The Sublime in Zuni Aesthetics.
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The Concept of the Sublime in Eighteenth Century Philosophy
An essay on the concept of the sublime in eighteenth century philosophy may seem out of place in a publication on Native American arts, but if you had read the previous posts concerning Zuni ontology and aesthetics you may see the relevance. In the eighteenth century British and German philosophers began making a polar distinction in aesthetic qualities, and in some cases it was a strict opposition. The concept of the Sublime, as distinct from Beauty, which these intellectual thinkers were describing, is a phenomena that occurs in Zuni and other pueblo dance rituals today. It has been described in Anglo writings on the Native Americans for years, and is a concept that has been manifest in Pueblo ritual for centuries. Anthropologists have commented in witnessing pueblo dance rituals of acts that were repulsive and considered extremely offensive. The masks and costumes which were at once beautiful but depicting horrible creatures of figures in mythology. The incredible acts of the ritual clowns meant to repulse and horrify, and make one laugh.
All this within an environment of strict lyrical prayer recitals and precision of movement in dance that could be nothing less than the beautiful. The resulting exhaltation derived from observing the ritual dance is experienced by all, in communion, where the aesthetic appreciation is beyond expression. In my Essay on the Zuni World View I have been questioned as to why my analysis of the conceptual presuppositions of the Zuni language was in terms of philosophers beginning in the eighteenth century, but it was these thinkers that began to grapple with the notions of semantic categories which may or may not be conceptualized, and were nonetheless experienced intersubjectively, possibly across cultural boundaries. The knowledge that the beautiful and the sublime were experienced collectively produces the exaltation associated with knowing that one belongs to a community of moral beings.
In addition to the essay on the sublime the last part of the Zuni World View on the collective consciousness has been reprinted.
The Sublime
The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the eighteenth century in the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper (third earl of Shaftesbury) and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison’s synthesis of Cooper’s and Dennis’ concepts of the sublime in his Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination,. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.
John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies, in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair." Shaftesbury had made the journey two years prior to Dennis but did not publish his comments until 1709 in the Moralists. His comments on the experience also reflected pleasure and repulsion, citing a "wasted mountain" that showed itself to the world as a "noble ruin", but his concept of the sublime in relation to beauty was one of degree rather than the sharp contradistinction that Dennis developed into a new form of literary criticism. Shaftesbury’s writings reflect more of a regard for the awe of the infinity of space, where the sublime was not an aesthetic quality in opposition to beauty, but a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty.
Joseph Addison made the “Grand Tour” in 1699 and commented in the Spectator , (1712) that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror". The significance of Addison’s concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified; greatness, uncommonness, and beauty, "arise from visible objects" (sight rather than rhetoric). It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime", but uses terms that would be considered as absolutive superlatives, e.g. "unbounded", "unlimited", as well as "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess.
Addison’s notion of greatness was integral to the concept of the sublime. An art object could be beautiful but it could not rise to greatness. His work Pleasures of the Imagination,, as well as Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, (1744), and Edward Young's Night Thoughts, (1745), are generally considered as the starting points for Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime in Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, (1756). The significance of Burke’s writings is that he was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, but antithetical to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction. Burke's concept of the sublime was a stark contrast to the classical notion of aesthetic quality in Plato's Philebus,, Ion,, and Symposium, , and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality.
The eighteenth century was an active period for investigation of the sublime as an aesthetic quality with many writers making contributions, but Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher to incorporate aesthetic theory into a philosophic system in the Critique of Judgment,. In accordance with his critical method of the first two Critiques, Kant poses the question "How are judgments of taste possible?" In other words, how can we be certain that a judgment concerning aesthetic quality can be known to be universally true? For Kant, judgments of taste, or beauty, corresponded to the four primary divisions of his categories of the understanding, with the essential element for universalization as the "moment" of "relation" that presupposed a disinterested state where the satisfaction derived was independent of desire and interest. The application of the synthetic a priori, of the judgment of taste, requiring a transcendental deduction, validated the judgment as universal. This treatment of judgments of beauty is analogous to the arguments made in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason,. In those arguments, for example, the intuition of space is presupposed by the mind and not a result of its perceptions. If space is universally presupposed in perception, then the axioms of geometry must be true for everyone. Like space, time, and the categories, beauty belongs to the understanding.
The sublime, on the other hand, was for Kant a feeling of satisfaction celebrating reason itself and our capacity as moral beings. The feeling is experienced when our imagination fails to comprehend the vastness of the infinite and we become aware of the ideas of reason and their representation of the totality of the universe, as well as those powers that operate in the universe which we do not grasp and are beyond our control. The feeling is at once existential in that we realize our own finitude, or smallness, but is universal in the realization of our own moral worth as an autonomous being belonging to the fraternity of mankind which shares a moral destiny through its capacity to apply the moral laws of practical reason. The judgments of the sublime arise from two principles of reason, the mathematical and the dynamic, which are both elements that have a common thread throughout Kant’s writings on pure and practical reason. The sublime reflects the exaltation of reason and the nobility of the human spirit, whereas judgments of beauty belong to the "mere" understanding.
In his discussion of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment,, Kant distinguishes between the sensible concept of measuring things by comparison, and an absolute which as a concept of reason defies comparison and is "great beyond every standard of the senses". It is the same concept of reason that Kant refers to in the Critique of Practical Reason, as a source of free, uncaused activity, and in the Critique of Pure Reason, as the Unconditioned which unifies and completes the conditioned knowledge of the understanding. The sublime is the satisfaction derived from the realization of this concept of reason and its aim at infinite totality. In all three Critiques, Kant had warned that these concepts of unity and the unconditioned are only ideas that regulate the search for empirical knowledge. Towards the end of the eighteenth century other philosophers would utilize Kant’s aesthetic theory and his notion of the unconditioned to try and reconcile the knower and the known, re-integrating the sublime and beauty in an Absolute which embodied the idealism which Kant had spent his career intent on refuting.
References
Addison, Joseph. The Spectator,. Ed. Donald E. Bond. Oxford, 1965.
Brett, R.L. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury. , London, 1951.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. , London, 1958.
Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of Nature,. Oxford, 1945.
Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody, in Characteristics, , Vol. II. Ed. John M. Robertson. London, 1900.
Dennis, John. Miscellanies in Verse and Prose, in Critical Works, , Vol. II. Ed. Edward Niles Hooker. Baltimore, 1939-1943.
Hipple, Walter John, Jr. The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. , Carbondale, IL, 1957.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. , 1790.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. , Ithaca, 1959.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. "Sublime in External Nature". Dictionary of the History of Ideas. , New York, 1974.
Stolnitz, Jerome. "On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory". Philosophical Quarterly, , 43(2):97-113, 1961.
Zuni Language and Worldview, Part VI
Zuni Religion and Language: The Collective Consciousness
Cushing also cited an incidence where he showed a pole that accompanies a theodolite to an old Zuni man and asked him what he thought the name of it was. In response the old man inquired as to the use of the item. After briefly describing the implementation of the device the old man provided a rather lengthy sentence-word that Cushing translated as “heights of the world progressively measuring stick”. The next day Cushing took the pole to the extreme corner of the pueblo and began “to flourish it around” until a middle-aged man relented to curiosity and asked what it was. Cushing then provided the Zuni name he had learned the day before and the man promptly requested, “Can they actually tell how far up and down journeying the world is?”[105].
When a Zuni is planting his field and performs the ceremonious prayer and ritual of planting prayer sticks, offering cornmeal and reciting to the six directions, changing the words only to correspond to the direction he is facing, it not likely that he is distinguishing between his religion and the agra-science he has learned. Samarin remarked that “as one level of scientia there is knowing how to perform a task or knowing the effects that natural and supernatural forces perform. That is primitive science or- depending on what we are looking at or what our prejudices may be- prescientific thinking”[106].
In this regard there is no distinction between religious and secular language as the logic of scientific language. There does however appear to be an underlying theme where non-verbal expression and the prospect of a deviant utterance distinguishes between the secular and religious in contradistinction to Young’s remark.
In Zuni Law, Smith and Roberts state, “In manifest cultural content, Zuni law appears less highly elaborated than Zuni religion. It is also true that Zuni law is less important in Zuni values than Zuni religion…In the institutional field of religion, direct association between high cultural elaboration and high evaluation is present” and while there is a an obvious disparity in elaboration of the religious and legal fields “the differential between religion and law in cultural evaluation appears to be less striking”, with the Zuni community possessing a high evaluation of law and the Tribal Council as a legal body[107].
In reports of litigation in both religious and legal trials “there is little expression …of an awareness of values pertaining to beauty”[108] and upon examination the most notable instance of any reference remotely related to aesthetic expression was case 62 where it was stated “Although in a dance it was desirable that one of the dancers wore jewelry, it should not have been stolen jewelry”[109]. In fact, most references were in regard to attanni, such as, “the woman should not have become a coyote at night”[110], or “the woman should not have brought a plague of grasshoppers into the valley”, or “it was undesirable that a man could send a centipede into the side of a woman”. All of these references are related to violations of observances and are considered as acts of witchcraft.
The duties of the Bow Society, and latter the Tribal Council, was enforcement as a secular institution despite religious evaluations. It would not do to punish or fend witchcraft through religious rite and ceremony, for to do so the canonical rite would paradoxically expose itself to the dangerous simply by reference to it, and would be akin to ‘fighting fire with fire’, a very undesirable prospect to the Zuni. Thus, attanni is negated by observance (teshkwi) and violations are reflections upon the individual, and dealt with by secular enforcement, which collectively, may include gossip, criticism, and public ridicule[111].
The underlying dialectic of the beautiful and the dangerous is evident in distinct dialogues, even in the absence of aesthetic expression, for attanni is proper to secular dialogue and is pertinent to religious dialogue only in the sense of observance where ‘if you have been living rightly, then attanni is not an issue’ (Ko’na to’ tewanan ateyaye). Non-verbal expression is not meaningless nor is a deviant utterance meaningless where the objective is the immersion of the subject into the social structure in order to eliminate causes of behavior conducive to the anti-structure of a social hierarchy where the collective consciousness of the people is to “pray to become one”[112].
East Enters the Medicine Lodge - Winnebago
When the Creation Lodge of the Medicine Rite was first made ready, it came time for the East band to enter into it. However, even though the entrance was open, no person of weak means nor unstable mind would be able to pass through. Indeed, only important spirits could so much as project their thoughts within. There the leader of the East took four steps and stopped in front of it. Earthmaker had created him in his own image and placed him in control of Hâp (light-and-life), therefore he strode right in without effort. When the leader of the East entered, even though the light within shone with brilliance, yet now it was all the more so. As he walked towards the center of the lodge where our Grandfather burns, his steps exuded brilliant light. Even those without could see the light flicker as he strode forth. There at the entrance of the road he stopped and made his greetings. There he sung a song of greeting, even that which is song today by the leader of the East. Then he sat down upon that seat which in reality is a bear.
Paul Radin, The Road of Life and Death: A Ritual Drama of the American Indians. Bollingen Series V (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973 [1945]) 215.
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In celebration of National American Indian Heritage Month, the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA) will host two evenings of Native American music and dance on Monday, Nov. 28, and Tuesday, Nov. 29, 7:30-10 p.m., at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The programs will take place in the Terrace Theater.
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The National Indian Gaming Association, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is a non-profit trade association comprised of 184 American Indian Nations and other non-voting associate members. The mission of NIGA is to advance the lives of Indian people -- economically, socially and politically. NIGA operates as a clearinghouse and educational, legislative and public policy resource for tribes, policymakers and the public on Indian gaming issues and tribal community development.
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Cushing also cited an
incidence where he showed a pole that accompanies a theodolite to an old Zuni
man and asked him what he thought the name of it was. In response the old man inquired as to the
use
of the
item. After briefly describing the
implementation of the device the old man provided a rather lengthy
sentence-word that Cushing translated as "heights of the world progressively
measuring stick". The next day Cushing
took the pole to the extreme corner of the pueblo and began "to flourish it
around" until a middle-aged man relented to curiosity and asked what it
was. Cushing then provided the Zuni
name he had learned the day before and the man promptly requested, "Can they
actually tell how far up and down journeying the world is?"
[105].
posted by Amerindian Arts at 11:35 AM
