Episode #060 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Now, I’m going to be really straightforward with you guys. I really have no idea what it is we’re even talking about today. Really, it’s something to marvel at, I think. For the next 30 minutes of your life, I’m going to speak into this microphone, and I’m going to tell you a story about something that is impossible to tell you a story about. I’m going to tell you about a very mysterious thing. It’s a thing that has captivated entire generations of people. It’s a thing that has consumed men much greater than me for their entire lives. This is a mystery that I’ve been interested in for many years now. I’ve read entire books on the subject. I’ve read firsthand testimonies, essays, eyewitness accounts. And despite all this, by the way, to be completely honest with you, I couldn’t even tell you exactly what it is. I certainly have never experienced it before. And if you just look at things statistically speaking, I will probably die one day; I will probably be lowered into a hole in the ground in a pine box, dead, without having ever fully understood what this thing actually is. It’s that mysterious.

But you want to know what keeps me going, people? It’s the simple fact that I’m not the only one. You may say that I am stupid. But I’m not the only one. No, in fact, I find solace in the fact that the thing we’re discussing today is so elusive, so profound, and so incredibly subjective that quite literally there is no one who has ever lived or will ever live that ever in audio-podcast form could ever convey to you what this concept means fully. And that’s because the thing we’re discussing today is, by definition, ineffable. Now, on the off chance you don’t read the dictionary every night before you go to bed, the word “ineffable” is fancy philosophical lingo to describe something that is so great and so above comparison that the very construct of human language is not capable of describing it.

And really this shouldn’t be that controversial of an issue at this point, right? We’ve talked on this show time and time again about this imperfect thing called language that we humans have created. We’ve talked about just how terrible this thing is sometimes at describing even the most basic things. Maybe I’m being a little hard on language. It’s good at doing most of the things we do on a daily basis. It’s good enough to convey basic things. It’s good at asking the person across the table from you to please pass the salt. It’s good enough to convey basic feelings of emotion. You know, “I think you’re a very beautiful girl. You should go on a date with me.” These are emotional states and thoughts that we have in our head that language is pretty decent at conveying. It’s good enough to plant basic ideas in one person’s head into another person’s head. It’s good at doing some things.

But is it that crazy to think that there are some things that it can’t describe? Is it that crazy to think that maybe language is just not capable of describing certain things out there? That at least potentially out there in the universe is something that is so great, so powerful, so immense that these things that we have called nouns, adjectives, and verbs are just not capable of conveying the greatness, power, or immensity of that thing? Is that possible?

Now, as you can probably guess, typically people assign this ineffability to the idea that they have of something like God. But we’ve seen it used in many other areas on this podcast before: for example, Lao Tzu and the Dao. The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao. He says it right there. Plotinus and his conception of the One. When Plotinus and Lao Tzu were talking about these concepts, they prefaced all of it by saying that to even try to categorize the essence of these things with words—now, that would be a huge mistake. See, language is good at doing some things, but it has its limitations. To deny that fact would be hubris. To deny that fact would be human arrogance.

Well, the thing we’re talking about today is one of these ineffable things that’s completely beyond human description. It’s become known to history and the generations of people who have tried to come into contact with it as the sublime. Now, we don’t know much for sure about the sublime. We know that it exists. We know that people claim to have come into contact with this thing, whatever it is. We know that typically they come into contact with it when they’re out in the wilderness somewhere—distantly secluded usually—usually when they feel like their life is imminently put in danger by something. We know that people spanning across many different time periods, many different cultures have all claimed to have very similar sublime experiences.

So, what is this thing? What are they communicating with? Now, at this point what I’ve noticed is after hearing the words I just said, what people typically do is they try to simplify this concept down into things that they’re already familiar with. They’ll hear that this is some sort of unique, powerful, ineffable, elusive experience. And they’ll immediately jump to the conclusion, “Oh, well, when people talk about having one of these sublime experiences, really what they’re talking about is just having some sort of run-of-the-mill, transcendent religious experience, right? They think they’re communicating with God or something.” Well, no, that’s not what this is. Some interpretations of sublime experiences do, in fact, talk about feeling at one with nature or God or whatever you want to call it. But if one thing seems clear about these experiences that people have had over generations, in fact, it’s that that would only be one specific interpretation of a sublime experience.

Now, I’m telling you a lot right now about what the sublime is not. Maybe the best way to begin telling you about what it is is by talking about the conditions that people are typically in when they have these sublime experiences. What I’m saying is, maybe I should just give you an example of it. And I’m here to tell you that through my research, historically speaking, by far the most common thing that people have used to illustrate the sublime—a motif that’s used time and time again across all generations and cultures—is a ship, a ship lost at sea, hopelessly caught in a horrible storm in the middle of the ocean. We’re talking thunder, lightning, rain, wind—this ship being rag-dolled around. Just imagine that scene real quick in your mind’s eye.

See, I want you to picture it because there’s a reason why these sublime experiences typically happen when people are out in the wilderness. The reason why is because to produce one of these sublime experiences that we’re talking about today you first need to do something. You need to perceive something powerful beyond measure, greatness beyond anything you could ever possibly calculate as a mere human. Where do you find that level of greatness? See, the reason these things typically happen in the wilderness is not because there’s some magical connection between humans and nature but because nature is usually the only place we can get that sort of greatness. It’s the only thing we have that’s capable of producing something that’s so beyond human thought or capability to be able to produce the sort of intense emotional state that’s needed.

So, knowing that, it’s no wonder that from the very beginning, from the very first philosopher that ever even references the sublime in his work—his name, by the way, was Longinus. He lived in the first century AD—and it’s no wonder that when he talks about the sublime, he talks about the ocean. He uses the ocean as an example of something that has this level of magnitude that would be required to produce a sublime experience. He says in his work, “Hence, it is almost an instinct that we follow in giving our admiration, not to small streams, though they be pellucid and useful, but to the Nile and the Danube and the Rhine, and far more to the ocean.”

What Longinus is saying here in the very first work ever created on the subject of the sublime, by the way, is that how fitting that we look at a stream—we look at a stream or a lake or a babbling brook somewhere, and it’s nice. They’re pretty. You might sit down and have a picnic by one. You might use one to travel down in your canoe. But man, there’s just a different feeling that you get when you look at the Nile, the roaring river, the turbulent white rapids, the inertia of the water moving. Even more than that, Longinus says, what about the ocean? When you compare those feelings, when you compare the way you feel between when you look at a little stream flowing through the park and the ocean, what a difference there is! I mean, the ocean is a great example of something that has this sort of greatness beyond calculation that we were talking about, that raw power. We don’t marvel at things like lakes and streams. We marvel at the ocean.

Now, for the sake of understanding why the ocean is such a great catalyst for having one of these sublime experiences, let’s talk about the ocean real quick, real quick. Now, I realize at this point in history that this is a comedic bit that’s been beaten into the ground, but it doesn’t make it not true. The ocean is one of—I’m just going to say it. The ocean is the most terrifying place in the world. It’s the most terrifying place you could ever possibly be. If somebody paid me a billion dollars to write a book about a place more terrifying than the ocean is right now—a fictional book—I would still be eating Top Ramen. I could never do it. Just think about the monsters in there, the monsters flying around and they’re killing each other. Just in the shallow end, if you just wade in—completely outside of swimming through the ocean—a jellyfish could accidentally rub up against your leg; you’re dead. You could stub your toe on the wrong coral reef; you’re dead.

Maybe I’m weird. I realize I’m a little bit weird sometimes, you guys. There’s just something a little off-putting to me about the fact that a shark swims through the water; it could hunt me down. It could rip me to pieces. It would have that dead, lifeless stare in his eyes. And it would never even cross his shark brain whether what he just did was morally acceptable or not. There’s something off-putting to me about that. Look, don’t get it twisted. Your opposable thumbs are nothing in the ocean. They do nothing for you. You are the bottom of the food chain. Just consider the fact that even whenever you decide to go on a visit to the ocean, when you decide to go into the water, keep in mind that that whole visit is contingent on the fact that you keep one part of your body out of the ocean at all times so that you can breathe, and the ocean doesn’t kill you.

But aside from all the danger—I’ll calm down—aside from all the danger, there’s a different type of magnificence to the ocean, isn’t there? There’s a certain eternal quality to the ocean. I mean, you can go on the beach and see exactly what I’m talking about. You can sit on the sidelines and just watch the ocean all day long slamming up against the rocks over and over and over, endlessly. The waves never stop. The ocean doesn’t wake up in the morning and give itself a pep talk to get up in the morning and start moving and doing what it does. No, it’s moving and shifting constantly. It’s moving and shifting because of a constant and necessary law of the universe, the law of gravity. Just consider for a second that for every second you’ve listened to this podcast, for every second you do anything for that matter—when you’re graduating high school, when you’re getting married, when you’re playing video games, when you’re checking the mail—when your mind is elsewhere, the ocean is still there doing what it does, wave after wave relentlessly slamming against those jagged rocks with the weight of the ocean behind it, with the power to erode the earth away. Any one of those waves could kill you, by the way. Any one of those waves would just suck you under. You’d never be heard from again. Consider in that moment if you were up against those rocks just how futile your attempts would be to resist that ocean. Think of the power of that.

Now, for the sake of time, I’ll stop, because I think I’ve made my point. But honestly, I could go on for a good hour before I got tired of listening to myself talk about the ocean. It’s not like I’d run out of things to say. The point is, the ocean is without a doubt an incredible thing. And for some reason, I really enjoy thinking about it. I really enjoy the sheer size of the ocean, the raw power. I enjoy thinking about how easily it could just chew me up and spit me out and never even bat an eyelash because it’s that powerful; it’s that big. As morbid as that may be on the surface, it’s truly awe-inspiring, right? Like, even if you disagree with me, even if you think the ocean is a lame and boring place—It’s water. Who cares?—I hope that you could at least consider where my feelings are coming from, that considering and thinking about the sheer greatness of the ocean at least potentially could be a source of pleasure for someone, right? That’s all we need to move forward.

So, given all this enormous power that the ocean possesses, this power beyond my ability to calculate it, it’s no surprise that it’s something Longinus suspected all the way back in the first century might be at least one piece of the puzzle when it comes to having these elusive sublime experiences. But don’t get me wrong. It’s not like in his work Longinus laid out exactly what the sublime was. It was very mysterious to him, and there was still a great deal of mystery surrounding the whole concept. There’s still many questions to be answered about the subject. I mean, for one, it’s an entirely subjective experience. How can we even know for sure whether people are having these experiences? How can we know that they’re not just going out into the wilderness, being alone out there, and going crazy? Or if they’re just vying for attention. What if they’re just claiming to have some special experience, and they’re not actually having it?

See, collectively as a species, we were confused for a long time about the sublime. And what people started to do is they got tired of being in this state of confusion, and they tried to get to the bottom of it. And they used their own bodies as the petri dishes. What people started to do was head out into the wilderness not in spite of these sublime experiences but in search of them. People would just head out into the woods, into the mountains, looking to have one of these sublime experiences. If and when they did, they said that they would record their findings, and they’d at least be able to shine a beam of light on something that was largely a mystery up until this point. Any information would be a step forward. What a noble sacrifice they’re making.

But here’s the problem. Maybe some of you guys can relate. If you’re a miserable skeptic like I am, the first thing you think when these people start talking about wanting to have these sublime experiences is—well, never underestimate the mind’s ability to convince itself that something’s true that it wants to be true. What I’m saying is, these people don’t seem like the best neutral third parties to be conducting these so-called unbiased experiments about the sublime. These people want to be having sublime experiences. If you go out into the woods and you want to find Bigfoot, it starts to become much easier for your mind to find ways to justify why it saw Bigfoot out there. If you want to look into the sky and see aliens flying around, it becomes much easier to find some mysterious light out there that you can identify as extraterrestrial, which is why to me the most fascinating and persuasive of all the accounts of the sublime are not the ones recorded by people that actively went out there searching for the sublime. No, it’s the people that sort of accidentally stumbled upon a sublime experience. These are the people that I really give credence to.

There are thousands and thousands of pages of diaries written by adventurers that were crossing the Alps in the 17- and 1800s. Now, the Alps is a mountain range. And just as far as mountain ranges go, just type “the Alps” into Google Images, and you’ll see what I mean. You look at these mountains, and they are just beautiful beyond words. But just look at the mountain and try to picture yourself as one little speck on the side of the mountain. And in that moment, you can’t help but notice how treacherous it must be to try to navigate up there, let alone in the 1700s. If two of the crucial ingredients that we need in this recipe for a sublime experience are, one, greatness beyond measure and, two, a fear for your own life, well, crossing the Alps in the 1700s must have been like a hotbed for growing these sublime experiences.

You read these accounts by the people that managed to catalog their emotions when crossing the Alps. They managed to do it. You feel the emotions they felt. Two of the most famous for their accounts of the sublime specifically were John Dennis and Joseph Addison. And both of them, when you read their diaries, describe pretty much the exact same sort of feeling despite being years apart. Dennis talks about this psychological tightrope that he’s walking the whole trip, torn between delight at the landscape but that delight was “mingled with Horrours, sometimes almost with despair.” Now, Addison talks about having almost the same seemingly paradoxical feelings as he’s braving the Alps in his time. He famously said, “The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror.”

Now, what are they talking about here? Well, they seem to be taking pleasure in the landscape, right? But as we know, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows up there in the Swiss Alps. It seems counterintuitive what they’re saying. How can you be mingled with horror but still somehow be unquestionably deriving pleasure from the entire experience? What these diaries show us, if anything I think, is the beginnings of what seems to be a completely different way of aesthetically judging the world while getting pleasure from the experience that has nothing to do with beauty. And this right here—this here—this is the exact reason why the sublime is such a fascinating concept to me personally. Because when I first read this, like, when I first read that what we’re talking about here is potentially a different way of aesthetically judging the world, different from beauty, perhaps mutually exclusive from beauty, it completely blew my mind.

So, just to be sure we don’t gloss over this point, let me explain why this is such a big deal. See, as you know from this podcast in the past, probably, aesthetically judging the world was nothing new at this point. It had been talked about ad nauseum in the past. Plato talks in the Symposium, in the Philebus—look, we can all relate to the experience of looking out at the world, finding something beautiful, and in that moment it doesn’t seem that controversial to say that the thing that differentiates something from being beautiful or not beautiful in my individual experience is that, “Oh, well, when I look at this thing that’s beautiful, it brings me some kind of pleasure however marginal it may be. And that pleasure makes me attracted to it.” Now, the natural conclusion to jump to from here is that if seeing a beautiful thing brings me pleasure and that’s part of the reason why I’m attracted to beautiful things, then the inverse must be true as well, right? Ugly things must bring me some small level of pain which is why I tend to recoil from them.

I kind of—honestly, I kind of feel bad for ugliness. Like, what did ugliness ever do to you guys? Why did ugliness get such a bad rap in the world? There’s even people like Augustine. People like Augustine went so far as to say that really ugliness doesn’t even exist. See, for him, whenever we perceive something beautiful, what we’re really seeing is God’s fingerprints on his creation, and that when we call something ugly, really what we’re seeing there is just an absence of God’s goodness not a quality in itself called “ugliness.” I’m sure you can see the striking resemblance here to Plotinus’s Theodicy. But for me, this is a pretty awesome assumption that’s being called into question. Edmund Burke does it when he writes his work on the sublime. Why is the inverse of that necessarily true? Why does ugliness necessarily have to be painful? Why does ugliness have to not exist at all?

Once you start calling these things into question, it opens up a whole other barrel of monkeys. Can we derive pleasure from looking at ugly things? Throw ugliness out for a second. Can we derive pleasure from some other type of aesthetic experience, from something other than just looking at beautiful things? This is what Burke’s responding to when he starts his work on the sublime. The sublime to Edmund Burke is a very strange type of pleasure that we get from feeling as though our lives are in danger while coming into contact with these things like the ocean that are powerful beyond calculation. Not too much in danger. Like, you still have to be able to feel that strange delight that he talks about. No, Burke says, too much danger and it just makes it into a terrible experience. No, there’s this not-too-hot, not-too-cold sort of Goldilocks’ zone of an attack on your instinct of self-preservation that when at the right place at the right time can bring you a sort of pleasureful distress. You’re in imminent danger by this thing that’s powerful beyond measure, but at some deep level you know that you’re going to be fine. You know you’re at arm’s length from this thing. And it brings you a weird kind of pleasure to be in contact with that greatness.

You can imagine the ship being caught out in the storm. You can imagine being a traveler in the 1700s crossing the Alps, looking out at the vast landscape. See, the sublime to Burke is visceral in nature. It’s not based on some intellectual calculation that we’re making. It’s not like beauty where we look at some thing; we weigh it up against all the other beautiful things we’ve seen in our life. We make a judgment about whether it’s beautiful. And if we find it beautiful, well, we sit there for a while and enjoy it. The tastemaker that Hume talks about where you use your mind to cultivate these skills of judging beautiful things.

No, the sublime is something different. It’s something deep within us to Edmund Burke. It’s part of what makes us human—very different than beauty. See, you read his work, and Burke talks about beauty as this thing where it brings the mind inaction; it doesn’t stimulate the mind. Beauty doesn’t stimulate the mind. You find beauty in the world; it’s more passive. You sit back. You find something beautiful. And you enjoy it. But on the contrary, Burke says, when the mind finds something sublime, he says the mind swells when it finds that—obviously a much more active thing. The sublime to Burke is a much more real, much more important type of aesthetic judgment than beauty.

Now, this idea of the sublime being a more real, non-intellectual, more natural version of aesthetically judging the world, this was a massively appealing concept during Burke’s time. Remember, this is the Enlightenment period. There is this intense momentum moving in the direction of using reason as the guide for human progress, of using empirical observation, of arriving at truths of fact. And in response to this momentum, there was this sort of pushback by people, as we’ve talked about. They thought we were going too far with this reason stuff. There was this populist uprising fueled by the ideas of people like Rousseau and many others. It was called romanticism, and they absolutely loved the idea of the sublime. There are stories you can read of dozens of people that really had no business pretending to be a mountaineer in the first place. These people are willingly led out into the mountains to survive and to try to achieve one of these fear-induced, distressful sublime experiences. Many of them ended up dying. That’s how powerful this was.

The point is, you can see how attractive this idea of the sublime was back then. There was a hysteria that people connected to it. It really was like the 1700’s version of Beatlemania. Artists everywhere during this time period—and artists ever since, by the way—they’ve tried to take this incredible, profound experience of sublimity that Edmund Burke talks about and encapsulate it in the form of a painting or of a poem or of a song. Artists for hundreds and hundreds of years have tried to use their art not to give people something beautiful to feast their eyes on—no, not something beautiful, something sublime, something to evoke a sublime experience, this new type of aesthetic judgment. Think of how powerful that would be if through a painting you could give someone a sublime experience. I mean, that would be incredible!

If you’re interested in this quest that the artists gave themselves, you can check out a series of paintings: The Horse and Lion by George Stubbs. Absolutely incredible example of somebody attempting to evoke this sublime experience in the viewer. See, George Stubbs was actually a friend of Edmund Burke at the time. So, he had this understanding of this concept of the sublime that not many people were privy to at the time, at least not many artists.

So, that said, here’s the question that you’ve all been considering hopefully the whole time you’ve been listening to this. Have you ever had a sublime experience in the way that Edmund Burke describes? Well, as I said at the beginning of the show, I haven’t. I certainly haven’t, definitely not. I have no idea what this guy’s talking about. But to be fair, when I say that I don’t know what he’s talking about, what I mean is I can’t fully relate to what the guy’s talking about. Because we can all relate to this idea of getting some sort of strange pleasure out of recounting ugly or life-threatening things from the past. We’ve at least seen people do that.

Like, my dad, for example, was in the military—first Gulf War. He was a hero. He was a good American. And it was interesting, because when he got home, at least when I was old enough to understand the conversations he was having, it seemed like whenever he came across anyone who had ever seen combat before like he had, they would inevitably sit down. They would have a beer. And they’d talk about the war. They would talk about what their units did, the sort of missions that they went on. They’d sit there and recount intimate, sometimes gruesome details about the terrible things that they’d seen in combat together.

I remember one time I was a fly on the wall to this whole process. I was sitting there. And there’s this guy that was in World War II, and he was telling a story. “I remember one time we were walking through the tree line. This kid next to me—young kid, sweet kid—stepped on a Bouncing Betty. All of a sudden, I got this 17-year-old kid looking at me in the eyes, holding his detached leg, saying, ‘Sarge, what do I do?’ I said, ‘Boy, you know what to do. Take off your bootlace. Make yourself a tourniquet. Save your leg, boy.’”

This guy told this story in the most cavalier voice that you’ve ever heard in your life. He told this story like he was standing in line at Subway talking to his friend. And my dad, by the way, he’s just sitting there nodding like he hears this kind of stuff every day. He was nodding like he was just enjoying a good story. “Ah, yes, yes, yes, I too remember the day I had to take off my bootlace and make a tourniquet out of it, save someone’s leg. That was one of my favorite days.”

Now, don’t mistake what I’m about to say. People join support groups, and it’s incredibly therapeutic. They talk to each other. They find relief in discussing the terrible things that they saw in wartime. I’m not saying they don’t. But this specific case was different. And I don’t think it’s entirely uncommon. If you ask these guys what the most traumatic, horrible things they’d ever seen in their entire life were, they would undoubtedly point at what they saw during their years in the military. Yet, for some reason they take advantage of every opportunity they get—they seek out opportunities to relive those moments in their heads over and over and over again.

Now, why would they do that? Is there something sublime about those experiences? It doesn’t seem like they’re talking about these things so that one day they can come to terms with them and never have to think about them again. That doesn’t seem to be the end goal. It seems like there’s some peace that it brings them, some strange pleasure that they get by recounting a horrible situation where their lives were in danger but knowing now at some level when they recount it that they’re at arm’s length from it. Could these horrible events be one of those rare exceptions of something not produced by nature that’s just powerful enough to produce one of these sublime experiences in people?

It’s interesting to think about. Both Burke and Kant give commentary on this. But I want to make sure this gets out. One of the main points Edmund Burke makes, one of his main contributions about the sublime in his work is the idea that the sublime is not just some higher gradient of beauty. It’s not just some greater level of beauty that we can only find in nature. And what I mean by that is, look, it’s not like I look at a flower and I think it’s beautiful. I look at a house, and I think it’s beautiful. And then when I look out at the ocean, oh, well, it’s just so incredibly beautiful that it evokes this sublime experience in me. No, to Edmund Burke, the beautiful and the sublime are two different things. They’re mutually exclusive. Again, the sublime to Burke is a much more real, much more important type of aesthetic judgment than beauty.

He says, “If taste has no fixed principles, if the imagination is not affected according to some invariable and certain laws, our labor…must be judged a useless…undertaking…to set up for a legislator of whims and fancies.” See, to Burke, it’s not just enough to look out at a calm ocean and think that it’s beautiful. No, he actually says explicitly, these waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues.

Well, this brings us to Immanuel Kant who is, in my opinion, the second greatest commentator ever on the sublime. Second only to a man named Arthur Schopenhauer who we’ll be talking about soon. But now we’re brought up to speed on this idea of the sublime, right? Oddly enough, we now know how little we do know about this thing called the sublime at this point in history, how mysterious it is, how seemingly profound it is. And I guess what I’m saying is, I have good news for you either way. If you hated this episode, then the good news for you is it’s probably going to be about 12, 13 episodes before we get to this concept of the sublime again. But on the other hand, if you loved this episode, if you’re as fascinated as I am about these sort of elusive, mysterious, truly undefinable sublime experiences that people have, then man, you have an absolutely epic episode to look forward to when we talk about Kant and Schopenhauer and really how they changed the entire way that I look at the world.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.