Sublime and the Beautiful

Edited and compiled by Jyotirmoy Sil

Topics/Issues

Sublime

Theories of Sublime

Edmund Burke

Immanuel Kant

Beauty

Perfection

Well formed

Proportioned

Sublime

Oxford Dictionary:

1. Of very great excellence or beauty.

‘Mozart's sublime piano concertos’

More example sentences

Synonyms

1.1Producing an overwhelming sense of awe or other high emotion through being vast or grand.

Merrium-Webster:

a : lofty, grand, or exalted in thought, expression, or manner

b : of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth

c : tending to inspire awe usually because of elevated quality (as of beauty, nobility, or grandeur) or transcendent excellence

Is ‘Sublime’ a form of ‘Beauty’?

Edmund Burke: 1756. Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgment,1790

Longinus’s 'On to the Sublime’ (Perì Hýpsous)

Longinus defines the literary sublime as "excellence in language", the "expression of a great spirit" and the power to provoke "ecstasy" in one's readers.

Five sources of 'sublimity’:

• great thoughts
• strong emotions,
• certain figures of thought and speech,
• noble diction,
• dignified word arrangement

Longinus (Cassius Longinus (213 – 273 AD)

​

On the Sublime

Other works according to Suda:

• Homeric Questions,
• Homeric Problems and Solutions,
• Whether Homer is a Philosopher,
• two publications on Attic diction.

Cassius Longinus was a Greek living under Roman rule in the eastern Mediterranean, and he wrote in Greek. He was born circa A.D. 213, educated in Alexandria, and appears to have taught for some time in Athens. Cassius Longinus, moreover, earned a reputation as “a living library and a walking museum,” in the words of the historian Eunapius; and he was extolled also by Porphyry, his friend and pupil, as the finest critic of his time. Toward the end of his life he moved to Asia Minor; became an important adviser to Zenobia, queen of Palmyra; and was executed by order of the Roman emperor Aurelian in 273 after being caught up in a conspiracy with Queen Zenobia to challenge Roman imperial power.

Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’

​

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burden of the mystery

In which the heavy and weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened (37-41).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

​

‘I meet, I find the Beautiful - but I give, contribute or rather attribute the Sublime. No object of the Sense is sublime in itself; but only as far as I make it a symbol of some Idea. The circle is a beautiful figure in itself; it becomes sublime, when I contemplate eternity under that figure.’

Edmund Burke

A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

• Notable works
• A Vindication of Natural Society
• A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
• Reflections on the Revolution in France
• He is remembered for his support for Catholic emancipation, the impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company, and his staunch opposition to the French Revolution.

A member of parliament (MP) between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party

A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

Introduction: On Taste

Part I:

• Novelty/originality
• Pain and Pleasure
• Delight and Pleasure
• Effects of tragedy: pain and sublime
• Sublime : pain and terror
• Beauty: Pleasure

Part Ii:

• Sublime
• Terror and sublime

​

​

​

​

​

Part III:

• Beautiful

Part IV:

• Causes of the Sublime and Beautiful

Part V:

• Impact of Words
• Passions induced by words
• Effects of Poetry

Preface: “On Taste”

• Burke aimed to show that aesthetic judgments are not entirely arbitrary and subjective.
• It is precisely because all humans have similar sensory experiences of the world that we can come up with sophisticated theories about why certain things are beautiful or sublime.

“I mean by the word Taste, no more than that faculty or those faculties of the mind, which are affected with, or which form a judgment of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts.”

Beauty

• Traditional definition of beauty::

proportion, fitness, or perfection.

Edmund Burke:

• Pleases us
• evokes the feeling of love’ for the object perceived as beautiful

Burke on ‘Beauty’

• “By beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it”.
• Burke defines beauty as any quality which inspires the individual to feel affection toward that which is perceived as beautiful.

Causes of Beauty (Burke)

beauty is not caused by symmetry, or by balanced proportion and perfection

Qualities which reveal beauty include--

• lightness,
• mildness,
• clearness,
• smoothness,
• gracefulness,
• gradual variation

Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Sublime

Evoke terror (astonishment) and pain: strongest of feelings

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

​

Examples of Sublime Scenes from Literature

• Macbeth’s opening scene
• Macbeth’s imagination of the fleeting dagger.
• King Lear’s monologue on ungratefulness and his foolishness in front of storm (gloomy ambience)
• Creation of the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Paradise Lost: description of hell, Death, and Satan

​

Opening Scene of Macbeth

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841

King Lear facing the Storm (Act III, Scene II)

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

You sulfurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Smite flat the thick rotundity o' th' world,

Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once

That make ingrateful man!

Facts/Effects that can Generate Sublime Experience

• Ambience of terror
• Power
• Privation
• Vastness: greatness of dimension
• Infinity
• Succession and Uniformity

​

• Magnitude in Building
• Infinity in Pleasing Objects
• Difficulty
• Magnificence: profusion of excellent things together

​

Facts/effects that Generate Sublime Experience

• Light : a contrasting combination of darkness and light correlating to the ambience
• Color considered as productive of the Sublime: dark and sombre colour reflecting sadness, terror and gloom
• Sound and Loudness
• Suddenness

• Intermitting: “some low, confused, uncertain sounds, leave us in the same fearful anxiety concerning their causes”
• The Cries of Animals
• Smell and Taste—Bitters and Stenches / experiences
• Feeling.—Pain

Burke’s examples of Sublime

Descriptions of Satan and Death and hell in Milton’s Paradise Lost

Milton’s Death, Burke wrote, is ‘sublime to the last degree’; his description of hell ‘raises a very great degree of the sublime’, and ‘we do not any where meet a more sublime description’ than that of Satan

Paradise Lost, Book 9

‘No more of talk where God or angel guest

With man, as with his friend, familiar used

To sit indulgent, and with him partake

Rural repast, permitting him the while

Venial discourse unblamed: I now must change

Those notes to tragic; foul distrust, and breach

Disloyal on the part of man, revolt,

​

And disobedience: on the part of Heav’n

Now alienated, distance and distaste,

Anger and just rebuke, and judgment giv’n,

That brought into this world a world of woe,

Sin and her shadow Death, and misery

Death’s harbinger…’

Burke

• great work of art is so inspiring is because it is not merely beautiful, but sublime.
• While the beauty of a work of art may inspire love or admiration, the sublimity of a work of art may inspire awe or astonishment at its mystery and power.

Immanuel Kant

Critique of Judgement (1790)

Immanuel Kant (1727-1824)

German philosopher whose comprehensive and systematic work in epistemology (the theory of knowledge), ethics, and aesthetics greatly influenced all subsequent philosophy, especially the various schools of Kantianism and idealism.

​

NOTABLE WORKS

“Critique of Pure Reason”

“Critique of Practical Reason”

“Critique of Judgment”

A priori and a posteriori in Critique of Pure Reason

A priori

A priori knowledge is that which is independent from experience. Examples include mathematics, tautologies, and deduction from pure reason

A posteriori

A posteriori knowledge is that which depends on empirical evidence. Examples include most fields of science and aspects of personal knowledge.

Critique of Judgement (1790)

Part one: critique of aesthetic judgement

First section Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement

First Book. Analytic of the Beautiful

Second Book. Analytic of the Sublime

Second section Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgement

​

Part two. critique of teleological judgement

First division Analytic of Teleological Judgement

Second division Dialectic of Teleological Judgement

Appendix Theory of the Method of Teleological Judgement

Aesthetic Judgement

• Aesthetic Judgement> Judgement of taste
• Based in an individual's subjective feeling
• Of universal validity (disinterested pleasure)

Beauty

Immanuel Kant, Book 1, Critique of Judgement:

Beauty> ‘judgement of taste’

Beauty according to Kant’s Opinion

• Finding something beautiful is more than merely liking it.
• This kind of liking is not dependent on your idiosyncratic tastes (like your preference for one color or flavor or tone over another) or on your moral opinions, but on the judgement of taste.
• This judgment is subjective in the sense that they're not about the object, but about the fact that people receive pleasure from it,
• yet this judgement can be considered universal, so that if I (correctly) find something beautiful, then I expect others to feel the same way, and moreover, if they have taste, they should.

4 Moments of the Judgement of Beauty

• Moment of Quality: wholly disinterested pleasure
• Moment of Quantity: the beautiful is an object of universal pleasure
• Moment of Relation: Something is purposelessly beautiful; beauty generates its own purposiveness
• Moment of Modality: the conditions necessary for a judgement of taste.

​

Moment of Quality

• The agreeable is a purely sensory judgment — judgments in the form of "This steak is good," or "This chair is soft." These are purely subjective judgments, based on inclination alone.
• The good is essentially a judgment that something is ethical — the judgment that something conforms with moral law,
• Aesthetic judgments are disinterested. (desire, expectations and self-interests are not involved)

Moment of Quantity

• Aesthetic judgments behave universally, that is, involve an expectation or claim on the agreement of others
• If I judge a certain landscape to be beautiful then I expect others shall also find this beautiful.

Moment of Relation

• The third introduces the problem of purpose and purposiveness
• Kant believes that a judgment of beauty cannot be solely a feeling: it must be based on formal properties
• “purposiveness without a purpose.” This is subjective; we must imagine that the object has a purpose even though, for an aesthetic judgment, it does not.

​

Moment of Modality

• “The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, is cognized as object of a necessary delight.”
• this necessity implies that the beautiful object is exemplary (being exemplary precisely of an aesthetic judgment)
• “conditioned”: what is it that the necessity of the judgment is grounded upon; that is, what does it say about those who judge?
• Kant calls the ground ‘common sense’, by which he means the a priori principle of our taste, that is of our feeling for the beautiful.

​

Sublime according to Kant

• Sublime is beyond all comparison (that is absolutely) great, either mathematically in terms of limitless magnitude, or dynamically in terms of limitless power. This is the standard meaning, derived from Kant.
• The term ‘sublime’ is used to designate natural objects that inspire a kind of awed terror through sheer immensity.

Kant: 2 types of Sublime

Mathematical sublime:

• something ‘absolutely large‘ that is, ‘large beyond all comparison‘
• a feeling of reason's superiority to imagination, (natural capacity)
• Infinite
• Nature

‘Dynamically Sublime’:

• if our ability to will or resist is overwhelmed by force
• the awareness of our physical powerlessness in the face of nature's might.
• evoke astonishment/terror but the beholder would not be not afraid of it
• Storm
• any aspect of nature

References

• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/#2.7
• https://iep.utm.edu/kantaest/#SH2c
• https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2014/11/15/episode-105-kant-what-is-beauty/
• Wikipedia.org
• https://iep.utm.edu/kantaest/

​

Recommended Books

Edmund Burke:A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful: And Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings (Penguin Classics)

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgement (Oxford)

Philip Shaw: The Sublime (Psychology Press)

Robert Doran: The Theory of Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge University Press)

​

​

​