Sublime (philosophy)
Encyclopedia
In aesthetics
, the sublime (from the Latin
sublīmis) is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.
: Peri Hupsous/Hypsous or On the Sublime. This is thought to have been written in the 1st century AD though its origin and authorship are uncertain. For Longinus, the sublime is an adjective that describes great, elevated, or lofty thought or language, particularly in the context of rhetoric
. As such, the sublime inspires awe and veneration, with greater persuasive powers. Longinus' treatise is also notable for referencing not just Greek writers such as Homer
but also biblical sources such as Genesis.
This treatise was rediscovered in the 16th century, and its subsequent impact on aesthetics is usually attributed to its translation into French by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
in 1674. Later the treatise was translated into English by John Pultney in 1680, Leonard Welsted
in 1712, and William Smith
in 1739 whose translation had its fifth edition in 1800.
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The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury
, and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's
synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator
, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps
and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.
John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair". Shaftesbury had made the journey two years prior to Dennis but did not publish his comments until 1709 in the Moralists. His comments on the experience also reflected pleasure and repulsion, citing a "wasted mountain" that showed itself to the world as a "noble ruin" (Part III, Sec. 1, 390–91), but his concept of the sublime in relation to beauty was one of degree rather than the sharp contradistinction that Dennis developed into a new form of literary criticism. Shaftesbury's writings reflect more of a regard for the awe of the infinity of space ("Space astonishes" referring to the Alps), where the sublime was not an aesthetic quality in opposition to beauty, but a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty. In referring to the Earth as a "Mansion-Globe" and "Man-Container" Shaftsbury writes "How narrow then must it appear compar'd with the capacious System of its own Sun...tho animated with a sublime Celestial Spirit...." (Part III, sec. 1, 373).
Joseph Addison embarked on the Grand Tour
in 1699 and commented in Remarks on Several Parts of Italy etc. that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror". The significance of Addison's concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified; greatness, uncommonness, and beauty, "arise from visible objects" (that is, from sight rather than from rhetoric). It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime", but uses terms that would be considered as absolutive superlatives, e.g. "unbounded", "unlimited", as well as "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess.
Addison's notion of greatness was integral to the concept of the sublime. An art object could be beautiful but it could not rise to greatness. His work Pleasures of the Imagination, as well as Mark Akenside's
Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), and Edward Young's
Night Thoughts
(1745), are generally considered as the starting points for Burke's analysis.
concept of the sublime was developed in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1756). Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, but antithetical to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction.
Burke's concept of the sublime was an antithetical contrast to the classical notion of the aesthetic quality of beauty as the pleasurable experience described by Plato
in several of his dialogues (Philebus
, Ion
, Hippias Major
, and Symposium
) and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality in its capacity to instill feelings of intense emotion, ultimately creating a pleasurable experience. Prior to Burke, the classical notion of the ugly, most notably related in the writings of Augustine of Hippo
, had conceived it as lacking form and therefore as non-existent. Beauty was, for St. Augustine, the consequence of the benevolence and goodness of God's creation, and as a category had no opposite. The ugly, lacking any attributive value, was a formlessness in its absence of beauty. For Aristotle
the function of art forms was to create pleasure, and had first pondered the problem of an object of art representing the ugly as producing "pain." Aristotle's detailed analysis of this problem involves his study of tragic literature and its paradoxical nature to be shocking as well as having poetic value.
Burke's treatise is also notable for focusing on the physiological effects for the sublime, in particular the dual emotional quality of fear and attraction noted by other writers. Burke described the sensation attributed to the sublime as a 'negative pain' which he called delight, and which is distinct from positive pleasure. Delight is taken to result from the removal of pain (caused by confronting the sublime object) and is supposedly more intense than positive pleasure. Though Burke's explanations for the physiological effects of the sublime experience (such as tension resulting from eye strain) were not taken seriously by later writers, his empiricist method of reporting from his own psychological experience was more influential, especially in contrast to Kant's analysis. Burke is also distinguished from Kant in his emphasis on the subject's realization of his physical limitations rather than any supposed sense of moral or spiritual transcendence.
Reference: How Burke's profound ideas of the sublime are still used today - http://schoolcommunicationarts.com/18112011-2/
Kant, in 1764, made an attempt to record his thoughts on the observing subject's mental state in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
.
In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant investigates the sublime, stating "We call that sublime which is absolutely great"(§ 25). He distinguishes between the "remarkable differences" of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness" (§ 23). Kant then further divides the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamical, where in the mathematical "aesthetical comprehension" is not a consciousness of a mere greater unit, but the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations (§ 27). The dynamically sublime is "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us", and an object can create a fearfulness "without being afraid of it" (§ 28). He considers both the beautiful and the sublime as "indefinite" concepts, but where beauty relates to the "Understanding", sublime is a concept belonging to "Reason", and "shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense" (§ 25). For Kant, one's inability to grasp the enormity of a sublime event such as an earthquake demonstrates inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability to subsequently identify such an event as singular and whole indicates the superiority of one's cognitive, supersensible powers. Ultimately, it is this "supersensible substrate," underlying both nature and thought, on which true sublimity is located.
, § 39.
For him, the feeling of the beautiful is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer.
in terms of their political structures and more fearful of divine law
. According to his reasoning, this meant that oriental artists were more inclined towards the aesthetic and the sublime: they could engage god only through 'sublated'
means. He believed that the excess of intricate detail that is characteristic of Chinese art
, or the dazzling metrical patterns characteristic of Islamic art
, were typical examples of the sublime and argued that the disembodiment and formlessness of these art forms inspired the viewer with an overwhelming aesthetic sense of awe.
touched on aspects of the sublime in both nature and man in many of his poems (Poems of Victor Hugo
). In his preface to Cromwell
, he defined the sublime as a combination of the grotesque and beautiful as opposed to the classical ideal of perfection. He also dealt with how authors and artists could create the sublime through art. Both the Hunchback and Notre Dame Cathedral can be considered embodiments of the sublime as can many elements of Les Misérables.
At the beginning of the 20th century Neo-Kantian German philosopher and theorist of aesthetics Max Dessoir
founded the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, which he edited for many years, and published the work Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in which he formulated five primary aesthetic forms: the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly, and the comic.
The experience of the sublime involves a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might, and is similar to the experience of the tragic. The "tragic consciousness" is the capacity to gain an exalted state of consciousness from the realization of the unavoidable suffering destined for all men and that there are oppositions in life that can never be resolved, most notably that of the "forgiving generosity of deity" subsumed to "inexorable fate".
Thomas Weiskel re-examined Kant's aesthetics and the Romantic conception of the sublime through the prism of semiotic theory
and psychoanalysis
. He argued that Kant's 'mathematical' sublime' could be seen in semiotic terms as the presence of an excess of signifiers
, a monotonous infinity threatens to dissolve all oppositions and distinctions. The 'dynamic sublime', on the other hand, was an excess of signifieds: meaning was always overdetermined.
According to Jean-François Lyotard
, the sublime, as a theme in aesthetics, was the founding move of the Modernist period. Lyotard argued that the modernists attempted to replace the beautiful with the release of the perceiver from the constraints of the human condition. For him, the sublime's significance is in the way it points to an aporia
in human reason; it expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world.
According to Mario Costa
, the concept of the sublime should be examined first of all in relation to the epochal novelty of the digital technologies, and the technological artistic production: new media art, computer-based generative art, networking, telecommunication art. For him, the new technologies are creating conditions for a new kind of sublime: the technological sublime. The traditional categories of aesthetics (beauty, meaning, expression, feeling) are being replaced by the notion of the sublime, which after being natural in the XVIII century, and metropolitan-industrial in the modern era, has now become technological.
There has also been some resurgence of interest in the sublime in analytic philosophy in the last 15 years, with occasional articles in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and The British Journal of Aesthetics, as well as monographs by writers such as Malcolm Budd, James Kirwan and Kirk Pillow. As in the postmodern or critical theory tradition, analytic philosophical studies often begin with accounts of Kant or other philosophers of the 18th or early 19th centuries.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
, the sublime (from the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
sublīmis) is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.
Ancient philosophy
The first known study of the sublime is ascribed to LonginusLonginus (literature)
Longinus is the conventional name of the author of the treatise, On the Sublime , a work which focuses on the effect of good writing. Longinus, sometimes referred to as Pseudo-Longinus because his real name is unknown, was a Greek teacher of rhetoric or a literary critic who may have lived in the...
: Peri Hupsous/Hypsous or On the Sublime. This is thought to have been written in the 1st century AD though its origin and authorship are uncertain. For Longinus, the sublime is an adjective that describes great, elevated, or lofty thought or language, particularly in the context of rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
. As such, the sublime inspires awe and veneration, with greater persuasive powers. Longinus' treatise is also notable for referencing not just Greek writers such as Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
but also biblical sources such as Genesis.
This treatise was rediscovered in the 16th century, and its subsequent impact on aesthetics is usually attributed to its translation into French by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux was a French poet and critic.-Biography:Boileau was born in the rue de Jérusalem, in Paris, France. He was brought up to the law, but devoted to letters, associating himself with La Fontaine, Racine, and Molière...
in 1674. Later the treatise was translated into English by John Pultney in 1680, Leonard Welsted
Leonard Welsted
Leonard Welsted was an English poet and "dunce" in Alexander Pope's writings . Welsted was an accomplished writer who composed in a relaxed, light hearted vein...
in 1712, and William Smith
William Smith (scholar)
Very Revd. Dr William Smith , Dean of Chester, Greek and Latin scholar.Smith was born in Worcester in 1711, the son of the rector of St Nicholas' Church. He was sent to RGS Worcester after which he proceeded to New College, Oxford in 1728. He remained here for many years gaining four degrees...
in 1739 whose translation had its fifth edition in 1800.
British philosophy
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury was an English politician, philosopher and writer.-Biography:...
, and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's
Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. He was a man of letters, eldest son of Lancelot Addison...
synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator
The Spectator (1711)
The Spectator was a daily publication of 1711–12, founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England after they met at Charterhouse School. Eustace Budgell, a cousin of Addison's, also contributed to the publication. Each 'paper', or 'number', was approximately 2,500 words long, and the...
, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps
Alps
The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....
and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.
John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair". Shaftesbury had made the journey two years prior to Dennis but did not publish his comments until 1709 in the Moralists. His comments on the experience also reflected pleasure and repulsion, citing a "wasted mountain" that showed itself to the world as a "noble ruin" (Part III, Sec. 1, 390–91), but his concept of the sublime in relation to beauty was one of degree rather than the sharp contradistinction that Dennis developed into a new form of literary criticism. Shaftesbury's writings reflect more of a regard for the awe of the infinity of space ("Space astonishes" referring to the Alps), where the sublime was not an aesthetic quality in opposition to beauty, but a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty. In referring to the Earth as a "Mansion-Globe" and "Man-Container" Shaftsbury writes "How narrow then must it appear compar'd with the capacious System of its own Sun...tho animated with a sublime Celestial Spirit...." (Part III, sec. 1, 373).
Joseph Addison embarked on the Grand Tour
Grand Tour
The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transit in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage...
in 1699 and commented in Remarks on Several Parts of Italy etc. that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror". The significance of Addison's concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified; greatness, uncommonness, and beauty, "arise from visible objects" (that is, from sight rather than from rhetoric). It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime", but uses terms that would be considered as absolutive superlatives, e.g. "unbounded", "unlimited", as well as "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess.
Addison's notion of greatness was integral to the concept of the sublime. An art object could be beautiful but it could not rise to greatness. His work Pleasures of the Imagination, as well as Mark Akenside's
Mark Akenside
Mark Akenside was an English poet and physician.Akenside was born at Newcastle upon Tyne, England, the son of a butcher. He was slightly lame all his life from a wound he received as a child from his father's cleaver...
Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), and Edward Young's
Edward Young
Edward Young was an English poet, best remembered for Night Thoughts.-Early life:He was the son of Edward Young, later Dean of Salisbury, and was born at his father's rectory at Upham, near Winchester, where he was baptized on 3 July 1683. He was educated at Winchester College, and matriculated...
Night Thoughts
Night Thoughts (poem)
The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality, better known simply as Night-Thoughts, is a long poem by Edward Young published in nine parts between 1742 and 1745.The poem is written in blank verse...
(1745), are generally considered as the starting points for Burke's analysis.
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke'sEdmund Burke
Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
concept of the sublime was developed in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a 1757 treatise on aesthetics written by Edmund Burke. It attracted the attention of prominent Continental thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant....
(1756). Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, but antithetical to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction.
Burke's concept of the sublime was an antithetical contrast to the classical notion of the aesthetic quality of beauty as the pleasurable experience described by Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
in several of his dialogues (Philebus
Philebus
The Philebus , composed between 360 and 347 BC, is among the last of the late Socratic dialogues of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Socrates is the primary speaker in Philebus, unlike in the other late dialogues...
, Ion
Ion (dialogue)
In Plato's Ion Socrates discusses with Ion, a professional rhapsode who also lectures on Homer, the question of whether the rhapsode, a performer of poetry, gives his performance on account of his skill and knowledge or by virtue of divine possession...
, Hippias Major
Hippias Major
Hippias Major is one of the dialogues of Plato. It belongs to the Early Dialogues, written while the author was still young. Its precise date is uncertain, although a date of circa 390 BCE has been suggested...
, and Symposium
Symposium (Plato)
The Symposium is a philosophical text by Plato dated c. 385–380 BCE. It concerns itself at one level with the genesis, purpose and nature of love....
) and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality in its capacity to instill feelings of intense emotion, ultimately creating a pleasurable experience. Prior to Burke, the classical notion of the ugly, most notably related in the writings of Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...
, had conceived it as lacking form and therefore as non-existent. Beauty was, for St. Augustine, the consequence of the benevolence and goodness of God's creation, and as a category had no opposite. The ugly, lacking any attributive value, was a formlessness in its absence of beauty. For Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
the function of art forms was to create pleasure, and had first pondered the problem of an object of art representing the ugly as producing "pain." Aristotle's detailed analysis of this problem involves his study of tragic literature and its paradoxical nature to be shocking as well as having poetic value.
Burke's treatise is also notable for focusing on the physiological effects for the sublime, in particular the dual emotional quality of fear and attraction noted by other writers. Burke described the sensation attributed to the sublime as a 'negative pain' which he called delight, and which is distinct from positive pleasure. Delight is taken to result from the removal of pain (caused by confronting the sublime object) and is supposedly more intense than positive pleasure. Though Burke's explanations for the physiological effects of the sublime experience (such as tension resulting from eye strain) were not taken seriously by later writers, his empiricist method of reporting from his own psychological experience was more influential, especially in contrast to Kant's analysis. Burke is also distinguished from Kant in his emphasis on the subject's realization of his physical limitations rather than any supposed sense of moral or spiritual transcendence.
Reference: How Burke's profound ideas of the sublime are still used today - http://schoolcommunicationarts.com/18112011-2/
Immanuel Kant
See also Immanuel Kant's Aesthetic philosophyObservations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime is a 1764 book by Immanuel Kant.The first complete translation into English was published in 1799...
.
In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant investigates the sublime, stating "We call that sublime which is absolutely great"(§ 25). He distinguishes between the "remarkable differences" of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness" (§ 23). Kant then further divides the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamical, where in the mathematical "aesthetical comprehension" is not a consciousness of a mere greater unit, but the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations (§ 27). The dynamically sublime is "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us", and an object can create a fearfulness "without being afraid of it" (§ 28). He considers both the beautiful and the sublime as "indefinite" concepts, but where beauty relates to the "Understanding", sublime is a concept belonging to "Reason", and "shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense" (§ 25). For Kant, one's inability to grasp the enormity of a sublime event such as an earthquake demonstrates inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability to subsequently identify such an event as singular and whole indicates the superiority of one's cognitive, supersensible powers. Ultimately, it is this "supersensible substrate," underlying both nature and thought, on which true sublimity is located.
Schopenhauer
In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. This can be found in the first volume of his The World as Will and RepresentationThe World as Will and Representation
The World as Will and Representation is the central work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in December 1818, and the second expanded edition in 1844. In 1948, an abridged version was edited by Thomas Mann....
, § 39.
For him, the feeling of the beautiful is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer.
- Feeling of Beauty – Light is reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer).
- Weakest Feeling of Sublime – Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life).
- Weaker Feeling of Sublime – Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer).
- Sublime – Turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).
- Full Feeling of Sublime – Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).
- Fullest Feeling of Sublime – Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel considered the sublime to be a marker of cultural difference and a characteristic feature of oriental art. His teleological view of history meant that he considered 'oriental' cultures as less 'developed', more autocraticAutocracy
An autocracy is a form of government in which one person is the supreme power within the state. It is derived from the Greek : and , and may be translated as "one who rules by himself". It is distinct from oligarchy and democracy...
in terms of their political structures and more fearful of divine law
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
. According to his reasoning, this meant that oriental artists were more inclined towards the aesthetic and the sublime: they could engage god only through 'sublated'
Sublation
Sublation may refer to:*Sublation, a translation of the German term aufheben*Ritual purification, the purification or exaltation of matter by its negation or redirection...
means. He believed that the excess of intricate detail that is characteristic of Chinese art
Chinese art
Chinese art is visual art that, whether ancient or modern, originated in or is practiced in China or by Chinese artists or performers. Early so-called "stone age art" dates back to 10,000 BC, mostly consisting of simple pottery and sculptures. This early period was followed by a series of art...
, or the dazzling metrical patterns characteristic of Islamic art
Islamic art
Islamic art encompasses the visual arts produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by or ruled by culturally Islamic populations...
, were typical examples of the sublime and argued that the disembodiment and formlessness of these art forms inspired the viewer with an overwhelming aesthetic sense of awe.
Romantic period
Victor Hugo
Victor HugoVictor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
touched on aspects of the sublime in both nature and man in many of his poems (Poems of Victor Hugo
Poems of Victor Hugo
The poems of Victor Hugo captured the spirit of the Romantic era. They were largely devoted to 19th century causes. Many touched on religious themes. Initially they were royalist but soon became Bonapartist, Republican, and liberal...
). In his preface to Cromwell
Cromwell (play)
Cromwell is a play by Victor Hugo written in 1827. It was a result of the creation of the literary circle around Hugo which identified itself as Romanticist, taking Shakespeare as their model dramatist rather than the Classicist models of Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille supported by the French...
, he defined the sublime as a combination of the grotesque and beautiful as opposed to the classical ideal of perfection. He also dealt with how authors and artists could create the sublime through art. Both the Hunchback and Notre Dame Cathedral can be considered embodiments of the sublime as can many elements of Les Misérables.
Post-Romantic and twentieth century
The last decades of the 19th century saw the rise of Kunstwissenschaft, or the "science of art", which was a movement to discern laws of aesthetic appreciation and arrive at a scientific approach to aesthetic experience.At the beginning of the 20th century Neo-Kantian German philosopher and theorist of aesthetics Max Dessoir
Max Dessoir
Max Dessoir was a German philosopher and theorist of aesthetics.Dessoir was born in Berlin. He earned doctorates from the universities of Berlin and Würzburg...
founded the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, which he edited for many years, and published the work Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in which he formulated five primary aesthetic forms: the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly, and the comic.
The experience of the sublime involves a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might, and is similar to the experience of the tragic. The "tragic consciousness" is the capacity to gain an exalted state of consciousness from the realization of the unavoidable suffering destined for all men and that there are oppositions in life that can never be resolved, most notably that of the "forgiving generosity of deity" subsumed to "inexorable fate".
Thomas Weiskel re-examined Kant's aesthetics and the Romantic conception of the sublime through the prism of semiotic theory
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
and psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
. He argued that Kant's 'mathematical' sublime' could be seen in semiotic terms as the presence of an excess of signifiers
Sign (semiotics)
A sign is understood as a discrete unit of meaning in semiotics. It is defined as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" It includes words, images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds – essentially all of the ways in which information can be...
, a monotonous infinity threatens to dissolve all oppositions and distinctions. The 'dynamic sublime', on the other hand, was an excess of signifieds: meaning was always overdetermined.
According to Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
, the sublime, as a theme in aesthetics, was the founding move of the Modernist period. Lyotard argued that the modernists attempted to replace the beautiful with the release of the perceiver from the constraints of the human condition. For him, the sublime's significance is in the way it points to an aporia
Aporia
Aporia denotes, in philosophy, a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement, and, in rhetoric, a rhetorically useful expression of doubt.-Definitions:...
in human reason; it expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world.
According to Mario Costa
Mario Costa (philosopher)
Mario Costa is an Italian philosopher. He is known for his studies of the consequences of new technology in art and aesthetics, which introduced a new theoretical perspective through concepts such as the "communication aesthetics", the "technological sublime", the "communication block", and the...
, the concept of the sublime should be examined first of all in relation to the epochal novelty of the digital technologies, and the technological artistic production: new media art, computer-based generative art, networking, telecommunication art. For him, the new technologies are creating conditions for a new kind of sublime: the technological sublime. The traditional categories of aesthetics (beauty, meaning, expression, feeling) are being replaced by the notion of the sublime, which after being natural in the XVIII century, and metropolitan-industrial in the modern era, has now become technological.
There has also been some resurgence of interest in the sublime in analytic philosophy in the last 15 years, with occasional articles in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and The British Journal of Aesthetics, as well as monographs by writers such as Malcolm Budd, James Kirwan and Kirk Pillow. As in the postmodern or critical theory tradition, analytic philosophical studies often begin with accounts of Kant or other philosophers of the 18th or early 19th centuries.
Further reading
- Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. Ed. Donald E. Bond. Oxford, 1965.
- Beidler. P. G. ‘The Postmodern Sublime: Kant and Tony Smith’s Anecdote of the Cube’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Spring 1995): 177–186.
- Brady, E. ‘Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Spring 1998): 139–147.
- Brett, R.L. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury. London, 1951. ASIN: B0007IYKBU
- Budd, M. The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and BeautifulA Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and BeautifulA Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a 1757 treatise on aesthetics written by Edmund Burke. It attracted the attention of prominent Continental thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant....
. London, 1958. ISBN 0-935005-28-5 - Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of Nature. Oxford, 1945. ISBN 0-313-25166-5
- Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody, in Characteristics, Vol. II. Ed. John M. Robertson. London, 1900.
- de Bolla, P. The Discourse of the Sublime. Basil Blackwell, 1989.
- Dennis, John. Miscellanies in Verse and Prose, in Critical Works, Vol. II. Ed. Edward Niles Hooker. Baltimore, 1939–1943. ASIN: B0007E9YR4
- Dessoir, Max. Aesthetics and theory of art. Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. Translated by Stephen A. Emery. With a foreword by Thomas Munro. Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1970. ISBN 0-8143-1383-3
- Duffy, C. Shelley and the revolutionary sublime. Cambridge, 2005.
- Ferguson, F. Solitude and the Sublime: romanticism and the aesthetics of individuation. Routledge, 1992.
- Fisher, P. Wonder, the rainbow and the aesthetics of rare experiences. Harvard University Press, 1999.
- Fudge, R. S. ‘Imagination and the Science-Based Aesthetic Appreciation of Unscenic Nature’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Summer 2001): 275–285.
- Hipple, Walter John, Jr. The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. Carbondale, IL, 1957.
- Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. J.H. Bernard. Macmillan, 1951.
- Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and SublimeObservations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and SublimeObservations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime is a 1764 book by Immanuel Kant.The first complete translation into English was published in 1799...
. Translated by John T. Goldthwaite. University of California Press, 2003. ISBN 0-520-24078-2 - Kirwan, J. (2005). Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics. Routledge, 2005.
- Lyotard, Jean-François. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford University Press, 1994.
- Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1935/1960.
- Nicolson, Marjorie HopeMarjorie Hope NicolsonMarjorie Hope Nicolson , was born February 18, 1894 in Yonkers, New York, USA, the daughter of Charles Butler Nicolson, editor-in-chief of the Detroit Free Press during World War I and later that paper's correspondent in Washington, DC, and Lissie Hope Morris.She graduated from the University of...
. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. Ithaca, 1959. ISBN 0-295-97577-6 - Navon, Mois. "Sublime Tekhelet". The Writings of Mois Navon
- Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. "Sublime in External Nature". Dictionary of the History of Ideas. New York, 1974.
- Noel, J. ‘Space, Time and the Sublime in Hume’s Treatise’. British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 34, No. 3, July 1994: 218–225.
- Pillow, K. Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel. MIT Press, 2000.
- George SantayanaGeorge SantayanaGeorge Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters...
. The Sense of Beauty. Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. New York, Modern Library, 1955. Pp. 230–240. - Ryan, V. (2001). 'The physiological sublime: Burke's critique of reason'. Journal of the history of ideas, vol. 62, no. 2 (2001): 265–279.
- Saville, A. ‘Imagination and Aesthetic Value’. British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 46, No. 3, July 2006: 248–258.
- Shaw, P. The Sublime. Routledge, 2006.
- Shusterman, R. ‘Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime’. British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 45, No. 4, October 2005: 323–341.
- Sircello, GuyGuy Sircello**Guy Sircello was an American philosopher best known for his analytic approach to philosophical aesthetics.-Biography:Guy Sircello was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Irvine from 1966 until his death in 1992 at the age of 55. He earned his PhD from Columbia University...
, ‘How is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Autumn 1993): 541–550. - Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and RepresentationThe World as Will and RepresentationThe World as Will and Representation is the central work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in December 1818, and the second expanded edition in 1844. In 1948, an abridged version was edited by Thomas Mann....
. Volume I. New York: Dover Press. ISBN 0-486-21761-2 - Slocombe, Will. Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern: The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship. New York: Routledge, 2006.
- Stolnitz, Jerome. "On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory". Philosophical Quarterly, 43(2):97–113, 1961.
- Zuckert, R. ‘Awe or Envy? Herder contra Kant on the Sublime’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Summer 2003): 217–232.