De Kapberg, January 17, 2002
 
Dear Adam,

You asked me in your last letter if there is a fundamental difference in aesthetic meaning between the Sublime and the Beautiful. And you wondered why the remark of the German composer Karl Heinz Stockhausen about the destruction of the World Trade Center as the greatest work of art in the cosmos, has aroused so much discussion.

I think that the two questions are related. But before I can clarify my idea, we have to define the meaning of the words sublime and beautiful, because both words carry a long tradition with them. You once wondered, whether the word love today still means the same as in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, not to speak about the other ancient cultures, or that its meaning had totally changed. I remember that your answer was quite ambivalent. You wished that the experience of love would be timeless, but you were not sure if your idea of love as a universal phenomenon was not a joke.

Already Greek philosophers made a distinction between the beautiful, as being pleasant, harmonious, proportional, natural and so on, and the sublime as the greatest, the highest, most intense aesthetic experience. Plato describes four forms and stages of beauty – the beauty of the body; moral beauty; intellectual beauty and absolute beauty. Absolute beauty is not longer a particular, concrete form but the inner realisation of the source of all the beauty there is. He calls this source the Idea of Beauty. Next to this source of the beautiful, there is the source / Idea of Truth and the source / Idea of Goodness. Beauty and Truth merge into Goodness; the three into the One. Whether the One of Plato could be compared with the Void of the Taoists or the Emptiness of the Buddhist, we might discuss another time.
The notion of the sublime covers various meanings. It is not only the highest stage of the beautiful both in the philosophy of Plato, as well as in the Christian, classicist and Moslem concept of the absolute beauty of God, but it refers also to the intensity of a tragic experience, for example in a Greek tragedy as Oedipus Rex or in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Longinus, an unknown author in the first century C.E., defines the sublime in Peri hupsous with the words: All that is really great, will not be exhausted by contemplation, and it is difficult, no, even impossible to offer resistance to it. The memory of it is strong and nearly ineffaceable.
This definition expresses what happened to all who saw the first TV-images of the attack on the WTC. This can’t be true, but it is true! Such an intense emotion belongs not to the order of the beautiful in the traditional sense of the word, but to the sublime. Since ancient times, the sublime has a Janus face. It might refer to the highest degree of beauty, which cannot be expressed in any form. This point of view is expressed in the interdiction of any effigy of Jahveh, God or Allah in Judaism, Protestant Christianity or Islam. But it can also refer to the most intense experiences we are able to imagine in real life and in the arts. Experiences with such an intensity that they surpass the frames of our culture-bound perceptions, such as Medea of Euripides, the Inferno of Dante, Towering Inferno, or…911, where the distinction between virtual reality and real reality faded away on the TV screens. The sublime as overwhelming horror and the sublime as the fascinating, frightening mystery of the holy, are somehow related to each other. They share with each other the desire of the infinite, of boundlessness. The infinite, the boundlessness do not know any aesthetic or ethical rule.

But while the sublime in the Platonic, Christian and classicist tradition may be defined as the all surpassing degree of natural beauty, the sublime of the Greek Medea or September 11, 2001 has a different origin. It unveils the dark side of life, the abyss of the human heart. The sublime raises questions which belong equally to ethics and ontology as to aesthetics. It raises the spectre of the ugly, of evil. In the experience of the sublime, we are facing non-being; we are facing death. That’s the heart of the matter. While in the experience of beauty, we are perceiving life, specific identities, elementary forms, desires and love.

Since ancient times, homo erectus has shown an ambivalent relation to death. Death evokes fear but it exerts also a certain attraction. We find their simultaneous expression in the black Hindu Goddess Kali. Kali, seated on the erect penis of a white man in horizontal position, with many skulls around her neck, holds a sword in her right hand, ready to kill the man. She is the symbol of life-giver and life-taker. She embodies the two necessary tendencies of all organic life, if not of all matter, viz. the centripetal energies, and the centrifugal energies. Good health is the outcome of the right balance between these tendencies. Together the two tendencies take care of the necessary dynamics of our metabolism. We call it respectively anabolism and catabolism. They build up and release the energy for all vital processes.

On the psychological level, we speak about Eros and Thanatos. Eros symbolises life, love and lust, and embodies as such the centre-oriented desires; thanatos symbolises death, transgression or negation of the own identity, and embodies the centrifugal desires. A Zen master expressed the intrinsic relationship between Eros and Thanatos in the following statement: where there is a beginning, there is an end. Or in the words of Goethe: Alles was entsteht, ist wert zum Grunde zu gehen / Everything that comes into being, is worthy to go down.
These are ontological statements in the sense that they indicate that any form, any identity, human or otherwise, will transform into something else. We can not even define what the word ‘else’ means…so profound is our ignorance. But what we do know, from experience and insight, is the permanent transformation of our existence, i.e. our identity, if there is anything like that at all. Because the ongoing loss of memory is identical to loss of identity.

I want to come back, dear Adam, to your question about the difference between the sublime and the beautiful, and why the horrible event of 911 might be called ‘sublime’. If we connect the principles of the sublime and the beautiful with the Death-principle and with the Eros-principle, we have to realise that we connect the level of the aesthetic perception with a biological and a psychological perspective. This means: I am looking at you, while you are looking at me. What do we see? Aesthetics, a body, a mind, a cad-cam system? Probably all at the same time. So, let’s stick to an elementary point of view. We see everything at the same time, but we are unable to grasp intellectually the totality of our existence.

In order to understand the working of the various tendencies, we have mapped out a series of concepts, including the sublime and the beautiful. Do these concepts have an autonomous status? Logically, more or less; ontologically, not at all. That is the issue. We are confronted with a dualistic vision on our existence, while that existence itself consists of a dynamic equilibrium between complementary and yet opposite tendencies.
Edmund Burke wrote in the middle of the 18th century about the sublime and the beautiful, defining the sublime as a feeling of great intensity, including even the experience of pain into the notion of the sublime, and separating it from the notion of beauty. A few decades later, Kant did the same, but on the level of reason versus the delight of the senses. Although great romanticists, like Schiller, Herder, Lessing were trying to bridge the gap between the domains of the sublime and the beautiful, it was too late. The abyss between the classic mind and the romantic mind in our bourgeois culture was already too deep to unite the principles of the sublime and the beautiful. This divorce manifests itself today in many domains, on which I hope to commend another time, in another letter. Without a dramatic divorce between the classic and the romantic mind in our culture, the aesthetic perception would have shown different faces. I use the word dramatic, because the marxist and fascist ideologies in the 20th century are the bastard heirs of the Enlightenment and the Romantic syndrome.

Visual artists are searching for a renewal of the perception, all the time. The sublime is haunting their spirit. Everyone wants to break through the existing frames of perception and experience, perhaps until 911. When the virtual destruction of a skyscraper in Towering Inferno became a real destruction on September 11, the ethical dimension entered the scene of the sublime. I write ‘sublime’, because the overall design of the attack, the long standing preparation, the minimal means, the self control, the suicide, the political agenda, the natural beauty of the planes, the buildings and the blue sky, were all elements in an act that negated any limit, any border. It manifested the sublime, without any relation to Eros. That is, I think, what Stockhausen meant to say. Reality surpassed the opera by all possible means.

When Eros leaves the scene, there is only the destruction by Thanatos. But without Thanatos, Eros becomes sterile. Art can only be art through a subtle interplay between the two opposite tendencies. The beauty of a haiku or a dance is due to the presence of the sublime manifesting itself in the exquisite experience of the passage of time. The Sublime is Time as Destroyer.
Beauty can only come into being when she accepts borders, when she enters a form. The Sublime has to break through boundaries. It blows up forms. In this way I can show that a radical, permanent divorce between the two principles is fatal for the arts and human life.
However, if everything would be in harmony, everything would turn into stone.
A new perspective for the arts arises from a dynamic balance between the sublime and the beautiful. Beauty looks for form. The Sublime breaks into the domain of Beauty – and gives it life.
Dear Adam, I wish you all the best,

Fons Elders