How to think about the sublime

[Celerity]

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-about-the-sublime-in-the-natural-world









There is no single way to elicit this peculiar feeling. Perhaps you have felt it on a hot summer’s night, lying in the grass, scanning a leaden sky for shooting stars, satellites and planets. You are struck by the vastness of the Universe, its infinite measure. There is an anxious and humbling sense of awe and underlying fear.

Maybe, while on a hike, you are struck by unending skies, and the vast sweep of a spectacular and somehow terrifying mountain range, unable to absorb its full size. Perhaps it’s a mountain range like the Alps that you can’t take in all at once but only in parts. Its grandeur is staggering and somewhat frightening.

Maybe you have read a line of poetry that captures an exquisite coming-together of pleasure and pain, or that invites you to see your life in a new light, which throws into relief the delicious strangeness of existence. Or perhaps you have felt unexpectedly transported by the immersive grandeur of a painting.

It’s a sense of being overwhelmed, of impending terror, of encountering the unending incomprehensibility of infinity or a natural force: a phenomenon that shows the limits of the human mind while arousing contemplation. This is the sublime – a pleasurable but unsettling feeling.

snip

[justaprogressive]

1. Philosophy 101 Further reading: Kant's Observations on the feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime

Immanuel Kant's collection "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings" presents a cohesive set of his works from the 1760s, edited and translated by Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer. This edition, notable for its thematic coherence and accessibility, argues against the notion of a complete rupture between Kant's early writings and metaphysical thought influenced by Rousseau. Instead, it highlights Kant's evolving understanding of the relationship between feelings, reason, and morality, and attempts to position metaphysics as a legitimate analytical discipline capable of yielding absolute certainty when proper methods are applied.

Full pdf here: https://www.academia.edu/53545773/Immanuel_Kant_Immanuel_Kant_Observations_on_the_Feeling_of_the_Beautiful_and_the_Sublime_and_Other_Writings_Reviewed_by

[Celerity]

2. thank you so much for that additional material

[justaprogressive]

3. ...and aren't you nice to say so!

[highplainsdem]

4. That's really the wrong way to think about the sublime, a perversion of the original meaning by adding

fear/terror to it. Experiencing the sublime is a sense of exaltation/admiration.

I checked my copy of the OED and the original use of the word had none of those negative connotations added to it.

From that article:

Burke was interested in what happens to the self when assailed by that which seems to endanger its survival. He also moved the analysis away from the sublime object and towards the experience of the beholder, thus making his enquiry a psychological one. The sublime, declared Burke, was “the strongest passion,” and he belittled the importance of the beautiful, claiming that it was merely an instance of prettiness.

That's a complete misunderstanding. Neurotic, really, to think that something can't be sublime unless you're also afraid of it.

What Burke was describing was a feeling of awe. The word awe was originally all about simple fear/terror, rather than fear mixed with reverence/admiration. More recently the fear aspect has been downplayed, so saying something is awesome is not meant to suggest it is or should be terrifying.