The sublime is the name philosophers gave to a particular mixed feeling: awe shot through with fear. It is what a person feels at the edge of a cliff, under a sky full of stars, or watching a storm from a place of safety. It is distinct from beauty. Beautiful things are proportioned to us and please us. Sublime things exceed us and, by a strange turn, exalt us.
The feeling has a history, because the things capable of producing it change. This essay follows it through three stages, the natural, the industrial and the one we live in now, and argues that the last is different in kind. For the first time, the overwhelming object cannot be seen.
The mountain and the storm
The classic account was worked out in the eighteenth century by writers contemplating mountains, oceans, thunder and the night sky. They distinguished two varieties.
One arises from sheer size: an expanse so vast that the imagination fails in the attempt to take it in as a whole. The other arises from power: a force so great that against it our capacity to resist is trivial. In both cases the first moment is a kind of defeat. The senses are overrun.
The second moment was the important one. Having failed to grasp the thing with the senses, the mind discovers that it can nevertheless think it. We cannot picture infinity, but we have the idea of it. We could not survive the storm, but we know that we are something more than what the storm could destroy. The experience ends in a peculiar elevation. Terror, held at a safe distance, turns into a sense of one's own dignity.
Two conditions are worth marking. The spectator had to be safe; there is nothing sublime about drowning. And the object, however large, was in front of you. It had an outline. You could stand somewhere and look at it. The first condition also underwrites the pleasure people take in fiction designed to frighten them, which is discussed in The Pleasures of Dread.
The factory and the bomb
In the nineteenth century the feeling migrated to things people had made. The blast furnace at night, the viaduct, the locomotive and the great exhibition hall were described in exactly the vocabulary once reserved for cataracts and peaks. This was the industrial sublime, and it kept the classical shape while changing its meaning. The power that overwhelmed the spectator was now human power. The elevation at the end was pride in the species.
The twentieth century followed the logic to its conclusion. A single weapon capable of ending a city, and then arsenals capable of ending everything, were the largest things human beings had ever made, and the old language was reached for at once.
Here the classical structure begins to fail. The spectator of the storm was safe. No one is a spectator of total destruction, because there is no safe place to stand. The second moment, in which reason asserts its superiority over the threat, does not arrive, since the threat is reason's own product. What is left is the first moment only: the overrunning of the imagination, without the recovery. The modern age discovered an awe that does not exalt.
The network that cannot be pictured
The third stage is the one that needs describing, because it lacks even an image.
The things that now exceed us are not objects. They are systems: financial markets that move faster than anyone can follow, supply chains that pass through forty countries to assemble one device, communication networks, logistics, the climate considered as a single interacting whole. These are, in the strict sense, sublime. They are vast beyond the imagination's reach and powerful beyond any individual's resistance.
The mountain could be painted. Nobody can paint a derivatives market.
But they have no outline. The mountain could be painted. Nobody can paint a derivatives market. There is no cliff edge from which to look at a global network, because one is always inside it. The data center is a windowless shed; the cable is under the sea; the decisive event is a change in a number. Attempts to represent these systems fall back on substitutes: the glowing map of connections, the wall of screens, the server corridor. Everyone recognizes that these are emblems, not views.
Critics call this the postmodern or technological sublime. Its characteristic feeling is neither the terror of the storm nor the pride of the engineer. It is closer to vertigo: the sense of being a small part of something enormous whose shape, purpose and location you cannot determine, and which nevertheless decides a great deal about your life.
Paranoia as a failed map
An awe with nowhere to rest will find an object. This is the most persuasive explanation available for the extraordinary growth of conspiratorial thinking, and it is developed at length in our essay on why conspiracy theories feel true.
A conspiracy theory takes the faceless system and gives it faces. In place of an impersonal web of incentives and accidents, it supplies a room, a table and a small group of people who meant it. This is false, and often viciously so. It is also, formally, an attempt at exactly the task the sublime sets: to picture the totality. It is a map drawn by someone who has correctly sensed that there is a territory and has no instruments with which to survey it.
That does not make it harmless. It does suggest that ridicule alone is a poor reply. People do not give up a bad map of something real because they are told the map is bad. They give it up when offered a better one.
The earlier ages had a different pathology. The modern sufferer was a solitary: the individual overwhelmed by the city, anxious, inward, a case. The contemporary version is shared. It is a mood held in common by thousands of strangers, traded and elaborated in public. The private neurosis of the modern period has given way to something more like a collective fever.
An honest awe
It may be that the systems we have built are simply beyond the reach of feeling, and that the sublime, as a way of coming to terms with what exceeds us, is finished.
There is another possibility. The classical experience ended in the discovery that one could think what one could not see. The equivalent discovery now would be modest and practical: that a system too large to picture can still be understood in part, traced along one of its threads, and occasionally changed at a point within reach. A single shipping container followed from port to port. One budget read line by line. This is not exaltation. It is closer to patience.
An honest awe, in these conditions, would hold two things together: a frank admission of how far the whole exceeds us, and a refusal to let that admission turn into either worship or dread. The mountain asked only to be looked at. The network asks to be read, slowly, by people who have accepted that they will never see all of it.