What is the Sublime? : Ecologies of Emptiness, Aesthetics, and the Visual Arts

An elaboration on the concept of the sublime that both clarifies the historical confusion, and offers recourse to the compulsion that characterizes our contemporary lives.

The sublime has been an elusive concept since its introduction by Longinus. No one seems to agree on a definition of the term; neither the idealists (Burke, Kant), nor the modernists (Barnett Newman), nor the postmodernists (Lyotard). ‘Sublime moments’ reveal the unobscured, undistracted, and unselfconscious nature of our minds—free of worry, anxiety, and fear. This describes what, in Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, is called emptiness (sunyata)—the genuine, underlying nature of who we are. Christopher Huck elaborates on this concept through a dialectical inquiry into the now-classic Burke-Kant sublime, which is grounded in either a notion of fear (Burke), or of something too vast to take in, but still somehow subject to rational containment (Kant). Huck demonstrates his view of the ‘empty-sublime’ through a revivification of the aesthetic experience which provokes and illuminates art’s potential as expressive of the empty-sublime experience, evidenced in the work of visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and Wolfgang Laib. These artists exemplify art that emerges from a space of vividness, clarity, and unselfconscious openness; that is to say, a lucid emptiness.