The Sublime

The sublime is the aesthetic response to the vast, powerful, or overwhelming—a mixture of awe and dread distinct from the pleasure we take in the beautiful.

Definition

The sublime is an aesthetic quality and response in which an object of great magnitude or power evokes a complex feeling combining awe, even terror, with a pleasure that, for Kant, reveals the mind's rational vocation.

Scope

This topic covers the aesthetic category of the sublime: its rhetorical origin in Longinus, its eighteenth-century development as a distinct aesthetic response by Burke and Kant, the contrast between the sublime and the beautiful, and Kant's division into the mathematical and dynamical sublime. It treats the sublime in nature and art and its modern reinterpretations. It does not cover the general theory of aesthetic experience, treated in a sibling topic.

Core questions

• How does the sublime differ from the beautiful?
• Why is the sublime pleasurable despite involving terror or overwhelming scale?
• Does the sublime reside in objects or in the mind's response to them?
• What is the distinction between the mathematical and dynamical sublime?

Key theories

Burke's physiological sublime

Burke roots the sublime in self-preservation: objects associated with terror, vastness, obscurity, or power produce a delightful horror—a pleasure arising when danger is contemplated at a safe remove.

Kant's mathematical and dynamical sublime

Kant locates the sublime not in objects but in the mind: the failure of imagination to comprehend the absolutely great (mathematical) or to resist nature's might (dynamical) awakens reason's ideas, yielding a pleasure in our supersensible vocation.

History

The sublime began as a rhetorical concept in Longinus's treatise on elevated style, was rediscovered in the seventeenth century, and became a central aesthetic category in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. Burke gave it an empirical, passion-based analysis, and Kant a transcendental one that relocated the sublime from objects to the mind's faculties. The sublime shaped Romantic art and landscape, and was revived in the twentieth century, notably by Lyotard, as a figure for what exceeds representation.

Debates

Object vs. mind as the seat of the sublime

Burke treats the sublime as a response to properties of objects, while Kant argues that strictly the sublime is in the mind, since no sensible object can be adequate to the idea of the absolutely great.

The pleasure of the sublime

Why an experience bound up with terror or the overwhelming should be pleasurable is explained differently by Burke's safe-remove account and Kant's appeal to reason's supremacy over sensibility.

Key figures

• Longinus
• Edmund Burke
• Immanuel Kant
• Jean-François Lyotard

Seminal works

• longinus
• burke1757
• kant1790

Frequently asked questions

How is the sublime different from the beautiful?

Beauty involves a harmonious, restful pleasure in form and bounded objects, whereas the sublime involves the formless, vast, or powerful and a more turbulent pleasure mixed with awe or dread.

What are the mathematical and dynamical sublime?

In Kant, the mathematical sublime concerns the overwhelmingly great in size or number that exceeds the imagination's grasp, while the dynamical sublime concerns nature's might contemplated from safety; both awaken the feeling of reason's superiority to sensible nature.