In a message dated 10/2/2015 6:41:06 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes in a differently titled thread!
(Well, I see that Helm's original post carried one title -- the one that
introduced the topic: "I've been reading Harold Bloom's /The Daemon Knows,
Literary Greatness and the American Sublime,") while this second one Helm
entitled "Philosophy and the American sublime"):
"Sublime as I take Bloom to mean is the poetry or literature that
transports us aesthetically. He quotes passages to point to what he
means, to what has transported him and presumably we who are also poets
or readers of poetry will agree with most of his argument-by-examples;
which is a non-philosophical but at the same time much more satisfying
way..."
Thanks.
I would not say that this is not a non-philosophical way! It may need a
tweak or two!
For example. Suppose we abbreviate Poet by "Utterer" (U) and Reader by
"Addresse". So Bloom is not just saying that 'x is sublime' if and only if x
transports Bloom aesthetically. But presumably generalising over addressees.
Now the second question is about the role of the utterer's intentions,
about which much has been misunderstood after Beardsley decided this was a
'fallacy'. But the issue is important philosophically because if the Utterer
DOES NOT intend the addressee to be 'transported' -- "aesthetically" I would
re-define because it may be criticised as rendering the definition
circular -- it would be what J. L. Austin called merely 'perlocutionary' (as
'conviction' and 'persuasion' -- "I was convinced", "I was persuaded"). So I
would add an U's intention, and A's ability to RECOGNISE that intention.
I would also add that the effect of 'transportation' (which I would qualify
to render it not literal) should be caused in part by U's ability to
recognise A's intention.
By "The Dæmon knows", Bloom may be meaning something like "God knows -- but
he is not telling us!" or something!, and I'm also reminded of Isaiah
Berlin that the Hedgehod knows JUST ONE BIG THING (while the fox knows many
little slightly otiose things, Berlin's implicature).
So, while Bloom is not a philosopher and his book would not carry in the
backcover: "Intended readership: philosophers", an æsthetic philosopher may
still tweak the definition Bloom works with -- Why? Well, perhaps this
philosopher is Tagalog speaker and wants to write a sequel: "Literary Greatness
and the Tagalog Sublime", by starting: "I will use Bloom's implicit
definition of the sublime."
I see that Helm above does write "transport US", so he is taking Bloom to
be making a rather general claim -- what philosophers call
'universalisable'. The fact that Kant, a philosopher obsessed with
universability, is
credited with rendering 'the sublime' an interesting æsthetic category helps!
(Although Kant took exception with issues of taste, of course -- 'de gustibus
non est disputandum' --).
"The sublime", in philosophy, and analytic æsthetic philosophy in
particular, has been applied to the pictorial. And the issue of the utterer's
intention seems crucial. Thus a landscape may seem sublime, and indeed Leonardo
Da Vinci was so Griceian at heart that he assumed that the WAS an utterer
that had intended that landscape to 'transport' (fig.) us aesthetically:
"Nature, after all, is God's art", he claimed.
And so on.
What Popper would say on this is still a different beast: if 'transport
aesthetically' is understood as W2 (psychology) the sublime can hardly be said
to belong (as it should) to W3, which is the world of musea, as he would
put it (In Continental Europe, they take the Latin plural seriously, museum,
musea).
When I say that I would re-define the 'æsthetically' (in "x is sublime" if
and only if x transports A's aesthetically") I would consider the issue of
pleasure, because Kant was apparently critical about pleasure NOT playing a
role, and thus allowing him to distinguish between the beautiful (where
pleasing sensation does play a role -- or has played a role since Plato --)
and the sublime proper.
When Freud took this notion and started to speak of sublimation he might be
having, _avant la lettre_, Bloom in mind!*
Cheers,
Speranza
* Cfr. Malcolm Bradbury's quotation in "Eating people is wrong" of a PhD
dissertation project at Manchester, Lancashire: "The influence of T. S. Eliot
on the poetry of Shakespeare", by a research fellow of the English
department!
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