Defining the Sublime

The notion of the sublime has been a part of philosophical discourse since the Roman author Longinus was translated by Nicolas Boileau in his text Du Sublime (1674). Proposing that “true nobility in art and life was to be discovered through a confrontation of the threatening and unknown, and drew attention to anything in art that challenges our capacity to understand and fills us with wonder” (Morley, 2010b: 14), his definition of the sublime remains accurate even after many philosophers have examined his ideas. However his positioning of the artist as a human who can contest the power of nature was challenged in the eighteenth century, where the sublime was understood to reveal the frailty of humanity as a powerless spectator to natural events, reversing the power balance addressed in Du Sublime.

Edmund Burke’s text A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757) looked to the sublime as a psychological state or experience, rather than analysing certain objects, using the Aristotelian principle of causal structures. This principle held that all forms are made up of four causes; material, formal, efficient and final. The material cause was whatever the form was made up of, the formal was the aesthetic shape it existed in, the efficient being the action which bought about the form, and the final being the purpose of the form. Using this theory, Burke suggested that objects that are beautiful held a certain causal formation. The material, formal, efficient and final causes were smallness, smoothness, and delicacy, the passion of love, the calming of nerves and God’s providence respectively. Differing from these qualities, the sublime’s causal structure equated to vastness, infinity and magnificence, the passion of fear, the tension of nerves, and God’s battle with Satan, again respective to the separate categories. Calling the state “the strongest passion”, Burke proposed the state took hold when the self is threatened, separating the sublime from what would otherwise have been a state of beauty.

Immanuel Kant read and expanded on this theory in his publication Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1799), in which he held that emotional enjoyment stemmed from what he described as the ‘finer feelings’, of the beautiful and the sublime. Like Burke, he saw the beautiful as ‘pleasant and joyous’, giving the example of flower beds, whereas the sublime was ‘enjoyment, but with horror’, the example being mountain peaks. Kant then subdivided the sublime into the categories of lofty, noble and splendid, which provoked further feelings of dread, and melancholy, quiet wonder and beauty respectively. However the text rejected Burke’s emphasis on the formal cause, instead proposing that the sublime is an effect on the conscious self, as the mind is unable to process the information presented. This makes Kant’s sublime an issue of negative limits, rather than positive endlessness. With a lack of understanding and comprehension comes the state of terror Burke discussed, however this is due to the limitations of imagination rather than a physical entity being presented. Kant saw this experience as a positive; believing that whilst initially negative, the acceptance of limitations leads to the growth of the persons powers of reasoning within their own context of understanding.

Arthur Schopenhauer agreed with the internal struggles Kant put forward, writing in The World as Will and Representation (1819) that sublime situations require a person to gaze inwards at their internal void, confronting their “fearful inner abyss”. The same text listed objects and observations in order of the strength of sublime feeling which they provoked, classifying them from the lowest, which was the ‘feeling of beauty’, described as ‘Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer’, such as light reflected off a flower, to the ‘weakest feeling of the sublime’, deriving pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life, for example light reflected off stones. A step up from this was the ‘weaker feeling of the sublime’, gained from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer, for instance an endless desert with no movement, and above this a complete sublime feeling, gained from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy the observer, the example given as turbulent nature. The fullest feeling of the sublime was proposed to be extracted from beholding very violent, destructive objects, such as overpowering turbulent nature, and finally the most absolute sensation of the sublime was proposed to be the pleasure from knowledge of the observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature, with Schopenhauer giving the example of contemplation of the immensity of the universe’s extent or duration.