a heavily academic paper which i thought i messed up but for which i received fairly decent feedback.
Sublime
Tactics and Political Domination:
the Radicalism of Schiller’s
Education as Emancipation
It is impossible to speak of the
sublime without a discussion of politics: that is, the power
relations between the perceiver and perceived. Immanuel Kant
describes the sublime as the feeling invoked within us when we look
upon something that is “large beyond all comparison” and that
gives our eyes the illusion of perceiving the idea of infinity (Kant
103). By likening this feeling to one felt by the Christian god,
Edmund Burke describes its effect in similar terms: “whilst we
contemplate so vast an object […] and invested upon every side with
omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and
are, in a manner, annihilated before him” (Burke 68). The object of
the sublime is awe-inspiring and terrible precisely because our sense
cannot possibly grasp it all at once; before it we also strongly
apprehend the inadequacy of our sensibilities and imagination. In
other words, we feel that we are at the mercy of the object that
overwhelms us with its vastness.
Longinus, in possibly the first
extensive exposition on the topic, devotes his work to the analysis
and application of these mechanisms in practical speech—specifically,
in political oration. The author’s primary interest in the sublime
is its potential to exert power over the listener. Among the various
other stylistic techniques that the author considers, what he calls
phantasia,
or visualization, is an especially potent weapon. This is because
this particular technique specifically targets is the imagination;
“when combined with factual arguments,” Longinus writes, “it
not only convinces the audience, it positively masters them”
(Longinus 223). Misleading them and concealing all these devices is
key to this mastery: the author punctuates his discussion of the
different tools and methodologies with frequent reminders to prevent
the audience from becoming aware of their use, as knowledge would
disperse the illusion (Longinus 231). Indeed, Kant condemns oratory
precisely because of its basis on deceitful manipulation. He calls it
“the art of using people’s weaknesses for one’s own aims” and
that it “is unworthy of any respect
whatsoever” (Kant 198).
For Burke, obscurity plays a
significant role in the feeling of sublime. He likens the source of
fear and terror to that of darkness and tales of ghosts and goblins.
We fear uncertainty, what we cannot apprehend in its completeness
while also “[i]t is our ignorance of things that causes all our
admiration, and chiefly excites our passions” (Burke 61). It is
from this double effect of fear and respect that the sublime derives
much of its power to dominate us.
In this equation, then, the other
side of fearful ignorance is omniscience. If the object of the
sublime is not a natural phenomenon but a person, the situation
becomes a dominant-subservient relationship that often results in a
systematized political economy. Michel Foucault, in Discipline
and Punishment, 1975,
argues that Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon functions on this political
relationship between knowing and unknowing. The architectural design
of this prison structure places a single surveillance tower
surrounded by a circle of individual cells. The person in this
tower—protected from gaze by Venetian blinds and angular
wall—receives an unobstructed view into the activities of every
inmate, while the inmates, on the other hand, are denied any view
into the interior of the tower, let alone each other’s cells.
Foucault writes that “Bentham laid down the principle that power
should be visible and unverifiable” (Foucault). The only knowledge
that the prisoners have is the fact of their being watched; they know
nothing about the identity of the watcher or whether the watcher is
even inside the tower. The inmate “is seen, but does not see; he is
the object of information, never a subject of communication”
(Foucault). This partial knowledge is the ingenious aspect of
Bentham’s creation: only a glimpse and denial serves to maintain
control on a psychological level.
In natural occurrences of the
sublime, there is a second part to the initial feeling of
subservience: the feeling of the imagination’s inadequacy is
quickly succeeded by an affirmation of our power of reason. Kant
describes the two-step process as a kind of sacrifice in the name of
morality, the object of humanity’s perpetual ambition toward a
higher purpose. Thus, the sublime is a negative pleasure: only after
we feel that “the imagination […] is depriving itself of its
freedom” do we receive the affirmation of our “supersensible
power” which surpasses that of anything in nature (Kant 129, 131).
The experience is
more rewarding because of the deprivation, as it is “one that
serves our inner freedom” by revealing our moral potential (Kant
131).
When this second part—the reward
that “expands the soul”—is removed, only deprivation remains,
and the sublime becomes exploitative power (Kant 135). In his
analytical, Kant inserts a brief critique of the government and
religion for doing precisely this:
That
is also why governments have gladly permitted religion to be amply
furnished with such accessories: they were trying to relieve every
subject of the trouble, yet also of the ability, to expand his soul’s
forces beyond the barriers that one can choose to set for him so as
to reduce him to mere passivity and so make him more pliable (Kant
135).
This gesture disciplines the masses to
make them more manageable. In a sense, it is the containment of a
multitude into finitude, the opposite of an untamable sublime.
Friedrich Schiller, too, criticizes this reductive strategy of state
control: “Compelled to disburden itself of the diversity of its
citizens by means of classification, and to receive humanity only at
second hand, by representation, the governing section finally loses
sight of it completely” (Schiller 41). Like so many inmates in
Bentham’s Panopticon (number 42, number 43, number 44...), the
demystified and generalized citizens become interchangeable parts
under a few that hold the knowledge and power of the sublime’s full
spectrum.
The key to reclaiming power and
freedom, then, lies in a reinsertion of mystery, chaos, and
complexity. Since its beginnings, modern science as well as
philosophy seem to have acted from a vengeance, a vehement mission to
strip all things of their obscurity to lay them bare under the
glaring light of rationality. Condemned and openly scorned are ideas
of the sacred, spiritual, and subjectivity. Certainly,
demystification soothes anxieties resulting from uncertainty, but it
is questionable whether we are happier human beings in our comfort of
supposed knowledge, as the pinnacle of this hierarchy—that is,
reason over sense—seem only to be a privilege of a small minority.
Schiller, in On
the Aesthetic Education of Man,
1795, argues that happiness comes with freedom, and these in turn are
not frivolities, but absolute necessities for the betterment of
society. He blames the hierarchy of reason over sensibility—often
championed in the name of progress—as the source of the degenerate
and selfish state that he sees in his contemporary world. Forcefully
imposing order onto citizens only has a limited influence. Instead of
a hierarchy, he calls for a balance of these two apparent
dichotomies, that is the only way that could produce a perfect and
complete being.
An aesthetic education—in contrast
to a rational-centric education dominant during his time of writing
as well as for us today—cultivates both aspects of a human being
and thus emancipates both. The suppression of either, that is,
“[p]artiality in the exercise of powers […] inevitably leads the
individual into error, but the race to truth” (Schiller 44). Though
generally regarded as two conflicting poles, their penchant for
either extreme make Christianity and philosophy guilty of the same
crime: “The old principles will remain, but their will wear the
dress of the century, and philosophy will lend its name to an
oppression which was formerly authorized by the Church” (Schiller
47). Choosing either or will always keep people in chains, merely
bearing different names. The problem, then, must be addressed on the
fundamental level, that is, education.
Freedom from the oppression of either
can only be achieved through beauty and art. Thus through this
solution, the figure of the artist—or genius, according to Kant—and
the very process of artistic creation emerge as emancipators. To
Kant, the creative process empowers the maker through its freedom:
the
imagination ([in its role] as a productive cognitive power) is very
mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the
material that actual nature gives it. […] We may even restructure
experience […]. In this process we feel our freedom from the law of
association […]; for although it is under that law that nature
lends us material, yet we can process that material into something
quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature (Kant
182).
In other words, the process not only
allows us to feel our own freedom in the moment, but also opens up
possibilities of freedom in the future by restructuring experience
into something new, untethered by the constraints of our given
structure of reality. Here, Kant forms the modern conception of the
mysteriously gifted artist, with originality—creation of the new—as
“the foremost property” that cannot be learned, nor passed
directly onto others because “he himself does not know” (Kant
175, 177). The artist/genius, veiled in mystery, assumes a god-like
power, that can only wield its fullest potential through proper
training and education. Schiller essentially calls for an education
that will shape every human being into an artist, who can take full
advantage of his/her potentials to free themselves and the whole of
society: “Beyond question Man carries the potentiality for divinity
within himself; the path to divinity, if we may call a path what
never reaches its goal, is open to him in his senses”
(Schiller 63).
Of course, this power, too, has
potential to abuse and manipulate. However, what is so pertinent
about Schiller’s educational proposition is that such a balanced
education will breed noble human beings. To successful results of
this education, abuse of power to dominate others would not be
desirable; in fact, it would be repulsive to do so. Since a noble
disposition cannot be taught or imposed, a person must wish
him/herself to reach this state. Hence, the aesthetic education would
drive each to voluntarily seek a moral life because he/she recognizes
it as his/her higher purpose to attain.
Schiller’s proposal has not only
the attainment of truth and the freedoms of individual citizens at
stake; it is, most importantly, a way to maintain order in society.
According to him, happy and harmonious individuals lead to a happy
and harmonious society, which essentially must be an egalitarian
society. “[S]ince the way to the head must lie through the heart,”
only when freedom is granted will an individual wish
to act nobly, not merely act out of obligation (Schiller 50). “A
noble spirit is not satisfied with being itself free; it must set
free everything around it,” and the result becomes a cooperative
and productive society (Schiller 111). Freed from constraints and
passivity, the individual wills him/herself to activity and order
emerges naturally (Schiller 124). In a language that strangely
resembles the optimism of early Communist writings in our modern
history, Schiller declares that in an aesthetic State, knowledge
becomes not just for the few, but the “common property of the whole
of human society” (Schiller 139). The power of the sublime, then,
returns to Kant’s two-fold definition: from shrinking in fear, we
rise again in defiance to meet that power and to surpass it.
Works cited:
Burke, Edmund. A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. ed. James T.
Boulton. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1968. Print.
Foucault,
Michel. "Panopticism." Discipline
& Punishment,
1975. Foucault.info.
Web. 04 Nov. 2012.
<http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html>.
Kant,
Immanuel. Critique
of Judgment.
trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 1987. Print.
Longinus.
On
the Sublime.
trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe and D. A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1995. Print.
Schiller,
Friedrich. On
the Aesthetic Education of Man.
trans. Reginald Snell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004. Print.
