The Sublime in Iris Murdoch "The Beautiful and the Sublime Revisited"

 

The Sublime has always been an important concept to me since I read Kant’s Third Critique and Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, as as student in a course with Wolfgang Natter, a very interesting teacher.   I now think Weiskel’s psychologizing of the Sublime less interesting than the structure and the metaphysical implications. Thus it surprised me that Murdoch is so critical of it in “The Beautiful and the Sublime Revisited.”

      Murdoch is reacting against a modern moral-spiritual tendency she associates with the sublime once it becomes detached from transcendence and objective goodness. My attraction to the sublime is close to what one finds in Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, or the great Romantics: an experience of human finitude before something overwhelming, inexhaustible, or transcendent. In that tradition, the sublime is not necessarily egoistic. It can involve precisely the collapse of ordinary selfhood before being, nature, infinity, God, or mystery. This is why the metaphysical structure interested me more than Weiskel’s psychologizing. Weiskel, like much twentieth-century criticism, tends to internalize the sublime into structures of consciousness, anxiety, linguistic crisis, or psychic oscillation. But for me the real fascination of the sublime is ontological. Something appears which exceeds conceptual containment. One stands before a reality that cannot simply be reduced to utility, conceptual mastery, or empirical description.

   Murdoch thinks the modern sublime often becomes entangled with the apotheosis of consciousness itself. She sees a line running from Romanticism into existentialism and certain forms of modern art in which transcendence collapses into heroic subjectivity. The sublime becomes not reverence before being, but the drama of the self confronting abyss, chaos, or nothingness and constituting meaning through its own freedom. That is why she contrasts it with beauty. Beauty, for Murdoch, arrests the ego. It compels attention outward. The sublime, in the modern tradition she is criticizing, tends to intensify self-consciousness and will.

 

    I think the key question is whether the sublime is fundamentally ecstatic or Promethean, or even Satanic in the sense of Milton’s Satan: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” In Satan’s mouth the line becomes something more radical and metaphysical. The self claims sovereignty over reality itself. Meaning no longer derives from participation in a moral and ontological order beyond the self. The mind becomes self-grounding. That is why the line is spiritually intoxicating. It expresses absolute inward autonomy: nothing outside me determines meaning; consciousness itself constitutes value. And this is exactly what Murdoch fears in existentialism.

       It is interesting to use Weiskel’s description of the sublime to compare the two versions. Weiskel describes the sublime as a three-stage movement. First, there is ordinary cognition. The mind encounters the world through familiar conceptual structures and symbolic forms. Reality appears intelligible and proportioned to human understanding. Second, something appears that overwhelms those structures. Imagination or understanding fails. One encounters excess, magnitude, power, infinity, abyss, or indeterminacy. Existing conceptual frameworks break down. This is the moment of blockage, crisis, or “semantic overflow.” One cannot adequately represent what confronts consciousness. Third, a higher-order response emerges. Consciousness somehow reconstitutes meaning after the breakdown. A new symbolic or reflexive order is generated.

      Murdoch’s criticism is directed at the nature of this third moment in modernity. For me, and perhaps for older religious forms of the sublime, the third stage remains revealing. The breakdown of finite cognition opens the self toward transcendence. The symbolic recovery does not abolish mystery but acknowledges it. Symbol, myth, poetry, or contemplation become gestures toward what exceeds conceptual mastery. The ego is humbled. In Murdoch’s view, however, modern Romanticism increasingly transforms this third moment into an act of self-assertion.

The structure becomes something like this:

1. Ordinary reality is experienced as limited, dead, banal, or spiritually insufficient.
2. The self undergoes crisis before the infinite, the abyss, or the breakdown of ordinary meaning.
3. Instead of submitting to transcendence, consciousness reconstitutes the world through its own freedom, imagination, or will.

At that point the sublime ceases to be contemplative and becomes Promethean/Satanic. This is where Murdoch sees the connection to Hegel, existentialism, and eventually modern voluntarism. The self does not merely encounter transcendence. It dialectically absorbs or reconstitutes transcendence within consciousness itself. Using Weiskel’s structure, one might say Murdoch fears that the third stage no longer preserves genuine otherness. The “beyond” is recovered only as a moment within self-consciousness. Thus the failure of finite reason becomes the triumph of self-aggrandizing consciousness. The collapse of representation becomes an opportunity for the expansion of the self. That, I think, is the “heroic” element she distrusts.

      One can see how she would interpret Jean-Paul Sartre through this structure:

1. The world lacks objective meaning.
2. Consciousness confronts nausea, contingency, nothingness.
3. Freedom creates value through choice.

Murdoch sees something spiritually continuous between this and certain Romantic conceptions of imagination.

    So one version of the Sublime, one Romanticism remains receptive to transcendence. The imagination discloses meaning already present in reality. The other becomes constructive. The imagination creates meaning in the absence of objective order. Murdoch’s critique is aimed at the second, and I completely agree with her. But my embrace of  the metaphysical implications of the sublime points to something Murdoch underestimates: the sublime can also wound the ego. It can reveal not the grandeur of the self but the inadequacy of the self before reality. In that sense, the sublime may actually become an ally of her own notion of “unselfing,” which is how I see it and why I was at first surprised at her criticism of it.

 . . .

 

I once found Kantian philosophy so appealing precisely because it set up the Sublime so well. Locked in a phenomenal world with no cognitive access to reality. The Sublime is like a crack in the phenomenal world. Reality breaks through and overwhelms the mind. Morality is sublime. Only the imagination can reconstitute balance on a symbolic level. But even on my current view that we are not locked into a phenomenal world cut off from reality, if there is merely a difference between our limited grasp of reality and reality itself, I think there is space for the Sublime. So I would  disentangle the sublime from Kantian metaphysics while preserving its phenomenological and ontological force. I reject  Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal dualism as such but affirm the structure of disproportion between finite cognition and reality. The sublime does not require absolute epistemological imprisonment within phenomena. It only requires that reality exceeds our conceptual grasp. (Wittgenstein's Tractatus has the same structure: he calls the Sublime "the Mystical" in that work.)

     So Weiskel’s three stages still work as a description.

 

Ordinary intelligibility

The world appears within stable conceptual and perceptual forms. Reality is domesticated enough for practical and cognitive orientation.

 

Rupture or excess

Something appears whose depth, magnitude, power, beauty, terror, or ontological density exceeds those forms. The mind experiences inadequacy. Existing categories fail to contain what is disclosed.

 

Symbolic or imaginative reconstitution

Consciousness does not fully master what has appeared, but it develops symbolic, poetic, metaphysical, religious, or artistic forms capable of bearing the excess without reducing it.

 

Crucially, the third stage does not abolish transcendence. Symbolization is a finite response to inexhaustibility. The healthiest forms of symbolism preserve the wound of transcendence within the symbol itself. The symbol points beyond itself. It does not close the gap. Thus the sublime to survive outside strict Kantianism. Even in a realist or participatory metaphysics – say, something closer to Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Martin Heidegger –  finite beings still encounter reality partially, analogically, perspectivally, and incompletely. Reality can still exceed the intellect without becoming unknowable in principle. Contra Kant, reality is genuinely accessible, yet never exhaustively comprehensible. I think that position  fits experiences of the sublime better than Kant’s own framework. If reality were wholly inaccessible, then the sublime risks becoming merely a drama internal to consciousness. The “beyond” would become structurally empty, a limit-concept generated by the mind itself. But in the world  version I believe in, the excess belongs to being itself. The mountain, storm, moral greatness, music, starry heavens, death, beauty, tragedy, or holiness are not merely occasions for subjective crisis. They disclose dimensions of reality that surpass finite articulation. Thus the imagination becomes symbolic rather than constitutive. The imagination does not create transcendence; it responds to transcendence.

 

     This makes clear my distance from the modern subjectivist sublime Murdoch fears. In the  interpretation I embrace, the self is not heroically creating meaning after the collapse of foundations. Rather, the self is attempting to bear, articulate, and participate in a reality whose fullness always exceeds it. That is closer to religious symbolism, metaphysical poetry, and even negative theology than to existential self-assertion. The Sublime is transformed from a crisis of epistemology into an event of ontology. The important thing is not that the mind fails but that reality is deeper than finite conceptualization. It acknowledges both contact with reality and the inexhaustibility of reality. Being is intrinsically richer than any finite articulation of it. The sublime occurs when reality discloses more than finite conceptual consciousness can contain, yet not so little that nothing is disclosed at all.

 

 . . .

 

    The sublime is not a deductive proof of transcendence. It is not an argument in the strict sense. It is a mode of disclosure or encounter whose interpretation depends partly upon one’s larger metaphysical orientation.

     A reductionist can always redescribe the experience in causal or psychological terms: dopamine release, evolutionary adaptation, cognitive overload, pattern-recognition failure, neurological arousal, symbolic compensation mechanisms, and so forth. And in one sense those descriptions may even be true as far as they go. The experience obviously has neurological and psychological conditions. Human beings are embodied creatures. But such explanations do not necessarily settle the ontological question of what is being disclosed in the experience.

     This is very similar to what happens with love, beauty, moral conscience, grief, or religious experience generally. One can always describe the mechanisms involved. But the metaphysical question remains open: does the experience merely arise from matter, or does it place us in contact with aspects of reality not exhaustively describable in reductive terms? The reductionist tends to assume that if an experience has a biological basis, its transcendent interpretation is invalid. But that does not logically follow. After all, every human act of knowing has biological conditions, including mathematics, logic, and science themselves. The existence of neural correlates does not by itself determine the truth-status of the experience.

    I am not treating the sublime as a coercive proof. It functions more like a disclosure-event that invites metaphysical interpretation. In Wittgensteinian language, one might say it belongs less to demonstrative proof than to an “aspect” under which reality can be seen. Or perhaps closer to Raimond Gaita or Iris Murdoch themselves: the sublime can alter one’s sense of what kind of world this is. Not by logical compulsion, but by deepened vision. Thus such experiences often become existentially decisive even though philosophically underdetermined. Two people may stand before the same mountain range, requiem, cathedral, or night sky. One, the unhappy man, sees an adaptive cognitive-emotional response produced by evolutionary pressures. Another, the happy man, sees a disclosure of being whose depth exceeds instrumental explanation. Neither interpretation is forced by pure logic alone.

 

    At that point larger metaphysical orientations, moral sensibilities, prior experiences, and even forms of life begin to matter. Thus Murdoch’s notion of “attention” (which she takes over from Weil) is relevant. What one is capable of seeing depends partly on the kind of soul one has become. Reality is not disclosed equally under every moral and spiritual condition. And perhaps this is also why reductionism can sometimes feel existentially unsatisfying even when intellectually powerful. It explains the conditions of experience while seeming unable to account for the depth, seriousness, or apparent meaningfulness disclosed within the experience itself. A sunset can be reduced to wavelengths and neural processing. Yet such explanations seem strangely irrelevant to the actual phenomenon of beauty as lived. Not false but incomplete.

 

. . .

 

I want to give two examples of the good sublime and two examples of the Satanic/Promethean sublime. I think what emerges from the good examples is a conception of the sublime very different from the one Iris Murdoch fears. Not the sublime of heroic self-assertion, but what we might call an affirmative or participatory sublime: experiences in which reality appears as carrying a depth of meaning, goodness, or transcendence that exceeds conceptual grasp while simultaneously calling the self beyond egoism.  These examples are important because they are not experiences of terror, magnitude, or annihilation in the Burkean/Kantian sense. They are experiences of an excess of Being disclosed through goodness, beauty, longing, or love.

     First comes ordinary inhabitation of the world. Reality appears within familiar  practical and conceptual horizons. One lives among things functionally, habitually, instrumentally. The self remains relatively enclosed within its ordinary projects and categories. Then comes an event of disclosure. In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis describes moments of Sehnsucht or Joy provoked by music, myth, northernness, nature, poetry. The experience is paradoxical: simultaneously piercing pleasure and painful longing. What matters phenomenologically is that the object immediately transcends itself. The experience is not exhausted by the empirical stimulus. Something “beyond” is intimated through it. Similarly, in A Common Humanity, Raimond Gaita recounts the nun in the psychiatric hospital whose way of loving the patients disclosed a different vision of human reality. The patients ceased to appear merely as cases, burdens, damaged organisms, or social problems. Through her attention, their absolute humanity became visible.

      In both cases there is a rupture in ordinary perception. But unlike the nihilistic or voluntarist sublime, the rupture is affirmative. Reality appears deeper, more meaningful, more real than previously grasped. The self simultaneously experiences the inadequacy of existing conceptual frameworks, the disclosure of transcendence or inexhaustibility, and attraction toward what exceeds it. The experience is like an invitation.  Lewis repeatedly insists that Joy is never possession. It is longing awakened by encounter. The object awakens desire for something beyond itself. The experience therefore preserves transcendence precisely by refusing closure. Likewise, Gaita’s account of the nun is not reducible to moral reasoning. Her love discloses a dimension of human reality irreducible to biological, social, or utilitarian description or theory. One does not infer dignity abstractly. One suddenly sees it. And involved are not just emotions; the experience is revelatory.

    Phenomenologically, one could say that the affirmative sublime contains several moments:

 Excess

Reality discloses more significance than ordinary conceptual schemes contain.

 Decentering

The ego’s ordinary self-enclosure is interrupted. One experiences humility, receptivity, astonishment, longing, reverence, or moral awakening.

 Symbolic overflow

Literal language becomes inadequate. Symbol, poetry, myth, music, religious language, or moral exemplarity become necessary because discursive concepts alone cannot fully bear what is disclosed.

 Participatory attraction

The subject is not merely overwhelmed but drawn toward transformation. The experience carries normative weight. It implicitly calls one beyond selfishness, reductionism, or indifference.

 Inexhaustibility

The disclosure cannot be totalized into a final concept or system. One genuinely knows something, but what is known exceeds complete articulation.

 The affirmative sublime is a phenomenology of transcendence encountered through finite mediations such as beauty, love, goodness, music, nature, suffering, moral holiness, and Sehnsucht. Not transcendence grasped directly or possessed, but genuinely intimated. This kind of sublime defeats the ego rather than magnifying it. The self is enlarged precisely through acknowledgment of what is not itself. 

      The affirmative sublime and the Satanic or Promethean sublime may share an initial structure of rupture, excess, and transcendence of ordinary consciousness, yet they diverge radically in the spiritual interpretation of that rupture. In the affirmative sublime, transcendence humbles and draws the self outward toward participation in reality. In the Promethean sublime, transcendence becomes internalized into the drama of consciousness itself. The self survives the collapse of ordinary meaning by identifying with negation, power, lucidity, or self-creation.

     One can indeed see this  in Friedrich Nietzsche’s reading of Hamlet in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche says Hamlet does not fail to act because he thinks too much in the ordinary sense. Rather, he has seen too deeply. He has perceived the terrible truth beneath appearances: the abyss beneath individuation, purposiveness, rational order, and moral optimism. Action becomes impossible because knowledge has dissolved the ordinary structures that make action meaningful.

     This is already a sublime structure: ordinary conceptual world, rupture through terrible insight, reconstitution of consciousness beyond ordinary meaning. But in Nietzsche the third moment becomes ambiguous and dangerous. The highest response is not humble participation in transcendent goodness, but aesthetic affirmation of existence despite its horror and groundlessness. The tragic artist says Yes to the abyss. That is sublime, but no longer in the participatory sense. Indeed, Nietzsche’s tragic heroism often consists precisely in refusing consolation through metaphysical transcendence. Meaning is created aesthetically in full awareness of contingency and suffering. This is why Murdoch would see Nietzsche as a culmination of the Romantic trajectory she fears, i.e., the heroic consciousness that survives nihilism through self-overcoming and aesthetic affirmation.

       And Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus may be one of the greatest literary phenomenologies of this Satanic sublime. Leverkühn seeks transcendence through radical artistic and intellectual extremity. Ordinary human goodness, affection, warmth, bourgeois morality, and ordinary happiness appear inadequate or artistically inferior. Genuine greatness requires rupture, coldness, isolation, even demonic renunciation. The structure again resembles the sublime: ordinary reality appears spiritually insufficient, a terrifying disclosure or negation occurs, consciousness attempts transcendence through radical creativity, lucidity, or self-overcoming. But now transcendence is no longer participation in being or goodness. It becomes transgression. And importantly, the Promethean-Satanic sublime often involves a peculiar inversion: suffering, alienation, and negation become signs of superiority. The self identifies with what exceeds ordinary morality precisely through refusal of dependence, tenderness, limitation, or reconciliation. The Satanic sublime transforms transcendence into spiritual aristocracy. The affirmative sublime says: Reality is greater than I am. The Promethean-Satanic sublime says: I become greater through confronting or mastering abyss, negation, or isolation. This is why figures like Satan, Nietzsche’s tragic artist, or Leverkühn possess such aesthetic fascination. They enact a terrifying form of transcendence through refusal.

     And phenomenologically, the emotional tone differs from the affirmative sublime. The affirmative sublime tends toward wonder, gratitude, longing, humility, reverence, participation, love. The Promethean-Satanic sublime tends toward lucidity, defiance, ecstatic isolation, self-intensification, spiritual pride, heroic suffering, aesthetic hardness. Both begin from an authentic perception that ordinary bourgeois reality is not ultimate. But they diverge over what transcendence means. For Lewis or Gaita, transcendence points toward goodness deeper than ego. For Nietzschean or Satanic forms, transcendence often appears through the destruction of comforting illusions and the heroic endurance of what remains. And perhaps the deepest issue between these visions is over whether transcendence culminate in communion or in isolation. That may be the spiritual fork in the road between the affirmative and the Promethean-Satanic sublime.

 

. . .

 

For Gaita, authoritative examples matter because certain moral realities are not first grasped through abstract principles or deductions but through revelatory encounters with persons whose way of seeing discloses reality more deeply. The nun in A Common Humanity is authoritative not because she possesses institutional power or theoretical arguments, but because her love reveals the full humanity of the patients in a way others had failed to see. Love discloses its object. This connects deeply to the affirmative sublime as I just developed it. In both cases, ordinary conceptual frameworks are ruptured by an encounter with a reality whose depth exceeds previous understanding. The self experiences both inadequacy and disclosure. One suddenly sees more than one could previously conceptualize. The authoritative example functions almost as a moral analogue to the sublime. Through goodness, love, holiness, or attention, reality appears more real than before. And the response is not Promethean-Satanic self-assertion but humbled acknowledgment. The authoritative figure does not create value arbitrarily; rather, he or she discloses what was always there but unseen.

 

. . .

 

    The descent of the Holy Spirit during the Pentecost can be understood as an affirmative form of the sublime. The disciples at Pentecost are not simply ordinary people prior to any encounter with transcendence. They have already undergone earlier sublime ruptures through both the Resurrection and the Ascension. Pentecost comes after a long destabilization and transformation of their world. One could almost describe the sequence phenomenologically as successive intensifications of transcendence. The Crucifixion shatters their ordinary moral and messianic expectations. Meaning collapses into apparent defeat, abandonment, and catastrophe. The Resurrection then ruptures the limits of ordinary reality itself. Death is no longer absolute. Reality suddenly appears deeper and stranger than previously imaginable. The disciples encounter something both continuous with and exceeding ordinary embodied existence. Fear, astonishment, doubt, wonder all intermingle. The Ascension introduces yet another movement. Christ is no longer simply present within ordinary empirical immediacy. Presence becomes paradoxical: absent yet more universally present. The disciples are left in a state of longing, expectation, incompletion, and openness toward transcendence. So by the time of Pentecost, they already inhabit a transformed horizon. Their previous conceptual world has already been broken open repeatedly.

     And this changes the phenomenology of Pentecost itself. The event is not a first rupture but a consummating indwelling. If one used the structure of the affirmative sublime, it might now look something like this.

 

The world ruptured open

Through Resurrection and Ascension, ordinary finite categories have already proven insufficient. Reality has disclosed depths previously unimaginable.

 

Longing and suspended incompletion

The disciples now inhabit a state somewhat analogous to C. S. Lewis’s Sehnsucht: expectancy, absence, desire for fulfillment, openness toward transcendence.

 

Descent and participation

At Pentecost, transcendence no longer appears merely externally or episodically. Divine reality enters into participatory communion through the Holy Spirit.

 

And this perhaps reveals why Pentecost differs from many other forms of the sublime. The culmination is not simply awe before transcendence, but inhabitation by transcendence. The sublime becomes interiorized without becoming subjectivized. In the Promethean sublime, transcendence collapses into self-consciousness and autonomous will. At Pentecost, transcendence becomes interior without ceasing to remain genuinely other and divine. The Spirit dwells within persons while remaining infinitely beyond them. And because the Spirit is identified with divine love and goodness, the result is neither annihilation nor self-exaltation, but communion. The disciples do not become isolated heroic consciousnesses. They become capable of mutual understanding, courage, forgiveness, proclamation, and shared life.

    There is a sublime structure here: 1) the Resurrection discloses that reality transcends death, 2) the Ascension discloses that transcendence exceeds empirical immediacy, and 3) Pentecost discloses that transcendence is love seeking communion. The ego is not glorified or annihilated but transfigured through participation in divine love.

 

 

In memory of my teacher, Wolfgang Natter, and his seminar on the Sublime.

Works Cited 

Gaita, Raimond. A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2000.

 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge UP, 2000.

 Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Edited by Heiner F. Klemme, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2009.

 Lewis, C. S.. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Geoffrey Bles, 1955.

 Mann Thomas. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Translated by John E. Woods, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

 Murdoch, Iris. “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited.” Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by Peter Conradi, Chatto & Windus, 1997, pp. 261–86.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1967.

Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.