Sublime (philosophy)
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In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis (exalted)) is the quality of transcendent greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual or artistic. The term especially references a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.
The first study of the value of the sublime is the treatise ascribed to Longinus: On the Sublime. For Longinus, artistic genius was the skill of metaphor. Prior to the eighteenth century sublime was a rhetoric term predominately relevant to literary criticism. Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant both investigated the subject (compare Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756, and Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764). Both men distinguished the sublime from the beautiful. Later writers tend to include the sublime in the beautiful.
Eighteenth Century
Immanuel Kant
See also Immanuel Kant's Aesthetic philosophyRomantic Period
The Romantics were essentially preoccupied by the sublime and especially by the sublime in Nature.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 Representation, § 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 a malignant object, 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).
Post Romantic and Twentieth Century
The last decades of the nineteenth 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 twentieth century Neo-Kantian German philosopher and theorist of aesthetics Max Dessoir founded the Zeitschift 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 a forgiving deity and inexorable fate.
The sublime, as a theme in aesthetics, went into a decline during the Modernist period, although experiencing somewhat of a revival in the work of Jean-François Lyotard. For Lyotard, 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.
Further reading
- Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. Ed. Donald E. Bond. Oxford, 1965.
- Brett, R.L. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury. London, 1951. ASIN: B0007IYKBU
- Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London, 1958. ISBN 0935005285
- Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of Nature. Oxford, 1945. ISBN 0313251665
- Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody, in Characteristics, Vol. II. Ed. John M. Robertson. London, 1900.
- 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 0814313833
- Hipple, Walter John, Jr. The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. Carbondale, IL, 1957.
- Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. 1790.
- Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Translated by John T. Goldthwaite. University of California Press, 2003. ISBN 0-520-24078-2
- Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. Ithaca, 1959. ISBN 0295975776
- Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. "Sublime in External Nature". Dictionary of the History of Ideas. New York, 1974.
- Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Volume I. New York:Dover Press. ISBN 0-486-21761-2
- Stolnitz, Jerome. "On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory". Philosophical Quarterly, 43(2):97-113, 1961.
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