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Home · Philosophie

The Sublime

Philosophy → Aesthetics → Cross-disciplinary concept

The stakes The sublime names a paradoxical experience: faced with what exceeds us (immensity, the storm, the infinite), we first feel dread, then a strange pleasure. Unlike the beautiful, which soothes and harmonizes with our faculties, the sublime crushes us the better to reveal a greatness within us. The stakes are decisive: the sublime is the point where aesthetics touches morality and metaphysics — it raises the question of what, in man, exceeds nature and sensibility.

History of the concept

Antiquity — the rhetorical sublime Pseudo-Longinus (On the Sublime, 1st century CE): the sublime (hypsos) is what, in discourse, “transports” and strikes the listener like lightning — a greatness of expression. Challenged by 17th-century classical aesthetics (Boileau translates Longinus in 1674 but subordinates the sublime to the rules): for the classicists, greatness must remain subject to measure and good taste.

The 18th century — the subjective turn

  • Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757): the sublime arises from mastered terror — everything that evokes danger, pain, and obscurity, provided we are safe, produces “delightful horror.” Challenged by Kant, who judges Burke’s approach too physiological (reduced to nerves and passions) and seeks an a priori foundation.
  • Kant (Critique of the Power of Judgment, 1790): distinguishes the mathematical sublime (the infinitely great: the starry sky) from the dynamical sublime (the infinitely powerful: the hurricane). The sublime is not in the object but within us: nature crushes us as sensible beings, but our reason, capable of thinking an infinite that no sense can grasp, discovers itself superior. Challenged by Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, 1818), for whom the sublime does not elevate us toward moral reason but momentarily tears us away from the painful will-to-live.

The 20th century — the sublime of the unpresentable Jean-François Lyotard (The Differend, 1983; Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 1991): the sublime becomes the paradigm of modern art — presenting that there is something unpresentable. Challenged by Jacques Rancière (The Distribution of the Sensible, 2000), who sees in this “cult of the unpresentable” a mystification: anything can be shown, art has no duty to sanctify an unsayable.

Main theses

1. The sublime reveals a greatness of the subject, not of the object (Kant) What exceeds us in nature refers us back to what, within us, exceeds nature: reason.

  • Example: watching a storm at sea from the shore, dread gives way to exaltation — I think the power that would destroy me, and thus dominate it in thought. Kant calls this the dynamical sublime.
  • Counter-argument: Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872) reverses this — the greatness is not that of Apollonian reason but of the Dionysian, the intoxication that dissolves the subject rather than elevating it.

2. The sublime feeds on terror held at a distance (Burke) Sublime pleasure presupposes a threat from which we are protected.

  • Example: the aesthetics of the disaster film, or Romantic painting (Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818), places a tiny spectator before immensity — a thrill without real danger.
  • Counter-argument: Adorno (Aesthetic Theory, 1970) — after Auschwitz, this contemplative sublime becomes suspect: real horror cannot be converted into aesthetic enjoyment without complicity.

Application: the sublime in cinema Spielberg stages a quasi-religious technological sublime (the spaceship’s landing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977): light from above, being crushed, then elevation — see Spielberg — The Cinema of Wonder and Memory. Counter-argument: for a Kubrick (2001, 1968), the cosmic sublime remains cold, enigmatic, refusing Spielbergian emotional resolution.

Critical nuance The sublime has an ideological face: exalting the individual’s being crushed before a superior power can serve political ends (the aestheticization of state or military power — see Violence). Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, 1935) warns: fascism is an “aestheticization of politics” that exploits precisely this thrill of the grandiose.

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