Sublime (philosophy)
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In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis (under the lintel,
high, exalted)) is the quality of transcendent greatness, whether
physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical or artistic. The term
especially refers to 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
predominantly 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.Contents
1 Eighteenth Century
1.1 British Philosophy
1.2 German Philosophy
1.2.1 Immanuel Kant
1.2.2 Schopenhauer
2 Romantic Period
2.1 Victor Hugo
3 Post Romantic and Twentieth Century
4 Footnotes
5 Further reading
Eighteenth Century
British Philosophy
Grosser Mythen, Swiss Alps. British writers, taking the Grand Tour in
the 17th and 18th centuries, first used the sublime to describe objects
of nature.
The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic
quality in nature distinct from beauty was first brought into
prominence in the eighteenth 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 Cooper's and
Dennis' concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator (1711), 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[1].
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" [2]. 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 "MansionGlobe" 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)[3].
Joseph Addison embarked on the Grand Tour in 1699 and
commented in the Spectator (1712) 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" (sight rather than 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[4].
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 Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime in A Philosophical Inquiry
into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756)[5].
The significance of Burke's writings is that he 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[6].
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.[7] 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[8]. 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" (without reference to the
absence of pleasure) in the Poetics. 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[9].
German Philosophy
Immanuel Kant
Viviano Codazzi: Rendition of St. Peter's Square, Rome, dated 1630.
Kant referred to St. Peter's as "splendid", a term he used for objects
producing feeling for both the beautiful and the sublime.
See also Immanuel Kant's Aesthetic philosophy
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)[10] , 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
merely 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 [11].
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 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 an overpowering or vast 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).
Romantic Period
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich1817,
Romantic artists during the 19th century used the epic of nature as an
expression of the sublime
Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo touched on aspects of the sublime in both nature and
man in many of his poems (Poems of Victor Hugo). In his preface
(http://www.gavroche.org/vhugo/cromwellpreface.shtml) to Cromwell
(play) 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 Notredame Cathedral can be considered
embodiements of the sublime as can many elements of Les Miserables.
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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.[12]
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.[13]
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".[14]
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[15]. 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.
Footnotes
^ Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory.
Ithaca, 1959
^ Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. "Sublime in External Nature". Dictionary
of the History of Ideas. New York, 1974.
^ Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. The Moralists:
A Philosophical Rhapsody. 1709.
^ Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. "Sublime in External Nature". Dictionary
of the History of Ideas. New York, 1974
^ Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. "Sublime in External Nature". Dictionary
of the History of Ideas. New York, 1974.
^ Beardsley, Monroe C. "History of Aesthetics". Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. Vol. 1, p. 27, Macmillan, 1973.
^ Stolnitz, Jerome. "Ugliness". Encyclopedia of Philosophy. McMillan,
1973.
^ Stolnitz, Jerome. "Ugliness". Encyclopedia of Philosophy, McMillan,
1973. Also, Beardsley, Monroe C. "History of Aesthetics". Encyclopedia
of Philosophy. Vol. 1, p. 22, Macmillan, 1973.
^ Beardsley, Monroe C. "History of Aesthetics". Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. Vol. 1, p. 20, Macmillan, 1973.
^ Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. J.H. Bernard.
Macmillan, 1951.
^ Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. J.H. Bernard.
Macmillan, 1951. Translator's introduction and notes to the Critique of
Judgment)
^ Stolnitz, Jerome. "Beauty". In Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 1,
p. 266. Macmillan (1973).
^ Emery, Stephen A.. "Dessoir, Max". In Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Vol. 2, p. 355. Macmillan (1973).
^ Emery, Stephen A.. "Dessoir, Max". In Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Vol. 2, p. 356. Macmillan (1973).
^ Lyotard, Jean-François. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime.
Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford University Press, 1994. Lyotard
expresses his own elements of the sublime but recommends Kant's
Critique of Judgment, §23-§29 as a preliminary reading requirement in
order to understand his analysis.
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 0-935005-28-5
Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of Nature. Oxford, 1945. ISBN 0-31325166-5
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
0-8143-1383-3
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
Sublime. Translated by John T. Goldthwaite. University of California
Press, 2003. ISBN 0-520-24078-2
Lyotard, Jean-François. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime.
Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford University Press, 1994.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory.
Ithaca, 1959. ISBN 0-295-97577-6
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. "Sublime in External Nature". Dictionary of
the History of Ideas. New York, 1974.
George Santayana. The Sense of Beauty. Being the Outlines of
Aesthetic Theory. New York, Modern Library, 1955. Pp. 230-240.
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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