Beauty in Distress – Weekend

Fear is not a weakness, not an atavism, not even just a security device. It is dark, unpleasant, irrational, not very honorable, but the strongest of human feelings. And since we perceive a work of art to a large extent through our experience of precisely these basic emotional states, then the terrible is also a very important artistic tool. Now this idea seems to be commonplace. However, at one time, in the middle of the 18th century, it sounded completely revolutionary – and anticipated a huge number of revolutions in literature, art, psychology, mass culture, without which today’s consciousness cannot be imagined.

“I think that not a single person will be so vicious as to feel a desire to see our noble capital, the pride of England and Europe, destroyed by fire or earthquake … But suppose that such a fatal event happened – what a huge number of people with will rush to look at the ruins … ”Edmund Burke wrote this in the 1750s, and the state of affairs in the information society of the 21st century fully confirms this idea: yes, yes, it rushes and rushes, just give a reason, catastrophes and disasters are a great engine traffic.

Burke is better known as a political thinker, an apostle of venerable British freedoms, a denunciator of the French Revolution, but that’s all – Burke is mature and late. And much earlier, when he was not yet thirty, he published a treatise of its kind astonishing called “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757). This is the case when a cheeky headline scares the reader for no reason: there is a rare and lively intrigue here. How do we imagine this time? The general intellectual climate is set by the Enlightenment, no disasters are at all visible on the horizon, the sciences are flourishing, morals are softening, and it seems that reason, in which everything can be trusted, really wins. And in this optimistic and rational context, Burke’s treatise sounds surprisingly dissonant.

The beautiful and the sublime, he says, are not something pleasantly abstract, incorporeal and spiritualized. The entire centuries-old mainstream of European thought – Plato, pagan Neo-Platonists, Christian Neo-Platonists, scholastics, humanists – agreed that if we love something, it is only because this “something”, at least in part, at least a little bit, is involved in the idea of ​​beauty – divine, supreme, perfect. Burke destroys this great construct with one phrase: “Beauty in trouble is the most powerful beauty, far superior to any other.” In fact, we do not love perfection at all, we can even love frank weakness and inferiority precisely because, by some coincidence, they evoke a powerful internal response in us, a genuine affect in which there is no noble aesthetic mathematics at all.

Art excites us due to the fact that it does not affect the top of our consciousness, but something much more uterine, the basic emotional processes – not well-bred beautiful feelings, but strong and natural feelings – such is the main idea of ​​Burke’s aesthetics. What can be stronger than fear? After all, the criterion of the great and sublime, explains Burke, is if some object fills the human consciousness to such an extent that the latter literally has no place and opportunity at this moment to reflect, consciously think about this object. And at the same time, “not a single affect deprives the spirit of all its abilities for action and reflection like fear.” And here comes a moment even more revolutionary than the idea that perfection does not necessarily have to seem beautiful and attractive to us.

The fact is that culture in its interaction with the feeling of fear for a long, very long time behaved somewhat vaguely. A child, for example, is afraid of the dark – this is normal, it has come from the most zoological depths. But civilization seemed to cut off some of these fears – an adult conscious individual does not have to be afraid of the dark, the forest, the inevitable hourly attack of another individual. And the other part tried to overcome in different ways, marking fears as ridiculous or shameful. Suppose everyone is afraid of death – but if you are fighting for your native policy, then it is indecent to be afraid, to die in this case will be honor and joy.

In folklore, the terrible is a ritual matter, horror stories are needed to relive the mythological situation and scare away evil, and yet, starting at least with Socrates, intellectual decency requires a reasonable person to look down on fear. In post-antique culture, everything becomes more complicated: on the one hand, the New Testament, through the mouth of the Apostle John, says that “he who fears is not perfect in love”, that “perfect love casts out fear”, that the truth brings a sense of freedom that encourages a person not to be afraid, trusting the loving Father . On the other hand, the Absolute also remains a punishing ruler, and, according to the words of the Apostle Paul, “it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God.” “God can be loved and must be feared,” as Jung somewhere formulated this conflict.

For the medieval consciousness to be afraid of some kind of carnal and earthly misfortune is a natural thing, but it seems to be not quite worthy. It is not good to absolutize this fear – well, except perhaps in the form of ideas that here, on earth, in general, everything is perishable and harmful: hence all kinds of dances of death and other late Gothic macabra, this is precisely the horror of mortality in general and the plague in particular, which accepts ideologically acceptable artistic form of gloomy moralizing. It is possible and necessary to be afraid of a posthumous fate – and therefore we have all sorts of late medieval intuitions on the subject of hell and the punishment of sinners.

It turns out that a decent fear is a pedagogically significant fear, and European culture lived with this feeling for an incredibly long time, just at different times the weight of this fear was distributed differently. The cultivation of horror before the torments of hell disappeared much earlier than the 1750s (not completely – and yet, compared with the hysterical outbursts of some 14th century, everything has changed simply in a tectonic way). But the no less old idea that fear is the basis of law and the basis of a healthy state, where criminals are afraid of a formidable ruler and terrible punishment, remained for a long time in the completely secular political theory of modern times.

Burke starts from the Aristotelian ideas about tragedy, which presents a concentrated form of “fear and compassion” to a person, but goes much further. Yes, we experience involuntary pleasure when we see from our safe little world (the very “suave mari magno” of Lucretius) the misfortunes of the hero – because we are inwardly afraid that this can happen to us, and rejoice that after all it did not happen to us . But the sublime is not the actions on the stage, it is what causes us real awe, even unconscious, what seriously frightens us, exceeds our perception, what we voluntarily or involuntarily see as a threat to ourselves here, in this world. being.

The expanse of the ocean. Eruption. Everything is too big, too sudden, too dark, too powerful, too incomprehensible. The creatures are not mythological, but quite real (“there are many animals, far from giants in size, which are nevertheless capable of exciting ideas of the sublime, because they are considered objects that cause fear …”). Pain (“the idea of ​​physical pain … is capable of evoking the sublime”).

“There is rapture in battle, / And the gloomy abyss at the edge, / And in the furious ocean, / Among the menacing waves and stormy darkness” – this is written seventy-odd years after Burke’s book, but it is written about the same. The intoxicated horror before the greatness of the elements, the infinity of the Universe, the ancient chaos of nature really became one of the main topoi of romanticism. Another thing is more interesting: much earlier, back in the 1760s, the phenomenon of Gothic literature appeared, turning Burke’s ideas into a lively and commercially successful literary trend. Then, in Fuseli and Goya, the theme of extramoral, irrational and completely non-pedagogical fear is picked up by fine art – and it has not left it to this day, but this was not the case before Burke. Philosophers, from Kierkegaard to existentialists, begin to talk about fear as an independent phenomenon of being. Cinema is born, and almost immediately it takes on distinctly terrible plots.

Diverse work with personal and social fears, repressed and demonstrative, compassionate and selfish, has become a separate cultural phenomenon, no less large and complex than the medieval “fear of God”. The complexity of the psycho-physiological explanations with which the fear is now backed up, the same Burke would probably even be embarrassed. For him, in the final analysis, everything was simple: “fear causes unnatural tension and certain strong excitations of the nerves.”

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