I.i. Supplement: The Ebbing of the Sublime and Private Experience—Zombieland Saga and VTubers
The Chinese original is approximately 10,300 characters long.
0. Introduction
Among last October’s anime, Zombieland Saga was undoubtedly the surprise hit. Episode 6 contains a particularly suggestive sequence. After Junko, a Shōwa-era idol, clashes with Heisei-era idol Ai Mizuno over their ideas of what an idol should be, the word “idol” that Junko has written on the beach is washed away by the waves in an instant. In light of episodes 6 and 7, the image’s significance is obvious. The Shōwa style of idol—striving to perfect one’s abilities and maintaining a distance from the audience—has “ebbed” with the changing times.
The fiercely competitive “warring-states era” of idols has already become part of the backdrop to our times. Idols who move closer to everyday life are now a familiar sight. Today, the fresher and more interesting topic is the warring-states era of VTubers. These performers clearly have an idol side to them. Famous VTubers, particularly those at the level of the “Boss” and the “Four Heavenly Kings,” have already begun to distinguish themselves as idols for a virtual age. Yet the difference between VTubers and traditional idols is far greater than that between Heisei and Shōwa idols. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” was a popular saying when the internet was still in its infancy. We might similarly describe the distinctive feature of VTubers as: “When you’re a VTuber, nobody knows whether you’re a 38-year-old guy or a cute 19-year-old girl with an adorable voice.” A VTuber need not even have a cute voice. Overidea’s famous headmaster Zhang Jinghua (Kyouka), a “DD” who loves just about every idol, has shown how, in just a few months, hundreds or thousands of fans devoted exclusively to Cierra can become fans devoted exclusively to the headmaster. Besides, if all else fails, there’s always a voice changer.
Suppose we understand an idol, broadly, as a performer who provides entertainment—and a certain kind of spiritual strength—through their own performances, with that entertainment bound to a particular individual. The historical shift from Shōwa idols to VTubers then makes clear how much the threshold for becoming an idol has fallen. The question that follows is how we should understand this change. There are two sides to that task. On the one hand, this change undoubtedly reflects a shift in what idols themselves, or the consumers who pay for them, pursue; we need to explain what that pursuit is. On the other, understanding often involves comparison and evaluation. How should we evaluate the changes in needs and experiences from Shōwa idols to VTubers?
Subtitle: “Your line had the most people in it! Don’t you understand?”
Forms of entertainment that carry cultural content can never be separated from aesthetics. For the first part of the question, I will treat the aspirations of idols and audiences as demands for aesthetic value, and view the historical shift through the contemporary condition of “the sublime” as an aesthetic value. For the second, I will draw on R. W. Sellars’s concept of “the Given”1 to approach the problem and offer an account of the common-sense belief that we ought to pursue the sublime. As times change, the value of the sublime seems to have ebbed in the contemporary world. Private experience has become the sole basis for our criticism, but cannot by itself give our claims external reliability. As I suggested in Anime Metacriticism I: Critical Expression as a Problem, criticism should be a defense of experience; reliability divorced from experience is an illusory aspiration. Nevertheless, the Given of beauty can indeed serve as both a ground for argument and an aim of practice in questions such as “X is a better idol” or “X is a better anime.”
1. The Sublime and Sublime People
Many texts identify the disintegration of “grand narratives” as a key feature of postmodernity. Projected onto aesthetic tastes in literature and art, this might suggest that the sublime, as an aesthetic value, has ebbed in our time. There are many definitions and interpretations of “the sublime” or “the feeling of sublimity,” but they share certain characteristic aesthetic images: enormous ocean waves, towering mountains, seas of cloud around their peaks, or famous buildings such as ancient Rome’s Pantheon, the Colossus of Rhodes, and Beijing’s Forbidden City. The beautiful and the sublime are often set alongside each other for comparison. We usually call a lakeside scene on a fine, sunny day beautiful, and the ceaseless rush of great rivers sublime. This simple contrast brings out some features of the sublime as an aesthetic value: immense spatial scale, temporal extension, violent movement and change, and so forth.
Sublime objects always give us a shock of something beyond ourselves. In Kant’s Critique of Judgment, this shock arises because human beings, as aesthetic subjects, cannot grasp such objects through sensibility and understanding. Sublime things exceed the limits of human cognition, all laws and common sense; in substance, they negate the aesthetic subject itself. The aesthetic pleasure of the sublime comes precisely from the opposition and conflict produced by this negation. When a tiny human being stands somewhere safe and watches an enormous wave approach from afar, the aesthetic subject first feels fear of this ungraspable thing. But once that fear is overcome, the tiny human being begins to struggle against the wave, even to defeat it. The aesthetic experience of the sublime is a dynamic process. We do not experience beauty’s pleasure the instant we see the object. The feeling of sublimity arises only when we enter into an interaction with it.
In artistic creation, the sublime more often takes the form of sublime people. Here I would prefer to say that a sublime person surpasses ordinary people in the lifeworld. This is not something ordinary people cannot understand; it is something they find difficult to match in action. Prometheus is sublime because we can understand his intention to bring fire and wisdom to humanity, but ordinary people, faced with unending suffering, would not make his choice. Kratos, the protagonist of the God of War series, is not sublime. We can understand his desire for revenge against the Olympian gods, but if ordinary people possessed his divine powers, setting out on a journey of revenge would not be an impossible choice. Some people with severe mental illnesses cannot be called sublime either. They may leap from a height of dozens of meters, but we cannot understand why they do so.
The sublime has always been present in modern literature, art, and entertainment. In Legend of the Galactic Heroes, for instance, history unfolds through the collision of the two most sublime souls in the galaxy. From his determination to rebel against the Goldenbaum dynasty to his clearing away the old Empire’s entrenched ills, from the establishment of the Lohengramm dynasty to his death from illness in Welserd Palace, Reinhard accomplishes a feat unmatched for centuries through a will ordinary people can scarcely approach. Yang Wen-li’s sublimity, by contrast, lies not in the legend of the undefeated “Yang the Magician,” but in his persistence: even knowing that democracy’s tenets pale beside the splendor of the new Galactic Empire, he holds on at Iserlohn Fortress to leave humanity another possible choice. Another example is the distinctive style of GAINAX and Trigger. At least before 2018, anime fans consistently praised their audacity: “Start with a bicycle; finish with a planet-destroying warship.” Whether it is a drill breaking through the heavens or a war spanning twelve thousand years, these modern myths embody a sublimity beyond ordinary people.
2. Idols and VTubers: The Contemporary Condition of the Sublime
Human beings have always loved sublime qualities. They have modeled temple statues on the bodies of sublime people, drawn on memories or imaginings of them to create texts to be passed down, and staged tragedy after comedy from their lives. In the premodern sense, an “idol” worshipped in the form of a statue was often synonymous with a sublime person. In contemporary entertainment with cultural content, however, the word “idol” is rarely easy to associate directly with the sublime. The idols who most readily come to mind are people like these: they make a profession of giving people entertainment and pleasure, mainly through singing or dancing, and generally sell recordings of their performances; most are handsome or beautiful, or at least have distinctive looks that do not repel; they maintain relatively stable public personae, shaped to some degree by management companies; their performance content is closely bound to the individual who is the idol, so that people pay more for that individual’s act of performing than for the content itself; they often have a group of passionate fans with their own internal norms; and so on.
In contemporary society, we do not usually call providers of entertainment sublime unless we believe their entertainment has attained an irreplaceable artistic influence. Take singing idols. Elvis Presley’s private conduct is hard to commend, but the pioneering character and influence of his work are beyond doubt. Modern society therefore continues to heap honors upon him. These honors symbolize, to some extent, the idol’s sublime qualities. Presley’s sublimity is embodied in his music: ordinary people like us have been able to appreciate it for decades, but few in those decades have approached his musical talent. In this sense, idols who provide entertainment can also possess sublime qualities. What they contend against is not a tangible entity, but the limits of human talent in a particular field. Not every idol is capable of approaching those limits, of course. But at least the profession involves, to some extent, an effort in that direction.2 An idol’s sublimity thus exists on two distinct levels, which need not coexist. One is the sublimity contained in the performances the idol provides, comparable to the sublime in artworks as traditionally understood. The other is the sublimity embodied in the idol’s actions: surpassing ordinary people in various respects, and pursuing that achievement.
Of course, these sublime qualities of idols already seem, to some extent, to belong to another age. The clash between Shōwa and Heisei ideals in episode 6 of Zombieland Saga thus touches obliquely on the contemporary condition of the sublime.3 Junko, the Shōwa idol, often asks in the early episodes, “Will this satisfy the customers?” This line reveals a fundamental difference between the two eras. For Junko, an idol should strive constantly to improve and present the audience with a perfect performance, at least within the limits of her abilities. For Ai Mizuno, who grew up in the idol warring-states era, “ten years of practice for one minute onstage” is an ideal almost out of touch with the times. An idol group that fails to seize its opportunities promptly has no chance of success. In practical terms, Ai is right. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, audiences do not mind an imperfect performance. We might even say they prefer one. That imperfection seems to suggest that idols and audiences are not fundamentally different: both are ordinary people with nothing exceptional about them. The high point of a life represented by “the idol at center stage” is therefore something any ordinary person can pursue. Imperfection also leaves room for growth. Under these circumstances, viewers see themselves not merely as consumers paying for a service, but as companions throughout an idol’s career.
Subtitle: “So it doesn’t matter even if your abilities fall short?”
The clash between these two eras’ ideals actually comes from different answers to a deeper question: should idols pursue the sublime? Junko’s thinking implies an affirmative answer. Since audience members, as customers, have paid for an idol’s performance, the idol needs to give the best performance she can. A professional idol must therefore distinguish herself from ordinary people. If an idol can offer only performances ordinary people could give too, why should audiences pay? Perhaps this partly explains why Junko always maintains a distance from her audience. Junko herself probably cannot be called sublime as an idol, but her ideal of the profession intrinsically includes the pursuit of the sublime. That pursuit may even be the idol’s lifeblood. Heisei-era Ai Mizuno would not necessarily reject Junko’s ideal altogether. Nevertheless, this pursuit of the sublime is clearly out of step with the times—I mean that neutrally—and is not necessary for contemporary idols. In Ai’s view, although Heisei idols no longer strive for perfection in performance as idols once did, they can still perform with all their might and convey enthusiasm and dreams to the audience. In this, they are no different from Shōwa idols.
If the difference between Shōwa and Heisei idols is that the former actively pursue the sublime while the latter pay little attention to its aesthetic value, then the VTubers who have appeared over the last two or three years have carried entertainment with cultural content still deeper into the world of ordinary people. However much Heisei idols advertise the absence of any distance between themselves and ordinary life, most are at least not really ordinary-looking. VTubers, who have no physical bodies, are entirely different—two-dimensional people. Popular sayings often elevate an “interesting soul” above a “good-looking exterior.” Sufficiently interesting content may indeed win a loyal following, but good looks often determine how much attention people pay to an idol in the first place. People tend to underestimate how much they care about appearance.
In principle, the VTuber form eliminates every barrier of appearance: a VTuber’s avatar is, after all, entirely a human-made creation. And with numerous mature technological solutions already available, becoming a VTuber is not especially difficult for most people. In a sense, the brief two years of the VTuber boom also show a further divergence in the pursuit of the sublime. As Kagura Mea puts it, “The people at the top of the VTuber world are all really smart.” Once a “good-looking exterior” is something everyone possesses, competition over who can provide more entertaining streams and videos grows fiercer still. Devoting oneself to improving content is actually an effort in the Shōwa-idol mold. The difference is that the entertaining content offered by many top VTubers is the product of teamwork, rather than an individual’s pursuit of achievement beyond ordinary people. For a VTuber run by a company, the performer behind the avatar certainly provides its indispensable soul. But the pursuit of the sublime—the effort to be “entertaining” beyond what ordinary people can achieve—becomes a group’s joint action. In this sense, many successful VTubers represent the personification of teamwork. It may be appropriate here to draw on Margaret Gilbert’s work: a VTuber is, in essence, a “plural subject,” an agent extending beyond the individual that pursues sublimity in being “entertaining.”
The rise of supposedly “pure and wholesome,” or seiso, VTubers such as Kagura Mea—hereafter Mea—in Chinese anime, manga, and game communities also represents another answer to the pursuit of the sublime. Every one of Mea’s “tengu,” as her fans are called, can reel off her “misdeeds”: abandoning her persona in her very first stream; her now-legendary jerking-off skills; frequent vulgar talk about everything below the belt; her habitual shouting and abuse of viewers while streaming; unabashed demands for their money. Of course, every tengu can also name plenty of moments when Mea really is wholesome: her singing segments, apart from “The Disease Called Love”; her sobs while watching Titanic together; her views on money and preferential treatment; what she says about everyday worries during chat streams; and so forth.
Although VTubers are developing in highly diverse directions, Mea’s performance style still seems unusual beside that of other VTubers. We might even find it difficult to say whether this “trash maid” has really tried to perform anything at all—apart from acting cute when money comes in. Many popular VTubers need not make their streams or videos as formulaic in style as a stage performance, but they are still performing within a certain framework. There are plenty of obvious examples: adopting a particular performance voice for a stream, or planning and preparing content to some degree. By comparison, Mea’s streams seem almost entirely made up of doing as she pleases and acting on impulse. If the VTubers at the top, by committing themselves to entertaining content, necessarily pursue a sublimity of “entertaining” that surpasses ordinary people, then Mea and perhaps many similarly niche VTubers have abandoned even this level of sublimity. They really are ordinary people. They have no exceptional ability to make their performance content entertaining—at least, that is how it appears. If the VTuber form removes the barrier that traditional idols’ exceptional looks place before ordinary people, VTubers such as Mea seem to suggest that an “interesting soul” devoted to devising entertaining content is unnecessary too. Both the existence of Kagura Mea anti-fan threads and the painfully slow growth of her YouTube subscriber count seem to corroborate this indirectly. At least for many viewers just passing through, her performances are not particularly entertaining, and may even be repellent. As Mea says of her popularity, “I just got lucky.” Perhaps the tengu were already a group whose tastes coincided in certain respects, and fate brought them together with Mea, the VTuber best suited to them.
So far, I have tried to follow “the pursuit of achievement beyond ordinary people” through three comparisons: Shōwa and Heisei idols, traditional idols and VTubers, and other highly popular VTubers and Kagura Mea. This has been a less-than-rigorous account of the contemporary condition of the sublime as an aesthetic value. In general, if we see VTubers as an extension of idols into the virtual world, the sublime has continually lost ground in the evolution of contemporary idols. For clarity, the diagram below borrows the form of Plato’s Divided Line, arranging Shōwa idols, Heisei idols, highly popular VTubers, and niche VTubers such as Kagura Mea according to the standing of the sublime. Its aesthetic value receives less and less emphasis from left to right. Within each of the two larger categories—traditional idols and VTubers—the right-hand subgroup abandons a level of sublimity pursued by the left-hand subgroup:
We can, of course, anticipate a reasonable objection. If Mea has rapidly become popular in Chinese anime, manga, and game communities, that popularity itself shows she has exceptional qualities, and in some contexts those qualities can be called sublime. This objection, based on causal attribution, actually comes from the common-sense belief that “everything happens for a reason.” I do not intend to discuss the problems with that belief here. Instead, I want to raise this question: if Mea’s success in China really does show that she has exceptional qualities, for whom are they exceptional?
“Exceptional qualities” viewed through aesthetic experience differ from facts such as “diamond is harder than graphite.” The former necessarily involve qualities deemed exceptional by an aesthetic subject. Obviously, Mea’s exceptional qualities are exceptional to her fans. Answers of this kind have long carried an underlying philosophical anxiety: can “better,” on an aesthetic scale, possess external reliability? This anxiety also takes us toward a practical question: in entertainment that carries cultural content, how can we evaluate the pursuit or abandonment of the sublime within a shared framework?
3. The Given of Beauty and External Reliability
Let us return to more familiar examples. One view holds that China’s film and television market has begun to mature over the last two years because audiences’ tastes have improved. Young male heartthrobs with huge followings no longer guarantee commercial success. Audiences are more willing to see seasoned actors with superb skills, and prefer film and television made well in every respect. Chinese even has specific labels distinguishing “skilled performers” from “idol stars.” People tend to assume that singers or actors called idols lack outstanding vocal or acting skills. Singers and actors with ambitions for their careers may themselves go to considerable lengths to avoid being seen as idols, even if that is how they debuted. At least in our culture, performers valued for their craft receive greater approval. People show considerable respect for those who pursue excellence in the different areas of the performing arts. Sometimes that respect even incorporates moral value. “Distinguished in both character and art,” for instance, is among our highest compliments to an artist. Yet the moral excellence implied by this phrase often refers not to general moral actions, but simply to the artist’s concentration, drive, and pursuit of excellence in performance—often accompanied by keeping a low profile outside their artistic life. These examples clearly show our approval of the sublime and its pursuit. I believe this exists in many societies: praise of the “craftsman’s spirit,” enthusiasm for family-run workshops passed down through generations, or simply admiration for people who take something to its highest level.
Admittedly, “Someone is sublime” is a constructed social fact. But at least in public discourse, this fact is not constructed arbitrarily. We always draw on relatively nonsubjective, nonprivate facts to construct a relationship between a person and sublimity. Suppose actor Z has spent a lifetime performing Monkey roles and has developed skills so extraordinary that they far exceed what ordinary people can imagine. The relevant community will recognize him as sublime in his acting, thus constructing the social fact “Z is sublime.” The key to this process is that a statement about sublimity points to an external fact: the fact of Z’s acting skills, or, more concretely, his actual performances on particular occasions. This process of construction has nothing to do with the well-worn question of “the reality of beauty.” It concerns only whether our assertions about the sublime have grounds outside ourselves.
The preceding discussion of Mea, however, reveals another side beyond this cultural consensus. As Mea’s tengu, we can directly experience her exceptional qualities as pointing toward the sublime, while passersby may not feel them. This kind of phenomenon is widespread, yet our approval of the sublime is shared. Thus, as in the objection at the end of the previous section, the tengu invoke common-sense causal attribution: if Mea can attract so many devoted viewers, she must possess exceptional qualities that point toward the sublime. The question is whether, as with “Z is sublime,” we can construct facts such as “Mea is sublime” on the basis of external facts. Put more clearly: when we say Mea has some exceptional quality pointing toward the sublime, does that statement have external reliability?
Some of the philosopher Sellars’s arguments will be useful here. Sellars proposes that traditional empiricism suffers from the “Myth of the Given.” Traditional empiricism holds that at least some of the simplest empirical observations are self-authenticating, reliably reflect the external world, and precede language. Provided we follow the correct rules of language use, these observations can be accurately converted into linguistic propositions that constitute knowledge. A proposition then inherits the reliability of the observation itself; in this sense, empirical observation justifies knowledge. Sellars, however, points out that this empiricist picture of observation is a myth. Our empirical observations are already permeated by language. When we report an observation such as “There is a red flower here,” it is at least because the world has already been divided, through our language, in such a way as to distinguish the object “red flower.” Nor is the relationship between language and the world a simple correspondence. We cannot make someone truly understand red simply by pointing to a red flower and saying “This is red.” Actual language learning makes this especially clear. When an ordinary visitor sees expressions specific to Bilibili’s culture of scrolling on-screen comments, or danmu, they cannot immediately understand them. Yet even without studying for an exam on danmu vocabulary, they can come to understand those expressions by watching large numbers of Bilibili videos with these comments enabled.
What interests me is that the concept of “the Given” itself can serve as a useful tool for this discussion.4 In my view, the Given differs from experience, observation, grounds, and the other things that can defend a statement. This is also true of the problem discussed here. The Given is something that comes from the world outside the mind and has a causal connection with linguistic expression, although we find that connection difficult to articulate in language itself. In the discussion above, the tengu’s aesthetic experience of Mea is likewise difficult to articulate, at least in terms of external reliability, but it does have a causal connection with her exceptional qualities. In this sense, when we say “X is sublime,” discussing the statement’s external reliability is actually a matter of discussing how it can appeal to the relevant Given in the external world, and thereby be constructed as a social fact. I call the Given appealed to in this process of construction “the Given of beauty,” to distinguish it from the subject matter of empiricism or epistemology. For the purposes of this inquiry, we can partly accept the “Myth of the Given”: the belief that relatively vague experience lends reliability to a proposition is, after all, a common-sense one.
The concept of the Given of beauty lets us think further about the difference between the undisputed social fact “Z is sublime” and the statement “Mea is sublime,” arrived at by causal inference. In the former case, Z’s specific performances on specific occasions are instances of the Given of beauty. They are not subjective experiences. Under certain established evaluative systems, they are recognized as excellent, exceptional, consummate. Z is therefore indeed sublime in his acting. In the latter case, Mea’s tengu actually refuse to provide this kind of Given of beauty. We know that most of her performance content cannot be considered entertaining within evaluative systems outside the tengu community. So when we think Mea has exceptional qualities, we can only retreat to private experience. Private experience, however, cannot itself provide external reliability.
4. Conclusion: Prior Private Experience
The analysis in this article has argued for the following view: once we abandon an appeal to the Given of beauty in our critical expressions, we also abandon our claims’ external reliability. Even if we are hopelessly drawn to a VTuber like Mea, we cannot make statements such as “Mea is sublime” on the basis of private experience alone. Indeed, it is difficult to derive any externally reliable statement from experience alone.
The same anxiety runs through the entire historical shift from Shōwa idols to the VTuber warring-states era. Abandoning the sublime as a value to pursue has a consequence: critical expressions such as “X is better than Y,” “X is very entertaining,” and “X is very appealing” have all more or less degenerated into tautological restatements of private experience. This suggests a possibility. In our era, perhaps a work of art would do better to rely on luck to coincide with some people’s preferences in private experience than to strive to surpass the ordinary in particular respects. After all, every critical expression ultimately rests only on direct private experience; pursuing excellence therefore does not necessarily bring more favorable judgments.
Yet there is a real cultural consensus that pursuing the sublime deserves approval. How, then, should we explain this contradiction? One explanation common in everyday discourse takes actors as its example. The craft-oriented actor and the idol star belong to different kinds, and we have different expectations of them. Actors valued for their craft must strive for acting skills beyond the ordinary, and bring passion and dedication to their profession. They should pursue the sublime. For idol actors, this is not necessarily required. From here, people often go on to say that craft-oriented actors deserve respect and enjoy longer careers, reflecting the public’s consistent, enduring desire for good actors, and so forth. Idol actors, by contrast, merely “live off their youth.” They frequently steal the limelight in public, but people soon tire of mass-produced young heartthrobs who offer nothing but looks, and their careers quickly end.
I find this explanation deeply unsatisfactory, though I am not a fan of any idol. The problem is that it seems to imply a kind of aesthetic realism. A good actor’s career may span decades in which every aspect of society is continually changing, yet the standards for good and bad acting supposedly remain unchanged. Those standards are also tacitly known to large numbers of ordinary viewers, allowing them consistently to expect good actors and good acting. Idol actors, by contrast, have only their looks to recommend them. Once people tire of those looks, they recognize the fact that the actors’ skills are not excellent and lose interest. This explanation seems to suggest that prior, real systems of value exist independently of social construction, and that these alone provide the frame of reference for our criticism.
If acting ability is indeed a social object within aesthetics, it is hard to accept this realism. Both differences between societies and cultures at a given time and their changes over time show that beauty has many different meanings in different contexts. What reason, then, do we have to say that the system for evaluating acting remains unchanged?
To understand the pursuit of the sublime, we must return to private experience, because only private experience varies with the contexts of different eras and cultures. Yet, as explained above, private experience cannot itself supply a critical expression with external reliability. A reasonable explanation must therefore consider exactly what place private experience occupies in the social construction of the sublime. We need to see this fact clearly: private experience is indeed self-authenticating and cannot be articulated any further, but it does causally influence which things from the external world we regard as the Given of beauty that supplies external reliability. Constructing the social fact “Z is sublime” requires the Given of beauty as an external guarantee. But the social fact itself is not independent of private experience. We do not put the Given of beauty into some evaluative system to construct externally reliable facts. Rather, we start from prior private experience, collect the corresponding Given of beauty, and integrate those instances into a system adequate to sustain the process of social construction. This conclusion can be extended to critical expression more generally: our critical expressions do not truly follow any evaluative system; they merely seek any possible defense of our private experience.
The defense of private experience bridges the apparent divide between the ebbing of the sublime and the cultural consensus in favor of pursuing it. At least in literature and art, surpassing ordinary people at any level is anchored in the confirmation of private experience. Private experience cannot itself serve as grounds for claiming such achievement in a particular respect. It does, however, causally lead us to invoke, modify, or even create evaluative systems, which themselves participate in a wider network of interactions. From Shōwa idols to VTubers, the sublime has ebbed, but it never leaves the stage. Fragmented private experiences are giving the sublime new defenses. In this sense, everyone is sublime.
Editor’s Note
Let me add a point by way of interpretation: private experience varies with the contexts of different eras and cultures. It is not an essence, not an atom. Private experience is not meant to abolish the sublime. Finally, a plug for a virtual idol I personally like:
A cappella: “Ren’ai Circulation” (“Love Circulation”)
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