Art in the age of the technological sublime
In many, the word ‘romantic’ effortlessly evokes the cliché image of romantic lovers in moonlit forests and on tropical beaches. A cliché image that one might call sentimental or even pathetic, yet one that is, at a superficial glance, rather innocent. However, Rüdiger Safranski leads us to believe that romanticism is significantly less innocent than this cliché image seems to suggest. In his bookRomantik: eine Deutsche Affäre, Safranski presents this movement, which emerged around 1800, with a generous touch of German self-hatred, as an explosive mixture of art, religion and politics, which brought European culture to the rim of a bottomless abyss (Safranski 2007). While the romantic desire for a better, congenial world of poets such as Novalis, Hölderlin and Schlegel can still be easily cast aside as rather innocentSchwärmerei,things went seriously awry, says Safranski, when later romanticists such as Marx, Wagner and Nietzsche primed themselves to truly realize this desire. From there, according to Safranski, it is only a small step towards Joseph Goebbels’stählerne Romantik(stealed romanticism, quoted in Herf 1995, 87). The catastrophe that sprang from National Socialism appears to have brusquely awoken the Germans from their romantic glow. According to Safranski, the counterculture of the 1960s, so critical of the existing social structure, and ending in the terrorist violence of the Rote Armee Fraktion, teaches us that romantic desire is a lasting threat for the democratic culture that finds its roots in Enlightenment.
Romanticism, viewed as a form of counter-Enlightenment, indulging in irrationalism and nationalism, and ending in an orgy of violence. It is a popular narrative. Twenty years ago Alain Finkielkraut told a similar story in hisLa défaite de la pensée(Finkielkraut 1987). In the following I will defend an opposing interpretation. The calamities that Safranski mentions, which have tormented Europe over the last two centuries, to my mind should be ascribed to alackof romanticism rather than to a surplus thereof. In an age and a country in which opinion-makers gladly refer back to the heritage of ‘Radical Enlightenment’ (Israel 2001) it is, therefore, worthwhile to shed light once more on the heritage of Radical Romanticism.
Contrary to what Safranski and Finkielkraut claim, the young romanticists did not take a hostile stance towards the ideals of Enlightenment at all. Most of them were fervent supporters of the French Revolution, which had its roots in these ideals. However, the bloody Jacobin terror that resulted from this revolution made it clear to the young romanticists that an enlightened mind is no guarantee for a better world. According to the romanticists, who, in this respect, followed Friedrich Schiller’s analysis in his influential collection of letters entitledÜber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen(On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795), the fiasco was caused by the one-sided intellectualism of Enlightenment thought, which had not managed to balance the ‘sensual passions’ of man with his high rational ideals (Schiller 1981).
The ‘disenchantment’ of the world, instigated by Enlightenment, also led to a crude utilitarianism. We live in an age, the romantic philosopher Schelling notes in 1800 ironically, “in which the improvement of themangelwurzelcounts as the highest achievement of the human mind” (Schelling 1957, 291). The remedy that the romanticists propose, following Kant and Schiller, is to aestheticize the world and life, to make them into a grand piece of art, so as to increase the sensibility for moral ideals.
In a secular, post-religious culture only art can give us the inspiration and communal spirit that was previously offered by religion. Novalis notes around 1798: “By endowing the commonplace with a higher meaning, the ordinary with mysterious aspect, the known with the dignity of the unknown, the finite with the appearance of the infinite, I romanticize it. This procedure is reversed for the higher, the mystical, the infinite . . . It gets a common expression. The humble self is identified with a better self through this operation” (Novalis 1977, II, 545).
In his book, Safranski calls romanticism a continuation of religion through aesthetic means. There is truth in that claim, but the continuation is marked by a noteworthy difference. Europe’s major religious wars and the fiasco of the French Revolution made the romanticists aware of the fact the striving for the Absolute – in religion, politics, and love – can easily turn into bloody violence, when it comes with the conviction that these things can andmustactually be realized, if necessary through force. For the romanticists, the desire for the Absolute is accompanied by a tragic realization of the unattainability of that goal. Romantic desire is, to use one of Hölderlin’s poetic phrases,heilignüchtern(‘solemn-soberly’).
This is also the reason why Friedrich Schlegel defines romantic desire as “an eternal oscillation between enthusiasm and irony” (Schlegel 1882, II, 361; cf. De Mul 1999, 9-14). Without enthusiasm – which stems from the Greekenthousiasmos(ἐνθουσιασμός) and means ‘a divine possession’– an individual or a society will lapse into cynicism and nihilism. But without ironic distancing high ideals all too easily lead to terror. When the romanticists look upon the ideal and call it forth with irony, they do so to prevent this taunting ideal from calcifying, and to stop themselves from falling for the dangerous illusion of the manipulability of human happiness. Romantic irony, therefore, is much more than a mere stylistic trope. Rather, it has an ontological meaning, which expresses the radical limitedness of our capabilities to realize our unlimited desires. At the same time, the ironical stance expresses the transcendent character of Romantic desire. Irony takes us beyond existing beliefs and truths. Thus it embodies the fundamental openness towards new experiences.
With her emphasis on the necessity to find new forms of inspiration in a post-religious culture, without falling into the traps of dogmatism or fanaticism, Radical Romanticism remains an inspirational model for European culture. This is all the more so, because the romanticists’ call quickly drowned in the unbounded enthusiasm of modernity. Viewed from a romanticist perspective, political, scientific and artistic modernity is characterized by a dangerous lack of irony. It is precisely on this point that the reconstruction of European history, as presented by Finkielkraut and Safranski, goes amiss.
We cannot deny that the secular ideals of Marx and communism have been inspired, among other things, by the revolutionary élan of early romanticism. However, what Marx and his revolutionary heirs lacked entirely, was the sense of irony that so deeply characterized romanticism in equal measure. This is why it is remarkable that Safranski, without much ado, presents Marx as a romanticist in his book (Safranski 2007, 248). The romantic position, however, was expressed much more distinctly by Marx’s friend Heinrich Heine, who sympathized with Marx’s communist ideals in many respects, but at the same time also warned of the dangers of an excess of enthusiasm in razor-sharp irony. As he expressed this famously in his playAlmansor(1821): “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”
Wagner, who dreamed of radically renewing German culture by transforming her into aGesamtkunstwerk, can be called a semi-romanticist for exactly the same reason as Marx. Particularly his thoroughly anti-Semitic nationalism and his return to Christianity, openly preached inParsifal, (a temptation, by the way, for which several early romanticists fell in old age), testify to the fact that he radically lacked a sense of ironic distance.
Nietzsche is a more complex figure. As a young man he was an idolatrous fan of Wagner’s operas, but he soon developed a wicked-ironic aversion towards their weighty mythology. “Maybe there is a future for laughter” (Nietzsche 1980, III, 370), Nietzsche wrote, after he had sobered from the Wagnerian glow, but European history has since given little cause for cheerfulness. National Socialism, in any case, has shown very little ironic self-deprecation, and the results of National Socialism are there to show for it.
And although Safranski rightly points out that the counterculture of the 1960s has known terrorist excesses, these excesses emerged precisely when the ludic irony was silenced and a fanatical enthusiasm became dominant. Even in its secular guises every belief in the Absolute, which is not held in check by irony, will let nothing stand in its way.
While modernity is characterized by an excess of enthusiasm, an unconditional belief in the possibility of realizing the Absolute – in religion, politics, and love – the post-modern response consists of radically deriding the Absolute. What sets Romanticism apart from both modernity and post-modernity is that it doesn’t entrench itself in either one of the two poles, but rather tries to maintain the oscillation between enthusiasm and irony. The result is an ambiguous attitude towards the Absolute, which itself appears as an utmost ambiguous matter. This becomes especially clear in the romantic conception of the sublime. In tracing the development from the natural to the technological sublime, which characterizes (post)modern culture, the current-day relevance of the romantic ambiguity will be become clear as well.
2 From the natural to the technological sublime
When we call a landscape or a piece of art ‘sublime’, we express the fact that it has particular beauty or excellence. Note, that the ‘sublime’ is not only an aesthetic characterization; a moral action of high standing or an unparalleled goal in a soccer game may also be called ‘sublime’. The sublime is something that exceeds the ordinary. This aspect of its meaning is expressed graphically in the German and Dutch word for the sublime: the ‘exalted’ (das Erhabene). In the latter term we also hear echo’s of the religious connotation that the phrase often contains. The sublime confronts us with that which exceeds our understanding.
The notion of the sublime has a long history. It stems from the Latin ‘sublimis’, which – when used literally – means ‘high up in the air’, and more figuratively means ‘lofty’ or ‘grand’. One of the oldest essays on the sublime dates back to the beginning of our calendar. It is a manuscript in Greek entitledΠερὶ ὕψους(On the sublime). For a long time it was ascribed to Longinus, probably incorrectly so. The author does not give a definition of ‘the sublime’ and some classicists even doubt whether ‘the sublime’ is even the correct translation of the Greek wordhypsous. Using a number of quotes from classical literature, the author discusses fortunate and less fortunate examples of the sublime. For one, it must discuss grand and important subjects and be associated with powerful emotions. For pseudo-Longinus the sublime landscape even touches upon the divine. Nature “has implanted in our souls an unconquerable passion for all that is great and for all that is more divine than ourselves” (Longinus 1965, 146).
Longinus’ essay was hardly noticed by contemporaries, and also in the centuries that followed, only rarely do we find references to this text. The essay was published in print for the first time as late as 1554 in Basel. But only after the French translation by Boileau (1674) and the English translation by Smith (1739) did the text begin its victory march through European cultural history. From the period of Baroque onwards, which culminates in Romanticism, the sublime grows to becomethecentral aesthetic concept. At the time, the sublime was often associated with the experience of nature. In the eighteenth century we find it predominantly in descriptions of nature of a number of British authors, who portray the impressions they collected on their Grand Tours through Europe and the Alps – a common phenomenon for young people from prosperous families in those days. These authors use the term to put the often fear-inducing immensity of the mountain landscape into words.
The sublime refers to the wild, unbounded grandeur of nature, which is thus contrasted starkly with the more harmonious experience of beauty. InA Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautifulin 1756 Edmund Burke defines the sublime as a “delightful terror” (Burke 1998, 101-2). That the forces of nature can lead the viewer into ecstasy nevertheless, is connected with the fact that the viewer watches this force from a safe distance.
However, in German Romanticism the sublime loses its innocent character. Especially the work of Kant has been of critical importance in this respect. In theKritik der Urteilskraft(1790) Immanuel Kant, following Burke, makes an explicit distinction between the beautiful (das Schöne) and the sublime (das Erhabene). Beautiful are those things that give us a pleasant feeling. They fill us with desire, because they seem to confirm our hope that we are living in a harmonious and efficient world. A beautiful sunrise gives us the impression that life is not that bad, really. The sublime, on the other hand, is connected with experiences that upset our hopes for harmony. It is evoked by things that surpass our understanding and our imagination, by their unbounded, excessive, or chaotic character (Kant 1968, B74ff.).
Kant makes a further distinction between the mathematical and the dynamic sublime. The first, the mathematical sublime, is evoked by that which is immeasurable and colossal, and pertains to the idea of infinitude. When we view the immensity of a mountain landscape or look up at the vast night sky, we are overcome by a realization of our smallness and finitude. Kant associates the second, the dynamic sublime, with the superior force of nature. The examples he uses include volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and turbulent oceans. Here, too, we experience our smallness and finitude, but in these cases this understanding is complemented with the realization that these forces of nature can destroy us with their devastating power. The dynamic sublime evokes both awe and fear, it induces a ‘negative lust’. Attraction and repulsion melt into one ambiguous experience in these cases.
Since the sublime remains primarily an aesthetic category in Kant’s work, he maintains the idea that the experience of the sublime is characterized by keeping a safe distance. When watching a painting of a turbulent storm at sea, one can allow oneself to contemplate the superior force of nature, while resting comfortably assured that one is safely in a museum and not at sea! Friedrich Schiller, in contrast, takes things one step further and ‘liberates’ the sublime from the safe cocoon of the aesthetic experience in a series of essays – deeply impressed as he was by the political terror that had sprang from the French Revolution under the Jacobin rule.
In order to accomplish this liberation Schiller rephrases Kant’s distinction between the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime in his 1793 text calledVom Erhabenen(On the Sublime). Schiller argues that the mathematical sublime ought to be labeled the theoretical sublime. The immeasurable magnitude of the high mountains and the night sky evoke in us a purelyreflexiveobservation of infinitude. When nature shows itself as a destructive force, on the other hand, weexperiencethe practical sublime, which affects us directly in our instinct for self-preservation. On top of that, according to Schiller, we need to make yet another distinction. When we view life-threatening forces from a safe distance – for instance by looking at a storm at sea from a safe place on land – we may possibly experience the grandeur of the storm, but not its sublime character. An experience can only be truly sublime when our lives are actually endangered by the superior forces of nature. And even that is not enough. Human beings have an understandable urge to shield themselves both physically and morally from the superior force of nature. Whoever protects his country by building dykes, attempts to gain ‘physical certainty’ against the violence of a westerly gale; whoever believes that his soul will live on in heaven after death, protects himself by means of ‘moral certainty’. Whoever truly manages to conquer his fear of the sea or of death, shows his grandness, but loses the experience of the sublime, according to Schiller. Truly sublime is he, who collapses in a glorious battle against the superior powers of nature or military violence. “One can show oneself great in times of good fortune, but merely noble in times of bad fortune” (“Groß kann man sich im Glück, erhaben nur im Unglück zeigen”) (Schiller 1962, 502).
In Schiller’s work the sublime is transformed from an ambiguous aesthetic category into a no less ambiguous category of life. History doesn’t stop, however. During the nineteenth and twentieth century, the ambiguous experience of the sublime is gradually transferred from nature to technology.
Our current time is viewed as the age of secularization. God is retreating from nature and nature is gradually ‘disenchanted’ in the process. Nature no longer implants in us, as was the case with Longinus, “an unconquerable passion for all that is great and for all that is more divine than ourselves”, but principally invites technical control. Divine rule has become the work of man. The power of divine nature has been transferred to the power of human technology. In a sense the sublime now returns to what it was in Longinus’s work: a form of human technè. However, these days it no longer falls into the category of the alpha technologies, such as rhetoric, but rather we find ourselves on the brink of the age of beta technologies. Modern man is less and less willing to be overpowered by nature; he vigorously takes command of nature instead.
As David Nye has documented in great detail in his bookAmerican technological sublime, the Americans initially embraced the technological sublime with as much enthusiasm as with which they had previously embraced the natural sublime (Nye 1994). The admiration of the natural sublime, as we may experience it in the Grand Canyon, was replaced by the sublime of the factory, the sublime of aviation, the sublime of auto-mobility, and the sublime of war machinery.
Nevertheless, it would be quite premature to think that we have banished the dark side of the sublime from history. With the transfer of power from divine nature to human technology, the ambiguous experience of the sublime, also, has nested in the latter. In our modern world it is no longer the superior force of nature that calls forth the experience of the sublime, but rather the superior force of technology. In the era of technology it is technology itself that gains a confounding character in its battle with nature. On the one hand, technology is an expression of the grandeur of the human intellect, but at the same time, we experience her progressively as a force that controls and threatens us. Technologies such as nuclear power and genetic manipulation, to mention just two paradigmatic examples, have a double-faced head: they gather both our hopes for the prosperity that human technology may bring, and our fears for its uncontrollable, destructive potential. This is why it is often said, in relation to such sublime technologies, that we ‘shouldn’t play for God’.
Modern man, however, has been denied the choice tonotbe technological. The biotope in which we used to live, in the modern age has been transformed entirely into a techno-tope. We have created a technological world without which we can no longer survive. The idea that we could return to nature is an unworldly illusion. As noted, we do not only have to regret that. Enthusiasm for technologies’ accomplishments is certainly justified. Modern technology has given the average European and American a level of comfort in life that Medieval royalty could only dream of. However, as the sublimity of war machinery has taught us, that which applies to the sublime in general also applies to the technological sublime: without ironic distancing the means can be far more brutal than the troubles they are supposed to mend. It is too easy to attribute all the horrors of the Nazi regime to irrationalism. It’s far too easy to blame irrationalism for the factory-like organization of the concentration camps. It was motivated by an enthusiastic faith in the technical manipulability of society as well. In a similar vain, the American belief in nuclear bombs and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasagi displayed a one-sided enthusiasm for the technological sublime. And more recently, the American attempts to bring ‘democracy’ to Vietnam and Iraq exhibited a politico-technological enthusiasm that borders on recklessness. Likewise, many of the ecological problems we are encountering today stem from an excess of technological enthusiasm (cf. De Mul 2009).
According to David Nye, this is the reason why, throughout the twentieth century, the enthusiasm for the technological sublime has turned into a fear. Especially atomic energy and genetic research evoke fears in us regarding the fact that we may be creating forces that will eventually destroy us. Since Mary Shelley’sFrankensteinthis has been a recurrent response to the technological sublime.
3 Living the sublime: beyond the opposition of enthusiasm and irony
By no means do I want to argue that irony is a solution for every problem. From the perspective of Radical Romanticism the ironicrejectionof technology would be no less naïve than the uncritical embracement of technology. Indeed, when the fiascos that spring from modern enthusiasm entail that we will entrench ourselves in a surplus of irony, we will have no progress whatsoever. This is what the history of post-modernism shows. Post-modernism has accompanied modernism from the start in the guise of a critical shadow. As a result of the atrocities of modern European history the voice of post-modernism has grown louder as time went by. Undoubtedly, we should take the critique that the post-moderns have put forth against the modern enthusiasm to heart. But where irony gets the upper hand and enthusiasm is extinguished, only cynicism and nihilism remain. And these are no less lethal for cultures. Exit post-modernism.
What we can learn from Radical Romanticism today is the fact that we have to maintain the precarious balance between enthusiasm and irony, as if we were walking on a tightrope. With respect to the technological sublime, too, we need to go beyond the unproductive opposition of enthusiasm and irony, of optimism and pessimism. In our current age of high technology we can no longer expect – as for example Nietzsche still did under the spell of Romanticism – that art will save us. Nevertheless, this does not imply that art has lost its part to play. In our current age of high technology art may help us feel at home with the technological sublime.
The romantic oscillation, eternally going back and forth between enthusiasm and irony, might also be just the right attitude in the multicultural societies that have emerged in Europe. In such societies, one form of enthusiasm easily provokes a radically opposite form of enthusiasm. That explains why Enlightenment fundamentalism often resembles the Muslim fundamentalism she attempts to combat to a sinister degree. If history can teach us anything, it is that these forms of radicalism are a guarantee for raving fires that spread far and wide. Ironic distancing is a wonderful extinguisher, particularly when it takes aim at our own enthusiasm. But we must not forget that with an excess of irony we may also miss our goal. Whoever ridicules the other entirely, is past any form of dialogue. And for whoever can only ridicule himself, even the monologue becomes devoid of expression. If, as Nietzsche suggests hopefully inThe Gay Science, laughter has a future, than let laughter be spent together, on matters that are truly holy for us all. There is quite a bit of romanticizing left.
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