Let me introduce you very quickly to the classical writer Longinus,
and then in future videos we'll zoom in and talk about specific aspects
of his work on the sublime. So as you may have heard,
his name is pronounced "Londjainus." For a long time i used to say
"Long Ginus." But I gather that's actually incorrect,
so "Londjainus." Now Longinus is a figure that we don't
know very much about. We have very few biographical details,
and those can be summed up quite quickly. First of all, he was likely
writing in the first century AD. ...
And we know that his work is addressed to a Roman figure
whose name is Terentianus Postumius.
Quite the name (Postumius), but we don't know very much about this figure either!
He may have been some kind of Roman official,
and that's about all that we're aware of about
Longinus. We gather that he may have had some Jewish connections,
so perhaps he was a Hellenic Jew, and Hellenic refers here to his Greek
nature. So a Hellenic Jew, but we do have to put a
question mark behind that because this is mostly just a kind of
surmise. We have two pieces of evidence for this--
the fact that he might have been a Hellenic Jew.
First of all, the Jewish part comes from the fact that he does refer to the Bible
at times (the Old Testament especially), and he talks for instance
about Genesis. He talks about how sublime it is, how
amazing it is when God creates the universe with his
words. The other part of this identity, the Hellenic part,
may be evident from the fact that sometimes
Longinus refers to "our author" when he's talking about
people like Homer for instance. So by saying that to the Roman
Terentianus, he's kind of saying, well, this is
our author, and that suggests that he has some kind of
Greek background. In any case, Longinus is very well read
and he refers to many different authors throughout his work.
Now when you read Longinus you'll find that he's quite different from
writers like Plato and Aristotle. Those authors are often concerned with very
big questions, questions of education, for instance, and
is poetry a good thing for the republic? Longinus very much zooms into one
issue and that issue is what makes writing
great? What do we look for in writing
and what makes us read great works of literature
to get a certain feeling? What is that feeling? So he calls this the sublime
and he treats it mostly as a literary phenomenon.
He writes, "The sublime, wherever it occurs, consists in a certain loftiness
and excellence of language. In other words, he's primarily focused on
language, and not so much on other forms of art --
painting and sculpture, and things like that,
although i'm sure he wouldn't exclude those either. But his focus is very
specific here. i'm not going to go into all kinds of
details here in terms of what he touches on, but i'd like to summarize just a few
critical things that Longinus achieves in his work. The first thing is
when he talks about the sublime he often compares it to a lightning bolt.
He does that to stress the
uniqueness of this experience. It's a psychological moment where some
amazing piece of writing hits you, or it hits the speaker who is
passionate in the text, and the sublime passion
just pours out. So it's very much like a lightning
bolt, and at one point he contrasts this with
rhetoric. So we can write that this is different from
rhetoric ... even though rhetoric and sublime
language often use the same poetic figures,
the same metaphors and so on. But this is different from rhetoric because
first of all rhetoric is often premeditated.
So you kind of plan what you're going to say to persuade somebody,
and as a result it's not spoken as much in the moment,
as a kind of passionate outpouring. The other thing is that
rhetoric is often not as fast, not as quick. It builds things up slowly, in some
kind of slow crescendo, and Longinus actually compares this to a
kind of slow moving fire that that comes at you. You
can see it from miles away. But the sublime is much more like a
lightning bolt. A couple more things here. Longinus does
not create a clear distinction, so no clear
separation
between beauty and the sublime ...
and that's important because later writers (especially Edmund Burke,
whom we'll cover in a different series) really start to create the separation
that these two things are not the same. Longinus doesn't do
that, and I think that's interesting that
the sublime is quite a wide concept that
can apply to many different things. And then the last critical thing about
his work, as we try to summarize very broadly what he's trying to do,
is that for him, yes, you can identify some of the features of the
sublime, and we'll get to that, but in the end it's ultimately about
passion. Passion is the critical
ingredient. Without it your writing is going to be stiff or
cold, overly ornate -- all kinds of problems that
we can identify. We absolutely need passion to get to the
sublime. The last thing i'll mention here is that
this work became very influential, but largely
after the Middle Ages, when it was rediscovered in the Renaissance.
And there are three figures that I'll mention in passing here.
First of all, Nicolas Boileau, the french critic, translated
the text into French in 1674,
which really made it accessible to a larger European public.
Then we have Edmund Burke writing in 1757,
in a text that's called A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin
of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,
and Burke really created that separation, as mentioned, between
the sublime and the beautiful. He was also
very influential in relation to the Romantics, who read him extensively,
and whose poetry is above all an attempt to
experience and express the sublime. And then the last figure I'll mention
here is Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher.
He was writing about the sublime a number of times in his life, but
particularly in 1764 and 1790.
I won't deal with him so much in these lectures on the sublime,
but he tries to look at it also from a philosophical point of view.
How does this happen psychologically? How does the mind
deal with the outside world and the way it stimulates particular
experiences? Hopefully that gets you interested in the subject, and in our
next lecture we'll talk a little bit about
the structure of Longinus' "On the Sublime."