The sublime: What is it and why are we so keen to experience it?

The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime goes back at least to Longinus (first century CE), who saw the sublime as an overwhelming, ecstatic force that uplifts the soul with grandeur. A flower is beautiful, and so is a great oak, but the great oak is also sublime, and it is its sublimity rather than its beauty that we retain.

Longinus and literary sublimity

At the heart of our attraction to natural grandeur is our desire for transcendence, which is then expressed through sublime art and language. In On the Sublime, Longinus laid out five sources of literary sublimity: noble concepts; passionate feeling; figures of speech; noble diction; and dignified composition. The first two, he claimed, are innate, while the last three are learnt.

Edmund Burke on the sublime, or why we ride rollercoasters

Later thinkers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant more sharply distinguished between beauty and sublimity, which they presented as antithetical. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757), Burke associated beauty with the likes of smallness, smoothness, and delicate form; the sublime, in contrast, he associated with power, vastness, and obscurity.

Whereas the beautiful (like a flower or a gentle landscape) gives rise to feelings of love, pleasure, and relaxation, the sublime (like the open seas or a raging storm) gives rise to overwhelming feelings of awe, terror, and delightful horror.

However, the sublime is only delightful, awe-inspiring, and aesthetic when it is experienced from a certain distance or place of safety; otherwise, if it represents an imminent danger, it is simply terrible.

Many who partake in extreme sports like paragliding or bungee jumping, ride rollercoasters, or watch horror movies are really seeking the thrill of the sublime, triggering the atavistic fear of death in the full knowledge that they are safe.

Feelings associated with the sublime are far more powerful than feelings associated with beauty, because feelings associated with self-preservation are far more powerful than feelings associated with pleasure. Who, asked Burke, would choose a life of great pleasure if it were fated to end in slow torture?

Kant on the sublime: A bridge between two worlds

Kant read Burke and elaborated upon his ideas. He distinguished between two forms of the sublime, the mathematical sublime, which arises from the contemplation of immensity (like the starry heavens or the pyramids) and overwhelms our cognitive capacity, and the dynamical sublime (like a violent thunderstorm or raging waterfall), which arises from the contemplation of great power and overwhelms our practical capacity.

With the mathematical sublime, the failure of our senses awakens our divine reason, which can easily grasp the idea of infinity or absolute totality, even when our senses cannot. With the dynamical sublime, our feeling of helplessness and physical insignificance awakens our moral vocation, which is immune to natural forces, as well as the noumenal world (the world as it really is, beyond mere appearances), in which we too are powerful, majestic, and absolutely free.

In sum, the feeling of the sublime reminds us of the superiority of our rational, moral noumenal selves over the phenomenal world and our mortal, phenomenal selves. Whereas the beautiful makes the phenomenal world feel like a better place, the sublime reminds us that we belong to an altogether different world.

Both beauty and sublimity bridge the divide between the two worlds, the one through harmony, the other through disruption, or disjunction.