Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the
Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000)
pp. 150-152:
Let us turn to two very interesting
and significant passages where Kant discusses the feeling of the sublime. The
first comes at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, shortly
before Kant’s hymn to ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’:
The
former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my
importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere
speck in the universe) the matter from which it came, the matter which is for a
little time provided with vital force, we know not how.2
The second passage is from the
Critique of Judgement.
Hence
if in judging nature aesthetically we call it sublime, we do so not because
nature arouses fear, but because it calls forth our strength (which does not
belong to nature [within us ]), to regard as small the [objects] of our [natural]
concerns: property, health, and life . . . . 2 4
These two passages call to
mind an episode in Monty Python’s film The Meaning of Life, where the
contrast between the magnificence of the starry heavens and the insignificance
of our ordinary lives also plays a major role. Of course, this episode is a caricature,
but this does not prevent it from helping us to define the logic of the sublime
more sharply.
The
scene takes place in the apartment of a married couple. Someone rings the bell.
Th e husband opens the door, and two men make their entry. They are in the ‘live
organ transplants’ business, and they demand his liver, which he had made the mistake
of donating in his will. The poor man defends himself by saying that they have
the right to take his liver only in the event of his death, to which objection
the two men reply that in any case he is not likely to survive the removal of
his liver. In what follows we witness a gory scene: blood splashes everywhere, one
of the two ‘butchers’ drags bloody organs out of the victim’s viscera and waves
them in front of the camera . . . . But what really interests us here is the
second part of the story, which could be regarded as a veritable ‘analytic of
the sublime’. While one of the men continues to chop up the defenceless husband,
the other accompanies the wife to the kitchen. He asks her what she is going to
do now, if she intends to stay on her own, if there is somebody else waiting in
the wings. He makes it sound as if he is courting her and she replies that no,
there is no one else. Satisfied with her answer, he asks her to donate her
liver as well. Of course she has no inclination to do so, and shrinks back in
fear. However, she changes her mind after she is brought to the edge of the
sublime - that is to say, when she ‘realizes’ how insignificant her position
appears from a more ‘elevated’ point of view. A tuxedo-clad man emerges from
the refrigerator and proceeds to escort her out of the kitchen of her everyday
life, on a promenade across the universe. While they are strolling across the
starry heavens, he sings about the ‘millions of billions’ of stars and planets,
about their ‘intelligent’ arrangement, etc., etc. Thanks to this cosmic (and
for her undoubtedly sublime) experience, the woman comes, of course, to the
desired conclusion: how small and insignificant I am in this amazing and
unthinkable space! As a result, when she is asked once again to donate her
liver, she no longer hesitates.
As we
have already said, this is a caricature. Nevertheless, the logic of this story
is precisely the same as the logic pointed out by Kant regarding the sublime.
There are moments when something entrances us so much that we are ready to
forget (and to renounce) everything, our own well-being and all that is associated
with it; moments when we are convinced that our existence is worth something
only in so far as we are capable of sacrificing it. There is no need to stress,
of course, that the whole thing seems ridiculous only to the ‘disinterested
observer’ who is not overwhelmed and challenged by the same feeling of the
sublime. This specific mode of challenge is, as we shall see, quite important
for the logic of the sublime, which we are attempting to define here.
The
two essential points in the passages cited above describing
the experience of the sublime
are therefore:
1. The feeling of our
insignificance as far as the ‘whole of the
universe’ is concerned (we are
but a speck in the immense
universe).
2. The fact that what functions
as the centre of gravity of our existence in our ordinary life suddenly strikes
us as trivial and unimportant.
The
moment we ‘resolve’ the feeling of anxiety into the feeling of the sublime (of
the elevated, das Erhabene) we are dealing with a sublimity (elevation )
relating to ourselves as well as to the world outside us. In other words, the
feeling of the sublime, the reverse side of which is always a kind of anxiety,
requires the subject to regard a part of herself as a foreign body, as
something that belongs not to her but to the ‘outer world’. We are dealing here
with what we might designate as ‘the disjunction of the body and the soul’,
that is to say, with the metaphor of death. We become aware of our ‘smallness’
and insignificance, but at the same time our consciousness has already been ‘evacuated’
- it is already situated in a place of safety, from which we can enunciate this
kind of elevated judgement and even renounce the part of ourselves that we find
small and insignificant. Thus we can enjoy the narcissistic satisfaction that
results from our consciousness of being able to ‘elevate’ ourselves above our
everyday needs. That is to say, the feeling of the sublime is linked, as Kant
puts it, with a self-estimation [Selbstschätzung].25
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp-pU8TFsg0
No comments:
Post a Comment