I. Burke's Aesthetic Categories
In our upcoming February circular, we print and examine selections from Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). To prepare for this, it is necessary to examine how Burke established a rigid boundary between two distinct modes of human aesthetic experience.
Burke argues that the Beautiful is founded on pleasure, characterized by smallness, smoothness, light, and delicate color, inspiring feelings of affection and tenderness. The Sublime, by contrast, is founded on pain and danger. It is characterized by vastness, infinity, obscurity, and terror—producing a "delightful horror" that fills the mind with awe and resets our self-importance.
For Burke, the Sublime requires distance; we must behold the terror without being in immediate physical danger, allowing the mind to feel the grandeur of the threat without the destruction of the self.
II. Howard's Critique: The Separation of Visual and Verbal
W. G. Howard's analysis of Lessing's Laocoön extends this categorical separation to the mediums of literature and painting. Howard argues that the sublime in poetry operates through suggestion and obscurity, leaving space for the reader's imagination to construct the vastness of the threat. Painting, however, because it is bound to the physical, visual plane, cannot represent the truly sublime; rendering a monster or a storm visually often reduces the terrifying to the merely grotesque or comical.
When writers attempt to "paint" with words, describing every visual detail with mathematical precision, they collapse the literary boundary. They destroy the suggestive obscurity that makes the sublime possible, reducing poetry to a slow, frustrating gallery of static pictures.
If detail makes a scene feel real, why is precision a threat to the sublime? Does a detailed description not help us visualize the scene?
[Reply]Visualizing is not the same as feeling. A list of measurements of a giant is not scary; the giant is scary because his height is lost in the clouds. Precision kills awe by defining its limits.
III. The Application: The Flat Screen
This February, we will apply Burke's and Howard's critiques to the modern collapse of visual and verbal boundaries on our screens. We live in a culture dominated by the high-definition image, where everything is rendered with total, glowing clarity. We have replaced the suggestive, verbal space of reading with the literal, visual density of video feeds.
This visual overload has eliminated the Sublime from our daily experience. By leaving nothing to the imagination, the flat screen reduces the infinite complexity of the world to a series of glossy, superficial objects. This circular is an exercise in reclaiming the verbal boundary, using text and silence to restore the suggestive depth that allows the mind to touch the sublime.
The HD screen is the enemy of the sublime. By illuminating every shadow, it leaves no room for the obscurity that Burke identified as the essential fuel of awe.
From Edmund Burke's Enquiry:
"To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Everyone will be sensible of this, who considers how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds which give credit to them... visual beauty is of a totally different nature, depending on smoothness, delicacy, and the gentle variation of form."