Sublime (philosophy)
In aesthetics, the sublime 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. Since its first application in the field of rhetoric and drama in ancient Greece it became an important concept not just in philosophical aesthetics but also in literary theory and art history.
Ancient philosophy
The first known study of the sublime is by Longinus in 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 referring not only to Greek authors such as Homer, but also to 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 linguist 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.
Modern philosophy
The concept of the sublime emerged in Europe with the birth of literary criticism in the late 17th century. It was associated with the works of the French writers Pierre Corneille, Jean-Baptiste Racine, Jean-Baptiste l'Abbé Dubos, and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux.British philosophy
In Britain, the development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and John Dennis. These authors expressed 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", 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, 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," Shaftesbury writes, "How narrow then must it appear compar'd with the capacious System of its own Sun...tho animated with a sublime Celestial Spirit....".
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 semi-synonymous terms such as "unbounded", "unlimited", "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess.
The British description of the sublime has been described as distinct from the Kantian conceptualization, which emphasized a detachment of aesthetic judgment. The British tradition is noted for its rejection of the idea that aesthetic judgment and ethical conduct are not connected. One of its positions holds that the affective register of the sublime is not divorced from the standards that govern human conduct and that it does not transcend ethical conduct.
Edmund Burke
Addison's notion of greatness was integral to the concept of sublimity. An object of art could be beautiful yet it could not possess greatness. His Pleasures of the Imagination, as well as Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination of 1744 and Edward Young's poem Night Thoughts of 1745 are generally considered the starting points for Edmund Burke's analysis of sublimity.Edmund Burke developed his conception of sublimity in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1756. Burke was the first philosopher to argue that sublimity and beauty are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy that Burke articulated is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, and is antithetical in the same degree as light and darkness. Light may accentuate beauty, but either great light or darkness, i. e., the absence of light, is sublime to the extent that it can annihilate vision of the object in question. What is "dark, uncertain, and confused" moves the imagination to awe and a degree of horror. While the relationship of sublimity and beauty is one of mutual exclusivity, either can provide pleasure. Sublimity may evoke horror, but knowledge that the perception is a fiction is pleasureful.
Burke's concept of sublimity was an antithetical contrast to the classical conception of the aesthetic quality of beauty being the pleasurable experience that Plato described in several of his dialogues, e. g. Philebus, Ion, Hippias Major, and Symposium, and suggested that ugliness is an aesthetic quality in its capacity to instill intense emotions, ultimately providing pleasure. For Aristotle, the function of artistic forms was to instill pleasure, and he first pondered the problem that an object of art representing ugliness produces "pain." Aristotle's detailed analysis of this problem involved his study of tragic literature and its paradoxical nature as both shocking and having poetic value. The classical notion of ugliness prior to Edmund Burke, most notably described in the works of Saint Augustine of Hippo, denoted it as the absence of form and therefore as a degree of non-existence. For St. Augustine, beauty is the result of the benevolence and goodness of God in His creation, and as a category it had no opposite. Because ugliness lacks any attributive value, it is formless due to the absence of beauty.
Burke's treatise is also notable for focusing on the physiological effects of sublimity, in particular the dual emotional quality of fear and attraction that other authors noted. Burke described the sensation attributed to sublimity as a negative pain, which he denominated "delight" and which is distinct from positive pleasure. "Delight" is thought to result from the removal of pain, caused by confronting a sublime object, and supposedly is more intense than positive pleasure. Though Burke's explanations for the physiological effects of sublimity, e. g. tension resulting from eye strain, were not seriously considered by later authors, his empirical method of reporting his own psychological experience was more influential, especially in contrast to the analysis of Immanuel Kant. 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.
German philosophy
Immanuel Kant
In an early work, Immanuel Kant made an attempt to record his thoughts on the observing subject's mental state in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. He held that the sublime was of three kinds: the noble, the splendid, and the terrifying.In his later Critique of Judgment, Kant says that there are two forms of the sublime, the mathematical and the dynamical, although some commentators hold that there is a third form, the moral sublime, a hold-over from the earlier "noble" sublime. Kant claims, "We call that sublime which is absolutely great". 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".
Kant divides the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamical, where in the mathematical "aesthetical comprehension" is not a consciousness of a merely greater unit, but the notion of absolute greatness not constrained by any idea of limitation. 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".
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". For Kant, one's inability to grasp the magnitude of a sublime event demonstrates the inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability subsequently to 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.