In Our Time - The Sublime

Episode Date: February 12, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss a transcendental idea that took hold on the Age of Enlightenment. When the English essayist John Hall translated the work of an obscure Roman thinker into English, he could hardly have known the ferment it would cause; for the work of Longinus introduced late 17th century Britain to the idea of the sublime – an idea that stalked the proceeding century. Longinus wrote, “As if instinctively, our soul is lifted up by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it had heard”.He was talking about the power of language, but in the 18th century the idea was set for a broader stage as British artists, poets, philosophers and scientists grappled with the sublime and adapted it to great swathes of the intellectual and physical landscape. What drove the great minds of the age to invest so much in the defining of the state of awe?With Janet Todd, Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow; Annie Janowitz, Professor of Romantic Poetry at Queen Mary, University of London; Peter de Bolla, Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, when the English essay, John Hall, translated the work of an obscure Roman thinker into English in the middle of the 17th century,

he could hardly have known the ferment it would cause. For the work of Longinus introduced the... A bit of trouble there. introduced the late 17th century British to the idea of the sublime, an idea that stalked the preceding century. Lunginus wrote, As if instinctively our soul is lifted up by the true sublime. It takes a proud flight and is filled with joy and vaunting,

as though it had itself produced what it had heard. Lunginus was talking about the power of the language, but in the 18th century the idea was set for a broader stage as British artists, poets, philosophers and scientists, uncovered the sublime and adapted it to a great sense, sways of the intellectual and physical landscape. What drove the great minds of the age to invest so much in the defining of the state of awe? With me to discuss the culture of the sublime are Annie Yanevitz, Janovitz, Professor of Romantic Poetre at Queen Mary, University of London,

Janet Todd, Professor of English at Glasgow University and Peter de Bola lecture in English at the University of Cambridge. Janet Todd, can you start telling us about who Longinus was and describing his ideas on the sublime? Well, I think nobody quite knows who Long Chinas was or whether he was. So sometimes people call him pseudo-longhinus. And he lived probably in, whoever wrote it, lived probably in the first century A.D. But his ideas are incredibly generative, partly because he adds to the usual classical notion of criticism

or of rhetoric and writing, the ideas that words should instruct and delight. He adds to this that they should make one rapturous. They should transcend, make one feel transcending the mundane. He actually said that words should have a pleasing rape on the soul. And he brought in the idea not only of the author, but of the reader or listener as completing the work so that it's a joint production. And the two, both poet and listener are raised to a higher level

and go beyond the mundane, go beyond the earthly. So I think that was a hugely important idea, and the idea of the work as being incomplete and requiring something else to go into it before it is an experience. And really the notions lay pretty fallow until the late 17th century. Before we go to the 17th century,

did Lunginus, if he was Lunginus, although he's been given a name, in the middle in about 50 AD, did he, do we discover the ideas first in him, or did they come to him from, Was it a major step forward, what he said? I think it's a major step forward to bring it all together. There is a notion of sort of divine afflatus

to the enthusiasm of the poet in earlier writers. But I think this is bringing together of the poet and the listener is something new and the sense of the incompleteness of the work of art. I think that is something. At least it was made into something quite new when it was rediscovered in the 17th century. You're stressing the business of incompleteness.

Is that the thing that he, him, self-stressed, or if you in the 21st century picked up as of most interest to you in the way you studied literature today, was it not the idea of transcendence and the way that rhetoric reading Homer could move you into regions? Was that not that which most preoccupied him? I think you're right. I think it is transcendence at the time. But I think in the early 18th century when the thing really gets going, it becomes an absolute buzzword, the sublime. At that point, the incompleteness is also there and the notion of the obscurity of the sublime. Is it possible because one of the interesting things about this program for me anyways, how ideas seem to just sail in. And of course they don't sail in, they generally creep in, crawl in, seep in, drizzle in and so on. But this was translated, this work was translated in the middle of the 19th century. And then did the idea, was the idea thus launched or was it brooding around before then? Well, it was there, but it doesn't make a huge difference.

And only those who read Greek would have... known about it. But it's taken up by people like Dryden, but not amazingly. And it's really at the beginning of the 18th century with John Dennis, grounds of criticism, that it comes into English in a very big way. And very, very quickly, it's a complete, fashionable buzzword, the sublime, and Dennis is mocked by Pope and Swift. He's called Sir Tremendous Longinus. And Swift says, oh, everybody's got to run out and buy Longhinus. I'll say, they won't be

fashionable. And the words that that come out of the whole business of the sublime, like excitability, enthusiasm, elasticity of mind. All these things become absolutely modish words in a very short time. How would you account for that? I know it was mocked, but it was fashionable. So first of all, the fashionable side before it was mocked. Why did it become so fashionable so quickly, do you think?

I think that there is a sense of the sort of terrifying aspects of religion are declining. And yet there's a sort of vague. paranoia still around. And I think there's a need for that notion of terror which comes in very clearly with Dennis, which is added to the sublime. That needs to go somewhere.

So I think it's a sort of vague religious longing. It's a sort of secularising of the religious in a way. Finally, before we move on, as I understand it, Dennis moves it away from rhetoric, from words to the idea of nature, sublime in nature. Is that right? He does, but he insists that it's the idea of nature in the mind.

I mean, he actually Christianised. longinous pretty thoroughly. And so although it is sublime nature that he's concerned about, it is the mind that is attuned to the manifestations of God that sees the sublime in nature. So the mind is set up to see the sublime in nature because the sublime in nature is God's spirit. Annie Janowitz, Newton earlier had discovered,

his discovery about the universe changed fundamentally the way that people thought about nature. Pope wrote nature, nature's laws, They hid in night. God said, let Newton be, and all was light. And the idea of Newton, reading as then was the mind of God, was awesome for many people. Was that running in parallel with the ideas coming in from?

Yes, I think the history of what you might call social Newtonianism, the way in which Newton's ideas about the universe lived in social and political life. In fact, it's quite closely connected with ideas of the sublime. I mean, you need to know that for between the time that Galileo develops the telescope and the time that Newton comes up with his universal law of gravitation, technology telescope development meant that lots and lots of things were visible in the sky that hadn't been accounted for before. And this, I think, had a kind of, even though it wasn't called the sublime, there was a terrifying aspect to this.

Maybe the universe didn't make sense. and Newton's law, in a sense, reimposed a sense of order on all the new things that had been learned. And there is a, I mean, Newton's Principia isn't translated until 1726, but people have been talking about his law and about gravity. And you have a vast number of poems that are written, which are explicitly used the term the sublime from Longhinus in the sense of elevated. in the sense that the word actually means rising up towards the threshold to describe the universe. And these are wonderful poems, poems which describe, for example, leaving Earth and flying through outer space with Newton,

Newton, the volume of the sky unseals and all the amazing miracle reveals. So this is a kind of sublimity which is about God and about the benigness of the universe. Because Newton holds to God in many ways, personally he did, he was a Christian, a very singular Christian, but nevertheless a very very powerfully committed Christian, as well as being a Magus, but he was a Christian. And also he maintained that his theory revealed God. It didn't destroy God, it didn't challenge God. That's right. He uncovered, I mean, as would have been said sort of more truthfully in his time,

the mind of God. This is the way God's mind. People were massively assured by that. But also, how did that feed into the sublime that Janet's been talking about? Well, I think if you you just then leap ahead after the French Revolution, you find an astronomer like Laplace place saying to Napoleon, when Napoleon says, when Laplace describes

the Newtonian universe, Napoleon says to him, but where's God in all this? And Laplace says, I have no need of that hypothesis. There's a paradox inside Newtonism, because even though Newton describes these laws

that are reassuring, there are very mysterious things in Newton's theories as well. That is, there's the fact that this is a force. He doesn't say that it's a material moving through the universe that pulls them all together, but it's a force which he can't understand where it came from. So there's a kind of scary aspect to the law of gravity as well. And even more importantly, I think for the development of the sublime as a poetic notion is the idea that all of space is empty. It's a void. There's a, there's no stuff in it. And that's very, very difficult for the mind to get its head around. You can't assimilate that information. And I think one of the central things about the sublime as an aesthetic and an

understanding notion is that you're faced with something which you can know on some level, but your feelings overwhelm the place where your reason is. And you do begin to get, after this period of very, very sort of happy sublime, poems. You begin to get palms which tease out the underside of the sublime, palms where people speak about how reason can't make sense of what they know. Peter DeBuller, is there any way that you can pull this together for us before we move on? The Newtonian idea feeding into longinus, translated by Holland and mediated by Dennis, and coming towards the end of the 18th century there, how, how, the idea, Janet Todd has told us this, is already fashionable. It's so, it.

It's a tact, therefore it must be fashionable. What's going on in the intellectual milieu of this country at that time? Well, I'll try and answer that question by backing up a little and giving this a narrative which will help us understand a little bit about why people in this period found this term so perplexing. The question that they really asked themselves is, well, what is the sublime? The term, as we've heard from Janet, certainly was there in rhetorical treatises before the 18th century. but it was used in such a way that people found it rather confusing and perplexing, rather like we do today.

And in fact, we can take from the 18th century inquiry, we can take from the way they thought about this question, an example, and we can say, well, let's first of all see how the word is used. So let me give you an example. If I was to say, well, last week I went into a classroom and a student said, hey Pete, sublime suit today. You could kind of glean the meaning of that, what's meant by that. But, of course, we must remember that when we use words, the context in which we use them is always incredibly important. So if I give you another example, if we were to say where that word sublime was used, if we were to give another example like a valley girl who might say, these cupcakes, hmm, sublime. You can again see that it's being used in a similar sort of way, and it seems to be a rather general and vague term,

which just means approbation, something like that. And then immediately, I'm going to take this on a little to show you how 18th century, thinkers thought about this problem, immediately you can see it's rather difficult to distinguish it from other words, which might be used in a similar way. So, ooh, Annie, cool shoes. You can see how we're not going to get very far very quickly. Well, this is in fact how 18th century thinkers began the work of thinking about what the sublime is. Only for them, they tried to distinguish the term from beauty or novelty or grandeur. So that's one way in which they started to think about this.

But they also studied another way, which was to use the term, a rather more precise and technical sense, to use it to refer to what Burke, Edmund Burke, called the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling. And Burke and other writers like Richard Payne Knight or Alexander Gerard try to understand what the cause and the nature, the quality of this feeling was. And a tradition developed throughout the 18th century, which numbers are very large, good large number of, of writers and very large number of texts,

where people tried to worry what was the cause and what was the precise nature of this feeling, this strong feeling. And perhaps the question which perplexed the most in trying to think about this was, when I look at this mind, when I try to put it in the optic of my understanding, is this thing out there,

is it caused by something out there in the world or quality of something out there in the world, in immensity or something like that, or rather is it in me, within me, within the perceiving mind. Put simply, is it out there or is it in here? And that's what really generates. That's the motor which generates this discussion. You can see immediately now how it connects up to Newtonianism. You can see immediately how it connects up to the elevated feeling that we get

when we're in the presence of a great orator and so on. So that's the second bit of the story. Can I put the third bit? Very briefly, because I want to move it around. Well, maybe I'll wait for the third. You'll wait for the third. John, can I come back to you to take on what Peter's been saying? saying about Edmund Burke in 1757 his essay was called a philosophical inquiry into the

origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. So to carry on from what Peter was saying, what distinction was he making there and why did that become so important? Well, it's a, it's a distinction that he put very clearly in gender terms, actually. I mean, the sublime had a sort of had a definite masculine quality about it and the beautiful, a feminine one. Um, and a beautiful, a feminine one. And certainly later, more feminist writers like Mary Wollstonecroft would look at it and say, but it's also the gaze of the man on the beautiful woman that is the beautiful, and that the subject position, therefore, of the sublime or indeed the beautiful, is masculine and would find the whole thing deeply irritating.

But in fact, I think the interesting thing about it from the earlier point of view, from Burke's point of view, is that he sees both in psychological terms. what Pete was saying about, is it inside or outside, I think he uses the medical theory of the time, particularly the idea of nerves, to suggest that the mind and the body are totally interrelated and that what is the sensations that are coming from outside are working on the mind,

and that this produces the sublime. I mean, I think he does have an internal, in the end, an internal psychological notion of the sublime and of the beautiful. And the beautiful is, in his words, It leads to repose tranquility, and the sublime is worrying, energising, terrifying. Even full of pain. Yes, even full of pain.

And I think this is another interesting thing is that he, again, part of his psychological notions, is that pain and pleasure are not opposites, but in fact very similar, and that they're opposite to indifference, and that there is a pleasing pain. There is a fascination with pain. There is something about pain and danger, especially when contemplated from a position of safety that is very, very attractive. Can I go back to Pete Mullen now?

We seem to have gone from rhetoric to touching on landscape and then to artefacts with poet, that was part of rhetoric, I suppose, an extension of poetry. And with God still, as it were, behind it all. Is that coming on to the third point you were making? Yes, although let's not get there quite so fast. Let's dwell a little moment on the natural artifacts and so on.

When in the early decades of the 18th century, a writer like Hilder Brand Jacob starts trying to enumerate, to list all of those things which seem to give rise to this feeling, this strong feeling, he lists things like the oceans, he lists things like the moonlight, he lists things like mountains and so forth, but he also thinks of things like ruins,

and he also thinks of things like statues and paintings. So right there, as it were at the very beginning of this, people are reaching for the prompt which gives rise to this feeling. Sorry, I have to continue. And once you can see that once that's there in the first thoughts about this, it doesn't take long before people start worrying about whether or not actually is a representation of a landscape the same thing as the landscape itself. Burke, for example, famously says,

I can tell you, I have no doubt that if you have a play which some terrible, all deed is going to take place, let's say, somebody's executed, and suddenly someone was to run into the theatre and announce an execution, the theatre would empty immediately. He's got a very, very strong idea that representations don't give the same kind of prompt as the real, the execution itself. But other writers and other thinkers think different ways, in different ways about representations,

and certainly in the visual arts, people begin to think very hard about the ways in which one could create visual materials, which would prompt those very, very strong feeling. as strong as the real landscape itself. How is this working itself into the poetry? Well, I was thinking when Pete was talking that and Janet as well, that the descriptions and the analysis

of the sublime that you're both focusing on quite properly is in the realm of representation and in writing. And yet one of the interesting things about the Newtonian problem, which is solving the riddle of the universe and creating new problems that

we hadn't thought of before, like If the universe is infinite and Newton proves, well, don't worry, we can measure it, but it's immeasurably measurable, then we begin to have a lot of doubts about our own capacities for making sense of the universe. And I think it's quite interesting that just a few years before Burke wrote his inquiry, his correspondent Adam Smith, who we all know from his wealth of nations, but also his treatise on the theory of moral sentiments, wrote an essay on astronomy and the importance of astronomy for understanding philosophy in which basically he said,

feeling astonishment, which is that sublime feeling, feeling astonishment, feeling wonder, feeling awe are things that we have to get rid of, in human response if we want to have a well-regulated social world. And so he writes an essay on astronomy, which is really a polemic against the pleasures of the sublime, in which he says what the imagination needs is to be tranquilized, not excited. And he says that the point of, that philosophy should direct its attention,

not to problems of reason, but to problems of imagination. So I think that the problem of the sublime remains closely linked to science and religious problems quite differently from in the realm of representation. Can we come to that religious side now, unless you wanted to add some ago. I just wanted to think a bit more about your point about the science, because I always feel with Burke and as with Dennis that words still remain the most important thing. I mean, Burke says that visual representation is a cool medium.

It doesn't have the impact that words have. And he takes up the Lockean point that we don't, mostly we don't even know the real meaning of words and that we relate to words even before we have any idea of what they can mean. And we still have things like the universe of death and we have no idea what it means or visible darkness. many of the phrases from Milton. And it seems to me that still words with their ability to move and transport

and keep us thinking, being terrified while being actually safe, that this is still to me the main medium for the sublime. Is there a sense, Peter DeBola, that the gathering notion of the idea of the sublime and the internalising of it is being seen as a challenge to the existence of the place of God. I knew that was going to come back. Yes, well, it's certainly the case that we need to put that into the picture.

Let's try and make that step in simple terms. When Burke starts worrying about what it is that causes the sublime or what it is that might be the particular quality of feeling that you have when you want to use the word sublime for describing that feeling, he says, well, let's think about it. It seems to be very big things. It seems to be very powerful things. He says, I know of nothing sublime,

which is not some modification of power. And that word power comes in, and it triggers in Burke's mind of thought, well, if that's the case, what's the most powerful thing I can come across? And of course, it's Godhead. And then he says, well, if that's so, how can I think Godhead, as it were? And he says, well, in fact, what happens when I try to do that is that I'm annihilated. What happens is that it's impossible for my mind to be as large as full as gods. And so what happens is that I feel the small, the miniature size, the minuscule size of my own mind. So God is very problematic here for Burke. On the one hand, God has to sit there as at the center of the universe he inhabits. But on the other, it's quite clear that it's impossible for the mind of man to reach that height. So that's the way in which it appears to Burke. But increasingly, of course, as this enlightenment progresses as the century moves on, God and God and the scriptures and so forth begin to have less force, less power. They don't go away, far from it. But there's there's less force, there's less power, and rationalism, inquiry into the world, into psychology and so forth,

begins to look for internal explanations for why things are as they are. And this is really the third bit of the story which I wanted to get in. As this inquiry into the sublime continued, people started worrying more and more about, is it out there or is it in here. And worries started to occur so that, for example, look, you say that a mountain gives rise to the sublime. Have you ever been to the Alps? Have you ever seen what it's like when you stand on the top of the matter horn? And you go along, when you go and stand on the top of the matter horn,

and it doesn't happen. Well, why? Or let's take another example, not an external cause, but an internal cause. I was feeling pretty chipper this morning until I ran into Janet, who said she was feeling really pretty low. She hadn't slept all night. And I thought, oh, God, I don't feel so chipper now. And in that kind of state of mind, the thing which normally gives rise to this feeling of the sublime doesn't work.

So maybe actually it isn't all. always the case that it's an internal process of the mind. So it doesn't seem to be out there. I can't put my finger on it. It's not out there. And it doesn't seem to be in here either. What is it? And this is really the crucial step, and this is the reason why I think the concept of the sublime

is still massively important to us today and why, as it's articulated as a concept, it's something which we can still use and learn from. What then happens, this is a difficult step, but what then happens is that this idea of the sublime, it's quite clear that there is no object as such which could create that feeling, nor is there any mental process as such that could create that feeling. It seems to come all of its own accord from its own internal workings,

its own internal mechanisms. In a sense, this is a concept for which there is no rule, no principle, no law. This is where Kant comes in. In the way in which Kant starts... Just a second, I want to bring the others in for a moment. You've said that you've taken... a long way forward there. We'll just go across to Annie now, way

across the table. Can you tell us, bring in how Burke's ideas are they directly influencing and this little subtext that's probably trailing away through the sand at the moment, how his, if his ideas are influencing the writers, for instance,

and the painters of the time, are they percolating is something happening as a result of what he's written and so on? Well, certainly. I mean, I think I think that really from, or at least I think Burke is part of a change, and maybe he's the most articulate speaker of it. I think he's quite different from, say, Addison in 1712, who actually uses the example of not being able to understand the sky

as an example of what will be sublimity, and he's quite happy about it. But the darkening of the sublime, I think, is the thing that Burke psychologistsizes and makes apparent, and then is very important for Wordsworth, certainly. But in the period around the time that Burke is writing, there is a developing sense that what happens inside of you is in a sense that what you see outside of you is the trigger for a process inside of you,

which I would like to take the example of a rather understudied, but a very important English poet named Anna Barbald, who wrote one of the best meditative landscape poems about going up into outer space in which she says she can't actually see anything because it's dark. And she sees the stars, and then her mind takes off, and she starts racing through outer space, and she begins to make up a universe inside her head.

And she says that she goes to the dread confines of eternal night, to solitudes of vast unpeopled space, the deserts of creation, wide and wild, where embryos systems and unkindled suns sleep in the womb of chaos, fancy droops and thought astonished stops her bold career, which is really a poetic description of the self-producing the sublime out of some kind of trigger. Janet, before we go on with Peter's taking it forward,

will you take that up and also tell us how, how Burke's idea is influenced, not only, the sublime on the side that people perhaps will be less familiar with, the sublime on the side of terror and horror and so on. I just wanted to take up Annie's point because there's such a wonderful tradition of that kind of writing. And I just wanted to make the point that Mary Walsuncraft, who is hugely interested in the sublime in different ways,

makes a heroine of her first novel. And this is an intellectual, person of great emotions based very largely on herself and she puts her heron into a sublime landscape where she reads the great sublime works of the 18th century or the 17th and

18th century that is Paradise Lost Thompson's Seasons and Young's Night Thoughts and certainly Young in Night Thoughts does something very similar to what Annie's been describing how he was doing. Can you just open that up a bit with young? Because she was very influential at the time. Hugely influential. Everybody read him

and it's a very wild and whirring work of thousands of lines of florid images and full, when you see it on the page, it's full of typographical excess. It's all dashes and exclamation marks to suggest what can't really be expressed in words. But you get to the ninth installment, which is really rather like the ninth symphony, and all the stops come out, and he imagines looking at the starry sky, which is chaotic and therefore sublime, because incomplete, not uniform, not regular. But it's not enough.

The starry sky isn't enough. And as with Barbell, he imagines other universes more and more until he sort of realizes that he's a Christian and perhaps this isn't quite proper. And he sort of reins himself in. But then he has this wonderful moment where he says, where am I, who am I? Where is Earth? Where is the sun?

Is the sun turned recluse? You know, has everything gone. And he has these moments of complete annihilation. And I think that that idea of being completely wiped out before the sublime and yet also expressing it. Also, in a way, I know that we're going to come to the canty and the struggle and the dynamic, but already there's this notion that one is overwhelmed but also one is describing. Even though it comes almost to an end, the end has been created by oneself.

Peter, can we to... Sorry, please come on. I just wanted to say that in a sense both, I mean, Barber, does that as well, comes back to Earth and is secured in her notion of God. And I think that's the thing in a way that the press of sublime poetry and the kind of rhetoric it generates begins to the Christian bit at the end where you say, oh, but it's all okay or I'll find out after I'm dead, that begins to drop out as we move later into the century. And the self becomes the grounding rather than the hypothesis of God. As it does in the gospel.

novel, which is this next phase. Before you drive on, can we just pause for a second and just take on the idea of the landscape? Could you take on for a short because most people listening will think of the sublime in terms of landscape, perhaps in terms of the words worthy and idea

of the landscape, for ease in the British sort of constituency really. How is a sublime affecting that on being affected by that? Well, that's a complex question and there's a simple way of cutting the knot of its complexity. We need to distinguish here between two things,

what we might call the aesthetics of landscape and its tradition, how people think about the landscape either real or represented, and this tradition that we've been sketching called the Sublime. In relation to the tradition of the Sublime, landscape is merely one of those prompts, as I said earlier, to this strong feeling. However, running parallel to or developed in the weight, of that tradition, there's something which we might call the tradition of thinking about

landscape aesthetics, in which landscape is attached to other terms, terms which can be used to describe different kinds of landscape like the picturesque, for example, in which attempts are made to try to distinguish between what might be sublime in a landscape and what might be picturesque. This kind of argument doesn't appear in the mainstream tradition of discussion about the sublime. It's as it were a corner of the discussion in relation to landscape aesthetics. Does that answer your question? Yes, it does. Do you want to drive onto the Kantian idea now?

Well, there was a very interesting moment about five minutes ago where we came to Kant and you, look, a terror came into your eyes and you thought, oh no, the K word, all of the listeners are going to turn off. And just a second, I didn't think that for a moment. I didn't think these listeners turn off with Kant. You misread the audience you're speaking to. It just didn't come in the right order for my notes. That's all.

So let's drive on. Where are we supposed to be now? Sorry about that, but that's one of the things you do. I don't know if we're driving the same car, but let's try this. It would be wrong to try to see this in terms of a kind of linear development of an argument. But let's see if we can put Kant into the discussion very quickly. What I was describing as this worry about whether or not one could work out whether or not the sublime was in here, in me, in the personally experiencing or out there in the world.

In relation to this, it becomes clear that the discussion, what we might call a discourse of the sublime, the discussion about this on what the nature of the sublime might be, itself seems to produce some effects. And this leads people to think about whether or not there might be some strange kind of concept here at work, which is different from other kinds of concepts. In Kant's terms, though this is not exactly,

it would be wrong to think that Kant is exactly in this British tradition, but let's leave that aside for the moment. In Kant's terms, there are certain things, there are certain ways in which we know the world, which he calls determinate judgment, that's to say we know the world, we know particulars in the world through universals. We have a law or a rule or a principle which enables us to understand what it is that we have in front of us. But there are some things, he says, which don't seem to be like that.

And the sublime is one of those things. This is the opposite of what I just described, determined judgment, what Kant calls reflective judgment, in which we have the particular and from the particular we move to the universal. And this seems to be the kind of concept that the sublime is. There isn't, as it were, a rule or a law which says this. will produce this kind of experience, this kind of effect. But there is the effect. And then the effect starts us thinking about,

well, what might be the universal from this particular. And this leads to, if you like, an invention or a discovery of a category, an epistemological category, something that helps us think about the world. In fact, what this term or concept, the sublime, helps us think about is something like transcendence or awe or wonder. Janet Todd, would you like to take that on? Well, not Kant particularly.

The idea of transcendence, sir. Yes, yes, I would like to go back with that. And I think one way I could look at that is where women come in as well. Because particularly, again, I'm thinking of people like the Gothic writers like Anne Radcliffe and also, again, Mary Wollstonecraft, who stands, I think, for a lot of women of this period. They want the transcendence that the sublime gives. and yet they're also, and they want to take the subject position of the sublime. They want to be the sublime person looking, despite the gender language of much of it.

So they want the transcendental experience, but they're also afraid of what it opens up, I think. And this is particularly so of Wollstonecraft in both vindications of the rights of men and the rights of woman, where she attacks Burke and the idea of the sublime quite directly. And towards the end of her life where she comes back to it and finds it someone, what fascinating, she still thinks that the sublime may be based on error, that that very rapture is anti-rational and dangerous, and a great excuse for a sublime ego to go off on some trip for getting its responsibilities and its duties to others.

And also, in particular with women, she thinks that the sublime or the notion of the transcendental and the sublime experience can open up one for other experiences that are really quite dangerous to the self. One is, for example, romantic love. The person who can be so amazed by scenery can be so moved by art has also opened up her mind for other experiences

which can endanger the identity of the person. So I think it becomes quite a problematic notion. And somebody like Radcliffe, who uses the Sublime a great deal, uses the notion of terror to wonderful effect. I mean, that is the driving force of the Gothic novel. At the same time, she insists on something that Burke didn't say, but many other writers on the sublime had,

that the sublime can lead to tranquility and repose at the end of it. Annie, can I ask you about where Blake takes this argument in his notion of the imagination? Yes, you can. And I'd like to answer it by also getting back to Kant, because Blake, many of you may know that Blake is known as an anti-Newtonian. And in fact, many of the romantics make a big deal about how Newton, you know, I can't remember the quotation, but about the prism basically ruined the rainbow

as something that Keats is said to have said. And in fact, when you study the poetry of sublimity and the poetry of Newtonianism, you find that in fact the romantics and Newtonians have an awful lot in common in terms of their understanding of the immensity of the ideas, that is the sublimity of the ideas that have to be grappled with. And as someone once said, Blake had to know Newton really, really well in order to come out with his anti-Newtonianism. And his anti-Newtonianism is really based in the idea of being against abstraction.

He felt that Newton made math, drew mathematical, rules out of the stuff of the universe. But Blake is like Newton in the sense that Blake feels that the world around us is actually made through the imagination. Now, that's like Newton in the sense that Newton felt that the explanation of the universe was a mathematical explanation. It was something that you arrived at through calculation. And so they share a focus on mental activity. And the reason why I wanted to come back to Kant is that it's very interesting to me that when Kant talks about the sublime,

I'm not a Kant scholar, but I've read Kant on the sublime, he has a very important category of what he calls the mathematical sublime, which is based on his understanding of Newton. He wrote about astronomy himself, Kant did. and his notion of the mathematical sublime has to do with this problem of being able to make sense of quantities. And Kant makes the point that the feeling of sublimity comes when you know that you can't make a whole out of what you're observing or thinking, but you know that you can't, and therefore you have the idea of what it might be to actually complete, which I think gets back to this question of the aesthetic of completion and incompletion.

And I just wanted to say one sentence, which is that an awful lot of the poetry of imagination, and particularly written by women, doesn't distinguish between rationality and imagination. Peter DeBahillan, do you want to respond to that? Well, we've moved into the rather troubled waters of some of the Kantian philosophy. I mean, perhaps the easiest way of trying to think about, the point that you've just raised, Annie, is that we can reach to other kinds of examples

which help us get a grip on this rather difficult concept. So, for example, although it's not a major part of the tradition in the 18th century, it certainly grows out of the tradition in the 18th century. One of the things which arises in that discussion is, well, what kinds of things

happens to us when we are in the face of artworks? What kinds of things happen when we read great poetry or when we look at paintings which move us or hear pieces of music which movers. And so one of the things we can do is we can try to look into our own experience of artworks and see whether or not those experiences in some way conform to this structure, this architectonic, this thing that's the concept that I said is the sublime. And there are different ways of describing our responses to artworks, but certainly one of the ways in which

we might describe our responses to artworks is exactly that, well, I know this yet I don't know how I know this. I don't know quite what it is that I know. When I hear some fantastic lines from Shakespeare, they reach me in a way which can't exactly be conveyed by a paraphrase of the words themselves. I understand their meaning. Sometimes we don't understand their meaning because it's quite complicated, but I don't quite know what it is that I'm being, as it were, let into knowledge here by these lines. Janet, do. Yes, I do. And we're back to obscurity, in a sense, again, the incomplete. I mean, Burke said that a clear idea was a little idea. And it always seems to me there is this obscurity about it.

We need to be in ignorance before the sublime. And that's why in a sense it's a notion that doesn't go away because there's always mortality, there's always solitude, there's always vacuity. You say it doesn't go away. Peter started, very near the beginning of this discussion, mentioned sublime suit or a sublime, cupcakes. And there's a sense in which the word has been marginalized

or it's out there, not in the centre. But do you still feel it's in the centre of intellectual discussion about this area of how you appreciate and what affects you and affect you in terms of what is outside at the edges of your understanding? I think the notions are still there. I think the word is having great difficulty. I mean, in preparation for the programme,

I put in female sublime into the internet and got up a load of porno sites. So, yes, I mean, there are problems with it, and I think we're afraid about religion and science going together. I've come a long way from longhinis, from laryans to pornosites. and we're going even further next week, we'll be talking about nuclear physics

and about Anders Rutherford. Thank you all for taking part, and thank you all for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.