Philosophy

"Intellect is to the people and the people's Force, what the slender needle of the compass is to the ship—its soul, always counselling the huge mass of wood and iron, and always pointing to the north. To attack the citadels built up on all sides against the human race by superstitions, despotisms, and prejudices, the Force must have a brain and a law. Then its deeds of daring produce permanent results, and there is real progress. Then there are sublime conquests. Thought is a force, and philosophy should be an energy, finding its aim and its effects in the amelioration of mankind. The two great motors are Truth and Love. When all these Forces are combined, and guided by the Intellect, and regulated by the RULE of Right, and Justice, and of combined and systematic movement and effort, the great revolution prepared for by the ages will begin to march. The POWER of the Deity Himself is in equilibrium with His WISDOM. Hence the only results are HARMONY."

"The sublime and ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step below the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again."

"Man is not to be comprehended as a starting-point, or progress as a goal, without those two great forces, Faith and Love. Prayer is sublime."

"Sublime Lucretius' poetry will pass away Only when Earth has seen its final day."

"Generally the ridiculous touches the sublime."

"There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous."

"I have this moment finished the gospel of St. Edmund, which your enthusiastic encomium had given me additional curiosity to read. As to style, he, like Shakspeare, touches the double octave from the sublime to the bathos. In many passages he is divinely eloquent; in some his wit is clean and brilliant, and his quotations remarkably lucky. His argument, with few exceptions, in my opinion, unanswerable. His work, with all its faults, does him the highest honour as an author, as a statesman, and as a moralist. It will do infinite good in France if it were possible to get it read there; but what is of far greater moment to us, it will do infinite service to us at home, in shewing us the danger of metaphysical speculations, and warning us not to go a-whoring after new inventions."

"So, for Kant, direct access to the noumenal domain would deprive us of the very "spontaneity," which forms the kernel of transcendental freedom: it would turn us into lifeless automata, or, to put it in today’s terms, into "thinking machines." And is this not ultimately presented as achievable in the future of Singularity? The prospect of is not to be dismissed as yet another “ontic” scientific research project of no authentic philosophical interest, since it offers something effectively new and unheard-of that challenges our status of being-human: the prospect of the actual (empirical) overcoming of our finitude/sexuality/embeddedness-in-the-symbolic. Entering this other dimension of Singularity becomes a simple positive fact, not a matter of sublime inner experience. What does this mean, for the status of our subjectivity and for our self-experience? Can we imagine a form of self-awareness that would be at the level of self-less floating in the space of Singularity?"

"[I]t is the duty of nations, as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord: And insomuch as we know that by his divine law nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of the civil war which now desolates our land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us: It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness... I do by this proclamation designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer. ...All this being done in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the divine teachings, that the united cry of the nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country..."

"The feeling of the sublime is . . . at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law. It is, in other words, for us a law (of reason), which goes to make us what we are, that we should esteem as small in comparison with ideas of reason everything which for us is great in nature as an object of sense; and that which makes us alive to the feeling of this supersensible side of our being harmonizes with that law."

"There are, one may say, some five most productive sources of the sublime in literature, the common groundwork, as it were, of all five being competence in speaking, without which nothing can be done. The first and most powerful is the power of grand conceptions... and the second is the inspiration of vehement emotion."

"If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius (I mean of his soul and genius) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions. He is every where confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod over him, and using a magisterial authority, while he instructs him. [...] He seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists; urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future; all this too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the triumph, before he entered into the lists. From this sublime and daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could have been every where as poetical, as he is in his descriptions, and in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aimed more to instruct, in his system of nature, than to delight."

"This tendency, however, to ascribe an universality of genius to great men, led Dryden to affirm, on the strength of two smart satyrical lines, that Virgil could have written a satire equal to Juvenal. But, with all due deference to Dryden, I conceive it much more manifest, that Juvenal could have written a better epic than Virgil, than that Virgil could have written a satire equal to Juvenal. Juvenal has many passages of the moral sublime far superior to any that can be found in Virgil, who, indeed, seldom attempts a higher flight than the sublime of description. Had Lucan lived, he might have rivalled them both, as he has all the vigour of the one, and time might have furnished him with the taste and elegance of the other."

"We may describe the Sublime thus: it is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think the unattainability of nature regarded as a presentation of Ideas. ...That is, the sublime is that which overwhelms the rational capacities of the mind, temporarily freezing the mortal in awe and fear, before his apparatus reignites and grants a pleasurable overcoming of sensation by rational comprehension."

"Utterances which appear inspired are often not sublime but merely childish."

"Without minute neatness of execution the sublime cannot exist. Grandeur of ideas is precision of ideas. Singular and particular detail is the foundation of the sublime."

"It frequently happens that where the second line is sublime, the third, in which he meant to rise still higher, is perfectly bombast."

"Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent."

"In the Old Testament stories... the sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable."

"I resolved, therefore, to bend my studies towards the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were. But behold, I espy something in them not revealed to the proud, not discovered unto children, humble in style, sublime in operation, and wholly veiled over in mysteries. ...such are thy Scriptures as grew up together with thy little ones. But I much disdained to be held a little one; and big swollen with pride, I took myself to be some great man."

"That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense."

"The study of the Latin writers had never been wholly neglected in Italy. But Petrarch introduced a more profound, liberal, and elegant scholarship, had communicated to his countrymen that enthusiasm for the literature, the history, and the antiquities of Rome, which divided his own heart with a frigid mistress and a more frigid muse. Boccaccio turned their attention to the more sublime and graceful models of Greece."

"The "Fall" is the theological name for such an unconscious choice, and it designates the wound (of separation, of the constitutive loss) which characterizes our being-human as finite and sexed. Musk (and other proponents of Neuralink) wants to heal the wound literally: to fill in the gap, to have man united with god by way of making him god-like, i.e., by way of providing him with properties and capacities which we (till now) experienced as "divine." What makes this option properly traumatic is that it turns around the gap that separates our ordinary daily experience from sublime speculations about our proximity to god."

"The man of a melancholy temper of mind gives himself little trouble about what others judge of, what they hold good or true, he relies on his own insight merely. As the motives with him assume the nature of principles; it is not easy to bring him to other thoughts; his steadfastness sometimes degenerates into stubbornness. He beholds the change of modes with indifference and their glitter with contempt."

"Friendship is sublime, and therefore for his feeling. He may perhaps lose a changeable friend; but the latter does not lose him so soon. The very memory of extinguished friendship is still venerable to him."

"The ' is a thing in the Lacanian sense: the material leftover, the materialization of the terrifying, impossible jouissance. By looking at the wreck we gain an insight into the forbidden domain, into a space that should be left unseen... This terrifying impact has nothing to do with meaning—or... it is a meaning that is permeated with enjoyment, a Lacanian jouissance. The wreck of the Titanic therefore functions as a sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible Thing."

"The sublime belongs to the æsthetic as well as the Beautiful, because it has, in common with it, the following properties: l. It is not a thing entirely intelligible nor entirely sensible, but is composed of these two elements. 2. The intelligible element and the sensible element are there united in one single individual, whose unity results from the first element, and implies its superiority over the other. 3. Its seat is the imagination. 4. From the imagination it may pass into the world of art, as it resides already in the world of nature. 5. It produces a pure and lively pleasure in the soul of him who enjoys it, although its essence does not consist in that agreeable impression which is a simple effect of it. 6. It is a mixture of subjective and objective elements."

"Above all... Beauty and Sublimity are opposed along the axis pleasure-displeasure: a view of Beauty offers us pleasure, while 'the object is received as sublime with a pleasure that is only possible through the mediation of dipleasure' (Kant...). In short, the Sublime is 'beyond the pleasure principle', it is a paradoxical pleasure procured by displeasure itself... [T]he relation of Beauty to Sublimity coincides with the relation of immediacy to mediation—further proof that the Sublime must follow Beauty..."

"Homologous to Hegel's determination of the difference between the death of the pagan god and the death of Christ (the first being merely the death of the... terrestrial representation... while with the death of Christ... is of... God as a positive, transcendent, unattainable entity...) ...what Kant fails to take into account is the way the experience of the nullity, of the inadequacy of the phenomenal world of representation, which befalls us in the sentiment of the Sublime, means at the same time the nullity, the nonexistence of the transcendent Thing-in-itself as a positive entity."

"Kant could not in any manner solve completely these three problems, in following the psychological and Cartesian procedure of his philosophy, and in adhering to the erroneous and false principles of his Critic of the Pure Reason. I will endeavour to supply... these deficiencies."

"[T]he Sublime is no longer an (empirical) object indicating through its very inadequacy the dimension of a transcendent Thing-in-itself (Idea) but an object which occupies the place, replaces, fills out the empty place of the Thing as the void, as the pure nothing of absolute negativity—the Sublime is an object whose positive body is just an embodiment of Nothing. This logic of an object which, by its very inadequacy, 'gives body' to the absolute negativity of the Idea, is articulated in Hegel..."

"Happy he who possesses this double power of meditation and inspiration, which is genius! Whatever may be the age on which he is, or the country—be he born in the bosom of domestic calamities, be he thrown on a time of popular convulsions, or, what is still more to be lamented, on a period of stagnant indifference—let him trust himself to the future; for, if the present belong to other men, the future is for him. He is of the number of chosen beings for whom a day is allotted. Sooner or later, the day comes; and it is then—fed by sublime thought, and elevated by divine inspiration—that he throws himself boldly before the world, with the cry of the poet upon his lips ‘Voici mon Orient: peuples levez les yeux!’"

"Poetical composition results from two intellectual phenomena, meditation and inspiration. Meditation is a faculty; inspiration is a gift. All men, to a certain degree, can meditate; very few are inspired. Spiritus flat ubi vult [The spirit flows where it wills.]. In meditation, the spirit acts; in inspiration, it obeys; because the first is of men, the second comes from a higher source. He who gave us this power is stronger than we. These two processes of thoughts are intimately linked in the soul of the poet. The poet invites inspiration by meditation, as the prophets raised themselves to ecstasies by prayer. That the muse should reveal herself to him, he must in some sort have passed all his material existence in repose, in silence, and in meditation. He must be isolated from external life, to enjoy in its fullness that inward life, which develops in him a new existence; and it is only when the physical world has utterly vanished from before his eyes, that the ideal world is fully revealed to him. It seems that poetic inspiration has in it something too sublime for the common nature of man. Genius can compass its greater efforts only when the soul is released from the vulgar cares that follow it in life; for thought cannot take its wings till it has laid aside its burden. Thence comes it, doubtless, that inspiration is born only of meditation. Among the Jews, the people whose history is so rich in mysterious symbols when the priest had built the altar, he lighted upon it an earthly flame -- and it was then only that the divine ray descended from Heaven."

"The most satisfactory theory of the sublime is that of Emmanuel Kant in his Critic of the Judgment. This philosopher distinguishes two kinds of sublime... the mathematical sublime, which results from the intuitions of time and of space, and the dynamical sublime, that is derived from the idea of force. The dynamical sublime is immaterial or material, according to the nature of the physical or spiritual force which is the source of it: the spiritual force gives rise to a second subdivision, as far as it may be intellectual or moral."

"[I]f these very objects whose significant forms invite us to pure contemplation, have a hostile relation to the human will... so that it is menaced by the irresistible predominance of their power, or sinks into insignificance... if, nevertheless, the beholder... turns consciously away from it, forcibly detaches himself from his will and its relations, and, giving himself up entirely to knowledge, quietly contemplates those very objects... comprehends only their Idea, which is foreign to all relation, so that he lingers gladly over its contemplation, and is thereby raised above himself, his person, his will, and all will:—in that case he is filled with the sense of the sublime, he is in the state of spiritual exaltation, and therefore the object producing such a state is called sublime."

"[A]fter the account which I have given... of the inner nature of æsthetical knowledge in its most general outlines, the following more exact philosophical treatment of the beautiful and the sublime will explain them both, in nature and in art, without separating them further. ...[W]e shall consider what takes place in a man when he is affected by the beautiful and the sublime; whether he derives this emotion directly from nature, from life, or partakes of it only through the medium of art, does not make any essential, but merely an external, difference."

"Thus what distinguishes the sense of the sublime from that of the beautiful is this: in... the beautiful, pure knowledge has gained the upper hand without a struggle, for the beauty... has removed from consciousness without resistance... imperceptibly, the will and the knowledge of relations which is subject to it, so that what is left is the pure subject of knowledge without... will. On the other hand, in... the sublime that state of pure knowledge is only attained by a conscious and forcible breaking away from the relations of the... object to the will, which are... unfavourable, by a free and conscious transcending of the will..."

"[A]n earthquake, a hurricane, a storm, a volcanic eruption, occasion the dynamical physical sublime; whereas genius and heroic virtue produce the dynamical immaterial sublime in its two aspects, of which one regards and concerns the intellectual force of the mind, and the other relates to the moral energy of the human will."

"Affability is beautiful, thoughtful taciturnity sublime. He is a good keeper of his own and of other's secrets."

"Veracity is sublime, and he hates lying or dissimulation. He has a high feeling for the dignity of human nature. He esteems himself and holds a man a creature that merits reverence. He suffers no abject submission, and breathes liberty in a noble breast. All chains, from the golden, which are worn at court, to the heavy iron ones of galley-slaves, are to him abominable. He is a severe judge as well of himself as of others, and not seldom tired of himself and of the world."

"But the conceptions of time, of space, and of force, either corporeal or spiritual, cannot produce the sublime without the concourse of... the notion of the infinite and of the absolute, in which the human mind seeks naturally a refuge when the form of the object which appears to it cannot be seized on account of its grandeur, and surpasses even the forces of the imagination, which endeavours in vain to become master of it."

"Genius... consists... in the capacity for knowing, independently of the , not individual things, which have their existence only in their relations, but the Ideas of such things, and of being oneself the correlative of the Idea, and thus no longer an individual, but the pure subject of knowledge. Yet this faculty must exist in all men... for if not, they would be just as incapable of enjoying works of art as of producing them; they would have no susceptibility for the beautiful or the sublime... this power of knowing the Ideas in things, and consequently of transcending... personality for the moment... The man of genius... possessing this kind of knowledge... more continuously... [W]hile under its influence... presence of mind... enable[s] him to repeat in a voluntary and intentional work what he has learned... and this repetition is the work of art. Through this he communicates to others the Idea... unchanged... so that æsthetic pleasure is one and the same whether it is called forth by a work of art or directly by the contemplation of nature and life. ...That the Idea comes to us more easily from the work of art than directly from nature... arises from the fact that the artist... has reproduced in his work the pure Idea... abstracted... from the actual, omitting... disturbing accidents. The artist lets us see the world through his eyes. ...that he is able to lend us this gift... is acquired, and is the technical side of art."

"It is very seldom that we satisfy ourselves; all the more consoling is it to have satisfied others."

"Dirt glitters as long as the sun shines."

"It is said that vain self-praise stinks in the nostrils. That may be so; but for the kind of smell which comes from unjust blame by others the public has no nose at all."

"Real obscurantism is not to hinder the spread of what is true, clear, and useful, but to bring into vogue what is false."

"No nation gains the power of judgment except it can pass judgment on itself. But to attain this great privilege takes a very long time."

"The man who is up and doing should see to it that what he does is right. Whether or not right is done, is a matter which should not trouble him."

"Certain minds must be allowed their peculiarities."

"The finest achievement for a man of thought is to have fathomed what may be fathomed, and quietly to revere the unfathomable."