In this lecture on Longinus' work "On the Sublime," from the first-century AD,
I'd like to have a look at five different topics that he explores.
You can think of these as kind of high points along the way.
At first glance, they may not seem like they have much to do with each other,
but we will try to establish some loose connections
anyways. Alright, so let's start with passion then,
and Longinus writes, "For I would confidently pronounce that nothing is so
conducive to sublimity as an appropriate display of genuine
passion ..." And, indeed, for Longinus, passion trumps
everything else. You can be hyper correct and follow all
the rules, you can display your rhetoric and your
artistic ability, but unless you take risks and really kind of
allow the passionate side of you to come out,
then you're not going to have much of an effect on the reader or the listener.
You have to make your imagery vivid. You have to make
the listener or the reader experience the situation, so that they
can feel, you know, the storm around them, or they
can feel what it's like to be in love, let's say.
And this also means that you can't just be kind of generally good at a whole
bunch of things. It's much better to specialize and to do one thing really
well. The image that comes to mind here is one
from sport. Like if you take an event where
you have multiple forms of competition, you can come second
or third in a whole bunch of them and still come first overall, but
Longinus says the sublime is a little bit more like a hundred
meter dash in a sense. It's like a lightning bolt, he
says. It's super fast. It hits you. It's the one thing that
really matters. Maybe that analogy helps a little bit
to understand how for Longinus, passion is the biggest
thing, and you can't just be generally good and
and kind of achieve good results in general, without doing
one thing super well and impressing
everybody. Passion, then ... the effect of it is that
any rhetorical device does not seem artificial.
It's not on the surface, [and] we don't even notice it, because we get carried
away with the passion. Similarly,
even though most sublime passages will have some elevated language,
and even though Longinus often says that vulgar language is not sublime,
nevertheless if your language is passionate, then even
common and plain words can become sublime.
Okay, and this means then that the sublime is less about mimesis, which is
the representation of reality, than it is about emotion.
That's a little bit of a change, I think, from writers like Aristotle and
Plato, who are focused much more on the way in which art represents reality,
although even Aristotle already was moving to a different model,
where it was more about selection than faithful copying.
But this really stresses this notion that
a sculptor, let's say, can make a perfect depiction of somebody, but unless there's
passion and emotion it's all rather meaningless. At one
point, Longinus also writes, "Passion requires a
certain disorder of language, imitating the agitation and commotion of
the soul." And he talks about how passionate
passages often have a flood of images and metaphors, and how
how when we are passionate we often omit conjunctions and different parts of
speech because it just all comes pouring out. So if I
make mistakes in this video you can blame it on that!
Alright, that's the first point that
Longinus makes here about what is considered sublime. Our second topic
has to do with psychology, and this connects to the first in a way, because
if we're so focused on the emotions, then one of the questions is: how do
these emotions work in a sense? How are they
channeled? There are two parts to this. The
first is that as readers or listeners we tend to identify
with the author. He writes at one point: it is
natural for us to feel our souls lifted up by the
true sublime and conceiving a sort of generous
exaltation to be filled with joy and pride,
as though we had ourselves originated the ideas which we read.
When you read an amazing book and you're carried away with it,
it's as if you are the author, as if you're in the driver's seat.
And that separation between author and reader
has been completely elided. Now there's also an identification
between the author and the characters.
At one point Longinus writes: In a sublime depiction of battle
(and here comes the quote), "the mind of the poet is swept along in the whirlwind of
the struggle." So the poet loses himself as well.
And you can see there that there's this kind of transport,
this kind of "ekstasis," where you stand outside of yourself.
So if you're a creative writer,
you need to allow yourself to be swept along and to be inspired.
Now if we think then about our third issue, which is
the worldview issue, there is a kind of conundrum that Longinus doesn't
quite deal with openly. He doesn't quite resolve this problem.
If we are passionate people, and we're overcome by our emotions,
then that presents a problem in terms of writing something that represents a
particular worldview and also tying the sublime to a
particular view of life. Okay, at one point, Longinus
writes, "It is proper to observe that in human life nothing is truly great
which is despised by all elevated minds." In other words, the sublime has
a moral aspect. Only good things in a sense, or relatively good things, or
things that build up or that we can admire, can be
sublime. Hopefully you can see the
problem this represents. If we think about passion or emotion,
Plato of course saw that the emotions are not always good.
They can lead to a kind of contagious effect where we are
infected by our emotions and by things outside of us, and we lose control of our
reason. So if we go to
a big music concert, for instance, and the whole thing is about materialism and
self-indulgence and so on, well, we can be swept up by our passions
and find it elevating and maybe sublime. But Longinus would say, if the moral view
expressed at that concert is not a good one, then we cannot
consider that sublime. He writes, "For example, no
man of sins can regard wealth, honour, glory, and power,
or any of those things which are surrounded by a great external parade of
pomp and circumstance, as the highest blessings." That's a really
fascinating point because it suggests that we should not
get carried away by external trappings, by great shows and things like that, but
we should look at what truly matters in life, and
we should have a moral view of life. This is a great point to make if we
think of something like the Nuremberg rallies,
where Hitler had the troops parade, and we have
all of these grand ceremonial effects. From Longinus' point of view, those would
be false pomp and circumstance, and a good
person should see through those and should see that that's an example of
bathos. Or that's an example of ... well, maybe
bathos is not quite the right word: maybe it's an example of bombast
actually, where there's a lot of sound and fury
signifying nothing. Okay, so you can hopefully see the
problem, then, that we have on the one hand this focus
on passion and then on the other hand we have more
of a focus on world view, which is a more rational
approach, and squaring these two things or bringing them together
is obviously very challenging. Our next point has to do with something
called the anxiety of influence, which is a term I've borrowed
from the critic Harold Bloom. So,
one of the things that Longinus points out is that
writers compete with each other. They all want to be the greatest
writer, and you can tie this to our previous point by then wondering, well, is
this actually a good thing to strive for. Is this just a false sense of glory.
I think Longinus doesn't quite address this issue,
and doesn't come to terms with it. He talks about
an "emulous imitation." In other words, we strive to outdo somebody else
in a kind of envious way almost, where we want to be the person who's given the
laurels. We want to be the poet laureate, you
might say. Alright, so he writes at one point
about the way in which Plato kind of competed with
Homer for the crown. And he writes this: "Nor in my opinion would so many fair
flowers of imagery have bloomed among the philosophical dogmas of Plato,
nor would he have risen so often to the language and topics of poetry,
had he not engaged heart and soul in a contest for precedence with Homer,
like a young champion entering the lists against a veteran."
So you can see the contest, the agon, here, and it's actually kind of funny
because of course Plato was very distrustful of Homer, and
was constantly saying that Homer was misleading people, and that
people had to think for themselves. But according to Longinus, Plato is just
trying to outdo Homer, and this is a competition.
That makes it ironic that Plato himself had so many
poetic images when he was criticizing Homer for
his poetry! If we want to
further this discussion, we might have a look at Harold Bloom's
work on the anxiety of influence. He argues that
we can look at Freud, who suggested that children often look to their fathers and
they want to metaphorically kill the father
figure in order to come to terms with that
issue of authority. Doesn't mean they literally kill the
father, but there's a there's a kind of desire to outdo the father, and as
somebody with a teenage son I can tell you that that's
definitely true. Okay, now in literature,
and this is where things are more controversial probably ...
well, even with Freud they're controversial already ...
but in literature what happens according to Harold Bloom
is that the younger poet tries to outdo the father poet, one of the
poets who came before, and a common way to do this is to use
the same metaphors, but then to do it better.
The younger poet often will allude to a passage in the older
poet's work and then change it and play with it,
and in a sense that's a kind of way of outdoing the father figure.
So the anxiety of influence, then, is a term that suggests that younger authors
are anxious about the way in which the father has
influenced them, and they want, they need to deal with this problem.
I think we can see that in the work of Longinus, the way in which he talks
about Plato and Homer, and Homer's influence
on Plato. But I think this also ties to our
larger discussion, as we've mentioned, in the sense that
in terms of morality should these authors even be striving for the crown?
Or should they be attempting for something a little bit more humble.
Our last topic is also in a sense about morality, and this has to do with whether
different types of societies or governments
are more conducive to producing sublime works.
In this particular passage. which is at the very end
of Longinus' On the Sublime, there's somebody who
claims or kind of wonders whether a democracy is not better
than a dictatorship, because in a democracy
people are free, they have liberty, and surely that would give them the
opportunity to produce great works of art.
Longinus counters this by saying, okay, well, that's all fair, but
one of the things that happens in a democracy
is that people become slothful. They're materialistic.
They only care about money and pleasure and things like that,
whereas in a dictatorship there's so much hardship.
Yes, there is also flattery and slavery, and all these problematic things,
but there's also an attempt to kind of live a more difficult life,
and to overcome one's materialism. And from that perspective, that kind of
government, even though I don't think Longinus approves of it necessarily,
but he does point out that it's just as likely to produce sublime works
of art as democracies, which is an interesting
point to consider. And he writes, "Are we not enslaved, nay,
are not our careers completely shipwrecked by love of gain,
that fever which rages unappeased in us all,
and love of pleasure?" So this brings us back then to the
beginning of our discussion, because we started with passion, and we
can now see that some of these passions which rage in us are actually
really problematic. I hope you can see then that
this is kind of a thread that runs
all the way through On the Sublime, this problem of
how do you reconcile morality and the sublime on the one hand, and
passion on the other? Are these things actually
in sync with each other or not?