The feeling of the vast, the terrifying and the boundless — traced from Longinus's rhetoric to Burke's terror, Kant's reason and Lyotard's unpresentable.
What happens when we meet greatness that overwhelms us — terror, elevation, or the awakening of reason?
Beauty pleases, but the sublime overwhelms. From a rhetorical concept about the loftiness of great writing, the sublime grew in the eighteenth century into a full aesthetic category for the experience of the vast, the powerful and the terrifying — storms, mountains, the starry sky, the abyss. Thinkers disagreed on its source: is it a physiological response to danger seen from safety, or a discovery that reason in us surpasses anything sense can contain? Some read it as the trace of the infinite and the holy; others as art's confrontation with what cannot be represented at all. What unites them is the intuition that certain experiences do not soothe us but shatter and then elevate us, revealing the limits and the greatness of the human mind.
Ancient Greek rhetoric
The sublime (hypsos) is a certain loftiness and excellence of language that does not persuade so much as transport the hearer out of himself. It springs from grandeur of thought, powerful emotion, and mastery of figures, diction and composition; a single sublime stroke can illuminate a whole work like lightning. Its sign is that it strikes irresistibly and lingers in the memory, the echo of a great soul.
On the Sublime (Peri Hypsous).
French classicism
By translating Longinus into French, Boileau reintroduced the sublime to modern Europe and distinguished it from the merely grand or ornate style. The true sublime, he argued, is a marvel that seizes and transports rather than a matter of inflated rhetoric; its power is felt immediately by all, learned and unlearned alike. His preface made 'le sublime' a central term of European taste for a century.
Preface and translation of Longinus's On the Sublime (1674).
English Enlightenment / criticism
Among the 'pleasures of the imagination' Addison singles out greatness — the vast and unbounded, such as open plains, wide oceans and the heavens. Such objects give the mind a delightful stillness and astonishment, an agreeable sense of its own capacity to grasp immensity. This early psychological account made the sublime a matter of the spectator's experience rather than of style alone.
'The Pleasures of the Imagination', The Spectator (1712).
British empiricist aesthetics
The sublime is rooted in terror: whatever excites ideas of pain and danger, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, the strongest emotion the mind can feel. Vastness, obscurity, power, infinity and privation all produce a 'delightful horror' when experienced at a safe remove. He sharply opposes the sublime, which is founded on self-preservation and fear, to beauty, which is founded on pleasure, smallness and love.
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).
German idealism / critical philosophy
The sublime is not in the object but in the mind: when imagination fails to comprehend the boundless (the mathematically sublime) or the overpowering (the dynamically sublime), reason reveals its own superiority through its idea of infinity and its moral vocation. The initial check on our vital powers gives way to a stronger outpouring; we feel small before nature yet exalted because reason in us surpasses all of nature. The sublime thus discloses the supersensible destiny of the human being.
Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), 'Analytic of the Sublime'.
German idealism / Weimar Classicism
Building on Kant, Schiller makes the sublime the experience in which the moral and spiritual person triumphs over sensuous nature and even over the fear of death. Where beauty reconciles us with the sensible world, the sublime reveals a freedom independent of it; tragedy shows us the human being enduring or defying overwhelming force. It is the aesthetic education of our capacity for freedom under the harshest necessity.
'On the Sublime' and 'Concerning the Sublime' (1793–1801).
English Romanticism
For Wordsworth the sublime is lived, not theorised: in the mountains, the crossing of the Alps, or a boat stolen at night, the mind is confronted by a presence that both humbles and expands it. Such moments — 'spots of time' — disclose an infinity in nature answering to something infinite in the soul, 'a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused'. Imagination itself is revealed as a power akin to the divine.
The Prelude (1805/1850); 'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey'.
German idealism
Hegel locates the sublime in symbolic art, especially Hebrew religious poetry, where the infinite God utterly exceeds every finite image meant to express him. The sublime is thus the failure of sensuous form to contain the Idea, which shows itself precisely by negating and surpassing all representation. It is a transitional stage, superseded when classical art achieves the adequate embodiment of spirit in the beautiful form.
Lectures on Aesthetics (delivered 1820s).
Post-Kantian idealism / pessimism
The sublime arises when we contemplate objects hostile to the will — raging storms, towering cliffs, the immensity of the cosmos — and yet tear ourselves free of our own willing to behold them in pure, will-less knowing. Unlike the beautiful, which invites contemplation effortlessly, the sublime demands a conscious wrenching away from the threat to our individual existence. In that elevation we feel ourselves as the eternal subject of knowledge, dwarfing the world that dwarfs the body.
The World as Will and Representation (1818), Book III, §§39–40.
Existential / genealogical critique
Nietzsche links the sublime to the Dionysian: the tragic artist transfigures the horror and absurdity of existence into something we can bear to look at and even affirm. The sublime is 'the artistic taming of the horrible', a mask through which the abyss can be faced. Yet he grows suspicious of the sublime pose when it becomes a solemn evasion of life; genuine strength ultimately learns to laugh and to say yes.
The Birth of Tragedy (1872); The Gay Science.
Philosophy of religion / phenomenology
The sublime is the nearest aesthetic analogue to the holy, or the 'numinous' — the wholly other, encountered as mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Confronting it, we feel our own nothingness (the 'creature-feeling') mingled with awe, dread and irresistible attraction. The sublime in art and nature is a 'schema' or echo of this deeper religious experience of the non-rational sacred.
The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige, 1917).
Postmodernism / French poststructuralism
Reworking Kant, Lyotard makes the sublime the key to modern and avant-garde art: it 'presents the fact that the unpresentable exists', bearing witness to what exceeds all form and comprehension. Where beauty gives consensus and pleasure, the sublime mixes pleasure with the pain of reason's demand for a totality it cannot picture. Abstract painting — Newman, Malevich — does not depict anything but points to the very event that 'something is happening', the there-is (il y a).
'The Sublime and the Avant-Garde' (1984); Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991).