Flame War Rant

[Jonathan]

I want to take a shot at this and have stood back because (1) I am developing my own theory of art (including an epistemological notion I am clunkily calling "story concept" for now), and (2) I have not yet read Kant's Critique of Pure Judgment, nor Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism, both of which I have and are on my "to read" list.

That being said, I suspect Rand's aesthetics are identical to Kant's with respect to logical derivation from the premise, but her concept of "sublime" is totally different.

I don't know that Rand had a concept of the Sublime, at least in the philosophical/aesthetic sense. She may have casually used the word "sublime" in a layman's sense to mean something like "grand," "lofty" or "elevated," but I'm not aware that she ever commented on the Sublime (I've taken to capitalizing the word when using it in the philosophical sense). It's possible that she may not have known anything about the concept or its long history.

I suspect that she didn't actually read the Critique of Judgment, but only perhaps read a few snippets here and there taken out of context, and that maybe she was misinformed by someone in her circle who had read it with the same hostility and disregard for historical context that Newberry brought to reading it. I'd guess that maybe Peikoff, one of the Blumenthals, or Mary Ann Sures was reading it and telling Rand about all of the evil that they imagined they were finding in it.

In her world, sublime holds reason--especially volitional conceptual human consciousness--as a fundamental component and Kant's does not (I presume).

Kant's ideas on the Sublime are about reason and volition. To Kant, the experience of the Sublime is our enjoyment of having our capacity to reason stimulated, to feel our will to resist whatever incomprehensible or powerful forces man or nature may throw at us, and to adhere to our highest chosen principles.

This makes it easy for Kant's version to logically arrive at modern art and hers to arrive at imitation stylized reality (with respect to visual arts).

The problem is that, regardless of what Rand may or may not have believed about Kant or his concept of the Sublime, or of any previous thinkers' concepts of the Sublime, her novels are still great examples of Kantian Sublimity. Her fiction presents objects of magnitude and terror which allow her heroes, as well as her readers, to enjoy feeling their rational capacity being stimulated in an effort to comprehend, to feel their will to resist, and to adhere to their highest principles, etc. As I said earlier, her novels are the ultimate examples of Kantian Sublimity. I know of no better examples.

Anyway, I don't know if guessing at Rand's views on the Sublime is relevant. The only reason that the subject of the Sublime is being discussed is because Newberry (and then later Hicks) went out looking to vindicate Rand, misunderstood Kant's concept of the Sublime (Newberry somehow took it to be about valuing incomprehension/terror rather than valuing rising above it), thought that he had found the smoking gun, and proceeded to present his flimsy case. We don't know if Rand would have disagreed with Kant's ideas on the Sublime. All we know is that Newberry and Hicks dislike the concept (without actually understanding it), and that they seem to want to believe that their disliking it is taking them in the direction of vindicating Rand's comments on Kant being the evil "father of modern art." I don't think that we should confuse their views with Rand's. They do not represent her or her ideas just because they think they're defending her.

The fundamental premise that leads to the different results is not the aesthetics per se, but the metaphysics and epistemology underlying it.

Well, Rand didn't refer to Kant's writings on epistemology as the cause of modern art, but specifically to his Critique of Judgment. If someone wants to make an epistemological case that Kant caused modern art, I'd be eager to hear it, but keep in mind that I'd then also expect to hear an explanation of why artists such as Cozens were experimenting with abstract art concepts before Kant.

And I believe Rand admirers go ballistic when you suggest a similarity between their aesthetics--rather than go off in a direction like I just did--because Rand attacked Kant and they are continuing the good fight.

Right, to certain people it's not about reality and truth, but about vindicating Rand and expressing rage at anyone who points out that she and her defenders have been mistaken.

As I said, I am shooting in the dark right now, but from the discussions I have read up to this point, my understanding seems to be the case.

At any rate, I believe your concept is worth looking into rather than dismissing it outright.

Well, look into it deeper. Read Kant, and, more importantly, read previous thinkers on the same subjects. I think you'll see that I, along with Johnson and Vacker (as quoted above), am right in identifying Rand's novels as being steeped in Kantian Sublimity.

J

Edited March 2, 2011 by Jonathan

[Jonathan]

We Objectivists can't have Kant or even some cant without the Rand decant of Kant

--Bkant

can't say what Kant said and Kant can't care about Kant or cant or can't or Bkant

Bkant, you should team up with Eminem.

J

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Jonathan,

I haven't read the Kant book, but I have read plenty of Rand. I don't think I'm guessing at what her meaning of "sublime" is. We just have to go conceptual and not semantic to get to her own description.

Although the word, "sublime" is not used specifically in the following passage, the concept certainly is--starting with her phrase "highest religious abstraction" from the "Introduction to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition" of The Fountainhead:

The possibly misleading sentence is in Roark's speech: "From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind."

This could be misinterpreted to mean an endorsement of religion or religious ideas. I remember hesitating over that sentence, when I wrote it, and deciding that Roark's and my atheism, as well as the overall spirit of the book, were so clearly established that no one would misunderstand it, particularly since I said that religious abstractions are the product of man's mind, not of supernatural revelation.

But an issue of this sort should not be left to implications. What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics—not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction "ethics," the realm of values, man's code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man's values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.

. . .

Religion's monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life. Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man's reach. "Exaltation" is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. "Worship" means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. "Reverence" means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one's knees. "Sacred" means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.

But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man's dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words or recognition.

It is this highest level of man's emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship.

. . .

The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it.

Everything about this means "sublime." Do you see it differently?

Just to be sure, I looked on the CDROM for the word "sublime." There are different meanings in the way Rand used it according to different contexts. But I came across the following letter she wrote to an actor, Colin Clive, on October 23, 1934. This was when she was younger, but it expresses the same thing as the passage above, except it purposefully uses the word "sublime." The passage is from The Letters of Ayn Rand, edited by Michael Berliner, p. 16.

I want to thank you for a little bit of real beauty which you have given me, a little spark of something which does not exist in the world today. I am not speaking of your great acting nor of the great part which you brought to life so expertly. Others have done great acting before, and there have been many great parts written. I am speaking of something which, probably, was very far from the mind of the author when he wrote Journey's End, and from your own when you acted it. Perhaps that which I saw in you exists only in my own mind and no one else would see it, or care to see. I am speaking of your great achievement in bringing to life a completely heroic human being.

The word heroic does not quite express what I mean. You see, I am an atheist and I have only one religion: the sublime in human nature. There is nothing to approach the sanctity of the highest type of man possible and there is nothing that gives me the same reverent feeling, the feeling when one's spirit wants to kneel, bareheaded. Do not call it hero-worship, because it is more than that. It is a kind of strange and improbable white heat where admiration becomes religion, and religion becomes philosophy, and philosophy—the whole of one's life.

I realize how silly words like these may sound today. Who cares about heroes any more and who wants to care? In an age that glorifies the average, the commonplace, the good, stale "human values," that raises to the height of supreme virtue the complete lack of it, that refuses to allow anything above the smug, comfortable herd, that places the life of that herd above all things, who can still understand the thrill of seeing a man such as you were on the stage? It is not your acting that did it, nor the lines you spoke, nor even the character you played, because the character was far from the type of which I am speaking. It was something in you, in the whole of the man you were, something not intended by the play at all, that gave me, for a few hours, a spark of what man could be, but isn't. I do not say that you were that man. I say only that you let me see a first spark of him, and that is an achievement for which one has to be grateful.

I don't know if this is Kant's meaning of sublime (like I said, I haven't read the book yet), but I doubt it at this stage of my knowledge. I am open to later correction if such be the case and I admit my view is colored by all of the anti-Kant ranting in O-Land, starting with Rand's own rants.

Your description certainly makes the meaning of sublime sound very similar to Rand's, especially when you say: "To Kant, the experience of the Sublime is our enjoyment of having our capacity to reason stimulated, to feel our will to resist whatever incomprehensible or powerful forces man or nature may throw at us, and to adhere to our highest chosen principles." The word "incomprehensible" jumps out at me as something that would clash with Rand's ideas on a fundamental level, but I'm going to suspend judgment on Kant's meaning right now until I read more.

To be clear about Rand's meaning, I bet if Rand had written a later work on the meaning of sublime specifically, it would have started from the understanding of the term in her letter above.

Michael

[Jonathan]

Everything about this means "sublime." Do you see it differently?

Although Rand is not addressing the specific philosophical concept of the Sublime, her concept of "exaltation" sounds as if it has a lot in common with it. In the quotes you provided, she sounds as if she would be in complete agreement with Kant, who also used the word "exalted" in explaining the Sublime:

Everything that provokes this feeling in us, including the might of nature which challenges our strength, is then, though improperly*, called sublime, and it is only under presupposition of this idea within us, and in relation to it, that we are capable of attaining to the idea of the sublimity of that thing which inspires deep respect in us, not by the mere display of its might in nature, but more by the faculty which is planted in us of estimating that might without fear, and of regarding our estate as exalted above it.

You quoted Rand...

...The word heroic does not quite express what I mean. You see, I am an atheist and I have only one religion: the sublime in human nature...I realize how silly words like these may sound today. Who cares about heroes any more and who wants to care? In an age that glorifies the average, the commonplace...

...and you commented:

I don't know if this is Kant's meaning of sublime (like I said, I haven't read the book yet), but I doubt it at this stage of my knowledge. I am open to later correction if such be the case and I admit my view is colored by all of the anti-Kant ranting in O-Land, starting with Rand's own rants.

The heroic, as opposed to the ordinary, is exactly what Kant's view of the Sublime is about. He specifically contrasts the aesthetic effect of seeing undaunted heroes facing great dangers against the effect of seeing people leading safe, average, commonplace, contented lives. The Sublime is about the heroic -- it's about scale and danger and rising above it.

Your description certainly makes the meaning of sublime sound very similar to Rand's, especially when you say: "To Kant, the experience of the Sublime is our enjoyment of having our capacity to reason stimulated, to feel our will to resist whatever incomprehensible or powerful forces man or nature may throw at us, and to adhere to our highest chosen principles." The word "incomprehensible" jumps out at me as something that would clash with Rand's ideas on a fundamental level, but I'm going to suspend judgment on Kant's meaning right now until I read more.

I used the word "incomprehensible" simply to refer to aspects of the Sublime which historically (including prior to Kant) have dealt with issues of great magnitude, and the effects that observing them can have on us: billions and billions of stars, a view of an ocean during a voyage where no land is visible for days, jagged mountain ranges as far as the eye can see, bottomless chasms, etc. To Kant, the exaltation experienced in such situations is due to the fact that they stimulate our capacity to reason -- they inspire us to try to 'get our minds around' them, even when we can't.

To be clear about Rand's meaning, I bet if Rand had written a later work on the meaning of sublime specifically, it would have started from the understanding of the term in her letter above.

I agree. I think she would have discovered that she was very Kantian if she had studied the history of the philosophical concept of the Sublime, pondered it and then commented on it. She probably would have recognized that Kant's view of Sublimity -- great magnitudes or forces challenging our strengths and inspiring us to rise above them -- was at the core of her own art.

J

* Kant says that everything which provokes the feeling of exaltation in us is "improperly" called Sublime because, to him, the object itself is not what is Sublime, but our exalted reaction to it. The Sublimity lies in us. It's like saying that facing difficulties can be good, but clarifying one's statement by saying that the difficulties themselves are not what are being valued, but the act of facing them.

[Brant Gaede]

The most evil man in history? Rand corrupted by Peikoff in her own lifetime?

--Brant

1970: Miss Rand, have you ever read a complete book by Kant? Rand: blah, blah, blah, without answering the question.

[Jonathan]

I want to add something that I intended to post earlier in response to MSK, but somehow I must have dropped it while copying and pasting:

This makes it easy for Kant's version to logically arrive at modern art and hers to arrive at imitation stylized reality (with respect to visual arts).

As I mentioned in this post, Kant's views do not logically lead to "modern art," since, as Kant scholar Paul Guyer observes, "Kant assumes that all works of art are mimetic, that is, that they have a representational content or theme" -- Kant's view was that "the beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing."

J