Sublime

Sublime (from Latin sublimis — elevated, lofty) — An aesthetic category designating the experience of overwhelming grandeur, distinct from beauty by its element of awe, terror, or the surpassing of the limits of ordinary perception. The ancient treatise Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime, attributed to Pseudo-Longinus, of uncertain authorship) already conceived of it as a quality of discourse able to “transport” the listener; rediscovered in the sixteenth century (Robortello’s edition, 1554), it nourished Enlightenment debate. Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), fixed the decisive distinction: the beautiful produces love and pleasure, tied to the small, smooth, and delicate; the sublime produces a delightful terror, tied to the vast, dark, and powerful, and activates the instinct of self-preservation when danger is experienced at a safe distance. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), transformed the problem by distinguishing the mathematical sublime (the magnitude that exceeds any sensory measure — the pyramids, the sheer numerical vastness of the stars) from the dynamical sublime (the power of nature — storms, volcanoes, raging oceans). For Kant, the sublime resides not in objects but in us: the inadequacy of the imagination reveals, by contrast, the superiority of reason and the moral vocation of the human being. Schiller developed this idea as an affirmation of moral freedom before sensory coercion, and Romanticism made mountains, ruins, and abysses privileged occasions for that self-consciousness. In the twentieth century, Jean-François Lyotard revived the category for avant-garde art, which would bear witness to the unpresentable through the very absence of adequate presentation — the aesthetic paradigm of an age distrustful of metanarratives.

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