Sublime (philosophy)
Since its first application in the field of rhetoric and drama in ancient Greece it became an important concept not just in philosophical aesthetics but also in literary theory and art history.
[2] In Britain, the development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and John Dennis.
These authors expressed an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination.
All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.
His comments on the experience also reflected pleasure and repulsion, citing a "wasted mountain" that showed itself to the world as a "noble ruin" (Part III, Sec.
In referring to the Earth as a "Mansion-Globe" and "Man-Container" Shaftsbury writes "How narrow then must it appear compar'd with the capacious System of its own Sun...tho animated with a sublime Celestial Spirit...." (Part III, sec.
[10] For Aristotle, the function of artistic forms was to instill pleasure, and he first pondered the problem that an object of art representing ugliness produces "pain."
[11] The classical notion of ugliness prior to Edmund Burke, most notably described in the works of Saint Augustine of Hippo, denoted it as the absence of form and therefore as a degree of non-existence.
[12] Burke's treatise is also notable for focusing on the physiological effects of sublimity, in particular the dual emotional quality of fear and attraction that other authors noted.
Though Burke's explanations for the physiological effects of sublimity, e. g. tension resulting from eye strain, were not seriously considered by later authors, his empirical method of reporting his own psychological experience was more influential, especially in contrast to the analysis of Immanuel Kant.
His teleological view of history meant that he considered "oriental" cultures as less developed, more autocratic in terms of their political structures and more fearful of divine law.
At the beginning of the 20th century Neo-Kantian German philosopher and theorist of aesthetics Max Dessoir founded the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, which he edited for many years, and published the work Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in which he formulated five primary aesthetic forms: the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly, and the comic.
[23] He argued that Kant's "mathematical sublime" could be seen in semiotic terms as the presence of an excess of signifiers, a monotonous infinity threatens to dissolve all oppositions and distinctions.
For him, the sublime's significance is in the way it points to an aporia (impassable doubt) in human reason; it expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world.
The traditional categories of aesthetics (beauty, meaning, expression, feeling) are being replaced by the notion of the sublime, which after being "natural" in the 18th century, and "metropolitan-industrial" in the modern era, has now become technological.
Noteworthy is a general theory of the sublime, in the tradition of Longinus, Burke and Kant, in which Tsang Lap Chuen presents the notion of limit-situations in life as being central to the human experience.
The recuperation that follows the break between one's sensibility and one's representational capability leads to sublimity and the subsequent feelings of admiration and/or responsibility, allowing for the intertwining of aesthetics and ethics...
