both natural and moral—is often what occasions such episodes, both for the participant

and for the observers. Again, it is hard to be precise here, since the content of the

experiences will typically lack the structure required for them to ground a premise in an

argument, or to defeat some pre-existing belief. Merely causal rather than evidential

processes, on the other hand, are too blunt an instrument since there does seem to be an

inferential connection between, say, the overwhelming experience of all-transcending

pain at the horrendous suffering of a child, and the subsequent belief (epiphanic in some

extended sense) that God does not exist. We will have to content ourselves for now with

simply laying out the two main species of the non-theistic sublime without going into

these structural details.

4.4.1. The non-theistic sublime: evil as privation

The first species is negative in the sense that it involves relinquishing or rejecting

theistic belief in the third stage of the experience. The liberators of concentration camps

at the end of World War II were presented with scenes of human degradation that defied

understanding: reports suggest that many of them felt both terrified and transfixed in a

way that is typical of the first stage of the sublime. This feeling was followed by a sense

of incapacity to understand such evil using normal cognitive resources and, finally, by an

epiphanic endorsement of the claim that the universe is empty of sacred purpose, justice,

and goodness.35
35
For discussion of Holocaust reports in this connection, see Giles Deleuze, Coldness

and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books, 1991), and Peter Haidu, “The Dialectics of

Unspeakability” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedlander

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 277-299.

35