Beyond the finite : the sublime in art and science

192 Pages·2010·1.189 MB·English

by  Roald Hoffmann & Iain Boyd Whyte

BEYOND THE FINITE

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B E Y O N D T H E

F I N I T E

The Sublime in Art

and Science

EDITED BY
ROALD HOFFMANN AND IAIN BOYD WHYTE

1

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1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beyond the fi nite : the sublime in art and science / edited by Roald Hoff mann and
Iain Boyd Whyte.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-973769-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Science—Aesthetics.
2. Sublime, Th e, in art. I. Whyte, Iain Boyd, 1947–
Q175.32.A47B49 2010
500—dc22 2009054357
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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For striking the initial sparks, our sincere thanks to Felice
Frankel, a distinguished artist, an advocate of bett er seeing
in science through photography, and the indefatigable
organizer of the Image and Meaning conferences. We are
grateful to Suhrkamp Verlag and its editors Hans-Joachim
Simm, Regina Oehler, and Sabine Landes for publishing
this volume in German as part of its Edition Unseld. At
Oxford University Press we found a welcome home, and
have received good advice fr om Jeremy Lewis, Lisa Stallings,
Hallie Stebbins, and Th eresa Stockton. We also appreciate
the expert help of Claudia Heide in obtaining good quality
images and permissions for their use. Roald Hoff mann is
grateful to Jennifer Cleland and Catherine Kempf for
research and editorial assistance.
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Editors’ Preface
Th ere are many excellent books on the sublime writt en by phi-
losophers, aestheticians, and art and cultural historians.1 Th is
volume represents a fi rst att empt to extend the discussion of the
sublime into the realm of the natural scientist. Th e project origi-
nated in a conversation among a chemist, a behavioral neurolo-
gist, an art historian, and an architectural historian. Th e occasion
was a conference entitled “Image & Meaning 2,” held at the Gett y
Center in Los Angeles in June 2005. Th e conversation took place
in a session of this conference entitled Th e Sublime in Art and
Science, and the ambition, which fi nds a broader rehearsal in this
book, was to search for areas of commonality in which a topic
widely discussed in art and aesthetic theory could be shared with
and opened up to the discourses of the sciences. Perhaps the
exchange might off er science some insights as it discovers and
creates the new.
Th e chosen vehicle—the sublime—is broad enough in its
many defi nitions to stimulate new thinking both in the arts and in
the sciences. Th e sublime has meant many things over its long
history as it has been applied to the emotional impact of that
which is beyond beautiful. Philosophers have contemplated the
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Editors’ Preface
anxiety that the sublime provokes and the resulting joy of self-
assertion that it off ers in the face of an uncontrollable world. In
the words of Jean-François Lyotard, the sublime is “the pleasure
that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagina-
tion or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.”2 Th e
breadth and indeterminacy of the term are central to the project.
Rather than address the sublime head-on as a category seeking
defi nition, this volume uses it as a catalyst to provoke responses
from a group of distinguished scientists and cultural historians.
I n this context, the sublime is not off ered either as a veiled
religiosity or as a mandate for nihilism. Rather, it is seen as a
means of defying conceptual rules and, in the process, relating
insights that were formerly unknown to each other. As the phi-
losopher Kirk Pillow has suggested, “Sublime refl ection can
provide . . . a model for a kind of interpretative response to
the uncanny Other ‘outside’ our conceptual grasp. It thereby
advances our sense-making pursuits even while eschewing unifi ed
conceptual determination.” 3
Th e best of science also makes claims to the sublime, for in
science as well as in art, each day brings the entirely new, the
extreme, and the unrepresentable. How does one depict negative
mass, for example, or the propagating, contagious misfolding of a
protein? Can one capture emergent phenomena as they emerge?
Science is continually faced with describing that which is beyond
previous experience and common sense. Th at, too, might be a
defi nition of the sublime.
A nd scientists have begun to discern the physiological and
genetic basis of our senses of the beautiful and the sublime.
Contemporary neurophysiology is charting the landscape of our
emotions, while biology addresses the transformation of sensory
impulses into aesthetic judgments.
viii
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Editors’ Preface
O ne might not have thought an aesthetic category would be a
fruitful meeting ground of art and science. Th is book, by nine
courageous scholars, proves that it is. Th eir explorations range
far—from the Hubble Telescope images to David Bohm’s quan-
tum romanticism, from Kant and Burke to the “downward spiral-
ing infi nity” of the twenty-fi rst-century sublime, through a denial
of utility to the category itself, to Litt le Nemo and the aff ective
foundations of the sublime. Th e sublime brings nine free-thinking
authors together, off ering a uniquely powerful portal into both
art and science, and into as yet uncharted spaces between.
Notes
1 . A list of major recent monographs on the sublime includes Paul Crowther,
Th e Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989);
Christine Preiss (ed.), D as Erhabene: Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Größenwahn
(Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora, 1989); Andrew Ashfi eld and Peter de
Bolla (eds.), Th e Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic
Th eory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kirk Pillow, S ublime
Understanding: Aesthetic Refl ection in Kant and Hegel (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2000); James Kirwan, S ublimity (New York: Routledge, 2005); Gene
Ray, T error and the Sublime in Art and Critical Th eory (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005); and Philip Shaw, Th e Sublime (Abingdon, UK: Routledge,
2006), which also has an extensive bibliography on the sublime.
2 . Jean-François Lyotard, Th e Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge ,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81.
3 . Pillow, Sublime Understanding , p. 2.
ix
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