beyond the conventional resources of the rhetorical tradition for achieving elevated effects and conveying powerful emotions. He suggested that nobility of soul and powerful and inspired emotions -- innate qualities in a person -- were more essential than in the traditional discipline of art.

One's inner state is occasionally the site of calm and docile emotions, but just as likely one of powerful, chaotic forces. There was nothing cute or nice about the sublime, and thus it was drafted to suggest the more powerful emotions of the soul. The sublime had its correspondence in the outer world -- be it God or infinity or some otherwise uncalculable natural phenomenon, like the massive, irregular, and chaotic geological formations of Switzerland -- while the sublime experience was the response of a person to the grandeur of the sublime object.

I have lately been working on the sublime, in particular the early transmission of this aesthetic idea into German literature in the 18th century. My focus has been Johann Jacob Bodmer (1698-1783), the learned Swiss man of letters who also introduced John Milton, in particular Paradise Lost, to German readers. Milton was for Bodmer the poet with the most noble mind and soul who likewise produced an epic on the most noble and sublime subject. Not much attention has been paid to the effect of the Swiss mountains on Bodmer's thinking. I like very much the paintings of Swiss mountains by Caspar Wolf, for instance, the above one, which shows visitors admiring the splendid ragged formations, which in effect indicates the taming of the sublime. Wolf was a predecessor of the Romantic-period painter Caspar David Friedrich in the portrayal of awesome natural subjects. By Friedrich's time, however, the awe felt in the face of powerful nature seems almost sentimentalized, as can be seen in the painting Wanderer in the Sea of Fog, at the top of this post, from 1814. Wolf seems to have been a much more modest figure, to show by this self-portrait.

Already by 1712, when Addison wrote his Spectator essays, these mountains (which Addison had seen on his trip to Italy) were a conventional trope in connection with the sublime. (They also figure prominently in Edmund Burke's 1757 essay on the beautiful and the sublime.) For Bodmer, it was Addison's emphasis on the quality of "great imagination" that drew him to John Milton. This subjective quality went on to play a huge role in the development of German literature in the 18th century, for instance, in the notion of "Genius."

It also played a role in Goethe's early oeuvre, in the so-called Storm and Drang period of the early 1770s. An expression of the sublime style and the expression of sublime emotion is on view in Goethe's essay on German architecture (1772), in which he rhapsodizes about the Gothic cathedral in Strassburg and its inspired architect, whom he compares to a second creator. Like God, such artists look down on their works and exclaim, "It is good!"

Later, Goethe abandoned this enthusiastic response in connection with sublime subjects. He became a "classicist," subsuming himself to the "edle Einfalt und stille Größe" (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur), which Winckelmann believed characterized ancient Greek art. I think Goethe's immersion in his scientific pursuits, beginning in the late 1770s, also distanced him -- made him more objective? -- vis à vis nature's more powerful and chaotic phenomena. He also was reacting against the kind of sentimental self-aggrandisement that is suggested by the Friedrich painting and that the discourse on the sublime had done so much to introduce to the European consciousness. Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, has something interesting to say about this secularization of emotion in The Ideology of the Aesthetic. He writes of the "production of an entirely new kind of human subject [in the 18th century] -- one which, like the work of art itself, discovers the law in the depths of its own free identity, rather than in some oppressive eternal law. The liberated subject is the one who has appropriated the law as the very principle of its own autonomy, broken the forbidden tablets of the law in which that law was originally inscribed in order to rewrite it on the heart of flesh."

Picture credit: Alpenverein