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Black Hole Sun: On the Materialist Sublime

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sciborg2:
Black Hole Sun: On the Materialist Sublime


--- Quote ---The first image of black hole has just been released today. This is a profound and important aesthetic moment from a new materialist perspective. The image is not beautiful because we enjoy a free play of our imagination as we try to figure out what we are looking at and how it fits with our existing conceptual framework. The image is also not sublime in the sense that a black hole is an infinitely dense singularity that defies all calculation by general relativity, and thus “blows our mind,” as we try to conceptualize the radically unconceptualizable. The black hole is itself a work of art. Nature, according to Kant, cannot be art because nature is passive and mechanistic. Art, for Kant, is radically free because it is a strictly human feeling of our own freedom.

The black hole is an excellent example of the materialist sublime. Nature and matter are not passive or deterministic. They are indeterminate material processes. They perform precisely the sublime that Kant restricts to humans alone. Black holes are not infinitely dense singularities. At the heart of a black hole is a specific (and very small) spatio-temporal region measured by the Planck scale and related to the size of the black hole (its Schwarzschild radius). However, and more importantly, below the Planck level of the black hole there are quantum processes that produce the spacetime of that region. These quantum processes below the Planck unit are fundamentally indeterminate—meaning that they are neither in one spacetime or another. They are the indeterminate material conditions for the emergence of spacetime itself (quantum gravity).

In other words, nature is not just the passive conditions for the human experience of its own aesthetic faculties of beauty or the sublime but itself performs the sublime activity of radical indeterminism without concrete form. Humans have the experience of sublimity only because nature is already performatively and materially sublime.
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BeardFisher-King:
A few questions [edited and expanded for clarity]:

1. From what perspective can the photograph of the black hole be described as "beautiful" or "sublime"?

2. If a black hole is a work of art, who is the artist? ("Work" implies a worker)

3. What can it mean for quantum matter to "perform"? Does an oscillating pendulum "perform"?

4. From what perspective can an aesthetic judgment that quantum activity is "performatively sublime" be made?

A very provocative and interesting post from this "new materialist perspective" with which I am not familiar. Thanks for sharing, sciborg2!

Francis Buck:

--- Quote from: BeardFisher-King on April 11, 2019, 02:52:30 am ---A few questions:

1. Who finds the photograph of the black hole to be "beautiful" or "sublime"?

2. If a black hole is a work of art, who is the artist?

3. What can it mean for quantum matter to "perform"? Does an oscillating pendulum "perform"?

4. Who is making the aesthetic judgment that quantum activity is "performatively sublime"?

A very provocative and interesting post from this "new materialist perspective" with which I am not familiar. Thanks for sharing, sciborg2!

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I think the image is aesthetically pleasing to a certain degree although it would almost certainly not be nearly so if not for the context surrounding it.

I'm lost on the other queries, but then I'm not a materialist. Not sure what a 'new materialist' is either...

H:
Well, as a strict armchair Kantian and "physicist" (that is, an idiot who reads things he can barely understand) I have no idea what this article is trying to tell us.


--- Quote ---This problem constitutes Kant's principle argument that something else must be going on in the sublime experience other than the mere overwhelmingness of some object. As Kant will later claim, objects of sense (oceans, pyramids, etc.) are called 'sublime' only by a kind of covert sleight-of-hand, what he calls a 'subreption' (sect.27). In fact, what is actually sublime, Kant argues, are ideas of our own reason. The overwhelmingness of sensible objects leads the minds to these ideas.

Now, such presentations of reason are necessarily unexhibitable by sense. Moreover, the faculty of reason is not merely an inert source of such ideas, but characteristically demands that its ideas be presented. (This same demand is what creates all the dialectical problems that Kant analyses in, for example, the Antinomies.) Kant claims that the relation of the overwhelming sensible object to our sense is in a kind of 'harmony' (sect.27) or analogy to the relation of the rational idea of absolute totality to any sensible object or faculty. The sublime experience, then, is a two-layer process. First, a contrapurposive layer in which our faculties of sense fail to complete their task of presentation. Second, a strangely purposive layer in which this very failure constitutes a 'negative exhibition' ('General Comment' following sect.29) of the ideas of reason (which could not otherwise be presented). This 'exhibition' thus also provides a purposiveness of the natural object for the fulfillment of the demands of reason. Moreover, and importantly, it also provides a new and 'higher' purposiveness to the faculties of sense themselves which are now understood to be properly positioned with respect to our 'supersensible vocation' (sect.27) - i.e. in the ultimately moral hierarchy of the faculties. Beyond simply comprehending individual sensible things, our faculty of sensibility, we might say, now knows what it is for. We will return to this point shortly. The consequence of this purposiveness is exactly that 'negative pleasure' (sect.23) for which we had be searching. The initial displeasure of the 'violence' against our apparent sensible interests is now matched by a 'higher' pleasure arising from the strange purposiveness Kant has discovered. Interestingly, on Kant's description, neither of these feelings wins out - instead, the sublime feeling consists of a unique 'vibration' or 'rapid alternation' of these feelings (sect.27).
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My hunch though, is that, like most of us, this "appeal to Kant" is misplaced, as ensconced in the entire Kantian "trancendental idealism" it's preposterous (to me) to make the claim that "Nature, according to Kant, cannot be art because nature is passive and mechanistic."  The very foundation of this claim (which I know not if it is something Kant said or not) but it presupposes that Kant would be saying something of nature as a "thing-in-itself."  Which is exactly what Kant wants us to understand as being unknowable.

So, indeed, nature, of course, is not sublime, in and of itself, it is sublime only in our perception of it.  "The sublime" in other words, would be phenomena not noumena, as a matter of course.  So, nature, as noumena, is not sublime, a priori, the sublime is a posteriori as a matter of course.  I'd think that is a bit like asking if there could be an a priori phenomena, which might be like asking if there is a married bachelor though...

BeardFisher-King:

--- Quote from: H on April 11, 2019, 12:20:33 pm ---Well, as a strict armchair Kantian and "physicist" (that is, an idiot who reads things he can barely understand) I have no idea what this article is trying to tell us.


--- Quote ---So, indeed, nature, of course, is not sublime, in and of itself, it is sublime only in our perception of it.  "The sublime" in other words, would be phenomena not noumena, as a matter of course.  So, nature, as noumena, is not sublime, a priori, the sublime is a posteriori as a matter of course.  I'd think that is a bit like asking if there could be an a priori phenomena, which might be like asking if there is a married bachelor though...

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Very good. Sublimity resides in the perceiver, not the perceived.

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