JADWIGA S.

SMITH

LONGINUS' ON THE SUBLIME AND THE ROLE

OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION

The Neoclassical battle over the importance of the ancients or the

modems is well over, but our awareness of the influence of Aris-
totle's Poetics as still the most quoted authoritative source in critical
theoretizing on literature is unfailing. To invoke Aristotle is to invoke
the main classical document concerning the ever-present questions of
literary genres, values or imitative qualities of a text. Moreover, to
quote any other classical texts of literary criticism usually means still
staying within the mainstream of largely Aristotelian thinking. An ex-
ception to this rule is the treatise On the Sublime by Longinus, written
in the first century AD. However, it is rather rare to quote Longinus
now, even though his work was popularized by Neoclassical critics and
poets (for example, Pope) and then elevated in the nineteenth century as
a "source of authoritative encouragement" (Bate 62) for the European
romantic writers, who stressed new critical methods and values.
This paper presents the work of Longinus from the point of view of
its relationship to, on the one hand, much of contemporary criticism
leaning toward, generally speaking, a structuralist position and, on the
other hand, a critical evaluation of Longinus' work as more akin to
some phenomenological thinking, particularly that of Anna-Teresa
Tymieniecka. In other words, this paper is enlisting the aid of "classical
authority" with not, by any means, an exaggerated intention to provide
a much needed context for contemporary literary criticism, that of a
non-Aristotelian kind.
Unlike many classical works concerning rhetoric, this treatise by
Longinus is not preoccupied with the mere mechanics of poetic diction,
but rather it is interested in the ways of arousing emotional transport.
For Longinus, the "greatness of soul" is fundamental for true greatness
of art. We can only express our regret that a separate treatise by
Longinus on passions, directly referred to in some passages in On the
Sublime, is lost. Moreover, we can analyze only about three-fifths of the
original text of Longinus' treatise; the remaining parts are lost.
In presenting the work of Longinus, I will analyze, of course, its
original intentions and also suggest the phenomenological context of On

A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXVlIl, 225-231.

© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
226 JADWIGA S. SMITH

the Sublime, particularly the context of the elemental passions of the

soul. As a result, I intend to enlist the much honored classical tradition
in the service of Tymieniecka's theory. Obviously, we have to keep in
mind that On the Sublime is primarily a rhetorical manual, but,
nevertheless, the intensity with which the "transport" of emotions
through art is emphasized by the treatise is often overshadowing some
of its purely mechanical, rhetorical passages.
This treatise is an example of western thought penetrating into
"things themselves". Much of this kind of pursuit has been lost In
contemporary aesthetic studies because, according to Tymieniecka:

The direct intuitive penetration into the nature of things, conceived by Husserl as
capable of reaching primeval insights through the sedimentations of meanings in which
cultures have clad them, has been deviated into linguistic, structuralistic, and post post
structuralistic, hermemeutic, and semiotic perspectives.
("Interdisciplinary Phenomenology" 389)

Similarly, William Ray in his Literary Meaning observes the tendency of

much of recent criticism to simplify the issue of literary meaning:
It seems self-evident that meaning involves a tension, perhaps an unresolvable paradox,
between systems and instance, and that this paradox must inform literary study. Yet this
is a proposition consistently evaded by most of theoreticians who have focused on
reading and literary meaning during the past half century. For various reasons, all but a
handful of the recent innovations in practical criticism have relied on theories of
meaning that deliberately attempt to simplify the phenomenon in question by repressing
one of its "identities".
(Ray 3)

Relying on "recent structuralist poitiques of literary discourse, with

their claim to a more value-free systematics" means accepting "scientific
holism which explicitly rejects the humanist assumptions" (Reed 73).
Such a critical stand can only, not surprisingly, lead to a desperate
rejection of systems and a rampant violation of basic beliefs in inter-
communication of meaning, which is doubted on the basis of the
assumption about the temporal character of rhetoric, which, of course,
is a system.
Now, to invoke the help of Longinus in this context of gloom and
dejection means not only to find a coveted classical authority to
support Tymieniecka's claim of finding a solution to the philosophical
and critical impasse of the present time, but indeed to discover in
Longinus an impressive resource of critical insight and vocabulary