Sublime Research Paper

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Recommended: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin od Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

What is the Sublime in today’s society?

In todays society we often use the word ‘Sublime’ in a colloquial manner. It seems to have been put into the category of words used to describe something better than just ‘good’: fantastic, amazing, magnificent, - sublime. The history of the sublime however does not indicate that the word was intended for such use; but in being a term that has a complex and rich history of development there is no wonder in todays society that the word is being used colloquially. Therefore we must ask, what is the true sublime in today’s society?

The word sublime “comes from the Latin ‘sublimis’ (elevated, lofty; sublime)” and the first philosopher to write about the sublime; Longinus imitated this. He wrote of how the …show more content…

To the Romanticists the focus of the sublime began in landscape. This idea of ‘the sublime’ focusing on landscapes could have stemmed from Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) in which Burke writes of how the sublime is connected with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Nature to Burke was seen to be the most sublime; the object that is the most able to inflict terror, awe and danger onto us as human beings. We cannot control nature, we cannot fully understand it and this is why it evokes powerful emotions in us. The sublime must address grand and important subjects “that surpass our understanding and our imagination due to their unbounded, excessive or chaotic character” Therefore nature seems to fit the bill of being the most sublime in terms of what Kant says about it surpassing our understanding. Take a storm at sea for instance; we can stand on the harbour and watch it happening, but we do not understand fully what the storm is like as we are viewing from a safe distance like we do when we are looking at an artwork such as a painting. However due to this some could argue “We might experience the grandeur of the storm, but not its sublime character. An experience can only truly be sublime when our lives are actually endangered by the superior forces of

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