Chasing the Sublime

Instead of a drawing for this visual essay, please enjoy the time lapse video above before reading the text below.

Like Catholics expressing religious devotion by building rose windows into Gothic cathedrals, in 2017 I fitted star maps into the windows of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art that glowed like stained glass. Pinholes in the maps represented the stars, through which the sun projected constellations onto the walls and floors. As the sun travelled from east to west, and clouds floated by, the lights stretched and flickered. Sometimes, the star maps acted like pinhole cameras by projecting images of trees and passersby inside the museum. It was a cosmic cinema.

Carl Sagan famously intoned:

The lives and depths of the stars seem impossibly remote from human experience, and yet we are related in the most intimate way to their life cycles. The very matter that makes us up was generated long ago and far away in red giant stars. A blade of grass, as Walt Whitman said, is the journey work of the stars.

He continued:

The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, of exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of nature.

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return.

And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of starstuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

To my slight embarassment, tears still well up in my eyes whenever I re-watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos, like a congregant moved by a stirring sermon. For me, at least, curiosity and science are a primary source of awe. Such a staggering sense of wonder can fill life with meaning.

Because I've written much about the ways that curiosity and science can misfire, I worry I’ve spent too little time extolling them. Initially, considering the downsides appears to temper the pleasure of finding things out. Balancing amazement with apprehension seems sobering.

But the risks associated with curiosity and science can actually enhance the experience of awe. A dash of terror elevates wonder into the sublime. Edmund Burke, one of the early philosophers of the sublime, described how:

Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.¹

Burke clarified that when we experience the sublime, we are not consumed with terror; it is more like a flirtation:

The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure.  Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime.²

Immanual Kant, another early philosopher of the sublime, agreed:

The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peaks arise above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or the depiction of the kingdom of hell by Milton, arouses satisfaction, but with dread.³

And Kant explained how anything that inspires the sublime must simultaneously entice and repulse us:

…the mind is not merely attracted to the object, but is also reciprocally repelled by it.⁴

This is why the Catholics built their cathedrals for a god frequently described in the Bible as “terrible,” before whom people “trembled.” The sublime is bound up with religious experience, so that when religious people feel the sublime, they feel close to their god. Whatever we hold sacred must be powerful enough to make us fear for our lives, or it would be too weak to inspire awe. It cannot be so dangerous that the terror overhwlems us, but it must threaten us just enough to transcend the merely beautiful.

Standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon is not just beautiful, because we know that one more step forward would mean death.

I'm fond of quoting physicist Richard Feynman's description of the value of science because it gets at this balance between the great and the awful:

Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value — even though the power may be negated by what one does.

I learned a way of expressing this common human problem [from] a proverb of the Buddhist religion: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”

…So it is evident that, in spite of the fact that science could produce enormous horror in the world, it is of value because it can produce something.

Although it is tempting to wish that science could be an unvarnished good, if we were to strip it of grave risk then science would cease to be sublime.

Of course I hope that we pursue science conscientiously, but I must also admit this silver lining: contemplating science as wonder mingled with terror imbues my life with profound meaning. An existence shorn of that dangerous edge would feel shallow by comparison.

In the video above, you can watch a time lapse of my art installation about astronomy and the delight evoked by starlight. In the links below, you can read my collection of visual essays about the philosophy of science, focusing in particular on the risks involved with pursuing curiosity. Taken together, these are my best attempts at expressing the pursuit of the sublime.

1. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, p58

2. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, p51

3. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, p208

4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p245