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September 7, 2006
The Romantics understood the sublime to be central to an appreciation or awareness of art and nature. Both terrifying and exhilarating, sublime experience defined the work of authors and artists who sought to stretch the bounds of sensory perception, and represented one of the most important challenges to the rationalism of Enlightenment thought. The sublime had little traction during twenthieth century modernism and it is often held that the sublime goes into cold storage after romanticism and the decay of the Romantic aesthetic.
The sublime has returned in postmodernity clustered around in the idea of limit-experience
The two major philosophers of the sublime are Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Both distinquished the sublime from the beautiful. Burke understood the sublime in termsd of the imagination being moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." He associates it with self-preservation.
Kant understood the sublime in terms of greatness and boundlessness, and he talked in terms of one's inability to grasp the enormity of a sublime event, such as an earthquake, or death, or absolute disaster (the Holocaust).The (dynamically) sublime names experiences like violent storms or huge buildings which seem to overwhelm us; that is, we feel we 'cannot get our head around them'. Kant argues however, that the sublime is more than the mere overwhelmingness of some object: what is actually sublime are ideas of our own reason, namely, the ideas of absolute totality or absolute freedom. Hence the sublime is linked to the moral idea of freedom. Though the sublime is a two-layered experience what is properly sublime and the object of respect is the idea of reason, rather than the awesomeness of nature.
Jean-François Lyotard reworks Kant in that , for him, 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. The attempting to think impossible thoughts, embrace paradox, face inconceivable disaster: these themes have been taken up by Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot, who both write of encountering limit-experiences that produce sublime emotions.
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really readable and enjoyable entry. covers lots of my interests! thanks!