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# Illusion and speechlessness in the emotional experience of the sublime

Matthieu Tarpin, Dir Jérôme Dokic

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Matthieu Tarpin, Dir Jérôme Dokic. Illusion and speechlessness in the emotional experience of the sublime. 2020. hal-04916423

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# Illusion and speechlessness in the emotional experience of the sublime

## On Immersion and Awe

Matthieu Tarpin, Institut Jean Nicod, PSL University, June 2020

Dir. Jérôme Dokic
# SUMMARY

1 – Title page

2 – Summary

4 – Thanks

5 – Abstract

6 – Introduction

9 I – What is awe

9 I.1 – Defining prototypical awe

11 I.2 – Can awe be considered an emotional response to the sublime?

13 I.3 – Limit-Experience as an awe-elicitin factor in art

18 I.4 – Awe as the meta-cognitive feeling of a Radical Limit-Experience

21 II – Aesthetical awe – Can there be an artistic sublime?

21 II.1 – Emily Brady's thesis

27 II.2 – Art and the sublime, a few points of interest in Brady's claim

33 II.3 – Exceptions on the impossibility of artistic sublimity

33 a) Architecture

35 b) Land Art

38 II.4 – On defending artistic sublimity

38 a) Brady's general argument against artistic sublimity

38 a.1 – That artworks “do not possess the scale of the sublime”

40 a.2 – That artworks lack the formlessness of nature

42 a.3 – That art “lacks the visceral ‘wild’ and ‘disordered’ character”

associated with the sublime

45 b) Sublime by association
45 c) Exceptions to Brady's general account

47 d) The special case of music

49 III – Immersion and Illusion

50 III.1 – What is immersion?

52 a) What is the cognitive nature of immersion?

55 b) When does immersion happen?

56 b.1 – Ishizu and Zeki's “A neurological enquiry into the origins of our experiences of the sublime and beautiful”, 2014

58 b.2 –Vessel et al. “Art reaches within: aesthetic experience, the self and the default mode network”, 2013

62 b.3 – Sperduti et al. “The paradox of fiction: Emotional response toward fiction and the modulatory role of self-relevance”, 2016

64 III.2 – Contexts of Immersion

64 a) Immersion in pictures

67 b) Immersion in music

69 c) Immersion in literature

71 d) Immersion in video, and the effects of VR

74 III.3 – Illusion and the sublime

74 a) What is illusion?

76 b) Is the sublime an illusion?

78 c) The illusory object of the sublime could explain speechlessness

80 Conclusion

83 ANNEXES

84 Artworks

90 Bibliography
Thanks

Writing this essay would not have been possible without the attention and guidance of Jérôme Dokic, who helped me get my ideas clear, and provided invaluable help in the research of pertinent sources. The teachings of the professors in Paris Sciences et Lettres University was of great help, and I would like to thank the pedagogic team for their effort this year, in teaching and in dealing with the unusual circumstances of this second semester. Finally, I give my very warm thanks to my friends and family, for their moral and intellectual help, and particularly my mother for proofreading and advices, and my friend Santiago Komadina for the fertile conversations.
"A need to concentrate on each note,
so that every blade of grass would be
as important as a flower"
Arvo Pärt, talking about Für Alina during
a masterclass

"C'est ça! Et plus encore, C'est cela pour moi"
Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte, Seuil 1973

ABSTRACT -

When having an experience of sublimity, we may feel what has come to be known as *awe*: a feeling of mixed valence, both vividly positive and frightening. And even though it appears we are at loss when trying to express it, we keep on trying. In this paper, I shall discuss whether it is accurate to speak of awe and sublime about art, and try to show how and why it is possible to link awe, in its very definition, with language. Thus, I propose an account of awe as a metacognitive feeling of a failure of language, that emerges from the immersion provoked by an object. The inherent linguistic nature of awe would then explain why expressing it using words seems to always gives a sense of dissatisfaction.
# INTRODUCTION

Why am I breathless, *speechless*, in front of some experiences? Listening to a piece of music, standing in front of a terrifying mountain range, why do I have such a hard time explaining what goes through my mind? Maybe this incapacity to communicate, even partially and not so clearly, about that experience is a defining factor of the sublime. Understanding this might be easier when we consider the concept of awe. For now, let's just say, quickly, that awe is the emotional response to the sublime. It is conceivable that a possible definition of awe could be 'what I feel when, in front of something sublime, I cannot say anything'. It is to be noted, though, that ineffability is in no way a sufficient condition for awe: I only argue here that it is a necessary condition. But why is it so?

Ever since Burke and Kant, in the XVIIIth century, there have been countless attempts of defining the sublime. Just about every writer seem to be agreeing on a few characteristics of the sublime and its emotional response, called *awe*. Awe, they say, is a rather strange emotion, almost as strange as the phenomenon that gives it birth. Defining awe implies a certain definition of the sublime: Keltner and Haidt 2003 have been trying to identify some characteristics of awe, so as to define what could be a “prototypical awe”. By comparing occurrences of the word in diverse contexts (religious awe, social awe, political awe, aesthetic awe, ...), they concluded that a prototypical account of awe should meet three requirements:

* its objects can be of various and extensive range, such as physical objects, landscapes, persons, concepts, sounds, ...

* awe is always in relation to other linked emotions: wonder, admiration, surprise, ...

* it is generally speaking ambiguous, being at the same time “profoundly positive and terrifyingly negative”<fnref n="1" />.

The authors then proceed to give the two main characteristics of prototypical awe, namely the feeling of vastness and the need for accommodation. Vastness here is not to be conceived only as a spatial vastness: awe is not limited to great landscapes, but really can

<footnote n="1">1 Keltner, Dacher, and Jonathan Haidt. 'Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion'. *Cognition and Emotion* 17, no. 2 (January 2003): 297–314; p.303</footnote>
extend to anything great, powerful or conceptually imposing. On the other hand, the need for accommodation “refers to the Piagetian process of adjusting mental structures that simply cannot assimilate new experiences”<fnref n="2" />. To these two features, the authors feel the need to add another, secondary feature: the flavor. Flavor is used to distinguish between different types of awe; five flavors are mentioned: threat, beauty, ability, virtue, and skill. We will come back later on to these definitions.

I feel that, even though such an account of awe seems satisfying, it lacks the depth that a profound analysis of awe-elicitin g stimuli could give; this is possibly why all papers written after 2003 use Keltner and Haidt as a solid basis – which it certainly is.

The problem rises with another reference, Emily Brady’s 2013 *The sublime in modern
philosophy*<fnref n="3" />, in which she defends the idea that only nature is eligible to be the sole awe-
elicitin g object. She claims that art cannot provoke sublimity, because it lacks the qualities
(vastness and power) and the effect (delight and angst) of the real, natural sublime (p.119).
This, I feel is an argument in need of discussion, mainly on the idea that art lacks the
vastness of natural landscapes.

In this paper, I will discuss the idea that while art does indeed lack a certain real
vastness, it still has the capacity to take us *into itself*, by means of what we call immersion. I
will propose that what matters for the sublime to be felt is not the objective qualities of the
object, but the mental state of the subject: what feels to me as being sublime, what provokes
awe in me, is not the vastness of the object, but the *feeling* of its vastness. This idea enables
us to think of the sublime as a subjective state, whose veridicality we should discuss. If the
sublime is about being immersed, it depends primarily on a shift in the relations between me
and the world; this allows to bypass the vastness requirement, at the expense of losing part
of the reality of the experience, thus making the sublime a sort of illusion. In that way, I
could feel awed by a small painting, if my immersion bypasses its lack of vastness, and I

<footnote n="2">2 Ibid., p.304</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Brady, Emily. *The Sublime in Modern Philosophy*. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, 2013.</footnote>
could still feel awed by a really huge thing – let’s say the Niagara falls – because it doesn’t need immersion to shift my reality.

In order to defend that, we need to requalify awe as a primarily subject-centered experience, in which one represents an object as bigger than life, bigger that one can conceive. If such a position can be held, the sublime would then be about *misrepresenting* a certain relation between the subject and the object that has no correlate in the actual world.

Following this re-definition, we will discuss several hypothesis on the veridicality of awe, and their implications on awe-centered speeches. I will argue in defense of a radical non-realistic view of awe, which seems able to explain why one cannot make any satisfying speech about his experience of awe. How could I explain clearly what I feel if, in reality, what I feel is not real? This is what I shall discuss in a second part of this essay.

A follow-up question would then appear: if the sublime is such, then why do I feel the urge do say something? I am reminded here of a picture by french artist Samivel in which a mountaineer stands in awe on a moonlit mountain range, and says “*Ce serait bien plus beau si je pouvais le dire à quelqu’un*” (“It would be so much more beautiful if I could tell someone of it”<fnref n="4" />). When in awe, we seem to be caught between a desire of expressing how unimaginable what we feel is, and the awareness that this effort would be useless. Useless, precisely because of how unimaginable this is. Awe appears to be an experience out of reach of our language, and yet, because of this almost mystic nature, it is something we yearn talking about. This is what I shall explore in a third movement, taking the consequences from a non-realistic account of awe onto the expression of it.

<footnote n="4">4 Voir Annexe 1</footnote>
# I – WHAT IS AWE?

## I.1 – Defining prototypical awe

Though the sublime has been constantly discussed ever since Burke and Kant, awe has been widely regarded as an emotional answer to the sublime, but has not received as much attention as the latter. However, there's been an important attempt at defining and refining the notion of awe, and that would be Keltner and Haidt's 2003 "Approaching awe<fnref n="5" />". In this paper, the authors explore the different sense that we often give to the word *awe*, and try to infer from these iterations a few key properties of awe, which they initially define as "central to the experience of religion, politics, nature and art". In this section, I shall briefly summarize their point before discussing the implications of their conclusions.

The main argumentative trail they follow is roughly a census of every aspect of awe in different domains (the aforementioned religious awe, political awe, natural awe and artistic awe), in order to point out the nodal properties of awe. It appears that awe has two main characteristics, very much proportional to those of the sublime, namely the feeling of vastness, and the need for accommodation.

Religious awe appears as a quite clear case: the authors quote the hindi Mahabarata, when Arjuna asks Krishna to see the universe.

> "Arjuna then experiences something that sounds to a modern reader like a psychotic break or a psychedelic experience. He sees gods, suns, infinite time and space. He is filled with amazement. His hair stand on end. [...] Arjnua is clearly in a state of awe when he says 'Things never seen before have I seen, and ecstatic is my joy; yet fear-and-trembling perturb my mind<fnref n="6" />'"

This situation shows first the feeling of something so immensely huge that it seems impossible to make sense of it, then the transformative experience that follows: Arjnua's relation to the world changes, and accommodates for all the newfound truths.

<footnote n="5">5 Keltner, Dacher, et Jonathan Haidt. « Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion ». *Cognition and Emotion* 17, nº 2 (janvier 2003): 297-314</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Keltner and Haidt, p.298</footnote>
As for politics, Keltner and Haidt give an account of awe as a feeling of fear, admiration and wonder at the sight of a charismatic leader (they call this *sociological awe*), but also as in social events like team sports of a political demonstrations. The point is more or less similar here, being that we feel amazed by something bigger than us, that drives us toward action. Psychology in turn identifies a few defining facial and physical expressions of awe, mainly “raised eyebrows, bright eyes, gaping mouth, and in extreme cases, hair standing on end or goosebumps<fnref n="7" />”.

From these remarks, the authors are able to give two main features and three requirements of prototypical awe; the features are the ones already mentioned of *feeling of vastness* and *need for accommodation*, but the requirements are enlightening. Given the variety of awe-elicitinig stimuli, it appears that prototypical awe has an **extensive range**, going from persons and landscapes to abstract ideas and paintings. This at least lets open the possibility of artistic awe, at least theoretically. As for its psychological range, awe seems to be **linked to several others emotions**: wonder, admiration, surprise, ... and finally, the emotional valence of awe is deeply troubling and ambiguous, being at the same time **profoundly positive and terrifyingly negative**<fnref n="8" />. In addition to these, Keltner and Haidt determine that awe can have several flavours, that allow for a very wide spectrum of awe-related experiences. They identify threat, beauty, ability, virtue, and supernatural; each of them is interesting, but this is not our premiere concern here. Since their account seems to be widely accepted, I will use this characterization thereafter.

Our task is now to determine how is prototypical awe linked to art, and how it is then expressed. To do so, we must take a step forward and find out about expression of awe. That, I claim, is usually reported in several ways, ranging from physical sensations (thrills, chills<fnref n="9" />, jaws dropping, eyes, widening, ...) to verbal expressions such as “I’m speechless”,

<footnote n="7">7 Keltner and Haidt, p.302</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Keltner and Haidt, p.303</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Konečni, Vladimir J., Rebekah A. Wanic, et Amber Brown. « Emotional and Aesthetic Antecedents and Consequences of Music-Induced Thrills ». *The American Journal of Psychology* 120, n° 4 (1 décembre 2007): 619 ; also Keltner and Haidt, p.302</footnote>
"this is incredible", ... Those latter forms we shall discuss more profoundly later, as I feel they are the key to understanding awe-elicitinig stimuli.

In their 2007 paper, Konečni, Wanic and Brown explore the thrill-inducing capabilities of music, trying to account for the distinction between three main responses to music. Namely, these are the feeling of being moved, the goosebumps, and awe experience, the latter being pointed out as a peak experience, and the other two being supposedly weaker than aesthetic awe. A question worth asking for would be whether these truly are separate phenomena, or a shift in intensity, with awe being the sum of all these traits. This can be related to a concern that Arcangeli et al. 2018 gives rise to: is there an analogy between beauty and the sublime such that, where there can be different degrees of beauty, there might be as well degrees of sublimity? If this is so, and if awe is in an intricate relation with inferior degrees, then what is true about thrills is, at least partly, also true for awe.

Awe has been reported widely in viewing natural scenery, such as a mountain range or the Milky Way, as well as in art. On the other hand, there are still discussions on whether or not there can be an artistic form of the sublime. The question is now twofold: first, to find out what links awe to the sublime (causation, correlation, or disconnection), then, taking into account this relation, to use what we know about a third concept, namely Limit-Experiences, to clarify how art could be the place of a sublimity experience.

**I.2 – Can awe be considered an emotional response to the sublime?**

Shiota, Keltner and Mossman 2007¹⁰ use the definition of awe as “an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that overwhelm current mental structures, yet facilitate attempts at accommodation”. Though it is quite obvious that this long expression points towards the sublime, it is not that easy a step to make.

Indeed, there can truly be awe without sublime; some would argue that the religious feeling of epiphany is not directly linked to the sublime, yet it seems to provoke awe. This

<footnote n="10">10 Shiota, Michelle N., Dacher Keltner, et Amanda Mossman. « The Nature of Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept ». *Cognition & Emotion* 21, n° 5 (août 2007): 944-63, p.1</footnote>
similarity follows from the fact that people experiencing epiphany display the same facial
features as those experiencing awe: jaws dropping, eyes wide open, tearing, goosebumps,
difficulty to express what they feel, ... In a different context, social awe can be felt in some
occasions, such as political meetings, public demonstrations, even a football game. I doubt
many would consider these situations a sublime experience. Yet, in all of them, if we were
to feel that, we would probably say something in the lines of "I was feeling a part of
something bigger", "I was overwhelmed". Which is precisely the point of the very wide
range of Shiota et al. 2007's definition.

On the other hand, it seems clear and undoubtful that the sublime can elicit an awe-like
emotional response. I think it citing here Kaspar-David Friedrich's *Wanderer above the sea
of Fog* (1818)<fnref n="11" /> to show that. The painting represents a man, standing atop a mountain,
facing a seemingly infinite sea of clouds. This is the prototypical situation of the sublime:
vastness, power embodied, and the smallness of oneself in front of that spectacle. Though
the painting may not elicit awe for everyone, it is likely that awe is what the character
experiences, because of the very nature of the sublime situation.

The problem we now have to face is here: if awe is indeed a necessary condition to the
sublime, what would a sufficient condition be? Could there be an equation like
`(awe+x)→sublime`? We have to analyze the characteristic features of the sublimity
experience to find what that x might be.

One possibility is to consider aesthetic appreciation as our x factor, thus defining the
sublime as a conjunction of aesthetic appreciation of an object or a phenomenon with
related awe. Such seems Jesse Prinz's view<fnref n="12" /> in Schellekens and Goldie's book, when he
argues that aesthetic appreciation "consists in an emotional response" (p.1). Note that in this
situation, we should have a relation that looks like this: if one has an aesthetic appreciation
of an object/phenomenon whose emotional component is awe, then this person might be
experiencing more than just plain beauty, and even possibly sublime. Though it might seem
a bit far stretched, this account would explain the emotional intensity of an aesthetic
experience, especially since Prinz makes clear that there can be aesthetic appreciation

<footnote n="11">11 See Annex 2</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Schellekens, Elisabeth, et Peter Goldie, éd. *The aesthetic mind: philosophy and psychology*. Oxford [etc.]: Oxford University Press, 2011, Part II chap 1, Jesse Prinz “Emotion and Aesthetic Value”</footnote>
without attractiveness and vice versa, and hence distanciating beauty from appreciation. An
example would be, maybe, an artwork that is not beautiful, but still strikes us as stunning.
Goya's "Saturno devorando a un hijo" is not beautiful by any means, in fact, it is just
horrifying. Yet, seeing it can make us breathless, even though we don't feel attraction
toward it. Prinz view, as he puts it in his 2018's "Wonder, Appreciation, and the value of
art", is that aesthetic appreciation is an emotion, but not necessarily an attraction or a feeling
of beauty<fnref n="13" />

On the other hand, the aesthetic appreciation thesis, though suiting well an account of
beauty, lacks a few elements that are needed to explain in a satisfactory way the sublime.
Namely, it ignores the idea of awe as potential metacognitive feeling, idea that emerges
from the analogy between the sublime and limit experiences. The next part focuses of this
very analogy, and how the concept of radical limit-experience can help us better understand
the cognitive status of awe, and the informational content of the sublime.

I.3 – Limit-experience as an awe-elicitinġ factor in art

In *La lumière comme matière*, french painter Pierre Soulages explained his *Outrenoir*
phase by saying:

"Ça m'intéresse parce que le noir c'est, d'un côté, l'extrême, le sombre, il n'y a pas plus sombre que le noir et, à côté de ça, c'est aussi une couleur lumineuse ; c'est le rapport de ces deux possibilités que j'ai avec le noir qui fait que je me suis orienté vers cette manière de peindre<fnref n="14" />."

In the contrast Soulages points out between two properties of black paint, that is,
darkness and lightness, one might consider whether it is possible to link his *Outrenoir* phase
to the concept of Limit-Experience.

Ever since Foucault's 1980 *entretien* with Trombadori, the notion of Limit-Experience
has been in debate, as a potential way to investigate an experience that we fail to qualify

<footnote n="13">13 Fingerhut, Joerg, and Jesse J. Prinz. « Wonder, Appreciation, and the Value of Art ». In *Progress in Brain Research*,
237:107-28. Elsevier, 2018</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Soulages, Pierre. « La lumière comme matière ». *Rue Descartes* 38, n° 4 (2002): 112</footnote>
clearly. To some, a LE is a kind of mystical experience, to others it is the experience of the
limits of our language, in a wittgensteinian position, but there is still room for improvement
on the definition of what truly is a LE. A first and necessary step in defining LE is to
distinguish between what can be called a Radical Limit-Experience and non-radical ones.
Non-Radical Limit-Experiences, being the experience of reaching the limits of a given
cognitive ability (eg: hearing the highest possible note, trying to see in the dark, ...), are an
everyday experience and are not what really concerns us here. Instead, we will be focusing
on Radical LE (which we shall call RLE).

RLE are often conceived as having three or four properties, by which we will abide for
now:

- They are intense

- They seem to profoundly transform the way we experience ourselves

- The cognitive ability they threaten is not reducible to a single capacities, but to some
sort of *absolute* cognitive capacity: what I'm experiencing is *too* strong, *too* big, *too*
everything. By "absolute", I mean here that the RLE seems to pose a threat to all of the
cognitive capacities at once, making the spectator feel numb, thoughtless.

- They transform the way in which we interact with the world<fnref n="15" />

In other words, RLE are different from non radical LE because of two paradoxical
movements, which we could call annihilation<fnref n="16" /> and wholeness.

Annihilation, because in his Limit-Experience, the subject feels removed from the
world: what he sees, hears, and lives, is just too much to bear. This goes accordingly to
Foucault:

"[L]'expérience chez Nietzsche, Blanchot, Bataille a pour fonction d'arracher le sujet à lui-même, de faire en sorte qu'il ne soit plus lui-même ou qu'il soit porté à son anéantissement ou à sa dissolution. C'est une entreprise de dé-subjectivation¹⁷."

<footnote n="15">15 Characterization taken from J. Dokic lessons, 2019, EPHE, "Limit-Experiences: An analysis"</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Yaden, David Bryce, Jonathan Haidt, Ralph W. Hood, David R. Vago, et Andrew B. Newberg. « The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience ». *Review of General Psychology* 21, nº 2 (june 2017); Yaden et al. use the term annihilation in this context, and describe more generally the whole experience as “self-transcendent experience”</footnote>
In his encounter with the object that provokes the RLE, the subject feels as if the
object is too overwhelmingly existent for him to exist at all, thus leading to a diminished
sense of self. This feeling can be analyzed as a result of either a hypo-familiarity with the
object, or of hyper-familiarity, meaning that a RLE can emerge from my experience of an
object that is radically new, that is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before and that eludes
my wits, as well as from an object that strikes me as being exactly what I know. This last
idea is persistent with Barthes’ *Le plaisir du texte*<fnref n="18" />, where, he says, the only thing we can
say about a text when it strikes us is nothing more than “That’s it, that’s exactly it”.

On the other hand, RLE induces an opposite movement, which I would call
*totalisation* in french, which roughly translates to *wholeness*. When challenged by the self-
reducing experience, the subject might feel what Keltner and Haidt<fnref n="19" /> call the “Need for
accommodation”, which they take from Piaget and Inhelder<fnref n="20" /> and define as a “process of
adjusting mental structures that cannot assimilate a new experience” (p.304). In turn, this
process “often involve feelings of enlightenment and even rebirth, when material structures
expand to accommodate truths never before known” (ibid). This seems to me as a
metacognitive feeling of a distinct positive valence: the feeling of *having been able to
accommodate*, as a response to the self-reduction, is what we could call wholeness.

This, furthermore, is what Cochrane<fnref n="21" /> pins as the “heroic account” of sublimity, which
he strongly relates to the XVIIIth century and the kantian theory. “The claim is that we
enjoy our capacity to engage with the sublime object, providing an enhanced recognition of
our powers”. There is pleasure in knowing that I can process something so huge that it is
threatening. Of course, this heroic view is not the only model that explains how we can find

<footnote n="17">17 Quoted by J. Dokic, see above note 6. Foucault, Michel. « Conversazione con Michel Foucault (D. Trombadori) 1978 ». In *Dits et Ecrits*, Gallimard., 4: texte n°281. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Barthes, Roland, *Le plaisir du texte*, in *Oeuvres Complètes*, vol 2, p.1500, Seuil, Paris, 1993-1995 : “C’est ça ! C’est exactement ça!”</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Keltner, Dacher, et Jonathan Haidt. « Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion ». *Cognition and Emotion* 17, n° 2 (janvier 2003): 297-314</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Piaget and Inhelder, *The Psychology of the child*, 1966</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 Cochrane, Tom. « The Emotional Experience of the Sublime ». *Canadian Journal of Philosophy* 42, n° 2 (janvier 2012) p.134</footnote>
pleasure in the experience of the sublime, but this is not the matter of this paper, as interesting as it may be.

Now that we’ve very briefly defined what could be a RLE, how would what Soulages says relate to RLE? There are several ways in which we can make sense of this notion here. First, Limit-experiences happen when a limit is reached, and in the case of Soulages, the very name “Outrenoir” (i.e. “further than black”) is somewhat paradoxical: black is, precisely, the end of the spectrum of visible light. There is light than black, but there is no darker than black. And yet, not only does the painter say that his paintings go beyond blackness, but furthermore, what he finds there is not a darker shade: it’s light and colours. He says:

> “Le clairobscur est fondé là-dessus finalement: on prend une couleur qui paraît obscure, on met une couleur encore plus obscure qui est le noir et, brusquement, elle s’éclaire; donc c’est la lumière qui est en jeu. C’est une autre manière de voir la lumière<fnref n="22" />.”

Souages’ *Outrenoir* can then be interpreted as a shift in the limits of our perception, but that is not sufficient, by our standards, to be characterized as a Radical Limit-Experience. We should then see if it does threaten the whole of our cognitive abilities, and if this threat gives birth to a redefining of the sense of self, and of our relation to the world. If so, then when can conclude that art can elicit RLE, and thus that it may possible to derive awe-elicitng stimuli, and sublime experience, from art.

Let's start by the cognitive abilities. What kind of cognitive abilities are at stake in the reception of an artwork in general, and in that of Soulages more specifically? When I am in front of a picturesque piece, what do I look for? Is there a need of finding, in what I see, recognizable patterns in forms and colours? Is it that I need to accommodate the artwork to a distinct artistic movement, complete with its own rules and ideas? I would argue that art in general (and thus painting) is a special object to receive, in that it always seems to exist as a challenge to our world. Art is an object that appears as a radical alterity; it is always that of which I cannot truly make sense without postulating the inaccessible subjectivity of another.

<footnote n="22">22 Soulages, Pierre. « La lumière comme matière ». *Rue Descartes* 38, n° 4 (2002): 112.</footnote>
Hence the idea that receiving an artwork in my experience is a threat to the whole of my ability to make sense out of the world. Surely, not all feel the same way for the same artworks. It has always been a cliché that *de gustibus non est discutandum*: an artwork that strikes me, awes me, touches me, may leave someone else indifferent. We may call that a *naming* ability, in the very broad sense of naming as *accommodating* the object as an object of *my* world. If this is true, then it appears that the ability to shift the boundaries of my world is inherent to art.

Since we are trying to make sense of our emotional responses to art, I think it is best to keep in mind that the reception of an artwork, though determined it may be by society, culture, and a million other factors, is a subjective matter. Let's be clear, the threat is not a cause for awe, but merely a part of it's definition: an artwork that is said to cause awe, to feel sublime, is an artwork that somehow startles us by menacing our cognitive ability to think our world, our naming ability.

What about the shift of *my* boundaries, the self-redution? Well, if art is indeed, as I argue, the inevitable postulate of a subjectivity different from mine (although I cannot truly make sense of it), then it follows that art is a threat to what constitutes me, as it reduces my naive solipsism: art is a proof that, even though my own subjectivity is overwhelming, there is another one out there.

We might object here that this is a truism, since I adopt here the perspective according to which my subjectivity is as extended as my whole world – in the sense that in every proposition in my world, there is an I. By that, I mean that every thought I have, every perception I have, is Mine, and thus the world as I perceive it is also Mine. To that I answer that I am merely redefining what *world* is, and assimilating it to and sum of propositions one can say about things; but the argument seems to hold still as long as it is agreed upon that art is a proof of alterity.

That being said, the threat to the boundaries of my world *equates* that to the boundaries of myself. In a nutshell, I suggest that, at least on art but maybe on other topics as well, the threat to absolute cognitive faculties is nothing more than a failure of my ability to make sense of an object in my world, which in turn threatens my own limits, and that of my world.
The only point that is left from our earlier characterization of RLE is then the intensity of the experience. This is a more complex, though not as deeply troubling, problem: intensity is a fundamentally personal, and therefore I am not quite sure it can be made sense of by logical means as we did before. Nevertheless, I feel we can trust the subjective accounts on this matter, and it should be sufficient here to recall just how often we hear people around us say things like “I was profoundly shocked by this painting”, “I was moved to tears by that piece of music”, … Here is not the place to do such an inventory, but I hope the reader has heard something like that.

If all that we said is true, then there is one question we should ask: is an artwork like that of Soulages able, by means of Outrenoir, to provoke such a radical experience? I do feel like the unusual use of black pigment in his work to create light and colours is just about enough to put us in a situation of hypo-familiarity: we do not expect something darker than black to be so colourful, so light and radiant with texture. This discrepancy in what we might expect from an artwork might be what allows for a shift in my boundaries and that of the world. At least, this is how I feel about these paintings, and I consider there to be enough reasons to believe this to be possible.

If a RLE can emerge from a painting, then we should work on the possible shift from Limit-Experience to the experience of the sublime, and thus of how we express awe in such a context. In order for us to operate this conceptual shift, we need to understand what is it that provokes the RLE we want to call sublime.

## I.4 – Awe as the meta-cognitive feeling of a Radical Limit-experience

Broadly speaking, a meta-cognitive feeling is a feeling whose object is our cognition; it can be related to an epistemic feeling and, in what follows, we will be using both indistinctly. An example of a meta-cognitive feeling might be the feeling of *déjà-vu* or the *tip-of-the-tongue*: a confuse feeling that we already know something, though we are not immediately able to comprehend whence this knowledge comes from. Epistemic confidence
might be another example: when I know Newton’s second law of motion, I know for certain
that *F=ma* and I don’t doubt have any doubt whatsoever. Those are epistemic feelings.

In this section, I will defend the view that awe could be understood, at least partially,
as a kind of meta-cognitive feeling, that is the feeling of reaching the boundaries of our
cognitive capacities.

As noted beforehand in section 1.3, Radical Limit-experiences are radical in the sense
that the cognitive faculties they defy are not one precise faculty (colour sight, pitch hearing,
...) but something broader that we called *absolute cognitive faculties*. This appears to be
difficult to define since, precisely, the consequence of this absolute threat is a sense of an
object being “too much, too everything”. It’s not only too big to comprehend, but also too
great an effort to process. When in a situation of RLE, not only do we experience trouble
processing a single aspect of an object, but we feel at loss. We don’t know exactly what
strikes us in the object we experience, we don’t know what precisely is unusual, but there is
definitely something *wrong*. Foucault in his 1978 entretien claimed that “*Ce qui est requis est le maximum d’intensité, et, en même temps, d’impossibilité*<fnref n="23" />”.

To put in in other words, a RLE denies us the possibility of adjusting the object of our
experience in predetermined concepts. Taken from a wittgensteinian point of view, this kind
of radical limit-experience is the experience of reaching the boundaries of our language, of
bumping head-first into these boundaries. Of course, the RLE has a short lifetime, and is
normally followed by an accommodation phase: the object that strikes us as defying
everything, leaving us jaws dropped and eyes wide open, is soon rationalized. When I
finally reach the summit of a mountain I’ve been climbing for days, and when I see the
astounding panorama, I may very well be in a situation of RLE, and that is also an awe-
eliciting situation. RLE, just like awe, is accommodated as fast as we can, and so the
immensity I’m facing, that both amazes and terrifies me, soon becomes a panorama of
mountains and valleys.

Let's not rush forward: all RLE are not awe experiences. Awe implies a pleasure, as a
necessary condition, and we still have to work out how a RLE can induce pleasure. One

<footnote n="23">23 “What is required is the maximum of intensity and, at the same time, of impossibility”; Quoted by J. Dokic, see above note 6. Foucault, Michel. « Conversazione con Michel Foucault (D. Trombadori) 1978 ». In *Dits et Ecrits*, Gallimard., 4: texte n°281. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.</footnote>
hypothesis could be that awe emerges from Radical Limit-Experiences that induce aesthetic pleasure. This, however, embarrasses us as it recalls for the need to clarify the link between beauty and the sublime. Indeed, the question remains to know whether the sublime is a superlative beauty (as the word is used in everyday life) or if it is a completely different experience. If aesthetic pleasure seems to be a staple in defining beauty<fnref n="24" />, what pleasure is there in awe? Is it just aesthetic pleasure, or is there a specific pleasure in link with accommodation?

It seems we can accept that some awe-inducing situations can bring aesthetic pleasure, but that is not a necessary condition. Another hypothesis could be that, while the RLE threatening our abilities is an unpleasant experience, a kind of sens of selflessness or self-reduction, the accommodation phase instead is pleasurable because it allows us some power over things. Naming things, conceptualizing them, is, in a sense, a pleasing thing to do.

Summarizing, we could consider that RLE that do induce a cognitive pleasure, a satisfaction of being able to accommodate the threatening situation, could be considered an awe-inducing stimuli. In other words, if a RLE is accompanied by cognitive pleasure, then it has a chance to elicit awe. This allows for flexibility in the use of the cord “sublime”, in art as well as outside of art. The question now remains: if not all RLE are awe-inducing, does it mean that some RLE do not accommodate, or that their accommodation does not give out pleasure? And if the latter is true, then why is it so?

My hypothesis here requires to go back to our definition of the RLE in question here. We said it was a threat to an absolute cognitive faculty, leaving that open to discussion. I suggest that the cognitive faculty the sublime threatens is a conceptual and linguistic process. Namely, what strikes us as being sublime is usually something that is at least in a way unusual, and that either fills the field of our mental representations (ie. I can only think of that) or empties it (ie. I can think of nothing). That is only a way of qualifying the feeling of ‘superlativeness’ of the sublime: it is too great for anything else to make sense. What if that meta-cognitive feeling – the feeling of nothing making sense, of something being

<footnote n="24">24 Reber, Rolf, Norbert Schwarz, et Piotr Winkielman. « Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience? » *Personality and Social Psychology Review* 8, n° 4 (novembre 2004): 364-82</footnote>
ontologically superlative – was only the way we feel when we can’t manage to fit that
experience in any existing concept? I cannot name what makes no sense, I cannot say
anything about it.

In a nutshell, I encounter an object that strikes me as unusual, and that suprises me in
such a way that, for a brief moment, I cannot put it into any existing concept and name it.
This is the RLE of language – bumping into the limits of our language. Then, making up my
spirits, I accommodate the object into existing concepts, or accommodate the concepts into
accepting the object within. This accommodation would be the longest part, possibly the one
we are actually aware of. Awe is now the emotional response to the process of successively
feeling the failure of our language and the accommodation that saves it. At this point, there
is only aesthetic pleasure missing. We could consider that what we call “sublime” is the
experience of a RLE that includes Aesthetic pleasure and that brings awe.

This would leaves us with the following typology:

- A Radical Limit-Experience of naming ability induces **awe** as a response to it's process

- Those of these RLE that include aesthetic pleasure can be called Sublime experiences

This allows for the fact that not all awe-experiences are sublime experiences, and that
not all RLE are sublime experiences, yet that all Sublime experiences induce both Awe and
RLE.
II – AESTHETICAL AWE – CAN THERE BE AN ARTISTIC SUBLIME?

II.1 – Emily Brady’s thesis

Though some authors have pointed out that awe can be experienced in art<fnref n="25" />, Emily Brady famously claimed in her 2013 book *The Sublime in modern Philosophy* that strictly speaking, artworks do not have the features of paradigmatic sublime, making exceptions only for architecture and land-art. In this section we will comment on Brady’s view, and discuss how we can interpret the existence of awe in arts as a possible counterargument.

Let’s first of all take a look at Brady’s claim itself:

> "Paradigm cases of the sublime involve qualities related to overwhelming vastness or power coupled with a strong emotional reaction of excitement and delight tinged with anxiety. Most works of art lack the combination of these qualities and accompanying responses, and therefore they cannot be sublime in the paradigmatic sense. Of course, that most artworks are not sublime in the original sense does not preclude art from being sublime"<fnref n="26" />.

Of course, this argument is allowed for by the adoption of the original definition of the sublime, ie. the sublime Kant and Burke were writing about. This definition is much narrower than the one we would be tempted to use today. Indeed, where I’d tend to define the sublime as the experience of a stimulus that brings both pleasure and a sense of self negation, the original definition was, as we said earlier, the experience of something both deeply terrifying and profoundly pleasing. The archetype was, of course, great panoramas such as “Actual encounters with the Alps, English and Scottish mountains, Niagara or Yosemite”<fnref n="27" />. Brady duly notes that, back then, those places were much wilder, and people would then be much less used to seeing them. Nowadays, instead, even if not all of us will see these places once in a lifetime, almost anyone can find at least a picture of them.

<footnote n="25">25 See Konečni, Vladimir J., Rebekah A. Wanic, et Amber Brown. « Emotional and Aesthetic Antecedents and Consequences of Music-Induced Thrills ». *The American Journal of Psychology* 120, n° 4 (1 décembre 2007): 619</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 Brady, Emily, *The Sublime in modern philosophy*, 2013, p.119</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 Ibid, p.118</footnote>
Taking that as a starting point, Brady details four reasons that disqualify the possibility for art to be sublime in itself and in this original sense.

The first is a matter or size and scale: original reports of the sublime mention the experience of an object of unusually great shape and power. It is obviously true that no human made object equals the Alps or the Niagara falls in size or power. Hence the idea that artworks cannot have the same effects of us as natural panoramas of sublime scale.

Second, by being handmade by a human, crafted after ideas and projections of one's mind, the artwork has forms and boundaries, which sublime objects should not have. It is hard to determine the limits of the Everest, or its shape. Brady considers art to have difficulties freeing itself from conventions and frames, thus limiting its ability to be sublime.

Third, “art lacks the visceral ‘wild’ and ‘disordered’ character associated with dynamically sublime things<fnref n="28" />”. Nature’s wildness expresses itself notably by the fact that you cannot escape the nature’s being sublime when it is, and you cannot make sublime a panorama when it is not. It is, widely, unpredictable and changing, and from that comes a part of the power that grants nature its potential sublime. Art, on the contrary, is as it is, fixed and defined, and you can just stop looking at it if it frightens you.

Fourth, Brady considers art to lack the power of making the viewer feel weak or small in comparison. As I understand it, this means that art does not have the emotional superlativity of a sublime-elicitig object.

Finally, taking it from her own words, art “struggles to present sublimity as such<fnref n="29" />.”
This is arguably the most hard to understand of her arguments, and we shall spend some
time trying to make sense of it before any criticism can be adressed.

On the first point, that is, art's lack of great scale, Brady rightfully notes that indeed, a
painting's canvas can be big, nut never as big as a mountain. To postpone this difficulty,
many artists (out of whom she cites Turner, Friedrich, Church, and a few others) decided to
*represent* vastness and, sometimes, a tiny human figure to further show the scale of the
subject. But just as painting a smile need not provoke happiness for the viewer, painting a

<footnote n="28">28 Ibid. p.119</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29 Ibid. p.120</footnote>
figure feeling small in front of a panorama does not put us in his shoes. I won't feel the sublime that the painting's subject is possibly experiencing. That is a very good point, and one I see no reason to argue against.

Furthermore, this is also the limit encountered by Ishizu and Zeki<sup>30</sup> when they moderate their inquiry's conclusions, considering how their test subjects could only be scanned while seeing a picture of sublime panoramas and not the real thing. It is, indeed, very difficult to test what happens inside our head when we are, by definition, in a wild and natural place. This could prove to be a clue that either this definition of being immersed in a natural environment is not satisfactory, or that we must find new ways to inquire about it. Virtual Reality might be such a new way, but we will talk about it later on.

However, this point is valid only for representational pictures, as the author herself writes, and it can be discussed whether this would hold either for non-representational pictures – such as abstract art – or for other forms of art, like cinema. Indeed, one limit Brady finds is that a picture is only a fix point in space time and therefore does not have the power and dynamics of a real point of view. From that she considers that representational pictures cannot provoke sublime itself, but only a kind of second-degree sublime, emanating from the associations of concepts, like the fear of a represented storm on the canvas, but not fear of the storm itself. Yet, what happens in a movie? If I am truly *into* the movie, truly immersed, do I not fear the very thing that is shown, or only the thought of it? Watching Tarkovski's *The Sacrifice* as a modern-day spectator, do I fear the isolation and the end of the world, or do I only fear the real-world threats that the movie conjures?

But for now, let's stick to what Brady writes, and we shall discuss other art forms when she mentions them.

Going on to her second argument, that of Formlessness, Emily Brady argues that human made art is limited, spatially and even possibly conceptually. She writes:

> "Paintings are two-dimensional, with frames, and many sculptures are three-dimensional works executed on a human scale. By contrast, larger pieces such as murals, triptychs, and installations may have an environing or more expansive quality, yet they are

<footnote n="30">30 Ishizu & Zeki 2014, p.7</footnote>
still not especially challenging to the senses. Of course, largeness alone does not make something sublime. After all, the mathematical sublime relates to a sense of limitlessness or the infinite rather than to immense size only<fnref n="31" />”

What matters here is the distinction made between actual formlessness and the impression of it<fnref n="32" />, though what that means remains to be clarified. Brady says that, arguably, the night sky is the most formlessness we can hope to see, as well as the most boundless, and that it is, for that reason, a possible object of the sublime. Yet, other objects, like a mountain range, aurora borealis or other things, can give a sense of formlessness by their sheer greatness and power.

To me, this seems to imply that there is an illusion at work for Brady’s view of the sublime. If an object has a shape and boundaries, like mountains do, and if, despite seeing it with my own eyes, I persist to feel as if it didn’t, then I am committing an error in interpreting my perceptions or in my perception itself. Either ways, having a feeling of something that is wrong and that I know to be wrong is what we call an illusion, like believing the magician is actually cutting in half his assistant when we know he is not. If we are to interpret this *feeling of formlessness* as an illusion, I concur with that part of Brady’s argument. Furthermore, this could indeed, as the author notes, be a useful way to distinguish between sublime and beautiful experience, the latter lacking the aforementioned feeling<fnref n="33" />.

The third case against artistic sublimity that Brady raises is that of wildness. Nature, as Kant, Addison and Schiller write it in the texts she quotes<fnref n="34" />, is wild and untamed. What strikes us in it is it’s profound disorder. In Addison’s own words, “in the wide fields of nature, the sight wanders up and down without confinement, and is fed with an infinite variety of images<fnref n="35" />”. The sublime, then, would be an effect of the mind’s wandering about,

<footnote n="31">31 Brady, Emily, 2013, p.123</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 Ibid., p.124</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33 On this point, Brady refers us to Kant and Coleridge</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34 ie. Schiller “Concerning the Sublime”, Addison’s *Remarks on certain parts of Italy*, and Kant’s *Critique of the Power of Judgement*</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 Addison, quoted by Brady 2013, p.127</footnote>
on the wings of sight and imagination. This, all of these authors claim, is possible only in
nature itself, since no painting can equate this wildness.

Wildness is deeply liked to nature in the sense that, by the way of it constant changing,
nature cannot be controlled or tamed by humans; but while this is true, I do not think it
excludes art altogether. Art can be changing – as we said before, music, video, theater,
dance, all those are arts that allow for movement, unpredictability, and change. Abstract art
is also a way for paintings or photographs to obtain a sense of wildness that, obviously, was
not at all imaginable in the XVIIIth century. But more on that later.

The capacity of the experienced object to be overwhelming, Brady writes, is tied to the
possibility of actually threatening the observer. She gives an analogy that speaks for itself:
watching a tornado in first person before escaping, versus watching a movie, however well
crafted, of a tornado. While both are impressive, and both can have their own beauty, only
the real tornado actually threatens me, thus having, maybe, a deeper connection to the
observer. The point here is that natural sublime, being free and impossible to contain, can
only be a different kind of experience than the sublime elicited by a bounded object. In other
words, the natural sublime puts its observer in a different place, in a different frame, that
consequently alters the very shape of the emotion experience that ensues.

This is furthermore developed by the fact that, as Brady states rightfully, nature's
wildness make it hard to predict it, hence forbidding that we seek it with precision. We can,
in fact, go to the mountains expecting to experience the sublime at some point, but it's really
hard to say something like "at the next tree I will stop and look at the valley, and be awed".
That's indeed not what happens, you just need to be "in the right place at the right time"<fnref n="36" />.
As for any phenomenon that happens randomly (or as randomly as physic's laws allow it),
you need to have luck, and by looking for these phenomenons you merely increase your
chances of encountering it, though not making theses chances 100%. The counterpoint to
this is that you cannot turn the sublime on or off.

Finally, though she does not explicit further the fourth and fifth arguments of her
claim, she adds that, if we were to defend that art can be sublime by the means of
imagination, adding strength and vastness to the object that lays before our eyes, we would

<footnote n="36">36 Brady 2013, p.129</footnote>
only be in a case of sublime *through association*<fnref n="37" />, and not sublime in itself. This, she claims, is the reason why literature, although arguably a better candidate for artistic sublime than visual arts, fails to present the sublime in itself, since it relies on imagination to make us experience its object.

I find this point to be insufficient, since it seems to overlook the fact that literature does not, strictly speaking, *need* imagination to make us feel a terrifyingly vast range of emotions. It is true that novels and narratives depend, in a certain way, on our capacity to represent the story that is written; but it should also be considered that, just as paintings are not always representational, the can be literature without representation. The case that immediately come to mind is poetry, that does not need to tell a story nor to represent any object. Poetry, or at least poetry as it's conceived by poets such as Rimbaud or Michaux, draws its emotional strength from its shape itself. The words are its beauty, and not what they mean or represent, and it can be argued that, what is true for poetry's beauty, can also be true for the sublime. One can be awed by the sheer power, wildness and amazement that the patiently crafted poem can elicit. As Edgar A. Poe puts it, "under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake<fnref n="38" />".

## II.2 – Art and the sublime, a few points of interest in Brady’s claim

Before moving on to a possible answer to Brady’s arguments and general claim, let’s look at the conditions the author gives to the possibility of artistic sublime. Indeed, while she did claim that there was, strictly speaking, no artistic sublime in itself in the original sense of sublime, she never said that art had nothing to do with the sublime. Thus, she allows for, if not exceptions, at least some compromises.

First comes the concept of profundity, that she defines as follows: “refers to an artwork’s depth of meaning and its capacity to convey some kind of insight about the world

<footnote n="37">37 Brady 2013, p.130</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle”, in *The Works of Late Edgar Allan Poe*, Vol. III, p.1-20, 1850</footnote>
or the human condition<fnref n="39" />”. This definition is to be understood in relation to the sublime’s way of putting one in the midst of a larger, harder to process, whole. This, she claims, is a property that can be exemplified in a large array of arts, ranging from literature to music, and possibly even cinema. The baseline here is that any art that conveys a meaning *or* that has the capacity to make us feel a part of a larger whole is eligible for profundity. But profundity is not the sublime; it implies no sens of belittling of oneself (or, as we called it earlier, self-negation), and has no intrinsic aesthetic qualities. It is also unclear whether it allows for the wide range of emotions that qualify the sublime.

Still, profundity is a property that has some interest for our point. Indeed, it is noted that profound music has an “environing quality”, ie. it allows for the reader to feel in the midst of music. That environing property, that keeps the subject in a different frame of reception, is particularly interesting for our question. Let’s work out how and why.

When I’m in front of a painting, I see not only the picture itself, but I also see a lot of other things: the painting frame, the things around me, and if I focus I can also see my glasses, parts of my nose, some hair,... In a nutshell, I see that there is a painting in my world, in other words: there is an unusual object in my usual perceptive frame.

But when I’m listening to music – let’s stick to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, since that is the example Brady gives – I’m able to close my eyes, shutting down almost all of my visual perceptions. What remains? In what world am I when I’m listening to Beethoven’s ninth? Defining world in the very specific sense of “sum of all that I perceive and know<fnref n="40" />”, and not in a more general sense of “what exists”, closing my eyes means reducing what appears to me at one moment. By being exposed to fewer phenomena, I change *my* world for a moment. And what remains as being part of my world is twofold: on the one hand, I still have physical perceptions (position of my body, sense of heat, pain, touch, and sounds...), and on the other hand I have thoughts. If I concentrate on the music, I can feel as if taken away. I think it is a common saying that music makes us travel.

By doing so, what music does is very different from what we told about the painting. Listening to music is not like adding an unusual object to my usual world, but changing the

<footnote n="39">39 Brady 2013, p.133</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40 Or in other words: that upon which I can speak propositions</footnote>
frame upon which I perceive anything. But that, to Brady, is restricted – as I understand it – to “music without text<fnref n="41" />”; it’s likely that her reason for saying so is that, by adding words, music marks itself as resolutely human made. Songs and poems, being artifacts of language, can only be interpreted as human-crafted objects. But this reason would mean that the only reason why music can indeed have that environing quality is that it would resemble or evoke nature. Is that really so? There is indeed music like Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimski-Korsakov, that does try in a certain extent to imitate nature, but I doesn’t seem to me as a particularly environing music. On the other hands, we can find music with words that imitates nature (like Janequin’s *Les Oiseaux*) to the point of very credible, and we can also find music with words that does not imitate nature but that appears to have the capacity to take the listener away from his world. We can think of many works here, like Allegri’s *Miserere*, many of Bach’s cantatas, and the more recent Arvo Pärt – though I am maybe talking here for my own sensibility.

To summarize, while I do think that Brady’s argument about profundity is interesting, it is not sufficient to explain the exact link between pseudo-naturality and profundity. This shows a weak point in Brady’s otherwise well-rounded argumentation, since it does not, strictly speaking, forbid music from showing this necessary condition for sublimity, the self negation and challenge of the world.

Nonetheless, she adds a point about how music lacks the unpredictability of natural phenomena, and I have nothing against that case. So we might conclude from that, either that unpredictability is not a necessary condition for sublimity, or that unpredictability of the experience of an artwork can come from somewhere else that the artwork’s nature. More on that later.

A second point of interest I would like to discuss is the claims Brady makes about abstract art. As we wrote before, abstract art would be a good counterargument to the author’s claim about music’s shape, and therefore inability to achieve formlessness and boundlessness. She acknowledges this possible counter arguments and develops this point using the examples of Barnett Newman (1905-1970) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). Their

<footnote n="41">41 Brady 2013, p.134</footnote>
paintings, large monochrome or bichrome abstract frames or great dimension might be able
to give a sense of environing that lacks in more representational artworks<fnref n="42" />. Certainly such a
thing could also be said about British artist Anish Kapoor, especially his 2001 *Descent into
Limbo*<fnref n="43" />. This artwork is a deep hole in the ground, in the middle of a square white building;
the hole is painted black, absorbing almost all light, making it impossible to distinguish the
shape, and tricking the spectator into thinking it's only a circle of black paint on the ground.
Going back to Brady's example, in Newman's words:

"We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, myth, or what have you, that have been the device of Western European painting. Instead of making *cathedrals* out of man, Christ, or 'life', we are making it out of ourselves, out of our feelings<fnref n="44" />"

Here, Brady opens a deeply interesting discussion both with *avant-garde* art and with Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard's point of view on Newman can be found notably in “The Sublime and the Avant-garde<fnref n="45" />”. To summarize his view, let's read, page 4:

"Thus, when he seeks sublimity in the here and now he breaks with the eloquence of romantic art but he does not reject its fundamental task, that of bearing pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible. The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another words, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. In the determination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the 'it happens' is the paint, the picture. The paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is to this that it has to witness."

In more simple words, Lyotard interprets Newman's art as a tentative of making the sublime, not the subject of the painting, but the very existence of the painting. What is sublime is not the painting itself, or its subject – and this is only made more true by the fact

<footnote n="42">42 For an example, see annex 3, *Voices of Fire*, notable for its height and sense of *grandeur*</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43 See annex 4</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44 Barnett Newman, 'The sublime is now' in Barnett Newman and John P. O'Neill, *Barnett Newman : Selected writings and interviews* (Berkeley university of California press, 1992), quoted by Brady p.136</footnote>

<footnote n="45">45 Lyotard, Jean-François. « The Sublime and the Avant Garde ». *Paragraph*, Edinburg University Press, 6 (October 1985): 1-18.</footnote>
that abstract art has no representational stake; what is truly sublime is the fact that this
painting is, is here, and is seen. The sublime is the very fact that I am here and that this art
exists. This naturalization of the sublime is an interesting idea, but by making sublimity an
emotional reaction to existence, it fails to explain the specificity of the sublime. Not
everything that exists can elicit sublimity. Lyotard's view then induces a side question: what
mental process explains that some situations elicit sublimity more than others? If sublime is
just something happening in the mind of the observer regardless of the qualities of the
object, ie. if it is only a mental misfire, why is it not homogeneous?

Therefore it is not a matter of whether or not a picture can in absolute terms, elicit the
sublime, but merely of a here-and-now. Lyotard displaces the question as more of a relation
between observer, artwork, and space-time. There can be no sublime out of time, only an
existence that does happen, that is deeply impossible to express, and that very fact, as I
understand Lyotard, is what makes it sublime.

This, as Brady puts it, is problematic. As she puts it, although it is an interesting
thought for sure, it radically changes the meaning of the word “sublime”, detaching it from
its original, naturalistic sense, to make more general. Lyotard’s sublime is indeed a mental
phenomenon, an “it happens”, and not a quality of a thing. Brady makes it clear that such a
new definition of the sublime is not here aim in her book, where she just tries to reflect on
the original definition, and shows how it just cannot work with art strictly speaking.

We now need to ask a methodological question. If, as the years pass and as
philosophers define and refine new concept, it appears that a concept we thought we
understood is no longer up to date, what are we to do? In this situation, the concept of the
sublime, on Lyotard’s view, is outdated if we persist in seeing it

- 1) as a property of an object, and

-2) if we reduce it to nature.

That argument is defended by the idea that sublime is inseparable from its emotional
effects, therefore making it a mental matter. Since it is a mental matter, it can be argued that
what *is* absolutely is not as important as *what is to me now and here*. From here, Lyotard’s
point is, in my opinion, quite clear, and shows why we could want to redefine the sublime.
Brady gives two further possible answers to Lyotard's point of view on Newman and Rothko. First, she considers that:

> "These works seek to capture the sublime, and they succeed in conveying a sense of formlessness through something that has form, if not sublimity as such. Instead of trying to imitate sublime subject matter, these works seek to capture or embody the metaphysical force of greatness, and how it throws the human self into transcendent modes of being. But despite their reference to something beyond themselves, the boundaries of these works ultimately limit their force<fnref n="46" />".

This allows us to conclude that Brady distinguishes between the sublime and the "metaphysical force" that emerges from greatness, since this force bears no implications on the emotional valence of this experience, nor on the qualities of the object. This, however, is not a self-evident point. Indeed, even though it is understandable that one could doubt of this "metaphysical force"'s pertinence, one could also be doubtful about,

1) the qualities of sublime objects, and

2) the way we would be able to know these qualities.

I do no wish here to do Kant's first *Critique* all over again, but merely to point out that such a metaphysical quarrel can interfere with our reasoning.

Finally, Brady discusses a few other cases of artists which, she claims, fared better in abolishing the forms of the artwork. Among them are James Turrel and Doug Wheeler, whose 2000's *SF NM BI SP 2000* is central in her argumentation<fnref n="47" />. This work consists on a large room, surrounded by columns, and painted in bright white, melting the shapes of the room into the unknown. By stepping *into* the artwork, we are incapable of discerning anything besides the columns that are *outside* of it. In other words, *SF NM BI SP 2000* seems to abolish space for a few moments.

In Brady's view, this is still not a true, artistic sublime, since "if they are sublime aesthetic experiences, they would probably be outlying cases because of having milder effects. The artistic settings put the appreciator in a less bewildering position, one that would appear to make the challenging character of the sublime less possible (though I

<footnote n="46">46 Brady, 2013, p.138</footnote>

<footnote n="47">47 See Annex 5</footnote>
suspect that for many appreciators, that setting may become somewhat backgrounded if they
are truly immersed or engaged with the artwork<fnref n="48" />).”

However, though I can concur with the core of this counterargument, it seems to me
that the parenthesis she adds here puts a real dent in her theory. Indeed, can it really be said
that there is no artistic sublime if, by way of immersion, the appreciator does feel the
sublime? Let's keep this point in mind, because it will be a central argument later on.

One final artwork discussed by Brady is Miroslaw Balka's *How it is* from 2009, it
being a metal container painted pitch black. Inside this container, since the appreciator is
completely disoriented, the author claims that there can, in theory, be an experience of the
sublime, with both anxiety and pleasure, and shapelessness. But this is mitigated by the fact
that, practically, there can always be some kind of stimulus to take us out of this immersion,
"such as other people, cell phones, and so forth<fnref n="49" />"

II.3 – Exceptions on the impossibility of artistic sublimity

This section shall be brief, but very important for what follows. Emily brady allows for
several exceptions to her main claim – to remind the reader, that there can be no artistic
sublime as such – that are discussed in the section “Sublimity, architecture and land art”. As
the title implies, she considers these two domains as cases where an actual sublime can be
elicited by an artifact, and we shall see how and why the author defends this position.

a) Architecture

Human technology has long been able to design and build extreme creations; the
oldest ones are arguably Ghiza's pyramids, but our modern society has its own architectural
achievements. Brady considers, namely, that skyscrapers and a city's skyline are able to
provoke a feeling that can be described as sublime. Indeed, when we watch a skyline from
afar, it is arguably comparable to a mountain range ; and by staring up at the top of a

<footnote n="48">48 Brady, 2013, p.140</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49 Brady, 2013, p.140</footnote>
skyscraper from down below, our eyes are constantly moving up and finding no limit to their wandering. This disorientation of the eye, together with great shape and sense of infinite, is able to create an ambiguous feeling. We are both pleased to see it, if it's beautiful, pleased to know that humanity is able to create such a thing, and terrified of the sheer height and power of the building.

She writes: “Instead of being humbled by nature's sublimity, something we cannot fully grasp, skyscrapers shock our senses, push imagination beyond its limits in trying to take in such size, and make us feel small, yet without a consciousness of this other thing as non-human. It is notable too that skyscrapers exist outdoors, within built environments, and thus will have a more spatial, environmental quality as compared to the arts<fnref n="50" />.”

This very last point is indeed true, and I see nothing against it, though I must admit that skylines do not touch me anywhere as much as some music pieces or poems. But further, what does it mean for our concept of the sublime, that it can be attained by mans of architecture? Firstly, it shows that the problem is not that the object is really man-made or not – otherwise, there could be no exception, apart from error (thinking that skyscrapers are natural when they aren't). The problem is rather how we interact with it, and our state of mind when we do: if the sublime comes from the way our eyes move, it means it is not entirely dependent on the object's naturality or artificiality.

As Brady tells it explicitly, the fact that there can be any exception to the kantian conception of the sublime implies one of two things. Either we need to correct that first definition in order to explain a wider range of phenomenas, or we must consider that what architecture has to offer is not really sublime. In which case, we have to figure out what it is exactly. This second possibility would have to be tested experimentally by comparing the reports by different subjects in both cases (artificial and natural) and their neurological statuses. Though this is not the topic of this paper, let's mention here Ishizu and Zeki's work<fnref n="51" />, which focuses on natural panoramas but presents a good framework for possible complements.

<footnote n="50">50 Brady, 2013, p.144</footnote>

<footnote n="51">51 Ishizu, Tomohiro, et Zeki, Semir. « A Neurobiological Enquiry into the Origins of Our Experience of the Sublime and Beautiful ». *Frontiers in Human Neuroscience* 8 (2014)</footnote>
What makes architecture a good candidate for sublime-elicitin object? As we said before, there's the environing property of a skyline, the sheer height of skyscrapers, the technological wonder that they can even be built. This, in a way, could be related to Keltner and Haidt's sociological sublime: we are awed by the perceived greatness of someone. The presence of aesthetic appreciation is, in my opinion, less obvious. Indeed, when I'm looking up to the top of the Empire State Building, though I can only admit feeling belittled in front of it, can I really say that I find it beautiful at the same time? Even if I can indeed feel awed at it, I can't say that this view pleases me. Maybe this is just a question of taste, of course. But I do feel like architecture just hasn't got the strength to take our breath away as would a mountain range.

This, I think, is a case where the reflection exposed in Brady's book focuses maybe too much on the properties of the object and not enough on the subject's experience. Is it really possible to say something in the lines of 'people may not feel like that but x is sublime' or 'y cannot in fact be sublime even though some people, mistakenly, reported experiences of the sublime'? Besides our own lived experience, cognitive, emotional and perceptive, what is there that can be really said sublime? Once again, this is not the matter here, but I do feel like a shift is needed in the focus of the debate here, going from an object-to-subject way to a subject-to-object direction. Meaning that the focus may probably be put more on the experience the subject report (and of course investigating the plausibility of first-person reports), and less on what the objects are like, at least on a first step.

Closing this parenthesis, let's move onto the second exception Brady exposes.

## b) Land-art

What is a work like Robert Smithson's *Spiral Jetty* able to evoke<fnref n="52" />? This giant spiral of dirt and stone, on the shores of the Great Salt Lake (Utah) does give an impression of naturality – due to its materials and size – while still being undoubtedly artificial. Indeed, it's shape in not one seen naturally in landscapes, and the it's very existence defies nature's entropy, to the point where the artwork is regularly submerged and will, one day, disappear.

<footnote n="52">52 See annex 6</footnote>
This interesting dichotomy might be the reason why Emily Brady takes Land art as a
possible case of artificial sublime. In her own words:

"The work is dynamic rather than static: depending on the water level of the lake, it submerges and re-emerges, now covered with white salt crystals. People can visit the place, as they might visit any great landscape, and walk along the curving spiral to its endpoint. The artwork operates on various levels, from the sheer physicality of the spiral, to its expansive lake site with long stretches of water and land, to ideas about earth, creation, and mathematics. Although it is positioned at the less terrifying end of the sublime, I do think it presents a case of sublimity rather than only beauty or grandeur, despite the glistening effects of the crystals and the vibrant colour of the lake<fnref n="53" />."

Several questions can arise from this. First, how should we differentiate between
intellectual effects of the artwork (“ideas about earth, creation and mathematics”) and its
physical properties? Brady does acknowledge that *Spiral Jetty* “operates on various levels”,
but then we need to specify what their respective importance is. Are higher cognitive
processes prevalent, or are perceptual processes prevalent, or are they both providing an
equal amount of effort? My question here, in a nutshell, is that if we consider that the
sublime is a consequence of both kind of processes, we must infer, from their prevalence, a
possible modification in our definition of the sublime.

If perceptual processes are the important factor, then we must think of the possibility
that, just as sense can be mistaken in everyday life, so can they be when assessing on the
sublimity of an object. In which case, the truth value of sublimity must be rethought, ie. we
must try to make sense whether or not the sublime is something real, or an illusion.

If high level cognitive processes such as imagination and reflection are the dominant
factor, we must first know which ones do. Do imagination, association, induction,
deduction, all work the same? These, of course, are a few very simple ideas on a very
complex matter.

On land art, Brady remarks on, page 146 that they can be understood as bridges, or
highways, bringing our attention to the sublime of nature. In that sense, we might interpret
land art's specificity as, metaphorically speaking, a kind of *surfactant*. As said above, land

<footnote n="53">53 Brady 2013, p.145-146</footnote>
art is both undeniably artificial and leaning toward the natural, just like a surfactant connects to non-miscible molecules like water and oil. This interpretation would lead indeed to Brady's point about the sublime *by association*, in the sense that what is sublime is more what the artwork points us to than the artwork itself.

But if this is true, then several new questions can be asked. First, if it is so, and land art is indeed able to convey sublimity by association, then what forbids regular art to do the same? Is it only a matter of size, or is there more to it? And second, if it is only the greatness of the object, then it is absolutely necessary to investigate the lead that Brady gave page 140 on immersion: is it possible to talk of *subjective* greatness of an object? I which case, we should consider the possibility that the actual greatness of the object can be, at least partially, overlooked. This will become particularly relevant in the case of music.

Because music is, indeed, the big absent on Brady's account. The greatness of music is very hard to explain or to measure; we can, as she does, speak of profundity of music, but that is still very abstract and some might find it hard to understand. This is why I think we cannot make the economy of a strong reflection on music if we are to understand the sublime in art.

In the next sequence, we shall try both to answer to Brady's arguments, and to offer a way around the difficult question of the qualities of the sublime objects.

Before moving on, however, let's summarize Brady's major arguments:

- Artworks lack some of the qualities necessary for the sublime strictly speaking

- Artworks can, at best, elicit the sublime by association, through imagination

- Even abstract and *avant-garde* art can merely try to embody a metaphysical force, but they are nonetheless limited by their physical boundaries.

- There are a few exceptions in the impossibility of artistic sublime (namely: architecture, land art, music, and some visual works)
## II.4 – On defending artistic sublimity

Now that we tried to expose Emily Brady's account as clearly as possible, we shall try to discuss the different arguments she gives supporting her claim. I classified these in four types: the five general arguments given on pages 119 to 120, the idea that artistic sublime can only be sublime by association, the exceptions detailed in our last section, and finally the lack of reflection on music, which was only briefly mentioned in Brady's account.

### a) Brady's general arguments against artistic sublimity

#### a.1 – That artworks “do not possess the scale of the sublime”<fnref n="54" />

No artwork known to man can be as enormous as mount Everest or as powerful as a thunderstorm. That is a statement I think everybody will agree with, and my goal here is not to deny it. There is naught, nor ought there be, such an artwork. What may appear as a weak point in this argument lays elsewhere, and is more of a methodological concern. If we define sublime based on the quality found in natural panoramas, is should be no wonder that only nature fills the requirements. But by doing that, we are creating what seems to me as a somewhat artificial distinction between *true sublime*, that can be only natural, and what *some people would call sublime* in artworks.

The general use of the word indeed, especially in french where it is widely used as a superlative to *beautiful*, does not seem to reflect the exclusivity of the philosophical definition. A first question we could ask here is therefore: do we need to disqualify the testimony of everyday life as being a misuse of a word, or do we need to extend our concept of the sublime to include what, pragmatically, it is associated with? I tend to adopt that later, pragmatical approach, for different reasons; the main one is that language evolves, and as it evolves, so does our ability to think our relation to the world. By letting the distance grow

<footnote n="54">54 Brady, 2013, p.119</footnote>
between the definition of a concept and its actual use, we forbid ourselves precious tools to
understand our everyday experience.

This is furthermore what concludes Konečni's<fnref n="55" /> "Emotions in painting and Art installations" in section V: "Without claiming scientific validity for (numerous) informal interviews, it may nevertheless be of note that to the simple question, "What do you feel?," the by far most frequent term used by respondents for their experience was "awe."" In the same paper, Konečni show that reports of paintings inducing an emotion in the strong, physiological sense, fail to prove anything, which would converge with Brady's point. He adds that some installations are "some installations are far more likely than paintings to induce aesthetic awe in spectators by virtue of their far greater amenability to being constructed such that they contain sublime stimuli<fnref n="56" />". This would imply that artificiality *per se* does not forbid sublimity, but merely restrains it. It is to be noted that, throughout this section, Konečni adopts a definition of "aesthetic awe" as a derived emotion (from fear and joy), emerging from sublime stimulus. How then are we to interpret the fact that subjects claim to feel awe in front of artworks if 1) the definition of the sublime restrains the possibility of it happening and 2) there is no physiological trace of such a strong emotion?

Two main answers seem plausible. First, that the subjects are mistaken when they report feeling awe. This would mean that, somehow, an emotion that is not felt, is reported to be felt, and that in turn is a challenge to make sense of. Second possibility, that the acknowledged definition for sublimity and/or aesthetic awe fail to make sense of what happens in our minds. This is a debate I will, for now, leave open, and try to clarify in our third section.

For now, let's ask this new question: theoretically, how could there be sublime when there is no objective vastness? An answer that would correspond to what we just said is error; I think it might be possible that someone reacts to an object *as if* it were much bigger. Just like, when we are in love, we are prone to idealizing our significant other, can we have such unrealistic ideas about an artwork?

<footnote n="55">55 Konečni. « Emotion in Painting and Art Installations ». *The American Journal of Psychology* 128, nº 3 (2015): 305</footnote>

<footnote n="56">56 Konečni 2015, p.317</footnote>
American psychologist Paul J. Silvia offered in this regard an interesting approach to the question. He follows the appraisal theory, that considers “that evaluations of events, not events themselves, are the local cause of emotional experience<fnref n="57" />”. As he puts it, putting objective criteria as a main feature of emotion-eliciting situations is problematic: “it is hard to explain interpersonal and intraperson variability in emotional experience by referring to objective features of events. In any situation, different people will respond with different emotions<fnref n="58" />”. This entails a deeply subjective view of aesthetic reception, that must be accounted for in an effort to make sense of the emotional response to art. Let’s keep this point in mind, as we go onto Brady’s second developed argument.

## a.2 – That artworks lack the formlessness of nature

This point is possibly more controversial. Indeed, the examples that bear this argument are mainly visual ones – and more precisely, pictural ones. But, even if we leave apart the objection raised in a.1), is it really that representative of art in general?

My objection here relies mainly on two forms of art that are not much discussed in Brady's book: literature (in a wide sense, from novels to poems and songs) and music. It very much depends on one question: what does it mean, for words or music, to have the formlessness of nature? For one, we must understand whether it is a binary process (form or formlessness) or a gradual one (different level of formlessness). Brady herself confesses that it's not that nature *per se* has no shape, because mountains do have complex shapes, but it's about the *impression* of formlessness. Therefore, what is at stake here is that, while have the perceptual experience of natural sublimity, we are mistaken, we consider a panorama as exemplifying formlessness, where in reality it's just a lot of complex shapes.

What prevents us then from saying the same thing of arts? A poem has a shape by different means; words are physical shapes of ink on the paper; the words follow sometimes traditional patterns, and sometimes do not; the meaning conveyed by the text can be very

<footnote n="57">57 Silvia, Paul J. « Emotional responses to art: From collation and arousal to cognition and emotion ». *Review of general psychology* 9, n° 4 (2005), p.345</footnote>

<footnote n="58">58 Silvia, Paul J?, 2005, ibid</footnote>
apparent, or obscure, or there could even be no meaning at all<fnref n="59" />. Where is the shape in that?
There is not that much regularity, and I would even argue that something in the way a poem
impacts us is similar to the irrationality with which, in nature, we are mistaken about
sublime stimuli being formless.

This seems to go according to Jean-Pierre Schaeffer when he writes, in his 1996 paper
“Qu’est-ce qu’une conduite esthétique”: “*Par ailleurs, le modèle de la connaissance sensible fait que lorsque l’esthétique s’intéresse aux arts — et ceci vaut pour la variante empiriste tout autant que pour la variante rationaliste — elle a tendance à privilégier le paradigme visuel. Du même coup, elle ne rend pas justice, par exemple, à l’art verbal, sauf à le ramener métaphoriquement à un art visuel en postulant par exemple que le fonctionnement esthétique du langage est celui de l’image poétique*<fnref n="60" />”

And what about music? A difficulty here is to understand whether our relation to music
with words or without them (or “absolute music”<fnref n="61" />). This is not the aim of this paper, so we
will focus instead on emotional responses to music. In this regard, Esteban Buch’s work is
an interesting approach; in a forthcoming paper<fnref n="62" />, he explores the relation between orgasm
and musical climax. I do consider orgasm to be close, in some kind of way, to a limit-
experience, in the sense that it is the peak of pleasure, possibly a physical intimacy peak.
The way orgasm shuts down thoughts and many cognitive processes also bears resemblance
to the way we described Radical Limit-experiences as an absolute wall upon wich our
cognitive abilities slams.

Buch writes, on page 15: “This shape [ie. the temporal shape of the music dictated to Debussy by his lover Emma], which elaborates a new theme – Emma’s theme – with a

<footnote n="59">59 As is the case in automatic writing, where the authors just throw words together without thinking of a meaning</footnote>

<footnote n="60">60 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. « Qu’est-ce qu’une conduite esthétique? » *Revue Internationale de Philosophie* 50, n° 198 (décembre 1996) p.670; roughly translated by myself: “furthermore, the model of sensible knowledge makes it so that, when aesthetics reflects about arts - and this is true for the empirical variant as well as for the rationalist – it tends to favour the visual paradigm. By the way, it doesn’t give justice to, let’s say, verbal art, or it does so by bringing it, metaphorically, to a visual art, by example by postulating that the aesthetical function of language is that of a poetic ‘image’”</footnote>

<footnote n="61">61 Konečni. « Emotion in Painting and Art Installations ». *The American Journal of Psychology* 128, n° 3 (2015) p.313</footnote>

<footnote n="62">62 Buch, Esteban. « Climax as Orgasm: On Debussy’s ‘L’Isle Joyeuse’ ». *Music and Letters* (Oxford University Press) 100, n° 1 (1 février 2019): 24-60</footnote>
steady upwards intensity curve leading to a sustained climax, is far from giving way to
silence. The passage ends at bar 144, not on a closing C major triad but on an open C
arpeggio with no third, and it fuses with the following C major section. [...] In short, the
third sketch depicts an open-ended climax. Given the biographical context, as a climax
'dictated' by a woman and not followed by silence, can we say it is a feminine orgasm<fnref n="63" />?".

If music is able, not only to convey a sense of orgasm, but to *be an orgasm without body*<fnref n="64" />, can we really say that it has a shape? Of course, we can do a spectrometer of apiece of music, and we often do, but it is merely a physical representation of what we hear, it is not what we hear as we hear it. By analogy, music can be written on a sheet, but, apart from those with perfect audition, we don't usually hear a succession of notes with their respective names. What we hear as we hear it doesn't have a shape, only it's physical correlates do. So can we really agree that art lacks the formlessness of natural sublimity?

a.3 – That art “lacks the visceral ‘wild’ and ‘disordered’ character<fnref n="65" />” associated with the sublime

Leaving aside once again the simple objection Paul Silvia allowed us to make in a.1)<fnref n="66" />,
I think the criterium of wilderness is still problematic, though maybe not as much as the
previous ones. Indeed, it seems that, just like profundity, viscerality can be elicited by art. It
is merely a personal experience, but I remember using that very word, “visceral”, to
describe what I felt seeing for the first time Angelin Preljocaj’s choreography on
Stravinsky’s *Rite of Spring* (created in 2001). Music, dance, theatre, novels, seem to be able
to strike us deeply; but do they have a “wild” and “disordered” character?

In this section we will focus mainly of music and dance. One point on dance is the
very recent creation of Clément Cogitore’s *Les Indes Galantes*⁶⁷, with a choreography
developed with Bintou Dembélé. This duet created a theatrical and choreographical artwork

<footnote n="63">63 Buch, Esteban, 2019, p.15</footnote>

<footnote n="64">64 Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">65 Brady, 2013, p.119</footnote>

<footnote n="66">66 ie. the objection according to which, to explain the interpersonal and intrapersonal variation of the experience of the sublime, we must focus on the subjective evaluation of the object, and not on the object's physical characteristics.</footnote>
on the music composed by Rameau, asking dancers of Krump and other dances derivative of
hip-hop to dance on their own style upon the music. The specificity of Krump is that, like
Capoeira, it was invented as a way to mimic a fight, for afro-americans, without risking an
intervention from the police. What is the result? Amidst more classical dance moves, the
dancers behave sometimes in a seemingly erratic way, thus connecting with the opera's
theme (*the savages*). There is violence, there is unpredictability, and there seems to be
wilderness. This even was one of the criticisms that could be heard within the public: that
this dance had no harmony.

As for music, two composers come to mind when it comes to disorder. First, I would
like to recall the creation of Edgar Varèse's *Déserts* on December 2, 1954. There is,
fortunately, a recording of this creation, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, in which you
can distinctively hear the public shouting and insulting the composer. A few sample of said
insults are: “Escroc”, “Salaud” and others that I dare not translate in english. The criticisms
toward Varèse's radical modernity and rejection of tonal music is best expressed in its
detractor's words: “Ce M. Varèse devrait être fusillé séance tenante. C'est le Dominici de la
musique! Et puis non, ça ferait encore du bruit, il serait trop content. C'est la chaise
électrique qui convient à cet ‘électrosymphoniste’<fnref n="68" />”. Supreme and delicious irony, it so
happens, since there was a recording of the fights and shouts in the audience, the first ever
recorded iteration of Varèse's *Déserts* includes it's criticisms, making it not only novel
because of its composition, but also novel because of this randomness.

Randomness is also the key word for another artist, Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Stockhausen is remembered for his important contributions as a founding father to what has
come to be known as *random music*. Let's take the example of *Klavierstück IV*, composed
along with three other pieces in 1952. This short musical piece (about two minutes) is
composed of nineteen musical cells, each of about 2-3 bars. When executing the piece, the

<footnote n="67">67 Clément Cogitore and Bintou Dembélé, *Les Indes Galantes*, Jean-Philippe Rameau, created in septembre 2019 at the Opéra Bastille in Paris</footnote>

<footnote n="68">68 *Cacophonie Radiophonique*, December 7th, 1954, quoted by Fernand Ouellette and Louise Hirbour in *Edgar Varèse, 1966*; this roughly translates to “This m. Varèse should be shot immediately. He’s the Dominici of music [note : Dominici was the principal suspect of a case of triple murder in 1952]. Or no, shooting him would still make noise, that would make him happy. The electric chair is what he deserves, this ‘electrosymphonist’”</footnote>
pianist chooses one of them, plays it, then randomly plays another one, etc., in such a way
that each iteration of the piece creates a new music. I am not saying here that Stockhausen's
music is therefore always sublime, that is not the point, but merely to show that disorder and
wildness can be achieved by different means in music.

As a side note here, one could add that in addition to dance and music, performance
arts can be another place to search for wildness and disorder in art. This concludes the
discussion I think could be had with the three arguments that Brady explicitly develops in
her claim.

b) Sublime by association

What is sublime *by association*? On this question, we shall find useful thoughts and
leads in Brady's own source, namely Rachel Zuckert's "The associative sublime"<fnref n="69" />. On page
70, she summarizes this problem better than we could: "the objects frequently used as
examples of the sublime do not seem to share any one common, sublime-making quality,
but, as I have just noted, they exhibit an array of different qualities (such as magnitude or
power). Thus, they [Gerard, Kames, Alison and Steward] ask, in virtue of what are all of
these objects sublime?". The problem, in a nutshell, is to identify how an object that lacks
the objective qualities of sublimity (those Brady outlined earlier) can nonetheless be
sublime.

In the account Zuckert gives on the imaginative sublime, she considers the possibility
that one may attribute sublimity to an object that, thought lacking the qualities of sublime
itself, bear resemblance to it. This resemblance, she says, is to be understood in a transitive
way: A is similar to B, B is similar to C, etc. In this way, if we were to call a poem sublime,
it would be because this poem makes us think of something big, and this thing itself could
be said sublime. In the same way, a sea tempest would appear sublime because, in some
way, we would *imagine* being in a situation where the tempest threatens us, and therefore

<footnote n="69">69 Zuckert, Rachel. « The Associative Sublime ». In *The Sublime*, edited by Timothy Costelloe, 64-76. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012</footnote>
feel both fear and elation. Zuckert recalls here that, in Burke's account, there can be no sublime if we are indeed threatened by the object, so this concurs.

How then does this idea of association work in with the rest of Brady's point? I think the difficulties raised by associative sublime shed light on a weak point of Brady's claim. The need for this intricate object that is the sublime by association indeed underlines a central contradiction – that non-sublime objects could feel sublime. Although, here again, it must be noted that the focus-shift on subjective experience can pave the way to an illusory conception of the sublime. If the sublime is something that only happens inside of one's mind, is there two kinds of sublime (one true and one illusory), or is all experience of the sublime an illusion? This shall be discussed with more precision in the last part of this essay. As Robert Clewis acknowledges it<sup>70</sup>, “If she had focused more on appreciator responses (sublime emotions, imaginative activity, the “passions”), in addition to the qualities of objects, it would have opened up more space for the sublime in art.”. if the focus of Brady’s work wasn’t centered as much on Kant’s view and on the objective qualities of sublime-eliciting objects, there would perhaps be more room in the concept of the sublime for imagination, without the need to create a whole new concept. Imaginative sublime seems, in a way, as a complex way around a problem that could be solved more easily. I don’t consider it to be false *per se*, but merely a way to save the ‘original’ concept of the sublime despite all odds, by adding more and more specifications to save it’s originality, instead of expanding somehow the concept extension.

### c) Exceptions to Brady’s general account (architecture, land-art)

This is, in a certain way, the same problem that we may find with the exceptions Brady allows for. It is indeed very difficult to advocate for a strict definition of the sublime as being necessarily somehow natural, excluding all artifacts *pro natura*, when at the same time managing space for exceptions. A definition that predicates of variables (like “all x are y”) can hardly be accounted for when we add nominal specifications (“all x are y, except for

<footnote n="70">70 Clewis, Robert R. « On Emily Brady's Sublime ». *Journal of Aesthetic Education* 50, nº 2 (2016): 104-18, p.109</footnote>
a which is different”). They do sound a little Orwellian : all animals are equal, except for
pigs.

Now, I am not pretending that Brady’s argument for these exceptions are not good. In
the canvas outlined by her definition of the sublime, architecture and land-art do appear as
serious problems, having some of the qualities of natural objects. In this regard, they are
highly interesting, and special cases that should not be overlooked. And Emily Brady does
not fall into this trap.

However, I cannot help but consider this problem under a pragmatical view. Doesn't
Occam's razor entice us to always prefer, our of two hypothesis, the less costly one? And
isn't it more costly, in terms of intermediary hypothesis, to allow for exceptions to a general
rule, than to change the general rule?

This might seem only a methodological claim, and it possibly is one indeed. I tread
carefully here, for this matter is of course very complex, as far as history of the ideas and
epistemology go. But, just considering the length dedicated in the text to defending, against
all odds, a naturalistic view of the sublime, while struggling to explain some artistic
sublimity by this associative sublime, we can rightfully ask whether it would not have been
simpler to allow for a wider definition of the sublime.

Of course, I could be objected here that this would lead to a dispersed definition. It
could very well be more useful to further enquiries to create new categories, more specific,
and abandon that of Sublime. This might relate to what Zuckert writes : “if the experience of
the sublime – and/or the experiences in the subgenres of the sublime – is constituted by
feeling (which is both imprecise and transferable) and imaginative association, then its
objects and feelings will be linked to many other feelings and objects that are not
necessarily similar to one another. Any such category will be, ineliminably, expandable
through transference and associative mechanisms<fnref n="71" />.”

Why then expand the definition of Sublime rather than create new categories to
subsume these specific experiences? For one, I think that it is difficult to go against the
linguistic use of concepts. The term Sublime has been in use for centuries and is well
incorporated in culture, and we cannot overlook that fact and pretend to add new concepts

<footnote n="71">71 Zuckert, Rachel, 2012, p.75</footnote>
that easily. Second, and it follows from the previous point, the cultural presence of the very
word sublime may very well have shaped the way we interpret our emotional experience
under this same category, making harder any attempt at changing the words.

d) The special case of music

Music holds a special place in Brady's view, and more generally in any account of the sublime. Indeed, it seems to be one of the most prevalent circumstances in which one may experience sublimity and/or awe, yet it is hard to understand how this works. Brady's account states, from the beginning, that she would be using a modern definition of sublimity as well as, at first, a modern view of arts, therefore excluding some arts. She then acknowledges other, more contemporary arts.

What is troubling here is that music appears to be a good place to look for counterexamples, yet there is significantly less time dedicated to it than to, say, pictural arts. One of the reasons may be that of representation: where paintings, sculpture, or even literature, can represent real-life object, music can hardly do that. One of the most notable case could be Berlioz's *Symphonie Fantastique*, where the composer uses the sound of a violin's bow on the instrument body to mimic a skeleton's bones colliding. But representation in music does not strike us as obvious, it's rather a hint toward something the composer has in mind.

What does that mean for us? It seems to forbid the representation of a sublime object,
which was one of the ways for Brady to explain feelings of greatness in some paintings like
that of Turner. So where can our feeling of grandeur come from in music, if not from
sublimity itself?

Brady proposes profundity, which we briefly tackled earlier. Profundity is not defined
in a really precise way, but more as a hint at the surrounding qualities of music. Then again,
apart from telling that music has the ability to virtually come from all directions, due to the
reflexion of sound waves or the use of headphones, it's hard know what profundity is. Brady
allows for a link between profundity and gravity of the notes, but she insists so little on it
that I do not think this is the proper definition.
The problem here is that, the inquiry on music only take about two pages, which may fail to give enough attention to a phenomenon that derives from, among others, the surrounding quality of music: immersion.
III – Immersion and Illusion

Our claim so far has been the following: an account of the sublime that forbids artistic
sublimity fails to explain some situations where art does elicit, if not sublime, at least
something extremely close. Two possibilities appeared: either we are mistaken when we
think art does elicit sublimity, or the definition of ‘sublime’ that was used was too
restrained. I argued in the favor of the second option, and the section that follows will
defend that point of view.

Let's first off try to explain in a few words the view I will defend in this section. We
saw that one of Brady's main objection to artistic sublimity was the lack of actual sublime
characteristics in artworks, mainly vastness, power, wildness, and a few others. I think we
can answer that objection, or, to be more precise, bypass it, by suggesting that what matters
is not the objective qualities of the objects as much as our relation with it. This is further
supported by Brady's claim that what matters is the *sense* of formlessness, and not
formlessness itself<sup>72</sup>. If this is true for formlessness, I argue that there can be a sense of
vastness, a sense of power, a sense of wilderness, and so forth, without this quality being
actually instantiated in the object. This would effectively make the sublime a sort of illusion,
or a kind of make-believe: the sublime arises when we feel *as if* and object had a property,
regardless of whether or not it actually does. Even the natural objects usually implicated in
the sublime (the ocean, the mountains, ...) are not entirely formless, or wild, or infinite, we
just think of them that way. Arguably, the universe might be, but the important thing, again,
is that we *feel as if* it is really infinite. Epistemically, as long as there is uncertainty that the
object has the quality we see in it, it could be considered an illusion to believe in this.

This, to me, points toward the idea that our interaction with artworks can be
understood through the prism of immersion. We will stick, for now, to a very basic
definition of immersion as the blurring of the subject's world's boundaries. Several
questions will arise as to the status of the immersive experience, and we shall tackle them as
clearly as possible.

<footnote n="72">72 Brady 2013, p.124</footnote>
In what follows, I will first try to define more precisely the concept of immersion,
giving a brief review of its meanings and uses, and trying to understand how immersion
works in different types of artworks. In a second section, I will work out how immersion
can relate to illusion, and how illusion can explain some of the features of immersion.
Finally, I will try to show of the immersive nature of artistic sublimity not only reconciliates
the concept of sublimity with its actual use, but furthermore hints us to a solution at our
initial problem: if the sublime is such an important emotional experience, how comes I
cannot say anything meaningful about what I actually feel.

### III.1 – What is Immersion

To obtain a first, rough definition of immersion, we will abide by the account provided
by Allan, de Jong and de Jonge in their 2017 article in *Style*: “From *Enargeia* to
Immersion”. The authors trace the history of this notion back to ancient Greece, and more
specifically, they link it to three ancient ideas:

> “The substantive *enargeia* is defined by one ancient critic as “the power of bringing
> the things that are said before the senses of the audience”; the substantive *ekstasis* refers to
> the displacement or transportation of the listener, who is so astonished that he leaves his
> normal state, which may result in strong identification with the characters of the narrative;
> the adjective *enagōnios* is perhaps best translated as “actively involving.”<fnref n="73" />”

On page 36, we find a further mention of the effects of *enargeia*: “Apart from visual
effects, the rhetoricians and commentators also point to acoustic effects, which are for
instance created by onomatopoetic words that mimetically suggest the sounds of the action
described. By “seeing” and “hearing” the events, the listener becomes deeply involved in
the narrative, as the distance to the narrative world seems to be reduced to zero: the events
appear to take place in front of the listener, who believes that he could almost talk to the

<footnote n="73">73 Allan, Rutger J., Irene J. F. de Jong, et Casper C. de Jonge. « From Enargeia to Immersion: The Ancient Roots of a Modern Concept ». *Style* 51, n° 1 (2017), p.35</footnote>
characters. Such effects will often result not only in cognitive but also in emotional involvement of the audience<sup>74</sup>”

This is also roughly a definition of immersion: the blurring of the subject’s world’s boundaries. When it becomes less clear whether or not what I’m living is my world, or the world someone is telling me about, or showing me: this is immersion. It is useful I think to underline the possible occurrences of this phenomenon for the reader; some of the more common might be as common as being afraid for a character, feeling happy when something good happens to him, and, after finishing a really good book, feeling as if the real world was lacking some of the magic we previously experienced. As the authors remark, *enargeia* implies bringing the narrative world to the subject, but the parallel concept of *ekstasis* implies bringing the subject outward, to another place, which seems closer to our modern concept of immersion.

Now, it may be difficult to draw a clear line between empathy and immersion, since both can, at first glance, seem pretty close (ie. : *x* feels *z*, *y* sees *x* feeling *y*, and that causes *y* to feel *z*). The easiest might be to distinguish these two phenomena by the type of object they are directed to. I feel empathy for a person, and immersion in an object. Even with that, if someone tells me the story of a short wooden stick, who fell out of a tree a got lost in the forest, I might feel empathy; but this is arguably because the wooden stick is described as if he had human feelings. For now, let’s simply consider that the main difference lies in the existence or not of *x*. Immersion does not need 1) that *x* and *y* be in the same world (one can be real, and the other fictional), and 2) that the feeling of *x* be the *cause* of *y*'s feeling. In other words, immersion is wider in range and with looser requirements than empathy.

It should be quite clear that “the distance to the narrative world seems to be reduced to zero” looks really close to what we wrote in our first section about Radical Limit-Experience; immersion is, in a way, a cognitive failure. More precisely, immersion is the failure of our capacity to distinguish reality from fiction, which in turn can make us feel things about nonexistent objects. Now, when immersed, one may not always be aware of this failure, and then she may not have the metacognitive feeling we identified. In this case,

<footnote n="74">74 Ibid., p.36</footnote>
I just enjoy being immersed in a book, or in a story. Maybe, what makes immersion sublime, is when my mind hints at reality amidst a fiction world.

Let's precise this by an allegory. I am standing in front of a blurred glass; depending on where I focus my eyes, I can either see the blurred world outside, or the reflection of myself and everything behind me. Let's say a full immersion would be paying entire attention to the world outside, and managing not to see any of the world behind me.

Going deeper into immersion, Allan, de Jong and de Jonge note that, to qualify as immersion, the must be a switch in the space-time positioning of the subject. A story is set in a place and time, and being thrown into the story also means being hurled at the time and place described. This is especially true for narratives, of course, since space-time situation is often explicit. But we may also consider the same for several other arts: a piece of music has it's own timeline, with a progression, a tempo, and musical 'landmarks' that can give a certain coherence to a 'musical world'; a painting is nothing but a way to occupy space; a poem can be read, becoming as temporal as a piece of music, or written on a sheet of paper. Artworks are spatial and temporal, at least in the minimal sense that they are artifacts.

To better understand immersion, we need several intermediary steps. In order to qualify it clearly, and give an acceptable definition, we need to establish the nature of the phenomenon we are talking about – is it a feeling, a belief, a perception, a sensation, an emotion,...? Then, we need to understand the prerequisites of immersion, in a general sense. Finally, when this is done, we need to give a satisfying account of what happens when we are immersed.

### a) What is the cognitive nature of immersion?

Immersion has been linked to imagination in previous accounts, and we will not be refuting this point. Several statements can be made regarding imagination out of Susanna Schellenberg's 2012 paper: imagination is a *mental state*, directed toward *p* regardless of whether *p* is true or not, and that consists in "pretending, visualizing, of fantasizing that *p* is
the case<sup>75</sup>”. This first rough characterization may help us define the cognitive nature of immersion. In Schellenber’s account, immersion is a sub-type of imagining. She writes, p.507: “The most relevant characteristic of imaginative immersion is that the subject does not consciously think about the fact that she is imagining. She is immersed in fiction”.

In turn, this would allow us to consider a first account of immersion as a mental state *i* characterized by the facts that:

- *I* is directed toward *p* regardless of *p* being true or not

- *I* implies a pretense, a visualization, or a fantasy that *p*

- *I* implies that the subject of *I* isn't conscious that she experiences *I*.

Now, several problems arise from this view, or rather several questions. Firstly, we might wonder how subject can infer truth judgments about *p*. In other words, does imagining *p* means believing that *p* is true? If I am reading Tolkien's *The Lord of the Ring*, and I start imagining the forests of Lothlorien, am I believing that they do exist? Schellenberg gives this question a thought: “If I am immersed in imagining that I am a talented wizard, I may start to take it to be true that I am a talented wizard. The distinctive cognitive role of the relevant representation is to some extent belief-like and to some extent imagination-like. If this is right, then imaginings and beliefs must be on a continuum<sup>76</sup>”.

She adds, page 510: “Arguably, one thing that marks a good actor is the ability to swiftly move up and down the continuum between imaginings and beliefs, that is, swiftly slip in and out of character. When a good actor plays a villain, she does not simply imagine that she is a villain. She immerses her-self in her role. In doing so, she arguably adopts mental representations that are to some extent imagination-like and to some extent belief-”

What does this mean for us? Arguably, the idea of a continuum between imagination and belief inside the state of immersion can be linked to the idea previously noted of a blurring of the boundaries of worlds. Imagination refers to a proposition *p* regardless of the actual existence of *p*, but belief entails that I assume *p* has a positive truth-value in the actual world, regardless of whether it is indeed true or not outside my understanding. If

<footnote n="75">75 Schellenberg, Susanna. « Belief and Desire in Imagination and Immersion »: *Journal of Philosophy* 110, n° 9 (2013), p.498</footnote>

<footnote n="76">76 Schellenber 2012, p.508</footnote>
immersion is indeed a continuum between these two kinds of mental states, it becomes understandable what Allan et al<sup>77</sup>. meant: the fictive world and the actual worlds are, subjectively, brought closer together by the shifting from imaginative-like propositions to belief-like propositions. There isn't a well defined border between what I believe and what I imagine: it's a smooth, seamless transition, comparable, in some ways, to objects described by fuzzy logic.

This would seem to entail our hypothesis that the Radical Limit-Experience involved in the experience of immersion: the cognitive ability threatened by the sublime could very well be the ability to distinguish the actual from the imaginary. If such is the case, then awe could very well be a meta-cognitive feeling relative to the failure of our sense of reality. Though this option seems seducing, it would require a lot more development than what falls in the scope of this paper; we shall only try to outline the mains challenges to face if one were to defend such a thesis.

One question that troubles me in Schellenberg’s account is the link between immersion and awareness. More generally, awareness is troubling in any account of our emotions, since we do actively feel our emotions and we are aware of their effects (e.g: I’m aware that everything seems beautiful, even though I may not causally link it to my current happiness). In the case of awe, we can probably say the same, something in the lines of: I’m feeling belittled, amazed and paralyzed, though I may not immediately recognize awe as the source of that. What is the problem in the case of immersion?

Schellenberg states: “A child who is immersed in a game of make-believe in which she is a crocodile will presumably not consciously think about the fact that she is using her arms as surrogate for crocodile jaws. So even if her imaginings are related to her beliefs to yield actions, she may not be consciously aware of the fact that she is using her arms as surrogates<sup>78</sup>”.

Now, it may seem hard to admit that one would not be aware of such a distorted reality; surely, at the first glance toward what is supposed to be her crocodile jaws, the kid

<footnote n="77">77 Allan, Rutger J., Irene J. F. de Jong, et Casper C. de Jonge. « From Enargeia to Immersion: The Ancient Roots of a Modern Concept ».
*Style* 51, n° 1 (2017) p.36</footnote>

<footnote n="78">78 Schellenberg 2012, p.513</footnote>
would see they are, in fact, human arms. To make a useful parallel with our own thesis, when I am awed by an object, I may use words comparing my situation to that of an epiphany: this is *otherworldly*, this is *beyond me*, etc. Surely, at the first glance, we should realize that the otherworldly object is, in fact, an object from my very world.

To understand that, I think it is important to recall the fuzziness of Schellenberg’s view: the kid doesn’t see her arms and think “oh those are human arms”, but precisely, her very game consists of 1) imagining she is a crocodile and 2), upon seeing human arms, think “these are a crocodile’s jaws, my jaws. The point is that the state of make-believe in an immersion situation is not destroyed by a mere glance at reality: immersion can be understood minimally as a way of mistaking reality and imagination by *crossing* the border between belief-like statements and imagining-like statements.

Surely, if this was a permanent state, that would be a great handicap for anyone affected. It would indeed recall some symptoms of derealization, mainly the uncertainty about what is real and what isn’t. Recurrent derealization is, undeniably, not a good thing for one to feel, and my aim here of course is not to suggest that immersion is a mild case of a severe dissociative symptom. I am just suggesting that the blurring of boundaries between belief-like thoughts and imagining-like thoughts is attested in psychological context, which may give some credit to Schellenberg’s fuzzy account on immersion.

Coming back to Schellenberg’s example, what we should remember here is, I think, characterized by the subject’s awareness being partially blind to a distinction between reality and imagination. To make a parallel with immersion in a narrative, be it a book or a movie let’s say, an equivalent phenomenon would be that, upon seeing or imagining a fictional scene, we would think “that is so beautiful” instead of “that *would be so beautiful if it existed*”, or something like that.

## b) When does immersion happen?

The question now shifts to a more pragmatical one: when does immersion happen? If immersion is the key to understanding artistic sublimity, there must be coincidences
between situations that allow for immersion and situations that are reported to elicit awe and
the experience of the sublime.

If we are to understand immersion as a fuzzy blending of our concepts, a way to test
that would be to, first, take note of situations that allow for immersion – in the very weak
sense of provoking an emotional response to a fictional situation – and compare those with
cases where awe was reported. This, of course, implies testing that I do not have the means
to do by myself; I shall then rely on several experiments, the main ones being Ishizu and
Zeki 2014, Vessel et al. 2013, and Sperduti et al. 2016.

Ishizu and Zeki's paper concentrates on reporting the stimuli eliciting either beauty or
the sublime. Vessel et al. have a focus on how the aesthetic experience can modulate the
auto-referential thought processes. Finally, Sperduti et al. focus on the differences in
emotional response to both fictional and real video stimulus. My hope here is that, by
putting these works in perspective, we might outline conditions for both successful
immersion and subjective reports of awe. Such a find, I think, would allow us to defend the
hypothesis that sublime in arts is made possible by our immersion in an artwork. Note that
we will come back later on what it would mean to be immersed *in* an artwork.

b.1 – Ishizu and Zeki’s “A neurological enquiry into the origins of our experiences of the sublime and beautiful”, 2014

The experiment described in this paper, summarized, consists of a brain scanner
(fMRI) of subjects as they are viewing several pictures and asked to rank them in terms of
sublimity. 1 is considered ‘not sublime at all’, while 5 is ‘very sublime’. The idea tested by
this protocol was twofold; first, outlining what differentiates experiences of the sublime
from experiences of beauty; second, to specify as best as possible the neurological
activatings and deactivatings specific to the experience of the sublime.

Here are, in short, the results of this experiment, given page 3 of the article: “a number
of brain areas, cortical and subcortical, were found to have been parametrically active when
sublime ratings were used as modulators. The cortical areas were the inferior temporal
cortex (encroaching upon fusiform gyrus and the lateral occipital complex (LOC), the
posterior hippocampus, and the inferior/middle frontal gyri. The sub-cortical cortical areas
were the basal ganglia (head of caudate and putamen). There was, in addition, prominent
involvement of the cerebellum. [...] All contrasts give significant deactivations in a number
of areas. These include the anterior part of cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex,
anterior superior temporal sulcus, parts of the cerebellum, and the caudate (tail and body).
The significant deactivations in posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus and superior frontal
gyrus were only obtained with stimuli rated as very sublime."

Now, I will not pretend that I am able to understand everything about these results,
since I am no neurologist. Nevertheless, the authors decipher this, and outline p.8 that "The
most prominently deactivated area, unique to the highest levels of the sublime experience,
was the superior frontal gyrus, a zone that was previously found to be deactivated during
sensorimotor processing, and interpreted to signify a suppression of self-awareness during
such processing (Goldberg et al., 2006). Suppression of self awareness would not be
expected during experience of the sublime, which has been written of as leading to an
awareness of one's insignificance in relation to the immensity and grandeur of the Nature.
This would imply that one is aware of one's existence and insignificance during such
experiences."

The awareness of one's existence in the experience of the sublime deserves some
discussion. We saw in Schellenberg's account of immersion that, in a game of make-believe,
imagination would play such a role that the kid pretending to be a crocodile would not see
her arms, but would consider them as if they really were a crocodile's jaws. The
deactivation of the superior frontal gyrus seems to indicate that, in a situation of sublimity,
we do not experience ourselves as vividly as we would in any other context. That, to me, is
consistent with the idea of a distorted subjective experience of reality. If I am immersed, that
is, if the line between belief-like statements and imagination-like statements is blurred, what
becomes of my self concept? Furthermore, this area is also implicated in the regulation of
emotions, which would explain the very specific intensity of awe and sublime-related
emotions.

One could argue that an important part of what defines the real world, what *makes me take it for true*, could very well be that it has my name all over it. The only world I know is
the one I’ve always experienced through my own eyes. A deactivation of the brain area dedicated to self-awareness could be a sign of a change in the way we think of our world, in the sense of our relationship to surrounding objects

Aside from the superior frontal gyrus, the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus is also noted to be deactived. The PCC/precuneus has been shown to play a somewhat similar role to the SFG, and “discerns emotional and self-related information”<fnref n="79" />, which would confirm the SFG deactivation effect.

## b.2 – Vessel et al. “Art reaches within: aesthetic experience, the self and the default mode network”, 2013

Vessel’s paper is not directly referring to the experience of the sublime, but more generally on the matter of aesthetic experience and how our brains react to it. Its seminal idea is an observation on the behavior of what is known as the Default Mode Network. The DMN is a network of brain regions in the medial prefrontal cortex usually known for being used in tasks involving “focus on external stimuli”<fnref n="80" />. Vessel’s experiment consisted in showing test subjects some artworks while scanning them in an fMRI, and asking them to rank how much the picture “moved them”, subjectively and emotionally. He concludes that “The DMN activity therefore suggests that certain artworks, albeit unfamiliar, may be so well-matched to an individual’s unique makeup that they can obtain access to the neural substrates concerned with the self-access which other externals stimuli normally do not get”<fnref n="81" />

These findings are interesting in several ways for our account, since they explore more in depths the links between self-concept and art, and they might be able to explain part of the reason why art has a special place among objective stimuli. From that special situation, maybe, can derive a special emotional experience, that could be linked to the sublime.

The experimental layout goes roughly as follows: sixteen observers are shown 109 little-known artworks while undergoing a fMRI; they are asked to rate each artwork on a 4-

<footnote n="79">79 Ishizu and Zeki 2014, p.9</footnote>

<footnote n="80">80 Vessel et al 2013, p.1</footnote>

<footnote n="81">81 Ibid., p.1</footnote>
point scale depending on how moved they were by the work. Two main behavioral results are noted, 1) that results are highly different for each observer, and 2) that the rating of 4 out of 4 was given less than 25% of the time<fnref n="82" />.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

The main find is that the DMN, ie. the brain region that is active during rest times, deactivates more when subjects give a 4/4 rate to an artwork. This is best shown by Figure 3A, reproduced above, and found in Vessel's paper, page 5. Figure 3A shows, in warm colors, the brain areas that are found to be more active while viewing an artwork than at rest, while cold colors show the opposite. It appears indeed that the DMN is part of the blue areas, which mean that it is substantially less active in viewing 4/4 moving artworks than in the other ratings.

What can be troubling about this result? As said before, the DMN is known to shut down while executing a task related to an exterior stimulus, and to activate in the absence of such a stimulus. Therefore, the DMN having an activity rate higher than baseline was to be expected, as is the case for ratings ranging from 1 to 3. The troubling thing is the reduction of deactivation in 4/4-rated artworks.

<footnote n="82">82 Ibid, p.2</footnote>
To fully understand what this activation means, the authors analyze the role of three parts of the DMN – ventral MPFC, Anterior and dorsal MPFC, and PCC/medial temporal lobe. The first is used in “affective decision making processes”, the second in “tasks involving self-knowledge such as making judgments about oneself as well as about close others”, and the third in “tasks that involve retrieving autobiographical memories<fnref n="83" />”.

The authors consider these findings as compelling clues toward the hypothesis that some artworks *somehow* gain access to neural substrate normally concerned with self-relevant thought processes. The question of knowing what causes some artworks to do that when others don’t, thought interesting it may be, is left aside by the authors. In a sense, would this hypothesis be found to be true, it would mean that the most highly moving artworks are ones that share a deep connection with ourselves. This is not, I think, something unthinkable, and is even consistent with a common conception of art. But there are two important things that follow from this.

First, there is the question of the difference between 1-3 rated artworks and 4-rated artworks. While the DMN activation results for 1 to 3 rated artworks is similar, and even following a certain ascending progression, the same isn't true for 4-rated works. In fact, the difference is striking in Vessel's results, and can leave us wondering if 4 really is just the high-end of an affective spectrum, or if it is a completely different phenomenon. This could be linked, in a way, to the idea of sublimity being either a higher beauty or a whole other thing. For now, I will only underline that there might be a bias in the way observers rate pictures. Indeed, it is possible that, them knowing that 4 is the highest grade they can give, they would refrain from using it for some artworks, in case, let's say, a better artwork comes after, that would better deserve a 4. If this was the case, there should be a significant increase in the number of 4 given by the observers as the test moves forward. However, this is not a result given in the paper, so this possible objection is in a dead-end.

Second, we are left to wonder if this is a top-bottom process or a bottom-up process. The first option (TB) would mean that an activation of the DMN happening during the perception of an artwork would lead to it being considered self-related; the second (BU) would mean that if something is found in the artwork that does relate to the self, this would

<footnote n="83">83 Vessel et al., 2013, p.6 for all three quotes</footnote>
trigger a whole lot of self-related processes. In the following reasoning, I will be
assimilating 4-rated artworks to sublime-elicitimg stimuli, even though I am not by any
mean pretending that all of those did actually trigger awe per se.

Both hypothesis have their own problems and implications. The TB hypothesis leave
us to wonder:

1) why would the DMN activate alone, without any stimulus? A misfire of neural connections may be possible, but it would probably be hard to defend that for a process that can happen relatively often.

2) following from this first problem is that it seems possible, in a certain extent, to predict what is able to trigger a high emotional response. Some objects appear to be able to place us in such an emotional situation, while other don't. The question is then, if the DMN activating is only a misfire, a cognitive failure in a way, why does it fail only in front of certain objects (panoramas, artworks, thoughts, ...) and not for any every-day object? A possible answer would be that, somehow, this misfire could be caused only by a somewhat unusual object, but this is possibly very hard to demonstrate. Furthermore, it could mean that it is impossible to feel awed by an object we are used to, and I feel that this is very problematic. It raises the question of whether we can be used to the sublime or not – which is not the topic here, but is nonetheless a troubling question. A possible answer to this objection could be that, when in a situation of aesthetic appreciation, we may get in a certain context – namely, I'm hinting toward immersion – which could allow for specific neural reactions and possible misfires.

In the BU hypothesis, however, several other problems come:

1) How would we find a self-relative element in the first place? This could possibly be answered by what is known as the “cocktail party effect”, as hinted at by the authors page 7, although it remains unanswered how a never-before seen artwork could trigger such a reaction. The question then would remain as to what are the features that facilitate this kind of neural reaction.

2) Should we then interpret the sublime's emotional response as a way of interpreting
the self-related stimulus in front of an artwork? This could imply that what feels so special
about a sublime artwork or sight is that, by triggering an unexpected reference to ourselves, it disturbs our general cognitive processes.

Comparing the TB and the BU hypothesis, it seems to me that the BU is less costly to accept. Allowing for a TB process would imply several intermediary hypothesis, some of them being quite complicated, but the BU process appears, relatively speaking, easier to defend. But there I am getting away from the main point of the article.

The main point we should remember for now about the findings exposed here, is that there seems to be a correlation between the rating of an artwork as maximally moving, and the activation of the DMN, and maybe for now we should refrain from making too far-fetched hypotheses.

### b.3 – Sperduti et al. “The paradox of fiction: Emotional response toward fiction and the modulatory role of self-relevance”, 2016

In common everyday life, emotions act as sort of reactions to real-life events, usually helping our interaction with the world. In a social context, displaying emotions allows us to feel part of a community, to be in touche with one another. In a situation where I must run away from a danger, fear can act as a trigger to facilitate the action. But if emotions are related to external stimuli, for interacting with said stimuli, why would we feel anything about fictional events or characters? This is one of the main paradoxes that fictions raises as a general feature. The team lead by Marco Sperduti and several others researchers produced in 2016 a study on the possible links between the brain areas interested in self-relevant thoughts and emotional response to fictions.

The findings that allow for such an experimentation are described page 54 of the paper: real characters or events “engage to a greater extent cortical midline structures, especially the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, while fiction recruits lateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex”. At the same time, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex has been shown to be linked to self-referential processes, autobiographical memories, and bossting emotional response, while the other areas are used in “cognitive control and emotion regulation”.
This is the basic layout of the experiment. In a first phase, the subjects are presented with several short videos, introduced by a word cue REAL or FICTION, while Electrodermal activity was recorded. The video clips could be more or less positive or negative in terms of emotional valence, and independently of fictionality or reality. In a second phase, the subjects are asked to rate the different clips on different scales: “ranging from 0 to 7 on four features: the intensity of perceived emotion (0=not intense, 7=very intense), the valence of perceived emotion (0 = very negative, 7 = very positive), the degree of personal memory linked to the scene (0= no memory, 7= a very precise memory), and the nature of the scene (0=real, 7 = fictional)”.

This to study two things: first, is the perceived reality of the stimulus has an influence on the emotional reaction, and second to identify precisely “the impact of self-relevance on the emotional response” (p.54). Electrodermal activity has the main role of controling physiological clues of emotional activity.

The results show that the EDA registers an impact of valence of the stimulus on the emotional response, but no significant effect of nature (fiction/real) or personal memories. As for the subjective results, there seems to be a strong correlation between personal memories and subjective valence of the stimulus. Subjective accounts show a significant impact from the nature of the video onto the subjective intensity (ie. fiction videos elicit less intense feelings).

A possibility here is that what is at stake is a mechanism of either emotional distancing of reappraisal, which the authors collectively refer to as “cognitive change”<sup>84</sup>. Cognitive change is a phenomenon that happens in the early stages of emotion generation, allowing for greater control on our emotions depending on the context. This would mean that there is, to some extent, a feedback from higher cognitive processes to emotion generation, allowing it to take into account complex information such as the reality or fiction of stimulus. This effect is shown to be greater in the case of negative contents being witnessed, which might be a way to protect ourselves from forming trauma because of fiction. However, the absence of significant change in the measured EDA is strange in this regard, since it would imply –

<footnote n="84"><sup>84</sup> Sperduti et al. 2016 p.57</footnote>
as far as my understanding goes – that emotion regulation has no impact whatsoever on EDA.

Back to our own subject here, the difference in subjective emotional response between reality and fiction might be interesting to study in the light of immersion. Indeed, what mattered in Sperduti’s team’s experiment was what the subjects were told about the supposed reality of what they saw. In a way, one could argue that believing that a fiction is true is a form of immersion. We defined earlier immersion as a blurring of the boundaries between reality-related processes and processes about fictive objects. If this blurring is imposed, as is the case when we don’t tell the truth to the subject, I am not sure it is indeed immersion *per se*, but it is likely that we react in a similar way to that of immersion.

Before moving on to the contexts of immersion, it may be useful here to outline

### III.2 – Contexts of immersion

When does immersion happen? If we are to make our claim that awe, being the emotional response to the sublime, is a meta-cognitive feeling that emerges as a side-effect of immersion, we need to understand what triggers immersion, to see if indeed this is persistent with the reported cases of sublimity. In the part that follows, we will be trying to make clear what could make immersion possible in different conditions. For the purpose of this essay, it should be enough to review different artistic medias, though a more thorough inquiry would of course be better. We will here review only the cases for pictures, music and literature, and say a few words about video, and video games. Finally, we will briefly study what the emergence of Virtual Reality can bring to the philosophical problem we are tackling.

#### a) Immersion in Pictures

Throughout what we wrote so far, we saw that pictures were probably the most studied cases for finding sublimity. Ishizu and Zeki made it the primary mean of testing the emotional response to the sublime, and it has served many purposes. The main advantage of
using pictures to test this is probably that it is very easy to show a picture to a subject while
investigating their brain. Obviously, the noise created by a fMRI makes harder the testing
with music.

But can we say we are immersed in pictures? As we mentioned before, as big as a
picture can be, it is never so big as to envelop you entirely. But if immersion is, as we
suspect, more a state of mind when approaching an object than a physical characteristic, the
lack of vastness in pictures does not prevent immersion entirely. It is, of course, entirely
possible that vastness may help immersion. There is less effort to make to feel belittled in
front of something huge.

That being said, why do I struggle to speak, why do I find myself grasping for air, hen
in front of Soulage's paintings? I take from Debus 2013⁸⁵ that the shift in one's limit that
characterizes immersion can be, to some degree, explained by attention.

When I give full attention to an object, or as full an attention, I make it so that as many
of my thought as possible are directed toward this object. In other words, giving an object
full attention means suppressing thoughts that do not regard this object. Thus, when I give
full attention to a painting, I suppress some thoughts about the world, about me, about my
meetings later that day or my usual concerns. Instead, I let my perceptions and emotions
take the stage.

This is what Debus calls Synchronic Exclusivity Claim: “*(Synchronic Exclusivity Claim)* In order for someone to be said to give her *full* attention to an object (or event) at some particular time, it is necessary that she do pay attention to the particular object (or event) at the time, and that she do *not* pay any attention to anything else at the same time<fnref n="86" />.”

To that, she adds a point that is very interesting for our case: “Amongst other things,
the Synchronic Exclusivity Claim entails that in order for a subject to give her full attention
to some object (other than herself), she must *not* attend to herself, nor to the relations in
which she stands to the object which she attends to. Thus, someone who gives something
her full attention might be said to ‘lose’ herself, and her involvement in the situation, while

<footnote n="85">85 Debus, Dorothea. « Losing Oneself (in a Good Way): On the Value of Full Attention: On the Value of Full Attention ». *European Journal of Philosophy* 23, n° 4 (décembre 2015): 1174-91</footnote>

<footnote n="86">86 Debus 2013, p.4</footnote>
make us awed if they combine aesthetic appreciation and the meta-cognitive feeling of a RLE.

## b) Immersion in music

Musical immersion is a more difficult topic. Indeed, pictures, paintings, videos, all have a distinct spatial dimension, that music does not have. It is possible to understand how a perceptive shift could happen in a visual object, just by giving full attention to specific objects in the space of the picture. But in the case of music, there are several ways to try to understand immersion. Either it has something to do with spatial hearing, in which case it is merely a physical phenomenon, or it depends on our subjective relation to music.

Spatial hearing is a very interesting phenomenon, and can be considered either an illusion or a natural thing. In nature, objects located further from us are heard at a low volume, objects on our right are hear by the right ear, ... The sum of all these adjustments give us the ability of locating objects in our auditory field. But when it comes to music, there are two spatial conditions. In a concert hall, sound can come from different places, depending on the position of the musicians, and this works as it does in nature. However, in recorded music, we are able to reproduce this effect, by recording different instruments at different volumes, or by playing them in the right earphone or on the left, or on both, ... This effectively makes us perceive auditory objects as if they were in several different places, when in reality the sound only comes from the device playing it. This is what we may call an illusion: creating a perception of something that has no reality.

Spatial sound is certainly important in musical immersion. Wearing a really good headset or being in a room with a full surround stereo, and closing your eyes, is undeniably a very different experience than just watching a youtube video on a smartphone's speakers. However, not everything that I can listen to in those great conditions is able to induce immersion.

Why is my experience of listening to Bach's Mass in B minor with a surround stereo not the same as listening to a commercial on the same setup, or a presidential speech? One may argue that both political speeches and music have been reported to induce awe. Keltner
and Haidt have analyzed Durkheim's classification of sociological emotions as a way for a
possible political awe: listening to a speech, or discoursing about the nation or communities
helps make us part of something greater, and feeling the power of the superior entity<sup>89</sup>. As
for Bach, it is almost a stereotype how his music can elicit strong, awe-like feelings. Here, I
think literature can speak for itself: in Albert Cohen's 1968's *Belle du Seigneur*, the
protagonist, Solal, is seducing his beloved Ariane by, ironically, exposing every possible
cliché about love. He says:

> "Do you like Bach? Of course, he hates Bach, this heartless robot, this mechanical
> geometer, but to give a good image, to show he has a beautiful soul, that he is a good
> baboon the poor man has to say that he adores him and his boring music. Are you shocked?
> Me too. So, always with his eyes closed, the she-baboon says from a soft and deep voice
> 'Bach brings us closer to god, doesn't he? How happy am I that we have the same tastes. It
> always starts with common tastes. Yes, Bach, Mozart, God, They always start with that. It
> sounds like honest conversation, moral alibi. And then, fifteen days later, playing in bed<sup>90</sup>."

But Bach, of course, is not the only composer able to elicit such a strong emotion, so
strong that it becomes a cliché. There is probably a lot to be said about the emotional impact
of music, and though here is not the place, it would be an interesting topic for another paper.
Instead, let's just say for now that. As noted by Shiota et al.<sup>91</sup>, defining precisely what are
the stimuli that are able to elicit awe is a complex task. In Brady's book, she mentions the
idea of musical "profundity" as a possible awe-elicitng element in music.

What is highly interesting about music, compared to pictures, videos, or texts, is that
music doesn't have the same relation to representation. A visual media can represent
something, it can build worlds resembling more or less our actual world. This is not true for
music. Of course, we can record actual sounds, but it is only considered music if it is
worked and if it undergoes a creative thought. Concrete music is not merely recording the
noise in a street, and calling it a day. It involves thinking, rearranging, manipulating,

<footnote n="89">89 Keltner, Dacher, et Jonathan Haidt. « Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion ». *Cognition and Emotion* 17, n° 2 (janvier 2003): p299</footnote>

<footnote n="90">90 Cohen, Albert, *Belle du Seigneur*, 1968, Folio Gallimard, . 413-414, personal translation</footnote>

<footnote n="91">91 Shiota, Michelle N., Dacher Keltner, et Amanda Mossman. « The Nature of Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept ». *Cognition & Emotion* 21, n° 5 (août 2007) p.945</footnote>
writing. Music is also able to *imitate* in a limited extent; a classic example could be Saint-Saens's *Carnaval des Animaux*, where the composer uses the distinct sounds of some instruments to mimics instruments. The xylophones mimics the rattling bones of dancing fossils and skeletons, the piano's arpeggios imitate the lion's roar, the double bass stands for the elephant's tooting, ... But this is not exactly representation, since it usually needs some context to be understood. On the contrary, if a painter draws a tree, we don't need context to understand that it is a tree.

What does this difference implies for immersion in music? If immersion is possible in music, as intuition seems to confirm, it means that immersion does not depend on representation, but more on focusing the attention on some perceptive stimuli rather than others. This is consistent with Debus 2013, and it is furthermore interesting, for it could be a useful reminder not to think of mental states on a visual frame. Immersion does not mean that we *picture* ourselves somewhere else, but that *we* are not in the same *world*, ie. in the same mental paradigm. I *think* of myself differently, without needing visual representation.

### c) Immersion in literature

It is once again a trope that, while reading a book, we can feel blown away, quite literally. I remember spending nights reading fantasy books, as a teen, and forgetting that I was not in Middle Earth, not in Hogwarts, not in some spaceship cruising through the universe. The reader's attention can be entirely *swallowed* by the writer's words. Wolf<fnref n="92" /> considers that immersion in a book can be linked to world-building by saturating the reader's attention with details and elements of descriptions and narrations. He writes, p.207, "The amount of detail and information, which overwhelms the audience, imitates the vast amount of Primary World information that cannot be mastered or held in mind all at once". Immersion might then depend on the writer's ability to seemingly make his world alive, making it credible, or at least making us *want* to believe in it.

<footnote n="92">92 Wolf, Mark J. P. « Beyond Immersion: Absorption, Saturation, and Overflow in the Building of Imaginary Worlds ». In *World Building*, édité par Marta Boni, 204-14. Amsterdam University Press, 2017</footnote>
"What remains in the audience's mind then, is always changing, as lower levels of detail are forgotten and later re-experienced and reimagined when they are encountered again. For example, someone can read Tolkien's works in grade school, high school, college, and later; and with each re-reading, the reader will notice new things, make new connections, and reimagine events and characters due to the reader's own changed level of maturity and experience<fnref n="93" />."

This induces the idea that immersion in a literary context is only possible in highly detailed works, and in very large fantastic worlds, or, at least, that saturation is limited to that kind of world-building. But what could catch our eye is another type of literature.

A text can be several different things: fiction, theatre, autobiography, or historical account; but there is also poetry, which is usually defined in negative: poetry is that which falls in no other category. Poetry is special because it is not limited to texts that make sense, or that tell a story; it is able to tell stories, of course, but it is not it's primary characteristic. This essay has no pretension to define poetry, so for let's simply say that a poem is a text that focuses on the sounds, the images, and the inherent beauty of words, more than on the rest.

What is the emotional experience of poetry? Speaking personally, poetry touches me by lighting sparks, lights and shadows, for a split second, that seem otherworldly. French poet Saint-John Perso wrote, in his Nobel prize speech, "by the grace of poetry, the spark of the divine lives forever in the human firestone".

In his 1946 article<fnref n="94" />, Stephen Pepper studies the poem "The highwayman", by Alfred Noyes, and defends the idea that, in poetry, the reader experiences the same emotion as the characters depicted, but reduced by what he calls "psychic distance<fnref n="95" />". He considers that, by analogy, the emotion the reader feels while reading the 'Highwayman' is comparable to that which the characters feel, in the same way that my anticipated fear of a dentist's appointment is similar to my fear when I am in the dentist's chair. He calls this derived

<footnote n="93">93 Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">94 Pepper, Stephen C. « Emotional Distance in Art ». *The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism* 4, n° 4 (June 1946): 235-39</footnote>

<footnote n="95">95 Pepper, 1946 p.236</footnote>
emotions. Pepper also manages some space for “doubly derived emotions”, which is the same example, only the dentist’s appointment is never happening, just imagined.

This argument is weakened, in my opinion, by the fact the Pepper chose a narrative poem with actual characters, which fails to make this representative of poetry – since most poems are not narrative, in today’s literature. However, he specifies that representation is not the only possible way for this: “My hypothesis is, that where emotions are stimulated in art by symbolic or representative means, these emotions are of the type of the doubly derived emotional acts. They are genuine emotions”.

So symbolism could also elicit strong emotions, by making us successively imagine emotions, then relating to them. This still does not pins the formal character of poetry, the focus on words *themselves* rather than what they mean. I feel like underlining this characteristic of poetry could be a path to explaining emotion and immersion in literature: just like repetitive patterns, rhythms could induce trance, focusing on the oral qualities of words, on their sound and relations, could have a similar effect.

Is there a RLE in poetry? We talked, earlier, about Roland Barthes “*C’est ça! C’est exactement ça!*<fnref n="96" />”, and I feel like it wouldn’t betray Barthes’ original thought to interpret it as a sign of metacognitive feeling emerging from literature. When I’m reading poetry, I can repeat over and over the same verse, until I get a flash of terrible beauty, not directed at the meaning of the words, not directed at anything in fact. This feels like the experience of *another subjectivity*. The limit-experience that poetry allows for could be the impression of getting out of my subjective world, feeling *as if* I really heard the voice that wrote these words. In this sense, poetry could have a different immersion from the one we pinned in fiction novels: instead of inviting us into a whole, precisely chiseled world, poetry just allows for a glance at another self, a bigger picture. To be fair, this is maybe a bit far from the concept of immersion we defined earlier, and it could be better to pin it as “exersion”. Rather than getting *in* a world, we go *out* of our world. This, I feel, has the potential to be a place for literary sublimity.

<footnote n="96">96 “That’s it, that’s precisely it”</footnote>
d) Immersion in video, and the effects of VR

A recently new media, video was not studied for ages like the other media we showcased previously. Nevertheless, it is almost too evident that it has a great potential for immersion: we can in fact experience this firsthand, by going to the cinema, and turning our back to the screen. The grinning faces, or tears in the eyes of the others spectators, are an easy sign that people are *moved* by video, at least under certain circumstance. In this section we will study three different forms of video media: movies, video games, and Virtual Reality (VR) immersive videos.

The immersive effects of movies have been noticed almost immediately at their invention. Let's simply acknowledge the rumor according to which, at the projection of the film *Arrivée du train en gare de La Ciotat*, by the brothers Lumière, peoples screamed at the approach of the train. Regardless of the truthfulness of this event, this shows with enough clarity that people have no trouble accepting the idea that movies can induce emotions, and strong emotions with that. But what is needed for immersion?

The quality of the writing, the vividness of the characters, the beauty of the scenery, the original score, all contribute to how connected we feel to a movie, but, as was the case for spatial auditory in musical immersion, there is probably also a physic characteristic. When we are watching a screen with moving pictures, our attention is constantly brought back to the objects on screen, which maybe facilitates the full-attention Debus deemed necessary for immersion. Moreover, in the special case of the cinema, the huge screen makes the video even more prominent in our perceptual field, and the darkness of the room allows for few distractions that could take us out immersion.

The case of video games has some similarities. In the same way, it offers constantly changing stimuli, and has multisensorial stimulation that helps us focusing more on the object. It must also be noted that what is, maybe, the most notable difference between video and video games is the idea of *interaction*: the player is not an idle spectator, but is the main protagonist of the action. His choices change the course of the story in game.

Bruno Trentini notes that immersion in a video game is a process that has to undergo certain steps, like learning the game's controls, to go from the set of rules in our worlds to
the rules that govern the game’s world. This immersion “Gives the illusion of a world like our usual world, but that doesn’t try to mimic it”<fnref n="97" />. This idea is also what motivates Bernard Guelton, in the same book, following Schaeffer’s *Pourquoi la fiction* (Seuil 1999), that immersion comes from split attention, and induces the coexistence of two worlds inside one’s representations: the actual world, that does not entirely cease to exist, and the immersive fictional world<fnref n="98" />.

The profundity of world-building, as it was also the case for literature and cinema, is a major component of video-game-related immersion, especially with games such as Sony Entertainment’s *Shadow of the Colossus* (2005), Bethesda Software’s *The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim* (2012) or Nintendo’s *The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild* (2017), how concentrated a remarkable amount of positive critics for offering a great immersive experience. The graphic quality of a game helps, but so does the voice acting, the realism of in-game physics, the writing of the scenario and dialogue, the fluidity of the gamer’s experience, the freedom offered,...

This seems to be even more often the case with the First person shooter (FPS) style, where the player sees the game world through his character’s eyes, and maybe in particular for horror FPS, where the world is highly hostile and dangerous. This might force the player to focus more than usual on the game world, and to react with stronger emotions to in-game contents<fnref n="99" />.

One side point that deserves to be mentioned here is the new experience that video
games created: that of an *Out of boundaries experience*. A video-game has to use the least
possible amount of computational resources in order to be run; a consequence of that is that
the game in which the game takes place is never fully loaded. The computer only displays
on the screen what the player sees: an effective way to do this is by loading only the conical
space of the player’s Field of view, making the rest disappear as the player moves. Another

<footnote n="97">97 Bruno Trentini, in Guelton, Bernard, Bruno Trentini, Etienne Amato, Alain Berthoz, Olivier Caira, Aurélie Herbet, Edith Magnan, Nikoleta Kerinska, Luc Larmor, et Sandrine Morsillo. *Les figures de l'Immersion*. Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Arts Contemporains. Rennes, 2014; p.30</footnote>

<footnote n="98">98 Bernard Guelton, ibid, p.79</footnote>

<footnote n="99">99 Kunth, Blaise. « Maurice Merleau-Ponty joue aux jeux vidéo : pour une théorie phénoménologique de l’immersion », 2014. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.30290.20163.</footnote>
way is by putting edges to the world: places that the player cannot possibly see are not modeled. However, some bugs can allow players to travel there, placing them in a surreal space, with no ground, no orientation, no physics, no sky, no animations, just eerie, random objects and textures. This is well known for potentially breaking the immersion: instead of being in a fiction world, the player can only acknowledge that he is inside a simulation. Paradoxically, the importance that gamers give to these out of boundaries experiences<fnref n="100" /> show how much immersion is important to them.

Finally, there is Virtual Reality. VR allows for an enhanced visual experience, completely suppressing the possibility for the viewer to look elsewhere, hence dedicating the full visual attention on the virtual world. VR devices are also frequently equipped with audio devices, and can be paired with vibrating devices, completing the already multisendorial stimulation of video and video games. It was noted that “Findings indicated that virtual stimuli were able to induce the expected emotional states. Recently, this procedure was replicated and further extended by Felnhofer et al. (2015) who used five different virtual park scenarios to elicit specific affective states.<fnref n="101" />”

By making the virtual world more resembling to the real world, VR may allow for an easier blurring of the reality-fiction boundaries. If the fictional world *feels like* the real world, immersion can be said to have been successfully elicited. One of the characteristics of the real world is that what is in it can make us feel emotions; in other words, if VR allows for immersion, it must allow for emotions elicited by fictional objects. “with VR it is possible to reproduce complex and vast stimuli at the base of awe emergence. Moreover, VR allows for a multi-level assessment of awe that could be useful to catch more awe nuances. Finally, if safety and effectiveness recommendations regarding this experimental tool are respected, we believe VR can play an important role in the study of awe as well as other emotions<fnref n="102" />.”

<footnote n="100">100 I am here thinking of french videast Alt236, how dedicated a remarkably well written video to these “myths of the new continent”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw8V9_OZ6R4</footnote>

<footnote n="101">101 Chirico, Alice, Pietro Cipresso, David B. Yaden, Federica Biassoni, Giuseppe Riva, et Andrea Gaggioli. « Effectiveness of Immersive Videos in Inducing Awe: An Experimental Study ». *Scientific Reports* 7, n° 1 (décembre 2017): 1218</footnote>

<footnote n="102">102 Ibid., conclusion p.5</footnote>
### III.3 – Illusion and the sublime

The main question that now remains for us is that of illusion. We hinted several times before at the idea that an immersive theory of sublime and awe should consider the subsequent changes in the truth-value of the sublime experience. If my feeling of awe can be elicited by entirely fictional objects, there are two possibilities. Either there is an illusory kind of sublime, elicited by immersion, and a real sublime, elicited by real world objects, or all sublime is, is an illusion, a fiction we tell ourselves by introspection.

#### a) What is illusion?

In order to see if the sublime is illusory, we first need to define what is an illusion. The *Britannica Encyclopaedia* offers the following definition:

"Illusion, a misrepresentation of a "real" sensory stimulus—that is, an interpretation that contradicts objective "reality" as defined by general agreement. For example, a child who perceives tree branches at night as if they are goblins may be said to be having an illusion. An illusion is distinguished from a hallucination, an experience that seems to originate without an external source of stimulation<fnref n="103" />".

The most common use for "illusion" in every-day life is probably that of perceptive illusions: drawings of impossibles structures, contradictory perspectives, counter-intuitive colors, ... However, illusions could also be described as having the strong belief that something wrong is true. It is consistent with the *Britannica* definition: the tree branches are not goblins, but the kid believes them to be regardless. In many ways, the make-believe games of kids (ie. "this branch is a sword, this tree stump is a dragon, I am a knight"), if the are immersive enough to make the kid really believe it for a moment, could, by this definition, be considered illusions. Self-induced illusions, the illusion we purposely immerse ourselves in, are not always a bad thing. Of course, believing that the earth is flat when there are so many proofs of the opposite can be damaging to science, but what damage is it to see

<footnote n="103">103 https://www.britannica.com/topic/illusion</footnote>
a wood stick as a sword? If I am dying, slowly, is it really a bad thing to believe that afterlife will be better, even if there's no way to know it?

The point is, illusion should not have automatically a bad reputation, as it can be comforting, and it could even be just enough to give us the spark of hope that allows us to get out of a bad situation. To make an analogy with the previously mentioned *Lord of the Rings*, when Frodo is given a magic vial by Galadriel, she tells him that this vial will give him light in the most hopeless situation. It is unknown if the vial actually has any magical power to restore magic, and I personally believe that it is only a device used by Tolkien to show that, in a hopeless situation, even a false hope can be good.

Coming back to what concerns us here, if the sublime can be linked to the idea of illusion, it does not entail that we should ban the sublime, discarding it as an error. Just as kids like to play, humans like to be amazed, to be awed. And even if this implies believing something ultimately wrong, this is not dangerous as long as the illusion is contained. The make-belief is contained in the play-time of kids, and parents make sure that their kids return to the real-world. Analogously, when I am awed by an artwork, when I feel like my world is collapsing reading a fiction book, this strong emotion is contained in a special time, and a special attitude. When a believer is awed to tears in his prayer, he is not feeling this at every single moment of his life. Immersion is an illusion that bear no danger as long as it is only the emotional experience of a specific activity, that we cannot mistake with others.

If, as we argue here, the sublime requires immersion to be successful, it needs our full attention. Giving full attention to an object or a thought is not something we can do at all times. When I am working, I have to focus on my work, not on the idea of the eternity and infinite vastness of the cosmos. And giving full attention to an object or thought to provokes such a strong emotional response, like awe, can be exhausting. Speaking personally, as much as awe is important to me, I certainly don't want to be awed at all times. It is an illusion best kept in its own, restricted, domain.
b) Is the sublime an illusion ?

It should be made clear here that the emotional response to the sublime, awe, is not an
illusion; I do think we actually feel like something is too great, too powerful for us. The
illusory aspect of the sublime is not to say that it does not exist, but merely that what
induces the sublime is an unknowable or false idea about a real or fictional object.

We said previously that one could be awed by something very real, like a mountain
range, or by something entirely or partly fictional, like the depth of a literary world. The
object of the sublime cannot be said to be illusory in every case, then. We also saw that
neurosciences are hinting toward the reality of the emotional experience of awe<fnref n="104" />.

However, the experience of the sublime is usually described as the attribution of a
characteristic to an object: this painting is *otherworldly*, this movie *took me somewhere else*,
this music is *godly*. I argue that, rather than being about an object, the sublime is about the
perceived *otherwordlyness* of an object, regardless of the reality of said object. In other
words, “this is sublime” wouldn’t mean “this object is sublime”, but “i feel like my world
changes, because of this object”.

And here is the illusory element of the sublime: the feeling of x being too great, too powerful to exist might be the cognitive error leading to the metacognitive feeling of a failure of our ability to distinguish truth from fiction. Bach’s cantatas may make me feel as if I was listening to music from heaven, but it is undeniably a music written by a human, at a real time and space.

The immersion, and hence the illusion, at play in the sublime would then consist of
believing, be it for a split second, that an object from my world has the impossible quality of
being *otherwordly*. This would give us a process of this kind:

1) I perceive an object, real or fictional

2) Failing to classify this object as any other object, I deem it impossible for this
world

3) This failure being convincing, I believe that the object has indeed an
impossible quality – it feels sublime, it feels like I am taken away from the world

<footnote n="104">104 Vessel et al. 2013, Ishizu and Zeki 2014, ...</footnote>
4) Tension builds up, as I try to accommodate this object into my world

5) The illusion shatters, as it appears undeniably that my first impression was wrong

6) This leaves me with the ambiguous feeling of feeling both amazed by what I took a glance at – the impossible – and terrified by this, and by my own failure: I am awed

In this process, awe is indeed the emotional response to the sublime, the metacognitive feeling of the failure of my reality-check that is the sublime.

### c) The illusory object of the sublime could explain speechlessness

By being fundamentally about something that is not real, the sublime is a very strange experience. Awe is a strong emotion, unlike any other; it is not very common: we are not awed every day. It is also somewhat unpredictable, or at least not with a high fidelity. Awe can move one to tears, it can be lived as a kind of mystic experience. This is consistent with Vessel’s investigation on how art can move us, as with the folk belief that art has some sort of bypass to go straight towards our emotions. At the same time, though we are somehow used to immersion, it remains an uncommon state. Most of the time, we are absorbed in our actual world, paying it attention, and interacting with it; immersion in the exception, not the rule. This makes it another point of curiosity amidst the general experience of the sublime.

The experience of the sublime, therefore, contains a lot of uncommon experiences, and the sheer look that is on our awed faces seems to show how much it strikes us emotionally. The abundance of theories regarding sublimity, beauty, and emotions, is also a sign that, beside the emotional importance of these phenomena, we are also prone to asking questions about it. What do I feel? When? Why? All of those questions that we tackled here, along with many others and more brilliant minds before us. The conflicting nature of the sublime, its endless fleeting before us, can only make us curious. Why do we feel the urge to explain, to define the sublime?

I argue that the experience of the sublime in its entirety, from the immersion that allows it, to the awe it elicits, is a very unique case, because of how rare this kind of meta-
cognitive feeling is. The rarity, the emotional intensity, and the cultural importance of this phenomenon, put together, make it so that we want to talk about our experience.

But here is a problem. Just like Barthes wrote, the only thing I can say is “That’s it! It is exactly this for me<fnref n="105" />”. Trying to describe our emotion seems too intellectual, or, to be more precise, introspecting about the sublime just makes the whole experience crumble. It is as an amazingly beautiful house of card, standing on thin air. It has us grasping for air, shaking with emotions, but as soon as we examine it more closely, the illusion shatters, and the house of cards is suddenly just a pile of cards. Remains only the memory of how incredible, how impossible it looked.

The deeply subjective nature of the sublime is what could motivate us to think of it, not so much in terms of physicality and objective properties, as in terms of appearances and feelings. The question here is not to defend the reality of theses, and I am in no way defending the ideas that *qualia* have a real existence; as a matter of fact, this question is not relevant here, as long as we accept the idea that one thought process can cause mental states. The failing of a cognitive process – discerning reality – could very well cause an emotional response, regardless of the actual ontological status of these.

This question put aside, what remains is this: I am deeply moved, and I want to talk about my experience. But as soon as I try to describe it, I find nothing to say, because it all appears unreal, irrational, impossible to put words on. The illusory object of the experience of the sublime, as we tried to defend here, might be the reason why we have so much trouble talking about the sublime: when we talk about the experience of the sublime we have, we have nothing to talk about, just the vague, but very real emotion – awe – to talk about. And awe, no matter what, remains fleeting.

<footnote n="105">105 Roland Barthes, *Le plaisir du texte*, Seuil Paris 1973</footnote>
## CONCLUSION

### What can we say about the sublime?

Three possibilities may exist for who really wants to express something about the sublime, as far as I can see. The first one is what I tried to do in this essay: putting some distance between us and the emotion, analyzing as best as possible what happens, and under which conditions. But this kind of academic talk is not the one we crave when our jaws drop, admiring sunset over the sea. Rather, it could be a “mood-breaker”.

Imagine being on the beach, enjoying the fiery lights, the cool breeze, the whisper of the sea, and suddenly, your friend, seated with you, begins a review of theoretical works concerning the sublime. Clearly, one would rather walk away a few meters and resume the contemplation, than listen to this. Explaining emotions, though interesting it may be, drains the magic out of them. Sure, it makes them more understandable, but they might, by that process, become merely words. Explaining emotions, while anchoring the emotions in our world, seems to disconnect them from our emotional experience. In a word, explaining emotions is as interesting as it is frustrating.

The more reasonable attitude could then probably be, either to keep quiet, and not utter a word, or to make a truism, which, in the end, is nothing more than a noisy kind of silence. Just like we often say “after Mozart, the silence is still from Mozart”, we could mockingly say that after the sublime, the silence is still sublime. Not talking, not trying to say anything might help us process the strong emotions we just experienced. This, however, is very hard to do, since, precisely, the sublime is an experience that seems to ask only to be told. The truism is then a way to both speak, break the enchantment, while talking about it, and not saying anything wrong *per se*. Barthes’ attitude, “That’s it”, can be understood either as a
truism (this experience is itself, it is autotelic), or as a statement so vague that it says nothing (this experience is “it”, “it” having no actual referent in the world).

However, silence inevitably feels somewhat empty. There might be a third way, that requires neither this unbearable silence, nor the also unbearable academic talk: art. Creating art, one way or another, be it by writing, composing, painting, dancing, talking, singing, filming, any form of art, might be the way to satisfy the frustration of the sublime. I am not here talking about *representing* the sublime, which might just create kitsch paintings. But instead, taking the strong emotions, the feeling of loss, of annihilation and totalisation, and turning them into what motivates our creation. Taking the frustration of not being able to talk about the sublime, and turning it into a new voice.

Let's summarize our thought process here. By thinking the sublime with an emphasis on its emotional counterpart, awe, we tried to defend the idea that the sublime depends on perceived qualities, not on actual qualities. This, in turn, makes for a possible artistic sublime. From there, the concept of radical limit-experience (RLE) allowed us to think of immersion as a RLE of our ability to discern reality from fiction. This strong, unusual experience could be such that it might make us feel awed. Thus, immersion might be a way to explain the sublime, which is consistent with the idea that the sublime can be thought as a subjective, interior process. Immersion being defined as a blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction, we derived from it the idea that immersion is, in a way, believing in the reality of something nonexistent. From there, we jumped onto the idea of illusion, both to shake it from her bad reputation, and to explain why expressing awe was such a difficult task.

Of course, a lot remains to be said, and this work doesn't have the pretense to be more than just a few ideas on how to explain why we are lost for words when feeling awed. It should still be interesting to study some of the main problems that remains with this theory.

One of them is understanding, if the sublime is just a cognitive failure, why only some types of objects do elicit it, and why is it usually consistent (like we saw, Bach is usually held for being sublime). This is an important issue, because it should explain how exactly does the “perceived greatness” of an object works, and why we don’t seem able to induce awe voluntarily out of thin air. However, this might be an extremely difficult task, since it
requires an extensive knowledge of perceptive mechanisms, of arts, and of the psychology
of the emotions. Solving the mystery of perceived qualities is also, if not insurmountable, at
least a very challenging problem, that this essay is, obviously, not going to answer.
ANNEXES
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Annex 1: Samivel, *Sous l'oeil des choucas*, 1937</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Annex 2: Caspar David Friedrich, *Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer*, 1818</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Annex 3 : Barnett Newman, *Voice of Fire*, 1967</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Annex 4 : Anish Kapoor, *Descent into Limbo*, 2001, cross section of the installation</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Annex 5 : Doug Wheeler, *SF NM BI SP 2000*, (2000)</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Annex 6 : Robert Smithson, *Spiral Jetty*, 1970</figcaption></figure>
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