The Sublime

— Cornelis de Bondt

A Proposal: If the beautiful is humane, then the sublime is divine (or ‘natural’). In this distinction, humanity stands opposite nature. For me, humans are observers and protagonists in relation to nature. God and nature are synonymous. ‘God’ is the source of that nature. I do not mean anything religious by this; it is a purely abstract concept, a point of reference. The blackbird is a given from nature; its articulations are as sublime as the overhanging rock formations or the thunder and lightning. I can experience the song of the blackbird with the same unease as the thunderstorm, or with the same pleasure. I can admire the rhythm of the thunderclaps for just as musical reasons as the song of the blackbird. The danger of a thunderstorm is not the essence behind the unease for me; it is real danger: a lightning bolt can be deadly. This is not the unease that Kant ultimately refers to. It is not the danger of death that the lightning bolt evokes its sublimity, but its boundlessness. That boundlessness is equally present in the song of the blackbird. Conversely we can state that an extraordinarily finely crafted weapon, a kris or gun with its handle or stock artistically inlaid with mother-of-pearl, can be just as deadly. The distinction that Burke can make between rocky mountain ranges that are sublime and a rolling lawn that is beautiful is then not based on the frightening aspect of those mountain ranges and the lovely nature of the lawn, but on the fact that the mountain ranges are given to us by nature, while the lawn is made by humans.


From this standpoint, we can give Kant’s problematic distinction between the beautiful and the sublime a different, and hopefully more workable direction, by involving reason in both cases. In the case of the beautiful, which now is directly related to art and not to nature, our judgement plays a game with reason through the imagination in such a way that the work becomes an ideal to achieve the perfect. The sublime is not idealistic; it is being moved by the perfect. Here, of course, we must make the caveat (this is not meant as a corny pun… — the word caveat, is in Dutch ‘kanttekening’ [CdB]) that with the ‘perfect’ we do not mean something measurable, whose degree of perfection can be gauged; we still follow Kant’s conceptlessness of the sublime here. Nature as a whole is an immeasurable given. The song of the blackbird — as a sublime experience — is immeasurable. Various aspects of this bird can, of course, be measured, even in its song, but not its sublimity. In other words, where art is a pursuit of the perfect, the sublime is a confrontation with the perfect. From this follows that the naive cannot be a part of art. The naive belongs to the sublime. A prodigy playing the stars from the sky is comparable to the blackbird. We can marvel at it, but it does not give us an expression of beauty. The beautiful benefits from imperfection, as Burke indicated in his remark that women understand this well, by accentuating their beauty with the pretense of weaknesses: They learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness, and even sickness.

— Cornelis de Bondt, Loosduinen, March 17, 2024